The Summer Isles Read online

  Christlow’s exercises have finished without my noticing. But for the click of shears in the walled herb garden, the midday air hangs still over the quad as I cross it. Once out in the street, I check once again the address on my appointment card. Not the Radcliffe this time—and further down Abingdon Road than I’d imagined. Too late for a bus, and I’ll have to hurry if I’m going to walk.

  12:45, P. Wiseman. Across the bridge, gull-like human cries and the reek of chlorine wash over me from the Open Air Baths. On the right, past Vicarage Road, I reach Saint Eustace Row, which is a lime-fronted edifice of old redbrick and rusted guttering that must be to do with one of the colleges. Here, I’ve floated up into some higher echelon where all the threads of medicine meet. Eventually, if you’re ill enough, you get to see the same specialists and going NHS or private no longer matters; the only difference is whether you get to chat afterwards over lunch at the club. Just the white plainness of this card, the fact that unlike some common GP, ward surgeon or anaesthetist, P. Wiseman doesn’t even call himself a doctor—let alone list his qualifications—tells me that.

  I’m shown straight down a surprisingly modern corridor and up a staircase where numerous dead stags have stuck their heads through the walls. A MIND YOUR HEAD sign leads to some older part of the building past a rusted coat of roundhead armour that looks as though it’s been left there by its forgetful owner. Then a large door into an even larger room. I’ve become used to these twists and turns in Oxford: the rabbit-hole that leads to the ballroom, the hovel that backs onto the palace. I cross the rucked carpet and sit down on a big but uncomfortable wing chair to squint expectantly as P. Wiseman lights a cigarette from his gold case and the sunlight from the tall casement windows pours down around him.

  “I’m glad you could make it,” he says, spectacles glinting as the ormolu clock pings one. “I’ve been following the progress of your tests, and I think it’s about time that you and I had a little chat.” Pause for a smile. “About things.”

  “It’s been,” I shrug, sweaty and breathless, “a bit of a shock to me.”

  “Bit of a shock?” He nods thoughtfully. “Yes, yes. And you’re what? Sixty Five?”

  “Sixty. My birthday’s next month.”

  “Mmmm.” He glances down at his tear-off page-a-day calendar SUPPLIED BY BRIGHTON PHARMACEUTICALS as if he doubts me. THURSDAY 13 JUNE 1940. The letters seem to glow in the sun, so brightly rainbowed at their edges that I wonder if this isn’t some other new symptom I’ll have to try to explain. There’s a day’s motto, too—Fata Obstant—which means nothing to me, not knowing Latin.

  Then P. Wiseman begins to tell me about my disease. About how each cell in my body is a single entity; and how I am comprised of a whole vast nation of such cells, all of which are working busily together. They live and they die and proceed about the business of their lives much as I proceed about my own. And each of them has a blueprint that it passes down to its offspring which contains details about who they are, and which particularly fleshy city, factory, warehouse, sewerage works, temple, library or brothel they’re supposed to belong to. But sometimes there is a delinquent, an errant messenger. It thinks it has a role greater than that properly granted to it. And it makes others in its likeness, and they in turn procreate and pass on this false message, and grow and spread.

  I nod occasionally, and ask one or two questions. None of this biology seems to have much do with me. Soon, I find myself settling sleepily into these words and the soft wood-and-leathery aura of this Oxford room, which is like so many others that I’ve been in. P. Wiseman, he could be studying the behaviour of the electron or the Siberian squirrel for all you could tell. There are no changing screens here, no implements, no kidney bowls, no bloody wads of cotton wool. The volumes along the wall are Carlyle, Boswell, Dante, Euripides. There’s a long photo of the arms-folded rugby team of one or other of the major public schools. A decent painting of a middle-aged but still glamorous woman in a blue evening gown. Another photo of P. Wiseman himself shaking hands with Deputy Prime Minister Arkwright on the steps of some stately home at the beginning of some conference. Outside, framed in redbrick and ivy, lies a striped and mown lawn much like my college’s own quad. It’s the same manicured green square, I sometimes think, that you’d find at the heart of every Englishman…

  “So I should give up that pipe, Brooke, if I were you.”

  “What?”

  “Your pipe. You have one sticking out of your top pocket. So I assume…”

  “Right.” I reach up and touch the smooth wooden bowl. The feel of it is pretty much the only pleasure that I’ve really ever got from the thing, anyway, and it never did do much for my scholarly image.

  “Try these.” He waves a fresh-lit Players Nation, which leaves a sky-writer’s vapour trail behind it. “Or you could try the new Lambert menthol-tipped.”

  “The thing’s been making me cough anyway.”

  “I’m not surprised. You people are down past Brasenose, by the way, aren’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Never been there much myself, you know. I’m a Magdalene man. Still tend to stick to the older colleges.”

  By that, P. Wiseman means medieval, rather than plain old Elizabethan like my own. He stares at me, probably wondering whether to start asking if I know so-and-so, or have I heard the news about old-whatsit getting the clap on a fact-finding trip in Gujarat. Perhaps he thinks we might talk as intellectual equals. But you never know what to expect these days, the way Oxford has become: filled with people like me.

  “Still, Brooke, I’m sure your lot keep busy.”

  “I’m working on a book at the moment, actually,” I hear myself saying.

  “Hmmm?”

  “About historiography—the actual study of history itself. It still remains a neglected subject.”

  “I’m sure. And what line do you plan to take?”

  “Basically, that the real influence played by the major figures of history—people like Napoleon, Alexander, even Buddha—has increased over the centuries. I mean, that the whole equation isn’t static.”

  “Interesting. I’m no expert, but that’s pretty much the history-as-process line, isn’t it?”

  “Well—”

  “—But it’s always seemed to me that the argument you’re taking is based upon a fallacy. What you’re describing is simply the fact that more recent figures are better documented, and therefore seem to us to have a greater substance. I mean, we know too little about the real Siddhartha to know whether he actually had much personal influence on Buddhism. You could say much the same about Christ…”

  I stare back at him.

  “But we digress.” P. Wiseman taps out his cigarette in his cut glass IMPERIAL CHEMICALS ashtray with his surgeon’s hands and lights another from the flame—invisible in this sunlight—of an onyx lighter. “As I was saying, Brooke, I’ve been following your case, and giving it quite a lot of thought. Outwardly, you’re still in good enough health. I can see that. But as I think I explained, this tumour in your right lung has been growing for some time. With the problem of metastasis—I mean, of course, lymphatic spread—I really don’t think that there’s any need to operate.”

  Not even any need for an operation! A stupid bubble of joy rises up from my stomach, then dissolves.

  “Just how far has it spread, then?”

  “Along the spinal cord, I’m afraid. Into the liver. The other lung, too. Possibly elsewhere…”

  I nod slowly, remembering a potato I once found at the back of my mother’s larder. It had gone to seed, shooting out pale runners along the walls and behind the shelves.

  “I’m sorry, Brooke,” he adds, realising that I hadn’t worked this out before.

  I lick my lips. “How long,” I ask, “have I got?” It’s one of those clichéd lines you can’t avoid in these circumstances.

  “At the very best, two years. Possibly less than one. I’m afraid you’ll need to make plans straight away…”
/>   But I’m floating by then. Everything else that P. Wiseman has to say to me is lost.

  In fact, I’m very annoyed with myself by the time I finally step back out into the sunlight. I’m even annoyed with myself about feeling annoyed. So stupid, stupid. The idea that you might eventually die is something that you get used to as you grow older, but actual death is quite different. Death that could stop you seeing this year’s Wimbledon. Death that makes it pointless to buy a decent pair of shoes that’ll last you through next winter.

  Somehow, I hadn’t realised that having lung cancer meant not just being ill, not just having my life shortened, but really dying.

  I feel so angry.

  Back in my rooms, I crouch over my desk trying to hammer out the many extra words, lines, sentences and pages that I know I must complete if I am ever to finish The Fingers Of History. But the process seems meaningless; a few more phrases thrown on the dungheap of all the other rubbish that’s been written. What’s the point of analysis? Napoleon existed, but now he’s gone, and we’ll never know what he was really like. And even if we did, what difference would it make? There would still be the horrors the Peninsular Campaign, the retreat from Russia. They’re written in blood, not in ink. If I’d been there, yes, then, it might have been different. The little Corsican was clever and charismatic, but surely anyone could see that he was a disaster in the making for all of Europe? Knowing what I now know—perhaps even being something like the person I now am, risen to my bogus position by terror and revolution in that strangely similar period of history—I would have killed him with a pure heart as he strode along the simpering lines of minor academics at some pompous ceremony. Then, where would history be? Changed for the better, by my own bloody hands…

  By late afternoon, my head is buzzing. I snap at Christlow when he peeks around the door to ask if I’ll be eating at Hall tonight, or perhaps just a few slices of smoked ham and a crusty cob on a tray up here? I don’t feel hungry, and the sour taste in my mouth that I’d been putting down to Four Square Ready-Rubbed or a summer cold has grown stronger. Is this another of the symptoms that Wiseman mentioned? What exactly does happen when a tube of flesh starts to entwine your spinal cord?

  Pulling on my jacket, purchasing twenty Navy Cut Unfiltered at Dobsons on the corner, breaking several matches, then taking long, bitter drags, I find myself wandering the city as evening floods in. For a while, I hardly notice where I am. There are bell towers, of course, copulating heaps of bicycles, ramshackle third-year student digs and bursting-at-the-seams secondhand bookshops; things to step around or fall over. People are heading home from work, getting on with the tricky business of being satisfied, healthy, ordinary. Alive.

  Now, I can easily see the futility of all the pages I have written; even if my supposed book were ever finished, then got around the censor and was deemed correct and saleable and was actually published, the thing would still be worthless. I can see, too, the insignificant and easily-filled space that my whole life will soon leave. A few clothes hanging in a wardrobe, an old suitcase beneath a bed, some marks on a toilet cubicle wall…

  I decide, once I’ve taken my bearings by Tom’s Tower, to call in again at the Gents by Christ Church Meadow. It’s not far; basically, I’ve been wandering in circles. The worn stone steps set with black and white mosaic, the welcoming doorway with its municipal crest, the smell of male wee and toilet block, all greet me like an old friend. The War veteran is just finishing mopping the floor, whistling tonelessly to himself after a long day wrestling with John Bull’s crossword. I notice for the first time as he wrings his mop into the bucket that he only has one hand.

  My feet leave a trail across his clean wet tiles, and he watches as I select the middle cubicle and push in my halfpenny and close the door and slide the brass blot. Nearly two weeks now, but there’s still no further mark on the green-painted walls. Dot, dot, dash, dash—then somehow, it all stops at the time my acquaintance made his usual thumbnail invitation the Sunday before last.

  It’s a mystery, although I’ve lived long enough to have experienced this sort of thing before. These ritual appointments never do last. People change. They get sick of themselves. Their wives find out. They suddenly decide that buggery’s not really them at all. They get beaten up, arrested, fall for someone else with a tighter bum, or move areas. You can’t expect Christmas cards. And I’m grateful, really, that this parting of the ways has coincided so well with my own sudden mortality—and a final realisation of the essential pointlessness of sex. But I’m also worried for him.

  I come out of the cubicle again, realising that I haven’t done anything, or even bothered to flush. The veteran glances back over his shoulder as he gives John Arthur’s photo over the urinals a final wipe. I press my hand to my stomach and mutter something about feeling ill, and how it’s passed now. Take care, he mutters—or something like it as the soles of my shoes tick across the tiles. Long after I’m outside, his gaze still seems to follow me.

  The sound of voices and the smell of cooking drift through half-open suburban windows as darkness thickens and I wander further out from the city. All these streets. All these houses. Here, at the centre of a front lawn, someone has laid out the Empire Alliance circle-cross in house leeks and saxifrage. A child, ready for bed in her nightie, parts the curtain of her window and gazes out at me. Her lips are moving. Mummy, who’s that funny man?

  I am weary. My whole body is stiff and cold as I walk past parked and uniform rows of Morris Ladybirds, the “people’s car” which is manufactured in vast quantities just down the road at Cowley. They all look like jelly moulds. I turn from the little lawns and fake-castellations of semi-detached and semi-skilled Lancelot Street onto the wider middle-management and mock-Tudor expanses of Falstaff Road. The street lamps nod their heads wisely. A cat yowls. A baby cries. A dustbin lid bangs down in an alleyway.

  I was born in Lichfield—which, then as now, is a town which calls itself a city—in the year 1880. It’s middle England, neither flat nor hilly, north or south. And so far from the sea that there’s one of the stone markers nearby asserting that it—and not Meriden, Banbury, or even Hexham as James I once claimed in his cups—marks the proper centre of England. Barring Doctor Johnson being born and a messy siege in the Civil War, nothing much has ever happened there.

  Thinking about it all now, the way that things have turned out, my parents were pioneers of much that has since happened in Britain. They owned their own house in one of the newer and more decent terraced developments that were then springing up around Stow Pool and behind the Cathedral. Inside toilet, running hot and cold, built-in stove, decorated picture rails. I really don’t know exactly how they came to meet each other and get married. They always seemed unsure themselves—it was just one of those things that happen to you, like the job you ended up doing, having a minor operation, or losing your hair—although they agreed that it probably had something to do with a shared distant relative. They were both of good Midlands stock; my family tree soon gets lost in meandering repetitions of Johns and Marys, Smiths and Coopers, carpenters and stockmen. Of course, there was talk about some great old house and all the wealth that a scandalous uncle had squandered. There always is. I can even remember my grandmother who lived in Malvern claiming to have been a childhood friend—at least a schoolmate—of Edward Elgar. Not that she really knew who he was when I questioned her, other than that he had done well for himself.

  I remember the rainbows of light that the glass pendants of the parlour lamp used to throw across the wall. A single child, I also remember feeling bored at home and looking forward to and then enjoying school, although somehow wishing there was more to it. I wanted to know about kings and queens, volcanoes and other planets, sea monsters… I had little time for passing around jars filled with object lessons—a bit of honeycomb, a monkey’s femur—or copying letters onto a slate, or ploughing through shared copies of Little Black Sambo and Down On The Farm.

  My father worked for Lichf
ield Corporation. He had a title that changed once or twice amid great glory and talk of more ambitious holidays, but he was always Assistant-this and Deputy-that—one of the great busy-but-unspecified (“Well, it’s quite hard to explain what I do unless you happen to be in the same line yourself…”) who now so dominate this country. Basically, he was an accounts clerk, and when he came home each evening, he smelled of underarms and India ink and rubber. Once I was old enough to make my own cheese sandwiches, my mother took a job at Hindleys’ Cake Shop on Bird Street. Dough and raisin buns—another smell that returns to me. She’d often bring home squashed battenburgs like broken bits of board game, or the stale and fly-blown remains of the hollow wedding cakes that were displayed in Hindleys’ window for a month or two. Here’s a treat for you, son… A crunchy spiral of icing. Little diamonds of angelica that looked and tasted like snot.

  Even then, long before I had the faintest idea what sex was, I knew that I was different. It always seemed as though I was stuck in some odd pattern, clothed and yet naked like that Emperor in the fable, in a way that other people either ignored or simply didn’t see. My mother snapped at me when I tried to question her about these feelings. I suppose that at that time, seeing me perhaps as too frail—but not in the physical sense, you understand; but not quite mannish enough, somehow too sensitive—she had her own worries, although they were probably as ill-defined as my own. My father just hummed to himself and got on with his job and his garden and his spreading commonwealth of allotments around which he would trundle his wheelbarrow until he died of a heart attack on the little hill up Gaia Lane. A fall of flowerpots. The children sniggering at the funny man with the quivering legs until a travelling newspaper salesman happened along. He tossed out the rest of the pots and wheeled my father way all the way up to St John’s Hospital. But he could have saved his time and gone straight to the Maddox’s the Undertakers in Market Place. My father was already dead.