I fought back my anger. I had no room, really, to think about Mum. It was all Brian.
* * *
At the crematorium, no one spoke to me. My father saw my jeans and refused to shake my hand. Of course I’d done it on purpose. The battered leather flying jacket with the tear in the back. The unwashed hair. The building was neutral and discreet. A few middle-aged people in sober clothes had come to pay their respects, filling the pews so that later on someone would fill the pews for them. There was a representative from the hospital, a couple of neighbors. It was just another transaction to most of them, conducted in the same detached manner as one might renew a passport or open a savings account. Hats for most of the women. Cigarettes smoked outside, at a discreet distance from the hearse. None of them had really cared about her. How could I not hate it? How could I not hate myself for being part of it?
Brian hadn’t trusted me to make it on my own. He was right: if he hadn’t sent his friend to pick me up, I wouldn’t have gone. The friend was called Bob or Dave or Phil. He looked just like Brian: sideburns, drinker’s red chops. “Are you coming like that?” he’d asked, winding down the window of his Cortina.
When he saw me Brian hissed at Bob-Dave-Phil, who blocked his way with a raised arm. Go on, I thought. Take a swing. You want to so much, but it wouldn’t do. Decorum. Disrespectful to Mum.
The curtain was operated by some kind of automated pulley system. To the sound of a crackly recording of organ music, it jerked its arthritic way along a brass rail, concealing the coffin from view. As an attempt to shield us from the finality of death it was ineffective. When it was over I tried to speak to Dad. One last chance for us. I touched him on the shoulder.
“You did this,” he told me. He meant Mum.
His petty, vicious tone still transmits clearly to me today. I didn’t
answer, “What about you, Dad?” or any of the other things it has since occurred to me I could have said. And because I couldn’t find any words, I walked away. I suppose it goes without saying that I never saw him again. Or Brian. After that, there was just me.
Collectivity. That’s what Saul called for in his speech to the VSC activists. That’s what he said the British lacked. A couple of days later he was gone, his bedroll and kit bag packed and shifted, his argumentative bulk absent from the kitchen. But he left that point of view behind him. No one had wanted to hear it. I listened to a cacophony of voices, all shouting that their particular project, their thing was a genuine example of community, throwing a lot of jargon at Saul to prove that he was wrong and, anyway, they were cleverer than he was. I thought he had it about right. Perhaps it wasn’t our fault. We were in a church hall and somehow that made everything we were doing absurd, just a bunch of people pushing each other around, like a Scout troop. How could we even think of making something new for ourselves when there were metal-framed chairs stacked at the sides of the room and a piano under a canvas cover in the corner? In England the power structure had fastened its roots right down to the bedrock; every inch of land, every object on which you rested your eyes spoke about the past, about how many people had gone before you and how insignificant their individual efforts had proved. It was all designed to stop us from coming together. All of it. And that meant it couldn’t be rejected partially. If it was going to be changed, it would have to be changed beyond all recognition.
That October, I decided I wasn’t going back to university and would dedicate myself full time to political work. A second large antiwar demonstration was planned. After my arrest in the spring I wasn’t sure I wanted to attend, but my friends persuaded me that it was important. Displaying solidarity on the streets was a way to make our politics visible to the masses. Every day, how many thousands of pounds of bombs? How much napalm? How many burned children? How many villages destroyed? They said I shouldn’t allow myself to be intimidated.
At a planning meeting there was a bad-tempered argument about the proposed route. The organizers insisted that a repeat of the violence in March would be counterproductive so it was moved that we’d walk along the Embankment to Whitehall, staying well away from Grosvenor Square and the U.S. embassy. A lot of us weren’t happy about that. Surely the point wasn’t to lobby the British government but to send a message to the Americans, to show that even in a country that was supposedly their ally, the people supported a Vietnamese victory. Wrong, said others. A riot would dominate the news coverage at the expense of the issues. Personally, I thought the papers would be against us whatever we did. There were already hysterical articles running almost every day, building up the march as a full-scale insurrection. Despite my militancy, I was privately pessimistic. I didn’t believe that a protest, violent or not, would change anything. British men weren’t getting drafted, let alone fighting for their freedom. People seemed half asleep. My sense of futility was deepened by the group of neatly dressed men sitting at the back of the meeting, taking notes. They were obviously from the police or secret service. What was the point of making plans that would be immediately relayed to the authorities?
On the day of the march my mood oscillated wildly. The Lansdowne Road group took a vote and decided as a bloc that if there was a move to divert to Grosvenor Square we’d go along. We put on heavy shoes, extra layers of clothes, padding our bodies in case there was a fight. Sean filled his pockets with marbles. “For the horses,” he said. For a while, as we walked along Fleet Street, I felt OK. The crowd stretched away as far as the eye could see and the chants of “U.S. out!” reverberated in the enclosed space. The newspapers had taken their own dire warnings seriously: we passed rows of boarded-up office windows. I looked around at Anna and Sean and the others and felt I was part of something, that perhaps together we could make a difference. At Trafalgar Square, as the stewards shepherded the march in the direction of Whitehall (“Turn left! Turn left!”), thousands of us broke away, running
through the streets, shouting and letting off firecrackers. At Grosvenor Square the police were waiting. As we reached it we saw an enormous cordon in front of the embassy. Various groups had decided to leave the main march: there were anarchists, Maoists, nonsectarian people we knew from Notting Hill. Together we linked arms and charged the police line, but time and again they repelled us. Just as we’d become more disciplined, so had they. In the end we forced them back through sheer weight of numbers. After that, as I’d feared, it degenerated. They started using their truncheons. They charged us with horses. It became a repeat of the March demonstration, with one significant difference: this time my friends stayed with me. Everyone from Charlie’s — a group of about twenty of us — kept as closely together as we could. We ran together. We stood together. And we fought. We threw stones and distress flares and marbles. When a policeman tried to grab Anna, we rushed in and tore her free.
Afterward, back at Lansdowne Road, bruised and crushingly tired, we watched ourselves on television, soundtracked by a disapproving commentary. The home secretary came on to praise the Whitehall protesters for their “self-control.” “I doubt,” he said, “if this kind of demonstration could have taken place so peacefully anywhere else in the world.”
“Can someone tell me what the hell the point of today was?” I asked. No one replied.
* * *
After Miles came to dinner, I couldn’t sleep. I got up and made a cup of chamomile tea, which I held as I sat awake in the study, looking out at the lawn, the skeletal branches of the pear tree silhouetted against the sky. On the second night it was the same. On the third night, as I lay rigid in bed, imagining the phone call that hadn’t come, Miranda noticed and solicitously dropped lavender oil on my pillow, offering me a tincture of valerian to drink, a sample of a new Bountessence product she was thinking of calling “Lethe Water.”