The Light and the Dark

32: A Noisy Winter Evening

I had thought, at the dinner party in the Adlon, how in England it was still natural for men like Roy and me to have our introductions to those in power. I thought it again, at the beginning of the war; for, within a few days, Roy had been asked for by a branch of intelligence, Francis Getliffe had become assistant superintendent of one of the first radar establishments, I was a civil servant in Whitehall. And so with a good many of our Cambridge friends. It was slick, automatic, taken for granted. The links between the universities and “government” were very strong. They happened, of course, as a residue of privilege; the official world in England was still relatively small and compact; when in difficulties it asked who was a useful man, and brought him in.

Of all our friends, I was much the luckiest. Francis Getliffe’s job was more important (he broke his health in getting the warning sets ready in time for the air battle of 1940 — and then went on obstinately to improvise something for the night fighters), Roy’s was more difficult, but mine was the most interesting by far. My luck in practical matters had never deserted me, and I landed on my feet, right in the middle of affairs. I was attached to a small ministry which had, on paper, no particular charge; in fact, it was used as a convenient ground for all kinds of special investigations, interdepartmental committees, secret meetings. These had to be held somewhere, and came to us simply because of the personality of our minister. It was his peculiar talent to be this kind of handy man. I became the assistant to his Permanent Secretary, and so, by sheer chance, gained an insight into government such as I had no right to hope for. In normal times it could not have come my way, since one can only live one life. It was a constant refreshment during the long dark shut-in years.

At times it was the only refreshment. For I went through much trouble at that period. My wife died in the winter of 1939. Everyone but Roy thought it must be a relief and an emancipation, but they did not know the truth. That was a private misery which can be omitted here. But there was another misery which I ought to mention for a moment. I was often distressed about the war, in two quite different ways. And so was Roy, though in his own fashion.

I will speak of myself first, for my distresses were commonplace. I often forgot them in the daytime; for it was fun to go into Whitehall, attend meetings, learn new techniques, observe men pushing for power, building their empires, very much as in the college but with more hanging on the result; it was fun to go with the Minister to see a new weapon being put into production, to stay for days in factories and watch things of which I used to be quite ignorant; it was fun to watch the Minister himself, unassuming, imperturbably discreet, realistic, resilient and eupeptically optimistic.

But away from work I could not sustain that stoical optimism. For the first three years of the war, until the autumn of 1942, I carried a weight of fear. I was simply frightened that we should lose. It was a perfectly straightforward fear, instinctive and direct. The summer of 1940 was an agony for me: I envied — and at times resented — the cheerful thoughtless invincible spirits of people round me, but I thought to myself that the betting was 5–1 against us. I felt that, as long as I lived, I should remember walking along Whitehall in the pitiless and taunting sun.

As long as I lived. I also knew a different fear, one of which I was more ashamed, a fear of being killed. When the bombs began to fall on London, I discovered that I was less brave than the average of men. I was humiliated to find it so. I could just put some sort of face on it, but I dreaded the evening coming, could not sleep, was glad of an excuse to spend a night out of the town. It was not always easy to accept one’s nature. Somehow one expected the elementary human qualities. It was unpleasant to find them lacking. Most people were a good deal less frightened than I was — simple and humble people, like my housekeeper at Chelsea, the clerks in the office, those I met in the pubs of Pimlico. And most of my friends were brave beyond the common, which made me feel worse. Francis Getliffe was a man of cool and disciplined courage. Lady Muriel was unthinkingly gallant, and Joan as staunch in physical danger as in unhappy love. And Roy had always been extremely brave.

He noticed, of course, that I was frightened. He did not take it as seriously as I did. Like many men who possess courage, he did not value it much. Without my knowing, he took a flat for me in Dolphin Square, the great steel-and-concrete block on the embankment, about a mile from my house. He told me mischievously, sensibly, that it was important I should be able to sleep. He also told me that he had consulted Francis Getliffe upon the safest place in the safest type of building. London was emptying, and it was easy to have one’s pick. He had incidentally given Francis the impression that he was enquiring for his own sake. He made it seem that he was abnormally preoccupied about his own skin. It was the kind of trick that he could not resist bringing out for Francis. Francis replied with scientific competence — “between the third and seventh floor in a steel frame” — and thought worse of Roy than ever. Roy grinned.

For himself, Roy did not pay any attention to such dangers. He gave most acquaintances the impression that he did not care at all. They thought the war had not touched him.

He worked rather unenthusiastically in a comfortable government job. He stayed at the office late, as we all did, but he did not tire himself with the obsessed devotion that he had once spent on his manuscripts. At night he went out into the dark London streets in search of adventure. He found a lot of reckless love affairs. He gave parties in the flat in Connaught Street, he went all over the town in chase of women, and often, just as I used to find so strange when he was a younger man, he went to bed with someone for a single night and then forgot her altogether. Rosalind often came to see him, but, when the air-raids started, she tried to persuade him to meet her out of London. He would not go.

It was an existence which people blamed as irresponsible, trivial, out of keeping with the time. He attracted a mass of disapproval, heavier than in the past. Even Lady Muriel wondered how he could bear to be out of uniform. I told her that, having once been forced into this particular job, he would never get permission to leave. But she was baffled, puzzled, only partially appeased. All her young relations were fighting. Even Humphrey was being trained as an officer in motor torpedo boats. She was too loyal to condemn Roy, but she did not know what to think.

I saw more of him than I had done since my early days in Cambridge. Our intimacy had returned, more unquestioning because of the time we had been kept at a distance. We knew each other all through now, and we depended on each other more than we had ever done. For these were times when only the deepest intimacy was any comfort. Casual friends could not help; they were more a tax than strangers. We were each in distress; in our different ways we were hiding it. We had both aged; I had become guarded, middle-aged, used to the official life, patient and suspicious; he was lighter in speech than ever, not serious now even though it hurt others not to be serious, dissipated, purposeless and without hope. He was still kind by nature, perhaps more kind than when he thought he would come through; he was often lively; but he could see no meaning in his life.

No one could know why we had changed so much, unless they knew all that had happened to us. That we had never told in full. We each had women friends to whom we confided something; Joan knew a great deal about Roy, and there were others who understood part of his story. It was the same with me. It was only in extremity that we needed to be known for what we truly were. That extremity had now come for both of us. We needed to be looked at by eyes that had seen everything, would not be fooled, were clear and pitiless, and whose knowledge was complete; we needed too the compassion of a heart which had known despair. So we turned to each other for comfort, certain that we should find knowledge, acceptance, humour and love.

I knew that he was suffering more than I. It was not the war, though it had become tied up with that — for many states of unhappiness are like a vacuum which fills itself with whatever substance comes to hand. The vacuum would remain, if whatever was now filling it were taken away. So with Roy: the cause lay elsewhere. War or no war, he would have been tormented. If there had been no war, the vacuum would have filled itself with a different trouble. For the wound could not heal: as soon as he realised that his melancholy was an act of fate, that he could not throw off his affliction by losing himself in faith, he could see nothing to look forward to.

Brave as he was, full of life as he was, he was not stoical. Many blows he would have taken incomparably better than I; wherever his response could be active, he was better fitted to cope. But this affliction — it was easy to think so, but I believed it was true — I should have put up with more stubbornly than he. He could not endure the thought of a life preyed on meaninglessly, devastated all for nothing. For him, the realisation was an acute and tragic experience. He could not mask it, cushion it, throw it aside. It took away the future with something of the finality that stunned the old Master when he was told that he was dying of cancer. Roy felt that he was being played with. He felt intensely humiliated — that he should be able to do nothing about it, that his effort and will did not begin to count! Angrily, hopelessly, frantically, he rattled the bars of his cage.

I could not forget the darkness of his face that morning in the college garden. For him it had been the starkest and bitterest of hours. He could not recover from it. Though for the next year or more he did not undergo the profoundest depression again, he never entered that calm beautiful high-spirited state in which his company made all other men seem leaden; with me he was usually subdued, affectionately anxious to help me on, controlled and sensible. His cries of distress only burst out in disguise, when he talked about the war.

He hated it. He hated that it should ever have happened. He hated any foreseeable end.

He did not simply dread, as I did, that England might be defeated. He knew what I felt; he felt my spirits fall and rise with the news, in the bad days he encouraged me. But his own dread was nothing like so simple. He shared mine up to a point; he too was chilled by the thought that his own country might lose; but he went further. He had an intensely vivid picture of what defeat in this war must bring. He could not shut it out from his imagination. He could not stand the thought for his own country — and scarcely less for Germany. Whatever happened, it seemed to him hideous without relief. Any world in which it could come about seemed meaningless — as meaningless as a life shadowed by the caprice of fate.

So he watched me through the bright and terrible summer of 1940 with protective sympathy, with a feeling more detached and darker than mine. And, as the news got a little better in my eyes, as it became clear through the winter that the war would not end in sudden disaster, I had to accept that he could not share my pleasure and relief. For me the news might turn better; for him all news about the war was black, and brought to his mind only the desert waste to come.

It was an evening in the early spring of 1941, and already so dark that I had to pick my way from the bus stop to Dolphin Square. It had become a habit to arrive home late, in the dark, tired and claustrophobic. I had to pull my curtains and tamper with a fitting, before I could switch on the light. I lay on my sofa, trying to rouse myself to go down to the restaurant for dinner, when Roy came in. He usually called in at night, if he was not entertaining one of his young women.

Although our flats were two miles apart, he visited me as often as when we lived on neighbouring staircases. His face had changed little in the last years, but he was finding it harder to pretend that his hair still grew down to his temples. That night he seemed secretly amused.

“Just had a letter,” he said. “I must say, a slightly remarkable letter.”

“Who from?”

“You should have said where from. Actually, it comes from Basel.”

“Whom do you know in Basel?”

“I used to be rather successful with the Swiss. They laughed when I made a joke. Very flattering,” said Roy.

“It must be some adoring girl,” I said.

“I can’t think of any description which would please him less,” said Roy. “No, I really can’t. It’s an old acquaintance of yours. It’s Willy Romantowski.”

I said a word or two about Willy, and then exclaimed how odd it was.

“It’s extremely odd,” said Roy. “It’s even odder when you see the letter. You won’t be able to read it, though. You’re not good at German holograph, are you? Also Willy uses very curious words. Sometimes of a slightly slangy nature.” Roy looked at me solemnly and began to translate.

It was a puzzling letter.

“Dear Roy,” so his translation went, “Since you left Berlin I have not had a very good time. They made me go into the army which made me sick. So I got tired of wasting my time in the army, and decided to come here.”

“He makes it sound simple,” I interjected.

“I have arrived here,” Roy went on, “and like it much better. But I have no money, and the Swiss people do not let me earn any. That is why I am writing you this letter, Roy. I remember how kind you were to us all at No. 32. You were always very kind to me, weren’t you? So I am hoping that you will be able to help me now I am in difficult circumstances. I expect you have a Swiss publisher. Could you please ask him to give me some money? Or perhaps you could bring me some yourself? I expect you could get to Switzerland somehow. I know you will not let me starve. Your friend Romantowski (Willy).” And he had added: “There were some changes at No. 32 after you left, but I have not heard much since I went into the army.”

The letter was written in pencil, in (so Roy said) somewhat illiterate German. He had never seen Willy’s handwriting, so he had nothing to compare it with. It gave an address in a street in Basel, and the postmark was Swiss. The letter had been opened and censored in several different countries, but had only taken about a month to arrive.

We were both excited. It was a singular event. We could not decide how genuine the letter was. As stated, Willy’s story sounded highly implausible. From the beginning Roy was suspicious.

“It’s a plant,” he said. “They’re trying to hook me.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know. Perhaps Reinhold Schäder. They think I might be useful. They’re very thorough people.”

I could believe that easily enough. But I could not understand why, if Schäder or Roy’s other high-placed friends were behind the move, they should use this extraordinary method. It seemed ridiculous, and I said so.

“They sometimes do queer things. They’re not as rational as we are.” Then he smiled. “Or of course they may have mistaken my tastes.”

He considered.

“That shouldn’t be likely. Perhaps Willy was the only one who’d volunteer to do it. You can’t imagine the little dancer trying to get hold of me for them, can you? But Willy wasn’t a particularly scrupulous young man. Or do you think I’m misjudging him?”

I chuckled, and asked him what he was going to do about it.

“You’re not going to reply?” I asked.

“Not safe,” said Roy. I had half-expected a different reply, but he was curiously prudent and restrained at that time. “I need to stop them getting me into trouble. It might look shady. I’m not keen on getting into trouble. Particularly if they’re trying to hook me.”

He had, in fact, already behaved with sense and judgment. The letter had arrived the day before. Roy had at once reported it to his departmental chief, and written a note to Houston Eggar, who was back at the Foreign Office handling some of the German work. Roy had told them (as Eggar already knew) that he had many friends in Berlin, and that this was a disreputable acquaintance. He added that one or two of the younger German ministers had reason to believe that he was well-disposed to them and to Germany.

He was far more cautious than he used to be, I thought. His chief and Eggar had both told him not to worry; it was obviously none of his doing; Eggar had gone on to say that the Foreign Office might want to follow the letter up, since they had so little contact with anyone who had recently been inside Germany.

Outside, the sirens ululated. They were late that night. In a few minutes, down the estuary we heard the first hollow thud of gunfire. The rumble came louder and sharper. It was strangely warming to be sitting there, in that safe room, as the noise grew. It was like lying in front of the fire as a child, while the wind moaned and the rain thrashed against the windows. It gave just the same pulse of rich, exalted comfort.

We turned off the light and drew aside the curtains. Searchlights were weaving on the clouds: there was an incandescent star as a shell burst short, but most were exploding above the cloud shelf. There were only a few aircraft, flying high. The night was too stormy for a heavy raid. Two small fires were rising pink, rosy, out to the east. The searchlights crossed their beams ineffectively, in a beautiful three-dimensional design.

The aircraft were unseen, undetected, untouched. We heard their engines throbbing smoothly and without a break. They flew west and then south; the gunfire became distant again, and died away.

We looked out into the dark night; one searchlight still smeared itself upon the clouds.

“They won’t find it so easy soon,” I said.

“Who’ll stop them? Getliffe and his gang?”

“They’ll help,” I said. “It won’t be any fun to fly.”

“You’re sure, old boy?” said Roy very clearly, in the dark room.

“I’m pretty sure,” I said. I had always had a minor interest in military history: since the war, with the opportunities of my job, it had become more informed. “It was the most dangerous job in the last war. It’s bound to become so again.”

“On both sides?”

“Yes.”

“What do you mean — the most dangerous job?”

I defined what I meant. I said that special élite troops on land, like commandos, might take greater risks than the average fighting airman; but that the whole fighting strength of the air force would suffer heavier casualties than any similar number of men on land or sea.

“They’ll take very heavy losses,” I said, staring at the night sky.

“And we shall too?”

“Quite certainly,” I said. “I don’t know how many fighting airmen will survive the war. It won’t be a very large percentage.”

“Just so.” I heard the clear voice behind me.

Two mornings later, Houston Eggar rang me up at my office. He was excessively mysterious. In him discretion was becoming both a passion and an art; both he and I had secret telephones, but he thought it safest not to speak. It would be wiser to meet, he said zestfully, revelling in his discretion. He would not give me an inkling of the reason. Would I mind going round to the Foreign Office?

I was annoyed. I did not believe that he was as busy as I was. I knew that he enjoyed all the shades of secrecy. Irritated, I went past guards, sandbags, into the dingy entrance of the Foreign Office, followed a limping messenger down corridors and up stairs.

Eggar was occupying a tiny ramshackle room, marked off by a pasteboard partition. The building was overcrowded, and, somewhat to his chagrin, he could not be accommodated according to his rank. One window had been blown out, and was not yet boarded over. It was a cold morning, and bitter draughts kept sweeping in. Eggar sat there in his black coat and striped trousers, muscular, vigorous, cheerful. He did not mind the cold. He worked like an engine, and he would be sitting in that arctic room until late at night, plodding through the day’s stack of files.

He greeted me with his effusive cordiality, man-to-man, eyes looking straight into eyes.

“Between ourselves,” he said, “I think I’ve got a job for you.”

“I’m pretty well booked,” I said.

“I know you’re not disponible. I know you’re getting well-thought-of round here. I hear your minister thinks the world of you.” Eggar was a generous-hearted man, and he was genuinely pleased that I should get some praise. Also he was thinking of one of his own simple, cunning, pushful moves. “But I want you for something important. I think we may be able to extract you for a week or two.”

“I do rather doubt it,” I said. “What do you want me for?”

“You’ve kept in touch with young Calvert, have you?”

The question surprised me.

“Yes.”

“Well, this is strictly in confidence — we’re particularly anxious that it shouldn’t get round, for reasons that I’m obliged to keep to myself. Strictly in confidence, young Calvert has received a letter from a German friend of his. I don’t want to give you a wrong impression. There’s nothing to blame Calvert for. He has behaved perfectly correctly.” Eggar told me the story of Romantowski’s letter over again; he produced a copy of the original, and I listened to another translation.

“Very curious,” I said.

“It may be useful,” said Eggar. “We’re finding out whether this chap Romantowski is really living at that address. If so, we want to chase it up.” He explained, as he had done to Roy, that they were uncomfortably short of news from inside Germany. “We think it might be worth the trouble of sending Calvert to talk to him.”

I nodded.

“Yes, we shall probably send Calvert out,” said Eggar. He looked at me, and added: “If we do, we should like you to go with him.”

“Why?”

Then Eggar took me completely aback.

“Between ourselves, Eliot, you ought to know. You ought to remember that two or three years ago Calvert was inclined to see some good points in the German set-up. I don’t count it against him: a lot of people did the same. I’m not saying for a minute that today he isn’t a hundred per cent behind the war. But we can’t afford to take chances. I should be more comfortable if you went and helped him out in Switzerland. I expect he would be more comfortable too.”

It was informal, rough-and-ready, fixed up like an arrangement between friends. It was the way things got done. I felt a new respect for Eggar’s competence.

I could not escape being persuaded. If they wanted news badly enough to send Roy, it was as well that I went with him. Eggar beamed at me triumphantly. He would not have got me ordered there against my will, but now all was clear, he said, for him to call upon my minister. It was quite unnecessary, for the minister was the least ceremonious of men; I could have explained it to him in five minutes.

But he was also a uniquely influential man, and Eggar was determined to know him. On its own merits, it was a good idea to despatch me to look after Roy; Eggar could always keep one eye on the ball. But the other eye was fixed elsewhere. From the moment he had thought of sending me, Eggar had been determined to make the most of the opportunity. It was an admirable excuse to introduce himself to the minister; he was out to create the best of impressions. He would never have a finer chance.

33: Journey into the Light

“We’ll get you there somehow,” said Houston Eggar heartily, when I asked about our route. The more I thought of it, the more my apprehensions emerged. In fact, it was so difficult to arrange the journey that it was cancelled twice. Each time I felt reprieved. But Eggar was determined that we should go, and at last he managed it.

The Foreign Office had been able to trickle a few people in since the fall of France, and Eggar used the same method for us: but even so, and getting us the highest priority, he took weeks to produce our papers complete. The delay was almost entirely caused by the French, for we needed a visa through Vichy France.

Though I viewed the journey with trepidation, I could not help being amused at the technique. For we were to fly to Lisbon in the ordinary way; there was nothing comic about that, but then the unexpected began; we were instructed to catch a German plane from Lisbon to Madrid, and another on the standard Lufthansa route from Madrid up north through Europe. We were to get off at Lyons, though the plane went on to Stuttgart. It had been done several times before by visitors on important missions, said Eggar: like them, we should carry Red Cross papers, and he expected all would be well. The French at last gave way. Eggar told us as though he had done all the difficult part, and ours was trivial; but, as a matter of fact, he was beginning to feel responsible.

He became slightly too genial, and stood us a dinner the night before we left.

We flew from Bristol on a halcyon spring afternoon. But we saw nothing of it, for the windows of the aircraft were covered over, and let in only a dim, tawny, subfusc light. The dimness made my plan for getting through the journey a little more difficult; I had to reckon on three hours’ sheer fright before we landed at Lisbon, and to help myself through I read quotas of fifty pages at a go before letting myself look at my watch. I had taken the Tale of Genji with me. Subtle and lovely though it was, I wished it had more narrative power. I could not keep myself from listening for unpleasant sounds. Once more I cursed and was ashamed of my timidity. I very much envied Roy.

He was lively, exhilarated, much as he had been in the most joyous days. He had been exhilarated ever since he was asked to make the journey. He seemed glad that I was going, as though it had been a holiday when we were much younger; he had not shown the slightest suspicion or resentment; he had not asked a single question why I should be there. Yet I felt he was too incurious. He could not accept it as naturally as he seemed to. He was much too astute not to guess. Still, his face lit up at the news of our journey, just as it used before any travel. He had always been excited by the thought, not of anything vague like the skies of Europe, but the unexpected and exact things which he might hear and see: I remembered the post-cards that used to arrive as he went from library to library: “Palermo. The post office here has pillars fifty-six feet high, painted red, white and blue.” “Nice. Yesterday a Roumanian poetess described her country and France as the two bulwarks of Latin civilisation.” “Berlin. The best cricketer of German nationality is called Maus. (All German cricketers appear to have very short names). He is slightly worse than I am, slightly better than you.”

He was excited again in just that fashion, as we got into the aircraft. He was stimulated, became more brilliantly alive, through the faint tang of danger. I envied him, reading my book with forced concentration, hearing him chat to a Portuguese business man. He knew that I should be frightened, that I should prefer to be left sullenly alone. His imagination was at least as active as mine, but it produced an utterly different result: the thought of danger made him keen, braced, active, like a first class batsman who requires just enough of the needle, just enough tingle of the nerves, to be brought to the top of his form. Portuguese was a language Roy had never had reason to look at, but he was asking his acquaintance to pronounce some words: Roy was mimicking the squashed vowel sounds, apparently with accuracy, to judge from the admiring cries.

My first quota of pages dragged by, then in time another, then another. I had to read a good many pages again, to draw any meaning from them; not that they were obscure (they were about lords and ladies of the Japanese court in the year 1000, making an expedition to view the beauty of the autumn flowers), but I was listening too intently for noises outside. I wondered for an instant how the Genji circle would have faced times like ours. They happened to live in an interval of extreme tranquillity, though their civilisation was destroyed a couple of generations later. The Victorians too — they lived in an interval of tranquillity, though they did not feel it so. How would they have got on, if they had been born, like Roy and me and our friends, into one of the most violent times? About the same as we did, I thought. Not better. They would have endured it, for human beings are so made that they struggle on. The more one saw of human beings in violence and adversity, the more astonishing it was how much they could bear.

The plane began to lose height earlier than I calculated. I was alarmed, but Roy had picked up a word, and smiled across at me affectionately, mockingly, with an eyebrow lifted: “We’re here, old boy. Lisbon.”

It was comforting to feel the bumps beneath the wheels, comforting to walk with Roy across the aerodrome.

“Five o’clock,” said Roy. “In time for tea. You need some tea. Also some cakes.”

We were staying that night in Lisbon, and we strolled through the brilliant streets in the warm and perfumed air. For five minutes, it was a release after the darkness of England. The lights streamed from the shops and one felt free, confined no longer. But almost at once, one forgot the darkness, we were walking in lighted streets as we had done before. Roy went from shop to shop, sending off presents; except that the presents were mostly parcels of food, it might have been a night in Cambridge in days past.

We caught the German aeroplane next day. It seemed a little bizarre, but not so much as when I first heard that this was the most practical way. The lap was a short one, Lisbon to Madrid; the windows were not darkened, I looked down on the tawny plains of Estremadura and Castille; we were all polite, everything went according to plan. I had been in Madrid just before the beginning of the civil war; it was strange to sit in a café there again, to read newspapers prophesying England’s imminent defeat, to remember the passions that earlier war had stirred in England. It had been the great plane of cleavage between left and right; we could recall Arthur Brown, the most sensible and solid of conservatives, so far ceasing to be his clubbable self as to talk about “those thieves and murderers whom Getliffe and Eliot are so fond of”.

Roy mimicked Arthur Brown making that reproachful statement, and one saw again the rubicund but frowning face by the fire in the combination room. “I regard a glass of port as rather encouraging on a cold night,” Roy went on mimicking. We were sometimes nostalgic for those cosy autumn nights.

The Lufthansa plane, on the run Madrid-Barcelona-Lyons-Stuttgart, was full of German officials, business men and officers. They knew we were English; one or two were stiffly courteous, but most of them were civil, helpful, anxious to be kind. Roy’s German was, of course, an aid: there is something disarming in a foreigner who speaks one’s language within a shade of perfection and who knows one’s country from the inside. I could now carry on some sort of conversation myself, and one youngish business man pressed sandwiches on us with a naïf, clumsy, puppyish kindness.

I was not expecting to be treated with such simple, amiable consideration. I did not understand why they should have gone out of their way to be kind. They were worried about our reception at Lyons, but anxious to assure us that we should be well looked after at Basel. “It is like a German town,” they said. “Yes, it is a fine town. All will be well when you come to Basel.”

So, in that odd company, I had my first glimpse of the Mediterranean for three years, as we flew over the Catalan coast. Since we landed at Lisbon, I was not so timid about physical danger; but I had two other cares on my mind. I was not sure whether it was a convenience for both sides to let Englishmen travel under this deception of ours. If not, it was always possible that someone here would report our names when he got to Germany: Roy was well enough known in Berlin for it to be a finite risk. I did not believe that the German intelligence would be taken in for a moment by our Red Cross status — and we were due to return on this same route.

For the same reason, I was nervous about the weather. If it did not let us touch down at Lyons, we should inevitably be taken on to Stuttgart. Could we possibly get away with it? Roy would have to do most of the talking: could I trust him to throw himself into whole-hearted lying? This time I was more afraid for him: of all men, he was the least fit to stand prison. I watched the clouds rolling up to the east.

Once (it was an ironical memory) we had been forced down at Lyons. Flying home from Monte Carlo after that happy holiday with the Boscastles, we had met a snowstorm. It was uncomfortable to remember now.

This time the weather did not interfere with us. We made our proper landing. Our German acquaintances inside the aeroplane wished us good luck, and I felt that now we had put the last obstacle behind us. It turned out otherwise. The French officials were not willing to let us disembark: they held the aircraft, the German officers getting first bleakly, then bitterly angry, while we were questioned. Our papers were in order; they could not find anything irregular; they remained sharp, unsatisfied, hostile, suspicious. Both Roy and I lost our tempers. Though I was too angry to note it then, I had never seen him abandoned to rage before. He thumped on the table in the control-room; he was insolently furious; he demanded that they put us in touch immediately with the protecting power; he treated them like petty officials; he loved riffraff and outcasts and those who were born to be powerless — but that afternoon, when he was crossed, he assumed that authority must be on his side.

Suddenly, with a good many shrugs and acid comments, they let us through. They had no formal case against us — but they might have persisted longer if we had kept our tempers and continued with rational and polite argument. As we walked into the town to the railway station (there was no car and they would not help us to find any sort of vehicle) it occurred to me that we were angry because of their suspicions: we were the more angry because the suspicions happened to be entirely justified. It was curious, the genuine moral outrage one felt at being accused of a sin of which one was guilty. I told Roy.

“Just so,” he said, with a smile that was a little sour.

The train was crowded up to the frontier, with people standing in each carriage. It arrived hours late at Annemas, and there we had another scene. At last we sat in a Swiss train, clean and empty.

“Now you can relax,” said Roy. He smiled at me protectively; but that smile vanished, as the excitement and thrill of the journey dropped from him. He looked out of the window, as the train moved towards Geneva; his face was pensive, troubled, and grave.

When there was no excitement to brighten his eyes, he had become by this time in his life sad without much intermission. It was not like the overmastering bouts of melancholy; he had not been invaded by irresistible melancholy since that last summer of peace. I wondered if it was creeping on him now. It was hard to tell, when so much of his time he was burdened — burdened without much up and down, as though this was a steady, final state. As he looked out of the window, I wondered if he was specially burdened now. Was he thinking of what awaited him at Basel?

He turned away from the window, and found my eyes upon him. His own gaze met mine. I noticed his eyes as though it were the first time. They were brilliant, penetrating: most people found them hard to escape: they had often helped him in his elaborate solemn dialogues, in the days when he played his tricks upon the “stuffed”.

“Anxious?” he said.

“Yes.”

“About me?”

“Yes.”

“You needn’t worry, Lewis,” he said. “I shan’t disgrace you. I shan’t do anything unorthodox.”

He looked at me with a faint smile.

“There’s no need to worry. I promise you.”

He spoke as he had come to speak so often — quietly, sensibly, kindly, without fancy. There was still just a vestigial trace of mischief in his tone. I accepted the reassurance implicitly. I knew I had nothing to fear at the end of this journey. It was a relief. Whatever happened now, I could cease to worry at the level of practical politics, at the level where Houston Eggar would be concerned.

Yet, in those quiet, intimate words, there was an undercurrent of something more profound. Perhaps I did not hear it at its sharpest. I was not then attuned. But could anyone, still struggling with hope, still battling on with the selfish frailty of a human brother, be so considerate, so imaginatively detached, so desperately kind?

We arrived at Basel late at night, and went at once to Willy Romantowski’s address. We were met by an anticlimax. Yes, he was living there. No, he was not in. He had been staying with some friends for a night or two. He was expected back tomorrow or the next day.

“Willy must have found someone very, very nice,” said Roy with a grin, as we left the house. “Really, I’m surprised at the Swiss. Very remarkable.”

I grinned too, though I was more frustrated than he by the delay. I wanted to get it over, return safely to England, clear off the work that was waiting for me. Roy did not mind; he was relaxed, quite ready to spend some time in this town.

He remarked that Willy was not doing himself too badly. It was midnight, and difficult to get an impression of a strange street. But it was clearly not a slum. The street seemed to be full of old middle-class houses, turned into flats — not unlike the Knesebeckstrasse, except that the houses were less gaunt, more freshly painted and spick-and-span. Willy was living in a room under the eaves.

“His standard of living is going up,” said Roy. “Why? Just two guesses.”

Willy did not get in touch with us the next day, and we spent the time walking round Basel; I was still very restless, and Roy set out to entertain me. At any other time, I should have basked in the Gothic charm of the streets round our hotel, for the consul had found us rooms in a quarter as medieval as Nuremberg. There were only a few of these Gothic streets, which led into rows of doctors’ houses, offices, shops, as trim as the smart suburb of a midland town in England; but, if one did not walk too far, one saw only red roofs, jutting eaves, the narrow bustling old streets, the golden ball of the Spalenthor above the roofs, gleaming in the spring sunlight. It took one back immediately to childhood, like the smell of classroom paint; it was as though one had slept as a child in one of those tiny bedrooms, and been woken by the church bells.

We used an introduction to some of the people at the university. They took us out and gave us a gigantic dinner, but they regarded us with a regretful pity, as one might look at someone mortally ill. For they took it for granted that England had already lost the war. They were cross with us for making them feel such painful pity — just as Lord Boscastle sounded callous at having his heart wrung by Roy’s sorrow. I found myself perversely expressing a stubborn, tough, blimpish optimism which I by no means felt. They became angry, pointing out how unrealistic I was, how like all Englishmen I had an over-developed character and very little intelligence.

Roy took no part in the argument. He was occupying himself, with the professional interest that never left him, in learning some oddities of Swiss-German.

Roy had left a note for Willy, and we called again at his lodging house. At last he came to our hotel, on our second afternoon there. His mincing mannerisms were not flaunted quite so much; he was wearing a pin-stripe suit in the English style, his cheeks were fatter, he looked healthy and well-fed. He was patently upset to find me with Roy. Roy said that he was sure Willy would be glad to see another old friend, and asked him to have some tea.

Willy would love to. He explained that he had become very fond of tea. He had also become, I thought, excessively genteel.

Roy began by asking him about the people at No. 32. Willy said that he had not seen them for eighteen months (both Roy and I thought this was untrue). But the little dancer had unexpectedly and suddenly married a schoolmaster, back in her native town; she had had a child and was said to be very happy. We were delighted to hear it. In the midst of strain, that news came fresh and calm. We sent for a bottle of wine, and drank to her. For a few moments, we were light-hearted.

Roy questioned Willy up to dinner, through the meal, through the first part of the night. Roy mentioned the clerk, Willy’s old patron, the “black avised” — Willy shrugged his shoulders: “I do not know where he is. He was tiresome. I left him. I do not know him any more.”

Roy scolded him: “It is hard to be kind to those who love you, Willy. But you need to try. It is shameful not to try.” It was strange that he took the trouble to rebuke Willy, who had always seemed to me inescapably hard, petty and vain. Perhaps Roy saw something else. Perhaps he remembered that he himself had sometimes behaved unforgivably to those who loved him.

From the black avised, he switched to Willy’s own adventures. Here we became inextricably entangled for a long time: it was difficult to pick out exactly where he was lying. His first, as it were official, story was this: he had been called up in the summer of 1939, had gone with an infantry division into Poland, had spent the winter with the army of occupation, had been transferred to the western front in the spring of 1940. His division had been sitting opposite Verdun, and had done no fighting; in the winter, they were moved across Europe again to the eastern front. It was then that Willy “got tired of it”. He had deserted, on the way through Germany, and smuggled himself over the Swiss frontier. Since then he had been living in Basel. “How are you keeping alive?” asked Roy.

“Thanks to friends,” said Willy, turning his eyes aside modestly — but added in a hurry: “I am poor. Will you please help me, Roy?”

Most of those statements were lies. That was quite clear. It was also quite clear that, if he wanted to make a proposition to Roy, he would have to admit they were lies. So we examined him, tripped him up on inconsistencies, just to give him a chance to come down to the real business. Meanwhile I was hoping, in the exchange, to collect a few useful facts.

I ought to say in passing that the results were disappointing. Willy was sharp, quick-witted, acquisitive, but he did not know enough. All he could have told us, even if he had had the will, was the day-to-day gossip of Berlin and the personal facts he had observed. Roy made some deductions from the gossip which proved more right than wrong: I missed the significance of something Willy let fall. He said that the draughtsman at No. 32 had not been able to find a job for months. I ought to have pounced on that remark, but I was just obtuse: it seemed incredible then that their administration should be fundamentally, for all its streamlined finish, less sensible, less directed, less businesslike than ours.

We drank a good deal before and during dinner. We hoped to get him drunk, for we were both, of course, accustomed to wine. But he turned out to have, despite his youth, an abnormally strong head. Roy said to me in English, over dinner: “We shall be dished, old boy — if he sees us under the table.”

However, after dinner Willy made some pointed hints that I should leave him and Roy alone. I did not budge. Willy pouted. He might be acquiring great gentility, I thought, but he still had some way to go. His patience was not lasting — all of a sudden he began commiserating with Roy on the dangers of life in England. “You too will be destroyed. It is stupid to stay in England. Why do you not come to Germany? It can be arranged. We will have everything nice for you.”

So that was it. I glanced at Roy. It was certain now that he would get more from Willy if I went away. He nodded. I made an excuse. “Don’t be too late,” said Roy. “He won’t have gone when you come back.” Willy regarded me with an absence of warmth.

I sat at a café in the Petergraben, not far away. The night was warm enough for all the windows to be open; lusty young men and girls went by on the narrow pavement. It was all cosy, cheerful, jolly with bodily life. It was different from anything we should know for long enough.

I bought a paper, ordered a large glass of beer, and thought about this affair of Willy Romantowski. It was grotesque. I was not worrying; I had faith that Roy would behave like the rest of us. Yet it was grotesque. Who had suggested it? What lay behind it? Maybe the motives were quite commonplace. In the middle of bizarre events, it was hard to remember that they might be simply explained. Yet I doubted whether we should ever know the complete truth behind Willy’s invitation.

I was sure of one minor point — that Willy himself was a singularly unheroic character. He was terrified of the war and determined to avoid it. It seemed to me distinctly possible that he had volunteered to fetch Roy in order to establish a claim on a good safe job back in Berlin. I remembered Roy’s judgment on how gallant these epicene young men would be: this was a joke against him.

I returned to the Spalenbrunnen. From outside, I could see Roy and Willy still sitting at the dinner-table. When I joined them, I noticed with a shock that Willy was in tears.

“Nearly finished, Lewis,” said Roy to me. “I’ve been telling Willy that I can’t go back with him. I’ve asked him to tell my friends that I love them. And that I love Germany.”

“I only came for your good,” said Willy, full of resentment, plaintiveness and guilt.

“You must not pretend, Willy,” said Roy gently. “It is not so.”

Willy gulped with distress — perhaps through disappointment at not bringing off his coup, perhaps through a stab of feeling. He shook hands with Roy: then, though he hated me to perdition, he remembered his manners and shook hands with me. Without another word, he went out of the room.

“Very remarkable,” said Roy. He looked tired and pale.

I took him out of the smoky room, and we sauntered along the street. Roy had packed a black hat for the journey, and he pulled it down low over his forehead. The lights were uneven in the gothic lanes, and his face was shadowed, a little sinister. I laughed at him. “Special hat,” he said. Whatever else left him, the mockery stayed. “Suitable for spying. I chose it on purpose.”

He was now certain that the first move had come from Schäder, though Willy did not have much idea. Someone from the “government” (no doubt an official in Schäder’s ministry) had gone to the Knesebeckstrasse to discover whether anyone knew Roy. Willy had been there, and had been only too anxious to please.

That was intelligible. But why had he been despatched to Basel, long before they had the slightest indication that Roy would come? That was one of the puzzling features of the whole story. Roy brought out the theory that Willy was given other work to do in Switzerland. This was only one of his jobs. He was the kind of low-grade agent that the Germans used for their petty enquiries, and no doubt other governments as well. He had a nose for private facts, particularly when they were unpleasant. Probably he mixed pleasure with business, and put in a little blackmail on the side.

But Roy had not been able to make him confess. It was no more than a guess. About the connection with Schäder, however (whom Willy had hardly heard of, any more than a bright cockney of the same class would have heard of a junior cabinet minister), Roy was able to convince me. For Willy had produced, parrot-like, several messages which he could not possibly have invented. The most entertaining ran thus: a few days before the war began, the university had resolved that Roy’s work during his stay in Berlin “had been of such eminence as to justify the title of visiting professor, and this title could properly be bestowed upon him, if he did similar work at a later period.” That is, the opposition had stone-walled until they got a compromise which must have irritated everybody. It was a piece of stately academic mummery, and we stood by the gold-painted fountain at the corner roaring with laughter.

Why had Schäder taken this trouble to lure Roy? It was true that Roy knew things that would be of use — but how had they discovered that? was it in any case sufficient reason? I suggested that it might be, in part, friendly concern.

“They must be absolutely confident that they’ve got it won,” I said. “It must be easy to sit back and do a good turn for a friend.”

“I wonder if they are so confident,” said Roy. “I bet they still think sometimes of defeat and death.”

He knew them so much better than I did. He went on: “Reinhold Schäder is a bit like you, old boy. But he’s very different when it comes to the point. He’s a public man. He never forgets it. He might think of doing something disinterested. Such as fetching me out for the good of my health. But he wouldn’t do it. Unless he could see a move ahead. No, they must think I could be some use. It’s very nice of them, isn’t it?”

Then there was the final puzzle. Schäder, or his subordinates, must have thought it out. Roy said that there were complete arrangements for passing him into Germany. How likely had they reckoned the chance of getting him? Did Schäder really think that Roy would go over?

Roy shook his head.

“Too difficult,” he said.

Then he said simply: “Did you think I should go?”

I replied, just as directly: “Not this time.”

“You came to watch over me, of course,” said Roy, not as a question, but as a matter of fact.

“Yes.”

“You needn’t have done,” said Roy. His tone was casual, even, sad, as though he were speaking with great certainty from the depth of self-knowledge. It was a tone that I was used to hearing, more and more. Suddenly it was broken humour. “If I’d wanted to go, what would you have done, old boy? What could you have done? I wish you’d tell me. It interests me, you know.”

I would not play that game. We walked silently out by the old town gate, and Roy said, again in that even tone which seemed to hold all he had learned of life: “It wouldn’t be easy to be a traitor.”

He added: “One would need to believe in a cause — right to the end. If our country went to war with Russia — would our communist friends find it easy to be traitors?”

I considered for a second.

“Some of them,” I said, “would be terribly torn.”

“Just so,” said Roy. He went on: “I may be old-fashioned. But I couldn’t manage it.”

So we walked through the old streets of Basel, talking about political motives, the way our friends would act, the future so far as we could see it. Roy said that he had never quite been able to accept the Reich. It was a feeble simulacrum of his search for God. Yet he knew what it was like to believe in such a cause. “If they had been just a little different, they would have been the last hope.” I said that was unrealistic: by the nature of things, they could not have been different. But he turned on me: “It’s as realistic as what you hope for. Even if they lose, the future isn’t going the way you think. Lewis, this is where your imagination doesn’t seem to work. But you’ll live to see it. It will be dreadful.”

He spoke with extreme conviction, almost as though he had the gift of foresight. In all our lives together, it was the one subject on which we had deeply disagreed. Yet he spoke as though he were reading the future.

We turned back, each of us heavy with his thoughts. Then Roy said: “I used to be sorry that I hurt you. When I tried to fall in on the opposite side.”

Between the gabled houses, the shadows were dramatic; Roy’s face was pale, brilliantly lit on one cheek, the features unnaturally sharp.

“I was clutching at anything, of course,” he said.

“Yes.”

“It was my last grab.” He smiled. “It left me with nothing, didn’t it? Or with myself.”

The clocks struck from all round us. He said lightly: “I’m keeping you up. I mustn’t. High officials need to become respectable. It’s time you did, you know. Part of your duties.”

34: Surrender and Relief

Shortly after we returned from Basel, Roy’s department was moved out of London, and I did not see him for some months. But I heard of him — just once, but in a whisper that one believes as soon as one hears, one seems to have known it before. I heard of him in a committee meeting: it was Houston Eggar who told me, in a moment’s pause between two items on the agenda.

We used to meet in the Old Treasury, in a room which overlooked Whitehall itself, just to the north of Downing Street. It was a committee at under-secretary level, which was set up to share out various kinds of supplies; there were several different claimants — Greece, when she was still in the war, partisan groups which were just springing up by the end of the summer of 1941, when this meeting took place, and neutrals such as Turkey.

The committee behaved (as I often thought, with frantic irritation or human pleasure, according to the news or my own inner weather) remarkably like a college meeting. Each of the members was representing a ministry, and so was speaking to instructions. Sometimes he was at one with his instructions, and so expressed them with energy and weight; Houston Eggar, for instance, could nearly always feel as the Foreign Office felt. Sometimes a member did not like them; sometimes a strong character was etching out a line for himself, and one saw policy shaped under one’s eyes by a series of small decisions. (In fact, it was rare for policy to be clearly thought out, though some romantics or worshippers of “great men” liked to think so. Usually it built itself from a thousand small arrangements, ideas, compromises, bits of give-and-take. There was not much which was decisively changed by a human will. Just as a plan for a military campaign does not spring fully-grown from some master general; it arises from a sort of Brownian movement of colonels and majors and captains, and the most the general can do is rationalise it afterwards.) Sometimes one of the committee was over-anxious to ingratiate himself or was completely distracted by some private grief.

As in a college meeting, the reasons given were not always close to the true reasons. As in a college meeting, there was a public language — much of which was common to both. That minatory phrase “in his own best interests” floated only too sonorously round Whitehall. The standard of competence and relevance was much higher than in a college meeting, the standard of luxurious untrammelled personality perceptibly lower. Like most visitors from outside, I had formed a marked respect for the administrative class of the civil service. I had lived among various kinds of able men, but I thought that, as a group, these were distinctly the ablest. And they loved their own kind of power.

Houston Eggar loved his own kind of power. He loved to think that a note signed by him affected thousands of people. He loved to speak in the name of the Foreign Office: “my department”, said Houston Eggar with possessive gusto. It was all inseparable as flesh and blood from his passion for getting on, his appetite for success — which, as it happened, still did not look certain to be gratified. It had become a race with the end of the war. He was forty-eight in 1941, and unless the war ended in five or six years he stood no chance of becoming an ambassador. However, he was a man who got much pleasure from small prizes; his CMG had come through in the last honours list, which encouraged him; he plunged into the committee that afternoon, put forward his argument with his usual earnestness and vigour, and thoroughly enjoyed himself.

He was propounding the normal Foreign Office view that, since the amount of material was not large, it was the sensible thing to distribute it in small portions, so that no one should be quite left out; we should thus lay up credit in days to come. The extreme alternative view was to see nothing but the immediate benefit to the war, get a purely military judgment, and throw all this material there without any side-glances. There was a whole spectrum of shades between the two, but on the whole Eggar tended to be isolated in that company and had to work very hard for small returns. It was so that day. But he was surprisingly effective in committee; he was not particularly clever, but he spoke with clarity, enthusiasm, pertinacity and above all weight. Even among sophisticated men, weight counted immeasurably more than subtlety or finesse.

Accordingly he secured a little more than the Foreign Office could reasonably expect. It was a hot afternoon, and he leaned back in his chair, mopping his forehead. He always got hot in the ardour of putting his case. He beamed. He was happy to have won a concession.

I was due to speak on the next business, but the chairman was looking through his papers. I was sitting next to Eggar; he pushed an elbow along the table, and leant towards me. He said in a low voice, casual and confidential: “So Calvert is getting his release.”

“What?”

“He has got his own way. Good luck to him. I told his chief there’s no use trying to keep a man who is determined to go.”

“Where is he going?”

Eggar looked incredulous, as though I must know.

“Where is he going?” I said.

“Oh, he wants to fly, of course. It’s quite natural.”

I had known nothing of it, not a word, not a hint. For a second, I felt physically giddy. A blur of faces went round me. Then it steadied. I heard the chairman’s voice, a little impatient: “Isn’t this a matter for you, Eliot?”

“I’m sorry, Mr Chairman,” I said, and mechanically began to explain a new piece of government machinery. I could hear my own words, faint and toneless like words in a dream — yet they came out in a shape fluent, practised, articulate. It was too hard to break the official habit. One was clamped inside one’s visor.

Eggar left before the end of the meeting, and so I could not get another word with him. I put through a call to Roy’s office, but he was out. I gave a message for him: would he telephone me at my flat, without fail, after eleven that night?

I went straight from my office to have dinner with Lady Muriel and Joan. They had come to London in the first week of the war, and were living in the Boscastles’ town house in Curzon Street. They were extravagantly uncomfortable. The house was not large, judged by the magnificent criterion of Boscastle (Lord Boscastle’s grandfather had sold the original town mansion); but it was a good deal too large for two women, both working at full-time jobs. It was also ramshackle and perilously unsafe. Nothing would persuade Lady Muriel to forsake it. A service flat seemed in her eyes common beyond expression — as for danger, she dismissed us all as a crowd of “jitterbugs” getting the idiom wrong. “This disturbance is much exaggerated,” she said, and slept with a soundness that infuriated many of us and put us to shame.

Her sense of duty would not permit her to employ any servants who could possibly do other work. In fact, they had two women who had been with the family all their lives, both well over seventy and infirm. Lady Muriel did all the cooking herself when she gave a dinner party, but made them both wait at table. It was a quixotic parody of nights in the Lodge and Boscastle.

She and Joan were sitting together in the drawing-room. The pictures had been taken away for safety, and the walls were bare.

“Good evening, Mr — Lewis,” said Lady Muriel. “It is good of you to come and see us.”

Nowadays, she used my Christian name when she remembered. The explanation was a little complicated. It did not mean for a minute that she thought the time had come to relax her social standards. As a matter of fact, the exact opposite was the case. She might officiate at a refugee centre each day and every day — which she did inexorably. She submitted to being slapped on the back by cheery women helpers: it was part of her job. But at night, in the privacy of Curzon Street, where she had lived as a girl, she became so magniloquently snobbish that her days in the Lodge came to seem like slumming. It was her defence, her retort, to those who kept saying that the day of her kind was gone forever. Lord Boscastle responded in just the same fashion — not with accommodation, not trying to fit in, but with an exaggerated, a considered, a monumental arrogance. They were both dropping most of their old acquaintances.

No, when Lady Muriel called me by my Christian name it certainly did not imply that she accepted me in any social sense. Perhaps she liked me a little more; with her, getting used to people and liking them tended to run together. But really her softening came from quite a different cause: it was a gesture of respect towards the government and those who organised the war. She was passionately determined that her country should win; and it made her curiously respectful to anyone who seemed to be in control. She had decided that I was far more important than in fact I was; she had also decided that I knew every conceivable military secret. Nothing would remove these misconceptions; a flat denial merely strengthened her faith in my astuteness and responsibility. Then someone told her that I was doing well, and that finished it. She listened open-mouthed to every word I said about the war, like a girl student with a venerated teacher; she drew inferences when I was silent; and, with a certain effort, she brought herself after all those years to use my Christian name.

I smiled at Joan. Despite her exertions, thick and heavy as she was, Lady Muriel was well preserved at fifty-five. But Joan no longer looked a girl. She had worked in the Treasury from the first winter, and her face had changed through success as well as unhappiness. She had shown how able she was; it was just the outlet for her tough, strong nature; and it had stamped its mark on her, for on the surface she was a little more formidable, a little more decisive, ruthless and blunt.

Though everyone praised her, though she knew that she could go high if she wanted, she recoiled. She liked it and hated it. In protest, she lived at night the gayest life she could snatch. She went out with every man who asked her. I saw her often in public-houses and smart bars and restaurants. She was searching for a substitute for Roy, I knew — and yet also she longed for the glitter and the lights more than many giggling thoughtless women.

I did not want to tear open her wound, but I was driven to ask at once about Roy. I could not begin to make conversation. I had to ask: did they know anything of him?

To my consternation, Joan smiled.

“You must have heard.” She told me the same news as Eggar.

“I’ve heard nothing.”

“I should have thought he would have told you,” said Joan. “He let me know.”

“It was only to be expected,” said Lady Muriel, “that he should let us know.”

I gathered that he had written to Lady Muriel. Joan was glad that she had heard the secret, and I had not; even now her love would not let her go, searched for the slightest sign, found an instant of dazzling hope in a letter to her mother. His friend had not been told; was this letter a signal to her?

“He seems content,” said Joan. “I hope it’s right for him. I think perhaps it is.”

“It is certainly right for him,” said Lady Muriel.

“He’s such a strange man,” said Joan. “I hope it is.”

“I’ve always known that he’s been uncomfortable since the war began. A woman feels these things,” said Lady Muriel superbly. “I can rely on my intuition.”

“What has it told you, Mother?” said Joan, as though she had picked up a spark of mischief from Roy.

“He could not bear being kept back while others fought. I consider that he would never have been happy until he fought.”

Joan smiled at her. Now that Joan had been battered by her own experience, she was much fonder of her mother, much kinder to her, more able to see the rich nature behind the absurd, forbidding armour. She was more ready to put up with her mother’s lack of perception — when Joan was a girl, before she had loved, it had merely made her aggressive and fierce. As the years passed, they were growing together.

They took the news of Roy quite differently, and yet with one point in common. For Lady Muriel, all was now clear and well. When she gave her trust, she gave it naïvely and absolutely, like a little girl; white was white, and she admired with her whole heart; and there was no one whom she admired more than Roy. She tried to get used to a war in which young men had safe jobs, did not want to leave them; but she could not manage it. She could not reconcile herself to Roy inert and indecisive. Now her trust was justified. She could worship again, in her simple, loyal, unqualified fashion. “I always knew it would happen,” said Lady Muriel, forgetting that she had ever been troubled, forgetting it just as completely as she forgot she had once herself opposed the war.

Joan’s feelings were far less simple. Although she had not spoken to him for two years, she could divine some of the reasons that had impelled him. She imagined how the war must outrage him. She knew how reckless he was and how self-destructive. Her heart went out to cherish him — and yet she had loved him partly because of that dark side. She was frail enough to rejoice that he did not find his life sweeter after he had deserted her. The news had softened her face, revived her yearning tenderness. It shone out of her: she was both relieved and proud.

She and her mother had one point in common. They did not give much thought to his danger. It was the first thing that had struck me: as the committee room went round, I was thinking of that only: he stood about an even chance of coming through alive. Yet Lady Muriel and Joan took it without a blench. Partly, of course, they were ignorant of the statistics, Lady Muriel entirely so; they did not realise how dangerous it was; they had not been, as I had, behind the scenes in the bitter disputes about the bombing “master plan”. But, even if they had, it would not have made much difference. They were stout-hearted themselves, and they assumed the same courage in their men. They were bred to a tradition of courage. They were warm-hearted, but they had very strong nerves.

In fact, Lady Muriel found a certain bellicose relish in having her beloved Roy to set against Humphrey Bevill. It had been bitterly galling to her to hear first that her nephew Humphrey had shown unexpected skill in charge of a small boat — and then, that he was taking risks in the Channel skirmishes with a wild, berserk bravery. He had just been cited for a DSC. It might have pleased Lady Muriel to see credit come to the family name; perhaps it did a little. But much more, it brought back a grief. Lady Muriel had craved for a son, and she was taunted by having daughters. It taunted her again when her sister-in-law, after being childless so long, bore a son. It had seemed just to Lady Muriel that the boy should turn out worthless, dissipated, bohemian, effeminate. Now he was suddenly talked about as the bravest young man in their whole circle. Lady Muriel was not good at disguising her rancour. I had always known that she both envied and despised Lady Boscastle: now I saw that she detested her.

I got back to my flat before eleven, in time for the telephone call; I found Roy there himself. He was sitting in a dressing gown, clean from a bath but heavy-eyed.

“Just going to bed,” he said. “Night duty last night. I’m extremely tired.”

He was still working in his civilian office. He had received my message, and taken the first train to London.

“I hear the news is true,” I said.

“It’s true,” said Roy.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“It was the one thing I couldn’t tell you.” He looked at me with a troubled, piercing gaze, as though I and he each knew the reason. Yet nothing came home to me; I was angry and mystified. Quickly, he went on: “I’ve nothing to keep from you now. You see? I’ve come tonight to tell you something no one else knows. I’m going to get married.”

“Who to?”

“Rosalind, of course.”

Roy was smiling.

“You’re not to speak of it,” he said. “I haven’t asked her yet. I don’t know whether she’ll have me. I hope she will.”

“I think she might.”

“Excellent,” said Roy, taking my sarcasm equably. “You’ve always had a weakness for her yourself, old boy. Remember: I shall be a jealous husband. I need a child.”

He went on: “I couldn’t ask her, of course, until the other thing was settled. It will be nice to have everything settled.”

Then he said that he could not keep his eyes open, and must go to bed. I fetched him a book, in case he wanted to read in the morning: he was asleep before I went out of the room.

I could not think of sleep myself. I turned off the lights, pulled back the curtains, and gazed out of the window for a long time. The night was very still. There was no moon; the river glistened in the starlight; there was neither light nor sound down there, except for a moment when an engine chugged across to the southern bank. All over the sky, the stars were brilliant. “I hate the stars.” I heard that cry again.

So he had no hope left at all. I could see no other meaning. I could understand Joan’s relief. I shared it, and knew it was selfish at the root. If he must be driven so — I had felt more than once that night — then I was selfishly glad he could make this choice: I was glad he could choose a way which those round him could accept and approve. It might have been far otherwise. Somehow he had kept within society. It was a help to Joan and me, who cared for society more than he did.

Yet that was a trivial relief, by the side of his surrender. For he had given up now. For years he had struggled with his nature. Now he was tired of it, and he had given up. Active as he was, still eager with the pulse of life, he had done it in the most active way. He was going into battle, he wanted a wife and child. But he had no hope left.

I looked at the brilliant stars. There was no comfort there.

35: Consequences of a Marriage

Roy’s marriage caused more stir than his other choice. The wedding took place in the autumn, three weeks before he sailed across to America for his flying training. I was held in London and could not attend it. One of the features of those years was the geographical constraint under which we had to live; a few years earlier, we had had more leisure than most people in the world; now I could not get out of my office even for the day of Roy’s wedding. In fact, I had only seen him for an hour or two since that night he made the special visit to tell me his news. We were all confined, as it were in prison. Many friends I had not seen since the beginning of the war.

But sitting in London, dining now and then with the Royces, I heard enough furore about the marriage. Lady Muriel was at first incredulous; then, contrary to all expectations, she became unusually indulgent. “I refuse to blame him,” she said. “I’ve seen other men make marriages almost as impossible as this before they went to fight. When a man goes off to fight, he feels a basic need to find a — squaw. I consider this young woman is simply his squaw. As for the future,” she said in a grand, gnomic fashion, “I prefer not to speak.”

Joan suffered afresh from all the different wounds of humiliated and unrequited love. She could feel her confidence and self-respect seeping away; she ached with the hunger of her fibres; she was lost in the depth of her heart. She had been able to adjust herself to loss before, while she could believe that he was weighted down with misery, that neither she nor any woman could reach or console him. But now he had married a stupid, scheming, ordinary woman, as though he were an ordinary domestic man!

Joan was not only hurt to the quick, but bitterly angry. And the anger was good for her. It burned away some of her self-distrust. Anything was better than that she should be frightened off love for good. She might feel that no man would ever truly love her; for her, that would be a mortal wound. But her formidable temper blazed out. I was glad to see it. I was glad to see her defiantly going from party to party on the arm of another man.

From two sources I heard that Ralph Udal had also taken it bitterly. Apparently Rosalind had not considered it necessary to break her engagement to him until she was simultaneously engaged to Roy. Had he suspected nothing? Was he so self-sufficient that he convinced himself all was well? I had not met Lady Boscastle since that final end-of-the-world week in Cambridge, but this was a subject peculiarly suited to her talents. She wrote me several feline, sub-acid letters about the “emotional misadventures of our unfortunate vicar”.

Udal was really unhappy. He showed it by one clear sign. He could not bear to stay in Boscastle where Rosalind had so often visited him, where — as even Lady Boscastle admitted — he must have known delight. He begged Arthur Brown to find him a living, any kind of living, “even one”, Arthur Brown reported over the telephone with a rotund wily chuckle, “even one with slightly less amenities.” Arthur Brown had exerted himself with his usual experienced kindliness; he managed to find Udal a slightly better living in Beccles.

Before Ralph Udal left the vicarage at Boscastle, Roy stayed with him for a weekend. It happened while Roy was on embarkation leave, and I did not see him afterwards. I would have given much to know what they said to each other; I was beginning to realise that Udal was a more singular man than I had at first detected. I guessed that they each felt a surge of their old friendship, unconstrained, warmer and more spontaneous than one could credit.

During the autumn, Rosalind came to see me. It was her first visit to London since Roy married her, and she was living in state at the Dorchester. As soon as she arrived in my flat, she busied herself tidying it up.

“I must find someone to look after you. It’s time you married again,” she scolded me. “I must say, it depresses me to think of you coming back here — and nothing ready for you.”

Then she sat down with a smile, knowing, self-important, triumphant.

“I’d better be careful,” she said. “It’s a bit of a drag for the first few months, so they tell me.” It was her way of telling me that she was pregnant. “We didn’t waste much time, did we?” Again she gave her mock-modest, humorous, surreptitious grin. “Of course, there wasn’t much time to waste. We only had three weeks, and that isn’t very long, is it?”

I laughed.

“It did mean we had to rush things rather,” said Rosalind. She gave an affectionate, earthy frown, and went on: “It’s all Roy’s fault. I’ve got no patience with him. I could kick him. The bloody old fool. If only he’d had the sense to marry me years ago, when I wanted to, we should have had a wonderful time. I ought to have dragged him to church by the scruff of his neck. Why didn’t he ask me then, the blasted fool? Our eldest child would be six now. That’s how it ought to be. You know, Lewis, I do wish I’d worked on him.”

She was serene, blissfully happy, but matter-of-fact in her triumph. I almost reminded her that she had no cause to reproach herself: she had done her damnedest. But well as I knew her, shameless and realistic as she was, I held my tongue. Curiously, it would have hurt her. She had the kind of realism that buried schemes as soon as they were no longer necessary. She would have stopped at nothing to marry Roy; but, having brought it off, she conveniently shelved all memory of plans, lies, stratagems, tears, pride abandoned. If she were confronted with it, she would look and feel ill-used.

She basked in her well-being.

“He is a nice old thing, though, isn’t he?” she said. “Do you know, Lewis, I enjoy looking at him when he’s reading. He has got a nice face. Don’t you think it’s lucky for a woman when she likes a man for something different” — she dropped her eyes — “and then finds she enjoys just looking at his face? I’ve never thought he was handsome — but it is a nice face.”

As the evening went on, I was unkind enough to remind her of Ralph Udal. She showed a faint, kind, sisterly desire that he should find a wife. As for herself, she would never have done, she said, contentedly. It was much better for him that she had broken it off: “in his own best interests,” I thought to myself, and made a note to tease Roy with it some time.

Her only worry was where to have the child. Roy would not have returned before it was born. His father was ill, and she could not (and for some reason was violently disinclined to) stay in the Calverts’ house. I suspected that she had not been well received; the Calverts knew her family, since her grandfather and Roy’s had started in the same factory. In any case, Rosalind was determined not to live near her home. After marrying Roy, she did not intend to spend any time at all in the provincial town. She had thrown up her job; her skill and reputation meant nothing to her, she was happy not to earn another penny. Roy would not be rich until his father died, but they were comfortably off. Rosalind meant to spread herself.

She would have liked to live in London; but though the nights were quiet then, the autumn of 1941, war-time London was not a good place to bear a child. And Rosalind said without any shame that she was a coward; she would come to London at the end of the war. Meanwhile, she hesitated. Suddenly she had her mind made up for her in an utterly unlooked-for manner. Lady Muriel took a hand.

Lady Muriel heard that Rosalind was with child; how I did not know, but I suspected that Rosalind had flaunted the news. She was kind and careless, but she liked revenge; the Royces used to snub her, Joan had taken away Roy for years, even in her triumph Rosalind was obscurely jealous of her. It was shameful to exult over her, but Rosalind was not likely to be deterred, when it was so sweet. I ought to have foreseen it, and have warned her not to gloat. But it seemed that she had had an hour of womanly triumph.

Anyway, Lady Muriel knew, and was strongly affected. Since her husband died, she had invested all the suppressed warmth of her heart in Roy. She felt responsible and possessive about anything of his. Most of all a child. His child must be cared for. Her feeling for her own babies had been outwardly gruff, in truth healthy and animal: and she was moved at the thought of one of Roy’s. It must be cared for.

Lady Muriel had no doubt forgotten that she once pronounced Rosalind barren. Here was Rosalind in the flesh, in the luxurious, triumphant, pregnant flesh. If Lady Muriel were to help with Roy’s child, she had to accept that “impossible young woman”.

Lady Muriel gave way. She was humbled by love. She did not see much of Rosalind; that was too bitter to stomach; she wrote her suggestions (which soon became orders) in letters which began “Dear Mrs Calvert”. Sometimes, I thought to myself, she behaved remarkably as though the child were illegitimate. It had to be cherished for the father’s sake — meanwhile one made as few concessions as possible to the sinful mother.

Yet it was a strange turn of the wheel. For like it or not, Lady Muriel had to become interested in Rosalind’s plans. Soon she became more than interested, she became the planner. For Lady Muriel decided that the baby should be born at Boscastle.

She would not listen to arguments against. Was there not plenty of room there? Would they not be reasonably waited on — despite her sister-in-law’s unworthy management? Was it not as safe, as far from the war, as anywhere in England? Did not the estate grow its own food, which was important nowadays? Could not Lady Muriel guarantee the competence of the family doctor?

But, of course, she wanted it for her own sake. It would give her a claim on the child.

Rosalind effaced herself. She was prepared to put up with insults, high-handedness, Lady Muriel’s habit of disregarding her, anything that came, if only this could happen. The idea entranced her. It was like a gorgeous, unexpected present. Like most realistic people, Rosalind was not above being a snob.

A correspondence took place between Lady Muriel and Lady Boscastle — firm, hortatory, morally righteous on Lady Muriel’s side, sarcastic and amused on Lady Boscastle’s. At first Lady Boscastle did not take the proposal seriously. Then she saw that it was being inexorably advanced. She objected. She was not a particular friend of Roy’s, she found Rosalind tiresome, she was bored by the war, she saw no reason why she should be inconvenienced; unlike Lady Muriel, she was not buoyed up by sheer vigour of the body, by the impulse of good crude health; Lady Boscastle often felt old, neglected, uninterested now, and she did not see why she should put herself out.

Lady Muriel quoted passages from her sister-in-law’s letters with burning indignation. Lady Boscastle, with cynical ingenuity, raised the question of the tenants’ peace of mind; they knew of Rosalind’s engagement to the late vicar; what would they be likely to think now? Usually, Lady Muriel was only too preoccupied with the tenants’ moral welfare; but she had not room for two concerns at once, and she brushed that point aside as though they were Tasmanian aborigines.

On paper, Lady Boscastle had the better of the argument; but, as usual when there was a difference about the family house, Lady Muriel had the greater staying-power, and harangued the others until she prevailed. Lord Boscastle appeared to turn into an ally; and in the end Lady Boscastle sent Rosalind an invitation. Lady Boscastle knew when she was beaten, and her letter was far more friendly than any Lady Muriel wrote to Rosalind (Lady Muriel still began “Dear Mrs Calvert”): Rosalind showed it to me with delight: I thought I could detect just one malicious flick, put in for the writer’s own benefit.

Rosalind accepted by return, and went to Boscastle in time for Christmas. In February, I had a letter myself from Lady Boscastle, in that fine, elegant, upright hand.

“This is really quite ridiculous,” she wrote. “God appears to have a misplaced sense of humour, which he reserves for those who haven’t taken him too seriously. There is no question, he scores in the end. Lewis, my dear boy, I once was pursued with singular pertinacity by a young gentleman of literary pretensions. He was remarkably, in fact embarrassingly faithful, and had a curious knack of turning up in unexpected places. I did not find him a particularly useful young man, but he added an element of interest by indulging in throaty prophecies about my future. He used to quote ‘Quand tu seras bien vieille’ in impassioned but distinctly imperfect French. He produced so many pictures of my old age that I was prepared for one of them to turn out right. (I should remark that he appeared to find them deeply moving: he was, as you would expect, a little too fervent for my taste.)

“But now I am bien vieille — pity me, for it is the only tragedy, as you will discover, my dear. Now I am bien vieille, and none of that young man’s absurd prognostications were anything like so undecorated as the truth. Really I did not expect this. It is a little much. I attribute it entirely to poor Muriel’s unappreciated virtue.

“Imagine me listening to the opinions, confessions, and simple aspirations of your friend Rosalind. It seems to me the most improbable occupation for my declining years. Except when I am immobilised and kept in bed (which, I have a feeling, will happen more often in the next few months), I do little else. Your friend Rosalind appears to think that I am a sympathetic listener. I have pointed out the opposite, but she laughs indulgently and feels it is just my little way.

“I have never been an admirer of my own sex. Listening to this young woman, I reflect on such interesting themes as why men are so obtuse as to be taken in. Feminine delicacy? Refinement? Frailty? Fineness of feeling? I reflect also on poor Muriel and poor Joan. I have to grant them certain estimable but slightly unlovable qualities: should one, under the eye of eternity, really prefer them to this companion of mine? To which of them does one give the prize for womanhood? I have never been a confidante of your Roy, but I admit I should like his answer to that question.

“I have met very few people, even very few women, who are as singularly unmoral as this young woman. I have known many whose interest in morality was slightly detached: but this one scarcely seems to have heard of such a subject. I must admit that I find it engaging when she assumes the same of me. It has not taken her long to regard herself and me as sisters.

“By the way, it also did not take her long to become unimpressed by the battlements and other noble accessories. Including my poor Hugh. She rapidly recognised that she could reduce him to a state of gibbering admiration. They both get a good deal of innocent pleasure from their weekly bridge with the new vicar and his wife. I suspect they are happier because my less enthusiastic eye is removed. Possibly I am becoming slightly maudlin about the ironies of time; but I do feel it is unfitting that nowadays Hugh should be reduced to this one high event each week. He fidgets intolerably each Thursday evening, as we wait for the vicar and his wife. No one could call the vicar a deep thinker, and he has large red ears.”

All through that winter and spring, I was attending committees, preparing notes for the minister, reading memoranda, talking to Francis Getliffe and his scientific friends; for decisions were being taken about the bombing campaign, and we were all ranged for or against. In fact, all the people I knew best were dead against. My minister was one of the chief opponents in the government; through Francis, I had met nearly all the younger scientists, and they were as usual positive, definite, and scathing. They had learned a good deal about the effect of bombing, from the German raids; they worked out what would be the results, if we persisted in the plan or bombing at night. I read the most thorough of these “appreciations”. I could not follow the statistical arguments, but the conclusions were given as proved beyond reasonable doubt: we should destroy a great many houses, but do no other serious damage; the number of German civilians killed would be relatively small; our losses in aircrew would be a large proportion of all engaged; in terms of material effect, the campaign could have no military significance at all. The minister shook his head; he had seen too many follies; he was a sensible man, but he did not believe in the victory of sense; and he knew that too many in power had a passionate, almost mystical faith in bombing. They were going to bomb, come what may; and naturally human instruments arose who could fit in. Against the scientific arguments, the advocates of bombing fell back on morale. There was something the scientists could not speak about nor measure. The others said, as though with inner knowledge, that the enemy would break under the campaign.

I went to a committee where Francis Getliffe made one of the last attempts to put the scientific case. Like most of his colleagues, Francis had left the invention of weapons and, as the war went on, took to something like the politics of scientific war. He was direct, ruthless, and master of his job; he had great military sense; he had never found any circumstances which gave him more scope, and he became powerful in a very short time. But now he was risking his influence in this war. Opponents of bombing were not in fashion. Bombing was the orthodoxy of the day. As I observed it, it occurred to me that you can get men to accept any orthodoxy, religious, political, even this technical one, the last and oddest of the English orthodoxies; the men who stood outside were very rare, and would always be so.

But Francis’ integrity was absolute. He was pliable enough to bend over little things; this was a very big thing. Someone ought to oppose it to the end; he was the obvious person; he took it on himself to do it.

He was much the same that afternoon as he used to be at college meetings — courteous, formal, clear, unshakably firm. He was high-strung among those solid steady official men, but his confidence had increased, and he was more certain of his case than they were. He was impatient of less clever men: his voice had no give in it. But he was very skilful at using his technical mastery.

He was setting out to prove the uneconomic bargain if we threw our resources into bombing. The amount of industrial effort invested in bombers was about twice what those same bombers would destroy. Bombing crews were first-class troops, said Francis Getliffe. Their training was very long, their physical and mental standard higher than any other body of troops. For every member of an aircrew killed, we might hope to kill three or four civilians. “That’s not business,” said Getliffe. “It’s not war. It doesn’t begin to make sense.” He described what was then known of the German radar defences. Most of us round that table were ignorant of technical things. He made the principles of the German ground control limpidly clear. He analysed other factors in the probable rate of loss.

It was a convincing exposition. He was putting forward a purely military case. He was passionately engrossed in the war. He was out to win at any cost. He would not have minded bombing Germans, if it helped us to win. He would not have minded losing any number of aircrews, if we gained an advantage from their loss.

For me, his words struck cold. Roy would be back in this country by August. He would be flying in operations before the new year.

I had to fend off the chill. Someone had just admitted that their defences were a “pretty bit of work”. I listened to the fierce argument in the smoky air; I was in attendance on the minister, and could not take part myself. The minister did his best, but his own stock was going down. As was inevitable, Francis Getliffe lost: he could not even get a few equipments diverted to the submarine war.

We went away together to have a drink.

“I’m on the way out,” said Francis Getliffe grimly. “This is the best test of judgment there’s ever been. Anyone who believes in this bloody nonsense will believe anything.”

From that day, the department in which I worked had to accept the decision. We did other things: but about a fifth of our time was spent on the bombing campaign. I found it irksome.

All that spring I was imprisoned in work, living in committee rooms, under the artificial light. I saw less still of my friends. I had an occasional lunch with Joan, and letters came from Boscastle. When I dined with Lady Muriel, she pronounced that the course of the pregnancy was satisfactory.

The child was born at midsummer. It was a girl, and was christened Muriel. That fact moved Lady Boscastle to write to me, at her most characteristic. I chuckled, but thought it wise to burn the letter.

During those months, I heard a few times from Roy. He was not being a great success on his pilot’s course. He was having to struggle to be allowed through; it irritated him, who liked to do things expertly, and I could not help smiling at that touch of vanity. He thought he would have done better ten years earlier; at thirty-two one did not learn so easily. In the end, he managed to pass, and landed in England in September.

After a week with Rosalind, he spent a night in my flat. He was sunburned and healthy; in uniform, his figure was less deceptive, one could have guessed that he was strong; at last his face was carrying the first lines, but he looked very tranquil. He was so tranquil that it was delightful to be with him. His spirits were not so intoxicatingly high as in his days of exaltation, but he laughed at me, talked about our friends, mimicked them with his features plastic, so that one saw a shadow of Lord Boscastle, of Arthur Brown, of Houston Eggar. We were happy. Since he had to return next day, we sat up most of the night. He seemed no longer driven.

He did not say much of his future — except that he would now be sent to his training in heavy aircraft. There was not much for either of us to say. But he talked of his daughter with extreme pleasure.

“It’s good to have a child,” he said. “It’s a shame you haven’t some, old boy. You’d like it, wouldn’t you?”

“Of course.”

“You must soon. It’s very important.”

His pleasure was simple, natural, radiant.

“She’ll be pretty,” he said happily. “Very pretty. Excellent.”

A month later, I received an unexpected telephone call from his wife. I knew she was coming to London, for Lady Muriel had announced that her godchild was staying with her for a weekend and had invited me to dine; it was only during the course of the invitation that Lady Muriel reluctantly mentioned “Roy’s wife”. Rosalind’s voice always sounded faint, falling-away, on the telephone, but that morning she seemed worried and urgent. “I must see you at lunch time. No, it can’t wait till tonight. I can’t tell you in front of Lady Battleship.”

I put off an appointment and met her for lunch.

“I want you to help me, Lewis,” she said. “Roy mustn’t hear a word about it.”

She was dressed in the height of style, her shoulders padded, her hat tilted over one eye; but her expression was neither gamine nor mock-decorous, but tired, strained, intent. I jumped to a conclusion.

“What is wrong with him?”

“Nothing,” said Rosalind impatiently, as though I did not understand. “He’s very well and very happy. Didn’t you think I should make him happy? The old thing has never been so comfortable in his life. He’s got a bit of peace.”

She stared at me with hurt brown eyes, pleading and determined.

“Lewis, I want you to help me get him out of flying.”

“Does he want it?”

“Do you think he’d ever say so? Men never dare to confess that they’re frightened. God’s truth, I’ve got no patience with you all.”

She was desperately moved. I said: “My dear, I think it would be impossible.”

“You’d rather let things happen than try,” she flared out like a cat.

“No. Remember he left an important job. He made a nuisance of himself to get out. It would be very hard to persuade the Air Ministry to leave go now.”

“Wouldn’t he be more useful on the ground? How many people in the world speak all the languages he speaks?”

“That’s true,” I said.

“Then we must get to work.”

“I’m afraid”, I said, “that they won’t leave go of a single man. They’ve been given complete priority.”

“Why are they so keen to keep them?” she cried. “Because they’re going to lose so many?”

“Yes.”

“They won’t throw him away if I can help it.” Her face was dark and twisted, as if she were in physical pain. “Let me tell you something. The other night I got him to talk a bit. I know he doesn’t talk to me as he does to you. He says you’re the only person who knows everything about him. But I got him to talk. It was in the middle of the night. He hasn’t been sleeping too well this last week. It’s not as bad as it used to be, but I know that he’s been lying awake. Somehow I can’t sleep if I think he’s lying there with his eyes open.”

She paused. She was crying out with the intimacy of the flesh. “The other night I knew he was awake. I hadn’t been to sleep either. In the middle of the night I asked him if anything was the matter. He said no. I asked him if he was happy with me. He said yes. Then I got into his bed and cried till he promised to talk to me. He said it was a long story and that no one understood it all but you. You know how he speaks when he’s being serious, Lewis? As though he was laughing and didn’t give a damn. It makes my blasted heart turn over. Anyway he said that he’d been miserable for years. It was worse than being mad, he said. He hoped he’d get out of it. He’d struggled like a rat in a trap. But he couldn’t escape. So he couldn’t see any point in things. He might as well be eliminated. That was why he chose to fly.”

She stared at me.

“Then he kissed me, and laughed a bit. He said that nowadays it didn’t always seem such a good idea. He was caught again. But he needn’t worry this time, because there was nothing to do.”

I exclaimed.

“You know, Lewis,” Rosalind went on, “he must have got it all worked out when he decided to fly. He said that he was looking round for the easiest way to disappear. He didn’t want to give too much trouble. So he found out from someone reliable what was the most dangerous thing to do.”

She cried out sharply: “What’s the matter, Lewis? Why are you looking so terrible?”

“Nothing,” I said, trying to speak in an even tone. “I just thought of something else.”

Rosalind watched me.

“I hope you’re all right,” she said. “I want you to help me today.”

36: The End of a Reproach

Rosalind had two lines of attack ready planned. She was cunning, she had not been successful at her business for nothing; she knew it was worse than useless for a move to come from Roy’s friends. The only hope was to get hold of people of influence. She wanted two different kinds of plea: first, by the leading orientalists, to say that as a scholar he was irreplaceable; second, by officials, to say that he was needed for a special job in an office. She was cunning but she did not know her way about this world; she needed me to tell her where to try.

She had no luck that afternoon. I sent her to old Foulkes, who was back in uniform again, a brigadier at the War Office. He had worked there seven days a week since the beginning of the war. I took her to the door in the side street, and waited on the pavement. It was an hour before she came out. She was angry and downcast. “I don’t believe the old idiot has ever seen a woman before. Oh, I suppose he’s rather sweet, but it’s just my luck to find someone who’s not susceptible.” Foulkes had told her that her husband had a European reputation. “Tell anyone so. Often do. Only man to keep our end up.” Rosalind parodied Foulkes ill-temperedly. But Foulkes would not say a word that would stand in the way of a man who wanted to fight. He had heard his colleagues wonder why Calvert had thrown up a safe job. “I’ve told them,” Foulkes had said, with his usual vigour. “No mystery. No mystery at all. He just wants to fight for his country. Proud of him. So ought you to be,” he had finished at great speed.

There was no other scholar in reach that day; and the officials who might be useful had all gone home for the weekend. Rosalind was frustrated, aching for something to do; but I persuaded her there was nothing, at least for the moment, and she returned to Curzon Street for tea. When I saw her next, as I arrived there for dinner that same night, I noticed at once that she was more restless. She was savage in her concern.

I was surprised to see the table laid for four. I had expected that Joan would spare herself; but she had decided with tough, masochistic endurance, to stick it out, and meet Roy’s wife and child. Both Joan and Lady Muriel agreed that it was a beautiful baby. I watched Joan nurse it with an envious satisfaction, a satisfaction that to my astonishment seemed stronger than envy. Her voice, like her mother’s, was warm and loving when she spoke to it.

At dinner she was far more at her ease than Rosalind, who sat silent, dark-faced, going over her plans. Joan tried to cheer her up. I was not prepared for such magnanimity. And I was not prepared to hear Rosalind suddenly tell them that she intended to go to any lengths to get Roy out.

“Behind his back?” Lady Muriel enquired.

“It’s the only way,” said Rosalind.

“I should consider that quite unsuitable, Mrs Calvert,” said Lady Muriel.

“You can’t, Rosalind,” cried Joan. “You can’t do such a thing.”

“I may want you to introduce me to people,” said Rosalind to Lady Muriel.

“I couldn’t think of it without Roy’s permission,” said Lady Muriel, outraged, shocked to the core. “I know he would not consider giving it. It would be unforgivable to go behind his back.”

Rosalind had not expected such opposition. She had wanted Lady Muriel as an ally. Now she was dejected, angry, hostile.

“If you were his wife,” she said, “you wouldn’t be so ready to do nothing.”

Joan put in: “I know how you feel.” Her face was heavy: she spoke with deep emotion. “We should all feel like that. It’s awful to do nothing. But you’ve got to think of him.”

“I’m thinking of nothing else—”

“I mean in another way. He has made his choice, Rosalind. It wasn’t an easy choice, surely you must know. It came out of all he’s gone through. He hasn’t had an easy life. You must leave him free. You can’t presume to interfere with him. There are some parts of anyone’s life — however much you love them — that you have to force yourself to leave alone.”

She was consumed with feeling. She leaned forward and asked Rosalind, in a quiet low tone: “Do you deny for a moment that Roy would say the same?”

“Of course he’d say the same,” said Rosalind. “He’d have to. He’s too proud to do anything else. But—”

“He’s not proud,” cried Joan. “No one could possibly be less proud. This is so much deeper, it’s part of him, surely you must see.” She hesitated, and then spoke sternly, almost harshly: “Perhaps this will make you understand. You know that I loved him?”

“Yes.”

“I would go to him now if he called me. Well, if he had been mine — I should have done what I’m telling you to do. It would have been agony — it is agony enough now, don’t you see? — but I should have left him alone.”

For a moment Rosalind was overawed by the passionate force of the other woman. Then Rosalind said: “I’ve got to keep him alive.”

They looked at each other with dislike and misunderstanding. They would never understand each other. They knew him quite differently, I thought. Joan knew the struggle of his spirit, his melancholy, his tragic experience, better than any woman. Rosalind did not seem to know those at all. She paid no attention to the features which distinguished him among men. She knew him where he was like all other men — she took it for granted that, like all other men, he was frail, frightened, a liar to himself and her. She took him for granted as a creature of flesh and bone; whatever he said, whatever the dark moods, he longed to live.

Was that why he had married her? Had she given him a hope of the fibres, a hope of the press of life itself stronger than any despair?

I caught sight of Lady Muriel, stiff-necked, troubled, heavy-footedly leading the conversation away. She was horrified. Perhaps until that moment she had not let herself recognise her daughter’s love for Roy. Now it had been proclaimed in public: that was the final horror. Her sense of propriety was ravaged. It plucked away the screen behind which she had been trained to live. She gazed at her daughter with dismay, indignation — and an inarticulate pity.

Rosalind left London next day, and she did not confide her plan to me again. However, she sent me a note, saying that Roy had discovered what she was up to, and had stopped her. It was probably true, I thought, that he had found out. But I very much doubted whether it would stop her: she would merely take more care about her secrecy. For of us all she was the most single-minded. When she was set on a purpose, it was with every scrap of her body, cunning and will.

Yet she did not bring it off. I was certain that she was not deterred by Roy’s order. Probably she was only stopped by a more remote, abstract obstacle: it was next door to impossible to extract a trained pilot. I talked the whole affair over with the minister. He was the most adept of men at knowing when a door would give. He shook his head, and said it was too late.

After listening to Rosalind, I had to speak to Roy alone. He had borrowed a house in Cambridge for her and the baby; he was training on an East Anglian airfield, and it was long odds that he would be stationed on one the following spring; he could get back to Cambridge often. I wrote that I must see him; I would take an evening off: could he arrange to dine in hall one night?

When I arrived at the college, it was just before dinner time. Roy was waiting for me at the porter’s lodge. He was wearing one of his old elegant suits, and had a gown thrown over his shoulder.

“My dear old boy,” he said.

We walked through the court. It was half-past seven on an October night, and already dark. The lights at the foot of the staircases were very dim, and one could scarcely see the list of names. Mine was still there, the white paint very faded; when we passed Roy’s old staircase, we saw a new name where his had been.

“On the shelf,” said Roy.

The bell began to clang. Roy mentioned, as we went towards the combination room, that he had not dined in college since he returned. I asked him why not; he was frequently in Cambridge and still, of course, a fellow.

“Too much changed,” said Roy.

“It’s not much changed,” I said.

“Of course it’s not,” said Roy. “I have, though.”

Sherry in the combination room: dinner in hall: they happened as they used to. It was a small party. Arthur Brown had discovered that Roy and I were dining, had put himself down at short notice, and had asked Winslow to come in. Otherwise there was only Despard-Smith, gloomily presiding.

Much of the college was unchanged. Francis Getliffe, Roy and I were away, as well as the new Master and the two most junior fellows; the others were all in residence. There had been a few of the secular changes which everyone reckoned on, as college officers came to the end of their span; Arthur Brown, for instance, was now Senior Tutor. Some of the old men were visibly older, and one noticed the process more acutely if one saw them, as I did, at longish intervals. Winslow was not yet seventy, but he was ageing fast. His mouth had sunken deeply since I last met him the year before; his polished rudeness was going also, and he was gentler, more subdued, altogether less conspicuous. His son had inflicted another disappointment on him, though not a dramatic one. Dick Winslow had not been able to get through his officer’s training course, and had been returned to his unit; he was now a corporal in the Ordnance Corps, completely safe for the rest of the war. I should have liked a crack or two of old Winslow’s blistering sarcasm. It was hard to see him resigned and defeated at last.

Despard-Smith showed no effects of time at all. He was seventy-six now, still spare, solemn, completely self-confident, self-righteous, expecting to get his own way by moral right. He was actually more certain of his command than we remembered him. Partly because it was harder to get spirits, which at one time he drank heavily, alone in his dark rooms: partly because the young men had gone away, and there was a good deal of executive work about the college for anyone who volunteered, Despard-Smith had taken on some of the steward’s work, which Francis Getliffe had left. It was a new lease of power. The servants were grumbling but the old man issued pernickety instructions, went into nagging detail, just as in his prime: he was able to complain with a croaking, gloating satisfaction, that he had “to bear the heat and burden of the day”.

He greeted Roy and me with his usual bleak courtesy. Winslow’s face lit up as he shook hands with Roy: “Good evening to you, young man. May I sit next to you?”

Not much had changed, except through the passage of time. But the conversation in hall was distinctly odd. Arthur Brown, the good-natured, kind and clubbable, had developed a passion for military detail. In his solid conservative fashion, he was as engrossed in the war as Francis Getliffe. He believed — with a passion that surprised those who took him at his face value — in “killing Germans”. With bellicose interest, he wanted to hear about Roy’s training.

Roy was going through his first practice flights at night. He said simply that he hated it.

“Why?” said Arthur Brown.

“It’s dreadful, flying at night. Dark. Cold. Lonely. And you lose your way.”

It was the last phrase which made Arthur Brown frown. He interrupted Roy. He just could not believe it. Hadn’t our aeroplanes got to learn to attack individual factories? Roy replied, that up to six months ago they had done well to get to the right country. Brown was angry: what was all this he had heard about factories going up in sheets of flame? And all this about pin-pointing targets? He regarded all those reports as too well established to doubt. I joined in on Roy’s side. Arthur Brown was discomfited, out of humour with both of us, still not convinced. For a man so shrewd in his own world, he was curiously credulous about official news. (I remembered Schäder’s remarks on how propaganda convinced everybody in time.) Here were Roy and I, his protégés and close friends: he loved us and trusted us: he realised that we both knew the facts, Roy in the flesh, I on paper: yet he found it hard to believe us, against the official news of The Times and the BBC.

But he smiled again, benignly, enjoying the treat he had prepared for us, as soon as we got back into the combination room. Two decanters stood ready on the table, one of port, one of claret. In front of them was a basket of silver wicker work, full of walnuts.

“They’re a bit special,” said Arthur Brown, as he confided in a discreet whisper what the two wines were. “I’m going to ask for the pleasure of presenting them. I thought they’d be rather bracing on a foggy night. It’s splendid to have the two of you back at once.”

We filled our glasses. The crack of the nuts was a cheerful noise. It was a night in that room such as we had often known in other autumns. There were wisps of mist in the courts, and the leaves were falling from the walls. Here it was warm; the rich curtains glowed placidly, the glasses gleamed; even though one liked claret better than port, perhaps one could do no better than drink port with the nuts.

Arthur Brown smiled at Roy. Despard-Smith expressed thanks in a grating voice, cracked more nuts than any of us, rang the bell and asked why salt had not been served. He finished his first glass of port before the decanter had come round to him again.

We talked as we had talked in other autumns. The Master of another college had died suddenly, whom would they elect? We produced some names in turn. Despard-Smith rejected all of ours solemnly and disapprovingly. One: “I have heard things against him.” Another: “That would be catastrophic, Eliot. The man’s no better than a bolshevik.” A third (whose wife had deserted him twenty years before): “I should not think his college would be easy about his private life. They ought not to take the risk of electing someone unstable. It might bring the place down round their ears.”

Then he made his own suggestion.

“Isn’t he extremely stuffed?” said Roy lightly.

Despard-Smith looked puzzled, deaf, and condemnatory.

“Stuffed,” Roy repeated.

“I’m afraid I don’t know what you mean, Calvert. He’s a very sound man. He’s not a showman, but he’s sacrificed himself for his college.”

Once, I thought, Roy would have followed up with mystifying questions. But he sat back, smiled, drank his wine, and played no trick. By now Despard-Smith had got into his stride. He was, in the Master’s absence, acting as chairman of the livings committee. It happened that the college’s best living was still vacant. The last incumbent had gone off to become an archdeacon. The committee, which for the moment meant Despard-Smith, could not make up its mind. In reality, the old man could not bear to bestow so desirable a prize. Most of the college livings were worth four or five hundred a year, since they had not risen as the value of money fell; but this one was nearly two thousand. In the nineteenth century it had meant riches, and there had been some resolute jockeying on the part of fellows to secure it in time for their marriage. It was then, and still remained, one of the richer livings of the Church of England. Even now, it would give some clergyman a comfortable middle-class life.

“It’s a heavy responsibility,” said Despard-Smith. He began to run through all the old members of the college who were in orders. He disapproved of all of them, except one or two who, for different reasons, could not be offered this living. One man had the month before taken one at three hundred and fifty a year. “It would be no kindness to him,” said Despard-Smith, “to go so far as mention this vacancy. He is a man of conscience, and he would not want to leave a charge he has just undertaken.”

Brown pleaded this man’s cause. “It’s wretched luck,” he said. “Can’t we find a way round? I should regard it as legitimate to put in someone for a decent interval, say a year or two—”

“I’m afraid that would be a scandalous dereliction of duty,” said Despard-Smith. No one ever got more relish out of moral judgments. No one was more certain of them.

Winslow drank another glass of claret, and took no part. He used, in his style as a nineteenth-century unbeliever, to make caustic interjections on “appointments in this mysterious profession”. He used to point out vinegarishly that he had not once attended chapel. Now he had not the heart for satire.

Despard-Smith looked at Roy with gloomy satisfaction.

“I seem to remember that Udal was a friend of yours, Calvert. He was your exact contemporary, if I’m not mistaken.”

“Just so,” said Roy.

“I needn’t say that we have carefully considered whether we could invite him to take Melton. He is a man of higher intellectual quality than we are accustomed to get in the Church in its present disastrous condition. We have given Udal’s name the most careful consideration, Calvert. I am very sorry to say that we don’t feel able to approach him. It would only do him harm to give him exceptional promotion at his age. I was very sorry, but naturally we were thinking entirely of the man himself.”

Roy was looking at him with bright, piercing, steady eyes.

“You must not say that, Despard,” said Roy, in a clear and deliberate tone. “It is not so.”

“What do you mean, Calvert?” said Despard-Smith, with grating anger.

“I mean that you’ve not thought of Udal at all. You don’t know him. He is a very difficult man to know. You have no idea what is best for him. And you do not care. You must not say these things.”

“I’m not prepared to listen,” Despard-Smith was choking. “Scandalous to think that my responsibility—”

Roy’s eyes were fixed on the old clergyman’s, which were bleared, full, inflamed.

“You like your responsibility,” said Roy. “You like power very much. You must not disguise things so much, Despard. You must not pretend.”

Roy had spoken throughout calmly, simply, and with extreme authority. It was exactly — I suddenly remembered — as he had spoken to Willy Romantowski; he had even used the same words. I had seen him with many kinds of human beings, in many circumstances: those two, the old clergyman and the young blackmailing spy, were the only ones I had ever heard him judge.

Arthur Brown hurriedly filled Despard-Smith’s glass. I thought there was a faint appreciative twinkle under Winslow’s hooded lids. The party got back to ordinary small talk. That room was used to hard words. The convention was strong that, after a quarrel, the room made an attempt at superficial peace.

So, for a few minutes, we did now. Then we broke up, and Arthur Brown took Roy and me to his rooms. He finished off his treat for us by giving us glasses of his best brandy.

Then he settled himself down to give a warning.

“I must say,” he scolded Roy, “that I wish you hadn’t gone for old Despard. I know he’s maddening. But he’ll stick about in this college for a long time yet, you know, and he still might be able to put a spoke in your wheel. There’s no point in making an unnecessary enemy. I wish you’d wait till you’ve absolutely arrived.”

“No, Arthur.” Roy smiled. “We wait too long, you know. There isn’t so much time.”

“I expect you think I’m a cautious old woman,” said Arthur Brown, “but I’m only anxious to see you getting all the honours this place can give you. I am anxious to have that happiness before I die.”

“I know, Arthur,” said Roy. “But I shall need to say a word now and then.”

He said it with affection and gratitude, to the man who had guarded his career with such unselfishness and so much worldly skill. But he meant more than he said. He meant that his pupilage was quite over. He was mature now. He had learned from his life. For the rest of his time, he would know what mattered to him, whom and what to take risks for, and when to speak.

Roy took another brandy, and set Arthur Brown talking about his water colours. Roy was in no hurry to be left alone with me; he had sensed what I had come to ask, and was avoiding it. Brown liked staying with us, and it was reluctantly that he pressed our hands, said how splendid it would be when we both returned for good, promised to save “something special” to celebrate the occasion.

Roy and I went up to my sitting-room. It struck dank through being empty for so long; there was a low smouldering fire, built up of slack.

“The old devil,” said Roy, grinning at the thought of Bidwell: since I went away, my rooms were being slowly and methodically stripped of their smaller objects.

I pulled down the old iron draught-screen to its lowest socket. Soon the flames began to roar. Roy pushed the sofa in front of the fireplace, and lay with his legs crossed, his hands behind his head.

I sat in my armchair. Those had been our habitual places in that room. I looked at him, and said: “I want to talk a little.”

“Better leave it,” he said. “Much better to leave it,” he repeated insistently.

“No,” I said. “I must know.”

“Just so,” said Roy.

“I didn’t say much when you chose to—”

I hesitated, and Roy said, in a light, quiet tone: “Try to get myself killed.”

“It was too clear,” I said.

“I got tired of struggling,” he said. “I thought it was time for me to resign.”

“I knew that,” I said. “I hadn’t the heart to speak.”

“I told you once,” he said with desperate feeling, “you’d done all you could. Believe me. No one on earth could have done as much.”

I shook my head.

“I was no use to you in the end,” I said.

“Everyone is alone. Dreadfully alone,” said Roy. “You’ve thought that often enough, haven’t you? One hates it. But it’s true.”

“Sometimes,” I said, in pain, “it does not seem so true.”

“Often,” Roy repeated, “it does not seem so true.” Suddenly he smiled brilliantly. “I’m not as tough as you. Sometimes it wasn’t true. I’ve not been alone always. You may have been — but I’ve not.”

I could not smile back.

“I hadn’t the heart to speak,” I said slowly. “It was too clear what had happened to you. But I didn’t understand one thing. Why did you make that particular choice? Why did you decide to go and fly?”

With one quick move he sat upright. His eyes met mine, but they were troubled, distraught, almost — shifty.

He was for once not ready with a word.

“Was it,” I said, “because of that night in Dolphin Square? When you asked me what was the most dangerous thing to do?”

“Oh God,” said Roy, “that was why I kept it from you. I was afraid you’d guess. I didn’t want you to learn from other people. But if I’d told you myself what I was doing, I should have given it away. You’d have remembered that night.”

“I remember it now,” I said.

“It was only a chance,” he said violently. “We happened to be talking. If I hadn’t seen you that night, I should have asked someone else. We happened to be talking, that was all.”

“What I said — decided you?”

“Yes.”

“You might have spared me that,” I cried.

We looked at each other; quite suddenly, reproach, remorse, guilt, all died away; the moment could hold them no more. There was no room for anything but the understanding which had sustained us for so long. We had the comfort of absolute acceptance.

In a tone that was simple and natural, Roy said: “I wasn’t mad when I decided to resign, you know. I couldn’t struggle any more, but I wasn’t a bit mad. Did you think I should be?”

“I wasn’t sure,” I said, just as easily.

“I thought you might feel that I did it when I was lashing out. As I did with poor old Winslow once. No, it wasn’t so. I haven’t had one of those fits for quite a long time. But I’d been depressed for years. Until I threw in my hand. I was sad enough when you saw me, wasn’t I? I was much worse when you weren’t there. It was dreadful, Lewis.”

“I knew,” I said.

“Of course you did. I was quite lucid, though. All the time. Just like that night in May week. When I threw in my hand, I was frightfully lucid. Perhaps if everyone were as lucid as that, they would throw in their hand too.” He smiled at me. “I’ve always felt you covered your eyes at the last minute. Otherwise why should you go on?”

It was half-envious, half-ironic: it was so intimate that it lit our faces: with magic, it lit up the room.

“You’ll always have a bit of idiot hope, won’t you?” said Roy. “I’m glad that you always will.”

“Sometimes I think you have,” I said. “Deeper than any of your thoughts.”

Roy smiled.

“It’s inconvenient — if I have it now.”

He went on: “What would have happened to me, Lewis, if there hadn’t been a war? I don’t know. I believe it wouldn’t have made much difference. I should have come to a bad end.”

He smiled again, and said: “It makes things a bit sharper, that’s all. One can’t change one’s mind. It holds one to it. That’s all.”

The fire had flared up now, and his face was rosy in the glow. The shadows exaggerated his smile. We talked on, so attuned that each word resounded in the other’s heart. And at the same moment that I felt closer to him than I had ever done, I was seized and shaken by the most passionate sense of his nature, his life, his fate. It was a sense which shook me with resentment, fear and pity, with horror and unassuageable anxiety, with wonder, illumination and love. I accepted his nature with absolute gratitude; but I could not accept how fate had played with him and caught him. While I delighted in our talk that night, I cried to myself with the bitterness of pity; to know him was one of the two greatest gifts in my life; and yet it was anguish to see how his life had brought him to this point.

He had once said, just before the only flaw in our intimacy, that I believed in predestination. It was not true in full, though it was true as he meant it. I believed that neither he nor any of us could alter the essence of our nature, with which we had been born. I believed that he would not have been able to escape for good from the melancholy, the depth of despondency, the uncontrollable flashes and the brilliant calm, the light and dark of his nature. That was his endowment. Despite his courage, the efforts of his will, his passionate vitality, he could not get rid of that burden. He was born to struggle, to pursue false hopes, to know despair — to know what, for one of his nature, was an intolerable despair. For, with the darkness on his mind, he could not avoid seeing himself as he was, with all hope and pretence gone.

Most men are saved from that tragic suffering. Nothing could have saved him. Knowing him — as I realised on that walk by the Serpentine years before — I was bound to watch him go through his journey, sometimes hopeful, sometimes tormented, often both together, until in the white and ruthless light of self-knowledge, he perceived himself.

So far, I believed in what he called “predestination”. I believed that some parts of our endowment are too heavy to shift. The essence of our nature lay within us, untouchable by our own hands or any other’s, by any chance of things or persons, from the cradle to the grave. But what it drove us to in action, the actual events of our lives — those were affected by a million things, by sheer chance, by the interaction of others, by the choice of our own will. So between essence and chance and will, Roy had, like the rest of us, had to live his life.

It was the interplay of those three that had brought him to that moment in my room, smiling, talking of his “bad end”. They had brought him to his present situation. I felt the delight of our intimacy — and from his situation I shrank back in anguish and appalled.

For it could have happened otherwise. In any case, perhaps, he would have known despair so black that he would have been driven to “throw in his hand”, he would have felt it was time to “resign”. That was what he meant by a “bad end”. If we had been born in a different time, when the outside world was not so violent, it was easy to imagine ways along which he might have gone. He might not have been driven into physical danger: he might have tried to lose himself in exile or the lower depths. But that was not his luck. He had had to make his choice in the middle of a war. And war, as he said, “held one to it”. It made his choice one of life and death. It was irrevocable. It gave no time for the obstinate hope of the fibres, which underlay even his dark vision of the mortal state, to collect itself, steady him, and help him to struggle on.

And I felt that hope was gathering in him now. Through his marriage, through his child, perhaps ironically through the very fact that he had “resigned” and needed to trouble no more, he had come out of the dark. Perhaps he had married Rosalind because he did not trouble any more; it was good for him not to care. He was more content than he had been since his youth. Hope was pulsing within him, the hope which is close to the body and part of the body’s life, the hope that one possesses just because one is alive.

He was going into great danger. He said that it was “inconvenient” to hope now. The mood in which he had made his choice should have lasted. But he was not to be spared that final trick of fate. He was to go into danger: but his love of life was not so low; it was mounting with each day that passed.

He was smiling, happy that we should be enjoying this evening together by my fire. Each second, each sound, seemed extraordinarily distinct. I was happy with him — and yet I did not want to see, I wished my eyes were closed, I could not bear the brightness of the room.

37: Mist in the Park

Roy began to fly on bombing raids in the January of 1943. From that time, he came to see me regularly once a fortnight; it was his device for trying to ease my mind. He could come to London to visit me more easily than I could get away. He had far more leisure, which seemed a joke at my expense. His life had become strangely free; mine was confined; I did not so much as see a bombing aerodrome through the whole length of the war.

When we met, Roy kept nothing from me. Sometimes I thought of the days, long before, when we sat by the bedside of the old Master. He had known he must soon die for certain; the end was fixed; and, for me at least, it was more terrible because he talked only of his visitors’ concerns — he, who lay there having learnt the date of his death.

Roy knew me too well to do the same. He was more natural and spontaneous than the old Master; he took it for granted that I was strained, that he was strained himself; he left it to instinct to make it bearable for us both. And, of course, there was one profound difference between his condition and the old Master’s; Roy did not know for certain whether he would live or die.

As a rule, he called at my office in the afternoon and stayed with me until he caught a train at night. In that office he looked down into Whitehall, and told me simply that he was getting more frightened. He told me of his different kinds of fear: of how one wanted to stop short, throw the bombs away, and run for home. He smiled at me.

“It’s peculiarly indecent for me to bomb Stuttgart, isn’t it? Me of all men.” (He had worked in the library there.)

I nodded.

“They’ll want me to bomb Berlin soon. Think of that.” Then he said: “But you don’t believe in bombing anyway, do you?”

“No,” I said.

“You don’t think it’s any use? It won’t win the war?”

“I don’t believe so.”

“You’re pretty sure?”

“Reasonably.”

“What does he think?” Roy pointed to the door which led through to the Minister’s room.

“The same.”

“Just so,” said Roy. “He’s a wise old bird. So are you, aren’t you?”

He smiled brilliantly, innocently, laughing at himself and me. He said: “There’s never been a place for me, has there?”

On those afternoons I heard something about his crew. He had become interested in them, realistically, affectionately, with amusement, just as with everyone he met, just as with the inmates of No. 32, Knesebeckstrasse. They were nearly all boys, and the oldest was twenty-six, seven years younger than himself. “I’m getting too old for this game,” said Roy. There was a Canadian among them. Most of them were abnormally inarticulate, and Roy mimicked them to me. Some were extremely brave. “Too brave for me,” he said.

I often speculated about what they thought of him. So far as I could gather, they did not consider him academic, donnish, or learned; it had always surprised people to discover his occupation. But they also did not think him intelligent or amusing. They liked him, they respected him as a pilot, and thought he was a kind, slightly eccentric old thing. I suspected he had gone in for some deliberate dissimulation — partly to stay anonymous, partly to shield them from what he was really like. For instance, they certainly did not know that he was a notorious lover of women. They just placed him as an uxorious married man, devoted to his daughter and inclined to show them photographs of his wife and baby.

He told me that with a smile. It was often, I reflected, odd enough to send a shiver down the spine, when one heard a friend described by other people.

It was as though each of us went about speaking a private language which no one else could understand; yet everyone caught a few words, uttered a cheerful, confident, dismissive judgment, and passed on. It reminded me of the fellows discussing Roy before he was elected. If one heard people talking confidently of another’s character, one realised once for all that human beings were inescapably alone.

Actually, the opinions formed by Roy’s crew were quite explicable. He was devoted to the child, with a strength of feeling that at times astonished me. And he was content and comfortable with Rosalind.

During one of his visits to my office, both he and I were set to write letters that were difficult to put together. For I had heard from Joan the day before that Humphrey Bevill had just died in hospital. He had been decorated again for one of the small boat actions; then, a week or so past, his boat had been sunk and he had spent some hours in the water. His fantastic courage was a courage of the nerves, and he was as frail as he looked. He had died from exposure and loss of blood, when a normally tough young man would have recovered.

“Poor boy,” said Roy. “It must have been dreadful to go out and fight — and then come back in an hour or two. Everything clean and normal. It makes it much harder.”

He said that he felt it acutely himself. In the daytime he would be at home in peace, all tranquil. At night they would be flying out in fear. Next morning he came back home again. It would have been easier if all his life were abnormal, disturbed, spent nearer the dark and cold. It would have been easier in trenches in a foreign country. Here the hours of danger were placed violently side by side with days of clean sheets, in familiar rooms with one’s child, one’s wife and friends.

“Poor boy,” said Roy. “He couldn’t have had a happy life, could he?”

We each wrote separate letters to Lord and Lady Boscastle.

“It’s hard to write,” said Roy. “It will break up Lord B. It’s a mistake to be fond of people. One suffers too much.”

We had no doubt that Lord Boscastle would be terribly afflicted, but even so we were amazed by the manner of his grief. I heard of it from Lady Boscastle, who wrote in reply to my letter of condolence. Herself, she was taking bereavement with her immaculate stoicism — but she seemed overborne, almost stunned, by her husband’s passion of inconsolable misery. He shut himself up in Boscastle, would acknowledge no letters, not even from his family, would see no one except his servant. He had only spoken once to his wife since he heard of Humphrey’s death. It was a rage of misery, misery that was like madness, that made him in sheer ferocity of pain shut himself away from every human touch.

Lady Boscastle was out of her depth. She would have liked to help him; yet, for once in her life, she felt ignorant and inept. She had never been possessed as he was now; for all her adventures, she had never been overmastered by an emotion; she had never abandoned herself to love, as her husband did, with all the wildness of his nature, first in love for her and then for his son. She could not meet such a passion on equal terms. For the first time in their marriage, she was not mistress of the situation.

When Roy next came to see me, it was a warm, sunny day at the end of February; the other side of Whitehall was gilded by the soft, misty, golden light.

I told Roy about Lady Boscastle’s letter.

“She’s too cold,” he said. He had never liked her as I did, though he felt a kind of reluctant, sparring admiration. “She’ll survive. But he’ll live with the dead.”

Roy looked at me, and spoke with extreme gentleness and authority: “You mustn’t live with the dead too much. You could.”

He had seen me live on after my wife’s death; he was the only person who had seen me close to.

“If you lose me as well,” said Roy, “you mustn’t mourn too long. You mustn’t let it haunt you. You must go on.”

He was pale, quiet, burdened that afternoon. He and his crew had moved a few days before to another aerodrome. “They don’t want us to see our losses. They need to keep us cheerful,” he said.

He went on: “If we started with thirty aeroplanes” (he never used the current terms, but always with great precision brought out the outmoded ones, such as “aeroplanes”) “and we notice that two don’t come back each night, they think we mightn’t like it much. Because we’ve got to make thirty trips before they give us a rest. Even if the losses are only five per cent — we might start working out our chances. They’re not good, are they?”

It was such a beautiful afternoon that we went for a walk in St James’s Park. The sky was a light, radiant blue; but, although it was only early afternoon, a mist was creeping on to the brilliant grass.

“Excellent,” said Roy. “I like to see that.”

I misunderstood him.

“It is a lovely day,” I said.

“Not so aesthetic,” said Roy. “I meant — as long as this weather lasts, we shan’t have to fly.”

He walked by my side, over the soft winter turf.

“Some nights,” he said in a moment, “I’m pretty certain that I’m not coming back. I want to ask them to let me stay at home. I need to be safe. I feel like saying that I can’t go through it once again. Those nights, I feel certain that I’m going to die.”

He added: “Somehow I’ve come back, though.”

We walked along through the calm, warm, fragrant air. Roy turned to me, his face quite open.

“Dear old boy, I am afraid, you know,” he said. “I am afraid of my death.”

38: An Evening Without Incident

On Roy’s next visit, nothing of importance happened; he said nothing which struck me at the time; it was a placid evening, but I came to remember it in detail.

He was shown into my office about half-past two on a Saturday afternoon. I should not have been there, but I was preparing a draft for the Minister. Roy saw that I was writing, cocked an eyebrow, and with exaggerated punctiliousness would not come round my side of the desk.

“Too secret,” he said.

“No. Just a speech.”

Roy was light-hearted, and his mood infected me. He had the next four days free, and when he left me that evening was going on to Cambridge. He was so calm and light that I could not stay in a grey, ordinary, workaday mood. I had nearly finished the speech, but I recalled that the Minister had one or two idioms which he always got wrong: “they can’t pull the wool over my ears,” he used to say with great shrewdness. I was fond of him: it occurred to me that those idioms should be inserted in the speech. I told Roy what I was doing.

“I thought you’d become much too responsible.” He smiled with cheerful malice. “Remarkable occupation for a high civil servant. You should model yourself on Houston Eggar. I’m afraid you’ll never catch him up.”

When we went down into the street, Roy said that he needed some books for the next four days. So we took a bus, cut down Charles II Street, and reached the London Library before it closed. Roy bent over a rack of recent books; his nose looked inquisitively long, since the peak of his cap cut off his forehead. He talked about one or two of the books. “Very old-brandy,” he murmured. Then suddenly, with an expression serious and concerned, he pointed to a title. He was pointing to a single word — FISH. “Lewis,” he said, in a clear, audible tone, “I’m losing my grip. I’ve forgotten the Soghdian for fish.” He looked up, and saw a member, fat, stately, in black hat and fur-lined overcoat, walking out with books under his arm. “I wonder if he knows,” said Roy. “I need to ask him.”

Roy stepped lightly in front of the fat man, and gave him a smart salute.

“Excuse me, sir,” he said, “but I have forgotten the Soghdian for fish. Can you help me?”

“The what?”

“Soghdian.”

“I’m afraid not.”

“One ought to keep one’s languages up,” said Roy: his gaze was solemn, reproving, understanding. “It’s terrible how one forgets them. Isn’t it?”

Hypnotised, the member agreed that it was. Roy let him go. On the bus to Dolphin Square, the word returned to Roy. He professed extreme relief. The bus racketed and swayed round the corner by Victoria. Roy said, calm and matter-of-fact: “If I live, I shall go back to the Soghdian, you know. I may as well.”

“I think you should,” I said.

“I shall become extremely eminent. And remarkably rude.”

“I wish you’d study that whole Central Asian civilisation. It must be very interesting — how did it keep alive? and why did it die?”

“You always wanted me to turn into a journalist,” said Roy. “I’m too old to change now. I shall stick to something nice and sharp.”

In my flat, we made a kind of high tea, since Roy was catching a train just after seven. But it was a high tea composed of things we had not eaten for a long time. I had a small hoard of foods that once we ate and did not know how good they were — butter, strawberry jam, a few eggs. We had bought a loaf of bread on our way; we boiled a couple of eggs each, and finished with several rounds of bread and butter and jam.

“Excellent,” said Roy. “This is good stuff.”

We had eaten well together in many places, but it was a delectable meal. Afterwards, we made another pot of tea; Roy lay on the sofa, smoked a cigarette, asked me about my love affair.

For I had fallen in love in the middle of the war. It had given me days of supernatural brilliance among the pain, anxiety and darkness. For hours together, I had been ecstatically happy and blind to everything else.

“You should let me vet them,” said Roy. “I still don’t like the sound of her.”

“She wouldn’t do for you,” I said.

“You like women who wouldn’t do for anyone, old boy. Such as Lady B.”

“Life wouldn’t have been dull,” I said, “with Lady B.”

Roy smiled mockingly, protectively.

“You’ve not tired yourself out, have you?” he said. “So much has happened to you — and yet you still don’t need life to be dull.”

He teased me, gave me advice, made me promise to arrange a dinner with both him and the young woman. Once I turned and caught him watching me, a half-smile on his lips, his eyes intent.

Then he said: “We haven’t had a walk for a long time, have we? Walk with me to the station.”

It was several miles, but I was glad to. We were both active that day. As soon as we got into the open air, we felt the prick of a Scotch mist, almost a drizzle. I asked if he minded about his buttons.

“Never mind them,” he said. “Rosalind will clean them tomorrow. She likes to.”

The drizzle persisted, but the moon was getting up behind the clouds, and the last of the daylight had not quite faded. Along the embankment to Westminster it was not oppressively dark; the derelict houses of Millbank stood blacker than the sky, and on our right there was a sheen upon the water. The tide was running full, and brought a smell from the sea.

“It’s a good night,” said Roy.

We left the river at Westminster, strolled down Whitehall, and then went back to the Embankment as far as Blackfriars Bridge. Trams clanked past us, sparks flashing in the dusk. Now and then a torch shone a beam on the wet road. Roy recalled jokes against us both, predicaments we had run into when we were younger, the various attempts to domesticate us.

“They got me at last,” he said. “They got me at last.”

He talked fondly of his daughter.

“I wonder what she’ll be like,” he said. “She won’t be stupid, will she?”

I smiled.

“I hope not,” said Roy. “I’ve got a feeling she’ll be anxious to please. If so, there’ll be trouble for someone.”

He took my arm, and went on in a light, clear, definite tone: “They mustn’t teach her too much. They mustn’t teach her to hold herself in. I’d like her to be easy. She’s my daughter. She’ll find the dark things for herself.”

Arm-in-arm, we went up Ludgate Hill towards St Paul’s. Roy was talking with affection tender and disrespectful, about one who “held herself in” — Lady Muriel. She must not be let loose on her godchild; he teased me about all her efforts to make me respectable in a way fitting to my station.

“Yet you dote on her,” I said.

“Ah, she needs so much love.”

“And Joan?”

He never laughed much about Joan. Of all the people we knew intimately, she was the only one he never mimicked. Even that evening, when he was so free, when his feelings flowed like quicksilver, he paused.

“And Joan?” I repeated.

“She needs more still,” said Roy.

We passed the cathedral; the rain was pattering down, but by now the invisible moon was high enough to lighten the sky, so that we could see the waste land close by; we stopped on the city side, near what used to be Bread Street, and gazed at the empty expanse under the gentle rain.

“Not pretty,” said Roy.

“No,” I said.

Then we discovered that we had cut it fine, if he were to catch his train. We walked fast the rest of the way to Liverpool Street. “Good for you,” said Roy, as he made the pace with a light step.

He was smiling as we entered the station. “I’ll send you a book,” he said, with a flick in his voice, as though he were playing an obscure joke.

He had only two minutes to spare. The train was at the platform, the carriage-doors were being shut, men were standing in the corridors. Roy ran towards it, waving back at me. He was the most graceful of men — but I thought then, as I used when he ran up to bowl, how he suddenly ceased to be so as he ran. His running stride was springy and loose but had a curious, comic, rabbit-like lollop. He got a place in the corridor and waved again: I was smiling at the picture of him on the run.

39: Grief

The following Friday afternoon, I was in my office reading through a file. The telephone bell rang: it was a trunk call. There were mutters, faint sounds at the other end — then Arthur Brown’s rich, steady, measured voice.

“Is that you, Eliot?”

“Yes.”

“I have bad news for you, old chap.”

“Yes.”

It did not need saying, but the kind, steady, deliberate voice went on: “Roy Calvert is missing from last night. His wife has just been in. I’ll see that she is properly looked after. She’s taking it very sturdily.”

“Thank you, Arthur.”

“I’m more sorry than I can say. I suppose there is a little hope, but I cannot hold it out to you.”

I did not reply. I could not reply. I had been swept by the first paralysing shock of death.

“If he is dead,” Arthur Brown’s voice came firmly, “we have lost someone who will never be replaced.”

For nights I could not sleep — or when I did, awoke from nightmares that tormented me as Roy’s had once tormented him. I thought of his nightmares, to get away for a second from my own. For mine, in those first nights, were intolerable with the physical imagination of his death. Sleeping or waking, I was lapped by waves of horror. A word would bring him back — “stuffed” or “Welsh” or often one that was not his special use — and I could not shut out the terrifying pictures of the imagination: the darkness, the face in the fire, the moments of unendurable anguish and fear, the face in the fire, the intolerable agony of such a death.

Nothing could guard me from that horror. It was impossible to harden oneself to such a death.

While that physical dread swept over me night and day (sometimes another pain attacked me: the night he died, I was dining happily with friends at Claridges), I could not bear to see anyone who wanted to give me hope. I could not bear to see anyone who knew him. I got through my committees somehow. I did my work. For the rest, I went about alone, or searched for company. Any company that would not bring him back.

This was the second time I had known intense grief through death. I could understand well enough the mad, frantic, obsessed concentration on his grief into which Lord Boscastle threw himself after the death of his son. I could understand well enough how some in grief squandered themselves in orgies.

After a fortnight of those days and nights, the first shock lessened. I had still spoken to no one about him, though I had managed to write a note to Rosalind. I was not ready for it yet. But I found myself searching for recollections of him. Time after time, I went over each detail of that last evening: it had seemed so light and casual when it happened, far less significant than a hundred other times we had talked together. Now I knew it off by heart. I kept asking myself questions to which there could never be an answer: just because of that they were sharp as a wound. What was the book that I should never receive? When he talked of his daughter, was he giving me instructions? Did he fear that this was his last chance to do so? Had he been fey that evening? Was he acting so lightly, to give me peace?

Then came the final news that he was dead. It was not an added shock. It meant only that I could indulge myself no longer. It was time to see others who were stricken. I would have avoided it if there had been a way: there was nothing for it but to go among them, and listen.

I sat through a night in Curzon Street with Lady Muriel and Joan. Joan was prostrate and speechless, her face brooding, white, so still that it seemed the muscles were frozen. Of those who loved him, perhaps she suffered most. Lady Muriel was like a rock. In the first shriek of pain, her daughter had told her everything about her love for Roy. Lady Muriel had forgotten propriety, had forgotten control, and had tried to comfort her. Lady Muriel had never been able to speak from her own heart; she had never seen into another’s; but when one of her children came to her in manifest agony, she lavished on them all her dumb, clumsy, overpowering affection. It was better for Joan than any subtler sympathy. For the first time since her childhood, she depended on her mother. She gained a deep, primitive consolation. Like all of us, she had laughed at Lady Muriel; she had produced for Roy’s benefit some of the absurdities, the grotesque snobberies, the feats of misunderstanding, which Lady Muriel incorrigibly perpetrated; but after she was driven to tell her mother how she suffered, Joan felt again that Lady Muriel was larger than life and that her heart was warm.

I thought that, of the two, Lady Muriel would be more crippled. For Joan was very strong; she had not a happy nature, but underneath there was a fierce, tough vitality as unquenchable as her mother’s; and she was still young. She would never be quite the same through knowing Roy — but I believed she was resilient enough to love again with all her heart.

It would not be so for Lady Muriel. It had taken an unusual man to tease her, to see that she was not formidable, to make her crow with delight. To find a friend like Roy — so clear-sighted, so utterly undeceived by exterior harshness — was a chance which would not come again. With age, disaster and loss, she was becoming on the outside more gruff and unbending. She would put everyone off, more completely than in the past. It would only be Joan who came close to her. Yet that night, her neck was stiff, her head upright, as she said goodbye in the old formula.

“Good evening, Mr — Lewis. It was good of you to come and see us.”

I went to see Rosalind in Cambridge. She had hoped right up to the end. She had seemed callous and thoughtless to many people; but I noticed that, in a few weeks, the hair on her temples had gone grey. I mentioned it.

“It doesn’t matter,” she cried. “He won’t see it, will he?”

She sobbed most of the time I was with her. She was trying to recapture every physical memory of him. She wanted to think of him, feature, skin and muscle, until she could recreate him in the flesh.

It was pagan. It was what all human beings felt, I thought, when someone dies whom they have loved in the body. Above all with sexual love — but also with the love one bears a son or anyone who is physically dear. If one has been truly bereaved, all resignation is driven away. Whatever one’s mind says, one craves that they may live again. One cannot help but crave for resurrection and a life to come. But it would all be meaningless, a ghastly joke, without the resurrection of the body. One craves for that above all. Anything else would be a parody of the life we cry out to have restored. Rosalind did not believe in an afterlife, did not believe in resurrection, either of the body or anything else; she believed that Roy had gone into annihilation. Yet with every atom of her whole existence, she begged that he might come to her again in the flesh.

We all found a kind of comfort in anything to do with his memory: as though by putting ourselves out, by being busy, by talking of him and making arrangements, we were prolonging his life. So Arthur Brown spent days organising the memorial service; and I occupied myself with the obituaries. It seemed to push back the emptiness — and I became obsessed, beyond any realism, beyond any importance that they could possibly carry, that the notices should praise his work and should not lie. I wanted them to say that he was a great scholar, and try to explain his achievement. For the rest, let them say as little as could be. It was hard to tell the truth about any man; the conventional phrases, the habits of thought which came so glibly, masked all that men were like. For Roy to be written about in the “stuffed” terms which he had spent so much of his life mocking — that I found painful out of proportion. He had spoken of himself with nothing but candour: with none of the alleviating lies which helped the rest of us to fancy ourselves at times: with a candour that was clear, light, naked and terrible. It would be a bitter irony to have that tone silenced, and hear the public voices boom out about his virtues and his sacrifice.

I broke my silence about my own feelings in order to get Arthur Brown’s help. He saw the point; he saw also that I was desperately moved, and exerted himself for my sake as well as Roy’s. The chief obituaries finally appeared as curiously technical, bare, and devoid of human touches; they puzzled and disappointed many people.

Perhaps because I was silent about Roy’s death, I did not receive much sympathy myself. One or two near to me were able to intrude — and I was grateful. Otherwise, I would rather have things as they were, and hear nothing.

Lady Boscastle wrote to me delicately and gracefully. And, to my astonishment, I had a note from her husband. It was short:

“My dear Eliot, They tell me that Roy Calvert is dead too. When last I saw you, those young men were alive. I had my son, and you your friend. I have no comfort to offer you. It is only left for us to throw away the fooleries of consolation, and curse into the silly face of fate until our own time comes.

B.”

I was given one other unexpected sign of feeling. One night I was sitting in my office; the memorial service was taking place next morning, and I was just about to leave for Cambridge. The attendant opened the door, and Francis Getliffe came in.

“I’m very sorry about Calvert,” he said without any introduction, curtly and with embarrassment.

“Thank you, Francis,” I said.

“The memorial service is tomorrow, isn’t it?”

I was surprised at the question, for Francis was rigid in never going inside the chapel. He and Winslow were the only unbelievers in the college who made it a matter of principle.

“Yes.”

“I’d come,” he said. “But I’ve got this meeting. I daren’t leave it.”

Francis had been found unimportant jobs, had been kept off committees, since he opposed the bombing campaign. He was just forcing his way back.

“No, you mustn’t,” I said. “It’s good of you to tell me, though.”

“I didn’t understand him,” said Francis. “I’m sorry we didn’t get on.”

He looked at me with a frown of distress.

“He must have been a very brave man,” he went on. He added, with difficult, friendly concern: “I’m sorry for you personally, Lewis.”

40: Memorial Service

I was lying awake the next morning when Bidwell pulled up the blind. The room filled with the bright May sunlight; above the college roofs, the sky was a milky blue.

“It’s a sad old day, sir,” said Bidwell.

I muttered.

“I wish I was bringing you his compliments, sir, and one of his messages.”

Bidwell came to the side of the bed, and gazed down at me. His small cunning eyes were round and open with trouble.

“Why did he do it, sir? I know you’ve got ways of thinking it out that we haven’t. But I’ve been thinking it out my own way, and I don’t feel right about it now. He’d got everything he could wish for, hadn’t he, sir? He wasn’t what you’d call properly happy, though he’d always got a joke for any of us. I don’t see why he did it. There’s something wrong about it. I don’t claim to know where. It won’t be the same place for me now, sir. Though he did give me a lot of trouble sometimes. He was a very particular gentleman, was Mr Calvert. But I should feel a bit easy if I knew why he did it.”

When I went out into the court, the smell of wistaria — with pitiless intensity — brought back other mornings in May. The servants were walking about with brushes and pans; one or two young men were sitting in their windows. For a second, I felt it incredible that Roy should be dead; it was so incredible that I felt a mirage-like relief; he was so full of life, he would soon be there.

Then in reaction I was gripped by savage resentment — resentment that these people were walking heedlessly through the court, resentment that all was going on as before. Their lives were unchanged, they carried no mark, they were calling casually to each other. I felt, with a sudden chill, the irrevocability of death.

The bell began to toll at a quarter to eleven. Soon the paths in the court were busy with groups of people moving to the chapel. From my window, I saw the senior fellow, Gay, who was eighty-six, hobbling his way there with minute steps. Lady Muriel and Joan followed him, both in black; as at the old Master’s funeral, they walked with their backs stiff and their mouths firm.

I took my place in the fellows’ stall. The chapel was full, as full as it had been for the funeral of Vernon Royce. Roy had been a figure in the town, and there were many visitors from other colleges. There was also Foulkes, in uniform, and a knot of other orientalists, sitting together. All the fellows had come except Getliffe, Luke (who was in Canada) — and old Winslow. Stubborn to the last, he had decided he would not set foot in the chapel — even to honour the memory of a young man he liked. It was like his old proud, cross-grained self.

There were many women in the chapel. Rosalind was given a stall by the Master’s; she was veiled and weeping. Lady Muriel and Joan sat just under her. Mrs Seymour was placed near the undergraduates. There were other, younger women, some of whom I knew slightly or had heard of from Roy. One or two I did not know at all — one struck me in particular, for she was beautiful.

“There seem to be several widows,” I heard someone in front of me whisper. He came from another college. I did not mind. I was ready for them to know him as he was.

For days past there had been a hidden bitter dispute in the college about who should officiate at the service. By all tradition, convention, and precedent, Despard-Smith had an unshakable claim. He was the only fellow in orders; he had taken every memorial service for the last thirty years; he assumed that as of right he would preside at this one, as he had done at the old Master’s.

But Arthur Brown did not like it. He had heard that last conflict between the old man and Roy. He knew, and so did most of the fellows, that Despard-Smith had been an enemy of Roy’s, throughout his time there. Brown also knew that Despard-Smith was one of the few people alive who did not come within Roy’s charity.

Brown was the last man in the college to make an unnecessary disturbance; he was willing to put up with a great many nuisances for the sake of a decent and clubbable life; and no one had more respect for precedent. But he could not let this pass. It was not fitting for Despard-Smith to speak in memory of Roy. Brown used all his expertness, all his experience of managing awkward situations, all his ability to get hints dropped and friendly representations made: but nothing came of it. Despard-Smith took it for granted that he would celebrate the service. Brown caused it to be suggested by other fellows that Calvert had intimate friends, such as Udal, in the church. It would give great pleasure if one of those officiated. Despard-Smith said that it would be reprehensible on his part to forsake his duty.

At last Brown fell back on the extreme obstinacy which he always held in reserve. He decided to “have it out” with the old man. For Brown, who disliked any unpleasant scene, it was an ordeal. But I had no doubt that he spoke his mind with absolute firmness. Even then Despard-Smith would not give way. He could not abrogate his moral responsibility, he said. If his taking the service gave too much offence, then there should be no service at all.

All that Brown could secure was a compromise about the actual oration. Despard-Smith was willing to be guided by Calvert’s friends upon what should be said. He would not pledge himself to use any specific form of words. But, if Brown gave him the notes for an address, he would use them so far as he felt justified.

So that morning Despard-Smith took the service. He looked younger than usual, buoyed up like other old men when a young one died — as though full of triumph that he was living on.

He did his office with dignity. At his age he was still spare, bleak, and erect. He viewed the crowded chapel severely: his voice had not lost its resonance. Some of the women cried as he spoke of Roy. Lady Muriel and Joan were dry-eyed, just as they had been at the old Master’s funeral. Just as at that service, Despard-Smith got through his work. Brown frowned; heavy-faced, his high colour darkened, throughout the address.

I was glad when it was over. The old clergyman told us, as he had told us before at other memorial services, that there was no sorrow in death for him who had passed over. “He has gone in great joy to meet his God. There should be no sorrow for the sake of our dear colleague. It is we who loved him who feel the sorrow. It is our lives which are darker, not his. We must try to conquer our deprivation in the thought of his exceeding joy.”

That was common form. So was much of what he said about Roy’s life in college — “very quiet in all his good actions, never seeking power or fame or worldly pleasures, never entertaining an unkind thought, never saying an unkind word”.

He had said almost exactly the same of Vernon Royce: I remembered catching a flash in Roy’s eye as he heard that last astonishing encomium.

Then Despard-Smith put in something new.

“Our dear colleague was young. Perhaps he had not yet come to his full wisdom. If he had a fault, perhaps it was to be impatient of the experience that the years bring to us. Perhaps he had not yet learned all that the years must tell us of the tears of things. Lachrymae rerum. The tears of things. But how fortunate he was, our dear colleague, to pass over in the glory of his youth, before he tasted the tears of things. There is no sorrow in such a death. To have known only the glory and happiness of youth, and then to cast away life for one’s country. ‘Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori’.”

The old man realised he had departed from his brief. He was a man who stuck to his contract; he adjusted his spectacles, fumbled with his notes, and began to read Arthur Brown’s version. It was clear and simple. Despard-Smith read it monotonously, without much meaning or inflection until the end. Brown had put down Roy’s great successes. And he had written: “He could have stayed in safety. But he chose otherwise. The heart knows its own bitterness.” Brown meant it as a comment on Roy’s whole experience, but Despard-Smith read it as mechanically as the rest.

The service ended. The fellows filed out first. Arthur Brown pressed my hand without a word. I wanted to escape before the others came into the court. I went across quickly to my rooms in the bright sunlight. The cold wind was getting up.

I had a few last things to do. Our belongings in college had been mixed up together. I happened to have a safe in my room, and there he had stored some of his manuscripts. I unlocked it, took out one or two of his papers, read through them, considered how they should be disposed of. Then I went down to the college cellar, under the kitchen. For years we had shared a section of the cellar together; we did not buy much wine, but there were a few dozen bottles of mine on the top racks, a rather less number of his below. His racks were labelled in his own hand.

Inexplicably, that sight wounded me more than anything at the service. I had been prepared for much: but to this I had no defence. I could not bear to stay there. Without any plan or intention, I went up into the court, began walking through the streets.

It was dark in the sunshine, and difficult to see.

The may on the trees was odorous on the cold wind. I felt beside me, closer than anything I saw and yet not close enough to take away the acute and yearning sadness, the face of a young man, mischievous and mocking, the sleeves of his sweater tied round his neck, as when we walked away from cricket in the evening light.