Of course Franco could have no notion of the mechanism at work. Even with all his sophistication, he would be revolted if it were put to him. And it was rather comical really. Pillman was so pleased with his own perspicacity in the matter that he began, halfway through the meal, to enjoy himself enormously. In fact he must have been putting on quite a sparkling turn, for he suddenly perceived – or thought he did – that something like Franco’s familiar admiration for himself was now being evinced by Franco’s sister. Lou was looking at him in a new way. Indeed, she was behaving in a new way. There was nothing crude about it, but he was aware of it as holding a distinct affinity with the occasional comportment of simpler and less well-mannered girls towards the tail-end of courageously uninhibited student parties. Lou Gethin was actually making passes at him! He could hardly have said how it was being done. But there could be no possible doubt about the fact.
Pillman’s head swam a little as he realised this. And it was precisely making his head swim that the girl must be after. She wanted a sign or a response from him; wanted, you might say, the release of appropriate chemicals into his bloodstream. He could hardly believe it – particularly as it was with so deft an unobtrusiveness that it was being done. And she succeeded. Just what sign he gave, he didn’t remotely know. Perhaps it was a gulp or gasp or a moment’s heavy breathing. Whatever it was, it had happened.
And then, quite suddenly, Lou switched off. It was over. The thing had vanished. He had a momentary weird vision of his family doctor (and Lou was going to be a doctor, after all) tucking away in his black bag the little mallet with which he had tapped you expertly just below the knee and elicited the reassuring involuntary jerk.
Lou had picked up her handbag. Franco was frowning over the bill, and had been doing so for several minutes – so it was possible that he had been quite unaware of what had occurred. Or was it the position that brother and sister understood one another very well? Was it possible that Lou knew that a first step towards a grotesque species of arranged marriage had been going forward, and that as part of the exploration had wanted to assure herself that those chemicals were there at all? Pillman couldn’t bring himself to believe quite this. It was too absurd, and the plain fact must be that he had been imagining things. Yet he had a sense – and it was to be a haunting sense – that his speculation had, as it were, got within a target area.
They saw Lou to her car – a smarter car than Pillman’s – and she drove off. Walking back to the university, Franco had a good deal to say about that doubtful bill.
III
Several weeks after the mysterious occasion just described, Pillman decided that, since Franco had introduced him to his sister, he ought himself to introduce Franco to Diana Eatwell. There was no particular logic about this. It was simply that Diana and Lou were linked in his mind as the only two young women he knew who existed substantially in the flesh. Pop either on a weighing-machine, and the dial would register at once. Dream girls weren’t like that at all.
There was no difficulty – except with Franco himself – in arranging something. Lord Furlong was still quite regularly an absentee on Saturdays: in fact Pillman had not yet set eyes on him. So Bounce had only to be told that Pillman had a friend eager to view the wonders of the Furlong Library, and that this friend happened to be the grandson of an Earl of Westcot, and the visit was fixed up at once.
At first Franco was definitely recalcitrant. He said he had no taste for beer, and when he had to mention Diana he referred to her not by name but as the poetess, which was even more rude than it would have been for Pillman to call Lou the leech or the sawbones. But, at the same time, the project seemed to hold for Franco a fascination to be felt as of an obscurely masochistic sort. And this Pillman was aware of as entirely in his character; Franco was a dab hand at going through with disagreeable assignments; when he was invited to tea by the Vice-Chancellor’s wife – an appalling woman with a drawing-room full of little gilt chairs as in a chichi tea-shop, Franco said – it never occurred to him to intimate a previous engagement.
So the two young men walked out to Notton Grange together. Their route took them through a long stretch of back-to-back slum-like dwellings (from which a few of their pupils came) and then through a further stretch of mean, tidy suburbs (from which all the rest came) and eventually landed them, quite suddenly, in open country. And there, beyond a broad stretch of rising ground and embosomed in trees, lay Notton. Viewed from this distance, William Shenstone would have thought quite highly of it. Franco, pausing to take stock, muttered that here was where the lion and the lizard keep the courts where Jamshyd gloried and drank deep. Being a mathematician and not a literary character, he was unaware of the distressingly banal character of this quotation.
‘And what they drink now—’ he began.
‘Yes, yes—Eatwell’s Entire. Don’t worry, Franco. You won’t be offered any.’
Just as on the occasion of Pillman’s earliest visit, the front door of the Grange opened instantly upon the first peal of the bell. Diana had now settled for waiting for Gillie’s arrival in this gratifying fashion, and wasn’t going to change it upon a particular occasion just because there was another young man. But she wasn’t in school uniform this Saturday, and a practised eye might have detected her as having given some thought to her dress. Pillman, had he been aware of this, would not have attributed it to the notoriously fickle nature of women. He would have supposed – and probably quite rightly – that Diana simply wanted to show Gillie’s friend what a nice-looking girl Gillie had gained the regard of, and that this might be termed in essence a Gillie-orientated impulse. But at least Diana looked at Franco curiously and at once. What she saw was a fine-featured but distinctly meagre young man in a state of considerable confusion.
‘This is Franco,’ Pillman said robustly. ‘He’s pretending to have come to see Bounce’s bumper books, but what he really wants to see is you.’
‘And I haven’t had to wait long.’ Franco brought this out in a jerky fashion which, although in fact quite normal with him, suggested even more disquietude than he had immediately evinced. ‘It’s awfully good of you,’ he added with sudden almost chilly formality. And he made a stiff little bow such as would have been appropriate had Diana been not an English schoolgirl but a French or German lady of mature years.
Pillman, who was always being amused by Franco, was amused now. Diana was less amused than pleased, and it was immediately clear that she was prepared quite to take to Gillie’s shy and rather distinguished friend.
‘Have you really got to do the bumper books at all?’ she asked.
‘I suppose so – although I’m not in the slightest degree interested in them, I’m afraid.’ Franco, who was quite composed again, had assumed his severest frown and his most incisive manner of utterance. ‘Gillie, you see, has mentioned the thing to Mr Bounce, so some civil show of interest is essential.’ As he said this, Franco removed his gaze from Diana – apparently not without effort – and glanced around the delicately ornate hall with its august marble presences. It was an environment that seemed yet further to restore his ease. It struck Pillman that his friend was well-accustomed to finding himself in such places, although not perhaps in the ownership of people like Lord Furlong. He told himself that if later that day Franco made any more snooty remarks about beer he would collar him and most vigorously scrag him. This was a juvenile form of behaviour which these two academic persons privily indulged in from time to time, and Franco in particular found entertainment in it.
‘I thought we might lurk in the den for a bit,’ Pillman said. ‘And that then I’d take Franco over to Bounce, and do a token stab at Billy Shenstone while he’s being shown over the works. Then we’ll come back and we can all wander around until it’s time for us to make off again. Perhaps we could get right round the park and chat up the deer.’ Pillman enjoyed thus showing his friend that he had become rather largely at home at Notton. But he did a little wonder what Lord Furlong would have made of it.<
br />
‘Lurking in the den for a bit’ involved, of course, Diana’s café filtre. Pillman, having an exaggerated sense of the degree of expertness required for the quite simple operations involved, took satisfaction in showing her off at them. Franco, although his attention was inclined to waver, seemed anxious to comport himself well. He received the eventual concoction with gravity and produced some proper murmur of appreciation when he had tasted it. So for a time it was quite a solemn business, rather as if these three had been Japanese persons involved in a ritual tea-drinking. But Diana and Gillie, at least, had a lot to say to one another – or at least they felt this to be so – and they were soon chattering animatedly enough. While this was happening Franco withdrew into little more than a listener’s or spectator’s part. He even took to letting his glance wander around the den more absently than one might have expected in so very well-mannered a young man. It was almost as if he was looking for something that wasn’t there. Perhaps – Gillie thought when he happened to remark this – what Franco found wanting was another girl. As things were, he was slightly in the position of a gooseberry, a position only too likely to be ungrateful to so sensitive a young man. Gillie, who had so recently discovered that a seriously regarded girl-friend was essential to the sane conduct of life, thought that Franco’s recurrent glooms might well be attributable to a deficiency in this regard. Franco’s customary severity of manner, he very well knew, masked a great deal of diffidence, and it was possible that so shy a chap had never succeeded in getting going with a girl at all.
Diana – the clairvoyant Diana – eventually proved to have arrived at some such conception herself. She had heard about the Sunday-afternoon golf, and presently got round to making mild fun of it. It was essentially a diversion for elderly business men, she said, and must be particularly dismal when prosecuted on a jaded municipal golf course. So why didn’t they both come to Notton and play tennis instead? She could easily scratch up another girl for mixed doubles. She could do that, in fact, for the very next day. And it was high time that the student of Shenstone should meet the owner of that fascinating batch of Shenstone’s letters. Her father was always at home on Sundays.
Gillie was all for this idea at once, but Franco was at first no keener than politeness required. He was no earthly good at tennis, he said, and would be no more than a drag on the whole thing. But he offered this objection while looking at Diana in considerable fascination. It was, it was true, in a kind of puzzled fascination not easy to interpret. But there was at the same time something so definite about it as to set Gillie momentarily thinking on fresh lines. Having along another girl for Franco to muck in with was a wholly admirable idea on Diana’s part. But what if Franco took it into his head to prefer Diana herself? Nothing could be more reasonable, Diana being what she was. It might lead to considerable awkwardness, all the same.
Nevertheless the plan went through. Diana picked up her telephone (there was even a telephone in that well-appointed den) and fixed things with a girl called Judy there and then. A time was arranged, and then Gillie carried off Franco to be presented to Mr Bounce.
Later in the morning the three young people went out to inspect the tennis court, and then they walked round the park. During their perambulation Franco became abstracted again. So Gillie decided that it would be a good idea if, at least for five or ten minutes, Diana had his slightly elusive friend to herself. This was an altruistic notion, and he approved of himself for having thought of it. The manoeuvre was quite easy to manage. They were wandering around informally, and he had only to drop behind for a little as if particularly attracted by Lord Furlong’s deer beyond their ha-ha, and then not be in too much of a hurry to catch up again.
It thus came about that, for an appreciable span of time, Gillie had Franco and Diana in view some thirty yards ahead of him. They were quite out of earshot but he could see them very clearly. They seemed to be talking a little, but not much. Then something happened which Pillman had reason to judge slightly odd. Franco had half-halted for a moment and turned towards Diana as if he suddenly had something of moment to communicate. For a fraction of a second he hesitated and then, as if he had changed his mind, walked on. When they had gone no more than a dozen paces further, precisely the same thing happened. Franco, that was to say, had twice been on the brink of uttering words he had then thought better of.
There was nothing remarkable about this in itself. In fact it was a habit of Franco’s, and almost like a nervous tic. It usually happened in circumstances suggesting simply that he had been overcome by a sudden sense of the appalling triviality of some remark he had been on the verge of making. Gillie was used to it. He had decided it was part of the misdoubting of himself that went deep into Francis Gethin’s character.
But what if it hadn’t been quite like that this time? Perhaps Franco had been about to say something like ‘I think you’re the most marvellous girl I’ve ever met’, or even ‘Diana, it’s no good; I must simply tell you I’m madly in love with you’. It would be dreadful if Diana found she had to cope with such a wild aberration on the part of Gillie’s close friend.
But all this was surely nonsense. It was a minute incident of the sort that comes under somebody’s observation, usually in a shrubbery, in Jane Austen’s novels. The aberration, Pillman decided, had been entirely his own. Probably Franco had intended no more than to offer another depreciatory remark about his tennis, and had then very rightly decided that it would be fussy to do so. Pillman hurried forward and made resolute light conversation about anything that came into his head. Later on he would probably tell Franco – again lightly – of what had been a simple impulse of jealousy on his own part. Franco would be embarrassed, since he always shied away from talk about sexual feeling. But that would merely add to the fun.
The tennis party on the following day was quite a success. The only snag was that Franco’s game proved to be a class ahead of any of the others’. He tried a little to dissimulate the fact at first. But that doesn’t really do, and when the girl called Judy, who was his first partner, became suspicious he dropped the attempt at once, and went right ahead. It was all rather amusing. Even Lord Furlong, who was the only spectator, was amused. And he didn’t seem to be a man who would often condescend to anything of the kind.
Pillman found himself not much liking Lord Furlong, who was physically imposing in an alarming way, and at the same time the kind of man one of Pillman’s uncles would have been had he flourished tremendously in the sphere of sanitary plumbing. And Lord Furlong, although he was civil, perhaps didn’t greatly take to Pillman in return. He did, on the other hand, take to Franco, and this was patently because Franco was hitched to the peerage in a much more distinguished way than his lordship himself was. Lord Furlong was much too intelligent not to understand that sort of thing. Franco in his turn was much too perceptive to remain unaware of the fact, and it might have been expected to infuriate him. But Franco got on quite well with Lord Furlong, as he sometimes tended to do with people to whom he gave high marks for absurdity. Gillie felt his friend to be mistaken in this particular instance. Lord Furlong was too formidable a man to be treated as a joke. He hadn’t been created a baron because he collected books. He did that as another man might collect postage stamps or butterflies. His real weight lay quite elsewhere.
‘I gather, Mr Pillman, that you work in my library every week,’ he said in a break between sets. ‘I suppose you ran into my daughter there. You must have, since she has invited you to come and play tennis.’
‘Yes, Lord Furlong.’ Pillman thought it prudent to let this serve as an answer to both these conjectures. It startled him a little to gather that Diana had said nothing to her father about the Saturday confabs in the den.
‘Diana is studiously inclined, and is very fond of books. Mr Bounce, of course, helps her to find her way about. He checked her poems for the spelling and so on before I sent them to the printer. Are poems your line, Mr Pillman?’
‘Well, yes they are, si
r, in a way. But I’m working—’
‘You will find I have a great many of them – perhaps more than any other man in the country. And I see no reason why some of you university people shouldn’t have the turning over of them now and then.’
‘It’s most generous of you, sir.’
‘I believe, you see, in encouraging the universities. They have a part to play. Between you and me, Pillman, this country is facing very severe industrial recession. It’s a result of the Americans having made such a mess of things. And the universities, I repeat, will have their part to play.’
‘I believe the Economics Department at ours, sir, is quite tip-top.’
The Bridge at Arta Page 6