Be Near Me (22 page)

I was going to Blackfriars every evening, sometimes morning Mass too, or afternoon office, but more often vespers, and I was glad to be among the Dominicans and out of reach of the Ampleforth monks at St Benet's Hall. Ampleforth was part of some great innocence, and I wanted to leave it behind, much as one wants to leave one's family behind at the first sight of romance. Conor's rebellion meant staying up late and questioning all authority; mine meant choosing to take up with the Dominican friars, the rival bunch, who represented the natural reach of my rebellious instincts. In any event, I found new, important holy hours in that place, in which to praise God and contemplate my duty.

He never tried to talk me out of it. Conor was too gracious in his handsome bones for that. He joked about religion, but he must have understood the impulse somewhere, for salvation was his great theme too: we each yearned for
peace and unity, like the peace and unity we had made for ourselves out of our mad differences. I loved Conor: that is the central matter in all this. In a sense, my story ends at the point where it may appear to begin, for when he put his hand through my hair and held the back of my head and kissed me, I knew I had found an answer to the question of how to live and what to do.

There was music one evening by the lake at Worcester. I remember walking down the stone steps of the quad—there were thirteen steps—and Conor was tipsy with beer and ambition. 'David, I tell you now, pubs are the only parliaments.'

'Please don't get sentimental about pubs now. Most of them are hellholes filled with con artists.'

'And so are most parliaments.'

'For the sake of the evening,' I said, 'let's agree to abandon the analogy.'

He pushed me playfully in the chest.

'You're so particular!' he said. 'You must look to the general if you want to see anything worth seeing. Otherwise, you're just one man on his own.' I stopped on the gravel path next to the lake and two geese came pecking at my shoes.

'But ultimately,' I said, 'that's what everybody is, a person on their own.'

'No,' he said. 'That's all over now.'

I don't know if he meant the old us or the old society: I suppose it must have been both, given him, given the times.

'Okay,' I said.

His eyes glittered when he spoke, and I saw the trees' branches were bent over the lake and dipping into the green
water. That evening at Worcester we listened to Borodin's Nocturne played by an orchestra of Welsh nationalists. We sat on the grass in the old college gardens, amid the wisdom that honours itself, and Conor made one of his bad but winningly delivered arguments. I think he ventured that the superior state of mind produced by music is an illusion. 'And what is wrong with an illusion?' I asked him.

'Society has enjoyed too many of them,' he said.

The dusk seemed to appear not from the sky but from the water, from the music, from the sycamore trees that crowded the lake. And Borodin's melody seemed to exert a loving grip across the grass. We listened together and I know the sound may flare in my ears in the last moments of life. In the dark, with the last notes swithering in the distance, Conor reached out and wiped loose earth from the palms of my hands.

We had a nightcap in the Grapes. He walked me back to Balliol and we bribed the porter with a packet of cigarettes to let us into the college for a nightcap in my rooms. We walked into the chapel passage that night and struck matches to look at the memorial wall. Conor wasn't so cautious when it came to smoking pot: he lit a joint from one of the matches, and at first I was nervous, looking out for the porter. I took a few drags from it and we stood close against the wall, taking in the names of the dead. 'Five of the names are German,' he said. 'See how they've separated them off from the English boys.'

'At least they're on the memorial,' I said.

'Only just,' said Conor. 'They're dropping off the bottom. Typical England, typical Oxford: patriotic to the end. They all died, those guys, no matter where they were from.' He blew smoke on the memorial, and the sweet smell rebounded as he touched my hair and pressed me back against the wall of the passage. His tongue was warm in my mouth. I felt his cheek grazing mine and he breathed into my hair a word or two before we stole away to my rooms.

Geoffrey Nashe came to hate the
Enragés
of 1968. 'They are spoiled reprobates,' he said in one of our last tutorials. He packed his pipe with Jean Bart tobacco and sat in his usual chair, spinning a handsome globe with the stem of his pipe and taking a puff every other time he passed North America. 'What a disgusting carnival,' he said. 'These so-called demonstrators are spoiling France. They are manhandling French philosophy with their idiotic graffiti and their
enfantillages.
Totally disreputable. You ought to mind how you go with that crowd. I can't tell you what mischief they would seek to enact on one of your monks if they were given the chance.'

'I wouldn't be so sure,' I said. 'The Church is changing too.'

Nashe smiled into his beautiful oak bookcase, a smile that travelled through the glass panels to reach his first editions. I had sometimes wondered what it must be like to be there in the college, year after year, while the young people came and went. Many of us left his rooms very different from the people we had been when we entered them. And we learned to upset him, for that was one of the things he taught us to do. When I said those words about the Catholic Church, I saw him register a change between us. It was the growth of some foreign commitment, perhaps, something
beyond his hopes for the college. Balliol had always been leftist, but there was something new in our reading of the world, and, seeing it, he inaugurated a moment of perfect silence before lifting me out of his affections.

'The Vatican Council and its aftermath,' he said. 'I see. And are they now part of your personal plan for the making of a new society?' He knocked his pipe on the wooden arm of his chair and smiled. His cheeks were as round as two Kent apples. 'I wish you well, Mr Anderton. I sincerely hope your world can marry up these separate beatitudes, graffiti and Our Lady.'

'I am happy, Geoffrey.'

The words came out as a whisper, but only because it made me embarrassed to say them in his company. And for a moment a pulse appeared in his pink cheek. I had never seen him so angry as he appeared to be at that meeting. The notion of my happiness, it seems, disgusted him about as much as our efforts to oppose the war in Vietnam.

'"True happiness is found only in the comforting of the unhappy,"' he said, citing Saint-Just.

'So now you are quoting a Jacobin at me,' I replied with all the venom I could muster.

'Oh, they have their uses,' said Nashe.

'Vietnam is a ridiculous imbroglio,' I said, my face growing hot with sudden passion. 'The students in Paris have every reason to protest. I find I admire them and I stand by them.' I remember stabbing the tip of my finger with a fountain pen as I said this.

'That is rather a pity, David,' said Nashe. 'If you pay attention to the world for long enough, you may find better
things to admire than the bored, pseudo-revolutionary antics of middle-class children from the VIIIème and XVIème arrondissements. I am not against your ideals: I wish you the use of both hands. But I happen to know those ideals are not well served, or served at all, by shutting professors out of their offices or kicking in their doors as happened to my friend at the University of Rouen. He is a man of singular intelligence and liberal sentiments, and his office was wrecked and his face slapped by the student action committee. You want to know about totalitarianism? This is it. An old man being slapped for the crime of being old. I should not expect you, in your current state of fascination, to see the point of my defence of my colleague Vidalenc.'

'The people are restless,' I said. 'They have had enough. They want change.'

'Please, Anderton,' he said. 'Don't speak to me of the people. I am considered an authority on the people in some quarters, and the one thing I can be sure of is their capacity to turn tyrannical in each other's company and in the face of elements they neither see nor comprehend. I'm sure you have good reasons for joining the throng, but please accept a word of advice from me, your old friend. Learn above all to read the political unconscious.'

'I thought you didn't believe in Freud? Too programmatic, you said.'

He sniffed. 'I believe in the political unconscious,' he said. 'And I advise you to know about it too, for without such knowledge one is apt to find oneself among the victims of its blunt determinations.'

'We are young,' I said.

'And what is the merit of simply being young?' Nashe said.

It was a good question. It remains a good question. Yet I was not old enough to provide a decent answer then and I am still not the person one would call upon to solve the matter. But people are sometimes grateful for the strange power of the young. Aren't they? When I first went to Blackpool, I was a young priest and I could see how pleased and hopeful it made the parishioners to be led by someone young.

'It's good to have a person half alive,' said a woman in the Blackpool parish who always wore a hearing aid. 'Someone with a head of hair.'

'I was doubly alive as a student,' I said.

'What's that, Father?'

'I loved somebody then.'

'What? You have to speak up.'

'We were very wise in my college!'

'Oh good,' she said. 'Good. There's nothing wrong with a bit of wise.'

Central London in March 1968. The sun was glinting off the Bloomsbury windows and the grass was warm in Russell Square. I sat there in the morning with a flask of tea, the buses coming from Euston and sandwich bags heaped in the litter bins. I spread a book of Victorian poetry on top of my duffel bag and read while absorbing the morning—the terrific shine on the square's black railings, a ladybird's journey across the page—until it was time to make my way to meet Conor in Holborn.

He had been up all night at the Union painting banners,
and by noon he was tossing slogans into the air. Conor gave directions and handed out leaflets by the Conway Hall, his face full of sunlight and everyone around him tuned to some bold new frequency, as if life could never be boring again or grey with complacent ideas. I was given the end of a banner to hold and we marched past the shops and along the streets of a beautiful London, each of us shouting out for the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign.

That will remain my image of him. My image of life. Conor saying yes to the prospect of change and some new condition of society. When we got to Grosvenor Square, and when Conor and the other leaders said the word, we pressed across the square in the direction of the American Embassy. The guards looked nervous of the future; they looked uncomprehending. Twenty thousand people and a chorus of moral sense; Conor down there throwing firecrackers under the police horses.

'Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh! NLF is gonna win!'

The press of people down South Audley Street. The linking of arms. The middle of Grosvenor Square. The sunshine. The sunshine sparking through the trees. High windows. It looked for a moment as if the Tower of Babel might fall to a group of flowery innocents. The comic songs. Policemen scampering after their helmets or pressing the faces of curly-haired youths to the pavement. The whistles and shouts. The armbands and the shoving and the sense of outrage. The new world appeared and departed over a blossoming two hours, my life as a radical, and then the day dissolved into an afternoon of pubs and forty years of chatter.

Love's cruel paternity. We were hardly born. We were
hardly named. I often see the ways real life would have made us banal. Victims of forgotten hope, we would have lived too closely, perhaps, and learned to hate the smallness of each other's habits, the unlovable, tense hostility of needs and doubts and supposed obligations. Conor had the bad grace to lose his life at a moment of unimpeachable promise. But we might have come to hate one another, to see only faults and bad faith. It comforts me to think so. He lost his life before his love of life or of me was tested, so becoming one of the golden boys of Oxford after all, not falling down in a hail of foreign fire at Ypres, not dying of consumption on a wormy bench, but growing drowsy, it seems, in the foothills of the Chilterns and crashing his car on the main road outside High Wycombe. I had gone back to Oxford on the train and must have been asleep when he died, the scent of him still on the pillows and daylight coming in at the window.

I see Conor reaching into the crowd with a smile as large as the decade that made him. I see the great hope on his face and his readiness to invent the air one might breathe. At night, I sometimes see him driving down to the place where the River Wye runs through a valley in Buckinghamshire. I hear his sacred heart and see his eyes closing as he falls asleep. And I say: be near me. The world is rowdy and nothing is certain. Do not stray. None of us was meant to face the day and the night alone, though that is what we do and memory now is a place of fading togetherness. Be near me. True love is what God intends.

I never saw Conor's body. I never spoke to his mother or father in Liverpool and I didn't attend the funeral. I never
took my degree and the years I think have only enlarged the space filled by his absence. That is all I know. I went once to find the spot where they say he died. There was a stone bridge and some beech trees there; just a dimple in the land. I kept a taxi waiting and the driver said that most of the trees in that area had been cut down by the furniture industry. He told me that furniture was a way of life down there. Even the football team kept the fact in mind, he said, calling themselves the Chair Boys. There wasn't a cloud in the sky. No markings to ponder on. It was the year everybody got shot. Martin Luther King. Rudi Dutschke. Andy Warhol. Bobby Kennedy. Conor would perhaps have grown to like the world of professional politics. So many of his comrades did. He hadn't time to see, as we have done, how the spark of rebellion might one day become the glow of opportunism, the burn of compromise, the hail of fire in new foreign lands. We know that death has its fearsome prerogatives: to freeze ethics in their prime, to make a ghost of a beautiful face, and all who survive the Conors of the world must live with the accident of their high example. He will not change. He cannot change. It is we who change and make our way, the prices of the real world becoming more tolerable with time. Yes indeed. We look around and they have gone and we are left to betray their world.