The Summer Isles Read online

  Still, my mother and I had his pension and his life insurance; there again, we were ahead of our time. And we had the house. We were never that stretched, and those complicated holiday trips to grey corners of the English coastline had never been much fun. By this time—I was eleven—I’d already decided I wanted to be a teacher. Until I passed into Secondary School from Stowe Street Elementary, I was always one of the brightest in my class, and I fondly imagined that I’d continue to hold my own in this slightly more elevated company. Egged on by my insular sense of superiority, even a County Scholarship to Rugby seemed within reach. And from there, yes, I was already dreaming of the Magdalene Deer, sleek bodies bathing in the Cherwell at Parson’s Pleasure, Jack Marvel in Quiller-Couch’s The Splendid Spur, the bold laughter across Tom Quad of a thousand half-baked-and-headstrong Oxford heroes.

  My later years in school, though, were a slog. I sensed already that I was hitting a permanent ceiling—that, without my having had much say in it, my life was already determined. Partly from struggling to keep pace amongst cleverer lads (all prototype bank managers, chartered accountants, KSG high-ups and solicitors) who could easily outdistance me, I fell ill with something that may or may not have been scarlet fever. On my long stay away from school, a boy called Martin Dawes who I had little liking for but was supposedly a friend would call in each afternoon to deliver school books and sit with me. Whilst up in my room, he would slip his hands beneath the sheets and the waistband of my pyjamas and toss me off—as if that, too, was a message that needed to be delivered from school. Of course, I was deeply grateful.

  Later, towards the end of my school years as I grew fitter and more resigned to my fate, there were the usual abrasions and obsessions. I recall a schoolmaster named Mr. Lockwood once helping me—for a whole good and glorious hour, it seemed—to don my cricket box as I struggled to hide my growing erection. It only occurred to me later that his breathy attentions were slightly unusual. But Mr. Lockwood had gone by then; he’d dissolved into the scholarly mists, leaving only a faint odour of unspecified scandal in his wake. And so had Martin Dawes, whom I never really did get to like despite everything. Still, as I took and passed my Highers and then scraped my Second Class Teacher’s Certificate and left school and found a job as an Assistant Master at nearby Burntwood Charity, as I reached the tender age of seventeen and became what was then looked on as a man, these few moments remained almost the sole fuel of my masturbatory fantasies.

  Sometimes, locked in the upstairs toilet with its freezing seat and ever-open window as my mother shuffled about down in the kitchen, I would dutifully try to incorporate women into my pink imaginings in the vague hope that they would make me feel less guilty about the act that I was performing. But at some vital moment, their chests would always flatten and their groins would engorge as they stepped towards me, cropped and clean and shining, bearing in their golden-haired hands the ever-more elaborate straps and protuberances of pseudo-cricket boxes. But then, what did I know about women? From the look of them, and were it not for the occasional classical statue, you’d have imagined that the bosom was a single fleshy appendage. And as for what went on in that smooth marble space between their legs… I was as innocent as most people were then, and knew little enough about the functioning of even my own anatomy. The ability, for example, to pull back my foreskin from the glans of my penis was something that I imagined as a cross I had to bear; my own special deformity.

  It was thus at some expense and considerable embarrassment that I took the trouble of going down to Birmingham one summer weekend to purchase some photographs in the hope that would give me a clearer idea. I had convinced myself by then that, with the right knowledge of the female anatomy, I would finally understand. But when I opened the envelope back in my bedroom that night, I found that I was shocked, confused, embarrassed. Breasts, I knew about—at least in theory. But this was the holy grail? I immediately renounced all thoughts of sex and resigned myself to a lifetime of selfless celibacy.

  A week later, I was back on the train to Birmingham, and then along the same smelly Digbeth streets, shaking with nerves as I entered the plain-fronted shop offering Novelty Art-Works and Souvenirs. I explained that, man of the world that I was, my lady friend had expressed an interest in acquiring a similar set of photographs to the ones that I had purchased; but this time, of men. I had glimpsed the things, tantalisingly, the week before, sliding about in one of the long felt-lined drawers that the shop’s proprietor had opened. Thicker arms, smoother bellies—and could that really be the casual flop against a hairy thigh of an actual penis? Reptile-eyed, unspeaking but for the matter of money, the proprietor handed me an envelope. Several days later, in a fit of self-disgust, I destroyed these, too. But by then it was too late. Things were as firmly set in my mind as they had long been in my body. I was—now that I finally got around to looking up the name in one of the bigger medical dictionaries that dared to include such monstrous afflictions—a homosexual; an invert.

  That, in the personal history of what I term my pre-Francis days, was the sole extent of my sexual development. There were no mad choirmasters, no smooth-talking deviant older friends, no ambushes by rapacious tramps, no bumps on the head sustained while bicycling, or desperate anonymous letters to Baden-Powell. There was just me and my guilty semi-celibacy, and helping my suddenly frail mother look after her house, and watching the lads I’d known at school grow up, leave home, marry, start families.

  Just as I had resigned myself to puzzled but inactive deviancy, so, by the time I was in my early twenties, I had also come to accept my position as a Second Class Teacher for the Senior Standard Threes at Burntwood Charity. Even getting promoted to First Class Teacher seemed unlikely, at least until the tyrant His Majesty’s Inspector Mr. Rathbate retired. My horizons were limited. South Staffordshire, then as now, was predominantly a mining and agricultural community. Despite the regulations, many of the children were no longer attending school by the age of ten, but assisting their mothers and fathers in a trade. Some of those who did bother to stay on until thirteen did so because they were intelligent and hoped to transfer into Secondary or even Grammar school. Others remained because they were too retarded to do anything else—Billy Choggin, I remember, was only thrown out from behind the desk where he sat hunched and picking at his warts when someone realised he’d turned seventeen.

  In the articles with which I began my career in the Daily Sketch nearly thirty years later, I gave the impression that John Arthur was one of my brightest and most ambitious pupils, a little comet trail across the pit-dusty Burntwood skies. Thanks to numerous flowery additions by the Sketch’s copy editor, I also stated that he was pale-skinned, quiet, good-looking, intense, and that he possessed a slight West Country accent, this being the time before it had changed to the soft Yorkshire that we all know now—all traits which would have got him a good beating up in the playground—and that, on summer evenings after school when the pit whistle had blown and the swallows were wheeling, he and I would walk up into “the Staffordshire hills” and sit down and gaze down at the spires of Lichfield, the pit wheels of Burntwood and the smokestacks of Rugeley from the flowing purple heather.

  Now, after all these years of practice, those pretty images have become like the tales of your own infancy that you absorb as a child, and become vivid, treasured memories. It’s been my party act, too, a fundamental part of my life, ever since my name—or at least that of Geoffrey Brook—was mentioned by John Arthur as a childhood mentor in his maiden speech before the old House of Commons. So, yes, I do remember the boyhood of John Arthur. He really is there in that classroom at Burntwood Charity with all the other children and the smell of chalk dust and unwashed bodies, the whispers of tension and the straining of the clock as they await the Friday evening bell and the glorious afternoon that shimmers outside to enfold them. His hand is raised from the third row of desks, his sleeve slipping back to show a thin wrist to ask a more than usually pertinent question before I start t
o ramble on about one of my many pet subjects. That is how I recall him.

  The fact is, I’ve always enjoyed being a teacher. I still do. It’s just that I’m far happier talking about the failures of Captain Franklin or the flower-like symmetry of the Henry VIII’s coastal forts than I am building up the fat blocks of information that are supposedly the foundations of a proper education now; the sort of thing that’s so well defined that every ten year old in the country is probably reading the same page of the expurgated Gulliver’s Travels at exactly the same time. Still, I like to think that it was a different John Arthur who misremembered the name of Griffin Brooke and his leapfrogging enthusiasms when his power finally touched me. Someone who understood love and knowledge.

  Too weary to stop, trailing cigarette smoke, memories, abstractions, I wander these new suburban streets. Here in Oxford, despite the many ways that my external life has changed, everything else about me seems much the same. I still yearn for closeness and understanding. I still play, despite the grasshopper weaknesses of my mind, at being an intellectual. I still feel, far too many times and in far too many ordinary situations, clumsy and foolish and naive. I’m still waiting, really, for my life to start. Now, it will soon be ending…

  The thought slides off me, still too large to comprehend. I sense my consciousness cowering like a trapped animal before it, twisting this way and that as it tries to get out of the way. My thoughts go heedlessly back towards John Arthur, and then my book, and then the subject of next week’s tutorials. Anything, in fact—anything—other than the one big, overwhelming truth.

  Past a space of fenced building sites. 8/10 WEEKLY OR £50 DOWN. GUARANTEED MODERN HOMES. NEARLY EVERY HOUSE HAS A GARAGE SPACE. Illuminated artists’ impressions of fireside families, bay-windows, honeysuckle walls, cats sleeping on doorsteps. Then Gladstone Drive, where the posters are made real. Perhaps a recently-constructed Disraeli Road also lies around the corner. Perhaps Disraeli’s accepted now just as he was in his lifetime; scarcely a Jew at all with his clever flattery of making an Empress out of our dowdy old Queen, his canny embracement of Christianity. Who knows? These things change so quickly.

  I pass illuminated porches bearing individual name-plates—CHURCH HOUSE. DAWRIC. THE WILLOWS.—in wrought iron, chinaware or poker-work. It’s quiet now, although scarcely past nine and only just getting fully dark. The houses have a sleepy look. Their curtains are drawn. Faintly, like the movement of ghosts, I can see the shimmer of television screens. The people of Greater Britain have taken so quickly to these flickering dreams. Rooftop aerials point towards the new transmitters with orderly precision. The shop windows of electrical shops along every high street are filled with invasions of greenish-grey Cyclops eyes. Each night, the walls of millions of darkened lounges fill with the shadows of marching bands, high-stepping dance routines, the rheumy leers of northern comics.

  A footstep scuffs in the street behind me. The sound is so unexpected that I turn and look back. There’s silence now. Whoever it is has stopped, and for a moment the street seems empty, the pale concrete road shining beneath the lights and the gathering stars. Then I see where the figure is standing, far too squat and large in the shadow of a parked delivery van to be my slim-bodied acquaintance. A chill sense of watching fills me and a loud pulse begins to beat in my ears as I walk towards it. The thing seems deformed; hardly a figure at all—in fact, nothing but a postbox. And all around me there is only silence. People shut indoors, and living their lives.

  I walk on more briskly. The sense of being followed is still hard to shake from my shoulder. OBERON DRIVE. HAZEL OAK ROAD. I’d be lost by the winding samey look of everything, were it not for the fact that these particular streets are familiar to me. Once or twice before, and equally furtively, I have walked these pavements. Beyond that patch of grass where BALL GAMES ARE PROHIBITED, and a stand of oak trees which must have shaded generations of cattle when this was all fields, lies the home of my acquaintance. His two girls will have been put to bed by now, today being a Thursday and their needing to be fresh for school tomorrow. I’d like to think that he and his wife are more cultured than to empty their minds with Jack “Mind My Bike” Warden, The Clarksons, ITMA or whatever is on television tonight. We’ve never discussed such things, but perhaps they tune instead to the Third Programme on their radio-gramophone and settle back to Malcolm Sargent conducting live from the Albert Hall. A chance, as The Swan Of Tuonela plays, for my acquaintance to talk about the way things are going down at the Censor’s Office, and then to plan for the weekend; how they might take the Sunday excursion train and spend the whole day together on Lambourn Downs. My acquaintance, he could easily skip his usual lunchtime trip to the pub, his afternoon in the garden, his evening constitutional walk…

  My footsteps drag now. My lungs and my throat throb and ache. A few bedroom lights are showing in the houses, then puffing out. Already, it’s later than I imagined. The tellies have shrivelled to a white dot, the concert halls have emptied, and all the Jims and the Betties will soon be abed; merrily, guiltlessly, fornicating. Yet, twisted angel of death that I am, I feel a sense of watching from those curtained windows.

  Number 4 Portia Avenue’s black-and-white gable looms into view: the privet and the long strip of drive that lead towards the side of the house where, in these days of ever-growing prosperity, a Ladybird car will probably soon replace the sturdy Raleigh that my acquaintance currently cycles to work on. Old Fatguts can’t last long now, love, and then it’ll be me in that office. My name on the frosted glass… The windows of his house, too, are darkened. But, unlike the others around it, they are also uncurtained. And, in this flowing summer darkness, there is something odd about the look of the panes, and even of the flowerbed that separates the house from Number 6 next door. A few weeks ago, I’m sure, it was filled with a military row of tulips. Now it seems messed, flattened.

  My feet crunch on something sharper than gravel as I find myself walking up the path to my acquaintance’s front door, which I never imagined I would do outside my dreams. Many of the windows have been shattered, and a fat iron padlock has been fitted across the door’s splintered frame. There is a pervasive, summery smell of children’s urine.

  I see, last of all, the sign that the Oxford Constabulary have pasted on the porch. TAKE NOTICE HEREBY… But this sky is incredibly dark and deep for summer, and even the streetlamps are out; I can’t read further than the Crown-embossed heading. I slump down the doorstep, scattering empty milk bottles, covering my face with my hands. At long last, it all seems to come to me. This. Death. The end of everything.

  When I look up some time later, I realise that a figure is watching me from the quiet suburban night.

  “I know,” it repeats. “This must be a shock to you.”

  I nod, scuffing the heel of my hand as I struggle to my feet.

  “Knew them well, did you?”

  “N—not exactly.”

  The figure, smaller than I am, clearly female, takes a step across the crazy paving. Housecoat and slippers. A steely glint of curlers. “Come on, then. I’ll get you some tea. We’re only next door…

  “I’m Mrs. Stevens,” she tells me, wisely keeping her first name to herself as she potters about with the teapot and the kettle in the blinding brightness of her kitchen.

  “My name’s Brook,” I say. I can’t see any point in lying.

  “I check the doorstep each day for the post,” she says, twisting off the tap and giving her mottled fingers a shake. “Pass it on to our local bobby, although I’m sure he doesn’t know what to do with it either. You’d think they’d know better, wouldn’t you, than to keep sending letters? I mean, him virtually working in the Post Office and all. You’d like it sweet and strong, I expect?”

  “Please.”

  I watch Mrs. Stevens as she warms the pot, then ladles in the tea. The kitchen, now that I can make out more of it, is surprisingly big. Windows on two sides, one with a fan-extractor. A white enamel machine that I suppose must be
a refrigerator hums gently to itself in a corner. A cuckoo clock ticks above the sink. The tiles and the work surfaces shine.

  “When did it happen?”

  “It would be…” Mrs. Stevens tilts her head and squints up at the ceiling. She must be close to seventy, but a part of her still seems girlish. “The Sunday before last. About six o-clock, I’d say it was. In fact, pretty much dead-on, as Les and me had just finished our salad.”

  “They took them all away?”

  “All of them. The pity of it really.” She stirs her own tea and passes me mine. Blue willow-pattern china. “Them young girls.”

  “Nobody did anything to stop it?”

  She gazes across at me, and licks a brown line of tea that’s gathered on her small grey moustache. “I’ll tell you what they were like, Mr. Brook. In every way, I’d have said, they were a decent couple. Only odd thing I remember now is they sometimes used to leave the light on without drawing the curtains so you could see right in… The lassies were nice, though. They fed our cat for us when we went up to Harrogate last year, although of course the poor thing’s got run over since. Probably that dreadful new road, trying to get back to his old hunting grounds. Silly puss…”

  “You were saying.”

  “There’s not much to say, really, is there? The way things have turned out. Shameful, though. Lets down the neighbourhood, especially what’s been done to the house since they left, mess and bricks through the window. But you know what the kids were like. Knew them well yourself, did you?”

  “He was just an acquaintance. I hardly had any contact with the rest of the family.”

  “Like I say, they seemed decent as you or I. Made no fuss when my Les was putting up the summer house at the back and got building sand all over their roses. Laughed it off. I remember him saying, Mrs. Stevens, it just doesn’t matter. Put my Les’s back out, though, it did. He’s upstairs now. Asleep, most probably. Separate rooms, we are, since he had that trouble.”