The Stranger's Child Part 30

'Mmm.' Robin looked at him keenly. 'So you knew Corinna, did you?'

'Oh, very much so,' said Paul, noting as if from the corner of his eye how indulgently he thought of her now that she wasn't there to expose him and put him down; she'd become a useful element in his own plans. 'That was how I met Daphne, you see. I worked under Leslie Keeping for several years.'

'Oh, you were in the bank,' said Robin, 'I see,' and squared his lighter and cigarette-packet on the table, as if making some subtle calculation. 'I wonder if you were there when Leslie died?'

'No, I'd already left.'

'Right, right.'

'But I heard all about it, of course.' It was the most grimly sensational piece of news that Paul had had anything to do with, and he felt, for all its horror, a keen attachment to it.

'All that hit Daphne very hard, of course.'

'Well, of course . . .' Paul waited respectfully. 'I first met them all in 1967,' he said, 'though I'm not sure Daphne remembered that when I saw her again.'

'Her memory is certainly somewhat . . . um . . . tactical,' said Robin.

Paul giggled, 'Yes, I see . . . but I wondered, she's not living by herself, is she?'

'No, no her son Wilfrid, from her first marriage do you know? is living with her.'

'I do know Wilfrid,' said Paul, and instantly pictured his strange determined amorous dance in the Corn Hall at Foxleigh, the first and last time he'd met him. He couldn't see him being a very practical nurse or housekeeper. 'And what about her son by her second marriage?' Robin shook his head rapidly, a sort of shudder. 'Okay . . . !' Paul laughed. 'And the Keeping boys, they don't see her?'

'Oh, John's far too busy,' said Robin, firmly but perhaps ironically. 'And you know Julian has become a drop-out . . .' with an air of marvelling hearsay, like a magistrate. 'Of course before long, Wilfrid will inherit the t.i.tle.'

'Yes, of course . . .'

'He'll be the fourth baronet.' They looked ponderingly at each other, then laughed in minor embarra.s.sment as if at some misunderstanding. Paul felt there was a certain s.e.xual undertone to the chat, even to the way they'd quickly got off on this topic amid the business of the office.

'To be absolutely frank ' said Robin, and here he did reach for his cigarettes, and kept Paul waiting uneasily while he lit one and inhaled and fixed him again with a blue gaze over the top of his spectacles, 'I think Daphne was rather put out by your review of her book in the New Statesman.' He sounded a bit stern about it himself. 'She felt you'd rather gone for her.'

'Oh, no!' said Paul, with a guilty face, though a p.r.i.c.kle of pride at his own sharpness very slightly offset the lurching feeling he'd been tactless and clumsy. 'The piece was heavily cut, I did tell her that.'

'I'm sure.'

'They took out a lot of the nice things I said.' He pictured her in the taxi to Paddington, and heard her saying how some reviewers had been horrid. To pretend she hadn't seen his review seemed now to be dignified good manners of a crus.h.i.+ngly high order. She had managed to reproach him and excuse him all at the same time. 'It was supposed to be a bit of a fan letter.'

'I'm not sure it read like that,' said Robin. 'Though you were by no means the worst.'

'I certainly wasn't.' ('Unhappy fantasies of a rejected wife' had been Derek Messenger's verdict in the Sunday Times.) Robin sipped at his coffee and drew on his cigarette, as if measuring regrets and pondering possibilities. He was indefinably in his element, and Paul sensed it was a stroke of luck to have met him, and if he could get him on his side he might get Daphne too. 'I must say, I enjoyed the book,' Robin said, with a further head-shake of frankness.

'No, I enjoyed it too. There were things I wanted to know more about, of course . . .' Paul gave him an almost sly smile, but asked something harmless first: 'I'm not clear really who Basil Jacobs was.'

'Oh, Basil' Robin sounded impatient himself with this tame question. 'Well, Basil was certainly the nicest of her husbands, though in a way as . . . as hopeless as the others.'

'Oh, dear! Was Revel Ralph hopeless too?'

Robin pulled on his cigarette as if to steady himself. He said, 'Revel was completely impossible.'

Paul grinned 'Really? You can't have known him, surely.'

'Well . . .' Robin toyed with this flattery; 'I was born in 1919, so you can work it out.'

'Mm, I see!' said Paul, which he didn't altogether was Robin claiming to have tangled with Revel himself? Revel was only forty-one when he was killed, so doubtless still pretty active, as it were, and Robin he could see just about as a naughty young soldier it was too much to ask about.

'Oh, G.o.d yes,' said Robin, suddenly disgusted by his cigarette, stubbing it out and folding it under his thumb in the ashtray. 'Basil wasn't hopeless like that, he was much more conventional. I imagine Daphne felt she'd had enough of temperamental artists.'

'What did he do?'

'He was a businessman he had a small factory that made something, I can't remember what, a sort of . . . washer or something.'

'Right.'

'Anyway, he went bust. He had a daughter from an earlier marriage, and they went to live with her. I think it was all rather a nightmare.'

'Oh, yes, Sue.'

'Sue, exactly . . .' said Robin, with a cautious smile. 'You seem to know most of the family.'

'Well . . .' said Paul. 'They're not actually all that useful when it comes to Cecil. But it's good to know they're on my side.' He found he had stood up, smiling, as if to go, and only then said, with a pitying shake of the head, 'I mean, what do you think really went on between Daphne and Cecil?'

Robin laughed drily, as if to say there were limits. Paul knew already that information was a form of property people who had it liked to protect it, and enhance its value by hints and withholdings. Then, perhaps, they could move on to enjoying the glow of self-esteem and surrender in telling what they knew. 'Well,' he said, and went slightly pink, under the pressure of his own discretion.

'I mean, would you like to have a drink some time? I don't want to bother you now.' Paul thought a discreet encounter, something with almost the colour of a date, might appeal to Robin. He saw, because it was a habit he had himself, elsewhere, how his eyes paused a fraction of a second in each upward or sideways sweep at the convergence of his black-jeaned legs. But Robin hesitated, as if to grope round some other obstacle.

'You see, I don't drink during Lent,' he said. 'But after that . . .' with a suggestion he drank like a fish through the rest of the liturgical year. 'Ah, Jake . . .' and there was Jake again, standing behind them, with the twinkle of someone detecting a secret.

'I hope I'm not breaking something up.'

'Not a bit,' said Robin suavely.

'I'll give you a ring if I may,' said Paul, ' after Easter!'

Jake led Paul back to have his books entered in the system, an unfollowable procedure of typed slips and cards. 'I've just had a word with the Editor,' he said. 'We wondered if you'd be interested in covering this for us?' He pa.s.sed him a sheet of paper 'Ignore that stuff at the top': two other names with question-marks and phone-numbers, heavily inked over during phone-calls surely, which as surely had not borne fruit. 'You'd have to stay overnight it would just be seven hundred words for the Commentary pages.' It was hard to take in, Balliol College, Oxford, a conference, dinner, the Warton Professor of English . . . a s.h.i.+ver of panic went through him, which he turned into a breathy laugh.

'Well, if you think I'd be right for it.'

'You're not a Balliol man, are you?'

'Ooh, no!' said Paul with a little shudder. 'Not I. Well, thank you ah, I see, Dudley Valance is speaking.'

'That's partly what made me wonder I didn't know he was still alive.'

'Not in good health, I'm afraid,' said Paul.

'You must know him . . .'

'A bit, you know . . . He and Linette live in Spain for most of the year.' He felt the p.r.i.c.kle of the uncanny again, the secret sign, the rea.s.serted intention that he should write his book. There were times in one's life that one only knew as one pa.s.sed through them, the decisive moments, when one saw that the decisions had been taken for one.

Jake walked him to the door of the office and they stood talking there a little longer, but had to move aside for a big fat boy in jeans and a T-s.h.i.+rt pus.h.i.+ng a trolley stacked high with tightly bound bales of newsprint; he threw one down with a pleasant thump on to the floor. 'Read all about it!' he said, and watched with a curious cynical smile as they reacted.

'Ah, yes . . . now . . .' said Jake, showing off, but charmingly, to entertain his guest. One or two others got up and circled, looking for scissors, a sharp knife, and ignoring the delivery boy, who wheeled back into the corridor, still smiling thinly. In a moment the plastic tape was snipped, and the top copy plucked up and turned and presented to Paul with a casual flourish: 'For you!' the new TLS Friday's TLS, ready two days early, 'hot off the press' someone said, enjoying his reactions, though in fact the paper was cool to the touch, even slightly damp. There was a cursory checking, in which Paul politely shared that pictures had come out, that a last-minute correction had been made while an enviable sense of professional satisfaction seemed to fill the air and then (since this momentous occurrence was a weekly routine) to fade almost at once as people went back to their desks and focused again on issues weeks and months ahead. Paul said goodbye to Jake, and went away with the clear idea of more such meetings already in his mind.

On the way along the dreary corridor he turned off into the Gents and had only just unzipped when he heard the yawn of the door behind him and a second later a half-pleased, half-embarra.s.sed 'Aha . . . !' He glanced round. Slightly disconcertingly, Robin Gray didn't follow the normal etiquette but came to the urinal right next to Paul's, leaving three further stalls untenanted. There was a droll murmur and frowning fidget as he got himself going, a certain st.u.r.diness of stance, as if on a rolling s.h.i.+p, and a quick candid gaze, friendly but businesslike, at Paul's own progress on the other side of the porcelain part.i.tion. Then looking ahead, he said, 'You were quite right, by the way, in what you said earlier.'

'Oh . . . really?' said Paul, glancing at him, a little confused. 'What was that?'

'About Cecil Valance and boys.'

Now it was Paul's turn to say, 'Aha! . . . Well, I thought it must be.'

Robin tucked in his chin, with his air of heavily flagged discretion. 'Not for now, I think.' He gave a cough of a laugh. 'But I believe you'll find it amusing. Well, I'll tell you all about it when we meet.' And with that plump promise he zipped himself up and went back to the office.

Paul sauntered down the broad stairs and into the lobby of the Times building with a smile on his face. He had A Funny Kind of Friends.h.i.+p in his briefcase and a feeling of something much funnier the first sense of a welcome from the literary family, of curtains held back, doors opening into half-seen rooms full of oddities and treasures that seemed virtually normal to the people who lived in them. In the long lobby, belatedly gleaming with afternoon light, low tables between leather armchairs were spread with copies of today's Times, and Sun, and the three Times supplements, thrilling evidence of what went on upstairs. He nodded goodbye as he pa.s.sed the uniformed receptionist. The revolving door from the street brought in a courier in helmet and whistling leggings, red URGENT stickers on the packet in his hand; Paul stepped into the still-revolving quadrant and emerged on to the pavement with a graciously busy half-smile at the pa.s.sers-by who would never have access to these mysteries. He kept his copy of the day-after-tomorrow's TLS under his arm, which he wanted very much to be seen with. He didn't think the people in the street here were getting the point of it but back in the North Reading-Room of the British Library he felt it might stir a good deal of envy and conjecture.

6.

Paul trotted down the long stone staircase and out into the quad with a preoccupied frown and a curious feeling of imposture. Though old enough to be a don, he was visited in waves by the nervous ignorance of a freshman. He skirted the lawn respectfully, beneath ranged Gothic windows, clutching his briefcase and picturing the evening to come, with its sequence of challenges, drinks in the Senior Common Room, dinner in Hall, social contacts and collisions all the more daunting for the tacit codes that college life was steeped in. But at some point, he was almost sure, tonight or perhaps tomorrow, he would get his chance. Of course it was still possible the old boy wouldn't turn up; at the age of eighty-four he had excuses readily to hand. With excited foreboding Paul pictured his dark autocratic face, as he knew it from photographs, and when he went up the three steps into the gatehouse there he was under the arch, by the porter's lodge, in a dark overcoat, leaning on a stick.

Paul nearly greeted him, gasped and suppressed a smile as he went past; his heart was racing at the sudden opportunity he turned and then stood near him, at an angle, as though waiting for someone else. Awful of course if it wasn't him; but no, the wide, hawkish face was unmistakable, stretched rather than furrowed by age, the full mouth a little thinner and down-turned, impressive dark eyes staring ahead, grey hair sleeked back into curls around the collar. Paul stepped aside to look at the gla.s.sed-in notice-boards, over which his own slightly smirking face floated in reflection. The old man remained immobile, only poking now and then at the flagstones with the rubber tip of his stick. He was evidently someone for whom arrangements had always been made. Paul cleared his throat and paced around, choosing his words. Through the inner window of the lodge, before the dark wall of pigeon-holes, he could see a woman talking to the porter. Surely, Linette with thick stiff hair, an improbable auburn, mingling with the upturned collar of her fox-fur jacket. A hard, good-looking face, thoroughly made up, and a manner he knew at once, from its tight smiles and frowns, of getting people to do things. The porter made a brief phone-call, and then came out, opening the door for her, and bringing her suitcase. 'Good evening, Sir Dudley! The Master's coming down himself to meet you' a flourish in which Paul heard a doubling-up of respect, of everyday loyalty to the Master and deference to the visitor. Linette had now made an approach impossible, and Paul went to look for his imaginary friend by the gate on to Broad Street. He could hear the tone but not quite the words of the muttered conversation between the Valances. In front of him, students cycling past, university life rattling on although it was the vacation. In a minute there were calls and wheezy laughs behind him, and as Paul turned round he saw a tiny grey-haired man in a gown come whirling up the steps from the quad and greet his guests not exactly as old friends but on the footing of some clear shared understanding, which seemed to smile out of his keen, rather spiritual face. Sir Dudley said, 'You needn't have come down yourself,' in a voice of chuffing, almost supercilious grandeur, and his wife said, 'Good evening, Master!' which for all its submissiveness showed she had got what she wanted.

Off they went, the Master offering Sir Dudley an arm on the steps. 'What year did you go down?' he said, and Paul heard, 'Nineteen fourteen, you see . . . I never took my degree . . . I got married . . .' Lady Valance laughed for the Master, as though to show how little this lack of a degree had mattered, and perhaps to indulge the mention of this earlier marriage. Well, they must have been together for fifty years themselves, after the mere nine or ten with Daphne, whom Paul thought of now more fondly. What a contrast he pictured her in her shabby mac and hat, in the place of this highly preserved woman, who still moved with the dawdling strut of a model. Paul watched them from the steps. Now two muscular boys in white rowing shorts burst out from a doorway, and slowed and ran on the spot to let the Master and his guests go by; then they were off, coming up past Paul in a rush and out through the gate into the street. For once it was the old man who held his interest, and seemed in fact almost miraculous, from the lordly jabs of his stick to the yap of his vowels. As they went off through an arch on the far side of the quad, Dudley still visibly a casualty of the Battle of Loos, other less palpable things seemed to hover about him, which were famous phrases of his brother, in Georgian Poetry, or the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations. Paul felt, in some idiotic but undeniable way, that he had very nearly seen Cecil himself.

He went on, as planned, along Broad Street, to look at the bookshops. The rowing boys had already vanished into the thickening light of the late afternoon the sun in the west struck right along the street, and dazzled the people who were coming towards him, leaving him, a mere looming silhouette, free to examine them closely. As he loitered around the biography table in Blackwell's, picking up the expensive new books and looking at their indexes and acknowledgements, he had Dudley's hunched but handsome figure on his mind, and was starting to hear answers to his questions in that extraordinary voice. Paul thought he would like his own acknowledgements page to begin with thanks to his subject's brother, ideally perhaps by that stage 'the late Sir Dudley Valance', who 'gave so generously of his time' and 'made his archives available without questions or conditions'. The author of this new life of Percy Slater had even been 'welcomed warmly into the family home' something Paul now sensed was less likely to happen in his case.

He had always opened such books at the grey-black seams that marked the inserts of pictures. His daydreams for his own book often dwelt on this last, almost decorative addition to the work the quickly pa.s.sed-over photos of unappealing forebears, the birthplace or childhood residence, the subject sharpening into focus in his teens, the momentarily confusing captions lower right, opposite, over , one or two of the pictures thought worthy of a full page, the defining portraits. Would Dudley ever make such things available to him? Paul felt some kind of subterfuge might be necessary. Percy Slater had lived into his seventies so there was all the proliferation of wives and children, snapshots from Kenya and j.a.pan, a late picture in doctoral robes of this very university, chatting to Harold Macmillan, the Chancellor. None of that for Cecil, of course, just a photograph of his tomb, perhaps.

And there, at the end of the table, in a sober brown jacket with the t.i.tle in red and yellow, was The Letters of Evelyn Waugh, a book with an aura, it seemed to Paul, and fat with confidence of its own interest he looked at something else first, just to savour and focus his antic.i.p.ation, and then after a minute casually picked up the heavy volume and hopped backwards through the index in his now systematic way Valance, then Sawle, then Ralph. Two mentions of Dudley, one of Cecil, which turned out to be in the footnote identifying Dudley as 'younger brother of the First World War poet'. He coveted it, but the price, 15, a week's rent hardly possible. A familiar but still extraordinary calm came over him. He made his way into the History department, chose a huge book on medieval England, itself part of a ma.s.sively scholarly series, pale blue wrappers, Clarendon Press, price 40, and a minute later took it off upstairs. In his bag he had a compliments slip from Jake at the TLS, with his name on and the scribbled message, '800 words by end of March', and he tucked it into the front of the book as he went. Stopping at a mezzanine where Cla.s.sics were displayed, he got out his notebook to write down a t.i.tle, and squatting down to a low shelf behind a table he pencilled three or four page numbers and a question-mark on the fly-leaf of his volume of Plantagenet history. From here it was a further turn of the stairs up to the secondhand department, where he asked the bearded young man if they bought review copies in good condition. The Plantagenets were given a quick glance, the review-slip almost subliminally noted, the book checked for any devaluing marginalia. 'We can only offer half-price,' said the man. 'Oh, really?' said Paul, chewing his cheek 'well, okay, fine, I guess, if that's your standard practice. Sorry . . . let me just take that review-slip . . .' The item was written in a ledger, the book itself translated to a trolley of new acquisitions, and two clean 10 notes handed over. A few minutes later he strolled back into college with The Letters of Evelyn Waugh in his briefcase and a happy surplus of 5 in his back pocket.

The room he'd been given, at the top of a long stone staircase, had the name Greg Hudson on the door, and though the sheets and towel were fresh he felt like an unwanted guest among all the books, records and clothes that Greg had left behind over the vac. There were muddy plimsolls under the bed, a Blondie poster above the desk. In a sweet-smelling cupboard full of jam and coffee he found a bottle of malt whisky, half-full, and poured a finger of it into a tumbler. He stood sipping at it, with one foot on the hearthstone. There was a poem by Stephen Spender that began, very oddly, 'Marston, dropping it in the grate, broke his pipe.' It had come into his mind the moment he'd unlocked the door, amid the uneasy displeasure, and covert excitement, of finding the room was full of someone else's things. The line about Marston was part of his illusion of Oxford, a glimpse of pipe-smoking students known by their surnames; and though he'd forgotten what happened in the rest of the poem, he saw Marston dropping his pipe on the stone hearth just here, as easily as he could let slip this gla.s.s of treasured Glenfiddich.

He read the postcards from Paris and Sydney propped on the mantelpiece, both signed Jacqui with a lot of crosses, and took down the mounted photo of the college's Second XV, which had the names written underneath in a crazily ornate script. So that was Greg, the grinning giant standing off-centre, his mid-parts hidden by the s.h.a.ggy round head of the man seated in front of him. How his great sweaty body must labour in this schoolboy-size bed and when Jacqui came round, what a terrible squash it must be for them. He pulled open the top drawer of the desk, but it was so jammed with papers that he couldn't face going through it just yet. Otherwise, there was nothing much to read except chemistry books. For some reason, he left his new purchase, if that's what it was, untouched.

He decided that before going down to dinner in half an hour he would look again at Dudley's Black Flowers, to have something to quote, or to ask, if he got a chance over drinks. 'I was wondering, Sir Dudley, when you said . . .' Since he knew Corley Court, it seemed a sound starting-point. He peered at the author photo with fresh interest, and a suspicion that Dudley looked almost younger now the style of the 1950s man of letters seemed deliberately ageing. He sat selfconsciously under the bright ceiling-lamp, with his gla.s.s of whisky. A red tartan rug thrown over the armchair disguised the probing state of the springs, deranged presumably by the recurrent impact of Greg. About the changes at Corley, Dudley had written: My father had been laid low and effectively silenced by a stroke a year after the War ended; he lived on until 1925, the patient prisoner of a bath chair, his essential geniality apparently undimmed. When he spoke it was in a cheerful language of his own, and with no awareness that the sounds issuing from his mouth were nonsense to his listeners. One saw from his expression that what he was saying was generally fond and amusing. And he appeared to follow our conversation with perfect clarity. It took a great deal of patience in us, and then a certain amount of kindly pretence, to keep up any sustained talk with him. His own demeanour, however, suggested that he drew great satisfaction from these agonizing encounters.

Of course all work on The Incidence of Red Calves Among Black Angus, meant as his major contribution to agricultural science, was suspended for ever. My mother very capably extended her control of domestic life at Corley to that of a large estate; my own efforts to a.s.sist her were, if not rebuffed, then treated as impractical and rather tiresome. It was suggested (fancifully, it seemed to me) that my brother Cecil had known all about farming, both 'horn and corn' as my mother liked to put it, but that I had never shown any apt.i.tude for the matter. The fact that in due course I must surely take over the running of Corley weighed oddly little with her. I was myself, it is true, a mutile de guerre, subject to various cautions and exemptions; but idleness did not sit easily with me. Perhaps the silencing of the other writers in our family, the poet and the agronomist, opened a door to the younger son. A psychologist of family life might find some such pattern of subconscious motivations and opportunities. At any rate I looked again at sketches I had published long before in the Cherwell and the Isis, and found myself pleased by their youthful sarcasm. The habit, so familiar to many of us after the War, of thinking of our earlier selves as foreign beings, Arcadian innocents, proved refres.h.i.+ngly a merely partial truth.

I wrote The Long Gallery at great speed, in a little under three months, in a mood of irritable tension and ferocious high spirits. I have already said something of its reception, and of the changes, some amusing and many tedious, that the success of that little book brought to our lives. But thereafter the more serious work I knew it in me to do refused to come. I felt as if there was much that I needed to clear away; and on this too no doubt our psychologist would have something to report. Some such need, I think, lay behind my strong desire, once my father had died, to clear out Corley itself. A deepening distaste for all Victoriana became a kind of mission for me, who had inherited by default a large Victorian house of exorbitant ugliness and inconvenience. Sometimes, it is true, I wondered if in later years its ugliness might recommend itself as a quaint kind of charm to generations yet unborn. In few places did I sanction the complete demolition of the heavy and garish decorative schemes of my grandfather the ornate ceilings, the sombre panelling, the childish and clumsy outcrops of stone-carving and mosaic but with the help of an interior designer of a thoroughly modern kind I saw to it that they were all 'boxed in'. Waterhouse, whose dismal Gothic buildings had despoiled my own College, was sometimes credited with the design, which in its ability to inflict pain on the eye was certainly up to his best standard. It is quite possible my grandfather consulted him. But the drawings surviving at Corley were all from the hand of a Mr Money, a local pract.i.tioner known otherwise only for the draughty Town Hall at Newbury (a building whose discomforts my brother and I knew well from our annual visits as children to observe our father presenting trophies to local livestock breeders). At Corley, of course, certain things were sacrosanct the chapel in the best Middle Pointed that money (or Money) could provide, and where my brother was laid to rest under a great quant.i.ty of Carrara marble. That could never be touched. And the library I left, at my mother's stern request, in its original state of caliginous gloom. But in all the other princ.i.p.al rooms, a modern brightness and simplicity effectively overlaid the ingenious horrors of an earlier age.

Paul had finished his drink, and felt a small top-up would be undetectable, and if detected untraceable. He went back to the cupboard with righteous impatience. Was this building, this spartan attic room, part of Waterhouse's work, he wondered? He peered at the stone-framed window, the notched and stained oak sill, the boarded-up fireplace, which perhaps had a general kins.h.i.+p with those at Corley Court. Peter's room there had had a fireplace just the same, grey stone, with a wide flat pointed arch . . . He remembered the time he had made him examine a hole in the ceiling, in a state of high excitement. Really such things meant nothing to him but Peter would certainly have known. He had been at Exeter College but had he had friends across the road here in Balliol? Paul saw him entirely at home in the university, as if they had been destined for each other. He went out to the lavatory, in a queer little angled turret, and when he looked down from the window into the gloomy quad he saw a dark-haired figure moving swiftly through the shadows and into the lit doorway of a staircase who might almost have been Peter, before he knew him, fifteen years ago, calling on a friend, some earlier lover that was what his unselfconscious evenings had been like.

By the time he set off for drinks, Paul already felt cautiously cheerful. In the large lamp-lit Common Room, a surprisingly sleek modern building, he rather got stuck with a secretary from the English faculty office, a nice young woman who'd been responsible for much of the conference arrangements. A mutual shyness tethered them in their corner, beside the table on which all the papers were laid out, including the TLS. 'Well, there you are!' said Ruth, his friend, blus.h.i.+ng with satisfaction, so that Paul formed the wary idea she had taken a s.h.i.+ne to him. The room itself, full of confident noise, brisk introductions, loud reunions, was a breathtaking plunge for him. He realized the man standing near him was Professor Stallworthy, whose life of Wilfred Owen had fought rather shy of Owen's feelings for other men. Paul suddenly felt shy of them too. Beyond him was a white-haired man in military uniform of some splendour General Colthorpe, Ruth said, who was going to speak about Wavell. She confirmed that the broad-faced, genially pugnacious-looking man talking to the Master was Paul Fussell, whose book on the Great War had moved and enlightened Paul more than anything he'd read on the subject though sadly, like Evelyn Waugh's Letters, it had only mentioned Cecil in a footnote ('a less neurotic and less talented epigone of Brooke'). Paul looked around admiringly and restlessly, his tiny empty sherry gla.s.s cupped behind his hand, waiting for the Valances to come in. 'Were you at Oxford?' said Ruth.

'No, I wasn't,' Paul said, with an almost bashful smile, as though to say he understood and forgave her error.

He was introduced to a young English don, and chatted to him in a keen but rather circular way about Cecil, the long sleeves of the don's gown brus.h.i.+ng over Paul's hands as he moved and turned. Paul couldn't always follow what he meant; he found himself in the role of lowly sapper while Martin (was he called?) talked in larger strategic terms, with a pervasive air of irony 'Well, quite!' Paul found himself saying, two or three times. He felt he was boring him, and he himself was soon achingly tense and distracted by the presence of the Valances in the room, and merely nodded genially when Martin moved off. Dudley's voice, both clipped and drawling, the historic vowels perhaps further pickled and preserved by thirty years' exile in sherry country, could be heard now and then through the general yammer. He was easy to lose, among the taller younger figures milling round him, the swoop of gowns, the odd barbaric intensity of people connecting. Linette's sparkly green evening jacket was a help in tracking their gradual movement through the crowd. Then for a minute they were alongside, Linette with her back to Paul, Dudley in stooped profile, and again with a look of short-winded good-humour as he tried to follow what a young Indian man was saying to him, in fas.h.i.+onably theoretical terms, about life in the trenches.

'Yes, I don't know,' said Dudley, maintaining a precarious balance between mild modesty and his fairly clear belief that the Indian was talking rot. He smiled at him widely in a way that showed Paul the conversation was over, but which the Indian scholar took as a cue for a further convoluted question: 'But would you agree, sir, that, in a very real sense, the experience of most writers about war is predicated on the idea that-'

'Darling, you mustn't tire yourself!' said Linette sharply, so that the Indian, mortified, apologized and backed away from her flicker of a smile. Well, it was a little lesson for Paul in how not to proceed with them. In the moment of uncomfortable silence that followed he perhaps had his chance: he raised his chin to speak, but a weird paralysis left him murmuring and blinking, looking almost as apologetic as the retreating questioner. He could have asked Ruth to introduce him, but he didn't want Linette in particular to learn his name at this early stage whether Dudley himself had ever seen his letters he doubted. Stiff-necked, Dudley seemed rarely to turn his head, and a call from his other side made him swivel his whole body away, with a well-practised lurch of his weight on to his stick. Paul was left with a sense of astonished near-contact, of greatness, it almost seemed, within arm's reach.

At dinner it turned out he'd been placed next to Ruth again, and when he said, 'Oh that's nice!' he half-meant it, and half felt a kind of emasculation. The seating was on long benches, and they all remained standing, one or two bestriding the bench as they talked, until everyone was in. Dudley stumped past in a swaying line that was heading for the High Table, and proper chairs. Now the Master made a more official welcome to the conference, and said a long scurrying Latin grace, as if apologetically reminding them of something they knew far better than he did.

Paul was drunk enough to introduce himself to the very unattractive little man on his other side (there were far more men than women), but he soon found his shoulder turned against him, and for an awkward ten minutes he strained the patience of the two men opposite who were involved in complex discussion of faculty affairs into which there was no real point in trying to induct Paul, whose TLS credentials started to wear thin. He leant towards them with a smile of forced interest to which they were rudely immune. 'I'm writing up the conference for the TLS' Paul felt he'd said this too often 'though also, as it happens, I'm working on a biography of Cecil Valance.'

'Did he ever finish his work on the Cathars?' said the man on the right.

'Not as far as we know,' said Paul, absorbing the horror of the question with some aplomb, he felt. Was the man thinking of someone else? Cecil's work at Cambridge had been on the Indian Mutiny, for some reason. Was that anything to do with the Cathars? Who were the Cathars, in the first place?

'Or have I got that wrong?'

'Well . . .' Paul paused. 'His research which he never finished, by the way was on General Havelock.'

'Oh, well, not the Cathars at all,' said the man, though with a critical look at Paul, as though the mistake had somehow been his.

The other man, who was a little bit nicer, said, 'I was just speaking to Dudley Valance, whom you must know, obviously, before dinner he was up with Aldous Huxley and Macmillan, of course. Never took his degree.'

'Well, nor did Macmillan, come to that,' said the first man.

'Didn't stop him becoming Chancellor,' said Paul.

'That's right,' said the nicer man, and laughed cautiously.

'That was all b.l.o.o.d.y Trevor-Roper's doing,' said the first man, with a bitter look, so that Paul saw he had ambled well-meaningly into some other academic minefield.

The meal unrolled in a further fuddle of wines, time was speeding past unnoticed and unmourned, he knew he was drinking too much, the fear of his own clumsiness mixing with a peculiar new sense of competence. He made it pretty clear to Ruth that he wasn't interested in girls, but this only seemed to put them on to a more confusingly intimate footing. The Master clapped his hands and said a few words, and then everyone stood while the High Table filed out, the rest of them being invited to use a room whose name Paul didn't catch for coffee and further refreshments. So perhaps tonight he wouldn't get a shot at Dudley after all. But then outside in the quad, as cigarettes were lit and new groups formed and drifted off, Ruth kept him back, and then said, 'Why don't you slip into Common Room with me?'

'Well, if you think that would be all right . . .'

'I don't want you to miss anything,' she said.

So back they went, Paul now rather shy at getting what he wanted. At a first quick survey, over his coffee cup, he saw that Linette had been separated from her husband, and was standing talking to a group of men, one almost her own age, a couple of them younger than Paul. He attached himself to another small group round Jon Stallworthy, from which he could watch while nodding appreciatively at the conversation. Dudley was sitting on a long sofa at the other side of the room, with various Fellows and a good-looking younger woman who seemed to be flirting with him. His magnetism was physical, even in old age, and to certain minds no doubt cla.s.s would come into it. Without him Linette seemed disoriented, an Englishwoman in her seventies, who lived much of the year abroad. She exacted some gallantry from the men, which went on in nervous swoops and laughs, small faltering sequences of jokes, perhaps to cover their own slight boredom and disorientation with her. And then, in a strange nerveless trance, Paul found himself accepting a gla.s.s of brandy, crossing the floor and joining the group around her he didn't know what he would say, it felt pointless and even perverse and yet, as a self-imposed dare, inescapable. She had a large jet brooch on her green jacket, a black flower in effect, which he examined as she talked. Her face, close-to, had a mesmerizing quality, fixed and photogenic, somehow consciously the face Dudley Valance had been pleased and proud to gaze on every day for half a century, as handsome as his own, in its way, and as disdainful of the impertinent modern world. She was having to say something about his work, but Paul had the feeling their lives and the people they saw were far from literary. He pictured them sitting in their fortified house, knocking back their fortified wine, their friends presumably the fellow expats of Antequera. And there was something else, about that stiff auburn mane, and those long black lashes Paul knew in his bones that she hadn't been born into Dudley's world, even though she now wore its lacquered carapace. Anyway, it seemed his arrival had been more or less what the others were waiting for, and after a minute, with various courteous murmurs and nods they all moved off in different directions, leaving the two of them together. 'I really must check on my husband,' she said, looking past him, the gracious smile not yet entirely faded from her face. Paul had a feeling that all that was going to change when he said who he was. He said, 'I'm so looking forward to your husband's talk tomorrow, Lady Valance.'

'Yes, I know,' she said, and he almost laughed, and then saw it was merely a general term of a.s.sent. She meant, what she then said, 'It's a great coup for you all to have got him here.'

'I think everyone thinks the same,' said Paul, then went on quickly, 'I'm hoping he'll be saying something about his brother.'

Linette's head went back a little. It was as if she'd only vaguely heard that he had a brother. 'Oh, good lord, no,' she said, with a little shake. 'No, no he'll be discussing his own work.' And a new suspicion floated in her eyes, in the quick pinch of her lips and angling of the head. 'I don't think I caught your name.'

'Oh Paul Bryant.' It semed absurd to be skulking around the truth, but he was glad to be able to say, 'I'm covering the conference for the TLS.'