Making History

MAKING MISTAKES

School report: II

Sweat dripped off my nose and onto the floor. Stuff this for a plover, I thought to myself.

Doctor Angus Alexander Hugh Fraser-Stuart liked to gather his long white hair in a net. He favoured silk kimonos, white cotton happi-coats and ballooning trousers of black satin. His rooms, a spacious set of chambers occupying the corner of the Franklin building that overlooked the Cam, let in a great deal of light: direct sunlight dazzled through the windows, reflected light from the river rippled on the ceiling and white spotlight from modern tracks funnelled onto studiedly arranged pictures and prints on the plain white walls. All around the room, on sills, ledges, tables and copra matting, cactus plants were disposed in trim lines. A huge Arizona specimen, as from a Larsen cowboy cartoon, dominated one corner of the room, thrusting up two asymmetric arms like a deformed traffic policeman. Above the fireplace, a smeared Bacon portrait leered with dissipated glee at a pair of crossed Turkish cavalry sabres on the opposite wall. Over all, a huge heat sat like a throttling fog. The day outside was searingly hot, the sky a sinister, cloudless sci-fi blue and within the room convection radiators threw dry boiling air at the cacti. More sweat ran down from my armpits and into the gap between shorts and hips. I saw then, prickling with horror, that things were preparing to get very much worse.

Fraser-Stuart, cross-legged on the floor, without looking up from the Meisterwerk spread on his lap, stretched out a hand towards his cigar box. When I had first sat in this room five years before, on just such a violently hot day and drowning in a thick ocean of Havana smoke, I had wondered if a window might be opened. The old man had looked sadly at his cactus collection and asked, blowing out a disappointed cloud, if I was wholly given over to my own comfort. A son of a bitch I had thought him then and a son of a bitch I thought him now.

I watched the smoke transmute from soft, round blue billows into elongated, yellow ellipses like the tops of cedar trees and settle high up near the ceiling as he continued to read.

‘Just need to remind myself,’ he had said when I came in. ‘Be sitting.’

So there I be: sitting. Also sweating, gasping, itching and pricking.

Perhaps you know how a PhD thesis works. You deliver it to your supervisor and he passes it to an examiner who in turn sends it on to an assessor from outside your university. The two examiners agree that the work has reached the required standard and, at a simple but affecting investiture in the Senate House you are ordained Doctor by the Chancellor or his benevolent proxy. After a little toad-eating and bum-lapping in the right directions you become a fellow of your college, a lecturer within your faculty and a permanently tenured academic. Your thesis is published to acclaim; you let it be known to radio producers and television journalists around the English-speaking world that you are in the market for expert pronouncements when something touching your field arises in the news; a well-judged series of textbooks aimed at the lucrative schools market relieves you of any financial worries; you marry your best girl in the medieval splendour of your college chapel; your children turn out highly blonde, intelligent, amusing and more than averagely proficient at skiing; your old students go on to become Prime Minister and are good enough to remember their best beloved history don when handing out such Chairmanships of Commissions, Knighthoods and College headships as lie within the Royal Gift: in short, life is good.

I was watching the first link of this chain being forged. Fraser-Stuart should have passed the Meisterwerk to Professor Bishop of Trinity Hall a week ago, but then Fraser-Stuart was as lazy as a cat. An ex-soldier possessed of a ‘brilliant mind’, whatever that means, he was one of those kooks who specialise in military history. Like Patton and Orde Wingate and many another self-regarding militarist before him he thought he cut a great figure mixing as he did a love of weapons and warfare with scraps of philosophy and louche arcana. Take a line through Sterling Hayden’s Colonel Jack Ripper and Marlon Brando’s Mr Kurtz. A blood and thunder general is bad enough, but one who prides himself on his knowledge of Taoism, French baroque music and the writings of Duns Scotus is your real menace to the world’s good order. If I’m to be sent into battle, give me Colonel Blimp any day, a fine, proud old bastard with a bristling moustache who reads John Buchan and thinks Kierkegaard is Sweden’s main airport, not some self-glorifying tit who plays polo in the nude and writes commentaries in silver Latin on the Pisan Cantos of Ezra Pound.

At last, just as I was thinking he would never have done with it, he looked up and squirted a jet of smoke in my direction like an archer fish spearing its prey, a tight little fart ripping from his lips.

‘So then, young Young, have you sought help?’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘For your drug problem.’

‘My what?’

‘You’re all smacked up with joints of heroin, man! You can’t deceive me. High on Euphoria or some other fashionable narcotic. I know this to be a problem for all people your age. I think you should do something about it. And that right urgently.’

‘Er…are you perhaps confusing me with someone else, sir?’

‘Oh, I don’t think so. No indeed. What other explanation could there be?’

‘For what?’

‘For this, boy. For this!’ He waved the Meisterwerk with a snarl.

My world began to disintegrate. ‘You mean…you don’t like it?’

‘Like it? Like it? It’s garbage. Offal. It’s not a thesis, it’s faeces! It’s pus, -moral slime, ordure.’

‘But…but…I thought we agreed that I was working along the right lines?’

‘So far as I knew you were working along the right lines. That was before you started snorting jazz salt or fixing yourself with skank or whatever it is you’ve been doing. It’s that film Trainspotting isn’t it? Don’t think I haven’t heard all about it. Christ, it makes me sick! Sick to the stomach. A whole benighted generation cut down before the scythe of dance drugs and recreational powders.’

‘Look, can I assure you I don’t do drugs. Not even grass.’

‘Then what? How? Hm?’ He had worked himself up into a huge hacking cough. I watched in alarm as, with streaming eyes, he repeatedly flapped a hand at me to indicate that he was recovering and that it was still his turn to speak. ‘We…we talk about your work,’ he resumed, in panting gasps, ‘and you give every sign of having all well in hand and then this…this effluent. It’s not an academic argument, it’s a novel and a perfectly disgusting one at that. What? What?’

‘Are you sure you’ve been reading the right paper?’ I leaned forward, more in hope than expectation. No, no doubt that it was the Meisterwerk he clutched.

‘What do you take me for? Of course I’ve been reading the right paper! So, if you aren’t a doped-out crack fiend hallucinating on comic mushrooms then what is the problem? Oh…ha!…of course!’ His face brightened and he bared his yellow teeth to me in a gamesome grin. ‘It’s a joke, isn’t it? You have the real thesis tucked away somewhere else! This is a May Week prank of some kind. Skh! Honestly!’

‘But I don’t understand what’s wrong with it!’ I almost wailed in despair. My last best hope had been that it was he who had been doing the joking.

He stared at me in disbelief for what must have been six full seconds. Six seconds. Count them. An achingly long time in such circumstances. One-alligator-two-alligator-three-alligator-four-alligator-five-alligator-six. I gaped back at him like a goldfish, trying to keep the tears of frustration from my eyes.

‘Oh Christ,’ he whispered. ‘He means it. He really means it.’

I stared back, thinking just the same thing. ‘I admit…’ I said, ‘I admit that parts of it are…unusual, but…’

‘Unusual?’ He took up a page and began to read. ’ “A great soaring, all-powerful, all-seeing, all-conquering eagle with piercing eyes and mighty wings and talons that dripped with the blood of the pig— ’” And you say you haven’t been injecting yourself with cannabis resin? “Another huge contraction sent her spinning higher even than the highest mountain. All Europe lay below her. Without customs posts, without borders or frontiers: all the animals running free.” Your research was so extensive that you actually acquired information as to the minutest details of the Polzl woman’s labour and the very images in her mind at the time? She kept a diary? She spoke her thoughts into a tape-recorder? And I note that you claim that her husband took the advanced twentieth century step of attending her lying-in? If so, fascinating! But where the attributions? Where the sources?’

‘No, well, those are just linking passages. I agree they are unorthodox, but I thought they lent…you know…colour and drama.’

‘Colour? Drama? In an academic thesis? Seek the shelter of a rehabilitation centre before it is too late, lad!’ He turned a few pages in wonderment, his eyebrows threatening to launch themselves clean into space. ‘Nor do you deign to tell the astounded reader how you came across the young Hitler’s school reports, I note.’

‘I did take a few liberties, I admit. But Adolfs teacher Eduard Humer did say all that about Adolf being ill-disciplined and fancying himself as a leader.’

‘Oh, it’s Adolf now, is it? Very chummy, aren’t we?’

‘Well, if you’re talking about a twelve-year-old boy, you can hardly keep referring to him by his surname, surely?’

‘And Adolfs mummy pumping water from the well while the train goes chug chug chugging by “puffing imperial white moustaches?” Adolfs mummy clutching the tendril of a convolvulus? Adolfs mummy smelling of violets? What?’

‘I just thought it made it all more readable, you know, for when it’s published…’

‘Published? I swear to God I thought he was going to explode. ‘Published? Great fuck, child, even Mills and Boon would blush at the prospect.’

‘I haven’t applied to them,’ I said, trying not to lose it. ‘Seligmanns Verlag have expressed an interest though.’

‘For their psychopathology list possibly. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. This is simply insupportable.’

‘Well, I could take those bits out,’ I said desperately. ‘I mean, they only amount to a twentieth of the whole. If that.’

‘Take them out? Hm…’ He considered this for a while.

‘I mean how’s the rest of it?’

‘The rest of it? Oh, competent I suppose. Dull but competent. It’s just that I simply can’t understand why you dropped in all that imponderable shite in the first place. Even if it were cut out I shouldn’t be able to read the whole in the same light. It is contaminated. You can fish a turd out of a water tank, but anyone who knows the turd was there won’t drink from it, will they, eh? Hm? What? Isn’t it? Hey? Hm?’

‘But no one will know, will they?’ I suffered a frantic vision of Fraser-Stuart, in some excess of integrity and fanatical zeal, writing sorrowful letters to my two examiners warning them off the polluted Meisterwerk.

‘I just wonder if you are quite sure that you’re cut out for an academic career, you see. You don’t think you’d be happier in some other atmosphere? The Media, for example? Advertising? Newspapering? The Beee Beee O’

‘This is my atmosphere,’ I said, as firmly as I could. ‘I know it.’

‘Very well, very well. Go back to your rooms then and type it all out again, this time omitting all fictitious and speculative impertinences. It may be something can be rescued from the wreckage. I find myself simply amazed that you thought I would ever consent to pass on such drivel to my colleagues.’ He burped suddenly and slapped his thigh, rocking backwards and forwards. ‘I mean, toss it, they would have thought I was barking mad, hey?’

I rose to leave. ‘Good heavens,’ I said eyeing him from bagged hair to rope-soled sandals, ‘we wouldn’t want that, would we?’

Free of the suffocating heat of his rooms, I leaned over the side of Sonnet Bridge, allowing such breeze as there was to fan out the damp heat trapped in the private corners of my body and the hot indignation swirling in the private corners of my mind. Below me punts were gliding up and down the river, loud with the bobbery of those lucky sons of bitches newly released from the examination halls. Christ, I thought. Heck and pants and great big vests. Life can be a bummer.

‘Coo-ee!’

On the bank nestled Jamie McDonell and Double Eddie, snug in Speedoes, reconciled and happy. I gave them a shy wave.

‘Go on, Puppy! Dive in, you know you want to.’

‘I’ve, er, I’ve still got your CDs,’ I called down. ‘Shall I drop them off some time?’

They laughed, their arms around each other’s waists. ‘Oh do! Yes do. Drop them off. Please do! Do, do, do! Just drop ‘em!’

A voice startled me from close behind. ‘There is something so very melancholy about the happiness of youth, don’t you agree?’ Leo Zuckermann, an improbable Panama perched on his head, looked down at Jamie and Double Eddie wriggling on the riverbank. ‘If summer comes,’ he said, ‘can fall be far behind?’

‘It’s all right for them,’ I said with morose relish. ‘They’re second years. No finals, no prelims. Just May Week and wine.’

‘And of course, it is so fashionable to be queer, as they like to call it now.’

‘Well, I suppose so…’

‘The pink triangle is a badge of pride. You know something, Michael? You know in the camps there was a purple triangle too.’

‘Really? Who for?’

‘Take a guess.’

‘A purple triangle?’

‘Purple.’

I pondered awhile. This was the sort of thing I was supposed to know. ‘That wasn’t the gypsies?’

‘No.’

‘Er…criminals then?’

‘No.’

‘Lesbians?’

‘No.’

‘Communists?’

‘No, no.’

‘Blimey. Let me see.’

‘Yes, a strange game, is it not? To put yourself into the mind of a Nazi. You have to imagine a whole new collection of humans to hate. Have another try.’

‘Interior decorators?’

‘No.’

‘The mentally ill?’

‘No.’

‘Slavs?’

‘No.’

‘Poles?’

‘No.’

‘Er…Muslims?’

‘No.’

‘Cossacks?’

‘No.’

‘Anarchists?’

‘No.’

‘Conscientious objectors?’

‘No.’

‘Deserters?’

‘No.’

‘Journalists?’

‘No.’

‘Christ, I give up.’

‘You give up? You can think of no one?’

‘Shoplifters? No, not criminals, you said. Um, a racial group?’

‘The purple triangle? No, not a racial group.’

‘Political?’

‘Not political.’

What then?’

‘Very well. I tell you for whom was the purple triangle. I tell you when you come and visit me in my laboratory. When will that be?’

‘Oh. Well, I’ve got some more work to do on…’

‘Perhaps you can come tomorrow morning? I should like it very much. We could talk too about your thesis.’

‘You’ve read it then?’

‘Certainly.’

I waited for some praise, but he added nothing more. We writers hate that. I mean, you know, this was my baby for God’s sake. Imagine you’re lying there in the labour ward and all your friends pile in to inspect the new-born child.

‘This is it, is it?’

‘Yes,’ you gasp, flushed with maternal pride.

Silence.

I mean, come on…that just won’t do. I’m not saying you have to kneel in awe, proffering bowls of frankincense and jars of myrrh, but something, just a little ‘aaaaaah!’…anything.

‘Right,’ I said at last, when it was clear that no gurgles of delight and admiration were ever going to be forthcoming, and blushing a little at the thought that he too found my flights of imaginative fancy insupportable and embarrassing. ‘So I’ll come round to your labs tomorrow morning then?’

‘Second floor, New Rutherford. One will direct you from there.’

‘Freemasons!’ I said.

‘I’m so sorry?’

‘Was it freemasons? The purple triangle.’

‘Not freemasons. I tell you tomorrow. Goodbye.’

He left me draped over the bridge under the hot sun. Below me, Jamie and Double Eddie leaned forward from the bank, tugged on a fishing-line and hauled in a bottle of white wine from the water. Whatever happened to them, I thought, they would have days like this to look back upon. In dank provincial libraries in February as, balding and bitter, they fussed over their mugs of Earl Grey; in local news production offices, fighting for budgets; in classrooms, floundering in the chaos of contemptuous thugs; at the Crush Bar in Covent Garden, twittering over a diva’s tessitura — wherever they might wash up, always they would have a memory of being nineteen, with flat stomachs, dazzling hair and bottles of river-cooled Sancerre. This place, I reflected sadly, belonged much more to them than to me; yet I would stay here for ever. To them it would always be an island of time, an oasis in the desert of their years, while for me it would soon become a gossipy, oppressive workplace like any other.

Oh, shut up, Michael. Oasis in the desert of their years. Fff! I don’t half think some crap sometimes. For all I know, if you’re going to suffer in life, it’s much better never to have known any kind of happiness at all. For all I know, the pain of suffering is far more bitter for someone whose childhood and youth has been nothing but trust and love and joy. I mean, if we’re talking deserts and oases, it would be a lot worse for a person brought up in Verdant Valley, Vermont to find themselves m the Sahara than it would be for a Tuareg who had never known anything else. The thirsty man’s memories of endless unfinished glasses of iced tea in happier days are not a comfort are they? More a corroding torture. Probably better to have had a miserable, starved, abused childhood. Give you some real appreciation of things. Force you to taste every drop of happiness to the full when it comes. No, hang on, that can’t be right: trauma is the problem there. That’s what everyone goes on about these days. Suffering will traumatise you and close off your capacity to enjoy anything at all. Numb you, desensitise you, dissociate you. Whatever. Jamie and Double Eddie were enjoying themselves, carping the diem, gathering the rosebuds, intensely living the moment on the pulses, fully sensitised, fully associated. Good on them, whatever the future might hold.

As for my future. Perhaps Fraser-Stuart was right, perhaps I wasn’t cut out for an academic career. I mean, arse it. I knew, deep inside me I knew that it had been madness to present him with all that horse shit. Hell, I knew that. Nonetheless, some demon inside me had allowed me to include those passages and present them to him. Perhaps I wanted to provoke him into failing me.

Can you have a mid-life crisis at twenty-four? Or is it just the usual crisis of adulthood, something I was going to have to get used to until I doddered into oblivion? For the past year, I realised, I had been suffering from this pain, this leaking of hot lead in my stomach. Every morning when I awoke and stared at the ceiling and listened to Jane’s gentle snoring it flooded my gut, a dark swell of recognition that here was another pissing day to be got through as me. How can you tell if that’s freakish or usual? No one ever says. The ceaselessly expanding Christian Societies in the university would tell you that it was a sign that you needed room for Christ in your life. That your ache was a vacuum in the soul. Yeah, right. Sure. It was the same void that drugs filled, I supposed. I had thought too that maybe this was what Jane was for. No, not what Jane was for, what Love was for. Then either I didn’t love Jane as I should or this was another blown theory. The longings of a creative spirit then? Maybe my soul craved expression in Art? But: can’t draw, can’t write, can’t sing, can’t play. Great. Where does that leave me? A kind of Salieri deal perhaps. Cursed with enough of divine fire to recognise it in others, but not enough to create anything myself. Aw, rats…

So perhaps it was nothing more than the fear of the arrival of a transitional phase in my life. This is when the void yawns in front of you. When you stand at brinks, on thresholds. The void is the doorway you’ve always wanted to pass through, but as you near it, you can’t help looking back and wondering if you dare.

Self-consciousness, that’s what it is. Always my abiding vice. I keep seeing myself. There I am. That’s me, walking along the street, what do other people see? That’s me, about to be Doctor Young. That’s me, with a girl on my arm. That’s me, wearing that cap — dork or dude? There I go, books under my arm, cutting the dash of the hip historian, academic cool on two bare legs, what a guy! So it’s a Prufrock syndrome. Do I dare to eat a peach? Are they laughing up their sleeves? Or not. Me thinking they’re laughing up their sleeves. Me watching myself watching others watch me. How do you lose that? What’s the trick? Blushing is the outward sign. Maybe I could train myself not to blush on the outside and the self-consciousness on the inside would go too. Naah…

Things of and pertaining to a crisis, the dictionary says, are critical. So my life is at a critical stage. A pivot, we have. The hinge of the door to my future is my thesis. So deliberately but unconsciously I don’t oil the hinge, I let it groan loudly just in case I want to scamper back and choose another door. Now I have been told to go back and oil the hinge. The door will swing soundlessly open and everything will be fine and smooth. Is that what I want?

At length, Jamie and Double Eddie finish their wine, collect their things and get up to leave, waving goodbye and treading with overcareful mimsy steps back up the bank, like Edwardian children picking their way over sea-side rock-pools. A tear falls from the end of my chin and joins the river water on its journey to the ocean.