“I’ve got a suggestion to make too. As soon as Christmas is over I’ll go to my cottage and you’d better come down and stay with me for the rest of the vac. It will be a reading party just for yourself. We can do a lot in an intensive fortnight when I shall have no one else’s work to consider. Can you manage that?”
Nan looked surprised and muttered, “I don’t know.”
“I’m going to spend Christmas with my family, and you will want to have yours at home, but we’ll start work at the cottage directly after. How about it?”
“I might.”
“You must let me know for certain before the end of next week. I’m not going to alter all my holiday plans to suit you unless I know you’re going to co-operate.”
Since Nan did not assert at once that nothing would persuade her to come to the cottage, Flora assumed that she meant, however ungraciously, to consider the invitation.
“Now there’s another thing, about Rick and his magazine. You can’t spare the time to do all his odd jobs.”
“I can’t let him down. I’ve got to go on seeing him.”
“Of course. Nobody wants to interfere with your friends or with what you do in your spare time. But it must be spare time and since you’re so far behind there won’t be such a lot of it. You must explain to Rick that your work for your finals has to come first.”
“He won’t care. He doesn’t think people ought to waste their time studying English literature. He thinks it’s rooted in the past.”
“So it is, but you may be one of the people who are going to make it flower again in the present. I don’t believe you’ve written a poem since the two you sent me when I was in Italy, have you?”
“They don’t come into my mind at all now. I’m not bothered.”
“Aren’t you? Aren’t you?”
“No. I tell you it doesn’t mean anything to me any more. I’m shut of all that. I’m glad to be. I tell you I’m glad.”
Nan gulped, turned her head aside, and in her old childish fashion knuckled her eyes and burst into tears.
“That’s splendid, Nan. Right back to your old form.”
Nan grinned broadly over the essay she had just finished reading aloud. She had washed and combed her hair, and although it was jaggedly cut—did Rick do it in his spare time?—it had recovered its old shine. Her skin was clearer, and her eyes bright. Whether English literature was a dead hat or not Nan was obviously much happier when working heartily at it than when neglecting it.
Perhaps too she is happier because I am here again.
“Just turn back to the third page, will you? There was a point I wanted to take up with you; I think it’s in the second paragraph.”
Flora longed to ask the girl whether she was writing poetry again, or thinking of it, but she felt that to lay even the lightest pressure there might at the moment be a mistake.
“Would you like to come out to lunch at the cottage on Sunday? A neighbour of my sister’s has a son up at Corpus; he and a friend are coming. One of them has a car, they could bring you.”
“Oh, no thanks. Rick will want me all day Sunday. We work at the magazine in the morning, and then there is a meeting of the group in the afternoon. Rick doesn’t bother with social life. He can’t waste time on it. He’s got far too much to do.”
“Well I must let you go now. Five o’clock on Friday.”
“O.K.”
Nan was clearly not listening.
“Did you get that? Friday afternoon at five for your next coaching?”
“Oh, yes.” Nan scribbled an illegible note on the back of the last page of her essay. She stood up but did not go.
“You see I feel responsible for Rick because he trusts me. He thinks that everybody else is against him.”
“But that can’t be true, can it?”
“He feels it’s true so that makes it true for him.”
“He’s the leader of your group, isn’t he? How come if everybody is against him?”
“Because he’s got far more brains than the rest of them. They have to recognize it, but they don’t understand him the way I do. When we met he had reached the point where he felt he couldn’t go on any longer. He was thinking about killing himself. He smokes pot, you know, a good deal and sometimes he takes the other things, acid.”
“You don’t, Nan?”
“No. I haven’t because I promised Ben. It was just before I came up to Oxford; he read in the papers about some students at a university who had been taking drugs, and one of them killed himself. He was right upset, Ben was. He asked me to promise not even to try any drugs.”
“And you’ve stuck to that? Well done. It must have been difficult sometimes, hasn’t it?”
Nan shrugged. “I’m not bothered. They let me alone now. I couldn’t face Ben if I’d done it. It’s different for Rick. He’s so much alone in the world. He would be quite alone without me.”
“Has he no family?”
“He has very ordinary parents.”
“What do you mean by that? His father earned his living and his mother looked after him, and they are both fond of him?”
“Oh, yes, all that. They do try to help him in a sort of way. His father sends him some money sometimes, and his mother bakes cakes for him and sends them. But they don’t understand him. They are very limited petty-bourgeois. His father keeps a shop in Surbiton. Rick can’t talk to them at all.”
“At his age you don’t so much want to talk to your parents, you talk to other people of your own generation. Rick has got this group.”
“I’m the only one he says he can really trust. That’s why I feel I can never let him go.”
Does she half want to, then?
“You see I’ve been in the same situation as Rick is now because of that time when nobody wanted me in my home.”
“Don’t tell me we’re getting round to that other baby again. I thought you’d come to terms with that. Besides Ben always wanted you. Can’t you console Rick in your spare time when you’re not working?”
“He doesn’t like that.”
“Doesn’t he want you to get your First?”
Nan gave her a shrewd glance. “He got a Third himself.”
“I see; and I think you do.”
“Yes, of course I do, but it doesn’t matter. It’s just part of him. It’s the whole Rick just as he is that I love, not the person that people think he ought to be. He’s angry and jealous and mean, he hates most people, he sometimes hates me, but I can do something for him by knowing what he’s like, and still loving him. Dr James …”
“Well?”
Nan hesitated and then said with unusual diffidence,
“I know you loved somebody and he died. Could you have put a thing like getting a First before him?”
“I can’t imagine him not wanting me to try to get anything good that I wanted.”
“Oh. Well Rick’s different.”
“Would you like to bring Rick to coffee with me one evening?”
“I don’t know if he’d come.”
“Just as you like.”
“I should like.” Nan added, “Thanks. I’ll ask him.”
She crushed the pages of her essay under her arm, grinned, walked out and as she usually did slammed her tutor’s door behind her.
“Are you still working on your lecture, Lal? I didn’t mean to disturb you.”
“But you have, haven’t you?” Lalage said crossly. She pushed her spectacles up her forehead and rubbed her eyes.
“Sorry, I thought you might have finished. You work so much harder than I do.”
“No, only more fussily.”
“Tonight I’m going to coffee with Nan to meet Rick.”
“What a treat for you.”
“Do you know how Nan makes coffee? She sprinkles a little instant coffee on top of a cup of warm water and lets it stand. I did invite them to my room, but she thinks Rick would feel more at home in hers. I very much want to see him, I want to know what I’m up against.�
��
“Are you still up against him?”
“Yes, indeed I am. Nan is working brilliantly, but by fits and starts. Rick is pulling against her work all the time. He wants her always available to be his dogsbody, and he’s quite clearly jealous of her gifts.”
“Is she very much in love with him?”
“She thinks she is. It’s not at all the way she was in love with Ralph. She seems to be half in hate with Rick. At the same time she’s convinced that she’s the only person who understands him, she has a mission to sustain him.”
“She must be enjoying herself very much.”
“She didn’t look as if she was when I came back. She looks much better now.”
“Probably needs a base to operate from.”
“Rick and his group take drugs, intermittently I think. Of course they tried to make Nan join in, but she promised Ben never to do it. Ben has been her lifeline all along—he kept tenderness from drying up in her.”
“I don’t associate Nan Coates with tenderness.”
“It’s there. I felt it in the worst of my trouble, although she could only express it in a poem—and after all what better way, for her? That’s what I want most, more even than her First, that she should start writing again. You’re very smart tonight, Lal, I haven’t seen that dress before. Pretty! Are you going out to dinner?”
“Yes. With Martin.”
“Enjoy yourself.”
Flora was opening the door when Lalage in a different voice called her name.
“Yes?”
“I didn’t want to bother you about this until you had settled down here again. But I want to ask you, how would you feel now about meeting Martin?”
“He told you, I suppose, all about my visit to Le Rondini?”
“Yes.”
“And I suppose he knows what happened after he left?”
“Yes. Some of it anyhow.”
“And I expect he made a very amusing story out of the whole thing?”
“No, honestly he didn’t. He was sorry that he had involved you in more trouble when he meant to help. He likes you, he has a respect for you which he doesn’t have for many people. I haven’t asked him to dinner here since you came back because I thought it might be painful for you to see him again.”
“Oh, ask him. I don’t need to have anything to do with him. Ask him whenever you like for God’s sake.”
“You’re still angry with me, aren’t you, Flora?”
“Let’s forget it.”
“I can’t. When I came out of All Souls that evening after I had told Martin about you and Hugh, I hated myself.”
“You knew you had told the whole of Oxford?”
Lalage bent her head and put her hands up to her face.
“I minded very much when I first found out, but a lot has happened since then. I’ve got tougher, I think. I have more idea of how people can surprise themselves. ‘World is more spiteful and gay than one supposes.’ Ask Martin whenever you want. I’m quite ready to see him again.”
“Thank you.”
“I never forget, Lal, what you did for me in the weeks after Hugh died. Any more than I could forget all the happy times we’ve had together. Don’t worry any more. I’m so glad to have your company again.”
That Rick, expectedly, could not have been more unlike Ralph Destrick, was Flora’s first impression. When she came into the room he was squatting half doubled up on the floor. At Nan’s jerky introduction he said “Hulloa,” without looking up or smiling. So much hair covered his face that his eyes, dark, sharp, wary, looked out of it like a bird peeping out of a nest.
Flora sat down in the chair that Nan awkwardly, as if half ashamed of the courtesy, pushed towards her. The room in the glare of the naked bulb hanging from the ceiling contrived to look both bare and untidy.
“Nan has shown me some copies of your magazine. How is it going?”
“If you’ve read the copies you know how it’s going.”
“I did read the copies. I really meant, Are you getting a lot of subscribers? How do you distribute it?”
“I sell it to my friends and they sell it to people they know, and I give it away to anyone who can’t afford to pay for it. I’m not aiming at commercial success.”
Perhaps just as well. Although Flora could imagine that somebody who had access to the media might pick up this young man, and arrange an opening for him, an interview in which he would be as abrasive as any interviewer. Some publisher might commission a book on the lines of the magazine and Rick might become for a time a popular figure, while Nan, with a good book of poems to offer, went from publisher’s door to publisher’s door. Quality was not in demand, a certain kind of aggro, the gist of Rick’s raw paragraphs, was. But I must be fair to him. I must try to understand what Nan sees or feels in him … perhaps her own resentment against her parents, against Ralph, embodied?
“We’ve got sixty-seven subscribers,” Nan said proudly. “That means at least two hundred readers, because you can calculate that each subscriber shows his copy to two people if not more. And they will be the kind of readers we want.”
“What kind do you want?”
Rick answered, “People who are not dogged by prejudice, and who aren’t concerned in the vested interests of a dying social system.”
“But aren’t those the people who agree with you? Don’t you want your paper to be read by people who disagree with you so that you make converts?”
“There’s not much chance of that. They’re activated entirely by greed and self interest.”
“Only by those? And are they the only people who are?”
“They’ve got more to lose, or they think they have. They don’t realize that most of it is lost already.”
Nan, who was busy with the gas ring, handed Flora a dusty looking cup of coffee.
“The thing is to consolidate, not to convert. We want to keep people who think the same as we do together and to keep them alert. That’s it, isn’t it, Rick?”
Her glance in search of his approval irritated Flora.
“Do you imagine, Rick, that I and people like me don’t want anything changed?”
“I expect you think you want some changes. You’re probably what’s called liberal-minded, which is the worst thing to be. I can do with an honest Tory, even if I should like to kill him. He says, ‘I’ll keep what I’ve got, if I can.’ He can’t, we’ll see that he doesn’t, but he helps us by making his attitude clear. We know what we have to fight against. But you are really saying, “I’ll keep what matters most to me and throw the rest to the wolves to distract them.’ You want to see yourself being generous, but not where it hurts.”
“And what do you think I want to keep most?”
“Anything that makes you feel superior to me.” Struck by the realization that she did feel it, Flora was silent for a moment, inwardly abashed. Nan, perched now on the arm of a chair, was looking as uneasy as most young people do when they try to connect two disparate parts of their lives. A gleam of satisfaction in Rick’s small bright eyes flicked Flora into a response.
“Look, I’m earning my living in a non-profit-making and on the whole underpaid profession. If you succeed in changing society more than it has been changed already I expect I shall be doing just the same.”
“You will be teaching what you are told to teach.”
“So I am now. You don’t imagine that I dictate what students must learn to get a degree in English at this university, do you? But I’ll tell you the things I want to keep. Respect for the law …”
“Of course. It’s been drawn up to protect the prosperous.”
“I don’t think so. And respect for the law doesn’t mean that some parts of it can’t be altered. In fact as you must know they are being changed all the time. Nations do sometimes learn by experience, like people. And I want to keep respect for human beings, respect for the law is part of that. I want to keep respect for quality … for good work of all kinds, good house building, good doct
oring, good writing, good cooking, good music, and so on.”
“The very words that you are using, respect, quality, are middle-class words.”
“No, I don’t think so. Anybody who does or makes anything well and lovingly is in my top class.”
“And you don’t mind what they do or make? You think you’re justified in stuffing Nan with a lot of dead nonsense, Anglo-Saxon, and Shakespeare and that?”
“I don’t teach her Anglo-Saxon, and I can’t say I was very keen on it when I was at college myself. But I suppose it’s a good thing to know the roots of your subject, and having to learn anything tough with accuracy is good discipline for the mind.”
“Another élitist word—discipline. Slave-training.”
“No, of course it isn’t; it makes muscular minds, not slaves. And Shakespeare isn’t dead. Don’t you think any great writer who illuminates life for us is alive in any age?”
“No. Not in these times. They’re too urgent for studying anything left over from the past.”
“What do you think, Nan?”
They both looked at her. She had slid down onto the floor, and was sitting with her back to her desk, her trousered knees drawn up to her chin, her vivid hair catching the light. Half defiant, half apologetic, she looked across at Rick.
“You’ve forgotten one thing. I enjoy it.”
“What?”
“Shakespeare. All of them.”
“You’re only saying that because your tutor’s here.”
“No, I’m not. It’s true. I enjoyed it all at school. Everything was different after I began to read poetry and to try to write it. I wasn’t just living in a house where nobody was interested in my kind of things. Garthwaite wasn’t just a village where the men went down the pit and the women worked in the homes. I wish I could make you understand, Ricky. You see so much more in everything when you begin to write about it; and reading makes you want to write.”
“I understand. You were dissatisfied with the cramping life in the household of a miner on inadequate pay, so you escaped into fantasies.”
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