Dance When the Party's Over

By Geraldine Gin

All is not as it seems when K arrives at Oxford in 1984. Is the girl with the irrepressible hair really a miner's daughter? How did Mario get his place at the University? And what is Raj doing with those binoculars? 'Dance' takes us on a student goose chase to a northern town where Robin Hood appears to be still alive and extorting. Back in Oxford, the disgraced Mario goes missing along with a mysterious painting...

We follow Mario's journey through France to find redemption, as others in the Oxford crowd graduate and move to start careers in London. K encounters drag queens, meets Amanda and helps her search for her estranged mother. Eventually, the reunited friends need to track down the valuable painting, the hunt taking them to Berlin and a rather queer café in the Canaries.

An irreverent tale of coming of age, friendship, identity, illusion, love and loss. With poetry.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Mar 2, 2018
• ISBN: 9781387548682

Book preview

Dance When the Party's Over

Geraldine Gin

Rights

Copyright © 2018 by GJ Britton

All rights reserved. The moral right of the author has been asserted.

This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review or scholarly journal.

First edition: 2018

ISBN 978-1-387-54868-2

Published by Lulu.com

Dedication

For Firdaus and for Annie,

whose interest, encouragement and appetite

hastened the conclusion.

For Erich, Jutta and Katharina,

as a surprise.

And for Paul G. In tandem.

Written slowly.

Au Lecteur

First word, last word

I am not Geraldine Gin, and that is not my name.

What difference does it make? Do you need to know who I am?

An illusion of knowledge is a dangerous thing.

In imagination, a name changes everything.

Were I a Janet or a John, you might think of someone plainer, more industrious, more sensible than myself. But with the name I borrow – do you envisage some liquor- swilling socialite, ambitious licensed victualler? Actress, comedienne, magician's assistant? I could be any, all, or none of these.

All you need to know is this: that I exist in my own imagination, for myself. And I aim to exist in yours.

The account I have written here is as real as it is fictional. If you would like to know which, I can't tell you. If you deal in facts, I can't help, apart from to suggest you become a historian. This history will not stand the test of empirical enquiry. But there are other tests. You may find something here which you think is not true. But what kind of truth are you looking for?

You may find out more about me, whereas I will know nothing of you. I hope you discover something new. I question your motives.

Yours suspiciously,

Geraldine Gin

1.    A trifle late

Oscar Wilde had got him into this, but having died just eighty-four years earlier, was not there to get him out. Had it not been for K’s incisive critique of the great man’s famous Ballad, he would not have been waiting now at  the porter’s lodge of Montague College, Oxford, on this warm October day, full of promise. The train from Brighton had meandered its way through the wooded landscape and brown-brick dormitory towns of Sussex and Surrey before joining the Thames at Reading, within view of the gaol. For a few miles here the train ran alongside the river, with its weirs and rowing clubs, country pubs and family-ridden water meadows.  Three, four, six men in a boat, rowing against the current. Huge pleasure-boats peopled with gin-drinking grandparents squeezing the last drop of joie-de-vivre from the bottle, the river and the memory of times past.

The landscape of constantly shifting colours and shapes offered up a source of stimulation for K to write from. Cushioned by the valley, train and river seemed to intertwine, stretch, yawn, carrying their separate cargoes on, from source to coast. Easy bedfellows, but for how long? The river with its power to flood, sweep away certainties. The train with its potential to snuff out life with speed, disaster.

He wasn’t displeased with the resulting poem, for a beginner. But it was time for practicalities. Putting down his suitcase and rucksack, he rang the little brass bell by the arched doorway of the lodge, through which he peered. The front quad with its unblemished, precisely-edged lawn, was familiar from his interview ten months earlier. A small square of green. Keep Off the Grass. It was perfect, as long as the rule was obeyed. Another sign by the door said Open to Visitors. K felt welcomed, and warned.

A minute or two later, it seemed, the porter woke from his habitual afternoon slumber, as he would have called it in preference to siesta.

Name, Sir?

K looked around, but the question was undoubtedly addressed to him.

Keith Joseph, first year English and European literature.

There was an expectant silence, while the porter’s eyes moved around a little in their sockets, accompanied by vague movements of the lips.

I’ve just arrived, K added.

So I see. And my name’s Norman Tarbutt, Sir.

They eyed each other doubtfully.

Usually referred to simply as Tarbutt. Let’s see if I can find you on the list. If, that is, I can locate the list. Slowly, he started to rummage.

In another university near the Sussex coast, Frank Joseph was at that moment running his fingers down a similar list of students, trying to deduce from his colleagues’ scribbles and hieroglyphs who had chosen his own course on Kafka’s short stories and who was pretending to have an interest in East German poetry of the 1960s.

If only he’d agreed, 19 years earlier, to do what his wife had thought only normal and natural – to run through the book of Simons and Stevens, Matthews, Marks, Lukes and Johns, to look at the list of top ten names from the previous year and compare it with her own list of preferences and possibles, to make judicious additions, alterations or suggestions. If only he’d agreed.

It was simpler, far simpler, to pick a name with a pin. And having done so, to realise with secret amusement and delight that his son’s name would invertedly echo Kafka’s famous protagonist, the accused and confused Joseph K, whose tangles with authority ultimately led to humiliation and downfall.

Having worn down his wife with his refusal to spend any more thinking time on the matter, Frank chuckled to himself for the remainder of the pregnancy, laughed heartily at his own joke at the birth, and continued laughing until he realised, many years later and long after everybody else, that Harrow-and-Oxford-educated Keith Joseph was poised to become Education secretary in Margaret Thatcher's first cabinet. 

Norman Tarbutt’s fingers moved very slowly down the long list of freshers. He seemed to be having some difficulty focussing.

Joseph, K. First year English and European literature. Is that you, Sir?

I think it must be.

Here’s your key, Sir. Room 13. You’re exactly one week late.

K departed meekly to find his room. Norman Tarbutt swung the little sign round viciously - Closed to Visitors – and resumed his afternoon slumber.

Room 13 was not one of the favoured rooms overlooking the desirable front quad or the attractive garden approach. It was waiting for K on the third floor, silent and dark. Although the afternoon sun glowed like honey on the carved-stone exterior, it did not penetrate room 13. The window looked out over the ancient college wall and the horse chestnut trees which cocooned the college from the road.

As K let himself into his living quarters for the next nine months, he heard laughter, both male and female, coming from other rooms nearby. There were footsteps above, Pink Floyd droning from below. He hummed along: We don’t need no education … we don’t need no thought control … all in all I’m just another ……. brick in the wall.

The room smelled clean, of polish. What it lacked in light it tried to make up for in size, being divided equally into a living room and bedroom. The living room had a wooden desk, chair, and two bottle-green armchairs. Going through to the bedroom, K put his case and rucksack on the bed, opened the wardrobe and stood in front of the mirror attached to its inside door.  He was thin, in the way that only an eighteen-year-old is thin. He took off his jacket, then his shirt. He wanted there to be more body, more muscle, more flesh, more man. There was nothing worth looking at. It was devastating to be thin.

He'd come this far, through the discomforts of an average comprehensive school, and the ever-present trauma of feeling different in some indefinable way. It had not been easy. Sometimes, he had kept out of the limelight, played his music, in measured acts of self-preservation. At other times he ran like lightning, 100 and 200 metres, to show them he was a fighter. He always won. But he was never sure if this aroused jealousy, admiration, or both. Speed was a mixed blessing. It had not, in every case, extricated him from trouble.

I played for them

Faltering, I played the Last Post

for the teacher's pet who pulled my hair,

for battles fought and battles lost,

for fathers, sons and Holy Ghost.

With mud on my shirt and a knuckleful of fear,

faltering, I played the Last Post

and was proud of my solitary notes, to my cost

when the Murphy boys and their gang appeared

for battles fought and battles lost.

For husbands and brothers and lines they'd crossed.

For the voice which said I would never dare.

Faltering, I played the Last Post

for battles fought and battles lost.

A face stared back at him. A face to forget, look past, lose in a crowd. There had to be something unique, he told himself. There had to be something that hadn’t been seen in all the undergraduates who’d passed through that room before him and stood in front of a mirror. They looked back at him, these ghosts from every year since the college was founded in 1379.  Long faces in a full-length mirror, laughing, crying.

K had the sensation that his own self was missing. He could not identify where it lay.

For all the sixth-form talk of self-realisation, fulfilling one's own potential and becoming the person you wanted to be, there had been no mention of where and how to find that present self. Who was he, where was he?

The laughter and music had faded away, leaving a moment of emptiness.

How often do we stand in the middle of an empty room alone, listen?

Car doors slamming. Traffic driving round the Sheldonian. A little wind in the college garden trees, a floorboard creaking. K’s own light breathing.

No mother humming to herself in the flower beds. No father muttering after his  glasses again.

Just faces in a mirror. Their sighs.

*

How it happened that K was a week late for the beginning of his first term at Oxford was a question which was never fully resolved. The most likely explanation was that his mother, Penny, having taken custody of the welcome letter from the College, put it at the bottom of a pile of other important papers and registered in her mind the date she wanted to register. Mid-October was when she always planted daffodil bulbs, and the thought crossed her mind that if K went to Oxford at the same time, she would at least have the satisfaction of knowing that Peeping Tom and Sir Winston Churchill  had been safely and carefully put to bed for the winter, that 4 inches under they would be slowly beginning the life cycle and that nothing unexpected or untoward could happen, unless they were dug up by the neighbours’ cats, against which she would militate with sticks and netting. This thought might well have been the reason that the later date was spoken of and eventually put on the kitchen calendar as the day the only son would fly the nest.

He would fly by train, as it occurred to neither parent to drive him to Oxford with the essentials of student life. The family mini metro was programmed to make only two journeys from their Edwardian end terrace on the Eastern side of Brighton – one to the University at Falmer, and the other to the new out-of-town Sainsbury’s with the squat spire which was promising to open for Sunday retail worship as soon as the law allowed.

The week before K arrived, Montague College had been alive with eager parents parking on yellow lines as near to the College as they dared and tottering through the side gates smothered in duvets, weighed down by boxes of tinned soup, cup-a-soup, baked beans and home-made jams, trailing through with cushions, throws, rugs, pot plants and framed photos of the family pets. Depositing a child to begin a semi-adult life appeared to involve the removal of whole household interiors, the clearance of country houses, Victorian terraces, and even 3-bedroom semis on the outskirts of Basingstoke (as even in 1984, Oxford was fully embracing equality of opportunity by admitting a small percentage of undergraduates from the state sector). The entire contents of these mansions and matchboxes would be compressed into one room, creating a condensed but skewed version of Thatcher’s Britain in a single corridor.

The wave of mothers, fathers and household objects over, there was an aftermath of goodbyes, hurried or protracted. Hugs were given awkwardly through lack of familiarity with the form; eyes were averted by unspoken agreement. This was followed by a smaller number of late lunches in the Kings Arms and the Queens Head, where there was nothing much to say but every reason to eat as much Beef Wellington as possible. Mothers gave birth a second time, to pink young adults. Sons and daughters wriggled uncomfortably, fathers looked on helplessly as the bar staff served the coffee and cut the cord.

K made his way uncertainly across the front quad to the dining hall. There was nobody around to ask if he was in time for dinner, as he then called it. He climbed up the ten uneven steps and followed a little wooden sign, catching a glimpse through the chapel door of its glistening interior. Turning left, he arrived at the magnificent Hall. On four rows of narrow tables, the lamps shone with dim gravity. Dark wooden panelling soaked up any light that remained after bouncing off nervous faces and white young teeth. Pompous faces with no teeth looked down from the walls and from the top table.

Selecting a table to sit at on his first evening was in all probability one of the most important decisions of K's life. Having made the choice between Oxford and Cambridge, heavily influenced by his father who had been at Balliol, and the decision about what to read – was the addition of European Literature an essential challenge or an unnecessary distraction? – the need to choose one table out of the four was overwhelming. Each line of undergraduates lured him with its possibilities, inviting

him to go in one direction or another. K looked at the head of the supper queue just ahead of him and made his choice based on the irrepressible black curly hair just leaving for the far left-hand table.  The girl it belonged to was talking and laughing enthusiastically with her flatter-haired friend, forgetting to hold the tray upright, with the result that a pool of gravy had left its roast beef behind and was starting to edge its way around the upturned rim of a glass of water.

K took his own roast beef and Yorkshire pudding from the counter and followed to the far table. The girl with the hair, the gravy and the friend had sat down towards the middle, opposite two boys engrossed in a conversation involving the serious waving of knives and forks. K sat next to them, feeling like an imposter at a banquet. If he kept quiet, they might not notice him before he’d finished eating.

Lives were being written. The flatter-haired friend, Helena Newman, from a very pretty village near Ipswich, happened to sit next to David Gold from Gloucester, and found his analysis of Educating Rita as a pastiche of university life and a slur on the intelligence of the working classes less than interesting, particularly – as she pointed out at least three times – because she hadn’t got round to seeing the film due to the pressure of the A-levels which had got her to Oxford and into this conversation in the first place. What she didn’t know yet was that David had an older, more modest and more attractive brother, Jonathan, reading PPE at Keble. A couple of weeks later he would enliven another tedious coffee in David’s rooms. This would be the start of a stable relationship over the next five years, during which both graduated with a 2:1 and found positions in accountancy and management consultancy in London. Eventually they would get married in the pretty church in the pretty village near Ipswich, buy a terraced house near Wimbledon High Street, have the desired children (a boy and a girl), bring them up quietly for a few years, separate due to Helena having a brief affair with a Moroccan coffee importer, re-unite two years later in order to move to a large house in the pretty village near to Helena's exasperating parents (returning to them a number of rugs, throws and lamps) and finally separate again when the children went to Oxford themselves and Helena launched a new career in lifestyle coaching for twenty-first century businesswomen. Such was the power of Montague College Dining Hall.

…. the point is not that lives were lost when our ships were attacked, but that the loss was necessary in order for more lives to be saved, said one of the freshers sitting opposite Fiona, a well-built boy in a tank top and gold-rimmed glasses.

Human life isn’t a question of simple mathematics, Michael, said Raj, in his precise, public-school way. His manner of contradicting was always polite.

You can’t glorify sacrifice by claiming it saves lives, that’s like saying you’re making massive savings by spending a lot of money in the January sales.

It’s nothing like that. Aggressors can’t be appeased. Thatcher did the only right thing. She’s got more balls than the rest of the cabinet combined, and she showed the Argentines who’s boss.

And husbands and fathers died for a squabble over a small South Atlantic island, interrupted the girl with the irrepressible hair.

Hardly a squabble, countered Michael, looking surprised to be taken to task by a girl he didn’t know, and don’t you think you’re exaggerating the importance of the personal over the national interest?

My only uncle died in that war.

Michael opened his mouth to speak. For once, nothing emerged.

Could I have both your serviettes? the girl demanded. Carefully, she mopped up the gravy on her tray and returned the sodden paper remains to their donors.

"Thank you. I’m Fiona. First year English.

Her strong chin lifted, turned deliberately. Her eyes met Michael’s, out-stared them.

There had been a phone call to Fiona’s parents one night, unusually late. Normally, phone calls in the Bowles household stopped with the chimes of News at Ten. Junta, Las Malvinas. Occupation. Task force. War. Gillian’s brother Karl.

The only word Fiona had understood that night was drowned.

The shock of the spoken word. The feared word. Become truth, dream, reality, nightmare.

Drowned – the entire strength of a man. His cradling arms, heavy chest, blue eyes. His fine, fair hair splayed upwards like a Struwelpeter of the sea, a merman on a fatal trajectory. The rushing of crippling green water. The bubble of debris rising and sinking in the swell. A wound in the leg trailing blood, shark-food.

Drowned – twenty-two years of a man’s love for his wife. Memories of the first meeting, on the Dorset coast path. First date, first kiss. Euphoria. Old-fashioned romance, roses. Her note: thank you. I love you. Proposal. Church. The sincerity of their vows, trying not to cry. The honeymoon cruise, the coast at Capri, Sorrento, Naples. Falling in love with the sea. A wife, an ocean – in sudden competition. The Navy, a cycle of parting and reuniting, with the loved-one, with the sea. The loved-one was life, the sea was breath. Both tried to claim him.

Drowned – his secrets. One short-lived, electrifying affair. Guilt and elation,  promises and prayers. The ease of breaking his vows. The fantasy of brothels, lingerie and massage oils breaking into his married lovemaking. The lies, told for the sake of the sea. Reconstructed CVs, bogus references. The fools he’d taken in, the things he’d believed about himself. Erased as the last air left his body.

Drowned, too, the hide-and-seek, the bike in the garden. Fiona’s puppet theatre, the balding teddy and wide-eyed performing dolls, string-and-cup telephones, pooh sticks and stones on the water, cushion fights and ticklings, piggybacks and stories.

Fiona saw her drowned childhood as she lifted her water to her lips. Her eyes had not left Michael's. Anger, water, repulsion, attraction, earth, wind and fire merged.

He died in a good cause, said Michael finally, it wasn’t in vain.

What makes you so sure of that?

Come up to my room, he said innocuously, and I’ll show you.

If you think that’s likely, she snorted, you’ve got a lot to learn about women.

Ever since she was small, Fiona’s anger had overtaken her at a moment’s notice. Her fits of temper had been frequent and volcanic. There was never any warning. One moment she’d be playing happily with her older brothers on the floor, building train tracks or Lego palaces. As soon as a piece refused to fit or the track would not connect, she would break into a fit of screaming and destruction, a veritable earthquake, resulting in a slap from her father and an hour of heavy sobbing in her room.

To her mild-mannered parents it was a mystery. There was no history of uncontrollable temper in the family. Her father, Richard, was a GP whose temperament was perfectly suited to his professional need for a soothing, reassuring manner. His voice was soft, his movements slow and old-fashioned. He was almost a parody of a doctor. Gillian was equally calm and balanced, though she had three children to bring up and a part-time job as a medical secretary. The house was a well-ordered oasis amidst the turmoil that surrounded it.

Richard and Gillian hadn’t wanted to live in the comfortable middle-class ghetto on the outskirts of this East Midlands mining town, with the rest of the doctors, lawyers and journalists who formed their social circle. It was against their principles to self-segregate; their liberal ideals dictated they should live in the community they served. Despite this, they bought the only house big enough for their young family, a large, red-brick Victorian villa at the top of a tree-lined avenue, with a wild, walled-in garden, a jumble of brambles and climbable trees. The wind raced upwards from the acres of terraces below and across the miserable recreation ground, engulfing the big house with its blasts of cabbage and sausages, coal-smoke and washing powder.

Inside, the house was warm and generous, with its high-ceilinged rooms, tall skirting boards, rich-coloured carpets and tiled hallways. Baking smells wafted from the kitchen, Richard worked in his first-floor study or relaxed with the Guardian in the sitting room, with its French windows giving onto the garden. The boys occupied themselves with Draughts, Monopoly, Meccano, Cluedo, and later Rubik’s cube. Fiona ran around in her underpants and screamed.

What does your father do? asked Raj, trying to defuse the situation.

Fiona re-adjusted her glare. Irritation and mischief got the better of her.

He’s a miner.

Oh. and where does he mine?

Near Nottingham. Maresfield. You probably won’t have heard of it.

Michael couldn’t resist: and what does he think of the government’s policy on mine closures, if you don’t mind my asking?

What do you suppose? It was more of a growl than a question. He’s ecstatic. And if you don’t mind my asking, where do you get your half-baked political opinions and your obtuse questions, and why don’t you keep them to yourself?

No need to get irate, countered Michael. I don’t see you keeping anything much to yourself.

Well then you won’t mind if I give you this disgusting-looking trifle.

Fiona picked up a clear plastic tub of jelly, sponge and cream decorated with hundreds and thousands and deposited the contents onto Michael’s half-eaten roast beef, where it stood quivering like a sandcastle.

Come on Helena, I’ve had enough. Let’s leave them to their puerile politics before I do something I regret.

Overcome with visions of broken Lego, Fiona grabbed Helena’s arm and whisked her away. Helena, taken aback by her new friend’s determination, offered little resistance and scuttled along behind with her own half-finished meal. ‘Sorry’, she mouthed somewhat pointlessly to the table in general.

Something happened to K. It was difficult to define. His hunger for beef was replaced by a hunger for anger.

Nobody reacted like that in Brighton. His family avoided conflict by finding quieter, less honest means of making their views known. Here was someone who said – no, screamed – what she felt.

He watched her flounce off, neck outstretched and hair streaming behind, like a newly-discovered comet approaching the sun. His stomach tightened, burned like the sun. His head felt light and unstable. Two feet firmly on planet Earth, for the first time he truly experienced what lay beyond Brighton and Oxford, A-levels, Dickens