Friends and Lovers (30 page)

“And if it were fashionable to be a Liberal?”

David shook his head.

“There isn’t enough violence in Liberalism for Breen,” he said.

“He has a mountainous inferiority complex. He has got to justify himself by extremes. He thinks strong methods prove strength. You know, if the revolution he is always talking about did come, he wouldn’t find that position of power which he thinks he will get. He isn’t good enough. Funny to see all these self-appointed controllers being left in the rank and file.”

“Very funny,” Marain said, but he looked at David sharply.

David was not only thinking of the Breens in this world, he knew.

David handed back the sheet of paper to Burns, who was silent but interested.

He had become accustomed by this time to the peculiar English way of argument, to the hidden conflict, the battle of innuendo, the gently placed barbs. Marain perhaps was just annoyed that David was so damned independent.

Marain usually dominated the men he met. Dominated? Burns looked at Marain critically. He felt the blurb in his pocket, and remembered how many of his suggessions for it had been side-tracked, so gently, so smilingly. Hell, he thought, we’ll see about this.

Burns rose to his feet.

“Must go now,” he said to David. They exchanged smiles. Marain looked slightly startled for one moment that he had not been the first to leave.

And then he recovered himself, and with his usual brief farewell remarks left the room. At least, he would be the first to do that.

It didn’t matter to Burns. His grin broadened. As he went downstairs by himself—Marain was showing his displeasure by walking determinedly on ahead of him—he was crumpling the blurb for Experiment in his pocket as he reminded himself to see more of Bosworth.

Chapter Twenty-two.

David listened to the dying footsteps, and thought about Marain. It was a strange feeling to have decided so suddenly that friendship was no longer friendship. Either Marain has changed or I have changed, he thought. Once his clever-cruel quickness was amusing, even when it was directed against me. Now he is becoming rather a bore: you can always depend on him to make remarks in character every bit as much as Fenton-Stevens. And he is becoming rather simple-minded: he judges people by their politics.

That alone isn’t enough. It isn’t a man’s political beliefs which make him a good or bad man: it is the way he uses his beliefs, the actions which his own humanity will make him do or refuse to do. Behaviour, not belief, is the standard. A man may talk and talk, and be a fake. A man may think he proves a lot by admiring poetry, smiling at children, growing sentimental over charming songs, but he proves a lot more by ignoring or tolerating violence and cruelty. (This is where Father would start the fourth chapter of his lectures on the problem of Germany. ) If Marain would only see the whole of a man, and not just—hell and damnation, why waste any more of my energy in coping with Marain? I’ve changed, David thought. I just don’t give a damn what Marain thinks of me. He felt like a man who has decided to clear out a lot of useless furniture from his house and, equally amazed at his own temerity and at the improvement, wonders why he postponed the decision so long. It seems easy enough now that it has been made.

David picked up his letter to Penny which he would post on his way to dinner in Hall. He began thinking about her, and a smile came to his lips, and his whole face softened. He no longer felt dogmatic and stupid and inadequate, as Marain had left him.

“You are a tonic, darling,” he said to the photograph with its warm smile and laughing eyes. And that was true, a fact which would seem absurd to the cynical. He had only to start thinking about Penny, and all his worries—his father’s health, his work, his possible inefficiency in his future job with Fairbaim if he got the job, Margaret, the lack of money, himself, and what he believed or couldn’t believe—all these took proper proportion in his mind. He could face any worry if he had Penny. He tried to remember the inflexion in her voice when he had said something quite preposterous, and she would laugh and say

“David!” half believing because it was he who had said it, half sceptical as she saw the beginning of a smile in his eyes. He bent down and kissed the photograph.

Outside the lane was dark and quiet. The row of tall, thin houses with their deep, sharp-pointed roofs formed a curving wall of shadows, pressing forward into the lane to blot it out. Round the corner the busy little street was quietening, but there were still signs of life in it. Later it would fall like the lane into its deep night sleep. (Streets are like children, David thought: the small ones go to bed first. ) Patches of yellow light came from windows, wide open in spite of the weather. There was the sound of voices and of gramophone records from successful sherry parties which had forgotten dinner. On the pavement, ahead of David and behind him, were the quick footsteps of undergraduates who had delayed too long and now must hurry towards their colleges. Like David, too, they wore no hat or overcoat, although there was a dank cold in the air and a chill from the wet pavement.

They had slung round their necks, and over their shoulders, the crumpled black cotton gowns (hip-length for commoners, knee-length for scholars) which they must wear to enter their college dining-hall. Those whose colleges were some distance away had borrowed bicycles, and were pedalling determinedly up the imperceptible hill (you never noticed it unless you were late) with bodies bent forward over the handlebars and the black gowns slipping off their shoulders. David increased his pace: he must be later than he had imagined. One always was, in Oxford.

This has all become a part of my life, he thought: I accept it as if it were absolutely normal. At first it had seemed strange—the old houses and crowding towers, the sky filled with medieval spires—and when it had been strange there had been a constant but well-concealed admiration and awe.

Every one felt that way to begin with. And then those who liked phrases would begin to speak of wedding-cake architecture and bastard Gothic. It wouldn’t do any of us any harm, he suddenly thought, if we were made to spend our fifth term in some manufacturing town with a Victorian University raising its horrors in a street of smoke and grime. Beauty deserved better than casual acceptance. Perhaps it was time to end this stage of his life. He had a short stab of remorse as he realized he was excited instead af saddened by the idea. For he had been happy here.

The bell was ending its three minutes’ warning as he passed through the vaulted portcullis gate into Holywell College. A handful of undergraduates were still lingering in front of the notice boards on one side of the deep entrance, and a couple were trying to borrow a gown for Hall from the Porter’s Lodge opposite. He entered the cloisters which led round the green quadrangle, and then slackened his pace as he saw the white-haired, shoulder-bent figure of the Senior Tutor in front of him. Perhaps you had to be as old as the Senior Tutor to feel sadness when a stage of your life was almost over, for then each stage could be the final one.

The mournful bell slowed down, as if its strength were ebbing away, and then stopped with a small, dim echo, leaving a foolish silence hanging in the air.

There was a sudden rush of running footsteps behind David, as the men at the notice-board scattered towards the Hall. The Senior Tutor’s flapping black gown disappeared into the Senior Common Room’s doorway, and David began running too. The large oak door was shut before he reached it. This is what comes of thinking of old age, David reminded himself, and waited with the others until Grace had been said and the heavy door was opened once more. It would close again after the first course had been served, and those who came then would have to find dinner elsewhere.

David’s sett was at the Scholars’ table. McLllwain and Halsey had kept a place for him, he noted, and remembered suddenly that they had arranged to sit beside each other tonight. There was that matter of discussing the programme for the next Musical Union concert, when Myra Hess had been invited to play. He had forgotten all about it, and he had almost turned away from the hall door as he had had to wait outside, and probably would have if he had had enough loose cash in his pocket for a dinner at the George or the Clarendon—he had given up signing cheques; they had a way of giving you an extra sinking in the pit of your stomach when you opened your bank statement.

But the clatter of plates as the scouts served the long tables at a half-run four courses were served and eaten within thirty minutes) helped to cover his momentary confusion.

“Thought you had forgotten,” Halsey said cheerily, and joined David’s smile at such an impossibility.

David listened to McLllwain, talking with Scots intensity about the merits of Bach and the demerits of Delius (Halsey being very pro-Delius at the moment), but his mind followed its own direction.

Overhead the high ceiling formed a deep vault, dark and withdrawn.

The shaded table lamps lit up the rows of faces, intent on mulligatawny soup and light remarks. (The two could go together it seemed. ) The enormous fireplace at one side of the hall had its outsized portion of tree-trunk as fuel, and the green baize screens were drawn to protect the spines of those undergraduates whose bench was too near the fire Those who sat at the other side of the room wore thick pull overs under their tweed jackets to keep them warm. At the end of the hall, opposite the doorway, was a raised dais when the dons’ white shirts bulged stiffly out from their low-cu dinner jackets. The junior Fellow, who voted Labour and di< not believe in all that conspicuous nonsense, was appearin; unnoticeable in his checked tweed jacket, red tie, and deter mined nonchalance. The three Distinguished Guests of thi evening sat with the dons and listened to the conversatiol which went evenly on, in spite of the rising spate of noisi from the undergraduates’ tables: the voices always rose afte: the second course, when hunger was partly abated by souj and fish.

David looked at the High Table, tried to distinguish thi three guests, wondered what they thought about this zoo listened to Halsey beside him.

Once Halsey and McLllwaii started arguing it was rather like watching two men sawin; sawdust. Still, they enjoyed it, and they never allowed it to interfere with the decisions they had already agreed upon. I would be Bach.

It would be the Chromatic Fantasia am Fugue. McLllwain and Halsey were just working up to that it their own way. David had no objections: this was an evenin; when he enjoyed being in a crowd of men and feeling corn pletely alone. It was the only pleasant way of feeling alone To be really alone and feel alone, that was the hour to b< avoided. Now this separation of himself from the crowdec hall was a luxury: he could step back into it when hi wanted. He watched the three D. G. “s without appearing t( notice them, and wondered about them. At this moment the] were alone too. Really alone in an inexplicable madhouse” Or just feeling alone and comfortably amused as the; watched it?

Certainly the D. G. “s were less successful than the dons ir ignoring the peculiarities of the young men. The most distinguished of them was a professor from Germany, a Jew who had been declared intolerable, who knew more than mos people could understand about nebulae. The small thin from was the Middle East expert who combined exploring wit!

his thirty years of study of the Turkic group of languages The third D. G. was a Permanent UnderSecretary: rathe: heavy-going, this one, as the Senior Tutor afterwards remarked to his colleagues. But he, at least, had been an undergraduate at Oxford and had known what to expect. He might even be telling himself that undergraduates were not what they had been. He certainly did not approve of the way they dressed. Thirty years ago you could have told a man’s income by the cut of his coat. The War had made a lot of changes, a lot of changes. He looked at the junior don’s red tie, and then took comfort in the fact that the linen was still excellent on the table and that the Charles II silver was displayed.

He took further consolation in the rows of Queen Anne candlesticks and the admirable Montrachet which he sipped from the crystal goblet standing beside the Doulton plate. The Senior Common Room still had its china specially made, he noted with satisfaction as he scraped up the last mouthful of fillet and mushrooms, and reached the College arms. He ignored the fact that the junior don was drinking beer like some undergraduate, and concentrated on the fact that the beer was held by a George II tankard. Perhaps George III. No, George” II.

The Turkic scholar was telling a very good story about a Rumanian countess at a dinner-party in Vienna. He would have been amused if he had known he was the only D. G. who had raised any comment. It had come from one undergraduate sitting at the Hearties’ table. (Those in training for rowing sat at this separate table, where they had their special beefsteaks and no starches. ) “Doesn’t look as if he could have lasted eight days in the desert with only a handful of dates, does he?” The tone was derogatory, but the highest compliment was intended. No one said anything about his lasting thirty years in Turkic languages.

The foreign nebulist merely looked slightly bewildered. Afterwards, in talking to his friends, he would probably be very amused. At the moment he was startled and shocked. All that waste of food, enough to feed a hundred men in a concentration camp for a day. And the science don beside him seemed to be determined to talk about some new experiments at Cambridge with heavy water. Do as the Romans do, the refugee scholar reminded himself, and tried to follow the almost inaudible English voice at his elbow. But he flinched when a roll, and then a pat of butter, was thrown through the air.

Now the circus has really begun, David was thinking.

There had been a pause in the running service of roast beef. The first piece of roll had been thrown from one table to another, and a reply was given in kind. Next, the pats of butter were catapulted from the blades of table-knives. The first one sailed over his head, aimed at the table behind him. Its near-victim retaliated, aimed too well, and was given a sconce for his success. The quart of heavy ale, to be drunk without pause for breath, was placed in front of him. He did not manage to drink it all, and he had to pass it round the table—and pay for it, too—as his forfeit. David smiled as he watched the Fresher’s obvious chagrin at his failure. And probably he had been practising for weeks in private. David glanced again at High Table.