Michael, Michael Read online

  Bello:

  hidden talent rediscovered!

  Bello is a digital only imprint of Pan Macmillan, established to breathe life into previously published classic books.

  At Bello we believe in the timeless power of the imagination, of good story, narrative and entertainment and we want to use digital technology to ensure that many more readers can enjoy these books into the future.

  We publish in ebook and Print on Demand formats to bring these wonderful books to new audiences.

  About Bello:

  www.panmacmillan.com/imprints/bello

  About the author:

  www.panmacmillan.com/author/wendyperriam

  Contents

  Wendy Perriam

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Wendy Perriam

  Michael, Michael

  Wendy Perriam

  Wendy Perriam has been writing since the age of five, completing her first ‘novel’ at eleven. Expelled from boarding school for heresy and told she was in Satan’s power, she escaped to Oxford, where she read History and also trod the boards. After a variety of offbeat jobs, ranging from artist’s model to carnation-disbudder, she now divides her time between teaching and writing. Having begun by writing poetry, she went on to publish 16 novels and 7 short-story collections, acclaimed for their power to disturb, divert and shock. She has also written extensively for newspapers and magazines, and was a regular contributor to radio programmes such as Stop the Week and Fourth Column.

  Perriam feels that her many conflicting life experiences – strict convent-school discipline and swinging-sixties wildness, marriage and divorce, infertility and motherhood, 9-to-5 conformity and periodic Bedlam – have helped shape her as a writer. ‘Writing allows for shadow-selves. I’m both the staid conformist matron and the slag; the well-organised author toiling at her desk and the madwoman shrieking in a straitjacket.’

  Dedication

  For Mary Edwardes Nefdt

  who gave me both her Michaels

  – and so much else

  Epigraph

  Si, dans ces tristes lieux, par l’ amour amenés,

  Quelques amants, un jour, y visitent nos cendres,

  Courbés sur notre marbre et les fronts inclinés,

  Ah! diront-ils, baignés des larmes les plus tendres,

  Puissions-nous, en aimant, être plus fortunés!

  From lines inscribed on the tomb of

  Heloïse and Abelard

  Chapter One

  ‘Ssh,’ said Tessa. ‘They’re starting!’

  ‘No, they’re not. Still two minutes to go.’

  ‘My watch says six already.’

  ‘It’s wrong, then. Anyway, the clock strikes first, and makes such a frightful racket, we can hardly fail to hear it.’

  Tessa shivered, had lost her coat somewhere between midnight and six a.m. Though the jostling throng of students should help to keep her warm – some in crumpled evening dress: ball-gowns muddy round the hems, dinner-jackets worn back to front, or white shirts splashed with wine; hordes of others scruffy in old jeans, fighting camera-laden TV crews for a foot or two of pavement space. If noise were heat, she’d be on fire. The crowd’s communal mouth had been emitting a continual roar since half past five, or earlier, and the drunken shouts and laughter had now reached fortissimo. She shivered again, though this time from excitement. You’d have to be made of blockish wood not to sense the exhilaration churning the cold air, pulsing through those packed and seething bodies. The bridge itself seemed charged, reeling from the weight of human flesh; Magdalen Tower vibrating in anticipation as the clock-hands crept to six.

  ‘Half a minute to,’ crowed Rob.

  ‘Thank God! I’m bloody freezing.’ Vicky slipped her hands beneath her armpits, hunched herself around them.

  Tessa stared up at the tower, the warm honey of its limestone rebuking the chill greyness of the morning. She could glimpse shadowy figures through the openings of the parapet, moving at the top: the choristers in white and red. She looked still further up, to the eight slender sculpted pinnacles, sharp against the dull haze of the sky; then down again to the Cherwell’s sludgy green, a dirty sleepy river bemused by its own ripples and reflections. The month of May seemed reluctant to be born – no glint on shining water, nor glimmer in the clouds – yet the long green hair of willows and the lushness of horse chestnuts were proof enough that winter had retired. She could feel the seasons fighting – a bleak November wind ripping April blossom off the trees; a row of pale spring ducklings chugging in a dogged line over dark and wintry water. Then, a frantic scream and splash, as a man in kilt and dress-shirt toppled into the water from the bank, scattering the ducklings, clutching at his tartan in a vain attempt at modesty. His friends all jeered and catcalled, and a second kilted Scot pelted him with beer-cans; the mother-duck fighting back with pathetic anguished squawkings. Then suddenly the clock began to strike – six booming chimes, silencing the antics of the crowd, demanding their attention, turning all eyes upwards from the river to the tower.

  The last stroke died away; the silence so expectant now you could feel it hanging in the air like another sort of cloud – swollen, almost bursting. Tessa thrust her arm through Rob’s; grabbed Vicky by the hand; glad when Liz and John and Richard also huddled closer. They must be joined, united, while they listened to the singing – boys’ high voices soaring from on high. She couldn’t understand the words, though she recognized the Latin; felt gooseflesh prickling the back of her neck as the pure unearthly sound echoed from the tower. She had always found it hard to believe in God or heaven, but this came pretty close – a near-angelic choir, their music floating out across the vastness of the sky. She was almost relieved when they changed to jaunty English: ‘Summer is icumen in’. It was now official summer – the song itself had made it so – season of warmth and growth and flowers. ‘Groweth seed and bloweth mead, and springeth wood anew.’ Already she felt less cold, as if the music were mulled wine pouring down her throat, thawing her stiff limbs.

  She kept gazing at the tower, trying to imprint the scene for ever on her memory – the smoothly solid stone, gold against the leaden clouds; the blurred and white-gowned choristers like ghosts behind the parapet; the sheen and throb of newly hatching leaves. She didn’t need a camera, like those scores of flustered tourists so busy with their light-meters and their recording for posterity that they’d missed the here-yes-now. She dodged away from a determined Japanese who was trying to sever her from Rob and squeeze between their group, using his Nikon as a battering-ram. She smiled and let him pass, too happy to be cross. The first time she’d come to Oxford, she too had been a tourist – a gawper and outsider, glued to maps and guidebooks, obeying all those notices which said ‘Private’, ‘College closed’. Now she had free entry, as someone who belonged.

  She gla
nced intently at her friends, wanting to store them in her mind, along with all the other details, preserve them like snapshots in an album: Vicky with her freckles and her lumpy ginger pigtail; Liz in her blue beret; Richard with his almost-beard; lanky Rob; tall John.

  ‘Why are you staring?’ Vicky whispered. ‘Have I got a dirty mark on my face?’ She rubbed her cheek, frowned at her clean fingers.

  Tessa shook her head, reluctant to speak, or interrupt the singing, capsize her high-flown mood.

  ‘They’re out of tune,’ joked Richard, cocking his blond head to listen, then wrinkling his nose in mock-disgust.

  Don’t spoil it, Tessa prayed. It’s beautiful, inspiring, so please don’t send it up. But she dared not say a word, especially not to Richard. His free-and-easy confidence always made her shy. He’d probably inherited it from his father – an international banker who drove a customized Mercedes with a built-in fax and television. Actually, she wouldn’t reveal her feelings to any of her crowd. That explosive mix of pride and exhilaration would probably sound plain daft. And it wasn’t done to enthuse, indulge in moony raptures or superlatives. She’d learned that on Day One; had arrived at Balliol so caught between terror and euphoria, she must have seemed a total prat: far too bubbly and naive, and completely overwhelmed by all the venerable buildings and traditions, the eccentric tutors and strange unfathomable jargon. Even now, after two whole terms, she had to make an effort to appear laid back and cool; to conceal the awe she felt at sitting in a library which had been founded in the sixteenth century and whose ceiling was adorned with hand-painted heraldic shields, rather than slumped in the reading room of her local public library (circa 1961) whose ceiling boasted stained acoustic tiles.

  The others in her year were so nonchalant, so blasé, seemed blind to their surroundings, and apparently accepted it as their natural and inalienable right to join the Oxford roll-call, add their names to all those dazzling earlier ones – Shelley and John Donne, Hobbes and Locke and Ruskin, Oscar Wilde and Tolkien, T.S. Eliot. Or were they just pretending, too, faking their sang-froid? She’d probably never know. If they needed to wear masks, or put on a show of being self-possessed, they were hardly going to admit it, least of all to her.

  She stole another look at them – Richard yawning openly; Liz fiddling with her hair. Weren’t they moved, as she was, all hyped up to be taking part in this centuries-old ritual of greeting dawn and summer from Magdalen College tower? One of the tutors had told her that it had started as a lark, a salute to the goddess Flora, and had now become encrusted with tradition. She loved the thought that they were enacting ancient rites, and that while life rolled on as normal in boring Leeds or London, Oxford celebrated the end of dark and winter by harking back to pagan nature-cults.

  The last note of the final song was just dying on the air; pagan still for all she knew, since she couldn’t decipher the words. A huge cheer went up from the clapping stomping crowd, as if the students were now making up for their spell of pin-drop silence – or for their coolness all the year. She abandoned her own self-restraint, let her voice ring out. Okay to be effusive when her shout was safely swallowed up in the general roar and bray, and anyway the place deserved a cheer. Oxford had once been the capital of England (though admittedly only for a few short years in the seventeenth century), but now it was her capital, the centre of her world, so why shouldn’t she applaud it? She took the foaming can of beer John was passing over, drank it with her eyes shut, so that she could transform it to champagne. Secretly and privately, she had never quite stopped marvelling that she’d made it here at all, when her school had been discouraging, and her mother had thought Balliol was the name of a new lager.

  She heard a popping cork beside her – real champagne swilled down by a Hooray Henry in a stiff wing collar and a brocaded turquoise waistcoat; his girlfriend looped with streamers and a red rose in her hair. They must have been at an all-night ball, whereas she and Rob and John and co had spent the evening in Queen’s College rowdy beer cellar, then ambled back to Richard’s room for more drinks and talk and music. At five a.m., they’d sallied out once more, linking arms and tripping down to Magdalen Bridge, enlivened by the band already playing in the streets, its oompah, oompah, oompah pounding away their tiredness.

  And if there was any torpor left, Magdalen’s bells were now pealing it away in waves of jubilation; great golden waves swelling through the sky, defying its persistent stubborn grey. The whole city must be stirring – woken by the bells, drenched and spattered by their foaming crests of sound, which were sweeping the vast crowd along, up the grey strand of the High Street.

  Tessa surrendered to the tide; Vicky one side, Rob the other; the morris dancers way in front, leading the procession with their accordions and fiddles. No need to make her feet work; she was simply churned along like a piece of bobbing flotsam. Richard stopped a moment, to buy a doughnut from a stall, but he too was floated back, rolled on by the bells. Tessa could almost taste the doughnut sweet and greasy on her tongue, curdling with the kick of beer; the waft of fresh-ground coffee teasing from the stall. She was starving hungry, but didn’t want to stop, be left behind while the huge mob roistered on. It was enough merely to admire the stalls – girls in butchers’ aprons doling out hot chocolate; permed and blue-rinsed matrons from the Save the Children shop offering posies of spring flowers in return for a donation; two enterprising students selling cheese-and-pickle sandwiches from an improvised cardboard tray, hung with pink balloons. One of the balloons had drifted free. Tessa grabbed its string, looped it round her wrist, followed as the crowd surged into Catte Street and along to Radcliffe Square. The morris men had already started performing on the stretch of cobbled paving; their straw hats wreathed with flowers, the brilliant coloured braiding criss-crossing their chests contrasting with the milk-white of their shirts.

  She squeezed her way to the front, to watch the dancing. There were twelve men in the set, each grasping a long wooden stick, which they beat one against the other. She could almost imagine that she was back in medieval England – no cars around, no shops in sight, nothing but the majestic spires rearing up above her; the same lively crush of revellers celebrating the first of May as the highlight of the year.

  ‘Why do they bang those sticks like that?’ she asked a morris man, who was standing on the sidelines with his troupe of white-breeched dancers, awaiting their own turn.

  ‘To ward off evil spirits, my dear. May’s not a lucky month, you know, and the first of May is especially bad for witches.’

  ‘You’re joking.’

  ‘No, he’s not,’ his wife chimed in, a plump woman in a matching hat, both brims submerged in sprays of purple lilac. ‘May’s not good for anything, and especially not for weddings. Haven’t you heard the old saying, ‘‘Marry in May, rue for aye’’? My sister wed last May and she’s left the lad already. And May babies never thrive well – nor kittens, for that matter.’

  ‘I was born in May,’ said Vicky, who had pushed in after Tessa and was now fumbling for a cigarette. ‘And I’ve had jolly good luck.’

  ‘So far,’ shrugged the woman. She turned back to the dancers, who’d been joined by a shambling giant of a figure, clothed entirely in green leaves. The leaves were fixed to a stout wire cage which encased his head and body, so he could barely see at all.

  Tessa recognized him as the Green Man; laughed at his ungainly steps, and the way he was losing half his foliage, as a shameless child plucked it from the frame. Why dwell on bad luck, when there were all these joyous symbols of fertility and spring, and when the rhythm of the music was so catchy and infectious? One old boy was shiny-bald and another of his fellow dancers looked at least a hundred, with his gnarled and crinkled face and the long white straggly ponytail bouncing on his back. Yet they were all leaping in the air, as fiery as the dragons embroidered on their waistcoats. The dancing made them younger; seemed to rejuvenate the ancient square, as well.

  ‘Look!’ said Vicky. ‘Food.’


  A morris man in a black felt hat was handing round small cubes of what looked like home-made bread – a springy golden loaf which he was serving from the tin. The tin was quite a sight, a circular one in battered fluted silver, with a gleaming sword plunged right through its centre.

  ‘Two bits, please,’ coaxed Vicky, holding out her hand.

  ‘Be careful, lass,’ he warned. ‘It’s not just any old cake, you know. If you eat a piece of this, you’ll fall pregnant within the year. So a double portion could mean twins!’

  Vicky almost spat her mouthful out, looked round for John to share the joke, but the boys had disappeared, along with Liz. She passed the second piece to Tessa, who chewed it greedily. Babies were the least of her concerns. She’d just broken up with Rob, and though things were pretty tense between them, she’d no intention of starting a new relationship. It made life too complicated, demanded too much of her time, when she already had her acting and her writing, not to mention her exams, which although seven weeks away, would still require hard slog. She sucked a cake crumb off her tooth, savouring its spicy taste, wished it were a whole fat loaf instead of just a morsel. She had eaten almost nothing since last night’s meagre dinner of lasagne and tinned pears, now felt hollow and suddenly dispirited, as if her engine had run down. Perhaps it was simply hunger – her body complaining about an excess of beer and wine, and demanding something solid to mop up all the froth. ‘Shall we go and get breakfast?’ she suggested.

  ‘No,’ said Vicky. ‘We’ve already lost the others, and if we move they’ll never find us. Tell you what, you go and buy some croissants from that stall we passed, and we can eat them here, on the steps of the church.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Tessa flatly, accepting Vicky’s three pound-coins. She was going to have to squeeze and shove, to fight her way back through the crowds, then maybe queue for ages to be served, but how could she refuse, when Vicky gave the orders, Vicky had the dosh?