Howard Jacobson - The Mighty Walzer

Yorath and Rubella, joint Directors of Studies at Golem — inspirational figures at the time, though scarcely remembered today. Except by me, except by me, except by me … Dr Iaoin Yorath, author of The Bleeding Wound: Women and Anguish in the Nineteenth-Century Novel and its sequel, The Wound Staunched: Suffering and Redemption in the Woman’s Novel of the Nineteenth Century. And Howard Rubella (Ph.D. pending) — still is, by the way — author of nothing, but a renowned teacher and expert on marriage and parturition in literature, though he himself was single and childless. My mentors.

So, no, not Moral Sciences strictly speaking. Not Hobbes or Hume. What I was actually majoring in was Collins Classics. Somewhere along the line I had ditched misogyny (it was only ever a growing pain anyway) and returned to the faith of my aunties. Austens, Jane; Brontës, Anne; Brontës, Charlotte; Brontës, Emily; Burneys, Fanny; Eliots, George; Gaskells, Mrs; Mitfords, Miss. I had even brought the original green volumes of my boyhood down from Manchester, concealing them under my bed at first, imagining I would need to buy more grown-up-looking versions from Heffers when my grant came through. But that turned out to be an unnecessary compunction; every one of my fellow students owned the same leatherette editions I did, so I felt free to arrange them on my shelves in alphabetical order. Austens, Jane, etc.

I did, though, decide against bringing out Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. It was a wise decision. Not because it was bashed after the years it had served as my de facto ping-pong bat, but because it was written by a man. Books written by men were frowned upon by Yorath and Rubella. We were here to study literature, and literature was written by women.

I remember my first week in Cambridge, and I remember my last, otherwise it’s a blur. Necrosis of the memory. Nature’s way of being kind. It’s not reality man cannot bear too much of, it’s shame. It’s Cambridge.

And of my first week it’s the first day I remember most clearly. Everything that was ever going to happen to me in Cambridge, happened that day. Everybody I was ever going to meet, I met then. And everything I was ever going to feel — but let’s leave feeling out of this or hysterical amnesia will swallow up even day one.

Day One. It Happened On Day One.

For all the difference the other years made, I might just as well have gone home in the morning.

I arrived off the Manchester train in the early afternoon, and was immediately suspicious of how everyone appeared to know one another. Not only the returnees, but new boys like me. Where had they met? Was this another of those party situations where you turn your back for two minutes and when you next look around everyone is intimate, in love, and skilful on the ball?

The taxi driver laughed when he saw my matching suitcases — though even I had thought the compressed cardboard a tolerable imitation of bruised leather, and the polka-dot pattern not lacking in traveller’s chic. When I told him which college I was going to he laughed again.

‘Are those dogs or bags, sir?’ the college porter asked me. ‘Because if they’re dogs they’re not allowed in your room.’

Then he laughed too.

They could smell swag on me.

There were three invitations in crested college envelopes waiting for me in my pigeon hole. An invitation to sherry from Lord Neville-Hacket, the Master. An invitation to sherry from the President of GCQ, the Golem College Quaffers, the college sporting club. (This was the moment I realized my reputation as a spieler of distinction had come before me.) And an invitation to sherry from Yorath and Rubella. All three were for 7.30, after hall, that night.

I succumbed to an immediate migraine. How do you go to three sherry parties simultaneously? For a grandiose emergency-recourse man there can be nothing worse — all your fall-back positions falling at once.

Rather than think about ordering preferences, I forwent the luxury of taking slow possession of my oak-panelled room and spent what was left of the afternoon at Woolworths instead, choosing a teapot, a toasting fork, two willow-patterned sideplates, and a tea cloth with the University arms on it. I also had to see to personal stationery, decide on a ring-binder, and organize to have one of the old coffee-table Bosch prints framed. Returning along Jesus Lane, absorbed in perturbations not of my own making, I knocked a small elderly gentleman, who on a second glance proved to be E. M. Forster, into the gutter. Too overawed to apologize, I backed into the road and was hit by C. S. Lewis on a bicycle. In the course of neither of these collisions did any party say a word or otherwise signal awareness that anything had happened. For the however many semi-amnesic years I was there — if I was there — this remained the Cambridge way. You didn’t see, you didn’t allude, you didn’t acknowledge. You went everywhere with your eyes down, and if that meant that you rode over your own tutor neither you nor he was going to be uncouth enough to mention it. Practicality lay behind this, partly. I see that. In a small town you can’t keep saying hello to the same person. Nor can you go on apologizing — ‘Whoops! There I go again’ — every time you inadvertently barge him into the river. But shyness had a lot to do with it as well. And shyness, as I knew from my own family, is catching. Already, after only an hour of Cambridge, I could feel the red rush of awkwardness returning to my cheeks. If I wasn’t careful I would soon have a shell on my back again. And it would be no consolation that every other person in Cambridge was carrying one too.

Not wanting to make anyone’s acquaintance in this condition, I didn’t linger in the main Golem quadrangle — an ugly open-plan classical rehash, like Old Trafford with Doric columns, at present littered with trunks and real leather suitcases which no porter found funny — but returned quickly to my aerie, opened first the first and second the second door, turned on the gas fire, and stretched out on my bed.

Ah, Cambridge! My Alma Mater. My foster-mother-in-waiting — at last!

Back home, my real mother and my aunties would be thinking about me. Oliver gone where none of them had ever been or ever dreamt of going. Oliver collegiate. Oliver become a man. Oliver receiving invitations from Lords noch. Oliver confronting his destiny.

Swish! went the Lady Ogimura’s kimono. From a willow-patterned sideplate she helped herself with dainty fingers to a toasted teacake dripping butter. Snap! went her suspenders.

At about five someone knocked. I had dozed off, overcome by gas fumes. I wasn’t sure whether to shout ‘Come in!’ or to answer the door formally, so I did both, colliding with my visitor in the airlock between the inner door and the outer.

‘Sorry,’ I said.

‘Sorry,’ he said.

He was a black white man. That’s to say he was white but appeared to carry a black shadow of himself around with him. He saw me mystified by his penumbra. Staring.

‘Sorry,’ I said.

‘I knocked,’ he said, ‘because your oak wasn’t sported.’

‘Wasn’t it?’ I said.

‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I’ve disturbed you. You should sport your oak.’

He had a thick throaty voice which seemed to be a burden to him, like a heavy shopping bag. And a surprise to him too, as though he suspected it belonged to someone else. Maybe even wished it to belong to someone else, since he looked mightily uncomfortable as himself. He had a deep dark cleft in his chin, of the sort my sisters considered manly, which he sawed away at with the side of his thumb, making it ever deeper.

‘No, no’ I said, ‘I want to be disturbed.’

‘So I have disturbed you. Sorry.’