Almost at once they drifted apart. They’d never had a reunion, and there wouldn’t be one now. Even Olly and David, who had been at school together, never met for more than a drink and a quick word until, in the 1970s, they found themselves spending the night in the same hotel. It was in the small market town on the outskirts of which their old school lay. They discovered that they both had grandsons there now: quite small boys in their first term. Being conscientious grandparents, they had both come down on a visit, just to see how things were going along. They agreed that it seemed to be not too badly. The school, Sir Oliver Russell said, had been humanised and liberalised in a most notable way since their time. Professor Read was of the same opinion. Every variety of civilised activity seemed to be encouraged; games, although vigorously pursued, were not the tyranny and fetish they had been; and their grandsons couldn’t be told to tip an arse because they had burnt some great oafs toast.
‘But most of the proper things remain,’ Sir Oliver said. ‘Nice to see everyone in chapel, wouldn’t you say? And all in surplices still. And the candles! Terribly jolly.’
Professor Read agreed that the scene in chapel was terribly jolly. The two old men reminisced together through a long evening, and after a second glass of port and some brandy following dinner each summoned the flickering attention of the other to the recollection of occasions not always particularly civilised or humane. Not unaware of their condition, they joked about being respectively Shallow and Silence. But it was a Shallow and Silence in form-rooms and dormitories and on playing-fields rather than as young blades about a town, pursuing the bona-robas. They took their time, in other words, about approaching Vienna.
‘The fees at the confounded school,’ Sir Oliver suddenly said, ‘are turning outrageous. I’ve had to lend a hand with covenants and so forth. I daresay you have too, David.’
‘Moderately, Olly. The academic life hasn’t been a gold mine exactly.’ While teaching in a university, David had developed quite a profitable side-line in the production of literary biographies, carefully researched, and written in an urbanely formal prose that pleased old-fashioned readers. But he wasn’t at all rich as a result.
‘A gold mine, David? There just aren’t any – not now. I expect you know, by the way, that there are grandchildren of poor Tim Merton’s of school age now? Boys, I believe. A pity they can’t be with ours. Out of the question, I suppose.’
‘No doubt.’ David knew nothing about Tim, except that he had been killed while driving an ambulance around London in 1944. ‘I almost believe,’ he went on, ‘that I never once ran into Tim again – not after our coming back from Vienna all those ages ago.’ David sipped his brandy. ‘In fact he disappeared abruptly. I felt he’d stopped approving of us.’
‘Oh, I don’t think it was that, David. Just then, he had a bad nervous breakdown, and that buggered things up a bit. Nasty thing to come on one, it must be. Never barged into that sort of trouble myself. Did you?’
‘No – or never anything to speak of.’ David gazed into his glass as he gently rotated it. He wondered whether if now, a dotard on the very verge of his confine, he was at last going to tell Olly, also a dotard, the story of that bad time that had climaxed in Spalato. It certainly remained with him vividly enough to be an effective story. But he rejected the idea. Close as Olly and he had once been, such a confidence would be unseemly now. ‘Don’t you seem to remember,’ he asked, ‘that Tim was a good deal under the weather during most of that time in Vienna? That’s how it comes back to me, at least.’
‘True enough – and I know what the trouble was.’ Olly looked round for a waiter; he would have one more brandy before going to bed. ‘I got it out of him not long before they killed him. He’d been married for only two or three years, you know. Sad. You must have got married about the same time, David?’ Olly looked up, for a moment sharply curious.
‘Yes, just about then.’
‘Local girl, eh?’
‘Oh, entirely.’ As impudent as ever, David thought. ‘Our vicar’s daughter.’
‘Good, good! Another brandy, please. We none of us went back to Vienna, did we, to collect a bride?’
‘Gott sei dank, Olly. And don’t be frivolous. But tell me what you got out of Tim. I’m curious. I always was. I used to wonder why he was grown up.’
‘Grown up?’ Olly was perplexed. ‘We were all three that, weren’t we? Or more or less.’
‘We shaved, and had our adventures, I suppose. But go on.’
‘Tim had been in love. Thank you – will you put it on my bill please? Tim had been very much in love.’
‘In love?’ There was a note of perplexity in David’s repetition of the phrase – rather as if its reference was to some dubious condition he’d once or twice heard of. It occurred to him that, back in that Tim-and-Olly time, they’d never used it. Making love, yes: it was the upper-class way of saying something denominated otherwise by the vulgar. But in love, no. It just hadn’t cropped up. ‘Do you mean,’ he asked Olly, ‘before our stay in Vienna?’
‘Yes, of course. During Tim’s final year at Oxford. It was what mucked up his Schools.’
‘I remember about that, of course. But I never knew why it had happened.’ David paused, puzzled. ‘Do you mean that, all through that Vienna period, Tim was a heart-broken man because some love affair had gone wrong?’
‘Just that. It happens, you know.’ For a moment, and as he said this, Olly was almost the old Olly again. ‘Yes, it does happen. The real thing.’
‘But he mucked in, didn’t he, in those attempts – and successes – of ours at what our sons would call an easy lay?’
‘Well, yes. He did – in a kind of cynical and half-hearted fashion. But all dust and ashes to him, I think. It would be – wouldn’t it? – after something quite different.’
‘Yes.’ David wondered whether he wanted to hear more. He found he did. ‘How did the crash come?’ he asked. ‘Was it before—’
‘It was before Tim came—with the wench, that is.’ Sir Oliver Russell paused, perhaps discomposed by this resurgence in himself of an ancient routine grossness. ‘But that wasn’t the point. Whether or not he’d possessed her – and he hadn’t – was precisely not the point. For Tim had landed himself with the real thing, as I say. The girl had indeed lain in his arms, he said. Moaning. All that. But at the same time it was beyond sense. And then she was pretty well wrenched away from him.’
‘What sort of a girl was she?’
‘Austrian, as a matter of fact, and aristocratic. Her people and his people saw – or thought they saw – it wouldn’t do.’
‘Good God! Just because—?’
‘No, no. Nothing of that kind. Not class stuff at all. The Mertons were quite in the right drawer themselves, so far as that went. It was some ghastly medical superstition of the time. The same sort of blood disease, or loopiness, or heaven knows what, imagined as running in both families. So a gaggle of bloody leeches blundered in and smashed the thing up. It was a bit morbid, in a way, Tim’s coming to Vienna at all. The girl’s grandfather had been something quite tremendous there, and her father had hung on in the Austrian Embassy in London. That’s how they met. I believe Tim’s father had a crazy idea that Tim might find another, and blamelessly hygienic, wench of the same sort on the banks of the Donau.’ Olly paused on this. Something of his old idiom was returning to him. ‘Perhaps Tim himself had dimly the same useless idea. Do you remember, David, that ghastly old party-giving Baronin?’
‘Gräfin, not Baronin. Baronessen were two a penny. Like the wives of knighted quill-pushers or grocers.’
This was scarcely a tactful pedantry on Professor Read’s part. But Sir Oliver, who nowadays only intermittently listened to what was said to him, ignored it.
‘Remember the girls paraded at those bun-fights, David? I think Tim really was a little cracked at the time, and imagined things as he gaped at them. Certainly when he got home they had to shove him for a time into a shocking bin in Northumberland, or some such discreet back-of-beyond. But, of course, he came round in time. He had a perfectly lovely wife. Astounding kids, too. Too bad that he never saw them scramble out of their perambulators.’
Sir Oliver Russell – he had driven a quill to good effect in some respectable Ministry – fell silent, and Professor Read said nothing. It was time to go to bed in this not very comfortable hotel. They both rose and made their way, a little creakingly, to the staircase. Sir Oliver paused at the foot of it.
‘I say,’ he said, ‘do you remember Sin and Death? My Sin, David, and pretty well your Death, eh?’
Chuckling softly at this aged witticism, Olly – who was inclined to stumble at times – cautiously led the way up to their rooms.