Wrote For Luck (12 page)

‘Do you think we ought to tell Tony?’ Tony was, or had been, Sam’s psychiatrist.

‘It can’t do any good. But yes, we probably ought to.’

Two other significant things happened that evening. The first was that she found the Prime Minister’s Christmas card torn up and flung in the waste-paper basket – flung, she thought, with a kind of ostentation that could only have meant that the flinging was a message to her. The second was that she went up to the book-room and looked out a copy of
Wonderland
in an old Penguin edition with a florid inscription –
To darling Amy with fondest love from James
– on the title-page (and who was James? She could not even remember) and spent the next hour or so skimming through its parched and curiously friable pages. The reading of it came as a shock to her – not because, as she had dimly anticipated, it was a much more ground-down affair than the jaunty encomia of the back jacket led you to believe, but because the people at large in it – the randy academics, the guileless women they were bent on seducing – were so entirely different from anyone she had ever met. They were not innocent people, and they were not neutral – they were Marxists, and Feminists and Materialists
and (a few of the older ones, anyway) Existentialists, and sometimes devious with it, but there was a kind of Romanticism about their efforts to preserve a tiny, uncontaminated corner of the academic world where, untroubled by questions of profit and loss, they could attempt to be themselves. On the other hand, Amy thought, if there was one thing that nearly three decades of adult life had taught her, inside a university and beyond it, it was that you should be deeply suspicious of Romanticism.

Cycling up the hill to the university for the meeting with the Dean, past grey, Titanic lorries that loomed up unexpectedly from out of the mist, she found that there was a paragraph forming in her head which could be used not exactly in her defence but as a way of assimilating the events of the past few days, in so far as they could be assimilated. It went:
all this, all the endeavours on which we are so optimistically engaged, are effectively meaningless. If Miss Chen, against whom I have no personal animus, is allowed to come here and buy a degree, without having the ability to read, much less comprehend, the books she is supposed to be studying, then why shouldn’t anyone? As for the idea that what we do here has any relevance to the world beyond the window of Arts Block Three, that literature, as it is currently taught, is an ameliorating force, that it is a source of moral rejuvenation, that it encourages us to see ourselves in perspective – that it possesses all those wonderful sanctifying qualities we are constantly told about – then let me tell you that the experiences of the past week suggest that literature has no bearing on whether I feel happy, sad or anything
else, and certainly no effect on my ability to cope with the impediments that life strews in my path
. She thought that this was putting it rather strong, but never, she realised, had she felt keener on putting things strongly.

In the end all this, all this unabashed cultural extremism, went unsaid. For the Dean’s office turned out to be empty, its door open, its complete edition of the
New Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
laid out invitingly in its double row, but the long sofa on which supplicants were invited to state their cases quite empty, and the birds flown – if, indeed, they had ever perched there in the first place. She had been there ten minutes and had time to read a whole article about Stefan Zweig in the
London Review of Books
when there came a shuffling noise in the doorway and she looked up to see the burly, chronically put-upon figure of Dorothy, the Dean’s secretary.

‘Are you waiting for Maurice and Graham? I’m afraid neither of them’s here.’

‘Why not?’ Amy demanded, more petulantly than she meant to. ‘Why aren’t they here?’

‘Actually,’ Dorothy said, coming into the room and shutting the door with an adroitness that belied her all-in-wrestler’s physique, ‘they’re with the V-C.’ There was a pause. ‘I think they’ll probably be there most of the morning.’

Amy cocked an eye. This was too big to be ignored. Much bigger than the Registrar being arrested in the nightclub or the cannabis patch in the woods. Happily Dorothy was an old friend. They had shared bottles of water after the charity fun run and criticised many an outfit worn by the Public Orator’s wife. After she had made a pretence of tidying the Dean’s
pristine desk and returned the copy of the
London Review of Books
to its proper place, she said:

‘Actually it’s a disciplinary matter.’

‘To do with whom?’

‘Professor Jamieson.’

‘What’s he done?’

There was a pause while Dorothy searched for the appropriate quasi-legal phrase. ‘Apparently he is supposed to have forced his attentions on one of the overseas students.’

‘Anyone we know?’

‘I believe,’ Dorothy said, indicating both that the conversation was at and end and that Amy could consider herself lucky to be divulged even this much, ‘that she’s called Lily Chen.’

Lily Chen, Amy thought, Lily Chen! What havoc have you wreaked in the breast of occidental man since you first flew in from the University of Taipei, or wherever it was? Such unprecedented news demanded a response, and so she left the Dean’s office, in all its anti-septic splendour, and marched off to the cafeteria in the shopping mall which occupied the campus’s central square in search of a cup of coffee. Outside the foyer they were holding a vigil for the girl who had drowned herself in the lake, and there were students standing about in groups holding placards which said REMEMBER VIOLET. All this, too, seemed incongruous. Nobody was called Violet these days, nobody, and somehow the placards seemed to emphasise her detachment from the world and the forces that had led her to do away with herself. But all this was serious, Amy thought. Whatever Jamieson had got up to, or perhaps only contemplated, with Lily Chen was
squalid, or offensive or laughable, but there was no getting away from the placards. When the university reassembled after the Christmas vacation somebody, she knew, would have created a shrine by the water’s edge with pictures of Violet laminated at the campus coffee shop and doggerel poems written by people who had known her.

Drinking her coffee and looking out over the square, she wished that she could separate the critical apparatus she brought to her professional life from the world that extended beyond it. The people who wrote those poems for Violet – if they did write them – would be doing so with the best intentions. The last thing they needed was some bright, merciless intelligence criticising their scansion. There were not many things she envied in her son, but one of them, she thought, was the ability to live your life as it happened, without the eternal critic, that metaphorical F.R. Leavis or John Carey perched on your shoulder. Just as she was thinking that Lily Chen’s inadequacies were probably not, or not entirely, Lily Chen’s fault, that vast external forces that Lily Chen had no way of resisting had probably brought her here on this magic carpet ride from the mysterious East, she realised that the girl sitting ten yards away behind the copy of
Closer
was, as a certain part of her consciousness had already hinted to her, indeed Lily Chen. Lily Chen, whose knowledge of the Bloomsbury Group was as full of holes as a Jarlsberg cheese, but who had in some grotesque and unfortunate way apparently been pawed over by Graham Jamieson. You could not, Amy decided, deny someone the moral support they needed because of their ignorance of Virginia Woolf. You could not
even deny it because you disliked them, or you suspected that they disliked you. In her mind she was back in the shop in the Camden square, where fierce old faces looked out of the frames of Victorian paintings, trying, and, as she suspected, failing to say the right thing, not even sure that the right thing could be said. Was there a right thing to be said here? Who knew? Coffee cup rattling in its saucer, the copy of
Closer
flapping before her like some ancient guerdon rallying a troop of medieval soldiery on their hill, she moved hesitantly, but hopefully, forward, in search of some elemental solidarity that had once existed in her life but had since gone missing from it, that ancient wonderland where moral feeling was simply moral feeling, babies lay uncontaminated in their cradles, and lakeland water flowed on undisturbed.

—2014

Of the stories included here, ‘Jermyn Street’ was first published in Nicholas Royle, ed.
Neon Lit: Time Out Book of New Writing 2
(1999). ‘As Long as He Lies Perfectly Still’ appeared in the
Independent on Sunday
. ‘Charcoal’ was published in the
Sunday Express Magazine
. ‘Wrote for Luck’ was broadcast on BBC Radio Four and appeared in the
Literary Review
. ‘Teeny-weeny Little World’ and ‘Blow-ins’ were broadcast on BBC Radio Four and appeared in the
Eastern Daily Press
. ‘The Disappointed’ was published in Nicholas Royle, ed.
The Agony and the Ecstasy: Short Stories and New Writing in Celebration of the World Cup
(1998). ‘Rainy Season’ was broadcast on BBC Radio Four. ‘Passage Migrants’ was broadcast on BBC Radio Four and appeared in
Pretext
. ‘Birthday Lunch’ was published in S magazine. ‘Cranked Up Really High’ appeared in the
Mail on Sunday’s You
magazine.

I should like to acknowledge the help and encouragement of the various editors and producers who originally commissioned or accepted these stories, in particular Nicholas Royle, Suzi Feay, Christie Hickman, Nancy Sladek, Trevor Heaton, Ali Smith and Julia Bell. Especial thanks are due to Sam Jordison, Eloise Millar and Henry Layte, without whose kind invitation this collection would not have existed.

D
.
J
.
TAYLOR
is the author of eleven novels, including
English Settlement
(1996), which won a Grinzane Cavour prize,
Trespass
(1998) and
Derby Day
(2011), both long-listed for the Man Booker Prize,
Kept: a Victorian Mystery
(2006), a
Publishers’ Weekly
book of the year and
The Windsor Faction
(2013), joint winner of the Sidewise Award for Alternate History. His non-fiction includes
After the War: The Novel and England Since 1945
(1993),
Thackeray
(1999) and
Orwell: The Life
, which won the 2003 Whitbread Prize for biography. He lives in Norwich with his wife, the novelist Rachel Hore, and their three sons.

FICTION

Great Eastern Land

Real Life

English Settlement

After Bathing at Baxter’s: Stories

Trespass

The Comedy Man

Kept: A Victorian Mystery

Ask Alice

At the Chime of a City Clock

Derby Day

Secondhand Daylight

The Windsor Faction

From the Heart

NON-FICTION

A Vain Conceit: British Fiction in the 1980s

Other People: Portraits from the ’90s (with Marcus Berkmann)

After the War: The Novel and England since 1945

Thackeray

Orwell: The Life

On the Corinthian Spirit: The Decline of Amateurism and Sport

Bright Young People: The Rise and Fall of a Generation 1918-1940

What You Didn’t Miss: A Book of Literary Parodies