Prague Spring

1

It started in a pub. Not unusual for a journey. Phileas Fogg started his at the Reform Club in London, but then James Borthwick was not Phileas Fogg, and this pub was the nearest thing to a club that James knew. And this journey wasn’t round the world, which these days you can probably do in less than eighty hours and never leave aircraft or airport. So, a pub, a student pub full of noise and laughter and spilt beer, with photographs of rowing eights on the walls and signatures of oarsmen and rugby players on the ceiling and even an oar hanging over the bar. Yes, one of those pubs that anxious tourists enter during the vacations in the vain hope that they are going to witness that ephemeral will-o’-the-wisp student life, when all they find is indifferent bar staff, flabby beer and flabbier meat pies.

‘Do you really think it makes any sense at all?’ James asked, feeling, for a moment, emboldened. He was sitting at a small, round table, opposite a rather ragged-looking girl, leaning towards her across the table so that they could catch each other’s words amidst the noise. James was feeling nervous because it wasn’t every day that he got this close to someone like Eleanor and he didn’t want to be wafting beery breath all over her in case that should blow her away. Also because, let’s face it, they came from opposite ends of the undergraduate spectrum. She was reading English while he was a scientist of a kind, and she was in her second year whereas he was a fresher. Furthermore – there’s more, we’re going further, into the murky world of class – furthermore, and despite her scruffy appearance, there was something decidedly superior about Eleanor that was noticeable when she spoke, a certain manner of enunciating her consonants, hitting the Ts and Ls and sculpting the vowels, that put her in a social class above James. His voice was vaguely Northern; hers was county. It doesn’t really matter which county. Perhaps even Oxford, although the Oxford voice, with its hooing and its cooing, was really a thing of the past. But the most decided difference between them was not accent or even social class but the plain biological fact that he was male and therefore one of many thousands, whereas she was female and therefore, within the university, as rare as a nun in a monastery. Perhaps that’s a surprise, considering that nowadays women outnumber men by the fraction that superior intelligence and unwavering work habits give them, but in those days it was so: lots of men, few women. Furthermore, those two contrasting versions of the species lived very separate lives for the simple, administrative, historical, insane reason that the colleges were still single-sex. Thus Eleanor belonged to St Hilda’s, all the way down the High and over the river. Turn right, away from the medieval glories of Magdalen, and you’ll find the rather lesser nineteenth-and twentieth-century glories of St Hilda’s college just there. No tourist bothers, ever. Whereas James lived in the Renaissance glory of one of the old colleges in the city centre, where tourists bother all the time.

Coming from such different worlds, they might have drifted past each other without even passing the time of day had it not been for one of those chance events of university life: they were acting together in a college play.

‘Of course it doesn’t make sense in the way you mean,’ Eleanor replied, leaving James to wonder which way he did mean and, furthermore, what kind of sense it might make in any other way. Thus instead of reducing his uncertainty, Eleanor had actually succeeded in increasing it. Typical of an arts undergraduate. The subject in question was the play that had brought them together both at a series of rather awkward rehearsals in rooms in college and more immediately on a stage in a hall somewhere in Walton Street, she as a female cripple in an old-fashioned pram and he as the witless male condemned to push pram and female around the rather limited universe of the playwright’s imagination. This unlikely duo was searching, so the storyline went, for the city of Tar. Although why they should wish to get to Tar was never made clear. Sub-Beckett, James wanted to say of the play, but lines like that were dangerous when you were talking to someone who was reading English, especially when you were reading science.

‘I suppose not,’ was what he replied, which appeared to cover all possible lines of attack. ‘Do you want another beer?’

‘I haven’t finished this one.’

‘No.’

She was smoking. James didn’t smoke because he didn’t like it, but she smoked, rolled her own, in fact, because… what? She did like it? Or did she feel that rolling her own made her seem closer to the working class whose virtues she extolled? He wondered other things – did she smoke pot, perhaps? That was the term in those days. Pot, hash, grass, weed. Shit, if you were feeling very edgy. Probably others that he didn’t know. Anyway, did she? And another, much more disturbing question: did her mouth taste of cigarettes? Disturbing because her mouth was itself disturbing. Full, with a slightly heavy upper lip. And very red. Somehow not exactly English. And he knew – for a fleeting moment as he tried to think what else to say – that he would love to kiss it, cigarettes or no cigarettes.

‘So what exactly are they searching for? Fando and Lis, I mean.’

‘They aren’t exactly searching for anything.’

‘Of course not. So what are they approximately searching for?’

That made her laugh. It was lovely, that laugh. Despite the cigarettes, her teeth were very white and the inside of her mouth coral pink. In contrast her skin was quite pale, and her hair – a curly cloud – straw-coloured. He would never have admitted it to anyone, but just being there at the table with her, watching her laugh, brought the beginnings of an awkward erection.

‘You’re so funny,’ she said, which, laughter being the great aphrodisiac, made the erection worse.

‘I suppose for fulfilment,’ James suggested.

‘What on earth do you mean, fulfilment? That’s a weasel word if there ever was one. I thought you scientists were meant to be precise.’

‘Well…’ he hesitated. ‘Love, perhaps.’

‘God, you’ll be calling them hippies next.’

‘Or maybe they’re just looking for a youth hostel.’

It was then, following a further little bout of laughter, that she asked, quite casually, apropos of nothing (as she might have said), the question: What are you doing in the long vac?

Vac. Inwardly James cringed. He hated terms like this. Rugger and cuppers and scouts and other stuff. Soccer as well. And he hated the prospect of long vac for what it was, a desert of nothing to do that stretched aimlessly from Trinity to Michaelmas and was both a purgatory and a wasted opportunity. Trinity and Michaelmas. More of those bloody terms. Terms for terms in this case, Trinity being spring term and Michaelmas being autumn. I mean, what did they mean, for Christ’s sake? Trinity, an atom-bomb test. And Michaelmas, a daisy. ‘I dunno, really,’ he answered her, wishing he had something more impressive to say. ‘Got to get a job, I suppose, but what I really want to do is travel. I had thought of going to Europe. Hitching. But…’

‘But what?’

‘I was going with a mate but he’s had to cry off. So…’ He hesitated, not wanting to go into too much detail. It wouldn’t sound cool, two guys going round battlefields. Because that’s what it was. A friend from home, like him an enthusiastic war-gamer. Not something to admit to freely. Like trainspotting or stamp collecting, it seemed a silly, childish interest. Board games and that. Ludo, Cluedo, Monopoly, all the crappy amusements of childhood. Except that it wasn’t the same, really. It was an attempt to reconstruct the past, to relive it and learn from it. But to explain all that to Eleanor would have just made things worse – she’d have looked at him with that knowing look and made him feel foolish and naive. Better just keep quiet.

‘That’s weird,’ she said.

‘Why weird?’

‘I had the same idea. But my friend decided to get married instead.’

‘A guy?’

‘To a guy. She’s a girl. We were going to retrace the Sentimental Journey. Do you know it?’

‘I remember my parents dancing to it in the sitting room. With Workers’ Playtime on the radio.’

Her laughter was so loud the hearties hushed their voices for a moment. ‘Not the song, you idiot. The book. By Sterne.’

Stern? He knew The Principles of Human Genetics by Curt Stern, but he doubted it was the same author. And of course there was the physicist Otto Stern, who must have published a great deal on quantum mechanics, but it wouldn’t be him. That was the trouble with science – it wasn’t the matter of ordinary discourse. You could get sconced in Hall for talking about bond energies, but you could never get sconced for talking about Shakespeare. Sconced. Another of those terms he hated, this one involving being challenged to drink too much beer out of one of those large silver tankards that graced the dining tables on special occasions in Hall. Punishment, of a kind. But Eleanor was going on. She’d clearly mistaken his ignorance for another of his jokes. ‘Oh, you should read it. It’s brilliantly funny, although not as important as Tristram Shandy. You have read Tristram Shandy, haven’t you? Anyway, we thought of taking it along with us as a guide – Sentimental Journey, I mean – although Sterne never gets beyond Lyon and the sequel, written by a friend after his death—’

‘The friend’s?’

‘Sterne’s, you fool. This friend tried to continue the book but his effort just isn’t up to the original. Anyway, that idea’s all finished now because Jenny’s gone and got engaged.’

‘Shame.’

‘So now I’m wondering what to do with myself.’ She took a sip of beer and looked at him thoughtfully. ‘What about going together?’

The oarsmen had started up again and were making such a song and dance about things that James couldn’t even be sure if he had heard right.

‘What did you say?’

She drew on her cigarette and blew blue smoke up towards the nicotine-stained ceiling. ‘I said, what about going together?’

The singing stopped. At least that is what it seemed to James, sitting there nursing his beer and his erection. ‘Sounds all right.’

‘I mean, just as friends, of course.’

‘Of course.’

‘The idea was mainly to sleep rough. In railway stations, public parks, you know what I mean. Hostels and pensions at a pinch.’

‘Could be dodgy for two girls.’

‘That’s what my parents said. But it wouldn’t be as dodgy with a guy, would it?’

‘No,’ he agreed.

‘So what do you say?’

He tried to take a calm swig of beer, but somehow it got caught up in his tonsils. Spluttering, he apologised.

‘Of course, if you’ve got other ideas…’

‘No, really.’

‘It was just a thought…’

He looked at her, wondering. She wasn’t pretty, not in any ordinary meaning of the word, because she wasn’t ordinary-looking – she was striking. That wild, uncontrolled hair, those bold features, her cheeks dotted with faint freckles, her mouth designed with anger and amusement, her eyes alight with a green fire. And she had a reputation that was largely political, although it did extend, in some whispered conversations, to the sexual. She was a member of ORSS, the Oxford Revolutionary Socialist Students, and she had been manhandled – literally, although you could prove nothing; maybe his hand had just slipped – by the Oxford City police during a student occupation of the Clarendon Building. Subsequently she had spent a night in gaol and had been charged with disturbing the peace and fined two pounds. Worse than that, she had been threatened by her college with rustication. Rustication was another of those words that James loathed. What was wrong with ‘suspension’, for Christ’s sake? Anyway, that little incident had made her political reputation. Her sexual reputation, on the other hand, was more obscure. Gossip had it that there had been a man who was no longer around. She had been in love with him but was now off men – a natural but temporary state, James surmised, for someone who had been crossed in love.

‘Are you serious?’

‘Of course I am.’ She giggled.

‘What are you laughing at?’

‘Nothing. Just a thought, that’s all. No, don’t say it—’

But he already had, and realised his mistake as soon as the words were uttered: ‘Penny for them.’

She finished her beer. Maybe the suggestion she’d made was a terrible mistake.

‘Well?’ he insisted.

‘Let’s go, shall we?’

‘Are you serious?’ he asked again, convinced that he must be the butt of some kind of tease.

‘About going? Yes. I’ve got to meet someone who’s going to review the play. For the Oxford Mail, no less.’

‘I meant, about this summer.’

‘Oh, that.’

They climbed the steps up to the daylight of the Broad. Another of those terms. ‘The Broad.’ ‘The High.’ Why was the word ‘street’ left out of the equation? ‘Well, are you?’

‘Maybe, maybe not. Not if you talk in clichés. “Penny for them”, indeed. Look, I must rush. See you later.’

And she’d gone.

2

Then came the performance itself, with its intensity of experience, its focus on the two of them – James and Eleanor, Fando and Lis – as they meandered across a creaking stage before the gaze of a hundred invisible faces. The play, with Lis tied up and dumped in an old pram and swearing love and devotion for her captor. The play with fear and fright and catharsis – Eleanor’s word – both in the script and in the minds of the players. The play, with Fando’s sudden raging temper and equally sudden collapses into recrimination and apology. The play with its inconsequential dialogue – ‘sub-Beckett’, wrote the reviewer in the Oxford Mail, stealing James’s unuttered line – and hopeless outcome.

‘They loved your Mancunian accent, darling,’ the director told James at the party after the opening, draping his arm round his shoulder.

‘It’s Sheffield.’

‘Whatever. Northern, that’s what it is. Gritty, darling, gritty. You should seriously think about the Royal Court.’

At the curtain call, Fando had carried Lis to the foot of the stage as though she really was disabled, and there were those in the audience who were fooled, one of them coming up to them next day as they walked together in the Cornmarket, on their way to a photo shoot for the student newspaper, to say how brilliant it had been and how she’d assumed that Eleanor actually was handicapped, so convincing was her performance.

After that encounter with fame they went to his rooms in college, in the Old Quad, with the Tudor gatehouse visible through the windows and the two-bar electric fire turned on to provide a focus of warmth before which the figure of Eleanor could disport itself, as careless but more articulate than Lis. She was wearing a red skirt and black tights and a black top. The skirt was a novelty, presumably intended for the photographer. Normally, when not dressed as Lis (whose costume had been a tattered and grubby nightdress), she wore jeans and assumed a vaguely military look. But now a photogenic skirt. Thus clad she set to toasting crumpets on the fire by hanging them on the grille with hooks made from paper clips. The hooks were James’s suggestion. ‘Typical scientist,’ she said, but he detected a hint of affection behind the mockery. ‘Do you often have crumpets in your rooms?’ she asked. She was on all fours before the fire. A small shriek of pain as she dropped a crumpet onto the plate and sucked her fingers.

‘As often as I can persuade them to step over the threshold.’

Laughter, edged with something more than amusement. Appetite, perhaps. She rearranged herself on the rug – a length of gleaming black thigh – and began to apply butter. James poured tea from the brown teapot he had brought from home and that Eleanor had declared ‘very ethnic’. By mutual agreement they sat side by side, on the rug, facing the fire, hot butter on their lips and fingers. By mutual agreement they turned to look at each other and then leant forward and kissed. There was a little exploratory engagement of buttery tongues and the mingled taste of each other’s crumpets and Eleanor’s cigarettes.

‘Mmm,’ she said, as though to take the agreement one step further. Then she pulled back, took a puff from her cigarette, sipped her tea and might as well have been sitting in the café in the covered market. ‘We were going to talk about the summer vac,’ she said in a faint tone of admonishment.

‘The summer,’ he repeated, thinking more about this spring, the here and now, and wondering exactly what had just happened.

‘We’ve got to have some idea of what we’re doing and where we’re going, haven’t we?’

‘Are we going then?’

‘Of course we are. Aren’t we?’

‘If you want to. I want to.’ He had feared she might prefer to go to Paris or something, to dig cobblestones out of the Boul’ Mich’ and throw them at the battle lines of the CRS. But no, she’d already done that. Pavé was passé. Now she just wanted to explore Europe, Italy especially, and maybe even make Greece and see what conditions were like there where the Colonels reigned supreme. ‘Fascists,’ she said disdainfully.

Alarm bells went off in his head. ‘You’re not planning—’

She laughed. ‘Don’t worry, I won’t get you into trouble. It’s just that I’ve never actually been to a Fascist dictatorship. Except Spain of course, but that doesn’t really count any longer, does it?’ And then she touched his wrist and said he looked terrified, but assured him that she would be as good as gold, which was not an element he was familiar with except to know that the only thing good about it, apart from its cost, was the fact that it was virtually inert. He doubted Eleanor would be inert.

They went on to talk about what they’d need to take with them, how much money, what clothes. Eleanor treated the whole thing as though it were a joke – ‘I can always sell my body if we run short of cash’ – and yet there was a bedrock of seriousness about the discussion, as though they really were going to do this. So James talked about sleeping bags, a couple of changes of T-shirt, a second pair of jeans. Washing things and changes of underwear, of course. What else? And he suggested his tent. ‘It’s okay for two at a squeeze,’ he added. He knew about these matters from weekends spent in the Peak District and the Lakes.

‘Your tent? At a squeeze?’ She had never slept in a tent.

‘Never?’

‘Well, not since my brother and I pitched one on the front lawn. That was ten years ago.’

‘Front lawn? You camped on your front lawn?’ To James front lawn implied back lawn and dragged along with it kitchen garden and orchard and probably, just probably, paddock. With a pony.

‘Yes, you know – one of those green things. Or don’t you have such things up North?’ She bit into another crumpet and told him the story. He was happy to listen, intrigued for the moment by lawns, front or back, as well as by the movement of her lips as she spoke and the butter that glistened on them. Apparently she and her brother had pitched the tent before having supper in the house and kissing their parents goodbye as though they were setting off for the South Pole. Darkness had descended on the garden and the tent. Inside, brother and sister had wriggled and fidgeted and tried to get comfortable on what had once seemed soft grass but now revealed itself as a bed of nails fit to try the patience of a fakir. Thus they had spent four sleepless hours before fleeing back indoors, her brother terrified because he had heard noises, Eleanor smugly triumphant because she had made them. ‘So, I am not,’ she concluded, ‘sleeping in a tent, and certainly not squeezing into one with you.’

‘That’s all right. I’ll sleep in the tent and you can sleep outside.’

That prompted a punch, not very effective, which landed on James’s upper arm. He responded by grabbing her wrist. Another punch, another wrist held. There was a brief struggle in which elbows and knees were involved before they were kissing once again and Eleanor was saying, through teeth and tongue and lips, that perhaps this was not a good idea, that she just wanted to be friends, that there was someone else in her life and that was the trouble.

There was an awkward rearrangement of limbs and clothing. She smoothed herself down. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, more than once.

‘There’s nothing to apologise for,’ James insisted, although there was, in fact, a great deal.

‘It’s just…’ she said.

‘Just what?’

‘I mean, it’s difficult.’

‘It seems rather easy to me.’

‘Maybe it is for you. You’re a man.’

‘Is it easier for men? Men have feelings as well, you know.’

‘Do they? I thought they just had erections.’

He made no reply to that, understanding when it was pointless to continue. ‘You know when we took that curtain call? When I carried you to the front of the stage and showed you to the audience?’

‘Of course I remember.’

He nodded, picking up the remains of her crumpet. ‘I think it was then that I realised how much I like you.’

Like you. A euphemism used in a time of hardship. There was a pause while he didn’t dare look at her.

‘That’s very sweet,’ she said. ‘But at the time I was a cripple wearing handcuffs.’

3

After the awkwardness of the afternoon tea and two more performances of the play, James and Eleanor settled into some kind of unspoken compromise. It involved a certain degree of physical contact – holding hands, kissing, perhaps a hesitant hand on a reluctant breast – but would go no further until…

‘Until what?’ James asked, emboldened.

Until she sorted herself out.

‘That sounds very bourgeois.’

Once again sitting in his rooms in college, talking in that rapid, articulate manner she could adopt, she denied it. Her emotional difficulties transcended all matters of class. They could belong to someone from an impoverished Irish family in Liverpool or Birmingham just as well as someone like her with her moneyed upbringing and her private schooling. Whichever way you looked at it, it was just nuns and priests.

‘Nuns and priests?’ Comprehension dawned slowly, for this was just another of those Oxford things – a peculiar ritual that might have meant something in the past but was now an irrelevance. So much of Oxford seemed irrelevant. ‘You mean you’re Catholic?’

‘My parents still are, in their different ways. My father treats it as an elaborate legal code and my mother tries to wash her guilt away in a mixture of consecrated host and gin.’

‘You mean you believe all that stuff?’

‘Of course I don’t. I gave it up a long time ago. But it’s like being a Jew. You never entirely get rid of it.’ She opened her hands as though to demonstrate her helplessness. Even James, brought up in a godless household, saw a weird significance in the gesture. As though she might be demonstrating – what was it they called the wounds of Christ? – her own personal stigmata. ‘Wounds may heal,’ she said, ‘but the scars remain. With guilt still embedded inside like bits of grit.’

‘What’s there to be guilty about?’

‘You wouldn’t understand. You don’t have to be guilty of anything in order to feel guilt. That’s the secret.’

‘That’s daft.’

‘Daft it may be but that’s how it is – original sin. The most oppressive thought control anyone has ever invented. George Orwell’s Thought Police, centuries before he ever wrote about it. The Catholic variation is that you are the police as well as the criminal.’

‘But if you no longer believe it, where’s the problem?’

She looked at him, head on one side. ‘You don’t understand, do you? That’s what I like about you. You see life in simple terms.’

‘It is simple. It’s you who’s screwed up. You shouldn’t spend so much time thinking about things. Just let them happen. Religion’s no different from studying literature – you spend all your time obsessing about fictitious people and imagining they’re real.’

‘You sound,’ she said, ‘just like my father.’

‘He sounds all right.’

And eventually, there they were, at her house in Surrey, in the stockbroker belt, with Leatherhead on the one hand and Esher on the other and Sheffield as far away as Patagonia. And he was about to meet both her mother and her father. Mummy and Daddy.

The father was a daunting man – big, loud, with a sharp look and a quick tongue. A lawyer, apparently. A barrister, a QC in fact, although James barely understood the difference between one type of lawyer and another except that barristers wore gowns and wigs, which always seemed bloody silly. Yet somehow he could see that Mr Pike would not look silly in gown and wig, would not ever look silly in fact, but would be well practised in the fine art of making others both look and feel immensely foolish. ‘So you’re the latest, are you?’ he boomed. A bittern, James thought. A bittern booming. The same posture, hunched over his utterance, grasping his lapels, glaring at the witness.

‘The latest?’

‘Eleanor’s latest.’

She stood close to her father, hugging his arm. ‘Daddy, I keep telling you, he’s just a friend.’

Daddy’s gaze never wavered. ‘Well she would say that, wouldn’t she?’ he boomed, and James laughed, recognising the line in the way that one might recognise a Latin tag, with amusement but also with the faint sense of having passed some kind of test.

‘Actually, what Ellie says is true, sir. We are just friends. Unless she knows something I don’t.’

Daddy liked the ‘sir’. It showed an appropriate measure of deference. He liked the recognition of his quotation, liked the humour of the response. ‘It is my experience,’ he said, in the portentous manner of the judge he would doubtless soon become, ‘that a woman almost always knows something that a man doesn’t.’

Dinner that evening was a ritual fraught with the possibility of solecism. Her mother was a pinched woman with heavily applied makeup and suspiciously brassy hair, whose eyes settled on James like two iridescent beetles, watching him carefully to see how he manoeuvred his knife and fork, how he used his napkin, how he broke his bread and which way he tilted his soup bowl. ‘That’s an interesting accent you have,’ she remarked when he dared speak. ‘Do you come from Manchester?’

‘Sheffield.’

Her mouth compressed, as though he might have got it wrong. ‘Eleanor said Manchester.’

‘I suggested Manchester, Mummy, ages ago.’

‘Sheffield is in Yorkshire, isn’t it?’

‘That’s right. And Manchester is in Lancashire, on the other side of the Pennines.’

‘The Pennines,’ the mother repeated, as though he might have said the Urals or the Carpathians. ‘And what do your people do, James? On their side of the Pennines.’

Your people. As if he came from one of the great families of the North, Percys or Nevilles, wild people leading bands of kerns and gallowglasses and for ever waging wars against their neighbours and the Picts over the border. ‘Both my parents are teachers.’

‘Oh, indeed, are they? Amble forth?’

James looked blank. Amble forth? Was that what she imagined Northerners did? Did she think they ambled forth into the Peak District or something, like the ramblers on Kinder Scout in the 1930s? He felt that he had been put to a further test and this time had failed. ‘I’m sorry, I…’

‘Friends of ours have children there. The Remnants.’

‘Remnants?’

‘An old recusant family. Obviously not.’

James looked even blanker. It was safe to say that he had not understood a word of that particular exchange. Remnants? Recusants? Ambling forth? The woman seemed to live in an alternative linguistic universe.

‘Mummy, James’s parents teach at a grammar school,’ Eleanor explained. ‘Not bloody Ampleforth.’

‘A grammar school? Where they teach—?’

‘Grammar,’ said James.

It was with some relief that he accepted the barrister’s invitation to join him in his study after dinner to try his favourite malt whisky. You couldn’t argue that the family stinted on alcohol. Before dinner it had been G&T; during the meal they had consumed three bottles of a red wine called Aloxe-Corton which had been quite good; and now it was a malt whisky that had lain in casks in a dank cave in Scotland since before James was born.

The barrister sat in his large, leather wing-back chair while James pressed himself defensively into the corner of a button-back Chesterfield. Once they had dispensed with the formalities of sipping and exclaiming and agreeing that this golden elixir ranked amongst the finest experiences a man could have, the barrister regarded James with beady and judgemental eye. ‘So are you two sleeping together?’ he asked.

‘I’m sorry?’

‘My daughter. Eleanor. Are you sleeping with her? It’s a plain enough question.’ How to describe the expression on his face? Bleak? Accusatory? Adversarial?

‘No sir. Of course not.’

‘What’s “of course” about it? Doesn’t every young man want to sleep with every young woman? According to the papers the younger generation does that kind of thing all the time, apparently to the exclusion of everything else except smoking pot. Surely all the journalists can’t be wrong.’

‘I can’t answer for my generation.’

‘But you can for Ellie and you.’

‘What I said before: we’re just good friends.’

‘Ha! You sound as though you’ve just been caught in her bedroom with your trousers round your ankles.’

‘But it’s true.’

‘And is that the limit of your ambition? Mere friendship?’

The barrister’s eyes, James decided, were considerably less blurred with alcohol than his speech. He was probing with intent, edging towards some kind of judgement about James’s suitability as company for his daughter or, more probably, manoeuvring into a position to warn him off. You’re not worthy, are you, young man? Something like that. You don’t have the right background, the right accent, the right parents and prospects.

‘Well, I’m very fond of her, of course. But there’s another man around, isn’t there? Kevin, I mean. He sort of gets in the way.’

The barrister smiled knowingly. ‘Ah, yes. Kevin.’

‘Ellie still seems a bit in love with him.’

‘Does she, indeed?’

‘And I think it better to let her get over that.’

The barrister sniffed. Perhaps at his whisky. ‘Do you want some advice? No, I don’t suppose you do. The young never want advice from their elders and betters, at least not until they’re on remand and trying to convince a judge that they are of good and upright character and should be granted bail. But I’ll give you some nevertheless.’ He sipped and savoured for a moment, contemplating the texture of his words. ‘Women are fantasists. That makes them good historical novelists and bad witnesses. Love them as much as you want, but don’t ever make the mistake of believing what they tell you. Especially anything that my daughter says.’

It was a joke. James laughed to demonstrate his acute sense of humour. Ellie’s father frowned.

‘I’m not joking, young man. Believe me. She always lived in a fantasy world as a child. Dragons and elves. Hobbit stuff. Tolkien. I used to go to his lectures before I saw the light and changed to law. Bloody idiotic, all that elvish nonsense. Most children grow out of it, but not Eleanor. Wouldn’t take my advice and read law. Instead she wanted to wallow in Romantic poetry and feed her imagination with all sorts of nonsense. And then there’s the politics. Another fairyland. From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs. Pah! So don’t believe a word she says about Master Kevin. Or anyone else. She’s a delightful girl but she’s a fantasist.’ He reached for the decanter and poured James a further two fingers of the precious whisky. ‘Now tell me about yourself. A scientist of some kind, aren’t you? I like scientists. They make good witnesses. And defendants.’

It wasn’t until after midnight that James won his release and made his way quite shakily upstairs to bed. The women had long since retired. The upper floor of the house was dark and silent. He crept to the spare room and climbed into bed, thankful for his freedom. Five minutes after he had turned off the light and was beginning to drift into unconsciousness there was a scratching at the door like the sound of a mouse in the wainscot. Dimly he was aware of the door opening and a shadow slipping into the room. For a dreadful moment – in silhouette their figures were not dissimilar – he thought it might be Mrs Pike. It was only when the shadow whispered, ‘James, are you awake?’ that he recognised Ellie.

He felt her climbing onto the bed, pushing his feet aside. He scrabbled for the bedside light and when finally he found the switch, there she was, cross-legged, at the foot of the bed, elf-like, wearing a long cotton T-shirt and apparently nothing else. His eyes went up and down her figure, and hesitated where matters were most difficult, where the hem of the T-shirt was stretched tight from thigh to thigh and there was a dark triangle of shadow. Possibilities crowded in on him. Lis, he thought, remembering moments during the play. She could do that trick, the actor’s trick, of assuming personalities at will.

‘So how was cross-examination by my beloved father?’

‘I think I passed.’

She considered him thoughtfully. It was disturbing to see vague and uncertain reflections of her father in her face, almost as though he was a hideous caricature of his daughter. ‘I think he likes you. He likes scientists. They make good witnesses, that’s what he always says.’

‘And he asked if we were sleeping together.’

She sighed. ‘How very forensic of him. What did you reply?’

‘I told him the truth, that Kevin gets in the way.’

That seemed to silence her. She looked down, picking distractedly at the duvet. Finally she raised her eyes and looked at him. ‘That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. I haven’t told you all about Kevin. Not really. I think I should.’

‘Not if it’s going to make me jealous.’

‘Envious,’ she corrected sharply. ‘You’re jealous of what you already possess, envious of what someone else has.’

‘And Kevin has you?’

She pouted. It was a good pout, with a strong French accent. He could imagine her in Paris, throwing rocks at French policemen and pouting.

‘Kevin and I were engaged, you see. I haven’t told you this, have I? I mean really engaged, a notice in The Times and the Telegraph, the church booked – yes, church, for God’s sake. Nuptial mass. The order sheets had gone to the printers. Reception at his college. It was all planned.’

‘I’ll bet your mother loved the idea.’

‘She did as a matter of fact. But it all fell apart. Differences, I suppose. Of character, of ideas. It was all a bit traumatic. Anyway, we decided at the last minute to call the whole thing off. Except it isn’t, really…’

‘Isn’t over?’

‘I went up to London last weekend.’

‘To see him?’

She looked miserable. Maybe, he thought with astonishment, she was about to cry. ‘We did it,’ she admitted quietly. ‘You know what I mean. We’d broken up and the idea was to meet up for lunch like old friends, to wish him all the best with his new job… and it sort of happened. In the afternoon. In his new flat that he shares with a couple of other guys. And there we were, shagging in his bedroom while they were watching football in the sitting room.’ There was silence. They sat at either end of the bed watching each other and experiencing all the agonies of behaviour in a time of transition, when love was meant to be free but actually was merely denominated in a new kind of currency. What did she owe the wretched Kevin? What, if anything, did she owe James? And what did she keep in the bank for a rainy day? She turned her attention back to picking at the quilt. ‘Don’t you mind?’

‘Not yet.’

A wry smile. She crawled up the bed to kneel beside him and plant an artless kiss on his cheek. ‘You’re very sweet, you know that? And funny.’

‘Funny’ll do, but I’m not sure I want to be sweet.’

There was something infinitely appealing about her face just a few inches from his, mouth part open, as delicate as a flower. He bent forward and touched his lips against hers. This was about to be, he felt sure, the moment – of truth, of consummation, of catharsis, of something. He wasn’t quite sure of the words. There was that familiar presence of her against him that he recognised from the play, when he, Fando, had had to carry her, the crippled Lis, on the road to Tar. He knew the angle of her bones, the roundness of her joints, the flesh and the sinew. And the smell of her, an amalgam of things that included soap and shampoo, but other, nameless scents as well. His hand went downwards, beneath the T shirt and down the front of the underpants he discovered there, the sort of groping he knew, back row of the stalls stuff, that he had done with one or two other girls. Then she twisted away.

‘What’s wrong?’

‘Nothing. I’m fine. It’s just, I don’t want that now. I’m sorry, but I don’t.’ She slipped off the bed. ‘It’s not you, James, it’s all sorts of stuff. Kevin, of course. But other things as well. The parents, everything.’

‘Everything?’

At the door she paused, looking back with a bright and positive expression. ‘Tomorrow we set off,’ she said. ‘How’s that for exciting?’

And then she slipped out into the darkness of the upstairs landing and the door closed behind her.