Engleby (13 page)

That afternoon, after the co-res lunch, since Stellings didn’t want to see me, I went to the Footballers and helped myself to a pint of Adnams, leaving the money on the till, because the landlord was asleep in his usual place, on the floor behind the bar. I sat by the fire and had a few more, always being careful to leave what I owed.

At seven I set off for Jennifer’s house and smoked a joint on the way. I rang the bell. The party had hardly started, but I felt surprisingly relaxed. Jen was in the kitchen, cooking a large rice dish, so I sat and talked to Anne for a bit while other people began to arrive.

By about nine there must have been seventy people or more in that tiny freezing house. It was almost impossible to get through to the kitchen, where the wine was. The corridor and the doorway were blocked by students, whose army greatcoats and sheepskin jerkins, beards and bushy hair took up all the space. I went to the off-licence on the next street and bought a bottle of wine for myself, which I kept in my coat pocket after I’d forced the cork in with the handle of a knife.

Music was playing – the Velvet Underground, the Eagles, Can and Roxy Music, I think. There were lots of people I knew there – Nick and Hannah and various others from Tipperary and people I’d met at the co-residency lunch. The rooms were what they call ‘heaving’, which is the right word when people are shoulder to shoulder and some are trying to dance, some to escape and some to manoeuvre a paper cup, a paper plate and a plastic fork in rice and chopped green pepper with occasional tiny flakes of tuna fish.

I went upstairs with my bottle to escape the crush and opened a door into a bedroom.

It was dark in there and it was cold. There was an unlit gas fire on one side of the room. The bed had a few coats thrown across it, over a duvet with a pale blue, clean, just-ironed cover. This was the first duvet I’d seen in England, and it looked exotic in a drab, Scandinavian way.

I shut the door behind me.

The desk had history textbooks in three or four divided piles. I sat down at the desk. There were notebooks with her handwriting. There was a tiny piece of foil with about ten bob’s worth of second-rate hash in it. (I licked some off my finger.) There was a photograph of a house with a man and a woman outside it, smiling. There was a birthday card with a boat on it and a half-used lipsalve.

Through the window in the darkness I could see the jumble of small slate roofs on the brick terraced cottages. I imagined a cat. I imagined a gas fire, ski socks (even though I wasn’t quite sure what they were) and morning tea. I imagined humorous living parents, with enough money and jokes about toothpaste and boyfriends and tights and Brian Martin’s endless speech.

I gently pulled open a desk drawer. Beneath some envelopes, a pad of paper and a new, unused blister-pack of contraceptive pills, I found a large diary, full of closely written entries.

I thought about my mother – for a second. Then I was able to put her out of my mind, along with much else.

There was a note in my pigeonhole this morning from Dr Woodrow, the fleshy one who interviewed me for the entrance award. ‘Dear Mr Engleby, I would be most obliged if you could drop into my room (G12) for a brief informal chat one day. Would Tuesday at noon be convenient? Peter Woodrow.’

I stood outside, where I had stood that winter morning. I wondered what had happened to the clever-looking boy, my competitor; I’d never seen him again.

‘Come in.’

Woodrow had glasses perched halfway down his thick nose; his grey hair needed cutting. He pointed me to the armchair where Gerald Stanley had sat to ask his asinine questions.

‘How are you enjoying Natural Sciences? An unusual move for an English scholar.’

‘I know. I didn’t do that well in Part One B, but I think it’s all right now.’

‘Yes, so I gather. Have you thought what you might do when you go down?’

Woodrow was sitting at the table where he had sat before, leafing through my papers.

‘No, I haven’t.’

‘I sometimes try to help out a bit. The university appointments board can place most people. But informally I sometimes . . . Would you like a glass of hock? Or sherry, perhaps?’

‘No, I don’t drink alcohol.’

‘I see. Would you describe yourself as a loner?’

‘No more than most. I have friends.’ Stellings. Jen.

‘Good, good, that’s important. But self-sufficient?’

‘I’ve learned to be.’

‘Good, good. Equally good.’

Woodrow sounded as though he was choosing between the cheese soufflé and the orange posset at a college feast.

He lit a pipe. ‘Do you speak any languages? German? French? Russian?’

‘Not really. German and French O level.’

‘So you have the basic grammar.’

‘I suppose so.’

‘And you’re a quick learner.’

‘Averagely.’

‘More than averagely according to Dr Waynflete.’

‘Maybe.’

‘Have you ever thought of the Foreign Office?’

Not really. The idea of the Foreign Office scared me. I pictured it full of people from Oxford, or from schools like Eton and Winchester, Rugby and Wellington – bilingual, duplicitous. Debonair.

‘Often,’ I said.

‘I could perhaps put in a word for you if you were interested.’

‘That would be very kind.’

I had no intention of serving in the visa section of the Belgrade embassy, but I was intrigued by the interest shown in me. It was so . . . Unprecedented. I wondered if there was some gay aspect to it.

Woodrow coughed a couple of times. ‘What are your politics? Are you much involved in that sort of thing?’

I thought of Jen Soc, Lib, Lab and Con Soc. I wanted people to be happy, but that wasn’t much of a position. I didn’t answer.

Woodrow looked at me. ‘Will you vote in the general election?’

I shook my head. ‘Who governs Britain?’ That was the question. Who governs Britain? Heath or the miners? Heath or Wilson? What was the other guy called? Not him obviously.

‘I understand you took part in the march on St Catharine’s.’

‘That wasn’t political. It was about whether the colleges should have both sexes.’

‘It acquired a political and ad hominem tone at one point, I understand.’

I didn’t know what he was talking about. ‘How did you know I was on that march?’

‘I believe there’s a march planned in protest against British troops in Northern Ireland. Will you be going on that?’

It depends if Jennifer Arkland’s going on it. ‘I haven’t decided yet. When is it?’

‘If you
are
interested in a career in the Foreign Office it would obviously be better not to be seen to be in open conflict with the government of the day. Obviously.’

Woodrow gave a small laugh. I nodded.

‘In private of course you are entitled to whatever views you wish. Private is the key word here.’

‘How would they ever know, anyway, if I’d been on some little student march?’

Woodrow breathed in noisily. ‘On matters of national security, such as Northern Ireland, the security services are as vigilant as possible. They want information before not after the event.’

I felt my jaw loosen. ‘You mean a photographer is—’

‘I haven’t the faintest idea how they proceed. I’m merely pointing out that if you are serious about the Foreign Office then you need to think carefully about such things.’

I left Woodrow’s rooms and returned to my own in Clock Court, where I listened to some Mozart and
Rainbow in Curved Air
by Terry Riley.

I can’t see the point of Mozart. Of Mozart I can’t see the point. The point of Mozart I can’t see. See I can’t of Mozart the point. Can’t I of Mozart point the see . . . I can’t see the point of Mozart.

That’s not a tune, that’s an algorithm. An algorithm in a powdered wig.

Stellings has this idea that ‘classical’ music will die before Tamla Motown, because it has no tunes by which it can be remembered. (For the sake of his argument, you have to exclude opera, particularly Puccini.)

It still isn’t true. Off the top of my head, I can think of at least ten great orchestral tunes. Elgar has three, Holst one, Schubert two, Brahms one, Tchaikovksy one, Handel two. Beethoven, er . . . Mozart, mmm . . . Hang on! Sibelius. The Intermezzo of the
Karelia
suite.

Not really a tune, according to Stellings, more of a brass-band march; or ‘sousa on a good day’ as he put it. His point is that
My Fair Lady, South Pacific
or
Porgy and Bess
– let’s say the work of Rodgers, Gershwin, Berlin – have more true melody,
and
of a better quality, than the whole ‘classical’ canon.

He jabs his finger in your face and barks out choices that you have to call at once. ‘The main theme of the
Trout
quintet or “This Nearly Was Mine”?
Fingal’s Cave
or “On the Street Where You Live”? Just pure melody, OK? Bach’s 23rd Goldberg Variation or “Stranger on the Shore” by Mr Acker Bilk? Piano Dirge for Wet Monday Afternoon in D Flat Minor by César Franck or “All I See is You” by Dusty Springfield?’

Stellings is mad, though I suppose I see what he means.

Terry Riley isn’t long on melody either, to be honest. You have to listen to it many, many times, and then you can begin to see how the patterns build up. He must have awfully quick hands on the keyboard.

The other thing you need to really appreciate T. Riley’s music is to have smoked about ten quid’s worth of premium marijuana. I’m pretty sure Riley had when he wrote the stuff.

That’s what I did after I’d seen Woodrow. Although I find dope gives me some memory loss, I don’t really mind about that. Quite apart from the effect of the chemical in the brain, the
taste
is so exquisite . . .

Perhaps it’s obvious to you what old Woodrow was driving at.

If so, I must have misremembered or misrepresented what he said because it certainly wasn’t obvious at the time.

All that seems a lifetime ago now. Why?

Because something truly terrible has happened. It’s very hard for me to believe or think about it in any cogent way. I can’t even believe that I’m sitting at my desk in Clock Court and I’m writing these words down, but it appears to be the case.

Nobody told me about it, as I feel they should have done. It was barely even ‘news’ by the time I heard it, having been known for almost twenty-four hours. And the first I find out is that I’m staring at a faculty noticeboard on Sidgwick Site and the lecture schedule is dwarfed by this large poster with a picture of a girl all too familiar. It takes me some time to register the full bleakness of what is being said. Third-year history student Jennifer Arkland has disappeared.

Notoriety is such a very odd thing. From the moment her face appeared on that poster, Jennifer has stopped being herself.

Vanished girl. Gone. Something pious has attached itself to her. It’s no longer possible to think of her as the girl in the next seat at the lecture. It’s impossible to think of her at all without a whiff of sanctimony.

People compete to express how well they knew her and what a great person she was – is. ‘I refuse to speak of her in the past’ has become a self-righteous refrain in the tea room.

We all feel estranged from her. She’s not herself any more.

For some days it was presumed, or hoped, that she had gone on a research trip or a holiday without telling her housemates, or her parents or her friends. This was in fact unlikely, bordering on impossible. She was an organised sort of person and aware of the anxieties of others. She could project herself into people’s thoughts and imagine what they felt. It was a habit; she couldn’t
not
show consideration for those near to her.

Still, on the grounds that the banal or simple is the answer to most mysteries, people keep saying there must be a straightforward explanation and that Jen will turn up fine and well in Harrogate or Paris or Lymington tomorrow.

She hasn’t.

In the Kestrel and the Whim, among those who knew her less well or not at all, the consensus is similar, but for a different reason. These people back the anticlimactic resolution – she left a message with the porter and he forgot to pass it on; she left a note in her tutor’s pigeonhole and it got lost in the other mail – for a different reason. They back the banal because they want the exciting; they would like her to have been abducted, tortured and disembowelled by a savage because that would be much more interesting than the missing-message explanation. They don’t want to seem callous by speculating in the lurid, however; plus, it’s tempting providence. If you’re hoping for the premium-bond jackpot, you talk about the preponderance of £25 prizes.

What is clear, however, is that whatever the outcome, Jennifer has in fact been taken away from us. She could never be herself again, because even if she reappeared it would be difficult to think of her in the same way. That innocent girl who suggested the Soc trip to Paris, who cleared up the plates at the end of the meeting in her new jeans and grey sweater, pushing the hair back behind her ear . . . She isn’t coming back.