The Noonday Devil

by Alan Judd

  The relief on leaving was as much physical as mental. The sun was already warm and the streets were busier. Her brown eyes rested on his for a moment.

  ‘You didn’t have to leave with me,’ she said. ‘All those lovely girls. You should have stayed.’

  ‘I’d sooner have breakfast than be it.’

  ‘David would have been in his element. It’s about the only thing he’d get up early for. Doesn’t know what he missed.’

  Anne and David lived in Norham Gardens, so she and Robert headed up past Keble. There was an old Daimler Majestic parked in a side road but she wanted to go through the parks, so he had to confine himself to a lingering look. The parks were empty save for a solitary jogger. The grass was wet and the dew glistened on the Japanese miniature trees.

  ‘Do you still go for your runs?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes, every day now.’

  ‘That’s a bit much, isn’t it? Why so often?’

  ‘If I didn’t overdo it I wouldn’t do it at all.’

  ‘I think that’s rather suspicious. It’s also rather typical.’

  They walked slowly, her sandals making a soft sound in the grass.

  ‘Still the same date?’ he asked.

  ‘Of course it’s the same. It’s an estimate. It may be right or wrong but it doesn’t change.’

  ‘I keep thinking of it as the projected arrival date for a round the world yacht race. You know, something that changes with the conditions.’

  ‘Just as well it doesn’t.’ The jogger padded past them. ‘Do you go much faster than that?’

  ‘Depends how much I want to hurt myself.’

  She laughed. ‘Oh, dear.’

  Within sight of the Cherwell they turned into a passage that gave on to the front of Lady Margaret Hall. A bald, irritible-looking man in a car asked them the way to the Cherwell Boat House. Anne directed him, leaning forward with one hand on the car and the other on her stomach. She was elegant and decisive, which made Robert feel superfluous.

  ‘I had breakfast there with Tim on Sunday,’ he said afterwards. ‘He’s been there every Sunday this term. Always takes someone. It starts at midday so you punt for an hour or two first and then come in and have fried eggs with black sausages and brandy and coffee and the papers. Nice way to start the day. In fact, it fills it. You’re no good for anything else.’ He glanced quickly at her, trying to remember whether he had talked in the same terms the previous year or had perhaps even been there with her. ‘Why don’t you come next Sunday? If you’re not doing anything.’

  She did not look up. ‘You’re very eclectic, you and Tim. It’s strange because you don’t have much else in common. You both collect sensations. Yet you always seem remote and detached, separate from them, even when you say you enjoy them.’

  He raised his eyes to the blue above the rooftops. ‘I need notice of remarks like that.’

  ‘The trouble is, it encourages other people to take the same attitude towards you.’ She took his arm. ‘Don’t worry, only teasing. I wouldn’t say it if I – if I didn’t know you well.’

  It was a quiet street of substantial Edwardian houses and overgrown gardens. Hers, partly hidden by a tree, had a broken gate and a crumbling wall. In the garden were bikes belonging to the student lodgers they took in to help Dr Barry with his maintenance payments.

  ‘Come in and have some proper breakfast,’ she said. ‘No brandy, though.’

  David Barry was sitting in the large untidy kitchen eating toast and reading the Guardian. He was a lively, iconoclastic Welshman with a restless energy, nervous and intellectual. His eyes were never still and he was renowned for his quick tongue, though his wit was perhaps due not so much to his being more perceptive than other people as less kind. He taught philosophy, in which Robert was to sit one paper. He greeted them both now with abrupt and impersonal cheerfulness.

  ‘It won’t bite, Robert, it’s only Nescafé. Sit down.’

  It was not the first time Robert had been with the two of them together. He did not fear or dislike it but found, slightly to his irritation, that he still talked with unusual rapidity as if to avoid gaps. He wondered if they did the same. They discussed the May morning ceremony and the party. Dr Barry agreed that he would have liked the girls and smiled mischievously. Robert talked about his play, partly because it was something he could talk about and partly to avoid discussing work, until it struck him that it might well prompt the question. After that they talked about the international situation. A plump girl wearing a Yale T-shirt walked in, said ‘Hi’ three times, took a carton of milk from the fridge and walked out.

  ‘That’s Yale Gail,’ said Dr Barry. ‘Doing Early Middle Ages, like her waistline.’ Anne sighed and said she wished he wouldn’t. He went on talking and reading the paper simultaneously, peppering his conversation with comments about the Government. His and Anne’s remarks to each other were few and off-hand, almost curt, a habit that Robert had at first thought was marriage shorthand for an understanding already reached. Anne’s manner was colder and sharper than usual.

  When she presented her cheek for Robert’s goodbye kiss she seemed perfunctory and distracted. He did not respond but stepped back, forcing her to look at him.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said.

  ‘Lovely to see you.’

  ‘Are you all right?’

  She kissed him directly on the lips. ‘Sweet of you to ask.’

  On leaving Robert, Tim had paused on Magdalen Bridge to look at the water. He never crossed a bridge without doing so, and he stared for some minutes at the slow eddies before pushing his bike towards St Hilda’s College. He chained the bike to a railing some distance from the porter’s lodge. The iron gates were locked but there was a smaller side gate that was not. No porter was evident. Once through the gate he quickly crossed the wet lawn towards one of the newer residential buildings. The door was locked. After looking around for a few seconds, he climbed the adjacent garden wall and pulled himself up to an open first-floor window that gave on to the stairs.

  Inside he moved swiftly up two more flights and into one of the carpeted corridors where he paused and listened, very slightly out of breath. There was no sound of anyone stirring nor of anyone in the loo. He walked to the door at the end, cautiously turned the handle and stepped inside. There was a close, cloying feminine smell and he could hear breathing. His heart thumped against his ribs but his mind was filled with a fatalistic calm.

  Her bed was round the corner. He stepped softly forward and paused. Suzanne lay curled up on her side, the blankets thrown off and only a sheet covering her. Her hips bulged surprisingly and her black hair was spread across the pillow. Her breathing was regular, her pale face half-hidden by her forearm. He sat carefully on the edge of the bed, whispered her name, waited, then spoke it. He put his hand on her shoulder, feeling the warmth of her skin and the slight rise and fall of her body. Sparrows squabbled on the windowsill and in the street someone started a car. After a while he withdrew his hand and very delicately pulled up the sheet so that it covered her shoulder. On the way out he noticed two pairs of her tights hanging to dry over the sink. He stopped and tied all four legs together, taking some minutes to form two linked bows, before creeping back down the corridor.

  In the late afternoon the sun filled Robert’s room with a warm glow before sinking behind the New Building. The skyline beyond was formed by Wytham Wood, and when the sun sank beneath it the sky became a vivid red with ragged shreds of clouds scattered as if by a bomb burst.

  Robert stood in the exact centre of his room, staring through the window at the denizens of the New Building, whom he could study like zoo animals. He pressed with both hands on the pile of unread books on the table before him until roused by the college clock striking the quarter. He went into his bedroom, changed hurriedly into running kit, loped across the quad, dodged the people milling about the porter’s lodge proffering leaflets and exaltations about Saudi Arabia and headed up towards the parks.

  He always
ran alone and for anything between twenty minutes and an hour. It was partly because he had acquired the habit of fitness, partly because it brought mental relief. It was not possible to think when out of breath.

  Once through the parks he crossed the Cherwell on an arched bridge and ran along the bank, then cut away down a cattle track by a hedge. The ground was hard and rugged and the cropped grass patchy and brown. The willow-lined ditches were dry.

  The real satisfaction, the punishment, came when he was over the bridge and on the way back. He sprinted the last quarter-mile or so. To keep going he concentrated on each straining muscle in turn, identifying and separating the pain, making it an object of study. Over the last hundred yards it was the tightness in his chest and the leaden reluctance of his thighs that were most insistent. He pushed and pushed again, knowing his body would go faster if only he made it.

  When at last he tottered through the park gates relief did not come instantly. But the knowledge that it would within seconds was the best part, better than the relief itself because that was valued less the more it was felt. He knew the whole business took a measure of self-hatred; a thought he did not find displeasing.

  Chapter 2

  In the hall that night Robert was not in the speaking mood. He sat with his shoulders hunched and his elbows on the table, turning his dessert spoon over and over. His gown was filthy, a result not only of neglect but also of the custom of wearing gowns as protection against the soup and gravy liberally spilled by the waiters and waitresses. The college had decided by referendum the year before that gowns should remain compulsory at dinner. In any case, a dirty gown was a sign of seniority.

  Dinner was both formal and hurried. The undergraduates sat at long benches, elbow to elbow, in a discomfort that did not encourage lingering. Table lamps left the beamed roof and portraits of presidents and benefactors in cavernous gloom. There was a minstrels’ gallery, used now for storing chairs and occasionally for a college drama production.

  Robert had kept a place beside him. Tim slipped into it with the briefest glance of acknowledgement just before Mr Farrow, the butler, announced the entrance of High Table. The two hundred or so gowned figures then stood at their benches, looking from behind like beetles balanced on their tails, while the dons walked the length of the hall, shoes creaking, gowns rustling. When they were assembled at high table the President nodded to a classics scholar who stood at the head of the nearest of the low tables. The scholar read the grace in Latin, everyone sat and the hubbub resumed.

  It was green pea soup again. Robert said nothing as the bowl was almost thrown in front of him, heaving like some primeval matter. As always, he seemed indifferent to food, eating anything and never commenting, perhaps never noticing. He was sometimes abstracted, sometimes aggressively energetic, remote and intense by turn.

  Tim also contemplated his soup in silence. Alone among undergraduates he had his gown cleaned regularly and wore a tie for dinner. Despite his attempts to make meals bearable, though, college food remained the greatest test of his willingness to accept college life. The unremitting stodginess, ubiquitous sprouts, unconquerable meat, the smell of centuries of communal cooking seeping from the stones and woodwork and the sheer noise of students feeding had more than once driven him to seek lodgings outside; but always he came back. He seemed to like to feel a part of it all, though he took very little part in it, and in any case could well afford to eat out whenever he liked.

  The soup bowls were cleared away and the dinner plates banged down. Robert started fiddling with his spoon again. Tim stared at High Table, still silent but suddenly attentive.

  ‘See the lady?’ he asked eventually.

  Robert looked in vain. It was a night when undergraduates were not allowed guests.

  ‘High Table, next to the Chaplain,’ added Tim.

  The line of donnish faces, variously battered, was softened in the centre by a very pretty young woman with shining black hair tied in a bun. She wore subfusc, which was black skirt and gown, white blouse and black bow tie. On her left was the college President, on her right the Chaplain, who was almost as pretty in a different way. It took Robert a moment or two to recognize Suzanne.

  ‘Did you know she was coming?’ he asked.

  ‘No.’

  ‘But what’s she doing on High Table? Did the Chaplain invite her?’

  ‘Looks like it.’

  ‘Well, that should be reassuring.’

  ‘She goes for the religious. There’s that monk at Christ Church.’

  ‘Did you see her this morning?’

  ‘That was all. I didn’t wake her.’ Tim’s manner was ironic, self-deprecating. He appeared deliberately to undercut whatever seriousness he might feel about anything.

  ‘Very romantic of you,’ said Robert after a while.

  ‘That’s what I thought. I’d like her to know about it but if I had to tell her it would spoil it. I left a small sign of my presence, though.’

  A hunk of bread landed on the table and another hit the wall behind, followed by a cheer from one of the tables by the door. It was becoming a rowdy night. Someone was sconced during the main course. The banging of spoons on tables while the man who was challenged stood on his bench and downed his beer put an end to all conversation. Years of the custom had flattened the bottom of college spoons; another cause of spillage.

  ‘They hardly ever do it properly,’ said a bespectacled mathematician called Marlowe. ‘You’re supposed to have to apply to High Table in a classical tongue for permission to sconce and they have to reply in a classical tongue. If your challenger is junior to you in college or is sitting farther than you from High Table you may apply to be released from the sconce. In a classical tongue, of course. People never seem to bother.’

  ‘Any classical tongue?’ asked a small dark man called Orpwood. ‘Classical Chinese?’

  ‘If you like; at High Table they may respond in whichever they choose. Tonight it will doubtless be Latin since the President will take it upon himself and his Greek is notorious.’

  Orpwood nodded. He lived on Robert’s staircase, had bulging dark eyes, was balding prematurely and was often mimicked because of his high eager voice. He belonged to a Marxist group opposed to Western intervention in the Middle Eastern crisis. During his first two years he had been much mocked but by the third his humourless persistence and refusal to be daunted had wearied his detractors. Few people were seriously interested in politics, anyway, and there were others besides Orpwood to laugh at or argue about. His doggedness won acceptance, even respect. While the spoon-banging increased in rhythm and volume he studied a sheet of paper, surreptitiously at first. When the sconcing was finished and the cheers had died down he addressed those near him.

  ‘Would you be willing to sign this manifesto for peace? It’s part of the international student campaign to put pressure on capitalist governments to keep out of the Middle East. The more signatures we can get the more chance of persuading our own government not to drag us into nuclear war.’

  ‘What about the Russians?’ asked Marlowe. ‘Are you petitioning them not to interfere in the Middle East?’

  ‘It’s an international campaign, as I said, and the Soviet student organization is bringing pressure to bear on the Soviet government.’ The attempt to be both discreet and urgent made Orpwood’s voice squeak.

  ‘I don’t believe that.’

  ‘That’s because you don’t want to.’ Orpwood waved his petition across the table. ‘Look, what I’m talking about is the choice between staying alive and nuclear annihilation. What’s the point of everyone being killed? What’s worth dying for? Not a few barrels of oil – no one believes that. Anyway, the Third World needs the oil more than we do. We’re robbing them of their resources.’

  Marlowe shook his head. ‘What rubbish. We’re not robbing anyone of anything. The Third World you’re talking about has hardly any industry and if we who do have industry can’t buy oil we can’t produce anything. And if we don’t prod
uce anything we’ll have nothing to sell to the Third World to help them build up their industry. Nor would we be able to buy their goods or give them any credit or aid.’

  ‘We’re robbing them, we’re exploiting them. This is a war against imperialism as well as a fight for our own survival.’

  ‘You’re at war with the world, that’s your trouble.’

  Marlowe pushed the petition away but the man next to him signed and passed it on. Marlowe watched, then continued more irritably than before. ‘Anyway, all this talk about the so-called Third World is ridiculous. There’s only one world and it contains rich, less rich, poor, very poor and starving. You can also find the same categories in many so-called Third World countries. “So-called”, because to say a country is part of the Third World simply means it is given money by other countries. It may be comparatively rich and well-organized like Singapore or Taiwan or it may be hopeless like India or almost any African country. And what about the first and the second worlds? No one ever mentions them. Who even knows what the first world would be?’

  ‘Switzerland, California and All Souls,’ said Tim, pushing the paper to Robert.

  The others laughed. Orpwood watched the paper arrive in front of Robert.

  ‘Robert?’

  Robert shook his head.

  Orpwood laughed abruptly and nervously. ‘You’d risk nuclear war rather than stop interfering with other countries and maybe going without a few luxury goods?’

  ‘The only way to put an end to war is to put an end to people.’

  ‘Don’t you care about being blown up, annihilated?’

  Robert smiled. ‘Not much.’

  Orpwood smiled back briefly, then got up and moved on to other tables where his thin bent figure bobbed, pleaded and exhorted.

  Tim turned to Robert. ‘Many a true word.’

  ‘Who says I was jesting?’

  ‘Would you really not mind?’

  ‘Probably. But I might not. Would you?’

  Tim lifted his hands, palms upward.