G133: What Have We Done (15 page)

It is light when he leaves the hotel. Light. Primordial sunlight disclosing empty streets, disclosing form with shadow, the stucco facades. And silence. Here in the middle of London, silence. Not quite silence, of course. Never true silence here. The sublimated rumble of a plane. The burble of pigeons courting on a cornice. A taxi’s busy rattle along Sussex Gardens, past the terraced hotel fronts, from one of which he now emerges.

He feels that he is leaving London unseen, slipping out while everyone else is still asleep, as he walks, with his single small holdall, to the square where he left the car. The square is hotel-fringed, shabby. A few benches and plants in the middle. Sticky pavements. The car is still there, surrounded by empty parking spaces. It is not his. He is simply delivering it. Slinging his holdall onto the passenger seat, he takes his place at the wheel, on the plump leather.

He sits there, enjoying the feeling of inviolable solitude. Solitude, freedom. They seem like nearly the same thing as he sits there.

Then he starts the engine, which sounds loud in the silence of the square.

He is aware now that he does not know exactly which way to go.
He looked yesterday and it all seemed simple enough, the way out of London, south-east, towards Dover. Now even finding his way to the river seems problematic. He tries to picture it, the streets he will need to take. When he has formed some sort of mental picture of where he is going, and only then, he pulls out.

He waits at a light on Park Lane, some posh hotel on one side, the park on the other, staring sleepily straight ahead.

When he gets to the river there might be a problem. He hopes there will be signs for Dover. The possibility of getting lost makes him mildly nervous, even though he would not be in any serious danger of missing the ferry. He has plenty of time. It is his habit, when travelling, always to allow more time than he needs.

He went to sleep very early last night. The previous night, Friday, he had been out late, with Macintyre, the Germanic philology specialist at UCL. And then he had had to get up early on Saturday to take the train to Nottingham and pick up the car from its previous ‘keeper’, a Pakistani doctor. (Dr N. Khan was the name on the documents.) He had done the whole thing on a hangover, which had made the day pass over him like a dream – made it seem even now like something he had dreamed, the time he spent in Dr Khan’s front room, looking through the service history, while the doctor’s cat watched him.

He swings around Hyde Park Corner, the sun pouring down Piccadilly like something out of Turner, the palaces opposite the park half dissolving in a flood of light.

He squints, tries to push it away with his hand.

Macintyre had not been very helpful. He was supposed to have looked at the manuscript, the section on Dutch and German analogues in particular. They had talked about it for a while, in The Lowlander. Macintyre, with a suggestion of subtle mockery that was entirely typical of him, always insisted on meeting there. The early modern shifts in German pronunciation, for instance. The way some dialects . . .

He has to focus, as he flows through them, on the layout of the streets around Victoria Station.

The way some dialects were still impervious to those shifts, after more than five hundred years.

The traffic system pulls him one way, then another, past empty office towers. He looks for the lane that will throw him left eventually, onto Vauxhall Bridge Road.

There.

No, Macintyre had not been as helpful as he might have been. Obviously, he was holding back. Professional jealousies were evident. He did not want to give too much away about what he was working on. That was why he had wanted to talk about other things. Kept steering the talk away from shop. Wanted to know, when he had had a few Duvels, about his ‘sex life’. ‘How’s your sex life, then?’ he had said.

Well, he had mentioned Waleria. Said something about her. Something non-committal.

The lights halfway down Vauxhall Bridge Road start to turn as he approaches them and after a moment’s hesitation he stops.

Macintyre was married, wasn’t he? Kids.

The lights go green. Unhurriedly he moves off. A minute later – the Thames. That exhilarating momentary sense of space. The water, sun-white.

Then streets again.

In south London he feels even freer. These are streets he does not know, that may be why. Strange to him, these sleeping estates. These hulks, slowly mouldering. He has a vague idea that he needs to find the Old Kent Road. Old Kent Road. That insane game of Monopoly that happened in the SCR once. He thinks of that for a moment, and imagines the Old Kent Road to be liveried in a drab brown.

Signs for Dover draw him deeper into the maze of south-east London. The maze marvellously unpeopled – the low high streets with their tattered shops. The sun shines on their grubby brick faces. Dirty windows hung with curtains. Only at the petrol stations are there signs of life. Someone filling up.

Someone walking away.

He has so much time, he thinks he might make the earlier ferry. His own ‘sails’, as they still say, just after eight. So yes, he may well make the previous one – it is not yet five thirty and already he is in the vicinity of Blackheath, already he is merging onto an empty motorway, its surface shining like water. Speed. There is a tangle of motorways here. He must keep an eye out for signs.

Yes, Macintyre has several kids. No wonder he seemed so threadbare and fed up. So tetchy. Some little house somewhere in Outer London, full of stuff. Full of noise. He and his wife at each other’s throats. Too worn out to fuck. Who wants it?

CANTERBURY
says the sign.

And he thinks, with a little frisson of excitement,
This is the way Chaucer’s pilgrims went. Trotting horses. Stories. Muddy lanes. And when it started to rain – a hood. Wet hands.

His dry hands hold the leather-trimmed wheel. Through sunglasses he eyes the wide oncoming lanes. He has the motorway to himself.

Wonderful to imagine it though. The whole appeal of medieval studies – the languages, the literature, the history, the art and architecture – to immerse oneself in that world. That other world. Safely other. Other in almost every way, except that it was
here
. Look at those fields on either side of the motorway. Those low hills. It was here.
They
were here, as we are here now. And this too shall pass. We don’t actually believe that though, do we? We are unable to believe that our own world
will
pass. So it will go on forever? No. It will turn into something else. Slowly – too slowly to be perceived by the people living in it. Which is already happening, is always happening. We just can’t see it. Like sound changes, spoken language.

‘Some Remarks on the Representation of Spoken Dialect in “The Reeve’s Tale”.’

The kick-ass title of his first published work. Published in
Medium Ævum
LXXIV. Originally written for Hamer’s
Festschrift
– Hamer who had supervised his doctoral work when he first turned up at Oxford. A tall, bald man with spacious, elegant rooms in Christ
Church. Would literally offer you a sherry when you arrived –
that
old school, that English.

The author of works such as:
Old English Sound Changes for Beginners
(1967). Professor Hamer lived, it had seemed, in a fortress of abstrusity. Asleep at night, he must have dreamed, so his young foreign pupil had thought, sipping his sherry, of palatal diphthongisation, of loss of
h
and compensatory lengthening.

And he had envied him those harmless dreams. Something so profoundly peaceful about them.

Something so profoundly peaceful about them.

Everything so settled, you see. It all happened a thousand years ago. And the medievalist sits in his study, in a shaft of sunlight, lost in a reverie of life on the far side of that immense lapse of time. The whole exercise is, in its way, a memento mori. A meditation on the effacing nature of time.

He likes the little world of the university. Some people, he knows, hate it. They long for London.

He likes it. The fairy-tale topography of the town. A make-believe world of walled gardens. The quietness of summer. The stone-floored lodge and the deferential porter. Yes, a make-believe world, like something imagined by a shy child.

Somewhere to hide.

Dreaming spires.

Sun sparkles on wide motorway.

It is just after six and he will be at Dover, he estimates, in an hour.

Yes, he likes the little world of the university. He
likes
its claustral narrowness. Sometimes he wishes it were narrower still. That the world of the present was even more absent. He would have quite enjoyed, he thinks, the way of life of a medieval monastery – as a scholarly brother, largely exempt from manual labour. He would have enjoyed that.

With, naturally, the one obvious proviso.

Without noticing, he has pushed the car well into the nineties. It manages the speed without effort. He eases off the accelerator and the
needle immediately starts to sink and for the first time this morning he feels sleepy – a mesmeric sleepiness induced by the level hum of the engine and the monotonous, empty perspective in front of him. It seems, for long moments, like something on a screen, something spewing from a CPU. Just graphics. Without consequences. He shakes his head, moves his hands on the wheel.

Yes. The one obvious proviso.

Last year, during the Hilary term, he had done the thing he had long wanted to, and had an affair with an undergraduate. It had been something he had had in view since his arrival in Oxford to finish his doctorate. It had taken years to achieve – and the affair itself, when it finally happened, was in many ways unsatisfactory. Just two weeks it had lasted. And yet the memories of it, of her youth . . .

He was sad in an abstracted way, for a day or two, when she ended it with that letter in her schoolgirl’s handwriting, that letter which so pathetically overestimated his own emotional engagement in the situation. And he understood that he had also overestimated her emotional engagement in it. As he had been intent on enacting his own long-standing fantasy, so she had been enacting a fantasy of her own, in no way less selfish. Except that she was nineteen or twenty, and still entitled to selfishness – not having learned yet, perhaps, how easily and lastingly people are hurt – and he was more than ten years older and ought to have understood that by now.

Only when he saw her, soon after, in the arms of someone her own age – some kid – did he experience anything like a moment’s actual pain, something Nabokovian and poisonous, seeing them there in the spring sunlight of the quad.

And by then he was already mixed up with Erica, the medieval Latin scholar from Oriel. That didn’t last long either. It lasted one summer.

The days he has just spent in London have exhausted him. Not only the meeting with Macintyre. He also had a meeting with his publisher. And a symposium on Old English sound changes at UCL, for which he was one of the speakers. Various social things.
He had seen Emmanuele, the short, snobbish, scholarly Italian who had finished his DPhil a few years before and was now a lawyer in London. Emmanuele had asked after Waleria, what was happening there? It was at a party at Mani’s, last September, that he had met her. ‘I don’t know,’ he had said. ‘Something. Maybe. We’re seeing each other. I don’t know.’

S
olitude, freedom. There is that feeling, still, on the ferry. This in spite of the other people; they are transient strangers, they do not fix him in place. They know nothing about him. He has no obligations to them. Sea wind disperses summer’s heat on the open deck, hung with lifeboats. The floor see-saws. Is sucked down, then pushes at his feet. England dwindles. The wind booms, pulls his hair. Inside, in the sealed warmth, people eat and shop. He wanders among them, nameless and invisible. Sits at a table on his own. His solitude, for the hour it takes to travel to France, is inviolable. He stands at a window, golden with salt in the sunlight. He watches the playful waves. He feels as free as the gulls hanging on the wind. Solitude, freedom.

A
s soon as he has driven off the ship he puts on the A/C and Vivaldi’s ‘Gloria’ – pours into the French motorway system with that ecstatic music filling his ears.

Dum-dee

Dum-dum-dum-dee

Dum-dum-dum

The asphalt glitters. It is Sunday morning. Farms lie in the flat bright land on either side of the motorway.

And he knows this motorway well. It follows the so-called Côte d’Opale, towards Ostende. To the left as he drives are the windy dunes.

WELKOM IN WEST-VLAANDEREN
says the sign.

And now it is like he is driving through his own past, through a landscape full of living nerves, of names that are almost painfully evocative. Koksijde, where he once went with Delphine and her
mother’s dog – the small dog digging in the sand among tufts of wind-flattened grass. Nieuwpoort – where they spent that summer, he and his parents. The smell of the sea finding its way inland, up little streets – and at the end of the streets, when you walked down them to meet the sea with your plastic spade in your hand, a milky horizon. Roeselare, where they would visit his father’s parents – the suburban house, with hop fields at the end of the neat garden. Though the memories possess a jewel-like sharpness they seem surprisingly small and far away, as if seen through the wrong end of a telescope. It has been years since he was here, on this flat tract of land next to the ship-strewn sea, and that his own life has been going on long enough now for things like that windy day at Koksijde with the little dog to lie more than ten, more than fifteen years in the past is somehow a shock to him. He was already an adult then, more or less, and yet he still thinks of his adulthood as something that is just getting under way.

Feeling a little shaken, he stops for petrol.