The Summer Isles Read online

  “I’m sorry to hear that, Mrs. Stevens. But when they came to the house, was it the KSG or did—”

  “—and you’d never have known, would you, to look at her?”

  “Her? You mean…?”

  “Ah…” Mrs. Stevens slaps her hand flat down on the table and leans forward, her brown eyes gleaming, almost childlike in her excitement. “So you still don’t know the truth of it? Well, that’s understandable, I suppose, cos, just like they say, you really never can tell. I mean, even you—I’ll be honest, Mr. Brook—it crossed my mind till I got a good look at you out of the dark. You can’t be too careful, can you?”

  “No. I suppose not. I’m sorry, Mrs. Stevens, but I’m still confused.”

  “Her real name, it seems, was something Polish before she married. All xs and ys and zs. Her parents came over here after the War, changed it to something proper.” She hurrumphs. “Hood, I think it was—but even that doesn’t quite right, does it?”

  “I suppose they were thinking of Robin.”

  “Robin?”

  “Don’t mind me, Mrs. Stevens.”

  “Not that I’ve got anything against the Serbs in their own country.”

  “You mean Poles?”

  “Yes. And a few of them over here—it’s understandable that they want to come, isn’t it—just as long as they don’t make themselves a burden, earn a decent living, talk like we do and don’t bother our children and keep themselves to themselves and make a proper effort to fit in.”

  “So what was the problem?”

  “She was a Jew, wasn’t she. All these years they’ve been living next door and acting all normal and hiding it from us. I mean, it’s the deceit I really can’t stand. And he must have known. Must have been in it with that job of his, and helped her fake the papers when they married. Her with coming round through that door in a sunhat sometimes to give me a few extra cuttings for the rockery Les was working on.” Mrs. Stevens raises her shoulders and shudders theatrically. “To think of it. It’s the dishonesty. And her nothing but a dirty little Jew.”

  The cuckoo clock whirrs and pings. A wooden bird with glass eyes sticks out its head and stares down at us for a moment as it toots breathlessly. Eleven o-clock already.

  It’s far later than I’d expected.

  3

  CLOUDS SWEEP IN ACROSS Oxford, thick and grey as wet cement. Rain brims over the low surrounding hills and washes away the hope of what had promised to be another spectacular summer. Cars hiss by on gleaming streets. Pedestrians dodge cascades from sluicing gargoyles. Queues of galoshes, wet coats and sodden umbrellas fill the doorways beneath college arches with a sick, rubbery smell.

  Ascot is a wash-out; horses and high-heeled women sink deep in the paddock, hats are ruined and Best Boy, the King’s own horse and hottest favourite in years, pulls up lame in front of the Royal Box in a sea-spray of mud; a story that fills the front pages of next morning’s damp-at-the-edges newspapers. In the whitewashed yard of Oxford’s town prison on the hissing grey dawn, two men are hanged for their part in an attempted mail robbery. But few turn up to watch, and it barely makes page five of that evening’s Oxford Mail.

  In Honduras, the British prefix lost to revolution in 1919 is restored when General Avetin succeeds in a bloody coup and asks to re-join the Empire. A car bomb in the Trans-Jordan kills fifteen German League of Nations soldiers. Plebiscites in the Gold Coast and Rhodesia confirm their population’s acceptance of newly-restored British Governors. In India, as ever, there are uprisings and massacres.

  Gone With The Wind, a film that most people want see despite the fact that it comes from decadent America and Bette Davis pinched the Scarlett O’Hara role from our own Vivien Leigh, is given the Modernist stamp of approval when it is premiered in the West End in the sprucely uniformed presence of Jim Toller, Major-General of the Knights of Saint George, the ubiquitous KSG, and Commander-in-Chief of the British Armed Forces. John Arthur, typically, is quoted to have said that he too would liked to have attended, but happened to be too busy.

  Despite P. Wiseman’s apparent pronouncement of my death sentence, there are still many tests and indignities for me at the Radcliffe. I am congratulated on my resilience and given the kind of drugs that I suspect could trace their origins back to the Chinese opium dens. Pain, when it does come, fills up my bleak sense of absence, and I can feel, if I press my skin lightly, a walnut-sized lump just to the left of my ribs. Why is it always walnuts, I wonder? Where are the plums, cherries, conkers, cobblestones, quail’s eggs of human pathology…?

  Back at college, as the University presses along Walton Street begin to churn out acres of examination papers and Trinity Term slips past the half-way mark, many of the students begin to look ill-kempt and pale, their hair lank; their voices, as they attempt to make themselves heard in seminars over the chatter of rain through antique lead gutters, sound lost. It’s the bright ones I feel sorriest for; middle-class lads and lassies who’ve pushed hard to get here through late nights of eye-stinging revision, grants and bursaries, enduring the bemusement of their family and friends. Like me, although probably with better reason, they thought that a different Oxford lay at the end of the dream.

  It doesn’t pay, after all, to be too clever nowadays. Merely bright will do just fine. After all, the students at Oxford have to put up with teachers like me, whom they should properly have left behind them when they went to a decent grammar school. A couple of days ago, for example, staring out during a tutorial at the quad’s dripping oak at the hunched figure that sometimes seems to be standing beneath it, I lost the thread with one of my best students as we discussed his essay on the reforms of Peter the Great. He gazed back at me in polite amazement as I talked, but said nothing. I only realised after he had gone that my thoughts had got tangled in the pages of my book, and that I had been going on about not Peter the Great, but Alexander.

  But BC or AD—Ancient Greece or Imperial Russia—what use anyway is the solemn study of history? Give me instead a few juicy stories of Empress Catherine or the complex morning ritual that was the Emptying of the Chamber Pots at Versailles. I’ve always had this gossipy view of my subject—more Charles Lawton and The Private Lives of Henry VIII than anything to do with the reality of the past, when life was surely no grander or funnier then than it is now, and probably made just as little sense. All the rest is a pretence of knowing the unknowable, or downright lies.

  Oxford, meanwhile, as the rain continues and salty tidemarks rise in her stones, endures. She functions, as some wag must surely have remarked, in much the same way as a swan drifting amid the stranded benches of the flooded Isis. All poise and grace above the surface. Much mad paddling beneath.

  Living here at the time that I do, when for every undergraduate student there are two who are taking some lesser qualification or simply here for a weekend course; at a time when, whilst my college and a few others struggle to maintain the tutorial system, there is no essential difference between our degrees and ones obtained, say, at Carlisle Institute Of Further Education, I still find it hard to be certain if anything has really changed. Did not Lord Eldon pass his Finals simply by giving the name in Hebrew for The Place Of The Skull, and that of the Founder of University College? Did not Gibbon describe his time at Oxford as the most idle and unprofitable of his life? Instead of the Lords and Baronets who used to cram the place, it’s true there are now many sons and indeed daughters of KSG Majors, Town Council Chairmen, Empire Alliance District Organisers and various other Modernist sycophants and high ups. But that in itself can hardly be described as making Oxford different—more a question of the old girl responding as she has always done to the ever-shifting times.

  The editor of the Daily Sketch was probably right when he told me over a compensatory lunch at the Savoy that the time was no longer suitable for a weekly column filled with old-fashioned facts, and that the John Arthur connection was well and truly played out. And I despair as I work on my book of ever making any sense of history. It
seems, to quote Gibbon again, little more than a register of cruelties, follies and misfortunes. For example, in the Year of Our Lord 1099, the First Crusade under Geoffrey of Bouillon captured Jerusalem from the infidels, then set about slaughtering the entire population. And in 1919, in Poland, Jews were gathered up by Nationalist gangs, stripped and flogged, then made to dig their own graves…

  In Britain, the Jews have always been small in number, and, although there were savage pogroms in York, London, Norwich, Stamford and Lynn in the late 12th century, we’ve generally been tolerant. Before the rise of Modernism, my acquaintance and his family probably had little more to fear from exposure than a silence in the greengrocers as they entered and the occasional human turd stuffed through their letter box. After all, Jewishness isn’t like homosexuality, madness, criminality, communism, militant Irishness: they can’t exactly help being born with their grabby disgusting ways, can they? Rather like the gypsies, you see, we didn’t mind them living, but not here, not with us… In this as in so many other areas, all Modernism did was take what people said to each other over the garden fence and turn it into Government policy.

  One of John Arthur’s first acts when he finally became Prime Minister in 1932 was to push a bill through the then still-functioning Parliament authorising what was termed a new Domesday Book. This amounted to a detailed tallying not only of Britain’s land, but also of her people, their racial background, their wealth, their contribution to society. From this many things followed. The issuing of identity cards. The reform of the tax and welfare system. The clear identification of minorities.

  The unemployed, ex-offenders, Indians and the Irish were required to report twice-weekly to the local Police Station. Jews were dispossessed of their homes and shuffled to holding camps at the edges of towns. I can well remember the Homeland for British Jewry newsreels: they were probably one of the defining moments of early Greater British history. There they were, the British Jews clear in black and white as the projector flickered through the spiralling cigarette smoke above the one-and-sixpennies. Whole eager families of them helped by smiling Tommies as they climbed from landing craft and hauled their suitcases up onto the shingle of remote Scottish islands that had been empty but for a few sheep since the Highland Clearances a century before. It was hard not to think how genuinely nice it would be to start afresh somewhere like that, to paint and make homely the grey blocks of those concrete houses, to learn the skills of shepherding, harvesting, fishing.

  So many other things have happened in Greater Britain since then that it has been easy to forget about the Jews. I remember a short piece on Pathé that I watched before Disney’s Snow White in what must have been 1939 at the old Electra Cinema. By then they looked rustic and sunburned, their hands callused by cold winters of weaving and dry-stone walling, their eyes bright from the wind off the sea. Since then, nothing. A blank, an empty space that I find hard to fill even in my imagination.

  Already, the same thing seems to be happening to my acquaintance. He’s so faint to me now that I can hardly remember his face. It’s as if he—his whole family—have been removed from history. For, despite all my snooping, it wasn’t as if I knew him well. Since our first chance encounter in the dank subterranean toilets beneath Park Street where the GWR and LNER stations meet, he has remained little more than a cock to me. It’s easier that way. Of course, I’ve scanned the newspapers, and winkled out what little town gossip there is that penetrates these college walls. I have hung around the back of Oxford’s Central Post Office, and have listened to the voices of the staff as they hurry home through the rain. I have pestered these same people at their counters with enquiries about what I can and cannot write to an imaginary aunt in Canada in the hope that I will draw down someone from the Censor’s Department upstairs; perhaps even Old Fatguts himself—although, I have to remind myself, he’s simply a creature of my own imaginings. I have caused consternation amongst the mothers waiting beneath their umbrellas outside the gate of his daughters’ school. You don’t actually have a child at Saint Frank’s, do you mate? So bugger off—anyway, you’re too old. Who’d you think you are? Old git. You don’t belong here…

  They’re right, of course. I don’t belong. One morning as thunder crackles and water streams and the whole college seems to shift and creak like a ship straining at its moorings, tutorial-less now the exams are close, purposeless now that my book seems more dead than alive, and in a more than usual amount of pain, I’m still marooned in my rooms when Christlow arrives at eleven to do the cleaning.

  Still clearly reluctant to get on with his duties even after I’ve assured him that I don’t mind in the least, Christlow pulls on his gloves and begins to dust the bookshelves. Pretending that I’m occupied at my desk, I steal glimpses of his bristled neck as he works. He’s no more ordinary than I am really; living in a pokier version of a room like this somewhere in the college depths. Alone, unmarried. At the end of the day, I realise, I have little to fear from Christlow. It’s the very obviousness of his allegiance to the Empire Alliance that makes him safe.

  “You know the Jews, Christlow.”

  “Jews sir? Yes sir. Although not personally.”

  He pauses in his dusting. The situation already has a forced air.

  “We seem to hear so little about them now.”

  “That would probably be right, sir.”

  “I was wondering—it’s part of my book, you see—what happened to the mixed families. Where a Jew married a gentile…”

  “I’m sure they were treated sympathetically, sir. Although for the life of me I can’t imagine there was ever very many of them.”

  “Of course,” I nod, and force my gaze back to my desk, the blank sheet of paper my elbows have been leaning on. Christlow returns to his work, his lips pursed in a silent whistle amid the rain-streaming shadows as he lifts from the mantelpiece, the photos of my mother, my father, the good-looking dark-haired young man.

  “So you’ll be alright, then, sir?” he asks, picking up his box of rags and polishes. “Fine if I leave you now?”

  “Thank you, Christlow. As always,” I add, laying it on thick, “you’ve done a splendid job.”

  He shoulders his way out of the door. When he’s gone and his footsteps have faded into the college’s loose stirrings, I slide in the bolt, then cross to the gloom of my bedroom and drag my mother’s old honeymoon suitcase from beneath the bed. Christlow’s complained about it being there once or twice—something about finding it hard to vacuum around. And I’m sure he’s fiddled with the padlock. Perhaps he’s even succeeded in getting inside, although the contents would surely disappoint him.

  I always keep its key in my pocket. The case’s hinges creak as I open it, rusty from disuse, but nothing inside has changed. The tin toys. The tennis slacks. The exercise book with the name FRANCIS EVELEIGH inscribed into the cardboard cover in thick childish letters. A school badge. A Gillette safety razor—his first? An antique pistol wrapped inside a blue hand-knitted sweater. A decent-enough herringbone jacket. A single shoe. A steel hip flask. A soldier’s pass for 14–26 September 1916, cross-stamped NO LONGER VALID. Various socks and old-fashioned collarless shirts and itchy-looking undies. A copy of Morris’s News From Nowhere. And a Touring Map of the Scottish Highlands, folded so often that the sheets threaten to break apart as I touch them.

  I grab a handful of his clothes and bury my face in them. Oxford damp. Oxford stone. Four Square Ready-Rubbed and Mansion House lavender floor polish. Little enough is left of Francis now. Still, that faint scent of his flesh like burnt lemon. A few dark strands of his hair…

  What a joke I have become. My sole claim to fame is having dimly known a great man when he was still a child. And my sole claim to happiness lies almost as far back, a miracle that happened to me for a few days nearly thirty years ago. I suppose I’ve convinced myself since that homosexuals cannot really love—it’s easier that way. And yet at the same time, in all the years since, Francis had always been with me.
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  “It really doesn’t matter, Griff,” I hear him say as his fingers touch my neck. He smells not of lemons now, but of the rainy oak he’s been standing beneath as he watches my window from the quad. But he hasn’t aged. He hasn’t changed.

  “No, it doesn’t matter at all,” he whispers as he turns me round to kiss me. “Not any of this. That’s the secret of everything.”

  I smile to find him near me, and still shudder at the cool touch of his hands. In the moment before the thunder crackles closer over Oxford and I open my eyes, all pain is gone.

  4

  ERNIE SVENDSEN, WITH HIS suspiciously foreign name, his long nose, his thick glasses, seems an unlikely survivor of my kind. He puts it down to something that he has on Oxford’s Deputy Chief Constable, although I would have thought that would have made him a prime candidate for a hit-and-run car accident. More likely, he’s betrayed so many people that the powers-that-be find him useful. He’s known about me for years, too, has Ernie, although he has no direct evidence. I suppose I must be in a file somewhere, but in this as in many other ways, I lead a charmed life.

  We meet at a park bench the next afternoon, during a break in the rain.

  “Do you think they’ll let them stay together?” I ask as he tosses bread from a brown paper bag to the feathered carpet of ducks that have gathered around us. “Will they send him to the Isle of Man, the girls and the mother to the Western Isles?”

  Giving me a pitying look, Ernie Svendsen (he swears his parents were Anglo Saxon) shakes his head. “It doesn’t work like that, my friend. Oh, they’ll get it out of him if that’s what they want. He’ll tell them anything—lies or the truth. That’s the problem they have to deal with. People always blab on so when you threaten them… I shouldn’t worry,” he adds, seeing the look on my face. “If something was going to happen to you, it would have happened already. Being who you are, I’m sure you’ll be safe.”