The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August

Chapter 44

Many lives ago, in that busy summer when Vincent Rankis and I first began to truly examine each other’s minds, and before that cold night when he learned of the Cronus Club and left me with some light bruises and some heavy doubts for my pains, we went punting down the river Cam.

I have never liked punting, always feeling that, as means of transport went, it was one of the least sensible available and, more to the point, as it appeared to be practised in Cambridge, a skill as much valued in the incompetence as the mastery. A good trip on the river would not be complete for both students and some of my peers unless it involved hitting a bridge, causing a pile-up, running aground on a muddy bank, dropping the pole in fast-flowing waters and, ideally, at least one person falling in. I have similar feelings about gondolas in Venice, where the skill of the pilot is almost entirely cancelled out by the size of the fee and the sense that you are, in your own naïve way, contributing to a cliché that will in later years serve more gondoliers to defraud more tourists of their cash.

“That’s your problem, Harry,” Vincent had explained. “You’ve never understood the concept of doing things by halves.”

I had grumbled my way to the riverbank, and grumbled my way on to the punt, and grumbled as we bumped our way between students, and grumbled as Vincent opened up his wicker basket, packed for the purpose, to produce flasks of gin with a dash of tonic, and perfectly cut cucumber sandwiches.

“The cucumber sandwiches,” he’d explained, “are vital if we are to fulfil our roles.”

“What are our roles?” I sulked.

“We are the living proof of the notion that rationality and intellectual vigour are slaves to social pressure and pleasant sunlight. For you and I may know, Harry,” he exclaimed, sloshing the pole through the water with pointed enthusiasm, “that this is a truly ridiculous pastime for any self-respecting scholar of the universe to indulge in, and yet, for no rational reason that I can possibly devise, this is what must be done.”

Our companions giggled.

I wasn’t at all convinced by Vincent’s choice of associates for this trip. I’d only met them at the riverbank, and their presence had further added to my sense of impending doom. She was Leticia, and she was Frances, but which was which I still couldn’t quite put my finger on. They were dressed very properly in high-buttoned summer dresses and with their hair immaculately curled by their ears, but alas, from their propriety also came their frivolity, for they knew–of course they knew!–that taking a punt ride with two young bachelors in the summer sun was very much something Mother Would Not Approve Of, and any other thoughts they might have had on the course of our journey were rather subsumed by this all-encompassing revelation.

“Leticia’s father is something in biochemistry,” Vincent whispered in my ear, “and Frances has been claimed, apparently, by Hugh, who’s a thoroughly repugnant creature but is playing tennis today down on the lawns. When we get there, Harry, I’m afraid it’s either your or my ghastly duty to ensure that one of us kisses Frances on the lips, for Hugh to see; better not get the timing wrong, else we’ll have to go through the entire procedure again until he notices.”

I begged tutor’s privilege, announcing it was bad enough to be seen to be on the river with students, let alone kissing one. Vincent sighed profoundly, and when we got to the lawns he did, indeed, as promised, contrive to drop the pole into the river and insist that myself and Leticia paddle against the current to collect it while he engaged in the loud and important business of temporarily seducing Frances. The calamity of our situation drew everyone’s attention; the sight of the small, slightly round figure of Vincent entering into a sensual embrace with the spry Frances held it, and his work was done.

To my surprise, as I dried my freezing hands on my trousers and returned the pole to the safety of the punt, I realised I was laughing. Quite when the absurdity of the situation had begun to outweigh my resentment at its circumstances, I couldn’t say, but no matter how hard I tried, I found it almost impossible to maintain a foul mood. Even the cucumber sandwiches, thin, tasteless and forlorn, entertained me for all of the above qualities. I had a worry that Leticia, feeling left out, expected me to do something sensual with her too, and my polite refusals to do so led to a rumour within the campus that I was, in fact, gay and enjoyed Vincent for his body, not his mind.

“Damn me, it’s nice that someone does,” said Vincent when the rumour reached his ears. “It’s a lot of hard work, falling back on intellectual brilliance and emotional intelligence to seduce girls these days.”

Should I have seen the clues?

Should I have spotted what Vincent was?

He was a novelty. He was unusual, ridiculous, brilliant, sombre and absurd. He was innovation in a stodgy town. When the day was done, and our companions had been returned to the stony embraces of their families, unsullied if not uncorrupted, we sat in my rooms, drinking the last of the gin–a nearly empty bottle being far sadder, in Vincent’s mind, than a finished one–and discussed once again the perpetual subject of Vincent’s final-year thesis.

“I don’t know, Harry. None of it seems really… important enough.”

Not important enough? The turning of the stars in the heavens, the breaking of the atoms of existence, the bending of light in our sky, the rolling of electromagnetic waves through our very bodies…

“Yes yes yes.” He flapped his hands. “That’s all important! But ten thousand words of thesis is… well, it’s nothing, is it? And then there’s this assumption that I should focus on one thing alone, as if it’s possible to comprehend the structure of the sun without truly understanding the nature of atomic behaviour!”

Here it was again, the familiar rant.

“We talk about a theory of everything,” he spat, “as if it were a thing which will just be discovered overnight. As if a second Einstein will one day sit up in his bed and exclaim, ‘Mein Gott! Ich habe es gesehen!’ and that’s it, the universe comprehended. I find it offensive, genuinely offensive, to think that the solution is going to be found in numbers, or in atoms, or in great galactic forces–as if our petty academia could truly comprehend on a single side of A4 the structure of the universe. X = Y, we seem to say; one day there will be a theory of everything and then we can stop. We’ll have won–all things will be known. Codswallop.”

“Codswallop?”

“Codswallop and barney,” he agreed firmly, “to paraphrase Dr Johnson.”

Perhaps, I suggested, the fate of the universe could briefly take second place to the thorny issue of graduating with honours?

He blew loudly between his lips, a liquid sound of contempt. “That,” he exclaimed, “is precisely what’s wrong with academics.”