My Father's Fortune Read online

  So love, yes. But love without the ghost of any physical expression. This may be simply because we’re so ill-informed that we don’t realise the possibility exists. I don’t think we’ve heard of such a thing as homosexuality, any more than we have of metre. We don’t know anything about anything! Well … there are some things that my fellow poet’s evidently now beginning to find out about, because somewhere in the middle of our School Certificate year, I think even while he’s still vaulting gates and we’re spending so much time on our way either to or from the Queen Adelaide and the Bonesgate, he shows me a poem dedicated not to me but to someone called Stella. Stella? A girl? He’s just met her, he tells me. They’ve been for a walk together. They’re going to go for another walk together. I feel the sickening stab of an emotion completely new to me: jealousy. I’ve been displaced. Also he’s found a girl and I haven’t. And not just one called Maureen or Doreen, but Stella, like a girl … well, like Mike the tiler’s girl in Chicago, or a girl in the dedication of a poem. Later he tells me that he invented the name, though what her real name is he doesn’t reveal. Perhaps it is Doreen, or Maureen. The girl herself, though, is real enough – the first indication of Lane’s growing attraction to and for the opposite sex. Or perhaps not the first; Elsie has always been rather taken by his debonair and dashing style, and whenever she gets half a chance, I think, now that she has broken the ice by bursting into tears in front of him, confides in him about how awful my father, my sister and I all are. Later he turns up in Ewell with a Rosalind, and then, in the summer holidays when we’re still only halfway through the sixth form, less than eighteen months after that first walk with Stella, he establishes his ascendancy for good and all. I get a wild letter from him in Paris confessing in an agony of self-reproach that something terrible has occurred involving a woman he’s met, a schoolteacher four years older than himself. He is bewildered, insane, completely uncontrollable … can’t answer for his actions … has committed an offence against her … I take this (wrongly, I have just discovered) to mean that they have had intercourse, and am shaken to the core.

  Once again I’ve been left far behind. My still cloudy romantic feelings fasten on girls, just as they always have; but the only practical manifestation of this, while my fellow-poet’s making so much headway, is that my knees turn to water whenever I pass a girl in the street. I pass quite a lot of girls in the street, particularly in the mornings, when they like me are on their way to school. By the time I get to the bus stop my knees are often scarcely in a condition to hold me up. Then, on the bus, more trouble. The vibration induces that awkward bulge in the trousers that disconcerts all adolescent boys. Some instinct tells me, even though nothing and no one else has, that there’s something shameful about this, and that when the moment comes to get off the bus it has to be concealed behind the pile of books I’m carrying. Whether I make any connection between the bulge in the trousers and the weakness in the knees I can’t remember. I realise that I must do better than this if I’m to go on talking to Lane. I must have something more than loss of muscle tone in my knees to report. I have at the very least actually to speak to a girl. In my diary for a start there are only cryptic allusions to my quest: ‘And now the patient stars are looking down outside my window, asking me why I am afraid to play the aces they so unexpectedly put in my hand. What can I answer? High morality? Faint-hearted mortality, rather; it is no use deceiving myself; I can only promise myself that next time … ah, next time …’

  Exactly what aces the stars have dropped into my hands from the heavenly card game they seem to be playing overhead I can no longer remember. No mystery, though, in spite of my coyness, about who it is that I’m pursuing – or rather failing to – because I don’t have much choice in the matter. I only know one girl: Jennifer, with whom I was in love six or seven years earlier, with whom I shared straw cigarettes and the Girls’ Crystal and the wartime twilight – the girl in the dirndl from whom my father worried that I might contract girlishness. (Does he ever worry about my friendship with Michael Lane? I can’t remember his ever saying anything to suggest it.) I quickly start being in love with Jennifer again. Within two weeks I’ve actually brought myself to write her name down in the diary, and to reveal a little of my new feelings, if only to myself. ‘She was, of course, as disarmingly amused and charming as ever … more beautiful than I have ever seen anyone look … intense nervous elation all evening afterwards, followed by sleeplessness nearly all night … Today, however, I have sunk once again into the sober depression of hopelessness …’

  From now on there are many sighs and moonings in the diary (‘… paralysed by suddenly hollow longing of love … could do nothing but walk about in the damp neighbourhood or sit and stare at my desk…’). I also record many attempts to contrive a meeting, which for some reason I feel must appear to be accidental. She has now left school and is working as a secretary in London. It takes me many evenings of watching the successive waves of commuters emerge from the station footpath at Ewell East to discover which train she returns on. Then, as she heads up the road towards home among all the others, I happen by some coincidence to be walking just behind her on my way back from school, even though school finished two hours earlier.

  The diary’s reticent about exactly how often this coincidence recurs, but quite often, I think, before at last I manage to walk a little faster, and find myself happening by an even greater coincidence to overtake her. I must be in danger of being pitched into the gutter by the instability in my knees at this sudden turn of speed, but somehow I remain upright long enough to just happen for some reason to glance back, and … ‘Oh, hello! What a surprise!’

  The stars are evidently dropping playing cards out of heaven as thick and fast as Elsie at bridge, because fate repeats the same coincidence for the next few evenings, and if Jennifer’s at all surprised at this strain upon the laws of probability she’s too polite to mention it. Eventually our relationship progresses a little. We walk round the neighbourhood at night together. I put my arm round her. In my conversations with Michael Lane I report progress, discuss the nuances of the relationship, and humbly listen to his expert advice. Jennifer gives me an expensive foulard in gold silk. I kiss her. I question myself in the diary as to whether I’m really in love with her after all. I take her to the sixth form social, and up to London for a night on the town. Where do we go – to a concert? A play? A night club? No – to the Ideal Home Exhibition. What am I doing? And what do her parents think about all this? My mother’s parents must have had mixed feelings about my father, when he first came courting in his bow tie and his slicked-down hair, but I must cut an even more unsettling figure. My father has given me money to get myself a new sports jacket and trousers. In a sober gents’ outfitters in Epsom I’ve selected them in a discreet shade of grey, but under the artificial lighting of the shop I’ve misread the colour. Mr and Mrs Dennis-Smith have to watch their beautiful daughter being called for by a young man who is not only nine feet tall and nine inches wide, with a permanent sneer on his lips, but who is dressed from head to foot in pale apple-green. I must look like a dissident intellectual who’s gone off to join Robin Hood and his Merry Men. Now this pale green young man is taking their daughter out to the Ideal Home Exhibition. Jennifer’s mother has always had an urbane social manner, and continues to exercise it as we make conversation while her daughter gets ready (and what on earth do we make conversation about? Subjectivity and objectivity in modern French literature?), but I detect a new note of unease in her manner. She thinks that we’re putting down a deposit on a house, and ordering our first three-piece suite. She thinks she’s going to find herself with a pale green son-in-law.

  When I think of Lane and that super-egoistic subjectivity of his that I’ve noted in the diary I’m abashed at the feebleness of my efforts. Or when I imagine the way my father walked into that party thirty years earlier and simply strolled up to the girl who was going to become my mother. No coincidences. No wobbly knees. No consulting wit
h his friend about how best to proceed. Simply: ‘I’m Tom – I suppose you’re Vi!’

  Girls and dancing, yes. I seem to be trailing rather a long way behind my father in the first department. And as for dancing … I sign up for a course at a local academy, and at the end of it can manage one authorised step in the waltz, provided I keep counting under my breath, one in the quickstep, and one in some South American dance which is fashionable at the time. I’m evidently better at dancing than cricket, at any rate.

  *

  I also acquire a taste for translation which is going to last for the rest of my life. There’s something deeply attractive about a task that combines the closed-endedness of the crossword puzzle, where you know that a preordained solution exists, if only you can find it, with the open-endedness of original composition, where you know that it doesn’t. One particular passage we’re set for translation into French, though, introduces me to a vice that it will take me seven years and some pains to extirpate – a demonstration that literature really does have the power to corrupt the young mind. We’re set a passage for translation into French from Stevenson’s Travels with a Donkey. Stevenson is four or five thousand feet up on the Mont Lozère at this point, and is spending a night in the open among the pines. At around two o’clock he wakes and rolls himself a cigarette.

  The stars were clear, coloured, and jewel-like, but not frosty. A faint silvery vapour stood for the Milky Way … I lay lazily smoking and studying the colour of the sky, as we call the void of space, from where it showed a reddish grey behind the pines to where it showed a glossy blue-black between the stars. As if to be more like a pedlar, I wear a silver ring. This I could see faintly shining as I raised or lowered the cigarette; and at each whiff the inside of my hand was illuminated, and became for a second the highest light in the landscape.

  How I cope with this quite difficult passage in French I can’t recall, but it seizes my imagination in rather the same way as the Ode to a Skylark did. I have fallen in love with cigarettes. I go straight out after school and buy a packet of Players, then that evening walk along the unlit tracks of the local farm under an overcast sky, with a glowing cigarette turned inwards towards my palm, trying to replicate something of the same effect with neither silver ring nor visible stars. There’s an added excitement in studying French and German with Dr Nichols, aka Gobbo, or, as I refer to him in the diary, simply the Doctor, because of the severe difficulties that he has in communicating, and the endless drama of his struggles to overcome them. He can’t even co-ordinate finger and thumb to turn over the page of one of our set texts to show us what he means. He has to lick his thumb and take a jab at it, in the hope that the paper will adhere to the saliva. The pages of our books rapidly become crumpled and loose, blotched with thumb-prints and stuck together with spit.

  Before you can learn any French or German from him you have to master not only his version of English, but also the phonetic alphabet, so that he can write out for us on the blackboard the sounds he’s trying to make. There’s a further problem here, though. The marks he makes on the blackboard are as wildly approximate as the sounds he utters, and the unfamiliar characters of the phonetic alphabet are even less comprehensible than his attempts at the more usual one.

  Insofar as possible he writes not on the board but on paper, where he can use a typewriter. This solution, though, brings yet another problem – two problems. The keys that he hits are almost as random as everything else – so he ruthlessly abbreviates and elides in order to reduce the scope for error. After two years of his teaching I become as adept as a cryptographer at reconstructing his thought and following his intentions. A friend who is also doing French for the Cambridge entrance exam shows me the list of topics for revision that Gobbo has prepared for him. It has taken most of his revision time, but he has worked out the meanings of all but one of them, which reads: Huge pot.

  It takes me some time, too, but in the end I get there: Revise Victor Hugo as a lyric poet. But the Doctor does it. By sheer, relentless determination and force of personality, lurching about in the ancient brown three-piece pinstripe suit that he wears day in, day out, summer and winter, he teaches us, he teaches us! Spanish, for anyone who wants it, as well as French and German. A little Russian on the side for me. He’s a Christian Scientist, and I have to say that he’s the most sustained and convincing demonstration of the power of mind over matter I’ve ever come across. Maybe the difficulties that we in our turn have to overcome to understand him are actually useful practice for linguists.

  Year after year he gets the language sixth through their A-levels. He propels them into Oxford and Cambridge. He does more – he persuades us to be interested in Racine, even if not quite in Corneille. He has us performing Schiller and reading Thomas Mann. Nor does he stop at the official syllabus. Every winter he organises an entertainment for the French Circle and another for the German Circle. In fact the Doctor and his entertainments are the French and German Circles, and they have the reassuring familiarity of Christmas. A boy called Loveday plays a violin solo by a French or German composer. Someone recites Le Corbeau et le renard or sings Die Lorelei. William Tell shoots Gessler. There’s even an audience; the Doctor has gone round the school collecting one, largely by the lobes of their ears, or possibly, in the case of the younger boys, simply by terrifying them into acquiescence by the weirdness of his appearance. None of the audience understands a word of the performance in either language, but everyone claps and cheers, and only in part ironically.

  In any case the evening always ends with a straightforward sing-song – a scene set in a French café or a German beer garden, with the whole cast in Lederhosen or berets and striped vests, raising glasses of cherryade or ginger beer and singing Santa Lucia (Italian, it’s true, which none of us is doing, but the Doctor has wide European horizons), accompanied by Loveday on the violin, Pratt on the piano-accordion – and the Doctor himself, lurking hugely at the back like an unsteady Eiffel Tower and playing the double bass, on which I suppose the fingering’s sufficiently widely spaced for him to hit something approximating to quite a lot of the notes. In the middle of one of these finales there’s a crash like a house falling down, as the Doctor and his double bass suddenly disappear from view. They’ve wobbled off the back of the stage together, and fallen horizontally on to the floor three feet below. Santa Lucia wavers, and then continues. The Doctor and bass reappear on stage in time for the last chorus, the Doctor’s wrinkled walnut face split by the lopsided grin with which he usually (not always) manages to greet disasters of this sort. One day in class his sudden compulsive twitches are too much for the chair he’s sitting on, and with a crunch of breaking timber he vanishes behind the desk as abruptly as from the stage. Mocking cheers from the class. When his head slowly rises above the horizon, like some strange moon, he’s clearly in both pain and shock. ‘Remember your religion, sir!’ calls Grandjean. The moon cracks into its heroic grin.

  He often finds time in class for jokes. They’re usually the same two, so we get to understand them quite well. The first is very short, about the Frenchman whose new trousers are Toulouse et Toulon. The second one’s more extended. It concerns a resting actor who’s hired to play the part of a major-domo at some grand occasion. All he has to do is to dress up in eighteenth-century costume, walk slowly and solemnly on to the stage, turn to face the audience, thump on the floor three times with a silver-topped staff and cry in a resoundingly authoritative voice: ‘Silence!’ The actor rehearses the performance many times until it’s perfect. The great occasion arrives. On to the stage he slowly and solemnly marches. Turns to face the audience. Thumps three times with his silver-topped staff. Then suddenly loses his nerve. ‘’Ush!’ he squeaks. This second joke has a serious educational message about how easy it is for even the best prepared candidate to panic in an exam. The first, I think, has no particular pedagogic function. Both give the Doctor great delight, however often he tells them. As well as favourite jokes he has favourite pupils, and usuall
y about the same number of them. For a time I’m one. ‘His receptivity makes it a real pleasure to teach him,’ he writes in his first report on me. (Entirely legibly, I see, now that I’ve found it in an ancient file, so I suppose he must have got someone to write it for him.) My star begins to fade, though, as time goes on, and then sets as abruptly as the Doctor himself on the breaking chair when I try to liven up the unwelcome prospect of writing yet another literary essay, and on a subject I find particulary dreary – ‘clle & t dePictm o ancient rum’ (‘Corneille and the depiction of ancient Rome’), by doing it not in English prose but in French verse. In alexandrines, to be precise, the way Corneille himself depicted ancient Rome, which are not an easy form, though I don’t suppose they’re very good alexandrines. Most schoolteachers, in my experience, can switch with disconcerting suddenness from sunshine to thunder, and the Doctor does so now. He sends me, alexandrines in hand, to the headmaster, who finds it difficult to keep a straight face, even before he reads the verses, and mildly recommends me to stick in future to English prose. Lucky for me, perhaps, that I’m not up before the Reverend J. B. Lawton. Uncalled-for alexandrines would probably have merited the cat-o’-nine-tails.

  Lane and I are both back before the headmaster for cutting French to watch the Labour Party losing the 1951 election, and my diary later records ‘a series of rows with the Doctor’, but in between whiles we must have made our peace. There are only four of us doing German, and it’s going to be difficult to produce Wil helm Tell, which has a cast of fifty, if even one of us is alienated. He invites me with the rest of the language sixth for his annual treat, chocolate éclairs in the Oak Lounge at Bentalls, then accords me an even greater favour – tea at his home, the gloomy Victorian house in Surbiton where he’s looked after by his two adoring sisters, and where he takes me on a guided tour of the collection he has assembled over the years: irregular lumps of stone, indistinguishable one from another without his expert commentary, that he has broken off the leading cathedrals of Europe.