HAND IN GLOVE
I went to Cambridge. Am I the way I am because I went there, or did I go there because I am the way I am? Cambridge certainly didn't teach me about life. Only life can do that, and it does it so badly I'm often inclined to ask for my money back. [We all have private lessons, after all, and pay through the nose; the slogan “experience is cheap at any price” wasn't written by consumers.]
I studied French and German Language and Literature, which means I learnt how to cope with life, and how to avoid it, at first hand, from individuals who had done just that. There may be ways to get closer to people, other than through their own words, with no intermediary except the printed page, but I'm not sure how reliable they are with the living, and I'm certainly not inclined to try them with the dead. Sam Johnson put it best, when he said that literature's job was to help us better to enjoy life or better to endure it; and even though his rolling periods eschew corvine directness in their circumambulatory inspection of the subject proposed, he actually wrote two straightforward essays on a prostitute's life, treating her as if she were a fellow-human being, and not an example in a homily.
When I got to Cambridge, Bob Dylan was just becoming famous and times were therefore changing. Crumbling traditions were being replaced by – nothing much, really. Gowns, for instance. Once, they had had to be worn in the streets at night, to distinguish students from townsfolk. Then, just to lectures. In theory, that was still true when I arrived. But fewer and fewer people bothered, and nobody said anything, so pretty soon no one was wearing them at all. In the summer, for exams, we turned up in them, just in case, but the invigilators noted the heat of the exam room and said we could take them off. We still had to wear them when we dined in Hall, but only at the formal Third Sitting at eight o'clock when we had Latin grace and dons on High Table and waiters to serve us, who frequently spilt soup all over us from the fifteen bowls on their trays, so the gowns were a Good Thing. The gate shut at midnight, but you didn't have to climb in, you could now knock and be admitted, though only when the porter had finished his half-hour round of the college and come back to the Porters' Lodge. So the discreetly placed bicycle by the lowest bit of college wall still served its purpose.
Was there no sense of tradition? Well, yes. No plaques, or any nonsense like that, but if you looked in the right book, you knew that Byron had lived on that staircase, and Newton over there. Within the same walls. There weren't any nameboards or naff bits of card. The names were painted [a beautiful piece of old-fashioned signwriting] on the wall just inside the archway at the foot of each staircase. Painted fresh each year, or when someone changed rooms – unless, of course, they just stayed there. You could see that, because their paint wasn't fresh, and you could judge how long they'd been there, by how faded they were, and the thickness of the layers of fresh paint above or below their name. No one ever burnt it off. Somewhere, I fantasised, right at the bottom, were the names of the people who'd lived there when the buildings were new, but all you could actually see were some suggestive lumps and bumps.
You never smelt the new paint, either. They did it in vacations, which were long long long. In fact, we were only there for just under half the year. You did the reading in the vacations – that’s what they were for, not stacking shelves in supermarkets (Tesco not yet a household name!) – and the thinking and the social bit and the translations (four a week) and the essays (two a week) during term-time. How did we fit it all in? The days were longer, then, no doubt.
Some traditions still persisted. The one of reserve, for example. The lecturers all addressed us as Mr This and Miss that, and we responded with equal formality. It felt very grown-up and respectful – on both sides. The thing about reserve is that when it drops it’s a sign of real intimacy and trust, not just can’t-be-bothered casualness. How do you show who your friends are, if you have to call everyone by their first name? But then, I’m a linguist, I know about the familiar and the unfamiliar you, and relish the distinction. In modern universities, the lecturers discuss their choice of central-heating system or their divorce settlement with their students. In my day, you talked about books – and I think you learn more about someone’s character that way.
But then, education was different in those days, too. It was more – Mephistophelean. Mephisto doesn't want to turn Marlowe's Faustus to the Dark Side – solamen miseris socios habuisse doloris – the solace of the wretched is to have/ companions to share their misery – he just wants someone he can talk to about good literature. But that does entail bringing the person concerned into the club of People Who Know Things, and incidentally disqualifies them from Normal Life for ever. Once you’ve read a good book, there’s no going back. You’re hooked. Nowadays, it's just a matter of getting the coursework out of the buggers so you can tick the boxes.
Then there were the women. Or rather, there weren't the women. Like the lands where the Jumblies live, they were far and few, even in Modern and Medieval Languages, which was supposed to be a hotbed – if you'll pardon the totally inappropriate expression. Why inappropriate? Well, at Girton, then a single sex women's college three miles out, [to make sure visiting males were too exhausted and sweaty from the bike-ride to think about getting sweaty and exhausted from anything else] students were supposed to move their bed into the corridor if they were entertaining a man alone in their room. Entertaining more than one at a time seems to have been all right, though – and they'd need the bed to sit on anyway, because the room only ever had two chairs in it. Nowadays, of course, we would all snigger at the naïveté of it, but then...
Of course, we knew our parents must have done the deed of darkness, otherwise we wouldn't have been around (unless we took Brave New World as fact, or thought you ordered babies through your doctor and picked them up from the hospital), but knowledge and belief aren't the same thing, and when we heard moans and groans and bumps and thumps coming from our parents' bedroom during the night, it was a lot easier to imagine they were moving the furniture round to see if it would look better that way – especially since our mother did that kind of thing on her own in the living room during our father's absence at work.
Of course, all kinds of people were at it, as they say, including in the recent past a Cabinet Minister, and I knew intellectually it must always have gone on – but it didn't really impinge on me, any more than the knowledge that Sherlock Holmes had mainlined on cocaine inspired me to develop a drug habit, even though a deerstalker hat was one of my first undergraduate purchases. [The East Anglian winter justified my natural eccentricity.]
The dons themselves fitted into the scheme very neatly. Their college rooms were, of course, celibate. But that didn't mean they couldn't be seen squiring around highly desirable specimens of the opposite gender in clothing that emphasised their desirability. Nothing gross. Nothing tacky. Nothing evident. We'd only just reached the bottom of Page 2, after all. Nothing you could put your finger on – though you might have liked to! Just suggestive lumps and bumps. And often gloves. All the way up the arm. To go on and come off – slowly!
Some dons, of course, could be observed with young ladies who might have been their daughters – but clearly weren't. Jealousy on our part was met by the reflection that these dons had the gift of tongues, and that their linguistic and grammatical superiority were receiving their just reward. They knew all about principal parts and were experts in the supine, while our juvenile efforts at conjugation were doomed to sputter out prematurely.
And then there were the ones who lived out of college, with dumpy, dowdy, bossy women they were presumably married to, and had carloads of kids in endless wellies with snotty noses, and missed out on Renaissance architecture and mediaeval feasts.
Dr Murray should have fitted into the first category. He had the car for it. The way he patted and stroked its curves as he got in and out was more instructive than a term’s lectures on the transferred epithet. The car itself had a throaty vroom that might have been modelled on Fenella Fielding’s voice.
How did I know who he was? There were no boards full of photos in the college. You had to wait till you were dead famous (or sometimes just dead) before they put your picture up, and then it was an artist’s impression, like Crimewatch, but in oils. The car drew my attention, I watched it park, I saw him walk into the staircase on the far side of New Court where I lived [C19, neo-Gothic, crummy stucco that looked like cardboard when it rained], the staircase beside the entrance to the baths [oh, those primitive days!], and his was the only don’s name on the list, at the top, which only meant that he lived at the top. Undergraduates’ names had initials, don’s names had titles, Professor, Doctor, Mr – even though, as I said before, when they taught us, they called us Mister and Miss, as if we were real grown-ups.
The fact that he had his name on the staircase didn’t mean he had to look out on pseudo-Pugin with damp stains, like a building whose anti-perspirant doesn’t work. Cambridge is secretive and mysterious. The way you go in isn’t always the way you come out. In my father’s college, there are many rooms. In a way the secretive bit is institutionalised by tradition. Most rooms have two doors, an inner and an outer, the outer opens outward, the inner opens inward. The outer one (with a letter-box) locks, the inner one doesn’t. If you’re actually out, or you really don’t want to be disturbed – an urgent essay, for instance, or some really private business [don’t ask], then you “sport your oak”. Otherwise, you’re fair game for interruption.
I knew nothing about Dr Murray, because he didn’t teach me or any of my friends – until… Just before the end of my first term, my normal supervisor, a lovely man in his early fifties, went down with back trouble. He’d recently got married, for the first [and, I’m delighted to say, last] time, to his charming 29-year-old secretary. [I heard, though I forget on what authority, that he proposed to her immediately after his mother died – and I must add, on the authority of my own experience, that they made one of the most civilised couples I have ever seen, producing – I met her myself, aged four, since I stayed on at Cambridge to do research – an utterly charming and articulate little girl who has grown up to be a very talented and whimsical artist, a cross between Marc Chagall and Beryl Cook, with a dash of Lucien Freud, whose name I see on the back of cards sent to me by the people who know me best and take most care in their selection.]
So, for the last supervision of the term, I was allocated to Dr Murray. [Supervisions in Cambridge are called tutorials in Oxford – though, since I didn’t attend The Other Place, I’m not sure if they’re really the same. Tutors, I take it, tute, or teach, while supervisors point out what you’ve done wrong and how you might do it right – the tutor needs to know stuff, the supervisor has to understand stuff, and can work with the knowledge you should have brought (in your essay), re-organising it and querying it, until YOU come to the right answer. A clever person can supervise on ANYTHING.]
Alas, I wasn’t allocated alone. Don Quijote had his Sancho Pansa, Achilles had his heel, and I had Colin Parrett. Public School by the accent, Part I Mod Langs, Part II Estate Management, I assume – I certainly never saw him again after first year. For Part II, I got together with a mate of mine, and we terrorised our supervisor by telling him what we intended to study – all proper stuff, mind you, no Mickey Mouse, l o n g books like The Magic Mountain, but we had very firm views on the canon. When Parrett was wrong, he was wrong, and I couldn’t help him, and when I was trying to take a different view, or be a bit clever, he just sat there and got all down-to-earth. A bit like your average marriage, really.
Anyway, in our gowns (because we didn’t know Dr Murray’s attitude to these things) we met at the foot of the staircase and made our way up flight after flight, turning, twisting, ducking, weaving, till we reached a tiny landing with a window filled by a battlement and knocked at the freshly-painted door. There was no room for an oak in the attics, so we obeyed the “Come in!” we had heard, and entered.
A pleasant and respectable room, for those pre-Habitat days. A blameless sofa, with a woven pastel loose-cover, non-matching chairs quite a way after Sheraton, glass-fronted bookcase cut short by the sloping roof, gate-leg table with a tapestry table-cover out of a Dutch master jigsaw. An interior from Country Life – the estate agent part, not the features [even I have to go to the dentist sometimes!] But the pictures…
Now, your normal don’s room in the Arts would have a set of intellectual pin-ups from the eighteenth century: Voltaire, Rousseau, Kant, Hume, Johnson, Pope, Swift – copperplate engravings with Latin inscriptions in fine calligraphy. The only nod in this direction was a mezzotint of Keats from the side, cheekbones very prominent, modelled like a bas-relief or a cameo, with a quotation on a little card in a rather scratchy hand poked, as an afterthought, in one corner on top of the glass and under the edge of the frame: Forever wilt thou love, and she be fair. [I’ll come clean; that’s the only reason I knew it was Keats.]
But the rest… professionally enlarged black and white photographs, all of them… a young man, with swept-back blonde hair, smiling toothily from a sports-car; another youngish man with twinkling eyes, wearing a dinner-jacket and holding a French horn on his lap, his left hand doing something slightly dodgy inside the bell; a thin-faced young man, his hair in a kind of widow’s peak, his eyes halfway between sleepy and passionate, as smouldering as Elvis, but clearly cleverer. Icons, all of them, in their way, and I did recognise them: Mike Hawthorn, the racing driver; Dennis Brain, the horn-player; James Dean, the film actor. Not what you’d have expected. Certainly not together.
There was another picture on the wall, as well, a collage of black and white photographs that I couldn’t make out at all. The perspectives were wrong. There were distortions in objects I thought I could recognise that simply didn’t make sense. But I had no time to try, for Dr Murray emerged from one of the two doors in the wall where the pictures hung, the end-wall of the room, the only wall, in fact, where pictures could hang, because the others had the slope of the roof. Two doors – one to his bedroom, I assumed, one no doubt to a little cubby-hole of a kitchen with a couple of gas-rings, enough to boil an egg or make Turkish coffee. No shower or toilet, for sure. [The swanky Adelphi, where Raffles lived, boasted of the fact that it had no facilities for cooking, because that was beneath a gentleman.]
“Sorry, sorry – I’d almost forgotten you were due to be coming to me – I was hoping to get away a little before the end of term – ”
Edinburgh, I’d have said, but it might have been Western Highlands, modified. Sandy hair, clear blue eyes. He sat behind the desk and looked at us, as we sat on the sofa, which was less comfortable than it had appeared.
“Descartes, is that right?” he asked, flicking his eyes from one of us to the other, in the hope of enlightenment.
“Cartesius,” said Parrett hesitantly. “Cartesian dualism – that’s what it says on – ”
“Yes, yes – René Descartes – Le Discours de la Méthode – that’s what you should have written about.”
Parrett ummed and ahhed and fiddled with his A4 pad, because he hadn’t done the work. My head was in my bag, because I had done it and was trying to find it. I mislay everything. I have Borrowers living in my pockets. I began piling unsorted lecture notes on the corner of Dr Murray’s desk, returned translations, texts to do over the vacation, notices about library opening hours – and then I found it, and started reading.
It wasn’t good. I hate doing summaries without attitude. But I covered the main points and didn’t sneer too much at the proof of the existence of God. Nonetheless, I couldn’t blame Dr Murray for doing whatever he was doing behind his desk – fiddling with something in one of the drawers, I thought – I try not to let myself be distracted by people who aren’t listening properly. [Naming no names.]
Anyway, he went over the main points again, for Parrett’s benefit, and then asked him for an example, and Parrett said, “I don’t really get it, sir, I mean, I don’t feel like two people. Should I?”
Dr Murray shifted in his seat, and carried on fiddling. I could see him wondering whether Parrett really existed, since he clearly didn’t think. Then he leant forward and brought something out of the drawer – perhaps what he’d been fiddling with.
“Here’s an example. This glove is like the human body. It’ll only move if there’s a hand inside it. Of course, when the hand’s inside it, you can’t see the hand. You only know it’s there, because you see the glove moving. ”
“So the hand,” I said, since Parrett was just staring with his usual grin, “is the human spirit?”
“Yes,” said Dr Murray, looking at the glove as if he was seeing it for the first time, turning it over and over, taking it in one hand and drawing it through the fingers of the other, “only of course it’s invisible, which the hand isn’t.”
“Why’s it invisible?” asked Parrett, staking a claim to existence.
“Because it’s not physical. You can see its effects, but you can’t see it itself.”
“Why’s that, then?” asked Parrett, destroying the good impression he had made.
“Because it’s a higher kind of existence. Because it doesn’t change, the way physical objects do. A piece of wax at a normal temperature is one thing, but heat it only a little, and the physical attributes by which we defined and recognised it are no longer present. This is not true of the human soul.”
I saw Parrett taking a deep breath, and jumped in with questions about Racine and Corneille, and human responsibility, using learning to avoid embarrassment. Dr Murray and I played a couple of rallies of name-tennis with minor characters and confidantes, and then we heard the clock in Great Court begin to strike the hour (always a lengthy business). The doctor put his head on one side, as if to listen, and then on the other side, to indicate the folly of attempting to speak, and then he looked us both full in the eyes and nodded, to indicate the supervision was at an end.
Attempting to reclaim the papers I had put on the desk, I dropped them, they slipped out of their folder and avalanched, knocking over a photograph I had not noticed before, or had taken for a desk-calendar.
Black and white, three-quarter face, a woman in her early twenties, dark hair, shiny, wavy, mid-length, back off the forehead as if blown by a wind, the ear covered but the earring showing, a long neck, the middle third clutched by a tightly knotted white kerchief, the point to the back, also following the wind, at the base of the throat that little hollow made to hold water from swimming or a lover’s tongue, leading down to the top of the crisp, tight, white blouse, with a slit of a shadow that suggested hidden depths. The eyes large, the pupils small, sparkling, looking at – someone other than the photographer – someone as well as the photographer – looking at anyone who was looking at her – making anyone who wasn’t looking look at her – and the eyebrows confirmed it, swooping up and out with the curves of the brow and the temple, asking, begging, commanding, the lips half-parted in a hungry smile, ready to speak but not needing to. A lot to interpret out of a half-glimpsed photograph, but then I have been taught by experts.
Doctor Murray’s hand shot out to pick it up and put it down again – face-down this time, as if he was proud enough of it to want to stake an instant claim, but felt it should be kept private. And I could sense why. The look on that exquisite woman’s face reminded me of those lines from Goethe’s Faust “Give me a girl, that lying on my breast/ Already eyes my neighbour for her own”. [Goethe was, let’s admit it, a Sexy Beast – read the Venetian Epigrams if you don’t believe me. If he’d had the chance to surf internet porn, he probably wouldn’t have written nearly as much.] Young as I was, I recognised her hunger, knew I could only feed it, never sate it, but didn’t care. My own eyes still held by the image I could no longer see, my hands fumbled and scooped up a bundle of papers, and as I did so I was aware of a scent in the air, just at that sudden moment, the way it is when you tread on pineapple mayweed without noticing, only this was heady and intoxicating, but underneath as sharp as all regret.
I scrambled the papers into my bag, trod on the end of my gown, because I was bending down, nearly fell over, recovered, [good thing we had the gowns – Dr Murray had been wearing one ready for us – a kind of unspoken thing, like an academic scissors, paper, stone] and followed Parrett out of the door and down the staircase – only he must have taken a wrong turn somewhere, because we came out into the passage that led from Nevile’s Court into Great Court, past the Dining Hall, known as The Screens (goodness knows why – at least, I think I’ve come across the phrase used since for something similar in one of those moated manor houses in Shropshire that grew out of an all together in one room mediaeval hall) where the notice-boards were. I used the close perusal of them as an excuse to ditch Parrett, and went back to my room in New Court.
Proust was crying out to have one of his long-winded and extravagant thirty-line similes rendered into English (rendered as in boiling down pig-fat into lard, I fear – calfater sounds frightfully elegant in French in a way that “caulking with pitch” doesn’t in English, but that’s how I had to translate it, faute de mieux, ‘it’s the fault of the mucus’, as we say). Montaigne at least had a special dictionary to tell you what his words meant, but the only copy was in the Faculty Library, so I had to squeeze those translations in between lectures and other classes, so as not to waste travelling time. I liked Montaigne more, though: sixteenth century French was such a wholegrain, multi-seed chewy language, compared with the exquisitely refined pap they made out of it under Louis XIV, emasculating the vocabulary and turning the spelling’s mixture of brown and wild rice into Easycook.
I interrupted my wrestle with Marcel to wrestle with college food – almost as fruitless, to tell the truth: soggy chips, tinned peas, and rubber chicken – a friend of mine once made a determined cut at his portion and sent it two places down the table with the rebound. Pudding at least was the standard English schoolboy’s sex substitute, filling stodge with a sauce to stand the spoon in. After which, I was in need of spiritual sustenance, so I carried on looking for lost time, and relaxed by reading a couple of La Fontaine’s fables, including the one about the man with the two mistresses. After which, since no one else was about to, Morpheus opened his arms to me.
There was, need I say, no central heating. The night was chilly, but not as Arctic as the one I’d spent before my scholarship oral exam the previous December, when I’d travelled thirty miles north from my home in balmy Hertfordshire, just to be on time for a little chat that (together with what I’d done in the written papers) brought me my place at Trinity and sixty pounds a year (which in those days – but you can complete the rest – only it really was!) Over forty years on, I can remember how I left the gas fire on all day in my room in Whewell’s Court, and my breath still misted in the corner. I slept in coat and gloves, with my head under the covers, and I was still cold. Why didn’t I learn, and go to some other university before it was too late?
It wasn’t that cold on this particular night. I turned off the electric fire (there was a mysterious solid fuel stove, that I lit at weekends, with my bedmaker’s patent rolled paper firelighters, when I was in all day) and listened as it stopped pinging. Then there was more or less silence.
It was the scrabbling that woke me up. The noise, I thought, as I lay there with my eyes closed, of some small rodent moving around among papers, its little clawed feet slipping and sliding on smooth printed surfaces, trying in vain to get a grip, as we all are, and making more and more frenzied movements, which in turn defeated its object all the more effectively. I recalled having encountered a mouse only once, in a garden shed, and having been startled more than necessary by its pattering rapidity. As with a thunderstorm, or Concorde, the sound only reached you after the thing that had made it was long gone. Achilles might have been able to catch a tortoise, whatever Zeno claimed; but he’d have stood no chance at all against mus domesticus.
When you can’t do anything, don’t do anything. It will all go away. Tout, as they say, passe. If you lie there long enough with your eyes closed, anyway. It’s a solution I still attempt, in too many cases, with, as I now reluctantly admit, limited success. But then, it seemed to have worked. The noises died down, and then ceased, and I fell asleep.
Now, I can recognise the Entrée des Songes from Rameau’s Dardanus (just don’t ask me to whistle it), and I know about the Gate of Ivory and the Gate of Horn, because I’ve read the Odyssey, but the dreams I have don’t fall into those categories of the true (but obscure) and the clear (but deceitful). I seldom if ever remember the dreams I have (I assume I have them). But there are one or two from my childhood or youth that I can conjure up in a moment, though their significance remains as problematic now as it was then. There was a scary period when I dreamt that every droning aeroplane I could hear was about to drop the Bomb, and my sleep was invaded by glimpses of future instants just before that event, instants that I recognised a few days later with the prickling scalp and raised hair of déjà-vu.
The dream that came to me that night was different – though not out of place for someone of my age and sex. I was in some southern French town – sandstone houses, flagstones and cobbles, winding streets, cataracts of geraniums, lobelia and petunias, a shady doorway and a girl I knew I loved, though I could only feel an emotion, not see a face, well, perhaps brown curly hair and warm eyes. [I will say that the flavour of that emotion was not one that I have ever tasted in real life – richer, deeper, darker, more complete than I could ever hope for.]
Freud – one of the most imaginative authors of fiction who has ever lived – and a gifted literary critic to boot, who described perversions and fetishes as “sexual metaphors”, though it was Karl Kraus and not Sigmund who urged us to feel sorry for the shoe-fetishist who has to put up with the whole woman – Freud suggests that we create our dreams to explain away the phenomena that are trying to wake us up. The grit in the oyster of sleep is surrounded and made harmless by the pearl of dream. Perhaps it was so in this case. I felt warmth, I felt movement, I felt an alternation between gentleness and fierceness, between squeezing and brushing, between the lightest of touches and the clutch of passion, and always the same regular pulsating movement, with a tempo that was now faster and now slower, though the sensation itself never ceased, bringing me gradually, gradually to an inevitable climax and conclusion. I hung there on the edge, I remember, teetering on the brink, leaning out, leaning back, raising myself, as if for a dive, on my metaphorical toes, and then feeling the firm ground again under the soles of my feet, my trembly, sweating feet, that urged themselves up and away from the ground, the weight of my whole body quavering and wavering on a small piece of extended flesh, until, just as I was about to overbalance, I swayed back, but, instead of sinking into security, I pushed off with all my strength, bending knees, bracing ankles, tautening calves, hurling myself up and out into the receptive, all-surrounding, all-embracing void that did not fail me and let me fall, but took me and threw me up even higher, letting my body do all the moving, without my volition, letting my body take over from my brain in a way that only happens otherwise when I play darts well, letting my body do all the thinking and feeling for both of us, me and my brain. Metaphors don’t work, because it’s like nothing else, but imagine a canal-lock, filling and filling and filling, the water coming in from somewhere invisible, though you can see the swirl and sometimes the bubbles, and the narrowboat rising and bumping about a little from the current, only when the lock’s full, it isn’t a question of the upper gate opening and the vessel gliding out smoothly, all on the level, no, it’s the lower gate that opens, and the accumulated pressure of all that piled-up water bursts out in a rush and gush, the narrow-boat riding it, prow up, stern up, just as it comes, like a mixture of surfing and white-water rafting and one of the wetter rides from Alton Towers, with a bit of obligatory screaming added in. Or, or, or – I don’t know if you’ve ever been to Wells, but after you’ve done the cathedral (or before, depending on the weather and the time of day) you ought to go and have a look at the feature that gives the place its name. It’s a big pool, part of a moat, and to be honest it looks like a rather small gravel-pit that’s been flooded, but the water is very clear and you can see to the bottom, and after you’ve been watching for a while you realise that water is entering the pool from underneath: there are curls and swirls in the fabric of the liquid just above the pool-bed, weeds sway in invisible currents, there are different thicknesses of water down there, as if you were mixing vodka and lime, with their different viscosities and colours, coalescing with reluctance at first, then, as they get to know each other, with a clinging voluptuousness, intertwined in a union that emphasises their separateness. There is also an enormous sense of pressure, as the spring forces its way up, out of the resisting earth into the softer, yet still resisting water, which gives way, but then surrounds it and makes it its own.
Pity about the mess afterwards, the way the liquid warmth becomes damp and cold and sticky and slimy. But hey, that’s life. If satisfaction lasted forever, we’d have no reason to do the thing again.
I flipped back the sheet and blankets [there’s a statement that’ll need a historical note!] to deal with the problem my pleasure had brought, wondering if I could do it all adequately by feel, in the dark, and then inherit the customary male oblivion. Reaching up for the box of tissues, however, [“The wind blows its nose across the marshes” is not a dictionary error in East Anglia, it’s a statement of fact!] I came across something I had not expected at all.
It was a glove. Quite a small glove, that would not even have fitted me. A driving glove, soft, soft leather, like a second skin. Pinked – that is, with tiny diamond-shaped holes on the back, to let the hand breathe, the holes themselves forming a diamond-shape. It lay there on the pillow, not placed, but tossed down, as if it had just been shucked off. It may have been my imagination, but I thought it was warm. It was certainly smooth, ineffably smooth, smoother than any hand could ever be, because our hands have lines on them, lines of identity, lines of use, lines of wear, lines that tell our character and future – and, of course, our past, the little scars and calluses, I got mine from carrying my schoolbag, from writing with my fountain-pen, but I always hoped [when I heard about how they identified intellectuals by their smooth hands] that the Khmer Rouge would see me as an intellectual worker, and not simply kill me out of hand. There was a scent about it, too, one I knew I had smelt recently, sweet, but not sickly, and sharp underneath. I picked it up, and was tempted for a moment to kiss it – this was, after all, before I went to Vienna and learnt that the gentleman brings his lips together above the hand he’s kissing, and never touches it with his mouth at all. But then, curiosity got the better of that instinctive emotional response (and in a way I’m glad it did) and I put it down again, and began to wonder what it was doing there (or what it had done there) and how it had got there in the first place?
While I was thinking, I attended to my ‘other business’, as well as I could – you don’t want to know the details – and looked around the room. A bedside light, in the middle of the night, is a metaphysical form of illumination: it scrapes away at the dark inside, as well as the dark outside, but I was looking at the stuff I wanted to see – and what I saw, was my bag (the old school-bag, I hadn’t needed a new one for university) upended and the contents scattered and scrabbled through. It couldn’t, I thought, have been a mouse, unless it was Mighty Mouse. A rat, I was sure, was out of the question. Draughty as the room was, there were no holes large enough.
Then I knew. Quite suddenly, I knew. I knew where the glove had come from. I knew how it had got from where it had been to my room. I did not know how it had got from where it had been in my room to where it was now, but I was beginning to have an idea, which would have explained the sharp scrabbling. All in all, I thought I’d have preferred the mouse.
My next thought was not reflection but decision – always a good sign in the middle of the night, when the mind tends to look backward rather than forward. I knew what I had to do – not a moral obligation, but a stark necessity – and I knew how to do it. All that remained now was to wait until I could put my plan into operation – if one could dignify it with the name of a ‘plan’.
I checked my watch, urged the horses of the night to run slowly so as to give me more sleep, and went to the chest of drawers to retrieve my cartoon clockwork alarm (I mean it had the two big bells on top, not that Mickey was kicking Goofy endlessly in the bum in place of a second-hand). Why was it in the drawer? Like the Marschallin in Rosenkavalier, I can’t stand ticking clocks, they keep me awake – the small, picky kind, anyway, not the statuesque slow ones with the mighty chimes. I don’t mind knowing that time passes – I just don’t want to be reminded of the speed. I set it earlier than usual – those were the days before my body had learned to collaborate with my head and wake me thirty seconds in advance of the alarm – knowing that I risked discourtesy, but certain that time was of the essence.
Then, being a man, I fell asleep. It’s still not clear to me whether the male ability to fall asleep under all circumstances, appropriate or inappropriate, shows that men have clear consciences, or none at all. The revised version of the alarm did its business, and I set off breakfastless on my mission.
Dr Murray’s staircase was no less confusing in the morning but once you’d started, you had to finish [as with many human activities] – there was simply no other way to go. I knew he’d be there, because the car was – but I could also hear the sounds of activity above my head, more frenetic and sustained than those I associated with a bedmaker. So far from his non-existent oak being sported, the single door to his rooms was wide open, and cardboard boxes and files and even desk drawers were jumbled on to the landing. The piles were too haphazard and lopsided to suggest he was moving out – more that he was looking for something, and had cleared himself some space for the purpose, in case whatever it was had fallen down, or got inside, or dropped behind, or found its way underneath.
I knocked, out of politeness, on the open door, and Dr Murray appeared from the door that I thought led to his bedroom. I don’t think he appeared in response to my knock. I think he appeared coincidentally, rushing from one site of fruitless investigation to another, breathing hard, though the exertion was clearly emotional rather than physical. To his credit, when he saw me he tried to turn back into a teacher, standing upright, slowing his movements, bringing his hands to his sides instead of letting them flail in impotent clutching gestures. But his hair looked like a gorse bush without flowers, and his face was a sheet of crumpled paper with two cigaretteburn holes for eyes.
“I hoped I could catch you before you left,” I said, putting down my school briefcase in a way that indicated I intended to stay. “I’m sorry if I’m disturbing you, but I wanted to do some more reading round Descartes over the Christmas vac, and I thought you could give me some pointers.” It was true, oh, it was true, but, of course…
How do you keep the cat away from the mouse? You wave a ball of wool under its nose. It knows where it is with wool, it’s used to it, it’s a familiar game, the familiar is always likely to win over the unknown and the uncertain – not necessarily in the long run, but for the moment, for long enough to –
I could see a kind of relief in his eyes, that he was being asked a question he could answer, instead of… He nodded and turned away, in acceptance, not rejection, because he was going to his books, scanning the shelves, taking down volumes with purpose, not at random. They were not from some imposing complete works, tooled leather and all that, they were scruffy French paperbacks , not every page cut open, some bought new, some clearly bought secondhand, stuffed in rucksacks, read at café tables with coffee and croissants and ketchup and mayonnaise and inevitably red wine, to judge by one ring-mark. They had bookmarks in, used envelopes, bills, browned sheets of lined paper, they constituted the history of his mind, insights gained on summer afternoons, with grass-stains, and winter evenings with butter dripping off the crumpets. They were him.
I didn’t watch the whole performance. It was clearly a very private thing. Besides, I had something of my own to do. I needed to organise my bag, and where better to do so than the corner of the desk where I had done so the day before? So I did. I unpacked that fearful jumble of disparate papers and began to sort them into piles. When I had finished, I put some of them back into my bag.
Having finished reviewing the correspondence in his life-long love-affair with René, Dr Murray came towards the desk, bearing books. As he did so, he caught sight of something which made him spill what he had in his hands, dropping (as you might say) literature in favour of life.
For a moment he looked at me, trying to catch my eye in a meaningful sort of way, but I fixed my gaze on the books, tumbled on the desk like erratic blocks after a glacier has retreated, and I knew he didn’t know if I knew. Then I took pity on him, and let our eyes meet. I do innocent concern very well, and he took my glance for that, but his eyes couldn’t stay off the one thing he wanted most in the world, and I was gentleman enough not to follow where they looked.
He let the books lie, and his hand shot out.
“Mislaid,” he said, breathing again. “It was a challenge.” It wasn’t clear who he was addressing when he said that – perhaps the glove, itself? – but the tone was that of explanation and justification, something academics are good at, perhaps because they need to be, or think they need to be. Evident emotions linked to unlikely objects need, after all, to be explained away. He pressed the precious object to his bosom [I choose my vocabulary very deliberately] and vanished with it into his bedroom.
While he was gone, I thought. And looked. And thought.
Der Handschuh, a ballad by Schiller, is the tale of a lady who drops her glove deliberately into a lions’ den (one lion, one tiger, two leopards, to be precise, and when was I ever otherwise?) and demands that the man who has long loved her (presumably without encouragement or reward) retrieve it. He does so, for who can deny a lady anything she desires, but when he climbs back out, he throws it in her face, says he doesn’t want her thanks, and stomps out of her life for ever. So much for literature.
I didn’t think it could have been like that in this instance. The girl didn’t look that kind of tease – she looked more like the kind who would have climbed down into the lions’ den first herself and then dared the man to join her. And Dr Murray, I felt, would have done so. I looked at her face again, which was, I admit, pleasurable. The photograph I had seen the day before was on the desk, haphazardly, moved sideways in the course of The Wild Hunt, and I had the chance, which I took with alacrity, to study it in more detail. One hand was, indeed, bare. The glove on the other had pinking on the back in a diamond shape. On my first glance, I had assumed she was sitting outside at some continental café table, her hand resting on the curved back of a bentwood chair as she sat with her torso half-twisted towards me. Now, however, I realised that the arc of the circle was part of a steering-wheel, a real wheel, ribbed underneath for better grip, the steering-wheel of a sports car.
Where had they raced from, where had they raced to? Nowadays, not possible – then, the roads really were emptier. And the trains ran everywhere. Somewhere, though, I realised, there had been a misjudgement. Who had been in the lead? No question. She would have taken the lead in everything – that was why I still couldn’t take my eyes off her, dead as she was and only in black and white. How far behind would he have been? Far off not to have seen the accident, I thought. I imagined him braking when he found the road blocked, wondering, hoping, fearing, rejecting certainty. There’s a passage in Racine’s Phèdre where the young hero Hippolyte has been killed in a chariot smash, and his girlfriend, Aricie comes by and asks where he is, though his blood is spread all around her. “She sees her lover, and asks for him still”. Did he make that connection? Later? Or, more dreadfully, at the time?
With that realisation, many other things became clear. I understood what the three male icons whose pictures were on the wall had in common: not just their early deaths, but the manner of them. Those whom the Gods love… So what does that say about the rest of us?
And Dr Murray’s response? He was an academic. Ordinary people wonder at the stars. An academic wants to give them names. Faced with the unthinkable, the irreparable, the unendurable, the academic seeks out parallel instances, compares and contrasts, attempts to fit it all into a framework. It changes nothing, but it gives the illusion of control: the reed thinks. Or do I really mean, the reed thought, even though it no longer exists?
Armed with this knowledge (which was, let us be clear, not knowledge at all, but a string of mutually dependent surmises) I made an assault on the Ultimate Enigma, the collage. And now, as they say, it all made sense: these familiar shapes, distorted, were just that: the wreckage and detritus of umpteen car crashes, bent radiator grilles, twisted chassis and subframes, the fire-blackened springs of seats whose padding had gone up in smoke, blind headlights, shattered glass, wheels whose tyres had melted off them, leaving the wire strands of the casing like witch’s hair, remnants, leftovers, scraps, all that remained of… but organised in some kind of subtle, impressionistic pattern, and trapped in a rectangle of brushed aluminium.
I was still looking at it intently when Dr Murray emerged from his bedroom, calmer than before, but still slightly hyper with relief. In seven and a half minutes flat he dictated to me section references (page references no use, since I was unlikely to have the same editions) to all the passages in Descartes that he considered important, and I wrote them dutifully down on a piece of paper that, to my surprise, I still have. Given his emotional state, you may wonder that he took the time and trouble to do this. I was not, after all, his personal student, he had only seen me once before and was unlikely to see me again. But he owed it to Descartes. And Descartes owed it to Truth. And that’s the way that debts get paid.
So, I toddled off, with time to spare, to a translation class (trying to shoehorn wispily lyrical E.M. Forster into relatively rugged German prose – Jones the Dictionary displaying wit, erudition and a sense of style in German and English that would have put most exponents of the New Criticism to shame – to say nothing of Lacan, Derrida, Barthes, Kristeva and their English clones).
I never saw Doctor Murray or his car again. There was unwritten shiny fresh black paint at the top of the list of names when I went for a bath after Christmas.
All that remains, then, are the pieces of Descartes; so let’s have them now, as a nice calm closure:
Toutefois il faut au moins avouer que les choses qui nous sont représentées dans le sommeil, sont comme des tableaux et des peintures, qui ne peuvent être formées qu'à la ressemblance de quelque chose de réel et de véritable;
It must be admitted that the things which are represented to us in dreams are like pictures and paintings which can only be formed from a likeness of something real and true.
Descartes, Première méditation metaphysique
Title of the second meditation
il est certain que ce moi, c'est-à-dire mon âme, par laquelle je suis ce que je suis, est entièrement et véritablement distincte de mon corps, et qu'elle peut être ou exister sans lui.
…it is certain that this I, that is to say my soul, by which I am what I am, is entirely and truly distinct from my body, and that it can be or exist without it.
6th meditation
C’est presque la même raison qui fait qu’on prend naturellement plaisir à se sentir émouvoir à toutes sortes de passions, même à la tristesse et à la haine, lorsque ces passions ne sont causées que par des aventures estranges qu’on voit représenter sur un théatre, ou par d’autres pareils sujets, qui, ne pouvant nous nuire en aucune facon, semblent chatouiller notre âme en la touchant.
It is almost the same reason that causes us to naturally take pleasure in feeling ourselves moved by all sorts of passions, even by sadness and hatred, when these passions are only caused by other people’s experiences that we see portrayed on the stage, or by other similar subjects, which, not being able to harm us in any way, seem to tickle our soul by touching it.
Les Passions de l’Ame, Art. 94
Started early in the New Year, maybe 2/3 January; completed 23rd January 2009; final touches 27th January 2009.