'You can't,' said Lang. 'Not in that abdominal plaster. That's why I was going to suggest you practice flirting with your nurse. You have the perfect alibi.'
'Full marks,' David conceded a little wearily. 'You know bloody well I meant when will I be on my feet again.'
'Can't really say.' Lang assumed professional ethics again, 'Fractures should be healed by now, so I imagine the plaster could come off any day. Then if your head is all right, your body will still be very weak. I'd say three weeks. Only don't quote that at the Establishment or they'll keep you another six.'
David frowned. 'Just tell them that Rogers purposes to be up in three weeks.'
'No.' Lang turned at the door. I'll look in again in a few days. There's an accumulation of less personal letters, for one thing. By the way, your landlady apparently called, and sent your Brother a chocolate cake. That tutor of yours, Thompson, was here too. Broke in because he wanted to see for himself whether your concussed state looked any different from your normal tutorial one. That was before they'd sent you down. He came again afterwards. If you hear a shot in the corridor it'll only be the Medical Council executing summary justice.'
David smiled and raised his hand in farewell.
David lay back on straightened pillows. A nurse had provided paper, a meal like soft soap, and a half-hour's delay before the pills. He had tried Donne to no effect:
For every hour that thou wilt spare me now,
I will allow,
Usurious God of Love, twenty to thee.
It hadn't worked. The pills would come.
The letter to Thompson must wait. It wouldn't be easy. He'd not been wrong about Thompson; but he'd wronged him. Mrs. Kanter and Jones must wait too; as must the telegram to Harrods to replace the tropical fish the thunder had killed.
David was exhausted. The nurse had left the curtains undrawn. He could see the oak tree standing out against a deep sky that had the clarity of Christmas. There were no clouds, but a wind had sprung up. David had an almost Wordsworthian apprehension of the magic that lay hidden in the winds. Thompson, he reflected, would probably be astonished at the idea. But then he had a no more explicable, or less deeply rooted, love for the autumn as well. It wasn't a death wish, because no season held such exhilaration for him. Yet the sense of quietus was there: a sense of journeying down the emptying corridor of the contracted days, resignedly, but with a keener expectation that bared the senses until, everywhere, they could watch, and hear the shallower breathing of the world. Now this expectation was heightened in him, because he had been reborn with a new body on the threshold of autumn; and because of the sense of a new dimension in Tony, whose mystery he had only glimpsed in the heavy summer.
David wrote a few words with the pencil he'd been given. He filled half a page. Tomorrow he could write again. Then he began to use symbols which he better understood; which Tony would better understand as well. He struggled to contain the ocean which the manuals of the organ might release beneath his fingers. Instead, he drew out a simple line of melody that flowed swiftly glinting like the Windrush or the Evenlode in the sun. But the new stream, running like dimpled glass over the cheeks of the boulders, was the Otter; and David allowed it to get saltier as it tumbled towards the sea. He released the organ to meet it with a smiling, tidal embrace. Then, of course, the Otter was the sea.
David swallowed the red pills. He held out the letter to the nurse. 'Would you put two fourpenny stamps on it? You see, the postman at the other end only has one leg.'
The nurse poked a thermometer under his tongue. She lifted his limp wrist with three firm fingers and nodded indulgently.
Chapter 21
Disposed on her bed Gloria looked like something toppled over in the cast rooms of the Victoria and Albert Museum. As the facetious image passed through David's mind he hated himself for the nervous insulation he knew it represented. He was discovering Gloria's real kindness, but custom died hard. Now he tangled his fingers in her hair. It was something to hold.
'Go on,' Gloria said, 'Tell me about Peter.'
Instead, David smiled at her slowly. 'Gloria, I think you're the only adult I know. We pretend to be grown-up here. Really we're all of us self-involved children.'
'Aren't you saying we when you mean I?'
'Maybe!' David laughed. He moved his leg, which was still stiff.
'I've listened to a lot of you.' Gloria said. 'You're more self-pitying than most.'
David looked at her quickly; then grinned. 'Probably. The world's a pretty pitiful place. Just sometimes one finds something, or someone who's not.'
'My, aren't we glum! Peter!' Gloria said firmly.
'Oh!' David was off-hand. 'Peter was just a kid.' He could hear his words continuing into the room; not a boy, or a child, but 'a kid'. It was the nervous, distancing device again.
Aloud he went on, 'My landlady's basement lodger makes some bitter remarks about public schools — though God knows he's no cause to — except that I annoy him. Or rather used to, when I'd nothing better to do. Poor old Sweeney ...'
David lit a cigarette and let his head fall back on the floor. His hospital hair cushioned the shock. 'I'll give you an example of public school mores. Sex Talks. Outside doctor ... a specialist ... steams in. Pretty giggles in the second and third forms. Blushes and feet-shifting in the fifth and sixth. First: colour slides about flowers. Graduation: birds and bees. Then astonishing photos of the female body. As a throwaway, the chap mentions he's the father of fourteen daughters. One begins to see why. Okay. So far it's been honest. But the lies are coming. You can sense the chap relaxing even his cock in his attempt to be casual. The audience beginning to quiver like a heat haze. "About these homosexuals," he says. "Don't get involved, boys. I'll tell you why, I knew a homosexual once and his mother died. He shot himself. There wasn't much else he could do." '
Gloria leant over the bed suddenly and kissed David's ear. 'Hang on. You haven't had the scientific proof yet. One of the boys did ... A few days later. Only he hadn't got a gun, and the pathologist said the rope must have broken first time. Apparently the police can tell when a tree's been climbed twice too ...'
'Was it Peter? Someone you knew?'
It was Peter,' David said slowly. 'But do you ever know someone you love?' He looked out through the uncurtained window; down towards the canal at the bottom of the narrow garden.
'That's your axe then?'
David looked up. 'No. I've none to grind ... or not consciously. It's all blacked out ... Unreal. Perhaps I didn't believe it at the time. You can't think of a child of fourteen hanging himself ... or not when you're only seventeen yourself. Sometimes, though, I get a nightmare glimpse of the state of his mind. This, maybe slight, but tender, wonderful thing he'd found, made monstrous by irresponsible lies. Of his struggle to maintain its rightness, for him, and at that time ... Then of the struggle's breaking him ...'
Gloria was sitting on the bed; her legs over the side against which David leant his back.
'Why d'you think he did it, David?'
'I don't really know. Virtually over nothing at all. I think he got silly the way little boys can and kissed a prefect ... front of a notice board. His housemaster had been talking to him about it. It all added up. That wasn't the tiny column the Headmaster gave The Times, though. Funny that,' David laughed suddenly. 'Until then one had thought the Headmaster, The Times, and Test cricketers were God's truth.'
Gloria began swinging her legs idly. 'He must have been unstable and neurotic in the first place anyway.'
David said nothing.
'Then you ran away?'
'Just as fast as I could. Europe. 'Then North Africa. I was sick of white faces ... but more ashamed of my own. I raw elements ... beauty and ugliness mixed. You can't imagine the squalor of Tunis ... Or the beauty of the Arabs. They have the most regular teeth in the world ... black as the windows of their houses ...'
David drew away, and sprawled his half-naked body out on the carpet. He could hear owls cal
ling near the canal in the darkness, and the sound of a radio came through the wall of the semi-detached house. 'I'm sorry, Gloria. To have made such a nuisance ... and fool of myself.'
Gloria had something on at last. She was moving about the room doing ordinary, human things. Now she was lighting a gas-ring.
Chapter 22
There could be no doubt that Mrs. Jones was large. In fact she was built like an ice breaker and gave the impression of being a woman who would be perpetually on manoeuvres in home waters. David found himself hoping that home waters might be limited to the flat in which he was standing. Now Mrs. Jones threw up her hands impatiently, and with a quick smile at David, which was strangely tight in the flabby, chow-like surround of her face, hustled out of the room in search of some missing item of tea equipment,
David had spent the morning incarcerated with Jones in an under-stair cupboard effect with a Yale lock, which evidently served the school as operational headquarters, and where he had received some sketchy improvisation as to the nature of his duties. Since, until his arrival that morning, Jones had forgotten all about his engagement, these would themselves be improvisation. Nevertheless, it was at some sort of timetable that Jones was now scratching away in the corner.
The early afternoon David had spent alternatively unpacking armfuls of clothing and possessions in the large first-floor room until recently inhabited by the Ghoul, and collapsing into an armchair before the leaded window with its distorting diamond panes for a cigarette. He had been on his feet now for ten days, but still felt weak. The window gave on to a prospect of St. Cecilia's Great Park, where it by flanked on the south by the river. The northernmost horizon of David's vision was marked by the back of Corpus and the squat tower of Merton, standing like a castle of gold ingots in the sun; while away on the right was The Plain obscured by trees, whose winter starkness would eventually reveal the colder, greyer stone of Magdalen Tower. The prospect was one ideally calculated to render Magdalen Tower Fever chronic in any sufferer. David told himself he was not one. And yet the view before him, allied to the feeling of standing beneath the first, crystalline archway of the autumn, which never failed to rediscover in him those emotions that were as old and mysterious as memory itself, had plunged him into an uncertainly luxuriant sadness. If it were true that he was no sufferer from the fever, and that the abortive termination of his career had left him with no regrets, then at least his present mood convinced him yet again that happiness was a fantasy of retrospect. Now, as he sat in front of the window with the university distanced from him both in time and space, and yet still visible before his eyes, it would be surprising if he hadn't reviewed the past without some indulgence and remorse. But then he told himself, there had been no life before Tony. And while it might be as an alien, as a townsman even, that he was now considering Oxford across the Great Park, it was, after all, only nearer to Tony that circumstances had brought him. The strangeness of his environment, and of course the imminence of Tony, must be contributory causes to this feeling of barely sub-hysterical sadness, which might at any moment be startled into an irrepressible and idiot joy.
Tony, David had learned from Jones, would not be coming on the school train that arrived at five, but for reasons of his own had elected for a later one that would deliver him about eight. David had been unsurprised at the news, and interpreted the delay in the light of recent letters from the boy whose tone made it clear that he proposed to regard himself as the guest, rather than pupil of the school in what he considered to be a charity term. Presumably he had broken his journey to do the statuary at the Tate or somewhere in more leisurely fashion. David was unconcerned and even relieved at the news. It would give him more time to settle in. He felt he needed the time badly, and should like to be able to spend an hour flat on his bed before meeting again with the physical presence of Tony. Already his apprehension of that moment was acute. For as Tony stood in his mind it was as a series of memories, each seemingly contained in its own diaphanous bubble of sunshine, which had mysteriously survived fresh and intact throughout ten weeks' unconsciousness. To these there had been added in the weeks of his convalescence both such myriad projections as were loosed in his mind by the suggestions of Tony's letters, as well as those countless, poignant, and often terrifying images, that came from he knew not where. He had in effect no real picture of the boy. In the absence of the photographs, all of which still lay unprocessed, the loved face remained characteristically veiled. When the veil did part it was fractionally, and through the working of a diabolical inconsequence whom no agency of human will might command, or even petition. When, fortuitously, the living image of Tony's face did appear like this, the consequence was such a stunning rupture of David's faculties that he was becoming convinced that if the Virgin really had once appeared to Lang on the towpath at Wimborne it had perhaps been neither so funny, nor so comfortable an occurrence as David had chosen to suppose.
With his unpacking completed, he had just determined neither to look back into the past, nor further into the future than the end of the coming term, and Tony's departure for his remote Scottish school, when he was summoned to the Joneses by a small boy, who had presumably been delivered early by car. Retrospection was the function of the morrow, while thoughts for the morrow itself inevitably proved to be a useless expenditure of psychic energy. Or was this, he wondered as he followed in the footsteps of the small boy, who was disconsolately and inexpertly playing with a yoyo, only as much as to say that his being had become so involved about Tony as to admit of neither a past nor a future dimension; or indeed of any sphere of influence other than that which, like the filings clustered around the magnet, was directly responsible to Tony's gravitational field.
David laid his hand upon the shoulder of the boy in front of him, and took the yoyo. He coiled the string about the axis of the bright yellow spool, and relinquished it confidently into the void, while the child watched him intently. Sure enough, when he gently tugged the string at the nadir of its fall, the bright spool sped upwards again, ferociously devouring its lifeline as it came, until it bounced off the tips of his fingers. The rhythm established, the yellow disc danced hypnotically up and down in the dark corridor, while both their eyes followed its motions in silence.
'I think I can do it now,' the child said.
David released the string and caught the spool in the air. The secret's in the rhythm; the timing of when you pull the string. You must get the feel of it.'
The small boy looked at the dead object in his hand as if afraid to make the experiment.
'There's nothing to be frightened of!' David laughed. 'Just so long as it is you who are holding the string, and aren't sitting on the yoyo.'
A thought seemed to occur to the child. 'If you had a big one, I mean a very big one so that you could sit on it, and you hung it from the ceiling, could you ride up and down?' He looked enquiringly at David.
'No! The string must be held by a person, who knows just when and how to pull it.'
'A person who can feel it then, like you said, but big enough to hold a big one?' The child looked up at the ceiling.
'Yes,' David assured him, 'then it would work.'
'God!' said the child devoutly, 'God would he big enough, and He can feel.'
David wondered whether he might legitimately parcel this infant into one of those ventilated boxes the railways employ for transporting guinea-pigs and send him to Lang. Meanwhile the metaphysics were becoming too much for him. Still, he owed a duty to the establishment. 'Yes,' he admitted 'God would do very well. If you are quite sure that it is God who is holding the string, then by all means sit on the yoyo. But until then, be sure that you hold the string yourself.' David turned to keep his appointment.
'Thank you very much, sir,' said the child, who must have decided that David was a sir.
David had left him, still in some perplexity, and made his way to the flat where he now stood while Jones, oblivious of his presence, scratched away at the timetable.
> Mrs. Jones padded into the room clutching a sugar basin 'Sorry to keep you waiting, Mr. Rogers,' she said in tones such as one might address to a tradesman. It was true David was still standing.
'Not at all.'
Somewhere in the building a bell was ringing, presumably summoning such boys as had arrived, and members of the staff less privileged than himself to similar refreshment. Mrs Jones was now bent over a table pouring tea.
'One lump two, Mr. Rogers?' She sang this like a descant.
'I don't take sugar, thank you.'
Mrs. Jones straightened her gargantuan form and advanced upon David with a cup of tea and a plateful of highly-coloured commercial pastries. 'Are you a Protestant or a Catholic, Mr. Rogers?'
This question, like the last, carried a certain assumption about it. For a second David was tempted to give it the same reply.
'I was brought up as a Protestant.'
Mrs. Jones nodded. 'I only asked, really, because we shall have two Catholic boys with us this term and we've been wondering who's going to take them to their church.'
'I see.' David was doing some wondering himself. He was in fact weighing the sound of that unnecessary 'really' in his mind, and speculating as to what clue it offered to the character of Mrs. Jones.
An awkward situation had now developed. Mrs. Jones stood before David holding the plate of cakes in one hand and the cup of tea in the other, while David, in the absence of an invitation to be seated still stood supporting himself on the walking-stick he had taken to carrying. The position might have been resolved were he to have taken only the cup and left Mrs. Jones holding the saucer. But unfortunately he was also hungry. As Mrs. Jones showed no signs of solving the deadlock, David smiled apologetically.
'I think I'd better sit down if I may.'
Suiting the action to the words he sank into a chair and tucked the cane between his legs. He relieved Mrs. Junes of the tea and one of the cakes, and noticed that she was regarding the cane with distaste. It was made of black ebony which terminated in the carved head of a negro, and David had discovered it in the cattle market on his first morning of freedom from the nursing home. It was perhaps an unfortunate support to have chosen at a time when colonial emancipation had become a universal demand, and some pleasantry to this effect was forming in his mind when Mrs. Jones' next remark confirmed him in the opinion that she would probably not have been able to grasp it. In fact she said
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