Ian R. Macleod - The Summer Isles

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Ian R. MacLeod
THE SUMMER ISLES
World Fantasy Award 1999
One
On this as on almost every Sunday evening, I find a message from my acquaintance on
the wall of the third cubicle of the Gents beside Christ Church Meadow. It's two thumbnails
dug into the sleek green paint this week, which means the abandoned shed by the
allotments past the rugby grounds in half an hour's time. A trail of other such marks run
across the cubicle wall; what amounts nowadays to my entire sexual life. Here-Oh, happy,
dangerous days!-is the special triple-mark that meant a back room in the hotel of a
sympathetic but understandably wary proprietor. He's gone now, of course, has Larry
Black, like so many others. Quietly taken one night for the shocks and needles of the
treatment centers in the Isle of Man.
I pull the chain, clunk back the lock, and step out into the sweet Jeyes Fluid air. Placed
above me on the wall as I wash my hands, with what, if you didn't know this country, you
would surely imagine to be ironic intent, hangs a photograph of John Arthur. He gazes
warmly across his desk, looking younger than his forty-nine years despite his grey hair. The
photograph is brass-framed, well-polished. Of course, no one has dared to deface it.
Outside along St. Giles, twilight has descended, yet the warmth of this early summer
day remains. A convoy of trucks lumbers around the cobbles, filled with bewildered-
looking conscripts on their way to the sprawling camps in the southeast of England. A few
of the newer or expensively refurbished pubs already boom with patriotic songs. I pause to
relight my pipe as I pass St. John's, then lean spluttering against a wall and cough up out a
surprising quantity of stringy phlegm, watched over by a small but disapproving gargoyle.
Odd, disgusting, habit-hawking and spitting. Something that, until recently, I'd only
associated with old men.
There's still some life out on the playing fields. Undergrads are wandering. There are
groups. Couples. Limbs entwine. Soft laughter flowers. The occasional cigarette flares.
Glancing back at the towers of this city laid in shadows of hazy gold against the last flush
of the sun, it's all so impossibly beautiful. It looks, in fact, exactly like an Empire Alliance
poster. Greater Britain Awake! I smile at the thought, and wonder for a moment if there
isn't some trace of reality still left in the strange dream that we in this country now seem to
be living. Turning, sliding my hand into my pocket to nurse the encouraging firmness of
my anticipatory erection, I cross the bridge over the Cherwell as Old Tom begins his long
nightly chime.
Despite all the back-to-nature and eat-your-own greens propaganda that Home
Secretary Mosley has been peddling, the shed at the far end of the allotments and the plots
it once served remain abandoned, cupped as they are in a secret hollow, lost by the men
who went to the War and never came back again. I lever open the door and duck inside.
Tools and seeds and sweet dry manure. But no sign yet of my acquaintance as the
floorboards creak beneath my feet. The darkness, even as my eyes grow accustomed to the
gloom, becomes near-absolute as night settles outside. A distant bell ripples a muffled
shipwreck clang. The late train to London rattles by in the distance, dead on time.
My acquaintance is late. In fact, he should have been here first. As I pushed back the
door, his younger arms should already have been around me. He trembles often as not when
we first lock together, does my acquaintance. After all, he has so much more to lose. For,
despite the darkness and the secrecy with which we pretend to cloak our meetings, I know
exactly who my acquaintance is. I have studied the lights of his house shining through the
privet that he trims so neatly each fortnight, and I have watched the welcoming faces of his
wife and two daughters as they greet him at his door.
Checking, occasionally, the radium glow of my watch, I let a whole hour slide by as the
residues of early hope and fear sour into disappointment, and then frank anxiety. But what,
after all, do I know of the demands of being a father, a husband? Of working in some grim
dead-end section of the Censor's Department of the Oxford City Post Office? At ten, I lever
the shed door open and step back out into the summer night, leaving my long-forgotten
libido far behind me. The stars shine down implacably through the rugby H's as I make my
way past lovers and drunks and dog walkers into the old alleys. I turn for a moment as I
hear the whisper of footsteps. Could that be a figure, outlined against the mist of light that
seeps from a doorway? But by the time I've blinked, it becomes nothing-an aging man's
fancy: the paranoias of love and fear.
Then quickly along Holywell where an owl calls, and onward under the plane trees to
my college and my quad, to the cool waiting sheets of my room deep in the serene heart of
this ancient city.
I open my eyes next morning to the sight of my scout Christlow bearing a tray
containing a steaming pot of Assam, a rack of toast, my own special jar of marmalade.
Even as the disappointments of the previous evening and the cold aches that have suddenly
started to assail my body wash over me, I still have to smile to find myself here.
"Lovely morning, sir." Christlow drifts through diamonds of sunlight to place the tray
astride my lap. The circled cross of the EA badge on his lapel winks knowingly at me. "Oh,
by the way, sir. You asked me to remind you of your appointment today."
"Appointment?"
"At ten o'clock, you were seeing your doctor. Unless, of course, you've-"
"-No. Yes." I nod in my pajamas, what's left of my hair sticking up in a grey halo, a
dribble of spilt tea warming my chin-all in all, a good approximation of an absent-minded
don. "Thank you, Christlow, for reminding me."
In that scarily deferential way of his, Christlow almost bows, then retreats and closes
the door. With a sound like distant thunder, his trolley trundles off down the oak-floored
corridor. And yes, I truly had forgotten my appointment. The dust-spangled sunlight that
threads my room now seems paler and my throat begins to ache as whispers of pain and
uncertainty come into my head.
Walking along High Street an hour later, I have to squeeze my way through the queue
outside the Regal for the day's first showing of Olivier's Henry V. Many, like Christlow,
wear EA badges. But all ages, all types, both sexes, every age and disability, are gathered.
A mixture, most bizarrely of all, of town and gown-undergrads and workers-the two quite
separate existences that Oxford so grudgingly contains.
Beyond the junction of Alfred Street I push through the little door beside the jewelers
and climb the stairs to the surgery. The receptionist looks up without smiling, then returns
to stabbing a finger at her typewriter. The posters in this poky waiting room are like the
ones you see everywhere nowadays. With Your Help We Can Win. Now Is The Time. Join
the Empire Alliance-Be a Part of the Modernist Revolution. There's a fetching painting of
the towers and spires of this great dreaming city aglow at sunset, much as I saw them
yesterday. And, of course, there's John Arthur.
"Mr. Brook. Doctor Parker will see you."
I push through the doorway, blinking. Doctor Parker is totally new to me. Fresh-faced,
young, and pinkly bald, he looks, in fact, almost totally new to himself. I have no one but
myself to blame for taking my chances with the National Health Service. I could have
availed myself of Doctor Reichard, who comes to our college every Wednesday to see to us
dons, and is available at most other times, since, on the basis of a stipend granted by
George I in 1715, these attendances comprise his sole professional duty. But my
complaints-shortness of breath, this cough, the odd whispering that sometimes comes upon
me, the growing ache in my bones-sound all too much like the simple ravages of age. And I
nurse, also, a superstitious fear that my sexual leanings will be apparent to the trained
medical eye.
"Sorry about this ah... I've only just got... ," he says as he glances down at his page-a-
day calendar. Thursday 13 June 1940. The letters seem to glow, so brightly rainbowed at
their edges that I wonder if this isn't some other new symptom. "You're the ah... The
columnist, aren't you? What was it? 'The Fingers of History'?"
"'Figures of History.'"
"Of course. Daily Sketch, every Saturday. Used to find it handy at school." Then
another thought strikes him. "And you knew him, didn't you? I mean, you knew John
Arthur..."
"That was a long time ago."
"But what's he really like?"
I open my mouth to give my usual noncommittal reply. But it doesn't seem worth it.
"Here we are." He shuffles the X-rays into order, then leans over the file. "Um-Griffin
Brooke. I thought it was Geoffrey, and Brook without the e?"
"It's a sort of pen-name," I say, although in fact the Oxford Calendar, the door to my
rooms-even the name tags Christlow sews into my gowns-also read Geoffrey Brook.
Griffin Brooke, the names I was born with, now resides only in odd corners such as this,
where, despite the potential for confusion, I find myself reluctant to give them up.
As my thoughts drift toward all the odd accidents in life that have brought me here-and
how, indeed, Fingers of History would be a good description of some historical process or
other-another part of me watches Doctor Parker as he then raises the cover of my file a few
inches to peer sideways into it.
Something changes behind his eyes. But when he clears his throat and smoothes back
down the papers and finally makes the effort to meet my gaze, I'm still certain that I'm fully
prepared for the worst. What could be more terrible, after all, than growing old, or
emphysema, bronchitis, tuberculosis...?
"It seems," he begins, "that a tumor has been growing in your lungs... Outwardly, you're
still in good enough health, but I really doubt if there's point in an operation."
Not even any need for an operation! A stupid bubble of joy rises up from my stomach,
then dissolves.
I lick my lips. "How long," I ask, "have I got?"
"You'll need to make plans. I'm so terribly sorry...."
Thrust upon the gleaming linoleum rivers of the new NHS, I am kept so busy at first
that there is little time left for anything resembling worry. There are further X-rays at the
Radcliffe, thin screens behind which I must robe and disrobe for the benefit of cold-
fingered but sympathetic men who wear half-moon glasses. Nurses provide me with over-
sweet tea and McVitie's Digestives. Porters seek my opinion about Arsenal's chances in the
FA Cup.
I feel almost heroic. And for a while I am almost grateful for the new impetus that my
condition gives to a long-planned project of mine. A book not of history, but about history.
One which examines, much as a scientist might examine the growth of a culture, the way
that events unfold, and attempts to grapple with the forces that drive them. The Fingers of
History? The odd way that inspiration sometimes arrives when you're least looking for it, I
may even have stumbled upon a title; serious and relevant to the subject, yet punning at the
same time on my own small moment of popular fame in the Daily Sketch.
After years of grappling with the sense of being an impostor that has pervaded most of
my life, I suddenly find that I am making good progress in writing the pivotal chapter about
Napoleon. Was he a maker of history, or was he its servant? Of course, he was both-and yet
it is often the little incidents, when history is approached from this angle, which stand large.
Questions such as, what would have happened if his parents Carlo and Letizia had never
met?-which normal historians would discount as ridiculous-suddenly become a way of
casting new light.
But one post-hospital afternoon a week or so later, as I huddle over my desk, and the
warm air drifting through my open window brings the chant and the tread of Christlow and
his fellow EA members parading on the ancient grass of our college quad, the whole
process suddenly seems meaningless. Now, I can suddenly see the futility of all the pages I
have written. I can see, too, the insignificant and easily filled space that my whole life will
soon leave. A few clothes hanging in a wardrobe, an old suitcase beneath a bed, some
marks on a toilet cubicle wall. Who, after all, am I, and what possible difference does it
make?
Pulling on my jacket, empty with fear, I head out into Oxford as evening floods in.
I was born in Lichfield-which, then as now, is a town that calls itself a city-in the year
1880. It's middle England, neither flat nor hilly, north or south. Barring Doctor Johnson
being born and a messy siege in the Civil War, nothing much has ever happened there. My
father worked for Lichfield Corporation before he died of a heart attack one evening while
tending his allotment. He'd had a title that changed once or twice amid great glory and talk
of more ambitious holidays, but he'd always been Assistant-this and Deputy-that-one of the
great busy-but-unspecified ("Well, it's quite hard to explain what I do unless you happen to
be in the same line yourself...") who now so dominate this country.
My mother and I were never that stretched; we had his pension and his life insurance,
and she took on a job working at Hindley's cake shop, and brought home bits of icing and
angelica for me when they changed the window display. By this time, I'd already decided I
wanted to be "a teacher." Until I passed into Secondary School from Stowe Street
Elementary, I was always one of the brightest in my class. Even a County Scholarship to
Rugby seemed within reach. And from there, yes, I was already dreaming of the Magdalene
Deer, sleek bodies bathing in the Cherwell at Parson's Pleasure.
My later years in school, though, were a slog. Partly from struggling to keep pace
among cleverer lads, I fell ill with something that may or may not have been scarlet fever.
On my long stay away from school, a boy called Martin Dawes would call in each
afternoon to deliver books and sit with me. Whilst up in my room, he would sometimes slip
his hands beneath the waistband of my pajamas and toss me off, as if that, too, was a
message that needed to be delivered from school. Of course, I was deeply grateful. After I
had recovered, locked in the upstairs toilet with its ever-open window as my mother
shuffled about in the kitchen, I would dutifully try to incorporate women into my pink
imaginings as, in the absence of Martin's attentions, I stimulated myself. But at some vital
moment, their chests would always flatten and their groins would engorge as they stepped
toward me, cropped and clean and shining.
That, in the personal history of what I term my pre-Francis days, is the sole extent of my
sexual development. There was just me, my guilty semi-celibacy, and helping my mother
look after her house, and watching the lads I'd known at school grow up, leave home,
marry, start families. I had, by my early twenties, also come to accept my position as a
Second Class Teacher for the Senior Standard Threes at Burntwood Charity. In the articles
with which I began my short career in the Daily Sketch nearly thirty years later, I gave the
impression that John Arthur was one of my brightest and most ambitious pupils there, a
little comet trail across the pit-dusty Burntwood skies. Thanks to numerous flowery
additions by the Sketch's copy editor, I also stated that he was pale-skinned, quiet, good-
looking, intense, and that he possessed a slight West Country accent, this being the time
before it had changed to the soft Yorkshire that we all know now-all traits that would have
got him a good beating up in the playground-and that, "on summer evenings after school
when the pit whistle had blown and the swallows were wheeling," he and I would walk up
into "the hazy Staffordshire hills" and sit down and gaze down at "the spires of Lichfield,
the pit wheels of Burntwood, and the smokestacks of Rugeley from the flowing purple
heather." Now, after all these years of practice, this has become my party act. So, yes, John
Arthur really is there in that classroom at Burntwood Charity with the smell of chalk dust
and unwashed bodies. His hand is raised from the third row of desks to ask a more than
usually pertinent question before I start to ramble on about one of my many pet subjects.
That is how I recall him.
Too weary to stop, trailing cigarette smoke, memories, abstractions, I wander Oxford's
new suburban streets, passing illuminated porches bearing individual name-plates; Church
House. Dawric. The Willows. It's quiet now, although scarcely past nine and only just
getting fully dark. The houses have a sleepy look. Their curtains are drawn. Faintly, like the
movement of ghosts, I can see the flicker of television screens in many darkened lounges.
A footstep scuffs in the street behind me, and the sound is so furtive and unexpected
that I turn and look back, although there was nothing to see. I walk on more briskly.
Beyond a patch of grass where Ball Games Are Prohibited lies the home of my
acquaintance, with its black-and-white gable, the privet, and the long strip of drive that, in
these days of ever-growing prosperity, will probably soon be graced with a Morris
Ladybird "people's car" instead of his Raleigh bicycle. But the windows of the house are
darkened, uncurtained. And there is something odd about the look of them...
My feet crunch on something sharper than gravel as I walk up the path to my
acquaintance's front door. Many of the windows in the bay are shattered, there is a
pervasive, summery smell of children's urine, and a fat iron padlock has been fitted across
the door's splintered frame. I see, last of all, the sign that the Oxford Constabulary have
pasted across the bricks in the porch. Take Notice Hereby... but this sky is incredibly dark
and deep for summer, and I can't read further than the Crown-embossed heading. I slump
down on the doorstep, scattering empty milk bottles, covering my face with my hands.
Suddenly, it all comes to me. This. Death. Everything.
When I look up some time later, a figure is standing watching me from the suburban
night with her arms folded, head tilted, a steely glint of curlers. "I'm Mrs. Stevens," she tells
me, offering a softly companionable hand to help me up, then leading me past the hedge
and the dustbins into the brightness of her kitchen next door. Slumped at the table, I watch
her as she boils the kettle and warms the pot.
"I know," she says. "This must be a shock to you..."
"They took them all away?"
"All of them. The pity of it really." She stirs her tea and passes me mine. "Them young
girls."
"Nobody did anything to stop it?"
She gazes across at me, and licks the brown line of tea that's gathered on her small
mustache. "I'll tell you what they were like, Mr. Brook. In every way, I'd have said, they
were a decent couple. Only odd thing I remember now is they sometimes used to leave the
light on without drawing the curtains so you could see right in.... The lassies were nice,
though. Fed our cat for us when we went up to Harrogate last year. Knew them well
yourself, did you?"
"He was just an acquaintance. But when they came to the house, was it the KSG or
did-"
"-and you'd never have known, would you, to look at her?"
"Her? You mean... ?"
"Ah..." Mrs. Stevens slaps her hand flat down on the table and leans forward, her brown
eyes gleaming. "So you still don't know the truth of it? Her real name was something
Polish. All Zs and Ks." She hurrumphs. "It's understandable that they want to come, isn't it?
Just as long as they don't make themselves a burden, earn a decent living, talk like we do
and don't bother our children and keep themselves to themselves."
"So what was the problem?"
"She was a Jew, wasn't she. All these years they've been living next door and acting all
normal and hiding it from us." Mrs. Stevens raises her shoulders and shudders theatrically.
"To think of it. It's the dishonesty. And her nothing but a dirty little Jew."
Two
Clouds sweep in across Oxford, thick and grey as wet cement. Rain brims over the low
surrounding hills and washes away the hope of what had promised to be another spectacular
summer. In the whitewashed yard of the town prison on a hissing grey dawn, two men are
hanged for their part in an attempted mail robbery. In Honduras, the British prefix lost to
revolution in 1919 is restored in a bloody coup. A car bomb in the Trans-Jordan kills fifteen
German League of Nations soldiers. In India, as ever, there are uprisings and massacres,
and I despair as I work on my book of ever making any sense of history. It seems, to quote
Gibbon, little more than a register of cruelties, follies, and misfortunes.
In Britain, the Jews have always been small in number, and we've generally been
"tolerant." Before the rise of Modernism, my acquaintance and his family probably had
little more to fear from exposure than the occasional human turd stuffed through their letter
box. After all, Jewishness isn't like homosexuality, madness, criminality, communism,
militant Irishness: they can't exactly help being born with their grabby disgusting ways, can
they? Rather like the gypsies, you see, we didn't mind them living, but not here, not with
us.... In this as in so many other areas, all Modernism did when John Arthur came to power
was take what people said to each other over the garden fence and turn it into Government
policy.
I can well remember the Homeland for British Jewry newsreels: they were probably one
of the defining moments of early Greater British history. There they were, the British Jews.
Whole eager families of them helped by smiling Tommies as they climbed from landing
craft and hauled their suitcases up onto the shingle of remote Scottish islands that had been
empty but for a few sheep since the Clearances of a century before. And it was hard not to
think how genuinely nice it would be to start afresh somewhere like that, to paint and make
homely the grey blocks of those concrete houses, to learn the skills of shepherding,
harvesting, fishing.
So many other things have happened since then that it has been easy to forget about the
Jews. I remember a short piece on Pathé before Disney's Snow White in what must have
been 1939. By then they looked rustic and sunburned, their hands callused by cold winters
of weaving and dry-stone walling, their eyes bright from the wind off the sea. Since then,
nothing. A blank, an empty space that I find hard to fill even in my imagination.
One morning as thunder crackles and water streams and the whole college seems to
shift and creak like a ship straining at its moorings, I'm still marooned in my rooms, ill and
lost in the blind alley of my book when Christlow arrives at eleven to do the cleaning.
"You know the Jews, Christlow," I chirp after clearing my throat.
"Jews sir? Yes sir. Although not personally."
He pauses in his dusting. The situation already has a forced air.
"I was wondering-it's part of my book, you see-what happened to the mixed families.
Where a Jew married a gentile..."
"I'm sure they were treated sympathetically, sir. Although for the life of me I can't
imagine there was ever very many of them."
"Of course," I nod, and force my gaze back to my desk. Christlow resumes his dusting,
his lips pursed in a silent whistle amid the rain-streaming shadows as he lifts the photos
along the mantelpiece of my mother, my father-and a good-looking, dark-haired young
man.
"So you'll be all right, then, sir?" he asks when he's finished, picking up his box of rags
and polishes. "Fine if I leave you now?"
"Thank you, Christlow. As always," I add, laying it on thick for some reason, as if
there's a deeper debt that he and I owe each other, "you've done a splendid job."
When he's gone and his footsteps have faded into the college's loose stirrings, I slide in
the bolt, then cross to the gloom of my bedroom and drag my old suitcase from beneath the
bed. I always keep its key in my pocket, but the hinges creak as I open them, rusty from
disuse. Nothing inside has changed. The tin toys. The tennis slacks. The exercise book with
the name Francis Eveleigh inscribed into the cardboard cover in thick childish letters. A
school badge. A Gillette safety razor-his first? A pistol wrapped inside an old rag. A
decent-enough herringbone jacket. A single shoe. A steel hip flask. A soldier's pass for 14-
26 September 1916, cross-stamped No Longer Valid. Various socks and old-fashioned
collarless shirts and itchy-looking undies. A copy of Morris's News from Nowhere.
And a Touring Map of the Scottish Highlands, folded so often that the sheets threaten to
break apart as I touch them.
I grab a handful of his clothes and bury my face into them, smelling Oxford damp,
Oxford stone, Four Square Ready-Rubbed and Mansion House lavender floor polish. Little
enough is left of Francis now. Still, that faint scent of his flesh like burnt lemon. A few dark
strands of his hair...
What a joke I have become. My sole claim to fame is having dimly known a great man
when he was still a child, and my sole claim to happiness lies almost as far back; a miracle
that happened for a few days nearly thirty years ago. I suppose I've convinced myself since
that homosexuals cannot really love-it's easier that way. And yet at the same time, in all the
years since, Francis had always been with me.
"It really doesn't matter, Griff," I hear him say as his fingers touch my neck. He smells
not of lemons now, but of the rainy oak he's been standing beneath as he watches my
window from the quad. But he hasn't aged. He hasn't changed.
"No, it doesn't matter at all," he whispers as he turns me round to kiss me. "Not any of
this. That's the secret of everything."
I smile to find him near me, and still shudder at the cool touch of his hands. In the
moment before the thunder crackles closer over Oxford and I open my eyes, all pain is
gone.
Ernie Svendsen, with his suspiciously foreign name, his long nose, his thick glasses,
seems an unlikely survivor of my kind. He puts it down to something that he has on
Oxford's Deputy Chief Constable, although I would have thought that would have made
him a prime candidate for a hit-and-run car accident.
We meet at a park bench the next afternoon, during a break in the rain.
"Do you think they'll let them stay together?" I ask as he tosses bread from a brown
paper bag to the feathered carpet of ducks that have gathered around us. "Will they send
him to the Isle of Man, the girls and the mother to the Western Isles?"
Giving me a pitying look, Ernie shakes his head. "It doesn't work like that, my friend.
Oh, they'll get it out of him. He'll tell them anything-lies or the truth. People always blab on
so when you threaten them... I shouldn't worry," he adds, seeing the expression on my face.
"If something was going to happen to you, it would have happened already. Being who you
are, I'm sure you'll be safe."
"I'm not who I am. I'm not anybody."
"Then you're doubly lucky."
"I keep asking myself what the point is. I mean-why?"
"I think you've forgotten what it's like, my friend."
"What?"
"Being the way we are-bent, queer. The guilt. The stupid scenes. You remember those
leaflets, the promises of help, that we could be cured. Don't tell me you didn't secretly get
hold of one. " He sighs. "If we could just press some button-pull out something inside us-
don't you think we'd all do it? Wouldn't you take that chance, if you were given it? Isn't
John Arthur right in that respect-and wouldn't the Jews feel the same?"
But to change would mean re-living my life-becoming something other than what I am.
Losing Francis. So I shake my head. And I've heard the stories of what happens to my kind.
The drugs. The electrodes. The dirty pictures. Swimming in pools of your own piss and
vomit. That kind of treatment that was available even before Modernism made it
compulsory. "It isn't John Arthur," I say. "It's all of us. It's Britain..."
Ernie chuckles. "I suppose you'll be alone now, won't you?"
"Alone?"
"Without companionship. Without a cock to suck."
I glance across the bench, wondering if Ernie's propositioning me. But his eyes behind
his glasses are as far away as ever; fish in some distant sea. Sex for him, I suspect, has
always been essentially a spectator sport. That's why he fits in so well. That's why he's
survived. He doesn't want a real body against him. All he needs is the sharp hot memories
of those he's betrayed.
"Look," I say, "I just thought you might have some information about what happens to...
to the Jews-and to people like us. Surely somebody has to?"
"All I know is what I read in the papers, my friend. And what I see in the newsreels."
His gaze travels across the silvered lawns. "I understand how it is. We're only human, after
all. It's always sad when you lose someone..."
He stands up, shaking the last of his breadcrumbs over the ducks, and I watch as he
walks off, splashing a short cut across the lawns and then around the sodden nets of the
empty tennis courts. I can't help wondering if there will be a black official KSG Rover
waiting for me somewhere soon. The polite request and the arm hooked around my elbow
and the people passing by too busy going about their lives to notice. The drive to a dark
clearing in a wood, the cold barrel to the forehead... I can't help feeling selfishly afraid. But
as I make my way down Holywell past the old city walls, the clouds in the west begin to
thin, and the wind picks and plays with rents of blue sky as the sun flickers through.
Dawdling along the narrow, unpredictable streets that wind around the backs of the colleges
giving glimpses of kitchen dustbins and Wren towers, the light brightens. And Oxford.
Oxford! All the years that I longed to see myself like this amid these quads and buildings,
the twin shining rivers, the whispering corridors of learning.
Working on my book each evening after school in the front parlor as my mother nodded
over her knitting in her chair behind me, I always knew that the dream was impossibly far
away. But nourishing my one great work, I never even bothered to think of setting some
more realistic target and perhaps submitting an essay on local history to the Lichfield
Mercury or Staffordshire Life. It was all or nothing-and perhaps in my heart of hearts I was
happy enough with nothing. One evening, I remember, the work at the parlor table was
going particularly well and the hours slid by until I cracked my weary fingers and turned
around to my mother to comment on the faint but foul smell that I had noticed. She sat
unusually still in the dimness of the room behind me.
Her head was lolling, her fingers were clenched around the knitting needles and her ball
of wool had rolled from her lap in her final spasm.
Three
Now that the rain has ended and the sun has come out, all of Britain seems to drift, held
aloft on wafts of dandelion and vanilla, the dazzling boom of bandstand brass. Each
morning, the Express, the New Cross, and the Mail vie for punning headlines and pictures
of Modernist maidens in fountains, ice cream-smeared babies, fainting guardsmen. With or
without me, life seems intent on going on-but I find that I remain remarkably active in any
case: with Christlow's help, for example, I can manage to be fully dressed, my lungs
coughed-out, my tablets taken, my limbs unstiffened, my eyes fully focused, my heartbeat
and my breathing made almost regular by half past eight or nine at the latest. And thus
aroused, thus fortified, I have taken a surprising number of trips out this August. This, after
all, is my last chance to see anything, and I can easily afford to squander my savings by
going First Class. But still, as I queue at the Oxford City Post Office for the appropriate
cross-county passes that will get me to Lichfield, I can't help but wonder if the woman
behind the spittle-frosted glass knew my acquaintance, and who emptied his desk upstairs
in the Censor's Office, who scratched his name off the tea club...
Next morning, climbing aboard the Sir Galahad after it slides into Oxford Station, its
streamlined snout oozing steam and the sense of far-away, I stumble past four senior
officers of the KSG, the Knights of Saint George, as I make my way down the carriage in
search of my reserved seat. They all look sleek, plump-seals basking on a sunny shore,
washed by the warm waves of the future. A mother and daughter are opposite my place in
the no smoking section further along. The morning sun pours over their blonde hair and
their innocent blue eyes rest on me as I slump down. I feel I must look strange and sinister,
already a harbinger of death, yet their manner is welcoming, and we begin to talk as the
train pulls out in that absent, careless manner that strangers sometimes have. The husband,
the little girl's father, is a Black Watch major who's risen through the Army ranks on merit
in the way that only happens in real conflicts, and is currently on active service on the ever-
troublesome India-Afghanistan border. The mother tells me she sleeps with his and John
Arthur's photograph beneath her pillow. I smile as their faces shine back at me and then
gaze out of the window, watching the telegraph lines rise and fall and the world flash by,
carrying me on toward Lichfield.
Living in what I still thought of my mother's house back in the years before the War,
alone and celibate, I still entertained thoughts of writing my book. But, after many botched
attempts, I began to wonder if something else was missing. History, after all, is ever-
changing, and must always be viewed from the perspective of the present. I was still as
neutral in politics as I imagined myself to have become sexually, yet in my efforts to take
myself seriously as a historian, I decided that politics probably lay at the cutting edge of
current affairs, and I joined the local Fabian Society. It was probably a good job that I
dipped my toe into the waters of political debate without any high ideals. Still, I can see
with hindsight that it was an interesting time for British left wing politics. The younger and
generally rowdier element (of which Francis Eveleigh was undoubtedly a member) were
busily undermining the cozy nineteenth century libertarianism of William Morris-the
Morris, that is, who existed before he was re-invented by Modernism. But it was all naively
innocent. Francis, for example, worked six days a week behind the counter of the John
Menzies bookstall at Lichfield station, lived in digs, lifted his little finger when he drank
tea, was secretive about his background, and spoke with a suspiciously upper-class accent.
Still, I was drawn to him. I liked his youth, his enthusiasm, his good looks.
He and I began meeting occasionally after he had finished work at the station bookstall,
and we would take quiet walks across the flat Staffordshire countryside. When we were
alone, there was a lot less of the usual posturing and political debate, but nevertheless, the
prospect of a war in Europe soon began to dominate our conversation. Francis, although
supposedly a pacifist, was fascinated by the whole idea of conflict. In a white shirt, his
collar loose, he would walk ahead of me as we wandered at evening along misty canal
towpaths and across muddy spring fields. His body was slight and bony, yet filled with
energy. He grew his hair a little longer than was then fashionable, and I loved to watch, as
he walked ahead of me, the soft nest of curls that tapered toward the back of his neck.
"You understand, Griff," he said to me once as we stood to catch our breath amid the
cows beneath a dripping tree. "I can work these things out when we walk together."
My heart ached. I could only smile back at him.
The idea of our taking a cycling trip to Scotland seemed to evolve naturally, gradually
from this process. That was probably a good thing, for if I had planned that Francis and I
could be on our own, sharing thoughts, ideas, and boarding house rooms for a whole
fortnight, I am sure that love and terror would have prevented it from ever happening. But
somehow, I found that we were checking maps and timetables on the basis of a vague
hypothesis-playing with the whole idea, really-until suddenly we were talking proper dates
and actual bookings and the thing had miraculously come about. And I was to pay. That,
too, slipped easily under the yawning bridge of my uncertainties. Thank God, the idea of
two men traveling together on holiday raised few suspicions in the summer of 1914.
Francis, bless him, probably had a far clearer idea of where he was leading me, and what
was to come. But for all of that, for absolutely everything about him, I am eternally
grateful.
We ate in the dining carriage as the train pulled out of Birmingham, studying our maps.
Yet we went to our shared sleeping compartment quite early, I recall, filled with that
soothed, tired feeling that only the start of a long railway journey brings. In that narrow
compartment, I tried to busy myself with sorting the contents of my suitcase on the lower
bunk as Francis undressed beside me. Trembling, alone after he had headed up the corridor
to wash, looking down at the half-erection that, absurdly, was trying to nudge its way out of
my pajamas, I cursed myself for my stupidity in ever falling for the idea of this holiday. I
pushed past him when he returned, and pulled down a window in the corridor and watched
the fields burn with sunset as the telegraph wires rose and fell, rose and fell. By the time I
finally got back to the compartment, the landscape had become a grainy patchwork and
Francis was up in the top bunk, reading News from Nowhere. Muttering about how tired I
felt, I climbed in below.
I stared up at the shape his body made against the bars of the bunk. It truly was
soothing, this motion of the carriage, the steel clatter of the wheels. Eventually, when
Francis turned off his light and wished me goodnight, I truly felt ready for sleep and when,
about half an hour later, he began to shift down from his bunk, I simply imagined that he
was heading off on a final trip to the toilets. Instead, he climbed in beside me.
His pajama shirt was already undone. He smelled faintly of soap and toothpowder, and
beneath that of the warmth of his own flesh, like burnt lemon.
"This is what you want, Griff, isn't it...?" he said. Then he put his arms around me, and
he kissed me, and nothing was ever the same.
Clatter, tee, tee... Even here, on the way to Lichfield, that same sense of passing. Then
as now, the onward rush of a train. Stations beside canal bridges. Stations in farmyards.
Stations piled with empty milk churns and mailbags in the middle of pretty nowhere. And
posters, posters. Posters of the seaside and posters of the country. Posters of towns. The
Lake District for Rest and Quiet Imaginings. Take the Sunday Special and Visit Lambourn
Downs, where a smiling couple are picnicking with their two pretty daughters as colored
kites dance against a cloudless sky...
Francis loved the place names as we journeyed across Scotland. Mellon Udrigle.
Plockton. Grey Dog. Poolewe. Smearisary. The Summer Isles. When he wasn't reading the
newspapers he got hold of every day to keep track of the repercussions of the assassination
of an obscure Archduke, he'd run his finger along some impossibly contoured and winding
route that the pedals of our basket-fronted Northampton Humbers were supposed to carry
us down, chosen entirely to include as many of those wonderful names as possible.
Alone together in those yellow-lit boarding house rooms with their great empty
wardrobes, riding the creaking seas of hollowed-out double beds, his chin cupped in his
hand and bare feet in the air, laughing at something, humming to himself, twiddling his
toes, Francis would study his maps and his newspapers. Then he'd lay a hand across me and
pull me closer with a touch that was both warmly sexual and at the same time had nothing
to do with sex at all. "This is real history, Griff," he said to me once when I expressed
摘要：

IanR.MacLeodTHESUMMERISLESWorldFantasyAward1999OneOnthisasonalmosteverySundayevening,IfindamessagefrommyacquaintanceonthewallofthethirdcubicleoftheGentsbesideChristChurchMeadow.It'stwothumbnailsdugintothesleekgreenpaintthisweek,whichmeanstheabandonedshedbytheallotmentspasttherugbygroundsinhalfanhour...

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