Engleby Read online

  One day I was coming out of the Jackson Rears in the mid-morning break when I saw Spaso Topley leaning against a pillar by the quad. As I walked past, he muttered, ‘Engleby?’

  For a moment, I couldn’t think who he was talking to. Then I stopped and turned and warily said, ‘Yes?’

  Spaso moved towards me. He had splayed feet and horn-rimmed glasses; although he had a deep voice there was something girlish about him. He said, in a rush, ‘Would you like to go to the cinema on Sunday if you do we can get a chit from Talbot and I know where I can borrow you a bike.’

  He was looking flustered and nervous. He kept glancing up and down the pillared colonnade.

  ‘Well?’

  I swallowed. ‘OK.’

  ‘See you by the bike racks at two but you’ve got to see Talbot first and bring your chit.’

  He waddled off on his large feet before I could say anything.

  Mr Talbot could be visited in his study after lunch, and when I told him what I wanted, he looked displeased. ‘Topley? Isn’t there someone in your own year you could go with?’

  ‘It’s just that Topley asked me, sir.’

  He pulled a pad towards him, wrote on it and pulled off a small sheet. ‘Bike Leave’. He handed it to me. ‘Next time, Engleby, go with someone in your own year.’

  Next time, Talbot, do your job and find out what’s going on in your house. ‘Yes, sir.’

  When Sunday came, I got down to the bike racks at five to two.

  I stood behind a hut, to stay out of sight, and kept looking at my watch. Eventually, Topley rounded the corner. He came up and handed me a key to a padlock.

  He said, ‘I’ve got Leper Curran’s bike for you. He owes me a favour for saving him Tubby Lyneham’s wrath. Electromagnetic fields. A Topley speciality. We toilers in the Collingham vineyard must stick together.’

  He really was a prize ass.

  We bicycled off together and found a cinema in the local town, about twenty minutes’ ride away. It was showing quite a good film with Steve McQueen in it, though I can’t remember the name.

  Afterwards, we went to a café where I bought us poached eggs and beans on toast with tea and chocolate cake, courtesy of a ten-shilling note I’d taken from Marlow’s rugby shorts. I’d broken my no-notes rule because I knew I’d be spending it off-radar.

  ‘Do you smoke, Topley?’

  ‘Good heavens no.’

  ‘You must know people who do. In your year.’

  ‘That would be telling.’

  ‘I know. That’s why I’m asking you. Tell me. I am buying the tea after all.’

  It was hard work, but eventually I persuaded him to act as go-between. He devised some rococo plan involving ‘safe drops’ in the Jackson Rears, which, since it was under a permanent fog of cigarette smoke, was one of the least safe places in Chatfield. But that was his problem. I left the goods, a packet at time, behind the cistern in the Dump; Spaso shipped them onwards. I never knew who the end-buyers were. It was a brilliant chain, with two natural cut-outs guaranteeing anonymity. We charged two-thirds shop retail price and split it down the middle. It was very good money. I think Topley spent his first pay packet on a second-hand rheostat.

  What happened then? Oh God, I don’t know.

  Days. Days are what we live in.

  Days came. Days went.

  I reached puberty. No one threw raspberry yoghurt in my face; I didn’t exude sebum through my follicles and pores; I didn’t smell of feet or pits; my voice didn’t do comic octave-jumps; my trousers didn’t flap at mid-calf. All that happened was that my back grew about a foot in width one night; my feet looked suddenly remote (I bought new trousers – cash, no chit, to the manager’s amazement – at the school shop); and one morning I awoke with evidence that I was capable of perpetuating the Engleby line. That was all.

  I built the cigarette business and dabbled in marijuana, though it was risky and hard to come by. There were not that many takers at Chatfield either. I found an off-licence on the London road with a delivery arrangement as lax as the tobacconist’s and was able to run bottles of vodka and whisky back in the saddlebag of a bicycle I’d stolen from outside the local girls’ school. There was always a good market in drink, and I shipped it on through a Ghanaian boy in Greville whom I’d met in the Combined Cadet Force. Since he could hardly speak English he hadn’t twigged that no one was meant to talk to me.

  Hood and Wingate eventually left.

  Baynes stayed another term (incredibly, he was not bad at work and was sitting the Oxford entrance exam in December). He had an accident, I was pleased to learn, coming back from late rugby practice in October. He was concussed, with a large contusion on the back of the head, and his leg was broken in three places; he appeared to have lost his footing going over the ditch at the edge of the wood by the practice ground, where he had been taking kicks at goal on his own in the twilight. He cracked his head on the concrete edge of the footbridge. He said he had no recollection of falling, but Dr Benbow put this down to the concussion (presumably after inspecting his groin by torchlight first).

  Spaso Topley was discovered to have 400 Sobranie Virginia cigarettes in his tuck box and was expelled in the year of his A levels. I really don’t know where they came from. Not from me. I think he’d become greedy and started operating on his own. It wasn’t a clever place to keep them. I kept mine in a former ammunition box, with a lock, in the Armoury shed. As a midshipman I had been entrusted by Chief Petty Officer Dunstable with a number of keys during a CCF night operation, and a short delay in returning them had enabled me to have them copied at the shoe-repair shop in Upper Rookley. But keeping them in your tuck box in your room . . . Dear oh dear. I think with no A levels Spaso became a lab technician or something.

  And what happened to me? Without Hood, Wingate and Baynes, my life became easier. The habit of not talking to me was hard to break. My classmates kept up their silence till the day they left. In the house, Francis and McCain occasionally asked for the salt or the tea, but I didn’t bother to answer. I didn’t need their belated acknowledgement. ‘Pukey’ Weldon in the year above asked me if I’d like to go see a football match and I told him where to put his ticket. He looked surprised. That was about it, until I turned my attention to the years that had succeeded us.

  There was a boy called Stevens in the first year, who was outgoing and enthusiastic. He was in a school play and in a rugby team. People in his year seemed to like him. He was a small, fair child with smooth skin and laughing eyes. He was good at work, too, from what I gathered.

  I saw his parents deliver him back at the beginning of his second term. The average Chatfield family group comprised a sexless crone of a mother with uncut greying hair in an embarrassing slide, like a small girl’s; a repressed, bald father with a pipe; a bow-legged Labrador you could smell at twenty yards; and a dilapidated shooting brake of a discontinued kind.

  Stevens’s father drove a new car, shiny, dogless; he looked alert and friendly. (Plus, he was alive.) The mother had glossy fair hair, newly set, and appeared to be about twenty-five. She had a figure. Both looked unashamedly fond of the smiling son, whom they saw off with embraces and jokes.

  I noticed Stevens.

  Significant things happen so slowly that it’s seldom you can say: it was then – or then. It’s only after the change is fully formed that you can see what’s happened. We were doing World War Two in History at this time. To the occupied French in 1940, co-operating with the Germans was not only a practical but even a noble course of action, according to old ‘sapper’ Hill – one that was enshrined in article two of the armistice and boasted of by the French government. Was there one fatal moment when co-operation went too far, so that they found they were doing the Occupier’s dirty work for him? Was there a day – an hour – when in deporting Jews they stopped following the Nazis and began to lead them? Was it when they offered to fill the trains with Jews of French as well as other nationalities? Was it when they said the Jews could be
taken from the Free as well as the Occupied zone? Was it when they offered the Jewish children – to fulfil the ‘quotas’?

  Yes, no, both, all. There was a day, there was a moment when something reasonable changed into something that would haunt them for ever. But it wasn’t visible at the time, because at the time everything is only a tiny addition to what’s already there.

  Stevens had the room that I’d once had, the last one on the left. As you got older, you moved term by term gradually towards the middle of the corridor. I was coming out of my room one morning when Stevens brushed against me as he was running to a lesson. First-years were always rushed; they had no ‘study’ periods, no time off and hadn’t yet been able to drop any subjects.

  I called him back and told him to look where he was going. He smiled and apologised and shifted from foot to foot in a hurry to get going again.

  It wasn’t really good enough, was it?

  A week or so later, during second prep, I found I was bored. I’d done all the work I needed to do. I’d written to Julie, not that she’d reply, and I was fed up with reading Mickey Spillane and Dryden.

  I had no clear plan in mind as I left my room quietly and walked down to the end of the corridor. Stevens, T.J., said the strip above the door.

  I was thinking of something completely different when I opened the door and found him bent over a book at his desk, in pyjamas and dressing gown.

  My mind was elsewhere when I noticed the look of terror on his face.

  ‘Time for a bath, Stevens,’ I said.

  Four

  The co-residency lunch in Trinity Parlour was what Chris from Selwyn called a ‘real gas’. There were many more people than had been expected, so the quiche and Hirondelle ran out quickly. Jennifer said she’d go out and get some more food from a supermarket and I said I’d go with her. There was a whip-round of fifty-pence pieces and off we went to . . . God, I suppose it must have been Marks & Spencer. The shop opposite Boots at any rate. Quite a walk from Trinity. By the time we got back we discovered that someone had been to the college buttery and got bread and cheese as well.

  Jen seemed a bit cross about missing the discussion, though her friend Molly assured her not much had happened. All the boys from places like Churchill and Fitz were understandably keen on the idea of having girls on their staircases, but even the ones from the older colleges like Christ’s and Corpus were enthusiastic.

  The girls were a bit more guarded. They wanted equality in all things and that meant equal numbers, but they felt attached to their bluestocking institutions. They didn’t want them to go co-res. It wasn’t what those fierce women founders had envisaged, was it, to have people like Chris from Selwyn in the corridors of female scholarship, in football clothes and leering.

  Some boy from Trinity itself said shouldn’t they suggest to the university a gradual change, so that the girls retained four colleges, boys had four and the others moved slowly towards co-res as their statutes permitted, aiming to have gone the whole way in about ten years’ time.

  This went down badly. He was called a ‘Fabian’ and worse.

  Someone from Caius said there they needed a two-thirds majority of all Fellows past and present and that some footnote in the statutes implied that the wishes of the dead must also be consulted, or presumed.

  The debate was fierce and long, but produced an odd atmosphere, something like a party. People came to know one another quickly and seemed to enjoy it. At three o’clock a porter came to close the room and demand the key. Most were in any case due at sport or experiments or lectures (I’d missed the Australopithecine at two).

  Chris from Selwyn said we should carry on the discussion later, but his rooms weren’t big enough. Simon from Pembroke said he knew a very switched-on Fellow of Sidney Sussex, a Classics don with a charming modern Greek wife, who should be asked along.

  The grumpy porter kept asking for the key until Molly said in desperation, ‘We can all meet back at my house. Seven o’clock. Everyone bring a bottle. And a supporter.’

  Jennifer gave her an amazed look – ‘My house?!’ – as Molly slowly repeated the address a dozen times.

  I dropped in on Stellings in his room that afternoon, but he was listening to the LP of High Society on his expensive headphones and didn’t want to talk. I walked over Jesus’s Bones or Christ’s Pieces or Corpus Domini – some area of municipal green – and found myself in King Street. In my second year I did something called the King Street Run, a drinking challenge. You had to drink a pint of bitter in each of the street’s eight pubs in less than two hours without going to the toilet for any reason. If you did, or if you vomited, you had to start that pint again. You had to be accompanied by a ‘jockey’ who’d done it before; mine was a friend of Stellings’s called McCaffrey who, aptly, spent his life at Newmarket. He told me to eat a lot in the dining hall, to cover the food with salt and drink no water. Then we walked to the first pub. The boy next to me drank his pint so quickly he threw up straight away, was penalised with another and never made it out of that bar. I completed the course in an hour and a half, in the first group of finishers. It wasn’t that hard. I had a slight sense of anticlimax when I got back to the college bar, where I had a couple of barley wines and a gin and tonic.

  That afternoon, after the co-res lunch, since Stellings didn’t want to see me, I went to the Footballers and helped myself to a pint of Adnams, leaving the money on the till, because the landlord was asleep in his usual place, on the floor behind the bar. I sat by the fire and had a few more, always being careful to leave what I owed.

  At seven I set off for Jennifer’s house and smoked a joint on the way. I rang the bell. The party had hardly started, but I felt surprisingly relaxed. Jen was in the kitchen, cooking a large rice dish, so I sat and talked to Anne for a bit while other people began to arrive.

  By about nine there must have been seventy people or more in that tiny freezing house. It was almost impossible to get through to the kitchen, where the wine was. The corridor and the doorway were blocked by students, whose army greatcoats and sheepskin jerkins, beards and bushy hair took up all the space. I went to the off-licence on the next street and bought a bottle of wine for myself, which I kept in my coat pocket after I’d forced the cork in with the handle of a knife.

  Music was playing – the Velvet Underground, the Eagles, Can and Roxy Music, I think. There were lots of people I knew there – Nick and Hannah and various others from Tipperary and people I’d met at the co-residency lunch. The rooms were what they call ‘heaving’, which is the right word when people are shoulder to shoulder and some are trying to dance, some to escape and some to manoeuvre a paper cup, a paper plate and a plastic fork in rice and chopped green pepper with occasional tiny flakes of tuna fish.

  I went upstairs with my bottle to escape the crush and opened a door into a bedroom.

  It was dark in there and it was cold. There was an unlit gas fire on one side of the room. The bed had a few coats thrown across it, over a duvet with a pale blue, clean, just-ironed cover. This was the first duvet I’d seen in England, and it looked exotic in a drab, Scandinavian way.

  I shut the door behind me.

  The desk had history textbooks in three or four divided piles. I sat down at the desk. There were notebooks with her handwriting. There was a tiny piece of foil with about ten bob’s worth of second-rate hash in it. (I licked some off my finger.) There was a photograph of a house with a man and a woman outside it, smiling. There was a birthday card with a boat on it and a half-used lipsalve.

  Through the window in the darkness I could see the jumble of small slate roofs on the brick terraced cottages. I imagined a cat. I imagined a gas fire, ski socks (even though I wasn’t quite sure what they were) and morning tea. I imagined humorous living parents, with enough money and jokes about toothpaste and boyfriends and tights and Brian Martin’s endless speech.

  I gently pulled open a desk drawer. Beneath some envelopes, a pad of paper and a new, unused blister-pack of
contraceptive pills, I found a large diary, full of closely written entries.

  I thought about my mother – for a second. Then I was able to put her out of my mind, along with much else.

  There was a note in my pigeonhole this morning from Dr Woodrow, the fleshy one who interviewed me for the entrance award. ‘Dear Mr Engleby, I would be most obliged if you could drop into my room (G12) for a brief informal chat one day. Would Tuesday at noon be convenient? Peter Woodrow.’

  I stood outside, where I had stood that winter morning. I wondered what had happened to the clever-looking boy, my competitor; I’d never seen him again.

  ‘Come in.’

  Woodrow had glasses perched halfway down his thick nose; his grey hair needed cutting. He pointed me to the armchair where Gerald Stanley had sat to ask his asinine questions.

  ‘How are you enjoying Natural Sciences? An unusual move for an English scholar.’

  ‘I know. I didn’t do that well in Part One B, but I think it’s all right now.’

  ‘Yes, so I gather. Have you thought what you might do when you go down?’

  Woodrow was sitting at the table where he had sat before, leafing through my papers.

  ‘No, I haven’t.’

  ‘I sometimes try to help out a bit. The university appointments board can place most people. But informally I sometimes . . . Would you like a glass of hock? Or sherry, perhaps?’

  ‘No, I don’t drink alcohol.’

  ‘I see. Would you describe yourself as a loner?’

  ‘No more than most. I have friends.’ Stellings. Jen.

  ‘Good, good, that’s important. But self-sufficient?’

  ‘I’ve learned to be.’

  ‘Good, good. Equally good.’

  Woodrow sounded as though he was choosing between the cheese soufflé and the orange posset at a college feast.