Gilbert Pillman and Francis Gethin shared digs. They were in their early twenties, and among the most junior of the junior lecturers in a provincial university. Their resemblance to one another stopped short just there. Pillman had taken his first steps in learning at a small Midland grammar school and considered himself (or thought he ought to consider himself) lucky to have got where he had. Apart from being clever there was nothing remarkable about him except his being very good-looking, which he was in a rather distinguished and (so to speak) unexpected way. People regarded him as being good natured and as not incapable of being good fun.
Gethin was the son of an eminent philosopher and the grandson of a peer. He just couldn’t believe that Winchester and Oxford had vanished from his ken and that here he was in this absurd place. Along with this intolerance and fastidiousness there went, oddly enough, a great deal of modesty and diffidence. His acquaintances accounted for this by remarking that, as a physical presence, he was distinctly pinched and meagre. Chetif was his own word for himself when he became intimate and confiding. But this he didn’t do at all readily. In fact in all Nessfield it was only his room-mate Gillie who was allowed much glimpse of a gloomy and self-tormenting Franco.
Neither of these young men was particularly keen on his job. Pillman’s subject was English literature (capital ‘L’ literature in professional contexts), and he wasn’t very clear as to what one did about it. He could run up quite amusing lectures surprisingly rapidly – which was just as well, since he was required to hold forth on a dais four times a week and had as yet no stock of the wretched things in a drawer. But, to get on, it was essential to be a scholar. You found something to edit, or somebody whose humdrum life you burrow into, or books which could be speciously represented as ‘influenced’ by other books. ‘We come on quite an interesting line of derivation here,’ he would say from that dais. ‘It’s odd how big dogs go for little dogs’ vomit. You’d expect it to be the other way round.’ And he’d get a not very comprehending laugh here and there from the captive audience ranged in front of him.
Gethin was a mathematician. It was the very bloodiest thing you could be, he declared, if you happened to be not a mathematician. He had recently counted up and found that there were at present six mathematicians in England. He himself was not among them.
So here was something more the two had in common, after all: a morose comfortable grousing was agreeable to them both. They’d hold sessions for this of an evening, sitting on either side of a smoky little fire in their shared sitting-room, drinking cheap burgundy (and it was really cheap in the nineteen-thirties) out of a flagon shaped (Gethin said) like a po.
Pillman was quite fond of Gethin. He approved of a distinct tendency in Gethin to admire him: something the more gratifying in that Gethin seemed indisposed to admire much else. Pillman felt it to be his role to jolly Gethin out of his glooms; even to rag him mildly at times. They had become Gillie and Franco to one another in the first week of their association.
‘He’s quite too absurd,’ Franco would say of his professor, whose name was Shuffrey. ‘It’s hard not to intimate one’s sense that he ought to have a little shop somewhere. Rather a shady little shop, with French letters kept under the counter.’
‘How very coarse. And I don’t believe, Franco, you’d know a French letter if you saw one.’
‘Oh, shut up, Gillie.’ For some reason Franco disliked this quip very much. ‘And do you know? He refers to his children as the kiddies. It’s unbelievable.’
‘I suppose it would be unbelievable in your class of society, my dear infant. But even men who beget kiddies are also God’s creatures. And I rather like your Professor Shuffrey. His finger-nails keep mine company, I suppose. Pass the bottle.’ Franco during the previous week had commented unfavourably on Gillie’s notion of adequate cleanliness in this regard. Public school standards of uncompromising candour were among the few things he felt he could assist his friend to a command of.
‘Look not on the third glass, Gillie.’
‘Bloody well look on the third glass when it’s three lectures on Samson Agonistes that lie ahead. Three lectures on Samson Agonistes! It’s straight murder.’
‘You’d better get started.’ Gethin himself had recourse to the third glass. ‘We don’t seem very cheerful, do we?’
‘No.’
‘Nor shall be when we’ve become professors in some awful hole in Wales or the Middle East. Nor when retired and seventy.’
‘Perfectly true, Franco. Sighing that only one thing has been lent to youth and age in common: discontent.’
‘I suppose you chuck those stale old poetical tags at your undergraduates.’
‘Students.’
Franco was falling into the habit of staring at Gillie quite a lot, but in the course of this exercise he usually switched on a frown of disapproval. He did this now.
‘Students or undergraduates,’ he said, ‘they’re a dreary crowd.’
‘Oh, some of them aren’t too bad.’ Pillman in fact rather liked many of his pupils, and particularly three or four of the prettier girls. In bed at night, and before he went to sleep, he commonly put in time accomplishing the seduction of one or another of them. They weren’t, after all, much younger than he was, and were certainly above what one read of in the newspapers as the age of consent. Unfortunately it seemed you could be sacked for sleeping with a member of the university in statupupillari – which you couldn’t be for going with some stray girl down in the town. Not that Pillman had ever done this. It was one of his few secrets that he was a virginal youth. Possibly Gethin was too. Gethin would sometimes describe a man as a ‘womaniser’ in a tone of chilly contempt, but without enlarging on the topic.
‘I suppose I’d better get cracking,’ Pillman said. He struggled out of a creaking basket chair, crossed the room, and glowered at the typewriter on his small work-table. ‘”Oh dark, dark, dark, amid the blaze of noon.” Why was it Samson’s hair that Dalila cut off? I could tell them it’s what psychoanalysts call an upward displacement. Like inserting a foreign body in old King Hamlet’s ear.’
‘If you’ve only got rubbish like that in your head, Gillie, you’d better leave it until tomorrow.’
‘I can’t. I’m going to Notton Grange tomorrow. It’s going to be a regular Saturday assignment for quite some time. A great opportunity for me, Hedger says.’ Hedger was Pillman’s professor.
‘Hell, Gillie! What about our golf?’ For a moment Gethin was pale and furious. The two young men had recently taken to playing singularly bad golf on the municipal links. ‘And what’s this Notton Grange, anyway?’
‘It’s Lord Furlong’s place. He’s a local grandee.’ Pillman told himself that ‘place’ was pretentious, as being what some other sort of person would say, and that he ought to have said ‘house’. Much reading in Eng. Lit. had given him a lot of information about U and non-U usage, although these actual terms had not yet been invented. ‘I’m going to have the run of the library.’
‘What absurd person had taken to concealing himself behind that cognomen? Another prosperous brewer, I suppose.’
‘Quite right. The family name’s a bit odd. It’s Eatwell.’
‘Eatwell?’ Repeating the word, Franco raised his eyebrows in a deprecating way, and then dropped them into a frown. ‘I once knew an Eatwell. It was in a juvenile society, in which he suffered for it. Justly, of course. One ought not to allow oneself to be born to such a bizarrerie.’
‘Well, here’s an Eatwell who has escaped from it. You’d be damned glad to become a first baron, or whatever it is, yourself if you’d been born Francis Eatwell instead of Francis bloody Vere de Vere.’ Pillman grinned amiably as he delivered himself of this. He knew that Franco quite liked being the recipient of such crude banter. On this occasion, however, Franco did not respond, but spent some minutes staring sombrely into his glass. Then he roused himself.
‘Tell me more about this nonsense, Gillie,’ he said abruptly.
‘Well, Lord Furlong has this library – starting from scratch, and buying every volume in it himself.’
‘Himself?’
‘He has agents, no doubt. And he has a librarian. The Furlong Librarian. A chap called Bounce. I’ve had a letter from him, signed just like that. “C. Bounce, Furlong Librarian”.’
‘Ye Gods!’
‘Quite so, Franco. And now his lordship has been going in for manuscripts as well as books. He has discovered, much to his surprise, that you can pay even more for stuff written by hand than for real printed books. So he has told Bounce to go ahead. I expect Bounce will take to calling himself “C. Bounce, Furlong Librarian and Archivist”.’
‘Your ridiculous subject does seem to be taking you among queer cattle, Gillie.’
‘Hedger has discovered there’s a lot of eighteenth-century material, including a batch of letters by Shenstone.’
‘Shenstone?’
‘Do quit that silly trick, Franco. I’ve told you about Shenstone. Hedger says nobody much seems to be working on Shenstone, so here’s my chance. Shenstone has a social tone you might rather admire. Poems upon Various Occasions. Written for the Entertainment of the Author, And Printed for the Amusement of a few Friends, Prejudiced in his Favour. What do you think of that? And Shenstone was a country gent. He entertained himself with landscape gardening as well. It might be quite entertaining to get up all that. Only there are several rather good books about it already. You should read Christopher Hussey’s. It’s the best one for beginners.’
‘I’ll have a look. I’m bloody ignorant, I know.’ Gethin was suddenly lapsing into his diffidence. He was also looking at his friend with unguarded pleasure, presumably at being in the company of so cultivated a character. ‘Just to keep up, I never dare take my nose out of maths. All figures and squiggles. It’s utterly barbarous.’
‘Nonsense, Franco. Numbers first began our might. There’s Yeats’s word for it. And look at your father. He takes maths in his stride and weaves it into the most profound philosophical speculations.’
‘So they say. I never made anything of my father – not any way on. I must have gone in for just having a mother right from the start.’
‘I suppose some chaps do. My father made himself felt. With quite a heavy hand.’ Pillman found himself tapping at the keys of the typewriter in front of him. Franco had never talked about his family before, and there was something a little uncomfortable about it now. ‘They let you play on that course on Sunday afternoons,’ he said suddenly. ‘We might have a go then.’
‘So we might.’ Gethin had faintly flushed, as if aware of having been made an object of consideration in an unwonted and not wholly agreeable way. ‘Yes, let’s say Sunday.’ And he put the cork in the burgundy flagon as a sign that he was going to bed.
Left to himself, Pillman tapped on for a few minutes on his boring machine. ‘The date of the composition of this sombre non-drama,’ he tapped, ‘is in dispute among the learned. So is the merit of its leaden versification.’ He stared at this and saw it wouldn’t do. It was half-baked throwaway stuff, which wouldn’t even raise a smile. So he ripped the sheet from the machine, crumpled it up, and went off to bed himself. As he climbed the staircase he selected, rather half-heartedly, his bed-time girl for the night.
Notton Grange had been acquired by Lord Furlong from a nobleman of somewhat more ancient lineage who had run out of money, packed up, and departed to the South of France. It was a big house but not big enough for Lord Furlong, who had caused various bits and pieces to be added to it. These embellishments included two curved colonnades each terminating in a pavilion. The pavilions were understood to be ‘ornamental’ (which meant twiddly) in a manner relieving the general severity of the main design. The house was in fact a plain double cube. In the centre of one cube there was a very grand staircase lit by a lantern into which you could have fitted quite a commodious cottage. The centre of the other was an open well across which there stared at one another the windows of numerous bedrooms and offices of inferior consideration. The single and eccentric lantern thus lent the august building a lopsided and incongruously comical effect, like a creature with one ear cocked and the other invisible on a picture-postcard of humorous intention. Notton Grange was sufficiently imposing, all the same, and if it had once been a grange, with farm buildings grouped comfortably around it, all evidence of the fact had been obliterated in the interest of various formal gardens of one sort or another. William Shenstone, who had believed in a great deal of duskiness in the Salvator Rosa manner, together with an ample provision of grots and groves appropriate for the use of hermits, would not have thought much of it.
Gilbert Pillman tried to persuade himself he didn’t think all that of it either. He had already heard a good deal about it, and about its supposed bibliographical treasures, from more senior members of his faculty whom it had pleased Lord Furlong to entertain for the purpose of demonstrating how his Library was coming along. The Library (capital ‘L’ as in English Literature) – or if not the library then his lordship’s relation to it – was what Franco would at once have termed, in one of his favourite words, an absurdity. Lord Furlong had perhaps never read a book in his life. He had been brought up in a household in which ‘book’ meant ‘magazine’. So, for that matter, had Pillman. Only Pillman, undistracted by the task of turning a little brewery into an enormous one, had come a long way from that in the brief twenty years since he had mastered the alphabet. He hadn’t come far enough, however, to take Notton Grange quite in his stride, as Franco would have done. He knew that he was going to be a little defensive amid its grandeurs – even scared, perhaps, now that he was there on his own. Moreover he had a lurking sense that he had come in quest of small beer – the phrase being metaphorical and having nothing to do with the Eatwell family commodity. Who the hell was Shenstone anyway? He represented the fact that in the academic profession you were expected in every way to begin at the bottom of the ladder. From Shenstone you might scramble up to Sheridan, and from Sheridan to, say, Swinburne, and from Swinburne to Shelley. That sort of gradus. What would be fun would be to know that what you were going to be handed was a copy of North’s Plutarch (1579), copiously annotated in a hand which you would triumphantly identify as Shakespeare’s, as that supposedly exists in The Booke of Sir Thomas Moore. This immodest fantasy (more exciting, really, than those bed-time fantasies) was in Pillman’s head as he parked his car.
He parked his car on what he supposed might be called the sweep. This followed the curve of one of the colonnades, and the battered little second-hand Austin Seven looked uncommonly incongruous there. Even so, it had been a rash purchase, ventured upon during the euphoria that results from the receiving of a first pay-packet, and he now knew that he could keep it going only if Franco and he could come to some arrangement about sharing it. The fact was that there was no money in learning. He’d be doing better for himself perched on a stool in one of Lord Furlong’s counting-houses.
But now he had to decide how to present himself. ‘Is Mr Bounce at home?’ didn’t sound right, since it wasn’t Mr Bounce’s home but Lord Furlong’s. ‘I have an appointment with Mr Bounce’ might be better – or he might even say ‘My name is Gilbert Pillman and I’ve come to work on William Shenstone’ – rather as if William Shenstone was the gas or the drains. Deciding it would be best to speak on the spur of the moment, he mounted a short flight of steps and rang a bell. At this the front door was opened so immediately that he wondered for a moment whether Lord Furlong kept a footman permanently on the other side of it, perhaps in one of those wicker-work affairs like an up-ended coffin. Then he found himself confronted by a young woman in a neat uniform, whom he took to be a parlour maid.
‘Oh, hullo,’ the young woman said – and gazed at him rather round-eyed. ‘Are you the one from the university?’
Pillman now saw that the uniform was a school uniform – from which it followed that he was being greeted by a schoolgirl. And there was a fairly firm further inference that here was a Miss Eatwell, in fact a Hon. Miss Eatwell, which was surely a particularly bizarre thing to be. It might almost be called a shame. She was a nice-looking girl, and it was in the slightly boyish way which can sometimes assist a young man to achieve, without undue alarm, a hitherto uncompassed relationship with a member of the opposite sex. Pillman judged her quite as pretty as any of his selected nocturnal companions – and with the substantial additional advantage of being three-dimensional. She seemed, too, very much of the same age. She must be in the Upper Sixth, or something of the kind, and ready to take wing for a university. But not for his university. The proprietor of the Furlong Library would have seen to it that she was to be taken on by Oxford or Cambridge.
‘Yes,’ Pillman said. ‘That’s me. Gillie Pillman.’ Encouraged by a sense that this familiar reply had been quite dashing, he added boldly, ‘Miss Eatwell, is it? How did you know about me?’
‘I’m Diana Eatwell, all right. Daddy said something about your coming before he went off to London, so I decided to keep a look-out for you. You do teach poetry, don’t you?’
‘Well, yes—I suppose I do in a way.’
‘I write it.’
‘Oh, good!’ Pillman couldn’t think of any more adequate response to the information thus afforded him than this rather inane exclamation. Diana Eatwell had decidedly an air of not being disappointed by what she had opened the door of Notton Grange on. Presumably she had seen at once that here was an intellectual and competent person, who could set her right on Rupert Brooke and other fellow-practitioners. ‘I haven’t come about poetry,’ Pillman added – perhaps not felicitously. ‘Or rather,’ he went on in what he recognised in himself as deepening confusion, ‘I suppose I have, in a way. I’ve come after a chap called Shenstone, who wrote poems of a sort. Poems upon Various Occasions for the Amusement of a few Friends.’
‘I know about that.’ Miss Eatwell now had a pleasing appearance of knowing she was in the presence of a scintillating wit as well as a scholar. ‘And I’ll take you along to Mr Bounce presently. He looks after the books and things, as you probably know. Did you ever hear such a ridiculous name as Bounce?’
Pillman might have said, ‘Well, yes,’ again, but felt it wouldn’t be tactful. Instead, he resolved to get on ‘Diana’ terms as quickly as possible. It was a pity, he thought, that her father was a mere baron and not an earl. Otherwise he could have started in on ‘Lady Diana’ straight away.
‘Do call me Diana,’ Miss Eatwell said clairvoyantly. ‘And I’ll call you Gillie, even although you are a professor. You’re very young- looking, among other things. You can’t really be much older than me.’
‘I’m twenty-four, Diana – and in my first university job. So I’m nothing like a professor, and I hope I don’t look like one.’
‘I shan’t tell you what you look like, Gillie.’ Miss Eatwell said this in a fashion that alarmed Pillman. Or perhaps it was less a matter of her tone than of the way she glanced at him as she spoke. It was almost as if she had some impulse to take his clothes off – mentally speaking, of course – and this would have been a much more proper impulse on his part towards her. Men, he believed, are sanctioned to do this with a pretty girl in a perfectly wholesome way, whereas the opposite process was surely unmaidenly. Then he told himself that it was, after all, he who was being libidinous in thus interpreting what was no doubt a regard of merely friendly (if also admiring) interest. It was simply his being hitched on to poetry that attracted her warmth of feeling. She was probably dotty about the stuff as adolescent girls sometimes are.
‘But first I’ll make us some coffee,’ the Hon. Diana said firmly. ‘I have a den of my own, you know, where nobody else is allowed to come. That’s only civilised, don’t you think?’
Pillman had no difficulty in subscribing to this view, although ‘den’ struck him as a shade ominous. Would Lord Furlong approve of his daughter’s thus proposing to carry off a totally strange young man into seclusion? What would old Hedger think of it as a way of starting in on Shenstone? And – and here was the real point – what about the girl herself? It was nice being so unexpectedly received by a nubile young person with such evident pleasure and even excitement. But what if it turned out to be excitement of a decidedly sexual sort? That ought to be O.K. too. All young men in novels went bang after that when it came along, and in a mild way he himself had a creditable record of hopeful flirtations when the chance of it had turned up on him – in the university book-stacks, for instance, or at dances and other social occasions when the girl students expected some prestige- according response of the sort from junior members of the faculty.
Despite all this, with Miss Eatwell, and in so intimidating a house, he was undeniably apprehensive. He even had a passing thought that Diana might be nymphomaniac – a word he had only recently discovered implies desire on the part of nymphs and not for them. For a morbid moment he had a wild vision of being pursued through Notton Grange in a Maenadic fashion by this probably perfectly chaste young woman, who might well be as virginal as her namesake.
What they were actually doing was moving through a kind of marble hall ornamented with marble statues in niches. There was at least nothing erotic about the statues; they were mostly of elderly men in senatorial robes and had obviously come with the house and commemorated former proprietors who had achieved eminence in church or state. And now they were going up the great staircase side by side – which was proper enough, since it would have accommodated half a dozen people walking abreast. It was rather like being in a Hollywood film of high life in England.
‘Who’s your favourite poet?’ Diana demanded suddenly.
‘Wordsworth.’
Had this bald question been pitched at Pillman by one of his pupils, he would probably have answered ‘Villon’ or ‘Valery’ or even ‘Verlaine’ or ‘Verhaeren’ simply by way of asserting the superior reach of his reading. As it was, he spoke the truth. And this was a great success.
‘Oh, how marvellous!’ Diana breathed. ‘He’s mine too. Gillie, I’ll always remember this. Always.’
The assertion, although it didn’t seem pregnant of anything in particular, at least confirmed the fact that the poetry-bug had indeed got the girl. This was at once reassuring and rather disappointing. Of course there was the hazard (or off-chance) that he and Diana would presently find themselves sitting on a window-seat with an amatorious book between them, like Paolo and Francesca in Dante’s poem and Rossetti’s painting – and with similar consequences. But the notion was no doubt far-fetched. Pillman now found himself quite looking forward to the den.
It struck him that the enormous house seemed oddly deserted. He had imagined that in such places there would always be a few flunkeys or at least scurrying housemaids on view. As it was, Notton Grange might have been a museum shut up for the day.
‘Are you a large family?’ he asked. ‘I mean, have you brothers and sisters, as well as parents?’
‘Oh, no, Gillie. There’s only Daddy and me. My mother died years and years ago. I had a twin brother, but he died too.’
‘I see. I’m sorry.’ Pillman said this awkwardly. It occurred to him that Diana might lead rather a dull life, and that this would account in part for the warmth of her reception for him. ‘Where do you go to school, Diana?’
Diana answered this question in some detail as they walked down a long broad corridor. It seemed that she was at rather a grand girls’ public school – which perhaps accounted for her having nothing of what Franco might have called the whiff of beer about her. But it was as a weekly boarder, and she always came home on Friday evening or Saturday morning.
‘I’ve just got back,’ she said. ‘That’s why I’m still in these idiotic clothes. We’re made to travel in them. They’re supposed to be a protection.’
Pillman almost heard himself saying, ‘They won’t protect you from me’ – which showed that he was really in a very confused state by this time. Instead, he ventured on, ‘I think they’re rather nice’, and had a sense that this had gone down quite well.
‘I’m going to show you my poems,’ Diana said. ‘Or some of them. You see, I do feel I need advice. Daddy’s very encouraging. But it’s not quite his sort of thing – even if he has stacks of Shenstone and all that in his library.’
‘Does he regard Shenstone and all that chiefly as an investment?’ Here was something that Pillman – like other scholars, old and young – was genuinely curious about. Nobody knew why Lord Furlong had set up to achieve one of the finest private libraries in England.
‘I don’t really know. But I think Mr Bounce may have had something to do with getting him going. Bounce originally had a job with books in the city library. I believe he carried them around.’
Pillman knew the last fact already, so had received no fresh enlightenment on this small Eatwell mystery. And now they were in the den. It was at least den-like in being quite small and cosy. Or it would have been cosy to Pillman’s sense had not everything it contained been a good deal more expensive-looking than anything he was accustomed to. Had he been required to give a guess as to what an eighteen-year- old girl’s room would contain he’d have plumped for group photographs of hockey teams and the like, a further photograph or two of what were called matinée idols, and perhaps a romantic print in washy sepias with some such title as A Lovers’ Tryst. In fact there was only one picture on display, and it turned out to be a nocturne by Whistler. The furniture was what he vaguely thought of as ‘French’, and two or three of the chairs looked as if they couldn’t safely support more than a cat. There were a lot of books – some of them lying carelessly around, but most of them displaying ornate bindings through protective walls of glass. It none of it seemed quite right, somehow, for a healthy sixth-former, and in fact rendered what might be called the poor-little-rich-girl effect. He suspected Lord Furlong of being a dominating character (you couldn’t have arrived at pouring millions of gallons of beer down British throats without being that) who threw his weight about at home as well as in the office. Having just one daughter, he insisted that everything should be slap-up around her.
‘Do you know how to make coffee?’ Diana demanded.
‘Well, yes—I suppose so. I put the stuff in a jug and pour on boiling water.’
‘I make café filtre,’ Diana said, and disappeared into a small pantry-like room next door. Pillman (who was inclined to be impressed by this degree of sophistication in one whom Professor Shuffrey might still have called a kiddy) looked round for evidences of literary work in progress. Sure enough there was a typewriter – an elegant little affair that looked as if it was carved out of ivory – and there protruded from it a sheet of quarto paper betraying what certainly looked like metrical composition. Presumably Diana did her poems straight on to the machine: a technique which he understood to be quite the go at the time. He conscientiously refrained from attempting to read the effusion currently on hand. It looked as if this poetry business might be embarrassing. Once or twice at the university young women had advanced upon him after a lecture, manuscript at the ready, and demanded criticism – but clearly feeling that nothing short of encomium would fill the bill. It had been a situation not too easy to handle. ‘It reminds me of Prufrock,’ he would say after due scrutiny – or ‘I think you must have been influenced by Isaac Rosenberg’. He somehow didn’t see himself saying that sort of thing to Diana Eatwell.
She turned out to be rather shy about it all, and they had finished the coffee before the subject turned up. He was astonished that when it did so it was through the production of a printed book. This was again of the slap-up order: typography by Bruce Rodgers, Van Gelder paper, stencilled decorations by T. L. Poulton, bound in vellum. And on the cover, in elegant gilt, it said First Poems by Diana Eatwell.
Pillman had the good sense not to make a to-do about all this refinement, and nerved himself to open the volume at an early page.
‘No,’ Diana said decidedly. ‘You must just take it away, and read it only if you want to. And please remember it’s only juvenilia. Daddy had it made for me as a sixteenth-birthday present. Books are always a thing with us on birthdays.’
‘Very well.’ Pillman wasn’t slow in agreeing to this arrangement. ‘I’ll be extremely interested,’ he added – not wholly mendaciously. What if the girl were a prodigy: a kind of female Rimbaud or Chatterton? That would be more exciting than acres of the familiar correspondence of William Shenstone on boring topics like the scooping out of hermits’ grottoes at the Leasowes in eighteenth-century Worcestershire.
‘And now I’ll take you to Bounce,’ Diana said briskly. Her nerve had perhaps a little failed her in this early crisis of her literary career. ‘But I come home every weekend, you know. So we’re going to have lots of quiet confabs here, Gillie.’
‘I do hope so,’ Pillman said. He was wondering whether Lord Furlong went up to London every Saturday.
The Furlong Library – in the sense of a chamber or chambers holding a collection of books – was less overwhelming than Pillman had expected. The Duke of Devonshire, he told himself, owned something a good deal more imposing at Chatsworth. Here was simply a very large room, with books all round it and more books jutting out in bays on either side, and what was chiefly remarkable about it was simply the fact that everything looked so very new. No end of the books, of course, must be as old as the hills, but everything in their setting seemed so recent an exercise of the slap-up sort that it was hard to believe that even the sixteenth-century folios hadn’t just been unpacked from the straw. Indeed, something of very much that sort appeared to be going on. Half a dozen large packing-cases stood open down the centre of the room, and it looked as if an army of librarians must have knocked off for elevenses while coping with them since all of them seemed to be disgorging more books than they could really contain. Pillman thought of those fake Christmas hampers you saw in the windows of expensive shops, spewing out hams and haggises and bottles of champagne. Two or three of the cases contained nests of steel boxes of the sort held at that time to be essential for the safe preservation of manuscripts. What if some of them contained a fresh flood of epistolary correspondence by William Shenstone? What if Shenstone proved to have been as maniacally compulsive a letter-writer as, say, Horace Walpole? Pillman had a momentary nightmarish vision of himself as condemned to labour for years on end in this poshed-up place – like a character in some farcical savagery by his contemporary Evelyn Waugh. Diana, meantime, would have been locked away in her den by Lord Furlong: more inaccessible to him than Miranda to Ferdinand when he was condemned to heaving logs.
And now for the moment, at least, Diana was sundered from him. She had handed him over to Mr Bounce and departed—presumably to her own superior labour of poetical composition. Mr Bounce had shaken hands with him, and though Mr Bounce was about five feet tall it had been in a decidedly condescending way. Although without first-hand acquaintance with academic life, Mr Bounce knew a junior lecturer from a professor when he saw one.
‘Delighted to help you, Pillman,’ Mr Bounce said (with intolerable familiarity). ‘Delighted to give you a leg-up. Of course – and as you can see – we have a great deal of work on hand. The accessions are coming in rapidly, very rapidly indeed.’ As he said this, the Furlong Librarian glanced round the packing-cases in perplexity, as if some supernatural agency had deposited them only that moment within his view. ‘The cataloguing is becoming very onerous, I assure you. I might have you help out a little one day. Pocket-money in your spare time, eh? Once you had learnt the ropes, of course. I’ve devised a very effective system: much in advance of the Bodleian, or any place of that sort. Each card is eight by six, suspended filing, instantly removable, with all the technical stuff on the recto, and on the verso biographical particulars, and selected critical appreciations by his lordship and others. You’d get the hang of it, and be quite useful, with a little hard work.’
‘Thank you very much,’ Pillman said (concealing outrage). ‘But I’ve come about Shenstone, as a matter of fact.’
‘Ah, yes—I remember. Well, Shenstone will be Poetry: Late Romantic: Miscellaneous Minor. That must be in the fifth catalogue cabinet. We’ll see what we have.’ For a moment Mr Bounce’s confidence and self-satisfaction flickered. ‘Or at least we can try.’
It would take a very raw freshman indeed, Pillman thought, to suppose that William Shenstone (1714–1763) was a late Romantic. As a ripe scholar Mr Bounce clearly had his limitations. Still, it wouldn’t do to alienate the man. About Shenstone Pillman couldn’t in his heart of hearts care less. But now Shenstone had become, as it were, the gateway or passport to Diana Eatwell, who was (he realised with some amazement) extremely attractive to him. So he must treat this tiresome man with circumspection if there were to be any more of those quiet confabs.
‘I’ll be most grateful,’ he said. ‘Just as I am to Professor Hedger for fixing me up with you. The Professor has a high regard for your work, Mr Bounce.’
This remark (although it was surely impertinent as well as untrue) went down well. Nearly an hour was taken up with various false casts, but at length the batch of Shenstone letters was run to earth. Having done his homework, Pillman was able to discover almost at once that none of them had ever seen print. And there were a great many of them. The job of transcribing them on Saturday mornings could be spread over months and months. He just hoped that it wouldn’t occur to Bounce to present him with the whole lot on microfilm with his lordship’s compliments. But that wasn’t likely. Lord Furlong was known not to be too liberal about his possessions. And he supposed that Bounce really had an eye on him as something going cheap on the labour market as an occasional harmless drudge. He spent the rest of the morning making a start on getting the things – which were all higgledy-piggledy – into a chronological series.