MY GUIDE AND MENTOR in the city of Oxford was Cromer-Blake and, four months after my arrival there, nine months before that same fifth of November, it was he who introduced me to Clare Bayes at one of the grandiloquent Oxford suppers known as high tables. These suppers take place once a week in the vast refectories of each of the different colleges. The table at which the diners and their guests sit is raised up on a platform and thus presides over the other tables (where the students dine with suspicious haste, fleeing as soon as they have finished, gradually abandoning the elevated guests to their solitude and thus avoiding the spectacle the latter end up making of themselves) and it is for this reason rather than because of any unusually high standard of cuisine or conversation that they are designated "high tables". The suppers are formal (in the Oxonian sense) and for members of the congregation the wearing of gowns is obligatory. The suppers do begin very formally, but the sheer length of the meal allows for the appearance and subsequent development of a serious deterioration in the manners, vocabulary, diction, expositional fluency, composure, sobriety, attire, courtesy and general behaviour of the guests, of whom there are usually about twenty. At first, though, solemnity reigns and everything is regulated down to the last detail. Half the guests are members of the host college and half from other colleges (plus the occasional outsider or foreigner who happens to be passing through), who have been invited by the former in the hope of subsequently being invited by the latter to their respective colleges (with the result that the composition of different high tables varies very little, the guests being nearly always the same, except that sometimes they dine at one college and at other times at another, some thus dining together ten or twelve times a year, often ending up on terms of such mutual detestation that they can scarcely bear the sight of each other). The guests have to gather first in an elegant little room next door to the refectory where they enjoy a swift glass of sherry and then, once everyone has arrived, proceed to the refectory (never at the stipulated seven o'clock sharp) two by two (each member accompanied by his or her guest) and strictly in accordance with college hierarchy. Having to remember instantaneously the seniority and titles often of twelve worthy and extremely touchy people is no easy task, so that even before going in to eat, the odd argument or outburst of bickering takes place, and there is some shoving, jostling and elbowing on the part of ambitious or forgetful members or fellows who attempt, so to speak, to torpedo protocol and jump the queue in order to gain in prestige. The students, who wait (hungrily) seated in the dining room, rise in a hypocritical show of respect to watch the entrance of the gowned dons and their chance and often bewildered companions from the outside world, who all duly place their hands on the back of the chair assigned to them. The Warden, that is the director or administrator of the college (often a bored member of the nobility), presides over the raised table which in turn presides over the other tables, so that he thus presides twice over, and demonstrates (even before the guests sit down) the most obvious duty of this double presidency, which is to deliver the unforgiving series of gavel blows interspersed with Latin phrases that keep any poor foreigners present in a state of permanent fear and trepidation throughout the meal. For the Warden has beside him a small gavel (together with a wooden stand affixed to the table to receive the blow, just like the one judges use) with which he inaugurates the meal, decides the timing and announces the arrival of the numerous changes of wines and courses, and which serves him as a dangerous plaything when (as almost always happens) he grows weary of what's going on around him. Once he has said the first prayer (in his anglified Latin), with everyone in the refectory on their feet in a silence still redolent of incense, the first abrupt gavel blow and the consequent tinkle of fine crystal gives way to the din of eager dons and even more eager students as they sit down, shout, contend for the favours of stewards, hurl themselves, spoon in hand, on the soup or consommé set before them and close ruddy fists about their glasses of red wine. It is stipulated that each (elevated) college member should speak for seven minutes with the person to his right or left (this depends on the distribution of the couples at the head of the table), and then for five minutes to the person on his other side and so on alternately for the two hours that the first stage of high table lasts. It is, on the other hand, extremely ill-advised to address the person opposite, unless both guests have simultaneously fallen victim to an error of timing on the part of their neighbours and been left momentarily with no one to talk to, a most unfortunate, not to say vexatious, situation in which to find oneself in Oxford. Oxford dons are, therefore, expert at simultaneously talking, eating, drinking and keeping track of the time, the first three activities at extraordinary speed and the fourth with great precision, for, according to a sequence ordained by the Latin phrases and gavel blows of the capricious Warden, the stewards will speedily remove the plates and wineglasses of all the guests regardless of whether the former are scraped clean, empty, half full or even untouched. I hardly ate a thing at my first high tables, preoccupied as I was with counting the minutes and keeping up a pretence at conversation in strict symmetrically duodecimal time to my right and my left. Course after course, the stewards wrested from me both my untouched plate and my wineglass, the latter in fact empty, indeed drained to the lees, since, plunged as I was into chronological and conversational despair, the only thing I did manage to do in between talking and clockwatching was to drink incontinently.
At my second high table, Clare, seated almost opposite me, observed me out of the corner of her eye, half amused at and half pitying my despair at the disappearance of yet another plate groaning with food that I hadn't even had time to look at let alone eat, despite my increasing drunkenness and growing hunger (I can picture myself now, knife and fork in hand, both implements in a state of permanently frustrated readiness, for every time I went to cut into or spear a piece of food I would remember to look at my watch or notice how the guest to my right was beginning to mutter unintelligibly, curses and swear words no doubt, or to eat more noisily than usual – I'm sure on occasions I even heard someone gargling - to warn me that his turn with his previous conversational partner was over and he was now impatiently waiting for me). During the first stage of the supper there were three, four or five main courses (according to the munificence or meanness of the college) and, as I have said, the consumption of these took about two hours, a time dictated more than anything by the long pauses between each course (during which we were left utterly alone with our glasses of wine). Thus, during these first two hours one was condemned to speak to only two people, of whom one - seated to your left - was always the colleague who had invited you whilst the other was determined by fate or, rather, by the usually malevolent intentions of the Warden who was in charge of seating arrangements. At that particular supper my host was Cromer-Blake, and he warned me that to my right I would have a promising young economist whose main defect (at least at high table) was that he had only one topic of conversation, the subject of his recent doctoral thesis.
"But what was his thesis about?" I asked while we searched and jostled for our place in the queue before going into the refectory.
As usual before answering a question, giving an opinion or telling an anecdote, Cromer-Blake stroked his greying hair and replied with a smile: "Well, let's just say it's most unusual. I'm sure you'll have more than enough time to find out."
The economist, Halliwell by name, was an obese young man with a bright red face and a small, sparse military moustache, either premature or being given an overhasty first public airing, who showed not a flicker of curiosity about my person or my country (my country being normally an excellent subject to fall back on for high-table talk) so that I had to initiate a polite interrogation which, after only four questions, led, as I had been warned, into the extraordinarily original topic of his doctoral thesis, namely: a certain and, it would seem, unique cider tax that existed in England between 1760 and 1767.
"It was just a tax on cider then?"
"Just on
cider," responded the young economist Halliwell with satisfaction.
"How interesting . . . fancy that," I replied. "And why a tax on cider alone?"
"You're surprised, aren't you?" said Halliwell gleefully, and proceeded to explain in minute detail the causes and characteristics of that unusual tax about which I couldn't have cared less.
"How fascinating," I said, "do go on."
Fortunately, in a language not one's own, it's easy to make a pretence at listening and, by pure intuition, to agree or enthuse or now and again make some (obsequious) comment, which was what I did during the endless seven-minute periods with Halliwell that were my allotted span after my five minutes of conversation with Cromer-Blake. While this promising young economist spouted endlessly on about cider without even having the delicacy to ask me one single question about me, I was able to devote myself, despite my increasingly drunken state (though I'm fortunate in that nothing in my conduct or external appearance ever betrays my progressive drunkenness), to observing the other guests, with whom any direct contact was forbidden until dessert was served, and, during my designated periods of talk with Cromer-Blake, either to interrogating him about the other guests or avenging myself on the young economist Halliwell by fulminating against him (in Spanish). I should say that, just as Clare was observing me out of the corner of her eye with mingled mockery and pity, I took great pleasure in observing her and, later, as the general deterioration of manners at the table became more marked, my gaze became one of open sexual admiration. She was one of only five women at the supper, and one of only two aged under fifty. She was also the only one to reveal beneath her black gown a tasteful glimpse of décolletage but, for the moment, I'll say no more than that, since, having been the lady's lover for a certain time, it would seem boastful now to enumerate her charms. The rest of the table was occupied by gentlemen all but one of whom wore gowns, and the Warden that night was Lord Rymer, a notorious intriguer in the cities of London, Oxford, Brussels, Strasbourg and Geneva. I was separated from him by two other guests, and Clare, on the other side of the table, by only one.
As is well known, the English never look openly at anything, or they look in such a veiled, indifferent way that one can never be sure that someone is actually looking at what they appear to be looking at, such is their ability to lend an opaque glaze to the most ordinary of glances. That's why the way Continentals look at people (the way I do, for example) can cause great unease in the object of their gaze, and that applies even when the gaze in question would be classified, within the range of possible Spanish or Continental gazes, as indifferent, dispassionate, even respectful. That's why, too, it can be shocking when the veil usually covering the insular or English gaze is torn away and why it might even provoke a dispute or an argument were it not for the fact that the eyes of those likely to see that gaze stripped of its veil still wear theirs, and therefore fail to see what to unclouded eyes (to Continental eyes, for example) would be obvious and possibly even insulting. Although during my two years there I did learn - at will - to veil my gaze somewhat, I was not at first trained in self-censorship, and at those unforgettable suppers my one recourse against hunger and tedium — apart from the wine: red, rosé and white - was, as I have explained, to look about me even more intently and devote myself to observing the other guests. Anyway, if my gaze (as I myself noticed) was, after a certain point, full of sexual admiration for Clare, that of the Warden, right from the first Latin phrase and gavel blow, was one of unbridled and undisguised lust. But just as the immodesty of my gaze was cancelled out by the modesty of other people's when they looked at me (this included that of the Warden, who put on the customary insular veil whenever he managed to tear his eyes away from Clare's décolletage and face), the offensive lustfulness of his gaze was obvious to mine, which, when it detached itself from Clare's face or décolletage, was manifestly agonised (because of the hard time Halliwell was giving me) or furious (at the animal lust I saw mirrored in the Warden's eyes). The main problem, however, was that Clare's own gaze was not totally English either, perhaps because (as I learned later) of a childhood spent in Delhi and in Cairo where one looks at others neither as one does in the British Isles nor as one does on the Continent; and so she was in a position to perceive not only the bestially salacious gaze of the Warden but also my own admiringly sexual one. The second (though minor) problem was that at the other end of the table, on my side and next to the other head of table, a famous literary scholar close to retirement age of whom I was very fond and of whom I will speak later, was her husband Edward Bayes, like Cromer-Blake a member of the host college; and although his gaze was always purely insular, it's possible that the fact that the only two unveiled gazes at the table were directed at his wife might in turn have obliged him to remove the habitual veil from his own gaze in order to keep abreast of the desires, untamed or otherwise, of others. But I'm not being quite accurate, for, given his position on the same side of the table as me, while Edward Bayes could not see my gaze at all, he had an uninterrupted view of Clare's and the Warden's. He must have noticed that at times his wife was on the verge of blushing but presumably attributed this to the wine or to the drooling and unworthy attentions of the Warden, a gigantic man with strangely tight skin - I imagined him as being completely hairless - and now much the worse for drink. And if Edward Bayes noticed his wife occasionally looking in my direction, he must have thought she was looking at her friend Cromer-Blake (seated, as I have said, immediately to my left) in search of protection or at least complicity. But there was a fourth gaze too - possibly a fifth if Edward Bayes' own had in fact dispensed with its layer of English tulle - that had no reason to remain veiled, and that was the gaze of Dayanand, the doctor of Indian origin who was Cromer-Blake's friend, seated to the left of Clare and therefore immediately opposite me. Although he had lived in Oxford for decades, his eyes retained the luminous, diaphanous quality of his native land and, in the context of that supper, they seemed positively aflame. Every five or six minutes, whilst he passed calmly from his conversation with Clare to a laconic silence with the one guest not wearing a gown (a hideously ugly lecturer in mineralogy from the University of Leiden whose gaze, despite being foreign, was also veiled by the two great rectangular magnifying glasses he wore in the guise of spectacles), his black, rather liquid eyes would rest on me for a moment and look me up and down with a clinical expression, as if my way of looking openly to right and left but above all at Clare were a symptom of some well-known complaint, easily cured, but long eradicated from those lands. It was impossible to hold Dayanand's gaze and every time my eyes met his, I had no choice but to turn back to Halliwell and pretend I was still absorbed by his exhausting chatter. Dayanand's eyes flashed fire when he turned them in Clare's direction and the Warden at the head of the table thus entered his field of vision; the latter, however, experienced no difficulty in holding Dayanand's gaze, since quite probably - believing himself unassailable - he barely noticed it. The Warden, forced to talk to his immediate neighbours, who visibly irritated him (to his right sat the warden of a women's college, a real harpy; to his left, a supercilious, pontificating luminary of the social sciences called Atwater), gradually began to free himself from the bonds of protocol and to intervene in the respective conversations of Clare and Cromer-Blake, his next neighbours along on either side of the table. But seeing that neither of them felt particularly disposed to involve him in their conversations, he took to feigning an interest in the talk of the harpy or the luminary and to playing with the gavel, a frequent pastime amongst bored or drunken wardens at high table. Out of temper and angry, he failed to notice that his initially indolent beating on the stand (he kept up a lazy drumming with the gavel) was becoming a series of hammer blows that grew steadily more violent (he was brandishing the gavel with real gusto now) and were given at sufficiently long intervals to cause both surprise and horrendous confusion, since, on hearing them, some stewards proceeded to remove plates they had only just served whilst others of great
er experience, aware that the blows did not form part of the ceremony, tried to retrieve the plates from their less experienced colleagues in order to return them to their intended recipients, who in some cases had barely got a sniff at them. After a couple of plates had crashed noisily to the floor as a result of these struggles, a moment arrived when all five of the stewards serving us stopped what they were doing and gathered in one corner of the refectory for a confabulation during which accusations of ineptitude were exchanged, while protests (albeit only muttered) began to arise amongst the guests, who found themselves amidst a clutter of abandoned serving dishes piled high with cold leftovers (a sight never seen at high table), equipped with only fish knives and forks to tackle a sirloin steak, or confronted by plates of food already begun or nibbled at or (most serious of all) with their glasses empty or filled with a mixture of two or more wines. The Warden was completely unaware of all this, and as each distracted blow on the stand or on the table (when he missed the stand) made the fine wood boom and splinter and set peas and mushrooms leaping and several wineglasses rolling, all I could do was calculate the possible trajectory of the gavel, according to his posture or rather his slant (for his huge body was slumping slowly on to the tabletop), were it to fly from his grasp. I leaned back slightly both in order to avoid the flying gavel and in the hope that I would thus increase the likelihood of the projectile braining the young economist Halliwell, for he, oblivious to everything, continued to douse me in sour, stale cider after every respite and breathing-space afforded by my conversational turns with Cromer-Blake, for nothing would have pleased me more than to see Halliwell rendered unconscious.