Golddigger
My father, Henry Golding, admired the novels of Evelyn Waugh, never read another writer after them, and was heartily sorry he had ever had the misfortune to encounter the written word before them.
Of that canon, he said he liked A Handful of Dust best, really liked The Sword of Honour best, and laughed most conspicuously when reading Scoop. Nevertheless it was after a conceit at the beginning and end of the Master’s second novel, Vile Bodies, that he determined he would name his daughters. The Pentecostal angel choir, the angelic voice of Chastity, directed his wishes. He wanted four daughters, and outdoing even his teacher’s choice of abstruse virtues, decided that they should be called Integrity, Dignity, Liberality and Diligence.
After securing a wife with the correct mixture of courage and complacence to allow him to implement his scheme, Henry engendered Integrity and Dignity. My mother, Mrs. Golding, fell pregnant a third time and gave birth while re-reading Ivanhoe. Henry was ushered through the hospital, throwing all feigned male indifference to the mysterious rites of Juno aside. His excitement built as he perceived the little creature had a gloriously dark head. Integrity and Dignity were fair in a monotonous yellow way, and Henry Golding, my father, that is, must have felt translucent with pride that he could forge a dark-haired daughter also.
No doubt she would be more trouble than her placid sisters, this dark Liberality. Those half-blind kitten eyes would plague her benevolent father’s existence, but he was ready for that, expectant and gleeful at this third, precious, unruly...but, oh, what aberration. Dark Liberality proved to be Henry Golding the Younger. Furthermore, my hair grew sandier as I reached adolescence.
I am a vain person, and have wanted to write my biography for a fairly long time, in fact ever since I worked out the difference between the words “autobiography” and “biography”. But I have noticed that most autobiographers almost always make those heroic colossi, themselves, look heavy-handed, portentous and unbearable; while a secondary character is capable of annexing some of the glitter shed by even the basest of pens.
So I am writing the biography of the younger of my two sisters, Golddigger, as everyone but her father called her since some distant playground, where the social concept of Golddigging was unknown and someone called Dignity Golding demanded a little attention. Golddigger has turned out to be a most unfair name with regard to its connotations, as my sister inherited a good deal more than I did, and has spent a good deal of her time ducking rich men. These things are in the hands of the Fates.
No, this isn’t working. It’s the first-person narration that’s the problem, though I have flirted with omniscience, with that silly comment about my father’s translucent pride for example. No, all these facts and jokes and bitternesses are yoked to my tongue, and I seem a bore already and will seem a boor by the end.
The solution has struck me. I like the first-person narration well enough; why should I not narrate as Golddigger? Yes, from now on he will be a discreet enough figure, my brother, narrow-faced and sympathetic at odd moments, a distant, failed young thing with a tinge of nobility. Only I must learn to mention him less.
Tuesday 29 December 2009
Another novel beginning from Eton, pseudo-Poe
Soleil D’Or
Everything could be ruined this afternoon, I thought in the early morning. But of course you have to remember that everything could be ruined most afternoons. It very often is, but I suppose we survive somehow, jettisoning dignity or comfort or earnestness or morality or pride. Yet I had no wish to behold any such unravelling; to be present when a certain pair of my friends I had rather not meet each other met each other; when certain truths I had rather not be illumined were illumined. I felt a great deal less shame in the act of a coward, ringing the Soleil D’Or Hotel, Cannes, than I would have done at the supper of Pervis, and Grunte, and the shared knowledge of Grunte, and Pervis.
For such reasons I took my holiday. The time was not irregular, fortunately enough; the schools were disgorging their burdens, and, though I had no children, the egoism of the parents who smugly hold the power of this world would easily forget this, and assume that, as they were compelled to move at half-term, so too was I.
I wondered for some minutes if I ought not to take with me a companion. But the chaperone I found most congenial was the cause of my migration in the first place, and I am no Antony to flaunt my Cleopatra; indeed I always hoped to be more of an Octavius. Even Octavius had an Imperial Cupboard filled with skeletons; I was only unfortunate in that my Imperial Cupboard had rattled the harder. Besides my little Corinna of Drury-Lane (you see I am a well-read man! enough to condemn anyone in the City), I could have chosen my sister; but that would, I think, have been a metaphorically masochistic course, (dear Corinna verges on the physical) for we are that type of sibling that scourge each other to reassure ourselves of the affinity of our blood.
I resolved, then, to go to Cannes alone. It was of crucial importance for my peace of mind, of course, that I should have left England by the time I knew Pervis to be meeting Grunte, so I left on one of those absurd airlines that still present you with tattered “frills”, coleslaw and Red Leicester around lunchtime, but have the great merit that they have been altogether abandoned by the banking classes. I departed with a fairly secure hope that I would be observed by no one who mattered. I was not quite sanguine enough to be sure that I would not meet someone; but this was the situation I aimed for, equipping myself with a newspaper and a volume of the Letters of Queen Victoria. I have long traced with affection the harmony of that Monarch’s mindset with some of the more sensational reporters.
Thus I was irritated, and unnerved too, I must own, to be addressed by name at the check-in desk. I looked up reluctantly from a condolence letter to Louis-Philippe, and nodded in acknowledgement, but I was relieved when I recognised the face.
“Why, Edward, it has been some time.”
“You haven’t changed,” the other replied. There was justifiably much of envy in his voice, for the same could not be said of him. I had left Edward Mutton a sharp graduate, ambitious and original. He had made an Acherontic descent, into schoolmastering; he was inflated and gnawed down at the same time, his cheeks shining with involuntary tears. But most happily of all, he was of no consequence. He might even, I thought with a little anticipation, prove amusing.
“You’re going to Pisa?” I suggested, thinking of a likely destination for a man of refined taste. Pisa is the gateway to Florence, that lodestone of Inglesi italianati.
“No, to Cannes,” he corrected laughingly. “I’m on your flight.”
This confounded and irritated me out of measure, though I tried not to make that perfectly obvious. Cannes? What would Edward’s kind do in Cannes? Cannes was for the rich and the dissolute; those who fell outside that lofty class could find no real satisfaction there, only a great deal of debt. Perhaps Edward wanted to be rich and dissolute, but that was a separate state altogether, best provided for, I reflected, by Nice.
“Ah. Where are you staying?”
“Oh, I don’t know the town well...I followed some recommendations...a little place called the Soleil D’Or...I wonder if you know it?”
It was that reply which made me realise that my escape was to assume a very different form from that which I had envisaged. Edward Mutton was a schoolmaster, but fate had shifted me into a position where I could not but educate him.
Everything could be ruined this afternoon, I thought in the early morning. But of course you have to remember that everything could be ruined most afternoons. It very often is, but I suppose we survive somehow, jettisoning dignity or comfort or earnestness or morality or pride. Yet I had no wish to behold any such unravelling; to be present when a certain pair of my friends I had rather not meet each other met each other; when certain truths I had rather not be illumined were illumined. I felt a great deal less shame in the act of a coward, ringing the Soleil D’Or Hotel, Cannes, than I would have done at the supper of Pervis, and Grunte, and the shared knowledge of Grunte, and Pervis.
For such reasons I took my holiday. The time was not irregular, fortunately enough; the schools were disgorging their burdens, and, though I had no children, the egoism of the parents who smugly hold the power of this world would easily forget this, and assume that, as they were compelled to move at half-term, so too was I.
I wondered for some minutes if I ought not to take with me a companion. But the chaperone I found most congenial was the cause of my migration in the first place, and I am no Antony to flaunt my Cleopatra; indeed I always hoped to be more of an Octavius. Even Octavius had an Imperial Cupboard filled with skeletons; I was only unfortunate in that my Imperial Cupboard had rattled the harder. Besides my little Corinna of Drury-Lane (you see I am a well-read man! enough to condemn anyone in the City), I could have chosen my sister; but that would, I think, have been a metaphorically masochistic course, (dear Corinna verges on the physical) for we are that type of sibling that scourge each other to reassure ourselves of the affinity of our blood.
I resolved, then, to go to Cannes alone. It was of crucial importance for my peace of mind, of course, that I should have left England by the time I knew Pervis to be meeting Grunte, so I left on one of those absurd airlines that still present you with tattered “frills”, coleslaw and Red Leicester around lunchtime, but have the great merit that they have been altogether abandoned by the banking classes. I departed with a fairly secure hope that I would be observed by no one who mattered. I was not quite sanguine enough to be sure that I would not meet someone; but this was the situation I aimed for, equipping myself with a newspaper and a volume of the Letters of Queen Victoria. I have long traced with affection the harmony of that Monarch’s mindset with some of the more sensational reporters.
Thus I was irritated, and unnerved too, I must own, to be addressed by name at the check-in desk. I looked up reluctantly from a condolence letter to Louis-Philippe, and nodded in acknowledgement, but I was relieved when I recognised the face.
“Why, Edward, it has been some time.”
“You haven’t changed,” the other replied. There was justifiably much of envy in his voice, for the same could not be said of him. I had left Edward Mutton a sharp graduate, ambitious and original. He had made an Acherontic descent, into schoolmastering; he was inflated and gnawed down at the same time, his cheeks shining with involuntary tears. But most happily of all, he was of no consequence. He might even, I thought with a little anticipation, prove amusing.
“You’re going to Pisa?” I suggested, thinking of a likely destination for a man of refined taste. Pisa is the gateway to Florence, that lodestone of Inglesi italianati.
“No, to Cannes,” he corrected laughingly. “I’m on your flight.”
This confounded and irritated me out of measure, though I tried not to make that perfectly obvious. Cannes? What would Edward’s kind do in Cannes? Cannes was for the rich and the dissolute; those who fell outside that lofty class could find no real satisfaction there, only a great deal of debt. Perhaps Edward wanted to be rich and dissolute, but that was a separate state altogether, best provided for, I reflected, by Nice.
“Ah. Where are you staying?”
“Oh, I don’t know the town well...I followed some recommendations...a little place called the Soleil D’Or...I wonder if you know it?”
It was that reply which made me realise that my escape was to assume a very different form from that which I had envisaged. Edward Mutton was a schoolmaster, but fate had shifted me into a position where I could not but educate him.
Monday 21 December 2009
To prove I still do poems - and love ones at that
No socket yet but fails, my love,
Aren't batteries born to give?
The nurselings of the human tongue -
Small miracles, a larger one
A wonder we can talk at all,
Even in screeds and palmistry.
I know my love we are not trained,
Not all of us, to make our tracks -
We're sealed to the human tribe
Whose currency is puzzled loss;
Yet when we have paid as we went
Still we'll have screeds, and palmistry.
Aren't batteries born to give?
The nurselings of the human tongue -
Small miracles, a larger one
A wonder we can talk at all,
Even in screeds and palmistry.
I know my love we are not trained,
Not all of us, to make our tracks -
We're sealed to the human tribe
Whose currency is puzzled loss;
Yet when we have paid as we went
Still we'll have screeds, and palmistry.
Novel fragment 2: late Eton vintage. Potential?
The Countess of the Leeks
St. David’s Day comes at an awkward moment, a crisp time, fertile only with deadlines. The saint’s leek is not a product of unlashed cornucopia, green, disproportionate, inevitably phallic, a thyrsus to be battered about by a leering, tasteless Green Man. Instead it is doomed to be yoked, until the Day of Judgement, to the potato; and it forms that most institutionalised of green soups, often made worse by some lofty claim to be “vichyssoise”.
Tamara served some into a bowl for the man at the front of the line. The kitchen’s St David’s Day Special vichyssoise was not a soup-like enough soup to spill much, which was a mercy; it just propelled itself downwards as if magnetically repelled by the stainless steel ladle. The notion rather pleased Tamara, but she was unsure whether stainless steel was even magnetic, and she let the concept be submerged in apathy and leek.
The alcoholic named Arthur who was now taking away the soup-bowl was not technically a beggar, but a pauper. He had told her this on her first day and had never failed to remind her since then.
“Pauper, not a beggar. I know these things. I have a Law Degree.”
“2:1?” Tamara suggested. This was a ritual. She knew he would say Double First, but she had herself got a 2:1, so this was the guess she offered. She did not like to deviate from patterns.
“Double First,” Arthur replied stoutly. “I came top. I’ve told you before.”
He had always been ungrateful about being fed, which Tamara thought quite admirable. She was prepared one day to be bitterly ungrateful, given the chance.
***
She hated being charitable more every week, but she couldn’t resist turning up to the kitchen. She was mesmerised by the way her co-caterers – yes, they called each other that, my co-caterer here, our co-caterer Katy, in one euphonious case – seemed to drain energy and happiness from exposure to misery. Not even dramatic misery, not Botswana or Barnado’s, just greyness and soup and sometimes croutons.
Throughout her professional week, Tamara showed the industry and pleasantness that had won her plaudits at school and university, jobs at every interview, and occasional disoriented men, in drastic cases, for her ugliness was not of the sort then marketed as beauty. Everyone relied on her at work, whatever work happened to be. On the Sunday evening following her stint at the soup kitchen, she did not go directly back to her flat in the evenings. She would put on a navy blue waterproof with a hood and walk to the off-licence where she purchased a bottle of vodka and a grey packet of cigarettes, which she would consume throughout the night (she was not susceptible to either substance at any other time).
She draped the hood of her coat over her head while still standing among the bottles and the packets, invariably the only woman in the shop, not counting the teenagers and one harassed, respectably dressed red-headed wife (or ex, or widow; she wore two rings, one thick and gold) who stopped by, more or less monthly, and bought ten packs of Silk Cut, paying with three £20 notes. Tamara noted and counted the appearances of this rare but regular visitor, a fellowwoman, sister and twin, recognised as such by Tamara because of the searing, ugly exhaustion on both their faces.
On the eleventh, and last time that the red-headed woman and Tamara met at the off-licence, they happened to talk. There wasn’t usually much conversation there; the shopkeeper was a Muslim, who sold and shortchanged the refreshments of Shaitan with indomitable sullenness, though occasionally youths of his blood would drop by on motorbikes, quick to smile, their eyes glinting in Tamara’s direction. She found this flattering to an extent – Anglo-Saxon men didn’t bother extending the privileges of the fairer sex to its less fair constituents – but she had a morbid horror of Muslims, especially at night, which had once led her to vote for the British National Party; so she never invited them further by speaking. She was in any case incapable of initiating speech in this place. Here she was not Tamara Kellwinch MacDonald, imperturbable and as efficient as stainless steel. She became for twelve hours a creature of flesh, dependent on poison’s maternal caress.
A combination of extenuating circumstances brought this exception to the rule, a conversation, into being. The red-headed woman spoke first, so Tamara only had to react, to reply, which took less effort, needed less dignity. They were outside the range of any obstructive third party, alone in the cold and dark of the street, providing for each other the only sources of light and warmth. But none of this mattered particularly; Tamara had been waiting for the red-headed woman to make an approach for eleven months, and whatever and whenever she had spoken, she would have been attended to.
It started with a satisfied intake of breath, but that was a sign in itself. Tamara knew that the other woman knew it was perfectly possible to smoke happily and silently; the sound meant the stranger wanted Tamara to know that she was happy, which probably meant she was about to talk.
“Don’t know what I’d do without that place...” The comment, meaningless in itself, was fascinating because the woman’s voice was nothing like her face. It was beautiful, soft and contented. Tamara looked through the miasma at the woman’s features, wondering if they had ever been beautiful, soft or contented, but after her examination she doubted it. There was the class thing, as always, but Tamara had always seen that the woman was upper middle-class, 1a socio-economic, whatever; she wouldn’t have guessed that she had a beautiful voice as well. She had expected the whine of a generous alimony.
So she said something she herself found unexpected. “I’m there every Sunday evening. Like evensong at a church.”
The red-headed woman found this very funny; her laugh burst into an alarming cough before she staunched the wound with tar. A little worried, Tamara came closer and made as if to pat her back, but the older woman waved her off impatiently. She gave the girl a shrewd look, one of her eyes half-closed, and then whispered, as if she was uttering something indecent, “Are you a Catholic?”
Tamara laughed now. “Yes. Haven’t been to church since I was confirmed, though.”
“It’s often the way,” the red-head reassured her. The talk now lulled, but in the clear expectation that it would pick up again after the ash had been shaken from its tip. Tamara now felt she had the right, too, to ask personal questions.
“What’s your name?” she wondered, nervousness apparent. She often thought it strange that any human communication was possible, when discovering a name, the chrism of real understanding, was always so awkward.
“Isabel,” Isabel answered, and then glanced to her hand, where her two rings pressed hard upon the cigarette’s malleable side. “MacDonald.”
“That’s my name too, Tamara Kellwinch MacDonald.”
“Kellwinch?”
“Yes, it is funny, but don’t laugh, it’ll set you coughing again...”
“What a good girl you are, my dear Kellwinch. I hope you aren’t good enough to acquiesce to the Government and give up, otherwise I suppose we won’t meet next month.”
The audience was over – Isabel walked firmly to a small, dark car, and Tamara listened to the departing engine. Then she thought for a moment, returned to the off-licence, and gave back the bottle of vodka, much to the shopkeeper’s irritation.
***
Tamara regarded herself as a facilitator of light industry. This could grant her a certain comfort when she needed it, even pride, like being a captain of light infantry. After leaving university, she had helped draft advertisements for paper napkin installations. Then she had become involved in designing paper napkin installations. During a health-scare she had persuaded institutions to convert paper napkin installations – some of which she recalled from the previous phase of her existence – into cleaner heat-emitting drying machines; on the rise of Green Awareness, she had joined the advisory board of Flaxen, a company devoted to stopping carbon-emitting drying machines and replacing them with recycled paper napkins. The environmental Flaxen paid less well than she had expected, as if ideological virtue was included in remuneration.
But talent was recognised, and the company threw about titles and responsibilities like some mediaeval king, compensating for his meagre treasury. So it was that Tamara, after less than a year, found herself with few equals in the Flaxen offices, Manchester, and only two superiors; Harold Green, (surely a surname born of deed-poll?) and Will Blackford, his more visible lieutenant. Above these somewhere, a London office lurked, which, if it had been at all interesting, would have been mysterious. Flaxen made the bulk of its profit out of tedium.
“Hello, James,” Tamara said. Her exalted position’s only extra salary was that she could call Jamie James and he would still have to smile at her. But it wasn’t a pleasure to be exploited too often. This small nastiness had been earned by a long career of niceness.
St. David’s Day comes at an awkward moment, a crisp time, fertile only with deadlines. The saint’s leek is not a product of unlashed cornucopia, green, disproportionate, inevitably phallic, a thyrsus to be battered about by a leering, tasteless Green Man. Instead it is doomed to be yoked, until the Day of Judgement, to the potato; and it forms that most institutionalised of green soups, often made worse by some lofty claim to be “vichyssoise”.
Tamara served some into a bowl for the man at the front of the line. The kitchen’s St David’s Day Special vichyssoise was not a soup-like enough soup to spill much, which was a mercy; it just propelled itself downwards as if magnetically repelled by the stainless steel ladle. The notion rather pleased Tamara, but she was unsure whether stainless steel was even magnetic, and she let the concept be submerged in apathy and leek.
The alcoholic named Arthur who was now taking away the soup-bowl was not technically a beggar, but a pauper. He had told her this on her first day and had never failed to remind her since then.
“Pauper, not a beggar. I know these things. I have a Law Degree.”
“2:1?” Tamara suggested. This was a ritual. She knew he would say Double First, but she had herself got a 2:1, so this was the guess she offered. She did not like to deviate from patterns.
“Double First,” Arthur replied stoutly. “I came top. I’ve told you before.”
He had always been ungrateful about being fed, which Tamara thought quite admirable. She was prepared one day to be bitterly ungrateful, given the chance.
***
She hated being charitable more every week, but she couldn’t resist turning up to the kitchen. She was mesmerised by the way her co-caterers – yes, they called each other that, my co-caterer here, our co-caterer Katy, in one euphonious case – seemed to drain energy and happiness from exposure to misery. Not even dramatic misery, not Botswana or Barnado’s, just greyness and soup and sometimes croutons.
Throughout her professional week, Tamara showed the industry and pleasantness that had won her plaudits at school and university, jobs at every interview, and occasional disoriented men, in drastic cases, for her ugliness was not of the sort then marketed as beauty. Everyone relied on her at work, whatever work happened to be. On the Sunday evening following her stint at the soup kitchen, she did not go directly back to her flat in the evenings. She would put on a navy blue waterproof with a hood and walk to the off-licence where she purchased a bottle of vodka and a grey packet of cigarettes, which she would consume throughout the night (she was not susceptible to either substance at any other time).
She draped the hood of her coat over her head while still standing among the bottles and the packets, invariably the only woman in the shop, not counting the teenagers and one harassed, respectably dressed red-headed wife (or ex, or widow; she wore two rings, one thick and gold) who stopped by, more or less monthly, and bought ten packs of Silk Cut, paying with three £20 notes. Tamara noted and counted the appearances of this rare but regular visitor, a fellowwoman, sister and twin, recognised as such by Tamara because of the searing, ugly exhaustion on both their faces.
On the eleventh, and last time that the red-headed woman and Tamara met at the off-licence, they happened to talk. There wasn’t usually much conversation there; the shopkeeper was a Muslim, who sold and shortchanged the refreshments of Shaitan with indomitable sullenness, though occasionally youths of his blood would drop by on motorbikes, quick to smile, their eyes glinting in Tamara’s direction. She found this flattering to an extent – Anglo-Saxon men didn’t bother extending the privileges of the fairer sex to its less fair constituents – but she had a morbid horror of Muslims, especially at night, which had once led her to vote for the British National Party; so she never invited them further by speaking. She was in any case incapable of initiating speech in this place. Here she was not Tamara Kellwinch MacDonald, imperturbable and as efficient as stainless steel. She became for twelve hours a creature of flesh, dependent on poison’s maternal caress.
A combination of extenuating circumstances brought this exception to the rule, a conversation, into being. The red-headed woman spoke first, so Tamara only had to react, to reply, which took less effort, needed less dignity. They were outside the range of any obstructive third party, alone in the cold and dark of the street, providing for each other the only sources of light and warmth. But none of this mattered particularly; Tamara had been waiting for the red-headed woman to make an approach for eleven months, and whatever and whenever she had spoken, she would have been attended to.
It started with a satisfied intake of breath, but that was a sign in itself. Tamara knew that the other woman knew it was perfectly possible to smoke happily and silently; the sound meant the stranger wanted Tamara to know that she was happy, which probably meant she was about to talk.
“Don’t know what I’d do without that place...” The comment, meaningless in itself, was fascinating because the woman’s voice was nothing like her face. It was beautiful, soft and contented. Tamara looked through the miasma at the woman’s features, wondering if they had ever been beautiful, soft or contented, but after her examination she doubted it. There was the class thing, as always, but Tamara had always seen that the woman was upper middle-class, 1a socio-economic, whatever; she wouldn’t have guessed that she had a beautiful voice as well. She had expected the whine of a generous alimony.
So she said something she herself found unexpected. “I’m there every Sunday evening. Like evensong at a church.”
The red-headed woman found this very funny; her laugh burst into an alarming cough before she staunched the wound with tar. A little worried, Tamara came closer and made as if to pat her back, but the older woman waved her off impatiently. She gave the girl a shrewd look, one of her eyes half-closed, and then whispered, as if she was uttering something indecent, “Are you a Catholic?”
Tamara laughed now. “Yes. Haven’t been to church since I was confirmed, though.”
“It’s often the way,” the red-head reassured her. The talk now lulled, but in the clear expectation that it would pick up again after the ash had been shaken from its tip. Tamara now felt she had the right, too, to ask personal questions.
“What’s your name?” she wondered, nervousness apparent. She often thought it strange that any human communication was possible, when discovering a name, the chrism of real understanding, was always so awkward.
“Isabel,” Isabel answered, and then glanced to her hand, where her two rings pressed hard upon the cigarette’s malleable side. “MacDonald.”
“That’s my name too, Tamara Kellwinch MacDonald.”
“Kellwinch?”
“Yes, it is funny, but don’t laugh, it’ll set you coughing again...”
“What a good girl you are, my dear Kellwinch. I hope you aren’t good enough to acquiesce to the Government and give up, otherwise I suppose we won’t meet next month.”
The audience was over – Isabel walked firmly to a small, dark car, and Tamara listened to the departing engine. Then she thought for a moment, returned to the off-licence, and gave back the bottle of vodka, much to the shopkeeper’s irritation.
***
Tamara regarded herself as a facilitator of light industry. This could grant her a certain comfort when she needed it, even pride, like being a captain of light infantry. After leaving university, she had helped draft advertisements for paper napkin installations. Then she had become involved in designing paper napkin installations. During a health-scare she had persuaded institutions to convert paper napkin installations – some of which she recalled from the previous phase of her existence – into cleaner heat-emitting drying machines; on the rise of Green Awareness, she had joined the advisory board of Flaxen, a company devoted to stopping carbon-emitting drying machines and replacing them with recycled paper napkins. The environmental Flaxen paid less well than she had expected, as if ideological virtue was included in remuneration.
But talent was recognised, and the company threw about titles and responsibilities like some mediaeval king, compensating for his meagre treasury. So it was that Tamara, after less than a year, found herself with few equals in the Flaxen offices, Manchester, and only two superiors; Harold Green, (surely a surname born of deed-poll?) and Will Blackford, his more visible lieutenant. Above these somewhere, a London office lurked, which, if it had been at all interesting, would have been mysterious. Flaxen made the bulk of its profit out of tedium.
“Hello, James,” Tamara said. Her exalted position’s only extra salary was that she could call Jamie James and he would still have to smile at her. But it wasn’t a pleasure to be exploited too often. This small nastiness had been earned by a long career of niceness.
Short story of Eton vintage (north Oxford, domestic, autobiographical)
In More Danico
From the highest window of the vertical house, the abandoned apples were still visible to the practised observer. Edith counted six. She had thought there had been six and a half, or perhaps a sixth, merely the day before. Was she witnessing the swift and ineluctable processes of Nature, in the ruthless form of biodegradation? Or did urban foxes eat fruit? And why had six perfectly good apples-Coxes, she was inclined to think-been left in their cramped, treeless garden in the first place?
She heard the front door opening, followed by several sounds and shriek, cat or child she was not certain. It was an interesting place for sound, this house. Everything was overheard. She and Harold had been quite ignorant of this fact early in their, marriage, taken in by the discreet, calm look of the Georgian walls, imagining a haven of secrets. But before a week had passed there, each had fallen into the trap of listening to sour confidences. They were both more careful afterwards.
“Edith, Edith, where are you woman?”
That was how he stressed it, as if he was enquiring about her gynaecological anatomy, not her location. Harold’s syntax was peculiarly Danish when he was puzzled. Edith did not bother answering; she wanted to hear for how long he would rail before he began to ascend the stairs. Her smile had the cruelty of serenity about it as she stepped out of her high-heeled shoes and threw herself backwards onto the bed. But the petulant squawk of a disturbed cat destroyed her stratagem. It really was a squawk, and it came from Edmund, who really did, at certain moments, resemble a disconcerted cockatoo.
“Upstairs? What are you doing?”
Edith was a woman of expedient emotion. She began to cry, at sufficient volume to reach Harold in the front hall, but without losing any measure of dignity. She played with her hair as she did so.
“Stop that woman, stop that. No need. None.”
Harold tripped over a pile of books arranged on the stairs for later transportation to Magnus’ bedroom as he hurried upwards. A copy of Anglo-Saxon Attitudes, a third edition that Edith was quite fond of, struck a glancing blow against an inopportunely arrived cat, Edwin, who let out a loud protest, clearly giving it to understand that he would not be on speaking terms with Harold for some time. Harold ignored the animal, but thoroughly condemned the books. He was always irritated by those little turrets of matter he could not thoroughly analyse or understand. He regarded them as fortifications against his movements. Particularly the English ones. He could talk English perfectly well of course, whatever his wife might say to the contrary, but his literary tastes remained solidly Danish.
But now the treachery of this bookish booby-trap was combined with that underhand womanish attack, weeping. It was embarrassing and it was un-English. Honestly, Harold thought, anyone would think it was his woman, not he, who was the foreigner...but he could not put off the conflict any further. He had to face his own guilt within and deny everything without, as usual.
“I’m here woman, here, shhh...” He was half way up the stairs now, on a pale uncluttered landing.
“But are you here in the Danish manner? Or in the English manner?” Edith replied, now, shoeless, coming down the stairs to meet him. “And where is your wife?”
“You are my wife, as far as it matters,” Harold spluttered in exasperation.
“Maybe. But you married Astrid Ranaldsen last month. And you will leave me before this month is gone. I was your Danish marriage. But she is your Danish wife.”
Harold bubbled with useless anger. It was only fortunate the boys were away at school. This was quite unseemly. He had intended to time and to control and to ease and to oil this matter. Now this idiot of a little woman thought it her duty to wrack and to spoil and to dramatise and patronise. He was the offender. But that did not stop him from being appalled at how much Edith was enjoying this.
“I’ve made your sandwich for the train,” Edith added quite naturally. “Ham. With the Jarlsberg you always like.”
***
The queue at the station was, as would be expected in the circumstances, an unpleasant affair, but hysteria was made still harder to stave off by the presence of several Frenchwomen, old, proud, mothers, grieving, glamorous wives, haughty sisters complaining about England, all in the most fashionable mourning black of French femininity..
“There was a party of French businessmen on the train, you see, madam,” a platform attendant explained to Edith. “From Grenoble, which happens to be twinned with this town. Tragic, really.”
“Yes,” Edith replied politely. She was wearing her best grey suit.
“Goddard, Anne,” the loudspeaker announced, “please proceed to the forensic team to offer immediate assistance.” A fat woman with swollen red eyes left, abdicating the front of the line to Edith.
“Do you have kids then?” the platform attendant asked, cultivating further polite conversation in the context where it is perhaps most impolite.
“Yes,” Edith answered.
“Godwin, Edith, please proceed to the forensic team to offer immediate assistance.”
“Bye then,” the platform attendant remarked. “Business as usual, that’s my motto, or the terrorists have won, ent they?”
The forensic team was, Edith could only assume, so named in order to brighten up the process of corpse identification, rather than to fulfil a semantic function, as the sight that greeted her was scarcely a cooperative one. Doctors, of nurses, or non-gender-specific forensic personnel, swarmed in increasingly dirtied white coats-not by anything so dramatic as blood, but by sweat, and the miasma of filth that British stations acquire through decades of bombardment by chewing gum and cigarette ends-swarmed, in any case, like flies competing for refuse, over the dead, leading silent relatives between the messes of failed biological structure. All the identifiers seemed quite lost, and far more dead than the vibrant butcher’s displays of those who were.
“Madam,” one of the swarmers started, “could you help us decide which one of these was your husband...? The bodies from his compartment were over here...”
Edith looked at the closest one to her and said, “What luck. I’ve found him already. That’s him, no doubt about it.”
“Harold Godwin, passenger GY096, seat D4, British-Danish dual nationality?”
“Absolutely,” Edith replied, and Guillaume Nord, passenger M6265, seat D6, French nationality, was packed up into a specially provided Health Service container, which was in turn wrapped in a black bag. Edith, helped by a couple of porters, got her new, unswervingly faithful, husband into a taxi and set the course for the vertical house, in the front garden of which six Cox apples still decayed.
From the highest window of the vertical house, the abandoned apples were still visible to the practised observer. Edith counted six. She had thought there had been six and a half, or perhaps a sixth, merely the day before. Was she witnessing the swift and ineluctable processes of Nature, in the ruthless form of biodegradation? Or did urban foxes eat fruit? And why had six perfectly good apples-Coxes, she was inclined to think-been left in their cramped, treeless garden in the first place?
She heard the front door opening, followed by several sounds and shriek, cat or child she was not certain. It was an interesting place for sound, this house. Everything was overheard. She and Harold had been quite ignorant of this fact early in their, marriage, taken in by the discreet, calm look of the Georgian walls, imagining a haven of secrets. But before a week had passed there, each had fallen into the trap of listening to sour confidences. They were both more careful afterwards.
“Edith, Edith, where are you woman?”
That was how he stressed it, as if he was enquiring about her gynaecological anatomy, not her location. Harold’s syntax was peculiarly Danish when he was puzzled. Edith did not bother answering; she wanted to hear for how long he would rail before he began to ascend the stairs. Her smile had the cruelty of serenity about it as she stepped out of her high-heeled shoes and threw herself backwards onto the bed. But the petulant squawk of a disturbed cat destroyed her stratagem. It really was a squawk, and it came from Edmund, who really did, at certain moments, resemble a disconcerted cockatoo.
“Upstairs? What are you doing?”
Edith was a woman of expedient emotion. She began to cry, at sufficient volume to reach Harold in the front hall, but without losing any measure of dignity. She played with her hair as she did so.
“Stop that woman, stop that. No need. None.”
Harold tripped over a pile of books arranged on the stairs for later transportation to Magnus’ bedroom as he hurried upwards. A copy of Anglo-Saxon Attitudes, a third edition that Edith was quite fond of, struck a glancing blow against an inopportunely arrived cat, Edwin, who let out a loud protest, clearly giving it to understand that he would not be on speaking terms with Harold for some time. Harold ignored the animal, but thoroughly condemned the books. He was always irritated by those little turrets of matter he could not thoroughly analyse or understand. He regarded them as fortifications against his movements. Particularly the English ones. He could talk English perfectly well of course, whatever his wife might say to the contrary, but his literary tastes remained solidly Danish.
But now the treachery of this bookish booby-trap was combined with that underhand womanish attack, weeping. It was embarrassing and it was un-English. Honestly, Harold thought, anyone would think it was his woman, not he, who was the foreigner...but he could not put off the conflict any further. He had to face his own guilt within and deny everything without, as usual.
“I’m here woman, here, shhh...” He was half way up the stairs now, on a pale uncluttered landing.
“But are you here in the Danish manner? Or in the English manner?” Edith replied, now, shoeless, coming down the stairs to meet him. “And where is your wife?”
“You are my wife, as far as it matters,” Harold spluttered in exasperation.
“Maybe. But you married Astrid Ranaldsen last month. And you will leave me before this month is gone. I was your Danish marriage. But she is your Danish wife.”
Harold bubbled with useless anger. It was only fortunate the boys were away at school. This was quite unseemly. He had intended to time and to control and to ease and to oil this matter. Now this idiot of a little woman thought it her duty to wrack and to spoil and to dramatise and patronise. He was the offender. But that did not stop him from being appalled at how much Edith was enjoying this.
“I’ve made your sandwich for the train,” Edith added quite naturally. “Ham. With the Jarlsberg you always like.”
***
The queue at the station was, as would be expected in the circumstances, an unpleasant affair, but hysteria was made still harder to stave off by the presence of several Frenchwomen, old, proud, mothers, grieving, glamorous wives, haughty sisters complaining about England, all in the most fashionable mourning black of French femininity..
“There was a party of French businessmen on the train, you see, madam,” a platform attendant explained to Edith. “From Grenoble, which happens to be twinned with this town. Tragic, really.”
“Yes,” Edith replied politely. She was wearing her best grey suit.
“Goddard, Anne,” the loudspeaker announced, “please proceed to the forensic team to offer immediate assistance.” A fat woman with swollen red eyes left, abdicating the front of the line to Edith.
“Do you have kids then?” the platform attendant asked, cultivating further polite conversation in the context where it is perhaps most impolite.
“Yes,” Edith answered.
“Godwin, Edith, please proceed to the forensic team to offer immediate assistance.”
“Bye then,” the platform attendant remarked. “Business as usual, that’s my motto, or the terrorists have won, ent they?”
The forensic team was, Edith could only assume, so named in order to brighten up the process of corpse identification, rather than to fulfil a semantic function, as the sight that greeted her was scarcely a cooperative one. Doctors, of nurses, or non-gender-specific forensic personnel, swarmed in increasingly dirtied white coats-not by anything so dramatic as blood, but by sweat, and the miasma of filth that British stations acquire through decades of bombardment by chewing gum and cigarette ends-swarmed, in any case, like flies competing for refuse, over the dead, leading silent relatives between the messes of failed biological structure. All the identifiers seemed quite lost, and far more dead than the vibrant butcher’s displays of those who were.
“Madam,” one of the swarmers started, “could you help us decide which one of these was your husband...? The bodies from his compartment were over here...”
Edith looked at the closest one to her and said, “What luck. I’ve found him already. That’s him, no doubt about it.”
“Harold Godwin, passenger GY096, seat D4, British-Danish dual nationality?”
“Absolutely,” Edith replied, and Guillaume Nord, passenger M6265, seat D6, French nationality, was packed up into a specially provided Health Service container, which was in turn wrapped in a black bag. Edith, helped by a couple of porters, got her new, unswervingly faithful, husband into a taxi and set the course for the vertical house, in the front garden of which six Cox apples still decayed.
Novel fragment: "The Don", crime, Oxford, gritty, man
And so they agreed to wait there longer. It was not raining much, so the MCS boys in their white to grey nylon, down in the neat field where the river somehow wasn’t, paused in stalled lines, drizzled but taut, tauter than the ball which would be replaced tomorrow. Ez drooped over their side of the bridge and extended his light eyes, his mouth unrolled in idleness, his fat tongue undermining and overhauling an irking strip of lodged saltfish from Rice N’ Peas.
“Who do you reckon”, Padraig asked him. At a further distance from the bridge’s rampart, he was yet taking more in. “Count the blonds, blonds are strong.”
Ez did not give away whether he thought anything of the tip or not. He said “Lot nearer us. Nearer the teacher, right. Four on them.”
“Four? Boy, your mind’s not on this.” Padraig gave an exaggerated, pointed, lashed out kick. His brown shoe brushed Ez’s calf and the dusty gum from its pad gripped into the wedges of the jeans.
“Maybe,” Ez said, slashing his tongue from gulf to gulf, severing the saltfish’s last tenacity and spitting in the solid competence of victory, “not. But I’ll still win. You taking?”
“I took that ten minutes ago. My lads scored third minute, that counts.”
“You can’t start ahead.”
“Can’t?”
“The situation was less than fully assessed. Unsafe.”
“Fuck off. Two ahead now, mine slamming yours. You should stop backing the yid looking ones, Ez, it’s like I say, blond is strong.You see where they are, you like what you…”
A bus was passing back down to beyond the roundabout. Ez got onto it. Padraig gathered his sinuous burden off the bench that had broken his fall. Beneath it lay the saltfish scrap, a new human tooth claimed, chipped at its side. Padraig gulped back the ichor and felt a bit drunkened by it, on top of recent happenings. Three goals, he thought, blond is strong. He put a battered hand in a harpooned canvas pocket and clawed. Wallet, two cameras, keys, keys to home, receipt, bag, phone. All of the techy metal was shiny enough to make Padraig look like a devout touching up his relics. He rang Mad, and began to walk the opposite way the bus had gone, into the city with a mediaeval heart.
“Who do you reckon”, Padraig asked him. At a further distance from the bridge’s rampart, he was yet taking more in. “Count the blonds, blonds are strong.”
Ez did not give away whether he thought anything of the tip or not. He said “Lot nearer us. Nearer the teacher, right. Four on them.”
“Four? Boy, your mind’s not on this.” Padraig gave an exaggerated, pointed, lashed out kick. His brown shoe brushed Ez’s calf and the dusty gum from its pad gripped into the wedges of the jeans.
“Maybe,” Ez said, slashing his tongue from gulf to gulf, severing the saltfish’s last tenacity and spitting in the solid competence of victory, “not. But I’ll still win. You taking?”
“I took that ten minutes ago. My lads scored third minute, that counts.”
“You can’t start ahead.”
“Can’t?”
“The situation was less than fully assessed. Unsafe.”
“Fuck off. Two ahead now, mine slamming yours. You should stop backing the yid looking ones, Ez, it’s like I say, blond is strong.You see where they are, you like what you…”
A bus was passing back down to beyond the roundabout. Ez got onto it. Padraig gathered his sinuous burden off the bench that had broken his fall. Beneath it lay the saltfish scrap, a new human tooth claimed, chipped at its side. Padraig gulped back the ichor and felt a bit drunkened by it, on top of recent happenings. Three goals, he thought, blond is strong. He put a battered hand in a harpooned canvas pocket and clawed. Wallet, two cameras, keys, keys to home, receipt, bag, phone. All of the techy metal was shiny enough to make Padraig look like a devout touching up his relics. He rang Mad, and began to walk the opposite way the bus had gone, into the city with a mediaeval heart.
[[In the process of being rejjed by Trinity News...]]
VISIONS OF TRINITY
So what does it mean, then? There’s the Matrix, obviously. Charming girl. Not much in the way of conversation, but that’s probably a qualification rather than otherwise for sexual tension with Keanu Reeves. Moving down the scale of macro-importance, the Trinity is the intellectual core, or if you like the bitter pill of thought, within Christianity. It has long dissuaded buyers of what is otherwise considered a popular spiritual product, and its rebarbative complexity has engendered offshoots as varied as Arianism, Monophysitism and Islam.
More interestingly, Trinity is the brand name that adorns three ancient collegiate institutions; and also the target ITV2 selected when deciding to nail posho British tertiary education. Why so, we wonder; but not for long. Kieron Quirke and Robin French, the writers of Trinity (late undergraduates, needless to say, of Oxford and Cambridge) needed a single word name (snappier), equipped with esoteric, sinister aspects (more commercial, cf Dan Brown), and possessed of some ambiguity (less vulnerable to litigation). What better choice than a medieval college named after a theological concept, whose very country of origin is tricky to place precisely?
I come from Balliol, Oxford, myself. We are next to your namesake and we have an extremely boring relationship with them. Despite being a larger, richer and more popular college, Balliol is plagued by a barely hidden architectural inferiority complex, and so chooses to uphold an ancient bloodfeud with Trinity (Oxford) which the other lot have, by and large, grown out of. It is a bit like Orwell’s Ten Minute Hate in 1984, or the pervasive British nostalgia for evil Germans, sly French and red Russians; our loathing of Trinity keeps us strong and gives us something to talk about, in theory, when all else fails.
So when Trinity emerged on ITV, it was an instant hit round my place, but a slightly nuanced one. Should we be thrilled that our traditional rivals were being pilloried on telly every Sunday by means the most absurd stereotypes imaginable (“I know girls like a bit of rough, but in my experience they prefer a nicely laundered waistcoat”)? Or should we envy them the attention and cachet of exemplifying such glamorous evil? I am myself firmly in the latter camp. I’d love to see a TV series encompassing class-tormented sex, fascistic medical experimentation and rad tailcoats called Balliol, though I’m not sure the ratings would be as high.
Of course Quirke, French and their various directors lacked the spirit to actually approach one of the Trinities over the question of shooting locations (despite those friendly, tempting Irish tax-breaks on artistic enterprise), and so Royal Holloway was picked. In Cambridge, Oxford and Dublin alike the disapproval will have been felt, for Royal Holloway is suitable neither in terms of architecture, nor context, for the accurate representation of any Trinity. All of our Trinities are old religious foundations engrained within a town (Trinity Oxford was founded to resist the Reformation, Trinity Dublin to support it, but that’s by the by). Royal Holloway looks like a secluded, Victorian Gothic public school experiment. The TV series lost out on any town/gown opportunities for their plot (internalising these instead through the Dandelion Club/meritocratic freshers contrast), and bowed to a strangely alien structural cliché. The result is that our beloved Trinity aristocrats behave like students of Christ Church in buildings that look like Keble, or (perish the thought) Girton, Cambridge (a weirdly feminine castle entirely erected from blood red stone), buildings the Bullingdon Club wouldn’t deign to vomit in.
These aesthetic quibbles aside, I must confess what must already be obvious, that, as Professor Maltravers, played by the immaculate Charles Dance, admits somewhere in the last episode, “I love Trinity; the Dandelion Club is my life.” I love the half-implemented way that Trinity is actually made to function as an “internationally recognised centre of learning” (the best school leavers in, at least, Britain seem to head there), despite retaining academic serfdom which must lack a certain efficiency (the President of the Dandelion Club, viewers are constantly reminded, doesn’t have to do any work at all). I love the skewed vision of the academics which results in Maltravers apparently teaching medicine (he is supposed to have discovered a vital cancer treatment which murdered an arbitrary bunch of babies) as well as English (he retails Shakespeare and mauled Tennyson effortlessly and demands coursework in King Lear from Dorian), or in Dorian and Rosalind for some reason having votes on the college’s governing body. I hate the two idiots, ‘Angus and Raj’, and can’t bear to watch them, but I enjoy the fact that, like all true gimps, they possess inexplicable computing skills.
And though I may have focussed so far on the obvious butts of ‘Bridgeford University’, i.e. my establishment and its hated sister in the fens, I don’t think the miasma and atmosphere of Trinity is without debt to Trinity Dublin, either, though it may be a matter of indirect and knock-on effect rather than deliberate reference and resonance. Take the two characters in Trinity who between them decisively wrest the show into their hands: Dance’s Professor Edmund Maltravers, and Christian Cooke’s Dorian Gaudain. I would contend they are in at least one sense – the intellectual sense - Dublin-born.
It’s all in the name. Without Oscar Wilde, there could have been no Sebastian Flyte (Evelyn Waugh’s pretty boy is obviously the king of Dorian Gaudain’s particular sub-category). The philosophy the Dandelion Club under Gaudain espouses (“a society dedicated to the pursuit of pleasure”) and Charlotte Arc rejects (“God, you’re boring: do you think about anything other than waistcoats and girls?”) is expressly Wilde’s own, and Trinity is able, for reasons of cultural context, to express its homoerotic side far more explicitly than is possible in Wildean drama (see the sometimes agonisingly heavy-handed love affair between Ross and Jonty: “We were lovers. You didn’t know that because you didn’t know him”). As for Edmund Maltravers, it should always be remembered that Wilde came to Oxford already a Trinity graduate, and a protégé of one of its most famous academics, John Mahaffy. Mahaffy it was who inducted Wilde into the details of Platonic homosexual ideals; and while Trinity’s Maltravers and Dorian Gaudain lack a relationship of any such intensity, there is suggestion of some close, at least, mental affinity between Maltravers and Richard Arc (“He had the most beautiful mind I have ever known”).
Nor, as it happens, is TCD without precedents for well-written, murderous trash. I direct the reader at once to a great, almost forgotten novel of Terence de Vere White’s, Lucifer Falling. This features the core struggle of Trinity – old guard academics vs modernisers – with the more spectacular, conspiratorial elements (weird science, building a master-race, etc) excised; with less nudity and more sexual agony. Basically, this novel (which is complete with a panicky disclaimer from de Vere White that “this is not intended to be a picture of Trinity Dublin”) toys with an archetype Trinity has gestured to without ever fully incorporating it – the Lecherous Lecturer. The ITV show allows its dons some kind of love life, with a triangle between Dr Gabriel Lloyd, Dr Angela Donne and (the late) Richard Arc, and a brief attempt by Rosalind Gaudain to seduce an academic’s “sexily honed brain”. But Lucifer Falling is from a seedier hand, less reliant on a youthful audience and happy to linger on the pains of middle-aged amours. It also contains, more like Trinity in this respect, a dramatic, well-timed and attuned killing:
It hit him between the shoulder blades, shattering his spine into several pieces. The bust was undamaged. The College has it in the Library now.
(For a less distressing literary take on your hothouse, there’s always Joyce.)
Aestheticism, mentoring and murder: Trinity would be nothing without Trinity (yours). Hold your heads high and grab that ITV internet player if you haven’t already.
So what does it mean, then? There’s the Matrix, obviously. Charming girl. Not much in the way of conversation, but that’s probably a qualification rather than otherwise for sexual tension with Keanu Reeves. Moving down the scale of macro-importance, the Trinity is the intellectual core, or if you like the bitter pill of thought, within Christianity. It has long dissuaded buyers of what is otherwise considered a popular spiritual product, and its rebarbative complexity has engendered offshoots as varied as Arianism, Monophysitism and Islam.
More interestingly, Trinity is the brand name that adorns three ancient collegiate institutions; and also the target ITV2 selected when deciding to nail posho British tertiary education. Why so, we wonder; but not for long. Kieron Quirke and Robin French, the writers of Trinity (late undergraduates, needless to say, of Oxford and Cambridge) needed a single word name (snappier), equipped with esoteric, sinister aspects (more commercial, cf Dan Brown), and possessed of some ambiguity (less vulnerable to litigation). What better choice than a medieval college named after a theological concept, whose very country of origin is tricky to place precisely?
I come from Balliol, Oxford, myself. We are next to your namesake and we have an extremely boring relationship with them. Despite being a larger, richer and more popular college, Balliol is plagued by a barely hidden architectural inferiority complex, and so chooses to uphold an ancient bloodfeud with Trinity (Oxford) which the other lot have, by and large, grown out of. It is a bit like Orwell’s Ten Minute Hate in 1984, or the pervasive British nostalgia for evil Germans, sly French and red Russians; our loathing of Trinity keeps us strong and gives us something to talk about, in theory, when all else fails.
So when Trinity emerged on ITV, it was an instant hit round my place, but a slightly nuanced one. Should we be thrilled that our traditional rivals were being pilloried on telly every Sunday by means the most absurd stereotypes imaginable (“I know girls like a bit of rough, but in my experience they prefer a nicely laundered waistcoat”)? Or should we envy them the attention and cachet of exemplifying such glamorous evil? I am myself firmly in the latter camp. I’d love to see a TV series encompassing class-tormented sex, fascistic medical experimentation and rad tailcoats called Balliol, though I’m not sure the ratings would be as high.
Of course Quirke, French and their various directors lacked the spirit to actually approach one of the Trinities over the question of shooting locations (despite those friendly, tempting Irish tax-breaks on artistic enterprise), and so Royal Holloway was picked. In Cambridge, Oxford and Dublin alike the disapproval will have been felt, for Royal Holloway is suitable neither in terms of architecture, nor context, for the accurate representation of any Trinity. All of our Trinities are old religious foundations engrained within a town (Trinity Oxford was founded to resist the Reformation, Trinity Dublin to support it, but that’s by the by). Royal Holloway looks like a secluded, Victorian Gothic public school experiment. The TV series lost out on any town/gown opportunities for their plot (internalising these instead through the Dandelion Club/meritocratic freshers contrast), and bowed to a strangely alien structural cliché. The result is that our beloved Trinity aristocrats behave like students of Christ Church in buildings that look like Keble, or (perish the thought) Girton, Cambridge (a weirdly feminine castle entirely erected from blood red stone), buildings the Bullingdon Club wouldn’t deign to vomit in.
These aesthetic quibbles aside, I must confess what must already be obvious, that, as Professor Maltravers, played by the immaculate Charles Dance, admits somewhere in the last episode, “I love Trinity; the Dandelion Club is my life.” I love the half-implemented way that Trinity is actually made to function as an “internationally recognised centre of learning” (the best school leavers in, at least, Britain seem to head there), despite retaining academic serfdom which must lack a certain efficiency (the President of the Dandelion Club, viewers are constantly reminded, doesn’t have to do any work at all). I love the skewed vision of the academics which results in Maltravers apparently teaching medicine (he is supposed to have discovered a vital cancer treatment which murdered an arbitrary bunch of babies) as well as English (he retails Shakespeare and mauled Tennyson effortlessly and demands coursework in King Lear from Dorian), or in Dorian and Rosalind for some reason having votes on the college’s governing body. I hate the two idiots, ‘Angus and Raj’, and can’t bear to watch them, but I enjoy the fact that, like all true gimps, they possess inexplicable computing skills.
And though I may have focussed so far on the obvious butts of ‘Bridgeford University’, i.e. my establishment and its hated sister in the fens, I don’t think the miasma and atmosphere of Trinity is without debt to Trinity Dublin, either, though it may be a matter of indirect and knock-on effect rather than deliberate reference and resonance. Take the two characters in Trinity who between them decisively wrest the show into their hands: Dance’s Professor Edmund Maltravers, and Christian Cooke’s Dorian Gaudain. I would contend they are in at least one sense – the intellectual sense - Dublin-born.
It’s all in the name. Without Oscar Wilde, there could have been no Sebastian Flyte (Evelyn Waugh’s pretty boy is obviously the king of Dorian Gaudain’s particular sub-category). The philosophy the Dandelion Club under Gaudain espouses (“a society dedicated to the pursuit of pleasure”) and Charlotte Arc rejects (“God, you’re boring: do you think about anything other than waistcoats and girls?”) is expressly Wilde’s own, and Trinity is able, for reasons of cultural context, to express its homoerotic side far more explicitly than is possible in Wildean drama (see the sometimes agonisingly heavy-handed love affair between Ross and Jonty: “We were lovers. You didn’t know that because you didn’t know him”). As for Edmund Maltravers, it should always be remembered that Wilde came to Oxford already a Trinity graduate, and a protégé of one of its most famous academics, John Mahaffy. Mahaffy it was who inducted Wilde into the details of Platonic homosexual ideals; and while Trinity’s Maltravers and Dorian Gaudain lack a relationship of any such intensity, there is suggestion of some close, at least, mental affinity between Maltravers and Richard Arc (“He had the most beautiful mind I have ever known”).
Nor, as it happens, is TCD without precedents for well-written, murderous trash. I direct the reader at once to a great, almost forgotten novel of Terence de Vere White’s, Lucifer Falling. This features the core struggle of Trinity – old guard academics vs modernisers – with the more spectacular, conspiratorial elements (weird science, building a master-race, etc) excised; with less nudity and more sexual agony. Basically, this novel (which is complete with a panicky disclaimer from de Vere White that “this is not intended to be a picture of Trinity Dublin”) toys with an archetype Trinity has gestured to without ever fully incorporating it – the Lecherous Lecturer. The ITV show allows its dons some kind of love life, with a triangle between Dr Gabriel Lloyd, Dr Angela Donne and (the late) Richard Arc, and a brief attempt by Rosalind Gaudain to seduce an academic’s “sexily honed brain”. But Lucifer Falling is from a seedier hand, less reliant on a youthful audience and happy to linger on the pains of middle-aged amours. It also contains, more like Trinity in this respect, a dramatic, well-timed and attuned killing:
It hit him between the shoulder blades, shattering his spine into several pieces. The bust was undamaged. The College has it in the Library now.
(For a less distressing literary take on your hothouse, there’s always Joyce.)
Aestheticism, mentoring and murder: Trinity would be nothing without Trinity (yours). Hold your heads high and grab that ITV internet player if you haven’t already.
[Rejjed by Cherwell and Isis]]...
Stornoway at the Sheldonian, 31st Oct
In one of those feeble bits of filler copy that consitute G2, I recall once reading some loser whose proudest vaunt was that he had known Joy Division when they were Warsaw, back in a Salford establishment called Eric’s. If all else fails, I fully expect to eke my moments through by reiterating, similarly, that I knew the most lyrical, melodic body of musicians in Britain back when they were just Stornoway, performing to a humble diehard audience of 600 or so Oxford students and residents in the Sheldonian Theatre, with only an orchestra apiece to back them up.
The brag, I accept, falls a little flat. Stornoway have arrived already, and I cannot discover them, only depict them as accurately – and hence as glowingly – as I can. In the invidious classifications of their industry, this band have easily been subsumed under the banner of the “alternative”, and it is important to express first just how effective an alternative to the alternative Stornoway in fact are. Their lyrics in such beautifully assembled songs as Boats & Trains and Fuel Up make sense by the standards of music, poetry and fiction, are largely audible, always articulate, and unfailingly moving. Their instrumentality falls into a number of broad approaches; the slow moving, quiet backdrop, the frenetic, almost military jig, and in the case of The November Song, relatively rarely played and harder to find online than much of the band’s output, a solo vocal effectiveness more reminiscent of singer-songwriters and troubadours than a band at all.
That last number, which I had never heard before, is written and performed by Brian Briggs, a man with one of those names welded for alliterative fame who nevertheless seems to have a taste for a tranquil private life. Especially given that he was performing to his core following of chronically romantically unfortunate Oxford undergraduates, Briggs took a risk in displaying a chanson d’amour of inner contentment and advertising it as such, even, it must be said nauseatingly, dedicating The November Song to “everyone in the audience lucky enough to have a soulmate”. It is a proof of the song’s quality that it overrode even this reviewer’s scepticism, and instead of acting as a tonal gloat captured the idea of love as an all-important but vulnerable aspect of life.
Brigg’s November Song preamble also displayed an element of Stornoway’s characteristic technique that is evident in their name; a folkloric connection to imaginative geography, that leaves every place name to embody a significance that is emotional, literary and traditional all at once. When Jarvis Cocker sings “she came from Greece”, he is gesturing to a vague idea of spivvy opulence. A folksong like Fairport Convention’s Sir Patrick Spens mentions Aberdeen for legendary reasons without significance outside tradition. Stornoway go for the heritage and the associations at once. November Song’s connection to the Pembrokeshire hills associates successful love with isolation from the world, but Briggs was also clearly, specifically, in the Pembrokeshire hills at the time and wanted to pin them down. It is this specificity about Stornoway’s songwriting that has allowed them to create what might be called the local national anthem of Cowley, Zorbing. When this band name a place they hallow it.
The magnetically popular Zorbing and the far more lyrically accomplished On The Rocks were deployed in what Briggs called “a really experimental moment”. The band were thrilled to be in the Sheldonian but aware of the changed atmosphere it imposed upon them; playing under a restored Baroque ceiling three centuries old with strict orders against standing or stamping in the audience. Stornoway reacted with an appealing combination of reverence and subversion. They combined operations, and shared their platform, with the Oxford Millennium Orchestra, one of whose violinists they are in the habit of borrowing. But Briggs kept a thumbnail on his rock-star’s honour by leading his audience in a group scream at the event’s conclusion.
As for the orchestral contribution, it was a musical experiment but perhaps also a qualitative risk. In a way that felt slightly allegorical of Music Today, our “alternative” pop heroes never failed to prove themselves more competent musicians than the smartly accoutred ensemble. The Millennium Orchestra momentarily resembled a classical bribe that had bought Stornoway the Sheldonian, and their warm-up act of some drearily rendered Mendelssohn and rather better Vaughan Williams instigated some audience impatience. But they redeemed any such charge by the excellence of their support to Zorbing and, particularly, On the Rocks. When an obviously deeply affected Briggs muttered it was the “best night of his life”, few in the audience had any doubt he was referring to the unforeseen and overwhelming success of this peculiar synthesis.
I’ve long had doubts about whether Zorbing deserves its place as the most widely circulated and reputed part of Stornoway’s achievement. When overlistened to, the song exposes wilfully trite rhymes and emotional truisms that fall short of much of the band’s originality. The Oxford resonances will ensure this song never fails to be welcome round here, however.
To secure their national standing (and this is not an absurd statement – Stornoway have just had a spin with Jools), the band are more likely to hit home with the song that provoked the wildest positive reaction from the audience, the funny and frightening We Are The Battery Human. This reminds its hearers of Stornoway’s consistent protest credentials; an early masterpiece, not alas performed in the Sheldonian, was the fabulously unmusical Good Fish Guide, a ranting sermon upon what fish we should and shouldn’t eat. We Are The Battery Human strikes simultaneous targets – by imagery, of course, shackled poultry, but explicitly, in a Luddite and Romantic vein, the present servitude of humanity to technology – “We were born to be free/…Range”. It has, inevitably, become a hit on the internet.
In one of those feeble bits of filler copy that consitute G2, I recall once reading some loser whose proudest vaunt was that he had known Joy Division when they were Warsaw, back in a Salford establishment called Eric’s. If all else fails, I fully expect to eke my moments through by reiterating, similarly, that I knew the most lyrical, melodic body of musicians in Britain back when they were just Stornoway, performing to a humble diehard audience of 600 or so Oxford students and residents in the Sheldonian Theatre, with only an orchestra apiece to back them up.
The brag, I accept, falls a little flat. Stornoway have arrived already, and I cannot discover them, only depict them as accurately – and hence as glowingly – as I can. In the invidious classifications of their industry, this band have easily been subsumed under the banner of the “alternative”, and it is important to express first just how effective an alternative to the alternative Stornoway in fact are. Their lyrics in such beautifully assembled songs as Boats & Trains and Fuel Up make sense by the standards of music, poetry and fiction, are largely audible, always articulate, and unfailingly moving. Their instrumentality falls into a number of broad approaches; the slow moving, quiet backdrop, the frenetic, almost military jig, and in the case of The November Song, relatively rarely played and harder to find online than much of the band’s output, a solo vocal effectiveness more reminiscent of singer-songwriters and troubadours than a band at all.
That last number, which I had never heard before, is written and performed by Brian Briggs, a man with one of those names welded for alliterative fame who nevertheless seems to have a taste for a tranquil private life. Especially given that he was performing to his core following of chronically romantically unfortunate Oxford undergraduates, Briggs took a risk in displaying a chanson d’amour of inner contentment and advertising it as such, even, it must be said nauseatingly, dedicating The November Song to “everyone in the audience lucky enough to have a soulmate”. It is a proof of the song’s quality that it overrode even this reviewer’s scepticism, and instead of acting as a tonal gloat captured the idea of love as an all-important but vulnerable aspect of life.
Brigg’s November Song preamble also displayed an element of Stornoway’s characteristic technique that is evident in their name; a folkloric connection to imaginative geography, that leaves every place name to embody a significance that is emotional, literary and traditional all at once. When Jarvis Cocker sings “she came from Greece”, he is gesturing to a vague idea of spivvy opulence. A folksong like Fairport Convention’s Sir Patrick Spens mentions Aberdeen for legendary reasons without significance outside tradition. Stornoway go for the heritage and the associations at once. November Song’s connection to the Pembrokeshire hills associates successful love with isolation from the world, but Briggs was also clearly, specifically, in the Pembrokeshire hills at the time and wanted to pin them down. It is this specificity about Stornoway’s songwriting that has allowed them to create what might be called the local national anthem of Cowley, Zorbing. When this band name a place they hallow it.
The magnetically popular Zorbing and the far more lyrically accomplished On The Rocks were deployed in what Briggs called “a really experimental moment”. The band were thrilled to be in the Sheldonian but aware of the changed atmosphere it imposed upon them; playing under a restored Baroque ceiling three centuries old with strict orders against standing or stamping in the audience. Stornoway reacted with an appealing combination of reverence and subversion. They combined operations, and shared their platform, with the Oxford Millennium Orchestra, one of whose violinists they are in the habit of borrowing. But Briggs kept a thumbnail on his rock-star’s honour by leading his audience in a group scream at the event’s conclusion.
As for the orchestral contribution, it was a musical experiment but perhaps also a qualitative risk. In a way that felt slightly allegorical of Music Today, our “alternative” pop heroes never failed to prove themselves more competent musicians than the smartly accoutred ensemble. The Millennium Orchestra momentarily resembled a classical bribe that had bought Stornoway the Sheldonian, and their warm-up act of some drearily rendered Mendelssohn and rather better Vaughan Williams instigated some audience impatience. But they redeemed any such charge by the excellence of their support to Zorbing and, particularly, On the Rocks. When an obviously deeply affected Briggs muttered it was the “best night of his life”, few in the audience had any doubt he was referring to the unforeseen and overwhelming success of this peculiar synthesis.
I’ve long had doubts about whether Zorbing deserves its place as the most widely circulated and reputed part of Stornoway’s achievement. When overlistened to, the song exposes wilfully trite rhymes and emotional truisms that fall short of much of the band’s originality. The Oxford resonances will ensure this song never fails to be welcome round here, however.
To secure their national standing (and this is not an absurd statement – Stornoway have just had a spin with Jools), the band are more likely to hit home with the song that provoked the wildest positive reaction from the audience, the funny and frightening We Are The Battery Human. This reminds its hearers of Stornoway’s consistent protest credentials; an early masterpiece, not alas performed in the Sheldonian, was the fabulously unmusical Good Fish Guide, a ranting sermon upon what fish we should and shouldn’t eat. We Are The Battery Human strikes simultaneous targets – by imagery, of course, shackled poultry, but explicitly, in a Luddite and Romantic vein, the present servitude of humanity to technology – “We were born to be free/…Range”. It has, inevitably, become a hit on the internet.
Administrative Decree
I've so many bits of unpublished nonspecific article/ etc that this website is going, very shortly, to feature prose for the first time.
Actually, I suppose strictly speaking it features prose for the first time now.
Actually, I suppose strictly speaking it features prose for the first time now.
Tuesday 15 December 2009
Fairy story
To be certain, he'd gone for a long enough way,
When they stopped by the priory's quiet.
And then he put aside some appeasement for time,
Pausing to strip at his stained saddle bags.
It was as they'd told him,
One of the calm places
In Cumbria with uncalm ends,
So he knew what to do with the glass box within.
Such a prince - he's the eldest, not the runt, of three -
And his talents and powers are where you can see them,
In his, like Arthur's, scabbardless, sword,
In his, like Talbot's, armed, company,
In frank blue eyes like Richard's,
Or Laszlo Corvinus',
Eyes atop the shape of Kornilov - you see.
But you have a night train to join and you catch it,
You knew - did you mind? - that was the last you'd see.
The prince cannot read and marks charters with crosses,
Or crowns, or some strange rampant creature he's put
In his fancy, when heralds put it in his arms;
So the curse that must frown from the priory lintel
Is read only, silently, by the dark cardinal,
Who's the old king's bastard, and a wicked man.
The cardinal has no hand telling this story,
But Powell and Pressburger say what the curse said.
The prince led the way down the priory aisle -
Forget about bridesmaids - the unhappy brideless
Are faithful and fatal bachelors for love
And bachelor doesn't for nothing mean knight,
So the prince's knight's rearing, well it could not pale him,
Standing beside the void in the glass box.
You are going away in a very strange carriage,
You sit in the midst of an ill-fitting train,
Such mien, such attendants, for king's or queen's daughter,
Even in the shadows...as small difference made
As the tablet in water you sink, mouth, eyes, glutting,
Your stare in the rest that seems such sure aggression.
The prince has displaced you in your display case,
His last gasps are silking up the demure crystal,
The cardinal's planning the regency council,
But only the farrier, local informant
Know's quite what's awry -
That his liege lies cold in sleepless beauty's eye.
When they stopped by the priory's quiet.
And then he put aside some appeasement for time,
Pausing to strip at his stained saddle bags.
It was as they'd told him,
One of the calm places
In Cumbria with uncalm ends,
So he knew what to do with the glass box within.
Such a prince - he's the eldest, not the runt, of three -
And his talents and powers are where you can see them,
In his, like Arthur's, scabbardless, sword,
In his, like Talbot's, armed, company,
In frank blue eyes like Richard's,
Or Laszlo Corvinus',
Eyes atop the shape of Kornilov - you see.
But you have a night train to join and you catch it,
You knew - did you mind? - that was the last you'd see.
The prince cannot read and marks charters with crosses,
Or crowns, or some strange rampant creature he's put
In his fancy, when heralds put it in his arms;
So the curse that must frown from the priory lintel
Is read only, silently, by the dark cardinal,
Who's the old king's bastard, and a wicked man.
The cardinal has no hand telling this story,
But Powell and Pressburger say what the curse said.
The prince led the way down the priory aisle -
Forget about bridesmaids - the unhappy brideless
Are faithful and fatal bachelors for love
And bachelor doesn't for nothing mean knight,
So the prince's knight's rearing, well it could not pale him,
Standing beside the void in the glass box.
You are going away in a very strange carriage,
You sit in the midst of an ill-fitting train,
Such mien, such attendants, for king's or queen's daughter,
Even in the shadows...as small difference made
As the tablet in water you sink, mouth, eyes, glutting,
Your stare in the rest that seems such sure aggression.
The prince has displaced you in your display case,
His last gasps are silking up the demure crystal,
The cardinal's planning the regency council,
But only the farrier, local informant
Know's quite what's awry -
That his liege lies cold in sleepless beauty's eye.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)