He reached out and took her hand: she made no movement. There was another pause, during which they heard someone run heavily downstairs into the hall. Margaret glanced at him for a moment, then turned her head away. In a parched sort of voice, she said: ‘All right, I’ll come to the pictures.’
‘Good.’ Dixon felt glad it was over. ‘I’ll go and find Neddy and book a seat in the car. He can get six in all right. You go up and get ready.’
They went out into the hall, where Welch, now wearing a blue serge suit of startlingly extravagant cut, was to be seen admiring his picture. When Margaret said ‘I shan’t be a minute’ and went up the stairs, Dixon reflected that their conversation, whatever its other peculiarities, had reflected an honesty on both sides that their relations had never shown before. That was something, anyway.
Welch’s mouth opened at his approach, no doubt in preparation for some pronouncement beginning ‘The point about child art, of course’, but Dixon got in first by explaining that Margaret would also, if convenient, like a seat in the car. After a very brief visitation from his wondering frown, Welch nodded and walked with Dixon to the front door, which he opened. They went out on to the step. A light breeze was blowing and the sun shone through a thin tissue of cloud. The heat had gone out of the day.
‘I’ll just go and bring the car round,’ Welch said. ‘I’d quite forgotten we were going out, you see, or I wouldn’t have garaged it. I shan’t be a minute.’
He went off. As he did so, somebody else’s step could be heard on the stairs. Dixon turned round and saw Christine coming towards him wearing a little black bolero, but otherwise dressed exactly as he’d seen her on the arty week-end. Perhaps these were the only ordinary clothes she had, in which case he oughtn’t to have let her give him that pound for the taxi. She smiled at him and joined him on the step. ‘I hope you didn’t have too bad a time with Bertrand,’ she said.
‘Bertrand? Oh . . . no, it was all right.’
‘I managed to calm him down after a bit.’
He watched her; she stood with her legs apart and looked very sturdy and confident. The breeze blew a small lock of fair hair the wrong way, half-across the parting. She screwed up her eyes slightly as she faced the sun. It was as if she were about to do something dangerous, important, and simple which she knew she could have a creditable shot at whether she succeeded or not. A feeling of grief that was also a feeling of exasperation settled upon Dixon. He looked away over the fields beyond the nearby hedge to where a line of osiers marked the bed of a small stream. A crowd of rooks, perhaps a couple of hundred, flew towards the house, then, directly above the stream, swerved aside along its course.
‘About this tea tomorrow,’ Dixon said, half-turning back to Christine.
‘Yes?’ she said, looking a little nervous. ‘What about it?’ As she said this, Welch started up his car at the side of the house. She added: ‘You needn’t worry. I’ll be there all right.’ Before he could reply she glanced over her shoulder into the hall and shook her finger at him, frowning.
Bertrand came out on to the step, glancing from one of them to the other. He was wearing a blue beret, which had much the same effect on Dixon as Welch senior’s fishing-hat. If such headgear was a protection, what was it a protection against? If it wasn’t a protection, what was it? What was it for? What was it for?
As if divining what he wanted to ask, Christine again frowned at him, then at Bertrand. ‘Now whatever you two think of each other,’ she said, ‘for goodness’ sake pull yourselves together, both of you, and behave decently in front of Mr and Mrs Welch. I thought you’d both gone off your heads just now.’
‘I was only telling him where he . . .’ Bertrand began.
‘Well, you’re not going to tell him anything now,’ she turned to Dixon, ‘and you’re not going to tell him anything. If you start quarrelling in the car I’ll jump out.’
They stood apart from each other for a few moments, while Dixon’s regret concentrated on the fact that to abandon the pursuit of Christine meant imposing a cease-fire in the Bertrand campaign. Then Welch’s car, with its owner at the wheel, came bouncing round the corner and the three of them moved towards it. Mrs Welch, accompanied by Margaret, came out of the house, shut the front door, and joined them, not looking at Dixon. A rather undignified scramble for places now ensued, ending with Dixon in occupation of the middle of the triple front seat with Margaret on his left. Behind them sat Mrs Welch, Christine, and Bertrand. Dixon thought the arrangement prettily symmetrical. Breathing noisily, Welch snatched his foot off the clutch-pedal, and, in the kangaroo mode to which it must by now be accustomed, the car started on its journey.
19
Dixon looked at the telephone where it stood on a black plush cloth in the middle of a bamboo table situated in Miss Cutler’s drawing-room. He felt like an alcoholic surveying a bottle of gin; only by using it could he obtain the relief he wanted, but its side-effects, as recent experience had proved, were likely to be deleterious. He must cancel the tea-date with Christine, now only six hours ahead. To do that he must take the chance of Mrs Welch answering the phone. This, in other circumstances a certain deterrent, he’d decided to risk in preference to keeping the date and telling Christine to her face that their little adventure was at an end. The thought of such a meeting being their last was not to be endured. He sat down by the phone, gave the number, and in a few seconds heard Mrs Welch’s voice. It didn’t discompose him, but before saying anything he made his lascar’s face in order to draw off his anger. Did Mrs Welch spend all her time sitting, had she perhaps had a bed made up, within arm’s length of the phone in case he might ring up?
‘Trying to connect you,’ he fluted as he’d planned. ‘Hallo, who is that?’
Mrs Welch mentioned her number.
‘Speak up, London,’ he went on; ‘you’re through.’ Then he jammed his teeth together, opened his mouth laterally as far as he could, and said in a growling over-cultured bass: ‘Hallaher, hallaher,’ following this with a whinnying ‘You’re through, London’ and, in the bass voice ‘Hallaher, have yaw a Miss Kellerhen steng with yaw, plizz?’ He made a rushing noise with his mouth which he thought imitated line disturbances.
‘Who’s that speaking, please?’
Dixon rocked to and fro as if in grief, bringing his mouth up to the phone and back again as he spoke: ‘Hallaher, hallaher.
Forteskyah hyah.’
‘I’m sorry, I didn’t quite catch . . .’
‘Forteskyaw . . . Farteskyaw . . .’
‘Who is that speaking? It sounds like . . .’
‘Hallaher . . . Is thet yaw, Miss Kellerhen?’
‘Is that you, Mr .. . ?’
‘Farteskyah,’ Dixon bawled desperately, muffling his mouth with his hand and trying not to cough.
‘That’s Mr Dixon, isn’t it? What are you trying to . . . ?’
‘Hallaher . . .’
‘Kindly stop this . . . ridiculous, this . . .’
‘Three minutes up,’ he neighed, slobbering. ‘Finish off, please, time’s up.’ He added a last throat-peeling ‘Hallaher’, the phone at the full length of his arm, and fell silent. This was a rout.
‘If you’re still there, Mr Dixon,’ Mrs Welch said after a moment, in a voice sharpened to excoriation by the intervening few miles of line, ‘I’d like to tell you that if you make one more attempt to interfere in my son’s or my affairs, then I shall have to ask my husband to take the matter up with you from a disciplinary point of view, and also that other matter of the . . .’
Dixon rang off. ‘Sheet,’ he said. Trembling, he reached for his cigarettes; in the last few days he’d given up all attempt to ration himself. He’d have to keep his date now; a telegram would be too curt. And Mrs Welch would probably station herself so as to intercept it anyway. As he was lighting his cigarette, the bell of the phone went off within two feet of his head; he started violently and began coughing, then took up the phone. Who could this be? An oboist for Johns, most likely
, or perhaps a clarinettist. He said ‘Hallo.’
A voice he realized with relief was quite strange to him said: ‘Oh, have you a Mr Dixon living there, please?’
‘Speaking.’
‘Oh, Mr Dixon, I’m so glad I’ve got to you. Your University gave me the number. My name’s Catchpole; I expect you’ve heard of me from Margaret Peel.’
Dixon grew tense. ‘Yes, I have,’ he said noncommittally. It wasn’t the sort of voice he’d have expected Catchpole to have; it was quiet, polite, and apparently diffident.
‘I rang up because I thought you might be able to give some news of Margaret. I’ve been away recently, and I haven’t managed to get to hear anything of her since I got back. How is she these days, do you know?’
‘Why don’t you get hold of her and ask her yourself? Or perhaps you’ve tried that and she won’t speak to you. Well, I can understand that.’ Dixon began to tremble again.
‘I think there must be some mistake about . . .’
‘I’ve got her address, but I don’t see why I should give it to you, of all people.’
‘Mr Dixon, I can’t understand why you’re taking that tone. All I want to know is how Margaret is. There can’t be anything objectionable about that, can there?’
‘I warn you that if you’re thinking of making a comeback with her, you’re wasting your time, see?’
‘I don’t know what you mean by that. Are you sure you haven’t got me confused with someone else?’
‘Your name’s Catchpole, isn’t it?’
‘Yes. Please . . .’
‘Well, I know who you are all right, then. And all about you.’
‘Please give me a hearing, Mr Dixon.’ The voice at the other end shook slightly. ‘I just wanted to know whether Margaret is all right or not. Won’t you even tell me that?’
Dixon calmed down at this appeal. ‘All right, I will. She’s in quite good health physically. Mentally, she’s about as well as can be expected.’
‘Thanks very much. I’m glad to hear that. Do you mind if I ask you one more question?’
‘What is it?’
‘Why were you so angry with me a moment ago when I asked you about her?’
‘That’s pretty obvious, isn’t it?’
‘Not to me, I’m afraid. I think we’re talking rather at cross-purposes, aren’t we? I can’t think of any reason why you should have a grudge against me. No real reason, that is.’
It sounded remarkably sincere. ‘Well, I can,’ Dixon said, unable to keep the puzzlement out of his voice.
‘There’s some kind of mix-up here, I can see that. I’d like to meet you some time, if I may, and try to straighten things out. We can’t do it over the phone. What about it?’
Dixon hesitated. ‘All right. What do you suggest?’
They arranged to meet for a pre-lunch drink in a pub at the foot of College Road the next day but one, Thursday. When Catchpole had rung off, Dixon sat for some minutes smoking. It was worrying, but then most of the things that had happened to him recently were that, and a good deal more besides. Anyway, he’d turn up and see what was what. Keep quiet about it to Margaret, of course. With a sigh he referred to the pocket diary for 1943 in which he wrote down telephone numbers, pulled the phone towards him again, and gave a London number. In a little while he said: ‘Is Dr Caton there, please?’
There was another brief delay, then a rich confident voice came clearly over the line: ‘This is Caton.’
Dixon gave his name and that of his College.
For some reason, the richness and confidence of the other voice waned sharply. ‘What do you want?’ it asked snappishly.
‘I read about your appointment, Dr Caton—incidentally may I offer my congratulations?—and I was wondering what was going to happen to that article of mine you were good enough to accept for your journal. Can you tell me when it’ll come out?’
‘Ah, now, Mr Dickerson, things are very difficult these days, you know.’ The voice was confident again, as if reciting a saying-lesson it knew it knew. ‘There’s quite a lot of stuff waiting to go in, as you can imagine. You really mustn’t expect your article—which I liked very much, I may say—to go in in five minutes, you know.’
‘I appreciate that, Dr Caton; I can quite understand there must be a long queue. I was just wondering if you could give me some sort of tentative date, that’s all.’
‘I wish you knew how difficult things are here, Mr Dickerson. Setting up our kind of stuff in type is a job which only an exceptionally highly-skilled compositor can tackle. Have you ever thought what slow work it must be getting even half a page of footnotes set up?’
‘No, but I can quite see it must be a very complicated matter. All I wanted to know, actually, is a rough idea of when you think you could manage to get my article out.’
‘Well, as to that, Mr Dickerson, things aren’t by any means as simple as they may look to you. You probably know Hardy of Trinity; I’ve had a thing of his at the printers for weeks now, and two or three times a day, or even more, I get them coming through on the phone with some query or other. Very often, of course, I just have to refer them to him, when it’s a question of a foreign document or something of that kind. I know chaps in your position think an editor’s job’s all beer and skittles; it’s very far from being that, believe me.’
‘I’m sure it must be most exacting, Dr Caton, and of course I wouldn’t dream of trying to pin you down to anything definite, but it’s rather important to me to have some estimate of when you’ll be able to publish my article.’
‘I can’t start making promises to have your article out next week,’ the voice said in a nettled tone, as if Dixon had been stupidly insisting on this one point, ‘with things as difficult as they are. Surely you must see that. You don’t seem to realize the amount of planning that goes into each number, especially a first number. It’s not like drawing up a railway timetable, what? what?’ he finished, loudly and suspiciously.
Dixon wondered if, without knowing it, he’d allowed an imprecation to pass his lips. A hollow, metallic tapping had begun on the line, like galvanized iron being hammered in a cathedral. In a louder voice he said: ‘I’m sure it isn’t, and I’m quite resigned to the delay. But to be quite frank, Dr Caton, I want rather urgently to improve my standing in the Department here, and if I could just quote you, if you could give me a . . .’
‘I’m sorry to hear of your difficulties, Mr Dickinson, but I’m afraid things are too difficult here for me to be very seriously concerned about your difficulties. There are plenty of people in your position, you know; I don’t know what I should do if they all started demanding promises from me in this fashion.’
‘But Dr Caton, I haven’t been asking you for a promise. All I want is an estimate, and even the vaguest estimate would help me—“the second half of next year” for example. You won’t be committing yourself in the least by just giving me an estimate.’ There was a silence which Dixon interpreted as one of maturing rage. ‘Could I have your permission to say “the second half of next year” when I’m asked?’
Though Dixon waited for ten seconds or more, nothing answered him except the metallic tapping, which had increased in volume and pace.
‘Things are very difficult, things are very difficult, things are very difficult,’ Dixon gabbled into the phone, then mentioned a few difficult things which occurred to him as suitable tasks for Dr Caton to have a go at. Still devising variations of this theme, he went out muttering to himself, wagging his head and shoulders like a puppet. A rival to Welch had appeared in the field of evasion-technique, verbal division, and in the physical division of the same field this chap had Welch whacked at the start: self-removal to South America was the traditional climax of an evasive career. Up in his room, Dixon filled his lungs to their utmost and groaned for half a minute or more without drawing breath. He got out the notes for his lecture and went on working them up into a script.
Five hours later, he had what he estimated as forty-f
our minutes’ worth of lecture. It seemed by then as if there were no facts anywhere in the universe, in his own brain or anyone else’s or just lying about loose, which could possibly be brought within his present scope. And even so, he’d been travelling for a large part of his forty-four minutes along the knife-edge dividing the conceivably-just-about-relevant from the irreducibly, immitigably irrelevant. The fifteen minutes needed to top the thing up to the fifty-nine minutes he’d set himself would have to be occupied by a presumably rather extensive conclusion, and he didn’t want to write one of those. Something on the lines of ‘Finally, thank God for the twentieth century’ would satisfy him, but it wouldn’t satisfy Welch. Then he seized his pencil again, gave a happy laugh, and wrote: ‘This survey, brief as it is, would have no purpose if left as a mere’—he crossed out ‘mere’—‘historical record. There are valuable lessons here for us, living in an age of prefabricated amusements as we do. One wonders how one of the men or women I have tried to describe would react to such typically modern phenomena as the cinema, the radio, the television. What would he think, accustomed as he was (had been? would have been? is?) to making his own music (must look at Welch at this point), of a society where people like himself are regarded as oddities, where to play an instrument himself, oneself, instead of paying others to do so, to sing a madrigal instead of a cheap dance-lyric, is to incur the dreaded title of “crank”, where . . .’
He stopped writing and ran out into the bathroom. He started washing with frenzied speed. He’d left it just late enough; with luck he’d have time to get ready and rush along to the hotel for tea with Christine, but no time to think about tea with Christine. Nevertheless, for all the energy of his movements, he began to feel a little queasy with apprehension.
He arrived at the hotel two minutes late. On turning into the lounge where tea was served, he felt a pang of fear, or whatever emotion it was, kicking at his diaphragm when he saw Christine already sitting waiting for him. He’d counted on a few minutes’ grace to think of things to say to her; if it had been Margaret, he’d have had them and more.