Books Do Furnish a Room

1

Reverting to the university at forty, one immediately recaptured all the crushing melancholy of the undergraduate condition. As the train drew up at the platform, before the local climate had time to impair health, academic contacts disturb the spirit, a more imminent gloom was re-established, its sinewy grip in a flash making one young again. Depressive symptoms, menacing in all haunts of youth, were in any case easily aroused at this period, to be accepted as delayed action of the last six years. The odd thing was how distant the recent past had also become, the army now as stylized in the mind — to compare another triumphal frieze — as the legionaries of Trajan’s Column, exercising, sacrificing, sweating at their antique fatigue, silent files on eternal parade to soundless military music. Nevertheless, shades from those days still walked abroad. Only a week before, the peak of a French general’s khaki kepi, breaking rather too abruptly through the winter haze of Piccadilly, had by conditioned reflex jerked my right hand from its overcoat pocket in preparation for a no longer consonant salute, counterfeiting the gesture of a deserter who has all but given himself away. A residuum of the experience was inevitable.

Meanwhile, traditional textures of existence were laboriously patched together in an attempt to reaffirm some sort of personal identity, however blurred. Even if — as some thought — the let-up were merely temporary, it was no less welcome, though the mood after the earlier conflict — summarized by a snatch Ted Jeavons liked to hum when in poor form — was altogether absent:

‘Après la guerre,

There’ll be a good time everywhere.’

That did not hinder looking forward to engrossment during the next few weeks amongst certain letters and papers deposited in the libraries here. Solitude would be a luxury after the congestions of wartime, archaic folios a soothing drug. War left, on the one hand, a passionate desire to tackle a lot of work: on the other, never to do any work again. It was a state of mind Robert Burton — about whom I was writing a book — would have well understood. Irresolution appealed to him as one of the myriad forms of Melancholy, although he was, of course, concerned in the main with no mere temporary depression or fidgetiness, but a ‘chronic or continued disease, a settled humour’. Still, post-war melancholy might have rated a short sub-section in the great work:

THE ANATOMY OF MELANCHOLY

What it is, with all the Kindes, Causes, Symptomes, Prognostickes, and severall cures of it. Three Maine Partitions with their severall Sections, Members and Sub-sections, Philosophically, Medicinally, Historically, Opened and cut up by Democritus Junior. With a Satyricall Preface, conducing to the following Discourse. Anno Dom. 1621.

The title page showed not only Burton’s own portrait in ruff and skull cap, but also figures illustrative of his theme; love-madness; hypochondriasis; religious melancholy. The emblems of jealousy and solitude were there too, together with those sovereign cures for melancholy and madness, borage and hellebore. Burton had long been a favourite of mine. A study of him would be a change from writing novels. The book was to be called Borage and Hellebore.

As the forlorn purlieus of the railway-station end of the town gave place to colleges, reverie, banal if you like, though eminently Burtonesque, turned towards the relatively high proportion of persons known pretty well at an earlier stage of life, both here and elsewhere, now dead, gone off their rocker, withdrawn into states of existence they — or I — had no wish to share. The probability was that even without cosmic upheaval some kind of reshuffle has to take place halfway through life, a proposition borne out by the autobiographies arriving thick and fast — three or four at a time at regular intervals — for review in one of the weeklies. At this very moment my bag was weighed down by several of these volumes, to be dealt with in time off from the seventeenth century: Purged Not in Lethe … A Stockbroker in Sandals … Slow on the Feather … Moss off a Rolling Stone … chronicles of somebody or other’s individual fate, on the whole unenthralling enough, except insomuch as every individual’s story has its enthralling aspect, though the essential pivot was usually omitted or obscured by most autobiographers.

However, nearly all revealed, if not explicitly in every case, a similar reorientation towards the sixth climacteric, their narrative supporting, on the whole, evidence already noticeably piling up, that friends, if required at all in the manner of the past, must largely be reassembled at about this milestone. The changeover might improve consistency, even quality, but certainly lost in intimacy; anyway that peculiar kind of intimacy that is consoling when you are young, though probably too vulnerable to withstand the ever increasing self-regard of later years.

Accommodation was in college. The place looked much the same as ever. Only one porter, his face unfamiliar, was on duty at the lodge. After studying a list for a long time, he signified a distant staircase for the rooms allotted. The traditional atmosphere, tenuously poised between a laxly run boarding-school and seedy residential club, now leant more emphatically towards the former type of institution. The rooms, arctic as of old, evidently belonged to a fairly austere young man, whose only picture was an unframed photograph of a hockey team. It stood curling on the mantelpiece. In the bookcase, a lot of works on economics terminated with St John Clarke’s Dust Thou Art, rather a recondite one about the French Revolution, which might be pleasurable to reassess critically. I pushed on into the bedroom. Here a crisis declared itself. The bed was unmade. Only a sombrely stained blue-grey mattress, folded in three, lay on the rusty wires of the frame. Back at the porter’s lodge, the inconceivable difficulties of remedying lack of bedclothes at this hour were radically discussed. Later, in hall, a few zombie-like figures collected together to consume a suitably zombie-sustaining repast.

This was the opening of a routine of days in the library, nights collating notes, the monotony anodyne. One became immediately assimilated with other dim, disembodied, unapproachable entities, each intent on his own enigmatic preoption, who flit through the cobbled lanes and gothic archways of a university in vacation. It was what Burton himself called ‘a silent, sedentary, solitary private life’, and it well suited me during the middle of the week. For weekends, I returned to London. Once Killick, a hearty rugby-playing philosophy don of my college, now grunting and purple, came bustling up the street, a pile of books under his arm, and I accosted him. There were explanations. Killick issued an abstracted invitation to dinner. The following week, when I turned up, it was to be told Professor Killick had gone to Manchester to give two lectures. This oversight hardly came as a surprise. In a city of shadows, appointments were bound to be kept in a shadowy fashion.

At the same time something very different, something perfectly substantial, not shadowy at all, lay ahead as not to be too long postponed, even if a latent unwillingness to face that fact might delay taking the plunge. A moral reckoning had to be discharged. As the days passed, the hypnotic pull to pay a call on Sillery grew increasingly strong, disinclination — that was, of course, far too strong a word, indeed not the right word at all — scarcely lessening, so much as the Sillery magnetism itself gathering force. Pretendedly heedless enquiries revealed that, although retired for some time from all administrative duties in his own college, Sillery still retained his old rooms, receiving visitors willingly, even avidly, it was reported, with so far as possible the traditional elements of welcome.

To enter Sillery’s sitting-room after twenty years was to drive a relatively deep fissure through variegated seams of Time. The faintly laundry-cupboard odour, as one came through the door, generated in turn the taste of the rock-buns dispensed at those tea-parties, their gritty indeterminate flavour once more dehydrating the palate. The props round about designed for Sillery’s nightly performance remained almost entirely unaltered. Eroded loose-covers of immemorially springless armchairs still precariously endured; wide perforations frayed long since in the stretch of carpet before the door, only a trifle more hazardous to the unwary walker. As might be expected, the framed photographs of jaunty young men had appreciably increased, several of the new arrivals in uniform, one in a turban, two or three American.

In this room, against this background, Sillery’s machinations, such as they were, had taken shape for half a century. Here a thousand undergraduate attitudes had been penitentially acted out. Youth, dumb with embarrassment, breathless with exhibitionism, stuttering with nerves, inarticulate with conceit; the socially flamboyant, the robustly brawny, the crudely uninstructed, the palely epicene; one and all had obediently leapt through the hoop at Sillery’s ringmaster behest; one and all submitted themselves to the testing flame of this burning fiery furnace of adolescent experience. Such concepts crowded in only after a few minutes spent in the room. At the moment of entry no more was to be absorbed than the fact that another guest had already arrived, to whom Sillery, with much miming and laughter, was narrating an anecdote. Any immediate responses on my own part were cut short at once, for Sillery, as if ever on his guard against possible assassination, sprang from his chair and charged forward, ready to come to grips with any assailant.

‘Timothy?… Mike? … Cedric?… ’

‘Nick—’

‘Carteret-Owen? … Jelf?… Kniveton? … ’

‘Jenkins — how are you, Sillers?’

‘So you’ve come all the way from New South Wales, Nick?’

‘I —’

‘No — of course — you were appointed to that headmastership after all, Nick?’

‘It’s—’

‘I can see you haven’t quite recovered from that head wound…’

The question of identification was finally established with the help of the other caller, who turned out to be Short, a member of Sillery’s college a year senior to myself. Short had been not only a great supporter of Sillery’s tea-parties, but also vigorously promulgated Sillery’s reputation as — Short’s own phrase — a ‘power in the land’. We had known each other as undergraduates, continued to keep up some sort of an acquaintance in early London days, then drifted into different worlds. I had last heard his name, though never run across him, during the war when Short had been working in the Cabinet Office, with which my War Office Section had occasional dealings. He had probably transferred there temporarily from his own Ministry, because he had entered another branch of the civil service on leaving the University.

Short’s demeanour, now a shade more portentous, more authoritarian, retained, like the sober suit he wore, the same consciously buttoned-up character. This mild, well-behaved air concealed a good deal of quiet obstinacy, a reasonable amalgam of malice. Always of high caste in his profession, now almost a princeling, he stemmed nevertheless from the same bureaucratic ancestry as a mere tribesman like Blackhead, prototype of all the race of fonctionnaires, and, anthropologically speaking, might be expected to revert to the same atavistic obstructionism if roused.

Sillery, moustache a shade more ragged and yellow, blue bow tie with its white spots, more likely than ever to fall undone, was not much changed either. Perhaps illusorily, his body and face had shrunk, physical contraction giving him a more simian look than formerly, though of no ordinary monkey; Brueghel’s Antwerp apes (admired by Pennistone) rather than the Douanier’s homely denizens of Tropiques, which Soper, the Divisional Catering Officer, had resembled. Even the real thing, Maisky, defunct pet of the Jeavonses, could not compare with Sillery’s devastating monkeylike shrewdness. So strong was this impression of metempsychosis that he seemed about to bound up on to the bookcases, scattering the photographs of handsome young men, and pile of envelopes (the top one addressed to the Home Secretary) as he landed back on the table. He looked in glowing health. No one had ever pronounced with certainty on the subject of Sillery’s age. Year of birth was omitted in all books of reference. He was probably still under eighty.

‘Sit down, Nick, sit down. Leonard and I were talking of an old friend — Bill Truscott. Remember Bill? I’m sure you do. Of course he was a wee bit older than you both’ — Sillery had now perfectly achieved his chronological bearings — ‘but not very much. These differences get levelled out in the sands of time. They do indeed. Going to do great things was Bill. Next Prime Minister but three. We all thought so. No use denying it, is there, Leonard?’

Short smiled a temperate personal acquiescence that could not at the same time be interpreted for a moment as in any way committing his Department.

‘Wrote some effective verse too,’ said Sillery. ‘Even if it was a shade derivative. Mark Members always sneered at Bill as a poet, even when he respected him as a coming man. Rupert Brooke at his most babbling, Mark used to say, Housman at his most lad-ish. Mark’s always so severe. I told him so when he was here the other day addressing one of the undergraduate societies. You know Mark’s hair’s gone snow white. Can’t think what happened to cause that, he’s always taken great care of himself. Rather becoming, all the same. Gives just that air of distinction required by the passing of youth — and nobody got more out of being a professional young man than Mark when the going was good. He was talking of his old friend — our old friend — J. C. Quiggin. JG’s abandoned the pen, I hear, perhaps wisely. A literary caesarean was all but required for that infant of long gestation Unburnt Boats, which I often feared might come to birth prematurely as a puling little magazine article. Now JG’s going to promote literary works rather than write them himself. In brief, he’s to become a publisher.’

‘So I heard,’ said Short. ‘He’s starting a new firm called Quiggin & Craggs.’

‘To think I used to sit on committees with Howard Craggs discussing arms embargoes for Bolivia and Paraguay,’ said Sillery. ‘Sounds like an embargo on arms for the Greeks and Trojans now. Still, I read a good letter from Craggs the other day in one of the papers about the need for Socialists and Communists hammering out a common programme of European reconstruction.’

‘Craggs was a temporary civil servant during the war,’ said Short. ‘Rationing paper, was it? Something of the sort.’

‘That was when JG made himself useful as caretaker at Boggis & Stone,’ said Sillery. ‘I expect that explains why JG dresses like a partisan now, a man straight from the maquis, check shirts, leather jackets, ankle-boots. “Well, Quiggin’s always been in the forefront of the Sales Resistance where clothes were concerned.” That was Brightman’s comment. “Even if he did live ‘reserved and austere’ during hostilities — ‘reserved’ anyway.” We all enjoy Brightman’s rather cruel wit. Brightman and I are buddies now, by the way, all forgiven and forgotten. Besides, I expect JG’s circumscribed by lack of clothing coupons. All right for such as me, still wearing the suit I bought for luncheon with Mr Asquith at Downing Street before the Flood, but then it was a good piece of cloth to start off with, not like those sad old reach-me-downs of JG’s we’re all so familiar with. No doubt they disintegrated under the stress of war conditions. Why not ankle-boots, forsooth? I’d be glad of a pair myself in winter here.’

Sillery paused. He seemed to feel he had allowed himself to rattle on rather too disconnectedly, at the same time could not remember what exactly had been the subject in hand. Like a conjuror whose patter for a specific trick has become misplaced, he had to go back to the beginning again.

‘We were talking of Bill Truscott and his verse. I expect Bill has abandoned the Muse now, though you never know. It’s a hard habit to break. Would you believe it, I produced a slim volume myself when a young man? Did you know that, either of you? Suggested the influence of Coventry Patmore, so the pundits averred. I suppose most of us think of ourselves as poets at that age. No harm done. Well, that shouldn’t be such a bad job at the Coal Board for Bill, if things are constituted as you prophesy, Leonard. Once Bill’s been well and truly inducted there, he should be safe for a lifetime.’

Again Short allowed polite agreement to be inferred, without prejudice to official discretion, or additional evidence that might be subsequently revealed.

‘ But what mysterious mission brings you to our academic altars, Nick? We don’t even know what you are doing these days. Back writing those novels of yours? I expect so. I used to hear something of your activities when you were a gallant soldier looking after those foreign folk. You know what an interest I take in old friends. Leonard and I were just speaking of poor Prince Theodoric, who was once going to perform all sorts of benefits for us here, endow scholarships and whatnot. Donners-Brebner was to co-operate, Sir Magnus Donners having interests in those parts. Now, alas, the good Prince is in exile, Sir Magnus gathered to his fathers. The University will never see any of those lovely scholarships. But we must march with the times. There’s a new spirit abroad in Prince Thedoric’s country, and, whatever people may say, there’s no doubt about Marshal Stalin’s sincerity in desire for a good-neighbour policy, if the West allows it. What I wrote to The Times. Those Tolland relations of yours, Nick? That unsatisfactory boy Hugo, how is he?’

I dealt with these personal matters as expeditiously as possible, explaining my purpose in staying at the University.

‘Ah, Burton?’ said Sillery. ‘An interesting old gentleman, I’ve no doubt. Many years since I looked into the Anatomy.’

That was undoubtedly true. Sillery was not a great reader. He was also wholly uncurious about the byways of writing, indeed not very approving of writing at all, unless books likely to make a splash beyond mere literary consideration, of which there was no hope here. He abandoned the subject, satisfied apparently that the motive alleged was not designed to conceal some less pedestrian, more controversially viable activity, and the unexciting truth had been told. A pause in his talk, never an opportunity to be missed, offered a chance, the first one, of congratulating him on the peerage conferred in the most recent Honours List. Sillery yelled with laughter at such felicitations.

‘Ain’t it absurd?’ he shouted. ‘As you’ll have guessed, my dear Nick, I didn’t want the dratted thing at all. Not in the least. But it looked unmannerly to refuse. Doesn’t do to look unmannerly. Literal case of noblesse oblige. So there it is. A Peer of the Realm. Who’d have prophesied that for crude young Sillers, that happy-go-lucky little fellow, in the days of yore? It certainly gave some people here furiously to think. Ah, the envies and inhumanities of the human heart. You wouldn’t believe. I keep on telling the college servants to go easy with all that my-lording. Makes me feel as if I was acting in Shakespeare. They will have it, good chaps that they are. Fact is they seem positively to enjoy addressing their old friend in that majestic way, revel in it even. Strange but true. Genuinely glad to see old Sillers a lord. Ah, when you’re my age, dear men, you’ll know what an empty thing is worldly success and human ambition — but we mustn’t say that to an important person like Leonard, must we, Nick? And of course I don’t want to seem ungrateful to the staunch movement that ennobled me, of which I remain the most loyal of supporters. Indeed, we’ve just been talking of some of Labour’s young lions, for Leonard has forgone his former Liberal allegiances in favour of Mr Attlee and his merry men.’

‘Of course, as a civil servant, I’m strictly speaking neutral,’ said Short primly. ‘I was merely talking with Sillers of my present Minister’s PPS, who happens to live in the same block of flats as myself — one Kenneth Widmerpool. You may have come across him.’

‘I have — and saw he got in at a by-election some months ago.’

‘This arose from speaking of Bill Truscott and his troubles,’ said Sillery. ‘I was telling Leonard how I always marvelled at the quietly dextrous way Mr Widmerpool had poor Bill sacked from Donners-Brebner, just at the moment Bill thought himself set for big things. Between you and me, I would myself have doubted whether Bill offered serious rivalry by that time, but, extinct volcano or not, Widmerpool accepted him as a rival, and got rid of him. It was done in the neatest manner imaginable. That was where the rot set in so far as Bill was concerned. Put him on the downward path. He never recovered his status as a coming man. All this arose because I happened to mention to Leonard that Mr Widmerpool had written to me about joining a society — in fact two societies, one political, one cultural — to cement friendship with the People’s Republic where Theodoric’s family once held sway.’

‘I ran across Widmerpool when I was on loan to the Cabinet Office from my own Ministry,’ said Short. ‘We first met when I was staying in the country one weekend with a person of some import. I won’t mention names, but say no more than that the visit was one of work rather than play. Widmerpool came down on Sunday about an official matter, bringing some highly secret papers with him. We played a game of croquet in the afternoon as a short relaxation. I always remember how Widmerpool kept his briefcase under his arm — he was in uniform, of course — throughout the game. He nearly won it, in spite of that. Our host joked with him about his high regard for security, but Widmerpool would not risk losing his papers, even when he made his stroke.’

Sillery rocked himself backwards and forwards in silent enjoyment.

‘A very capable administrator,’ said Short. ‘Of course one can’t foretell what prospects such a man can have on the floor of the House. He may not necessarily be articulate in those very special surroundings. I’ve heard it suggested Widmerpool is better in committee. His speeches are inclined to alienate sympathy. Nevertheless, I am disposed to predict success.’

Neither of them would listen to assurances that I had known Widmerpool for years, which had indeed no particular relevance to his election to the House of Commons some little time before this. The event had taken place while I was myself still submerged in the country, getting through my army gratuity. At the time, Widmerpool’s arrival in Parliament seemed just another of the many odd things taking place roundabout, no concern of mine after reading of it in the paper. Back in London, occupied with sorting out the debris, physical and moral, with which one had to contend, Widmerpool’s political fortunes — like his unexpected marriage to Pamela Flitton — had been forgotten in attempts to warm up, as it were, charred fragments left over from the pre-war larder.

‘He’d probably have become a brigadier had hostilities continued,’ said Short. ‘I’m not at all surprised by the course he’s taken. At one moment, so he told me, he had ambitions towards a colonial governorship — was interested in those particular problems — but Westminster opens wider fields. The question was getting a seat.’

Sillery dismissed such a doubt as laughable for a man of ability.

‘Elderly trade unionists die, or reap the reward of years of toil by elevation to the Upper House — better merited, I add in all humility, than others I could name. The miners can spare a seat from their largesse, those hardy crofters of Scotland show a canny instinct for the right candidate.’

‘Between ourselves, I was able to do a little liaison work in the early stages,’ said Short. ‘That was after return to my old niche. I’d been told there was room for City men who’d be sensibly co-operative, especially if of a Leftward turn to start. Widmerpool’s attitude to Cheap Money made him particularly eligible.’

‘Cheap Money! Cheap Money!’

The phrase seemed to ravish Sillery by its beauty. He continued to repeat it, like the pirate’s parrot screeching ‘Pieces of eight’, while he clenched his fist in the sign of the old Popular Front.

Then suddenly Sillery’s manner changed. He began to rub his hands together, a habit that usually indicated the launching of one of his anti-personnel weapons, some explosive item of information likely to be brought out with damaging effect to whoever had just put forward some given view. Short, still contemplating Widmerpool’s chances, showed no awareness that danger threatened.

‘I don’t think he’ll be a back-bencher long,’ he said. ‘That’s my view.’

Sillery released the charge.

‘What about his wife?’

After that question Sillery paused in one of his most characteristic attitudes, that of the Chinese executioner who has so expertly severed a human head from the neck that it remains still apparently attached to the victim’s shoulders, while the headsman himself flicks an infinitesimal, all but invisible, speck of blood from the razor-sharp blade of his sword. Short coughed. He gave the impression of being surprised by a man of such enlightened intelligence as Sillery asking that.

‘His wife, Sillers?’

Short employed a level requisitive tone, suggesting he had indeed some faint notion of what was behind the enquiry, but it was one scarcely worthy of answer. There could be little doubt that, in so treating the matter, Short was playing for time.

‘You can’t close your ears to gossip in this University, however much you try,’ said Sillery. ‘It’s rampant, I regret to say. Even at High Table in this very college. Besides, it’s always wise to know what’s being bruited abroad, even if untrue.’

He rubbed his hands over and over again, almost doubling up with laughter.

‘I haven’t the pleasure of knowing Mrs Widmerpool so well as her husband,’ said Short severely. ‘We sometimes see each other where we both live, in the hall or in the lift. I understand the Widmerpools are to move from there soon.’

‘Comely,’ said Sillery. ‘That’s what I’ve been told — comely.’

He was more convulsed than ever.

‘Certainly, certainly,’ allowed Short. ‘She is generally agreed to be good looking. I should myself describe her as a little —’

Short’s power to define feminine beauty abandoned him at this point. He simply made a gesture with his hand. Unmarried himself, he spoke as if prepared to concede that good looks in a wife, anyway the wife of a public man, might reasonably be regarded as a cause for worry.

‘I expect she’ll make a good canvasser, an admirable canvasser.’

Sillery rocked.

‘Sillers, what are you getting at?’

Short spoke quite irritably. I laughed.

‘I see Nick knows what I mean,’ said Sillery.

‘What does Nick know?’

‘I met her during the war, when she was called Pamela Flitton. She was an ATS driver.’

‘What’s your story, Sillers? I see you must have a story.’

Short spoke in a tone intended to put a stop to frivolous treatment of what had been until then a serious subject, Widmerpool’s career. Being in the last resort rather afraid of Sillery, he was clearly not too sure of his ground. No doubt even Short had heard rumours, however muffled, of Pamela’s goings-on. Sillery decided to play with him a little longer.

‘My information about Mrs Widmerpool brought in a few picturesque details, Leonard. Just a few picturesque details — I say no more than that. I call her young Mrs Widmerpool because I understand she is appreciably junior to her spouse.’

‘Yes, she’s younger.’

‘The name of a certain MP on the Opposition benches has been mentioned as a frequent escort of hers.’

‘By whom?’

‘I happen to have a friend who knows Mrs W quite well.’

Sillery sniggered. Short pursed his lips.

‘A man?’

The question seemed just worth asking.

‘No, Nick, not a man. A young lady. You didn’t think an old fogey like me knew any young ladies, did you? You were quite wrong. This little friend of mine happens also to be a friend of Mrs Widmerpool — so you see I am in a strong position to hear about her doings.’

Sillery’s own sexual tastes had, of course, been endlessly debated by generations of undergraduates and dons. It was generally agreed that their physical expression was never further implemented than by a fair amount of arm-pinching and hair-rumpling of the young men with whom he was brought in contact; not necessarily even the better-looking ones, if others had more substantial assets to offer in the power world. More ardent indiscretions charged against him had either no basis, or were long forgotten in the mists of the past. Certainly he was held never to have taken the smallest physical interest in a woman, although at the same time in no way setting his face against all truck with the opposite sex. Sillery’s attitude might in this respect be compared with the late St John Clarke’s, both equally appreciative of invitations from ladies of more or less renowned social status and usually mature age; ‘hostesses’, in short, now an extinct species, though destined to rise again like Venus from a sea of logistic impediment. Accordingly, Sillery was right to suppose his boast would cause surprise. The scandal-mongering female friend would probably turn out to be a young married woman, I thought, the wife of a don. Before Sillery had time further to develop his theme, from which he showed signs of deriving a lot of pleasure in the form of teasing Short, a knock sounded on the door.

‘Come in, come in,’ cried Sillery indulgently. ‘Who is this to be? What a night for visitors. Quite like old times.’

He must have expected another version of Short or myself to enter the room. If so, he made a big mistake. Afar more dramatic note was struck; dramatic, that is, for those used to the traditional company to be met in Sillery’s rooms, also in the light of his words immediately before. A young woman, decidedly pretty, peeped in. Leaning on the door knob, she smiled apologetically, registering a diffidence not absolutely convincing.

‘I’m sorry, Sillers. I see you’re engaged. I’ll come round in the morning. I’d quite thought you’d be alone.’

This was certainly striking confirmation of Sillery’s boast that he had contacts with young women. However, its corroboration in this manner did not seem altogether to please him. For once, a rare thing, he appeared uncertain how best to deal with this visitor: dismiss her, retain her. He grinned, but with a sagging mouth. The intrusion posed a dilemma. Short looked embarrassed too, indeed went quite pink. Then Sillery recovered himself. ‘Come in, Ada, come in. You’ve arrived at just the right moment. We all need the company of youth.’

Irresolution, in any case observable only to those accustomed to the absolute certainty of decision belonging to Sillery’s past, had only been momentary. Now he was himself again, establishing by these words that, for all practical purposes, there was no difference between his own age and that of Short and myself, anyway so far as ‘Ada’ was concerned. He settled down right away to get the last ounce out of this new puppet, if puppet she were. The girl was in her twenties, fair, with a high colour, a shade on the plump side, though only enough to suggest changes in the female figure then pending.

‘I didn’t want to disturb you, Sillers. I didn’t really, but I’m almost sure you gave me the wrong notebook yesterday. There were two years missing at least.’

Her manner, self-possessed, was also forthcoming. She smiled round at all of us, not at all displeased at finding unexpected company in Sillery’s rooms. It looked as if some twist of post-war academic administration had committed Sillery to aspects of tutoring that included the women’s colleges. In the old days that would have been much against all his known principles, but changed conditions, possibly in the line of post-graduate courses, might have brought about some such revolutionary situation in the University as now constituted.

‘Two years missing?’ said Sillery. ‘That will never do, Ada, that will never do, but I must introduce you to two old friends of mine. Mr Short, one of our most cultivated and humane of bureaucrats, and Mr Jenkins who is — you just explained to me, Nick, but I can’t recall for the minute — no, no, don’t tell me, I’ll remember in a second — come here to do some research of a very scholarly kind, something he is planning to write — Burton, yes, Burton, melancholy and all that. This is Miss Leintwardine, my — well — my secretary. That’s what you are, Ada, ain’t you? Sounds rather fast. All sorts of jokes about us, I’m sure. Sit ’ee down, Ada, sit ’ee down. I’ll look into your complaints forthwith.’

Miss Leintwardine took a chair. Clearly well used to Sillery’s ways and diction, she accepted this presentation of herself as all part of the game. In the role of secretary she was a little more explicable, though why on earth Sillery should require a secretary was by no means apparent. Perhaps a secretary went with being made a peer. Whatever it was, he now retired to a corner of the room, where, lowering himself on to the floor, he squatted on the worn carpet, while he began to rummage about amongst a lot of stuff stored away in the bottom of a cupboard. All the time he kept up a stream of comment.

‘What a way to preserve sacred memories. Isn’t that just like me? Might be a lot of old boots for all the trouble I’ve taken. Nineteen-eight… nineteen-four … here we are, I think, here we are.’

Miss Leintwardine, who had sat down as requested, showed willingness to make herself agreeable by a laudatory reference to a novel I had written before the war. She was about to expand her views on this subject, but, whatever other modifications had taken place in Sillery’s approach, tolerance of his guests’ books being discussed in front of him was not among them. Sillery’s enemies were inclined to imply that aversion to other people writing was the fruit of pure envy, but it was much more probable that talk about ‘writing’ simply bored him, unless arousing a sense of conflict. He began a loud confused monologue to put a stop to all other conversation, then suddenly found what he sought, closed the cupboard and rose without effort, holding two or three tattered exercise books. He cast these on the table.

‘Here they are. I don’t know what I can have been thinking about, Ada. Was it the nineteen-twelve volume I gave you? Let me have a look. Ah, no, I think I understand now. This is supplementary. Ada’s helping me get my old diaries in order. Not only typing them, but giving me her valuable — I should say invaluable — advice. I’m pleading as a suppliant before the inexorable tribunal of Youth. That’s what it comes to. Don’t know what I’d do without her. I’d be lost, wouldn’t I, Ada?’

‘You certainly would, Sillers.’

‘Diaries?’ said Short. ‘I didn’t know you kept a diary, Sillers?’

Sillery, laughing heartily, lowered himself again into a vast collapsed armchair in which he lay crouched.

‘Nobody did, nobody did. Strict secret. Of course it’s possible nothing will appear until old Sillers is dead and gone. That’s no reason why the diaries shouldn’t be put in proper order. Then perhaps a few selections might be published. Who can tell until Ada has done her work — and who should help make the decision better than Ada?’

‘But, Sillers, they’ll be absolutely …’

Short was again without words. Only an ingrained professional habit of avoiding superlatives, so he implied, prevented him from giving more noisy expression to welcome a Journal kept by Sillery.

‘You’ve met everybody, Sillers. They’ll be read as the most notable chronicle of our time.’

Sillery made no attempt to deny that judgment. He screwed up his eyes, laughed a great deal, blew out his moustache. Miss Leintwardine took up the exercise books from the table. She glanced through them with cold professional competence.

‘That’s better, Sillers. These are the ones. I’d better bear them away with me.’

She rose from the chair, smiling, friendly, about to leave. Sillery held up his right hand, as if to swear a solemn oath.

‘Stay, Ada. Stay and talk with us a while. You must meet people younger than myself sometimes, eligible bachelors like Mr Short. By the way, these gentlemen are contemporaries of another friend of ours, Mark Members, whom you talked of when he was up the other day lecturing on whatever it was. He’s left the Ministry of Information now.’

‘Kleist, Marx, Sartre, the Existentialist Equilibrium.’

‘Of course,’ said Sillery. ‘One of Vernon Gainsborough’s jeux d’esprit. I can’t remember, Leonard, whether you’ve met our latest Fellow. He’s a German — or rather was — a “good” German, of course, called Werner Guggenbühl, but Gainsborough’s better, we all agree. Of patrician background, but turned early to the Left.’

‘You’re interested in German literature, Miss Leintwardine?’ asked Short.

He must have hoped to gloss over Sillery’s rather malicious reference to ‘eligible bachelors’, but notably failed in this attempt to guide conversation into intellectual channels.

‘We were talking of old friends like Mark,’ said Sillery. ‘J. G. Quiggin, Bill Truscott, all names with which you are familiar from my reminiscing, Ada. Conversation led from them to that interesting couple the Widmerpools, about whom you were speaking when we last met. How goes that union? Well, I hope.’

These last sentences put an end to doubt, explaining Sillery’s momentary uncertainty at Ada Leintwardine’s arrival. He was well satisfied at the surprise she caused, the confirmation by her presence that he numbered ‘young ladies’ amongst his acquaintance, but at the same time he had been faced with the decision whether or not to reveal her as his source of Widmerpool information. It was in the Sillery tradition to brag of a great spy network, while keeping secret the names of individual agents. At the same time, with an audience like Short and myself, fullest advantage might be derived from Miss Leintwardine by admitting her as fount of that information, now she was on the spot. That at any rate was what happened. Sillery had decided the veil of mystery was not worth sustaining, especially as Miss Leintwardine herself might at any moment give the show away. However, it turned out she was well aware that contacts with the Widmerpool ménage were too profitable to be squandered in casual enquiry. She was giving nothing away that evening. This attitude was probably due also to other matters connected with her relationship with Sillery which only came to light some minutes later.

‘They’re both all right so far as I know, Sillers.’

‘Leonard here lives in the same block of flats.’

‘Oh, do you?’

She spoke politely, no more.

‘You were saying Mrs W finds the place rather poky,’ persisted Sillery.

Miss Leintwardine did not choose to answer that one. Instead, she addressed herself to me.

‘I think you know Pam and Kenneth, Mr Jenkins. They spoke of you. Like so many people, Pam’s been having rather a painful reaction now the war’s over. Tired, I mean, and listless. Always ill. We’ve been friends since we were in the ATS together.’

‘She was a driver in the ATS when I first met her.’

‘Then we both went into secret shows, different ones, and always kept in touch — but for God’s sake don’t let’s talk about the war. Such a boring subject.’

Sillery shouted assent to that, showing distinct signs of displeasure at this interchange. What was the good of presenting Ada Leintwardine as a woman of mystery, if she shared a crowd of acquaintances in common with another guest? Besides, long experience of extracting information out of people must have warned him she was not prepared to furnish anything of great interest that evening, unless matters took an unexpected turn. Grasp of the fact was to Sillery’s credit, in some degree justifying the respect paid him in such traffickings by Short and others. He rose once more from his chair, again throwing himself to the floor with surprising suppleness of movement, to scrabble further at the stuff in the cupboard.

‘You’re sure you’ve got the right notebooks now, Ada? I’m putting away the ones you brought back, ere worse befall. Don’t want to lose them, do we?’

Miss Leintwardine chose this moment of Sillery’s comparative detachment on the floor to announce something probably intended to take a less abrupt form. Possibly she had even paid the visit for this purpose, the diaries only an excuse. Since she had not found Sillery alone, she had to take the best opportunity available.

‘Talking of J. G. Quiggin, you’ve heard about this new publishing firm of his?’

She spoke rather self-consciously. Sillery, swivelling round where he squatted orientally on a hole in the carpet, was attentive to this.

‘Have you any piquant details, Ada? I should like to know more of JG’s publishing venture.’

‘I’m rather committed myself. Perhaps you heard that too, Sillers?’

Whatever this meant, clearly Sillery had not heard. He sat up sharply. Miss Leintwardine’s manner of asking the question strongly suggested he had been given no opportunity to hear anything of the sort

‘How so, Ada?’

‘As it happens, I’m joining the firm myself. I’ve been reading manuscripts for them since they started. I thought I told you.’

‘No, Ada, no. You never told me.’

‘I thought I had.’

This showed Sillery in the plainest terms he was not the only one to discharge bombshells. He took it pretty well, though there could be no doubt he was shaken. His eyes showed that.

‘Craggs brought in the goodwill of Boggis & Stone, together with such Left-Wing steadies as survive. Of course the new firm won’t be nearly so limited as Boggis & Stone. We’re hoping to get the young writers. We’ve signed up X. Trapnel, for example.’

She spoke all this quickly, more than a little embarrassed, even upset, at having to break the news to Sillery. He did not say anything. She continued in the same hurried tone.

‘I was wondering whether the possibility wasn’t worth exploring for publication of your own Journal, Sillers. You haven’t decided on a publisher yet, have you? There’s often something to be said for new and enterprising young firms.’

Sillery did not pledge himself on that point.

‘Does this mean you’re going to live in London, Ada?’

‘I suppose so, Sillers. I can’t very well commute from here. Of course it won’t make any difference to my work for you. I shall always have time for that. I do think it should be an interesting job, don’t you?’

Again Sillery made no pronouncement on such expectations. His face provisionally suggested that the future for those entering publishing offices was anything but optimistic. There could be no doubt the whole matter was intensely displeasing to him. His annoyance, together with Miss Leintwardine’s now very definitely troubled manner, confirmed that in a peculiar way they must have been having some sort of flirtation, an hypothesis scarcely to be guessed by even the most seasoned Sillery experts. The girl’s nervousness now confession had been made, well illustrated that odd contradictory feminine lack of assurance so typical of the moment when victory has been won — for there could be little doubt that progression on to the staff of Quiggin & Craggs represented a kind of victory over Sillery on her part, escape from his domination. It looked as if she had half dreaded telling him, half hoped to cause him to suffer. Sillery had been made the object of a little affectionate feminine sadomasochism. That was the grotesque presumption. She jumped up.

‘I must go now, Sillers. I’ve got an awful lot of work waiting at home. I thought I’d just bring those wrong notebooks along as they were worrying me.’

She laughed, almost as though near tears. This time Sillery made no effort to detain her.

‘Goodnight, Ada.’

‘Goodnight, Mr Short. Goodnight, Mr Jenkins. Goodnight, Sillers.’

However much put out by her unexpected arrival, refusal to discuss the Widmerpools, final news that she was abandoning him, Sillery’s usual resilience, his unyielding capacity for making the best of things, was now displayed, though he could not conceal relief at this withdrawal. He grinned at Short and myself after the door closed, shaking his head whimsically to show he still retained a sense of satisfaction in knowing such a wench. Short, on the other hand, was anxious to forget about Miss Leintwardine as soon as possible.

‘Tell us something about your diaries, Sillers. I’m more interested than I can say.’

Sillery, anyway at that moment, did not want to talk about the diaries. Ada Leintwardine was still his chosen theme. If she had displeased him, all the more reason to get full value out of her as an attendant personality of what remained of the Sillery court.

‘Local doctor’s daughter. Clever girl. Keen on making a career in — what shall we say? — the world of letters. Writing a novel herself. All that sort of thing. Just the person I was looking for. Does the work splendidly. Absolutely reliable. We mustn’t have pre-publication leaks, must we? That would never do. I hope she’s aware of Howard Craggs’s little failings. Just as bad as ever, even at the age he’s reached, so I’m told. All sorts of stories. She must know. Everyone knows that.’

His manner of enunciating the remark about pre-publication leaks made one suspect Sillery meant the opposite to what he said. Pre-publication leaks were what he aimed at, Miss Leintwardine the ideal medium for titbits proffered to stimulate interest. The Diary was to be Sillery’s last bid for power, imposing his personality on the public, as an alternative to the real thing. However, he had no wish to talk to Short about this. If the Journal was of interest, it was likely Sillery would have published its contents, at least a selection, before now. Even if the interest were moderate, there would be excitement in preparation and advance publicity, whetting the appetite of the public. When, in due course, Short and I left the rooms — Sillery admitted he went to bed now earlier than formerly — it was only after solemn assurances we would call again. Outside, the night was mild for the time of year.

‘I’m staying in college,’ said Short. ‘Sillers is always talking of my becoming an Honorary Fellow, I don’t know how serious he is. I’ll walk with you as far as the gate. Sillers is wonderful, isn’t he? What did you make of that young woman? I didn’t much care for her style. Too florid. Still, Sillers must need a secretary if he has all that diary material to weld into order. Rather inconsiderate of her to give up work for him, as she seems to be doing. Interesting your knowing Widmerpool. I wouldn’t have thought you’d much in common. I believe myself he’s got a future. You must lunch with me one day at the Athenaeum, Nicholas. I’m rather full of work at the moment, but I’ll tell my secretary to make a note.’

‘Is she as pretty as Miss Leintwardine?’

Short accepted that pleasantry in good part, leaving the question in the air.

‘Brightman calls Sillers the last of the Barons. Pity there’ll be no heir to that ancient line, he says. Brightman’s wit, as Sillers remarked, can be a shade cruel. Nice to have met in these peaceful surroundings again.’

Traversing obscure byways on the way back to my own college, I had to admit the evening had been enjoyable, although there was a kind of relief in escaping from the company of Sillery and Short, into the silent night. One had to concur, too, in judging Sillery ‘wonderful’; wonderful anyway in categorical refusal to allow neither age nor anything else to deflect him from the path along which he had chosen to approach life. That was impressive, to be honoured: at least something the world honoured, capacity for sticking to your point, whatever it might be, through thick and thin.

‘There have never been any real salons in England,’ Moreland once said. ‘Everyone here thinks a salon is a place for a free meal. A true salon is conversation — nothing to eat and less to drink.’

Sillery bore out the definition pretty well. The following day I was to knock off Burton, and go back to London. That was a cheering thought. When I reached my own college there was a telegram at the porter’s lodge. It was from Isobel. Erridge, her eldest brother, had died suddenly.

This was a contingency altogether unexpected, not only dispersing from the mind further speculation about Sillery and his salon, but necessitating reconsideration of all immediate plans.

Erridge, a subject for Burton if ever there was one, had often complained of his health, in this never taken very seriously by the rest of his family. Lately, little or nothing had been heard of him. He lived in complete seclusion. The inter-service organization, a secret one, which had occupied Thrubworth during the earlier years of the war had been later moved, or disbanded, the place remaining requisitioned, but converted into a camp for German prisoners-of-war. Administrative staff and stores occupied most of the rooms, except the small wing at the back of the building that Erridge, on succeeding his father, had adapted for his own use; quarters where his sister Blanche had later joined him to keep house. This suited Blanche well enough, because she preferred a quiet life. She undertook, when feasible, the many local duties unwelcome to Erridge himself whose dedication to working for the public good never mitigated an unwillingness to burden himself with humdrum obligations. This disinclination to play a part in local affairs owed something to his innate uneasiness in dealing with people, together with an aversion from personal argument and opposition, unless such contentiousness was ‘on paper’. What Erridge disliked was having to wrangle with a lot of not very well-informed adversaries face to face. In these attitudes poor health may well have played a part, for even unhampered by ‘pacifist’ convictions, his physical state would never have allowed any very active participation in the war.

However much recognized as, anyway in his own eyes, living in a more or less chronic convalescence, Erridge was certainly not expected to die in his middle-forties. George Tolland, next brother in point of age, was another matter. George, badly wounded in the Middle East, had long been too ill to be brought home. From the first, it seemed unlikely he would survive. Back in England, he made some sort of recovery, then had a relapse, almost predictable from the manner in which Death had already cast an eye on him. The funeral had been only a few months before. George’s wife Veronica, pregnant at the time, had not yet given birth. The question of the baby’s sex, in the light of inheritance, added another uncertainty to the present situation.

The following morning I set out for London. The train was late. Waiting for it like myself was a man in a blue-grey mackintosh, who strolled rather furtively up and down the platform. His movements suggested hope to avoid recognition, while a not absolutely respectable undertaking was accomplished. At first the drooping moustache disguised him. It was an adjunct not at all characteristic. Then, a minute or two after, the nervous swinging walk gave this figure away. There could be no doubt. It was Books-do-furnish-a-room Bagshaw.

The cognomen dated back to the old Savoy Hill days of the BBC, though we had not known each other in that very remote period. A year or two older than myself, Bagshaw had been an occasional drinking companion of Moreland’s. They shared a taste for white port. Possibly Bagshaw had even served a brief stint as music critic. The memory persisted — at our first encounter — of Bagshaw involved in an all but disastrous incident on top of a bus, when we were going home after Moreland had been conducting a performance of Pelleas and Melisande. If Bagshaw, at no moment in his past, had ever written music criticism, that must have been the sole form of journalism he had omitted to tackle. We had never seen much of each other, nor met for seven or eight years. Bagshaw’s war turned out to have been waged in the Public Relations branch of the RAF. He had grown the moustache in India. Like a lot of acquaintances encountered at this period, his talk had become noticeably more authoritative in tone, product of the war itself and its demands, or just the ponderous onset of middle age. At the same time he had surrendered none of his old wheedling, self-deprecatory manner, which had procured him a wide variety of jobs, extracted him from equally extensive misadventures. He was in the best of spirits.

‘The subcontinent has its moments, Nicholas. It was a superlative experience, in spite of the Wingco’s foul temper. I had to tell that officer I was not prepared to be the Gunga Din of Royal Air Force Public Relations in India, even at the price of being universally accepted as the better man. There were a lot of rows, but never mind. There was much to amuse too.’

This clearcut vignette of relations with his Wing-Commander defined an important aspect of Bagshaw’s character, one of which he was very proud.

‘You’re a professional rebel, Bagshaw,’ some boss-figure had remarked when sacking him.

That was true in a sense, though not in such an entirely simple sense as might be supposed at first sight. All the same, Bagshaw had obtained more than one subsequent job merely on the strength of repeating that estimate of himself. The label gave potential employers an enjoyable sense of risk. Some of them lived to regret their foolhardiness.

‘After all, I warned him at the start,’ Bagshaw used to say.

The roots of this revolutionary spirit lay a long way back. Did he not boast that on school holidays he had plastered the public lavatories of Cologne with anti-French stickers at the time of the occupation of the Rhineland? There were all sorts of later insurgent activities, ‘chalkings’, marchings, making policemen’s horses shy at May Day celebrations, exertions which led, logically enough, to association with Gypsy Jones. Bagshaw was even reckoned to have been engaged to Gypsy at one time. His own way of life, the fact that she herself was an avowed Party Member, made it likely he too had been ‘CP’ in his day, possibly up to the Spanish Civil War. At that period Quiggin used to talk a lot about him, and had probably learnt a good deal from him Then Bagshaw was employed on some sort of eyewitness reporting assignment in Spain. Things went wrong. No one ever knew quite what happened. There had been one of Bagshaw’s rows. He came back. Some people said he was lucky to get home. Politically speaking, life was never the same again. Bagshaw had lost his old enthusiasms. Afterwards, when drunk, he would attempt to expound his changed standpoint, never with great clarity, though he would go on by the hour together to friends like Moreland, who detested talking politics.

‘There was a chap called Max Stirner … You’ve probably none of you ever heard of Der Einzige und sein Eigentum … You know, The Ego and his Own … Well, I don’t really know German either, but Stirner believed it would be all right if only we could get away from the tyranny of abstract ideas… He taught in a girls’ school. Probably what gave him the notion. Abstract ideas not a bit of use in a girls’ school…’

Whatever Bagshaw thought about abstract ideas when drunk — he never reached a stage when unable to argue — he was devoted to them when sober. He resembled a man long conversant with racing, familiar with the name of every horse listed in Ruff’s Guide to the Turf, who has now ceased to lay a bet, even feel the smallest desire to visit a racecourse; yet at the same time never lost his taste for talking about racing. Bagshaw was for ever fascinated by revolutionary techniques, always prepared to explain everybody’s standpoint, who was a party-member, fellow-traveller, crypto, trotskyist, anarchist, anarcho-syndicalist, every refinement of marxist theory, every subtle distinction within groups. The ebb and flow of subversive forces wafted the breath of life to him, even if he no longer believed in the beneficial qualities of that tide.

Bagshaw’s employment at the BBC lasted only a few years. There were plenty of other professional rebels there, not to mention Party Members, but somehow they were not his sort. All the same, the Corporation left its mark. Even after he found more congenial occupations, he always spoke with a certain nostalgia of his BBC days, never entirely losing touch. After abdicating the air, he plunged into almost every known form of exploiting the printed word, where he always hovered between the sack and a much more promising offer on the horizon. He possessed that opportune facility for turning out several thousand words on any subject whatsoever at the shortest possible notice: politics: sport: books: finance: science: art: fashion — as he himself said, ‘War, Famine, Pestilence or Death on a Pale Horse’. All were equal when it came to Bagshaw’s typewriter. He would take on anything, and — to be fair — what he produced, even off the cuff, was no worse than what was to be read most of the time. You never wondered how on earth the stuff had ever managed to be printed.

All this suggests Bagshaw had a brilliant journalistic career ahead of him, when, as he described it, he set out ‘with the heart of a boy so whole and free’. Somehow it never came off. A long heritage of awkward incidents accounted for much of the furtiveness of Bagshaw’s manner. There had been every sort of tribulation. Jobs changed; wives (two at least) came and went; once DT was near at hand; from time to time there were periods ‘on the waggon’; all the while legend accumulating round this weaker side, which Bagshaw’s nickname celebrated. Its origin was lost in the mists of the past, but the legend emphasized aspects of Bagshaw that could make him a liability.

There were two main elucidations. One asserted that, the worse for drink, trying to abstract a copy of The GoldenTreasury from a large glass-fronted bookcase in order to verify a quotation required for a radio programme, Bagshaw overturned on himself this massive piece of furniture. As volume after volume descended on him, it was asserted he made the comment: ‘Books do furnish a room.’

Others had a different story. They would have it that Bagshaw, stark naked, had spoken the words conversationally as he approached the sofa on which lay, presumably in the same state, the wife of a well-known dramatic critic (on duty at the theatre that night appraising the First Night of The Apple Cart), a clandestine meeting having reached emotional climax in her husband’s book-lined study. Bagshaw was alleged to have spoken the words, scarcely more than muttered them — a revolutionary’s tribute to bourgeois values — as he rapidly advanced towards his prey: ‘ Books do furnish a room.’

The lady, it could have been none other, was believed later to have complained to a third party of lack of sensibility on Bagshaw’s part in making such an observation at such a juncture. Whichever story were true — probably neither, the second had all the flavour of having been worked over, if not invented, by Moreland — the nickname stuck.

‘There’ll be a stampede of dons’ wives,’ said Bagshaw, as we watched the train come in ‘Let’s be careful. We don’t want to be injured for life.’

We found a compartment, crowded enough, but no impediment to Bagshaw’s flow of conversation.

‘You know, Nicholas, whenever I come away from this place, I’m always rather glad I skipped a novitiate at a university. My university has been life. Many a time I’ve put that in an article. Tell me, have you read a novel called Camel Ride to the Tomb?’

‘I thought it good — who is X. Trapnel? Somebody else mentioned him.’

‘The best first novel since before the war,’ said Bagshaw.

‘Not that that’s in itself particularly high praise. Trapnel was a clerk in one of our New Delhi outfits — the people who used to hand out those pamphlets about Civics and The Soviet Achievement, all that sort of thing. I was always rapt in admiration at the way the Party arranged to have its propaganda handled at an official level. As a matter of fact Trapnel himself wasn’t at all interested in politics, but he was always in trouble with the authorities, and I managed to help him one way and another.’

Although not in the front rank of literary critics — there might have been difficulty in squeezing him into an already overcrowded and grimacing back row — Bagshaw had reason in proclaiming Trapnel’s one of the few promising talents thrown up by the war; in contrast with the previous one, followed by no marked luxuriance in the arts.

‘Then he got a poisoned foot. Trapnel was a low medical category anyway, that’s why he was doing the job at his age. He got shipped back to England. By the end of the war he’d winkled himself into a film unit. He’s very keen on films. Wants to get back into them, I believe, writing novels at the same time — but what about your own novels, Nicholas? Have you started up at one again?’

I told him why I was staying at the University, and how work was going to be disrupted during the following week owing to Erridge’s funeral. The information about Erridge at once disturbed Bagshaw.

‘Lord Warminster is no more?’

‘Heard it last night.’

‘This is awful.’

‘I’d no idea you were a close friend.’

Bagshaw’s past activities, especially at the time when he was seeing a good deal of Quiggin, might well have brought him within Erridge’s orbit, though I had never connected them in my mind.

‘I didn’t know Warminster well. Always liked him when we met, and of course sorry to hear the sad news, but why it might be ominous for me was quite apart from personal feelings. The fact was he was putting up the money for a paper I’m supposed to be editing. I was on the point of telling you about it.’

At this period there was constant talk of ‘little magazines’ coming into being. Professionally speaking, their establishment was of interest as media for placing articles, reviewing books, the various pickings of literary life. Erridge had toyed with some such project for years, although the sort of paper he contemplated was not likely to be of much use to myself. It was no great surprise to hear he had finally decided to back a periodical of some sort. The choice of Bagshaw as editor was an adventurous one, but, if they knew each other already, Bagshaw’s recommendation of himself as a ‘professional rebel’ might well have been sufficient to get a job in Erridge’s gift.

‘A new publishing firm, Quiggin & Craggs, is going to produce the magazine. Warminster — Erry, as you call him — was friends with both directors. You must know J. G. Quiggin. Doubt if he’s ever been CP, but Craggs has been a fellow-traveller for years, and my old friend Gypsy toes the Party line as consistently as anyone could.’

‘What’s Gypsy got to do with it?’

‘As Craggs’s wife.’

‘Gypsy married to Craggs?’

‘Has been for a year or two. Quiggin’s an interesting case. He’s always had Communist leanings, but afraid to commit himself. JG doesn’t like too many risks. He feels he might get into more trouble as a Party Member than outside. He hasn’t got Craggs’s staying power.’

‘But Erry wasn’t a Communist at all. In many ways he disapproved, I believe, though he never came out in the open about it.’

‘No, but he got on all right with JG and Howard Craggs. There was even a suggestion he did more than get on well with Gypsy at one time. He was going to back the publishing firm too, though they are to be run quite separately.’

‘What’s the magazine to be called?’

‘Fission. That was thought to strike the right note for the Atomic Age. Something to catch the young writers coming out of the services — Trapnel, for example. That was why I mentioned him. The firm would, of course, be of a somewhat Leftward tendency, given its personnel, but general publishing, not like Boggis & Stone. The magazine was to be Warminster’s toy to do more or less what he liked with. I hope his demise is not going to wreck things. It was he who wanted me to edit it There were one or two others after the job. Gypsy wasn’t all that keen for me to get it, in spite of old ties. I know a bit too much.’

Bagshaw’s lack of orthodoxy, while at the same time soaked in Left-Wing lore, was something to make immediate appeal to Erridge, once considered. Then another idea occurred to me. It was worth firing a shot at random.

‘You’ve been seeing Miss Ada Leintwardine about all this?’

Bagshaw was not in the least taken aback. He stroked his moustache, an utterly unsuitable appendage to his smooth round somewhat priest-like face, and smiled.

‘You know Ada? I thought she was my secret. Where did you run across her?’

He listened to an account of what had taken place in Sillery’s rooms; then nodded, as if understanding all.

‘Sillery’s an interesting case too. I’ve heard it suggested he’s been in the Party himself for years. Myself I think not, though there’s no doubt he’s given quite a bit of support from time to time in his day. I’d be interested to know where he really stands. So the little witch has ensnared this venerable scholar?’

‘She’s kept that to herself so far as you were concerned?’

‘Absolutely.’

‘Is she a Party Member too?’

Bagshaw laughed heartily.

‘Ada’s ambitions are primarily literary. Within that area she’ll take any help she can get, but I doubt if she’d get much from the Party. What did you think of her?’

‘All right.’

‘She’s got a will of her own. Quiggin & Craggs did right to sign her up. JG was much taken.’

‘You produced her?’

‘We met during the war — all too briefly — but have remained friends. She’s to be on the publishing side, not Fission. I’d like you to meet Trapnel. I really do think there’s promise there. I’ll call you up, and we’ll have a drink together. I won’t be able to arrange anything next week, as I’m getting married on Tuesday — thanks very much, my dear fellow, thanks very much… yes, of course… nice of you to put it that way… I just didn’t want to be a bore about a lot of personal matters …’