9
November 14 had arrived, the day of Victor Dax’s talk to the Club. Before lunch I quickly rewrote my two-page introduction, and then stood to rehearse it, looking out at the quad through rain-streaked windows. As secretary I liked to speak without notes (last week I’d surprised myself with a ten-minute eulogy on Cecil Day Lewis, who’d said drolly that it ought to be published); but Victor was making me anxious. It wasn’t only my mixed feelings about his work (I thought much of Day Lewis was windy and derivative), or the fact of his being Evert’s father. It was to do with the portrait of him Evert had created, inadvertently and piecemeal, in my mind: a man with few friends and little humour, proud of his gift and disdainful of his contemporaries; a man of fanatical habits, who worked each day from eight till four, seen by no one but Herta with her lunch tray; who had, like Brahms or Balzac, a coffee-making device and dosed himself into a mania of production, but then emerged and moved, full of remote benignity, among his family; whose children, even so, lived so much in fear of saying the wrong thing that they barely said anything to him at all. Most worryingly for me, it seemed that praise – a full-page notice in the New York Times, the award of a prize or the Légion d’honneur – made him specially touchy, as if it were too late, too small, or itself somehow belittling. Still, praise him I must, and I was changing my little essay once again in my mind when I saw Evert coming across the quad towards my staircase. His umbrella concealed him from the chest up, but there was no mistaking his walk, the quick small steps. ‘My dear, what a day!’ he said, when he’d come into my room and then gone out again to leave the opened brolly on the landing. (‘Bad luck,’ I heard him say, ‘but still . . .’: the War combined with the Sparsholt affair had made him madly superstitious.)
‘I think things are more or less in order,’ I said.
‘Mm . . . ? Oh, good . . .’ Evert had the look of hollow sleeplessness I’d grown used to, and today he was smiling too, a tense, persistent smile, as if refuting a series of arguments. I’d known from the start that his father’s visit was a challenge for him, which only added to the worry I felt about it myself. A note had come to me from Victor’s secretary announcing his arrival on the 4.30 train, which left us with nearly two hours in which to amuse him before dinner.
‘This weather’s not encouraging, but perhaps your father would like to see the tombs in the Cathedral.’
‘Oh, Christ!’ said Evert.
‘Or I thought some of the Rawlinson manuscripts in Bodley, for instance—’
‘My father’s coming.’
‘Well, yes. You mean you’d forgotten?’
Evert looked at me and shook his head. ‘Oh, Fred,’ he said. ‘That’s not why I’m here, you know.’
‘Well, it’s a good job you are, none the less.’
‘No, no . . .’ He walked around abstrusely for a minute with a hand raised to forbid questions. Then he took an envelope from his breast pocket. ‘I really wanted you to see this,’ he said, but held it and pondered it for a while before passing it over; then he sat down and crossed his legs, and stared ahead as if mentally ready – for triumph or despair, or simply perhaps to reply. In the envelope was a standard white postcard with the College’s embossed address, and beneath it a mere three characters, in careful blue ink:
α & Ω
‘Little alpha,’ I said, ‘but upper-case omega.’
‘Yes,’ said Evert, still gazing ahead, ‘he’s a scientist, not a classicist.’
I winced, stared again at the card, played the part of the slow-witted friend. ‘So you know who sent it,’ I said. I had my ideas, but felt there must be an element of doubt.
Evert said nothing, but gazed at the cornice, still with his provoking hint of a smile. He said, ‘The question is not who it’s from but what the person who sent it means by it.’
‘I feel to know that one would have to know who the sender was. It might be, as you say, scientific, it might be religious, it might be, well, some other kind of symbol.’
‘It’s from him, Freddie – from Drum.’
‘Drum is it now?’ He stared ahead. ‘In that case not religious, I think.’
Evert laughed briefly at my tone but he trembled, or rather a single shiver passed through him, before he said quietly, ‘I spent last night with him. This was in my pigeonhole at ten o’clock this morning.’
This was a mad way of speaking, and I treated it lightly. ‘You spent the night.’
‘I had him,’ said Evert.
I was never a bit rattled by the sexual anecdotes of my friends but I may have shown that on this occasion I was shocked. Shock no doubt was part of the effect he was aiming for, the shock of the fact and of the brutal little phrase; I think he was startled by it himself. I felt the burn of something darkly secret, even wicked, and I hid the stiffness of my features by returning to the window and gazing down into the quad, as my tutor did when pursuing a complex argument. I saw that likewise I had to test what Evert had said. It was something Peter Coyle threw out once a week – ‘I had him’: but quite what this ‘having’ was one never knew, and hardly liked to ask. Nor could I ask now. I said, ‘What about Connie? It simply doesn’t make sense.’
‘Connie’s gone home for a couple of nights for her uncle’s funeral. And anyway, there’s a side of Drum that doesn’t make sense.’
‘Well, no doubt—’
‘I mean he doesn’t make sense in the sense that you mean sense.’ There was something tryingly riddling about Evert today, a mixture of defiance and anxiety. But he was probably right. I thought of Sparsholt’s unexpected visit to my rooms the day before, and the question he’d asked, almost reluctantly, as to where Evert was. And now I glimpsed, with a wary curiosity close to envy, the two of them together. It wasn’t envy for Evert’s act, however I pictured it, that troubled me, but for his having acted. His body held a knowledge that could neither be expressed nor forgotten, but which invested it, in my young eyes, with the indefinable aura of experience.
I’m not sure if I provoked him into telling me the story, or if he was set on doing it anyway. He seemed still astounded himself that it had happened, that love had flowered in this unlikeliest of places. He wanted to get it clear, and I felt that what I was hearing was the primary text: it would be no good deciding later on that something different had been said or done. I don’t rule out to this day that he may have exaggerated certain points; and I sensed a strange relish that his victory over Sparsholt was a victory over me, of whom he had long been pointlessly jealous. But I saw even so that I was the recipient of the essential truth. Again I give the story as he let me see it.
*
During Hall the previous night they had twice caught each other’s eye: the first time, David looked instantly away, but the second time there was the flicker of an eyebrow and suppression of a smile as he turned his head to speak to his neighbour, and Evert believed that over the following minute David was conscious of him, and that something had not only been acknowledged but promised. Something tiny, no doubt – it was the frail first chapter of a friendship, that might still be screwed up and thrown away without much sense of loss on David’s part. But that they were friends, since their evening in the pub, was surely beyond question. When they stood for grace there was no more than a glance before the bowing of the head – but it now felt to Evert inevitable that on the stairs outside, as they made their way down in the dark like so many fireflies, a hand should grip his elbow and a light flash upwards on the face beside his own. He looked devilish like that, and still gleamed on the eye in the darkness half a minute later, when he could barely be made out in fact; though it wasn’t at all clear what was happening, and neither of them said a word till they were out in the quad, where they would normally have turned in opposite directions. The blackout was no place for polite indecision – in a moment Evert might have lost him. He knew that the grip, and the flash of the torch, might be no more than childish clowning; he foresaw the scene of misunderstanding, the mortified return to his own room, alone; but his pounding heart made him walk on beside David, and then quite accidentally he stumbled against him in the dark – he felt his strong hand grab at him again and steady him. ‘All right there, Evert?’ he said, with a quick laugh; and then, in a very flat voice, in which all the things he would rather have done seemed to loom and die, ‘So what are you doing tonight?’
‘Oh . . . nothing,’ said Evert, with a half-glimpsed image of Roderick Random and Peregrine Pickle, the subjects of this week’s essay, tumbling into a dark chasm, where Dryden’s plays and the Life of Johnson already lay abandoned.
‘You don’t fancy a pint, later on?’ And now it was all the other men David might have gone drinking with that Evert pictured, in a shadowy crowd.
‘Oh, well, yes – if you like,’ he said, sounding nearly reluctant with excitement. It was the question he’d failed to ask a dozen times himself, and he thought he detected a slight airy nervousness in David, as if he too had rehearsed it. But he kept his head. ‘Will Connie be joining us?’
‘No . . . no, she’s gone home for a couple of nights. Her uncle’s been killed.’
‘Oh, I’m so sorry,’ said Evert – and in his happiness he almost was sorry for her, in a generous overspill of feelings. Though of course what this meant was that David simply needed someone to fill the time with: no doubt this peculiar second-year man who seemed to quite like him would do as well as any. Evert’s job, very likely, would be to condole with him on Connie’s absence, and to say repeatedly what a great girl she was. ‘What time would suit you?’ he said.
‘I expect you’re too busy,’ said David.
‘No, no – really,’ said Evert.
‘Then what about eight?’
‘Yes, perfect.’ There was something in him that seized on this forty-five minutes’ reprieve, and he went to his room and paced back and forth, glancing at his watch and thinking by turns it had stopped or was running fast.
When he went down to the Tom Gate, David was already waiting, and sounded impatient. ‘Do you want to go to the Marlborough House?’ he said. Evert felt he might be regretting his invitation.
‘Wherever you like,’ he said amiably, though his heart was racing. A smooth remoteness of manner covered him sometimes, the trance of tension. It was a ten-minute walk to the Marlborough, over Folly Bridge and away from the centre of town, into a part where fewer students went. He felt David had chosen it because he wanted to be alone with him; and it was only once they’d set off down St Aldate’s that he saw it was just as likely he didn’t want his rowing friends to see them together. Well, perhaps both things were true. ‘Good to get some exercise,’ he said.
‘If you call this exercise,’ said David – in the dark it was hard to tell if he was teasing. Evert felt already his humour was a thing of situations more than tones, and that irony might nettle him if it didn’t elude him altogether.
‘Not to you, of course,’ said Evert firmly, and rubbed shoulders with him for a step or two. He knew that he was older, and much more sophisticated, but he’d surrendered so much in advance to the figure beside him that it was hard to remember they were barely friends. He saw the heavy disproportion in their feelings for each other, but was too light-headed to worry about it. Surely both of them felt the novelty of their first walk alone together. They heard the far-off drone of planes passing high up to the west, and David grunted and looked skyward. The moon, nearly full, was hidden by the high walls of the College as they went downhill, and disappeared behind cloud as they approached the river. He seemed to Evert both uneasy and determined.
There was a square way round to the pub by road, but halfway over the bridge Evert felt David touch his arm and they crossed to the far side – thirty seconds later he was following him down the narrow footbridge that breaks off through a gap in the parapet to the riverbank below. Evert would never have taken the towpath alone at night, it seemed even darker than the street they had left, the river nothing at first but a quick and irregular licking sound, and then, as they walked on, a broad barely visible presence, curving northwards – the sheds and chimneys of the gasworks on the far bank just beginning to show against grey cloud. It was a further little test of nerve, Evert flashed his torch with an anxious laugh, and David said, ‘Best not to use that’ – as though they might give themselves away.
At the pub they groped their way into the cheering glare of the public bar, where a few heads turned, and Evert himself stared at David with disbelief. He said quietly, ‘What will you have?’ But David seemed puzzled, not by the momentary attention of the room or by Evert’s gleaming look but perhaps by the bar itself not matching the idea he had had of it when they set out.
‘There’s another bar, isn’t there?’ he said; and after they’d peered through the door into the empty snug – ‘Let’s go in here.’ To Evert it had the air of taking a room in a hotel – he pushed the door to behind them and found he couldn’t quite look at David. They unbuttoned their coats and hung them on the stand, Evert purchased their pints of mild and bitter, and brought them over to where David was sitting, beneath the dim ceiling light, in the odd raw smell of the blackout curtains and the banked coke fire. He saw now that David had changed to come out, into old flannels and a home-knitted jersey surely made for the much smaller boy he had been two years ago. The low table had a beaten copper top, and the glass roared a little as he slid it towards him. He raised his own glass to his chin, met David’s eye, and for the first time in his life said, ‘Cheerio!’
When they left the pub they had each had three pints, and Evert found himself in the most unexpected, exciting and worrying position – he had made a huge advance, but into territory he had never dreamt of. The rush of drunkenness and the immediate return to the dark outside world made things all the more confusing and inescapable. The three pints themselves were like the acts of a drama – a strange, experimental one, spoken in fragments and murmurs, but to Evert the most intense he had known, dark with surprises and decisions; the decisions seemed almost to make themselves, in the liberty of drink and the irrefusable presence of the man he adored.
To begin with their shyness made them rush at things. The outing was David’s idea, but he hadn’t suggested it had a purpose, and to Evert simply being with David was purpose enough. Still, he heard something forced and masochistic in his own first question: ‘How’s Connie getting on in her new job?’
David looked into the barely smouldering fire. ‘Oh, all right, thanks, Evert – it’s, you know, very long hours.’ He spoke consciously as one of a couple. It was a place, a view, that Evert had never inhabited, but he took some small amusement from the frown.
‘So you don’t see much of her?’
‘It’s not perfect,’ said David, flatly stoical.
Evert left a considerate pause. ‘Still, it’s better than nothing!’ he said. David grunted and looked again at the fire. He perhaps didn’t want to talk about his private life, any more than Evert wanted to hear about it; even so, to hear about it was to move in the magic zone of his confidence, to be privy to his secrets. ‘I wasn’t quite clear the other night what she’s actually doing. She’s . . . well, she’s so bright!’
‘Oh, aye,’ said David, as if that were both a proud fact and a bit of a problem. Was it possible something was wrong, there was some intimate obstacle with which he needed help? He spoke bluntly, as though impatient with Evert for not knowing: ‘Well, you know she’s at Blenheim Palace, she’s working there.’ For a second he had the glare of efficiency, he was the soldier in mufti, the opposite of Evert, the essential civilian; who said,
‘Ah, yes, I see,’ though in fact it was mere rumour to him what was going on at Blenheim. He sensed he’d missed hints before.
‘Along with our friend Mr Green,’ said David.
Evert said, ‘Quite so . . .’ as if discreetly concealing his own knowledge of this confidential matter. He was surprised, and pleased, by that cool ‘Mr Green’. Then he found David was giving him a sly but rather beautiful smile, and he held his gaze for as long as he could, and then looked down in confusion. He wasn’t sure what had happened, but he hoped to take advantage of it.
Evert of course couldn’t judge how David saw their evening going – perhaps just a pint and then a quick walk back to College. He loved sitting close to him, looking at him as much as he liked, laying his hand on his arm now and then to make some amusing point – the smoky drabness of the bar was to him a golden privilege . . . but it was painful too, because it forced a recognition: he was his friend now, but he would never be more. As Evert finished his beer David stood up and said, ‘The same again, then?’ as if in his view the evening was going well – perhaps only just getting started. There was the same small fraction of play-acting, as there was in his being engaged, or at other times in rowing kit. Evert watched him at the bar, the old flannels tight too around his over-developed backside and thighs, and almost worn through under his seat – he was standing a drink but it was obvious he had very little money.
It was only when David sat down again that Evert saw he had something particular on his mind, and thought for a second it might be some gentle but awful rebuke, and that their first time alone together was designed exactly to be their last. ‘Cheers!’ said David again. ‘So you haven’t heard about my bit of trouble?’
‘Oh, no!’ said Evert. ‘Back home, do you mean?’
‘Not that, no – though that’s pretty bad’ – and he seemed ready to talk about the air raids instead, but stopped himself: ‘No, I mean this business in College.’
‘I haven’t heard a thing,’ said Evert, sounding slightly indignant. A number of ideas appeared to him like figures glimpsed in a room before the door is shut. ‘What is it? – if you want to tell me, that is.’ He thought it would be very hard after that for David not to.
David glanced at him with a quick provisional smile and took a swallow of beer before he answered. ‘I’m in trouble with the Censor.’
‘Oh, yes . . . ?’
‘I didn’t know the ropes, you see – I see that now.’
‘Ah,’ said Evert, pretending even to himself he didn’t see what was coming. But then, ‘You mean to do with Connie?’
David pursed his lips and nodded. Was he going to make Evert come out with it for him? ‘I see,’ said Evert, feeling there was still some welcome ambiguity.
‘Yep,’ said David, and drank some more. ‘No, what happened, if you want to know, was that my scout came in first thing two days ago and found us together. And he’s reported me to the Censor. He’s never liked me, since that business with Sangster downstairs – well, you wouldn’t know about that.’
‘The scout hasn’t, you mean . . .’
‘Well, or the Censor.’ It was that baffling idea, for Evert, of anyone not liking Sparsholt, or giving him the widest licence.
‘So what did the Censor say?’ Evert found he was picturing the moment of discovery, the threshold of the blacked-out bedroom where he himself had first met Gordon Pinnock. He was appalled to think David might be about to leave in disgrace, never to be seen again. ‘He can’t send you down for that,’ he said, in solid defiance of the truth.
‘Oh, he’s not sending me down,’ said David. ‘Don’t worry.’
‘Ah good,’ said Evert.
‘No, he says in view of the fact that I’m about to leave anyway, he doesn’t want to mess up my service career.’
‘Well, that’s a relief.’
‘And of course the fact that we’re engaged, which must make a difference.’
‘Yes . . .’
In the pause that followed, while David nodded and then drank and set down his glass, it was as though there were no problem after all. ‘No,’ said David, ‘but he is going to fine me.’
‘Oh, well . . .’ said Evert, and thought he sounded too careless. ‘A lot?’
‘Twenty quid,’ said David.
Evert winced sympathetically. ‘Quite a lot.’ It was exactly what he was going to pay his North Oxford contact for a second little landscape by Stanley Goyle – in another two weeks, when his December allowance from his father came through. ‘Can you manage?’
David flung himself back in his chair, in a gesture of defeat that was also a kind of display. He showed his wounded magnificence, his sweater tight across his chest as he spread his arms and shrugged. And he looked directly at Evert, with the perfect blankness of someone calculating a move. ‘I can’t ask my parents, of course’ – he gave a curt laugh, and now his look at Evert seemed faintly accusing.
‘I can see that might be difficult.’
‘I mean, they’re very strict – you know what parents are.’
‘Yes,’ said Evert kindly. He thought his own father, though he’d complain about it, would be hugely relieved to hear that he’d had a woman in his room. David sighed deeply, and slid further down in his chair, in a strange abandonment of his normal alertness; one leg pressed against Evert’s calf. ‘Will you be able to manage?’
‘I haven’t got it,’ said David, curtly. ‘We’ve got a bit put away, you know, for the wedding. But that’s untouchable.’
‘No, quite,’ said Evert.
‘That has to be untouchable.’
The word seemed to Evert oddly provoking. His eyes played over his friend in a stunned inventory of his merits. It was a reckless, sickening decision, that must be made briskly and completely. ‘Can’t I help you out?’ he said. David stared back at him, with respect, as well as the proper gloom of someone who must decline the offer they have just solicited.
‘I couldn’t accept,’ he said; but there was something else, as he sat up and leant forward, the dull glint of the tactician, to whom winning is everything.
‘I don’t have a lot of money,’ said Evert, ‘but I could probably lend you, you know . . . what you need . . . tomorrow.’
‘Really?’ said David. Now he seemed all anxious solicitude for him. ‘Isn’t it too much? It’s a hell of a lot. Well, that’s grand’ – sticking out a hand, to shake on it, in a way both gracious and inescapably businesslike. Before he let the hand go he jerked Evert forward, flung his other arm round him and hugged him; did he even kiss his ear? – clumsily spontaneous, it was too as if he’d found a moment to do something long planned. Or so Evert was to feel the next day. ‘You’re a real friend.’ And he sat back, manly and capable again, staring at the table as at the barely doubted outcome of a daring act: he seemed to see his rightful future given back to him.
With the third pint they moved away from the fine and the loan, though the question still gaped darkly for Evert. The beer carried them along for the moment. ‘So tell me more about your family,’ said David, a diplomatic new line. And for a minute or two Evert did so, but stumbling and exaggerating out of worry that he wouldn’t find them interesting. David nodded and gave occasional small smiles of recognition. His question was (Evert sensed it already) the inattentive politeness of a man who still wanted mainly to talk about himself, or who had not yet quite learned the art of conversation. Evert said how his sister was living in Tenby with their mother.
‘Is she pretty?’ David wanted to know.
‘Yes, she is,’ said Evert, ‘well, they both are!’ – annoyed by his mechanical interest in Alex instead of himself.
‘Perhaps she’ll come and visit you,’ said David.
‘You can meet her if she does,’ said Evert. ‘If you’re still here.’
‘Ah . . . well!’ said David, and nodded over his pint at the justice of the remark. ‘Anyhow, you’re not bad-looking yourself, you know.’
‘Well . . .’ said Evert, astonished, and grateful, but caught at once in the maze of impossible replies. David’s own beauty was the unspoken context, and of course his incalculable modesty and vanity shaded any such compliment. ‘As I say, my mother’s very pretty,’ he said.
‘There,’ said David, almost reproachfully, and for the first time, miraculously, he blushed.
It was on their brief walk back to College, in the barely penetrable dark, that the new possibility took shape, unseen, between them. That it couldn’t be happening, was only a possibility, gave it a kind of terror to Evert. The walk by the bickering river, that had been stiff and self-conscious on the way out, now was hurried along home on a giddy-making swirl of altered meanings. When David abruptly took his arm Evert stumbled to get into step – ‘Shape up!’ said David, and the unstated promise of the light grip and then squeeze of his elbow against David’s ribs had to struggle with the wild unlikeliness that anything further could happen. The white rings painted round tree trunks marked out their passage to the footbridge. Surely it was a mean and wicked game, to encourage a belief without putting it in words, ready to rebuff it if Evert dared to act on it. But not to dare would leave him with tormenting regret. Their element was the night and the unspoken, in all its queasy ambivalence. When they reached the great gateway and ducked through its small postern Evert’s pulse was bouncing in his ear. Then inside, with the vast unseen courtyard a mere intuition beyond them, he said, ‘I’ve got whisky in my room, if you’re on for another drink.’ There was something in him that hoped David would say no, and restore him to his accustomed state of unbreachable longing; but something else that made him smile in the face of the darkness when he said, ‘Yes, all right,’ and then, ‘Show me the way!’
Evert seemed to retain just a few impressions of what happened in the room. To him it raced with tension, and David himself showed a jocular unease as he hung up his coat and flung himself down in the armchair by the grey fire. Then he sprang forward, poked the embers gently to uncover them before he put on the last two pieces of coal from the box. They both watched the fire as if it were the most important thing in the world. Evert saw that the room, which he disliked, and its precious books and pictures, were not of the slightest interest to David.
He poured out a good inch of whisky, and offered water, which David rejected. There was something quite rough in his reach for reassurance, the stiff fix of alcohol. Evert hovered near the window, smiling like someone alone at a party. After a minute David sat forward to tug off his sweater, and barely looked round as he chucked it on the floor beside his chair. Evert stared at it, talking distractedly as he made his way slowly towards it. He picked it up, while discussing with elaborate pointlessness the essay he was meant to be writing, which itself was as pointless and remote as starlight when he held the warm homemade mass of the sweater, with its smells, soft or sharp, of David’s person against himself and then slowly folded it and set it on the table as if quite unaware he had done so. David’s look, his near-smile, tongue on lip, was mocking and as it lingered almost tenderly questioning. ‘You’re as bad as my Connie,’ he said – and the mention of her seemed to reassure him, and to clarify perhaps his sense of whatever it was he was doing now. He slid forward in his chair, head thrown back, boots straight out across the hearthrug. Evert knew already how David took drink, and noted the way he mugged being drunker than he was. He saw for three seconds David was showing him a thing beyond speech, and looked away and back again in hot-faced excitement. Then David dropped his hand and covered himself loosely, as if Evert were indeed a pervert to peep at a man’s lap. In his other hand, flung out across the arm of the chair, the whisky glass was at an angle, only lightly held. ‘Careful . . .’ said Evert, and David, lifting his head, saw what he meant, and drank a slug of it as if swallowing a pill. Now his sly little smile had faded, the instinctive command of mere gesture became a scowl, as if something faintly unreasonable had been asked of him. ‘Well, we’ll have to have the light out,’ he said.
It was with an incredulous tension, as if carrying some large delicate object, that Evert, with his eyes fixed on David’s, slid back step by step towards the bedroom door. In there too the blackout was up, the dark air, as he pushed the door open, as cold as a pantry. He didn’t dare disobey by flicking the light switch, or feeling for the bedside lamp. He felt he had a look of terrified coquetry as he stood there, and watched David get up, with the sigh of a strong man who’s been called on to help, the nod of almost concealed satisfaction, and come towards him with the whisky bottle in his hand.
In the calm after David had gone he thought lucidly of the Goyle that he’d seen and would perhaps never now own; the strange economics of the thing appeared to him – the loan had been made for love, it was the unexpected surrender of something lifeless but lasting for something impulsive and unrepeatable. His collector’s obsession seemed mere consolation, a sad shadow of his obsession with David, whom he would never own, but had borrowed for an astonishing few hours. For the moment the heat of the memory peopled the chilly room where he lay, with the blankets pulled up, staring into the darkness. He was awake, and alone in a new way, pulsing with hope and triumph and a quite unexpected prospect of despair. The beauty of the thing was that the surrender had been wholly unnecessary for David – he had won the promise of the loan already, on the sheer intuited force of Evert’s feelings for him. He showed a leader’s strength, a sixth sense of what others would do for him. But then to come to his room, to encourage him and submit to him, was pure will and hunger, and a taste for danger – freed from one kind of sexual trouble he entangled himself at once in another. Evert imagined him a few months ahead, as a fighter pilot of idiotic daring and brilliance. And then, as the first sounds of day began, and he waited for his scout to come into the next-door room, open the black curtains, and take out the ashes and the empty glasses, the thought of David on the far side of the world, in the unknowable future of the War, turned him suddenly cold. He got out of bed, put on his dressing gown and went into the sitting room, where old Joe, who was always so tickled and confused by the Anders Zorn woman, big-hipped, heavy-breasted on a Nordic beach, was plumping the cushions in a genteel mime of curiosity and reproach. ‘A bit of a session, sir?’ he said.
Evert’s yawn and stretch as he crossed the room disguised a sudden horror of discovery; he pretended unconcern at whatever Joe was doing. ‘A friend came round for a bit of a . . .’ – for a moment he couldn’t decide . . . ‘I suppose it was a bit of a session,’ he said. He peered out at the dull dawn – no, there was nothing to worry about here, but in the bedroom? For a wild few seconds he saw himself being called up by the Censor, on grim evidence from Joe, and being made to pay a further £20 to get out of trouble. There was the slight noise of the gate being opened down below to the left, and as he half-knelt on the window seat, and looked out, he heard a quick shout and saw the squad of two dozen men in dark running gear swing out at speed on to the Broad Walk and cross in ten seconds into the avenue beyond. The dark path as much as the gleams of the reflected room had swallowed them up. But he had seen David there, in the thick of the other men, in their fast forward rush. He seemed restored to his rightful element – nothing made the chasm between them clearer than this instant unswerving return to the life of the crew, and their charge to the river at first light.
Evert cut his tutorial that morning, and it wasn’t till after ten that he went to the lodge and found the postcard he had shown me, and which he now took back, with a look of slight mistrust. It seemed very likely to me that David would regard the nighttime favour as itself the repayment of the promised loan, but I couldn’t tell if Evert had yet made the calculation of his own folly – a feverish two or three hours in bed at a cost of £20. He said, ‘So we return to the question of the card, Fred, the alpha and omega. Does he mean that I’m the be-all and end-all?’
‘Well, indeed,’ I said. ‘Or does he mean,’ and I was as tactfully objective as possible, ‘that that was not only the first time, but the last time too?’
Evert and I went down to the station to meet his father, and said nothing more about the matter; our talk was bright but empty for the lack of it. And in that evasion I saw something else – that this Sparsholt affair, which had consumed my friend’s life and pressed for a few weeks so oddly on my own, was surely quite unknown to the rest of the world. Evert, I felt certain, had no other confidant, and it was unthinkable that Sparsholt himself would speak of it. It had already assumed its true scale, something fleeting, and entirely personal, too hidden to rate even a footnote in the history of its time. I doubt anyone has spoken a word of it till now. I glanced at Evert as we hurried down past the Castle. ‘Did Dad write to you about the train?’ he asked.
‘Well, I had a note from his secretary.’
‘Oh, yes? I didn’t know he had a secretary. What’s she called?’
‘I can’t remember.’
‘It’s probably just the woman who does his typing: Miss Hatchet?’
‘Perhaps,’ I said, though it didn’t sound quite right.
The train was late, of course, and we sat for ten minutes in the blacked-out waiting room, sharing a discarded copy of the Oxford Times. Unlike Evert I was hungry, but the once friendly chocolate machine had been empty for months. Still, I tugged at the drawer. Then the train was in the station, and we had to jog along beside it towards the first-class carriage, in which Evert had spotted his father sailing past as the engine slowed. I’d caught a glimpse of a severe pale face and of a figure behind him, hovering or reaching up to the rack above his head, a woman in a wide-brimmed hat and a ginger fur. The grinding scream of the brakes lent an edge to my nerves.
I had no idea how Evert would greet his father – in fact they both avoided a greeting, Victor turning as he stepped down to address the woman behind him, with the wide hat, who I saw was a complete surprise to Evert. ‘This is Miss Holt,’ Victor said, ‘my secretary.’ We all shook hands, Miss Holt hanging back and looking after a large briefcase as well as her own handbag and two umbrellas. Victor wore a grey trilby and a red paisley scarf, between which his smooth blue-eyed face looked out blankly. His book jackets bore no photographs, but I had seen his picture in the paper, and imagined a much larger man. Evert stood two inches taller, but no doubt saw him in all the psychological grandeur of a parent; to me the first impression was of a humourless businessman of superior rank, neat, preoccupied, more likely to be a slave than a master of the word.
‘I don’t know what you’d like to do,’ I said, preparing my small menu of amusements.
‘We’ll go straight to the Mitre,’ he said. ‘I need to press on with an article for Sweden.’
Evert looked relieved, and I’m not sure what I felt.
A taxi was an expensive rarity, and I proposed that we go into town by bus. A bus was waiting, nearly full, at the station entrance, and we clambered on, Victor absorbing the indignity by pretending not to be in a bus at all; I paid their fares. Evert sat beside his father, and I squeezed up with Miss Holt and her bags in the seats behind them. Every now and then Victor turned and said loudly, ‘That’s Worcester College, Miss Holt . . . That’s Elliston & Cavell’s . . .’ At another time Evert might have been embarrassed by his father, but today he was barely with us; his yawns were his helpless tribute to the night before. If Victor was conscious of the minor stir he caused on the bus he perhaps put it down to his being known; and there was something unaccountably distinctive about him, it seemed to me, which made anyone who’d glanced at him once do so again. His voice carried, even in Oxford, a city of unstoppably self-confident talkers: it was crisp, autocratic, he had caught to perfection the drawl and snap of the upper classes, but with the charm and oddity of an ‘r’ rolled lightly in the back of the throat. In his mouth such familiar monuments as the Radcliffe Camera and the Clarendon Building emerged in a subtly glamorized light. ‘That’s Christ Church down to the right, Miss Holt, where my son is.’ Evert turned and smiled in confirmation and apology.
Evert, Charlie Farmonger and I went over at five-thirty to collect our guest for dinner; we planned a drink in the bar first. He came in with a small cigar going, and Miss Holt again just behind.
‘There’s one thing I’d ask,’ he said, as he took his glass of gin. ‘Will you be introducing me later on?’
‘I will, sir, yes. I thought—’
‘Keep it brief, if you don’t mind.’
‘I won’t go on long,’ I promised.
‘I gave a talk in Paris last year – chap went on for a good twenty minutes, full of praise, of course, finest writer alive and all that, but it eats into one’s own time.’
‘I’ll have to praise you a bit,’ I said. But this was close to teasing, and Victor showed by his congested frown over his cigar that I wasn’t to try anything in that line. I’d wondered for a second if Victor was teasing himself, but of course he wasn’t mocking his French introducer – he was in strict agreement with him. It appeared Miss Holt agreed with him too, though with a hint of anxiety, as if telling herself to concentrate.
When we sat down at a small round table with our drinks I looked more closely at her. She was about thirty-five, slender but not frail, with hesitant brown eyes, and dark hair pulled back from a face more intelligent than beautiful. ‘Have you been with Mr Dax long?’ I asked. ‘Hardly any time,’ she said, with an uncertain smile. I said it must be fascinating. She thought for a moment before murmuring, rather sweetly, ‘I’m still learning the ropes.’ Her accent was refined, she seemed to say ‘the reps’, and I guessed she was an educated woman making ends meet. I couldn’t help seeing her in that moment as Lorna Monamy in The Heart’s Achievement or Christine Lant in Horseman, What Word?, those obscurely troubled helpmeets to the war-blinded artist and the disillusioned sage. Her delicate fingers trembled slightly, and I noticed when she reached for her glass the soft ridge where a long-worn ring had been removed.
Poor Evert wasn’t really with us. He’d produced his famous father and now sat beside him with an empty beer glass, as if hardly knowing who he was. We shared a few long glances, which made me feel uncomfortably not merely his friend but his accomplice. Victor carried on as if his son weren’t there, and after a while Evert seemed to feel the need to remind him that he was. A silence had fallen over all of us before he said pleasantly, ‘How’s Herta, Father?’
‘Why do you ask?’ said Victor, rather crossly; and Miss Holt too looked uncomfortable. ‘I don’t know if you’ve heard about the German Blitzkrieg presently being waged over the very roof of your family home’ – he looked quickly round at us to enlist us in his sarcasm. Charlie laughed loudly, and Evert said he had heard, that was why he was asking; he was as unsure as the rest of us what he had said wrong. A silence fell, and I changed the subject and nervously asked Victor about the name Dax – was it Dutch? I think I must have known it was his mother’s family who were Dutch. ‘No, it’s an old Shropshire name,’ Victor said, ‘as a matter of fact.’
‘I wonder then if it’s a Norman name,’ I said, ‘that has lost its apostrophe.’ I thought myself it was extraordinary how he elicited this kind of flattery and submission merely by sitting there and staring at us over his drink. He seemed to compute the relative problems and advantages of the Norman idea – he blew up a big cloud of smoke in busy, rather wounded-looking thought before he said, ‘You may well be right,’ superbly making no claim himself to such ancient lineage, and making it sound as if I cared far more about the matter than he did.
Jill came to join us just as we were leaving the hotel. Victor perked up a bit at the sight of another woman, and as our little group trailed back down Alfred Street towards the College, they walked together, in the noncommittal good humour of such brief moments between strangers. Jill held the torch, Miss Holt and I came just behind, with Evert and Charlie in the rear. The night was so clear, after the earlier drizzle, and the moon already so strong that the torch was barely needed. The roofs across the street gleamed steeply, and the reflected moon slid from window to dark window like a searchlight. By now I was measuring the length of dinner, which was all that remained before my speech, but I watched Jill too. Her confidence with Victor had a touching new note of bravery to it – she flattered him, which was what he demanded, and where from a man the flattery, once secured, was treated with disdain, from her he was prepared to take it. ‘I hugely enjoyed The Gift of Hermes,’ I heard her say, and Victor said something about enjoyment being the least he hoped readers would get from it. ‘In my considered opinion,’ she said (and here I regretted that dear bossy tone of hers), ‘it’s the finest thing you’ve done.’
‘Well, it’s a great book,’ said Victor briskly, as if there were no point in either of them pretending otherwise. But he smiled as he turned to her. ‘Though not as good, I hope you’ll think, as the one I’m writing now.’ Like others of our writers he took no interest in his hosts, but with her there was a glint of engagement through the cigar-smoke. I suppose I was jealous.
We came in through the back gate of the College, the achievements of the Boat Club chalked up in the quad all glimmering in the moonlight. Though he was the guest of our Club, Victor dined with the Fellows on High Table: there was just a moment, when Evert left him at the SCR door, when I glimpsed the straightforward affection of father and son, a quick nod, a light pat of Evert’s upper arm as the great man turned away. In Hall he was seated next to the Dean, and I glimpsed him myself now and then between the backs of the nattering dons with a kind of proprietary affection, and a real anxiety, now the thing was unstoppably in motion, about how he would go down with the undergrads. Evert had stuck by me, counting on my understanding, and we wisely sat where we couldn’t see David. Even so, his presence somewhere behind us made the starving Evert turn his meal over incapably and gaze into the dark oak of the table as if it hid untold marvels, or miseries.
It was when we came down from Hall into the moonlit Tom Quad that we started to hear the noise. We were pulled up short as the crowd of undergraduates pressed behind us and around us. The sound was of a weight and penetration and strange gusted density we hadn’t heard before, outside London: the sickening irregular drone of the Heinkel 111. In a quick flick of the flashlight I saw Evert and his father, side by side, stock-still and staring up at the nearly invisible spectacle. Victor’s head was back, his mouth open, so that even he, with his famous indifference to the Blitz, appeared for a second like a figure witless with fear. On and on it went – no one could count, but there might have been fifty, a hundred, two hundred enemy aircraft, Heinkels and Dorniers, passing high overhead towards the north. I felt a hand grip my elbow and sensed more than saw that it was David. I did my best to stand steady, a little anchor for him, as he swung round on the flood of the crowd, and with his other hand seized on Evert. I had the impression we both held him up, as he stood gaping at the thing he had dreaded above all.
Sparsholt’s home was destroyed that night, though it was two days before he knew for sure what had happened. Hearing the siren, his parents had gone out as always to the air-raid shelter at the bottom of the garden; the noise of explosions was already loud when they found that the cat wasn’t with them. Frank Sparsholt ran back to the house for it, and died there together with the cat while his wife sat trembling underground thirty yards away, terrified by the noise and by what she had allowed to happen.
My affairs at Woodstock took more and more of my time in what was left of that Michaelmas term. I saw Connie Forshaw now and then on our special bus, but surrounded by a group of other girls – I raised my hat to her and smiled, and once only she gave me a nod. Had she somehow found out what had happened while she was away? If so, was her coolness towards me a sign that she thought me to blame? At the Palace she worked among the labyrinth of filing cabinets in Vanbrugh’s library, while I had my desk in a Nissen hut out on the freezing forecourt; so we were kept apart. But two small incidents connected with her fiancé remain.
I gave Peter’s drawing of Sparsholt’s torso to Evert. He was the person likely to value it most, and I felt uneasy keeping it in my bedroom closet. It wasn’t beyond that old investigator Phil to find it, and fiddle it out of its tube, and leapfrog his way to all kinds of conclusions – I imagined already the strained courtesy of our subsequent dealings. It was a relief to pass it to Evert one evening, and a teasing, curious pleasure to see how he took it. As he unrolled it in my room and turned it to catch the light from the fire, I edged my question into his distracted attention. The red chalks and the fire-glow made the drawn image lively and a little satanic. ‘I suppose it was omega?’ I said. He didn’t answer at first. ‘Well, I had to see him to give him the cheque.’ ‘Oh, yes, of course you did.’ ‘Thanks for the drawing, though.’ ‘No – I’m glad you’ve got it’ – we both considered it for a minute. ‘And have you, you know,’ I said, ‘seen him since . . . ?’ ‘Mm, what’s that . . . ?’ Evert murmured – red-faced himself as he hung over the drawing. I found that I couldn’t repeat the question; and saw that he knew I couldn’t.
Then in eighth week, with its more than usual flurry of packing and departure, I saw David Sparsholt in person for what proved to be the last time. I had been down to Magdalen to visit a friend who himself was leaving prematurely for the Army, and I went on from there, in a melancholy mood, to the Bodleian Library. I was on the first broad stretch of the High Street, with the glowing windows of Schools across the way looking almost friendly in the bitter December morning. An enormous convoy was approaching from behind, over Magdalen Bridge, and as the first lorry drew level with me I became aware of a figure running in the opposite direction on the far side of the street. He was in white shorts and a singlet, as if about to leap into a boat, and his breath made vanishing white plumes round his head. His powerful thighs were pink from the cold, but he seemed almost madly unaware of the weather, and loped forward with who knew what mixture of pride and indifference. A figure so unstoppable was alarming as well as splendid. I slowed as I walked but didn’t wave to him – he was in his own world, and besides it was too late. It was in two successive gaps that I saw him, as the convoy passed, like a man in a Muybridge photo, in exemplary motion: first here, then there, then no longer there, as if swallowed up by his own momentum.
*
This narrative, written for, but never read to, the Cranley Gardens Memoir Club, was found among Freddie Green’s papers after his death.