The Rotters' Club (17 page)

‘This is for my mother?’ said Philip.

‘You have it in a nutshell.’

Philip looked at the envelope. Nothing could be deduced from it, beyond the simple fact that Mr Plumb wanted to send his mother a private message. He put the envelope in his pocket.

‘OK,’ he said, and walked on. He could feel Mr Plumb’s eyes upon him until he reached the end of the corridor and turned a corner.

*

Eric Clapton was standing on stage at the Odeon New Street, his eyes screwed tight, his left hand caressing the neck of his guitar, high up the fretboard. He was in the middle of some extended solo, bending a note on the second string. ‘Motherless Children’, maybe? ‘Let It Rain’? Impossible to say. He seemed to be enjoying himself, at any rate, and to be happily oblivious of the fact that he was standing in front of an enormous swastika. Beneath his platformed feet the word ‘RACIST’ had been printed in eighteen-point bold type.

Philip examined the image critically.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘it’s not exactly subtle, is it?’

Doug chewed on his pencil for a moment or two before replying.

‘Subtlety,’ he pronounced, with studied contempt, ‘is the English disease.’

There was no answer to this; at least, Philip couldn’t think of one, offhand. Sitting opposite him, on the far side of the wide editorial table, Claire Newman began to write something down. She made a proper show of it, muttering the words beneath her breath and placing great emphasis on ‘
English disease
’.

‘What are you doing?’ Doug asked.

‘I’ve decided that your
bon mots
have to be preserved for posterity,’ she said, in the tone of cutting facetiousness she seemed to reserve for Doug alone. ‘I’m going to be Boswell to your Johnson. Your amanuensis.’

The others smiled; even those who didn’t understand the word.

‘I’m glad to hear it,’ said Doug, briskly. ‘So what do you think about the cover?’

‘It’s all right.’

Philip, meanwhile, had thought of a new objection. ‘It might be libellous,’ he said.

‘You think Eric Clapton’s going to sue a school magazine?’ When this was merely greeted with a shrug, he added: ‘If he does, so much the better. We’ll get into the newspapers.’

Mr Serkis, the young English master who oversaw these meetings, pulled thoughtfully on his long, soon-to-be-unfashionable hair.

‘I might have to show this to the Chief, you know. We should really run it by him before we go to press.’

‘Come on, that’s censorship, pure and simple,’ Doug protested. ‘We’re living in Callaghan’s Britain, not Ceausescu’s Romania.’

Claire picked up her biro again. ‘Are you spelling Romania with an “o” or a “u”?’ she asked.

‘Any halfway decent amanuensis would know that already,’ said Doug. This time, there was a flirtatiousness in his smile which she registered but refused to return. Rebuffed, and conscious that the others had seen it, he spread his hands and turned to rhetoric. ‘I thought we were agreed,’ he said, ‘I thought we were agreed that if this paper was going to be anything more than a sixth-form gossip sheet, we were going to have to give it some edge. And that means politics. I mean, there’s always been politics in this paper before. We’ve got to keep that going. Sharpen it.’ He looked again at Claire, sensing that she was, in this at least, his closest ally. ‘I thought we were agreed on that.’

‘Well yes,’ said Claire, doodling on her notepad now. Upside down, it was hard to see what she was drawing. A tree, perhaps. ‘That’s true. But I’m not sure this is… I don’t know, the right approach…’

Silence descended. Mr Serkis glanced at the clock on the wall, which showed 3.20. The meeting would overrun if they didn’t reach a decision quickly.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘we’ve got to make up our minds about this. The Chief’ll be going home in half an hour, so if there’s anything he needs to see…’

Benjamin, sitting on the windowsill which afforded a sweeping view of the school rooftops, had taken no part in the discussion so far. He stared into the encroaching dusk, watched as the neon lights flared up, one by one, in the language laboratories across the courtyard. There was a remoteness about him, nowadays; something more than abstraction. It was possible, Mr Serkis thought, that the distance opening up between Benjamin and his friends might soon become unbridgeable. He wanted to do everything in his power to prevent that from happening.

‘What do you think, Ben?’ A slight turn of the head; eyelids heavy with indifference. His thoughts might have been anywhere. (As it happened they were on a chord change: D minor 6th to C seven.) ‘You’re a fan of his, aren’t you?’

‘Used to be,’ said Benjamin. He rose stiffly from the windowsill and crossed over to the table, the better to inspect Doug’s illustration. All eyes were upon him, awaiting his verdict (none more intently than Claire’s). But he merely picked the collage up between finger and thumb, glaced at it for a listless moment, and blew out his cheeks. ‘Oh, I don’t know…’

‘What did he actually
say
?’ Philip wanted to know. ‘What did Clapton actually say?’

Doug wasn’t sure. ‘I haven’t got the exact quote,’ he said. ‘I haven’t been able to find it. Something about Britain becoming one of its own colonies. He mentioned Enoch Powell, anyway. I’m sure of that. Said that Powell was right and we should all be listening to him. It’s in my article.’

‘He was drunk, wasn’t he?’

‘So? What difference does that make?’

Mr Serkis watched as Benjamin drifted away from the table and picked up a bag from the corner of the room. It was a plastic carrier bag, twelve inches square, and bore the name and address of a shop called Cyclops Records, much patronized by the sixth-formers of King William’s. Benjamin’s books and exercise pads had been crammed into it with some difficulty. A briefcase would have been more practical but would not, he suspected, have radiated the same aura of would-be cool. Then Benjamin hovered in the doorway, intending to say goodbye to his colleagues, it seemed, and waiting for a suitable hiatus in their conversation. By now Doug and Philip had given up on the specifics of Eric Clapton’s recent
faux pas
and moved on to the subject of racism generally. Birmingham, Doug maintained, had produced two notable racist thinkers in the last few decades: Enoch Powell, and J. R. R. Tolkien. Philip was outraged by this statement. Tolkien was unquestionably his favourite author and in what way, he wanted to know, could he be described as racist? Doug suggested that he reread
The Lord of the Rings.
Philip assured him that he did, at six-monthly intervals. In that case, Doug replied, surely he must have noticed that Tolkien’s villainous Orcs were made to appear unmistakably negroid. And did it not strike him as significant that the reinforcements who came to the aid of Sauron, the
Dark
Lord, are themselves dark-skinned, hail from unspecified tropical lands to the south, and are often mounted upon elephants?

‘This racism thing is beginning to obsess you,’ Philip retorted. ‘It’s about time you changed the record.’

‘It’s about time
you
changed your reading habits,’ said Doug.

Benjamin had gone.

*

He still nursed a residual fondness for Tolkien, even though it was years since he had read
The Lord of the Rings.
He had moved on to Conrad and Fielding, and was beginning to struggle with
Ulysses.
In any case, it was
The Hobbit
that held a special place in his affections; and although it had never struck him before that it was written by a local author, now that Doug had mentioned it, he could see that it made a kind of sense. Why else, after all, had Benjamin remained so partial to Tolkien’s own illustration of Bag End and Hobbiton-across-the-Water, the limpid colours of which still, after so many years and changes of taste, glowed soothingly down upon him from his bedroom wall? Surely it was because somewhere in that painting, in the diffident contours of its landscape, in its artless evocation of one morning ‘long ago in the quiet of the world, when there was less noise and more green’, he found sentimental echoes of the area where he himself had grown up. More particularly, it reminded him of a place just a mile or two south of Longbridge: the Lickey Hills, where his grandparents lived, and where he was heading that same afternoon. It wasn’t just the slow inclines and occasional muted, autumnal glades of this semi-pastoral backwater that made him think of the Shire; the inhabitants themselves were hobbit-like, in their breezy indifference towards the wider world, their unchallenged certainty that they were living the best of all possible lives in the best of all possible locations. These were attitudes, Benjamin knew, that Paul was already beginning to despise; and no doubt with some justice. But for his own part he had grown up with them, inherited them, and he could not shed them. Not completely. He loved his grandparents precisely for, and not in spite of, their preposterous, unspoken belief that God had somehow chosen them, marking them out for special favour, by placing them where all of life’s blessings seemed to be gathered together in one unassumingly hallowed spot. It was a belief from which he at once recoiled and drew strength.

When he rang the doorbell it was his grandmother who answered and said, ‘Hello, love,’ giving him a soft and camphored kiss on the cheek. She seemed to have been expecting him, even though he had given no forewarning. ‘Come for tea?’

Good manners demanded that he sit on the sofa for a while, dunking digestive biscuits into his mug of pallid tea and telling her about his week at King William’s. It was no hardship, really. Benjamin’s grandmother took an amused, unforced interest in his life at school, her mind was sharp, she even had a better memory for the names of his friends than his parents had. He liked talking to her, almost as much as he liked talking to his grandfather, who could be glimpsed in the garden raking the first of the fallen leaves into a bonfire and who even now was probably dreaming up some silly joke or terrible pun to make him groan over the tea-table.

Nevertheless, Benjamin had not come here to see his grandparents, however much he liked them. He had come to use their piano; and at the earliest opportunity, while his grandfather remained busy with the gardening and his grandmother went next door to the kitchen to begin work on a shepherd’s pie, he hurried up to the spare bedroom, retrieved a small suitcase containing his two tape recorders, and ran downstairs again to begin setting up his makeshift studio.

His latest musical project, slotted in between occasional work on his novel and short stories, was a series of chamber pieces for piano and guitar called
Seascape Nos. 1-7.
They were inspired both by his memories of Skagen and, inevitably, by his continuing, unrequited longing for Cicely. The first three had already been recorded and, listening back to them over the last few days, Benjamin thought that he could hear a new maturity, a measured, reflective lyricism beginning to emerge in his writing. He was aiming for something simple but resonant; austere but heartfelt; a suitable antidote, he hoped, to the different excesses against which he imagined himself rebelling, namely the ridiculous symphonic pretensions of Philip’s progressive heroes, on the one hand, and on the other, the neo-neanderthal dynamism of punk, which Doug was just beginning to discover and enthuse about to his horrified friends. To map out another creative path altogether, not so much between these two courses as on some lonely, blasted heath of his own choosing, appeared to Benjamin a fine thing, noble and romantic. He was sure that Cicely herself, if she ever heard any of the music (which seemed highly unlikely), would have been moved and intrigued by it.

The practicalities of recording at his grandparents’ house were a little on the mundane side, all the same. First of all he had to stop their cuckoo clock by detaching the pendulum, since it was ticking far too loudly and was liable to sound the hour at the most inappropriate moment. Not something that Richard Branson’s roster of musicians ever had to worry about when recording at the Manor, he imagined. And then there was the whole problem of extraneous noise generally, not just the traffic noise from the Old Birmingham Road but the everyday sounds of his grandparents going about their business, for he had never been able to impress on them the need for absolute silence while he was making these secret bids for musical immortality. There had been many times, three-quarters of the way through a take, when everything had been ruined by the ringing of the telephone or the careless slamming of a door.

But tonight’s recording proceeded smoothly, for the most part.
Seascape No. 4
was a bitter-sweet composition lasting about four minutes, song-like in form, with the guitar playing an erratic, plangent melody over a gentle backwash of minor chords ebbing and flowing on the piano. After the verse-chorus structure had run its course, everything dissolved into a wash of lazy, wistful improvisation. Benjamin always regretted that these pieces never turned out to be quite as avant-garde as he would have liked; but he still believed that they were, in their way, original. Behind them lay a strange compound of influences absorbed from modern classical composers and the English experimental pop groups into whose busy, eccentric soundworld Malcolm had once fatefully guided him; but out of these influences Benjamin was starting to fashion something entirely his own. So much his own, in fact, that he knew he would never share these recordings with anyone – not even Philip, his closest friend – which meant that it scarcely mattered if, as this evening, he played a handful of bum notes, lost time on three separate occasions, and was interrupted towards the end of his chosen take by the sound of Acorn, his grandparents’ cat, miaowing outside the French window. The miaow was clearly audible when he played the tape back, but Benjamin didn’t mind. The composition was fixed, now, sculpted in time, in a version which at least approximated to his first intentions. He would listen to it, grow tired of it, and move on. These pieces, he already realized, were merely stepping stones at the start of a journey towards something – some grand artefact, either musical, or literary, or filmic, or perhaps a combination of all three – towards which he knew he was advancing, slowly but with a steady, inexorable tread. Something which would enshrine his feelings for Cicely, and which she would perhaps hear, or read, or see in ten or twenty years’ time, and suddenly realize, on her pulse, that it was created for her, intended for her, and that of all the boys who had swarmed around her like so many drones at school, Benjamin had been, without her having the wit to notice it, by far the purest in heart, by far the most gifted and giving. On that day the awareness of all she had missed, all she had lost, would finally break upon her in an instant, and she would weep; weep for her foolishness, and for the love that might have been between them.