Lucky Jim Part 3

Margaret glanced at Dixon, and Carol said: 'What about you, Jim?'

Dixon shook his head firmly. 'No, I've never been much of a dancing man, I'm afraid. As far as I'm concerned it would be just money thrown away.' It would be terrible if Margaret blackmailed him into taking her.

'Oh well, we don't want that, do we?' Bertrand said. 'That wouldn't do at all. I wonder where young Callaghan has got to. Her nose must be fairly thickly encrusted with powder by now, I should hazard. And why the delay among the musicians?'

Dixon looked over and saw that the two performers, tuning evidently completed, music set up, and bow resined, were hanging about smoking and chatting. Welch was nowhere to be seen; he must be displaying his rather terrifying expertise as an evader. At the other end of the long, low, softly-lit room the door opened and the Callaghan woman came in. For so well-built a girl Dixon thought she moved awkwardly.

'Ah, my dear,' Bertrand said with a gallant bow, 'we were wondering what had become of you.'

She seemed disconcerted.' Oh, I've only been...'

'We've been discussing Mr Gore-Urquhart, and wondering whether he'll be available the week-end after next, there being a species of dancing festivity at the College during that time. Can you enlighten us, I wonder?'

'Well, his secretary said he'd probably be in Paris till the middle of next month, which would be too late for that, wouldn't it?'

'Yes, I think it would. Yes, it would. Oh well, it'll have to be another time, won't it?' He didn't appear at all put out by this news.

'I've written to Uncle asking him to let me know when he's coming back.'

Dixon wanted to laugh at this. It always amused him to hear girls (men never did it) refer to 'Uncle', 'Daddy', and so on, as if there were only one uncle or daddy in the world, or as if this particular uncle or daddy were the uncle or daddy of all those present.

'What's the joke, Jim?' Carol asked. Bertrand stared at him.

'Oh, nothing.' He returned Bertrand's stare. He wished there were some issue on which he could defeat Bertrand, even at the risk of alienating his father. Any measure short of, or not necessitating too much, violence would be justified. But there seemed to be no field of endeavour where he could employ a measure of that sort. For a moment he felt like devoting the next ten years to working his way to a position as art critic on purpose to review Bertrand's work unfavourably. He thought of a sentence in a book he'd once read: 'And with that he picked up the b.l.o.o.d.y old towser by the scruff of the neck, and, by Jesus, he near throttled him.' This too made him smile, and Bertrand's beard twitched, but he said nothing to break the pause.

As ever, Margaret had thought of something to say: 'I was reading about your uncle only recently, Miss Callaghan. There was a piece about him in the local paper. He was presenting some water-colours to our Gallery here. I don't know what we should do without someone like him to keep things going.'

This remark, in itself virtually unanswerable, had the effect, familiar to Margaret's acquaintances, of dumbfounding its audience by the obviousness of its intention namely, the intention of forcing them to talk. Some feet away the amateur violinist could be heard laughing huskily at something the local composer was telling him. Where was Welch?

'Yes, he is very generous,' the Callaghan girl said.

'It's a good job there are some people still about who can afford to be, in that way,' Margaret said. Dixon looked up to catch Carol's eye, but she was exchanging a glance with her husband.

'Well, there won't be much longer, I fear, if the lads at Transport House go on running our lives for us,' Bertrand said.

'Oh, I don't think this crowd have done too badly,' Goldsmith put in. 'After all, you can't...'

'Their foreign policy might, I agree, have been a good deal worse, with the exception of their spectacular inability to pour water on troubled oil.' Bertrand looked quickly round the group, then went on: 'But their home policy... soak the rich... I mean...' He seemed to be hesitating. 'Well, it is that, pure and simple, isn't it? I'm just asking for information, that's all. I mean that's what it seems to be, don't we all agree? I take it that it is just that and no more, isn't it? or am I wrong?'

Pretending not to notice Margaret's warning frown and Carol's expectant grin, Dixon said quietly: 'Well, what's wrong with it, even if it is that and no more? If one man's got ten buns and another's got two, and a bun has got to be given up by one of them, then surely you take it from the man with ten buns.'

Bertrand and his girl were looking at each other with identical expressions, shaking their heads, smiling, raising their eyebrows, sighing. It was as if Dixon had just said that he didn't know anything about art, but he did know what he liked. 'But we don't think anybody need give up a bun, Mr Dixon,' the girl said. 'That's the whole point.'

'Hardly the whole point, I should have thought,' Dixon said at the moment when Margaret said 'Don't let's get involved in a set-to about...' and Bertrand said 'The whole point of this is that the rich...'

It was Bertrand who won the little contest. 'The point is that the rich play an essential role in modern society,' he said, his voice baying a little more noticeably. 'More than ever in days like these. That's all; I'm not going to bore you with the stock plat.i.tudes about their having kept the arts going, and so on. The very fact that they are stock plat.i.tudes proves my case. And I happen to like the arts, you sam.'

The last word, a version of 'see', was Bertrand's own coinage. It arose as follows: the vowel sound became distorted into a short 'a', as if he were going to say 'sat'. This brought his lips some way apart, and the effect of their rapid closure was to end the syllable with a light but audible 'm'. After working this out, Dixon could think of little to say, and contented himself with 'You do', which he tried to make knowing and sceptical.

It seemed to encourage Bertrand. 'Yes, I do,' he said even more loudly, so that all his listeners looked quickly at him. 'And shall I tell you what else I happen to like? Rich people. I take pride in the contemporary unpopularity of that statement. And why do I like them? Because they're charming, because they're generous, because they've learnt to appreciate the things I happen to like myself, because their houses are full of beautiful things. That's why I like them and that's why I don't want them soaked. All right?'

'Come along, dear,' Mrs Welch called from behind them. 'If we wait for Father we'll be here all night. Shall' we make a start? If you'll come over here we can all sit down.'

'All right, Mother,' Bertrand said over his shoulder, and the group began to dissolve, but before he moved himself he said, his eyes on Dixon: 'That's quite clear, is it?'

Margaret pulled at Dixon's sleeve and he, not wanting to go on fighting after the end of the round, said amicably: 'Oh yes. You seem to have been luckier in the rich people you've come into contact with than I have, that's all.'

'That wouldn't surprise me in the least,' Bertrand said with some contempt, standing aside so that Margaret could pa.s.s him.

Dixon said angrily: 'Well, you'd better make the most of them while you've got them, then, because you won't have them much longer, you know.'

He began to push past after Margaret, but the Callaghan girl halted him by saying: 'I'd rather you didn't talk in that strain, if you don't mind.'

Dixon looked about him; the rest of the company were seated, and the amateur violinist was snuggling his instrument in under his chin. Dropping into the nearest chair, Dixon said in a lowered voice: 'You say you'd rather I didn't talk in that strain?'

'Yes, if you don't mind.' She and Bertrand also sat down. 'I always get a bit irritated by that sort of thing. I'm sorry, I can't do anything about it; it's just a thing about me, I'm afraid.'

If Dixon hadn't learnt to dislike this argument when offered by Margaret, he probably wouldn't have answered as he did. 'Seen anybody about it yet?'

The amateur violinist nodded the top half of his body and, supported by the local composer, burst into some scurrying tunelessness or other. Bertrand leaned over towards Dixon. 'What the h.e.l.l do you mean?' he asked in a loud undertone.

'Who's your alienist?' Dixon said, broadening his field of fire.

'Look here, Dixon, you're talking as if you want a b.l.o.o.d.y good punch on the nose, aren't you?'

Dixon, when moved, was bad at ordering his thoughts. 'If I did, you don't think you're the one to give me one, do you?'

Bertrand screwed up his face at this enigma. 'What?'

'Do you know what you look like in that beard?' Dixon's heart began to race as he switched to simplicity.

'All right; coming outside for a bit?'

The latest of this string of questions was drowned by a long rumbling shake in the ba.s.s of the piano. 'What?' Dixon asked.

Mrs Welch, Margaret, Johns, the Goldsmiths, and the contralto woman all seemed to turn round simultaneously. 'Ssshh,' they all said. It was like a railway engine blowing out steam under a gla.s.s roof. Dixon got up and tip-toed to the door. Bertrand half rose to follow, but his girl stopped him.

Before Dixon could reach the door, it opened and Welch entered. 'Oh, you've started, have you?' he asked without dropping his voice at all.

'Yes,' Dixon whispered. 'I think I'll just...'

'Pity you couldn't have waited a little longer. I've been on the phone, you see. It was that chap from the... from the...'

'See you later.' Dixon began edging past to the doorway.

'Aren't you going to stay for the P. Racine Fricker?'

'Shan't be long, Professor. I just think I'll...' Dixon made some gestures meant to be indecipherable. 'I'll be back.'

He shut the door on Welch's long-lived, wondering frown.

V.

'HE was going down-grade making ninety miles an hour, when his whistle began to scream,' Dixon sang. 'He was found in the wreck with his hand on the throttle...' He broke off, panting; it was hard work walking up the dry sandy track to the Welches' house, especially with so much beer distributed about his frame. A dreamy smile stretched his face in the darkness as he savoured again in retrospect that wonderful moment at ten o'clock. It had been like a first authentic experience of art or human goodness, a stern, rapt, almost devotional exaltation. Gulping down what he'd a.s.sumed must be his last pint of the evening, he'd noticed that drinks were still being ordered and served, that people were still coming in and that their expressions were confident, not anxious, that a new sixpence had tinkled into the works of the bar-billiard table. Illumination had come when the white-coated barman struggled in with two fresh crates of Guinness. The little town and the city were in different counties; the local pubs, unlike the city pubs and the hotel he went to with Margaret, stayed open till ten-thirty during the summer, and the summer had now officially begun. His grat.i.tude had been inexpressible in words; only further calls at the bar could pay that happy debt. As a result he'd spent more than he could afford and drunk more than he ought, and yet he felt nothing but satisfaction and peace. Rebounding painfully from the gatepost, he began creeping round the cobbled environs of the house.

The large, long room at the back, where the music had been going on, was in darkness. That was good. Further round, however, where the drawing-room was, there were lights and, he soon found, voices in conversation. Peering through a c.h.i.n.k in the curtains, he saw Welch, in his crimson-striped blue raincoat and fis.h.i.+ng-hat, just going out of the door, followed by the local composer and Cecil Goldsmith, both of them also dressed in raincoats. People were evidently about to be driven home; Dixon grinned as he imagined the sort of drive Welch would give them. Carol, in a light tweed coat, stayed for a moment to exchange a last remark with Bertrand. n.o.body else was in the room.

A nearby window was open, but Dixon couldn't catch the words now spoken by Bertrand. He could tell from their intonation, however, that they formed a question, to which Carol said: 'Yes, all right.' At this, Bertrand stepped forward and put his arms round her. Dixon couldn't see what followed, because Bertrand had his back to the window, but if there was a kiss it lasted only a moment; Carol freed herself and hurried out. Bertrand went too.

Dixon went back to the music-room and got in through the french window. What he'd seen had disturbed him in some way he couldn't tie down. Though theoretically inured to that kind of activity, he found its dose proximity disagreeable rather than anything else. To have seen and talked to Cecil Goldsmith several times a week for some months didn't make the fellow any less a nonent.i.ty, but it gave him a claim on one, a claim which was somehow invoked by the sight of his wife being handled by a third party, especially that third party. Dixon wished he hadn't found that gap in the curtains, then thrust the matter from his mind. All his attention would be needed for the operation of getting up to his bedroom undetected.

Deciding that the small risk of someone coming into the music-room had got to be faced anyway, Dixon groped through the darkness to an armchair, lay back in it, closed his eyes, and heard with satisfaction the sound of Welch's car being started up and driven away. After a moment, he felt as if he were heeling over backwards, and the pit of his stomach seemed to swell so as to start enclosing his head within it. He opened his eyes again, making his tragic-mask face; yes, it had after all been a bad idea to take that last pint. He got up and began a skipping-with-arms-raising exercise he'd learnt all about in the R.A.F. Five hundred skips and raising of the arms had helped to clear his head before. After a hundred and eighty an unclear head seemed much preferable to more skips. It was time to move.

Half-way across the hall he heard the sound of Bertrand's laugh, but well m.u.f.fled by an intervening door. He creaked up the stairs and across the landing. Through some architectural vagary, his bedroom could only be approached by way of a large bathroom, the outer door of which he now tried to open. Nothing happened. The bathroom was evidently occupied; perhaps Johns had decided to blockade the bedroom allotted to the defacer of his periodical. Dixon stood well back, straddling, and raised his hands like a conductor on the brink of some thunderous overture or tone-poem; then, half-conductor, half-boxer, went into a brief manic flurry of obscene gestures. Just then somebody opened a door on the other side of the landing. There was no time to do anything at all except adopt the att.i.tude of one waiting outside a bathroom, a stratagem vitiated to some extent by the raincoat he still wore.

'James! What on earth are you doing?'

Never had Dixon been so glad to see Margaret rather than anyone else. 'Ssshh,' he said. 'Get me away from here.'

He liked her even more when she beckoned to him and led him, without more words, into her bedroom. Just as he closed the door of this, whoever it was came out of the bathroom. Dixon realized his heart had been pounding. 'Thank G.o.d for that,' he said.

'Well, where have you been all the evening, James?'

While he told her he commented adversely to himself on her resentful expression and manner, which soon overrode his feelings of relief. What would this sort of thing be like if they ever got married? At the same time he had to admit she looked at her best in the blue dressing-gown, her brown hair, tawny in places, loosed from its pins and rolls. He took off his raincoat and lit a cigarette, beginning to feel better. He finished what he had to say without mentioning what he'd seen through the drawing-room window.

After hearing him out in silence she smiled slightly. 'Well, I can't really blame you, I suppose. It was rather rude, all the same. I could see Mrs Neddy thought it was a bit off.'

'Oh, she thought that it was a bit that, did she? Where did you say I'd gone?'

'I didn't get a chance to say anything: Evan told her he thought you'd probably gone to the pub.'

'I'll wring that little b.a.s.t.a.r.d's neck one of these days. My G.o.d, that's good, isn't it? Nice friendly spirit. This ought to put me nicely in bad with the Neddies. And don't call him Evan.'

'Don't worry too much. Neddy didn't seem to mind.'

Dixon snorted. 'How can you possibly be sure of that? There's no way of telling what goes on inside that head of his, if anything. Just hang on here a minute, will you? There's something I want to do in the bathroom. Don't go away.'

When he came back she was still sitting on the bed, but had evidently put on some lipstick for him. This pleased him, more from the implied compliment than from the actual effect; indeed, he was beginning to feel really good again, and stayed like that, even leaning back in his chair, while for a few minutes they discussed the early part of the evening. Then Margaret said: 'I say, don't you think you ought to be going? It's getting late.'

'I know, I will in a minute. I'm enjoying this.'

'So am I. It's the first time we've been really alone for... how long?'

One of the effects of this query was to make Dixon feel very drunk, and afterwards he could never quite work out why he did what he did next, which was sitting down beside Margaret on the bed, putting his arm round her shoulders and kissing her firmly on the mouth. Whatever his motives the blue dressing-gown, the uncoiled hair, the specially-put-on lipstick, the pints of local bitter, his wish to bring their relations to some crisis, his wish to avoid a further salvo of intimate questions and avowals, and his worry about his job all came into it the effects were unequivocal: she put her arms round his neck and kissed him back with zeal, with more zeal, in fact, than she'd shown in any of their previous, rather halfhearted and altogether inconclusive, s.e.xual encounters in her flat. Dixon twitched off his, then her, spectacles and put them down somewhere. He kissed her again, harder; he felt his head spin, faster. After a minute or two there seemed no reason why he shouldn't put his hand in under the lapel of her dressing-gown. She murmured some endearment and tightened her arms round his neck.

Why shouldn't he go on? It seemed he'd be able to, though he couldn't tell how far. Did he want to? Yes, in a way, but was it fair to her? He remembered dimly how he'd advised her not to get into even the mildest s.e.xual entanglement for a good long time, say a year, after the Catchpole one. Was it fair to her? Was it fair to him? He could only just handle her as a female friend; as her 'lover' he'd be a cowboy facing his first, and notoriously formidable, steer. No, it wouldn't be fair to him. And it certainly wouldn't be fair to her, confronting her with something that could hardly fail to disturb and upset her in the short run, let alone what might happen later. No, she oughtn't to have it. On the other hand Dixon battled for clear, or any, thought she certainly seemed to want it. He felt her breath, soft and warm, on his cheek, and his desire, which had been failing, suddenly strengthened. Of course, all that had been worrying him was fear of a rebuff. He withdrew his hand, then put it back, this time under her nightdress. This, and the shudder she gave, made his head reel the furthest yet; too far, indeed, for him to do any more thinking. The silence roared in his ears.

Some short time later, as they lay on the bed, he made a movement not only quite unambiguous, but even, perhaps, rather insolently frank. Margaret's response to it, though violent, was hard to interpret. Without hesitation Dixon advanced further. There was a brief rolling struggle, then he found himself flung sideways with enough vigour to bring his head, with a brisk report, into contact with the bed's footboard. Margaret got up, adjusting her dressing-gown, and picked up his raincoat. 'Go on,' she said. 'Out you go, James.'

He struggled to his feet and managed to catch his coat when she flung it. 'I'm sorry; what's the matter?'

'Out.' Her small figure was trembling with anger.

'All right, but I don't see...'

She opened the door and gestured with her head. Feet were mounting the stairs to the landing.

'Look, there's somebody...'

He found himself bundled out, his coat over his arm, his head spinning in a new direction. Half-way to the bathroom he found himself confronted by the Callaghan woman. 'Good evening,' he said politely. She looked away and went past him to her room. He tried to open the bathroom door; it was again locked. Without thinking he threw back his head, filled his lungs, and let loose a loud and prolonged bray of rage which recalled, in volume and timbre, Goldsmith's performance in the madrigals. Then he clumped down the stairs, hung his coat on a hook, went into the dining-room, and genuflected in front of the fake, or possibly genuine, eighteenth-century sideboard.

In a moment he'd taken a bottle of port from among the sherry, beer, and cider which filled half a shelf inside. It was from this very bottle that Welch had, the previous evening, poured Dixon the smallest drink he'd ever been seriously offered. Some of the writing on the label was in a Romance language, but not all. Just right: not too British, and not too foreign either. The cork came out with a festive, Yule-tide pop which made him wish he had some nuts and raisins; he drank deeply. Some of the liquor coursed refres.h.i.+ngly down his chin and under his s.h.i.+rt-collar. The bottle had been about three-quarters full when he started, and was about three-quarters empty when he stopped. He thumped and clinked it back into position, wiped his mouth on the sideboard-runner, and, feeling really splendid, gained his bedroom without opposition.

Here he wandered about for a few minutes, undressing slowly, thinking as best he could about the encounter with Margaret. Had he really wanted what his actions had implied? As before, the only answer was Yes, in a way. But he wouldn't have tried, would he? or not so hard, anyway, if she hadn't seemed so keen. And why had she decided to seem so keen, after so many weeks of seeming so not keen? Most likely because of some new novelist she'd been reading. But of course she ought to be keen anyway. It's what she really wants, he thought, scowling with the emphasis with which he put this to himself. She doesn't know it, but it's what she really wants, what her nature really demands. And, G.o.d, it was his due, wasn't it? After all he'd put up with. But was it fair to her to implicate her in this sort of situation after all she'd had to put up with? As soon as Dixon recognized the mental envelope containing this question he thrust it away from him unopened, and went into the bathroom tying his pyjama-cord.

It wasn't as nice in the bathroom as it had been in the bedroom. Though it was a cool night for early summer, he found he felt hot and was sweating. He stood for some time in front of the wash-basin, trying to discover more about how he felt. His body seemed swollen below the chest and uneven in density. The stuff coming from the light seemed less like light than a very thin but cloudy phosph.o.r.escent gas; it gave a creamy hum. He turned on the cold tap and bent over the basin. When he did this, he had to correct an impulse to go on leaning forward until his head lay between the taps. He wetted his face, took a bakelite mug from the gla.s.s shelf above the basin, and drank a very great deal of water, which momentarily refreshed him, though it had some other effect as well which he couldn't at once identify. He cleaned his teeth with a lot of toothpaste, wetted his face again, refilled the mug, and ate some more toothpaste.

He stood brooding by his bed. His face was heavy, as if little bags of sand had been painlessly sewn into various parts of it, dragging the features away from the bones, if he still had bones in his face. Suddenly feeling worse, he heaved a shuddering sigh. Someone seemed to have leapt nimbly up behind him and encased him in a kind of diving-suit made of invisible cotton-wool. He gave a quiet groan; he didn't want to feel any worse than this.

He began getting into bed. His four surviving cigarettes had he really smoked twelve that evening? lay in their packet on a polished table at the bed-head, accompanied by matches, the bakelite mug of water, and an ashtray from the mantelpiece. A temporary inability to raise his second foot on to the bed let him know what had been the secondary effect of drinking all that water: it had made him drunk. This became a primary effect when he lay in bed. On the fluttering mantelpiece was a small china effigy, the representation, in a squatting position, of a well-known Oriental religious figure. Had Welch put it there as a silent sermon to him on the merits of the contemplative life? If so, the message had come too late. He reached up and turned off the light by the hanging switch above his head. The room began to rise upwards from the right-hand bottom corner of the bed, and yet seemed to keep in the same position. He threw back the covers and sat on the edge of the bed, his legs hanging. The room composed itself to rest. After a few moments he swung his legs back and lay down. The room lifted. He put his feet to the floor. The room stayed still. He put his legs on the bed but didn't lie down. The room moved. He sat on the edge of the bed. Nothing. He put one leg up on the bed. Something. In fact a great deal. He was evidently in a highly critical condition. Swearing hoa.r.s.ely, he heaped up the pillows, half-lay, half-sat against them, and dangled his legs half-over the edge of the bed. In this position he was able to lower himself gingerly into sleep.

VI.

DIXON was alive again. Consciousness was upon him before he could get out of the way; not for him the slow, gracious wandering from the halls of sleep, but a summary, forcible ejection. He lay sprawled, too wicked to move, spewed up like a broken spider-crab on the tarry s.h.i.+ngle of the morning. The light did him harm, but not as much as looking at things did; he resolved, having done it once, never to move his eyeb.a.l.l.s again. A dusty thudding in his head made the scene before him beat like a pulse. His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum. During the night, too, he'd somehow been on a cross-country run and then been expertly beaten up by secret police. He felt bad.

He reached out for and put on his gla.s.ses. At once he saw that something was wrong with the bedclothes immediately before his face. Endangering his chance of survival, he sat up a little, and what met his bursting eyes roused to a frenzy the timpanist in his head. A large, irregular area of the turned-back part of the sheet was missing; a smaller but still considerable area of the turned-back part of the blanket was missing; an area about the size of the palm of his hand in the main part of the top blanket was missing. Through the three holes, which, appropriately enough, had black borders, he could see a dark brown mark on the second blanket. He ran a finger round a bit of the hole in the sheet, and when he looked at his finger it bore a dark-grey stain. That meant ash; ash meant burning; burning must mean cigarettes. Had this cigarette burnt itself out on the blanket? If not, where was it now? Nowhere on the bed; nor in it. He leaned over the side, gritting his teeth; a sunken brown channel, ending in a fragment of discoloured paper, lay across a light patch in the pattern of a valuable-looking rug. This made him feel very unhappy, a feeling sensibly increased when he looked at the bedside table. This was marked by two black, charred grooves, greyish and s.h.i.+ny in parts, lying at right angles and stopping well short of the ashtray, which held a single used match. On the table were two unused matches; the remainder lay with the empty cigarette packet on the floor. The bakelite mug was nowhere to be seen.

Had he done all this himself? Or had a wayfarer, a burglar, camped out in his room? Or was he the victim of some Horla fond of tobacco? He thought that on the whole he must have done it himself, and wished he hadn't. Surely this would mean the loss of his job, especially if he failed to go to Mrs Welch and confess what he'd done, and he knew already that he wouldn't be able to do that. There was no excuse which didn't consist of the inexcusable: an incendiary was no more pardonable when revealed as a drunkard as well so much of a drunkard, moreover, that obligations to hosts and fellow-guests and the counter-attraction of a chamber-concert were as nothing compared with the lure of the drink. The only hope was that Welch wouldn't notice what his wife would presumably tell him about the burning of the bedclothes. But Welch had been known to notice things, the attack on his pupil's book in that essay, for example. But that had really been an attack on Welch himself; he couldn't much care what happened to sheets and blankets which he wasn't actually using at the time. Dixon remembered thinking on an earlier occasion that to yaw drunkenly round the Common Room in Welch's presence screeching obscenities, punching out the window-panes, fouling the periodicals, would escape Welch's notice altogether, provided his own person remained inviolate. The memory in turn reminded him of a sentence in a book of Alfred Beesley's he'd once glanced at: 'A stimulus cannot be received by the mind unless it serves some need of the organism.' He began laughing, an action he soon modified to a wince.

He got out of bed and went into the bathroom. After a minute or two he returned, eating toothpaste and carrying a safety-razor blade. He started carefully cutting round the edges of the burnt areas of the bedclothes with the blade. He didn't know why he did this, but the operation did seem to improve the look of things: the cause of the disaster wasn't so immediately apparent. When all the edges were smooth and regular, he knelt down slowly, as if he'd all at once become a very old man, and shaved the appropriate part of the rug. The debris from these modifications he stuffed into his jacket pocket, thinking that he'd have a bath and then go downstairs and phone Bill Atkinson and ask him to come through with his message about the senior Dixons a good deal earlier than had been arranged. He sat on the bed for a moment to recover from his vertiginous exertions with the rug, then, before he could rise, somebody, soon identifiable as male, came into the bathroom next door. He heard the clinking of a plug-chain, then the swis.h.i.+ng of tap-water. Welch, or his son, or Johns was about to take a bath. Which one it was was soon settled by the upsurge of a deep, untrained voice into song. The piece was recognizable to Dixon as some skein of untiring facetiousness by filthy Mozart. Bertrand was surely unlikely to sing anything at all, and Johns made no secret of his indifference to anything earlier than Richard Strauss. Very slowly, like a forest giant under the axe, Dixon heeled over sideways and came to rest with his hot face on the pillow.

This, of course, would give him time to collect his thoughts, and that, of course, was just what be didn't want to do with his thoughts; the longer he could keep them apart from one another, especially the ones about Margaret, the better. For the first time he couldn't avoid imagining what she'd say to him, if indeed she'd say anything, when he next saw her. He pushed his tongue down in front of his lower teeth, screwed up his nose as tightly as he could, and made gibbering motions with his mouth. How long would it be before he could persuade her first to open, then to empty, her locker of reproaches, as preliminary to the huge struggle of getting her to listen to his apologies? Desperately he tried to listen to Welch's song, to marvel at its matchless predictability, its austere, unswerving devotion to tedium; but it didn't work. Then he tried to feel pleased about the acceptance of his article, but all he could remember was Welch's seeming indifference on hearing the news and his injunction, so exasperatingly like Beesley's, to 'get a definite date from him, Dixon, otherwise it's not much... not much...' He sat up and by degrees worked his feet to the floor.

There was an alternative to the Atkinson plan; the simpler, nicer one of clearing out at once without a word to anybody. That wouldn't really do, though, unless he cleared out as far as London. What was going on in London now? He began to take off his pyjamas, deciding to omit his bath. Those wide streets and squares would be deserted at this time, except for a few lonely, hurrying figures; he could revisualize it all from remembering a week-end leave during the war. He sighed; he might as well be thinking of Monte Carlo or Chinese Turkestan; then, jigging on the rug with one foot out of, the other still in, his pyjamas, thought of nothing but the pain that slopped through his head like water into a sand-castle. He clung to the mantelpiece, nearly displacing the squatting Oriental, crumpling like a shot film-gunman. Had Chinese Turkestan its Margarets and Welches?

Some minutes later he was in the bathroom. Welch had left grime round the bath and steam on the mirror. After a little thought, Dixon stretched out a finger and wrote 'Ned Welch is a Soppy Fool with a Face like A Pigs b.u.m' in the steam; then he rubbed the gla.s.s with a towel and looked at himself. He didn't look too bad, really; anyway, better than he felt. His hair, however, despite energetic brus.h.i.+ng helped out by the use of a water-soaked nail-brush, was already springing away from his scalp. He considered using soap as a pomatum, but decided against it, having in the past several times converted the short hairs at the sides and back of his head into the semblance of duck-plumage by this expedient. His gla.s.ses seemed more goggle-like than usual. As always, though, he looked healthy and, he hoped, honest and kindly. He'd have to be content with that.

He was all ready to slink down to the phone when, returning to the bedroom, he again surveyed the mutilated bedclothes. They looked in some way unsatisfactory; he couldn't have said how. He went and locked the outer bathroom door, picked up the razor-blade, and began again on the circ.u.mferences of the holes. This time he made jagged cuts into the material, little inlets from the great missing areas. Some pieces he almost severed. Finally he held the blade at right angles and ran it quickly round the holes, roughening them up. He stood back from his work and decided the effect was perceptibly better. The disaster now seemed much less obviously the work of man and might, for a few seconds, be put down to some fulminant dry-rot or the ravages of a colony of moths. He turned the rug round so that the shaven burn, without being actually hidden by a nearby chair, was none the less not far from it. He was considering taking the bedside table downstairs and later throwing it out of the bus on his journey back when a familiar voice came into aural range singing in a way that suggested head-wagging jollity. It grew in volume, like the apprehension of something harmful or awful, until the locked bathroom door began to be shaken and its handle to be rattled. The singing stopped, but the rattling went on, was joined by kicking, even momentarily replaced by the thudding of what must be a shoulder. Welch hadn't thought in advance that the bathroom might bear signs of occupation by another when he wanted to get back into it himself (why, in any case, did he want to get back into it?), nor did he soon realize it now. After trying several manoeuvres to replace his first vain rattling of the handle, he returned his attention to a vain rattling of the handle. There was a final o.r.g.a.s.m of shakings, knockings, thuddings, and rattlings, then footsteps retreated and a door closed.

With tears of rage in his eyes, Dixon left the bedroom, first unintentionally treading on and shattering the bakelite mug, which must have rolled out from under something into his path. Downstairs, he looked at the hall dock twenty past eight and went into the drawing-room, where the phone was. It was a good job that Atkinson got up early on Sundays to go out for the papers. He'd be able to catch him easily before he went. He picked up the phone.

What gave him most trouble during the next twenty-five minutes was giving vent to his feelings without hurting his head too much. Nothing whatever came out of the receiver during that time except the faint sea-sh.e.l.l whispering. As he sat on the arm of a leather-covered armchair, putting his face through all its permutations of loathing, the whole household seemed to spring into activity around him. Footsteps walked the floor above his head; others descended the stairs and entered the breakfast-room; still others came from the back of the house and also entered the breakfast-room; far off a vacuum-cleaner whined; a cistern flushed; a door banged; a voice called. When it sounded as if a posse was being a.s.sembled immediately outside the drawing-room door, he hung up and left, his bottom aching from its narrow seat, his arm aching from rattling the receiver-rest.

Breakfast technics at the Welches', like many of their ways of thought, recalled an earlier epoch. The food was kept hot on the sideboard in what Dixon conjectured were chafing-dishes. The quant.i.ty and variety of this food recalled in turn the fact that Mrs Welch supplemented Welch's professorial salary with a good-sized income of her own. Dixon had often wondered how Welch had contrived to marry money; it could hardly have been due to any personal merit, real or supposed, and the vagaries of Welch's mind could leave no room there for avarice. Perhaps the old fellow had had when younger what he now so demonstrably lacked: a way with him. In spite of the ravages wrought by his headache and his fury, Dixon felt happier as he wondered what foods would this morning afford visible proof of the Welches' prosperity. He went into the breakfast-room with the bedclothes and Margaret a long way from the foreground of his mind.