She Died Young (3 page)

chapter
4

‘I
OVERHEARD A
HILARIOUS
conversation in Blackwell’s.’

They were seated at the back of the Cadena Café on the corner of Cornmarket and the Broad. ‘There was this woman in the languages section – obviously a don’s wife – and she was asking for a
Hungarian phrase book
! “We’ve got a
wonderful
young freedom fighter staying with us,”’ mimicked Charles Hallam in his campest falsetto. ‘“A refugee from the revolution!
So
brave and so handsome!” God!’

Penny Brookfield squinted at Charles through the smoke from her cigarette. She looked puzzled, and didn’t seem to see why it was funny.

‘Don’t you see how pretentious it is? All that rot about freedom fighters. Half of them are just petty criminals trying to evade justice back home.’

‘Oh –
are
they?’ Penny looked terribly disappointed.

‘Well – not all of them I suppose.’

It was Fergus, his communist friend, who had told Charles that. But that was before Fergus had left the Party, disgusted by the Soviet invasion. Charles, like almost everyone, sided with the rebels, yet was cynical about the Cold War propaganda that daily flooded the papers.

‘D’you think there’ll be another war?’

‘I shouldn’t think so.’

The excitement of the past weeks grew ever more feverish. There was bad news every day. Even the undergraduates talked about nothing else. It seemed as if he alone was bored now, sick of the photos of Anthony Eden, a broken prime minister, with his toothbrush moustache and weak chin, sick of pictures of fighting around the Suez Canal, and equally sick of the Hungarian uprising and the anti-communist hysteria in its wake.

‘You’re not in a very good mood, are you,’ said Penny.

Charles resented Penny for having noticed. Not that it was a mood. These days it was a settled disposition. ‘I’m fine.’ He looked away across the crowded café, through the swirls of smoke. At the front, W.H. Auden, the famous Professor of Poetry, could be seen silhouetted against the light as he held court amid an admiring circle of acolytes. That annoyed Charles too: the jockeying for position, the fawning on celebrity – and Fergus, for all his revolutionary views, was as bad as the rest of them. In fact he was sitting there now, gazing with rapt attention at the poet’s craggy face.

‘Are you going to Julian’s party?’

Charles made an effort to smile. ‘Not sure. Probably not. I was surprised he even invited me.’

‘Alistair said he’ll see me there. Oh, do come.’

She stirred the foam around in her coffee. She was pretty, he supposed, her face still rather unformed, with big eyes and mouth and thick eyebrows; her short curly hair was mousy brown and hadn’t been brushed; and she shouldn’t be so desperately earnest.

‘I don’t go to undergraduate parties any more,’ he said. ‘I’m no longer in circulation. In fact my life is a social wasteland.’

She laughed, astonished. ‘What on earth do you mean?’

They had, after all, met at a party. Long ago, it seemed, on the New Building lawn at Magdalen. Alistair’s party. The funny thing was, he’d had his eye on Alistair and then the truth had dawned – that Penny was Alistair’s girlfriend. So he’d chatted to her, flattered her, found out which college she was at (St Hilda’s) and later sent a note round inviting her to tea. He’d never got anywhere with Alistair, but he and Penny became friends, which was ironic, really.

He didn’t know quite why he liked her. He just liked having a girl friend, someone to chat and giggle and talk about clothes with, but that was another irony, because Penny wasn’t the chattering or giggling type. She’d rather talk about Simone de Beauvoir.

‘It’s different, being a postgraduate,’ he said. ‘It’s a different world.’

‘I should’ve thought it’d be rather exciting.’

‘It isn’t.’

‘But last year – and this summer even – you were enjoying it, you seemed to be …’

‘It was still new then, it was still a novelty. And that was before I got lumbered with Professor Quinault.’

She looked at him with wide-eyed anxiety. ‘So what are you going to do? You’re not going to chuck it up, are you?’

Silly idiot. She always took everything so literally. At face value. Face value was everything where Penny was concerned.

‘Of course not. I might if I could think of anything else to do. You know I did the Russian course for National Service.’

‘I’m not sure what that is.’

‘It seemed like a cushy option for intellectuals, miles better than going to Cyprus or Germany. We just did all this Russian. But one gradually realised it was really for recruiting spies. I might have joined the secret services.’

‘Might you really? How exciting!’

‘It didn’t appeal.’

‘Anyway, your research is so interesting. The first Roman emperors. You mustn’t lose heart.’

Both of them were utterly unaware of it, but as Penny spoke she looked just as her mother used to when making conversation with Indian dignitaries: head slightly on one side, an encouraging smile, hands locked together on her lap. The difference was, Penny’s interest and concern were genuine.

He longed to write a really shocking book about the early Roman Empire; but it was already too late. The Romans – Tacitus, Suetonius, Juvenal – had started the scandalmongering themselves and it had gone on from there, right up to the eighteenth century and Edward Gibbon’s enormous history,
Decline and Fall
. There was no shocking revelation you could unearth that had not already been reported by all those historians and writers, and as if that wasn’t bad enough, Charles had been pipped to the post by Robert Graves’ much more recent novel,
I Claudius
.

Anyway, that sort of thing was not what Oxford wanted at all. A study of Roman farming practices in the Latium with a discussion of the slave economy would be far more appropriate; an article in the
Journal of Roman Studies
, not some lurid bestseller. Even were he capable of writing such a book, it would only create a sensation if it was totally counter-intuitive, if those bloodthirsty pagan murderers could be presented as heroes: a revisionist account of the Emperor Caligula, tragically thwarted transvestite, the Oscar Wilde of his day. Now that the
fin de siècle
, Aubrey Beardsley and the
Yellow Book
were coming back into fashion, of course, all things were possible. Charles rather liked the idea of spearheading a revival of decadence, something to shake up the stodgy tedium of the mid-twentieth century.

‘What you don’t understand, Penny, is that undergraduates are here to have fun. It’s a children’s tea party. But fun is an entirely foreign concept to the world of the postgraduate. As postgraduates the troglodytes, the cave dwellers, come into their own. It’s a world of dreary grammar-school types.’

‘I’m sure that’s nonsense,’ said Penny firmly – again, it was her mother speaking. ‘You’re being awfully cynical. And snobbish. Janey – you know my friend Janey – she went to a grammar school and she’s much cleverer than me. She wants to go into the civil service.’

‘I thought girls were here to get husbands.’ This was deliberately provocative, all part of Charles’ bad mood.

‘Don’t be like that. That’s just nasty. Mind you, that’s what the Principal told us. We’re being educated to be diplomats’ wives.’

‘Really?’ Charles thought fleetingly of the only girl in his seminar, a dreary young woman with glasses. ‘How depressing.’

‘You just find everything depressing at the moment. You need cheering up. Come to the party later. Please come. Alistair won’t be able to take me. He has to be there early. He’s one of the hosts. And I won’t know many people. Most of Julian’s friends are rather grand. I was only invited because of Alistair. He and Julian see a lot of each other these days. You know – that Christ Church set.’

Charles could see she was anxious, so he said: ‘We’ll meet up beforehand and go together, shall we?’

‘Oh,
can
we? Yes, let’s.’ On this, she stood up, knocking her cup over so that the dregs of coffee dribbled onto the table. ‘I’ve got a lecture.’

He stood up when she did. ‘I have to see Quinault. But I’ll meet you outside St Hilda’s at six.’

Charles was not in fact due to see Professor Quinault until four in the afternoon. He went back to Blackwell’s bookshop and loitered there for a while, then biked to the Bodleian in search of the learned paper a fellow doctoral student had recommended.

At three-thirty he left the library and set off on foot for Corpus Christi College. He’d collect his bike later. He hadn’t eaten, but wasn’t hungry.

The mauve November afternoon suited his mood. A mist rolling up from the river further softened the faded old buildings of Cotswold stone. The dank cobbled lanes along which he paced lived in perpetual dusk. Tattered yellow leaves clung to branches but most of the foliage was underfoot, rustling in the gutters like torn brown paper. He could imagine he was walking through some impressionistic painting – Whistler, Corot, Piper even.

But how wearisome it was to experience life through the veil of art instead of directly. As he wandered along, a pair of rugger players in muddy shirts and shorts jogged past him. He envied them. To experience life directly, physically, was so much more authentic than to be a pallid aesthete.

He walked slowly, reluctantly. He didn’t enjoy his sessions with Professor Quinault and was only too glad they were few and far between. It wasn’t even as if it’d be a proper discussion of his work. There’d be other people invited to tea.

On this occasion, however, there was, after all, no-one else. A fire spat and glowed in the stone grate, providing more illumination than the foggy light bulbs. Everything in the room was ancient and shabby, like the Professor himself. Like Oxford itself. Oxford wore its ancient shabbiness to disguise the ambitions of members such as Professor Quinault. Indeed, the Professor himself had once said: ‘Patina, my dear Hallam, patina, is so important in creating the right impression.’

Certainly the room created the impression of a scholarship and a culture with a pedigree so long and precious as to take any foreigner’s breath away (but particularly any American’s). Patina, however, was hazardous and the room full of booby traps. The ancient Turkish carpet, for example, was frayed at the edge so that the unwary visitor was in danger of tripping up on its unravelling strings; an ancient book sent up a cloud of dust if removed from its shelf; and the springs of the visitor’s leather armchair had long ago collapsed, so that sitting down involved an undignified bump.

Professor Quinault himself, shrunken and mummified inside the stiff tweed three-piece suit he always wore, matched the room. Sparse strands of tallow-coloured hair straggled across his scalp and hung over his forehead to meet eyebrows as unruly and sprouting as his locks were scant. His lizard skin was dry and cracked and he had cultivated (Charles felt sure it was cultivated) a shuffling, wavering walk. His voice sounded equally uncertain; but – and that was the trick – he managed to infuse his utterances, no matter how banal, with vague significance.

They faced each other, seated either side of the chimney piece. The rosy firelight contrasted with the darkness of the rest of the room, making it even more shadowy. An ancient electric kettle came fitfully to the boil and Professor Quinault poured water into the teapot, which stood prepared with the cups and saucers on a tray. Charles had rather hoped for sherry.

‘How are you getting along, dear boy? Making progress, I hope.’

‘I’m doing a lot of reading at the moment,’ Charles began cautiously. He’d actually done very little work since the summer. The heat of the fire was stupefying, and made him feel dull and sleepy. He began to rehearse the tedious argument of the article he’d just read, but to his relief a knock on the door was followed immediately by the appearance of a stranger.

‘Ah – I’m interrupting.’ The hesitation of the new arrival was formal rather than sincere.

‘Turbeville! Not at all. Not at all. Come in. An unexpected pleasure.’

Charles scrambled to his feet from the depths of the armchair. He recognised Rodney Turbeville at once, for as a junior minister at the Home Office he’d been in the front line of the Hungarian crisis, dealing with refugees, and so had featured recently in the press. Seen close to, Turbeville was shorter than expected, but still had the slightly larger-than-life quality that politicians tended to acquire: he was bald and rather untidy, his torso filled out by good tailoring and a personality projected by his professional smile.