The Scent of Dried Roses Read online

  The London School of Economics, I now learn, is quite a prestigious university. It is certainly almost entirely middle and upper middle class in make-up. I am astonished by the knowledge, the self-confidence of the people who physically seem little more than children. They make speeches at the student union, they picket and march, they write letters to Parliament, they throw eggs at politicians. It is highly politicized, a training ground for civil servants and cabinet ministers. Politics is the social life; everything seems to revolve around issues, what is supported, what is opposed, what is to be currently debated. Everybody seems quite sure of what they think about everything. Are you left or are you right? is substituted for the question at my last school: are you Rangers or are you Chelsea? Why do they not feel, as I do, that knowledge recedes endlessly? Because, I suppose, they are cleverer than me.

  I am instinctively and habitually left wing, but an orthodoxy has emerged with which I am uncomfortable. I am asked to participate in demonstrations and pickets about the sacking of Times printers at Wapping and it is clear that to do less is betrayal. Yet I have met Fleet Street printers and know most of them to be surly and grotesquely overpaid.

  At the same time I am asked to take as axiomatic the proposition that I am racist, sexist and homophobic, because I am white, male and heterosexual. I am told, in other words, to hate myself. I am told that policemen are all fascists, that criminals are all victims, that the striking miners are all heroes. I want to believe it, all of it, really I do. I want to have a story for myself. I want to have a team.

  Yet I find myself stuck with the wishy-washy suburban English scepticism of my father written through my bones: There’s good and bad in everyone, I suppose. Everyone’s basically the same, wherever you go. But doubt is not an acceptable point of view. In this world, it is a mark of moral weakness. My father’s words echo again: It’s not what you say that counts, it’s what you do. Here it is the other way round.

  I know I am required to have opinions, to have commitment, but I can find only deepening layers of doubt. I can see only a sort of tribal self-righteousness on the one hand, facing cynicism and cruelty on the other. In other words, I have no team. I realize, more than ever, that there is no place of belonging here, not for me at least.

  Uncommitted and struck through with uncertainties, I begin to try to make myself invisible. My normal extroversion is intimidated and bruised into careful muteness, in case I make a fool of myself. I fear that I will be found out. I realize with a shock that my idea about university – people sitting and trying to make sense of things for their own sake – is wildly wrong and outdated. My old perception, the one from my school ten years ago, has turned out to still apply. The world is about making up a story and sticking to it. The university is about passing exams, and convention, and a certain kind of forgetfulness.

  Quickly bored by anthropology, I have switched to politics and history. I start writing essays without the faintest idea of what I am doing. To my tutor’s surprise, they emerge with the structure of lurid tabloid news stories (thirty-five-word intro, build it like a pyramid). Most of the essay questions seem to be about causality. There are clearly techniques for answering these questions, for passing the exam, but I do not understand that that is the point. I want to know the answer. I do not know yet that there are no answers, only stories. I get Cs and Ds.

  I become obsessed by the idea of certainty, since it is clearly what I crave. Yet, as I read about fascism and communism, about the French Revolution and the Spanish Inquisition, it seems to me that certainty, and the need for identity which it serves, is a sort of virulent and dangerous disease. Yet it becomes equally clear that the need for it is the deepest impulse there is. And I am also beginning to understand why, as doubt about everything deepens and spreads within me. Was doubt also a disease that left you crippled, purposeless, free-floating? Yet it seems inescapable. Like a quark or a gluon, everything recedes the more it is examined.

  It dawns on me that I have a whole language, a whole mode of communication to unpick. References, sources, quotes, evidence. Will it help the making of sense? Why can I never reach any conclusions, as you are clearly supposed to? All the different explanations and interpretations, I cannot escape the impression that each is exactly as convincing as another. My head seems, quite literally, to hurt. The ideas that confront me are completely bewildering, and there is more or less no teaching, only books, books, millions of incomprehensible books. The shy, day-dreaming child I was all those years before I cast him out into the darkness seems to me to be looming once more, threatening me with his freakish introspection: Timothy lives in a little world of his own. I am stupid, I think to myself every day. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

  But my family, all of my family, are determined people. I do not give up, although I feel increasingly lost and disoriented. I thank my gods once more for Kate, to whom I can cleave in this incomprehensible universe of plummy accents and exam skills, and roseate country-house cheeks and endless, unanswerable questions, all demanding answers.

  I am sitting in the front room of the houseboat in Chertsey. It is a beautiful setting; light ripples from the water on to the low ceiling. There is a gentle rocking from underneath and tree shadows feed through the windows on to the pale floor. I have asked Kate to live with me. Despite my infatuation, it has taken three years for me to make the offer because, like so many of my generation, I am concerned with maintaining what I think of as the Grail – ‘freedom’ – for as long as possible. She has said no, which is a surprise, because I have always thought she was the one who wanted to ‘settle’. I put down the refusal as temporary, due to her obsession with her new boat. It seems to have become a sort of metaphor for her life: she is pulling it apart, scraping the hull, cutting out dead wood. It seems to occupy her endlessly. I have begun to see it is a rival, but I am still unshakeably certain about Kate’s love for me. I do not realize the investment that I have made in this certainty.

  It is Valentine’s Day 1984. We have risen from bed, where we have not made love; sex seems to be slowly disappearing from our relationship, but I am blind to what this should tell me. I am drinking coffee. Kate is smoking a cigarette. I am happy, the last time I will be happy, even momentarily, for four or five years. The postman has come along the path and there is the sound of something falling on the mat. I hope that my card will arrive on time.

  There is only one letter. Kate picks it up, tears it open and reads it, smilingly. It is not signed. I smirk and pretend it is not from me, and then I glance at where she has put it on the sideboard and I see, with a shock, that it really is not from me. Mine has not arrived.

  I cannot keep up any sort of pretence in front of Kate for long. I tell her that the card is not mine, really not mine. And – just for an instant, just for a half-second – an expression ripples across her face. It is excitement. I see it clearly. She is hoping that the card is from a particular person who is unknown to me. Something in me kicks, feels sick.

  But Kate loves me, is part of me. This I know. If I do not know this, I know nothing at all, nothing whatsoever. My story, my one and only story, will turn out to be fiction. So it has to be true. I shake my head, as if to dislodge some nasty speck of grime, and do not mention the matter again. I begin to tell myself, and I begin to believe, that the expression on her face was nothing more than the sense of flattery that anyone would feel on receiving such a card. It is forgotten. It must be forgotten.

  A few weeks later, I go round to the boat and we go out for dinner. Kate is acting strangely. She sits at the table and hardly speaks for the whole evening. It is gradually becoming an unavoidable fact that something is wrong. I begin to quiz her, to press, to nag, to bother. She will not speak. She will not look at me.

  For all my pretensions to honesty, I am an expert at denial. I do not ask Kate the obvious question, not because I am frightened of the answer, but because it does not occur to me. Or perhaps it is because I am so frightened of the answer that it does not occur t
o me. Instead, I accept her assertion that she needs some time alone, and leave the boat telling her to sort herself out, to find some words to speak. We will give it a rest for a month, then I will call her. In the meantime, we will not phone or talk. I am unhappy, but the action makes me feel strong, in control.

  After a week or two, I do begin to have some doubts, but my confidence hardly falters. It is only when I finally ring Kate up again and she says, without committing herself, that she wants to come and see me and talk that I begin to feel nervous. Her voice is distant, changed. Perhaps it is the telephone line.

  When she walks into my flat she seems cheerful, quite full of herself, but she still can’t quite bring herself to say what it is she has come to say. I finally manage to find the question that has been eluding me so carefully for the last couple of months. I feel ridiculous as I speak the words, as if I am playing at being a grown up. Is there someone else? She nods. There is a man who lives on another boat, a few moorings along. They are sleeping together. They are in love.

  Everything goes white. I stand up and begin pacing about the room. I pick up a table lamp and smash it against the wall. I kick the chair. I punch the door so hard it cracks. Some great reserve of anger and fear has welled up in me, so volcanic it threatens to tear me apart. I do not know what to do with it. Kate is frightened, although I know I will never strike her. Instead the rage begins to flow inward. I ask, I beg for an explanation, but she simply sits silently. I start to yell at her – to get out, and to never, ever contact me again. She leaves, whey-faced.

  I sit down and cry, and shake. I feel something terrible is happening inside me, all at once. Something is freezing, something is shaking loose. Something is falling apart, something is tightening in order to hold it in place. I feel terrible. I feel lonelier than I have ever felt. I do not know what is to become of me, stripped as I am of my only true faith. And stripped, even more terrifyingly, of control. It is as if I am once again naked, and stamping my feet, and shouting, No.

  Chapter Fourteen

  We would rather be ruined than changed

  We would rather die in our dread

  Than climb the Cross of the moment

  And see our illusions die.

  W. H. Auden, ‘The Age of Anxiety’

  ‘Little boys who are not good/might just as well be made of wood’ – The Blue Fairy, Pinocchio

  Self-defence, I write in my diary with a steady, confident hand, sometime early in the endless year of 1984, is the prime instinct of the human mind. The fortification of ramparts, and bridges, and ditches, and moats. Nothing else finally matters so long as the defences are kept up.

  I do not really understand that I am talking about myself, as my mind struggles to come to terms with a suddenly fluid and unstable reality, where nothing holds good or true. Neither do I understand that the very act of diary-writing, which I have only recently begun, is a sort of self-defence, a grasping at control. The diary continues: But what happens if you fail? What is it, exactly, that you are defending? How can you defend what is in the first place unknown?

  I am going to keep those defences aloft, some obscure part of me realizes, however much it costs me. I have to or – Or what? Blankness. No story. A stare into what, like Medusa, cannot be seen without paralysis.

  I am gradually mimicking my Uncle Alan, scratching at scabs until they bleed. But they are not physical, they are wounds inside that I cannot leave alone, that I hector and pick at. I have to find a solution, a healing. I struggle to find the will to let Kate go, although I fear that my whole idea of self will go with her.

  Despite my fierce instructions to stay out of contact, she sends me a letter telling me she still loves me, but that she still ‘needs time’. This is all that is needed to keep me from doing what needs to be done – that is, for me to, psychologically, leave her. Presumably this is the intention of the letter. Kate is covering her bets.

  To survive, I know now, I must decide to grieve, to let the past move through and beyond. In fact, I know it even then. Yet I am weak, I cannot do this with Kate. Fatally, I refuse to mourn her loss. Perhaps without that letter… But I am hooked now, trapped in my past, unable to resolve or to move on. In an attempt to deny the fluidity of the world, I have made it static, fixed, rigid. All that is important to me is Kate’s return. It seems to be a matter of interior life and death.

  I see Jack and Jean often and put on a brave face. They are both sad that we have split, for they are fond of Kate, but Jack naturally assumes that everything will sort itself out, one way or another. It is his most basic assumption about life. Jack goes every day for lunch at PizzaExpress in Notting Hill Gate, two doors along from the shop. The Galleon and the Varsi Grill have closed down. I join him from time to time on a Saturday, when I am passing the restaurant and see him, as always, with his face buried in a book. Nowadays his favourites are historical thrillers and, still, murder stories. Almost sixty now, he looks a decade younger, and is still handsome. He remains curious and engaged by what I am studying at the LSE. Over a single beer and his customary order of Eggs PizzaExpress, we discuss psychology, history, economics. He has picked up most of his knowledge from the potboilers he reads endlessly, but he is surprisingly clued up. James joins us sometimes, which foreshortens the discussions, for he feels that to disagree about something is the same as arguing, so he changes the subject the moment we get ‘too serious’.

  At home, Jean is more sensitive to what I am continuing to, rather badly, conceal. I understand that it should be concealed, for Jean is worried as it is about the family on the other side of the Atlantic. She and Jack have been on holiday to New Orleans to see Jeff and Helma and have had a miserable time. It is clear that their marriage is on the rocks.

  I am a bad actor. Jean sees the rigidity in my face and the slow disappearance of my usual jokey, obstreperous self. She worries.

  You’ve not been the same since you split up with Kate. A mother can tell these things.

  I try to reassure her, again, that everything is OK.

  Six months pass and the situation remains agonizingly unresolved. Kate still talks about coming back. I still hang on to my hopes, rerunning past and future scenarios through my head like an infuriating, pointless tape-loop. In the meantime, I suffer through each day at university, sitting alone in the library. There is a sense that I am drying out within myself, that a million tiny little taps and valves are being slowly turned off. Or perhaps it is a hardening, a cooling, as if a smooth, impervious stone is being formed at the very centre of my chest.

  I have made few friends at the LSE, their tribe is so different from mine. But I have made one. She is a woman about my age, an Essex Girl from Chigwell. She is Jewish, trained as an actress at LAMDA, attractive and street-smart, who walks with short, stumpy, determined steps that remind me of – of me. In fact, nearly everything about her reminds me of me. Her parents are kind, loving and vaguely philistine, and live in a nice part of subtopia. She has the same passions, the same apparently limitless ambition, the same deep insecurities, the same compensating competitiveness, the same proud vulgarity and mouthiness. She seems instinctive, witty and honest, and yet is torn by one question: will the books she is reading do her harm? Like me, she both loves and hates the place she comes from. Like me, she both desires and fears the place she senses she is going to.

  There is one film, she tells me, that she identifies with more than any other. It is Willy Russell’s Educating Rita. This film, a sort of tragedy, is about Rita, a raw, charismatic Liverpudlian working-class girl, who goes to study literature and finds ‘culture’ while at the same time losing everything that makes her special: her spontaneity, her instinctive sense of rightness, her lack of pretension, her bullshit-detector. With each book that Becka reads, she is haunted by this fear of loss, and I know exactly what she means. As we force our minds into structured, careful, penned places, we seem to be losing something vital in ourselves. The conflict within us draws us together. I feel myself falling in
love with her.

  But I know that it is a pointless love. She is deeply involved with a man, an actor and model, who is pleasant, charming and handsome. She repeatedly tells me that she loves him, and on one occasion makes a point of inviting me over to dinner and sitting on his lap all the way through dessert. It is clear that she has a message for me that it is important I understand if our friendship is to continue.

  I accept it. Anyway, I am still obsessed with Kate. Unlike my careful, private parents, I am happy to unload my angst on anyone who will listen and I am aware of myself turning into a bore. It seems that the stiffness of upper lips is something else Jack and Jean’s generation were right about. My friends are patient and listen to my endless introspections, which help me not a whit. After a while, I even begin to bore myself. Nevertheless, I seem to be powerless to free myself. A decision has to be made. Kate refuses to make it and I don’t know how to.

  During the summer recess, I take a holiday in New Orleans, where I go to see my brother Jeff and his wife, Helma. Things, as Jack and Jean have found out, are not going well for them. I sense a tension so thick it is uncomfortable the moment I walk into the house. Jeff, like me, seems strung out on a tight inner cord. The rivalry between us, although it is submerged in adult politeness, is far from exhausted. It seems to me that he hardly stops trying to convince me – and therefore perhaps himself – of the rightness of his decision to marry and settle in New Orleans. He hardly stops proselytizing: the balconies, the food, the weather, the ‘authentic culture’. Does he want my approval as badly as I want his? I can hardly imagine it to be so, for I feel myself to be irrelevant to Jeff, I know that I do not count.

  Frustratingly for him, Helma and I get on almost too well. Although I try hard to avoid any sense of alliance with her, it seems that Jeff’s insecurities run as deep as mine. He is constantly on the defensive, constantly in fear of losing control. Each day has to be planned to his schedule, each meal has to be eaten in the restaurant which he knows and approves of. His records are still in alphabetical order.