by C. P. Snow
I was half-ruffled, half-amused, when Roy rushed me away to another shop.
“I’m buying these books,” he said before I could protest. “Just lend me your name. I’ll settle tonight. Talking of names, Lord B. is staying at the Lodge tomorrow” (for Lord Boscastle was a real person, and his sister, Lady Muriel, was the Master’s wife).
Breathlessly we hurried from bookshop to bookshop, buying every copy of Udal’s book before half-past five. Roy sent them as presents, had them put down to my account, asked me to enquire for them myself.
As we left the last shop, Roy grinned.
“Well, that was quite a rush,” he said.
He insisted on paying three pounds for the books that had been put down to me – and, to tell the truth, I did not feel like stopping him.
“I suppose I’m right in thinking that Udal is a friend of yours?” I said.
Roy smiled.
On our way back to the college, he asked:: “Tell me, Lewis, are you extremely tired?”
“Not specially.”
“Nor am I. We need some nets. Let’s have some.”
We changed, and he drove me down to Fenner’s in the cold April evening. The freshman’s match was being played, and we watched the last overs of the day; then Roy bought a new ball in the pavilion, we went over to the nets, and I began to bowl to him. Precisely how good he was I found it difficult to be sure. He had a style, as in most things, of extreme elegance and ease; he seemed to need no practice at all, and the day after a journey abroad or a wild and sleepless night would play the first over with an eye as sure as if he had been batting all the summer. When he first came up, people had thought he might get into the university team, but he used to make beautiful twenties and thirties against first class bowling, and then carelessly give his wicket away.
He was fond of the game, and batted on this cold evening with a sleek lazy physical content. Given the new ball, I was just good enough a bowler to make him play. My best ball, which went away a little off the seam, he met with a back stroke from the top of his height, strong, watchful, leisurely and controlled. When I over-pitched them on the off, he drove with statuesque grace and measured power. He hit the ball very hard – but, when one watched him at the wicket, his strength was not so surprising as if one had only seen him upright and slender in a fashionable suit.
I bowled to him for half-an-hour, but my only success was to get one ball through and rap him on the pads.
“Promising,” said Roy.
Then we had a few minutes during which I batted and he bowled, but at that point the evening lost its decorum, for Roy suddenly ceased to be either graceful or competent when he ran up to bowl.
The ground was empty now, the light was going, chimes from the Catholic church rang out clearly in the quiet. We stopped to listen; it was the hour, it was seven o’clock. We walked across the ground and under the trees in the road outside. The night was turning colder still, and our breath formed clouds in the twilight air. But we were hot with exercise, and Roy did not put on his sweater, but knotted the sleeves under his chin. A few white petals fell on his shoulders on our way towards the car. His eyes were lit up as though he were smiling at my expense, and his face was at rest.
“At any rate, old boy,” he said, “you should be able to sleep tonight.”
2: Inspection at Dinner
The next morning, as I was going out of the college, I met the Master in the court.
“I was wanting to catch you, Eliot,” he said. “I tried to get you by telephone last night, but had no luck.”
He was a man of sixty, but his figure was well preserved, the skin of his cheeks fresh, rosy and unlined. He was continuously and excessively busy, yet his manner stayed brisk and cheerful; he complained sometimes of the books he had left unwritten or had still to write, but he was happier in committees, meetings, selection boards than in any other place. He was a profoundly humble man, and had no faith in anything original of his own. But he felt complete confidence in the middle of any society or piece of business; he went briskly about, cheerful and unaffected, indulging in familiar intimate whispers; he had never quite conquered his tongue, and if he was inspired by an amusing sarcasm he often was impelled to share it. He asked me to the Lodge for dinner the following night, in order to meet the Boscastles. “My wife’s note will follow, naturally, but I was anxious not to miss you.” It was clear that I was being invited to fill a gap, and the Master, whose manners were warm as well as good, wanted to make up for it.
“We’ve already asked young Calvert,” he went on, and dropped into his intimate whisper: “Between ourselves, my brother-in-law never has considered this was the state of life his sister was born to. I fancy she wants to present him with someone who might pass muster. It’s a very singular coincidence that we should possess a remarkably talented scholar who also cuts his hair. It’s much more than we could reasonably expect.”
I chuckled.
“Yes,” said the Master, “our young friend is distinctly presentable. Which is another strong reason for electing him, Eliot. The standard of our colleagues needs raising in that respect.”
I was left in no doubt that Roy had been invited to the original party, and that I was a reserve. The Master could not explain or apologise more, for, indiscreetly as he talked about fellows of the college, he was completely loyal to his wife. Yet it could not have escaped him that she was a formidable and grandiose snob. She was much else besides, she was a woman of character and power, but she was unquestionably a snob. I wondered if it surprised the Master as much as it did me, when I first noticed it. For he, the son of a Scottish lawyer, had not married Lady Muriel until he was middle-aged; he must have come strange to the Boscastles, and with some preconceptions about the aristocracy. In my turn, they were the first high and genuine aristocrats I had met; they were Bevills and the family had been solidly noble since the sixteenth century (which is a long time for a genuine descent); I had expected them to be less interested in social niceties than the middle classes were. I had not found it so. Nothing could be further from the truth. They did it on a grander scale, that was all.
On the night of the dinner party, I was the first guest to arrive, and the Master, Lady Muriel, and their daughter Joan were alone in the great drawing-room when I was announced.
“Good evening, Mr Eliot,” said Lady Muriel. “It is very good of you to come to see us at such short notice.”
I was slightly amused: that sounded like rubbing it in.
I was not allowed to chat; she had discovered that I had an interest in world affairs, and every time I set foot in the Lodge she began by cross-questioning me about the “latest trends”. She was a stiffly built heavy woman, her body seeming cylindrical in a black evening dress; she looked up at me with bold full tawny eyes, and did not let her gaze falter. Yet I had felt, from the first time I met her and she looked at me so, that there was something baffled about her, a hidden yearning to be liked – as though she were a little girl, aggressive and heavy among children smaller than herself, unable to understand why they did not love her.
Seeing her in her own family, one felt most of all that yearning and the strain it caused. In the long drawing-room that night, I looked across at her husband and her daughter. The Master was standing beside one of the lofty fire screens, his hand on a Queen Anne chair, trim and erect in his tails like a much younger man. He and Lady Muriel exchanged some words: there was loyalty between them, but no ease. And Joan, the eldest of the Royces’ children, a girl of eighteen, stood beside him, silent and constrained. Her face at the moment seemed intelligent, strong and sulky. When she answered a direct question from her mother, the friction sounded in each syllable. Lady Muriel sturdily asked another question in a more insistent voice.
The butler called out “Mr Calvert”, and Roy came quickly up the long room, past the small tables, towards the group of us standing by the fire. Lady Muriel’s face lightened, and she cried out: “Good evening, Roy. I almost thought you w
ere going to be late.”
“I’m never late, Lady Muriel,” said Roy. “You should know that, shouldn’t you? I am never late, unless it’s somewhere I don’t want to go. Then I usually appear on the wrong day.”
“You’re quite absurd,” said Lady Muriel, who did not use a hostess’ opening topic with Roy. “I wonder why I allow you in the house.”
“Because you know I like to come,” said Roy. He knew it pleased her – but each word was clear, natural, without pretence.
“You’ve learned to flatter too young,” she said with a happy crow of laughter.
“You’re suspicious of every nice thing you hear, Lady Muriel. Particularly when it’s true,” said Roy. “Now aren’t you?”
“I refuse to argue with you.” She laughed happily. Roy turned to Joan, and began teasing her about what she should do at the university next year: but he did not disarm her as easily as her mother.
Just then the Boscastles entered from one of the inner doors. They were an incongruous pair, but they had great presence and none of us could help watching them. Lord Boscastle was both massive and fat; there was muscular reserve underneath his ample, portly walk, and he was still light on his feet. His face did not match his comfortable body: a great beak of a nose stood out above a jutting jaw, with a stiff grey moustache between them. By his side, by the side of Lady Muriel and Joan, who were both strong women, his wife looked so delicate and frail that it seemed she ought to be carried. She was fragile, thin with an invalid’s thinness, and she helped herself along with a stick. In the other hand she carried a lorgnette, and, while she was limping slowly along, she was studying us all with eyes that, even at a distance, shone a brilliant porcelain blue. She had aged through illness, her skin was puckered and brown, she looked at moments like a delicate, humorous and distinguished monkey; but it was easy to believe that she had once been noted for her beauty.
I watched her as I was being presented to her, and as Roy’s turn came. He smiled at her: as though by instinct, she gave a coquettish flick with the lorgnette. I was sure he felt, as I had felt myself, that she had always been courted, that she still, on meeting a strange man at a party, heard the echoes of gallant words.
Lord Boscastle greeted us with impersonal cordiality, and settled down to his sherry. The last guest came, Mrs Seymour, a cousin of Lady Muriel’s who lived in Cambridge, and soon we set out to walk to the dining-room. This took some time, for the Lodge had been built, reconstructed, patched up and rebuilt for five hundred years, and we had to make our way along narrow passages, down draughty stairs, across landings: Lady Boscastle’s stick tapped away in front, and I talked to Mrs Seymour, who seemed gentle, inane, vague and given to enthusiasms. She was exactly like Lady Muriel’s concept of a suitable dinner partner for one of the younger fellows, I thought. In addition, Lady Muriel, to whom disapproval came as a natural response to most situations, disapproved with particular strength of my leaving my wife in London. She was not going to let me get any advantages through bad conduct, so far as she could help it.
Curiously enough, the first real excitement of the dinner arrived through Mrs Seymour. We sat round the table in the candlelight, admired the table which had come from the family house at Boscastle – “from our house,” said Lady Muriel with some superbity – admired the Bevill silver, and enjoyed ourselves with the food and wine. Both were excellent, for Lady Muriel had healthy appetites herself, and also was not prepared to let her dinners be outclassed by anything the college could do. She sat at the end of the table, stiff-backed, bold-eyed, satisfied that all was well with her side of the evening, inspecting her guests as though she were weighing their more obvious shortcomings.
She began by taking charge of the conversation herself. “Mr Eliot was putting forward an interesting point of view before dinner,” she said in an authoritative voice, and then puzzled us all by describing my opinions on Paul Morand. It seemed that I had a high opinion of his profundity. Joan questioned her fiercely, Roy soothed them both, but it was some time before we realised that she meant Mauriac. It was a kind of intellectual malapropism such as she frequently made. I thought, not for the first time, that she was at heart uninterested in all this talk of ideas and books – but she did it because it was due to her position, and nothing would have deterred her. Not in the slightest abashed, she repeated “Mauriac” firmly twice and was going ahead, when Mrs Seymour broke in: “Oh, I’d forgotten. I meant to tell you straightaway, but that comes of being late. I’ve always said that they ought to put an extra light on your dressing-table. Particularly in strange bedrooms–”
“Yes, Doris?” Lady Muriel’s voice rang out.
“I haven’t told you, have I?”
“You have certainly told us nothing since you arrived.”
“I thought I’d forgotten. Tom’s girl is engaged. It will be in The Times this week.”
The Boscastles and the Royces all knew the genealogy of “Tom’s girl”. For Mrs Seymour might be scatterbrained, but her breeding was the Boscastles’ own; she had married a Seymour, who was not much of a catch but was eminently “someone one could know”, and Tom was her husband’s brother. So Tom’s girl was taken seriously, even though Lord Boscastle had never met her, and Lady Muriel only once. She was part of the preserve. Abandoning in a hurry all abstract conversation, Lady Muriel plunged in with her whole weight. She sat more upright than ever and called out: “Who is the man?”
“He’s a man called Houston Eggar.”
Lord Boscastle filled the chair on his sister’s right. He finished a sip of hock, put down the glass, and asked: “Who?”
“Houston Eggar.”
Lady Muriel and Lord Boscastle looked at each other. In a faint, tired, disconsolate tone Lord Boscastle said: “I’m afraid I don’t know the fellow.”
“I can help,” said the Master briskly from the other end of the table. “He’s a brother-in-law of the Dean of this college. He’s dined in hall once or twice.”
“I’m afraid,” said Lord Boscastle, “that I don’t know who he is.”
There was a moment’s silence, and I looked at the faces round the table. Lord Boscastle was holding his glass up to the candlelight and staring unconcernedly through it. Roy watched with an expression solemn, demure, enquiring: but I caught his eye for a second, and saw a gleam of pure glee: each word was passing into his mimic’s ear. By his side, Joan was gazing down fixedly at the table, the poise of her neck and strong shoulders full of anger, scorn and the passionate rebellion of youth. Mrs Seymour seemed vaguely troubled, as though she had mislaid her handbag; she patted her hair, trying to get a strand into place. On my right Lady Boscastle had mounted her lorgnette and focused the others one by one.
It was she who asked the next question.
“Could you tell us a little about this Dean of yours, Vernon?” she said to the Master, in a high, delicate, amused voice.
“He’s quite a good Dean,” said the Master. “He’s very useful on the financial side. Colleges need their Marthas, you know. The unfortunate thing is that one can never keep the Marthas in their place. Before you can look round, you find they’re running the college and regarding you as a frivolous and irresponsible person.”
“What’s the Dean’s name?” said Lord Boscastle, getting back to the point.
“Chrystal.”
“It sounds Scotch,” said Lord Boscastle dubiously.
“I believe, Lord Boscastle,” Roy put in, seeming tentative and diffident, “that he comes from Bedford.”
Lord Boscastle shook his head.
“I know his wife, of course,” said Lady Muriel. “Naturally I have to know the wives of the fellows. She’s a nice quiet little thing. But there’s nothing special about her. She’s an Eggar, whoever they may be.”
“She’s the sister of this man you’re telling us about,” Lord Boscastle remarked, half to himself. “I should have said he was nothing out of the ordinary, shouldn’t you have said so?”
His social judgments
became more circuitous the nearer they came to anyone the company knew: Lady Muriel, more direct and unperceptive than her brother, had never quite picked up the labyrinthine phrases with which he finally placed an acquaintance of someone in the room; but in effect she and he said the same thing.
Mrs Seymour, who was still looking faintly distressed, suddenly clapped her hands.
“Of course, I’d forgotten to tell you. I’ve just remembered about the post office place–”
“Yes, Doris?” said Lady Muriel inexorably.
“Houston’s a brilliant young man. He’s in the Foreign Office. They said he was first secretary” – Mrs Seymour gabbled rapidly in case she should forget – “at that place which looks after the post, the place in Switzerland, I forget–”
“Berne,” Roy whispered.
“Berne.” She smiled at him gratefully.
“How old is your Houston?” asked Lady Boscastle.
“About forty, I should say. And I think that’s a very nice and sensible age,” said Mrs Seymour with unexpected firmness. “I always wished my husband had been older–”
“If he’s only a first secretary at forty, I should not think he was going so terribly far.” Lady Boscastle directed her lorgnette at her husband. “I remember one years younger. We were in Warsaw. Yes, he was clever.” A faint, sarcastic, charming smile crossed her face. Lord Boscastle smiled back – was I imagining it, or was there something humble, unconfident, about that smile?
At any rate, he began to address the table again.
“I shouldn’t have thought that the Foreign Office was specially distinguished nowadays. I’ve actually known one or two people who went in,” he added as though he were straining our credulity.
While he thought no one was looking, Roy could not repress a smile of delight. He could no longer resist taking a hand: his face composed again, he was just beginning to ask Lord Boscastle a question, when Lady Muriel cut across him.