It must be remembered that this callow attempt at a personal decor existed against—or because of a background of austerity, rationing, and universal conformity. Britain was still deep in a dream of siege. Of its time, it was daring. People who went to parties in it were honoured, and told less fortunate friends about it afterwards. An added piquancy was the well-known landlady downstairs, who raged against the viper she had taken to her bosom and the bourgeois decadence of his fancy pots and pieces and his general attitude to life—or so Dan liked to pretend to his guests. The truth was that the elderly comrade, despite her eccentricities, was no fool and knew her young men, and their potentialities for the cause, a good deal better than they knew themselves. Not one whom Dan had shared that house with, and who had like him in later life achieved some public notice, had become a Communist; but rather more remarkably none had become a Conservative, either.
Jane knew the room too well to notice it at all that afternoon. She went to the window and stared down at the garden. After a moment, she pulled off the red headscarf and shook her dark hair loose; but still stood there holding the scarf, brooding.
‘Do you want a drink, Jane?’
She turned and smiled faintly. ‘Tea?’
‘I’ll go and fill the kettle.’
When he came back from the bathroom with it, he found her standing in the corner where he kept his exiguous kitchen.
Only dried milk.
‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘I could pinch some fresh off old Nadya Constantinovna.’
‘No really.’
‘She’s out.’
‘Honestly.’
And she came with two cups and a teapot, spoons, and knelt by the fireplace. He put the kettle on the little electric coil he used for heating water, then went to the corner and fetched the dried milk, tea, sugar. Then he sat down on the rug opposite her and watched her measure out the black leaves into the pot.
‘Is Nell coming round?’
He shook his head. ‘Essay night.’ She nodded. He sensed that she did not want to talk. Yet the feeling of emptiness in the silent house, in the day, in the time of day, made the vacuum embarrassing to him.
‘Shall I put the fire on?’
‘If you like.’
The gas-fire phutted at his match, began to flame blue and gold; sparks of incandescent pink. The kettle started to add its slow voice. They echoed a kind of deep purr in Dan, for all his slight unease and Jane’s silence. Already his dialogue-inventive mind, the monster that then still seemed a joyous gift, was secretly rehearsing various amusing ways of telling what had happened: that pompous half-education of the policemen’s voices, Andrew’s impossibly blasé behaviour, that Ianded at Anzio, old man’… and then something else, not only the event, the grey buttocks like uncooked tripe, the reported maggots seething in the hair (which Dan would claim for his own eyes too) but having been with Jane, the idol of her year, the almost celebrated already.
All of young Oxford knew she must one day be more famous, truly famous, with those gifts (much more serious than just taking off Rita Hayworth, her Vittoria in The White Devil had proved that beyond doubt) and looks. She sat, one arm back, leaning sideways a little, staring into the gas-fire. Deep down it wasn’t her vivacities, her powers of mimicry, her mobility, all she could be on stage; but what her face showed just then, a sort of pensive inwardness. She was very much two people, one had long ago realized that, much more complicated than Nell; which was what matched her, against all superficial probability, with Anthony, who was in so many ways the antithesis of them all the Greats scholar from Winchester, already halfway to becoming a don, applied, logical (in all except his religious beliefs, at that time almost as much a dandyism as collecting Art Nouveau mirror-frames); rapidly analytical and aphoristic. Young Oxford men who were mature, like Mark, in terms of war and death were two a penny; everyone knew the story of the proctors’ bulldog who had clapped hands on a student caught drinking in a pub—only to find that his victim was the young colonel whose batman he had been during the war. But Anthony had a different maturity, an apparently much surer knowledge of who he was and what he intended to be. He was widely envied Jane, but their relationship seemed incongruous only to people who knew neither of them well. Behind the masks their complementarity was striking.
As he might, though less concisely, have put it at the time; in simple fact he was in love with her. That was why he was embarrassed. For some months, at least two terms, he had known this; and that he was trapped. His future marriage to her sister was broken long before that day. Webster’s immortal line: strange geometric hinges. His sense of guilt ought to have been attached to Nell; but in fact it was much more orientated towards Anthony, and not at all, or very little, because on that particular occasion Anthony had granted himself a weekend’s break (some monastery in Gloucestershire that went in for the instant retreat) from his final grind.
Dan still felt a baffled privilege, to have got on so well with Anthony—baffled because he still couldn’t really understand what the brilliant Wykehamist saw in him. He knew much better what he had himself taken from the relationship the contact with a much more fastidious and incisive intellect, with a psyche far more certain of both external and internal values, far less easily corrupted by new ideas and the ephemeral. In a way, Anthony was Oxford; Dan was merely a visitor. He had learnt far more from him than from his tutors, if the truth were known. But there was that one great flaw: he could never quite shake off a deep, though carefully hidden, conviction that it was a friendship between unequals.
In fairness to Dan, and to historical accuracy, it must be said that in terms of undergraduate prestige—so closely connected with undergraduate notoriety—his feeling of inferiority would have seemed odd to his contemporaries. He was a far better known, and perhaps even envied, student of his time than Anthony; of that group who escape academy and achieve more than a mere college reputation and who, later, in retrospect, give their whole university generation its characteristic stamp. But like Jane, he was also two people, though far less prepared, or able, to admit it than she. Perhaps it was mainly in his secret feelings towards Anthony that he did admit it; and in those towards Jane. He was even a little jealous of her gender, her young womanhood, which he felt allowed her both a more natural and a more mature attitude; she could both mock and be affectionate in ways he could not. They would, in fact, usually take the same side in any argument against Anthony, conspiring in guying him gently if he became too outrageously the young don. But it was a stage alliance, would-be worldly-wise thespians sniping at intellectualism; and hid the truth of where the real affinities lay.
So Dan watched this apparent proof, the prize he had not won and, to complicate matters, which had even seemed partly stolen from him, since he had known Jane before Anthony, had even first introduced them, had really only held back before that introduction because he was in awe of her. Now he took what consolation he could from this substitute intimacy, in the softly hissing silence. The sky seemed to grow darker, strangely dark for midsummer. It began to rain outside, more heavily. The kettle boiled and Jane leant across and lifted it; filled the pot. She was still filling it when she asked her astounding question.
‘Do you and Nell go to bed together, Dan?’
Her intent, down-looking face.
‘Darling… ‘ he gave a little puff of shocked amusement; of pure shock, really. She did not smile, but set the kettle on the hearth before the fire. He had one virtue, I suppose, he read other people’s moods fast; caught their intonations, usages, changed millimetres of mouth and eye-shape; but only the moods, not the intentions.
He murmured, ‘Hasn’t Nell…?’
‘Sisters don’t always talk about things like that.’ She put a spoonful of milk in each of the two cups. ‘You mean you do?’
‘Doesn’t everybody?’
Again, they didn’t, and far from it, in those days; and the comparatively few that did kept up a convention of secrecy about it
. But Dan had never been a young man to keep his hard-earned and very far from innate sophistication under a bushel. One has to have some substitute for honesty.
‘Anthony and I don’t.’
He couldn’t understand why she should want to tell him. Knowing Anthony’s views, he had not supposed that they did; both he and Nell had decided quite definitely that they didn’t.
‘The Catholic thing?’
She passed him his cup; little flecks of undissolved white powder floated on top.
Yes.
‘It means a lot to him.’
‘Yes.’
‘Under the squibs and epigrams.’
She smiled faintly, but for the second time that day she seemed to be reproaching Anthony. A shifting of deep grounds, a sudden mystery, a hinge’s first faint creak. She sipped her tea.
‘I’m not a virgin, Dan. There was someone else. In my first year. Before I met Anthony.’
Which pierced something hitherto virgin between them.
‘He knows?’
She made a wry grimace. ‘This is rather why I’m telling you. It’s a sort of rehearsal.’
‘Oh Gawd.’
‘It’s so stupid. If I’d only told him at the beginning. Then it seemed too late. I’m sort of trapped now. It’s not what I did. But that I haven’t told him before.’
He offered her a cigarette, lit a spill and held it out, then lit his own.
‘And he’s never thought to ask?’
‘For someone so intelligent, he’s rather bizarrely trusting. He assumes things about people he’d never assume about a theory of logic or a syllogism.’ She drew on the cigarette. ‘At least that’s what I used to think.’
‘And now?’
‘I wonder if he isn’t rather frightened. Which frightens me every time I try to screw my courage up to tell him.’
‘You’ll have to tell him some time.’
‘I can’t just before Finals. He’d be bound to see it as… ‘
‘As what?’
She had such fine eyes, soul; sometimes she looked young, she did at that moment, staring into the fire, younger than Nell.
‘The Jesuit in him. So badly timed, I must be trying to say something else. He’d look for it.’
‘Are you sure he doesn’t think about you as one more step in the dark?’
She smiled. ‘I suppose I am a standin for the whole shebang. Now you mention it.’
‘Is he putting a lot of pressure on about the Catholic thing?’
‘You know what he’s like.’ She shrugged. ‘He doesn’t lay down the law. It’s all Gabriel Marcel and personal choice. Falling over himself not to decide for me.’ She leant back on an elbow, moving her legs from the warmth of the fire; but still stared into it. ‘I’ve suddenly realized what Rabelais was on about this week. How he’s really more modern than all the St Germaindes-Près crowd. Far more of an existentialist. That’s what I was trying to say on the river. When you think how utterly obsessed by self-denial England’s become. Outside the little world we’ve made for ourselves here. I feel there’s something about Anthony and his religious side that’s rather the same. Always thinking about the past and worrying about the future. Never actually managing to enjoy the present. And Rabelais is just one gorgeous long raspberry in the face of all that. There are passages, you… you suddenly feel he’s the only sane human being who ever lived.’ She stared at her cigarette. ‘I tried to explain all this to Anthony the other evening.’
‘And he didn’t quite follow.’
‘On the contrary. Everything. Except the fact that I’d just been to bed with the man. In spirit.’
Dan grinned down. ‘But you didn’t quite put it that way.’
‘It’s how it felt. Adultery as well as heresy. Especially when the read the ethical riot act over my poor little female mind.’
‘Come on. He’s not like that.’
‘Of course not. He was quite funny. Because he was so sure I couldn’t be serious.’ She began tracing patterns in the worn Turkish carpet beneath the rug. ‘His problem is he can only be himself. You and I can be other people.’
‘Now you’re denying him imagination. That’s not fair.’
‘Not imagination. But acting on it. He could never write plays. Novels. Anything where you have to be someone else. Not in a thousand years.’ There was a silence; suddenly she shifted ground. ‘I can’t make out if Nell likes him or not.’
Again he was shocked. ‘Of course she does. You know she does.’
‘She doesn’t realize he disapproves of her?’
Dan gave her a quick look then; but her eyes remained on the carpet.
‘That’s news to me too, Janey.’
Liar: it was long sensed, and feared. And now the afternoon really started to show strange facets, cracks, reversals of time; was hinged indeed. It seemed there was almost a malice in her, a determination to force scales from his eyes; and at the same time a nakedness, as she let him see all these buried feelings.
‘He does try to hide it. Even from me.’
‘But what’s he got against her, for God’s sake?’
‘I suppose he suspects you go to bed. Fears something in me that be fears in her. He does rather take the sexpot image at face value. But that’s at least half a mask. He knows that.’
‘1 know.’
‘And I’m just as bad.’
‘No, you pass. You’re a child of nature. His proof he’s not a prig.’ She slid him a glance. ‘Is all this shocking you?’
‘I think he’s being terribly inauthentic.’
‘He’s also authentically fond of you both.’
‘Thanks a million.’
‘And he tries to understand.’
‘But he can’t have it both ways. He can’t pretend to our faces that he likes Nell and then pity me or something for having fallen into the clutches of the Scarlet Woman of Babylon.’
‘Fear for you.’
He stared at her, but her own eyes were lost in the fire. Again he felt left a step behind.
‘Is this what you were trying to say on the river? About Nell and me getting married?’
‘How do you mean?’
‘In your and Anthony’s considered opinion, we shouldn’t?’
‘It’s not something I have a considered opinion about.’
He was silent, then gave a sour little sniff. ‘I thought at least we’d gained your qualified approval.’ He went on: ‘So why did you say Nell was lucky?’
‘Because I think she is.’ She said slowly, ‘And I haven’t got a considered opinion because I’m not able to judge properly.’
Once more he tried to force her to look at him.
‘Why not?’
‘Because.’
‘Come on.’
Her voice dropped. ‘Because I’m jealous of her.’
‘Because the bed thing’s not a problem?’
‘That would be just envy. I said jealousy.’
It took a moment or two to sink in. But the intentness of her eyes on the carpet… he looked down at his own stretched-out legs, he was sitting with his back to the wall beside the fire; and felt like someone led blindfold to a precipice. She murmured in the silence, ‘Fais çe pie lodras.’
‘This is getting rather complicated.’
‘Perhaps it’s a long overdue simplification.’
‘But you and Anthony, I thought …’ She turned away on the other elbow. He stared at her back.
‘All this summer, whenever the four of us have been together, you won’t look at me. Unless you absolutely have to. And I’ve had to force myself to look normally at you.’
Her head bowed, face hidden, she waited.
‘I didn’t realize.’
‘That you’ve been avoiding my eyes?’
‘Your side of it.’
‘No idea at all?’
‘Just… once or twice. That evening at the Trout.’
‘Why did you think I held your hand like that?’
They had
strolled out to Rosamund’s Bower when the pub closed. Nell and Anthony had gone on ahead. He had been very conscious of her hand lightly in his in the darkness… but it had not said this.