All Souls Page 10

  During my second and last year at Oxford, at the beginning of the term known as Trinity, whose eight weeks are spread over April, May and June, Clare Bayes' son fell ill whilst at school and Clare and Edward had to drive down to Bristol and bring him home. He remained in Oxford for four weeks to recuperate and during that period of convalescence and recovery I practically stopped seeing Clare altogether. As I mentioned earlier, although we didn't see each other very regularly or on all that continuous a basis, it's also true to say that from the time we met - with the exception of the vacations - we never went more than a week without meeting at least once, even if it was only for a swift, turbulent half hour between classes. Those four weeks were the worst weeks of my two years in Oxford (though perhaps the weeks that followed were no better). Not only was I more alone and at even more of a loose end (during their final term students either skip classes or the classes end up being cancelled to allow the undergraduates to devote themselves to preparing for the exams and the dons to preparing ever more fiendish questions) but I also discovered with great displeasure that the tenuous and sporadic feelings of jealousy I had very occasionally felt about Edward Bayes (or about their past love, unrepeated with or for me) became focused on her son Eric and the care his mother lavished on him to my immediate detriment. It was she who decided not to see me while the child Eric was at home and although his affliction was not a serious one, merely slow in passing (after the second week he was allowed out, as long as he took it easy), Clare Bayes decided to make it up to him for all the months of the year he spent away from her. Taking advantage of his illness, she wanted to nurture him, to make him more of a child, to feed her retina with images. Or so I surmised.

  I called her at her office every two or three days (which was all she allowed me to do) on the pretext of finding out how the boy was coming along and with the intention of persuading her to agree, at her convenience, to just one more swift, turbulent encounter. I was never more available, more accommodating, more full of suggestions, all of which were - one after the other, day after day — declined. I was also at my most ardent (verbally). But Clare wanted no adult distractions or interruptions while the child Eric was at home. She was prepared to receive my calls, even to call me to give me a progress report, believing or pretending to believe that I was really concerned about the infection or the broken bone (I can't even remember what it was that brought the boy home, so little attention did I pay to her explanations), which, in the body of someone who was no more to me than an intrusive stranger, was presumably being fought off or was healing. She wouldn't agree to see me and when we met in the street or in the echoing corridors of the Taylorian, she greeted me with even more restraint and indifference than she normally showed me in public - as a precautionary, though instinctive measure. And then she'd continue on her way. In an all too southern European gesture, I would turn to watch the strong, slightly muscular legs poised on their high heels as she walked away. Now that I never saw her barefoot, they never seemed slender or boyish in their movements. I couldn't force her to stop by grabbing her arm and remonstrating with her as I've seen desperate lovers do in films, for in the streets of Oxford (and even more so in the echoing corridors of the Taylorian) there are, at any given moment, large numbers of dons or colleagues (they've taken the town over) who, on the pretext of walking from one college to another or from a meeting in one building to another meeting in another building, mill around in front of the shop windows or the billboards outside the (scarce but adequate) theatres or cinemas or contrive over-long exchanges of greetings and impressions (on university life). (Maybe they're spying.) And the Taylorian is constantly filled with an impassioned, almost furious thread of a voice, a distant metallic murmuring, which is Professor Jolyon delivering his magisterial lectures, banished (mercifully) to the top floor. Anyway, I couldn't really be said to be desperate. Clare Bayes had banished me from her Catte Street rooms for the duration and, of course, forbidden me to phone her at home, even at times when Edward's absence could be guaranteed. Now it didn't matter if her husband was there or not, because the child Eric was always certain to be there. Though I had never met him, I felt an intense antipathy for that child who had snatched from me the only affection - unsteady, precarious and with no future, but still the only one in evidence - that I'd enjoyed in that static city preserved in syrup. But I never (quite) reached the point of desperation.

  During those four interminable spring weeks I intensified my wanderings round the city in search of rare books, and one consequence of that unwanted, artificial and ultimately unwholesome intensification was that my feeling of unease and my uncertain sense of identity reached crisis point.

  The city of Oxford, especially during Trinity with the arrival of what passes in that part of the world for "the good weather", is peopled by or, rather, is packed to the gills with beggars. For the whole of spring and part of summer the city, which in other seasons also entertains a fair number of them, undergoes a wild and disproportionate increase in its mendicant population. One gets the impression that there are nearly as many beggars as there are students. The latter are the main reason for the proliferation of the former, who represent a genuine (undisciplined) army of occupation. If, with the arrival of spring (indeed it's the waves of beggars that announce the coming of spring), all the English, Welsh, Scots and Irish beggars abandon their respective winter refuges or quarters and as one man begin their pilgrimage to or march on the city of Oxford, it's because Oxford is a wealthy city (very wealthy) and because there are a couple of poorhouses or shelters where they're afforded one meal a day and occasionally (for those less given to night wanderings) a bed, but the main reason is that the vast majority of Oxford's inhabitants have young, innocent hearts. These British beggars, who invade the more prosperous towns of the south when the climate there begins to make paving stones or asphalt (or more likely benches) seem suitable places to bed down, have nothing in common with our traditional southern European beggars, who always retain a remnant of awareness that, however much they may feel it to be their due, they are in fact asking for money. These English and Irish beggars are sullen, fierce and extremely drunk. I never saw them ask for anything, which is not to say that they demand it either. They simply say nothing, they do not speak, they do not behave in the time-honoured manner of beggars, they make no mention of their trade or its meaning, rather they take it for granted that their attitude and their appearance (which is of course impoverished) somehow in themselves make any holding out of hands, any timeworn postulant phrases redundant. They will never tell you their life story or attempt any kind of sales pitch; they haven't got the gift of the gab. They're practically dumb. They're monosyllabic. There is, I think, an element of laziness and pride, a measure of boredom and fatalism in them. They don't beg because - unless the petition is false and merely the first, furtive step in an actual mugging - one who begs cannot at the same time maintain the boastful, bored, loutish, gruff mien so peculiar to them. They're not humble, they lack slyness. They're simply not interested. They make not the least attempt or pretence at cleanliness, their eyes are barely visible for the dark circles round them, they all boast long beards and prehistoric tangles of hair, their clothes are in holes or frayed or torn (but whilst all of them have a jacket or coat, almost none has an anorak or a tracksuit or any other item of sports clothing), they are of all ages and all are tireless. Not one of them is sedentary. They walk along brandishing bottles of beer, gin or whisky in hands innocent of water, they only stay in one spot long enough to sit down and drain the contents of a bottle or when they fall down exhausted by their endless perambulations. The Oxford beggars seem possessed by a fury or fever for walking that leads them to cover the whole city several times a day, striding along, remonstrating as they do, making swaggering or obscene gestures at the passers-by, muttering oaths, blasphemies and curses that remain indecipherable. The Oxford beggars are wanderers. They are the only members of the population who do not know where they are going and thus
keep walking round and round the red-grey streets in the rain or beneath lowering skies. Every now and then one of them will pause to lean over a bridge and vomit into the River Isis, or prowl around for a while outside the door of a pub in case some customer (of those who choose to drink outside) should depart in a hurry and leave within reach of the beggar's grimy hand a generous amount of alcohol in their abandoned glass. But for the rest they are ceaseless rovers. There are a few who work, if you can call it that, at something other than cultivating their needy appearance, and they tend to remain in one place, or at least on their wanderings carry with them the tools of their trade. They are the ones who play an instrument, own a performing animal, do clumsy juggling acts, croon ballads or tell fortunes (the latter are very rare, given that there's no market for it in Oxford, no curiosity about the future). These active beggars are the richest and therefore the most hated by their less gifted colleagues. Late one afternoon I saw two of the fiercest and most inveterate of the wandering variety (always heavily bearded) attacking a little man getting on in years to whom I regularly used to give a few pence because he looked so tidy and peaceable and because he played old Madrid dance tunes on a barrel organ salvaged, he claimed, from a dockside bonfire in Liverpool. To walk down Cornmarket and hear in the distance the vibrant sound of a barrel organ grinding out such tunes caused a hilarity in me comparable only to that provoked by the lively groups of Spanish tourists I occasionally came across on Saturdays who, as is their custom when abroad, would invariably be walking along clapping (flamenco style). So the least I could do whenever I heard him was to go over to the organ grinder's pitch, even though it was somewhat out of my way, and give him whatever loose change I had on me. On that occasion, as I said, I saw two bearded beasts laying into the old man and his barrel organ. I ran up to them full of indignation and panic, hurling awful insults at them in Spanish and it was doubtless the sonorous quality of a foreign language so well adapted to insults (I think they were particularly impressed by "culo", the Spanish word for arse) that put them to flight before I had a chance to get near enough for them to lay into me (equally pitilessly), which would, in the ordinary run of events, have been my fate: I'm neither very strong nor very brave. Luckily, neither the barrel organ nor the old man suffered any irreparable damage and some minutes later I saw both man and barrel organ disappearing with slightly stumbling steps along St Aldate's into the advancing dusk. The sky was red and I was breathing hard.

  But what I did perhaps have the courage and strength to do was to recognise and realise that I was becoming like them, like the beggars, even though the Oxford beggar's worst enemy is the Oxford professor or don who, unlike the undergraduate, has an old and wily heart and sees off beggars with a few sharp remarks and a well-aimed flick of his gown. Since at the time I was an Oxford don and no doubt looked the part, I was consequently regarded by the beggars with a hostile eye. But I was only a temporary don and as yet had scant feeling for the role, and the habits peculiar to it, amongst them a talent for intimidating vagabonds and a repertoire of loud cries cultivated for the purpose, were not yet that deeply rooted in me. As regards my upbringing and degree of learning, that in no way belied the perceived similarity, for there are some very cultivated beggars in England. The condition of beggar does not necessarily have its origin in a background of great poverty or the collapse of a business or in paralysing ignorance, but rather in a liking for drink, the loss of one's job, disillusion, a passion for gambling or a mental breakdown — usually of a minor nature — which the state chooses to ignore. John Mollineux, the solo violinist, who at one time often played with a leading chamber orchestra, is now another anonymous wino sleeping by the Thames after having enjoyed a brilliant career as a musician for more than five years and having travelled (feted and honoured wherever he went) all over the world. Now he just drinks, he never plays, indeed he can't bear the sight of a music stave. Professor Mew, a Catholic, a hopeless case suffering from some kind of mental disorder, spent years wandering the streets of Oxford, brandishing a bottle, swearing, talking nonsense, raving and pestering his former colleagues and subordinates when he bumped into them (the latter at a loss as to whether to send him packing or to continue treating him as if he still had his Chair), and yet he left behind him theological writings of great note, and reached the heights of his profession as an academic and even, for several years formed part of the Papal Council for Culture over which the Pope himself presides. Both men (the first violin and the theologian, not the Pope) were drunks who had subsequently become mentally unhinged and at a certain point in their careers were expelled from their respective jobs. For a good part of the day during those first weeks of the Trinity term of my second year, I too wandered from one place to another or rather from one of the city's bookshops to another, and in my wanderings I came across the same unsociable faces again and again, dressed in the same ragged, stinking clothes, with the same alcoholic fumes and resounding belches issuing from mouths that could barely articulate a word. The beggars who wandered the city as I did were the most violent, desperate, inactive and drunken of the lot and some were perhaps wasted talents from the arts and sciences like the violinist and the theologian. The city of Oxford, or at least its centre, is not that big, so it's perfectly possible to come across the same person two or three times in one day. You can imagine how easy it is then if both oneself and the other person spend the whole day in the street, wandering, roaming around, aimlessly drifting, probably not even aware of what they're doing. Particular faces and outfits began to grow painfully familiar to me. "Ah, the ginger-bearded bloke with the blackened teeth and the broken nose," I'd think as I passed him yet again. 'There's the one with the moss green mittens." "There's that woman with the toothless grin who long ago lost her looks but who still walks as if she hadn't, like a sixties woman confident of her own prettiness." 'There goes that Scotsman who's bald as a coot under his jockey cap and who rolls his r's so tremendously when he rails against Great God and his Virgin Mother." "And that's the young black chap with all the tattoos and the right leg of his trousers slit almost to the groin." 'There's that frenzied, dishevelled old man who looks just like Fragonard's painting of the philosopher." I feared that they would begin to recognise me too and assimilate me into their ranks, that they would begin to realise that, although I was not a beggar and did not speak or dress like them, but rather had the unmistakable look of a man in a gown even when I wasn't wearing one, I too, over a period of one week, two weeks, three weeks and eventually four weeks, cropped up several times a day during their mechanical, directionless wanderings, like a stray domestic animal banished to the streets because the child Eric was ill.

  IN A WAY I DID BEGIN to feel that I was one of them and to fear that one day, in Spain or England, or wherever in the world fortune or interest led me, I might end up like them. But lest this seem the product of a mere delirium, however fleeting, I should say that my sense of unease was not in itself powerful enough to feed that fear, illusion, fantasy or identification, fomented or sustained by nothing more substantial than a mutual wandering of Oxford's streets, a mutual inactivity. There was something else feeding that baneful fear, that sombre illusion, that gloomy fantasy, that nebulous identification, even if it too were tenuous.

  Following Alan Marriott's first visit, a year or more before, I had added to the list of rare authors whose books I sought a writer unknown to me until then, John Gawsworth, whose name Marriott had mentioned and jotted down before saying goodbye and for whom Machen had written a foreword. As Marriott himself had said, Gawsworth's works were very difficult to find. Of his scant oeuvre nothing remains in print in England but, little by little, with patience, luck and the progressive sharpening of my hunter's eye, I began to find the odd short work by him in my second-hand bookshops in Oxford and London, until after some months I came across a copy of his book Backwaters, published in 1932, signed moreover by the author himself. Inscribed in ink on the flyleaf was: "John Gawsworth, written aged 19½". There wa
s also a correction in his own hand on the first page of text (after the name "Frankenstein" he had added the word "monster", in order to make it clear that he was referring to the creature and not its creator). It was precisely that feeling of temporal vertigo or of time annihilated that is provoked by holding in one's hands objects that still speak in muffled tones of their past that first aroused my curiosity, and from that moment I initiated a research project that for many months proved distinctly unfruitful, so elusive and unfamiliar was, then as now, the figure of Terence Ian Fytton Armstrong, the real name of the man who usually signed himself Gawsworth.

  Nevertheless, despite the fact that his writings were at most either passable or bizarre and made both his fall into oblivion and the lack of reprints of his book quite understandable (there was no book, nor it seemed a single article on Gawsworth and he scarcely rated a mention in even the most voluminous and exhaustive dictionaries and encyclopaedias of literature), as I tried to find out more, my interest in him grew not so much because of his rather indifferent literary output but because of the strange man behind it. The first thing I discovered were the dates of his birth and death, 1912 and 1970 and then, on a page of otherwise mute bibliography, the fact that several of his works had been published (at times under different pseudonyms, each one more absurd than the last) in such exotic and improbable places for a London-born writer as Tunis, Cairo, Sétif (Algeria), Calcutta and Vasto (Italy). His poetic works, collected between 1943 and 1945 in three volumes — mostly printed in India - enjoy the peculiarity of having a missing fourth volume, or so it would seem, for it was never published despite having a title (Farewell to Youth). It simply does not exist. His prose work - mainly short literary essays and horror stories -can be found scattered throughout obscure anthologies of the 1930s or saw the light of day - if I may use that expression — in private or limited editions.