Fish was indeed my affair to the extent that, if anything was to be organised for him, I’d have to do the organising. I had been pitched into his disaster – or rather had kicked off my shoes and dived into it – fortuitously, but I had to see him through it nevertheless. The first essential seemed to be to get some signal from Fish himself. I had been spending hours with him, and had at least an inkling of how he was feeling. But of what he thought I hadn’t a clue. Was he doing anything that could be called thinking at all? Baffling questions surrounded his state. Did he, for instance, still have in his head a picture of Martine which wasn’t Martine in any objective regard? Or had he gained an accurate but impotent sense of her as the little slut she was? Did he know what she had done: exploited her discovery of a ludicrous Achilles’ heel in him to ditch him contemptuously and with a slow-motion sadism when she had become bored? Floundering ignominiously in the Cherwell, he had in effect been put through a symbolic enactment of impotence. There had been no doubt of his irrational terror; it must have been like a clutch at his vitals. Perhaps one had to put down the unmanned Fish as suffering the ravages of a primitive castration complex.
These speculations, if extravagant, had their modish fascination; we were most of us depth-psychologists at that time. They didn’t prevent me from coming to the fairly sensible conclusion that Fish must be got to talk. Words, in fact, must damned well be shaken out of him. As soon as I saw this I had a go. I ran upstairs, banged loudly on his door in the manner customary with us, and pushed in. Fish was sitting at his writing table. It had the same dismal sort of serge covering as I remembered adorning the room in which I had discussed with Stumpe how to start having women – but this was partly obscured beneath a litter of papers scrawled over with mathematical computations. I drew encouragement from the sight; it looked as if Fish was at last managing to do some work for his tutor, or at least obtaining solace or forgetfulness by absorbing himself in his own thing. There was a character in The Prelude, I remembered, who, when having a bad time on some desert island, managed to cheer himself up by drawing geometrical figures in the sand. Then I took another look, and saw that the exercises being performed by Fish were concerned with addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. He was merely assuring himself that he hadn’t gone completely mad.
‘Martin,’ I said, ‘quit it. Lay off.’
‘Oh, Duncan!’ As Fish said this, he looked for a moment startled and abashed. This was quite something, since for days it had been impossible to wring out of him any kind of emotional response at all. ‘I was just getting on with a spot of work,’ he added, and rapidly shuffled the scattered papers into a pile.
‘You were doing nothing of the sort – nothing except doodling. Can’t you do something useful for a change? Be a real pal, and make me some coffee. Proper coffee, in that bubbling thing.’ Fish’s well-appointed rooms ran to a complex percolator.
‘Coffee? Yes, of course.’ Fish got up obediently, and blundered around. I thought the percolator was going to suffer, but in fact he coped with it competently enough. ‘I know I’m being a nuisance,’ he said suddenly. ‘It’s just that I don’t seem able to get this straight. What has happened. How it can have happened. I try to see it clearly, but it’s behind a kind of cloud. Have you ever lived in absolute darkness? It’s just hell. Christ! I don’t suppose you even know what I’m talking about.’
‘Of course I know what you’re talking about. Martine.’
‘That’s right!’ There was an imbecile surprise in Fish’s voice which I found daunting. But I saw nothing for it but to charge ahead.
‘Listen,’ I said. ‘If you’re not clear about Martine I can put you right at once. She’s a girl in your past, and she was a damned bad buy. Or let’s be frank, Martin. She was a third-class harlot, but made up for it by being a first-class shit.’ I paused on this; it had been a little too elaborate to be quite right. ‘Honestly,’ I added. ‘Honestly, honestly, Martin, she was just no bloody good. Face up to it, man. Take a straight look at her, and you’ll see the thing was about as wholesome as trying to get kicks out of a corpse.’
This random vehemence I’d no doubt have disapproved of if I’d been behind my typewriter; it was my idea to get a reaction out of Fish at any cost. If he’d chucked the percolator at my head I’d have done my best to dodge the coffee and the glass, and counted it another scrap of ground won. The young psychologist, that’s to say, was thinking in terms of what he’d have called abreaction therapy – meaning, I suppose, the securing of a violent and cathartic emotional discharge. As often with amateur experiments, it failed to work. Fish simply dismantled the percolator, and poured me a cup of coffee with care.
‘But I don’t see it that way,’ he said mildly, and in a tone conveying faint bewilderment rather than strong indignation. Then he did, for a moment, become slightly agitated. ‘Oh, God!’ he said. ‘I know I’m no bloody good. I’m making a pest of myself to anybody who knows me. Do believe, Duncan, that I feel awfully bad about it. I feel so miserably guilty. And you’re a true cobber, Duncan. Really you are. I see I haven’t any sugar. I’m terribly sorry.’ He relapsed into mournful passivity.
This was dreadfully embarrassing. As I’d myself, with a hollow gamesomeness, exhorted Fish to be a real pal I couldn’t fairly take exception to being acclaimed as the same thing in honest Australian English. But Fish’s impulse more or less to apologise for his existence, and the revelation that his kind of depression and defeat could unloose irrational feelings of guilt, were aspects of the situation which took some facing up to.
I had to be firm with myself in sitting down and continuing to talk.
‘How much have you got around the Continent?’ I asked, thus evidencing at once that I was a good deal under Gavin Mogridge’s thumb.
‘The Continent?’ It appeared that Fish had to run the meaning of the word to earth somewhere deep down in his mind. But he continued with the unfaltering politeness he seldom failed to manage. ‘I’ve never been there at all. Except as a kid. My parents brought me on a trip home before I was old enough to have to go to Geelong, and they traipsed me around quite a bit. I remember hardly anything about it – except seeing a very fast ball-game, rather like what’s called pelota, played somewhere in Italy. I think pelota’s Spanish, but I’m pretty sure this was in Italy.’ Fish paused. He had made a big effort. ‘I’m afraid this is awfully dull for you, Duncan,’ he added idiotically.
‘Why don’t we go? In the long vac. That’s in no time now, Martin.’
‘Go abroad?’ Fish stared at me in inert surprise. ‘That would be terribly nice,’ he added quickly. ‘But you see, I’ll be having a good deal of work to do in the long vac. Catching up, as a matter of fact. The truth is that I haven’t been a hundred-percent lately. Not altogether. A little worried. I don’t know if you’ve noticed it.’
It looked like a point at which to give up. But I was getting annoyed with Fish, and this unreasonable reaction in myself made me decide for another round.
‘You run a car, don’t you?’ I demanded.
‘A car? Oh, yes—I have a car. Somehow, I don’t seem to have been using it much lately.’
‘We could go in it. That would be marvellous for me, Martin. Of course, I’d go shares in the petrol, just as in everything else.’
‘But there’s been this war. We don’t really know anything about the conditions.’
‘Bugger the conditions. American tourists talk about the conditions. The conditions are quite good enough for you and me. I’ve been in France, and I know.’ I said this with all the air of a travelled man. I had spent a fortnight with a school party in Normandy immediately before my most recent – and alarming – stay at Corry, and we had enjoyed horrifying glimpses of whole landscapes blighted and cities blown to bits. This had been my only experience of travel, although I wouldn’t have been in a hurry to admit it. When Ninian and I were quite small, and before the barriers of war had gone up, it had never occurred to our father, deep though his attachment to France was, to take us or despatch us there. Or perhaps it had – since sporadically he was by no means neglectful of us – but he had judged the proper age for it would come when we were not quite children any longer. He would certainly have thought it money poorly spent if all we had been equipped to retain in memory had been, as with Fish, a notably exciting ball-game.
I urged my project for a Grand Tour upon Fish for some time, but he didn’t respond. Indeed, after having emerged from himself to the extent of exhibiting a mild play of feeling about this and that, he now seemed to be retreating again into his own misery more deeply than ever. He sat looking at me unrecognisingly, and with a frown creasing his brow. It may fleetingly have struck me that the frown was new, and at least belonged to a man who had started thinking of something. But I went away more discouraged than before, feeling that there was nothing for it but to bring in dons and doctors. Perhaps this was why I hesitated when I ran into the White Rabbit.
It had been one of those odd hesitations which take the form of not knowing on which side to pass the other person. Quite suddenly, and although there is plenty of room for orderly and composed behaviour, one is dodging right and left like a panicked and incompetent rugger player. It is a phenomenon that probably figures in Freud’s Psychopathology of Everyday Life, a work with which I had no doubt become familiar by that time. But at the moment I was thinking only of being properly apologetic to Tindale, whose entrance to his own rooms I appeared to be obstructing in a spirit of tiresome and disrespectful frolic. I was there at all – down on the ground floor – only because it had come into my head to seek further advice from other of my contemporaries, and notably from Colin Badgery, who had rooms in Howard. Badgery – that John Ruskin Scholar a year ahead of me who had assisted in my frantic hunt for Timbermill – I was inclined at this period to treat as something of a guru. It may have been because my mind was on this quest that the dodging business in front of Tindale overcame me.
‘Oh, good evening, Pattullo,’ Tindale said. It was the first time he had displayed knowledge of my identity, although this was the third term that we had been on the same staircase. He was a spare middle-aged man, with a florid complexion, a head notably bald and domed, and a fuzz of grey hair over each ear. His eyes had a glitter which a little reminded me of Timbermill – except that they were small, black, bilberry eyes, more suggestive of a plain-clothes detective than of a visionary. For a moment, indeed, his gaze had been bent on me keenly enough for police purposes of the most sinister sort, so that I found myself surprised when his glance suddenly dropped to the neighbourhood of my feet. I’d have been more surprised still had I been able to reflect (as I was to be a long time afterwards) that this was the idiosyncrasy so strikingly exhibited by Cyril Bedworth’s shamefast wife, Mabel Bedworth.
‘I’m afraid I don’t know my neighbours very well,’ Tindale said, with a hand on his door-knob. ‘Apart from my own pupils, my undergraduate acquaintance seem to come from here and there around the university. At my age, you see, a good many of one’s old school friends tend to have sons up at one college or another.’ Having offered this explanatory remark, the White Rabbit appeared to feel the way cleared for the next thing. ‘Have you a minute or two?’ he asked. ‘If so, do come in and have a drink.’
I found this very much in order. Buntingford, the tutor so casually confident about the adequacy of my Latin unseen translation, had made fun of my freshman’s persuasion that Oxford undergraduates lived in a freely mingling society of learned persons, old and young. We had got it, he once declared, out of inferior Edwardian novels of ‘Varsity life. But, in fact, the lack of interest in our young lives exhibited by dons at large wasn’t absolute. If they tended to know only their own pupils tolerably well, they did occasionally cast a social net a little wider than that. And perhaps most of them acknowledged the staircase principle in some degree. I didn’t know whether Tindale had already taken some notice of Bedworth and Mogridge and Tony Mumford. But if he hadn’t, he ought to have; and that went for me too. So I accepted his invitation with what I felt to be becoming ease. It was in my mind, of course, that here might be the right senior person to whom to speak about Fish.
‘There’s much to be said for the ground floor,’ Tindale said, ushering me into his sitting-room. ‘One gets a window broken rather more often, of course, than if one is upstairs. But the culprits regularly pay up, after all, and it makes honest work for deserving glaziers. Saves a surprising lot of tramping up and down, too, in the course of the day. Foot-pounds, or ergs, or whatever energy is reckoned in. Brandy?’
I approved of brandy. After Fish’s coffee, it seemed just right. And it seemed just right, for that matter, after Fish as well. So I accepted quite a tot of the stuff, and looked round the room. There was a typewriter on which it was to be presumed that Tindale’s suspect young lady laboured twice a week in the interest of a clearer view of the diplomacy of Pope Zosimus. Apart from this, the place was sparely, even a shade meanly, furnished; it wasn’t the room of a man who had been bred up in any tradition of taste. Over the mantelpiece, and thus directly beneath Tony’s Roman bagnio, was a large colour-print of the Ansidei Madonna. It was massively framed – much more massively than was appropriate for a thing so thin as a colour-print – but it somehow suggested itself as first cousin to that droopy Corot tree which had adorned the room in Rattenbury in which I had been lodged during my Scholarship Examination. On another wall there hung the sawn-off blade of an oar, painted in the college colours and with the names of some victorious crew or other – all eight of them and a cox – inscribed in small gold lettering. I wasn’t able to make out, without uncivil peering, whether the cox – or perhaps the stroke – had been Tindale. It seemed a faintly anomalous trophy in a don’s room: a kind of attestation of something about a dead self that Tindale didn’t want lost sight of.
‘Head of the river, as a matter of fact,’ the White Rabbit said casually, noticing my glance. ‘Do you smoke?’
I didn’t smoke. It seemed a pity, since I vaguely conjectured that what went with brandy at a donnish level was cigars. There was a pause, as if Tindale was momentarily at a loss.
‘Let me see,’ he said, easily enough. ‘What was I saying? Ah, the ground floor. Do you know that I’m a good way in?’
‘Sir?’ Rather stupidly, I was at a loss myself. ‘Oh, I see. No – I didn’t know.’
‘A closely guarded secret, perhaps. The Tindale route isn’t given away to freshmen, eh?’ My host seemed amused at this. He glanced at me again, and I had an odd impression that what he was looking at was my hair. ‘Quite an income in it, as a matter of fact. A toll-gate effect. Come into my bedroom, and you’ll see. Might be useful to you one night. Who knows?’
We went into the bedroom. It was pretty bleak. I felt a certain awkwardness in the situation. But Tindale was again quite at ease. He threw open a further door. His set, as I have mentioned, rambled as the other sets on the staircase did not.
‘A kind of dressing-room, I suppose. I really haven’t any use for it. But go and take a look out of the window. I expect you can still just see.’
‘I expect so.’ I entered the dressing-room and obeyed my entertainer’s instruction. ‘It’s what’s called the coal-yard, isn’t it?’
‘Quite right. And that flat roof at the far side is the Dean’s motor-shed. Dead easy to get on that from the street, and then there’s just this window. They have to come in over the upper sash, because the lower one is chocked up. Kind of jack-knife athletic performance, it has to be. Scatters their small change over the carpet, and they’re too scared to stop and pick it up. They bolt through the dining-room, and I collect in the morning. Regular revenue. We’ll call it a fine.’
‘I see,’ I said, and registered adequate amusement.
‘But the main thing, Pattullo, is that I keep this door communicating with the bedroom open. They all know that to be my tedious habit. Increases the nervous effect.’
‘I suppose it does.’
‘And sometimes I give a further turn of the screw.’ Tindale led me back to the sitting-room, chuckling softly. ‘Seem to stir in my sleep. Or even call out in a smothered manner, as if from a horrid dream. More brandy? But perhaps we’d better not.’
‘No thank you, sir.’ I judged curious the picture of this elderly character lying in his narrow bed and watching the shadowy forms of these young idiots flitting past. ‘Isn’t it pretty silly,’ I asked, ‘keeping up this convention of men having to climb back into college in the small hours? They’re coming all the way from Malaya and goodness knows where, some of them.’ I paused. ‘In a sense,’ I added, feeling that Tindale mightn’t quite be getting there.
‘Ah, but you mustn’t deprive me of my Trinkgeld! ‘Tindale indicated comical dismay, although it was clear he wasn’t naturally a humorous type. ‘Not that you’re not quite right,’ he went on, with a transition to gravity. ‘Another five or ten years, and it will all have vanished. But we adjust slowly to changed conditions in a place like this. Don’t you agree? And one has a certain nostalgia for the ancient ways.’
‘I don’t think I have.’ I had abandoned the notion of appealing to this particular don in the matter of Fish’s neurosis.
He seemed, somehow, to be a mixed-up type, and moreover I didn’t much take to his air of connivance in the irregularities of the young. He got his pay for doing the in loco parentis stuff, and he’d do better to play it straight. There was a silence, and I realised he was sensitive to my not being quite on the right beam. ‘Thank you very much for the drink,’ I said. ‘I’ll have to be getting along.’
‘Ah, always that essay to write!’ Tindale produced a small friendly gesture. ‘It’s a hard life, Pattullo. Do you know an expression I heard the other day? The rat-race. About nails it, I’d say. Good of you to come in, and I hope you’ll come again. Sometime.’ He moved to the door – entirely the man who could hardly murmur Good-morning or Good-afternoon. ‘Good-night,’ he said, and made the little gesture a second time over.
I stepped into the quad, wondering whether I had cut this unsatisfactory encounter uncivilly short. If so, it had been partly because, having written off Tindale as a reliable ally, I wanted to resume my plan of seeking out Colin Badgery. It still seemed to me that it was up to us to hand over Fish to the operations of a more adult wisdom than we ourselves presumably possessed. Badgery would know the proper way to go about it.
Hurrying across Surrey, I met Tony. He looked as if he were returning prematurely to his rooms from some disappointing conviviality.
‘Come and see Badgery,’ I said. ‘We must get this Fish business sorted out. It’s bad.’
‘Oh silver fish that my two hands have taken,’ Tony murmured, and had to cast around for something to give this particular Yeats joke any appositeness. ‘Do you think the charming Martine chanted that as she grabbed him where she wanted to?’
‘I don’t care a damn what she did. Just come over to Howard.’
Tony made a resigned gesture and fell into step with me. We found Badgery entertaining one of our own contemporaries, Robert Damian. Being affable and instructive to freshmen was one of Badgery’s lines, and he greeted us amiably now.
‘Oh, hullo,’ he said, ‘it’s the industrious John Ruskin Junior and his idle hanger-on. There’s some beer under the table. It’s in those horrible little cans. Please make moderately free with it. We’re discussing Behaviourism. It seems it’s susceptible – the good Dr Watson’s nonsense – of practical applications. Robert says they’ll be beneficent. But that’s because he still retains the sanguine and guileless outlook of youth. They sound pretty sinister to me. What do you think?’
‘We haven’t come for a tute,’ I said – for Badgery’s questions commonly turned into sustained inquisition, conducted on monotonously Socratic lines. ‘But I do have a problem.’
‘How to gouge a single useful word out of Albert Talbert, I expect. No go, Duncan. I tried myself for a whole year, and it was no bloody go. So I can’t help.’
Badgery was still John Ruskin Senior, but he had ceased to read English. With difficulty, and probably on the strength of much hard work, he had persuaded the college to let him change to another School hazardously far on in his undergraduate career. It must have been judged that he had quite a lot of brains.
‘Talbert lets one be,’ I said defensively. ‘He doesn’t produce those Five Main Points at the end of your essay, or make lively faces at you to show he’s being stimulating and God knows. The appreciation of literature is a delicate business. He refrains from irritating the sensibility.’
‘And do you respond to that particular maieutic technique, my child? Does the sensibility burgeon week by week?’
‘Not too well.’ Badgery’s own technique, which was often one of nonsensical badinage, had the unexpected effect of making one grope after a dim honesty. ‘I don’t do all that for him, as a matter of fact.’
‘No matter. Young Pattullo, unlike the frivolous drunkard Mumford, wins golden opinions from his preceptors, tute by tute. Have you heard of the kiss of life?’
‘No, I haven’t.’
‘It’s a newfangled way of resuscitating the moribund. But it’s my point that reading English is the kiss of death. Or at least getting a First in it is. Have you ever thought of running through the Class Lists since the racket started?’
‘Of course not. It would be a waste of time.’
‘Nothing of the sort. It’s most illuminating.’ Badgery turned to the others. ‘Or at least for a literary character like young Pattullo it ought to be. Have you ever heard of anybody becoming a star of the Oxford English School and afterwards a poet or novelist or dramatist of the faintest significance?’
‘Aldous Huxley,’ Tony said unexpectedly.
‘Precisely! He’s the exception that proves the rule. The others all become professors of the stuff. Rank upon rank of them. An army of unalterable aridity. It becomes self- perpetuating.’
‘For Christ’s sake,’ Robert Damian said, ‘stop talking such stupid shop. Let’s have Duncan’s problem. I suspect it’s this Fish.’
‘Oh silver fish—’ Tony began, and remembered I’d had this one already. ‘Fish it is. Duncan’s obsessed with the man.’
‘I’m nothing of the kind. But I do seem to be expected to fix Fish, and I’ve come to wonder whether it can really only be done by doctors and people. So I want to know how to begin. Could I barge in on his tutor – who can’t be too bright if he hasn’t tumbled to the situation already? I rather thought of putting it to Tindale, as a matter of fact.’
‘Tindale?’ Tony echoed, and stared at me in surprise. ‘But you don’t know Tindale. Nobody does.’
‘Yes, I do. I’ve just been drinking his brandy.’
‘Well, I’m blessed!’ Badgery sounded equally astonished. ‘Question: why was young Pattullo born so beautiful? Answer: to delight the gods by constraining the elusive Tindale into breaking his rule.’
‘What do you mean – his rule?’ I demanded crossly.
‘Not to pick his young associates from inside his own college. A prudent, a decorous rule.’
‘Then that’s it!’ Tony said rapidly. He regarded it as a duty to snub or short-circuit this particular joke at my expense – partly because he thought Cyril Bedworth to be the sort of person upon whom it was funniest to direct it. ‘If this obscure don’s tastes lie that way, it releases the typewriter.’
‘The typewriter?’ Damian queried.
‘A nice girl,’ I said. It was I who had lately discovered that typists had originally been called typewriters – and, indeed, that Joseph Conrad had bewildered his Polish relations by writing home to announce that he had married one. ‘Like the young lady of Barking Creek, she has a date with Tindale twice a week. But Tony’s talking nonsense.’
‘Not at all.’ Tony had already succeeded in opening a second can of Badgery’s beer. ‘We waylay the pretty creature as she leaves her dull assignment with the inappropriate Tindale, and tell her we have quite a different proposition two floors up. Swiftly striking a bargain as we ascend—’
‘Yes, Tony’s talking nonsense, all right,’ Badgery said, with the air of a mature person suffering the absurdities of the young. ‘But perhaps his general idea is on the right lines. Fish must be found another wench. But the notion of simply hiring one and then saying to him, “Look what we’ve tucked up in your bed” is a shade on the crude side, if you ask me. Duncan, wouldn’t you agree?’
‘I wish you’d all stop being idiotic. Of course it’s true that, if Fish doesn’t hang himself or something, time the great healer may weigh in. He’ll go back to Australia and make a suitable marriage and have lots of children. But it’s not going to happen in a day.’
‘Of course not. What a penetrating mind Duncan has.’ Badgery paused to drink in a meditative fashion. ‘Taking a scientific view, one sees that one has to work in stages. Is Fish still attached to this girl who has ditched him?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I don’t even know that. But I’d suppose so.’
‘Then the first thing to arrange is a sort of deconditioning. Does he still see the girl?’
‘Almost certainly not. Martine has vanished.’
‘Then she must be tracked down, and it must be fixed so that Fish runs into her in an accidental way quite often. And whenever that happens, there must be somebody ready to produce a very loud noise – perhaps by firing a pistol or something – preferably just behind Fish’s head.’
‘You’re dotty,’ Damian said.
‘Not at all. It’s just Behaviourism again. But one also wants Fish – about every second time there’s one of these casual sightings of the girl – to experience the sensation of a sudden drop through space. You see, these are the only two things that frighten a baby: being dropped, or being banged at loudly. After that, it’s all conditioned reflexes. So that’s how we work on Fish.’
‘It sounds too easy for words,’ Tony said. ‘Particularly the dropping him through space. And then what?’
‘He’s ready to be introduced into new female society. Lots of it, if possible; not just a typewriter delivered at the door. Duncan, what about this old dame you go to tea with in North Oxford?’
‘What’s that?’ Tony interrupted. ‘Duncan, you’ve been hiding something from your very oldest friend. Who is she?’
‘She’s a Mrs Triplett.’ I was surprised to discover that I had, in fact, kept this recent association to myself. ‘But all that’s totally irrelevant.’
‘I’m not at all sure. Everybody has heard of Mrs Triplett. How did you come to achieve the entrée?’
‘It began with a cow, if you want to know.’
‘Duncan began with a cow.’ Tony was diverted for a moment to routine impropriety. ‘An unassuming, indeed a rustic, taste. And then?’
‘She asked me my name and college, rather as if she was the Junior Proctor. Then later it turned out she thought she knew some vague relations of mine, and she started asking me to tea. I don’t see the point of talking about Mrs Triplett.’
‘The point,’ Badgery said with extreme patience, ‘is that, at her tea-parties, your Mrs Triplett is said to lay on wenches. Is that right? If it is, the relevance of the fact to the good Fish and his situation ought to be evident.’
‘Well, yes – it is right. But not wenches, exactly. I’d say approved young gentlewomen.’
‘No matter,’ Tony interposed. My report on Mrs Triplett’s set-up was interesting him. Later, he would denounce me scathingly for having kept dark about it. ‘Fish is quite presentable, despite his obscure colonial origins.’
‘The girls are mostly foreigners. The deceased Triplett was Foreign Secretary, or an ambassador, or something of that kind; and when the widow Triplett isn’t milking cows she likes to have the old polyglot stir around her.’ I caught Badgery’s eye, and realised he was taking note of my being not quite easy about these tea-parties. ‘”Foreigners” probably isn’t quite right,’ I said. ‘There’s a strong bias towards the Empire, or the Commonwealth, or whatever it is.’
‘Favourable milieu for Fish,’ Damian said.
‘Well, I’m not sure. Some of them are black—’
‘Black?’ Tony repeated, surprised.
‘Quite, quite black. And others are quite, quite yellow. An acquired taste, I’d suppose, in either case.’
‘Unlike cows,’ Tony said.
‘Oh, shut up!’ If I snapped this at Tony, it was because I was conscious of myself becoming sillier and sillier. ‘But most of them are brown. Brown girls in all sorts of subtle shades. I like the ones from the Shan States best. They’re rather small, and their brown has a hint of gold to it.’
‘The Shan States?’ Tony was round-eyed before my unwary admission of this exotic interest. ‘Does that mean the Road to Mandalay?’
‘More or less, I suppose.’
‘Where the flying-Fishes play,’ Damian said.
There was a moment’s silence, nobody thinking highly of this rudimentary joke. The pause was broken by Badgery, who was clanking hospitably among the beer-cans.
‘Do we understand,’ he asked me, ‘that you feel much attracted by these dusky beauties?’
‘I’d say I do, rather.’
This was another of the occasions upon which, in the middle of much laboured nonsense, Badgery displayed his power of eliciting a fragment of truth. I had found one or two of the girls we were discussing very exciting. Their appeal lay as much in their miniaturised dimensions as in their complexions; they’d have been, fantasy hinted to me, marvellously handlable. But something deeper was involved. Formative months were passing over me; I was tidying up on a late adolescence; I was more aware of necessities not to be coped with in what Stumpe had called quiet half-hours with sex. These were commonplace circumstances; added to them was the quality of my relationship to the distant, and now elusive, Janet. I had begun to whisper to myself that this had been a boy-and-girl affair; at the same time I was unwilling to think of Janet except in the context of a life-time’s fidelity. So Mrs Triplett’s Burmese princesses (for I believe they were mostly that) became for me the channel for a tide of feeling which I told myself could run blamelessly in parallel with one both more ideal and more realistic – realistic in the sense of being supported within the embankments of a common culture and shared interests. (Janet Finlay, to put it more simply, was the girl next door.) I was telling myself that East is East and West is West, and that the two can be quite reasonably separated for certain purposes. It was ignoble, this phase of feeling; and I think it made me sometimes see myself as potentially in some not very edifying short story by Colonel Morrison’s friend Willie Maugham. But it was to be a situation which, like the majority of situations, never came to anything much. I wasn’t – I have to face it – a young man particularly good at forcing the moment to its crisis.
‘It seems to me,’ Tony was saying, ‘that our sly young friend Pattullo here has been behaving in a meanly dog-in-the-mangerish way. And he has told me quite a packet of lies from time to time about his Sunday afternoon toddles.’
‘The point is Fish,’ I said. ‘And I see no solution du côté de chezTriplett. The Australians have something called a Colour Bar, after all.’
‘But we propose no more than an emergency and salubrious liaison,’ Badgery said reprovingly. ‘And I’m interested, by the way, in this business of brown girls. There’s a don somewhere – I think it’s at Magdalen – who has written a book about a chap called John. It’s one of those pilgrimage fables of an edifying sort. John is rather like Duncan, as a matter of fact. He wants to be serious and truthful, like those boring people in E. M. Forster. He even wants to find God, which is outside the Forsterian terms of reference.’
‘Not at all,’ Tony said with one of his random admissions of literacy. ‘God si Love.’
‘God si Balls,’ Badgery said robustly. ‘That’s just a jab at Hindu toshery. The point about this John is that, as he piously journeys, he’s continually ambushed by brown girls. That’s what they’re called: brown girls. They tumble him in the hay. I’m wondering whether they have their origin in Mrs Triplett’s salon. It might be a fruitful field for literary research. That laborious man Bedworth might do his B.Litt. on it.’
‘Isn’t it time,’ Robert Damian demanded abruptly, ‘that we were talking sense about this hapless Fish? He doesn’t sound a bit funny to me.’
‘The night is yet young,’ Badgery said. He glanced at the depleted crate. ‘But yes – perhaps you’re right. Midnight has come, and the great Christ Church Bell – as your pet poet says. We now listen to Robert. He’s the first I call.’
‘Very well.’ Damian was attractive to me as possessing almost my own disabling juvenility of appearance – a matter of being pink and white – but he owned much self-confidence too.
‘This talk of an instant replacement for the disgusting Martine is futile. She’d be as useless as instant coffee.’
‘Could any of these girls,’ Tony asked me, ‘be described as coffee-coloured? It sounds less glamorous than brown with a hint of gold.’
‘You, Mumford, belt up,’ Damian said. ‘If you’re going to listen, you’re going to listen. And, for a start, let me tell you Duncan’s right on the bloody ball when he says the man needs a doctor. He’s a cot case, if ever I heard of one. Still, his condition’s obviously benign.’
‘Benign?’ I asked.
‘Opposite of malignant. Fish is clearly an ordinary virile Australian who happens to be in a mild depression. But it’s reactive and not endogenous. So the prognosis is O.K. It’s what we nearly always find. Handle the thing vigorously, and Fish can be safely returned from deep misery to ordinary human unhappiness. That’s what Freud liked to promise his patients at the end of Interview One. Not, of course, that Freud knew how to go about it. We do.’
‘”We”,’ I said, ‘meaning yourself and that equally eminent Behaviourist?’ Damian, a freshman reading Physiology as Oxford’s regular start to becoming a doctor, commonly used this pronoun to indicate persons working on the furthest frontiers of scientific medicine.
‘Well, no—not really.’ Damian remained serious. ‘I do think it will become possible to tinker with human personality, and control human behaviour, on Pavlovian or Watsonian lines. What they call brain-washing is obviously a crude start on that – which is why Colin here thinks of it as sinister. Perhaps it is. Anyway, it looks like being about as laborious as psychoanalysis. At present, you can just get a bad joke out of it – like that one of confronting Fish with his Martine to the accompaniment of loud bangs and nasty falls. What we’re really working on most hopefully is psychotropic drugs.’
‘Giving Fish pills?’ I asked. We were being attentive now. I felt that, in a broad way, Robert Damian knew his stuff.
‘There are quite a lot of pills, and others are coming along.’
‘He’ll have to take them three times a day after meals?’ I was disliking what I heard. If Damian had recommended that Fish should take to the bottle and drown his sorrows as he might, I’d probably have been slightly revolted. But now I’d been given a vision of Fish fumbling furtively in a little chemist’s box for something that would mysteriously take hold of what, whether fallaciously or not, he probably thought of as the core of his being. This wasn’t revolting; it was frightening. It was much more frightening then, no doubt, than it would be now.
‘More or less that,’ Damian said. ‘And for weeks and weeks. They’re not like narcotics or crude hallucinogens. They get to work rather slowly.’
‘Do you know how they get to work?’ Tony asked.
‘No we don’t. Different chaps have different theories. But all medicine is surprisingly empirical. People just notice things. As in the penicillin business.’
‘But that’s not quite the same,’ Badgery said. ‘You can’t just go on mixing recondite drugs in endless permutations and feeding them to loonies to see if anything happens. It would be like the monkeys producing Shakespeare’s plays on typewriters.’
‘Quite true. But we needn’t go into that. Anyway, I don’t think they’ll give Fish pills. They’ll deal with him by other methods. I don’t mean asking him if he can remember what happened to him in the wood-shed, or if he ever misinterpreted the behaviour of mum and dad in bed. Other physical methods.’
‘Mightn’t it be better,’ I asked, suddenly turning round on myself, ‘if he were just left alone, after all? By doctors and people, that is. Just having us do our best in a companionable way. There is that thing I was being funny about. Time the healer, or whatever I said. These things must wear off.’
‘Almost certainly, but we can’t ever be quite sure. If he has a certain constitutional vulnerability, then this neurotic bout, if left untreated, may just possibly deepen into an untouchable melancholia. No, the only safe thing will be ECT. And the sooner they get cracking the better. In other words, we ought to get cracking ourselves.’
‘Just how?’ Tony asked.
‘Go straight across to the Dean, yank him out of bed, and panic him. Or the Provost himself, for that matter; I’d like to see that bland hauteur with the wind up. But the main thing is to have Fish hospitalised within the next hour or two. So come on.’
Damian had stood up, a simple action which shook the other three of us considerably. I told myself that he was going to be a good doctor, and that in the future he’d save lives by simple decisiveness of this sort. I felt I had to say something, nevertheless.
‘Look!’ I said. ‘Hold hard a minute. Is this ECT thing electric shocks?’
‘That’s right – although it’s an uninformed way to put it.’
‘I don’t believe it’s anything of the kind. And isn’t it another of those irrational things, hit on by sheer chance?’
‘Oh, quite probably.’ Damian didn’t hesitate for a moment. ‘Like insulin, you know. You pump it in for diabetes, and find it’s controlling schizophrenia.’
‘Fish is going to be taken away, and be tied up, and have electrodes or whatever they’re called—’
‘Don’t get excited, Duncan. It can be made to sound horrific – and I suppose it really is, in a way. But they have various dodges for toning the drama down. Besides, he won’t feel anything at all.’
‘Won’t he writhe in his bonds, and produce noises commonly heard only by the Gestapo?’
‘Oh, stuff it, Duncan! Fish can’t be subjected to any treatment without his consent. And it mayn’t be that treatment. I’m not a doctor.’ Damian seemed just to have remembered this. ‘I may be quite wrong on what will be thought about him. But he should see someone now.’
‘Yes,’ Badgery said, ‘that’s true.’
‘We ought to wait till tomorrow,’ I said, my change of front hardening. ‘We ought to sleep on it, before setting so drastic a ball rolling.’
‘I don’t agree.’ Badgery had got up too. ‘Come on – all three of you.’
‘No.’
It was Tony who had spoken, and we all stared at him. The single monosyllable had come from him with a startling effect of command. It wasn’t a turn I recall his ever putting on again during his remaining undergraduate days. We were brought to a halt as abruptly as by a shout on a parade ground.
‘We’re all concerned about this Fish,’ Tony went on. He was entirely relaxed again. ‘Half-a-dozen other people are as well. But it’s Duncan who has been carrying the can. Think, you two. If you go off to the Dean or somebody now, you’ll be gabbling to him about a situation you hardly know about except at second-hand. And that pretty well goes for me too. So if Duncan’s instinct has turned against this, I back Duncan. I’m most impressed by what Robert says – and I can see, as I’d expect, that you, Colin, are as well.’ Tony paused – it might have been said to radiate a sense that he held the highest opinion of us all. I could once more have reflected, had I not been too anxious about other things, that homo politicus in his embryonic form was before us. ‘But it just happens to be Duncan who has an intimate sense of the thing, and I think we must leave the responsibility with him for the moment.’
‘For twenty-four hours,’ I said.
‘Something like that.’ I could see that Tony disapproved of being unnecessarily specific about one’s pledges. ‘And now we’d better go to bed.’
This carried the day – or rather the night. Tony and I walked back to Surrey together. It was late; the quads were deserted; only once did we hear revellers conscientiously bawling and breaking things in some distant rooms.
‘He’s still got his light on,’ Tony said quietly.
I took this to be counsel.
‘All right,’ I said. ‘I’ll have another go.’
Tony turned into his own quarters, and I continued upstairs. Before I reached Fish’s landing I encountered his neighbour, Clive Kettle, coming down. The light was dim. He stopped as soon as he recognised me.
‘Pattullo,’ he said, ‘are you by any chance on your way to see Martin Fish?’
‘Yes, I am.’ Kettle might have supposed it more probable that I was going on further to call on my own contemporary, Cyril Bedworth.
‘I was coming down to see you, as a matter of fact,’ Ketde said nervously. ‘Because I know you’ve been trying to help Martin.’
‘Well, yes.’ Kettle’s choice of words embarrassed me. I might have said to Bedworth, ‘Cyril, help me with this bloody awful text’, but I couldn’t possibly have said to Fish, ‘Martin, I do want to help you if I can.’ I searched for a further reply. ‘He does seem to need sorting out.’
‘He desperately needs sharing,’ Kettle said – thus further revealing that we were of different tribes. ‘He’s been in deep distress.’
‘Girl-trouble can be pretty grim while it lasts. But that’s all it has been, as I expect you know.’ I produced this coarse-grained remark quite against my own sense of the matter. A kind of instant jealousy was involved. ‘Have you turned the chaplain on him?’ I asked, more brutally still.
‘Yes, of course.’
The manner of Kettle’s saying this pulled me up. I hardly knew him at all. Tony and I – and probably Badgery and Damian as well – regarded Christians in the college as harmless eccentrics with whom it wasn’t awfully easy to get on. For the moment, however, I felt rebuked.
‘I’m sure that’s all to the good,’ I said. ‘It’s no doubt the chaplain’s thing, in a way. But I feel there’s a certain urgency about Martin’s case. Medically, one might say.’
‘Medically?’ Kettle looked blank. ‘Well, yes—perhaps.’
‘Do come down and have a word about it before I see him. I’m glad you thought of me. I have been seeing him quite a lot.’
On this conciliatory note, we went downstairs together. I found myself hoping Tony wouldn’t stick his head out and observe this new development. I was certain he wouldn’t think much of it.
‘What some of us feel,’ I said when we had sat down, ‘is that it’s clinical, really.’ I didn’t gain much confidence from this vogue word. ‘Martin’s in a depression – the sort that can take a man into the bin. And he’s just not reasonable. Have you met the girl?’
‘Oh, no!’ The idea of this appeared to alarm Kettle. ‘I don’t think she can have behaved too well.’
‘That’s the understatement of the year. Martine’s a real horror. After the first nasty shock of being expertly tortured, and if he had any sanity at all, Martin ought to have been damned glad to be shut of her. But you might as well put that point of view to the college cat. I can’t make any impression on him. But what about you? I suppose you’ve known him longer than I have.’
‘Yes, I have. And he has always been very friendly. He is still, in a way. That’s why I’ve tried getting him to pray with me.’
‘I see.’ Again I felt foolish embarrassment. ‘And he wouldn’t play—pray, I mean?’
‘Oh, but yes. He agreed to try.’
‘He’s always very polite.’
‘Polite?’ Kettle took this fresh brutality gravely. ‘We did pray together. An hour or so ago, as a matter of fact. And I don’t think it’s been quite in vain. One or two things he said made me feel that. It seemed to me he was coming to a better sense of the matter. And yet I’m puzzled, all the same. That’s why I thought I’d come in and have a talk with you. He mentioned you several times.’
‘What sort of things did he say?’ I was disconcerted to think of Fish offering a word or two about me between bouts of intercessory prayer. Still, if he pulled himself straight by way of the comforts of religion, that was all right by me. If he spent the rest of his undergraduate days scurrying in and out of the chilly college chapel, he’d be in a blessed state indeed compared with his recent experience, and I’d continue to like him quite a lot. I was coming rather to like Kettle, for that matter. His concern was clearly serious and admirable. ‘Did he say anything about Martine?’ I amplified.
‘He didn’t mention her specifically. But I’m sure he was thinking about her. I believe he was realising it had been an unsanctified relationship. Something entirely of the flesh.’
‘I’d say it was that, all right.’ This time, I had less difficulty with Kettle’s vocabulary. ‘But the flesh does seem able to take bloody awful swipes at the spirit, doesn’t it? I’m not an authority. But it seems to me you go after something you call cunt, or tail, or a free poke – there are any number of care-free words for it – and before you know where you are it’s making you shiver in your private parts. Your real private parts, right in your ruddy soul.’
‘I’m not an authority either,’ Kettle said. ‘But certainly we are fearfully and wonderfully made.’
‘The psalmist says it’s something to be thankful for.’ I thought I’d show Kettle I’d been properly brought up. ‘Sex is coming to seem just one hell of a risk to me.’
‘A risk,’ Kettle said surprisingly, ‘we all must take sooner or later. Unless, of course, one has a vocation for celibacy.’
‘I don’t suppose Martin has that.’ I paused, and saw that we were straying from the point. ‘You were going to tell me what he said.’
‘He said he had seen the light.’
‘Martin said that?’ For some reason I felt obscurely uneasy.
‘He said that at last he could see. But then – and this is why I’m puzzled – he became agitated. You’d expect calm to follow illumination, wouldn’t you?’
‘I haven’t a clue. Isn’t there a lot of ecstatic behaviour mixed up with religion? Even hysteria?’
‘Hysteria?’ This time, it was Kettle who was uneasy. ‘He has rather been rushing around. And waving. What you might call beating the air. Beating something off.’ Kettle seemed concerned to convey with as much precision as possible the disturbing appearances he had been presented with. ‘Do you know what I thought of? A chap caught in a searchlight and trying to get away from it. And soon I couldn’t make him pay any attention to me. So I thought I’d better leave him for a while. I went back to my own room, and prayed by myself. I was guided to try again. But when I went out on the landing I heard sobbing. I stood outside Martin’s door and listened. I hope that wasn’t dishonourable.’
‘Well?’
‘Just that. He was weeping and weeping. It was then that I thought I’d come and consult you.’
‘You bloody fool, why didn’t you tell me this at the start?’ I had jumped to my feet – appalled to think that, but for my own obstinacy, the distraught Fish would by now have been well on the way to being in competent professional hands. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I beg your pardon. I’m going straight up again. I’ll look in on you later.’
And I left Kettle in my room. He was getting on his knees for more prayer as I had my last glimpse of him and ran upstairs.
There was not much sign of Fish’s having so recently been in the state described by Kettle. He answered my knock in a normal manner, and revealed himself as engaged in the commonplace activity of preparing for bed. He greeted me in his pyjamas and carrying a toothbrush; and if he had really been in a paroxysm of tears he had washed all trace of it away. Only he was very pale. Once in bed, his complexion would have matched the sheets.
‘Hullo,’ I said cautiously. ‘I’m afraid it’s a bit late to look in. But are you all right, Martin? I thought I’d just like to know.’
This seemed to me fair enough. After what had been passing between us it would be silly to pretend that I didn’t have
Fish’s condition on my mind. But now for a moment I wondered whether he had it on his mind, since he looked as if he didn’t know what I was talking about. Perhaps, I thought, after a real brain-storm a protective amnesia sets in, and I was putting my foot in it through not perceiving this. Fish’s puzzled expression, however, faded almost as soon as I noticed it; it was as if he was bringing me into focus as a familiar physical object against a background of recent events which it just took a little time to sort out. I concluded that his mind was working slowly, and that he was very reasonably in a condition of extreme fatigue.
‘I’m dinkum, Duncan, thank you.’
I didn’t know whether to judge this whimsical jingle reassuring; only once or twice before had I heard Fish indulge the affectation of using Australian slang which probably wasn’t particularly native to him.
‘Then that’s fine,’ I said, as easily as possible, and wondered whether to go away. Fish looked stabilised at least until the following day, when I could take stock of his state again. This was what, in Badgery’s room, I’d suddenly decided to work for; Kettle had panicked me into thinking I’d perhaps been fatally wrong; now I was thinking myself right again.
‘Can you stay a minute, Duncan?’ It seemed that Fish had detected some slight movement I had made. ‘I want to tell you what’s happened. Things have cleared up a bit, I think.’
‘It all seems less desperate?’ I asked – perhaps rashly.
‘Well, I don’t know.’ Fish frowned, as if I had said something obscure or irrelevant. ‘It’s a matter of finding an objective standpoint, I’d say. Seeing oneself, and being dispassionate about it. I suppose that’s what really wise people can do. It’s what I’m trying to do. Only, you see, I’m not wise – so ought I to be a bit cautious? Suppose you were an unspeakably hideous old dotard, or some awful sort of abortion. In a country without looking-glasses. And suddenly you were given one. Say you were a king, and nobody could possibly tell you the loathsome truth about yourself. And then an explorer or merchant or somebody made you a gift of a whacking great mirror. If you had sense, you’d begin with no more than a quick peep. That’s right, isn’t it?’
‘I suppose it is.’ I found the thought being developed by Martin Fish unnerving. He would never have struck me as a particularly imaginative type, or as having the instinct of the fabulist. But the burden of this concoction was clear enough. He was projecting himself in the image of a man so despicable and repellent that he couldn’t stand up to self-scrutiny. And all – for it came down to this – because he had been ditched by a depraved girl, and mocked when caught out as not much liking cold water. That was the cold truth of the matter, and realising it sent an appropriately chilly shudder down my spine. Fish’s grotesque state suggested some travesty of the situation of the Tragic Hero as propounded in my textbooks: a tiny flaw in character or a tiny slip-up in conduct being visited with utterly disproportionate misfortune. And his own sense of proportion had deserted him. The more he looked the humiliating little business in the eye, the less could he bear it.
‘Look, Martin,’ I said on a reasoning note, ‘there’s no point in going on about that now. Let’s talk about it another time. What you need is a good night’s sleep. And I’ve just remembered. When I was scared about my idiotic Prelim I scurried off to the college doctor and got some sleeping stuff. It’s called sodium amytal, and he said it’s quite harmless, just in an occasional way. But I didn’t use it, after all. I’ll go down and get it for you. It’s a little bottle of things called capsules.’ I paused, and was visited by a moment of sanity. ‘I’ll bring you up a couple of them. That’s a night’s dose.’
‘It’s frightfully kind of you.’ Fish had squared himself; his instinct for courtesy was on top; he smiled at me – for the first time in many days. ‘But I don’t in the least need anything of the sort. I’ll tell you what: just see me into bed.’
I performed this nursery ritual, which ought to have been absurd but seemed entirely natural. It was as if I had been fussing in an unnecessary fashion, and Fish had found a light and whimsical way of giving me a sense of being useful to him. Within a couple of minutes I was standing again at the door of his bedroom, managing my own confident smile.
‘Good night, Martin. Are you going in to breakfast?’
‘Yes, of course, Duncan. I’ll call for you. Good night. Pleasant dreams.’
No dreams visited me. But in the small hours I woke up, aware that there was somebody in the room. I didn’t know how late it was, and thought at once that a blundering drunk had turned up on me; even – for I was still freshman enough for such alarms – that it was designed to make me the victim of some foolery. In such circumstances boldness is all. I snapped on the bedside lamp.
‘Duncan?’
It was Fish – standing strangely in the doorway.
‘Good Lord, Martin! You scared me.’
‘Duncan—is it you?’
‘Yes, of course.’ I sat up. ‘What is it?’
‘The bloody lights have failed. Fused, or something. I was going to the loo.’ Fish’s voice cracked. ‘Duncan, try yours.’
We stared at each other – or rather I stared at Fish – in the clear light of a 60 watt bulb.
‘It’s on, Duncan?’
‘Yes, Martin – it’s on.’
‘Then that’s it. I’ve had it. I’ve gone blind.’
I got Tony, and Tony got the night-watchman, and the night-watchman got the Dean. With surprising speed – although it felt like an aeon – the college doctor arrived from somewhere in the town. Habituated to the panics of young men, he was prepared to be tough as well as kind. He examined Fish, and listened to what he had to say. He listened to me. He went to the telephone. I believe I was in a state of considerable shock, but as people were not then removed to hospital on that account Fish presently departed in an ambulance alone.
The doctor gave the Dean a look, and the Dean returned to bed. The doctor packed his bag; he had no appearance of inviting conversation.
‘Sir,’ I said, ‘will Fish have ECT?’
‘Have what?’
‘Electric shocks.’
‘I’d say it was most improbable. Have people been talking about electric shocks?’
‘Well, yes.’ I pressed on. ‘Do you think he’s likely to be permanently blind?’
‘My dear lad, heaven forbid!’ The doctor had moved to the door, but now he paused there. ‘Mr Pattullo, does anything else occur to you?’
‘Well, this girl—’
‘Yes, I think I understand about that. But anything else? Take your time.’
‘It does occur to me that Martin – that’s Fish – had rather a lot to say about seeing, and not seeing, and not daring to see.’
‘Humph!’ The doctor appeared to think better of receiving this without comment. ‘Does it also occur to you that there’s more sense in remembering that than in talking rubbish about ECT?’
‘I suppose it does.’
‘I expect you’ll be able to go and visit him in a few days’ time. I’ll let you know. Good night.’
Tony had already departed. I was left alone in my bedroom, which had remained the scene of all these activities. I climbed into bed. Shock or no shock, I was asleep again within minutes. But when I woke up I was very anxious about Fish. I had no idea of how to find out where he had been taken, or whether it was more likely to be an eye hospital or an asylum. When at length I received a summons it was to a private nursing home to which he had been transferred – he was to tell me later – on the strength of peremptory cables from his parents in New South Wales. I found him sitting up in bed, reading Punch. He was peaked and pale still, but entirely composed.
‘Hullo, Duncan!’ he said. ‘I’ve been the most awful nuisance to you, and I’m frightfully sorry.’ He smiled cheerfully, as one who indicates that his words are to be accepted in a conventional sense. ‘But look at this one,’ he said. ‘Not bad for Punch.’
I looked at some meaningless joke, and realised that Fish was a different man – so different that I insanely wondered whether he had been crammed full of electricity after all. I don’t think that at this moment I recalled my mother, whose own burdens would sometimes lift and vanish within an hour.
‘No, not bad,’ I said. Looking up, I saw that Fish had transferred his gaze to a large looking-glass on the wall opposite his bed.
‘Funny thing to keep in a place like this,’ he said. ‘Might turn patients a bit blue, if they weren’t exactly feeling in the pink.’ He continued to study himself with complacency. ‘Do you know? I think I’ve lost a useful bit of weight. I’d been putting it on, rather. Not enough squash.’
‘Or messing about in boats,’ I said. Before this transformation, the spirit of experiment was momentarily strong in me.
‘Or messing about in boats,’ Fish repeated – and if it wasn’t indifferently, this was merely because he had recognised the quotation from The Wind in the Willows. ‘I say, Duncan! About the long vac. That was a good idea of yours. Let’s go.’