The Rachel Papers (30 page)

During the one-hour train journey the Interview Folder lay unread upon my lap. I was shaking studiedly - and twice had to go to the lavatory to have some convulsions. Could that be the only reason he had ? I had often entertained this as a foul-minded possibility; I never dreamed that it could actually be
true.
And Norman - so vehement, unreflecting, and free. Are we all such emotional Yahoos? Was it strange that Norman should show a reluctance to dunk his rig into a blood-heat steak-and-kidney pudding for the rest of his life? Wouldn't you? Going through my pockets for handkerchiefs I came across the letter from Coco. I could hardly remember who she was supposed to be. Anyhow, she apologized for confusing me with her reference to 'Maybe Land'; it was an expression Coco and her friends used, roughly denoting the area of fantasy or human desire; in fact, the place didn't exist. As regards my other inquiry (whether or not I'd get to fuck her when she came to England), '... I'm not sure that perhaps I'm ready too...' By way of reply - first draft - I dashed off a prose paraphrase of Marvell's 'To His Coy Mistress': 'If we had all the time in the world, your becoming "modesty" would be quite acceptable. We could relax, and consider,' etc., etc. Normally this exercise would have both calmed and stimulated me. Now, it did neither.

I walked up and down the train, smacked like a pat-ball from side to side as the carriages rocked and swayed. Discarded newspapers, bacterial cakes and rigid sandwiches, swindle-cups half full of grey tea, children, small Harry Secombes with grimed mouths and cheeks, tended by women you might mistake for retired footballers, expressionless men, alone.

I knocked and entered Dr Charles Knowd's rooms, not even partially naked, and with my Adam's apple on the tip of my tongue. According to the lodge notice-board the interview had begun ten minutes ago; the blazered, unsettlingly handsome porter (whom I addressed variously as 'sir', 'your serene highness', etc., like a Yank) himself escorted me to the correct staircase and told me which study to go to. I came in shouting apologies.

Opposite each other, facing an unlit electric fire, sat a pair of hippies. One of them, presumably the doctor, waved his hand at me and said, without looking up :

The room across the corridor. Five minutes.'

There was a further hippie in the room across the corridor.

'Hi,' I said. 'What's going on around here ? Are you next ?'

'What's your name ?'

'Highway.' What's yours? Manson?

'Right. I'm after you.'

'Is Dr Knowd the one in there with the longer hair?'

He looked straight ahead and nodded. 'I hear he's quite a cool guy. About the coolest guy in Oxford. Around now.' He went on nodding. 'Seminars on Berryman. Snodgrass. Sexton. Guys like that.'

'Christ. What will you be telling him about ?'

He bunched his fist and swirled it in the air, as if making some lazy threat. 'If I can just get into Robert Duncan. Or Hecht, maybe...'

Who
were
these people? I had studied neither the Extremists nor the Liverpudlians.

While I undid my top four shirt-buttons, took off my tie and noosed my forehead with it, put on my jacket inside out (the lining, thank heaven, was slightly torn), and tucked my trousers into my boots, the hippie asked, 'Hey. What are you doing?'

'Bit hot,' I said.

'Yeah?'

'Hey look, just how old is he, do you know?'

Twenty-five. Six. He's very active.'

'Active?'

'For reform.'

'What do you mean?' Letting girls stay in until midnight rather than eleven thirty? Serving breakfast ten minutes later? 'What sort of reform? Political?'

'Yeah.
Political
reform.'

'Oh shit.'

The door opened.

'Highway?' The second hippie gestured with his beard.

I raced towards him. 'That's me.'

'You're next.'

'Hey, how did it go?' I whispered.

Gatty, it must have been, paused on the stairs. 'Okay, I think. Don't worry, he's pretty friendly. Nice cat.'

'What did you talk about?'

The Russian neo-symbolists.'

*

Dr Knowd had moved to a cushionless window-seat in the far corner of the room where the December breeze playfully tangled the errant curls of his hair.

'Does the air bother you?' he asked, in a voice without much in the way of accent; rather like my own.

'Not at all. Do you mind if I take my jacket off, actually?'

'Not at all.'

I could see my exam-papers resting on his thighs. They were marked in red ink.

'Sit,' the man said.

On the floor. No: too obvious - too
simplistic.
From a choice of sofa, two armchairs and a stool, I took the last. For Knowd, who continued to sift unemphatically through my papers, was in urban-guerrilla dress: variegated, camouflage-conscious green and khaki canvas suit; beetle-crusher, pig-stomper boots; beret. Jack-Christ face and hair. Softly I hummed the Internationale, in order to stop my teeth chattering.

'Mr Highway ... do you like literature?'

Oh come on. What kind of question is that ? What novels have you been reading recently? What are your problems?

I smiled. 'What kind of question is that?'

'I beg your pardon.' He glanced up at me. 'But if I've read your papers correctly

Sweat flushed my face and armpits. I took out a handkerchief.

Knowd spoke. 'For example. In the Literature paper you complain that Yeats and Eliot ... "in their later phases opted for the cold certainties that can work only outside the messi-ness of life. They prudently repaired to the artifice of eternity, etc., etc." This then gives you a grand-sounding line on the "faked inhumanity" of the seduction of the typist in
The Waste Land -
a point you owe to W. W. Clarke - which, it seems, is just a bit
too
messy all of a sudden. Again, in the Criticism paper you jeer at Lawrence's "unreal sexual grandiosity", using Middleton Murry on
Women in Love,
also without acknowledgment. In the very next
line
you scold his "over-facile equation of art and life".'

He sighed. 'On Blake you seem quite happy to paraphrase the "Fearful Symmetry" stuff about "autonomous verbal constructs, necessarily unconnected with life", but in your Essay paper you come on all excited about the "urgency ... with which Blake educates and refines our emotions, side-stepping the props and splints of artifice'. Ever tried side-stepping a splint, by the way ? Or educating someone urgently, for that matter ?

'Donne is okay one minute because of his "emotional courage", the way he seems to "stretch out his emotions in the very fabric of the verse", and not okay the next because you detect ... what is it you detect? - ah yes, a "meretricious exaltation of verbal play over real feeling, tailoring his emotion to suit his metrics". Now which is it to be? I really wouldn't carp, but these remarks come from the same paragraph and are about the same stanza.

'I won't go on ... Literature has a kind of life of its own, you know. You can't just use it ... ruthlessly, for your own ends. I'm sorry, am I being unfair?'

There was a knock at the door.

'We'll be just a minute,' he called.

I hawked richly into my handkerchief and studied its contents. Knowd stood up and so I did, too.

'Is it really as ... ?' I shrugged and looked at the floor.

He held out my papers. 'Would you like these? I've included a break-down of one of your more pageant-like essays, it may interest you to see it. Would you like to take another look at them, see if you agree?'

I shook my head.

'All right. Now. I want you to do a great deal of hard thinking in the next nine or ten months - I'm going to take you anyway; if I don't, somebody else will and you'll only get worse. Stop reading critics, and for Christ's sake stop reading all this structuralist stuff. Just read the poems and work out whether you like them, and why. Okay ? The rest comes later - hopefully. You'll get the letter in a few days. Tell Leigh to come in, would you?'

*

Oxford skylines offered spurious serenity in the form of gold stone against sharp blue, which I of course refused. I wondered what made this town think it was so different. Keep your eyes level and your feet on the ground and I don't see how you can miss the ugly, normal, tooling, random street-life of record-shops, dry-cleaners, banks. Once you stop following the architectural lines upwards, then it's just like anywhere else. But Oxford doesn't think so; never known a place so full of itself. And not a single person looked at me as I walked to the station.

In George Street, though, I stopped, put down my case, and straightened my tie. Then I did what I suppose I had been intending to do all along. I turned right into Gloucester Green and asked the time of the next bus to the village. There was one in fifteen minutes. I felt hungry, something I couldn't remember ever having felt before, so I had some liquid fudge in the cafeteria, and also a tapeworm omelette (or a 'bacon' omelette, to use the menu's phrase). Then I went home.

Mother and her youngest son were in the passage by the back door. She was polishing Valentine's shoes, while he picked his nose, with both hands, paying elaborate justice to either nostril. They greeted me as if I had nipped down to the shop and back.

'Hello,' I said. 'I've been for my interview - and I got in! ... I've been accepted. To Oxford.'

It appeared to make few odds to Valentine, who was anyway nibbling on a rather complicated bogey. But mother said :

That's rather super, isn't it?'

'Yes.'

'Your father - Valentine, darling,
don't
do that - will be pleased.'

'When's he coming?'

'About six, he said. Um. Charles, there isn't much lunch, because I'm afraid I —'

'Doesn't matter. I'll help myself.'

Upstairs I began the Letter to Rachel. Three hours' work and the fair copy was written out. I have the carbon before me now. It reads:

My dearest Rachel, I don't know how anyone has ever managed to write this kind of letter - anyone who does is a coward and a shit and used to dishonesty, so I can only minimize all three of these by being as candid as possible. I got a feeling some weeks ago that what I felt for you was changing. I wasn't sure what the feeling was, but it wouldn't go away and it wouldn't change into anything else. I don't know how or why it happens; I know that it's the saddest thing in the world when it does.

But it is I who have changed, not you. So let me hope you feel (as I do) that it has been worth it, or that it will turn out to have been worth it, and let me beg your forgiveness. You are the most important thing that has ever happened to me. C.

There was a pleasingly unrehearsed air about the repetition of 'feeling' and 'feel' and of 'changing' and 'changed'. That 'it is I' seemed rather prissy; perhaps 'it's me' would have been a bit beefier and ... more modest. And I still can't decide whether all the 'it's' and 'don'ts' are nastily groovy or nicely Robert Frost. But, so far as I know, Rachel is not a fastidious reader.

I wrote it out once more, altering accidentals. Coco's letter would have to do as it was.

On the way to the front door, the telephone rang. It was for me. I put the envelopes down on the hall table, not wishing to smudge them.

'So how did it go?'

'Mm ? Oh fine. I got in.'

' ... You don't sound very pleased.'

'Oh, I am really.'

' ... Why didn't you come home?'

'Dunno really. Felt a bit shattered.'

'... When will you be?'

I clenched my teeth. 'Not really sure. I feel a bit, I don't know, strange.'

Rachel gulped. 'Charles, what is it?'

'I'm sorry. The interview was a bit harrowing. Not a bit what I expected.'

'But you did get in?'

'Oh yeah. Have you heard from your mother yet?'

'Yes, she rang this morning. She almost apologized. Archie's coming round to get me this afternoon. I suppose I'd better go back. Shall I?'

'Oh, yes, definitely. Far the best thing. Look, sorry I'm being so awful. Don't worry about anything, I'll most likely be back tomorrow. Ring you if I'm not. Okay? I love you. Right. Bye!'

And I felt next to nothing as I walked to the village; I paid my respects to the countryside yet was unable to detect solemn sympathy in its quiet or reproach in its stillness. Usually that road brought me miles of footage from the past: the bright-faced ten-year-old running for the Oxford bus; the lardy pubescent, out on soul-rambles (i.e. sulks), or off for a wank in the woods; the youth, handsomely reading Tennyson on summer evenings, or trying to kill birds with feeble, rusted slug-guns, or behind the hedge smoking fags with Geoffrey, then hawking in the ditch. But now I strode it vacantly, my childhood nowhere to be found.