The Bridge at Arta

by J. I. M. Stewart

  The Furlong Library – in the sense of a chamber or chambers holding a collection of books – was less overwhelming than Pillman had expected. The Duke of Devonshire, he told himself, owned something a good deal more imposing at Chatsworth. Here was simply a very large room, with books all round it and more books jutting out in bays on either side, and what was chiefly remarkable about it was simply the fact that everything looked so very new. No end of the books, of course, must be as old as the hills, but everything in their setting seemed so recent an exercise of the slap-up sort that it was hard to believe that even the sixteenth-century folios hadn’t just been unpacked from the straw. Indeed, something of very much that sort appeared to be going on. Half a dozen large packing-cases stood open down the centre of the room, and it looked as if an army of librarians must have knocked off for elevenses while coping with them since all of them seemed to be disgorging more books than they could really contain. Pillman thought of those fake Christmas hampers you saw in the windows of expensive shops, spewing out hams and haggises and bottles of champagne. Two or three of the cases contained nests of steel boxes of the sort held at that time to be essential for the safe preservation of manuscripts. What if some of them contained a fresh flood of epistolary correspondence by William Shenstone? What if Shenstone proved to have been as maniacally compulsive a letter-writer as, say, Horace Walpole? Pillman had a momentary nightmarish vision of himself as condemned to labour for years on end in this poshed-up place – like a character in some farcical savagery by his contemporary Evelyn Waugh. Diana, meantime, would have been locked away in her den by Lord Furlong: more inaccessible to him than Miranda to Ferdinand when he was condemned to heaving logs.

  And now for the moment, at least, Diana was sundered from him. She had handed him over to Mr Bounce and departed—presumably to her own superior labour of poetical composition. Mr Bounce had shaken hands with him, and though Mr Bounce was about five feet tall it had been in a decidedly condescending way. Although without first-hand acquaintance with academic life, Mr Bounce knew a junior lecturer from a professor when he saw one.

  ‘Delighted to help you, Pillman,’ Mr Bounce said (with intolerable familiarity). ‘Delighted to give you a leg-up. Of course – and as you can see – we have a great deal of work on hand. The accessions are coming in rapidly, very rapidly indeed.’ As he said this, the Furlong Librarian glanced round the packing-cases in perplexity, as if some supernatural agency had deposited them only that moment within his view. ‘The cataloguing is becoming very onerous, I assure you. I might have you help out a little one day. Pocket-money in your spare time, eh? Once you had learnt the ropes, of course. I’ve devised a very effective system: much in advance of the Bodleian, or any place of that sort. Each card is eight by six, suspended filing, instantly removable, with all the technical stuff on the recto, and on the verso biographical particulars, and selected critical appreciations by his lordship and others. You’d get the hang of it, and be quite useful, with a little hard work.’

  ‘Thank you very much,’ Pillman said (concealing outrage). ‘But I’ve come about Shenstone, as a matter of fact.’

  ‘Ah, yes—I remember. Well, Shenstone will be Poetry: Late Romantic: Miscellaneous Minor. That must be in the fifth catalogue cabinet. We’ll see what we have.’ For a moment Mr Bounce’s confidence and self-satisfaction flickered. ‘Or at least we can try.’

  It would take a very raw freshman indeed, Pillman thought, to suppose that William Shenstone (1714–1763) was a late Romantic. As a ripe scholar Mr Bounce clearly had his limitations. Still, it wouldn’t do to alienate the man. About Shenstone Pillman couldn’t in his heart of hearts care less. But now Shenstone had become, as it were, the gateway or passport to Diana Eatwell, who was (he realised with some amazement) extremely attractive to him. So he must treat this tiresome man with circumspection if there were to be any more of those quiet confabs.

  ‘I’ll be most grateful,’ he said. ‘Just as I am to Professor Hedger for fixing me up with you. The Professor has a high regard for your work, Mr Bounce.’

  This remark (although it was surely impertinent as well as untrue) went down well. Nearly an hour was taken up with various false casts, but at length the batch of Shenstone letters was run to earth. Having done his homework, Pillman was able to discover almost at once that none of them had ever seen print. And there were a great many of them. The job of transcribing them on Saturday mornings could be spread over months and months. He just hoped that it wouldn’t occur to Bounce to present him with the whole lot on microfilm with his lordship’s compliments. But that wasn’t likely. Lord Furlong was known not to be too liberal about his possessions. And he supposed that Bounce really had an eye on him as something going cheap on the labour market as an occasional harmless drudge. He spent the rest of the morning making a start on getting the things – which were all higgledy-piggledy – into a chronological series.

  II

  Francis Gethin listened attentively to Gillie’s account of Notton Grange. He had an odd way of doing this even when he seemed not at all interested in what Gillie was talking about.

  ‘But you didn’t see the fledgling lord?’ he asked.

  ‘Furlong? He was away in London, and I don’t know whether he’d have bothered to see me anyway. I only saw this daughter, Diana.’

  ‘Who did the honours of the ancestral home.’

  ‘Well, she did the honours of what she called her den. I thought her rather nice, as a matter of fact. In a childish way, that is.’ Pillman didn’t know quite why he added this not particularly honest qualification. ‘She’s still at school, so she can’t be more than a bare eighteen.’

  ‘I suppose the girl can be very nice, if she’s bare and eighteen.’ Franco frowned, apparently in disapproval of having made this feeble and not very characteristic joke. ‘Did you say something about poetry?’

  ‘She writes it. And her father has had some of it printed for her in a classy way.’

  ‘They call that vanity publishing, I believe.’

  ‘Yes – but of course it’s her father’s vanity and not hers. She seems quite a sensible girl. Anyway, I’ve promised to read the stuff and offer remarks.’

  ‘Good God, Gillie! It just shows what whoring after Shenstone leads to. Is your Diana a creature inspired, like Mrs Hemans and Mrs Browning?’

  ‘I don’t think so – although I’ve only just looked at some of the poems. I doubt whether there will really be much to say about them.’

  ‘Probably the less the better.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know about that. They seem quite nice really.’ Pillman saw that this was not a particularly incisive remark. But it was fair enough in its way. Diana’s verses didn’t recall Prufrock. The influence of Isaac Rosenberg was not to be detected in them. They were, in fact, Wordsworthian – surprisingly so, considering the distance between Notton Grange and Dove Cottage. Of course their harmless pastiche would certainly not bear much analysis. Curiously enough, this didn’t perturb him. He had a feeling that, poems or no poems, he was going to get on with Diana Eatwell entirely agreeably.

  ‘Talking of women,’ Franco said, ‘I heard today that my sister’s coming.’

  ‘Your sister, Franco? I didn’t know you had one.’

  ‘Louisa. We call her Lou. She’s staying with people about twenty miles away, and she’s coming over to inspect us. You might quite like her, Gillie.’ Franco was looking his gloomiest. ‘I don’t know that I do, particularly. Lou’s a year younger than I am, but a bit bossy.’

  ‘You mean she’s coming to inspect you – or us, as you say – in these dismal digs?’

  ‘That’s up to you, Gillie. I could go it alone with her, and take her out to lunch. But I’ve an idea she wants to meet you. It seems to be a way girls have. Look at this Diana of yours, panting for the arrival of young Adonis.’

  ‘Diana didn’t have anything to do with Adonis. That was Venus.’ Pillman had produced this pedantic correction because Franco was vaguely puzzling
him. ‘I shouldn’t have thought your sister would ever have heard of me.’

  ‘I’ve talked about you, I suppose, Gillie. I’ve no snobbish impulse, you know, to conceal my low connections.’

  ‘Well, of course I’ll like meeting Lou. Let’s take her out to lunch jointly.’ Pillman was still slightly at sea. That last crack about low connections hadn’t been quite in the common tone of the banter he and Franco exchanged. But it seemed to knit up with a way Franco had, when at all perturbed, of saying something quite opposite to what was in his head. Indeed, it had something to do with the fact, obscurely understood by Pillman, that Franco thought much better of his room-mate than his room-mate (in decently modest moments) knew he deserved. The idea of this meeting, he decided, had been Franco’s, not Lou’s. Franco wanted to show off the wonderful friend he had so cleverly gained for himself from a quite alien social milieu.

  Nothing of this annoyed Pillman, or even much held his attention. He was too pleased with himself for having successfully (as the Americans said) dated a girl. For that was what it came to. Regular Saturday dates, with Daddy well out of the road! As for Louisa Gethin, whether bossy or not, he knew he wasn’t going to give twopence for her. For one thing, she’d probably be like poor old Franco: far from being anything much in the physical way.

  It turned out that there couldn’t have been a worse guess. When she turned up for the luncheon engagement Louisa Gethin proved strangely to combine a strong family resemblance to her brother with being quite staggeringly beautiful. Or so Pillman in the first moment of seeing her judged her to be. Not that he was at once bowled over by her. What he chiefly felt was that he had come by a piece of information. A woman can be something to which neither the word ‘pretty’ on the one hand nor ‘handsome’ on the other has any applicability, and which is at once a straightforward ocular phenomenon and completely mysterious and beyond the scope of analysis. This, he told himself, must be what ‘beauty’ is – and as he hadn’t met it before there couldn’t be very much of it around. And it struck him – for he was really quite a thoughtful young man – that the effect was probably not one that often produced the response known as love at first sight. That is something provoked by some identifiable irregularity or idiosyncrasy of form or feature for which, for some reason, one has all-unconsciously been waiting around. With somebody like Lou one had to cope with absorbing a purely aesthetic experience before getting on to anything further. He found himself wanting to look at Lou Gethin quite a lot. But it wasn’t, so far as he could detect, in any concupiscent way.

  Quite early in the meal he got the impression that Lou, on her part, wanted to do a certain amount of looking at him. But this wasn’t concupiscent either. And although he was aware of himself as being quite good-looking he knew that he certainly wasn’t beautiful, so it seemed improbable that she was emulating him in the field of detached aesthetic contemplation. What she seemed to be doing was sizing him up to the limited extent that the eye can size up a total stranger. He was inclined to suppose that this was a purely social thing; that it had to do, perhaps, with his choice of clothes and the way he wore them; that she was working out whether this intruder from the Midlands, picked up by her brother at his outlandish place of employment, was to be admitted to the category of ‘possible’ acquaintances. It was no doubt significant that she kept on addressing him as ‘Mr Pillman’. This was a formality still just possible at that time even between quite young people. It was consciously distancing, all the same – just as it was when Franco persisted in saying ‘Smith’ or ‘Jones’ to colleagues of his own standing. Pillman had too much self-confidence to be riled rather than amused by this, and every now and then he said ‘Miss Gethin’ in a courteous and at the same time almost avuncular way, as if he were speaking to a child recently out of the nursery who would relish this solemnity of address.

  As for Franco, he had an air of controlled distaste which might have been occasioned either by the fare in the pretentious ‘French’ restaurant of the local posh hotel upon which the young men were expending injudicious sums in Miss Gethin’s honour or by the situation more at large. If this last was the correct supposition he was surely being rather unreasonable, since the original initiative in the affair had been largely his. But then Franco was quite good at being unreasonable from time to time. It wasn’t, however, that he was washing his hands of the encounter, or at all suggesting that pitching Gillie at Lou or Lou at Gillie was necessarily a bad and ill-considered job. He didn’t say much, but at least he was being sharply observant of any signs indicating how his sister and his friend were hitching up. This was so obvious at times that an obscure suspicion – perhaps gratifying in itself – was set lurking in Pillman’s head.

  ‘You’re not quite as I imagined you, Mr Pillman,’ Lou said easily. ‘But then I’ve had nothing to go on but the brief word or two about you that Francis has let fall from time to time.’

  ‘Anything he says needs interpreting.’ Pillman found that he did resent this ‘Francis’ business. His friend, in reply to the early question ‘What do they call you when they want to take the chill off?’ had replied that they’d always called him Franco at home – and that it had nothing to do with ‘the reactionary character who later bobbed up in Spain’. So Lou’s ‘Francis’ was another bit of distancing.

  ‘I suppose you’re attracted to one another through having contrasting temperaments,’ Lou went on. ‘It’s said to be a good basis for tolerance and even affection. But what would you say you have in common?’

  ‘Our lowly and inconsiderable station in the academic world,’ Franco said, unexpectedly breaking in. ‘And we listen to quite a lot of music together. It’s something of which Gillie is totally ignorant, but it seems to help him through to the close of the day. And then he sleeps like a pig. I can hear him snoring in his sty from mine next door.’

  ‘Do you mean you’re not sleeping properly again?’ Lou demanded sharply. ‘That you lie awake trying to solve hopeless equations?’

  ‘I don’t want my health asked after, thank you. Even if you are a sucking doctor.’

  Franco had said this quite savagely, and Pillman found the incident curious. For one thing, Franco had never even hinted that he lay awake at night, whether doing sums or not. For another, he’d been reminded of something he’d been told already: that Lou was a medical student at a London hospital. He didn’t know why he should find this at all out of the way. Perhaps he had got her so firmly in his head as the granddaughter of an earl that he was forgetting something that went for Franco equally with herself. More immediately considered, their background lay in a kind of top rank of professional people, in fact the intelligentsia. Franco, who found it unbelievable that an educated man should call children kiddies, invariably professed himself as holding his own aristocratic ancestry in particular disesteem. It was true he would equally have scoffed at the term ‘intelligentsia’. But he had lately taken a fancy for ‘clerisy’, recently revived as a vogue word and blowing around quite a lot. He probably believed that, really and truly, a sacred bond united the absurd Professor Shuffrey and himself. Reflecting on this, Pillman again found himself suspecting something that might be hovering in Franco’s head.

  ‘Tell me about Shenstone, please,’ Lou said, making an abrupt change of subject after this slightly awkward moment.

  ‘I’m afraid he’s not terribly glamorous.’ Pillman knew by this time that he was always going to sound an apologetic note about the owner of the Leasowes. ‘He wrote something called The School-Mistress. A Poem.’’

  ‘An eminently poetical theme,’ Franco said.

  ‘It’s an imitation of Spenser. He didn’t seem to realise there’s quite enough of Spenser already.’ Pillman wasn’t very pleased with this. It might have come from one of his feebler lecture-giving jollities.

  ‘However,’ Franco went on, ‘Shenstone has led Gillie to enchanted ground. Notton Grange. There he has found a mistress – although not a school one. The fair Diana Eatwell, and a p
oet herself.’

  ‘Don’t be so bloody silly, Franco.’ Pillman was suddenly quite furious with his friend. He was also a little upset at having said ‘bloody’ in Lou’s presence, since there was here a small semantic uncertainty in his head. He could name the few words, freely chucked about between young men, that they wouldn’t employ in the presence of a woman not intimately known to them. But he wasn’t quite sure about ‘bloody’.

  ‘Francis can be bloody silly,’ Lou said calmly. ‘But tell me about Miss Eatwell.’ Lou, for some reason, was now looking at Pillman very consideringly indeed. He found this elusively exciting, but at the same time he didn’t like it a bit. He was quite clear that he wasn’t going to produce lunch-time chat about Diana. But at least Diana did now come into his head. And this produced an astonishing discovery.

  He couldn’t see Diana. He couldn’t – sitting, as he now was, opposite Franco’s sister – see Diana at all. He could see that den. He could see those school clothes. He could even taste the flavour of café filtre. But Diana’s features were a blur.

  ‘She’s Lord Furlong’s only child,’ he said, ‘and she was home from school for the weekend. She gave me some coffee – a good deal better than we’re going to get in this place – and then she took me along to the man Bounce.’ And Pillman addressed himself firmly to elaborating a ludicrous narrative of his encounter with the Furlong Librarian.

  Lou didn’t renew her demand for information about Diana – which showed, Pillman thought, that she could take a hint. Franco didn’t mention her again either. But his little bit of raillery about Gillie’s having found himself a girl at Notton Grange seemed to have cheered him up, and he took a fuller part in the conversation than he had done at first. It did come into Pillman’s head that poor old Franco was pleasing himself with the notion that he had been very cunning. For Pillman had now managed to confirm himself in that suspicion which had occurred to him earlier. What Franco was up to on his contrived occasion was a stroke of match-making, and he had judged it tremendously clever to bring in a mention of Diana as likely to add a useful component of jealousy to his design. His admiration for his friend must be even livelier than that friend had supposed, so that he had decided he wanted him as a brother-in-law. Pillman, like the many of his generation who had made deep studies in the wonderful world of Freud, seemed to remember that there was some sort of syndrome or complex associated with behaviour of this sort. Chaps were continually planning to marry off their sisters to their friends. You saw it happening at those university dances, and he had been told it was a positive mainspring of those grander affairs of the same sort at what were known at Oxford as Commem Balls. It was, of course, a suppressed incestuous impulse that was involved. You weren’t allowed to lay your sister yourself, so you proposed to get a kick out of doing it, as it were, by proxy in the person of some intimate friend with whom you could ‘identify’. There was a great deal in the notion of identifying. Children were doing it all the time in their imitative play, and it was axiomatic in this as in other matters that we all remain children to the end.