As Stephen woke, the single bell was ringing. He didn’t wake, as he had sometimes done, into well-being and then become invaded by disquiet: the strain of the night before had ceased, just as when he was walking with his friends. It was like a morning in childhood, the room still dark, no need to get up yet. The bell clanged on, it must be for the early communion, eight o’clock, the communion to which his father went.
It was luxurious, lying in the familiar room, half-awake. An idea about his work entered into consciousness. Neutrons packed together. No, the equations wouldn’t fit.
People spoke and wrote, he had sometimes reflected, not now, there in the twilight between sleep and waking, as though their thoughts all came to them in words. It wasn’t so for him, at least not often. Thoughts of sex were not much like sex itself. Thoughts of sex didn’t come to him in words.
He had wanted to take Tess to bed the night before. There was nowhere to take her in this town. They would have to wait until she came to Cambridge. Pictures of the last time. Waiting in bed, watching her undress. Scampering to him, climbing in, pulling the bedclothes round them. Room colder than this. Face smiling beneath his, eyes going unfocused, rapt. Then he didn’t see her face, just the rough sound of panting, joy, release and sigh, joyful sigh.
The first time, he had trembled until the unconscious took control. He had trembled before, the first time with a girl. Tess had taken it easier than he did. Now all that was past. Just the pictures of expectancy, comfort, lying together afterwards looking at the window, arms round her, the feel of cherished unmysterious flesh.
Other kinds of expectancy. He could hear her voice, as they were talking, one of those nights: ‘We mustn’t have false hopes, either of us, must we?’ Direct, honest voice. But he thought later, when anyone talked of not having false hopes, it meant they had them.
He didn’t know. She was more certain than he was.
Sometimes in her absence, he had tried to form the words, so that when they met, he could explain himself to her. The words never came out as they had been formed. Just as, when he made a picture of them next time in bed, it didn’t turn out like that: as though bodies had their own will.
Now, nearer waking, he was forming the words of what he had to tell the others that afternoon. He mightn’t think in words, but he knew that he was articulate, more than most of them. This time, though, it wasn’t just being able to talk, he had to be precise. There mustn’t be any responsibility left in doubt. Perhaps there had been too much left in doubt already.
Later that morning, when the full peal outside was making the windows shiver, he found his mother alone in the drawing-room. That was like other Sundays: she didn’t go with her husband to matins, his second observance of the day. Bifocals on her fine beak of a nose, she was reading a Sunday paper. With a quick snap, as it might be with a vestigial vanity, she had her glasses off. ‘Hallo,’ she said. Her voice was high and friendly, perhaps indistinguishable from what it had been in youth, sounding like a young woman’s greeting a new young man.
When he sat down in an armchair opposite to hers, she said: ‘How did you like last night?’
‘Nice dinner.’
She grinned. It was a curiously urchin-like grin, incongruous on the handsome face, and from his childhood Stephen had always welcomed it.
‘People do talk round the point, sometimes, don’t they?’ she said.
‘I suppose so.’
‘It used to embarrass me a little, once.’
All his life, Stephen had not heard her make a disloyal remark about his father. Maybe this was as near as she could come. Even now, she seemed to correct herself.
‘Of course, it didn’t take much to embarrass me.’ She gazed at him. ‘Do you ever get embarrassed?’ She asked as though it were an interesting clinical point.
‘Not terribly easily, I think.’
‘Lucky,’ said his mother.
With an air that was at the same time social and oddly youthful, she inquired if he would like some coffee. When he said no, she said, not altering her tone of voice: ‘You’re in a bit of a mess, aren’t you?’
‘Yes, a bit.’ He had no idea how much she knew, or what his father had told her, or on what terms the two of them discussed him.
‘I gathered as much.’ After a pause, she went on: ‘I expect you’ll get out of it, though.’
‘I hope so.’
‘You will. You’re pretty capable at getting out of things.’
It sounded bleak and brittle, it seemed all she had to say, and yet Stephen, without knowing why, found it a support. Casually, she was reflecting: ‘You remind me rather of a man I used to know. He was always walking into the most extraordinary situations. Somehow he always managed to pull himself out.’
‘Who was he?’ But Stephen realized that it was useless to ask. She was scrupulous and gallant about referring to men who had courted her. It was only through his father, who was by no means reluctant to admit that he had won in serious competition, that Stephen had caught hints of admirers, of passionate pursuers, in the past.
‘No. You might have heard of him. He’s done very well. I don’t know what’s happened to him now. I should think that he’s all right.’
Then she asked, once more brittle, straight out: ‘Are any of the others in this?’
‘In what?’ He knew well enough.
‘In this mess of yours.’
‘Yes, they are.’
‘You needn’t worry about Tess. She’s strong. She can look after herself.’
Stephen was, not for the first time, surprised by his mother. She talked so little, gossiped with no one: she missed things which anyone round her noticed: phases of absence, then suddenly her eyes swathed through the darkness like a searchlight beam.
‘What about Mark?’
Stephen replied, as candid as she was: ‘Sometimes I worry about him.’
‘Why?’
‘He’s more – fragile than some of us.’
‘You may be right.’
Then her interest faded as though it had been switched off. ‘Your father,’ as she always spoke of Thomas Freer to Stephen, would soon be coming in from service. This was the only day of the week on which he allowed himself a pre-lunch drink and so she ought to have it waiting for him.