He switched on his standard-lamp and moved it and a padded chair as far forward as he could, took a bottle out of the cupboard and poured a glass of what was semi-sweet sherry, not port—all one to them though. His academic cap lay where he had put it after Saturday's collection; in an instant he was wearing it, sitting in the chair, holding the glass up to the light. A muffled cheer sounded from outside and the cameras licked and fizzed once and again, one lot, then another. He gave them a simulated in-the-act-of-drinking pose, a here's-to-you pose and a glass-out-of-sight pose for the religiously scrupulous. Then he switched off the light to signal the end of the show and acknowledged the grateful smiles, waves and thumbs-up.
"No, not at all, fuck 'you,'" he said. "Fuck you very much, ladies and gents, fucks a million. And a fisherman's fart to all at home."
He had poured the untasted sherry back into the bottle, which was only there for visitors, and was going to hang up his raincoat when he noticed a bulge in the pocket—the thing he had collected at the lodge. He felt interest, curiosity, a nice change for one given to knowing all too well and at first sight whatever the post might have brought him. The outer cover, reinforced with sticky tape, was resistant. When at last he got it off he had come to a roughly cylindrical object wrapped in many thicknesses of purple lavatory-paper. After unwinding these he found himself holding an imitation phallus made out of some plastic material or other with the words Try This One, Wanker! written on it in the same large green letters as the outside. Moving faster than he had done for some years Jake locked the object up in his desk, then looked briefly and without result at the wrapper, went not at all fast to his armchair by the empty fireplace, sat down and put his hand across his mouth and sighed. All he needed now was a visit from the madwoman, dropping in on her way to catch Harry or June as they came off shift at British Leyland, or more likely find them on strike.
11—Academic Study
Jake didn't know how long he sat on in the armchair. He roused himself at the sound of a light step on the stone flags of the corridor outside. Anyone coming to visit him would clear off without further ado at the sight of the shut outer door, a convention that had stood him in unimprovable stead in the days Ernie had referred to but not wanted at the moment. He hurried to open that door, looked out and saw the figure of a girl retreating.
"Miss Calvert?"
She turned back. "I'm sorry, I thought...."
"No, my fault. The door must have...." He found he had started to suggest that half a hundredweight of forest giant had swung through something like a hundred and fifty degrees at a puff of wind, and changed tack. "I had to shut it to keep some tourists out."
"Tourists? Out?"
"Yes, they chased me from the gift shop. They wanted to photograph me. I mean not me in particular, just a don. Any don. An Oxford don. So I put my square on and let them. Photograph me, I mean. Might as well. Do sit down, Miss Calvert. Now I'll just find your essay—your collection paper."
They had moved into the sitting room, where his suitcase, containing Miss Calvert's collection paper and everybody else's collection paper and much else besides, stood on the otherwise empty dining table. He went over and put his hands on the corners of the case. Should he open it in here or take it through the communicating door into his bedroom and open it in there? The first would be quicker if the scripts were at or near the top, as he was almost certain they were. Or rather the first would be quicker wherever they were, only if they weren't near the top he would have to unpack a lot of his belongings on to the table and then at some stage put them back again before finally, unpacking in the bedroom. How certain was he that the scripts were near the top? Had he perhaps put them in first to make sure of not leaving them out? Realising that he must have been standing there with his back to the girl for close on half a minute, he unclicked the catches of the case and at the same instant became almost certain he had indeed put the scripts in first. Then he had better reclick the catches and do the necessary unpacking in the bedroom after all. But one of the catches, the left-hand one, was hard to fasten securely, always had been. Would the other one stand the strain if he carried the case by its handle in the normal way?—he didn't want his belongings all over the floor. So should he try to carry it held horizontally out in front of him? He could. Then he must. Quick. Now. He wriggled his forearms underneath the bugger and, no doubt looking rather like a man who risks his life to remove a bomb from a place of public resort, took himself and burden off at top speed. Thank Christ the communicating door wasn't latched.
The scripts were on top, as he could have seen earlier with little trouble. Miss Calvert's wasn't among them. Yes it was. There was something worrying about it but he took it straight back into the sitting room, where Miss Calvert had failed to sit as requested. Although she had been his pupil. for two terms he had never properly looked at her before. Now he did. He saw that her eyes were darker than most fair-complexioned girls" and that her jaw was firm, not much more than his original vague impression of generic blue-clad blondeness; he certainly made no progress in estimating whether she could be, should be, surely must be considered attractive or not. This failure wasn't the result of loss of interest, in the way that morbid failure of appetite for food might be expected to impair the palate: he had had no trouble over Professor Trefusis. That was because the comely scientist was in her middle thirties, well above the decisive age-limit. No, it wasn't an age-limit in the usual sense, because the ones just below it were getting older all the time. The whole thing was a matter of date, of year of birth : 1950 would be about right. So when he was seventy he wouldn't be able to tell whether any female under thirty-seven was attractive or not. A curious world that would be.
Enough. He tried to bring himself round. "Ah. Of course. Miss Calvert."
"Yes, Mr Richardson?"
The sound of his name reminded him of the last time he had heard it uttered by a female, not long ago and not far from here. Someone in the picket had known it, had recognised him, and he was an obscure person, never on TV or in the papers, in no sense an Oxford character, more or less of a stranger even to many undergraduates of his own college, one who taught a subject neither soft nor modish nor remunerative. Was it this girl who had identified him? And of course what had bothered him about her script was that it was written in green ink, like the words on the object he had locked up in his desk. He glanced at the script, saw immediately that the respective hands were quite different and even the ink was a bit different, then looked wordlessly at the girl.
"Are you all right?" she said, taking a short pace towards him.
The movement brought to mind what he must have noticed before, how slim she was, her middle hard looking and yet flexible, more like a thick electric cable than any thin living creature. He had embraced slim girls in his time and could remember consistently finding them more substantial then than the sight of them suggested. Perhaps fellows found the same thing today. "Oh—yes," he said. "Yes, thanks. Do sit down. Been rather a hectic day one way and another. Here we are."
He pushed the padded chair back to its usual place. It wasn't very comfortable and it certainly looked nasty but it was the second-best in the room to the battered old dining-chair at his desk, its leather scuffed by generations of academic bums. Everything else was wine- or ink-stained, fire- or water-damaged, extruding springs, possessed of legs or arms that fell off all the time, impossible to open, impossible to close and repulsive. For years lie had lived here most of the week, most weeks, not only in term-time, and without meeting Brenda's standards the place had been quite decent. Since then, by ruse, hard bargaining and straightforward theft-and-substitution the Domestic Bursar had plundered it into the ground. Well, not easy to complain when you spent no more than a tenth of the year in it.
"I hope you had a pleasant vacation?"
"Yes thank you."
"Settling down all right this term?"
"Yes."
"Good." He picked up a lecture-list. "Now I presume you w
ent to Sir Clarence Frankis yesterday and will continue to do so."
"I didn't actually."
"Why not?"
"Well, there's a lot to do, you know, and a lot to get through, and it isn't in my special subject, Minoan, and you said yourself it would be more detailed than I needed." For some reason she had a deep voice.
"Yes. I did. But, er .... Minoan .... 'civilisation' is fairly interesting, and Sir Clarence is probably the most—er, rather good. It's not really a question of need, not totally. You ought to go. Sorry, I mean try to go whenever you can. No difficulty with the others? Right. Now your collection paper, Miss Calvert. I don't quite know what to say to you about it."
But he quite knew what he wanted to say to her about it and related matters. One, see if you can't work out some way of getting yourself just a bit ashamed and scared of not wanting to know anything about anything or to be any good at anything. Two, if that fails, at least try to spell a bit and write legibly and write a sentence now and then—you can forget, or go on never having heard, about punctuation. Three, when you see a word you recognise in a question, like Greek or Tyre or Malta, fight against trying to put down everything remotely connected with it that you may have—oh stuff it. And four, go away and leave your place at St Hugh's to someone who might conceivably—oh stuff it.
Jake didn't say any of this because he wanted Miss Calvert's benevolent neutrality at least in the coming struggle for power at his Wednesday lectures, where that little bastard from Teddy Hall seemed about to escalate his campaign of harassment into a direct bid to seize the lectern. So he said as gently as he thought he could,
"Your handwriting. You do realise, don't you, that we're allowed to ignore anything we can't read or else have it typed up and make you pay the typist?"
"Why could a typist read it if you couldn't?"
Once, he might have been able to tell if this was defiance or ingenuous inquiry. Now, he couldn't or couldn't be bothered.
"Because the typist would have you there with your script reading out to her what you'd written. With incidentally an examiner looking over your shoulder to see you didn't correct anything or put new bits in."
"Her? Why not him? Why shouldn't a typist be a man?" Oh for..... "No reason at all. It's just that in fact the typists in this case are as far as I know all women."
"I didn't know that. And I'm sorry, I didn't understand about the typing."
"That's all right. You do now. Don't forget either that I know your writing pretty well by this time, but it won't always be me reading it. Now your spelling. I'm quite tolerant about that," because a policy of being quite intolerant would multiply the failure rate by something like ten, which would never do, "but the same thing applies. I know some of these names are difficult; even so, I think it might pay you for 'instance' to remember that Mediterranean is spelt with one T and two Rs and not the other way round. Especially," he went on, striving not to shake from head to foot with rage and contempt as he spoke and summoning to his aid the thought that in the Oxford of the '70s plenty of his colleagues would share Miss Calvert's difficulty, "since it appears in the actual title of the subject and is very likely to come in the wording of some of the questions—four times on this paper, in fact." Was she listening? All right, call it the fucking Med! was what he wanted to shout, but for-bore. "I've put a wavy line under some of the other examples.
"In general, you clearly have a concentration problem," are an idle bitch, "and I was wondering whether there was anything in your personal life that..... I'm not asking you to tell me about it but you could mention it to your Moral Tutor. Or if you like I could—"
"No it's all right thanks. There isn't anything really. Except the point."
"What point?"
"The point of going on."
"With the subject."
"Well....
"With Oxford?"
"All sorts of things really."
Jake said in his firmest tone, "I think most people feel like that from time to time. One just has to hang on and have patience and hope it'll put itself right." He couldn't remember now why he had started to ask her; habit, something to say, show of concern to assuage possibly wounded feelings. Yes, habit, a carry-over from the days when he might have gone on to suggest discussing her problems under more informal conditions. Oh well. "Now you answered only two questions but I'm going to give you a beta-double-minus all the same," like a bloody fool. You must try for three next time. Now which of the other questions would you have tried if you'd had longer?"
Muttering to herself, Miss Calvert studied the paper for a space. At last she said, "I think "Culture is the most profitable export." Discuss with reference—"
"Oh yes. Well, suppose you take that as your subject for next week." This favourite tactic not only gratified his perennial need, strangely exacerbated today, to avoid having to think up essay subjects whenever remotely possible, it also relieved him, having just marked several exam answers on the topic, from the slightest mental exertion about it till next week came, if then. He tried to turn his complacent grin into a smile of friendly dismissal, but before the process was finished felt his face stiffen at the tone of the girl's next remark.
"Mr Richardson .... 'you' know that article of yours in JPCH you asked us to look at? On Ionian trade-routes?"
"Yes?"
"Well, the copy in the Bodleian's all .... well, people have been writing things on it."
"Writing things? What sort of things?"
"Like graffiti."
"Really."
"I sort of thought you ought to know."
Malice or goodwill? Those two should on the face of it be no trouble to tell apart, but not much thought was necessary to recall that in practice they mixed as readily and in as widely-varying proportions as coffee and milk, no sugar, no third element, needed. But then what of it? He would look in at the library on the way to or from his lecture the next morning; for now, he thanked Miss Calvert, gave her her script back and sent her off, noticing at the last moment that she bore a handbag like a miniature pack-saddle, all flaps and buckles. He watched out of the window to see if she tossed the script over her shoulder as she left, but she held on to it at least until after she had vanished into the tunnel. Her walk showed that their interview had entirely left her mind.
12—I Have Heard of Your Paintings Too
Jake stood at the window in thought, though not of any very purposeful description, for a couple of minutes. It took him as long to make quite sure that the locked drawer of his desk was indeed locked, secured, made fast, proof against anything short of another key or a jemmy. Then he collected himself and went into the bedroom to unpack. It was small and dark but dry and not particularly draughty, and had in it the only decent object in the set, the bed that filled about a third of it, his own property from long ago and as such safe from the Domestic Bursar's depredations. By the time he had finished in here and glanced through his notes for the next day, the chapel clock, the nearest among innumerable others, was striking six. He slung his gown over his shoulder and sauntered across the grass, looking about at the buildings, which had once been attributed to Nicholas Hawksmoor; recent research, after the fashion of a lot of recent research, had disproved this without producing any certain reattribution. Never mind: they were pleasing to the eye for two sufficient reasons—someone had put them up well before 1914, and no one, out of apathy, lack of money, instinctive conservatism or sometimes even perhaps deficiency of bad taste, had laid a hand on their exterior since except to clean them. Until about a quarter of a century back, Jake had had no architectural sense that he knew of but, like every other city-dweller in the land with eyesight good enough to get about unaided, he had acquired one since all right, had one doled out to him willy-bloody-nilly. So it was no great wonder that he halted and looked about all over again before entering the staircase in the far corner.
Here, on the first floor, there lived an English don called Damon Lancewood, like Ernie in being an almost exact c
ontemporary of Jake's but unlike him in an incalculable number of ways. One of the fewer ways in which he was unlike Jake has already been mentioned: he lived where Jake only popped in and out. Lancewood belonged to the lonely and diminishing few who still treated college as home. It was true that he had a cottage near Dry Sandford and also true, while less well known, that he was joined there most week-ends by the owner of a small business in Abingdon, a man of fifty or so to whom he had been attached for the past twenty-two years.
Jake knocked at the door, which had a handsome brass fingerplate and other furniture on it, and obeyed the summons to come in. He saw that Lancewood had somebody with him and spoke up at once.
"I'm sorry Damon, I didn't realise you were—"
"No no no, my dear Jake, I was expecting you. I'd like you to meet a colleague of mine...."
Introductions were made. Jake failed to gather or shortly forgot the Christian name and college of the visitor, a tall longhaired sod in his thirties, but caught the surname-Smith. Lancewood, himself tall but with neatly cut white hair and a bearing and manner of dress that suggested a retired general rather than a don, turned his blank-looking gaze on Jake.
"I think you could do with a glass of sherry."
"I think so too. Thank you."
Quite possibly it was Jake's sherry: he brought Lancewood a bottle now and then, a much nicer arrangement for everyone than returning hospitality in his own place. It came in a solid bit of glass that went with the way the room was fitted up, which in turn reflected its occupant's military style: nothing overtly martial or imperial but suggestive of bungalow here, club there, mess somewhere else, the many pictures showing horses, dogs, an occasional parrot or monkey, what could have been a troopship, what could have been a cantonment, portraits of dark-skinned persons no one had the authority to say were not sometime servants. They even included three or four watercolours of aggressively English scenes given that niggling, almost effeminate treatment characteristic of men of action.
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