David settled himself finally in the gravel and closed his eyes. For perhaps five minutes he lay back dimly sensing the dispersal of the worshippers. Though feet of fifty different weights constantly tramped past his ears they made less noise than he'd imagined they would. The only articulate cry he had been able to distinguish had come from the remote west corner, away from the mouth of the Temple: 'Real tennis this afternoon, Jamie?'; to which another voice, presumably Jamie's, had called back no and sorry and something about Henrietta.
David felt the sun hot upon his eyelids and relaxed absolutely still. From the direction of his right ear he heard a voice whisper, 'He's dead!' Another voice, as if in explanation, said: 'He's probably got exams. They have them in the summer'
'Stop,' David said aloud, without consulting himself or opening his eyes. There was a moment's silence, broken only by the sound of feet slipping on the gravel, and then a voice he recognised as the second speaker's asked:
'Do you mean us, sir?'
Suddenly David smiled. He opened his eyes as much as the unaccustomed sunlight would allow. 'I'm not a sir. And I'm not dead.' He was looking up at a grey sock with a wine and navy blue band around its top. Above this his painful eyes could make out a bare brown knee and the hem of a pair of flannel shorts. The choirboy twisted slightly and the copious skirt of his black opera cloak shaded David's eyes from the sun.
'What are you doing down there?' the boy asked.
Before replying David withdrew a fountain pen which was tucked into the boy's sock and had leaked, staining the wine and merging with the blue. He handed it up towards the sky. Ich habe genug — gehabt' he said: all his German derived through Bach. To his delight the boy laughed, seeming to sense a conspirator.
'So've we!' he said; then added, 'Hamley felt sick at Communion.'
David sensed rather than saw Hamley nod. As his shaded eyes accustomed themselves to the light he realised he was looking straight up the gold beam of the boy's thigh into the shadows of his widely belled shorts. Before David could look away the boy seemed to sense his unease. He flexed his knee slightly forward and sideways like a fashion model so that the hem of his shorts closed around his limb. He made no attempt to move his footing. Instead he distractedly screwed the toe-cap of his shoe into the gravel. David noticed the initials A.S. crudely worked in brass tacks on the sole. Alessandro Scarlatti? He still hadn't seen the boy's face.
'D'you know anything about Frogs?' the boy asked, ceasing for a moment to ruin his shoes.
It was then that David, squinting over his chest, became aware of an elderly don about fifty yards away who was staring at him in amazement. For no reason he laid his hand on the boy's ankle.
'About what?'
'Frogs. Model 'plane engines. Mine won't go …'
'Do you buy your fuel made up?'
'Yes.'
'Well, try screwing the compression right down, and adding one part of ether to five parts of the fuel you get from the shop.'
'All right. I'll try that.'
'Why aren't you with the rest of the crocodile?
The boy gestured with his shoulder. 'I had to hold the basin for Hamley. He felt sick again in the eleven o'clock.'
'What was it this morning?'
'The fried bread, I think,' said Hamley, speaking for the first time from somewhere out of David's sight.
'No: I mean the service.'
The boy standing over David twisted his body round so that the opera cloak billowed out behind him. David's eyes travelled up the neat creams of his grey shorts. Scarlatti was a sartorially conscious child, excepting the ink-stain on his sock. 'Oh, "Sing joyfully unto God our Strength", Mundy, and sermon by the Lord Bishop of Dorchester or someone.' Hamley had begun to shift his feet. Perhaps he was thinking of lunch. The boy standing over David seemed more reluctant to move.
'D'you use a glove to start your engines? Or did you when you had them, I mean?'
David grinned up at the sky. He still couldn't see much of the boy above his blue elastic belt. 'No. You don't want to be afraid of it though. Just get used to flicking the propeller sharply down against the compression. Your finger comes away naturally.'
'That's what I'm afraid of! My finger coming away! I'll try the way you suggest, though; and with the special fuel.'
The boy made flicking motions in the air with his hand, and blew a rapid succession of popping sounds from his lips. As he did so he bent forward and David saw his face. The smooth curve of his hair line was broken at one temple by the absurd, conical hat. David hardly noticed it.
'We ought to go now,' the boy said. Perhaps I'll see you again.' He turned on the ball of his foot and ordered Hanley into line abreast. A moment later a clear voice rang out across the Great Quad. 'Don't forget! Ich habe genug gehabt, too ' David raised the hand with which he was exploring the extent of the indentation where his hair receded. Involuntarily, he felt more liquid than when he had been playing the metaphysical game. He got up, looking at his watch. Twelve forty-five. He had a number of acquaintances living in college who might give him a drink if he looked in at their rooms, and his friend, Lang, whom he'd continued to know since they'd both left the same school two years ago. He decided against the acquaintances, and then against Lang as he remembered he was currently receiving instruction from Rome, and that at this hour there was bound to be a row of Jesuits perched on his bed like carrion crows on a gate. Last time he'd looked in on Lang there had been a Spanish Jesuit in attendance who was smoking Turkish cigarettes. David had had to talk himself rapidly off-stage, feeling for the doorknob with his hands behind his back.
Instead, he decided to get a sandwich in a pub, and wandered out through the west gate. On the pavement three American ladies were stating in triplicate their reasons for not entering St. Cecilia's. The thesis that 'all the insides were the same' might have pleased Swift. David negotiated a don who was inexplicably manoeuvring a battered Ford on to the pavement, and crossed the road to the Wasp's Nest where he had beer and a polythene-protected and apparently reinforced sandwich.
After lunch David strolled aimlessly in the Great Park. The summer had appeared early. The air carried the scarcely perceptible hum of extreme heat. It was one of these peculiar Thames Valley afternoons when the sunshine may bring body and soul together on the brink of Elysium, but where bliss is held at bay by some invisible and enigmatical presence. Throughout his first year David had watched the same sunlight creeping along the stone balustrade outside the dormer window of his room in St. Cecilia's until it licked the pencilled mark that defined tea-time. Now he sat in its full warmth, listening to the rhythmic thud of rowlocks coming up from the river and looking at the great crescents of blossom scattered from the St. Cecilia's trees. He felt relaxed; securely lulled, as if new life had entered him. Nevertheless the sense of an unstaged drama remained. Perhaps it was like a consumptive's fear that the coughing might begin again.
Chapter 3
On an impulse David decided to put in an appearance at his language tutor's open-house tea. He might even leave him his paper on the absurdity of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford called Try Cantab. There was a lot to be said for the enraged followers of the school who claimed the language to have been invented by a bunch of mad German philologists in the nineteenth century, and quoted the names of editors such as Quirk and Grimm to support their claim. Confirmation was badly needed, though. He might suggest to the company that if while wandering in Mercia or Northumbria any of them should detect a small scholar with Germanic face inflicting runes upon honest English tombstones with a coal-chisel they should apprehend him and ask his business.
David shook himself his from a line of thought that was apt to produce unwelcome pressure cycles, and took a number two bus out to North Oxford.
A black claw seized his neck from behind, pinning his shoulders to the back of the seat. For a second he thought a West Indian conductor had gone berserk, and he was to be the first martyr in a caste war; then he saw it was the handle of an Italian umbr
ella that was throttling him.
'For God's sake!' a voice said. Wait for me!'
A moment later a person David hardly knew collapsed on to the seat beside him and buried his face in his hands. Meanwhile David freed himself from the umbrella.
'You're Rogers, aren't you?' Crawley said, sinking his teeth into the upholstery of the seat in front. 'No, don't answer! There was a pause in which David lit a cigarette and became uncomfortably aware of passengers turning their heads. 'Rogers ...' Crawley said, and stopped, as if unable to admit the diagnosis was cancer. 'Rogers, if you only knew the moral responsibility of writing anything for these ten thousand bewildered youths!'
'You do okay,' David hazarded.
'Shut up, will you. I must talk to you because I suspect you can read. Don't you play — a banjo, is it?' Crawley had hold of his umbrella again. It was martial law. 'Ninety per cent of this university can't, you know. They haven't got ears, eyes or minds, just sex-organs, beer stomachs nicotine-lined lungs.' Crawley’s key had sunk tragically into the minor. It leapt suddenly into the major. Rogers, that’s not a cigarette in your mouth, is it?'
'Yes.'
'Please put it out of the window.'
David threw the cigarette away. Perhaps the man's mind had snapped.
'Now can people really read? It's a question that tortures me, Rogers. Do they derive anything at all? From anything any more? Look at what Christ inspired once! Look at Him now! Dead even to the corrugated Edwardian widows who crawl out to His service on second Sundays. Look at Raphael, Rogers! Angelo even, poor sod. Dante! A beautiful story inspired great men and peasants alike. What have we now? Consumer goods shovelling us into the sea. Telly and hideously bent tin — Christ, man, look at that car!
'They call Oxford a melting pot,' Crawley went on. The upper deck was now empty save for the two of them. He could afford to lower his voice. 'But it's not. Our ten thousand courses are parallel. There is no communication'
'Where there is it's not very democratic,' David said. Crawley hadn't heard him.
'God!' he whispered. 'Communicate, Rogers! You may not play that flute of yours very well. Keep trying though. That was my stop. I must leave you now.'
'That's okay by me,' David said.
Crawley rose in a trance and felt his way towards the stairs.
David knew North Oxford well from the walks with which he had occupied the afternoons of his first year while he waited for the sun to reach the pencil mark on the balustrade, and allow him to put the kettle on. The danger here was not from traffic but from the rabid teeth of the perverse little terriers that always seemed to go with history dons. This was a square mile of silence, ruffled only by the stolen Scout on a bicycle, the obstetrician's basset hound, and the lawn-mowers of opposed half-acre squirearchies. Two small boys ambled past David in the gutter talking about rockets. He turned his head and the silence seemed visibly to be restoring its equilibrium in the wake of the pigeon-toed figures.
A practically pubescent girl wearing nothing but knickers opened the Furlows' door. She stared up at David through spectacles with only one lens. 'Yes?'
'Is your father at home?' David asked. The girl said nothing. 'I'm David Rogers. One of your father's pupils,' David said desperately. He was hypnotised by the grossly exaggerated eye behind the single lens. The child still made no move to admit him.
'I-mutation?' said David evenly. 'Ash? Thorn? Yok, then? No?
May your eyes mutate and decline,
Italicised in paradigm!'
The child showed no sign of softening before the compliment.
'Umlaut!' David cried, slapping a hand to his stomach to clinch the matter.
The little girl smiled faintly, sceptically perhaps, pushing the door open with her big toe. 'You panic easily, don't you?' the said. 'Tea's in the garden if you really want some. Harold's here,' she added possessively, indicating the garden through the depths of the house with the same bare foot. I'm meant to have made a cake but I've been reading Jane Eyre. What do you think of the female novelists?'
'Mansfield's okay.' David was cautious. 'Woolf and Murdoch rather more so.'
'The Waves puzzled me rather: the girl said. She took a brassiere off a hatstand and began putting it on.
'Me too,' David confessed.
'You're rather an ineffectual person, aren't you?'
David looked hard at the magnified eye. 'Supposing you come out to the garden in ten minutes and tell me why there are no female composers,' he said.
He walked through a succession of book-lined orangeries as he had been directed. He had reached the glass door leading into the garden when the identity of Harold was revealed to him with an uncomfortable jolt. Harold Ricks was the demented St. Cecilia's don who had been staring at him so incredulously that morning in the Great Quad. David became aware that the palm of his hand had stuck to the door-knob. He pushed open the door and shook himself free.
'Why, Rogers!' Furlow cried. A heavy armchair had evidently been lugged out from the house, and his tutor was reclining in it in his habitual position on his shoulder blades. David advanced, as he supposed beaming, over the lawn.
Apart from Ricks, and a second-year contemporary of his own, Brougham, the only other people present were a rather bohemian-looking woman, whom David imagined must be Mrs. Furlow, and, sitting some yards away in evident gloom, what could only be a French au pair girl. North Oxford imported these to heave coal.
When he had introduced David to the bohemian woman as his wife, and gestured towards the French girl, who was called Susanne, Furlow pointed to a treacherous little folding chair and said, 'When do you think people stopped sleeping in the nude?'
'Have they?' David asked blankly. He was aware of Ricks staring at him like a bird through eyebrows like briar bushes.
'I take it you mean, sir,' said Brougham, nestling his chin into the pale-blue cravat thing that served him for a tie, 'when did people begin to indulge the habit of wearing night clothing at all, as opposed to possessing them and abandoning them only ... um ... periodically … in the proper pursuance of ... eh ... matrimonial rights?'
'It,' said David.
'I beg your pardon?'
'Night clothing's a singular noun.'
Brougham ignored him and turned back to Furlow. 'I think that's fair, sir?' He had coloured slightly and twisted his head towards Mrs. Furlow and the silent au pair girl. The cravat thing was rather like a blanket cushioning an Easter egg that had been dipped in cochineal.
'Yes, quite,' said Furlow. 'You see, there's plenty of evidence to suggest that medievals, for instance, slept in nothing at all: prints for example always show people naked in bed. Before you arrived, Mr. Ricks and I were wondering roughly when the practice continued to. I don't think the Elizabethans even had night-shirts. Ricks?'
The old man had nothing to add. He still looked at David as if he were some sort of isotope with the lead casing off.
'There are 'sweaty night-caps' in Shakespeare,' David hazarded, biting into a conical macaroon. 'And the author of the Ancrene Riwle directed that his anchoresses might wear woollen socks in bed if they were cold. That was Middle English times …'
'I know. It's very interesting.' Furlow was sitting forward in his chair now musing. He probably really did think it was interesting, David realised with horror. Furlow slowly raised the cigarette which was dangling from his big sheep dog's paw. He drew in a mouthful of smoke with studied leisure, and then gasped it back into his lungs with a rapid convulsion of his whole body. David thought of the breakfast cereal shot from guns which had mystified his childhood. Furlow had begun pummelling his face. He raised his glasses beneath his right hand and violently massaged his cheek-bones. The little finger of his left hand corkscrewed into his left ear and, seeming to discover something embarrassing, the whole process froze.
Silence had descended on the North Oxford garden. Mrs. Furlow had disappeared into the house, and Brougham was sipping tea with well-bred affectation. Even Ricks had taken his e
yes off David, and instead was contemplating a row of gold tooth-picks in the waistcoat pocket of his hairy suit. Unkindly ignoring Brougham, who was about to offer him one of his cigarettes with the college crest on it, and which were in fact Senior Service disguised, David turned to the French girl.
'Have you been on our river?' He instantly realised this might be like snapping a lead at a dog one has no intention of walking.
'River,' David grinned; making balancing motions with his feet in the air, he directed a phantom punt pole into Riek's stomach.
But the girl only looked at him more eagerly. 'No, please?' She put her chin out and looked supercilious.
Heaving a huge breath as if he were taking on smoke like Furlow, David made an expansive gesture, and intoned with idiot punctuation, 'Lovely English summer!'
'Please!' the girl echoed, apparently satisfied, and David became aware of Ricks watching him with a little frown that might have been photographed on a grandmother.
'It has something to do with the belated emancipation of women; but only a little,' Furlow's daughter said. She had materialised beside David, chair. Her brassiere must have been hung up on the hatstand again. 'The main reason is that male energy is creative and exploratory. They're go-getters, if you like. Female energy is more introspective. I think it's mostly devoted to having children, and then holding the family together.'
The little girl looked up at David almost as to a fellow intellectual. He was oddly touched. 'So you see,' she went on, 'that's why there are no female composers and very few female painters. There are writers. But that's an introspective energy. I think of painters as cave men fighting for their lives: against real enemies, but also against imaginary ones, whose terror Freud modified a bit for us.' She laughed; kneeling naked beside him. 'Do you like my Vesuvian protuberances?'
On the verge of panic, David remembered she was the reluctant cook. He bit gratefully into another macaroon. 'I like them.'
Sandel Page 3