The Bridge at Arta

by J. I. M. Stewart

  Notton Grange had been acquired by Lord Furlong from a nobleman of somewhat more ancient lineage who had run out of money, packed up, and departed to the South of France. It was a big house but not big enough for Lord Furlong, who had caused various bits and pieces to be added to it. These embellishments included two curved colonnades each terminating in a pavilion. The pavilions were understood to be ‘ornamental’ (which meant twiddly) in a manner relieving the general severity of the main design. The house was in fact a plain double cube. In the centre of one cube there was a very grand staircase lit by a lantern into which you could have fitted quite a commodious cottage. The centre of the other was an open well across which there stared at one another the windows of numerous bedrooms and offices of inferior consideration. The single and eccentric lantern thus lent the august building a lopsided and incongruously comical effect, like a creature with one ear cocked and the other invisible on a picture-postcard of humorous intention. Notton Grange was sufficiently imposing, all the same, and if it had once been a grange, with farm buildings grouped comfortably around it, all evidence of the fact had been obliterated in the interest of various formal gardens of one sort or another. William Shenstone, who had believed in a great deal of duskiness in the Salvator Rosa manner, together with an ample provision of grots and groves appropriate for the use of hermits, would not have thought much of it.

  Gilbert Pillman tried to persuade himself he didn’t think all that of it either. He had already heard a good deal about it, and about its supposed bibliographical treasures, from more senior members of his faculty whom it had pleased Lord Furlong to entertain for the purpose of demonstrating how his Library was coming along. The Library (capital ‘L’ as in English Literature) – or if not the library then his lordship’s relation to it – was what Franco would at once have termed, in one of his favourite words, an absurdity. Lord Furlong had perhaps never read a book in his life. He had been brought up in a household in which ‘book’ meant ‘magazine’. So, for that matter, had Pillman. Only Pillman, undistracted by the task of turning a little brewery into an enormous one, had come a long way from that in the brief twenty years since he had mastered the alphabet. He hadn’t come far enough, however, to take Notton Grange quite in his stride, as Franco would have done. He knew that he was going to be a little defensive amid its grandeurs – even scared, perhaps, now that he was there on his own. Moreover he had a lurking sense that he had come in quest of small beer – the phrase being metaphorical and having nothing to do with the Eatwell family commodity. Who the hell was Shenstone anyway? He represented the fact that in the academic profession you were expected in every way to begin at the bottom of the ladder. From Shenstone you might scramble up to Sheridan, and from Sheridan to, say, Swinburne, and from Swinburne to Shelley. That sort of gradus. What would be fun would be to know that what you were going to be handed was a copy of North’s Plutarch (1579), copiously annotated in a hand which you would triumphantly identify as Shakespeare’s, as that supposedly exists in The Booke of Sir Thomas Moore. This immodest fantasy (more exciting, really, than those bed-time fantasies) was in Pillman’s head as he parked his car.

  He parked his car on what he supposed might be called the sweep. This followed the curve of one of the colonnades, and the battered little second-hand Austin Seven looked uncommonly incongruous there. Even so, it had been a rash purchase, ventured upon during the euphoria that results from the receiving of a first pay-packet, and he now knew that he could keep it going only if Franco and he could come to some arrangement about sharing it. The fact was that there was no money in learning. He’d be doing better for himself perched on a stool in one of Lord Furlong’s counting-houses.

  But now he had to decide how to present himself. ‘Is Mr Bounce at home?’ didn’t sound right, since it wasn’t Mr Bounce’s home but Lord Furlong’s. ‘I have an appointment with Mr Bounce’ might be better – or he might even say ‘My name is Gilbert Pillman and I’ve come to work on William Shenstone’ – rather as if William Shenstone was the gas or the drains. Deciding it would be best to speak on the spur of the moment, he mounted a short flight of steps and rang a bell. At this the front door was opened so immediately that he wondered for a moment whether Lord Furlong kept a footman permanently on the other side of it, perhaps in one of those wicker-work affairs like an up-ended coffin. Then he found himself confronted by a young woman in a neat uniform, whom he took to be a parlour maid.

  ‘Oh, hullo,’ the young woman said – and gazed at him rather round-eyed. ‘Are you the one from the university?’

  Pillman now saw that the uniform was a school uniform – from which it followed that he was being greeted by a schoolgirl. And there was a fairly firm further inference that here was a Miss Eatwell, in fact a Hon. Miss Eatwell, which was surely a particularly bizarre thing to be. It might almost be called a shame. She was a nice-looking girl, and it was in the slightly boyish way which can sometimes assist a young man to achieve, without undue alarm, a hitherto uncompassed relationship with a member of the opposite sex. Pillman judged her quite as pretty as any of his selected nocturnal companions – and with the substantial additional advantage of being three-dimensional. She seemed, too, very much of the same age. She must be in the Upper Sixth, or something of the kind, and ready to take wing for a university. But not for his university. The proprietor of the Furlong Library would have seen to it that she was to be taken on by Oxford or Cambridge.

  ‘Yes,’ Pillman said. ‘That’s me. Gillie Pillman.’ Encouraged by a sense that this familiar reply had been quite dashing, he added boldly, ‘Miss Eatwell, is it? How did you know about me?’

  ‘I’m Diana Eatwell, all right. Daddy said something about your coming before he went off to London, so I decided to keep a look-out for you. You do teach poetry, don’t you?’

  ‘Well, yes—I suppose I do in a way.’

  ‘I write it.’

  ‘Oh, good!’ Pillman couldn’t think of any more adequate response to the information thus afforded him than this rather inane exclamation. Diana Eatwell had decidedly an air of not being disappointed by what she had opened the door of Notton Grange on. Presumably she had seen at once that here was an intellectual and competent person, who could set her right on Rupert Brooke and other fellow-practitioners. ‘I haven’t come about poetry,’ Pillman added – perhaps not felicitously. ‘Or rather,’ he went on in what he recognised in himself as deepening confusion, ‘I suppose I have, in a way. I’ve come after a chap called Shenstone, who wrote poems of a sort. Poems upon Various Occasions for the Amusement of a few Friends.’

  ‘I know about that.’ Miss Eatwell now had a pleasing appearance of knowing she was in the presence of a scintillating wit as well as a scholar. ‘And I’ll take you along to Mr Bounce presently. He looks after the books and things, as you probably know. Did you ever hear such a ridiculous name as Bounce?’

  Pillman might have said, ‘Well, yes,’ again, but felt it wouldn’t be tactful. Instead, he resolved to get on ‘Diana’ terms as quickly as possible. It was a pity, he thought, that her father was a mere baron and not an earl. Otherwise he could have started in on ‘Lady Diana’ straight away.

  ‘Do call me Diana,’ Miss Eatwell said clairvoyantly. ‘And I’ll call you Gillie, even although you are a professor. You’re very young- looking, among other things. You can’t really be much older than me.’

  ‘I’m twenty-four, Diana – and in my first university job. So I’m nothing like a professor, and I hope I don’t look like one.’

  ‘I shan’t tell you what you look like, Gillie.’ Miss Eatwell said this in a fashion that alarmed Pillman. Or perhaps it was less a matter of her tone than of the way she glanced at him as she spoke. It was almost as if she had some impulse to take his clothes off – mentally speaking, of course – and this would have been a much more proper impulse on his part towards her. Men, he believed, are sanctioned to do this with a pretty girl in a perfectly wholesome way, whereas the opposite process was surely unmai
denly. Then he told himself that it was, after all, he who was being libidinous in thus interpreting what was no doubt a regard of merely friendly (if also admiring) interest. It was simply his being hitched on to poetry that attracted her warmth of feeling. She was probably dotty about the stuff as adolescent girls sometimes are.

  ‘But first I’ll make us some coffee,’ the Hon. Diana said firmly. ‘I have a den of my own, you know, where nobody else is allowed to come. That’s only civilised, don’t you think?’

  Pillman had no difficulty in subscribing to this view, although ‘den’ struck him as a shade ominous. Would Lord Furlong approve of his daughter’s thus proposing to carry off a totally strange young man into seclusion? What would old Hedger think of it as a way of starting in on Shenstone? And – and here was the real point – what about the girl herself? It was nice being so unexpectedly received by a nubile young person with such evident pleasure and even excitement. But what if it turned out to be excitement of a decidedly sexual sort? That ought to be O.K. too. All young men in novels went bang after that when it came along, and in a mild way he himself had a creditable record of hopeful flirtations when the chance of it had turned up on him – in the university book-stacks, for instance, or at dances and other social occasions when the girl students expected some prestige- according response of the sort from junior members of the faculty.

  Despite all this, with Miss Eatwell, and in so intimidating a house, he was undeniably apprehensive. He even had a passing thought that Diana might be nymphomaniac – a word he had only recently discovered implies desire on the part of nymphs and not for them. For a morbid moment he had a wild vision of being pursued through Notton Grange in a Maenadic fashion by this probably perfectly chaste young woman, who might well be as virginal as her namesake.

  What they were actually doing was moving through a kind of marble hall ornamented with marble statues in niches. There was at least nothing erotic about the statues; they were mostly of elderly men in senatorial robes and had obviously come with the house and commemorated former proprietors who had achieved eminence in church or state. And now they were going up the great staircase side by side – which was proper enough, since it would have accommodated half a dozen people walking abreast. It was rather like being in a Hollywood film of high life in England.

  ‘Who’s your favourite poet?’ Diana demanded suddenly.

  ‘Wordsworth.’

  Had this bald question been pitched at Pillman by one of his pupils, he would probably have answered ‘Villon’ or ‘Valery’ or even ‘Verlaine’ or ‘Verhaeren’ simply by way of asserting the superior reach of his reading. As it was, he spoke the truth. And this was a great success.

  ‘Oh, how marvellous!’ Diana breathed. ‘He’s mine too. Gillie, I’ll always remember this. Always.’

  The assertion, although it didn’t seem pregnant of anything in particular, at least confirmed the fact that the poetry-bug had indeed got the girl. This was at once reassuring and rather disappointing. Of course there was the hazard (or off-chance) that he and Diana would presently find themselves sitting on a window-seat with an amatorious book between them, like Paolo and Francesca in Dante’s poem and Rossetti’s painting – and with similar consequences. But the notion was no doubt far-fetched. Pillman now found himself quite looking forward to the den.

  It struck him that the enormous house seemed oddly deserted. He had imagined that in such places there would always be a few flunkeys or at least scurrying housemaids on view. As it was, Notton Grange might have been a museum shut up for the day.

  ‘Are you a large family?’ he asked. ‘I mean, have you brothers and sisters, as well as parents?’

  ‘Oh, no, Gillie. There’s only Daddy and me. My mother died years and years ago. I had a twin brother, but he died too.’

  ‘I see. I’m sorry.’ Pillman said this awkwardly. It occurred to him that Diana might lead rather a dull life, and that this would account in part for the warmth of her reception for him. ‘Where do you go to school, Diana?’

  Diana answered this question in some detail as they walked down a long broad corridor. It seemed that she was at rather a grand girls’ public school – which perhaps accounted for her having nothing of what Franco might have called the whiff of beer about her. But it was as a weekly boarder, and she always came home on Friday evening or Saturday morning.

  ‘I’ve just got back,’ she said. ‘That’s why I’m still in these idiotic clothes. We’re made to travel in them. They’re supposed to be a protection.’

  Pillman almost heard himself saying, ‘They won’t protect you from me’ – which showed that he was really in a very confused state by this time. Instead, he ventured on, ‘I think they’re rather nice’, and had a sense that this had gone down quite well.

  ‘I’m going to show you my poems,’ Diana said. ‘Or some of them. You see, I do feel I need advice. Daddy’s very encouraging. But it’s not quite his sort of thing – even if he has stacks of Shenstone and all that in his library.’

  ‘Does he regard Shenstone and all that chiefly as an investment?’ Here was something that Pillman – like other scholars, old and young – was genuinely curious about. Nobody knew why Lord Furlong had set up to achieve one of the finest private libraries in England.

  ‘I don’t really know. But I think Mr Bounce may have had something to do with getting him going. Bounce originally had a job with books in the city library. I believe he carried them around.’

  Pillman knew the last fact already, so had received no fresh enlightenment on this small Eatwell mystery. And now they were in the den. It was at least den-like in being quite small and cosy. Or it would have been cosy to Pillman’s sense had not everything it contained been a good deal more expensive-looking than anything he was accustomed to. Had he been required to give a guess as to what an eighteen-year- old girl’s room would contain he’d have plumped for group photographs of hockey teams and the like, a further photograph or two of what were called matinée idols, and perhaps a romantic print in washy sepias with some such title as A Lovers’ Tryst. In fact there was only one picture on display, and it turned out to be a nocturne by Whistler. The furniture was what he vaguely thought of as ‘French’, and two or three of the chairs looked as if they couldn’t safely support more than a cat. There were a lot of books – some of them lying carelessly around, but most of them displaying ornate bindings through protective walls of glass. It none of it seemed quite right, somehow, for a healthy sixth-former, and in fact rendered what might be called the poor-little-rich-girl effect. He suspected Lord Furlong of being a dominating character (you couldn’t have arrived at pouring millions of gallons of beer down British throats without being that) who threw his weight about at home as well as in the office. Having just one daughter, he insisted that everything should be slap-up around her.

  ‘Do you know how to make coffee?’ Diana demanded.

  ‘Well, yes—I suppose so. I put the stuff in a jug and pour on boiling water.’

  ‘I make café filtre,’ Diana said, and disappeared into a small pantry-like room next door. Pillman (who was inclined to be impressed by this degree of sophistication in one whom Professor Shuffrey might still have called a kiddy) looked round for evidences of literary work in progress. Sure enough there was a typewriter – an elegant little affair that looked as if it was carved out of ivory – and there protruded from it a sheet of quarto paper betraying what certainly looked like metrical composition. Presumably Diana did her poems straight on to the machine: a technique which he understood to be quite the go at the time. He conscientiously refrained from attempting to read the effusion currently on hand. It looked as if this poetry business might be embarrassing. Once or twice at the university young women had advanced upon him after a lecture, manuscript at the ready, and demanded criticism – but clearly feeling that nothing short of encomium would fill the bill. It had been a situation not too easy to handle. ‘It reminds me of Prufrock,’ he would say after due scrutiny – or �
�I think you must have been influenced by Isaac Rosenberg’. He somehow didn’t see himself saying that sort of thing to Diana Eatwell.

  She turned out to be rather shy about it all, and they had finished the coffee before the subject turned up. He was astonished that when it did so it was through the production of a printed book. This was again of the slap-up order: typography by Bruce Rodgers, Van Gelder paper, stencilled decorations by T. L. Poulton, bound in vellum. And on the cover, in elegant gilt, it said First Poems by Diana Eatwell.

  Pillman had the good sense not to make a to-do about all this refinement, and nerved himself to open the volume at an early page.

  ‘No,’ Diana said decidedly. ‘You must just take it away, and read it only if you want to. And please remember it’s only juvenilia. Daddy had it made for me as a sixteenth-birthday present. Books are always a thing with us on birthdays.’

  ‘Very well.’ Pillman wasn’t slow in agreeing to this arrangement. ‘I’ll be extremely interested,’ he added – not wholly mendaciously. What if the girl were a prodigy: a kind of female Rimbaud or Chatterton? That would be more exciting than acres of the familiar correspondence of William Shenstone on boring topics like the scooping out of hermits’ grottoes at the Leasowes in eighteenth-century Worcestershire.

  ‘And now I’ll take you to Bounce,’ Diana said briskly. Her nerve had perhaps a little failed her in this early crisis of her literary career. ‘But I come home every weekend, you know. So we’re going to have lots of quiet confabs here, Gillie.’

  ‘I do hope so,’ Pillman said. He was wondering whether Lord Furlong went up to London every Saturday.