But Diana proved to write from Biarritz, and she really was staying with relations. They were her dead mother’s relations, who were clearly wealthy people and wholly upper class as well – in this latter regard being singularly remote from Lord Furlong, at least in point of his origins. The letter was a somewhat inconsequent affair, wandering between professions of undying love and a recital of numerous social occasions. Biarritz seemed to be a place in which a large and floating cosmopolitan society put in all its time living it up no end. To Gillie Pillman the presented scene seemed excruciatingly vulgar in a glossy Edwardian way, but it was evident that Diana was quite bowled over by it. She certainly wasn’t thinking of Wordsworth, or remembering that love is to be found in huts where poor men lie. Gillie saw that what he was faced with was a fiendish cunning on Lord Furlong’s part, and that a whirl of gaiety was much more likely than an old-fashioned paternal severity to drive his daughter’s late adolescent infatuation out of her head.
He felt that he ought to hasten to Biarritz at once. But it lay in a discouragingly remote corner of France, and moreover he felt that, without a penny in his pocket, he would appear at some disadvantage amid Diana’s new surroundings. And of course the empty-purse factor went further than that. He would have to hitch-hike all the way from Calais, a distance which an old Guide Miche told him was 1032 kilometres. It just wasn’t on.
In addition to which, he had something else to do.
‘There was this bookshop, you see,’ he said to Professor Hedger.
‘A bookshop, Pillman,’ Hedger said severely. ‘The intrusive use of a demonstrative pronoun is, to my mind, less a colloquialism than a vulgarism.’
‘I couldn’t agree less, Hedger. To my mind, “this” has a small but legitimate rhetorical function. However, in Blois there was a bookshop, if you prefer it that way.’ Gillie paused, and was gratified to observe that Hedger was already a little shaken by the brusque familiarity with which he had been addressed by his subordinate. ‘It’s odd that in France they call bookshops libraries, more or less. Well, this bookshop is near the cathedral and just above the Jardins de L’ancien Evêché. You probably know it.’
‘No, I do not. I’ve never been to Blois.’
‘Well, you should drop in there some day. Your wife and daughters would find the Château quite marvellous. Well now, this bookshop is a dusty old place, almost entirely antiquarian, with a mass of stuff that mightn’t have been disturbed for centuries. I poked around for quite a long time, mostly in a small and completely neglected English section. I picked up a couple of things I thought I’d rather like to have – miscellanies in duodecimo which I’ll be delighted to show you one day – and then I came on these two volumes of Hartley’s. I’ve always been a bit interested in Hartley, because his ideas look forward to Pavlov, you know.’
‘Pavlov?’ Hedger repeated suspiciously.
‘He’s a Russian who has some dogs. However, the point is that I came away with those four books – and as quite a bargain, too, as you’ll see if you glance at the bill.’
Not very willingly, Hedger glanced at the bill. It duly recorded the sale, in the Rue du Ht. Bourg at Blois, of quatre tomes to an unnamed purchaser.
‘Well?’ he demanded.
‘When I got back to my hotel I discovered that the Hartley had belonged to Wordsworth. The first volume has his signature on the fly-leaf. Here it is.’
‘Most interesting.’ Hedger said this a shade testily. He’d have quite liked to own a book with Wordsworth’s signature himself. ‘But it’s probably a forgery,’ he added hopefully. ‘One is constantly coming across such foolish impostures. As you will find, Pillman, when you gain a little more experience than you at present possess.’
‘I rather think it’s not a forgery.’
‘Then you ought to think harder,’ Hedger said – now definitely with bad temper. ‘Of course Wordsworth spent some time at Blois during his liaison with that young woman. But Hartley’s is a most unlikely book for him to have possessed – either then or when he was older.’
‘Oh, come, Hedger. There’s no end of Hartley’s associationism in The Prelude. ‘
‘My dear young man, he picked up scraps of that sort of vocabulary from Coleridge. Even your pupils are likely to know that. He himself had no interest in philosophy whatever. When he died his library didn’t contain a single one of the philosophical classics.’
‘That’s true. I see you have a very fair working knowledge of Wordsworth.’ Gillie paused again, this time to allow himself the pleasure of hearing Hedger breathing heavily. ‘It makes it all the more interesting that he owned Hartley’s Observations on Man in 1791, and that he annotated it so extensively.’
‘That he what?’
‘Look for yourself.’
Professor Hedger did look for himself – and in a progressively disorganised state.
‘If he put in all this work on the thing,’ he said, ‘I don’t see he could have come to leave it behind him, either at Blois or anywhere else.’
‘It was the French Revolution, wasn’t it?’ Gillie offered this prompting in the encouraging tone he might have adopted to a dull or diffident pupil. ‘”Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive”, and so forth. Still, he probably felt one day that he’d better beat it quick, or he’d be bowling along on a tumbril in no time.’
Hedger had no reply to this, and resumed his dubitative scrutiny.
‘And you own this book?’ he asked at last.
‘Yes, of course – and I’m going to edit the stuff. It’s true the annotations, since they’ve never been published, are copyright still. But I’ll fix all that. And no end of people are interested. Professor Beatty, for instance. Of course you know his William Wordsworth, his Doctrine and Art in their Historical Relations. It’s a great thrill for Beatty. And there are one or two other people I must drop a line to. Old Legouis, for instance. And Ernest de Selincourt. The Coleridge crowd are interested too. I’ve had a delightful note from Livingston Lowes.’
Professor Hedger (who was an entirely obscure professor) was suitably daunted by this august roll-call. He acknowledged to himself that he was in the presence of a coming man, and no doubt heartily wished that he was a going man as well. The late neophyte in Shenstone studies, he was bound to be feeling, had got well above himself.
‘And I gather,’ Gillie said, ‘that the British Academy will be inviting me to give one of those annual lectures. When they do, I’ll see that they send you a card.’
‘That’s very kind of you, Pillman. I’m sure it will be most interesting.’
There could be no doubt about it. Professor Hedger was a broken man.
Gillie enjoyed all this very much. He enjoyed it the more, perhaps, because in another department of life things were so clearly not going well. As the weeks went by it was progressively harder not to resign himself to the condition of a thwarted lover. A second letter from Diana in Biarritz was just like the first, and moreover it made very little reference to a letter he had addressed to her. He had to face the fact (he told himself) that what had occurred between them had been rather tenuous, after all; that as her declared and accepted lover he had enjoyed a tenure to be estimated as between three and four minutes; and that this had to be regarded as on the brief side for establishing a lasting relationship. He also discovered with some surprise that he came short of any sharp and specific wish to possess Diana. If he was a thwarted lover, what he was thwarted of was obscure at the centre and hazy at the edges. It didn’t come at all easily to him to imagine himself in bed with Diana, although he conscientiously exercised himself in this way. In fact he was constrained to begin whispering to himself that what lay behind him was a boy-and- girl romance. What lay in front of him (in another sense) was William Wordsworth’s copy of Hartley’s Observations on Man. It looked very much as if Diana’s birthday present to him was going to be her farewell present into the bargain.
He was very worried about the Hartley (as he well might be). Working away like
mad to get up Hartley’s theory of the mind (since it was going to be necessary that he should have mastered it completely), he was haunted by a sense of guilt which arose partly from his feeling that he was being feeble about Diana and partly from the fact that he had involved himself in a risky deception on her behalf. Yet it had to be admitted that it was on his own behalf as well. Had he returned Hartley’s work to Bounce, or confidentially to Lord Furlong himself, saying that he felt Diana to have been led through ignorance to make him a gift of something quite inappropriately valuable, it was very unlikely (offending as he had done) that he would have received permission to remain in on the discovery in a scholarly way. For a time he had been so pleased with the perfect success of his ploy at Blois that no doubts had assailed him. Even now he couldn’t see that he had done anything enormously wrong. He hadn’t stolen the volumes; they’d been given to him. He hadn’t forged Wordsworth’s annotations; he could no more have managed such a feat than he could have flown to the moon. He had merely manipulated things a little in the interest of protecting the reputation of a confiding young gentlewoman. Yet coming back to this theory of his conduct didn’t much reassure him. He told himself that he hadn’t fully confronted what would happen to him if somehow or other he were found out. To claim that he had bought in a French provincial town what had in fact come to him in a more than dubious way from the Furlong Library could probably be regarded as a criminal offence. He might even be put in gaol! It was true that if that threatened Diana would certainly come forward with the true story of her rash behaviour. But if that kept him out of the Scrubs it would be far from keeping him in the academic profession. He had to face it. He’d be finished.
For a time Gillie contrived to feel quite injured and indignant about this disagreeable fact of life. What he’d done –he told himself – wasn’t far removed from the kind of ingenious and high-spirited learned hoax that jokers did occasionally get away with. If he himself now promptly exposed and exploded the Grand Blois Deception perhaps he’d be forgiven.
Unfortunately he was too hard-headed to believe this for more than five minutes at a time. So what were the chances of the whole affair blowing up on him? He addressed himself urgently to this question. There was no record – he was now tolerably certain – of the annotated Hartley ever having passed through a sale-room or appeared in an antiquarian bookseller’s catalogue. In its early days in particular the Furlong Library had been built up on purchases made more or less by the yard, and these two volumes had almost certainly tumbled into it that way – and had remained as unknown to the ridiculous Bounce as to Lord Furlong himself. It was Diana herself who had come upon them, and all that meant anything to her would have been Wordsworth’s signature; of the annotations, if she had noticed them, she would have made nothing at all. So the main secret he didn’t share even with his beloved – or late beloved. It was his alone.
Yet this didn’t take him quite out of the wood. He was now committed to publishing his discovery. It was true that Diana was highly unlikely ever to become aware of such an activity. She admired Wordsworth’s poetry, but was as ignorant of anything to be called Wordsworth scholarship as an unborn Hottentot. Only if she happened to divulge to some informed person the title of the work which she had so fondly filched and presented to her lover was there the slightest chance of disaster.
But the chance existed. Conceivably other chances he had failed to think of existed too. As Gillie Pillman sat in his lonely digs and contemplated these facts it was almost as if he heard beneath the floorboards the ticking of an infernal machine. He had to resign himself to living with a time-bomb.
VII
The passage first of several months and then of several years gradually diminished but never wholly dissipated Gillie’s sense of living dangerously. David Hartley, that proto-Pavlov, had functioned as a tremendous spring-board for his career, and before he was thirty he had been rocketed or catapulted into a Chair at very much the sort of university in which he had been so humbly employed along with Francis Gethin. He had worked very hard, and partly because of this had remained unmarried, perhaps subscribing to the view that he travels fastest (and furthest) who travels alone. His celibate state was certainly not due to any undying memory of Diana Eatwell. He did sometimes fall into the paradox of telling himself that she never came into his head. Yet it was almost true. He had virtually censored or repressed her image as one does censor or repress painful, or even merely uncomfortable, recollections. Quite apart from her association with the terrific risk he had taken in fabricating a bogus provenance for Wordsworth’s copy of Observations on Man, her memory made an awkward bedfellow. The crucial moment in that love affair (he now told himself when he thought about it at all) had come right at the start. No man can hope to recover in his mistress’s regard from having been taken by the seat of the pants and chucked out of a room. If he did ever decide to marry he would take care that nothing of the sort happened again in the early stages of his engagement.
He had no notion of what had eventually become of Diana. Perhaps she had got married to one of that Biarritz Ritzy crowd. And Franco had passed entirely out of his life as well. He had, it was true, no reason to censor Franco. He no longer had any reason to be envious of Franco in his Fellowship. Being a professor in a provincial university was not quite so glamorous, somehow, as being a Cambridge don, but it was a good deal better paid. In fact Franco’s memory wasn’t in the least painful to him except in one regard. His room-mate’s enamourment struck his mature sense as having been innocent and rather touching. Perhaps it had been no more than a startling instance of the hung-up state these public-school chaps were liable to for a time. The only nasty thing about it had been his own immoderate reaction. Because of this he remained sure that they had parted enemies. He had once ventured, quite early on, to send Franco a message of goodwill by a common acquaintance. There had been no response. It was possible that so casual an injunction had been neglected or forgotten about, and the signal never passed on. But Gillie decided that Franco had simply not wanted to restore their relationship even at such a harmless remove.
A day came, however, on which he chanced to run into Franco’s sister. He was staying in London, doing some work in the British Museum. It was June, and he decided to take an afternoon off and amuse himself by watching tennis at Wimbledon. He had watched a whole set before suddenly becoming aware that Lou Gethin was sitting next to him. She was unaccompanied – and even better-looking than he remembered her as a medical student. It was conceivably this latter circumstance that prompted him to take a plunge.
‘Good afternoon,’ he said as the players were changing sides. ‘I don’t expect you recognise me. I’m Franco’s friend, Gillie Pillman.’
‘Of course I recognise you, Mr Pillman – and it’s not really such a very long time since we met. It’s a splendid match, don’t you think? Franco would enjoy it. He’s rather a good player himself, surprisingly enough.’
‘So he is.’ Gillie hoped that this acquiescence didn’t exhibit him as endorsing the sisterly candour touched in by the last part of Lou’s speech. It was, of course, true that there was something surprising in any sort of athletic prowess in anybody so physically skimpy as Franco. But that particular aspect of his former admirer was one that Gillie specially disliked remembering, since it was obscurely involved with his own bad behaviour. ‘We used to play—’ he began, and then checked himself, since those occasions at Notton Grange were also on the list of things he didn’t care to recall. ‘We used to play a bit of golf too. But Franco was no better at that than I was.’
‘They’re beginning again.’
Lou had thus briskly indicated that they had better give their attention to the game, and Gillie did his best to do so. But he found it hard to concentrate on the play, and every now and then he stole a glance at his companion. There was no doubt about her beauty. It was precisely as he remembered it. Nobody looking at Helen of Troy could so much as call up another woman’s face. Lou was just
like that. He managed to catch a glimpse of her ungloved left hand. She wasn’t wearing a wedding ring. This somehow seemed incredible in face of such attractiveness, and the sudden thought came to him that Lou perhaps shared her brother’s sexual inclination. He had become of an increasingly tolerant mind in such matters, but for some reason this particular notion horrified him. Then he remembered the odd kind of mission which Lou had been engaged on at that luncheon party long ago. She’d hardly have undertaken that, he supposed, if anything of the sort were true of her.
He realised that in the casual exchange they’d so far had Lou had certainly studied him with some interest. There had been almost the same sort of sizing-up scrutiny that he remembered from long ago. This, if perplexing, was gratifying too. He wouldn’t have expected Lou Gethin to take the slightest interest in a middle-aged (for he was beginning to feel himself that) provincial professor.
The current game ran to several long rallies, so Gillie had plenty of time to reflect on his situation, and to wonder whether he mightn’t take some step to place his renewed acquaintance with this stunning girl on a less transitory footing. But now the game was over, and the players were going through their ritual mopping and sipping and vigorous towelling of their racket handles. This time, it was Lou who took the initiative in speaking.
The Bridge at Arta Page 9