The Light and the Dark

11: Serene Night by the Sea

Roy returned to college for the rest of the Michaelmas term. His reading lamp was alight all day; his window in the turret gleamed above the court through the dark afternoons and the December evenings. He dined regularly at high table; and no one meeting him there, polite, cheerful, teasing with a solemn face, could have guessed what he had just passed through. Though I had seen it, I often forgot. His step on my stairs at night now meant ease, and well-being. He was quite unstrained, as though he had only to wait for good things to happen.

After he had talked to them at dinner, some of his opponents felt he had been misjudged. He sat by Winslow’s side for several nights running. He had a respect for the cross-grained, formidable, unsuccessful man, and he happened to know his son. It was generally thought that Dick Winslow was nothing but a stupid waster, but Roy both liked him and felt his father’s vulnerable, unassuageable love. So they talked about Dick — Winslow pretending to be ironic, realistic, detached. Roy was very gentle, both at the time and afterwards, when he said to me: “It must be dreadful, never being able to give yourself away. He needs to stop keeping his lips so tight, doesn’t he?”

Roy did not, however, make the slightest progress towards melting Despard-Smith. He began by making a genuine attempt, for Ralph Udal’s sake: Despard-Smith was the most influential member of the livings committee, and, if Udal were to have a chance of a college living, the old man had to be placated. But Roy met with a signal failure. He suppressed the glint in his eye that usually visited him in the presence of the self-satisfied and self-important, those who seemed to him invulnerable and whom he called “the stuffed”. Deferentially he discussed the Church of England, college finance, and early heresies. Despard-Smith replied bleakly and with certainty, looking at Roy with uncompromising suspicion. Roy led up to the question of a living for Udal. “I can’t speak for my colleagues, Calvert,” said Despard-Smith, meaning that he could. “But I should personally regard it as nothing short of scandalous to let a man of Udal’s age eat the bread of idleness. It certainly would not be in the man’s own best interests. When he has got down to the c-collar for twenty or thirty years, then perhaps he might come up for consideration.”

“He wants peace to think,” said Roy.

“The time to get peace, as some of us know,” said Despard-Smith, “is when one has borne the heat and burden of the day.”

Roy knew it was no good. But his next question was innocent enough. He asked who would get the vacant living, which was the second best in the college’s gift.

“I’ve told you, I can’t speak for my colleagues,” said Despard-Smith reprovingly. “But I should personally regard Anderson as a very suitable choice. He was slightly junior to me here, so he is no longer in his first youth. But he is a very worthy man.”

“Should you say he was witty?” said Roy, no longer able to repress himself or deciding it was not worth while.

“I don’t know what you mean, Calvert.”

“Worthy people are not witty,” said Roy. “That’s how we can tell they’re worthy.”

He looked at Despard-Smith with steady, serious eyes.

“Isn’t that so, Despard?”

Despard-Smith looked back with mystification, anger and disapproval.

From that time on, Roy selected Despard-Smith for his most demure and preposterous questions — partly because the old man incited him, and partly because, knowing of Despard-Smith’s speeches over the election, Roy had a frail and unsaintly desire for revenge. Whenever he could catch Despard-Smith in the Court or the combination room, Roy advanced on him with a shimmering net of solemn requests for information. Despard-Smith became badgered, increasingly hostile, and yet mystified. He was never sure whether Roy might not be in earnest, at least part of the time. “What an extraordinary young man Calvert is,” he used to grumble in a creaking, angry voice. “He’s just made a most extraordinary remark to me—”

The Boscastles had gone down to the villa at Roquebrune late in November, and the Master and his family followed them a few days before Christmas. Roy spent Christmas with his family, and I with my wife in Chelsea. She asked me to stay a little longer, and so I arrived at Monte Carlo the day after Roy.

I had lain awake all night in the train, and went to bed in the afternoon. When I woke it was early evening, and from my window I could see lights springing out along the coast. Roy was not in his room, was not in the hotel. He had already told me that we were dining that night out at the Boscastles’. It was not time to dress, and I took a walk away from the sea, through the hilly streets at the back of the town.

I was thinking of nothing, it was pleasant to smell the wood smoke and garlic in the narrow streets: then I heard two voices taking an amorous farewell. A woman’s said something in Italian, was saying goodbye: then another, light, reedy, very clear in the crisp, cold air. “Ciao,” he called back to her, and I saw in the light from a window a girl disappearing into the house. “Ciao,” she called, when I could no longer see her: her voice was rough but young. “Ciao,” Roy replied again, softly, and then he saw me.

He was disconcerted, and I extremely amused. I knew as well as he about his minor escapades: some woman would catch his fancy, in a shop, in a theatre, behind the desk in an hotel, and he would pursue her with infinite concentration for a day. He sometimes told me of his rebuffs, but never of his conquests; and he did not like being caught at the end of one.

“Remarkable Italian they speak here,” he said with a somewhat precarious dignity, as we descended into the clean, bright, shop-lined streets. He gave me a pedantic lecture on the Italian of Liguria contrasted with Provençal; it was no doubt correct, his linguistic skill was beyond question, but I was grinning.

We came to the square; the flowers stood out brilliantly under the lights; as though unwillingly, Roy grinned too.

“It’s just my luck,” he said. “Why need you come that way?”

A motor-car drove in to take us to the Villa Prabaous.

“The Boscastles have hired three cars for all the time they’re here,” said Roy. “Plus two which they need occasionally for visitors. There’s nothing like economy. They sweep in and out all day.”

On our way, along the edge of the calm sea, he was speculating with interest, with amusement, over the Boscastle fortune. “Poor as church mice”, “they haven’t two sixpences to rub together”, “it’s really heroic of them to keep up the house” — we had both heard those descriptions from Lady Muriel and her friends. Yet, with occasional economies, such as taking a villa at Roquebrune, the Boscastles lived more grandly than any of the rich people we knew. The problem was complicated by the fact that the estate had, as a device through which they paid less taxes, been made into a company. The long necklace of lights twinkled through the pines on Cap Martin: Roy had just satisfied himself that, if Lord Boscastle died next day, his will would not be proved at less than £200,000.

The Villa Prabaous was rambling, large, very ugly, and, like many houses on the north side of the Mediterranean, seemed designed for a climate much hotter than where it found itself. That night an enormous log fire sputtered and smoked in the big dining-room, and we were all cold, except Lady Muriel. For Lady Muriel it provided an excellent opportunity to compare the degree of discomfort with that of several mansions she had visited in her childhood, and to advise her sister-in-law how, if one’s experience were great enough, these privations could be overcome. Lady Muriel was not a passive guest.

It was exactly the same party as when Roy was first presented to the Boscastles. Mrs Seymour was staying at the villa; I had escaped her for some time past, but now found myself sitting next to her at dinner.

“It must be wonderful to see heaps and heaps of counters being pushed towards you,” she said.

“It must,’’ I said.

“Yes, Doris?” said Lady Muriel loudly. “Have you been playing today?”

Mrs Seymour giggled, and was coy. I was surprised and irritated (uncharitably, but she annoyed me more than was reasonable) to meet her there. One reason, I thought, was that Lord Boscastle should never miss his evening bridge; Mrs Seymour, like Lady Muriel and Joan, was a player of good class.

Sure of his game that night, out of which I had managed to disentangle myself, Lord Boscastle wished to spend dinner talking of Saint-Simon’s memoirs, which he had just been reading. I would willingly have listened, but Roy distracted him by asking his opinion of various fashionable persons staying in Monte Carlo and the villas near. Lord Boscastle, as I now knew for certain, took a perverse pleasure in acting in character. He was always ready, in fact, to caricature himself. And so, as Roy produced name after name with a flicker in his eye, Lord Boscastle was prompt with his comment. “I don’t know him, of course, but I shouldn’t have thought he was anything out of the ordinary, should you have thought so?” “I don’t know whether any of you have met her, but I shouldn’t have expected her to be specially distinguished.”

The Master chuckled. It was hard to guess precisely what he thought of his brother-in-law’s turns; but it was patent that he was delighted to see Roy so manifestly happy and composed. The Master smiled at me with camaraderie, but rather as though I had always exaggerated the fuss. Yet I was sure that he had not shared our knowledge with anyone in the villa that night, certainly not with his wife.

Lady Muriel herself, not perceiving any secrets round her, had been led to mention acquaintances of hers who were wintering in the town. She finished by saying: “Doris tells me the Houston Eggars have arrived. No doubt for a very short holiday. They are not staying at your hotel, I think?”

“No,” said Roy.

“Doris! Where are they staying?”

Mrs Seymour opened her eyes vaguely, then gave the name of an hotel slightly more modest than the Hermitage.

“I’m glad to hear it.” Lady Muriel looked at me accusingly. “I should think it is very suitable to their income.”

After dinner, just before the bridge four broke away, I saw Joan take Roy aside. She was wearing a blue dress, and I thought how much prettier she was becoming. She asked him straight out: “Why do you lead my uncle on? Why don’t you make him talk about something worth while?”

“Too stupid,” said Roy.

“He’s not too stupid.”

“Of course he’s not. I am.”

“You’re impossible.” She had begun to laugh, as she could not help doing whenever the demure and solemn expression came over him. Then she turned fierce again, stayed by him, and went on quarrelling as Lord Boscastle led off Lady Muriel, Mrs Seymour and the Master for their bridge. Meanwhile Lady Boscastle was commanding: “Lewis, bring your chair here, please. I am going to scold you a little.”

She glanced at me sarcastically, affectionately, charmingly, through her lorgnette.

“Yes,” she said, as I came beside her, arranged her table, filled her glass, “I think I must scold you a little.”

“What have I done now?” I said.

“I notice that you are wearing a soft shirt tonight. It looks quite a nice shirt, my dear Lewis, but this is not quite the right time. What have you to say for yourself?”

“I loathe stiff shirts,” I said. “This is very much more comfortable.”

“My dear boy, I should call that excuse rather — untravelled.” It was her final word of blame. “The chief aim of civilised society is not comfort, as you know very well. Otherwise you would not be sitting in a draughty room listening to an old woman—”

She was an invalid, her temples were sunk in, her skin minutely wrinkled; yet she could make me feel that she was twenty years younger, she could still draw out the protests of admiration. And, when I made them, she could still hear them with pleasure.

“Quite nicely said.” She smiled as she spoke. “Perhaps you would always have found some compensations in civilised society. Though we did our best to make you obey the rules.”

She flicked her lorgnette, and then went on: “But it’s not only soft shirts, my dear Lewis. Will you listen to your old friend?”

“To anything you like to tell me.”

“I want you to be a success. You have qualities that can take you anywhere you choose to go.”

“What are they?”

“Come! I’ve heard you called the least vain of men.”

“Not if you’re going to praise me,” I said.

She smiled again.

“I needn’t tell you that you’re intelligent,” she said. “You’re also very obstinate. And for a man of — what is it, my dear?”

“Thirty.”

“For a man of thirty, you know something of the human heart.”

She went on quickly: “Believe me about those things. I have spent my life among successful men. You can compete with them. But they conformed more than you do, Lewis. I want you to conform a little more.”

“I don’t parade my opinions—”

“We shouldn’t mind if you did. I have seen that you are a radical. No one minds what a man of distinction thinks. But there are other things. Sometimes I wish you would take some lessons from your friend Roy. He couldn’t do anything untravelled if he tried. I wish you would go to his tailor. I think you should certainly go to his barber. Your English accent will pass. Your French is deplorable. You need some different hats.”

I laughed.

“But these things are important,” said Lady Boscastle. “You can’t imagine your friend Roy not attending to them.”

“He’s a good-looking and elegant man,” I said.

“That’s no reason for your being too humble. You can do many things that he can’t. Believe me, Lewis. If you took care, you could look quite impressive.”

Then she focused her lorgnette on me. Her porcelain eyes were glittering with indulgence and satire. “Perhaps Roy is really much more humble than you are. I think you are very arrogant at heart. You just don’t care. You have the sort of carelessness, my dear boy, that I have heard people call ‘aristocratic’. I do not remember knowing any aristocrats who possessed it.”

Just as the car drew up outside to take Roy and me back to Monte Carlo, the Boscastles’ son returned from a dinner party. He was only eighteen and still at school; he had been born to them when Lady Boscastle was nearly forty and they had given up hope of a child. I had not met him before, and caught just a glimpse before we left. He was slender, asthenic, with a wild, feminine face.

It was after midnight when our car dropped us at the hotel, and, like other pairs of friends in sight of the casino, we had a disagreement. One of us was addicted to gambling, and the other hated it. Some might have expected Roy to play lavishly the night through: but the facts were otherwise. It was I who spent the next two hours at baccarat; it was Roy who stood behind me, smoking cigarette after cigarette, who walked irritably round the square, who entered again hoping that I should have finished.

“Excellent,” he said, when at last I had had enough.

“Why didn’t you come in?” I said, as we took a walk in the casino gardens.

“I’ve something better to do with my money,” said Roy, as though he were the guardian of all the prudent virtues.

I had won forty pounds, but that did not placate him.

“It’ll only lead you on,” he said. “I wish you’d lost.”

“It will pay for my holiday,” I said.

“You’ll lose it all tomorrow. And a lot more.”

It was a brilliant frosty night, utterly calm on the sea. The two lights of the harbour shone, one green, one red, and their reflection lay still upon the water. The stars were bright in the moonless sky, and below the lights of the coast road blazed out.

“Extremely serene,” said Roy. “Now I shall go and sleep.”

We were tired and contented. A few moments later, the porter at the hotel said that there was a telegram for Mr Calvert. As he read it, Roy made a grimace.

“Not quite so serene,” he said, and gave it to me. It was from Rosalind, the English words curiously distorted on the way. It must have been written as something like:

ARRIVE IN CANNES TOMORROW TWENTY-NINTH PROPOSE STAY MONTE CARLO UNLESS INCONVENIENT FOR YOU SHALL APPEAR THIRTY-FIRST UNLESS YOU SEND MESSAGE TO AMBASSADEURS SAYING NO.

12: Some Women

We discovered that, several days before, Rosalind had reserved a room, not at the Hermitage but at the Hotel de Paris. Whether this was to save Roy’s face or simply to show off, no one could be sure. Rosalind’s origins were similar to mine, though less poverty-stricken: she still lived in our native town, where she earned a large income for a young woman: she had a flair for bold dramatic design and, applying her usual blend of childish plaintiveness and businesslike determination, took £600 a year from an advertising company. She lived simply at home and spent her money on extravagant presents and holidays at the most expensive hotels, which she examined with shrewd businesslike eyes and basked in with a hearty provincial gusto.

When he realised that she was coming not on a sudden caprice but by plan, Roy was amused, irritated, pleased, hunted, and somewhat at a loss. He knew he could not keep her unobserved while the Boscastle party spent its days in Monte Carlo; he knew that Rosalind would see that did not happen. But he was too fond of her, too clearsightedly, intimately, physically fond of her, to forbid her to come.

He decided that he must brazen it out. Lady Muriel and Joan lunched with us at the hotel, and half-way through Roy said, less unselfconsciously than usual: “By the way, Lady Mu, a friend of mine is coming down on Thursday.”

“Who may that be, Roy?”

“A girl called Rosalind Wykes. I brought her in for tea one day, do you remember? I only knew she was coming this morning.”

“Indeed.” Lady Muriel looked at him. “Roy, is this young woman staying here alone?”

“I should think so.”

“Indeed.”

Lady Muriel said no more. But when I arrived at the Café de Paris for tea, I found the four women of the Boscastle party engrossed in a meeting of disapproval and indignation. There were shades of difference about their disapproval, but even Lady Boscastle, the fastidious and detached, agreed on the two main issues: Roy was to be pitied, and Rosalind was not fit for human company.

“Good afternoon, Mr Eliot. I am glad you were able to join us,” said Lady Muriel, and got back to the topic in hand. “I cannot understand how any woman has the shamelessness to throw herself at a man’s head.”

“I can’t help admiring her courage,” said Joan. “But—”

“Joan! I will not listen to anything you say in her favour. She is a mercenary and designing woman.”

“I’ve said already,” said Joan, fierce, sulky, angry with both her mother and Rosalind, “that I think she’s absolutely unsuitable for him. And if she thinks this is the way to get him, she’s even stupider than I thought. Of course, she’s appallingly stupid.”

“I should have called her rather — uninformed,” said Lady Boscastle. “I think our mothers would have thought her a little forward.”

“I don’t know how any man ever allows himself to get married,” said Mrs Seymour, “the way some women behave.”

“She’s a Clytemnestra,” said Lady Muriel surprisingly. We all looked puzzled, until Lady Boscastle observed gently: “I think you mean Messalina, Muriel.”

“She’s a Messalina,” said Lady Muriel with passion and violence. “Of course, she’s not a lady. She’s not even gently bred. No lady could do what this woman is doing.”

Lady Boscastle raised her lorgnette.

“I’m not quite sure, Muriel. I think this girl’s behaviour is rather unbecoming — but haven’t you and I known cases—?”

“It was not the same,” said Lady Muriel grandly. “If a lady did it, she would do it in a different way.”

Soon afterwards Roy came in. When he apologised for being late, Lady Muriel was banteringly, clumsily affectionate, as though she wanted to say that he was still in favour. Then Lady Boscastle began to talk about her party on New Year’s Eve.

“I have at last succeeded in persuading my husband to enter the Sporting Club. It has taken some time,” she said with her delicate, sarcastic smile. “We are dining at ten o’clock. I am counting on you two to make up the party. Will you come, Lewis?”

I said that I should love to.

Roy hesitated.

“I don’t know whether Lady Muriel has told you, Lady Boscastle,” he said, “but a friend of mine is arriving that day.”

“I had heard,” said Lady Boscastle.

“I think I need to look after her.”

His tone was light but firm. He looked at Lady Boscastle. For a second her eyes wavered to Lady Muriel, and then came back to him. In a few moments, I knew that she would not invite Rosalind, and that he would not give way.

“I’m so sorry,” said Roy, as though there had been no challenge. “It’s a shame to miss you all on New Year’s Eve. I should have enjoyed it so much.”

I was shocked that Lady Boscastle could be rude in this fashion. She was acting, so it seemed to me that afternoon, not as herself but as part of the clan. These were not her manners, but the manners of the whole Boscastle circle. Which were often, under their formal politeness, not designed to give pleasure. For instance, it was not politeness of the heart when Lady Muriel, seeing Roy and me constantly together, called him by his Christian name and me “Mr Eliot”, year in, year out, without softening or change. She was intensely fond of him, of course, and neutral to me, but some codes of manners would have concealed those feelings.

On the afternoon of the thirty-first, I was told that Rosalind had come, but I did not see her. Roy and she were together, I assumed, but they avoided the normal meetingplaces of the Boscastle party. So I had tea with the Master and Lady Muriel, dressed early, and put in some hours at the tables before dinner. Mrs Seymour, who was becoming an insatiable gambler, was also in the casino, but I managed to pass her undetected. That was too good to last; and at dinner at the Sporting Club her place was inevitably on my right. Full of excitement, she described to me how she had been invited to a French house at five o’clock that afternoon and offered an aperitif.

“I don’t like wine for tea,” said Mrs Seymour. For once her vagueness, even her enthusiasm vanished, and she felt like the voice of England.

Lord Boscastle’s table was in an alcove which commanded the whole room. Lights shone, shoulders gleamed, jewellery flashed, expensive dresses rustled, expensive perfume touched the air: champagne buckets were being carried everywhere: there were at least a dozen people in the room whom I recognised from photographs. Lord Boscastle viewed the spectacle with disfavour.

“I don’t know any of these people,” he said. He looked at his sister who, despite his approval of scholarly pursuits, he sometimes affected to think moved in a different circle of existence.

“Muriel!” he called out. “I suppose you know who these people are?”

“Certainly I do not,” said Lady Muriel indignantly.

To her profound annoyance, an elderly man bowed to her.

“Who is that fellow?” asked Lord Boscastle.

“Lord Craycombe,” said Mrs Seymour.

“That family are nothing but nineteenth-century arrivistes,” said Lord Boscastle. “Not a very distinguished acquaintance, my dear Muriel, I should have thought—?”

He was on the rampage. This was his revenge for being dragged into society.

“Talking of arrivistes,” he said, “I noticed one or two over-luxurious yachts in the harbour. I didn’t think they were in specially good taste. But it’s obvious that people whom one simply wouldn’t have known some time ago have managed to do remarkably well for themselves.”

Which noble families was he disposing of now? I wished that Roy had been there.

The party contained eight people. Houston Eggar had been asked to fill Roy’s place; his wife (“Tom Seymour’s girl”) had already left for Rome, where they had been posted for a year past. Lord Boscastle proceeded to interrogate Eggar upon the Abyssinian war. The Boscastles had lived years in Italy; he had a passion for the country; though he called himself a whig, the squabble about a colonial war seemed to him hypocritical nonsense. Eggar tried hard to be both familiar and discreet, but I got the impression that in his heart he agreed. With one criticism of Lord Boscastle’s he did not agree, however; and I could not help feeling that this particular criticism would have seemed unfamiliar to my left wing friends. For Lord Boscastle appeared to regard the mishandling of British policy towards Italy as due to the increasingly middle-class constitution of the Foreign Office.

Joan argued stormily with her uncle. She thought he was clever but misguided, and never gave up hope of converting him. Eggar she dismissed as set in his ways. Actually, Eggar put on a tough assertive manner, as though he were anxious to talk to Lord Boscastle as man to man. Underneath the assertiveness he was deferential and eager to please. He was determined never to say anything foolish, never to let slip a confidence, never to be indiscreet. He was powerfully built, dark, young-looking for a man in early middle age; he was kindly, vulgar, inordinately ambitious, and not at all subtle.

It was eleven, and the room was full. Suddenly Joan said: “There’s Roy.”

Our table fell into silence as we watched. Across the floor, up an aisle between the tables, Roy walked, quite slowly, with Rosalind on his arm. They attracted many glances. Roy looked more than ever spruce, with a white gardenia in his buttonhole; but Rosalind took attention away from him. She was not a beauty, in the sense that several women in this room were beauties; she had none of the remoteness that beauty needs. But her face was mobile, pathetic, humorous and living, and she had dressed to make sure that she would not be overlooked.

The aisle ran only one row of tables away from ours. As they came near, Rosalind, who was on the far side, kept talking to Roy; but he turned half round and gave us a brilliant smile. It did not look a smile of defiance or triumph; it was fresh, cheerful, alight with high spirits.

I caught Lady Boscastle’s eye. She must have seen a glint of satisfaction in mine, for she shrugged her shoulders and her mouth twitched. She had too much humour, too much sense of style, not to be amused. Yet she was stubborn in the arguments which followed.

“She’s a very personable young woman,” said Lord Boscastle, approvingly. “We’d better have them over here, Helen.”

“I don’t think that would be at all suitable,” said Lady Muriel.

“Why not? I remember meeting her. Young Calvert’s got an eye for a pretty woman.”

“She is rather untravelled perhaps for tonight, my dear Hugh,” said Lady Boscastle.

“Have you just discovered that? I got on perfectly well with her,” said Lord Boscastle. He was annoyed. “And I regard Calvert as someone I know.”

Lady Boscastle, with heavy support from Lady Muriel, maintained her opposition. Lord Boscastle became nettled. One could feel the crystalline strength of Lady Boscastle’s will. In that marriage, I thought, she had had the upper hand all the way through. He had been jealous, she had gone her own way, she had never sacrificed that unscratchable diamond-hard will. Yet Lord Boscastle was accustomed to being the social arbiter. In the long run, even Lady Muriel deferred to his judgment on what could and could not be done. That night he was unusually persistent. Mainly because he did not mean to be deprived of a pretty girl’s company — but also he had a masculine sympathy with Roy’s enjoyments.

In the end, they agreed on a compromise rather in his favour. Roy and Rosalind were to be left to have dinner alone, but were to be invited to visit our table afterwards. Lady Boscastle wrote a note: it was like her that it should be delicately phrased. “My dear Roy, It is so nice, and such a pleasant surprise, to see you here tonight. Will you give us the pleasure of bringing your friend Miss Wykes to this table when you have finished your dinner? We are all anxious to wish you a happy new year.”

They came. Rosalind was overawed until she was monopolised for half-an-hour by Lord Boscastle. Afterwards I heard her talking clothes with Mrs Seymour. As the night went on, her eyes became brighter, more victorious, more resolved. She talked to everyone but Lady Muriel. She did not want the glorious night to end.

Roy did not show, perhaps he did not feel, a glimmer of triumph. He exerted himself to be his most gentle, teasing and affectionate with the other women, particularly with Lady Muriel.

Within a few hours of the party, I heard the rumour that Roy and Rosalind were engaged. It came first from Mrs Seymour, who had been driven in alone and marked me down across the square.

“I think it’s perfectly certain,” she said.

“Why do you think so?”

“I seem to remember something,” she said vaguely. “I seem to remember that young woman giving me to understand—”

Joan came in with her father later that morning, and asked me point-blank if I knew anything.

“Nothing at all,” I said.

“Are you being honest?” she said. She was suspicious, and yet as soon as I answered her face was lightened with relief.

“Yes.”

“Do you think it’s likely?”

“I should have thought not.”

She looked at me with a troubled and hopeful smile.

Another member of the New Year’s party found it necessary to talk to me that morning, but on quite a different subject. Houston Eggar took me for a walk in the gardens, and there in the bright sunlight told me of an embarrassment about that day’s honours list. “You won’t have seen it yet, of course,” he said. “But they happen to have given me a little recognition. If these things come, they come.” But what had come, he felt, needed some knowledgeable explanation. Before he was appointed to Rome, he had been seconded for two years to another ministry. He considered, as an aside, that this had temporarily slowed down his promotion in the Foreign Office, but he assured me that it ought to pay in the long run. As a reward for this work, he was now being given a CBE: whereas anyone of his seniority in the Foreign Office would expect, in the ordinary course of things, to be getting near a CMG — “which has more cachet, needless to say,” said Houston Eggar. “You see, Eliot,” he went on earnestly, “to anyone who doesn’t know the background, this C of mine might seem like a slap in the face. Instead of being a nice little compliment. I’d be very much obliged if you’d explain the situation to the Boscastles. Don’t go out of your way, but if you get a chance you might just remove any misconceptions. I’ll do the same for you some day.”

Several more rumours about the engagement reached me during the next twenty-four hours, and I knew that Roy had heard what was bubbling round him. But I scarcely saw him; he did not eat a meal in our hotel; it was from someone else I learned that Rosalind had been invited out to the villa on January 3rd — but only for tea, apparently as another compromise between Lord and Lady Boscastle.

It was the day before, January 2nd, when Lady Muriel announced that she would make “tactful enquiries” of Roy himself. “I shall not embarrass him,” she said. “I shall merely use a little finesse.”

Lady Boscastle raised her lorgnette, but said nothing. We had met for tea at our usual place in the window of the Café de Paris; we were a little early, and Roy was expected. The Times of the day before had been delivered after lunch; Lady Muriel had studied it and made comments on the honours list, which Mrs Seymour was now reading through.

“Muriel,” she cried excitedly, “did you see that Houston has got a CBE?”

“No, Doris,” said Lady Muriel with finality. “I never read as low in the list as that.”

Roy joined us and made a hearty tea.

“I must say, Roy,” said Lady Muriel in due course, with heavy-footed casualness, “that you’re looking very well.”

It happened to be true. Roy smiled at her.

“So are you, Lady Mu,” he said demurely.

“Am I?” Lady Muriel was thrown out of her stride.

“I have never seen you look better,” Roy assured her. “Coming back to the scene of your conquests, isn’t it?”

“You’re a very naughty young man.” Lady Muriel gave her crowing laugh. Then she remembered her duty, and stiffened. “You’re looking very well, Roy,” she began again. “Have you by chance had any good news?”

“Any good news, Lady Mu?”

“Anything really exciting?”

Roy reflected.

“One of my investments has gone up three points since Christmas,” he said. “I wonder if it could be that?”

Lady Muriel plunged desperately.

“I suppose none of our friends are getting engaged just now, are they?”

“I expect they are,” said Roy. “But I haven’t seen The Times. There’s always a batch on New Year’s Day, isn’t there? I wonder why? Could I borrow The Times, Mrs Seymour?”

Under Lady Muriel’s baffled eyes, Roy worked down a column and a half of engagements. He took his time over it. There were nearly fifty couples in the paper; and the party at tea knew at least a third of them by name, and half-a-dozen personally.

“There you are, Lady Mu,”said Roy at last. “I’ve put a cross against two or three. Those are the ones you need to write to.”

Lady Muriel gave up.

“By the way,” Roy asked, “is anyone going to the ballet tonight?”

We all said no.

“I think we will go,” said Roy. “I think I should take Rosalind.”

13: A Complaint of Elusiveness

Roy did not, however, find it pleasant to fend off the Master. Lady Muriel made her “tactful enquiries” on the Saturday afternoon; next morning, the Master, Roy and I went for a walk along the hill road. The Master used no finesse; he asked no questions with a double meaning: he walked briskly between us, upright and active as a young man, breathing confidential whispers about Cambridge acquaintances, but he let it be seen that he felt Roy’s silence was a denial of affection.

Roy was in a difficult position. For he was not cherishing a secret. He had not proposed to Rosalind. Yet it was awkward to contradict the rumour. For he guessed, as I had, that Rosalind had set it going herself.

He was not willing to put her to shame. He was too fond of women to romanticise them. He knew she was determined to marry him, and would, if she thought it useful, lie and cheat and steal until she brought it off. He did not think the worse of her. Nor did he think the worse of Lady Muriel because, if she could lie in ambush in the dark and cease to be a great lady, she would with relish have pulled Rosalind’s hair out by the roots. He was fond of them all. But for Rosalind he felt the special animal tenderness that comes from physical delight, and he would not consent to see her humiliated among those who hated her.

So there was nothing for it but to take her round Monte Carlo, dine with her each night, ignore all hints and questions, and go on as though the rumour did not exist.

But I did not believe for a minute that Rosalind would win: she had miscalculated completely if she thought those were the best tactics. Probably she knew that, whatever happened, he would not give her away before the Royces and the Boscastles. Down to a certain level, she understood him well. But below that, I thought, she must be living with a stranger, if she imagined that she could take him by storm.

We turned back down the hill. In the distance, down below the white patches of houses, the sea shone like a polished shield. I made an excuse and stayed behind, taking off a shoe, so that they could have a word together. I watched their faces turn to each other, their profiles sharp against the cloudless sky. The Master was talking, Roy listening, they were near together, their faces were softened by seriousness and intimacy. In profile Roy’s nose ran too long for beauty: the Master looked more regularly handsome, with trim clear lines of forehead, chin and mouth; his skin had been tinged a little by the January sun, and he seemed as healthy as Roy, and almost as young.

After we had seen his car drive away in the direction of Roquebrune, I said to Roy: “What did he ask you?”

“He didn’t ask me anything. But he told me something.” Roy was smiling, a little sadly.

“What?”

“He told me that, if ever I thought of getting married, I was to consider nothing but my own feelings. It was the only occasion in life when one needed to be absolutely selfish in one’s choice. Otherwise one brings misery to others as well as to oneself.”

Roy looked at me.

“It cost him an effort to say that,” he said. “It was brave of him.”

He added, as though off-handedly: “You know, old boy, if he had let himself go he could have had a high old time with the women. It’s almost not too late for him to start.”

Roy spoke with the deep and playful ease of a profound personal affection. For his relation with the Master had nothing of the strain that comes between a protégé and his patron — where all emotion is ambivalent, unless both parties are magnanimous beyond the human limits: if they are ordinary humans, there is the demand for gratitude on one side, resentment on the other, and those forces must drive them further apart. Roy’s feeling was different in kind. It was deep, it had nothing to do with their positions. It was more like a successful younger brother’s for an elder who has had a bad time. And underneath there was a strong current of loving envy; for, whatever had happened to the Master, his essential self had been untouched. He might regret that he had done little, he might be painfully lonely, but in his heart there was repose. Roy envied him, even that morning, when he was himself free of any shadow; in the dark nights Roy envied him passionately, above all for his simple, childish faith in God. He was cynical in his speech, sceptical in his human reflections, observant and disinterested: how had he kept that faith?

The Boscastle cars were busy that day, carrying out guests for lunch, bringing them back; and one called in the afternoon for Roy, Rosalind and me. Rosalind was spectacular in black and white.

“I’ve worn ten different outfits in four days,” she said. “Do you think this will get by?”

She was excited, full of zest, apprehensive but not too much so to enjoy herself. She exclaimed rapturously as we drove round the beautiful stretch of coast. It did not matter to her that it had been praised before. She thought it was romantically beautiful; she said so, and gasped with pleasure.

Both the dress and Rosalind “got by” with Lord Boscastle. Lady Boscastle was delicately polite, Lady Muriel gave what she regarded as a civil greeting; but Lord Boscastle was an obstinate man, and here was a decorative young woman asking only to sit at his feet and be impressed. He was happy to oblige. Her taste in dress might be bold, but she was incomparably better turned out than any of the women of his party, except his own wife. And each time he met her, he felt her admiration lapping round him like warm milk. He felt, as other men felt in her presence, a size larger than life.

He placed her in the chair next to his. Tea was brought in.

“I’m afraid I’m not much good at tea,” said Lord Boscastle to Rosalind, as though it were a very difficult game. “But I expect you are, aren’t you?” He pressed her to take some strawberry jam. “From my house,” he said. “We grow a few little things at my house, you know.”

Roy, sitting between Lady Muriel and Joan, was watching with the purest glee. It did not need his prompting that afternoon to send Lord Boscastle through his hoops.

“We have always grown a few things at my house,” said Lord Boscastle.

“Have you, Lord Boscastle?” said Rosalind.

They discussed the horticultural triumphs of the house for the past two hundred years, Lord Boscastle taking all the credit, Rosalind giving him all the applause.

Then he remembered a displeasing fact. “The trouble is,” he said to her, “that one never knows who is coming to live near one’s house nowadays. I heard from my steward only today that someone is going to squat himself down ten miles away. His name appears to be” — Lord Boscastle reached for a letter and held it at arm’s length — “Woolston. A certain Sir Arthur Woolston.”

He pronounced the name with such painful emphasis that Lady Muriel and the rest of us waited for his next words.

“I’m afraid I don’t know the fellow,” he said. “I think,” he added, in a tone of tired dismissal, “I think he must be some baronet or other.”

He stared across at his sister, and said: “I suppose you probably know him, Muriel.”

“I have never heard of him,” Lady Muriel replied in dudgeon. Then, using the same technique, she turned on her sister-in-law: “Or is he some sort of lawyer? Would your father have known him, Helen?”

“I scarcely think so,” said Lady Boscastle.

“Don’t I remember one of your father’s cases having something to do with the name of Woolston?”

“Perhaps you do, Muriel,” said Lady Boscastle, smiling with charm and sarcasm. “In that case you remember more than I.”

A moment later, Lady Boscastle said to me: “It is such a beautiful sunset, Lewis. I should like to take a little walk in the garden. Will you come with me, my dear?”

She rang for her maid, who brought her coat and wraps and dressed her. She took my arm, leaned on me, and her stick tapped slowly along the terrace. It was a magnificent evening. The sun had already set behind the hills, but the sky above was a startling luminous green, which darkened to velvet blue and indigo, so dense that it seemed tangible, as one looked over the sea towards Italy. The lights of Mentone sparkled across the water, and the first stars had come out.

“Had I told you that my father was a barrister, Lewis?” said Lady Boscastle.

“No, never,” I said.

“It may have made me more interested in you, my dear boy,” she said.

She told me his name; he had been an eminent chancery lawyer, some of whose cases I had studied for my Bar examinations. It came as a complete surprise to me. Rather oddly — so it seemed to me later — I had never enquired about her history. Somehow I had just assumed that she was born in the Boscastle circle. She had acclimatised herself so completely, she was so much more fine-grained than they, so much more cultivated, so much more sophisticated. No one could be more exquisite and “travelled”; she told me of the sweetness of life which she and her friends had known, and, far more than Lord Boscastle or Lady Muriel, made me feel its graces; she had been famous in Edwardian society, she had been loved in the last days of the old world.

But she had not been born in that society. She had been born in a comfortable place, but not there. When I knew, I could understand how she and Lady Muriel scored off each other. For Lady Boscastle, detached as she was, was enough child of her world not to be able to dismiss Lady Muriel’s one advantage; she knew she was far cleverer than Lady Muriel, more attractive to men, more certain of herself; but still she remembered, with a slight sarcastic grimace, that Lady Muriel was a great aristocrat and she was born middle-class.

It might also explain, I thought, why sometimes she was more rigid than her husband. When, for example, it was a question of inviting Rosalind, and she spoke for the entire Boscastle clan, did the accident of her own birth make her less able to be lax?

We retraced our steps along the terrace, her stick tapping. The curtains had not been drawn, and we could see the whole party in the bright drawing-room. Rosalind was listening to Lord Boscastle with an expression of pathetic, worshipping wonder.

“That young woman,” said Lady Boscastle, “is having a succès fou. Lewis, have you a penchant for extremely stupid women?”

“I am not overfond of intellectual women,” I said. “But I like them to be intelligent.”

“That is very sensible,” Lady Boscastle approved.

“By the way,” I said, “Rosalind is far from stupid.”

“Perhaps you are right,” she said indifferently. “She is a little effusive for my taste. Perhaps I am not fair.” She added, with a hint of sarcastic pleasure: “I shall be surprised if she catches your friend Roy. In spite of the bush telegraph.”

“So shall I.”

She glanced into the drawing-room. She did not need her lorgnette, her long-sighted blue eyes could see a clear tableau of Roy, Joan, and Lady Muriel: Lady Muriel had turned away, as if to hide a smile, Joan was beginning her lusty, delightful laugh, Roy was sitting solemn-faced between them.

“I shall also be surprised,” said Lady Boscastle, “if my niece Joan ever succeeds in catching him.”

“She’s very young,” I said.

“Do you think she realises that she is getting excessively fond of him?” Lady Boscastle asked. “Which is why she quarrels with him at sight. Young women with advanced ideas and strong characters often seem quite remarkably obtuse.”

“Under it all,” I said, “she’s got great capacity for love.”

I felt Lady Boscastle shrug her shoulders as we slowly made our way.

“She will never capture anyone like your friend Roy,” she said coolly. “Our dear Joan is rather — unadorned.”

She began to laugh, and turned up her face in the brilliant twilight. She looked puckish, monkey-like, satirical, enchanting.

“I am sure that her mother will never notice that Joan is getting fond of him,” said Lady Boscastle. “Muriel has never been known to notice anything of the kind in her life. It was sometimes convenient that she didn’t, my dear Lewis. Perhaps it was as well.”

In the small hours of the next morning, I was having my usual game of baccarat. I heard Rosalind’s dying fall behind me.

“I thought I should find you here. Shall I join in?”

But she did not know the rules. Sooner than explain them, it was easier for me to take her across to a roulette table.

“Don’t tell Roy that I’ve been here,” she said. “Or else I shall get into trouble.”

She gambled with the utmost method. She had decided to invest exactly ten pounds. If she made it twenty, she would stop: if she lost it, she would also stop. She sat there, looking modish, plaintive, and open-eyed: in fact, I thought, if it came to a deal she was more than a match for the violet-powdered, predatory faces round her. That night the numbers ran against her, and in half-an-hour she had lost her quota.

“That’s that,” said Rosalind. “Please can I have a drink?”

She liked money, but she threw away sums which to her were not negligible. In presents, in loans, in inventing and paying for treats, she was the most generous of women. The ten pounds had gone, and she did not give it a thought.

We sat in two of the big armchairs by the bar.

“Where’s Roy?” I asked.

“In bed, of course. And fast asleep. He sleeps like a child, bless him.”

“Always?”

“Oh, I’ve known him have a bout of insomnia. You knew that, did you? It was rather a bad one. But as a rule he just goes to sleep as soon as his head touches the pillow.” She smiled. “He’s rather a dear old thing.”

She looked with clear open eyes into mine. “Lewis,” she said, “is there any reason why I shouldn’t do?”

“What do you mean?”

“You know what I mean. Does he want more from a woman than I manage to give him? He seems to like me when we’re alone—” she gave her secret, prudish, reminiscent, amorous smile. “Is there anything more he wants?”

“You ought to know.”

“I don’t know,” she said, almost ill-temperedly. “I haven’t the faintest idea. I give him all the chances to speak I can think of, but he never takes them. He says nice things at the proper time, of course” — again she gave a smile — “but that is neither here nor there. He never tells me his plans. I never know where I am with him. He’s frightfully elusive. Sometimes I think I don’t matter to him a scrap.”

“You do, of course.”

“Do I? Are you sure?”

“You’ve given him some peace.”

“That’s not enough,” she said sharply. “I want something to take hold of. I want to be certain I mean something to him.”

She added: “Do you think he wants to marry me?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do you think he ought to marry me?”

I hesitated, for a fraction of time. Very quickly Rosalind cried, not plaintively but with all her force: “Why shouldn’t I make him a passable wife?”

14: One Way to Knowledge

After that talk with Rosalind, I thought again that she was living with a stranger. She knew him with her hands and lips: she knew more than most young women about men in their dressing-gowns; yet she did not know, any more than his dinner partners that January in Monte Carlo, two things about him.

First, he was sometimes removed from her, removed from any human company, by an acute and paralysing fear. It was the fear that, unless he found his rest in time, he might be overcome by melancholy again. In the moment of grace when we walked by the Serpentine, that fear was far away — and so it was during most of the joyful holiday. But once or twice, as he talked, made love, and invented mischievous jokes, he felt what to another man would have been only an hour’s sadness or fatigue. Roy was at once gripped, forced to watch his own mood.

It was like someone who has had an attack of a disease; he feels what may be a first symptom, which another would not notice or would laugh away: he cannot ignore it, he can attend to nothing else, he can only think “is it beginning again?”

Sometimes Rosalind thought he was elusive: he was distant from her because he had to attend to something else — is it beginning again? Those occasions were very rare in the winter after his outburst. The period of near-grace, of almost perfect safety, lasted right through the weeks on the Mediterranean, the months of the Cambridge spring. Rosalind came often to Cambridge, and spent weekends in the flat in Connaught Street. She was pressing, persuading, bullying him into marrying her — with tears, pathos, storms, scenes of all kinds. But she did not know of those moments of fear.

She did not know also of his brilliant, insatiable hopes. Those he tried to tell her of; she listened indulgently, they were part of the meaningless discontent with which so many men fretted themselves. If she had been as lucky as Roy, if she had what he had, she would have been ineffably happy. God? If she had been born in a religious time, she would have enjoyed the ceremonies, she would have assumed that she believed in God. As it was, she disbelieved just as cheerfully. There was no gap in her life; it was full and it would always have been full; she was made for the bright and pagan world, and in her heart she would always have found it.

So she dismissed, tenderly, half-contemptuously, half-admiringly, all that she heard of Roy’s hopes. She thus failed to understand the second reason why he was “elusive”. For her, love was an engrossing occupation. She had not been chaste when she met Roy, she was physically tolerant, she could have loved many men with happiness; but, loving Roy, she could make do without any other human relation, either in love or outside it. She liked her friends in a good-natured casual way, she had a worldly-wise gossipy interest in those round her, she liked to talk clothes and scandal to her women confidantes, she liked to show off her knowledge of books and art to men — but, if Roy had suddenly taken her to the Pacific, she would have missed nothing that she left behind.

She could not begin to realise how profoundly different it was with him. He lived in others more than any man I knew. It was through others that he drew much of his passionate knowledge of life. It was through others, such as the Master and Ralph Udal, that he tried to find one way to belief in God. Into anything human he could project himself and learn and feel. In the stories people told him, he found not only kinship with them, but magic and a sense of the unseen.

By contrast, he often seemed curiously uninterested and insensitive about non-human things. Places meant little to him except for the human beings they contained, and nature almost nothing at all. It was like him to talk of the Boscastle finances as we drove that night along the beautiful coast. He had very little feeling for traditional Cambridge, though no one had as many friends in the living town. He was amused by my interest in the past of the college: “romantic”, he called it scornfully: even when I produced sharp, clear facts about people in the past, he was only faintly stirred; they were not real beside the people that he knew.

Because he lived so much in others, his affections had some of the warmth, strength, glamour and imagination of love. His friendship with me did not become important to either of us until we were both grown men, but the quality he brought to it transformed it: it was different from any other of my friendships, more brilliant than anything I expected when I was no longer very young. He made others feel the same. They were the strangest variety, those to whom he brought this radiance: Lady Muriel — the “little dancer” (who was a consumptive woman in Berlin) — Winslow, who soon looked for Roy to sit next to him in hall — Mrs Seymour — the Master. There were many others, in all sorts of places from Boscastle to the tenements of Berlin, and the number grew each year.

In nearly all those affections he gave himself without thinking twice, though his parodic interest went along with his love. He had no scrap of desire to alter or “improve” those he loved. He was delighted by Lady Boscastle’s determination to reform me, but he was himself quite devoid of any trace of reforming zeal.

There were only one or two in all his human relations where there seemed the friction and strain of self. He was fond of Ralph Udal, but he was never so utterly untroubled and unselfconscious with Udal as with ten or twenty people who mattered to him less, as with, say, Mrs Seymour or Lord Boscastle. It puzzled me for a long time until I saw that with Udal Roy for once wanted something for himself. He wanted to know how to find the peace of God.

There were others too, besides Udal, whom Roy marked down as having spiritual knowledge denied to him. He felt they could be of use to him; he tracked them down, got to know them; he had a sharp eye for anyone who could be of this special use, as sharp an eye as a man develops who is out to borrow money or on the make. They were always youngish men, as though he felt no old man’s experience could help him (he was deeply fond of the Master, he envied his religious faith, but it neither drew them closer nor came between them). Yet he was never easy with them. He gave each of them up, as soon as he felt sure they had not known his own experience. Udal was the only one for whom he had a strong personal feeling. Rosalind did not realise that, through Udal, through some of those others, Roy was living an intent and desperate search. She did realise, as she had shown with the Boscastles and with me, that Roy’s friends captured his imagination and that she must know them. That was all she could see; it was a move in her plan to marry him. His hopes, his sense of life through others, his search — they would go, he would cease to be elusive, once she had him safely in the marriage bed.

It was in the early summer that he told her he could not marry her.

Rosalind let herself go. She had been crying, reproaching him, imploring him, for some days when I first heard what had happened. I went round to Connaught Street one night, and found Roy lying on the sofa, his face pale and tired. Rosalind was sitting in an armchair; the skin under her eyes was heavily powdered, but even so one could see that she had not long since been in tears.

They were in silence when I entered.

“Hallo, old boy,” said Roy. He was relieved to see me.

“I’d better tell Lewis,” said Rosalind.

“You needn’t,” said Roy. “It would be better if you didn’t.”

“You’ll only tell him yourself the minute you’ve got rid of me,” she said, angrily, pathetically.

Roy turned his face away. She faced me with open, brimming eyes.

“He’s got tired of me,” she said.

“Not true,” said Roy, without turning round.

“He won’t marry me. He’s told me that he won’t marry me.” She spoke to Roy. “You can’t deny that you’ve told me that, can you?”

Roy did not reply.

“I’m no good to him,” said Rosalind. She took out a crumpled handkerchief and began to cry, very quietly.

In time she said to me: “What do you think of it, Lewis? I expect you think it’s right.”

“I’m very sorry: that’s all one can ever say.”

“You think he’ll be better off without me, don’t you?” she cried.

I shook my head. “It’s for you two only,” I said.

She made a pretence of smiling.

“You’re a nice old thing, Lewis. If you don’t think he will be better off without me, everyone else will. All the people who think I’m a little bitch — they’ll all feel I’ve got what I deserve. Oh, what do I care what they all think? They don’t matter, now he’s turning me out.”

“I’m not turning you out.”

Roy’s voice was flat and exhausted, and Rosalind found it easier to talk to him through me. She looked at his back and said: “I’ve told him that I’ve got to get married some time. I can’t wait for ever. And someone quite nice is rather anxious to marry me.”

Whether it was an invention or not, I could not guess. In any case, she had used it in order to force Roy’s hand. She had thrust it in front of him: he could not be elusive any more, she thought. She had first mentioned it, hopefully, plaintively, three days before, and since then she had been blackmailing and begging. She had not reckoned that he would be so firm.

At this point Roy broke in: “I can only say it again. If you need to marry, you should marry him.”

It was very harsh. But it was harsh through a cause I had not expected. He was jealous. As a rule he was the least jealous of men. He was resolved not to marry her, yet he was jealous that she should marry another.

“I don’t know whether I could bear it.”

“I expect he will make you happier than I ever could.”

“You’re horrible,” said Rosalind, and sobbed again.

She did not move him, either then or later. He stayed firm, though he became more gentle when the first shock wore off. He wanted to go on living with her, but he would not marry her. Rosalind still kept coming to see him, though more fitfully. I heard nothing more about her engagement to the other man.

The scene left Roy quiet and saddened. For some days I dreaded that he was being overcome by another wave of depression. But it fell away. It was good to see him light-hearted with relief. Yet I thought, as the summer passed, that he was never as carefree after the scene with Rosalind; even at his gayest, he never reached the irresponsible, timeless content of Monte Carlo. He became more active, impatient, eager, more set on his own search. He spent much more time with Ralph Udal in Lewisham. He persuaded me to try to trace old Martineau for him: but Martineau had moved from the Leeds pavement, no one knew where.

One afternoon in August I saw something which surprised me and set me thinking. I was being driven over the Vauxhall bridge, when through the car window I saw Rosalind and Ralph Udal walking together. Neither was speaking, and they were walking slowly to the north side of the river. What was she doing now, I thought? Did she think that he had become the most powerful influence on Roy? Was she playing the same game that she had once played with me?

The first part of the liturgy was published in the summer. In due course, often after months of delay, there followed respectful reviews in three or four scholarly periodicals. Colonel Foulkes, as usual putting in his word without a pause, got in first with his review in the Journal of Theological Studies; he wrote that the complete edition of the liturgy looked like being the most authoritative piece of oriental scholarship for a generation. But apart from him English scholars did not go out of their way to express enthusiasm. The reviews were good enough, but there was none of the under-current of gossipy personal praise. I had no doubt that, if Roy had kept quiet at the December meeting, he would have had different luck, his reputation would have been as good as made; Sir Oulstone would have paid a state visit to the college, all Sir Oulstone’s friends would have been saying that Roy had once for all “arrived”. But none of those things happened. Sir Oulstone and his school were cold and silent.

The Master was painfully disappointed. Arthur Brown said to me with sturdy resignation: “I want to tell them, Eliot, that our young friend is the best scholar this college has had since the war. But it looks as though I shall have to wait for a few years.” He warned me comfortably: “It’s never wise to claim more than we can put on the table. People remember that you’ve inflated the currency, and they hold it against you next time.”

We were downcast and angry. Roy’s own response was peculiar. He was amused, he treated it as a good joke at his own expense — and also at ours, who wanted him to be famous. “It’s a flop, old boy,” he said mischievously in his room one afternoon. He developed the habit of referring to his work as though he were a popular writer. “It’s a flop. I shan’t be able to live on the royalties. I’m really very worried about the sales.”

I wanted him to make his peace with Lyall, but he smiled.

“Too late. Too late. Unsuccessful author, that’s what I shall be. I shall need to work harder to make ends meet.” He jumped to his feet, and went towards the upright reading desk. He was busy with a particularly difficult psalm. “Can’t stay talking,” he said. “That won’t buy Auntie a new frock.”

He was gaining a perverse satisfaction. I realised at last that he did not want the fame we wanted for him. He would do the work — that was a need, a drug, an attempt at escape — but if he could choose he would prefer to be left obscure.

Most men, I thought, are content to stay clamped within the bonds of their conscious personality. They may break out a little — in their daydreams, their play, sometimes in their prayers and their thoughts of love. But in their work they stay safely in the main stream of living. They want success on the ordinary terms, they scheme for recognition, titles, position, the esteem of solid men. They want to go up step by step within their own framework. Among such men one finds the steadily and persistently ambitious — the Lyalls and the Houston Eggars.

Roy always shied from them. He thought of them as “stuffed”. It had been obtuse of us to imagine he would seek a career as they might seek it. Arthur Brown and I were more ordinary men than he was. We were trying to impose on him the desires we should have had, if we had been as gifted. But one could not separate his gifts from the man he was.

No one was less willing, less able, to stay clamped within the bonds of self. Often he wished that he could: he cried out in envy of the comfortable. But he was driven. He was driven to his work by the same kind of compulsion that drives an artist. It gave him the obsessed, the morbid concentration that none of the ordinary healthy ambitious scholars could achieve; it did not give him the peace he hoped, although he knew he would be lost without it; above all it did not give him the matter-of-fact ambition that everyone round him took for granted. In his place, they would all have longed to be distinguished savants, men of weight, Fellows of the British Academy, recipients of honorary degrees — and in time they would have got there. Yet, at the prospect Roy felt caught, maimed, chained to the self he was trying to leave behind. At the prospect he was driven once more, driven to fly into obscurity.

Perhaps it had been wrong of Arthur Brown and me to see that he became a fellow. He seemed to want it — but perhaps even then we were reading our desires into him. Was his outburst a shriek of protest against being caught? Was it a wild flight as he saw a new door closing?

Yet I had my own minor amusement. Roy’s enemies in the college had heard the Master prophesy an overwhelming triumph; the book came out, and with gratification Despard-Smith and others slowly sensed that there was an absence of acclaim.

Despard-Smith said one night: “I have always been compelled to doubt whether Calvert’s work will s-stand the test of time. I wish I could believe otherwise. But it will be a scandal for the college if his work turns out to be a flash in the pan.”

Roy was not dining, but I told him afterwards. He was no more consistent than other men, and he became extremely angry.

“What does he know about it?” said Roy furiously, while I laughed at him. “He’s never written a line in his life, except asking some wretched farmer to pay the rent. Why should some tenth-rate mathematician be allowed to speak about my work? I need to talk to him.”

Roy spoke to Despard-Smith the next night.

“I hear that you’ve become an oriental scholar, Despard?”

“I don’t know what you mean, Calvert.”

“I hear that you doubt the soundness of my edition. I suppose that you needed to study it first?”

Roy was still angry, and his subtle, mystifying, hypnotic approach had deserted him. Despard-Smith felt at home, and a gleam of triumph shone in his eye.

“No, Calvert, that wasn’t necessary. I relied on my judgment from what I picked up round me. Exactly as one has to do — in electing a fellow. One has to rely on one’s judgment. I don’t pretend to be clever, Calvert, but I do congratulate myself on my judgment. I might tell you that some people never acquire it.”

Roy had no reply. I was very much amused, but it was a joke that he did not see.

It was not long before the Master and Arthur Brown were able to score a success for Roy within the college. Roy’s reputation had been high with German scholars since he brought out his grammar, and the liturgy was praised at once, more immediately and vociferously than in England. The Professor of Oriental Religions at Berlin and a colleague came to London for a conference in October, and wrote to the Master asking if he could present them to Roy. They stayed in the Lodge for a weekend and met Roy at dinner. The Professor was a stocky roundfaced roguish-looking man called Ammatter. When Roy was introduced to him, he clowned and pretended not to believe it.

The Master translated his remark with lively, victorious zest. “Professor Ammatter says,” the Master addressed himself to Despard-Smith, “that it is impossible anyone so young should have done such work. He says that we must be foisting an impostor upon them.”

Despard-Smith made a creaking acknowledgment, and sat as far down the table as he could. The Master and Roy each spoke excellent German; Ammatter was tricky, fluid, entertaining, comic and ecstatic; the wine went round fast in the combination room, the Master drinking glass for glass with Ammatter and Roy. Old Despard-Smith glowered as they laughed at jokes he did not understand. The Master, cheerful, familiar, dignified though a little drunk, broke off their conversation several times in order to translate; he chose each occasion when they were paying a compliment to Roy. The Master spoke a little more loudly than usual, so that the compliments carried all over the room. It was one of his happiest evenings, and before the end Roy had arranged to spend the next three months in Berlin.

15: Tea in the Drawing-Room

I received some high-spirited letters from Germany, in which there were references to acquaintances all over Berlin, from high party officials to the outcasts and those in danger; but I did not see Roy again until early January, after we had heard bad news.

The Master had been taken ill just before Christmas; he had not been in his briskest form all through the autumn, but in his spare, unpampered fashion he thought little of it. He got worse over Christmas, vomited often and could not eat. In the first week of January he was taken to hospital and examined. They gave him a gastroscopy, and sent him back to the Lodge the same night. They had found the answer. He had an inoperable cancer. There was no hope at all. He would die within a few months.

The day after the examination, all the college knew, but the doctors and Lady Muriel agreed that the Master should not be told. They assured him that nothing was seriously the matter, only a trivial duodenal ulcer. He was to lie still, and would recover in a few weeks. I was allowed to see him very soon after they had talked to him; I knew the truth, and heard him talk cheerfully of what he would do in two years’ time, of how he was looking forward to Roy’s complete edition. He looked almost as fresh, young and smooth-faced as the year before in the hills above Monte Carlo. He was cordial, sharp-tongued and indiscreet. His anxiety had been taken away, and so powerful was the psychological effect that he felt well. He spoke of Roy with intimacy and affection.

“He always did insist on behaving like a gilded dilettante. I wonder if he’ll ever get over it. Why will he insist on going about with vineleaves in his hair?”

He looked up at the ceiling of the great bedroom, and said quietly: “I think I know the answer to that question.”

“What do you think?”

“I think you know it too. He’s not a trifler.” He paused. He did not know that he was exhausted.

He said simply: “No, he’s searching for God.”

I was too much distressed to find what he knew of Roy’s search. Did he really understand, or was it just a phrase?

Most people in the college thought it was a mistake to lie to the Master. Round the table in the combination room there were arguments whether he should or should not have been told the truth. The day I went to the Lodge, I heard Joan disagree violently with her mother.

But Lady Muriel, even if all thought her wrong, had taken her decision and stood her ground. When he was demonstrably worse, when he could no longer think he would get better, he would have to be told. Meanwhile he would get a few weeks of hope and peace. It would be the last comfort he would enjoy while he was alive. Whatever they said, she would give it to him. Her daughter passionately protested. If he could choose, cried Joan, there was no doubt what he would say.

“I am positive that we are doing right,” said Lady Muriel. Her voice was firm and unyielding. There was grandeur in her bold eyes, her erect head, her stiff back.

Roy returned from Berlin a couple of days later. He had heard the news before he ran up my stairs, but he was looking well and composed. It was too late to see the Master that night, but he arranged to visit him the next afternoon, and for us both to have tea with Lady Muriel.

So next day I went over to the Lodge alone, and was shown into the empty drawing-room. I stood by the window. Snow had lain on the court for days, and, though it was thawing, the ground still gleamed white against the sombre dusk. The sky was heavy with dense grey clouds. The court was empty, it was still the depth of the vacation, no lights shone from the windows. In the drawing-room there was no light yet except the roaring fire.

Roy joined me there. His face was stricken. “This is dreadful,” he said.

“What did he talk about?”

“The little book on the heresies which we’re to work at in a year or two. After my liturgy is safely out.”

“I know,” I said.

“There was a time,” said Roy, “when I should have jumped at any excuse for getting out of that little book.”

“You invented several good reasons.”

“Just so. Now I shall do it in memory of him.”

I doubted whether I should ever be able to dissuade him. He would do it very well, but not superbly; it would not suit him; as a scholar his gifts were, as the mathematicians say, deep, sharp, and narrow; this kind of broad commentary was not at all in his line. People would suspect that he was losing his scholar’s judgment.

“I’d expected a good deal,” said Roy. “But it is dreadful. Much worse than anyone could guess.”

Lady Muriel threw open the door and switched on the lights. “Good afternoon, Roy,” she said. “I’m very glad you’ve come to see us. It’s so long since you were here. Good afternoon, Mr Eliot.”

Roy went to her, took her hand in his. “I’ve been talking to the Master, you know,” he said. “It’s dreadful to have to pretend, isn’t it? I wish you’d been spared that decision, Lady Mu. No one could have known what to do.”

He alone could have spoken to her so. He alone would take it for granted that she was puzzled and dismayed.

“It was not easy, but—”

“No one could help you. And you’d have liked help, wouldn’t you? Everyone would.”

Her eyes filled with tears.

She was embarrassed, flustered, choked like one unused to crying: soon Roy got her sitting beside him on the sofa, and helped her to tea. She smiled at him, her bold eyes misted and bloodshot.

“I should be filling your cup. In my own drawing-room.”

Roy smiled. “You may, the next time I come.”

She gripped hold of her drawing-room manner — for my benefit, perhaps. Her neck straightened, she made a brave attempt to talk of Roy’s journey from Berlin. He told her that he had had to sleep sitting up in a crowded carriage.

“How could you?” cried Lady Muriel. “I couldn’t bear the thought of being watched when I was asleep.”

“Why not, Lady Mu?”

“One wouldn’t know how one was looking before strangers. One couldn’t control oneself.”

He glanced at her: in a second, her face broke, and she smiled back.

Soon afterwards Joan came into the room. She walked in with her determined, gawky stride: then she saw Roy, and her whole bearing changed. She seemed to shiver. For an instant she went stiff. She came towards him, and he jumped up and welcomed her. He said a word about her father; she looked at him steadily, shook her head, deliberately put it aside and went on to argue with him over living in Germany.

“Don’t you feel pressed down? You must feel that it’s a relief to get to the frontier. I felt it very strongly—”

“The Dutch porters have no necks,” said Roy. He disliked arguments, particularly among intellectual persons.

“Seriously—”

“Seriously—” he mimicked her exactly. She flushed, and then gave her unexpected charming laugh.

“You can’t get away with it by parlour tricks,” she said. “In a police state you’re bound to feel a constant friction, anyone is. And—”

“In any sort of state,” he said, “most lives of most people are much the same.”

“I deny that,” said Joan.

“They’ve got their married lives, they’ve got their children, they’ve got their hobbies. They’ve got their work.”

“Your work wouldn’t be affected.” She seized the chance to talk about Roy himself. “But you’re an unusual man. Your work could go on just the same — in the moon. Imagine that you were a writer, or a civil servant, or a parson, or a lawyer, in Berlin now. Do you deny that the police state would make a difference? You must agree.”

“Just so,” said Roy, giving in to evade the argument. “Just so.”

Both women smiled at him tenderly. They were always amused by the odd affirmative, which seemed so out of keeping. Joan’s tenderness was full of a love deep and clear-eyed for so young a woman.

Roy returned to bantering with Lady Muriel. He was out to give them some relief but he was happy with them, and it was all light and unpretending. He told her of some Junker acquaintances in Berlin, the von Heims. “They reminded me of you so much, Lady Mu.”

“Why ever was that?”

“The Gräfin spent most of her time reading Gotha,” said Roy, sparkling with mischief, malice, fondness. “Just like you, Lady Mu, idly turning over the pages of Debrett.”

She gave her loud crowing laugh, and slapped his hand. Then she said seriously: “Of course, no one has ever called me snobbish.”

She laughed again at Roy. Joan, who knew her mother well and also knew that no one could treat her as Roy did, was melted in a smile of envy, incredulity, and love.

It was a dark rainy night when Roy and I walked out of the Lodge. On the grass in the court there were left a few patches of melting snow, dim in the gloom. The rain pelted down. Roy wanted to go shopping, and soon the rain had soaked his hair and was running down beside his ears.

I said something about Joan being in love with him, but he would not talk of her. It was rare for him to want to talk of love, rarer still of the love he himself received. He was less willing than any man to hint at a new conquest.

That night he was sad over the Master, but otherwise serene. He had come back with his spirits even and tranquil. Despite the shock of the afternoon, he was enjoying our walk in the rain.

He asked me for the latest gossip, he asked gently after my concerns. The rain swirled and gurgled in the gutters, came down like a screen between us and the bright shop windows. Roy took me from shop to shop, water dripping from us on to the floors, in order to buy a set of presents. On the way he told me whom he wanted them for — the strange collection of the shady, the shabbily respectable, the misfits, who lived in the same house in the Knesebeckstrasse. Roy would go back there, though his flat was uncomfortable, whenever he went to Berlin; for the rest, the “little dancer” and the others, had already come to be lost without him. Some thought he was an unworldly professor, a rich simple Englishman, easy to fleece.

“Poor goops.” Roy gave his most mischievous smile. “If I were going to make a living as a shark, I should do it well, shouldn’t you? We should make a pretty dangerous pair, old boy. I must try to instruct them some time.”

Nevertheless, he took the greatest pains about their presents.

16: “I Hate the Stars”

On those winter nights the light in the Master’s bedroom dominated the college. The weeks passed: he had still not been told; we paid our visits, came away with shamefaced relief. We came away into a different, busy, bustling, intriguing life; for, as soon as it was known that the Master must die, the college was set struggling as to who should be his successor. That struggle was exciting and full of human passion, but it need not be described here. It engrossed Arthur Brown completely, me in part, and Roy a little. We were all on the same side, and Winslow on the other. It was the sharpest and most protracted personal conflict that the college went through in my time.

Meanwhile, Roy spent more time in the Lodge than the rest of us put together. He sat for whole afternoons with the Master, planning their book on the heresies, and he became Lady Muriel’s only support. In the Lodge he forgot himself entirely. He devoted himself, everything he was, to each of the three of them. But he knew that he was in danger of paying a bitter price. Outside he remembered what he was watching there. It filled him with dread. At times he waited for the first sign of melancholy to take hold of him. I was waiting too. I watched him turn to his work with savage absorption: and there came nights when he drank for relief.

It was harrowing for anyone to watch, even for those far tougher-skinned than Roy. We saw the Master getting a little more tired each time we visited him; and each time he was more surprised that his appetite and strength were not coming back. For a few days after he had been told that all was well, the decline seemed to stop. He even ate with relish. Then slowly, imperceptibly to himself, the false recovery left him. By February he was so much thinner that one could see the smooth cheeks beginning to sag. He no longer protested about not being allowed up. The deterioration was so visible that we wondered when he would suspect, or whether he had already done so. Yet there was not a sign of it. He complained once or twice that “this wretched ulcer is taking a lot of getting rid of”, but his spirits stayed high and he confided his sarcastic indiscretions with the utmost vivacity. It was astonishing to see, as he grew worse under our eyes, what faith and hope could do.

Everyone knew that he would have to be told soon. The disease appeared to be progressing very fast, and Lady Muriel told Roy that he must be given time to settle his affairs. She was dreading her duty, dreading it perhaps more than an imaginative person would have done; we knew that she would not shirk it for an hour once she decided that the time had come.

One February afternoon, I met Joan in the court. I asked first about her mother. She looked at me with her direct, candid gaze: then her face, which had been heavy with sadness, lost it all as she laughed.

“That’s just like Roy,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“Asking the unexpected question. Particularly when it’s right. Of course, she’s going through more than he is at present. She will, until she’s told him. After that, I don’t know, Lewis. I haven’t seen enough of death to be sure. It may still be worse for her.” She spoke gravely, with a strange authority, as though she were certain of her reserves of emotional power. Then she smiled, but looked at me like an enemy. She said: “Has Roy learned some of his tricks from you?”

“I have learned them from him,” I said. She did not believe it. She resented me, I knew. She resented the times he agreed with me; she thought I over-persuaded him. She envied the casual intimacy between us which I took for granted, for which she would have given so much. She would have given so much to have, as I did, the liberty of his rooms. Think of seeing him whenever she wanted! She loved him from the depth of her warm and powerful nature. Her love was already romantic, sacrificial, dedicated. Yet she longed too for the dear prosaic domestic nearnesses of everyday.

It was a Sunday when I spoke to Joan; the Wednesday after Roy’s name was on the dining list for hall, but he did not come. Late at night, long after the porter’s last round at ten o’clock, he entered my room without knocking and stood on the hearth-rug looking down at me. His face was drawn and set.

“Where have you been?” I said.

“In the lodge. Looking after Lady Mu.”

“She told him this afternoon,” he added, in a flat, exhausted voice. “She needed someone to look after her. She wouldn’t have been able to cope.”

“Joan?”

“Joan was extremely good. She’s very strong.”

He paused, and said quietly: “I’ll tell you later, old boy. I need to do something now. Let’s go out. I’d like to drive over to—” the town where we had both lived — “and have a blind with old George. I can’t. They may want me tomorrow. Let’s go to King’s. There’s bound to be a party in King’s. I need to get out of the college.”

We found a party in King’s, or at least some friends to talk and drink with. Roy drank very little, but was the gayest person there. I was watching for the particular glitter of which I was afraid, the flash in which his gaiety turned sinister and frantic. But it did not come. He quietened down, and young men clustered round to ask him to next week’s parties. He was gentle to the shy ones, and by the time we set off home was resigned, quiet and composed.

We let ourselves into college by the side door, and walked through the court. When we came in sight of the Lodge windows, one light was still shining.

“I wonder,” said Roy, “if he can sleep tonight.”

It was a fine clear night, not very cold. We stood together gazing at the lighted window.

Roy said quietly: “I’ve never seen such human misery and loneliness as I did today.”

I glanced up at the stars, innumerable, brilliant, inhumanly calm. Roy’s eyes followed mine, and he spoke with desolating sadness.

“I hate the stars,” he said.

We went to his rooms in silence, and he made tea. He began to talk, in a subdued and matter-of-fact tone, about the Master and Lady Muriel. They had never got on. It had not been a happy marriage. They had never known each other. Both Roy and I had guessed that for a long time past, and Joan knew it. I had once heard Joan talk of it to Roy. And he, who knew so much of sexual love, accepted the judgment of this girl, who was technically “innocent”. “I don’t believe,” said Joan, direct and uncompromising, “that they ever hit it off physically.”

Yet, as Roy said that night, they had lived together for twenty-five years. They had had children. They had had some kind of life together. They had not been happy, but each was the other’s only intimate. Perhaps they felt more intimate in the supreme crisis just because of the unhappiness they had known in each other. It was not always those who were flesh of each other’s flesh who were most tied together.

So, with that life behind them, she had to tell him. She screwed up her resolve, “and if I know Lady Mu at all, poor dear,” said Roy, “she rushed in and blurted it out. She hated it too much to be able to tell him gently. Poor dear, how much she would have liked to be tender.”

He did not reproach her for not having told him before, he did not hate her, he scarcely seemed aware of her presence. He just said: “This alters things. There’s no future then. It’s hard to think without a future.”

He had had no suspicion, but he did not mind being fooled. He did not say a word about it. He was thinking of his death.

She could not reach him to comfort him. No one could reach him. She might as well not be there.

That was what hurt her most, said Roy, and he added, with a sad and bitter protest, “we’re all egotists and self-regarding to the last, aren’t we? She didn’t like not mattering. And yet when she left him, it was intolerable to see a human being as unhappy as she was. I told you before, I’ve never seen such misery and loneliness. How could I comfort her? I tried, but whatever could I do? She’s not been much good to him. She feels that more than anyone thinks. Now, at the end, all she can do is to tell him this news. And he didn’t seem to mind what she said.”

Roy was speaking very quietly. He was speaking from the depth of his dark sense of life.

Silently, we sat by the dying fire. At last Roy said: “We’re all alone, aren’t we? Each one of us. Quite alone.” He asked: “Old boy — how does one reach another human being?”

“Sometimes one thinks one can in love.”

“Just so,” he said. After a time, he added: “Yet, sometimes after I’ve made love, I’ve lain with someone in my arms and felt lonelier than ever in my life.”

He broke out: “If she was miserable and lonely today, what was it like to be him? Can anyone imagine what it’s like to know your death is fixed?”

After she left him, Lady Muriel had gone to his room once again, to enquire about his meals. Joan had visited him for a few minutes. He had asked to be left alone for the evening. That was all Roy knew of his state.

“Can you imagine what he’s gone through tonight? Is he lying awake now? Do you think his dreams are cheating him?”

Roy added: “I don’t believe he’s escaped the thought of death tonight. It must he dreadful to face your death. I wonder how ours will come.”

17: Struggle Through Summer Nights

When he knew the truth, it was a long time before the Master asked to see any of his friends. He told Roy, who alone was allowed to visit him, that he wished to “get used to the idea”.

He talked to Roy almost every day. Throughout those weeks, he saw no one else, except his family and his doctor. He no longer mentioned the book on the heresies. He said much less than he used to. He was often absent-minded, as though he were trying to become familiar with his fate.

Then there came a time, Roy told me, as his own spirits darkened, when the Master seemed to have thought enough of his condition. He seemed to have got bored — it was Roy’s phrase, and it was not said lightly — with the prospect of death. He had faced it so far as he could. For a time he wanted to forget. And he became extraordinarily considerate.

That was at the end of term, and he invited us to call on him one by one — not for his sake, but for ours. In his detached and extreme consideration, he knew that each of us wanted to feel of some help to him. He felt, with a touch of his old sarcasm, that he could give us that last comfort.

Everyone who talked to him was impressed and moved by his disinterested kindness. Yet I was appalled to receive so much consideration from him, to be asked about my affairs with wise detached curiosity — and then face the eyes of a dying man. His cheeks were hollow and yellow, and his skin had a waxy texture; his clothes hung on him in folds, on him who had been the best preserved of men, and as well groomed as Roy. And there was one macabre feature of his appearance, which I learned afterwards had upset him for a time. He had always been slender, he was now emaciated — but under his waistcoat swelled the round pseudo-paunch of his disease.

He had never been so kind, and I went out of the room with dread. It struck me with more distress than anyone, even Roy. For Roy, each hour in the Master’s bedroom had been an agony; he had seen too much of suffering, too much of the inescapable human loneliness; yet this state of detached sub-ironic sympathy, to which the Master had now come, seemed to Roy a triumph of the spirit as the body died. He was moved to admiration and love; I was moved too, in the same way; but I also felt a personality dissolving in front of my eyes, a human being already passing into the eternal dark and cold.

At the beginning of the summer, the disease seemed to slow down. The doctors had guessed that he would be at the point of death by May or June: they admitted now that they had calculated wrong. He sat up a little each day in his bedroom above the sunny court. He was slightly more exhausted, still disinterestedly kind, still curious about each of us. It was clear that he might live for several months yet.

This lengthening of the Master’s life had several effects upon those round him. The tension in the college about the next Master had been growing; everyone had reckoned that the election would be settled by the summer. Now the uncertainty was going to be indefinitely prolonged — and the news did not relax the tension, but increased it. The hostility between the two main parties, the talks at night, the attempts to cajole the three or four wavering votes — they all grew more urgent. And so did the campaign of propaganda and scandal. There were all kinds of currents of emotion in that election — men were moved, not only by personal feelings in the intimate sense, but also by their prejudices in subjects, in social origins, in political belief. At least two men were much influenced by the candidates’ attitude to the Spanish war, the critical test in external politics. And there was a great deal of rancour set free. On the side which Winslow led, there was a determined attempt to label us others as rackety and disreputable. Winslow himself did not take part, although he was too much committed to the struggle to control his own party. He was set on getting his candidate in. Old Despard-Smith did some sombre calumny, and one or two others became virulent.

It was inevitable that much of this virulence should direct itself at Roy. He was unusual, brilliant, disturbing; some of the men who had opposed his election, though not Winslow, envied and hated him still. And by now they knew more about him. They had had him under their eyes for nearly two years. They knew a little, they suspected much more. In such an intimate society, small hints passed into circulation; often the facts were wildly askew but the total picture preserved a sort of libellous verisimilitude. With a self-righteous satisfaction, Roy’s enemies acquired a sense, groping but not everywhere false, of a wild and dissipated life. They knew something of drunken parties, of young women, of a separate existence in London. They knew something of Joan’s love for him.

The slander became more venomous, as though in a last desperate campaign. One heard Roy attacked night after night in hall and the combination room and in private gossip. Very often women’s names were mentioned: as the summer term went on, Joan’s was the most frequent of all.

It was a curious technique, attacking our candidate through his friends and supporters. But it was not altogether ineffective. It cost us a good deal of anxiety. We tried hard to conceal these particular slanders from Roy himself, but in the end they reached him.

If he had been untroubled, he would have laughed them away. No one cared less for what others thought. He might have amused himself in executing some outrageous reprisal. But in fact he had no resilience left. He did not laugh when he heard he was being maligned. He took it darkly. It was a weight upon him. He went from the Master’s bedroom to face his own thoughts through interminable sleepless nights, and harsh, jeering voices came to him as he lay lucidly and despairingly awake. For what he had been waiting for had happened. The melancholy had gripped him again. He made less fight this time. He was both more frightened and more resigned.

It did not stop him spending all his spare time at the Lodge. He worked as hard as ever, he was drinking alone at night; but, whenever they wanted him, he was there. Perhaps it was because of them that he did not make his old frantic attempts to escape from his affliction. He did not see Udal at all, he scarcely left Cambridge for a day, he had not spent a night with Rosalind for months. He was living more chastely than at any time since I knew him. He did not talk to me about his wretchedness or hopes; he seemed resigned to being alone, lost, terrified.

I knew, though he said nothing, that thoughts pressed in on him with merciless clarity as he lay staring into the long bright summer dawns. In the Lodge he had seen the approach of death, the extreme of loneliness, faith, despair, the helpless cries of human beings as they try to give each other help. He had seen it, and now saw himself in this torment of his own melancholy. I believed later that in those nights he learned about despair.

He was looking harrowed and ill. Depriving himself of his minor pleasures, he played no cricket that summer; he was mewed up all the day time with his manuscripts, or inside the Lodge, and for the first time one saw his face with no sunburn at all. There was no colour in his face, except for the skin under his eyes.

I had to submit myself again to watch him suffer so. Much of the time I lived in apprehension. Some things I feared less than the first time, some more. I knew roughly now the course of these attacks. They differed a little among themselves; this was quieter, more despondent, more rooted in human grief; but even so I had already seen the occasional darts of fantastic elation. I had not to worry so much about the unknown. I expected that, after the melancholy had deranged and played with him, in another outburst it would end. All I could do was take such precautions as I could that this outburst would not hurt him or his friends.

But I feared something much more terrible, which last time I had not feared at all. I wanted to turn my mind away from what he must bear — not because of his present misery, but because it had overcome him again. He must have faced it often, in his loneliness on those summer nights. He must have seen it, in different lights and shades of recognition. And all were intolerable. Sometimes — this was a doom he was born with. He was as much condemned as the Master. There was no more he could do. He would be swept like this all through his life; at times, as now, he would be driven without will; he would not have the appearance of will which gives life dignity, meaning and self-respect.

The Master still had will, facing his death. He was more condemned. He must be ready to suffer aimlessly, for no reason, whenever this affliction came. He would always be helpless.

Sometimes — he could still escape. But why were the doors closed? If he could escape, why was it so preposterously harder than for others? He had to struggle, to push back the sense of doom, and still the doors would not open, and misery came upon him again. He should have escaped before this attack, and yet he was caught. It was worse to feel that he could escape, and yet be caught. It was harder to endure, if there was a way out which he could not find.

I remembered that winter evening by the Serpentine, and I was wrung by pain and by acute fear. There were nights when I too lay awake.

It was during May that Joan first told Roy that she loved him. The reprieve to her father seemed to act as a trigger to her love. It had begun long since, in the days when as an awkward girl she used to decry Roy in company and quarrel with him whenever she could make the opportunity. It had accumulated through those harsh winter days in the Lodge, when they all rested on him. Now it was set loose and pouring out.

I knew it, because she talked to me about his unhappiness. Unlike Rosalind, she could not take it as a matter of course. She was forced to discover what had stricken him. She was the proudest of young women, and yet she humbled herself to ask me — even though she thought I was her enemy, even though she felt she alone should possess his secrets. Whatever it cost her, she must learn him through and through. I was touched both by her humility and her pride. So she watched him in those weeks of affliction with eyes that were anxious, distressed, loving, hungry to understand. But she was spared the climax.

I was nervous about him almost to the end of Arthur Brown’s claret party. Brown gave this party to his wine-drinking colleagues each year at the beginning of June.

That summer he arranged it for the second night of May week. As a rule this would have been the night of the college ball, but, though the Master asked that all should continue normally, it was not being held this year. The undergraduates took their young women to balls at other colleges: Roy had danced with Joan at Trinity the previous night. Now he turned up at Brown’s party, heavy-eyed for lack of sleep, and deceived all the others into believing that his sparkle was the true sparkle of a joyous week.

All through the evening, I could not keep my eyes away from him for long. Time after time, I was compelled to look at him, to confirm what I dreaded. For this was the sparkle I had seen before. I wished I could take him out of danger.

Six of us sat in Brown’s rooms on that warm June night, and the decanters stood in a shapely row in the evening light. Brown was giving us the best clarets of 1920 and 1924.

“I must say, Tutor,” said Winslow, “that you’re doing us remarkably proud.”

“I thought,” said Brown comfortably, “that it was rather an opportunity for a little comparative research.”

Although it was late evening, the sun had scarcely set, and over the roofs opposite the sky glowed brilliantly. From the court there drifted the scent of acacia, sweet and piercing. We settled down to some luxurious drinking.

Roy had begun the evening with some of his malicious imitations, precise, unsparing, and realistic, which rubbed away the first stiffness of the party. Winslow, who had once more come to see him in the glare of propaganda, was soon melted.

Since then Roy had been drinking faster than any of us. The mood was on him.

He talked with acute intensity. Somehow — to the others it sounded harmless enough — he brought in the phrase “psychological insight”. One of the party said that he had never considered that kind of insight to be a special gift.

“It’s time you did, you know,” said Roy.

“I don’t believe in it. It’s mumbo-jumbo,” said Winslow.

“You think it’s white man’s magic?” Roy teased him, but the wild glint had come into his eyes.

“My dear young man, I’ve been watching people since long before you were born,” said Winslow, with his hubristic and caustic air. “And I know there’s only one conclusion. It’s impossible for a man to see into anyone else’s mind.”

Roy began again, the glint brighter than ever.

Suddenly I broke in, with a phrase he recognised, with a question about Winslow’s son.

Roy smiled at me. He was half-drunk, he was almost overcome by desperate elation — but he could still control it that night when he heard my signal. Instead of the frantic taunt I had been waiting for, he said: “You’ll see, Winslow. The kind of insight that old Lewis here possesses. It may be white man’s magic, but it’s quite real. Too real.”

He fell quiet as Winslow talked, for the second time that evening, about his son. Soon after he entered, Brown asked about his son’s examination, which had just finished. Winslow had been rude in his own style, professing ignorance of how the boy was likely to have got on. Now, in the middle of the party, he gave a different answer.

“My dear Brown,” he said, “I don’t know what kind of a fool of himself the stupid child has really made. He thinks he has done reasonably well. But his judgment is entirely worthless. I shall be relieved if the examiners let him through.”

“Oh, they’ll let him through,” said Brown amiably.

“I don’t know what will happen to him if they don’t,” said Winslow. “He’s a stupid child. But I believe there’s something in him. He’s a very nice person. If they give him a chance now, I honestly believe he may surprise you all in ten years’ time.”

I had never heard Winslow speak with so little guard. He gazed at Brown from under his heavy lids, and recovered his caustic tone: “My dear Tutor, you’ve had the singular misfortune to teach the foolish creature. I drink to you in commiseration.”

“I drink to his success,” said Brown.

After the party, Roy and I walked in the garden. It was a warm and balmy night, with a full moon lemon-yellow in the velvet sky. The smell of acacia was very strong. On the great trees the leaves lay absolutely still.

“I shall sleep tonight,” said Roy, after we had walked round once in silence. His face was pale, his eyes filmed and bloodshot, but the dionysiac look had gone. “I shall sleep tonight,” he said, with tired relief.

He had not been to bed for forty-eight hours, he was more than a little drunk, yet he needed to reassure himself that he would sleep.

The smell of acacia hung over us.

“I think I’ll go to bed, old boy,” he said. “I shall be able to sleep tonight. You know, I’ve been getting out of practice.”

18: Outburst

The last college meeting of the academic year took place a fortnight after Brown’s claret party. By tradition, it was called for a Saturday morning, to distinguish it from all other meetings of the year. For this was the one at which examination results were considered; the last of the results were published that morning, and Brown and I studied them together, a couple of hours before the bell was due to ring. There were several things to interest us — but the chief was that we could not find Dick Winslow’s name. Brown thought it might be a clerical mistake, and rang up the examiners to make sure. There was no mistake. He had done worse than one could have believed.

The meeting began at half-past eleven. As the room filled up, whispers about young Winslow were passing round the table; Winslow himself had not yet come. In the whispers one could hear excitement, sometimes pity, sometimes pleasure, sometimes pity and pleasure mixed. At last Winslow entered and strode to his place, looking at no one there.

An old man, who had not picked up the news, said a cheerful good morning.

“Good morning to you,” said Winslow in a flat leaden desolate voice. He was remote, absent-minded in his misery.

There were some minor courtesies before the meeting. Winslow was asked a question. He sat mute. He could not rouse himself to a tart reply. His head had sunk down, bent towards the table.

Despard-Smith, who had taken the chair since the Master fell ill, at last opened the business. The sacramental order was followed, even at this special examination meeting. There was only one trivial matter connected with livings: then came the financial items, when as a rule Winslow did most of the talking and entertained us in his own style. He could usually be relied on to keep us for at least half-an-hour — just as he had done at Roy’s election. That morning, when Despard-Smith asked: “Bursar, will you take us through your business?”

Winslow replied in defeat and dejection: “I don’t think it’s necessary. It explains itself.”

He said nothing more. He sat there, the object of curious pitying, triumphant glances. There were some who remembered his arrogance, his cutting words. An opponent made several financial proposals: Winslow had not the strength even to object.

Then the Senior Tutor (who had been an enemy of Winslow’s for years past) went through the examination results name by name. There were startling successes: there was a man who had a great academic future; there were failures of the hardworking and dense, there were failures among the gilded youth. There was one failure owing to a singular personal story. The Senior Tutor went through from subject to subject, until at last he came to history, which young Winslow had studied. The table was very quiet. I looked at Roy, and his expression filled me with alarm. Roy’s eyes were fixed on Winslow, eyes full of angry pity, sad and wild. Since the claret party he had been unendurably depressed, and much of the time he had shut himself up alone. Now his face was haunted.

The Senior Tutor congratulated Brown on the performance of one pupil. He exuded enthusiasm over another. Then he looked at his list and paused. He said: “I think there’s nothing else to report,” and hurried on to the next subject.

It had been meant as sympathy, I believed. How Winslow felt it, no one could know. He sat silent, eyes fixed on the table, as though he had not heard.

We had not quite finished the business by one o’clock, but broke off for lunch. Lunch was laid in an inner room; it was cold, but on the same profuse scale as the tea before the usual meetings. There were piles of sandwiches, pâtés, jellies, meringues, pastries, savouries, jugs of beer, decanters of hock, claret, burgundy: the sight of the meal drew approving cries from some of the old men.

Most of the society ate their lunch with zest. Winslow stood apart, staring out of the window, taking one single sandwich. Roy watched him; he looked at no one but Winslow, he said nothing, his eyes sharpened. I noticed him push the wine away, and I was temporarily relieved. Someone spoke to him, and received a sharp uncivil answer, unlike Roy even at his darkest.

There were only a few speeches after lunch, and then the meeting closed. Men filed out, and I waited for Roy. Then I noticed Winslow still sitting at the table, the bursarial documents, order-book and files in front of him: he stayed in his place, too lost and dejected to move. Roy’s eyes were on him. The three of us were left alone in the room. Without glancing at me or speaking, Roy sat down by Winslow’s side.

“I am dreadfully sorry about Dick,” he said.

“That’s nice of you.”

“And I am dreadfully sorry you’ve had to sit here today. When one’s unhappy, it’s intolerable to have people talking about one. It’s intolerable to be watched.”

He was speaking with extreme and morbid fervour, and Winslow looked up from the table.

“You don’t care what they say,” Roy cried, his eyes alight, “but you want them to leave you alone. But none of us are capable of that much decency. I haven’t much use for human beings. Have you, Winslow, have you? You know what people are feeling now, don’t you? They’re feeling that you’ve been taken down a peg or two. They’re thinking of the times you’ve snubbed them. They’re saying complacently how arrogant and rude you’ve been. But they don’t matter. None of us matter.”

His tone was not loud but very clear, throbbing with an anguished and passionate elation.

Winslow stared at him, his eyes startled, bewildered, wretched.

“There is something in what they say, young man,” he said with resignation.

“Of course there is. There’s something in most things they say about anyone.” Roy laughed. It was a terrible, heart-rending sound. “They say I’m a waster and seduce women. There’s something in that too.”

I moved round the table, and put a hand on his shoulder. Frantically he shook it off.

“Would you like to know how much there is in it?” he cried. “We’re both miserable. It may relieve you just a bit. Would you like to know how many loving invitations I’ve coaxed for myself — out of women connected with this college?” Winslow was roused out of his wretchedness.

“Don’t trouble yourself, Calvert. It’s no concern of mine.”

“That’s why I shall do it.” Roy took a sheet of blank paper, began to write fast in his fluent scholar’s hand. I seized his arm, and his pen made a line across the paper.

He swore with frenzied glee. “Go away, Lewis,” he said. His face was wild with a pure, unmixed, uncontrollable elation. At that moment the elation had reached its height. “Go away. You’re no use. This is only for Winslow and me. I need to finish it now.”

He wrote a few more words, dashed off his signature, gave the sheet to Winslow. “This has been a frightful day for you,” Roy cried. “Keep this to remind you that people don’t matter. None of us matter.”

He smiled, said good afternoon, went with quick strides out of the room.

There was a silence.

“This is distressing,” said Winslow.

“He’ll calm down soon.” I was alert, ready to explain, ready to guard secrets once more.

“I never had any idea that Calvert was capable of making an exhibition of himself. Is this the first time it has happened?”

I evaded and lied. I had never seen Roy lose control until this afternoon, I said. It was a shock to me, as it was to Winslow. Of course, Roy was sensitive, highly-strung, easily affected by the sorrows of his friends. He was profoundly upset over the Master, and it was wearing his nerves to see so much suffering. I tried to keep as near the truth as I safely could. In addition, I said, taking a risk, Roy was very fond of Winslow’s son.

Winslow was recalled to his own wretchedness. He looked away from me, absently, and it was some time before he asked, in a flat tone: “I’m very ignorant of these matters. Should you say that Calvert was seriously unstable?”

I did not tell Winslow any of the truth. He was a very clever man, but devoid of insight; and I gave him the sort of explanation which most people find more palatable than the strokes of fate. I said that Roy was physically not at his best. His blood pressure was low, which helped to make him despondent. I explained how he had been overworking for years, how his long solitary researches had affected his health and depressed his spirits.

“He’s a considerable scholar, from all they say,” said Winslow indifferently. “I had my doubts about him once, but I’ve found him an engaging young man.”

“There’s nothing whatever to worry about.”

“You know him well,” said Winslow. “I expect you’re right. I think you should persuade him to take a good long holiday.”

Winslow looked down at the sheet of paper. It was some time before he spoke. Then he said: “So there is something in the stories that have been going round?”

“I don’t know what he has written there,” I said. “I’ve no doubt that the stories are more highly painted than the facts. Remember they’ve been told you by people who envy him.”

“Maybe,” said Winslow. “Maybe. If those people have this communication,” he tapped the paper, “I don’t see how Master Calvert is going to continue in this college. The place will be too hot to hold him.”

“Do you want to see that happen?” I was keyed up to throw my resolve against his. Winslow was thinking of his enemies in the college, how a scandal about Roy would confute them, how he could use it in the present struggle. He stared at me, and told me so without any adornment.

“You can’t do it,” I said, with all the power I could call on.

“Why not?”

“You can’t do it. You know some of the reasons that brought Calvert to the state he was in this afternoon. They’re enough to stop you absolutely, by themselves.”

“If you’d bring it to a point—”

“I’ll bring it to a point. We both know that Calvert lost control of himself. He got into a state pretty near despair. And he wouldn’t have got into that state unless he’d seen that you were unhappy and others were pleased at your expense. Who else had any feeling for you?”

“It doesn’t matter to me one way or the other,” said Winslow.

Then I asked: “Who else had any feeling for your son Dick? You know that Calvert was upset about him. Who else had any feeling for your son?”

Winslow looked lost, bewildered, utterly without arrogance or strength. He looked sadly away from me. He did not speak for some moments. At last, in a tired, dejected, completely uninterested tone, he said, the words coming out slowly: “What shall I do with this?” He pointed to the sheet of paper.

“I don’t mind,” I said, knowing that it was safe.

“Perhaps you’d better have it.”

Winslow pushed it towards me, but did not give another glance as I walked to the fireplace, and put a match to it over the empty grate.

19: The Cost of Knowledge

I went up to Roy’s room. He was lying on his sofa, stretched out and relaxed. He jumped up and greeted me with a smile contrite and remorseful.

“Have I dished everything?” he said.

He was quite equable now, affectionate, and happy because the shadow had passed over.

“Have I dished everything?” he said.

“I think I’ve settled it,” I said, in tiredness and strain. I could let myself go at last. I felt overwhelmed by responsibility, I knew that I was ageing before my time. “But you’ll do something one day that I can’t settle.”

“I’m frightened of that too,” said Roy.

“I shan’t always be there to pick up the pieces,” I said.

“You look pretty worn. I need to order you some strawberries for tea,” he said with tender, mocking concern. He went into his bedroom to telephone, and talked to the kitchens in the voice of the senior fellow, ludicrously like the life. I could not help but smile, despite fatigue and worry and unreasonable anger. He came back and stood looking down at me.

“It’s very hard on you, dear old boy,” he said, suddenly but very quietly. “Having me to look after as well as poor Sheila. There’s nothing I can say, is there? You know as much about it as I do. Or at least, if you don’t now, you never will, you know.”

“Never mind,” I said.

“Of course,” said Roy, with a joyous smile, “just at this minute I feel that I shall never be depressed again.”

In the next few days he spent much of his time with me. He was inventive and entertaining, as though to show me that I need not worry. He was quite composed and even-spirited, but not as carefree as after the first outburst. The innocence, the rapture, the hope, did not flood him and uplift him. He put on his fireworks for my benefit, but underneath he was working something out. What it was I could not guess. I caught him looking at me several times with a strange expression — protective, concerned, uneasy. There was something left unsaid.

On a night early in July, he invited me out to dinner in the town. It was strange for us to dine together in a restaurant in Cambridge: we had not done so since he became a fellow. It was stranger still for Roy to be forcing the conversation, to be unspontaneous, anxious to make a confidence and yet held back. He was specially anxious to look after me; he had brought a bottle of my favourite wine, and had chosen the dinner in advance out of dishes that I liked. He told me some gleeful anecdotes of people round us. But we came to the end of the meal and left the restaurant: he had still not managed to speak.

It was a fine and glowing evening, and I suggested that we should walk through one of the colleges down to the river. Roy shook his head.

“We’re bound to meet someone if we do,” he said. “They’ll catch us. Some devils will catch us.” He was smiling, mocking himself. “I don’t want to be caught. I need to say something to you. It’s not easy.”

So we walked to Garret Hostel Bridge. There was no one standing there, though some young men and girls on bicycles came riding over. Roy looked down into the water. It was burnished in the bright evening light, and the willows and bridges seemed to be painted beneath the surface, leaf by leaf and line by line: it was the time, just as the sun was dying, when all colours gained a moment of enhancement, and the reflections of the trees were brilliant.

“Well?” I said.

“I suppose I need to talk,” said Roy.

In a moment he said: “I know what you think. About my nature. About the way I’m made.”

“Then you know more than I do,” I said, trying to distract him, but he turned on me in a flash with a sad, teasing, acute smile.

“That’s what you say when you want someone to think you’re nice and kind and a bit of an old buffer. I’ve heard you do it too often. It’s quite untrue. You mustn’t do it now.”

He looked into the water again.

“I know enough to be going on with,” he said. “I know you reasonably well, old boy. I have seen what you believe about me.”

I did not answer. It was no use pretending.

“You believe I’ve got my sentence, don’t you? I may get time off for good conduct — but you don’t believe that I can get out altogether. A bit of luck can make a difference on the surface. And I need to struggle, because that can make a little difference too. But really, whatever happens to me, I can never change. I’m always sentenced to be myself. Isn’t that what you believe? Please tell me.”

I did not reply for a moment. Then I said: “I can’t alter what you say — enough to matter.”

“Just so,” he said.

He cried: “It’s too stark for me. I can’t believe it.”

He said quietly: “I can’t believe as you do, Lewis. It would make life pointless. My life isn’t all that important, but I know it better than anyone else’s. And I know that I’ve been through misery that I wouldn’t inflict on a living soul. No one could deserve it. I couldn’t deserve it, whatever I’ve done or whatever I shall do. You know that—”

“Yes, I know that,” I said, with anguished pity.

“If you’re right, I’ve gone through that quite pointlessly. And I shall again. I can’t leave it behind. If you’re right, it could happen to others. There must be others who go through the same. Without reason, according to you. Just as a pointless joke.”

“It must happen to a few,” I said. “To a few unusual men.”

“I can’t accept a joke like that,” he said. “It would be like living in a prison governed by an imbecile.”

He was speaking with passion and with a resentment I had never heard. Now I could feel what the terrible nights had done to him. Yet they had not left him broken, limp, or resigned. He was still choosing the active way. His whole body, as he leaned over the bridge, was vigorous with determination and purpose.

Neither of us spoke for some time. I too looked down. The brilliant colours had left the sky and water, and the reflections of the willows were dark by now.

“There’s something else,” said Roy. His tone was sad and gentle.

He added, after a pause: “I don’t know how I’m going to say it. I’ve needed to say it all night. I don’t know how I can.”

He was still gazing down into the water.

“Dear old boy,” he said, “you believe something that I’m not strong enough to believe. There might come a time — there might come a time when I was held back — because of what you believe.”

I muttered.

“I’ve got a chance,” he said. “But it will be a near thing. I need to have nothing hold me back. You can see that, can’t you?”

“I can see that,” I said.

“You believe in predestination, Lewis,” he said. “It doesn’t prevent you battling on. It would prevent me, you know. You’re much more robust than I am. If I believed as you believe, I couldn’t go on.”

He went on: “I think you’re wrong. I need to act as though you’re wrong. It may weaken me if I know what you’re thinking. There may be times when I shall not want to be understood. I can’t risk being weakened, Lewis. Sooner than be weakened, I should have to lose everything else. Even you.”

A punt passed under the bridge and broke the reflections. The water had ceased swirling before he spoke again.

“I shan’t lose you,” he said. “I don’t think I could. You won’t get rid of me. I’ve never felt what intimacy means, except with you. And you—”

“It is the same with me.”

“Just so,” said Roy.

He added very quietly: “I wouldn’t alter anything if I could help it. But there may come a time when I get out of your sight. There may come a time when I need to keep things from you.”

“Has that time come?” I asked.

He did not speak for a long time.

“Yes,” he said.

He was relieved to have it over. As soon as it was done, he wanted to assure me that nearly everything would be unchanged. On the way back to the college, he arranged to see me in London with an anxiety, a punctiliousness, that he never used to show. Our meetings had always been casual, accidental, comradely: now he was telling me that they would go on unchanged, our comradeship would not be touched; the only difference was that some of his inner life might be concealed.

It was the only rift that had come between us. During the time we had known each other, his life had been wild and mine disordered, but our relation had been profoundly smooth, beyond anything in my experience. We had never had a quarrel, scarcely an irritable word.

It made his rejection of intimacy hard for me to bear. I was hurt, sharply, sickly and bitterly hurt. I had the same sense of deprivation as if I had been much younger. Perhaps the sense of deprivation was stronger now; for, while as a younger man my vanity would have been wounded, on the other hand I should still have looked forward to intimacies more transfiguring even than this of ours; now I had seen enough to know that such an intimacy was rare, and that it was unlikely I should ever take part in one again.

Yet he could do no other than draw apart from me. If he were to keep his remnant of hope, he could do nothing else. For I could not hope on his terms: he had seen into me, and that was all.

It had been bitter to watch him suffer and know I could not help. That was a bitterness we all taste, one of the first facts we learn of the human condition. It was far more bitter to know that my own presence might keep him from peace of mind. It was the harshest of ironies: for he was he, and I was I, as Montaigne said, and so we knew each other: just because of that mutual knowledge, I stood in his way.

I had thought I was a realistic man — and yet I took it with dismay and cursed that we are as we are. But I tried not to make the change harder for him. As I told Joan in the spring, I had learned more from Roy than he from me. I had watched the absolute self-forgetfulness with which he spent himself on another, the self-forgetfulness he had so often given to me. I was not capable of his acts of selflessness, I was not made like him. But I could try to mutate him in practice. There was no question what I must do. I had to preserve our comradeship in the shape he wished, without loss of spirits and without demur. I had to be there, without trouble or pride, if he should want me.

20: A Young Woman in Love

Roy and Joan became lovers during that summer. I wondered who had taken the initiative — but it was a question without meaning. Roy was ardent, fond of women, inclined to let them see that he desired them, and then wait for the next move: in his self-accusation to Winslow, he said that he “coaxed invitations” from women, and that was no more than the truth. At the same time, Joan was a warm-blooded young woman, direct and canalised in all she felt and did. She was not easily attracted to men; she was fastidious, diffident, desperately afraid that she would lack physical charm to those she loved. But she had been attracted to Roy right back in the days when she thought he was frivolous and criticised his long nose. She had not known quite what it meant, but gradually he came to be surrounded by a haze of enchantment; of all men he was the first she longed to touch. She stayed at her window to watch him walk through the court. She thought of excuses to take a message to his rooms.

She told herself that this was her first knowledge of lust. She had a taste for the coarse and brutal words, the most direct and uncompromising picture of the facts. This was lust, she thought, and longed for him. She saw him with Rosalind and others, women who were elegant, smart, alluring, and she envied them ferociously, contemptuously and with self-abasement. She thought they were fools; she thought none of them could understand him as she could; and she could not believe that he would ever look at her twice.

She found, incredulously, that he liked her. She heard him make playful love to her, and she repeated the words, like a charm, before she went to sleep at night. At once her longing for him grew into dedicated love, love undeviating, whole-hearted, romantic and passionate. And that love became deeper, richer, pervaded all her thoughts, during the months her father lay dying and Roy sat with them in the Lodge.

For she was not blinded by the pulse of her blood. Some things about him she did not see, for no girl of twenty could. But others she saw more vividly, with more strength of fellow-feeling, even with more compassion, than any woman he had known. She could throw aside his caprices and whims, for she had seen him comfort her mother with patience, simplicity and strength. She had seen him suffer with them. She had heard him speak from the depth of feeling, not about her, but about her father’s state and human loneliness: after his voice, she thought, all others would seem dull, orotund and complacent. She had watched his face stricken, or, as she put it, “possessed by devils” that she did not understand. She wanted to spend her life in comforting him.

So her love filled her and drove her on. I thought it would be like her if, despite her shrinking diffidence, she finally asked to become his mistress. It was too easy to imagine her, with no confidence at all, talking to him as though fiercely and choosing the forthright words. But that did not really mean that she had taken the initiative. Their natures played on each other. Somehow it would have happened. There was no other end.

From the beginning, Roy felt a deeper concern for her than for anyone he loved. She was, like her mother, strong and defenceless. Stronger and abler than her mother, and even less certain of love. Roy was often irresponsible in love, with women who took it as lightly as he did. But Joan was dependent on him from the first time he kissed her. He could not pretend otherwise. Perhaps he did not wish it otherwise, for he was profoundly fond of her. He was amused by her sulkiness and fierceness, he liked to be able to wipe them away. He had gone through them to the welling depths of emotion, where she was warm, tempestuous, violent and tender. He found her rich beyond compare.

Like her, he too had been affected by their vigil in the Lodge. It had surrounded her, and all that passed between them, with its own kind of radiance — the radiance of grief, suffering, intense feeling, and ineluctable death. In that radiance, they had talked of other things than love. He had told her more than he had told any woman of his despair, his search, his hope. He was moved to admiration by her strength, which never turned cold, never wilted, stayed steady through the harsh months in the Lodge. There were times when he rested on that strength himself. He came to look upon her as an ally, as someone who might take his hand and lead him out of the dark.

It was not that she had any obvious escape to offer him. She was not a happy young woman, except when she caught light from his presence. She had left her father’s faith, and in her beliefs and disbeliefs she was typical of her time. Like me, she was radical in politics and sceptical in religion. But Roy felt with her, as he had done with me, that deep down he could find a common language. She was unusually clever, but it was not her intellect that he valued. He had spent too much time with clever men; of all of us, he was the most indifferent to the intellect; he was often contemptuous of it. It was not Joan’s intellect he valued, but her warm heart and her sense of life. He thought she might help him, and he turned to her with hope.

Meanwhile, the Master’s state seemed to change very little. Over the months Joan told us that she could see the slow decline. Gradually he ate less, was sick more often, spent more of his time in bed; he had had little pain throughout the illness, and was free of it now; the curve dipped very slowly, and it was often hard for her and her mother to realise that he was dying. Sometimes they felt that he had reached a permanent state, weak, tired, but full of detached kindness. He was so mellow and understanding that it humbled everyone round him, and they spoke of him with wonder and magnified affection. They spoke of him in quiet tones, full of something like hero worship. Lady Muriel, so Joan said, was gentler than anyone had ever known her.

I thought of that comment when I next saw her. Throughout the year, at the Master’s request, she had stoically continued some of her ordinary entertaining, and the official Lodge lunches had gone on without check. She had, however, asked no guests at night. It was Joan’s idea that Roy and I should call in after dinner one night in July, and treat her to a four at bridge. Like Lord Boscastle, Lady Muriel liked a game of bridge more than most things in the world; she had deprived herself of the indulgence since the Master fell ill.

Roy and I entered the drawing-room that night as though we had been invited by Joan, and Lady Muriel was still enough herself to treat me so.

“I am always glad for my daughter to have her friends in the house, Mr Eliot,” she said. “I am only sorry that I have not been able to see as much of the fellows recently as I used to set myself.”

She sat in her armchair, stiff, formal, uncompromising. She looked a little older; her eyelids had become heavier, and her cheeks were pinched. But, as she spoke to me, her back was as poker-like as ever, and her voice just as unyielding. She said: “How is your wife, Mr Eliot? I do not remember seeing her for a considerable time.”

“She’s rather better, Lady Muriel.”

“I am very glad to hear it. I am still hoping that you will find a suitable house in Cambridge, so that you will not be separated so often. I believe there are suitable houses in Grantchester Meadows.”

She looked at me suspiciously, and then at her daughter, as though she were signalling my married state. It seemed incredible that she should think me a danger when she could see Joan in Roy’s presence. For Joan was one of those women who are physically transmuted by the nearness of their lover, as it seemed by the bodily memory of the act of love. Her face was softer for hours together, the muscles relaxed, the lines of her mouth altered as she looked at him. Even her strong coltish gawky gait became loosened, when he was there.

Roy had been deputed to propose bridge. Lady Muriel was gratified, but at once objected: “I couldn’t, Roy. I have not touched a card for months.”

“We need you to,” said Roy. “Do play with us.”

“I think it would be better if I left you three to yourselves,” she said.

“You don’t think you ought, do you, Lady Mu?” Roy asked quietly.

She looked confused.

“Perhaps it isn’t the most appropriate time—”

“Need you go without the little things?” said Roy. “I’m sure the Master would tell you not to.”

“Perhaps he would,” said Lady Muriel, suddenly weak, unassertive, broken down.

We played some bizarre rubbers. Roy arranged for stakes of sixpence a hundred, explaining, out of pure devilry, that “poor old Lewis can’t afford more. If he’s going to save up for a suitable house”. (Lady Muriel’s idea of a “suitable house” for me was something like the house of a superior college servant: and Roy had listened with delight.) Even at those stakes, Lady Muriel took several pounds from both Roy and me. It gave her great pleasure, for she had an appetite for money as well as for victory. The night passed, Lady Muriel’s winnings mounted; Joan was flushed and joyful with Roy at the same table; Lady Muriel dealt with her square, masterful hands and played with gusto and confidence. Yet she was very quiet. Once the room would have rung with her indignant rebukes — “I am surprised you had such diamonds, Mr Eliot”. But now, though she was pleased to be playing, though she enjoyed her own skill, she had not the heart to dominate the table. After Roy’s word about the Master, she was subdued.

It was a long time before she seemed to notice the heterogeneous play. For it was the oddest four. Lady Muriel herself was an excellent player, quick, dashing, with a fine card memory. Joan was very good. I was distinctly poor, and Roy hopelessly bad; I might have been adequate with practice, but he could never have been. He was quite uninterested, had no card sense, disliked gambling, and had little idea of the nature of odds. It was curious to see him frowning over his hand, thinking three times as long as anyone at the table: then he would slap down the one card for which there was no conceivable justification. It was hard to guess what could be going on in his mind.

Joan was smiling lovingly. For he had entered into it out of good nature, but she knew that he was irritated. He chose to do things expertly, or not at all.

At last Lady Muriel said: “Do you like playing bridge, Roy?” He smiled.

“I like playing with you, Lady Mu.”

She was just ready to deal, but held the pack in her hand.

“Do you like the game?”

“Of course I do.”

“Do you really like the game, Roy?” Her tone was not her usual firm one, but insistent. Roy looked at her, and gave her an affectionate smile.

“No, not very much, Lady Mu,” he said.

“It’s good of you to give up your evening,” she said. She added, in a low, almost inaudible murmur: “I wonder if the Master ever liked the game. I don’t remember asking him. I’m afraid he may have felt the same as you.”

She still did not deal. Suddenly we saw the reason. A tear rolled down her face.

She had been subjugated by the Master’s disinterested kindness. She felt ashamed, she tried to imagine now things which had not troubled her for thirty years. It was almost incredible, as Roy said to me late that night in the garden, that she could have played with him night after night and never have known if he enjoyed the game. She was broken down by his heightened understanding, as he came near to death. Her imagination was quickened; she wanted to make up for all her obtuseness had cost him; she could not rest with her old content, formidable and foursquare inside herself. She felt unworthy. If his illness had made him more selfish, had worn her out with trouble, she would have undergone less pain.

I was asked myself to call on the Master towards the end of August. Roy had been obliged to return to Berlin in order to give a course of lectures, and it was Joan who gave me the message. She had heard from Roy the day before, and could not help telling me so. “He doesn’t keep me waiting for letters,” she said, happily and humbly. “I never expected he’d write so often.” She longed to confess how much she loved him, she longed to throw away her self-respect.

By this time the Master did not often leave his bed, and I looked at him as he lay there. His face had become that of a very old man; it was difficult to remember him in the days when he seemed so well-preserved. The skin was dried up, waxy-yellow, lined and pouched. His eyes had sunk deeply in their orbits, and the lids were very dark. Yet he managed to keep his voice enough like its former self not to upset those who listened to him.

He spoke to me with the same kind, detached curiosity that had become his habit. He asked after my affairs as though nothing else interested him. Suddenly he saw that he was distressing me.

“Tell me, Eliot,” he said gently, “would it embarrass you less if I talk of what it’s like to be in this condition?”

“Much less,” I said.

“I believe you mean that,” he said. “You’re a strange man.”

“Well,” he went on, “stop me if I ramble. I’ve got something I particularly want to say to you, before you go. I can think quite clearly. Sometimes I fancy I think more clearly than I ever did in my life. But then the ideas start running away with me, and I get tired. Remember, this disease is something like being slowly starved.”

He was choosing the tone which would distress me least. He went on to discuss the election of his successor; he asked about the parties and intrigues, and talked with his old sarcastic humour, with extraordinary detachment, as though he were an observer from another world — watching the human scene with irony, and the kind of pity which hides on the other side of cynicism. He made one or two good jokes. Then he asked whether the college had expected to get the election over before now. I said yes. He smiled.

“It can’t be long,” he said quietly. “There are days even with this disease when you feel a little better. And you hope. It’s ridiculous, but you hope. It seems impossible that your will should count for nothing. Then you realise that it’s certain that you must die in six months. And you think it is too horrifying to bear. People will tell you, Eliot, that uncertainty is the worst thing. Don’t believe them. Certainty is the worst thing.”

He was very tired, and closed his eyes. I thought how he was facing death with stoicism, with detachment, and with faith. Yet even he would have prayed: take this from me at least. Do not let me be certain of the time of my death. His faith assured him that he would pass into another existence. But that was a comfort far away from the animal fact. Just like the other comfort that I should one day have to use myself: they tell me that, when I am dead, I shall not know. Those consolations of faith or intellect could not take away the fear of the animal fact.

He began to talk again, but now he seemed light-headed, his words flew like the associations of a dream. I had to remind him: “You said you had something important to tell me, before I go.”

He made an effort to concentrate. The ideas set off in flight again, but he frowned and gathered up his will. He found a clue, and said: “What is happening about Roy Calvert?”

“He’s in Berlin. The proofs of the new part of the liturgy are just coming in.”

“Berlin… I heard some talk about him. Didn’t he take my daughter to a ball?”

“Yes.”

He was quiet. I wondered what he was thinking.

Again he frowned with concentration.

“Eliot,” he said. “I want you to do me a favour. Look after Roy Calvert. He’s the great man of the future in my field. I like to think that he won’t forget all about my work. Look after him. He’ll need it. People like him don’t come twice in a generation. I want you to do me a favour. Look after Roy Calvert.”

That cry came partly from the sublimed kindness in which he was ending his life. I was moved and shaken as I gave him my promise.

But it was not only self-forgetting kindness that brought out that cry; it was also a flicker of his own life; it was a last assertion of his desire not to be forgotten. He had not been a distinguished scholar, and he was a modest man who ranked himself lower than he deserved. But he still did not like to leave this mortal company without something to mark his place. For him, as for others I had sat by in their old age, it was abhorrent to imagine the world in which he had lived going on as though he had never been. It was a support, bare but not illusive, to know that he would leave a great scholar behind him, whom he could trust to say: “You will find that point in one of old Royce’s books. He made it completely clear.” A shadow of himself would linger as Roy became illustrious. His name would be repeated among his own kind. It was his defiance of the dark.

I thought by his bedside, and again a few minutes later when I met Joan, how tough the core of our selves can be. The Master’s vanities had been burned away, he was detached and unselfish as he came towards his death, and yet the desire to be remembered was intact. And Joan was waiting for me in the drawing-room, and her first question was: “What did he say about Roy?”

She knew that the Master had wished to tell me something. It was necessary for her to know any fact which affected Roy.

I told her that the Master had asked me to do what I could for Roy.

“Is that all?”

“Yes.”

“There was nothing else?”

I repeated one or two of the Master’s observations, looking at us from a long way off.

“I mean, there was nothing else about Roy?”

She was deeply attached to her father, she had suffered by his side, she had been touched beyond expression as his self-forgetful kindness grew upon him in the last months of his life — but it counted for nothing beside her love for Roy. She was tough in her need for him. All her power was concentrated into feeling about him. Human beings in the grip of passion are more isolated than ever, I thought. She was alone with her love. Perhaps, in order to be as healthy and strong as she was, one had to be as tough.

The Master had asked me to look after Roy. As I listened to that girl, I felt that she would take on the task, even if she knew as much as I did. She would welcome the dangers that she did not know. She cross-examined me with single-minded attention. She made me hope.

21: Towards the Funeral

Roy came back from Berlin in October, and I watched contrasts in Joan as sharp as I had seen them in any woman. Often she was a girl, fascinated by a lover whom she found enchanting, seeing him hazily, adoringly, through the calm and glorious Indian summer. The college shimmered in the tranquil air, and Joan wanted to boast of him, to show off the necklace he had brought her. She loved being teased, having her sulkiness devastated, feeling mesmerised in front of his peculiar mischief. She was too much a girl not to let his extravagant presents be seen by accident; she liked her contemporaries to think she was an abandoned woman, pursued by a wicked, distinguished, desirable and extremely lavish lover. Once or twice, in incredulous delight, she had to betray her own secret.

She confided it to Francis Getliffe and his wife, and Francis talked anxiously to me. He liked and understood her, and he could not believe that Roy would bring her anything but unhappiness. Francis had never believed that Roy was a serious character; now he believed it less than ever, for Roy had come back from Berlin, apparently cheerful and composed, but ambiguous in his political attitude. Francis, like many scientists of his age, was a straightforward, impatient, positive socialist, with technical backing behind his opinions and no nonsense or frills. He was angered by Roy’s new suggestions, which were subtle, complex and seemed to Francis utterly irresponsible. He was angered almost as much by Roy’s inconsistency; for Roy, despite his friends in high places in the Third Reich, had just smuggled into England a Jewish writer and his wife. It was said that Roy had taken some risks to do it; I knew for certain that he was spending a third of his income on them. Francis heard this news with grudging approval, and was then maddened when Roy approached him with a solemn face and asked whether, in order to ease relations with Germany, the university could not decree that Jewish scholars were “Welsh by statute”.

“He’ll be no good to her,” said Francis.

“She’s very happy now.”

“She’s happy because he’s good at making love,” said Francis curtly. “It won’t last. She wants someone who’ll marry her and make her a decent husband. Do you think he will?”

Francis was right about Joan. She needed marriage more than most women, because she had so often felt diffident and unlike others. It was more essential to her than to someone like Rosalind, who had never tormented herself with thoughts of whether men would pass her by. Joan recognised that it was essential to her, if ever she were to become whole. She thought now, like any other girl, of marrying Roy, sometimes hoped, sometimes feared: but she was much too proud to give him a sign. She was so proud that she told herself they had gone into this love affair as equals; she had done it with her eyes open, and she must not let herself forget it.

So she behaved like a girl in love, sometimes like a proud and unusual girl, sometimes like anyone who has just known what rapture is. But I saw her when she was no longer rapturous, no longer proud, no longer exalted by the wonder of her own feelings, but instead compassionate, troubled, puzzled by what was wrong with him, set upon helping him. For she had seen him haunted in the summer, and she would not let herself rest.

She was diffident about attracting him: but she had her own kind of arrogance, and she believed that she alone could understand him. And she was too healthy a woman, too optimistic in her flesh and bone, not to feel certain that there was a solution; she did not believe in defeat; he was young, gifted, and high-spirited, and he could certainly be healed.

It was not made easy for her — for, though he wanted her help, he did not tell her all the truth. He shut out parts of his nature from her: shut them out, because he did not want to recognise them himself. She knew that he was visited by desperate melancholy, but he told her as though it came from a definite cause: if only he could find peace of mind he would be safe. She knew he was frightened at any premonition that he was going to be attacked again: she believed, as he wanted to, that they could find a charm which kept him in the light.

The Master lay overlooking the court through that lovely, tranquil autumn. Joan tried to learn what faith would mean to Roy.

She found it unfamiliar, foreign to her preconceptions of him, foreign to her own temperament. One thing did not put her off, as it did Francis Getliffe and so many others; since she loved him, she was not deceived by his mischievous jokes; she could see through them to the gravity of his thought. But the thought itself she found strange, and often forbidding.

He was searching for God. Like me, she had heard her father’s phrase. But she discovered that the search was not as she imagined. She had expected that he was longing to be at one with the unseen, to know the immediate presence of God. Instead, he seemed to be seeking the authority of God. He seemed to want to surrender his will, to be annihilated as a person. He wanted to lose himself eternally in God’s being.

Joan knew well enough the joy of submission to her lover; but she was puzzled, almost dismayed, that this should be his vision of faith. She loved him for his wildness, his recklessness, his devil-may-care; he took anyone alive as his equal; why should he think that faith meant that he must throw himself away? “Will is a burden. Men are freest when they get rid of will.” She rebelled at his paradox, with all her sturdy protestant nature. She hated it when he told her that men might be happiest under the authority of the state — “apart from counter-suggestible people like you, Joan.” But she hated most his vision, narrow and intense, of the authority of God.

In his search of religion, he did not give a thought to doing good. She knew that many people thought of him as “good”, she often did herself — and yet any suggestion that one should interfere with another’s actions offended him. “Pecksniffery”, he called it. He was for once really angry with her when she told him that he was good himself. “Good people don’t do good,” he said later, perversely. In fact, the religious people he admired were nearly all of them contemplative. Ralph Udal sponged on him shamelessly, wanted to avoid any work he did not like, prodded Roy year in, year out to get him a comfortable living, and was, very surprisingly, as tolerant of others as of himself. None of this detracted from Roy’s envy of his knowledge of God. And old Martineau, since he took to the religious life, had been quite useless. To Roy it was self-evident that Martineau knew more of God than all the virtuous, active, and morally useful men.

Joan could not value them so, and she argued with him. But she did not argue about the experience which lay at the root of Roy’s craving for faith. He told her, as he told me that night we walked on the Roman road, about his hallucination that he was lost, thrown out of God’s world, condemned to opposition while all others were at rest. That sense had visited him once again, for the third time, during the blackness of the summer.

Joan had never met anything like it, but she knew it was a passionate experience; everything else dropped away, and her heart bled for him. For she could feel that it came from the depth of his nature; it was a portent that nothing could exorcise or soften. While the remembrance haunted him, he could not believe.

She called on all she knew to save him from that experience. She pressed love upon him, surrounded him with love (too much, I sometimes thought, for she did not understand the claustrophobia of being loved). She examined her own heart to find some particle of his despair. If she could know it herself, only a vestige, only for a moment, perhaps she could help him more. She asked others about the torments of doubt and faith — loyally, sturdily and unconvincingly keeping out Roy’s name. She talked to me: it cost her an effort, for, though she had with difficulty come to believe that I admired her and wished her well, she was never at ease with me as Rosalind was. Rosalind had confided in me when she was wildly unhappy over Roy — but it had been second nature to her to flatter me, to make me feel that in happier days she might not have been indifferent to me. With Joan, there was not a ray of flirtatiousness, not the faintest aura of love to spare. Except as a source of information, I did not exist. Each heart beat served him, and him alone.

She came to a decision which took her right outside herself. Wise or unwise, it showed how she was spending her imagination in his life. Herself, she stayed in her solid twentieth-century radical unbelief: but him she tried to persuade to act as though he had found faith, in the hope that faith would come.

It was bold and devoted of her. And there were a few weeks, unknown at the time to anyone but themselves, when he took her guidance. He acted to her as though his search was over. He went through the gestures of belief, not in ritual but in his own mind. He struggled to hypnotise himself.

He could not keep it up. Sadness attacked him, and he was afraid that the melancholy was returning. Even so, he knew that his acts of faith were false; he felt ashamed, hollow, contemptible, and gave them up. Inexplicably, his spirits rose. The attempt was at an end.

Joan did not know what to do next. The failure left its mark on her. She was seized with an increased, an unrestrainable passion to marry him. Even her pride could not hold down a sign.

It became obvious as one saw them together in the late autumn. Often she was happy, flushing at his teasing, breaking out into her charming laugh, which was richer now that she had been loved. But more than once I saw them in a party, when she thought herself unobserved: she looked at him with a glance that was heavy, brooding, possessive, consumed with her need to be sure of him.

I was anxious for her, for about that time I got the impression that something had broken. She did not seem to know, except that she was becoming more hungry for marriage; but I felt sure that for him the light had gone out. Why, I could not tell or even guess. It did not show itself in any word he spoke to her, for he was loving, attentive, insistent on giving her some respite from the Lodge, always ready to sit with her there in the last weeks of her father’s life.

He was good at dissimulating, though he did it seldom; yet I was certain that I was right. For lack of ease in a love affair is one of the hardest things to conceal — and this was particularly true for Roy, who in love or intimacy moved as freely as through the evening air.

I was anxious and puzzled. One night in late November I heard him make a remark which sounded entirely strange, coming from him. It was said in fun, but I felt that it was forced out, endowed with an emotion he could not control. The occasion was quite trivial. The three of us had been to a theatre, and Roy had mislaid the tickets for our coats. It took us some time, and a little explanation, to redeem them. Joan scolded him as we walked to the college along the narrow street.

“I didn’t do it on purpose,” he said.

“You’re quite absurd,” said Joan. “It was very careless.”

Then Roy said: “Think as well of me as you can.” He was smiling, and so was she, but his voice rang out clear. “Think as well of me as you can.”

I had never before heard him, either in play or earnest, show that kind of concern. He was the least self-conscious of men. It was a playful cry, and she hugged his arm and laughed. Yet it came back to my ears, clear and thrilling, long after outbursts of open feeling had gone dead.

Through November the Master became weaker and more drowsy. He was eating very little, he was always near the borderline of sleep. Joan said that she thought he was now dying. The end came suddenly. On December 2nd the doctor told Lady Muriel and Joan that he had pneumonia, and that it would soon be over. Two days later, just as we were going into hall for dinner, the news came that the Master had died.

After hall, I went to see Roy, who had not been dining. I found him alone in his rooms, sitting at a low desk with a page of proofs. He had already heard the news.

He spoke, sadly and gently, of Joan and her mother. He said that he would complete the “little book” on heresies as soon as he was clear of the liturgy. He would bring it out as a joint publication by Royce and himself. “Would that have pleased him?” said Roy. “Perhaps it would please them a little.”

A woman’s footsteps sounded on the stairs, and Joan came in. She looked at me, upset to see me there. Without a word, Roy took her in his arms and kissed her. For a moment she rested with her head against his shoulder, but she heard me get up to go.

“Don’t bother, Lewis,” she said. She was quite dry-eyed. “I’ve come to take Roy away, if he will. Won’t you come to mother?” she asked him, her eyes candid with love. “You’re the only person who can be any use to her tonight.”

“I was coming anyway,” said Roy.

“You’re very tired yourself,” I said to Joan. “Hadn’t you better take a rest?”

“Let me do what’s got to be done before I think about it,” she said.

She was staunch right through. Roy went to eat and sleep in the Lodge until after the funeral. Joan made no claims on him; she asked him to look after her mother, who needed him more.

Lady Muriel was inarticulately glad of his presence. She could not say that she was grateful, she could not speak of loss or grief or any regret. She could not even cry. She sat up until dawn each night before the funeral, with Roy beside her. And each night, as she went at last to bed, she visited the room where lay her husband’s body.

At the funeral service in the chapel, she and Joan sat in the stalls nearest the altar. Their faces were white but tearless, their backs rigid, their heads erect.

And, after we had returned from the cemetery to the college, word came that Lady Muriel wished to see all the fellows in the Lodge. The blinds of the drawing-room were drawn back now; we filed in and stood about while Lady Muriel shook hands with us one by one. Her neck was still unbent, her eyes pitiably bold. She spoke to each of us in her firm, unyielding voice, and her formula varied little. She said to me: “I should like to thank you for joining us on this sad occasion. I appreciate your sign of respect to my husband’s memory. I am personally grateful for your kindness during his illness. My daughter and I are going to my brother, and our present intention is to stay there in our house. We may be paying a visit to Cambridge next year, and I hope you will be able to visit us.”

Roy and I walked away together.

“Poor thing,” he said gently.

He went back to the Lodge to see them through another night. At last Lady Muriel broke down. “I shall never see him again,” she cried. “I shall never see him again.” In the drawing-room, where she had bidden us goodbye so formally, that wild, animal cry burst out; and then she wept passionately in Roy’s arms, until she was worn out.

For hours Joan left them together. Her own fortitude still kept her from being another drag on Roy. She remained staunch, trying to help him with her mother. Yet that night words were trembling on her lips; she came to the edge of begging him to love her for ever, of telling him how she hungered for him to marry her. She did not speak.

22: Strain in a Great House

Roy was working all through the spring in the Vatican Library, and then moved on to Berlin. I only saw him for a few hours on his way through London, but I heard that he was meeting Joan. He had not mentioned her in his letters to me, which were shorter and more stylised than they used to be, though often lit up by stories of his acquaintances in Rome. When I met him, he was affectionate, but neither high-spirited nor revealing. I did not see him again until he returned to England for the summer: as soon as he got back, we were both asked down to Boscastle.

I had twice visited Boscastle by myself, though not since Lady Muriel and Joan had gone to live there. Lady Boscastle had invited me so that she could indulge in two pleasures — tell stories of love affairs, and nag me subtly into being successful as quickly as might be. She had an adamantine will for success, and among the Boscastles she had found no chance to use it. So I came in for it all. She was resolved that I should not leave it too late. She approved the scope of my ambitions, but thought I was taking too many risks. She counted on me to carve out something realisable within the next three years. She was sarcastic, flattering, insidious and shrewd. She even invited eminent lawyers, whom she had known through her father, down to Boscastle so that I could talk to them.

Since the Royces arrived at the house, I had had no word from her or them. It was June when she wrote to say that Roy was going straight there: she added, the claws just perceptible beneath the velvet, “I hope this will be acceptable to our dear Joan. It is pleasant to think that it will be almost a family party.”

I arrived in Camelford on a hot midsummer afternoon. A Boscastle car met me, and we drove down the valley. From the lower road, as it came round by the sea, one got a dramatic view of the house, “our house”, “Bossy” itself.

It stood on the hill, a great pilastered classical front, with stepped terraces leading up from the lawns. When I first went, I was a little surprised that not a stone had been put there earlier than the eighteenth century: but the story explained it all.

Like good whig aristocrats with an eye to the main chance, the Boscastles had taken a step up after 1688. They had been barons for the last two centuries: now they managed to become earls. At the same time — it may not have been a coincidence — they captured a great heiress by marriage. Suitably equipped with an earldom and with money, it was time to think about the house. And so they indulged in the eighteenth-century passion for palatial building.

The previous house, the Tudor Boscastle, had lurked in the valley. The domestic engineers could now supply them with water if they built on the hill. With a firm eighteenth-century confidence that what was modern was best, they tore the Tudor house down to its foundations. They had not the slightest feeling for the past — like most people in a vigorous, expanding age. They were determined to have the latest thing. And they did it in the most extravagant manner, like a good many other Georgian grandees. They built a palace, big enough for the head of one of the small European states. They furnished it in the high eighteenth-century manner. They had ceilings painted by Kent. They had the whole scheme, inside and out, vetted by Lord Burlington, the arbiter of architectural taste.

They impoverished the family for generations: but they had a certain reward. It was a grand and handsome house, far finer than the Tudor one they had destroyed. It impressed one still as being on the loftiest scale. It also impressed one, I thought as I went from my bedroom to a bathroom after tea, as being grandiosely uncomfortable. There were thirty yards of corridors before I got to my bathroom: and the bathroom itself, which had been installed in the nineteenth century, was of preposterous size and struck cold as a vault. There were also great stretches of corridor between the kitchens and the dining-rooms, and no dish ever arrived quite warm.

I discovered one piece of news before I had been in the house an hour. Lord Boscastle had in his gift several of the livings round the countryside; one of these had recently fallen vacant, and Roy had persuaded him to give it to Ralph Udal. So far as I could gather, Roy had sent letter after letter to Lord Boscastle, offered to return from Berlin to describe Udal, invoked both Joan and her mother to speak for him. He was always importunate when begging a favour for someone else. Lord Boscastle had given way, saying that these fellows were much of a muchness, and Udal was now vicar of a small parish, which included the house of Boscastle itself. His church and vicarage were a mile or two along the coast.

I walked there before dinner, thinking that I might find Roy; but Udal was alone in the vicarage, although Roy had called that morning. Udal brought me a glass of sherry on to the lawn. It was a long time since we had last met, but he greeted me with cordiality and with his easy, unprickly, almost impersonal good nature. He had altered very little in appearance; the hair was turning grey over his ears, but since he was twenty-five he had looked a man in a tranquil and indefinite middle age. He was in shirtsleeves, and looked powerful, sunburnt and healthy. He drank his sherry, and smiled at me, with his eyes narrowed by interest and content.

“How do you think Roy is?” he said easily, going back to my question about Roy’s visit.

“How do you?”

“You see much more of him than I do,” said Udal, also stonewalling.

“Not since he’s been abroad,” I said.

“Well,” said Udal, after a pause, “I don’t think he is to be envied.”

He looked at me with his lazy kindness. “To tell you the truth, Eliot, I didn’t think he was to be envied the first time I set eyes on him. It was the scholarship examination. I saw him outside the hall. I said to myself ‘that lad will be too good for you. But he’s going to have a rough time.’”

He smiled, and added: “It seems to me that I wasn’t far wrong.”

He asked me about Roy’s professional future. I said that everything must come to him; the university could not help creating a special readership or chair for him within three or four years.

Udal nodded his head.

“He’s very talented,” he said. “Yet you know, Eliot, sometimes I think it would have been better — if he had chosen a different life.”

“Such as?”

“He might have done better to join my trade. He might have found things easier if he’d become a priest.” Suddenly Udal smiled at me. “You’ve always disliked my hanging round, in case he was going to surrender, haven’t you? I thought it was the least I could do for him, just to wait in the slips, so to speak.”

I asked him how much Roy had talked to him about faith. He said, with calm honesty, very little: was there really much to say? Roy had not been looking for an argument. Whichever side he emerged, he had to live his way towards it.

Udal went on: “Sometimes I wonder whether he would have found it easier — if he’d actually lived a different life. I mean with women.”

“It would have been harder without them,” I said.

“I wonder,” said Udal. “There’s much nonsense talked on these matters, you know. I’m trying to be guided by what I’ve seen. And some of the calmest and happiest people I’ve seen, Eliot, have led completely ‘frustrated’ lives. And some of the people I’ve seen who always seem sexually starved — they’re people who spend their whole time hopping in and out of bed. Life is very odd.”

We talked about some acquaintances, then about Roy again.

Udal said: “Well, we shall never know.” Then he smiled. “But I can give him one bit of relief, anyhow. Now I’ve got this job, I don’t see any particular reason why I should have to borrow any more money from him. It will save him quite a bit.”

I laughed, but I was put off. I tried to examine why. From anyone else, I should have found that shameless candour endearing. Like Roy, I did not mind his sliding out of duties he did not like. I did not mind, in fact I admired, his confidence in his own first-hand experience. I did not mind his pleasure, quite obvious although he was so settled, in an hour of scabrous gossip. They were all parts of an unusual man, who had gone a different way from most of our acquaintances.

Yet I was on edge in his company. Roy had once accused me of disliking him. As we talked that afternoon, I felt that was not precisely true. I did not dislike him, I found him interesting and warm — but I should be glad to leave him, I found his presence a strain. I could not define it further. Was it that he took everything that happened to him too much as his by right? He had slid through life comfortably, without pain, without much self-questioning: did I feel he ought to be more thankful for his luck? Did he accept his own nature too acquiescently? His idleness, his lack of conscience, his amiable borrowing — he took them realistically, without protest, with what seemed to me an over-indulgent pleasure. He looked at himself, was not dissatisfied, and never kicked against the pricks.

It was strange. Though I was not comfortable with him, he seemed perfectly so with me. He told me of how he proposed to adjust his life, now that at last he had arrived at a decent stopping place.

He intended to devote Sunday and one other day a week to his parish: three days a week to his own brand of biographical scholarship: one day to sheer physical relaxation, mowing his lawn, ambling round the hills, sitting by the sea: which would leave one day “for serious purposes”. I was curious about the “serious purposes”, and Udal smiled. But he was neither diffident nor coy. He meant to spend this one day a week in preparing himself for the mystical contemplation. One day a week for spiritual knowledge: it sounded fantastically businesslike. I said as much, and Udal smiled indifferently.

“I told Roy about it,” he said. “It’s the only time I’ve ever shocked him.”

It struck me as so odd that I spoke to Roy when we met in the inner drawing-room before dinner. I said that I had heard Udal’s time-table.

“It’s dreadful,” said Roy. “It makes everything nice and hygienic, doesn’t it?” He was speaking with a dash of mockery, with hurt and bitter feeling. He shrugged his shoulders, and said: “Oh, he may as well be left to it.”

Just then Lady Muriel entered and caught the phrase. She gave me a formal, perfunctory greeting: then she turned to Roy and demanded to know whom he was discussing. Her solid arms were folded over her black dress, as I had seen them in the Lodge: my last glimpse of her after the funeral, when she kept erect only by courage and training, was swept aside: she was formidable and active again. Yet I felt she depended more on Roy than ever.

Roy put his preoccupations behind him, and talked lightly of Udal. “You must remember him, Lady Mu. You’ll like him.” He added: “You’ll approve of him too. He doesn’t stay at expensive hotels.”

Lady Muriel did not take the reference, but she continued to talk of Udal as we sat at dinner in the “painted room”. The table was a vast circle, under the painted Italianate ceiling, and there were only six of us spread round it, the Boscastles, Lady Muriel and Joan, Roy and I.

Lady Muriel’s boom seemed the natural way to speak across such spaces.

“I consider,” she told her brother, “that you should support the new vicar.”

Lord Boscastle was drinking his soup. The butler was experimenting with some device for reheating it in the actual dining-room, but it was still rather cold.

“What are you trying to get me to do now, Muriel?” he said crossly.

“I consider that you should attend service occasionally.” She looked accusingly at her sister-in-law. “I have always regarded going to service as one of the responsibilities of our position. I am sorry to see that it has not been kept up.”

“I refuse to be jockeyed into doing anything of the kind,” said Lord Boscastle with irritation. I guessed that, as Lady Muriel recovered her energies, he was not being left undisturbed. “I did not object to putting this fellow in to oblige Roy. But I strongly object if Muriel uses the fellow to jockey me with. I don’t propose to attend ceremonies with which I haven’t the slightest sympathy. I don’t see what good it does me or anyone else.”

“It was different for you in college, Muriel,” said Lady Boscastle gently. “You had to consider other people’s opinions, didn’t you?”

“I regarded it as the proper thing to do,” said Lady Muriel, her neck stiff with fury. She could think of no retort punishing enough for her sister-in-law, and so pounded on at Lord Boscastle. “I should like to remind you, Hugh, that the Budes have never missed a Sunday service since they came into the title.”

The Budes were the nearest aristocratic neighbours, whom even Lord Boscastle could not pretend were social inferiors. But that night, pleased by his wife’s counter-attack, he reverted to his manner of judicial consideration, elaborate, apparently tentative and tired, in reality full of triumphant contempt.

“Ah yes, the Budes. I forgot you knew them, Muriel. I suppose you must have done before you went off to your various new circles. Yes, the Budes.” His voice trailed tiredly away. “I should have thought they were somewhat rustic, shouldn’t you have thought?”

Revived, Lord Boscastle proceeded to dispose of Udal.

“I wish someone would tell him,” he said in his dismissive tone, “not to give the appearance of blessing me from such an enormous height.”

“He’s a very big man,” said Roy, defending Udal out of habit.

“I’m a rather short one,” said Lord Boscastle promptly. “And I strongly object to being condescended to from an enormous height.”

But, despite the familiar repartees, there was tension through the party that night.

One source was Joan: for she sat, speaking very little, sometimes, when the rest of us were talking, letting her gaze rest broodingly on Roy. There was violence, reproach, a secret between them. Roy was subdued, as the Boscastles had never seen him, although he put in a word when Lady Muriel was causing too much friction.

Even if Roy and Joan had been in harmony, however, there would still have been frayed nerves that night. For the other source of tension was political. At Boscastle, when I first stayed there, people differed about political things without much heat. There was no danger of a rift if a political argument sprang up. But it was now the summer of 1938, and on both sides we were feeling with the force of a personal emotion. The divisions were sharp: the half-tones were vanishing: in college it was 8–6 for Chamberlain and appeasement; here it was 3–3. On the Chamberlain side were Lord Boscastle, Lady Muriel, and Roy. On the other side (which in college were called “warmongers”, “Churchill men”, or “Bolsheviks”) were Lady Boscastle, Joan and I.

Roy’s long ambivalence had ended, and he and I were in opposite camps.

Bitterness flared up in a second. Lady Muriel favoured a temporary censorship of the press. I disagreed with her. In those days I did not find it easy to hold my tongue.

“Really, Mr Eliot,” she said, “I am only anxious to remove the causes of war.”

“I’m anxious,” I said, “not to lose every friend we have in the world. And then stagger into a war which we shall duly lose.”

“I’m afraid I think that’s a dangerous attitude,” said Lord Boscastle.

“It’s an attitude which appears to be prevalent among professional people. Mr Eliot’s attitude is fairly common among professional people, isn’t it, Helen?” Lady Muriel was half angry, half-exultant at having taken her revenge.

“I should think it very likely,” said Lady Boscastle. “I think I should expect it to be fairly common among thinking people.” She raised her lorgnette. “But it’s easy to exaggerate the influence of thinking people, shouldn’t you agree, Hugh?”

Lord Boscastle did not rise. He was out of humour, I was less welcome than I used to be, but he was never confident in arguing with his wife. And Roy broke in: “Do you like thinking people, Lady Boscastle?”

He was making peace, but they often struck sparks from each other, and Lady Boscastle replied in her high sarcastic voice: “My dear Roy, I am too old to acquire this modern passion for dumb oxen.”

“They’re sometimes very wise,” said Roy.

“I remember dancing with a number of brainless young men with cauliflower ears,” said Lady Boscastle. “I found them rather unenlightening. A modicum of brains really does add to a man’s charm, you know. Hasn’t that occurred to you?”

She was a match for him. When he was at his liveliest, she studied him through her lorgnette and capped his mischief with her ivory sarcasm. Of all the women we knew, he found her the hardest to get round. That night, with Joan silent at the table, he could not persevere; he gave Lady Boscastle the game.

But the rift was covered over, and Lady Muriel began asking energetically what we should do the following day. We were still at dinner, time hung over the great dining-room. No one had any ideas: it seemed as though Lady Muriel asked that question each night, and each night there was a waste of empty time ahead.

“I consider,” said Lady Muriel firmly, “that we should have a picnic.”

“Why should we have a picnic?” said Lord Boscastle wearily.

“We always used to,” said Lady Muriel.

“I don’t remember enjoying one,” he said.

“I always did,” said Lady Muriel with finality.

Lord Boscastle looked to his wife for aid, but she gave a slight smile.

“I can’t see any compelling reason why we shouldn’t have a picnic, Hugh,” she said, as though she also did not see any compelling reason why we should. “Apparently you must have had a regular technique. Perhaps Muriel—”

“Certainly,” said Lady Muriel, and shouted loudly to the butler, who was a few feet away. “You remember the picnics we used to have, don’t you, Jonah?” The butler’s name was Jones. He had a refined but lugubrious face. “Yes, my lady,” he said, and I thought I caught a note of resignation. Lady Muriel made a series of executive decisions, like a staff major moving a battalion. Hope sounded in the butler’s voice only when he suggested that it might rain.

Lord Boscastle was having a bad evening. We did not stay long over port, for Roy only took one glass and was so quiet that it left all the work to me. When we went into the biggest of the drawing-rooms (called simply the “sitting-room”; it was a hundred feet long) Lord Boscastle received another blow. His wife never played bridge, and he was relying on Joan to give him his rubber. He asked whether she was ready for a game, with an eager expectant air: at last he was in sight of a little fun.

“I’m sorry, Uncle. I can’t,” said Joan. “I’ve promised to go for a walk with Roy.”

She said it flatly, unhappily and with finality.

Lord Boscastle sulked: there was no other word for it. He stayed in the room for a few minutes, complaining that it did not seem much to ask, a game of cards after dinner. People were willing to arrange picnics, which he detested, but no one ever exerted themselves to produce a four at bridge. He supposed that he would be reduced to inviting the doctor next.

That was the limit of degradation he imagined that night. In a few minutes, he took a volume from his collection of eighteenth-century memoirs and went off sulkily to bed.

Roy and Joan went out immediately afterwards, and Lady Boscastle, Lady Muriel and I were left alone in the “sitting-room”. It was clear that Lady Boscastle wanted to talk to me. She made it crystal clear: but Lady Muriel did not notice. Instead, she brought out a series of improvements which Lady Boscastle should adopt in her régime for the house.

Lady Boscastle could not move up to her own suite, for that meant calling her maid to help her. In all this gigantic mansion, she could not speak a word to me in private. It seemed very comic.

At last she insinuated some doubts about the orders for the next day’s picnic. Lady Muriel rebuffed them, but was shaken enough to agree that she should confer with the butler. “In your study, my dear,” said Lady Boscastle gently, and very firmly. “You see, you will have plenty of paper there.”

Lady Muriel walked out, businesslike and erect.

“Our dear Muriel’s stamina used to be perfectly inexhaustible.” Lady Boscastle’s eyes were very bright behind her lorgnette. “She has changed remarkably little.”

She went on: “Lewis, my dear boy, I wanted to talk to you a little about Humphrey. I think I should like your advice.”

Humphrey was the Boscastles’ son, whom I had met at Monte Carlo; he was a wild effeminate lad, clever, violent-tempered, restlessly looking for gifted people to respect.

“All his friends,” said Lady Boscastle, “seem to be singularly precious. I’m not specially concerned about that. I’ve known plenty of precious young men who became extremely satisfactory afterwards.” She smiled. “But I should be relieved if he showed any sign of a vocation.”

She talked with cool detachment about her son. It was better for him to do something: he would dissipate himself away, if he just settled down to succeed his father. Their days were over. Lord Boscastle was not willing to accept it, preferred that his son should wait about as he himself had done; but Lord Boscastle’s response to any change was to become more obstinate. Instead of taking a hand in business, he plunged himself into his gorgeous and proliferating snobbery. There was imagination and self-expression in his arrogance. It was his art — but his son would never be able to copy him.

Lady Boscastle asked me to take up Humphrey.

“He will do the talking if you sit about,” she said. “That is one of your qualities, my dear boy. Do what you can, won’t you? I shouldn’t like him to go off the rails too far. He would always have his own distinction, you know, whatever he did. But it would distress his father so much. There are very strong bonds between them. These Bevill men are really very unrestrained.”

Lady Boscastle gave a delicate and malicious smile. She had an indulgent amused contempt for men whose emotions enslaved them. There was a cat-like solitariness about her, which meant she could disinterest herself from those who adored her. That night, while everyone else in the party was bored or strained, she was bright-eyed, mocking, cynically enjoying herself. Her concern about her son did not depress her. She waved it away, and talked instead of Roy and Joan; for now, in her invalid years, observing love affairs was what gave her most delight.

She had, of course, no doubt of their relation. Her eyes were too experienced to miss anything so patent. In fact, she was offended because Joan made it too patent. Lady Boscastle had a fastidious sense of proper reserve. “Of course, my dear boy, it is a great pleasure to brandish a lover, isn’t it? Particularly when one has been rather uncompeted for.” Otherwise it seemed to her only what one would expect. She was not used to passing judgments, except on points of etiquette and taste. And she conceded that Roy “would pass”. She had never herself found him profoundly “sympathique”. I thought that night that I could see the reason. She was suspicious that much of his emotional life had nothing to do with love. She divined that, if she had been young, he would have smiled and made love — but there were depths she could not have touched. She would have resented it then, and she resented it now. She wanted men whose whole emotional resources, all of whose power and imagination, could be thrown into gallantry, and the challenge and interplay of love.

She would have kept him at a distance: but she admitted that other women would have chased him. Her niece was showing reasonable taste. As for her niece, Lady Boscastle had a pitying affection.

She speculated on what was happening that night. “There’s thunder in the air,” she said. She looked at me enquiringly.

“I know nothing,” I said.

“Of course, he’s breaking away,” said Lady Boscastle. “That jumps to the eye. And it’s making her more infatuated every minute. No doubt she feels obliged to put all her cards on the table. Poor Joan, she would do that. She’s rather unoblique.”

Lady Boscastle went on: “And he feels insanely irritable, naturally. It’s very odd, my dear Lewis, how being loved brings out the worst in comparatively amiable people. One sees these worthy creatures lying at one’s feet and protesting their supreme devotion. And it’s a great strain to treat them with even moderate civility. I doubt whether anyone is nice enough to receive absolutely defenceless love.

“Love affairs,” said Lady Boscastle, “are not intriguing unless both of you have a second string. Never go lovemaking, my dear boy, unless you have someone to fall back upon in case of accidents. I remember — ah! I’ve told you already.” She smiled with a reminiscence, affectionate, sub-acid and amused. “But our dear Joan would never equip herself with a reserve. She’ll never be rusée. She’s rather undevious for this pastime.”

“It’s a pity,” I said.

“Poor Joan.” There was contempt, pity, triumph in Lady Boscastle’s tone. “Of course it’s she who’s taken him out tonight. It’s she who wants to get things straight. You saw that, of course. She has insisted on meeting him after dinner tonight. I suppose she’s making a scene at this minute. She couldn’t wait another day before having it out. I expect that is how she welcomed Master Roy this morning. Poor Joan. She ought to know it’s fatal. If a love affair has come to the point when one needs to get things straight, then” — she smiled at me — “it’s time to think a little about the next.”

23: A Cry in the Evening

The next day was fine, and the rooms of Boscastle stood lofty and deserted in the sunshine. I had breakfast alone, in the parlour, which was the image of the “painted room” but on the south side of the house, away from the sea. The Boscastles breakfasted in their rooms, and there was no sign of Joan or Roy. Lady Muriel had been up two hours before, and was — so I gathered from whispered messages which a footman kept bringing to the butler — issuing her final orders for the picnic.

The papers had not yet arrived, and I drank my tea watching the motes dance in a beam of sunshine. It was a warm, hushed, shimmering morning.

The butler came and spoke to me. His tone was hushed, but not at all sleepy. He looked harassed and overburdened.

“Her ladyship sends her compliments, sir, and asks you to make your own way to the picnic site during the morning.”

“I haven’t any idea where the site is,” I said.

“I think I can show you, sir, from the front entrance. It is just inside the grounds, where the wall goes nearest to the sea.”

“Inside the grounds? We’re having this picnic inside the grounds?”

“Yes, sir. Her ladyship’s picnics have always been inside the grounds. It makes it impossible for the party to be observed.”

I walked into the village to buy some cigarettes. At the shop I overheard some gossip about the new vicar. Apparently a young lady had arrived the night before at one of the hotels. She had gone to the vicarage that morning. They were wondering suspiciously whether he intended to get married.

On my way to the site I wondered casually to myself who it might be. The thought of Rosalind crossed my mind, and then I dismissed it. I went into the grounds, through the side gates which opened on to the cliff road, down through the valley by the brook. It was not hard to find the site, for it was marked by a large flag. Lady Muriel was already sitting beside it on a shooting stick, looking as isolated as Amundsen at the South Pole. The ground beside her was arrayed with plates, glasses, dishes, siphons, bottles of wine. She called out to me with unexpected geniality.

“Good morning. You’re the first. I’m glad to see someone put in an appearance. We couldn’t have been luckier in the weather, could we?”

From the site there was no view, except for the brook and trees and wall, unless one looked north: there one got a magnificent sight of the house of Boscastle: the classical front, about a mile away, took in the whole foreground. It was a crowning stroke, I thought, to have chosen a site with that particular view.

But Lady Muriel was on holiday.

“I consider that all the arrangements are in hand,” she said. “Perhaps you would like me to show you some things?”

She led me up some steps in the wall, which brought us to a small plateau. From the plateau we clambered down across the road over to a headland. Below the headland the sea was slumberously rolling against the cliffs. There was a milky spume fringing the dark rocks: and further out the water lay a translucent green in the warm, misty morning.

“We used to have picnics here in the old days,” said Lady Muriel. “Before I decided it was unnecessary to go outside our grounds.”

She looked towards the mansion on its hill. It moved her to see it reposing there, the lawns bright, the house with the sun behind it. She was as inarticulate as ever.

“We’re lucky to have such an excellent day.” Then she did manage to say: “I have always been fond of our house.”

She tried to trace the coast line for me, but it was hidden in the mist.

“Well,” she said briskly, in a moment, “we must be getting back to our picnic. All the arrangements are in order, of course. I have never found it difficult to make arrangements. I did not find them irksome in the Lodge. I have found it strange not to have to make them — since my husband’s death.”

She missed them, of course, and she was happy that morning. We had begun to leave the headland, with Lady Muriel telling me of how she used to climb the rocks when she was a girl. Then, in the distance along the road, I saw a woman walking. I thought I recognised the walk. It was not stately, it was not poised, it was hurried, quick-footed and loose. As she came nearer, I saw that I was right. It was Rosalind. She was wearing a very smart tweed suit, much too smart by the Boscastles’ standards. And she was twirling a stick.

I hoped that she might not notice us. But she looked up, started, broke into a smile open-eyed, ill-used, pathetic and brazen. She gave a cheerful, defiant wave. I waved back. Lady Muriel did not stir a muscle.

When we saw Rosalind’s back, Lady Muriel enquired in an ominous tone: “Is that the young woman who used to throw her cap so abominably at Roy?”

“Yes,” I said.

“What is she doing here?”

“She is a friend of Ralph Udal’s,” I said. “She must be visiting him.” To myself I could think of no other explanation. So far as I knew, she had given up the pursuit of Roy. In any case, she could not have known that he was staying at Boscastle that week. It was a singular coincidence.

“Really,” said Lady Muriel. Her indignation mounted. She was no longer genial to me. “So now she sees herself as a clergyman’s wife, does she? Mr Eliot, I understand that the lower classes are very lax with their children. If that young woman had been my daughter, she would have been thrashed.”

She continued to fume as we made our way back to the site. It was too far from the house for Lady Boscastle to walk; she had been driven as far as the path would take a car, and supported the rest of the way by her maid. Lord Boscastle was sitting there disconsolately, and complaining to Roy. Roy listened politely, his face grave. It was the first time I had seen him that day, and I knew no more than the night before.

Lady Muriel could not contain her disgust. She gave a virulent description of Rosalind’s latest outrage.

“You didn’t know she was coming, Roy, I assume?”

“No. She hasn’t written to me for a year,” said Roy.

“I’m very glad to hear it,” said Lady Muriel, and burst out into fury at the picture of Rosalind walking “insolently” past the walls of Boscastle.

Roy said nothing. I fancied there was a glint — was it admiration? — in his eye.

“I hope this fellow Udal isn’t going to be a nuisance,” said Lord Boscastle. “There’s a great deal to be said for the celibacy of the clergy. But I don’t see why the young woman shouldn’t look him up. I always felt you were hard on her, Muriel.”

“Hard on her?” cried Lady Muriel. “Why, she’s nothing more nor less than a trollop.”

Soon after, Joan came walking by the brook. Her dress was white and flowered, and glimmered in the sunshine. As she called out to us, in an even voice, I was watching her closely. She was very pale. She had schooled herself not to do more than glance at Roy. She made conversation with her uncle. She was carrying herself with a hard control. She had all her mother’s inflexible sense of decorum. In public, one must go on as though nothing had happened. How brave she was, I thought.

A file of servants came down from the house with hampers, looking like the porters on de Saussure’s ascent of Mont Blanc. Cold chickens were brought out, tongues, patties: Lady Muriel jollied us vigorously to get to our lunch. Meanwhile Lady Boscastle’s lorgnette was directed for a moment at Joan, and then at Roy.

“I don’t for the life of me see,” said Lord Boscastle, gazing wistfully at the house, “why I should be dragged out here. When I might be eating in perfect comfort in my house.”

It sounded a reasonable lament. It sounded more reasonable than it was. For in the house we should in fact have been eating a tepid and indifferent lunch, instead of this delectable cold one. Lady Muriel had bludgeoned the kitchen into efficiency, which Lady Boscastle did not exert herself to do. It was the best meal I remembered at Boscastle.

We ended with strawberries and moselle. Lady Boscastle, who was eating less each month, got through her portion.

“It’s a fine taste, my dear Muriel,” she said, “I recall vividly the first time someone gave it me—”

I recognised that tone by now. It meant that she was thinking of some admirer in the past. I did not know how much Joan was listening to her aunt: but she made herself put a decent face on it.

After lunch, Lady Muriel was not ready to let us rest.

“Archery,” she said inexorably. Another file of servants came down with targets, quivers, cases of bows. The targets were set up and we shot through the sleepy afternoon. Lord Boscastle was fairly practised, and it was the kind of game to which Roy and I applied ourselves. I noticed Lady Boscastle watching the play of muscle underneath Roy’s shirt. She kept an interest in masculine grace. I thought she was surprised to see how strong he was.

Joan shot with us for a time. She and Roy spoke to each other only about the game, though once, when he misfired, she said, with a flash of innocence, intimacy, forgetfulness: “It must have bounced off that joint. Didn’t you feel it?” She was speaking of the first finger of his left hand; the top joint had grown askew. She was not looking at his hand. She knew it by heart.

Lady Boscastle was assisted to the car before tea. For the rest of us, tea was brought down from the house, though Lady Muriel maintained the al fresco spirit by boiling our own water over a spirit stove. Lord Boscastle said, as though aggrieved: “You ought to know by now, Muriel, that I’m no good at tea.” He drank a cup, and felt that he had served his sentence for the day. So he too went towards the house, having taken the precaution of booking Joan for bridge that night.

Some time after, the four of us started to follow him. Lady Muriel had uprooted the flag, and was carrying it home; all the paraphernalia of the meals was left for the servants. The site looked overcrowded with crockery: we had left it behind when Roy suddenly challenged me to a last round with the bow.

“Just two more shots, Lady Mu,” he said. “We’ll catch you up.”

Joan hesitated, as if she were pulled back to watch. Then she walked away with her mother.

Roy and I shot our arrows. As we went towards the targets to retrieve them, Roy said: “It’s over with Joan and me.”

“I was afraid so.”

“If she comes to you, try and help. She may not come. She’s dreadfully proud. But if she does, please try and help.” His face was angry, dark and strained. “She has so little confidence. Try everything you know.”

I said that I would.

“Tell her I’m useless,” he said. “Tell her I can’t stand anyone for long unless they’re as useless as I am. Tell her I’m mad.”

He plucked an arrow from the target, and spoke quietly and clearly: “There’s one thing she mustn’t believe. She mustn’t think she’s not attractive. It matters to her — intolerably. Tell her anything you like about me — so long as she doesn’t think that.”

He was torn and overcome. He was unusually reticent about his love affairs: even in our greatest intimacy, he had told me little. But that afternoon, as we walked up the valley, he spoke with a bitter abandon. Physical passion meant much to Joan, more than to any woman he had known. Unless she found it again, she could not stop herself becoming harsh and twisted. We were getting close behind Joan and her mother, and he could not say more. But before we caught them up, he said: “Old boy, there’s not much left.”

It was some days before I spoke to Joan. She was not a woman on whom one could intrude sympathy. The party stretched on through empty days. Roy took long walks with Lady Muriel, and I spent much time by Lady Boscastle’s chair. She had diagnosed the state of her niece’s affair, and had lost interest in it. “My dear boy, the grand climaxes of all love affairs are too much the same. Now the overtures have a little more variety.” At dinner the political quarrels became rougher: we tried to shut them out, but the news would not let us. There was only one improvement as the days dragged by: Roy and I became steadily more accurate with the long bow.

One night towards the end of the week I went for a walk alone after dinner. I climbed out of the grounds and up to the headland, so as to watch the sun set over the sea. It was a cloudless night: the western sky was blazing and the horizon clear as a knife-edge.

As I stood there, I heard steps on the grass. Joan had also come alone. She gazed at me, her expression heavy and yet open in the bright light.

“Lewis,” she said. So much feeling welled up in the one word that I took a chance.

“Joan,” I said, “I’ve wanted to say something to you. Twelve months ago Roy told me I made things harder for him. You ought to know the reason. It was because I understood a little about him.”

“Why are you telling me this?” she cried.

“It is the same with you.”

“Are you trying to comfort me?”

She burst out: “I wonder if it’s true. I don’t know. I don’t know anything now. I’ve given up trying to understand.”

I put my arm round her, and at the touch she began to speak with intense emotion.

“I can’t give him up,” she said. “Sometimes I think I only exist so far as I exist in his mind. If he doesn’t think of me, then I fall to pieces. There’s nothing of me any more.”

“Would it be better,” I said, “if he went away?”

“No,” she cried, in an access of fear. “You’re to tell him nothing. You’re not to tell him to go. He must stay here. My mother needs him. You know how much she needs him.”

It was true, but it was a pretext by which Joan saved her pride. For still she could not bear to let him out of her sight.

Perhaps she knew that she had given herself away, for suddenly her tone changed. She became angry with a violence that I could feel shaking her body.

“He’ll stay because she needs him,” she said with ferocity. “He’ll consider anything she wants. He’s nice and considerate with her. So he is with everyone — except me. He’s treated me abominably. He’s behaved like a cad. He’s treated me worse than anyone I could have picked up off the streets. He’s wonderful with everyone — and he’s treated me like a cad.”

She was trembling, and her voice shook.

“I don’t know how I stood it,” she cried. “I asked less than anyone in the world would have asked. And all I get is this.”

Then she caught my hand. The anger left her as quickly as it had risen. She had flared from hunger into ferocity, and now both fell away from her, and her tone was deep, tender and strong.

“You know, Lewis,” she said, “I can’t think of him like that. It’s perfectly true, he’s treated me abominably, yet I can’t help thinking that he’s really good. I see him with other people, and I think I am right to love him. I know he’s done wicked things. I know he’s done wicked things to me. But they seem someone else’s fault.”

The sun had dipped now to the edge of the sea. Her eyes glistened in the radiance; for the first time that night, they were filmed with tears. Her voice was even.

“I wish I could believe,” she said, “that he’ll be better off without me. I might be able to console myself if I believed it. But I don’t. How does he expect to manage? I’m sure he’s unhappier than any human soul. I can look after him. How does he expect to manage, if he throws it away?”

She cried out: “I don’t think he knows what will become of him.”