North

by Brian Martin

Genres: Thrillers; Psychological Thrillers

Synopsis

Soon after arriving at his Oxford school, the enigmatic North has invited his female history teacher, Bernie, to lunch - and not, as she had thought, to discuss history. When Monty, North's married physics teacher, makes it clear that he wants Bernie for himself, North seeks to mollify him in his own particular way: by seducing him. As North and his bizarre cohort travel across Oxford, London, Ravello, and Washington, the sexual anarchy grows ever more devastating, until eventually North's farcical ménage-à-trois results in death and tragedy. But what is the real story - and is the English master's version to be trusted? A dazzling psychological thriller, North is by turns erudite, audacious and brilliantly witty. An utterly assured and wholly original debut.

Release date: June 15, 2013

Publisher: Quercus Publishing

Print pages: 256

Sample

I FIRST MET HIM WITH HIS MOTHER, a short, neatly turned out woman, precise in the detail of her dress, but not obviously conscious of current fashion. She was an American, divorced, who lived and worked in England, her ex-husband living in the US. Hence North was Anglo-American, and, in contrast to his mother, was at one with the contemporary fashion of a certain reserved, refined youth cult. He was not ordinary, and that made him tantalizing. There is always something dangerous about the extraordinary: you do not forget Hitler’s awful dictum, ‘Extraordinary geniuses take no account of ordinary humanity’.


You might have described him as ahead of his years. There are few seventeen-or eighteen-year-olds who show poise, self-confidence, sophistication, an ability to converse with their seniors of twenty, thirty or forty years on apparently equal terms; but North possessed these qualities. He dressed with a dark elegance that matched his long, straight, jet-black hair: a dark blue button-down collar shirt, well-cut black trousers, no jacket but a long black loosely fitting gabardine coat, and laced black leather ankle boots, a modern equivalent of George boots which were worn in the Army with Number One Dress. His fashion tastes were expensive. His underwear, as his lovers were to tell later on, came from Emporio Armani or Donna Karan.


Yet his mother, for all her attention to detail of dress and the catch of perfume, First by Van Cleef and Arpels, did not convince you that she could afford his wardrobe. At once there was an anomaly, a mystery. Here was this young man, elegant, athletic, good-looking, with high cheekbones and even teeth, finishing his career at a British school, but who was incongruous in relation to his mother. Perhaps the black emphasis should have forewarned those who knew him, his friends – acquaintances, admirers and lovers.


The term ‘lover’ I use advisedly, for when I got to know him it became clear that he had enjoyed these since he was about sixteen. First he was taken advantage of – that is to say, seduced – but quickly he assumed control in his relationships: his learning curve, as they say, was fast and steep.

Were he here now, he would weep at my telling you this, an invasion of his privacy, a revelation of his professional secrets; but then he would relent and see the point, smile and laugh with me. Subsequently, he would plot his revenge, and with superb adeptness and cool objectivity observe my discomfiture and downfall. Despite the intensity of his habitual warm accolades at greetings and partings, the disturbing heat of those kisses on both cheeks, the steely intent of his vengeance would be implacable. I have noted it well. He is not here: mine is the freedom. I use it not in revenge, but because I know we have to recognize his reincarnations.


He was exceptionally attractive. We all yearned for him, to be with him. He had a terrible magnetism: his presence, conversation, animation were seductive; most fell under his spell. I shall tell you about some of them. Some knew they were subject and enjoyed their slavery; others knew their obsession, hated it but could do nothing. Fortunately, my reading, my theology, gave me suspicions and put me on my guard. My experience told me to take care.


Evil exists in many guises. Sometimes it is outright and apparent, blatant and brutal: it has no ambiguity. You know it, and either succumb to it or fight it immediately. Sometimes it is subtle, deceptive and alluring: it is enjoyable, sweet and sensitive, and only with the passing of time does it turn sour, the nectar transform to venom. Eventually I came to think of Milton’s Satan when I met North. I was always delighted to see him, as were all his other friends, but after a few minutes I would think of Lucifer driven out of Heaven to become Satan in Hell, yet still possessed of those ineradicable angelic qualities which made, and still make, him attractive and irresistible. It was necessary in any relationship with North to fear what you might be up against, and most people simply did not know his true nature: they were naïve, uneducated, ill-informed, lacking that clear view of the continuous war between good and evil. The ‘immortal garland’ of true virtue cannot be run for ‘without dust and heat’. Milton warns that we must all learn to recognize vice. We have to be able to consider it ‘and yet abstain, and yet distinguish, and yet prefer that which is truly better’. In the case of DH Lawrence the voice of his education constantly informed him. Mine warned me.


At the school which we both attended, North to learn, I to teach, there was a smart young girl who taught History. In fact, she ran the department. It had been to her intense surprise that she had been appointed two terms previously. It had been a put-up job, so to speak. She had not much experience. Aged twenty-seven, she had taught in Africa for a year, in Uganda, on one of those years out when the young must feel that they are doing good. The school was run by a charitable trust and educated children from miles around. Some children walked to school from the countryside for two hours in the morning and repeated the journey back home in the late afternoon. Such eagerness and devotion for learning she was not to come across in the young sophisticates of the UK. British youth, addicted to football, fashion and the club culture, attended school for the most part with patronizing resignation. In order to maintain a sort of street credibility with her students, she cultivated a knowing air of contemporary culture from which in age she was not too distant. Yet cults move quickly and disappear with extraordinary rapidity: her esoteric Cambridge education and remoteness from the Ministry of Sound created certain solecisms which betrayed her to the young. To her colleagues she seemed to be trying too hard to keep up with her charges.


She was good-looking. Tall, athletic, shapely in low-cut, tight-fitting tee-shirts, she painted herself with artificial tanning lotions (sometimes the imperfection of streaking was noticeable at the back of her legs and she carried a top-up bottle in her shoulder bag). The cosmetic ladies of some of Shakespeare’s quips came to mind. She was attractive and lively: long blonde hair, pony-tailed or sometimes in bunched ringlets, a pleasant, agreeable, smiley face, firm and even teeth. It was no wonder that her male colleagues were infatuated with her, and her sixth-form students alternated between satirical censure and perfect adolescent love. How could such a bimbette run a history department? After all, her predecessor had been a scholar in his own right: a Leverhulme Award holder, author of a monograph on European romanticism; this girl might have been a primary school teacher. She was infinitely beddable, even to inexperienced minds. Their imaginations ran like x-rated feature movies.


Needless to say, North stood aloof from the sixth-form discussions and private group conversations that occupied his contemporaries. He watched coolly and quietly, did what he had to do, and, with an air of both reserve and confidence, produced his work. When he asked his teacher one day in bright sunshine if she would like to have lunch with him, he did it with finesse and he clearly meant it. Others thought it a joke to try and lead on their mentors. They would have made the suggestion satirically, expecting a refusal, the polite brush-off. There was no mistaking North’s elegant seriousness. It could not be turned aside. His invitation had its own magnetism, its own mystery. How could it be refused? That was it: he was so unusual in his attitude; he had a dynamic ability to make you want to get to know him.


Bernie – her proper name was Bernadette, which she loathed and hence the preferred diminutive – at once accepted.

‘I’d love to. I’m not sure I should, but it would be great. We can discuss the Vienna Settlement, and, in any case, I can find out more about you.’

‘I shall need some help with the next essay, you’re right. But that is not the main idea. I should like to know more about you too. I’m not sure that you are all that happy here.’

North spoke with an easy informality, with a prescience intriguingly beyond his years.

‘Where shall we go?’ asked Bernie. ‘I don’t know the eateries too well. I usually eat in town.’


The school was surrounded by bars, cafés and restaurants. Over the previous four years, two of the streets that radiated away from the roundabout which lay before the entrance to the old city had regenerated thriving small businesses. There was a tapas bar, a Mexican restaurant called Chico’s, a fish restaurant, a Chinese takeaway and three Indian restaurants, including a Kashmiri halal in the backyard of which butchery took place (it was constantly being visited by Environmental inspectors and Health and Safety Executive agents).

What was this handing over of initiative to North? He was supposed to be under her tutelage, but she was inclined to hand over decisions to her junior. That was his nature: to prompt this type of submission in small matters and, later, as we shall see, in affairs of great importance. Even I found it difficult to resist North’s control. You had to deal with him on a permanent intellectual plane. It was necessary to approach him as if he were an opponent in a game of chess or bridge: you needed to remember his moves or the cards he had already played. If you did not, then you were lost.


‘We should, I think, go to Quod,’ he said. ‘It is far enough away and large enough for us to be intime.’


At the same time as wondering how many times he had been there, whether he was aware of her fears of impropriety and what sort of life he led away from school, she agreed. She noted his faintly provocative reference to intimacy and decided he was being gently ironical. Later, when she remembered his comment, it sent a tingle of excitement through her and created an intense expectancy which she could barely tolerate. She knew Quod, and it would do nicely.

‘That would be good. When shall we say? Tomorrow? Or the next day? I can do either of those days this week.’

She recognized inside herself an eagerness to have this proposed lunch, this liaison. Why put it off? She knew it must be innocent, but there was something strange about it, about him, about her ambivalent feelings to his approach. It was unorthodox, bizarre even. It had never happened before. Still, she had not been teaching long: she did not understand that her inexperience put her in danger. Her knowledge of history and literature should have shown her vicariously that she was in mortal danger. Only that morning she had discussed Sir Thomas Wyatt’s great poem ‘They flee from me that sometime did me seek’ and yet she failed to notice the warning in the lines ‘… they put themselves in danger/ To take bread at my hand’.


‘Why not tomorrow?’

‘I’ll be there first,’ she said. ‘I’ll be waiting. Let’s say half past one.’

She hoped to put him at his ease in case he would find it awkward arriving at the restaurant to find her not there. After all, he was only seventeen, almost eighteen. He acknowledged her consideration with a slight incline of his head, but it was inconceivable that someone with such poise could ever find himself in company and at an embarrassing disadvantage. This gesture of hers was simply one of many misjudgments about him that she was to make. The idea of him being gauche in any adult situation was absurd. At the bar, or at a table in the restaurant, he would take his place and immediately look as though he was meant to be there by some sort of natural law. He could make conversation with anyone who was near him. Again, it was as though he had some extraordinary gift that set him aside from his classmates and put him on equal terms with his seniors. In any case, she should have remembered, he had made the first approach: he had asked her to lunch.


He raised his head, looked her straight in the eyes, fixed her shifting, downward gaze and held it with a surprising, shocking intensity.

‘I look forward,’ he said.

Disturbed, apprehensive, she walked towards the common room and her colleagues. Had they been watching, they might have thought that some aspect of his work was being discussed. She felt uneasy, excited. She could not explain to herself or anyone else why she felt that way. She felt a trace of blush appearing on her cheeks and checked herself: how absurd to be so affected by one so young. At the same time she knew that she could talk about her feelings to only one person: not to her closest friend, nor to her mother, certainly not to her father; she knew she could only sort out her feelings with the one person who had provoked them, and that was North. That in itself was confusing and, perhaps, shameful. The realization made her blush even more. How fortunate that the colour of her rising blood was hidden by her tan.


She went about her business preoccupied with thoughts of North, working on autopilot.


* * *

The following day it was fine and bright. I went for a walk, and round about midday I passed through the meadows and made my way towards the centre of town. Quod was on my route. Quite often I called in to read the Financial Times and take a coffee or a Campari and soda for refreshment. By the time I reached Quod it was twelve-thirty. I went in, ordered a Campari and sat against the bar, brooding over the FT with its bad news of the previous day’s trading.


I had been there for a few minutes when the hotel manager, an old friend from another, smaller, establishment in the city, where he had also been manager, came in, noticed me and started chatting about this and that: the decline in the tourist trade, his luck in being able to employ students from a local catering school, his long working hours and the effect on his young family.

Quod was a smart place. It was mainly the ground floor of the Old Bank Hotel. Thus there was a dual operation: if you stayed at the hotel, you used Quod for meals, and Quod was open to the public. Alex, the manager, had overall responsibility for both. The entrepreneur who owned it, had converted the old Barclays Bank into a modern, luxury hotel, bar and restaurant. The rooms were very contemporary chic: lots of light-wood finish, brushed steel, glass and hard edges, a modern painting hung on every wall. Naturally there was television with satellite channels and computer terminals with broadband connection. The en suite bathrooms were Finnish-designed, lacking only a personal sauna. To use the current expression, the space was wired.


The restaurant was similarly designed, with huge wall pictures illuminated by the light coming in from tall windows at the front and back of the building. As in the hotel rooms, there was a hard-edge feel to the overall design. I wondered if, in the restaurant, the intention was to discourage you from staying too long. Yet it had its attraction, a clean, sharp, brisk atmosphere about it.


Alex was eventually called away by a receptionist and I studied the Lexus column, which mentioned a company in my portfolio. The news, though brief, was cheering: a contract had been secured to service and repair almost a million mobile phones for Nokia in the coming year. The shares had risen, against the trend, by three and a half pence to £1.21. As I digested this intelligence and thought idly of Dr Johnson’s opinion that ‘There are few ways in which a man can be more innocently employed than in getting money’, I was aware of Bernie entering through the glass double-doors from the High. She looked gorgeous: very well turned out, nicely made up, her hair in tight tiny ringlets frizzed out, showering on to her shoulders. She had to be intent on making an impression. It crossed my mind that she must be meeting her bank manager, her wealthy godfather perhaps, her old college tutor, a future employer, or even her lover.

I remained unobserved by her, and I watched as she talked quietly to a waiter and was shown to a table. She clearly indicated that she would not order anything but wait for her lunch companion, whoever that might be.


It was not long, a few minutes, before a familiar, elegant, dark figure entered. It was North. Did he make an entrance? If so, it was not deliberate or obvious, but it was only natural, right, that he should be noticed. Heads came up from tables, eyes lifted to encounter this arresting youth who had just appeared. I knew him. One glance, indeed one sensory feeling that he was at the door, put me on my guard. I resisted mimicking the inquisitive or admiring regards of those lunchers who had noticed him and continued my scrutiny of the FT, but not before the quickest of glances had established eye contact with him. He acknowledged me with the slightest of nods and his eyes sparkled towards me for a moment. To tell the truth, it was disconcerting. He had no reserve or reticence. He did not care that I was witness to his assignation. It did not matter. If anything, I felt, it helped him to have me there. It made him perform better. I knew it: I felt his inspiration and his power.


He looked around the floor and saw Bernie, raised his hand in gesture of greeting and went up to the table where she was sitting. She rose and held out her hand. He held it, stepped inwards towards her, embraced her with his other arm and kissed her on both cheeks in the continental manner. There was no hesitation. This was his custom; it made no difference who it was, man or woman. The difference lay in how he performed the greeting: he could run the gamut from complete formality to implied passion.

I could see that Bernie was surprised, a little taken aback. She had not expected this familiarity, and North could make that accolade extremely intimate, charged with intent. It was like a text message that she could either respond to at once or disdain. She recovered herself and smiled with pleasure as he joined her at table. They sat sideways to my view. He did not point me out. He knew that he could make me part of a game, whereby he kept her in the dark about my presence and, more importantly, turn me into a voyeur. He enjoyed his power and he wanted to discover how I would respond.

We had great respect for each other. North knew I had no illusions about him, as I once had and as others in the restaurant now did. For him, I was Keats’s sage Apollonius, a stern critic of his fabricated world ‘… do not all charms fly/ At the mere touch of cold philosophy?’ But I lacked the power, or objective will to destroy him. He recognized me as a neutralized force, a eunuch in his games of love, completely powerless, an impotent spectator. He relished his power – over me and over others. The people in the restaurant were captivated by this unusual, magnetic figure: he was constantly being looked at, when you might have expected Bernie to be the object of attention. He focused his casual charm on her. I could sense the grip he was exerting on her. I do not know what their conversation was about, but I can guess. He would have complimented her on her looks. Who instructed him in manners? Was it his American mother? Did he have some counsellor? How did he come by such charm? There is no answer to these questions except that his behaviour seemed to be innate. It was a natural part of him. There was no need for instruction, nor counsel. He would have asked her about her previous evening, where she had been, who she had seen. He would have discussed her colleagues and delivered perceptive judgments. He might, at her prompting, have touched on his academic work, but he would have glossed it and turned the talk back to more urbane and, for him, more urgent matters. He would not, for a moment, have betrayed a sense of urgency: nothing was allowed to ruffle the great composure he possessed.


I wondered how long I could go on watching this game of his. He was bewitching her, not obviously but subtly, and he, of course, knew it. It was intentional, calculated. I knew where he was heading. I almost felt that I should warn her.

In the end, I decided to continue my walk and make my way back to my study. I folded my paper and donated it to the bar. I could sense he knew I was leaving, but Bernie, deep in conversation and oblivious to all but North, did not notice me. I left at the back of the hotel, where the doors from its dining room give out on to decking which in the summer is covered with tables for al fresco meals. Through the car park, I made my way in to the mediaeval side street. Immediately, I felt a desire to go back. I wanted to be there with North and watch his manoeuvrings. At the same time, I knew that I should resist. Bernie was clearly trapped. The silk of North’s web was beginning to stick to, and wrap around, his female prey. What was his design? What did he want? Was he just in need of diversion? I knew that the answer was not that simple. At this point, I did not know.


Back in my study, I brooded. I was supposed to be writing a lecture for a US visit to Cornell, where I had been invited to speak on CS Lewis. His concern with Milton’s Paradise Lost has always fascinated me, and Lewis’s conviction of the power of evil, an active force at large in the world, troubled me. Beware! The Prince of Darkness, the apostate angel. I had written the introduction, using Lewis’s poem On a Vulgar Error as an anchor for my thoughts. It is a precise and shrewd poem, but at first sight a little enigmatic. In the end, what Lewis is saying shines brightly through: the poem is an elegant statement of what his life and work were all about. He researched the past, and all his writings are based on the accumulated wisdom of past ages, particularly as embraced by the Bible and Milton’s Paradise Lost. ‘So when our guides unanimously decry/ The backward glance …’ they are wrong, even, perhaps, stupid. I intended to elaborate and illustrate this theme. Earlier in the day I had warmed to my task, but now could not see my way forward. My mind could not work out the sequence of what I wanted to say. Everything had become muddled. Naturally enough, thoughts of Bernie and North kept recurring. My mind flitted back to Quod and what might be happening there. A series of disturbing images haunted me.


I had watched North from a distance over a few years – since he was about thirteen. He had been a dark-haired, silent boy who kept very much to himself. He exerted a certain sort of smooth charm even then, but his personality at that time was entirely passive: he kept from being noticed. It was in the sixth form that he emerged as an irresistible force, assuming very quickly a sophistication beyond his years.


The school organized art appreciation trips to galleries around the country, especially to those in London. We had close connections to two famous young artists, alumni of the school: one an install. . .