Abdication: A Novel (22 page)

“Do you want to confess? Have you silently run over anything? Oh I am so sorry. Not funny. Sorry.”

May reddened even more.

“I have left my overnight bag behind.”

For a moment they were both silent.

And then Julian remembered he had two spare shirts. “You can have one of them. We will buy a toothbrush and some soap. And after all, it is only for a few nights.”

What an idiot she was, she had told him. But she had accepted his old shirt and reported the next morning that she had slept better than she had for many days.

The three young people chose to have their breakfast in a nearby café rather than at the grubby linoleum kitchen table in the boarding house with its bottle of Worcester sauce, piles of ancient crumbs, and unidentifiable slops of liquid on its greasy oilcloth. Over a cup of tea
and a thick slice of bread, Peter said he was intending to accompany his friend Eric to Spain before the year was out. Despite the short span of their acquaintance, Peter’s passion for the cause made his invitation to Julian to join them sound persuasive. The Communist Party could do with all the help it could get against the right-wingers, Peter told him eagerly. If Julian thought the mining industry was in trouble over here he should also take a firsthand look at the working conditions in Spain. A major conflict over there was not only inevitable but also imminent. Peter wanted to be there to record it and Julian assured him he would think seriously about his proposition.

As they left the stifling heat of the brightly lit café, thanking Peter and wishing him well with his research and the writing of his paper, they adjusted their eyes to the darkness outside. Both were in a jaunty mood as, turning the corner, they were confronted with what looked like a giant orange gobstopper balanced on a tall black pole. Julian recognised the Belisha beacon at once. The transport minister, Mr. Hore-Belisha, was a parliamentary friend of Sir Philip’s and had stayed at Cuckmere the preceding summer just after the first beacon had gone up. He had joked to Julian that pedestrians had at last won their independence from the tyranny of cars.

“You are witnessing an historic landmark of the future,” Julian assured May in an exaggeratedly dramatic voice.

But May was looking bored.

“I thought you would be interested, what with you being a car buff,” he said in a tone of mock-hurt.

“Interested in lamps on sticks? You must be mad. Anyway, I’ve seen them before. They’re all over the place. You notice things like that when you drive a car, you know.”

She spoke in such a robust way that Julian burst out laughing at his pomposity. And then May laughed too. Together they walked through the streets, their carefree mood evaporating as they became conscious
of the curiosity they invited in passers-by with their clean, neat clothes and their healthy, well-fed cheeks. At first the greyness and despair that Julian had anticipated seemed to be everywhere. Row upon row of identical buildings, built back to back, stretched out in front of them. Washing lines hung in the backyards, on which newly washed clothes were flapping, already grubby from air that tasted bitter with coal dust. Gutters were full of discarded crusts and tea leaves. Miniature cemeteries crowded out the flowerbeds that must once have brought some brightness to the front gardens.

May heard Julian’s indrawn breath. A man was hunched against a wall for support, coughing the life out of his guts, gasping and heaving between each spasm. A sailor was crossing the road, carrying a parrot on his arm, the blue and green plumage of the ragged bird muffled as if it had been dipped in muddy water. A small boy flinched in the doorway of a shop, as a woman raised her fist, lowering it as soon as she noticed she was being watched, her anger temporarily thwarted from making contact with its target. Bunched up at the street corners, and standing outside the high iron-grilled factory gates, groups of men smoked, huddled together in twos and threes, their caps dragged well down over their eyes, their jacket collars pulled up firmly to their necks, the top button done up. Every moment or two one of them would suck in his cheeks, before landing a globule of foamy spit on the pavement.

“These men and two and a quarter million more cannot find work,” Julian said more to himself than May, shaking his head.

But May was not listening. She was looking at a man whose face was so ingrained with coal that it seemed that no amount of washing could ever remove the stains. May smiled at him, her gesture returned with an expression that lit up the young man’s face, his smile revealing white teeth that dazzled in contrast to his sooty lips.

“For a moment that boy reminded me of my brother,” she said, smiling once again at the thought, as she and Julian walked on. “Same sort of age, I think.”

And as they both looked more closely they began to see that among the scenes of hopelessness there was an intense vitality to these streets. Groups of shoeless children were playing near the steps of the houses, jumping, hula-hooping and chasing one another around the cold hard pavements with as much abandon as the children May had watched playing on the powdery sand of her island home. Women stood in animated conversation, sharing grudges and gossip, their arms tightly folded over their dingy aprons. Some knelt, their backs rounded over a pail of sudsy water, or squatted with a brush, demonstrating their pride in producing the most gleaming of thresholds. A couple of women were turning a skipping rope, their chatter uninterrupted by the children who hopped over the whirling arc between them. Two little girls were absorbed by something in the sky directly above them and, following their gaze, May and Julian made out a vapour trail emerging from the tail of a high-flying aeroplane, as it formed the word “OXO” in blurry white letters.

Julian closed his eyes as shame began to creep over him. What had he been expecting to gain by this cursory visit north? On the way up he had tried to defend the research-based purpose of the visit to May. His own words returned to him now and he regretted them. Over breakfast May had told Peter about some of the families who lived in her cousins’ neighbourhood in East London. The children, many of whom had so little, played together and laughed together as if the riches of the world were theirs. Women who spent back-bending hours of the day cleaning and cooking and doing their best to manage, viewed life with a cheerfulness that was instinctive, infectious. And men, even though unemployment meant they struggled to maintain their natural place in the
hierarchy of society by providing for their families, were rarely beaten entirely. May’s ability to look beneath the superficial was unmistakable. Her insight startled him.

That evening the mayor had moved on and two single rooms had become available in the hotel. Julian suggested they go out to a film and a plate of fish and chips afterwards. As Popeye, the spinach-eating sailor, appeared on the cinema screen accompanied by his hoop-eyebrowed girlfriend, May was unable to suppress a shout.

“That’s it! It’s
her
! Different body but same face!”

“Who?” hissed Julian, taken aback by the little outburst.

“Tell you later,” she promised.

But later Julian had forgotten to ask her why she had laughed so much at the sight of Olive Oyl, although he did notice that May pushed the chips to one side of her plate, leaving them uneaten. By an unspoken agreement they did not dwell on the sights and experiences of the day they had just spent together. Both sensed a need to leave the subject alone for a while. Instead, May wanted to know about Julian’s life in Oxford. She had glimpsed that beautiful city once from the window of a coach, she told him, and longed to visit it again properly. Julian told her how his father had taught at the university, how instead of sending him to sleep Matthew Arnold’s dreaming spires had woken his mind and how long hours in the Bodleian library raced by as he read everything he could lay his hands on. Locke and Berkeley and other writers May had never heard of seemed to be speaking directly to him, he said, although he couldn’t get on with Kant. And for that matter he was having a hard time getting on with his flatmate.

“Rupert is a member of a club called the Bullingdon,” he told May. “God alone knows what they all get up to except drink and eat and demolish as much precious property as possible. About ten years ago club members smashed up nearly five hundred windows in Peckwater Quad at Christ Church. They are a bunch of vacuous, spoiled,
snobbish, stupid idiots,” he said, suddenly furious. “And what’s more, their current hero is Oswald Mosley, the fascist leader, one of the most wrong-headed men in Britain. God knows where it is all going to lead.”

“Why on earth do you share a flat with Rupert?” May wanted to know.

“I sort of fell into it,” Julian admitted. “The truth is I am annoyed with myself for not having ended the arrangement. Too late now, though. But that’s my trouble. I say I will do things and I mean it when I say it, but then the motivation slips away. But I do rate his parents. Especially her. Poor Joan. She worries so much about Rupert. She deplores all that right-wing talk.”

Julian changed the subject.

“Tell me about you,” he said to May. “What sort of place did you grow up in? What do the West Indies look like? I know nothing about that part of the world.”

May needed no more prompting. She began to tell Julian of the monkeys who hung from their stringy arms in the trees around the plantation, waiting for the right moment to sneak a banana from the lunch table. She spoke of the rustling sound made by the wind that whispered its way up and down the green swaying sugarcane. She told of the brilliance of the new growth of the cane, the colour of crushed peas, and described the way she would peel the waxy skin from the stalks and suck out the sweet sticky juice. She spoke of the markets held in village squares, where the country people would come, balancing baskets on their heads packed high and tight with shiny avocadoes, olive- and coral-coloured mangoes, lemons still attached to their leafy branches, shiny green peppers and crescent-moon-shaped chillies. And without mentioning her mother, or the accident, May told him about the island’s deserted beaches, which lay below cliffs lined with scrawny hawthorn trees, bent almost double by years of storms that had tried to dislodge them from their precarious footholds. Finally, when she
began to describe the sea itself, in all its mesmeric, ceaseless, churning, dangerous, deep blue beauty she fell silent, floored by the power of her memories.

When May came to the end, her eyes shining as bright as seawater, Julian gazed at her.

“Thank you,” he said, eventually. “That was so lovely.
You
are lovely.”

Julian and May had stayed on in Wigan for two more days and when the time came to leave Julian had learned something, but not the lesson he had been expecting. Instead of the mixture of detached, analytical pity that he had anticipated as the legacy of his visit to the North, he was instead conscious of something more elusive, more humbling and more valuable. He felt chastised by his self-importance.

During the long drive back Julian struggled to work out how he should respond to the preceding days. Something of his old confused thinking returned as he tightroped between a sequence of intellectual and emotional choices. Maybe he could volunteer to teach at a local school once his exams were out of the way, to which May had ventured, “Well now, that
is
an idea.”

“Education is everything,” he said, adding in a lighter voice, “perhaps we should bring the king back with us on our next trip?” Between them, he suggested, they could dissuade the king from looking at Germany for answers, and force him to concentrate on the problems at home.

“He might hear us but do you think he would really be
listening
?” Julian asked her with a hard little laugh, not expecting a reply.

With May’s prompting he talked about the Great War. He was studying its cause and effect as part of his degree. The economist John Maynard Keynes predicted dreadful consequences to the harshly punitive treaty with Germany that had ended the four years of conflict. The trouble is, Julian explained, off on one of his rambles, that however
hard you try to dissolve patriotism with the other ingredients of an emotional stew, it always floats to the top, just like grease finding its way to the surface of a meat broth. There were still so many older people alive who believed that it was a glorious thing to die for one’s country. In Julian’s view it was madness. He looked at May. Her eyes were on the road ahead of her but the occasional affirmative nod confirmed that she was concentrating on what he was saying. He went on. An Oxford friend was being taught economics by a don who had once slept with Keynes and pronounced him (“only out of bed, mind you”) to be the most terrifying of that group of artists and writers and thinkers who called themselves the Bloomsbury Group. The leader of the bunch was Virginia Woolf, writer of luminous, poetic prose and, with James Joyce, one of the most innovative novelists the century had so far seen.

“I have heard her speak on the wireless. She has a beautiful voice,” he said clearly impressed by the woman. “And come to think of it, she also has a beautiful face, judging by the photographs I have seen of her.”

Julian’s offer to lend May his copy of Woolf’s novel
Mrs. Dalloway
was accepted at once although May did not mention she had met Virginia Woolf on several occasions. The well-known writer and feminist lived in the village of Rodmell near Cuckmere Park and May had driven Mrs. Cage over there several times for lunch with her friend, Mrs. Woolf’s cook. Mrs. Woolf was always most courteous to May on these visits. Usually she was busy putting on her hat and about to leave for the train to London but she never failed to ask May questions about herself.