The Man Within My Head (25 page)

T
he wind, too perfectly, picked up and the sky began to grow dark as I pulled at last into Berkhamsted on the local train from London Euston, continuing to Tring and Leighton Buzzard. The day before had been a glorious, anomalous, eighty-six-degree summer fantasy, but now it was blowy and close to rain and the low English sky had turned grey, even imprisoning, by the time I got out of the train. I had never consciously sought out a Greene location before—the trip to Capri was something I’d stumbled into—but I had a day free in London and somehow, as never before, I felt the presence and proximity of all those birds and bats and other swarming terrors he’d felt around him in his ancient hometown, not far away.

Outside the small station ran green fields and a narrow road leading up to a small bridge. I asked after the school and was directed to the left and down a grey lane that seemed to be called Castle Street (I remembered all the haunted men called Castle in Greene’s books, including the one in
The Human Factor
who leads his son around the “forgotten hiding-places
and the multiple dangers” of Berkhamsted Common). Just after Castle crossed Chapel Street, the black, heraldic gates of Berkhamsted School loomed up on my right.

I had known what I would find here just by drawing on old memories: long, empty playing fields, grey plaques and chapels with locked black doors at their entrances; the cloisters would echo with the sound of my lonely footsteps. I might have been returning to one of my schools off the plane from California, four hours earlier than everyone else, thirty-five years before. At the tail end of a long summer holiday, the place would be an image of abandonment.

But as I walked through the gates now, I found the front courtyard packed: tall, tanned blond girls, in chic leggings and skirts (if only they’d been here when Greene was a student), flush with the Greek islands or villas in southern France they’d just returned from; red-faced, spotty boys, hands thrust deep into their pockets, lounging in a circle as they shot anxious glances at Old Hall and wondered whether to go in there now or whether to brave it out a little longer; a couple of mothers fussing around little Amanda or Graham, while their charges cast wistful looks at the groups of classmates not so parentally encumbered.

It was the kind of timing I’d never have believed in a novel: I had arrived at 9:55 a.m. on Thursday, August 20, and, quite by chance, 10:00 a.m. on Thursday, August 20 was the time when A-level results were being announced, essentially telling the school’s departing students what the rest of their lives would be. I remembered the terror that attended these national school-leaving exams when I was a boy: how you did in them determined which college you could go to—if you could go to college at all—and what destiny, what life might await you.

The kids—they looked so grown-up now, especially with the stylish girls around (almost as if they were in a private school in a place called Hope Ranch)—headed, one by one, through the imposing door that leads to Old Hall (I strolled in behind them and saw large portraits of the school’s headmasters on the walls, most prominent among them a stiff-shouldered and bespectacled Charles Greene). A minute or two later they emerged, as from their interview at St. Peter’s Gate. Some athletic-looking girls with blond ponytails were jumping up and down, hugging one another, pushing away tears of joy that smeared their mascara; another girl walked over to an ax-faced mother, who tried to keep very different tears out of her eyes as she led her charge over to a wooden bench, where a teacher was handing out alternative destinies.

“Dad!” cried a red-faced boy with self-cut hair—an apprentice football hooligan, so it seemed—as he pulled a cell phone out to share the news. “It wasn’t bad at all! Yes, a D and three F’s.” He paused. “Actually, Dad, that’s pretty good. It was a very high D.”

Gangs of boys were pushing one another around, anxious to show how little they cared about all this, and punching one of their number who’d dared to get a B. A small girl trudged, as into a dentist’s office, through the door marked “Careers Centre.” “It wasn’t brilliant,” a brown-haired girl with pink cheeks was saying to a shyly enquiring boy; her tone of voice said it might as well have been.

I sat on a bench next to a boy who, hands shaking, began to open his envelope; another boy was rolling his finger around the inside of his cheek, as if to steady himself.

“You’re not going to open it?”

“No. I’ll wait.” A small, studious-looking boy with a mop of
black hair affected cool, and then looked around. What would he do while he waited for his future?

“Look, look, look”—a tall boy’s voice went falsetto. “I got a B!”

I remembered myself at the same day of reckoning, though by then I was already on the road, traipsing around India for my summer holidays with a huge suitcase loaded down with books on Jung and carrying a new acoustic guitar, a worn cassette of Leonard Cohen’s
Songs
and the faint ambition to become a darker-skinned Leonard Cohen, first by falling in love with a blond Nordic girl and then by pursuing dissolution and the mystical life, ideally in the same breath.

In the mornings I walked across the Oval in Bombay—cricket games everywhere, many at once, crisscrossing wildly on the worn, bald grass—past the men seated on the street, selling piles of books (
Improve Your I.Q.
, Dale Carnegie’s
How to Stop Worrying and Start Living, Right Ho, Jeeves
), to the dark, largely unlit library at the University of Bombay, my parents’ first place of higher education, where I had to make my way through a single-volume
Complete Shakespeare
to prepare for university exams back in England, while birds flapped in the roof up above and I tried not to sneeze from the dust.

In the afternoons I walked back through the commotion, glanced at
The Times of India
to see if Richard Nixon had announced his resignation yet and walked up the stairs to my room at the West End Hotel, to compose a Leonard Cohen song rhyming “stranger” with “danger” and “love” with “above.” When the telegram came from England, with its row of letters, it might have been a news report from another planet.

I woke up from my memory now and looked around the
main street in the small, too-typical town—the copies of the
Berkhamsted and Tring Gazette
on sale at the newsagents, the women pushing prams past the little B and B offering “Bacon Sandwiches,” the Denture Care office next to a funeral director’s parlor—and felt how an amiable and well-meaning town like this could close in on one till all life was gone.

There were churches everywhere—one of them had even set up a currency-exchange counter—and the people walking past me in the grey summer morning looked as comfortable and settled in their belief as parishioners. “Please Pray for All Those who are suffering in silence and who has not gotten a voice,” someone had written on a scrap of paper inside the eight-hundred-year-old Norman church, onto whose graveyard Greene’s nursery had looked. When I went into the local library, a kindly worker gave me a code to become a temporary member of the community and showed me the books of local history describing this as “A Commuter’s Paradise.”

Yet one morning in Berkhamsted had me longing for anywhere else—even somewhere dangerous and dark—instead of the innocent treadmill the town seemed to represent. By the time I returned to the school in early afternoon—“Time and Tide Wait for No Man,” intoned the motto above the school clock, not far from the Admiral House Dental Practice—all the students had dispersed again, off into their future lives, and among the arched windows and turrets, the red-brick buildings towering above lawns, bulletins told me about “The 3rd Annual Scholars and Rogues Eton Fives Tournament (Sign up with Mr. Petit or Mr. Foster).” A plaque in the cloisters, not far from the classroom called “Greene’s,” reminded, “Berkhamsted depends on its tradition of loyalty and simplicity and discipline.”

I walked across Greene’s Field, home to the school tennis courts, and came to a narrow canal, with houseboats bumping along its sides and small red-brick bridges arching over it, like a slightly roughened dream of English rural paradise. A pair of teenage lovers courted shyly on a picnic table. Another walked along the bank, too embarrassed to look at each other. Off near the station, a grey set of flats made for lonely men and the love poems they wrote—it could have been North Oxford—was guarded by a black sign, “PRIVATE ROAD,” and called itself, I noticed, “Greenes Court.” At the station, as I waited to escape again, an announcement intoned anxiously, and monotonously, “Stand well back from the platform edge,” while rumors came in that a vessel of escape was approaching.

I
t was always the most chilling moment of the day, akin to the night of the Angel of Death; in our third “Division,” just after Chambers, as it was called (when we awaited our black-gowned teachers around the “Burning Bush”), suddenly we might hear a pair of footsteps moving very rapidly along the corridor outside, past the long lines of names of the dead, past the bulletin boards summoning us to divinity class or listing the names of those who were required to show up on Saturday night for military exercises. Something would stop in me—in all of us—and then there would come a rap on the door and it would fly open and an older boy with a “stick-up” white collar would step into the classroom.

“Is Iyer in this Division, sir?”

“Yes.”

“He is to see the Head Master at eleven forty.”

For drawing on Treitel’s trigonometry answers, or stealing across the bridge in mufti to hear the Strawbs play in Windsor. For sins I hadn’t even known were infractions.

In time—this was the logic of the system, teaching you to obey and to command, to work within a precisely determined order (all things come to pass and the young, too, shall one day grow old)—I, in turn, would become a
praepostor
(the word comes from a medieval term for a monastic prior) and start making official visitations from our local God. You had to learn how to administer hardship as well as to endure it, the system was saying; it was fine to read “Endymion” and play Mozart on the piano next to the Lower Tea Room—near-perfect recitals would float up through the stairwells to where we were doing homework, from other boys, and one teacher would earnestly show us the parallels between Keats and Joni Mitchell—but the world expected firmness, and to be wet was to be lower than the mud. There were two sins: admitting to an act of decency (indecency was prized, of course) and underestimating the toughness and complexity of the world.

One time, at the Dragon, Turpin made a run for it, slipping out of Leviathan, or whichever room several of us were sharing then, and disappearing off into the dark. Rumors ran excitedly around School House: he had been seen making his way back to his parents’ house in Wales, he was heading in the other direction, across the wilds, like a character in Hardy. He had always seemed among the frailest, sniffling well into the second week of term, and now he had tried—simple folly—to take his destiny into his own hands (a scene that comes up again and again in Greene).

Within a few days, though, he was gathered in again—there
was talk of the Parable of the Lost Sheep—and back in one of the beds in our room, squandering the glamour of his escape by turning his back to us and sniffling away as he lay facing the wall. In my next school, the only African student—son of some bigwig in the Nigerian government—would do the same and soon the tabloids would be full of this boarding school boy who had set up a “love nest” in Chelsea with two blondes; it was always said that boys from the school ended up in record numbers in prison, as well as in 10 Downing Street, and sometimes professed not to see much difference between them. One of my friends would go on to become a shaman (though, as he wryly admitted, his license hanging on his wall, it was hard to find clients for soul retrieval); another would man the level-crossing gate on a rural railway line, watching it go up and then go down again. Eighteen Old Boys had gone on to become British prime minister and, as I write this, the nineteenth has just come to power, and the current Thai prime minister, as well as the two sons of the British Crown Prince, emerged from the same cloisters.

Such schools were famously a training ground for Empire, so it was no surprise that British rule across the globe could be seen as a version of school, extended to a life sentence: it was never hard to see geopolitics (if you were Graham Greene, at least) as an unending competition between the bullies who’d become cabinet ministers and their painfully sensitive victims. When he was in West Africa, his protagonist would meet a man who blurts out “I love you” to a colleague’s wife he’s met just once, when in Sweden, a smooth charmer who hopes that his silky confidence will somehow obscure his shiftlessness. All across the world, from Brighton to Saigon, we meet in his books a small group of boys, tied in a kind of fellowship and living
in spartan quarters, very simply, clinging to their worn-out innocence as if they were still in the room called Pterodactyl.