Engleby. Part 4

I started to get out, but Wingate pushed me in again. It was very very cold.

'You get out when I say so,' said Baynes, snarling so much the words seemed to come out not through his mouth but through the pus of his cheeks.

I was shivering, in paroxysms, but managed to stay in. It was better to stay in than try to get out and have to fight, so they would have an 'excuse' to touch me.

I plunged my head under the water voluntarily. There were two reasons. One, I hoped it would give them sport or entertainment, so they'd let me go they'd be satisfied.

Two, the physical shock took away the pain of being.

Still, I had that tiny radio beneath the bedclothes with its earphone like a deafie's. Radio Luxembourg, 208 metres in the medium wave. Terrible reception, but that dodgy signal was my connection to a better place. The Horace Batchelor Infradraw Method... Keynsham, K.E.Y.N.S.H.A.M, Bristol... But there was laughter, and, boy, I liked those songs. G.o.d. 'Penny Lane'. It wasn't a song, it was a book, it was a world. The Yardbirds, Sandie Shaw and Dusty Springfield with that crack in her mid-range that sent a shiver up my back as I lay curled beneath the grey woollen blankets. Amen Corner. This was something to hang on to. Simon Dupree and the Big Sound, the Beach Boys, 'Wouldn't It Be Nice'. Oh yes, it certainly would. I'd read an article in a magazine about California and about the canyons above Los Angeles with their wooden A-frame houses (whatever they they were), pet cats, dirt roads, girls with long hair and guitars, soft drugs and kindness and open house and everyone sleeping with everyone else in this heavenly soft climate and dreaming of it all on such a winter's d-a-a-ay... were), pet cats, dirt roads, girls with long hair and guitars, soft drugs and kindness and open house and everyone sleeping with everyone else in this heavenly soft climate and dreaming of it all on such a winter's d-a-a-ay...

'Toilet.'

I was so lost in 'California Dreamin'' that I almost had a heart attack when I heard Wingate's voice and felt a thump in the small of my back that had the hallmark of Baynes's superfluous violence. I pulled out the earphone and stuffed the radio down between my legs as I sat up in the iron bed.

'What is it?'

'Get out of bed.'

Wingate turned the light on.

'What's this?'

'It's a radio, Wingate.'

'Are you in Remove year?'

'No.'

'So why have you got a radio?'

'And why are you listening to it after lights out?'

'Let's have a look at it, Simon.'

'Whoops, John, you've dropped it.'

'Oh dear, I think it may be broken. Careful, Simon. Oh no, you've stepped on Toilet's radio. It's all broken now.'

'Maybe I could oh dear, I've dropped it again.'

'Never mind, it wasn't much of a radio, was it? I expect Mrs Toilet got it from a cracker.'

'I expect she can get another one when Toilet gets into the Remove.'

The cold bath became a regular event. My genitals shrivelled when I heard the late-night footfall outside my door.

It maybe doesn't sound so bad, but a cold bath on a winter night... Ever tried it? I don't know where Chatfield got its cold water from, but it felt as though they had a pipeline to the Baltic.

Sometimes it would just be Wingate on his own. But usually there'd be others. Bograt Duncan was keen.

They just stared. They lounged on the duckboard bench and stared. I wondered if they wanted to touch. Wingate liked to hold me under. Baynes liked a struggle, so I didn't offer one.

Hood merely gazed on, impa.s.sive. He smiled a bit. Hood was the only half-human one of the three; he was not grotesque to look at, but with his blue eyes and open smile, quite normal. He alone retained some pretence that this was all fair game, that it was part of normal life. For instance, it was Hood who told me that pouring a bucket of water over my bedclothes was an old Chatfield custom called 'splicing the mainbrace'. Was there a scintilla of comfort in thinking that we were all part of a great tradition?

Wingate and Baynes were in a different place. There was no pretence there. They had sold out, crossed over.

Hood's occasional smile wasn't rea.s.suring, though. If, as it suggested, this was all just part of the way things were done, then it couldn't be resisted or stopped.

I thought his smile showed it was costing him a bit, though. I think it was partly to square it with himself. He hadn't cut free like Wingate and Baynes. There was a twitch of stress or conscience there.

The strangest thing was that it never did seem to satisfy them. They always looked disappointed when they let me go. I wished I could have pleased them, so that then they might have relented.

There was a sweetshop in Lower Rookley that was run by an old woman. I asked her for a bag of sherbet lemons or some nonsense that meant she had to stand on some steps and reach up to a big gla.s.s jar. While her back was turned, I was able to take my pick of the chocolate bars spread out on the counter. There was no hurry, as her arthritic joints let her move only in slow motion. I pocketed a petrol lighter from a stand next to the cash till while I was at it.

I paid her for the sherbet lemons with a shilling I'd nicked from Plank Robinson's trousers.

'Thank you, dear.'

'No, thank you.'

In Upper Rookley, there was a similar shop, though the owner was a man, and quite a bit younger. He also sold cigarettes, but annoyingly he kept these behind the counter, out of my reach. One Sat.u.r.day, I went round the back of his shop, which shared a delivery yard with the dry cleaners next door. I sat down beside the high wire fence and watched. At about five, there was a delivery from a large van, and this was what I had been waiting for. If I couldn't get them retail, I'd go wholesale.

The security was hopeless. The delivery man left the back of the van open while he was inside the shop and he was never away for less than five minutes at a time. Tea, biscuit, chat, mustn't grumble.

The problem was that the back of the van was filled with large unopened cardboard boxes and I was only looking for a couple of cartons. It was not until the end of his visit, when the shop was fully restocked, that he'd return with some opened boxes. And he didn't hang around then, but banged up the tailgate and drove off.

On the third Sat.u.r.day, I was lucky. I had moved a little closer and was crouched down behind a car. The driver went through the back corridor to get the retailer's signature on the docket, but in the meantime the shop phone had rung, so he had to wait. But I didn't. I moved swiftly and dipped my hand into an open cardboard box. Two cartons of... I was hoping for Benson & Hedges or Rothman's, but they turned out to be Emba.s.sy. Typical cheapskate Rookley. I was out of that gate and down the backstreet in two seconds with the cigarettes tucked into the duffel bag I lugged my books round in.

Back in Collingham, I Sellotaped them to the underside of my iron bedstead until I could think of a better place. The next thing I had to do was find a way of getting them into the market. I knew who the likely takers were, but none of them spoke to me. Then I got lucky.

One day I was coming out of the Jackson Rears in the mid-morning break when I saw Spaso Topley leaning against a pillar by the quad. As I walked past, he muttered, 'Engleby?'

For a moment, I couldn't think who he was talking to. Then I stopped and turned and warily said, 'Yes?'

Spaso moved towards me. He had splayed feet and horn-rimmed gla.s.ses; although he had a deep voice there was something girlish about him. He said, in a rush, 'Would you like to go to the cinema on Sunday if you do we can get a chit from Talbot and I know where I can borrow you a bike.'

He was looking fl.u.s.tered and nervous. He kept glancing up and down the pillared colonnade.

'Well?'

I swallowed. 'OK.'

'See you by the bike racks at two but you've got to see Talbot first and bring your chit.'

He waddled off on his large feet before I could say anything.

Mr Talbot could be visited in his study after lunch, and when I told him what I wanted, he looked displeased. 'Topley? Isn't there someone in your own year you could go with?'

'It's just that Topley asked me, sir.'

He pulled a pad towards him, wrote on it and pulled off a small sheet. 'Bike Leave'. He handed it to me. 'Next time, Engleby, go with someone in your own year.'

Next time, Talbot, do your job and find out what's going on in your house. 'Yes, sir.'

When Sunday came, I got down to the bike racks at five to two.

I stood behind a hut, to stay out of sight, and kept looking at my watch. Eventually, Topley rounded the corner. He came up and handed me a key to a padlock.

He said, 'I've got Leper Curran's bike for you. He owes me a favour for saving him Tubby Lyneham's wrath. Electromagnetic fields. A Topley speciality. We toilers in the Collingham vineyard must stick together.'

He really was a prize a.s.s.

We bicycled off together and found a cinema in the local town, about twenty minutes' ride away. It was showing quite a good film with Steve McQueen in it, though I can't remember the name.

Afterwards, we went to a cafe where I bought us poached eggs and beans on toast with tea and chocolate cake, courtesy of a ten-shilling note I'd taken from Marlow's rugby shorts. I'd broken my no-notes rule because I knew I'd be spending it off-radar.

'Do you smoke, Topley?'

'Good heavens no.'

'You must know people who do. In your year.'

'That would be telling.'

'I know. That's why I'm asking you. Tell me. I am buying the tea after all.'

It was hard work, but eventually I persuaded him to act as go-between. He devised some rococo plan involving 'safe drops' in the Jackson Rears, which, since it was under a permanent fog of cigarette smoke, was one of the least safe places in Chatfield. But that was his problem. I left the goods, a packet at time, behind the cistern in the Dump; Spaso shipped them onwards. I never knew who the end-buyers were. It was a brilliant chain, with two natural cut-outs guaranteeing anonymity. We charged two-thirds shop retail price and split it down the middle. It was very good money. I think Topley spent his first pay packet on a second-hand rheostat.

What happened then? Oh G.o.d, I don't know.

Days. Days are what we live in.

Days came. Days went.

I reached p.u.b.erty. No one threw raspberry yoghurt in my face; I didn't exude seb.u.m through my follicles and pores; I didn't smell of feet or pits; my voice didn't do comic octave-jumps; my trousers didn't flap at mid-calf. All that happened was that my back grew about a foot in width one night; my feet looked suddenly remote (I bought new trousers cash, no chit, to the manager's amazement at the school shop); and one morning I awoke with evidence that I was capable of perpetuating the Engleby line. That was all.

I built the cigarette business and dabbled in marijuana, though it was risky and hard to come by. There were not that many takers at Chatfield either. I found an off-licence on the London road with a delivery arrangement as lax as the tobacconist's and was able to run bottles of vodka and whisky back in the saddlebag of a bicycle I'd stolen from outside the local girls' school. There was always a good market in drink, and I shipped it on through a Ghanaian boy in Greville whom I'd met in the Combined Cadet Force. Since he could hardly speak English he hadn't twigged that no one was meant to talk to me.

Hood and Wingate eventually left.

Baynes stayed another term (incredibly, he was not bad at work and was sitting the Oxford entrance exam in December). He had an accident, I was pleased to learn, coming back from late rugby practice in October. He was concussed, with a large contusion on the back of the head, and his leg was broken in three places; he appeared to have lost his footing going over the ditch at the edge of the wood by the practice ground, where he had been taking kicks at goal on his own in the twilight. He cracked his head on the concrete edge of the footbridge. He said he had no recollection of falling, but Dr Benbow put this down to the concussion (presumably after inspecting his groin by torchlight first).

Spaso Topley was discovered to have 400 Sobranie Virginia cigarettes in his tuck box and was expelled in the year of his A levels. I really don't know where they came from. Not from me. I think he'd become greedy and started operating on his own. It wasn't a clever place to keep them. I kept mine in a former ammunition box, with a lock, in the Armoury shed. As a midshipman I had been entrusted by Chief Petty Officer Dunstable with a number of keys during a CCF night operation, and a short delay in returning them had enabled me to have them copied at the shoe-repair shop in Upper Rookley. But keeping them in your tuck box in your room... Dear oh dear. I think with no A levels Spaso became a lab technician or something.

And what happened to me? Without Hood, Wingate and Baynes, my life became easier. The habit of not talking to me was hard to break. My cla.s.smates kept up their silence till the day they left. In the house, Francis and McCain occasionally asked for the salt or the tea, but I didn't bother to answer. I didn't need their belated acknowledgement. 'Pukey' Weldon in the year above asked me if I'd like to go see a football match and I told him where to put his ticket. He looked surprised. That was about it, until I turned my attention to the years that had succeeded us.

There was a boy called Stevens in the first year, who was outgoing and enthusiastic. He was in a school play and in a rugby team. People in his year seemed to like him. He was a small, fair child with smooth skin and laughing eyes. He was good at work, too, from what I gathered.

I saw his parents deliver him back at the beginning of his second term. The average Chatfield family group comprised a s.e.xless crone of a mother with uncut greying hair in an embarra.s.sing slide, like a small girl's; a repressed, bald father with a pipe; a bow-legged Labrador you could smell at twenty yards; and a dilapidated shooting brake of a discontinued kind.

Stevens's father drove a new car, shiny, dogless; he looked alert and friendly. (Plus, he was alive.) The mother had glossy fair hair, newly set, and appeared to be about twenty-five. She had a figure. Both looked unashamedly fond of the smiling son, whom they saw off with embraces and jokes.

I noticed Stevens.

Significant things happen so slowly that it's seldom you can say: it was then or then. It's only after the change is fully formed that you can see what's happened. We were doing World War Two in History at this time. To the occupied French in 1940, co-operating with the Germans was not only a practical but even a n.o.ble course of action, according to old 'sapper' Hill one that was enshrined in article two of the armistice and boasted of by the French government. Was there one fatal moment when co-operation went too far, so that they found they were doing the Occupier's dirty work for him? Was there a day an hour when in deporting Jews they stopped following the n.a.z.is and began to lead them? Was it when they offered to fill the trains with Jews of French as well as other nationalities? Was it when they said the Jews could be taken from the Free as well as the Occupied zone? Was it when they offered the Jewish children to fulfil the 'quotas'?

Yes, no, both, all. There was a day, there was a moment when something reasonable changed into something that would haunt them for ever. But it wasn't visible at the time, because at the time everything is only a tiny addition to what's already there.

Stevens had the room that I'd once had, the last one on the left. As you got older, you moved term by term gradually towards the middle of the corridor. I was coming out of my room one morning when Stevens brushed against me as he was running to a lesson. First-years were always rushed; they had no 'study' periods, no time off and hadn't yet been able to drop any subjects.

I called him back and told him to look where he was going. He smiled and apologised and shifted from foot to foot in a hurry to get going again.

It wasn't really good enough, was it?

A week or so later, during second prep, I found I was bored. I'd done all the work I needed to do. I'd written to Julie, not that she'd reply, and I was fed up with reading Mickey Spillane and Dryden.

I had no clear plan in mind as I left my room quietly and walked down to the end of the corridor. Stevens, T.J., said the strip above the door.

I was thinking of something completely different when I opened the door and found him bent over a book at his desk, in pyjamas and dressing gown.

My mind was elsewhere when I noticed the look of terror on his face.

'Time for a bath, Stevens,' I said.

Four.

The co-residency lunch in Trinity Parlour was what Chris from Selwyn called a 'real gas'. There were many more people than had been expected, so the quiche and Hirondelle ran out quickly. Jennifer said she'd go out and get some more food from a supermarket and I said I'd go with her. There was a whip-round of fifty-pence pieces and off we went to... G.o.d, I suppose it must have been Marks & Spencer. The shop opposite Boots at any rate. Quite a walk from Trinity. By the time we got back we discovered that someone had been to the college b.u.t.tery and got bread and cheese as well.

Jen seemed a bit cross about missing the discussion, though her friend Molly a.s.sured her not much had happened. All the boys from places like Churchill and Fitz were understandably keen on the idea of having girls on their staircases, but even the ones from the older colleges like Christ's and Corpus were enthusiastic.

The girls were a bit more guarded. They wanted equality in all things and that meant equal numbers, but they felt attached to their bluestocking inst.i.tutions. They didn't want them them to go co-res. It wasn't what those fierce women founders had envisaged, was it, to have people like Chris from Selwyn in the corridors of female scholarship, in football clothes and leering. to go co-res. It wasn't what those fierce women founders had envisaged, was it, to have people like Chris from Selwyn in the corridors of female scholarship, in football clothes and leering.

Some boy from Trinity itself said shouldn't they suggest to the university a gradual change, so that the girls retained four colleges, boys had four and the others moved slowly towards co-res as their statutes permitted, aiming to have gone the whole way in about ten years' time.

This went down badly. He was called a 'Fabian' and worse.

Someone from Caius said there they needed a two-thirds majority of all Fellows past and present and that some footnote in the statutes implied that the wishes of the dead must also be consulted, or presumed.

The debate was fierce and long, but produced an odd atmosphere, something like a party. People came to know one another quickly and seemed to enjoy it. At three o'clock a porter came to close the room and demand the key. Most were in any case due at sport or experiments or lectures (I'd missed the Australopithecine at two).

Chris from Selwyn said we should carry on the discussion later, but his rooms weren't big enough. Simon from Pembroke said he knew a very switched-on Fellow of Sidney Suss.e.x, a Cla.s.sics don with a charming modern Greek wife, who should be asked along.