My Father's Fortune (23 page)

When we meet much later in middle age, after being out of contact for many years, he's a senior civil servant in Canada, and he tells me that I've caused him some professional embarrassment by announcing to the world, in a newspaper interview I've just given, that he and I had been communists, and that our friendship had had homo-erotic overtones. Did it, in fact? Well, it was certainly a love affair of some sort. I remember once waiting for him to arrive at my house. I'm standing in the living room looking out through the net curtains, as eager in my anticipation as I would be later waiting for a girl on a date … And here he comes, strolling in his nonchalant way, demonically handsome, in a belted raincoat of immense sophistication, like a gangster in a movie. He places a hand on the front gate, just above the plate that says ‘Chez Nous' – hesitates for a moment – and then, instead of pushing it open,
vaults
it, his belted raincoat flying. My heart vaults it with him.

So love, yes. But love without the ghost of any physical expression. This may be simply because we're so ill-informed that we don't realise the possibility exists. I don't think we've heard of such a thing as homosexuality, any more than we have of metre. We don't know anything about anything! Well … there are some things that my fellow poet's evidently now beginning to find out about, because somewhere in the middle of our School Certificate year, I think even while he's still vaulting gates and we're spending so much time on our way either to or from the Queen Adelaide and the Bonesgate, he shows me a poem dedicated not to me but to someone called Stella.
Stella
? A
girl
? He's just met her, he tells me. They've been for a walk together. They're going to go for another walk together. I feel the sickening stab of an emotion completely new to me: jealousy. I've been displaced. Also he's found a girl and I haven't. And not just one called Maureen or Doreen, but
Stella
, like a girl … well, like Mike the tiler's girl in Chicago, or a girl in the dedication of a poem. Later he tells me that he invented the name, though what her real name is he doesn't reveal. Perhaps it
is
Doreen, or Maureen.
The girl herself, though, is real enough – the first indication of
Lane's growing attraction to and for the opposite sex. Or perhaps not the first; Elsie has always been rather taken by his debonair and dashing style, and whenever she gets half a chance, I think, now that she has broken the ice by bursting into tears in front of him, confides in him about how awful my father, my sister and I all are. Later he turns up in Ewell with a Rosalind, and then, in the summer holidays when we're still only halfway through the sixth form, less than eighteen months after that first walk with Stella, he establishes his ascendancy for good and all. I get a wild letter from him in Paris confessing in an agony of self-reproach that something terrible has occurred involving a woman he's met, a schoolteacher four years older than himself. He is bewildered, insane, completely uncontrollable … can't answer for his actions … has committed an offence against her … I take this (wrongly, I have just discovered) to mean that they have had intercourse, and am shaken to the core.

Once again I've been left far behind. My still cloudy romantic feelings fasten on girls, just as they always have; but the only practical manifestation of this, while my fellow-poet's making so much headway, is that my knees turn to water whenever I pass a girl in the street. I pass quite a lot of girls in the street, particularly in the mornings, when they like me are on their way to school. By the time I get to the bus stop my knees are often scarcely in a condition to hold me up. Then, on the bus, more trouble. The vibration induces that awkward bulge in the trousers that disconcerts all adolescent boys. Some instinct tells me, even though nothing and no one else has, that there's something shameful about this, and that when the moment comes to get off the bus it has to be concealed behind the pile of books I'm carrying. Whether I make any connection between the bulge in the trousers and the weakness in the knees I can't remember.
I realise that I must do better than this if I'm to go on talking to Lane. I must have something more than loss of muscle tone in my knees to report. I have at the very least actually to speak to a girl. In my diary for a start there are only cryptic allusions to
my quest: ‘And now the patient stars are looking down outside my window, asking me why I am afraid to play the aces they so unexpectedly put in my hand. What can I answer? High morality? Faint-hearted mortality, rather; it is no use deceiving myself; I can only promise myself that next time … ah, next time …'

Exactly what aces the stars have dropped into my hands from the heavenly card game they seem to be playing overhead I can no longer remember. No mystery, though, in spite of my coyness, about who it is that I'm pursuing – or rather failing to – because I don't have much choice in the matter. I only know one girl: Jennifer, with whom I was in love six or seven years earlier, with whom I shared straw cigarettes and the
Girls' Crystal
and the wartime twilight – the girl in the dirndl from whom my father worried that I might contract girlishness. (Does he ever worry about my friendship with Michael Lane? I can't remember his ever saying anything to suggest it.) I quickly start being in love with Jennifer again. Within two weeks I've actually brought myself to write her name down in the diary, and to reveal a little of my new feelings, if only to myself. ‘She was, of course, as disarmingly amused and charming as ever … more beautiful than I have ever seen anyone look … intense nervous elation all evening afterwards, followed by sleeplessness nearly all night … Today, however, I have sunk once again into the sober depression of hopelessness …'

From now on there are many sighs and moonings in the diary (‘… paralysed by suddenly hollow longing of love … could do nothing but walk about in the damp neighbourhood or sit and stare at my desk…'). I also record many attempts to contrive a meeting, which for some reason I feel must appear to be accidental. She has now left school and is working as a secretary in London. It takes me many evenings of watching the successive waves of commuters emerge from the station footpath at Ewell East to discover which train she returns on. Then, as she heads up the road towards home among all the others, I happen by some coincidence to be walking just behind her on my way back from school, even though school finished two hours earlier.

The diary's reticent about exactly how often this coincidence recurs, but quite often, I think, before at last I manage to walk a little faster, and find myself happening by an even greater coincidence to
overtake
her. I must be in danger of being pitched into the gutter by the instability in my knees at this sudden turn of speed, but somehow I remain upright long enough to just happen for some reason to glance back, and … ‘Oh, hello! What a surprise!'

The stars are evidently dropping playing cards out of heaven as thick and fast as Elsie at bridge, because fate repeats the same coincidence for the next few evenings, and if Jennifer's at all surprised at this strain upon the laws of probability she's too polite to mention it. Eventually our relationship progresses a little. We walk round the neighbourhood at night together. I put my arm round her. In my conversations with Michael Lane I report progress, discuss the nuances of the relationship, and humbly listen to his expert advice. Jennifer gives me an expensive foulard in gold silk. I kiss her. I question myself in the diary as to whether I'm really in love with her after all. I take her to the sixth form social, and up to London for a night on the town. Where do we go – to a concert? A play? A night club? No – to the Ideal Home Exhibition. What
am
I doing?
And what do her parents think about all this? My mother's parents must have had mixed feelings about my father, when he first came courting in his bow tie and his slicked-down hair, but I must cut an even more unsettling figure. My father has given me money to get myself a new sports jacket and trousers. In a sober gents' outfitters in Epsom I've selected them in a discreet shade of grey, but under the artificial lighting of the shop I've misread the colour. Mr and Mrs Dennis-Smith have to watch their beautiful daughter being called for by a young man who is not only nine feet tall and nine inches wide, with a permanent sneer on his lips, but who is dressed from head to foot in pale apple-green. I must look like a dissident intellectual who's gone off to join Robin Hood and his Merry Men. Now this pale green young man is taking their
daughter out to the Ideal Home Exhibition. Jennifer's mother has always had an urbane social manner, and continues to exercise it as we make conversation while her daughter gets ready (and what on earth do we make conversation about? Subjectivity and objectivity in modern French literature?), but I detect a new note of unease in her manner. She thinks that we're putting down a deposit on a house, and ordering our first three-piece suite. She thinks she's going to find herself with a pale green son-in-law.

When I think of Lane and that super-egoistic subjectivity of his that I've noted in the diary I'm abashed at the feebleness of my efforts. Or when I imagine the way my father walked into that party thirty years earlier and simply strolled up to the girl who was going to become my mother. No coincidences. No wobbly knees. No consulting with his friend about how best to proceed. Simply: ‘I'm Tom – I suppose you're Vi!'

Girls and dancing, yes. I seem to be trailing rather a long way behind my father in the first department. And as for dancing … I sign up for a course at a local academy, and at the end of it can manage one authorised step in the waltz, provided I keep counting under my breath, one in the quickstep, and one in some South American dance which is fashionable at the time. I'm evidently better at dancing than cricket, at any rate.

I also acquire a taste for translation which is going to last for the rest of my life. There's something deeply attractive about a task that combines the closed-endedness of the crossword puzzle, where you know that a preordained solution exists, if only you can find it, with the open-endedness of original composition, where you know that it doesn't. One particular passage we're set for translation into French, though, introduces me to a vice that it will take me seven years and some pains to extirpate – a demonstration that literature really does have the power to corrupt the young mind. We're set a passage for translation into French from Stevenson's
Travels with a Donkey
. Stevenson is four or five thousand feet up on the Mont Lozère at this point, and is spending a night in the open among the pines. At around two o'clock he wakes and rolls himself a cigarette.

How I cope with this quite difficult passage in French I can't recall, but it seizes my imagination in rather the same way as the
Ode to
a Skylark
did. I have fallen in love with cigarettes. I go straight out after school and buy a packet of Players, then that evening walk along the unlit tracks of the local farm under an overcast sky, with a glowing cigarette turned inwards towards my palm, trying to replicate something of the same effect with neither silver ring nor visible stars.
There's an added excitement in studying French and German with Dr Nichols, aka Gobbo, or, as I refer to him in the diary, simply the Doctor, because of the severe difficulties that he has in
communicating, and the endless drama of his struggles to overcome them. He can't even co-ordinate finger and thumb to turn over the page of one of our set texts to show us what he means. He has to lick his thumb and take a jab at it, in the hope that the paper will adhere to the saliva. The pages of our books rapidly become crumpled and loose, blotched with thumb-prints and stuck together with spit.

Before you can learn any French or German from him you have to master not only his version of English, but also the phonetic alphabet, so that he can write out for us on the blackboard the sounds he's trying to make. There's a further problem here, though. The marks he makes on the blackboard are as wildly approximate as the sounds he utters, and the unfamiliar characters of the phonetic alphabet are even less comprehensible than his attempts at the more usual one.

Insofar as possible he writes not on the board but on paper, where he can use a typewriter. This solution, though, brings yet another problem – two problems. The keys that he hits are almost as random as everything else – so he ruthlessly abbreviates and elides in order to reduce the scope for error. After two years of his teaching I become as adept as a cryptographer at reconstructing his thought and following his intentions. A friend who is also doing French for the Cambridge entrance exam shows me the list of topics for revision that Gobbo has prepared for him. It has taken most of his revision time, but he has worked out the meanings of all but one of them, which reads:
Huge pot.

It takes me some time, too, but in the end I get there: Revise Victor Hugo as a lyric poet.
But the Doctor does it. By sheer, relentless determination and force of personality, lurching about in the ancient brown three-piece pinstripe suit that he wears day in, day out, summer and winter, he teaches us, he teaches us! Spanish, for anyone who wants it, as well as French and German. A little Russian on the side for me. He's a Christian Scientist, and I have to say that he's the most sustained and convincing demonstration of the power
of mind over matter I've ever come across. Maybe the difficulties that we in our turn have to overcome to understand him are actually useful practice for linguists.