‘There, I think that looks very nice,’ the girl said. ‘You couldn’t guess what was underneath it all if you didn’t know, could you?’
‘No, and thanks very much for the idea and the help.’
‘Oh, that’s all right. What are you going to do with the table?’
‘I’ve been thinking about that. There’s a little junk-room at the end of the passage, full of broken furniture and rotting books and things; they sent me up there yesterday to fetch a music-stand or whatever they call the things. That room’s the place for this table, behind an old screen with French courtiers painted on it—you know, floppy hats and banjos. If you’ll go and see whether the coast’s clear, I’ll rush along there with it now.’
‘Agreed. I must say that’s an inspiration. With the table out of the way nobody’ll connect the sheets with smoking. They’ll think you tore them with your feet, in a nightmare or something.’
‘Some nightmare, to get through two blankets as well.’
She looked at him open-mouthed, then began to laugh. She sat down on the bed but immediately jumped up again as if it were once more on fire. Dixon began laughing too, not because he was much amused but because he felt grateful to her for her laughter. They were still laughing a minute later when she beckoned to him from outside the bathroom door, when he ran out on to the landing with the table, and when Margaret suddenly flung open the door of her bedroom and saw them.
‘What do you imagine you’re up to, James?’ she asked.
7
‘We’re just . . . I’m just . . . I was just getting rid of this table, as a matter of fact,’ Dixon said, looking from one woman to the other.
The Callaghan girl made an extraordinarily loud snorting noise of incompetently-suppressed laughter. Margaret said: ‘Just what is all this nonsense?’
‘It isn’t nonsense, Margaret, I assure you. I’ve . . .’
‘If anybody minds me saying so,’ the girl interrupted him, ‘I think we’d better get rid of the table first and explain the whys and wherefores afterwards, don’t you?’
‘That’s right,’ Dixon said, put his head down, and ran up the passage. In the junk-room he nudged aside an archery target, making his crazy-peasant face at it—what flaring imbecilities must it have witnessed?—and dumped the table behind the screen. Next, he unrolled a handy length of mouldering silk and spread it over the table-top; then arranged upon the cloth thus provided two fencing foils, a book called The Lesson of Spain, and a Lilliputian chest-of-drawers no doubt containing sea-shells and locks of children’s hair; finally propped up against this display a tripod meant for some sort of telescopic or photographic tomfoolery. The effect, when he stepped back to look, was excellent; no observer could doubt that these objects had lived together for years in just this way. He smiled, shutting his eyes for a moment before slopping back into the world of reality.
Margaret was waiting for him at the threshold of her room. One corner of her mouth was drawn in in a way he knew well. The Callaghan girl had gone.
‘Well, what was all that about, James?’
He shut the door and began to explain. As he talked, his incendiarism and the counter-measures adopted struck him for the first time as funny. Surely Margaret, especially since she wasn’t personally implicated, must find them funny too; they formed the sort of story she liked. He said as much at the end of his account.
Without changing her expression, she dissented. ‘I could see you and that girl were finding it all pretty funny, though.’
‘Well, why shouldn’t we have found it funny?’
‘No reason at all; it’s nothing to do with me. The whole thing just strikes me as rather silly and childish, that’s all.’
He said effortfully: ‘Now look, Margaret: I can quite see why it looked like that to you. But don’t you see? The whole point is that naturally I didn’t mean to burn that bloody sheet and so on. Once I’d done it, though, I’d obviously got to do something about it, hadn’t I?’
‘You couldn’t have gone to Mrs Welch and explained, of course.’
‘No, “of course” is right, I couldn’t have. I’d have been out of my job in five minutes.’ He produced and lit cigarettes for the two of them, trying to remember whether Bertrand’s girl had said anything about owning up to Mrs Welch. He didn’t think she had, which was odd in a way.
‘You’ll be out in less time than that if she ever finds that table.’
‘She won’t find it,’ he said irritably, beginning to pace up and down the room.
‘What about that sheet? You say it was Christine Callaghan’s idea to remake the bed?’
‘Well, what about it? And what about the sheet?’
‘You seem to have got on a good deal better with her than you did last night.’
‘Yes, that’s good, isn’t it?’
‘Incidentally I thought she was abominably rude just now.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Barging in and sending you off with that table like that.’
Stung with this reflection on his dignity, Dixon said: ‘You’ve got this “rude” business on the winkle, Margaret. She was absolutely right: one of the Welches might have turned up at any moment. And if anyone barged in, it was you, not her.’ He began regretting this speech well before it was over.
She stared at him with her mouth a little open, then whipped abruptly round away from him. ‘I’m sorry, I won’t barge in again.’
‘Now, Margaret, you know I didn’t mean it like that; don’t be ridiculous. I was only . . .’
In a high voice, kept steady only by obvious effort, she said: ‘Please go.’
Dixon fought hard to drive away the opinion that, both as actress and as script-writer, she was doing rather well, and hated himself for failing. Trying to haul urgency into his tone, he began: ‘You mustn’t take it like that. It was a bloody stupid thing to say, on my part, I admit. I didn’t mean you actually barged in, in that way, of course I didn’t. You must see . . .’
‘Oh, I see all right, James. I see perfectly.’ This time her voice was flat. She wore a sort of arty get-up of multicoloured shirt, skirt with fringed hem and pocket, low-heeled shoes, and wooden beads. The smoke from her cigarette curled up, blue and ashy in a sunbeam, round her bare forearm. Dixon moved closer and saw that her hair had been recently washed; it lay in dry lustreless wisps on the back of her neck. In that condition it struck him as quintessentially feminine, much more feminine than the Callaghan girl’s shining fair crop. Poor old Margaret, he thought, and rested his hand, in a gesture he hoped was solicitous, on her nearer shoulder.
Before he could speak she’d shaken his hand off, moved over to the window, and begun to talk in a strain that marked the opening, he soon realized, of a totally new phase of the scene they were evidently having. ‘Get away. How dare you. Stop pushing and pulling me about. Who do you think you are? You haven’t even had the grace to apologize for last night. You behaved disgracefully. I hope you realize you absolutely stank of beer. I’ve never given you the least impression . . . Whatever made you think you could get away with that sort of thing? What the hell do you take me for? It isn’t as if you didn’t know what I’ve had to put up with, all these last weeks. It’s intolerable, absolutely intolerable. I won’t stand for it. You must have known how I’ve been feeling.’
She went on like this while Dixon looked her in the eyes. His panic mounted in sincerity and volume. Her body moved jerkily about; her head bobbed from side to side on its rather long neck, shaking the wooden beads about on the multicoloured shirt. He found himself thinking that the whole arty get-up seemed oddly at variance with the way she was acting. People who wore clothes of that sort oughtn’t to mind things of this sort, certainly not as much as Margaret clearly minded this thing. It was surely wrong to dress, and to behave most of the time, in a way that was so un-prim when you were really so proper all of the time. But then, with Catchpole at any rate, she hadn’t been proper all of the time, had she? But of course it was al
l wrong to think like this, very bad, in fact, to allow his irritation with some of the things about her to do what it always did, to obscure what was most important: she was a neurotic who’d recently taken a bad beating. Yes, she was right really, though not in the way she meant. He had behaved badly, he had been inconsiderate. He’d better devote all his energy to apologizing. He booted out of his mind the reflection, derived apparently from nowhere, that in spite of her emotion she seemed well able to keep her voice down.
‘I was thinking only yesterday afternoon about the relationship we’d been building up, how valuable it was, something really good. But that was silly, wasn’t it? I was dead wrong, I . . .’
‘No, you’re dead wrong now, you were right then,’ he broke in. ‘These things don’t stop just like that, you know; human beings aren’t as simple as that, they’re not like machines.’
He went on like this while she looked him in the eyes. The rotten triteness of his words seemed, if anything, to help him to meet her gaze. She stood with one leg partly crossed over the other in her favourite attitude, no doubt designed to show off her legs, for they were good, her best feature. At one point she moved slightly so that her spectacles caught the light and prevented him seeing where she was looking. The eeriness of this disconcerted him a good deal, but he soldiered pluckily on to his objective, the promise or avowal, not yet in sight, which would end this encounter, bring some respite from the trek away from honesty. Boots, boots, boots, boots, marching up and down again.
After a while she was no more than implacably annoyed; then annoyed; then sullen and monosyllabic. ‘Oh James,’ she said at last, smoothing her hair with a convex palm; ‘do let’s stop this for now. I’m tired, I’m terribly tired, I can’t go on any more. I’m going back to bed; I couldn’t manage to sleep much last night. I just want to be left alone. Try to understand.’
‘What about your breakfast?’
‘I don’t want any. It’ll be over by now, anyway. And I don’t want to have to talk to anybody.’ She sank on to the bed and closed her eyes. ‘Just leave me alone.’
‘Are you sure you’ll be all right?’
She said ‘Oh yes’ on a great sigh. ‘Please.’
‘Don’t forget what I said.’
When no reply came, he went quietly out and into his bedroom, where he lay on the bed smoking a cigarette and reflecting, to small purpose, on the events of the last hour. Margaret he succeeded in putting from his mind almost at once; it was all very complicated, but then it had always been that, and he’d hated what she’d said to him and what he’d said to her, but then he’d been bound to do that. How well, really, the Callaghan girl had behaved, in spite of her standoffishness at times, and how sound her suggestion had been. That, and her laughing fit, proved that she wasn’t as ‘dignant’ as she looked. He remembered uneasily the awful glow of her skin, the distressing clarity of her eyes, the immoderate whiteness of those slightly irregular teeth. Then he cheered up a little as he put it to himself that her attachment to Bertrand was a fair guarantee of her being really very nasty. Yes, Bertrand; he must either make peace with him or keep out of his way. Keeping out of his way would almost certainly be better; he could combine it with keeping out of Margaret’s way. If Atkinson phoned punctually he’d be out of the house in well under the hour.
He put out his cigarette in the ashtray, taking twenty or thirty seconds over the job, then went and had a shave. Some time later a loud baying bawl of ‘Dixon’ brought him to the stairhead. ‘Somebody want me?’ he roared.
‘Telephone. Dixon. Dixon. Telephone.’
In the drawing-room, Bertrand was sitting with his parents and his girl. He pointed to the phone with his big head, then went on listening to his father, who, canted over in his chair like a broken robot, was saying splenetically: ‘In children’s art, you see, you get what you might call a clarity of vision, a sort of thinking in terms of the world as it appears, you see, not as the adult knows it to be. Well, this . . . this . . .’
‘That you, Jim?’ said Atkinson’s cruel voice. ‘How are things at Barnum and Bailey’s?’
‘All the better for hearing your voice, Bill.’
While Atkinson, unexpectedly garrulous, described a case he’d been reading about in the News of the World, asked Dixon’s opinion on a clue in its prize crossword, and made an impracticable suggestion for the entertainment of the company at the Welches’, Dixon watched the Callaghan girl listening to something Bertrand was explaining about art. She was sitting bolt upright in her chair, her lips compressed, wearing, he noticed for the first time, exactly what she’d been wearing the previous evening. Everything about her looked severe, and yet she didn’t mind sheets and charred table-tops, and Margaret did. This girl hadn’t minded fried eggs eaten with the fingers, either. It was a puzzle.
Raising his voice a little, Dixon said: ‘Well, thanks very much for ringing, Bill. Apologize to my parents, will you, and tell them I’ll be back as soon as I can.’
‘Tell Johns from me where to put his oboe before you go.’
‘I’ll do my best. Good-bye.’
‘That’s the real point about Mexican art, Christine,’ Bertrand was saying. ‘Primitive technique can’t have any virtue in itself, obviouslam.’
‘No of course not; I see,’ she said.
‘I’m afraid I shall have to leave right away, Mrs Welch,’ Dixon said. ‘That phone call . . .’
They all looked round at him, Bertrand impatiently, Mrs Welch censoriously, Welch with incomprehension, Bertrand’s girl without curiosity. Before Dixon could begin to explain, Margaret walked in through the open door, followed by Johns. Her recovery from prostrating fatigue had been rapid; had Johns somehow assisted it?
‘A-ah,’ Margaret said. It was her usual greeting to a roomful of people: a long, exhaled, downward glissando. ‘Hallo, everybody.’
Those already in the room began moving uneasily about in response to this. Welch and Bertrand began talking simultaneously, Mrs Welch looked rapidly to and fro between Dixon and Margaret, Johns hung whey-faced at the threshold. When Welch, still talking, sprang ataxically from his chair towards Johns, Dixon, finding his own chance to talk about to lapse, moved forward. He heard Welch use the phrase ‘figured bass’. He coughed, then said loudly and with unforeseen hoarseness: ‘I’m afraid I’ve got to be off now. My parents have come to see me unexpectedly.’ He paused, to give room for any cries of protest and regret. When none came, he hurried on: ‘Thank you very much for putting me up, Mrs Welch; I’ve enjoyed myself very much. And now I’m afraid I really must be off. Good-bye, all.’
Avoiding Margaret’s eye, he walked through the silence and out of the door. Apart from making him feel he might die or go mad at any moment, his hangover had vanished. Johns grinned at him as he passed.
8
‘Oh, Dixon, can I have a word with you?’
To its recipient, this was the most dreadful of all summonses. It had been a favourite of his Flight-Sergeant’s, a Regular with old-fashioned ideas about the propriety of getting an N.C.O. out of the men’s hearing before subjecting him, not to a word, but to an uproar of abuse and threats about some harmless oversight. Welch had revived it as a short maestoso introduction to the allegro con fuoco of his displeasure over each new item in the ‘bad impression’ Dixon had been building up, and it heralded at best the imposition of some fresh academic task designed, conceivably, to probe his value to the Department. Michie, too, had more than once used it to signal a desire to talk, and ask questions, about Medieval Life and Culture. It was Welch who delivered the summons now, swaying about in the doorway of the little teaching room which Dixon shared with Goldsmith. Intellectually, Dixon could conceive of such a request leading to praise for work done on indexing Welch’s notes for his book, to the offer of a staff post on Medium Aevum, to an invitation to an indecent house-party, but emotionally and physically he was half-throttled by the certainty of nastiness.
‘Of course, Professor.’ While he followed Welc
h next door, wondering whether the subject for debate was the sheet, or his dismissal, or the sheet and his dismissal, Dixon reeled off a long string of swear-words in a mumbling undertone, so that he’d be in credit, as it were, for the first few minutes of the interview. He stamped his feet hard as he walked, partly to keep his courage up, partly to drown his own mutterings, partly because he hadn’t yet smoked that morning.