December 13
“BOOMIER FROM THE TENORS,” commands the choirmaster. “Get our firm diaphragms wobbling, boys! Wibble-wobble, wibble-wobble. Trebles, lesss sssybilanccce on the esss—we aren’t a troupe of Gollums, now, are we?—and tap out those ts. Adrian B—if you can nail the top C in ‘Weep You No More Sad Fountains,’ you can nail it here. Once more with more welly! A-one, a-two, and a—” King’s College Choir’s sixteen bat-eared choristers, bereft of hairstyles, and fourteen choral scholars exhale in unison …
Of one that is so fair and bright,
Velut maris stella …
Benjamin Britten’s “Hymn to the Virgin” launches, chasing its echoey tail around the sumptuous ceiling before dive-bombing the scattering of winter tourists and students sitting there in the chancel in our damp coats. For me, Britten’s a hit-and-miss composer; prolix on occasion but, when pumped and primed, the old queen binds your quivering soul to the mast and lashes it with fiery sublimity …
Brighter than the day is light,
Parens et puella …
In my idler moments, I do wonder what music I’ll hear as I lie dying, surrounded by a bevy of hot nurses. Nothing more exultant than “Hymn to the Virgin” occurs to me, but I worry that when the big moment arrives DJ Unconscious will launch me off on the back of that “Gimme Gimme Gimme (A Man After Midnight)” and for once in my life I’ll have no redress. World, shut yer mouth, for one of the canon’s most glorious musical orgasms, on the “Cry”:
I cry to thee, thou see to me,
Lady pray thy Son for me …
The hairs on my neck prickle, as if blown on. By her, for example, sitting across the aisle. She wasn’t there when I last looked. Her eyes are closed to drink in the music so I drink her in. Late thirties … vanilla hair, creamy-skinned, beaujolais lips, cheekbones you’d slice your thumb on. Slim beneath a midnight-blue winter coat. A defected Russian opera singer, waiting to meet her handler. You never know, this is Cambridge. A true, rare ten …
Tam pia,
That I might come to thee …
Maria.
Let her stay put after the choir troop out. Let her turn to the young man across the aisle and murmur, “Wasn’t that the very breath of heaven?” Let us discuss the Peter Grimes Interludes, and Bruckner’s Ninth. Let us avoid talk of her domestic arrangements as we drink coffee at the County Hotel. Let coffee turn into trout and red wine, and to hell with my last pint of the Michaelmas term with the boys at the Buried Bishop. Let us climb the carpeted stairs to that snug suite where Fitzsimmons’s mother and I frolicked during fresher’s week. Ouch. The Kraken in my boxer shorts wakes. I’m male, twenty-one, it’s been ten days since I last got laid, what do you expect? But I can hardly adjust myself with a lady watching. Oh? Well well well, if she isn’t discreetly studying me. I watch Rubens’s Adoration of the Magi above the altar, and wait for her to make a move.
? ? ?
THE CHOIR TROOPS out but the woman stays put. A tourist aims his fat camera at the Rubens before Security Goblin snarls, “No flash!” The chancel empties, the goblin returns to his booth by the organ, and minutes trickle by. My Rolex says three-thirty. I’ve an essay to polish on Ronald Reagan’s foreign policy, but an eerie goddess is sitting six feet away, waiting for me to make a move. “I always think,” I tell her, “that seeing the choir’s blood, sweat, and tears as they work on a piece deepens the mystery of music, not lessens it. Does that make sense?”
She tells me, “In an undergraduate way, yes.”
Oh, you sultry minx. “Post-grad? Staff?”
Ghost of a smile. “Do I dress like an academic?”
“Definitely not.” There are Francophone curves in her soft voice. “Though I’m guessing you can sting like one.”
No acknowledgment. “I just feel at home here.”
“Almost true for me—my rooms are at Humber College, only a few minutes away. Most third-years live off campus, but I can drop in to hear the choir most days, supervisions allowing.”
A droll look, saying, Someone’s a quick worker, isn’t he?
I shrug cutely. I might get hit by a bus tomorrow.
She says, “Cambridge has met your expectations?”
“If you don’t use Cambridge well, you don’t deserve to be here. Erasmus, Peter the Great, and Lord Byron all lodged in my rooms. It’s a fact.” Bullshit, but I love to act. “I think of them, lying on my bed, staring up at the very same ceiling, in our respective centuries. That, for me, is Cambridge.” And that’s one tried-and-tested pick-up line. “My name’s Hugo, by the way. Hugo Lamb.”
Instinct warns me off attempting a handshake.
Her lips say, “Immaculée Constantin.”
My, oh, my. A seven-syllable hand grenade. “French?”
“I was born in Zürich, as a matter of fact.”
“I’m fond of Switzerland. I go skiing in La Fontaine Sainte-Agnès most years; one of my friends has a chalet there. Do you know it?”
“Once upon a time.” She places a suede-gloved hand on her knee. “You major in politics, Hugo Lamb.”
That’s impressive. “How could you tell?”
“Speak to me about power. What is it?”
I do believe I’m being out-Cambridged. “You want me to discuss power? Right here and now?”
Her shapely head tilts. “No time except the present.”
“Okay.” Only for a ten. “Power is the ability to make someone do what they otherwise wouldn’t, or deter them from doing what they otherwise would.”
Immaculée Constantin is unreadable. “How?”
“By coercion and reward. Carrots and sticks, though in bad light one looks much like the other. Coercion is predicated upon the fear of violence or suffering. ‘Obey, or you’ll regret it.’ Tenth-century Danes exacted tribute by it; the cohesion of the Warsaw Pact rested upon it; and playground bullies rule by it. Law and order relies upon it. That’s why we bang up criminals and why even democracies seek to monopolize force.” Immaculée Constantin watches my face as I talk; it’s thrilling and distracting. “Reward works by promising ‘Obey and feel the benefit.’ This dynamic is at work in, let’s say, the positioning of NATO bases in nonmember states, dog training, and putting up with a shitty job for your working life. How am I doing?”
Security Goblin’s sneeze booms through the chapel.
“You scratch the surface,” says Immaculée Constantin.
I feel lust and annoyance. “Scratch deeper, then.”
She brushes a tuft of fluff off her glove and appears to address her hand: “Power is lost or won, never created or destroyed. Power is a visitor to, not a possession of, those it empowers. The mad tend to crave it, many of the sane crave it, but the wise worry about its long-term side effects. Power is crack cocaine for your ego and battery acid for your soul. Power’s comings and goings, from host to host, via war, marriage, ballot box, diktat, and accident of birth, are the plot of history. The empowered may serve justice, remodel the Earth, transform lush nations into smoking battlefields, and bring down skyscrapers, but power itself is amoral.” Immaculée Constantin now looks up at me. “Power will notice you. Power is watching you now. Carry on as you are, and power will favor you. But power will also laugh at you, mercilessly, as you lie dying in a private clinic, a few fleeting decades from now. Power mocks all its illustrious favorites as they lie dying. ‘Imperious Caesar, dead and turn’d to clay, might stop a hole to keep the wind away.’ That thought sickens me, Hugo Lamb, like nothing else. Doesn’t it sicken you?”
Immaculée Constantin’s voice lulls like rain at night.
The silence in King’s College Chapel has a mind all its own.
“What do you expect?” I say eventually. “We all have to die one day. End of. But in the meantime, doing unto others is a damn sight more attractive than being done to by others.”
“What is born must one day die. So says the contract of life, yes? I am here to tell you, however, that in rare instances this iron clause may be … rewritten.”
I look at her calm and serious face. “What level of nuts are we talking here? Fitness regimes? Vegan diets? Organ transplants?”
“A form of power that allows one to defer death in perpetuity.”
Yes, she’s a ten, but if she’s Scientologically slash cryogenically oriented, Ms. Constantin needs to understand that I don’t eat bullshit. “Did you just cross the border into the Land of the Crazy People?”
“The lie of the land has no notion of borders.”
“But you’re talking about immortality as if it’s real.”
“No. I’m talking about the perpetual deferral of death.”
“Hang on, did Fitzsimmons send you? Or Richard Cheeseman? Is this a setup?”
“No. This is a seed.”
This is too creative to be a Fitzsimmons prank. “A seed that grows into what, exactly?”
“Into your cure.”
Her sobriety is unsettling. “But I’m not ill.”
“Mortality is inscribed in your cellular structure, and you say you’re not ill? Look at the painting. Look at it.” She nods towards The Adoration of the Magi. I obey. I always will. “Thirteen subjects, if you count them, like the Last Supper. Shepherds, the Magi, the relatives. Study their faces, one by one. Who believes this newborn manikin can one day conquer death? Who wants proof? Who suspects the Messiah is a false prophet? Who knows that he is in a painting, being watched? Who is watching you back?”
THE SECURITY GOBLIN is waving his palm in front of my face. “Wakey-wakey! So sorry if I’m disturbin’ you, but would you an’ the Almighty resume your business tomorrer?”
My first thought is, How dare he? There isn’t a second thought because his Gorgonzola-and-paint-thinner breath makes me gag.
“It’s closin’ time,” he says.
“The chapel’s open until six,” I tell him tersely.
“Uh—yeah. Exactly. And what’s the time now?”
Then I notice the windows; they’re shiny dark.
17:58, insists my watch. It can’t be. It’s only just gone four. I peer around my tormentor’s belly to find Immaculée Constantin, but she’s gone. Long gone, I feel. But no no no no no; she told me to look at the Rubens, just a few seconds ago. I did, and …
… I frown up at Security Goblin for an answer.
“Out at six,” he says. “Closing time’s closing time.”
He taps his watch in front of my face and, even upside-down, its cheap and nasty digital face is quite clear: 17:59. I mutter, “But …” But what? Two whole hours do not vanish in the space of two minutes. “Was there …” my voice is thin, “… was there a woman here? Sitting there?”
He looks where I point. “Earlier? This year? Ever?”
“About … half three, I think. Dark blue coat. A real looker.”
Security Goblin folds his stumpy arms. “If you’d kindly get your herbally enhanced arse into gear, I’ve got a home to go to.”
? ? ?
ME, RICHARD CHEESEMAN, Dominic Fitzsimmons, Olly Quinn, and Jonny Penhaligon clunk our glasses and bottles in the roar and slosh of the Buried Bishop, across the cobbled lane behind Humber College’s west gate. The place is heaving: Tomorrow the Christmas exodus begins, and we’re lucky to have found a table in the furthest nook. I hole-in-one my Kilmagoon Special Reserve, and the fat Scotch slug scorches a trail from tonsils to stomach. Here, it gets to work on the knot of gut-worry I’ve been suffering from since my zone-out in the chapel earlier. I’ve been rationalizing. It’s been a tiring month with essays and deadlines; Mariangela keeps leaving those nagging messages; and I’ve endured two all-nighters at Toad’s in the last week to tenderize Jonny Penhaligon. Losing track of time isn’t proof of a brain tumor; it’s hardly as if I keeled over, or found myself wandering among the chimneys of the college, naked. I lost track of time while sitting in the finest Late Gothic church in the country, meditating upon a Rubens masterpiece—surroundings designed to transport you. Olly Quinn puts down his half-drunk pint and suppresses a belch. “So, did you solve the mystery of How Ronald Reagan Accidentally Won the Cold War, Lamb?”
I can barely hear him: The Humber College Young Conservatives in the next room are howling along to Cliff Richard’s probably immortal Christmas hit “Mistletoe and Wine.” “Done, dusted, and slipped under Professor Dewey’s door.”
“Don’t know how you’ve stuck at politics for three years.” Richard Cheeseman wipes Guinness foam from his Young Hemingway beard. “I’d rather circumcize myself with a cheese grater.”
“Too bad you missed dinner,” Fitzsimmons tells me. “Pudding was the last of Jonny’s Narnian weed. We couldn’t very well let Mrs. Mop find it during her end-of-term clean-up, assume it was a turd nugget, and chuck it out with Jonny’s gluey copies of Scouting Ahoy!” Jonny Penhaligon, still draining his bitter, gives Fitzsimmons the finger; his knobbly Adam’s apple bobs up and down. Idly, I imagine slicing it with a razor. Fitzsimmons sniffs and asks Cheeseman, “Where’s your leather-trousered friend from the Mysterious Orient?”
Cheeseman glances at his watch. “Thirty thousand feet over Siberia, turning back into an upstanding Confucian eldest son. Why would I risk my reputation on being seen with a gang of notorious heterosexuals if Sek was still in town? I’m a fully converted rice queen. Crash us a cancer-stick, Fitz; I could bloody murder a fag, as I delight in telling Americans.”
“You don’t need to light up in here.” Olly Quinn is our pet nonsmoker. “Just breathe in.”
“Weren’t you giving up?” Fitzsimmons passes Cheeseman his box of Dunhills; Penhaligon and I take one too.
“Tomorrow, tomorrow,” says Cheeseman. “Your Hermann G?ring lighter, Jonny, if you’d be so kind? I adore its frisson of evil.”
Penhaligon produces his Third Reich lighter. It’s genuine, obtained by his uncle in Dresden, and these fat boys fetch three thousand pounds at auction. “Where’s RCP tonight?”
“The future Lord Rufus Chetwynd-Pitt,” answers Fitzsimmons, “is scoring drugs. Pity for him it’s not an academic discipline.”
“It’s a recession-proof sector of the economy,” I note.
“This time next year,” Olly Quinn picks at the label of his nonalcoholic lager, “we’ll all be out in the real world, earning a living.”
“Can’t bloody wait,” says Fitzsimmons, stroking his chin cleft. “I despise being poor.”
“My heart bleeds.” Richard Cheeseman holds his ciggie in the corner of his mouth à la Serge Gainsbourg. “People see your parents’ twenty-roomed mansion in the Cotswolds, your Porsche, your Versace gear and jump to all the wrong conclusions.”
“It’s my parents’ loot,” says Fitzsimmons. “It’s only fair that I have my own obscene bonus to squander.”
“Daddy’s still sorting you a job in the City?” asks Cheeseman, then frowns as Fitzsimmons brushes the shoulders of Cheeseman’s tweed jacket. “What are you doing?”
“Flicking the chips off your shoulders, our Richard.”
“They’re superglued on,” I tell Fitzsimmons. “And don’t knock nepotism, Cheeseman; my well-connected uncles all agree, nepotism made this country what it is today.”
Cheeseman blows smoke my way. “When you’re a burned-out ex-Citibank analyst having your Lamborghini repossessed and your third wife’s lawyer’s got your nuts under a judge’s gavel, you’ll be sorry.”
“Right,” I say, “and the Ghost of Christmas Future sees Richard Cheeseman working on a charity project for Bogotá street-children.”
Cheeseman ponders Bogotá street-children, purrs, and desists. “Charity breeds fecklessness. No, it’s the way of the hack for me. A column here, a novel there, bit of broadcasting now and then. Speaking of which …” He fishes in his jacket pocket and retrieves a book: Desiccated Embryos by Crispin Hershey. REVIEW COPY ONLY is emblazoned in red across the cover. “My first paid review for Felix Finch at The Piccadilly Review. Twenty-five pence a word, twelve hundred words, three hundred quid for two hours’ work. Result.”
“Fleet Street beware,” says Penhaligon. “Who’s Crispin Hershey?”
Cheeseman sighs. “The son of Anthony Hershey?”
Penhaligon blinks at him, none the wiser.
“Oh, c’mon, Jonny! Anthony Hershey! Filmmaker! Oscar for Box Hill in 1964, made Ganymede 5 in the seventies, the best British SF film ever made.”
“That film robbed me of the will to live,” remarks Fitzsimmons.
“Well, I’m impressed by your commission, our Richard,” I say. “Crispin Hershey’s last novel was superb. I picked it up in a hostel in Ladakh on my gap year. Is this one as good?”
“Almost.” Monsieur Le Critic places his fingertips together. “Hershey Junior is a gifted stylist, and Felix—Felix Finch, to you plebs—Felix puts him up there with McEwan, Rushdie, Ishiguro, et al. Felix’s praise is premature, but in a few books’ time, he’ll ripen nicely.”
Penhaligon asks, “How’s your own novel going, Richard?” Fitzsimmons and I do hanged-men faces at each other.
“Evolving.” Cheeseman gazes into his glorious literary future and likes what he sees. “My hero is a Cambridge student called Richard Cheeseman, working on a novel about a Cambridge student called Richard Cheeseman, working on a novel about a Cambridge student called Richard Cheeseman. No one’s ever tried anything like it.”
“Cool,” says Jonny Penhaligon. “That’s sounds like—”
“A frothy pint of piss,” I announce, and Cheeseman looks at me with death in his eyes until I add, “is what’s in my bladder right now. The book sounds incredible, Richard. Excuse me.”
THE GENTS SMELLS well fermented and the only free urinal is blocked and ready to brim over with the amber liquid so I have to queue, like a girl. Finally a grizzly bear of a man ambles away and I fill the vacancy. Just as I’m coaxing my urethra open, a voice at the next urinal says, “Hugo Lamb, as I live and breathe.”
It’s a stocky, swarthy man in a fisherman’s sweater with wiry dark hair, whose “Lamb” sounds like “Limb”—a New Zealander’s vowels. He’s older than me, around thirty, and I can’t place him. “We met back in your first year. The Cambridge Sharpshooters. Sorry, it’s appalling men’s-room etiquette to put a guy off his stride like this.” He’s pissing no-handedly into the gurgling urinal. “Elijah D’Arnoq, postgrad in biochemistry, Corpus Christi.”
A memory flickers: that unique surname. “The rifle club, yes. You’re from those islands, east of New Zealand?”
“The Chathams, that’s right. Now, I remember you because you’re a natural bloody marksman. Still room at the inn, you know.”
Now I know there’s no cottagey thing going on, I start pissing. “You’re overestimating my potential, I’m afraid.”
“Mate, you could be a contender. I’m serious.”
“I was spreading myself a bit thin, extracurricular-wise.”
He nods. “Life’s too short to do everything, right?”
“Something like that. So … you’ve enjoyed Cambridge?”
“Bloody love it. The lab’s good, got a great prof. You’re economics and politics, right? Must be your final year.”
“It is. It’s flown by. Do you still shoot?”
“Religiously. I’m an Anchorite now.”
I wonder if “Anchorite” means “anchorman,” or if it’s a Kiwi-ism or a rifle club–ism. Cambridge is full of insiders’ words to keep outsiders out. “Cool,” I tell him. “I enjoyed my few visits to the range.”
“Never too late. Shooting is prayer. And when civilization shuts up shop, a gun’ll be worth any number of university degrees. Happy Christmas.” He zips his fly. “See you around.”