Once Again Assembled Here Page 5

  Rackham nodded to me and without looking at Feldberg held out a book for him to stamp. It was a biography of Pierre Laval, the collaborationist French prime minister. I had no idea we stocked such a thing. Who on earth had ordered it? Rackham himself, to spare the expense of buying his own copy? Feldberg rose slowly and took up the date stamp, then pressed it heavily into the inky pad, inspecting the results and repeating the process. Rackham looked at him and put the book down on the counter, at which Feldberg opened it, stamped it and slid it back to Rackham without once looking up. Rackham seemed as if he was about to speak in rebuke but thought better of it. He caught sight of what Feldberg was reading and gave his thin smile, then nodded once more at me and went out. Feldberg had coloured. He turned away and began packing his briefcase.

  ‘There’s no one about, sir. Mind if I knock off early?’

  I wondered what to say. Dumb insolence was usually the preserve of the lower school, which made Feldberg’s behaviour worse. On the other hand, Rackham had let the matter slide, hadn’t he?

  ‘This place is a mess, Feldberg,’ I said. ‘The returned stock needs moving on to the shelves. Don’t let it build up behind the issue desk. Make sure the others do their share.’

  ‘Yes, sir. I’ll sort it out.’ He understood what I was obliged to do. He waited patiently for it to be over.

  ‘Well, think on, then. And yes, you may as well get off home.’ He would probably be heading for the city library, which stayed open until eight p.m. in those days. ‘Remember me to your father.’ Samuel Feldberg ran the city’s best bookshop, somewhere I had spent a good deal of time myself. He nodded and began to gather his things together.

  I went back to the staffroom, hung up my gown and checked my pigeonhole. As I walked back across the quad and along the drive I wondered what I had just seen. It was not possible, surely, that Rackham had deliberately sought to insult or provoke Feldberg. That would be unforgivable. So – this is what I seem to have decided, forty-odd years ago – it could not actually have happened. Anyway, it was such a small, momentary thing. As I have indicated, casual anti-Semitism often surfaced in the boys’ talk – though usually in the middle school rather than the sixth form – along with other kinds of racism and unceasing sexual obscenity. The masters would know better. In the city there were golf clubs which did not admit Jewish members, but that was not – and I cannot now remember what I thought it was not. There was a substantial Jewish population, established since the waves of late nineteenth-century immigration, active in business and the professions and local politics, playing an important part in the life of the place. People made off-colour remarks. They said things to each other. But it didn’t signify. There’d been a war. People knew. Nothing could happen. The massacre had taken place nearly seven hundred years before.

  And what had Rackham done? He’d borrowed a book from the library. He hadn’t said anything. He had simply given his lipless smile and looked at me, as though I should know what was meant – as one Old Blakean to another. He did, I had noticed, provoke a certain reserve among his colleagues, and without quite knowing why, I saw that there was in the case of Carson a degree of watchfulness, or wary expectancy. I attributed this to Rackham’s reputation for unpredictability. An enthusiasm for Laval, I now thought, would not commend him to Carson either.

  Blake’s was, as I may have indicated, philistine at heart, but the school admitted exceptions against which to measure its norms the more clearly. Rackham was a literary type, so he was allowed to be a bit odd. I suppose I was curious firstly because I knew Maggie. Rackham, who seemed younger than what must have been his age, as if he had been set aside to wait, had published a couple of collections of poems at the end of the 1940s and nowadays contributed essays and reviews to obscure literary journals. I’d come across the poems in the school library. I seemed to be their only borrower. They were the kind of Rilkean work whose vogue had long since passed, along with The White Horseman and Apocalypse and Poetry London – part of a lost world that seemed beyond resurrection. My own preferred poets were of the Movement generation, formal and unpretentious, at times – I now see – suffocatingly so.

  Rackham should have held no interest, but his books – their physical pages, their poor-quality paper – somehow smelt of the war, which gave them a resonance beyond any verbal life they might have possessed. After coming across these works when I took on the library, I asked Tim Connolly, the Head of English, about him. Connolly brightened, cautiously, at the enquiry: here perhaps, he thought, was someone else who cared about the only poet Blake’s had ever produced. Rackham, he explained, did not encourage enquiries about his work, any more than he sought friends on the staff. He had flirted with Mosley’s British Union of Fascists – like a lot of people who saw the error of his ways, Connolly hastened to add. It was said that Rackham had substantial means, which presumably made his schoolteaching a hobby or a vocation. It seemed his life was elsewhere. Connolly made his investigations privately. He told me that Rackham had at some point in the 1950s become a Poundian. Since then he had apparently been working on a book-length poem, from which tiny provisional scrapings appeared at long intervals in severe and exclusive like-minded journals where Pound’s economic theories, such as they were, seemed to be viewed with the same seriousness as his Cantos.

  ‘Is the later stuff any good?’ I asked Connolly.

  ‘I’ve no idea,’ he replied. ‘It’s very impressive and learned and modernist but half the time with the extracts I’ve read I’ve no idea what’s going on. You need to be polyglot and a polymath to follow it.’

  ‘Is it worth the effort?’

  ‘Well, he’s all we’ve got at Blake’s, isn’t he?’ Connolly gave his wry grin. ‘I’m assuming that since you haven’t mentioned it, you aren’t doing any writing yourself.’

  ‘I’m sorry to say that’s correct.’

  ‘Ah, well. Anyway, apart from Carson’s early monographs Rackham is about it for the literary tradition of the school.’

  ‘What about General Allingham?’ I asked.

  Connolly gave his weary sigh. ‘Yes, well, Allingham. The military stuff’s a bit technical. And as a writer he’s not exactly Liddell Hart. As for the rest, well . . .’ He shook his head. The General was, to say the least, an ambiguous figure, as perhaps Oswald Mosley must have seemed to Wykehamists, though of course they, unlike us, had a great many notable old boys to choose from. ‘Anyway, as I say, Rackham’s not very approachable where his writing’s concerned,’ Connolly went on. ‘I’ve looked into all this without his help. Someone has to keep an eye on this aspect of school life.’

  ‘So it’s a matter of duty.’

  ‘Like everything else, Maxwell.’ Connolly gave his smile again. Perhaps it was a way of assuaging disappointment. ‘That’s what it comes down to. You know the score. We’re all old boys here. The angel has to record everything.’

  ‘Why do you stay?’ I knew the answer to this. Connolly and his wife had four rapidly accumulated sons, all of whom would in turn be educated at Blake’s at staff rates.

  He laughed. ‘Well, it’s the company store. And I might ask: why have you come back? Funny how people do, though. When I finished National Service I meant to go into journalism. Just the way it goes, eh, Maxwell? Quick – run away before it’s too late!’ It would have been too complicated to explain that it was running away that had brought me back here.

  As I came out into the square beyond the gates, Rackham’s green VW Beetle went slowly past in the thickening darkness. He raised his hand in a wave, as though we were acquainted now, on the same side. I wondered what he thought he knew about me, and about what part of that was true.

  SEVEN

  After Rackham had driven off I returned to my flat on Fernbank Avenue, ate, washed, changed and, as if there were no alternative, went out and round the corner to the Narwhal. As usual I was meeting Smallbone but I was a bit early, so I bought a pint while scouting the main bar and then went through and sat on a stool in
the empty back lounge with the framed boxing photographs covering the walls. I spread the local Chronicle out on the counter. Fish, rugby league and council corruption – the comforts of home. The newspaper’s style persisted in hyphenating street names, as if this were the eighteenth century. The pub was in effect the out-of-hours centre of the universe. Its evening noise sounded agreeably muted in the lounge: quiet was always hard to acquire.

  A movement drew my attention. Across in the little mirrored snug known as the Coffin Bar, a tall, astonishingly ugly man with pitted skin and the huge jaw and brow of a sufferer from acromegaly, wearing an army surplus parka the size of tent, listened impassively to a pale fat companion in a brown wide-brimmed soft hat. The tall man was Lurch, one of the groundsmen’s assistants at Blake’s, a troll-like figure in his forties who was feared by the younger boys for his habit of looming in the woods. I’d never heard him speak and he wasn’t speaking now. I couldn’t hear what the second man was saying, but he offered repeated decisive chopping gestures, as though demonstrating Occam’s razor. From time to time he would pause and nod as if his sense of things had been confirmed, though his silent companion remained expressionless.

  The shorter, fatter man was Claes, the proprietor of Vlaminck Books, the second-hand shop round the corner, just off the main road. He was usually glimpsed sitting in an armchair by a paraffin heater in an inner room of his premises, speaking on the phone, gesturing as now, his eyes widening as he nodded. There was a peculiar bland softness about Claes, as though his outline did not contain him securely. He made me think of canals and flooded landscapes. He was Belgian but had lived in the city a long time, apparently a refugee of some sort. He had acquired something of the accent but retained the stereophonic nasality of his fellow countrymen, as though used to breathing in tunnels half-underwater.

  I had started going to Vlaminck’s as a teenager. When after returning to the city I had visited the shop he was perfectly affable, sitting in his captain’s chair at his desk with the paraffin heater on whatever the weather, surrounded by columns of books. He hardly seemed to move once he was installed on the premises. People handed him books and the money and he rang up the transactions on an ancient mechanical till before resuming his reading or his many long telephone calls, conducted in what I gathered was Flemish. He ate chocolates continually. He smelt slightly of chocolate, but with a hint of something more distasteful, as though over-cooked, behind it.

  Claes was completely indiscriminate as a bookseller. If it had a cover, he would sell it – a view diametrically opposed to that of Feldberg’s father, who saw no point in making money out of material he despised or the unserious people who sought it. There were, I liked to think, not many customers like me who had a foot in both camps. At Vlaminck’s, behind the steamy windows, sets of Dickens and Conrad cohabited with Frank Harris and Fanny Hill, textbooks of seamanship with Health and Efficiency, Parade and other men’s magazines. I went there because I liked collecting early Penguins, on which he seemed to place little value. He would point out a new pile of rusty orange-and-white covers whenever he’d unearthed them in a house clearance, which was one of his several other businesses, in which he apparently employed Lurch on a cash-in-hand basis. Away from his shop Claes and I did not speak or even acknowledge each other, a practice which seemed to suit both of us. It was somehow a form of courtesy, one which we continued to observe this evening.

  For his own reading Claes seemed to go through phases – green Penguin Crime for a while, then military history in several languages, including General Allingham’s book on tank warfare (much admired by Guderian, the Panzer commander), then an excursion towards Mickey Spillane and his English epigone Hank Janson, the covers of whose novels had offered scenes of intense depravity which had also been attractive to passing schoolboys such as myself a few years earlier when it was understood that Blake’s did not approve of the shop (as though Blake’s really advocated the use of any bookshop), which gave us another reason to go there. And there was a more serious side to Claes. One day I found him reading Spengler, then later a biography of Leon Degrelle, Mosley’s Belgian analogue, of whom I had not heard at the time.

  ‘But you are a teacher of history,’ he said with a delighted smile. Not for the first time I noticed that his tongue seemed too large for his mouth. ‘He is a major figure in my country’s history.’

  ‘Forgive my ignorance. He hasn’t come up in my reading, I’m afraid. Belgian history appears to have been rather neglected in this country.’ As far as I am aware this has remained the case. Apart from Hergé and Simenon, what do the English know of Belgium? ‘Who was Degrelle?’

  ‘Degrelle was a patriot and a hero, some of us think. Others would say the opposite. Poor Belgium.’ He gave his wide, mad, hound-tongued smile again. ‘She is unknown, ignored, divided, derided, created as a country of convenience and treated as a whore by the powers who brought her to a disfigured birth.’ I wondered for a moment if Claes would climb on top of the heater to continue his oration. But he fell silent and nodded, his lips pursed.

  ‘Blimey.’

  ‘You think I am making a joke, Mr Maxwell. To the English no one except the Germans is really serious, perhaps because the Germans most resemble you. Your queen is a German. It is perhaps a joke even to speak of my country. Perhaps. We shall see. But now’ – the smile was back – ‘you surely cannot help but be curious about Leon Degrelle. See how we are all Europeans together now.’

  ‘De Gaulle would disagree.’

  ‘I do not speak of him. No.’ He seemed about to issue a denunciation. Then his expression altered, and, if it were possible, softened. ‘I regret, my friend, I cannot sell you this, my personal copy. But I am sure I can find one for you in a French translation, if you wish. I can find almost anything, if you should wish. Whatever is of interest. I have many links, here and in continental Europe. History, literature, art books, photography of all kinds, also meat products and carpets and also cultural and political organizations with whom you might find contact beneficial and even profitable. Catholic societies, for example.’ I said I would bear all this in mind, paid for a couple of early Greenes and left him to the contemplation of history, a damp-seeming and unsung Napoleon there by the paraffin heater, sealed behind the steamy windows of the shop.

  Leon Degrelle is probably no more familiar to English readers now than in those days. He was the leader of the prewar Belgian fascist party, the Rexists, seeking to mend the linguistic and cultural divisions present since the creation of the country in 1832. After early success, his electoral support fell away as his fascism became apparent. He served as an SS Volunteer in the Brigade Wallonie, one of several SS units made up of foreign nationals. Degrelle himself, who began as a private, gained a commission, and seems to have fought with distinction, if it can be called that, on the Russian front. He was condemned to death in absentia by the Belgian authorities after the war, but escaped the fate of some of his erstwhile colleagues. He spent the rest of his life living in unrepentant and comfortable exile in Spain, beyond the reach of retribution. Asked if he had any regrets, he said, ‘Only that we lost.’ Contrast Claes, marooned in the English provinces and running a seedy bookshop. Discuss.

  A third person appeared at the bar. This was Shirley, a curvy blonde girl – never quite a woman – of my age, and thus much younger than her strange companions. She smiled and waved. For a time in the sixth form I’d gone out with her. She was one of those bright children who fell quietly back into the class they were supposed to be escaping through education. St Clare’s was as far as she would go. She would never leave town, never complain. She was a brilliant seamstress. She made most of the costumes for the joint production of the Scottish play that Blake’s and St Clare’s had put on when we were in the sixth form.

  When she finished school, all she wanted to do was read and smoke dope. Shirley was what would now be called an early adopter, a few years ahead of the fashion for drugs. In the blues clubs near the docks, where she and he
r girlfriends had ventured quite fearlessly, there was already a small, discreet trade from sailors returning from Durban and other African ports. Shirley’s father had left when she was a child, and her mother seemed resigned to solitude and fortified wine. She made no attempt to control or even advise her daughter. Shirley and I would smoke and make love in her room at the top of the house, listening to music and talking about books.

  ‘How do you know what to do, Stevie?’ she asked once. We lay there hearing the television blaring from downstairs in competition with Shirley’s prized Dusty Springfield LPs.

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘You’re off to university. You’ve got a plan.’

  ‘Or someone’s drawn one up for me.’

  ‘Yes, but you know where you’re going. But how do you know it’s the right way?’

  ‘I suppose it feels right. I’m interested in doing it.’

  ‘That’s the difference.’ She sat up and pulled an LP cover on to her lap and began to roll a joint. ‘I haven’t got that feeling. I don’t know what’s the right thing.’

  Shirley should have been a librarian – that had been the school’s plan, with which she had seemed in passive agreement – but somehow although she passed her A-levels she had ended up working in Claes’s bookshop, for the time being at first and then indefinitely. She also made the occasional garment on request.

  ‘You should get away from here. Everyone should, for a while, anyway,’ I said. ‘I can’t wait.’

  ‘I like it here. I’m at home. I know people. At St Clare’s in the sixth form the teachers told us all to be ambitious. But I’m not, and anyway, what were they? They were only teachers. I just like reading and sewing and smoking dope and being in bed with you. I don’t want you to go away. Because when you go this will be over.’ And there she stayed, when most of her contemporaries had left town.