The Long Room (13 page)

Giles is proof that a man can change, as a caterpillar changes to a butterfly, or a frog becomes a prince. That pallid little boy is now the man whose face looks down at Stephen from a million billboards and assures him every time he sees it that transformation does not only happen in fairy tales and myths. But it does need a helping hand from chance. In Stephen’s opinion Giles’s voice is nothing special, and without the make-up he’d still look like the stick insect he was, but he did have luck and determination. It was Giles’s determination that kept him on the hard circuit of clubs and pubs where he could get a hearing and it was luck that led the right A&R man into the pub in Kensal Green on a night when Giles and his band just happened to be playing.

No one is sole author of his life. Stephen, looking back, sees his own divided into chapters – before school, junior school, secondary school – in which his younger self was swept along by the tide of other people’s actions. Children have no power to steer themselves. Reminded by Bennet-Gilmour, reminder
of his three years at university, he remembers how sure he was in the beginning that that particular chapter would contain an open door, the door that would magically yield to a secret password and give onto a new and better world. Three years seemed like a long time in prospect at eighteen but in reality it wasn’t long enough. The seventy-two weeks that are all you get of stone staircases, linenfold panelling, low-lying mist on mown grass, girls in silk and rainbow colours – they don’t give you time to turn yourself from the boy you were into the man you want to be. But they do show you where the doors are and how to forge the keys.

Stephen had watched and listened closely. Who told the long-limbed boys, the Greenwoods and the Bennet-Gilmours of this world, the Buckinghams, that asparagus is eaten with the fingers not a fork? Were they taught at school to tell their Château Lafite from their Château Latour when he, who has actually read some Heidegger, had only ever seen those names in books? Stephen observed buttonholes on the sleeves of jackets, links in place of buttons on shirt cuffs, bow ties that were actually tied, not pre-formed with elastic. He noted clipped consonants and drawled vowels, and changed his own to match them. In his new voice he didn’t do much talking but instead, in lecture rooms and libraries, he listened and he read and the words of poets filtered deep into his mind.

He was not alone. There were dozens of young men like him, some in his own college. He went to lectures with them, to cinemas and pubs and, occasionally, to parties. They were friends, or passed for friends, during that time at least. Like Stephen they’d been top of the class at school and thought that they’d secured the passage to a future more expansive than the
past they’d left behind. A future that would have in it success, careers and love. Hard work was important to them; that’s the reason they were there, spending all their days and half their nights in laboratories and libraries, aiming for the high degrees.

There were also girls in lecture rooms and libraries of course. Most of them were like the boys by whom they were outnumbered – unobtrusive, studious and shy. The fortunate among them – boys and girls – recognised in each other the beauty of their souls and cleaved like twins thereafter. The rest looked on in hunger, from their own obscurity, with no choice but to wait, and hope that the wait would not be too agonisingly prolonged.

Girls in libraries. He can see them still; he even counted a few of them as friends. But they were not the sort of girls who floated through his dreams – those were girls with silver bangles jangling on their wrists, and swathes of shiny hair. Distracted girls, fresh from their lovers’ beds, willow-slim and silk-skinned, in their tight tight jeans and flimsy layers of finest cotton, their small breasts showing through. Painted toenails, mouths like newly unfurled petals, drifts of rose-scent, lilac and patchouli; one long golden hair left lying on the scratched wood of a desk.

One girl in particular, whom he had encountered on his way out of a seminar on a summer afternoon. She’d been trying ineffectually to pin a poster on the English Faculty notice board and had dropped the others she was holding into a fan that spread across the floor. He’d stopped to pick them up. ‘You’re sweet to stop,’ she’d said. ‘Could you possibly very kindly help me to put the others up?’

For an enchanted hour he had followed her around the sunlit town, pasting posters onto walls at her command, her image on
them as Titania. He was still trying to summon up the nerve to ask if she would care to have a drink with him when the last poster had gone up and she said she had to dash. Hey, but if you’re not doing anything next week, why don’t you come and do our front-of-house? What that meant he did not know but he went anyway, and carried chairs for the three nights of the play’s run, and on the last night was invited to a party.

Now, on this December night, he looks back to it again, that summer – the air so still and soft, and heavy, as if heat had lent it weight. The night of the party, a bed of scented flowers beneath the window of the room, and the pulse of music echoing off the high quadrangle walls. The room so full it was hard to get in through the door, and dense with sound, and he knowing no one but another quiet boy who had also been roped in and yet, for once, no shame in being a stranger. When the press of bodies opened to make way for him, it enfolded him and told him he belonged there. At its centre, in the heart of the maze, the girl whom he would always think of as Titania, flushed and laughing in her wisps of silk, that evening’s star.

She saw him and she smiled, and when he made his way through the crowd to her, she reached up to kiss him on the cheek. ‘Thank you for all your help,’ she said. She was small; he could have lifted her in his arms as easily as if she were a child. When she turned aside he saw the smooth crown of her head. He reached out his hand to hold her back but someone else had caught her up and spirited her away into a throng of dancers. And she was gone. It was the end of term: like migratory birds the students were departing to spend the summer somewhere else.

The next day he roamed the streets of Oxford in search of
Midsummer Night’s Dream
posters that were not yet overlaid. There was one undamaged on a board beside the Covered Market, which he carefully peeled off and kept; he has it still. Perhaps he could have found her, if he’d tried. But he let her go. He won’t do that again. He is older now, a grown man: there’s another chapter opening. But there won’t always be new chapters; he knows now that stories end.

For a while he’s lost in thoughts and memories. The pub is warm and quiet, the man behind the bar feels no need to talk, Stephen’s almost in a trance in this safe haven. When he shakes himself awake he finds his glass is empty and the group at the table by the door has left. He might as well have another drink before he has to face the night and the journey home. But first he needs to pee and anyway the bartender is nowhere to be seen.

When Stephen comes back from the gents’, the other solitary man is waiting at the still-deserted bar. He smiles at Stephen. His pipe is lit now and the smile is partially occluded by a cloud of smoke. ‘It’s cold tonight,’ he says.

‘It is,’ Stephen agrees.

‘I better had been on my way but I am putting off the moment.’

‘And so am I.’

‘But where is that barman then? Ah, he comes. Maybe you would care to join me? What’s your choice of poison?’

‘I was drinking Guinness,’ Stephen says. ‘But please, let me …’

‘No, no. My shout. I myself am fond of an Irish pint from time to time but in general I do favour the local ale. London Pride! Unbeaten, for my money.’

He is a shortish man with a faintly melancholy look and thinning hair that is still more blond than grey. His lips are the same colour as his skin. There is something Nordic about him, or Slavic perhaps, but to Stephen his accent is unplaceable: a slight gurgle on the ‘l’, an elongated ‘a’, the suggestion of a diphthong on the ‘e’, – a liquid sound – a trace of mid-Atlantic maybe, and something else from somewhere more remote. After ordering the drinks he moves along the bar to offer Stephen a handshake. ‘Alberic,’ he says.

‘Are you visiting London?’ Stephen asks.

‘No! I am a denizen, I live here! Since four years I have lived here and I am sorry you mistake me for a tourist!’

‘I do apologise. It isn’t that I took you for a tourist; it’s simply that you don’t sound exactly like a native, although I must say that your English is extremely good.’

‘It is,’ says Alberic. ‘I study. I am especially hot on slang. I find it good to listen to the radio; it improves my accent but better by far is normal conversation. Like we are having now. Londoners are friendly. By chewing fat with normal people I hear the real language, do you know what I mean? There is not an excessive quantity of slang on the radio except, I guess, for Radio 1, but I have to tell you I am not a groupie of pop music.’

‘Nor me. Actually, I’m thinking of learning the piano.’

Alberic looks delighted. He adores the piano! Only last week he had the great good fortune to hear Horowitz playing the Chopin
Fantaisie Impromptu,
fantastic really, but even more than the piano he adores the cello. That marvellous instrument that is the heart’s voice and comes closest to the human form, he says, outlining with his hands a shapely woman.

‘Another?’ Stephen asks, indicating his empty glass.

Alberic consults his watch. ‘One shouldn’t. But, listen to the rain!’

Both men turn their heads towards the door. He’s right: in the hush that falls as they stop talking, Stephen hears the rattle of heavy rain against the windows. ‘We’d be better staying here until it stops,’ he says to Alberic.

‘I’m of your mind. One for the road then, thank you, but any more beer and I’ll be pissing up all night so I’ll take a brandy, if I may.’

Stephen orders the brandy and a Southern Comfort for himself; a drink that’s new to him but sounds right, on this winter evening. It’s beginning to seem dream-like, a sleepy, underwater feeling. It’s good to be here in this warm place, with this companionable stranger. Alberic, returning to the question of accents, asks Stephen about his. ‘Ordinary RP,’ he says. ‘Not very interesting, I’m afraid. Received Pronunciation.’

‘Is that the same as Oxford English?’

‘Well, yes, I suppose it is. Well, I was up myself, as a matter of fact.’

‘Up?’

‘At Oxford.’

‘I could tell you were a varsity man. It was your clothing that showed me, even before you spoke. But is that perhaps your old school tie you wear? Is it true that that some gentlemen wear their old school socks?’

Two doubles later and the two men are still talking when the bartender calls time. Alberic is in import–export; he has an office up the road. He also has a wife and a teenage daughter but they are on an extended visit back to family at home. His wife’s mother is unwell. It can get a little lonesome of a night.
Stephen, using a form of words approved by Security, tells him in response to his enquiry that he works in a government department that deals in defence statistics and research. ‘Far too dull to talk about, I can assure you.’

‘That, old boy, I simply don’t believe. A clever young man like you who received his education at the University of Oxford? You’re pulling my leg. I won’t believe that you would jam yourself into a routine job!’

Having to pretend that you are duller than you are: that was not what Stephen had expected when he joined the Institute. No, far from it. He had thought that he was entering a new world, a world which offered him the chance to make himself into the man that he was always meant to be: correctly dressed, well-bred, a man of the world, a man of action and a scholar. Indeed he has become that man, or like enough, and that is how his colleagues see him, clad in his suits and cut-glass accent. As soon as he knew he’d got the job, he went to Ede and Ravenscroft with an advance against his salary. But it’s ironic: an occupation that should confer glamour and mystique on him makes him more invisible to outsiders than he was before. A dull man in a dull job? Yes, and the job really is dull most of the time, but when it’s not, when it involves action that the outside world sees as exciting, he’s forbidden to say anything about it. He didn’t want to be a listener, he assumed he’d be an operative, and no one has satisfactorily explained why he is not. ‘We need your capabilities,’ Sub-director Personnel had said. ‘The initial selection tests you took show unusual verbal skill. You may apply to the Board for promotion in due course. When you have served at least four years at your current grade.’

Fuck him. Oh it is hard to be relegated to the shadows when
you should be in the limelight. How dare anyone decide that he, Stephen Donaldson, was less capable than Rollo Buckingham? He has applied to be promoted, twice. And twice been told to re-apply when, perhaps, there may be a vacant post. Meanwhile that wingèd chariot is rushing up behind him at a furious lick; he will be thirty before he knows it, he can feel the cold air whistling on his neck. He winks at Alberic. ‘Well, you know what government work is like,’ he says. ‘Hush-hush.’

‘Time, gentlemen, please,’ the man behind the bar reminds them. Alberic knocks out his pipe into an ashtray and puts on the coat he had draped carefully over the back of a chair. ‘Once more into the breach, old man,’ he says, making for the door.

Buttoning his own coat up, Stephen follows him outside. The rain is falling still, cold and sharp as surgeon’s steel. In the shelter of the doorway, Alberic comes to a sudden halt.

‘Look,’ he says. ‘I have an idea. Piano music. Of which the two of us are lovers. I happen to have a spare ticket for a concert, I think at the Festival Hall, next Tuesday; it was for my old Dutch but of course now she had to leave for home. If you could join me for the evening, I would be deeply honoured. For if not, that ticket will go to waste.’

About to make an excuse or at least to ask what concert, Stephen stops. Why not? Alberic is charming. ‘That would be nice,’ he says.

‘Super! Just tell me your phone number. I’ll remember it, don’t bother to find your card or a piece of paper, for in this rain the ink will run.’ For the second time he holds his hand out to shake Stephen’s.