Where was Syd? Not around; that much was plain and little more seemed needed—Eve could be trusted to have seen to it that he wasn't going to cease to be not around at any sensitive stage. In fact that little more was all there was going to be: Jake never knew where Syd was that night and so likewise never knew whether his absence had been engineered or merely taken advantage of. He wondered about that for a bit till he saw it didn't make much odds. Where was here? He had forgotten anything Eve might have said to him or the taxi-driver that indicated which direction it was or how far it was from wherever they had picked up the taxi, though he could well remember having been in the taxi for at least fifteen seconds. When he listened he heard a distant vehicle, then another—no clue there. She had mentioned Headington, sure, but in a connection that implied past rather than present domicile. He wasn't approaching the problem in a spirit of pure disinterested inquiry. In the end there could presumably be expected to be a morning; when it came he would be all right if he was in Rawlinson Road, but if he was in a cottage half-way between Thame and Aylesbury he might find some difficulty in getting back to Comyns and picking up his lecture-notes in time to make it to Parks Road by eleven, this on the assumption that Comyns, lecture-notes and the like still existed.
Round about this point something he hadn't bargained for happened: a light went on at the other side of the bed. He went into a distinguished underplayed imitation of a man sound asleep, breathing deeply and regularly nearly all the time, not being lavish with grunt, sniff and swallow. So matters seemed to rest for a couple of minutes; not having sat up or made any other detectable move she could hardly be reading. When the minutes were up she got out of bed without the flurry he had half-expected and was to be heard walking away. A swift blink showed her naked back-view going out by a doorway in the far corner. He looked about: his clothes, or most of them, seemed to be on and around a chair next to a dressing table at the window. And he now knew where the door was, but to gather up clothes and exit either instantly or later, in the dark, wasn't worth considering, so he looked about the room further. It was quite a big room with a certain amount of probably expensive furniture in it, and some pictures, paintings—he did notice them. Clever old Syd and lucky old Eve.
He heard a cistern flush and revivified the role of sound-asleep man. Quietly but audibly she came back into the room and over to the bed, this time to his side of it. Silence and stillness. What was she doing? He opened his mouth a little and shut it again. Nothing continued to happen. The moment at which he would have to scream and thrash about approached and arrived and prolonged itself. After he had given up hope she sighed, made a small wordless noise that might have indicated contempt or affection or sadness or pity or almost anything else but pleasure, went around the bed, got carefully back into it and switched off the light.
The return of darkness had the effect of informing him authoritatively that he wasn't going to sleep again that night. The soporific effect of the alcohol he had drunk had long since been dissipated, his Mogadons were far away and the bottom sheet had become strewn with little irregular patches of hot semi-adhesive sand. More than this, his recent struggles to breathe regularly had fucked up some neural mechanism or other so that he now seemed to be breathing by conscious control alone: in, hold it, out, hold it, in. He kept trying to yawn but couldn't fill his lungs to the point where he could turn the corner, get over the hump and exhale naturally. So exhale anyhow, hang about and try again. He didn't know whether to be glad or sorry that he hadn't looked at his watch while he had had the chance.
In the end he came to a state of which it could be said with more truth than of any other in his experience that it was between sleeping and waking. He had thoughts; no, there were thoughts, each one of an unmeaningness, of a neglect of any imaginable kind of order that caused him leaden wonderment, numb doubt whether he would ever be able to go back to proper thinking. They came along at a regular moderate pace, each one a dozen or twenty words or word-semblances long and lasting a few seconds before being overlaid by the next. Most of them posed as statements of remarkable fact or hitherto unformulated views and beliefs, though a few were pseudo-questions that it was out of his power to begin to try to answer; the nearest comparison was the sort of stuff they gave you to read in dreams.
They receded sharply at an abrupt clashing sound and a voice saying Tea but didn't go away altogether for the first few seconds after he opened his eyes and at once started to come back when for excellent reasons he shut his eyes again. He struggled up to a sitting position, having to take his time about it because of the way his head rolled about like a small baby's unless he concentrated hard, and concentrating at all was no light matter. The curtains had been drawn back and it was full day, in fact, as he saw when he had hauled and crammed his glasses on to his face, seven-forty. There was indeed a cup of tea on the bedside table and he got it to where he could drink from it without spilling a drop outside the saucer. The state of his bladder had become something he could live with, given his present standard of living, so he sat and sipped and felt the hot sweet brew sinking into his tissues and doing him no good at all. When he had finished he got up, put on his trousers, soon found the bathroom and thank Christ. After that he drank, by way of tap and tooth-glass, something approaching his own weight in water. There was a metal cabinet above the basin, in the mirror of which he gained a first-rate view of his face. It looked as if it had been seethed in a salt solution for a time and then given a brisk buffing with sandpaper, but it felt as if it had also been lashed with twigs. He bathed it gently, which left it none the worse. More extensive ablutions would have meant deferring the time when he should be fully clothed and that would never do.
Back in the bedroom he got trousers off, pants on, trousers back on double-quick, then slowed right down, his head pounding. The ache in it was now firmly established in the top of his nose and had even moved on to the inner end of his left eyebrow, but it had relinquished a little of its former territory on the other side of his forehead. As he started to get up after easing on his shoes a wave of giddiness pushed him forward in a sudden crouching run that, if not checked, might well have sent him out of the window. The move brought him a view of what looked very much like part of North Oxford: one fear disposed of. He tied his tie and combed his hair, thereby making his arms ache a lot, put on his jacket and went.
He found Eve in a large well-equipped kitchen reading the 'Daily Telegraph,' which she lowered when she saw him. Her glance and tone were pointedly neutral.
"You look bloody awful," she said.
"Yes."
"How do you feel?"
"If you don't mind I think I'd rather not try to answer that question."
"Spirits don't seem to agree with you."
"They differed from me sharply this time."
"Would you like some breakfast?"
"No thanks, I must be on my way."
"Cheero then."
"Look, I'm sorry about last night."
"Which part of it?" When he didn't speak she went on, "You don't remember much about it, do you? I might have known. Well, at your urgent insistence we went to bed, an act of sexual intercourse duly took place, and you immediately turned—"
"Oh really?"
"Yes really. If that's what was bothering you you can forget it—honour was satisfied. In fact considering how pissed you were you did quite well. It was what happened afterwards that you might consider feeling sorry about."
He waited but in the end had to say, "What was that?"
"Fuck-all. You said Good night love, turned over and went to sleep."
"I was tired. And pissed."
"That's when we show what we're like. You practically went on your knees to get me to play, when you'd promised not to try when you first asked me, right? and I told you twice at least I'd be breaking eight years of being faithful to Syd, yes we've been married quite a bit longer but it took me a while to give up my old ways, and then you do that. A nice man would have tried t
o make a girl feel it had been worth while, however tired and pissed he was. No that's not fair, a man who sees more in women than creatures to go to bed with, a man who doesn't only want one thing. So you see I've rather come round to Brenda's way of thinking. Suddenly. Before last night I couldn't have agreed with her less."
Again he could think of nothing to say, though on a larger scale than before: he had the awful part squarely in front of him now.
"Don't worry about me." Eve picked up the paper again. "I'll get over it. You're the one with the problem. Turn right outside and you'll be in the Banbury road in three minutes."
He found his raincoat in the hall and saw himself out. When he got to the Banbury road he saw he was only about half a mile north of St Giles", say a mile all told from Comyns. It wasn't actually raining and a walk would do him good. It did, in that it brought about in him an additional form of physical exhaustion to help take his mind off his other troubles. He stepped through the wicket with what alertness he could muster: he must not run into Ernie, be found by him entering college at a quarter to nine in the morning. At first sight there was nobody about. He tiptoed over to the lodge and had a peep: one of the tinder porters behind the glass partition. Moving quite naturally now he went in, nodded good morning, wished he hadn't nodded anything, went to his pigeon-hole and was turning over a couple of pieces of mail when he heard the approach of a familiar and dreadful creaking sound. Perhaps he could just..... He was still a yard or two from the doorway when Ernie was there, filling it, well not filling it but making it hard for any creature much larger than a rabbit to get past.
"Morning, Ernie," said Jake, taking a half-pace diagonally forward as if he somehow expected the porter to make way for him.
"Morning, Mr Richardson." Of course he didn't budge. "You're up early." He looked more closely; it wasn't going to do Jake any good not to have been actually witnessed at the gate.
Had a night on the tain have you sir?"
"Staying with, with friends."
"Yes, you always were a bit of a night-ale, like, but never much of a .... If I didn't know you better I'd have said you'd been draining your sorrows. I just hope you don't feel as lazy as you look."
"Oh yes. No. Now if you—"
"Oh well, in for a penny, in for a bloody—" Ernie advanced suddenly and with a loud creak, his head twisting round over his shoulder. "Sorry sir, I didn't know you was there."
"Well, now you do, now you do. Morning, Jake."
It was Roger Dollymore, looking offensively fit and spruce. The sight of him was an instant reminder of the College Meeting to be held that afternoon and the hortations to be delivered there for and against the admission of women. No doubt Dollymore's was already prepared. Jake's wasn't. He stumbled off to his room to see if he could think of anything to say.
20—Girls Everywhere
He thought of something quite soon and wrote it down on the spot, and that was a good idea, because not long afterwards he was just wondering whether he could possibly feel worse, given present circumstances, in other words not given epilepsy or impending execution, when he put his mind at rest about that by starting to feel not only worse, but worse and worse. The newcomer among his sensations was anxiety. By the time he reached the lectern in Parks Road it was advanced enough to reduce his entire audience, the little bastard from Teddy Hall along with the rest, to immobile silence. They were all keyed up for the moment when he should collapse and die or start screaming and tearing off his clothes. But he disappointed them. When he had finished he cancelled his tutorial with the Bradfordian, savoured an all-too-brief moment of self-congratulation at his own sagacity and fought his way back to Comyns through a medium that seemed appreciably denser than air. In his sitting room he ran his eyes over the print of some of 'The Hippogriff Attaché-Case'. He wanted to lie down but what he didn't want was another dose of those bloody thought-substitutes.
Having (purposely) missed breakfast he decided he had better try to eat some lunch and managed to get quite a decent way through a portion of steak-and-kidney pie with cabbage and mashed potatoes. It was slow work but he left the SCR in bags of time to get over to his rooms, throw up and stroll back so as to arrive in the Grade Room on the stroke of two. Inside him there continued to lie a dissolving Mogadon, taken with the object not of inducing sleep, which your true-to-form College Meeting could do on its own, but of soothing his nerves: Curnow had said when prescribing the stuff that it was a muscle relaxant, which surely must mean that it relaxed the muscles, and offhand he couldn't think of any muscle of his that couldn't have done with some relaxation bar his sphincter, which for the last four hours or so had notably excepted itself from the tension that possessed him.
Lancewood was already settled in his usual place, half-way down the left-hand vertical, so to speak, of the hollow square of baize-covered tables, at the top horizontal of which sat or shortly would sit the Master, the Dean, the Senior Tutor and other holders of office. Jake went round and joined Lancewood, who at first sight of him said,
"Hallo, how terrible you look."
"Ernie was saying much the same thing this morning."
"Even Ernie is right sometimes. I think it's your eyes mostly. No, that's too easy—it is your eyes, but it's your mouth mostly. Its shape has changed. What have you been up to?"
"Oh Christ. Are you in to Hall?"
"Yes, and at a loose end afterwards. Skip dessert and come straight over to my rooms."
"Christ. I mean thanks."
Very soon afterwards Marion Powle came in and took his place at the centre of the top table. He announced that the minutes of the last meeting had been circulated and asked if he might sign them as correct. Jake could find no more objection than anybody else. Then Powle recited the names of lazy bastards who had said they weren't coming. After that part the Estates Bursar was called upon to introduce Agenda Item 3. (They mean Agendum 3, thought Jake.) The item or agendum in question concerned the sale of some college property in a part of the kingdom that had until just the other day borne the name of an English county but was now known by some historically authentic title that meant as good as nothing to anyone. The price quoted ran into six figures and was immediately agreed by those assembled. It was a very different story when the next item—agendum came up. This time the focus of attention was the proposed new chairs for the library, the joint proponents of the proposition being the Domestic Bursar and the Mods don who doubled as the Librarian of the college. A prototype was brought in by a menial and examined with some closeness, several leaving their own chairs to see it better. At first it seemed to gain some approval, and when Wynn-Williams sat on it and it didn't collapse its adoption looked almost certain. But then the cost was asked for and given at £125 and all over the room there were wincing noises, rather like but in sum louder than those made by Brenda on getting into a cold bed. For a chair! they all kept saying—for a chair? Not quite all. 'Of course' it seems a lot, said Jake to himself, but haven't you noticed that 'everything' seems a lot these days, you fucking old fools? In the end the Domestic Bursar, after he had made it plain that it would be no use going back to the maker and trying to beat him down, was instructed to do just that.
The next topic was described simply as Stanton St Leonard Churchyard. All Jake knew about Stanton St Leonard was that it was a village to the north-west of Oxford, that the living of its church was in the gift of Comyns and that 'by way' of consequence a part of its churchyard was set aside for the remains of Fellows of the college, an amenity not much in use for however long it was since they had been permitted to marry. Probably the local authorities wanted the place concreted over and a community centre or skateboard park built on the site.
The Master looked round the meeting with a serious expression. "Now I'm afraid I have a rather serious matter to draw to the attention of Fellows," he said seriously. After explaining about Stanton St Leonard for the benefit of the recently elected, he went on, "During the vacation a certain Hoyt H. Goodchild, a citizen o
f the United States, was visiting relatives in the village when he suddenly died. It seems that these were his only relatives; at any rate, there was silence on the other side of the Atlantic and the family in Stanton decided to bury Mr Goodchild in the churchyard there. By a most unfortunate and grievous coincidence the rector was away at the time and the, sexton ill, and evidently neither had briefed his substitute in full, because on returning to their duties they found Mr Goodchild buried at the Comyns end."
There was a general gasp of consternation, almost of horror, in which Jake couldn't quite prevent himself joining. Funny how we all overact at these get-togethers, he thought to himself: what ought to be of mild, passing interest attracted passionate concern or a facsimile of it, ordinary care for the interests of the college came out as crusading zeal. All part of being donnish.
Powle was continuing, "Both men have expressed their profoundest apologies but that's hardly the issue. I must have some guidance here. Senior Tutor?"
"No difficulty that I can see," said Dollymore. "He'll have to come up, won't he?"
Wynn-Williams and some of the other senior Fellows showed their agreement.
"I don't really think we can quite do that," said Powle.
"We won't have to do anything, Master, it's up to those two in Stanton to set right their mistake."
"There would have to be an exhumation order, which might not be easy to obtain. And there are the feelings of Mr Goodchild's relatives to be considered, surely."
"They'll be village people, I don't expect much obstacle there. And as for the exhumation, the authorities are bound to understand our historic right not to have a total stranger, and an American at that, in our own sacred ground. Why, some of those graves go back to the time of the Civil War."
"I think everybody here understands that, Senior Tutor, but I very much doubt if the authorities would, to the point of taking action that is. They'd be nervous of the publicity and I couldn't blame them."
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