Time and Time Again (11 page)

'If there is any relief you wish for, please suggest it,' said the invigilator, after they had walked twice round a small quadrangle. Charles did not guess what he meant till he added: 'Though I am unfortunately compelled to accompany you, even to the humblest abode.' He was a lean elderly professor whom Charles had never seen before and whose name he did not know.

'Oh no, thanks--I'm all right now. I think I can go back.'

'I hope so, Anderson. When I mark your paper I shall try not to be unduly influenced by sympathy.'

Charles smiled, wondering what made university dons grow up like that. Yet he was aware of genuine friendliness behind the man's tee-heeish manner.

Back in the hall he found the ink smear already dry and the atmosphere sultrier than ever, but he managed to endure it without further mishap. He had lost half an hour, though, and didn't have time to finish all the questions.

One evening, as by some gorgeous miracle of light and air, it was all over and he returned to his rooms after the last paper had been consigned to whatever fate might be in store for it and for him. He felt somewhat as he had done when the war ended--a sense of anticlimax following hard on the heels of relief. But the emptiness soon filled with thoughts of Lily's visit, which was by now a definite arrangement. Mr. Mansfield had given permission, and even Mr. Graybar had been persuaded to let her leave the office an hour earlier to catch a better train. In a recent note to Charles confirming all these matters both handwriting and spelling had betrayed her excitement.

Saturday (almost to his unbelief) was the day following, and he spent half the night sleepless for thinking of it, but quite pleasantly awake for the same reason. In the morning, which was warm and fine, he rose early and bought armfuls of fresh-cut flowers at the stalls in the Market Square. Then he made plans with the college kitchen for special meals to be sent to his rooms. He had planned a small dinner party for that evening, inviting his two best friends--a man named Weigall whose rooms were on the same staircase across the landing, and another man from Sidney Sussex whom he had got to know at history lectures. Since the cost of this party would come on the college bill at the end of term he could indulge himself without any immediate financial problem, and with all the examinations over he felt he had earned the right to do so. His allowance from his father was not inadequate, but it had been stretched pretty far of late by all the travelling back and forth to London and the dinners and lunches and excursions there; he was beginning to look forward to his next birthday (his twenty-first) if only because he would then come into some money of his own. He had already borrowed a little from his Cambridge tailor (a wealthy and knowing tradesman) on the strength of this.

* * * * *

He felt very proud of her as they rode in an open taxi from Cambridge station to the Lion Hotel. Other students had been meeting girls on the same train, and he could not avoid the comparison; Lily was not so well dressed as many, nor so strikingly pretty as a few, but she had poise and grace and some quality for him of sheer radiance. It was so personal that he was often relieved when he saw others--and not only men--aware of it; this seemed to prove he was no victim of love's illusion, though it also showed that the radiance was not for him alone. Anyhow, her own extreme of pleasure now cast a special halo round it, and he felt doubly exultant. 'You're really here--at last!' he kept saying in the cab, as if the distance to Linstead and London were reckonable in thousands of miles.

'Charlie, I always wanted to come here to see you.'

'Then why didn't you suggest it? Or why didn't I--sooner? It's so obvious--and yet wonderful.'

'I thought perhaps you didn't want me mixed up with your work.'

'You already are mixed up. I see you on every page of Stubbs and Maitland.'

She laughed gaily. 'And I see you on every page of Mr. Graybar's dictation.'

'Forget Mr. Graybar--for two whole days.' He squeezed her arm and thought that possibly in his own room, sometime during her stay, they would enjoy the privacy they had sought till then in streets that happened to be dark or train-compartments that happened to be empty between stations; he knew this Cambridge visit was bound to mark a stage in their relationship.

He began to point out the colleges. 'That's the first one, Downing-- I mean the first on the way from the station. The next is Emmanuel. . . . They're all separate, and together they make up the University. So you see why you can't say Cambridge College-- there isn't such a thing--if you talk of a college you have to use its own special name--like Downing or Emmanuel.' He had always wanted to explain that to her.

'How many colleges are there?'

'Over a dozen, I should think--yes, at least a dozen.'

'Don't you know exactly?'

'I don't believe I do, unless I counted them on my fingers. . . . This is Christ's--John Milton's college. We'll look round some of them later. . . . Here's Petty Cury--this narrow street, where your hotel is. I think you'll be comfortable.'

He had engaged a room, even going so far as to inspect it before approval; it overlooked Petty Cury and might be noisy till late at night, but she wouldn't be using it till then. While she took her bag to it he waited in the glass-roofed lounge. Then she came down, spruced and tidied, and his heart melted to see her against this new background, but at the same time he felt tense, as if the full significance of her visit was only just dawning on him. He also hoped he could sleep better during the coming night; it was a need, like others he was beginning to be aware of, that went deeper than a desire. Suddenly he wondered what on earth had made him ask Tony Weigall and Bill Peters that evening--how much cosier just to have dinner on their own, with no strangers intruding when once Debden had cleared away and said goodnight.

They crossed the centre of the town to his college, which he was anxious to show her first, as a sample, though it was not the oldest or one of those most visited by sightseers. She was much impressed by the salute the porter gave him as they passed into the First Court, and surprised by the narrow staircase they had to climb and the double doors he had to open to get to his top-floor rooms, and entranced by the rooms themselves--so much larger and grander than she had imagined. He then took her to the Chapel and the Library and the Hall, where he showed her the ancient tables and the Holbein and the piece of wood, shaped like a hand-mirror, that had printed on it the college grace which he had taken his turn to read aloud until, with no particular effort of memory, he had come to know the long Latin paragraph by heart. Then they strolled along the Backs and looked into King's Chapel till it was time to return to his rooms, when it was revealed to her (by the most plausible of circumstances) that seventeenth-century college rooms lacked some of the basic conveniences of the modern house. She was surprised again, but agreeably unshy about such things and therefore amused. Perhaps because of this he decided to conquer his own shyness about something very different, but in its own way just as intimate; he got out some of his paintings. He was always reluctant to do this--too often he had read in the eyes of people looking at other people's paintings neither enthusiasm nor distaste, but merely a desperate struggle to think of something to say that was clever or at least flattering. It was a test, therefore, that he shrank from putting his friends to, because he shrank from putting himself to it. But now with Lily, acting on impulse, he took the risk. He fixed the easel and placed the canvases on it one by one, saying nothing about any of them, while she sat curled in the window seat viewing them equally without word or gesture.

When she had seen the lot and he had put them away again he poured himself a glass of sherry. She still didn't speak, and he began to approve of her silence in a miserable sort of way. At least she wasn't dealing out insincere and meaningless compliments. Presently she said: 'Charlie, I'm so glad you let me see the pictures. It's no good my trying to tell you what I think of them because I don't know. I liked some better than others. I liked the one of the windy day.'

'Which one was that?'

'The third, I think, or the fourth.'

He knew the one she meant; it was a fenland scene, mainly clouds--a windy day, to be sure (the canvas had been blown down by one of the gusts), but there were no obvious clues like bending trees or drifting smoke. What he had tried to do, but did not think he had succeeded in doing, was to get the wind into his lighting of the sky, into the whole surface texture of the picture. And now she was telling him he had succeeded.

Never had he felt such a moment of utter and blissful reassurance. He went over to her and put his arm round her in full view of anyone who might be passing across the court, and in a curious way he hoped he might be seen, as the finder of a new truth wants to proclaim it.

'Lily, my little one--my darling. . . .'

'Did I say the wrong thing about the pictures? Oh, I'm sorry, Charlie.'

'Nothing you say is ever the wrong thing. It's I who DO the wrong things. Tonight, for instance, we ought to have been alone.'

'But you asked some friends of yours, didn't you?'

'Yes, I did, and I--but no, it's all right, you'll like them. They're good fellows.'

'Of course I'll like them.'

The college clock began to strike the hour, followed by other clocks all over the town. The miscellaneous near and distant chiming lasted for some time, many of the clocks being minutes fast or slow, and he told her it would all begin again, for the quarter, after about a ten-minute interval. 'They'll probably keep you awake all night.'

'I won't mind. I'm so excited to be here. Charlie, d'you know this is the first time I've ever been away from home by myself?'

'You're not by yourself.'

'I mean at night . . . without a friend.'

'What friend? I didn't know you had any other particular friend.'

'Of course I have. I mean girls. There's Ethel at the office--we always go away on our holidays together. And there's Phyllis Baxter I used to go with at school. You haven't met them because every time you're free I'd much rather be with you.'

'A good answer.'

'Don't you believe me?'

'I do. And it WAS a windy day in that picture. It was indeed.'

In the mood he was in, torn between exultation and regret, between the wish that they were alone and the hope that his friends would like her, and over it all the tensions that had not been eased by sleep, he could hardly understand himself, much less expect her to understand him.

'Charlie, what's the matter? You sound so sharp, as if you were nervous about something.'

It was because he had heard Weigall and Peters coming up the stairs.

Within a few minutes he was relieved at least on one count. Weigall had draped his long legs from the far end of the couch and Peters was at the nearer end, and in between, laughing and chatting as if she had known them for years, was Lily. It came out that Weigall's family were from Norfolk and that Lily, too, had relatives there; they talked about Norwich and Sandringham and other places they both knew. With Peters, who was a historian, Lily found less in common at first; but soon they discovered a shared interest in films, Peters being something of a highbrow while Lily was just an ordinary regular patron of whatever the Linstead cinema offered. Peters seemed to find her comments both amusing and delightful, and when Debden announced that soup was served Peters insisted on sitting next to Lily although Charles had planned to have Weigall there. But with only four persons at a small table it really didn't much matter how they sat. What did matter, as Charles began to notice it, was that Peters was bringing Lily to a kind of life Charles had never seen in her before. Charles even wondered whether he had ever been jealous before, for the glum and spiritually disabling sensation he felt was new in his experience.

Lily was telling Peters about a dog they had had at Ladysmith Road when she was a child, and it appeared that Peters also liked dogs and that his family had had one of the same breed. 'There's nothing like a dog,' Peters assured her.

'Except a cat,' said Lily. 'We have a lovely cat.'

'But a cat isn't really like a dog,' said Peters.

Weigall winked at Charles. 'Too intellectual for me--this conversation,' he commented.

'We have two Airedales at Beeching,' said Charles, suddenly desperate to assert himself.

Peters laughed. 'You see, Lily, we can't win! TWO Airedales! Think of that . . . and how many horses, cows, housemaids, butlers, grooms, and other domestic pets? I don't suppose Andy knows--he's never bothered to count.'

'He didn't even know how many colleges there are in Cambridge,' said Lily, extending the joke. 'Did you, Charlie? And you never told me they called you Andy, either.'

Charles was concerned lest she should gain an exaggerated impression of Beeching from Peters' nonsense, but he was also astonished--and perhaps dismayed--that Lily seemed to be impressed so little. It was the 'Andy' she had picked up. 'It's just a nickname I had at school,' he explained, adding rather foolishly: 'From Anderson.'

'Really?' Weigall gave himself an ironic poise. 'I think we can accept that as a hypothesis.' He intoned in imitation of some professor. 'And as for how many colleges there are, does ANYBODY know?'

This kind of thing was lost on Lily. 'Well,' she said, 'when I was at school we were told how many counties there are in England.'

'What a depressing school it must have been!'

'It was not! It was better-looking than some of these old colleges.'

Weigall assumed his most languid air. 'BETTER-looking, Lily?'

'Newer. More modern. I tell you, Linstead's an up-to-date place. You should see some of the parks we have. My dad's the superintendent of them.'

Peters abruptly seized Lily's hand across the table. 'Lily . . . ignore these other two and listen to me. First, I congratulate you. To have a father who superintends parks is magnificent. My own father, God bless him, is a coal miner. Lived in the same cottage for thirty years--a cottage in a town where there are no parks and consequently no superintendent of parks. My father began work in the pits when he was eleven, and he still works in the pits. But by sheer grit and ability his son, whom you see here in a preliminary stage of intoxication . . . by sheer . . . whatever it was I just said . . . plus, of course, an army grant and a scholarship and sundry other assistances . . . has been admitted to this ancient seat of learning to study, ape, and acquire the manners and customs of his betters . . . while still retaining, Lily--and this is important--that innate sympathy with the working classes that makes him salute you, as he does now, in profound adoration!'