Making History

MAKING FRIENDS

The History Muse

Diabolical Thought Number One occurred to me on my way to Zuckermann’s rooms.

I had passed through the Porter’s Lodge and was walking around Old Court towards the archway that led to Hawthorn Tree. I might legitimately have been able to short cut across, not around the court, but I wasn’t exactly sure that I was entitled to walk on the grass. The sign said ‘Fellows Only’ and I had never plucked up the nerve to ask if this included Junior Bye Fellows. I mean, it sounds so feeble to put the question. You know, as if you’ve just been made a prefect at school and you want to find out if that means you can wear trainers or call the teachers by their Christian names. Wet, or what?

Assert yourself, Michael, that’s the thing. I mean, how much more has to happen to you before you’ll believe that you’ve got as much right as anyone to inhabit the earth? A new attitude is needed: some dignity, some gravitas, something consonant with our new position in life…

These amiable thoughts were interrupted by a rumbling, a tumbling and a squawking as I passed the open stone doorway of F staircase in the corner of the courtyard. A figure rushed out in a squeaking blur and stamped across the lawn. He was carrying a pile of CDs, a plaster bust, three velvet cushions and a rolled-up poster. I knew him for Edward Edwards, Double Eddie, someone with even less right than me to walk across the grass. He shared rooms and a life with another second year, James McDonell. They enjoyed embarrassing me by cat-calling me and shouting, ‘get that tush? or ‘ker-yoot!’ and other such shit when I walked past. A very sweet pair really, but prone to enacting hysterical scenes and bruiting abroad the supposedly superior virtues of their sexuality.

Double Eddie was shedding CDs at a great rate across the lawn.

‘Woah!’ I called after him. ‘You’ve dropped these.’

Double Eddie didn’t turn round or stop walking. His angry back turned to me, he just said, ‘Don’t care!’ and sniffed.

Oh dear, I thought. Another row. I followed him, treading the grass gingerly, like a responsible father testing the ice to see if it will bear the weight of his children.

Behind us a voice shrieked out clear and high, echoing off the stonework and windows of the court. I looked round to see James framed in F staircase doorway, eyes flashing and arms akimbo.

‘Simply come back!’ he screamed.

Still Double Eddie strode on. ‘Never!’ he said, without a backward glance. ‘Never, never, never, never, never.

‘OH’

Now Bill the Porter had emerged grimly from his lodge. ‘Off the grass, gents, if you please.’

Since Double Eddie had already reached the other side of the lawn and Bill had used an unambiguous plural, there now was the answer to my question about Junior Bye Fellows and lawns. Verboten.

As Double Eddie stalked through the lodge trying, without success, to whistle jauntily, I started to pick up the fallen CDs, blushing furiously under the porter’s eye.

‘Sorry!’ I mumbled. ‘I’ll just get these and…’

Bill nodded grimly and watched my too much haste and not enough speed fumblings. ‘Festina lente. Eile mit Weile,’ I babbled to myself. When you’re an academic and under pressure, you blather in Latin tags and foreign languages to remind yourself of your superiority. It never works.

I clumsily collected together Cabaret, Gypsy, Carousel, Sweeney Todd and the rest and tripped quickly back to James, who leaned against the doorway, his eyes wet with tears.

‘Urn, here you are then.’

His hand fended them away. ‘I don’t want the horrid things! You can burn them for all I care.’

I put a hand to his heaving shoulder. I’ll keep them for you then. Listen, I’m really sorry,’ I said. ‘I mean, it’s a bummer. Being jilted.’ He said nothing, so I continued, this time offering him all the benefit of my recent experience. ‘I should know, man. I’ve been ditched too, you know?’

He stared at me as though I were mad. I thought perhaps he was going to tell me that in my case it wasn’t the same thing at all. Instead he wailed that it simply wasn’t fair. Then he turned away and stomped up the stairs, leaving me with the CDs.

No, it isn’t, I thought as I miserably trailed my laces through the archway and cut into the car-park, it simply isn’t fair at all. To be left is indeed the bummeriest bummer of all. How to separate the humiliation from the loss, that’s the catch. You can never be sure if what tortures you is the pain of being without someone you love or the embarrassment of admitting that you have been rejected. I had already been playing with the idea of persuading Jane back so that I could be the one to do the jilting, just to even things up.

And in the car-park thar she blew: four thousand quidsworth of Renault Clio. My Killer Loops on the dash, I noticed. Bloody having them. I dropped the briefcase on the ground by the car, scrabbled out my set of keys, opened the door and put them on. Does one assert one’s self more or less when wearing dark glasses? You’re hiding your eyes, which ought to count as timorous and weak, but then you’re looking cool and way inscrutable. There again, you can’t see so well in a car. I could make out a tube of mints in the floor-well, they were mine for sure. Remembered buying them at a service station. Come to think of it, half those tapes belonged to me too. I grabbed as many as I could hold. General mixture: bit, of Pulp, Portishead, Kinks, Verdi, Tchaik, Blur, the Morricone and Alfred Newman collections and of course all my beloved Oily-Moily. She could keep the Mariah Carey, the K.D. Lang, the Wagner and the Bach, I reckoned. Severed childless relationships in this age revolve around the custody of record collections, so it’s essential to get your claim in first.

That was when Diabolical Thought Number One actually hit. I leaned further into the car and yanked the college parking permit from the inside of the windscreen and tore it up into tiny little shreds. Hee-hee.

Diabolical Thought Number Two struck as the tapes joined Double Eddie’s opera CDs in my briefcase and I came upon that little bottle of Liquid Paper.

For a man of the keyboard generation I have to confess I do have top hand-writing. My godmother gave me an Osmiroid Calligraphy Set for Christmas when I was about fourteen and I really got into it for a while. You know, forming the letters properly, two strokes for an ‘o’, the dinky upward italic serifs on the descenders and ascenders, thick thin, thick thin, all nicely proportioned, the whole ball of wax. Should have seen my thank-you letters that year. Storming.

I leaned over the bonnet of the Renault like a suspect assuming the position for a US Highway Patrolman, poked my tongue out of one side of the mouth and got to work. It struck me as likely that the solvents in Liquid Paper would do something fabulously corrosive to the paintwork making my little message of love extremely difficult to remove without a whole boring, time-consuming and highly expensive respray. Cool. This, surely then, was the assertive Michael Young we had been looking for. My heart went thump-a-thump-a-thump as I stood back to get the full effect. Never really done anything like this before. Felt like shoplifting or buying pornography.

The lettering was not as large as I would have liked, but a small bottle of Liquid Paper won’t go far, even on the compact bonnet of a Clio. Nonetheless, the effect of white on Dubonnet Red was striking, and the wording, I reckoned, more or less on the money.

I HAVE BEEN STOLEN BY A MAD BITCH

I stood admiring this for a little while, wondering whether or not I should also have a go at removing that pathetic, absolutely pathetic, sticker on the rear window, GENETICISTS DO IT IN VITRO hardi-fucking-har, when I realised it must be nearing eleven. I still had to deliver Zuckermann’s bloody parcel, drop off the Meisterwerk in Fraser-Stuart’s rooms and get to my own where a first year would be awaiting a supervision. If I remembered rightly she was late with a Castlereagh and Canning essay, on whose delivery I had sweetly granted two extensions already. She could expect the shortest of short short shrifts from me if she was late again. I, who had completed a two hundred thousand word thesis of closely reasoned, intensely researched, innovatively presented, elegantly phrased historical argument was not going to have any truck with lazy, shiftless undergraduates, however good my mood. No more Mr Nice Guy. Meet Dr Nasty.

I stooped to pick up the briefcase when IT happened. The most dreadful thing that could have happened did happen. A really shitty thing on its own, but which set in train what was possibly the shittiest event (or non-event) in the history of humanity. Of course, I couldn’t have known that at the time. At the time, the personal disaster represented by this shitty happening was all that consumed me; believe me it was bad enough in its own right, without knowing that the destinies of millions hung on the event, without having even the vaguest idea that I was setting in train the explosion of everything I knew.

What happened was this. As I picked up my briefcase by its handle, the clasp, worn’ from years of handling and toting and tugging and hefting and lugging and kicking and dropping and schlepping, chose this moment to give way. Maybe it was the unaccustomed burden of Double Eddie’s CDs, my music tapes, the Meisterwerk and that incorrectly pigeon-holed package from Seligmanns Verlag. Whatever. The brass three-tiered plaque that received the tongue of the clasp broke free from its rotten stapled moorings, pulling open the perished mouth of the briefcase and sending four hundred unbound pages of closely reasoned, intensely researched, innovatively presented, elegantly phrased historical argument into the eddying tornadoes of mid-May breeze that swirled around the car-park.

‘Oh not I howled.

‘Please no.’ No, no, no, no, no, no!’ as I chased from corner to corner snatching at the flurry of flying pages like a kitten swatting snowflakes.

There’s a TV programme where celebrities do this with money. A thousand currency notes are sent into the air by a wind machine and the celleb has to get hold of as many as possible. ‘Grab A Grand’ it’s called. Presented by that guy who looks like Kenneth Branagh in bearded Shakespearean mode. Edmunds, Noel Edmunds. Or possibly Edmonds.

Most of the table of contents had landed under the wheels of my/Jane’s Renault in a safe bunch. The rest, the mighty body of the noble work, including appendices, tables, bibliography, index and acknowledgements, flew free.

Bending double to hold the rescued pages against my chest, I staggered from one whirl of paper to the next, clutching and clawing like a herring gull. Yes, all right, I can’t have been like a kitten swatting snowflakes and a herring gull.

‘God in helling pants, no! Come here, you bastards!’ I screamed. ‘Please!’

But I was not alone.

‘Dear, dear! This is unfortunate.’ I turned to see an old man walking slowly through the car-park, calmly picking up page after page.

It seemed to me, in my fever and frenzy and grateful though I was for assistance, that it was all right for him, for everywhere he went the currents of air seemed to be stilled and the pages just fluttered lifelessly to the ground, content for him to pick them up. That couldn’t be happening. But I stopped and stared and saw that it was happening. It really was. Really. Wherever he walked, the wind dropped before him. Like the wizard calming the brooms and dishes in the Sorcerer’s Apprentice sequence in Fantasia. Which cast me, of course, as Mickey Mouse.

The old man turned to me. ‘It is better if you approach from windward,’ he said, Germanically pronouncing the Ws as Vs, ‘your body will shelter the papers.’

‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Thanks. Yeah. Thank you.’

‘And you should maybe do up your laces?’

There’s always some wise-arse, isn’t there? Someone who can make it look like you have absolutely no common sense. My father was like that until he learned better than to try to teach me the most rudimentary elements of carpentry or sailing. Then he died before I could repay him by showing any interest at all. This wise-arse was bearded, favouring the Tolstoy model over the Branagh-Shakespearean, and continued to step serenely through the car-park picking up the loose pages that lay down and played dead at his bidding.

The Vindvood’ technique kind of worked for me too and we both shuttled back and forth between the fallen pages and that landed fish of a dead, gasping briefcase.

Once all the visible paper had been gathered, I checked under each car and got myself as good and filthy and bleeding and torn on the outside as I was feeling on the m. The last page to be found was lying face down on the bonnet of the Clio, stuck to the drying Liquid Paper. I peeled it gently off.

This disaster only put me a day behind, of course. I mean, everything was there on hard disk back at our house in the village of Newnham but it wasn’t, you know, it just wasn’t a good omen. It meant buying another five hundred sheets of laserprinter paper and…well, somehow it scraped the gilt off the gingerbread, that’s what I felt. The celebrations last night, the £62.00 Chateauneuf du Pape, that feeling of freedom as I had bicycled into town…all premature.

A cloud went over the sun and I shivered. The Old Man was standing absolutely still and staring at one of the pages of the Meisterwerk.

‘Thanks so much,’ I panted pinkly. ‘Stupidest thing. Must get a new briefcase.’

He looked up at me and something there was in that look, something that even then I could plainly recognise as monumental. A thing absolutely eternal and unutterable.

He returned the piece of paper he had been reading with a stiff bow. I saw that it was Page 49, from the first section of Das Meisterwerk, the part that covered the legitimisation of Alois right up to the marriage with Klara Polzl.

‘What is this, please?’ he asked.

‘It’s, uh, my doctoral thesis,’ I said.

‘You are a graduate?’

I was accustomed to the surprise in his voice. I looked too young to be a graduate. Frankly, I looked too young to be an undergraduate sometimes. Maybe I would have to start trying to grow a beard again. If I had the testosterone that is. I had tried last year and the flak had nearly driven me to self-slaughter. I pinkened more and nodded.

‘Why?’ he asked, nodding down at the paper in his hand.

‘I’m sorry?’

‘Why that subject? Why?’

‘Why?’

‘Yes. Why?’

Well…’

I mean, everyone knows how you choose a subject for a doctoral thesis in history. You go round the libraries in a fever, looking for a subject that no one else has covered, or at least a subject that hasn’t been covered for, say, twenty years and then you bag it. You stake your claim for that one seam. Everyone knows that. But the look the old man was giving me was of such imponderable gravity that I didn’t know how to begin to answer him, so I gave a helpless shrug and smiled stupidly at the ground. Jane was always giving me grief for this feeble tactic, but I just couldn’t ever help it.

‘What is your name?’ he asked, not harshly as one who has a good mind to report you to the authorities, but in a kind of bewilderment, with a high upward inflection, as if astonished and slightly frightened that he had not been told it long before.

‘Michael Young.’

‘Michael Young,’ he repeated, again with puzzlement. ‘And you are a graduate? Here? At this college?’ I nodded and he looked up at the clouds covering the sun behind me. ‘I can’t see your face properly,’ he said.

‘Oh,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry.’ I moved round so that he could get a better look.

Absolutely surreal. What was he, a plastic surgeon? A portrait painter? What had my face got to do with anything?

‘No, no. The sunglasses.’ With emphasis on the second syllable, ‘sun-glasses’, definitely German, perhaps a little east or south.

I whipped off the Killer Loops, which made me even shyer and we stood there looking at each other. Well, he was looking, I was stealing quick glances from under my lashes like the young Lady Di.

He was bearded and old, as I have said. A lined face and a worn one, but hard to date exactly. Academics age in ways different from most people. Some remain unnaturally smooth and youthful well into their seventies, the boyish, sandy-haired Alan Bennetty type, which is how I supposed I would ripen. Others senesce prematurely and will begin to peer and blink and hunch like little library moles well before forty. This man reminded me of that photograph of…Chief Joseph is it? Or Geronimo? One of those figures. W H Auden in his sixties anyway. That in turn made me think of what David Hockney said, on first catching sight of the elderly Auden: ‘Blimey, if that’s his face, what can his scrotum look like?’ This old man, judging from the crags and trenches on his forehead must have had something like a savoy cabbage swinging in his trousers. The beard was white at the roots and it gradated, if that’s a word, into a mid-grey at the raggedy wiry ends.

I’m not sure what he saw as he looked back at me: twenty-four, all my hair, none of it facial, and, yes all right damn you, a baseball cap. Whatever he did see was enough, at any rate, to bring out his right hand to shake mine.

‘Leo Zuckermann,’ he said.

‘Professor Zuckermann?’ Get out of here. The man himself.

‘I am a Professor, yes.’

‘Oh. Well. I’ve got something for you, actually.’ The parcel from Seligmanns Verlag was lying face down on the ground. I brushed some crud away and handed it over. ‘It was in my pigeon-hole, which is above yours. Yours was full, so I…’

‘Ah yes. Xenakis, Young, Zuckermann. X,Y,Z.’ He preferred ‘zee’ to ‘zed’, which fitted the slightly Americanised swing to his accent. ‘I’m so sorry. I am sadly neglectful of clearing my pigeon-holes.’

‘No worries. Fine.’

‘Not your only copy, I hope?’ he said, gesturing at the shambles in my suitcase. ‘AH backed up on computer, I am sure?’

‘No. But it’s still a pain.’

‘God’s punishment.’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘For taking rejection with such ill-grace.’ He pointed, smilingly, towards the bonnet of the Clio and its message of love.

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Childish.’

He looked at me intently. ‘You, I should say, are a coffee man.’

‘A coffee man?’

‘From the way you skip and jump in the air when excited. A coffee man. I am a hot chocolate man. Would you be pleased to come and visit my rooms some time soon? For coffee?’

‘Coffee? Right. Mm. Yeah. Why not? Sure. Thanks. Absolutely. Great.’ Managing to avoid only ‘cheers’ and ‘lovely’ in the meaningless litany of polite British English.

‘What day? What time? I am free all this afternoon.’

‘Er…oh, this afternoon? Today? Sure! Yeah. Lovely. That be great. I’m…I’ve got to get this all printed out again but…’

‘So what we say? Half past four-ish?’

‘Sounds great to me, thanks. And thanks for helping with the…you know. Thanks.’

‘I think probably you have thanked me enough.’

‘What? Oh. Yes. Sorry.’

‘Tshish!’ he said.

Well it sounded like ‘tshish’ anyway, and was meant, I suppose, to indicate foreign amusement at the English disease of being unable, once started, to stop thanking and apologising.

We walked backwards away from each other as academics do.

‘Half past four then,’ I said.

‘Hawthorn Tree Court,’ he said, ‘2A.’

‘Right,’ I said. ‘Thanks. I mean sorry. Cheers. Cool.’