The Light and the Dark (36 page)

“That’s true,” I said, and Rosalind looked ill-used.

We had just sat down under one of the chestnut trees.

“I shall settle down so that you wouldn’t believe it,” said Rosalind. “But I’m not going to fool myself. After old Roy, other men seem just a tiny little bit dull. It stands to sense that I should want to see the old thing now and again.”

“It’s dangerous,” I said.

“I’m not so bad at covering up my traces when I want to,” said Rosalind, who was only willing to think of practical dangers.

She asked, with a glow of triumph: “Do you think I oughtn’t to have come? The old thing asked me to look him up. When he wrote about me and Ralph. And he did seem rather pleased to see me last night. I really think he was a bit pleased to see me.”

She laid her hand on my arm, and said, half-guiltily, half-provocatively: “Anyway, he asked me to go to a ball with him tonight.”

“Are you going?”

“What do you think? It’s all right, I’ll see that the old gorgon doesn’t find out. I’m not going to have her exploding down in Boscastle. I won’t have Ralph upset. After all,” she grinned at me, “a husband in the hand is worth two in the bush.”

She and Roy had arranged to go to a ball at one of the smaller colleges, where none of us had close friends. I warned her that it was still a risk.

She pursed her lips. “Why do you want to stop us?” she said. “You know it might take the old thing out of himself. He’s going through one of his bad patches, isn’t he? It will do him good to have a night on the tiles.”

I could not prevent myself laughing. Under the chestnut, an expensive lingering scent pervaded the hot afternoon. There was a bead of moisture on her upper lip, but her hair was swept up in a new, a rakish, a startling Empire coiffure. I asked when she had had time to equip herself like the Queen of the May.

“When do you think?” said Rosalind with lurking satisfaction. “I went up to town first thing this morning and told my hairdresser that she’d got to do her damnedest. The idiot knows me, of course, and when she’d finished she said with a soppy smile that she hoped my fiancé would like it. I nearly asked her why she thought I should care what my fiancé thinks of it. It’s what my young man thinks of it that I’m interested in.”

What was going through her head, I wondered, as I walked back across Parker’s Piece? She was reckless, but she was also practical. If need be, she would marry Ralph Udal without much heartbreak and without repining. But need it be? I was ready to bet that, in the last few hours, she had asked herself that question. I should be surprised if she was in a hurry to fix the date of her wedding.

As I was dressing for dinner, Roy threw open my bedroom door. His white tie was accurately tied, his hair smooth, but I was thrown into alarm at the sight of him. His eyes were lit up.

I was frightened, but in a few minutes I discovered that this had been only a minor outrage. It came as a respite. I even laughed from relief when I found how he had broken out. But I felt that he was on the edge of sheer catastrophe. It could not be far away: perhaps only a few hours. His smile was brilliant, but frantic and bitter; his voice was louder than usual, and a laugh rang out with reedy harshness. The laugh made my pulses throb in tense dismay. This fearful excitement must break soon.

Yet his actions that afternoon were like hitting out at random, and would not do much harm. They had been set off by an unexpected provocation. The little book on the heresies, by Vernon Royce and R C E Calvert, had been published at last, early in the summer. Since Lyall’s death, Roy’s reputation had increased sharply in English academic circles, owing to the indefatigable herald-like praise by Colonel Foulkes, who was now quite unhampered. But the heresy book had been received grudgingly and bleakly; most of the academic critics seemed to relish dismissing Royce now that he was dead. That morning Roy had read a few sentences about the book in the
Journal of Theological
Studies
: “…Mr Calvert is becoming recognised as a scholar of great power and penetration. But there is little sign of those qualities in this book’s treatment of a subject which requires the most profound knowledge of the sources and origins of religious belief and its perversions. From internal evidence, it is not overdifficult to attribute most of the insufficiently thought-out chapters to the late Mr Royce, who, in all his writings on comparative religion, never revealed the necessary imagination to picture the religious experience of others nor the patient and detailed scholarship which might have given value to his work in the absence of the imaginative gifts…”

Roy was savagely and fantastically angry. He had sent off letters of which he showed me copies. They were in the Housmanish language of scholarly controversy, bitter, rude, and violent – one to the editor asking why he permitted a man “ignorant, unteachable, stupid, and corrupt” to write in his journal, and one to the reviewer himself. The reviewer was a professor at Oxford, and to him Roy had written: “I have before me your witty review. You are either too old to read: or too venal to see honestly. You attribute some chapters to my collaborator and you have the effrontery to impugn the accuracy of that work, and so malign the reputation of a better man than yourself. I wrote those chapters; I am a scholar; that you failed to see the chapters were precise is enough to unfit you for such tasks as reading proofs. If you are not yet steeped in your love of damaging others you will be so abashed that you will not write scurrilities about Royce again. You should state publicly that you were wrong, and that you stand guilty of incompetence, self-righteousness and malice.”

Roy was maddened that they should still decry Royce. With the desperate clarity which visited him in his worst hours, he saw them gloating comfortably, solidly, stuffed with their own rectitude, feeling a warm comfortable self-important satisfaction that Royce had never come off, could not even come off after his death: he saw them saying in public what a pity it was that Royce was not more gifted, how they wanted so earnestly to praise him, how only duty and conscience obliged them so reluctantly to tell the truth. He saw the gloating on solid good-natured faces.

As we walked through the court to his dinner party, he broke out in a clear, passionate tone: “All men are swine.”

He added, but still without acceptance, charity, or rest: “The only wonder is, the decent things they manage to do now and then. They show a dash of something better, once or twice in their lives. I don’t know how they do it – when I see what we are really like.”

The desks in Roy’s sitting-room had been pushed round the wall, where one noticed afresh their strange shapes and colours. In the middle, the table had been laid for eight – laid with five glasses at each place and a tremendous bowl of orchids in the middle. It was not often Roy indulged in the apolaustic; he used to chuckle even at the subdued, comfortable, opulent display of Arthur Brown’s claret parties; extravagant meals were not in Roy’s style, they contained for him something irresistibly comic, a hint of Trimalchio. But that night he was for once giving one himself. Decanters of burgundy and claret stood chambering in a corner of the room; the cork of a champagne bottle protruded from a bucket; on a small table were spread out plates of fruit, marrons glacés, petits fours, cold savouries for aperitifs and after-tastes.

The person who enjoyed it all most was undoubtedly Bidwell. He took it upon himself to announce the guests; the first we knew of this new act was when Bidwell threw open the door, decorous and rubicund, the perfect servant, and proclaimed with quiet but ringing satisfaction: “Lady Muriel Royce!”

And then, slightly less vigorously (for Bidwell needed a title to move him to his most sonorous): “Mrs Seymour!”

“Mrs Houston Eggar!”

Since Lady Muriel left the Lodge, I had escaped my old dinner-long conversations with Mrs Seymour; in the midst of despondency, Roy had been able to think out that joke; it was time to see that she pestered me again. Before they came in, he had been talking to me with his fierce, frightening excitement. As he greeted her, he was enough himself to give me a glance, sidelong and mocking.

I attached myself to Mrs Eggar, whom I had only met once before. Eggar had sent her back from Berlin with her baby, and she was staying with Mrs Seymour for the summer. She was a pretty young woman with a beautiful skin and eyes easily amused, but a thin, tight, pinched-in mouth. She had considerable poise, and often seemed to be laughing to herself. I found her rather attractive, somewhat to my annoyance, for she was obstinate, self-satisfied, vain and narrow, far less amiable than her pushing, humble, masterful husband.

Bidwell came to the door again and got our attention. Then he called out in triumph: “The Earl and Countess of Boscastle!”

It was a moment for Bidwell to cherish.

His next call, and the last, was an anticlimax. It was simply: “Mr Winslow!”

I was surprised; I had not known till then who was making up the party. It seemed a curious choice. Roy had not been seeing much of the old man. He was not even active in the college any longer, for he had resigned the bursarship in pride and rage over a year before. Yet in one way he was well-fitted for the party. He had been an enemy of the old Master’s, Lady Muriel had never liked him – but still he had been the only fellow whom she treated as some approximation to a social equal. Winslow was fond of saying that he owed his comfortable fortune to the drapery trade, and in fact his grandfather had owned a large shop in St Paul’s Churchyard; but his grandfather nevertheless had been a younger son of an old county family, a family which had remained in a curiously static position for several hundred years. They had been solid and fairly prosperous country gentlemen in the seventeenth century: in the twentieth, they were still solid country gentlemen, slightly more prosperous. Winslow referred to his ancestors with acid sarcasm, but it did not occur to Lady Muriel, nor apparently to Lord Boscastle, to enquire who they were.

With Roy in the state I knew, I was on edge for the evening to end. (I was strung up enough to suspect that he might have invited Winslow through a self-destructive impulse. Winslow had watched one outburst, and might as well have the chance to see another.) In any other condition, I should have revelled in it. To begin with, Winslow was patently very happy to be there, and there was something affecting about his pleasure. He was, as we knew, cross-grained, rude, bitter with himself and others for being such a failure; yet his pleasure at being asked to dinner was simple and fresh. I had the impression that it was years since he went into society. He did not produce any of the devastating snubs he used on guests in hall; but he was not at all overborne by Lord Boscastle, either socially or as a man. They got on pretty well. Soon they were exchanging memories of Italy (meanwhile Mrs Seymour, who was, of course, seated next to me, confided her latest enthusiasm in an ecstatic breathless whisper. It was for Hitler – which did not make it easier to be patient. “It must be wonderful,” she said raptly, “to know that everyone is obliged to listen to you. Imagine seeing all those faces down below… And no one can tell you to stop.”)

The dinner was elaborate and grand. Roy had set out to beat the apolaustic at their own game. And he had contrived that each person there should take special delight in at least one course – there were oysters for Lady Muriel, whitebait for me, quails for Lady Boscastle. Most of the party, even Lady Boscastle, ate with gusto. I should have been as enthusiastic as any of them, but I was only anxious that the courses should follow more quickly, that we could see the party break up in peace. Roy was not eating and drinking much; I told myself that he had a ball to attend when this was over. But I should have been more reassured to see him drink. His eyes were brighter and fuller than normal, and his voice had changed. It was louder, and without the inflections, the variety, the shades of different tone as he turned from one person to another. Usually his voice played round one. That night it was forced out, and had a brazen hardness.

He spoke little. He attended to his guests. He mimicked one or two people for Winslow’s benefit: it affected me that the imitations were nothing like as exact as usual. The courses dragged by; at last there was a chocolate mousse, to be followed by an ice. Both Lord Boscastle and Winslow, who had strongly masculine tastes, refused the sweet. Lady Muriel felt they should not be left unreproved.

“I am sorry to see that you’re missing this excellent pudding, Hugh,” she said.

“You ought to know by now, Muriel,” said Lord Boscastle, defensively, tiredly, “that I’m not much good at puddings.”

“It has always been considered a college speciality,” said Lady Muriel, clinching the argument. “I remember telling the Master that it should become recognised as the regular sweet at the Audit feast.”

“I’m very forgetful of these matters,” said Winslow, “but I should be slightly surprised if that happened, Lady Muriel. To the best of my belief, this admirable concoction has never appeared at a feast at all.”

He could not resist the gibe: for it was not a function of the Master to prescribe the menus for feasts, much less of Lady Muriel.

“Indeed,” said Lady Muriel. “I am astonished to hear it, Mr Winslow. I think you must be wrong. Let me see, when is the next audit?”

“November.”

“I hope you will pay particular attention.”

“If you please, Lady Muriel. If you please.”

“I think you will find I am right.”

They went on discussing feasts and college celebrations as though they were certain to happen, as though nothing could disturb them. There was a major college anniversary in 1941, two years ahead.

“I hope the college will begin its preparations in good time,” said Lady Muriel. “Two years is not long. You must be ready in two years’ time.”

Suddenly Roy laughed. They were all silent. They had heard that laugh. They did not understand it, but it was discomforting, like the sight of someone maimed. “Two years’ time,” he cried. He laughed again.