At seven o’clock of a Caribbean morning, on the island of Antigua,
one Peregrine Makepiece, otherwise known as Perry, an all-round
amateur athlete of distinction and until recently tutor in English
literature at a distinguished Oxford college, played three sets of tennis
against a muscular, stiff -backed, bald, brown-eyed Russian man of
dignifi ed bearing in his middle fi fties called Dima. How this match
came about was quickly the subject of intense examination by British
agents professionally disposed against the workings of chance.
Yet the events leading up to it were on Perry’s side blameless.
The dawning of his thirtieth birthday three months previously
had triggered a life-change in him that had been building up for a
year or more without his being aware of it. Seated head in hands at
eight o’clock in the morning in his modest Oxford rooms, after a
seven-mile run that had done nothing to ease his sense of calamity,
he had searched his soul to know just what the fi rst third of his natural
life had achieved, apart from providing him with an excuse for
not engaging in the world beyond the city’s dreaming spires.
Why?
To any outward eye, his was the ultimate academic success
story. The State-educated son of secondary-school teachers arrives
in Oxford from London University laden with academic honours
and takes up a three-year post awarded him by an ancient, rich,
achievement-driven college. His first name, traditionally the property
of the English upper classes, derives from a rabble-rousing
Methodist prelate of the nineteenth century named Arthur Peregrine
of Huddersfi eld.
In the term-time, when he isn’t teaching, he distinguishes himself
as a cross-country runner and sportsman. On his spare evenings he
helps out in a local youth club. In vacations he conquers diffi cult
peaks and Most Serious climbs. Yet when his college off ers him a
permanent Fellowship – or to his present soured way of thinking,
imprisonment for life – he baulks.
Again: why?
Last term he had delivered a series of lectures on George Orwell
under the title ‘A Stifl ed Britain?’ and his rhetoric had alarmed him.
Would Orwell have believed it possible that the same overfed voices
which had haunted him in the 1930s, the same crippling incompetence,
addiction to foreign wars and assumptions of entitlement,
were happily in place in 2009?
Receiving no response from the blank student faces staring up at
him, he had supplied it for himself: no, Orwell would emphatically
not have believed it. Or if he had, he would have taken to the streets.
He would have smashed some serious glass.