After seeing Anna, Henry walked up and down in the drizzle, lecturing himself, he told himself without amusement, like a third-rate serious novel, on having gone against life, on having neglected for an imaginary glory, for dead words, for man-made ideas, for second-hand experience – he lumped all these disparate things as cheerfully together as the novel he posited – having neglected for these, life, the tug in the blood, that was, for the two had become ridiculously inextricable, his own frustrated undergraduate self who had slept with no one and had never got drunk, and Anna his daughter, who had certainly not not slept with anyone, but who had so little sense of life or direction that she had come only to an affair with a desiccated middle-aged critic whose wife, moreover, said he was a mental and not only a mental sadist. Part of the trouble was that he was so upset that he had quite forgotten what he had been writing, and could not have summoned life or concentration enough to plan another paragraph; he saw his work now as he occasionally saw a novel the moment he had finished it – a grotesque parody of life, a string of words, selecting and obscuring facts to suit himself. And dead, dead, dead. He had a vision of himself in his study, a dedicated and misguided Casaubon, and saw the procession of lives that he told himself his touch had withered – Caroline whom he had allowed to think that teacups – for him – were enough; Margaret, whom he had thought arrogantly to solve by re-arranging on paper; Anna, who had gone pale in his shadow, and poked blindly about in no direction, a plant in a cellar.
The next morning he walked up through rain to the University library. This had been built since his time and he had not been near it before. He thought it extraordinarily ugly, with its tremendous, disproportionate mock Assyrian tower, its rows of laboratory windows, and inside the revolving door its curving staircases like a timidly ostentatious town hall, its heavy glass doors covered with gilt and brass curlicues quite irrelevant to the slightly clinical atmosphere that was the only really positive thing about it. He bolted up the staircase knitting his brow like an intent and absent-minded don, stumbling over the top step through his effort to meet no one’s eye, in case he should be asked for a ticket, a fee, a gown, an explanation of his business – he had no idea of how the place worked, and he didn’t want to know. He went ahead through three sets of glass doors, still looking at no one, and found himself in a large, grey metal and battleship room that seemed to be the main reading room. He realized that it was no longer any good not looking at anything. He must start trying to find Oliver. So he strolled around the room, on tiptoe, rolling heavily since he wasn’t used to controlling his own bulk on the balls of his feet, not, at least, with eyes on him. He peered between the rows of desks and saw rows of similar people, in gowns, hunched over books, hundreds of worried or sleepy faces, most of them very young, one or two ecstatic. None of them seemed to be Oliver, but he hadn’t courage to approach closely enough to make certain. He was cross with himself when he got out; he shouldn’t have needed to be afraid of being spoken to, only because the room was silent and he didn’t want to find what he was looking for. He put it down as another unpleasantness, on Oliver’s account.
In the catalogue room he peered at a plan of the building without seeing it. Then he wandered vaguely along silent corridors, between metal book-stacks, up and down in little lifts. He saw that at any other time he might have liked this part of the library; the glass windows made a whole light wall to the stacks, and people sat in ones and twos at little tables against the glass and could look out, between thoughts, into air and branches. In the end, in the basement he lost his temper, snapped himself back into the lift, ground the machinery into action, and returned to the main floor. At the other end of a corridor was a notice: Anderson Room. Well, he would look in there, and if he couldn’t find him, that was the end. He could go home.
He strode into the room, keeping his head turned well away from those at the desk, and therefore, having to set off fairly briskly towards the end of the room. The reading room had been too large to be more than hushed; the Anderson room, smaller, brighter, more airy, with wider tables and more space between the heavy armchairs, was tented in silence. The inhabitants seemed predominantly aged and accepting. There was a curious, uneven musical tinkle in the room. Henry finally tracked it down to the plastic knobs on the ends of the blind cords which were like little pale green bells and swayed, even on that airless day, one after the other against the glass. The only other sounds were the movement of pages and the rasping breathing of one or two old men. Here was the centre, Henry felt, of the pyramid. Here was the inner chamber where the dead thing all this had been built to glorify was preserved to be interpreted by future scholars or devastated by vandals.
It is not easy to pick out one from a series of bent heads all turning their crowns. Henry scrutinized them all, could not see Oliver, and decided to do his duty, after peering into the ultimate alcove, by coming back down the other side before crossing to the door. He was nearly through and was walking more confidently, breathing more easily, when Oliver spoke from under him, from one corner of the table near him.
‘Are you looking for someone, Henry?’
He had been easy to miss, hunched in his chair behind the incongruously lurid neon cover of an American novel, and his own very heavy dark-rimmed spectacles. He smiled, thinly, and did not stand up.
‘For you,’ Henry whispered. The silence decided his tone for him; he sounded very gentle, very friendly, under his breath. He had an irrational feeling that Oliver had laid a trap for him, had hidden himself on the corner of this table and thought with amusement of him, Henry, hunting him all over the building, clambering in and out of lifts, growing apprehensive and wild. Next to Oliver a very old man with a yellowing beard cut in a spade shape, a hearing aid, a pair of convex, bulbous spectacles and an ivory handled reading glass picked out fragments of papyrus from a box at his side and scrutinized them, using his thickened fingers with infinite delicacy. He spoke the words to himself soundlessly and wrote them down with a gold pencil, hanging from somewhere inside his clothes on a long gold chain. He paid no attention, not the movement of a muscle, to either Henry or Oliver. He had a look of complete, finished attention, a look of discovery, of travelling over golden lands, which distracted Henry, who saw him two ways at once, as an echo of his own absorption in his study, live and active, and as an appropriate inhabitant of this house of squandered effort, a waster of a dying mind on dead words. He was the Saint seeing the central life by looking through the glass and not at it; he was a grotesque gnome, a parody of a human being, who would give to life in the end phosphorus and carbon and nothing more.
Oliver continued to look at Henry over the edge of his book; he made no move to stand up, or help Henry to begin to talk to him. Henry hovered enormously, and whispered, almost lovingly into the silence, ‘I want to talk to you for a few moments if you can spare the time.’
‘Perhaps,’ said Oliver, moving his head up fractionally and smiling slightly more widely, ‘you’ll let me buy you a cup of coffee in the tea room. There’s not likely to be a crowd yet.’
Henry wanted suddenly to pick Oliver up under the arms like a baby and drag him out of the room; he wanted to bang about, to knock Oliver on the book-cases, scatter a few teeth, bruise that smooth, pointed, pale little face and smear a bit of real blood across all the piles of books and papers. He saw himself holding the little man by the feet and sweeping books from tables with his head, in a great whirling arc. Samson again, he thought. In amongst the Philistines. But Samson with his hair trimmed by civilization – or women – or both.
‘Well,’ said Oliver, a little more sharply, twitching his shoulders slightly.
‘That’ll do,’ said Henry. Oliver smiled again. ‘Just a moment,’ he said. He screwed the cap onto his pen, began to blot his papers, one after the other, and then clipped them one after the other into a folder. Then he creased a piece of paper in eight, deliberately tore off a strip, laid it in his book to mark the page, closed the book, and placed it neatly on the folder. Then he took off his spectacles, clipped them together, fetched out his spectacle case, snapped them into it, and put it back in his pocket. All this took some time. Henry hung over him, huge and conspicuous. As they walked away together Henry saw the old man spread himself slightly over the patch of table cleared by Oliver. He had a look of even greater self-possession and pleasure.
Oliver led the way down to the tea room, pulled out a chair for Henry at a table near the glass door into the courtyard, and fetched two cups of coffee without saying more than ‘Sugar?’ He looks like a bank clerk, Henry thought rudely, scuttling about in a tidy dark suit, slightly too generously cut, too deep at the instep, with his hair clipped very neat and short over the ears. Not at all like a scholar, much too businesslike and organized, and without any of the traditional flamboyance. Not surprising, Henry told himself wildly and unjustly, that this kind reduce reading to counting how many times a man uses the word red, or pink, or sin. Tallies and accounts, that’s it, he told himself, and saw his unfairness clearly for a moment. What has happened to me? he asked himself.
‘No good going outside,’ said Oliver, ‘in the rain. It can be pleasant in summer. You mustn’t smoke in here of course.’
Outside was a small square courtyard with a patch of grass in the middle, sloping slightly upwards to a bare magnolia bush in a bare circle of earth. The brick and glass towered up on all sides. It was bleak, ugly, not Cambridge. Oliver seemed at home. He said, ‘Must apologize for the coffee,’ and receded into silence, leaving Henry to make all the running. Henry suspected that this amused him and looked suspiciously at him, but Oliver studied the surface of his coffee, and would not meet his eye.
Henry had not been able to think what he would say to Oliver but had supposed that something would present itself when the time came to speak; he found now that he had nothing at all to say, and no way of saying it, and was not likely to find any. He said hopefully, ‘You’ll know why I want to see you.’
‘No,’ said Oliver, into his cup. Henry paused and then brought out abruptly, ‘I promised Margaret I would. I went to see her. She wrote to me.’
‘Indeed?’ said Oliver, but his head came up and Henry saw that this had surprised him. He would have said more, but could think of nothing to say about Margaret that did not sound pious or silly; indeed he found it hard to remember Margaret at all, or how things had seemed to her, since he had his mind full of Anna. So he said, ‘But I don’t know what to say to Margaret now.’
‘Indeed?’
‘Since I’ve seen Anna.’
‘Indeed?’ said Oliver for the third time. Henry swallowed his coffee in one gulp and shouted, ‘You know what Anna told me.’
‘Hush,’ said Oliver quickly, automatically, schoolmasterly. He said, ‘Yes. I know.’
‘So you see why I had to talk to you.’
‘No, I don’t. I don’t know what you think you can do. You might just as well have kept out.’
This was what Anna had said. Henry looked into his cup, which was empty, and then began, clumsily, ‘Anna is my daughter. She’s under age. I want something good for her. A life. She can do something. Even you can’t pretend you’re helping her.’
‘I think I am.’
‘Oh, Christ,’ said Henry, too loudly again. He said, ‘What about Margaret?’
‘My affair, not yours.’
‘I don’t see that, if she had to turn to me to save her sanity. And it’s come to that, by God. And whatever she may be, Anna’s my affair. She’s my daughter.’
‘Just discovered that, have you? It isn’t much use your pretending you can horsewhip me and drag her home and incarcerate her, is it? It’s out of character, you wouldn’t really know how, or think you had any right, would you? And if you did get her home, you’d shut her in her bedroom and forget all about her again, your duty done, wouldn’t you? Don’t you honestly think she might be better with me? I care for her you know. She’s not just a pretty girl. I want to help her.’
Henry sat silent, feeling exposed, already defeated. Oliver said, ‘Is that all?’
‘No,’ said Henry. ‘What I have to say is – you must see – I don’t think you should involve Anna – not Anna – in – your feelings about me.’
‘I don’t see,’ said Oliver very sharply. He put down his cup in his saucer, sat very upright, and began to drum with his finger on the edge of the table. ‘I don’t see that at all. Please explain.’
‘Oh,’ said Henry wearily. ‘What do you want me to say? I don’t know what you’ve told Anna – something about selfish genius, something about having too much expected of her because she’s my daughter, something about cutting loose from me – some of all that’s sense, I’ve told her so myself. I want to give her some money and let her go where she likes and fend for herself a bit.’
‘Does she want that?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Escape’s no answer. She must face facts.’
‘But not your facts, not your way. I don’t even know if you know how irresponsible you’re being. How can I explain? I’ve always felt – right from the beginning – something in your attitude to me – or my books, I think both – a kind of grabbing, a pulling down – a hatred.’
‘A standard love-hate relationship?’ asked Oliver with edgy mockery.
‘Yes,’ said Henry, without irony. He tried to ignore Oliver, and his own wish to batter Oliver on the paving stones outside, and to present things dispassionately as he saw them. He noticed his own voice take on its remote Olympian tone, and he noticed that this, at last, irritated Oliver.
‘I’ve always hated your reviews. Thought what I’d written was less good than I’d thought it was, when you’d been at it. Forgotten what I felt like when I wrote it, or whether what I’d written meant what you said it did, or something more or less, or different. Thought you were trying to take possession of me – I mean, of what I wrote – you know, like processed Gruyère cheese, mash it all up, put artificial holes in, cut it in neat squares, put plastic round, say there, I’ve examined it, it’s what I told you, it’s been through my hands, it’s Gruyère all right. Gruyère? What do you know about it? Same with my life – you don’t approve, imitation country gent and all that, I know what you think, all a bit pathetic – well, you make it so by coming and looking at it with your processing eye. And by God, you will come, won’t you? You will share? You won’t just stay away from what you dislike?
‘Well, if I let you get at me, that’s my fault. I ought to be able to look after myself. I don’t know why it should be me you want to get at.’
Oliver stirred; there was a tone of the old mild arrogance in this that seemed to anger him; he said hotly, ‘Well, ask yourself why, ask yourself, show some interest in someone else.’
Henry went on heavily, ‘But when it comes to Anna, that’s different. I don’t even know if you’re doing it consciously. If you are, if you want to know, you’ve succeeded. You’ve got at me. I can’t bear to think of you – taking possession – of her too, of Anna, and telling her she’s got to be – like you. That’s what you’ve told her, she said. That’s not true, she’ll come to see that if she’s allowed to, if she’s in a position to. But what I want to say is have you thought what it will mean to her when she works out why you’re doing this? I mean, if she comes to think that this is a second-hand love affair because of me, just as everything else she’s had has been – according to you too, remember – because of me. Don’t you see even if – even if you did care for her – it wouldn’t do, you’re too much involved in what she’s got to get out of? She’s an intelligent girl she’ll work it out in the end. And then what will she have had?’
‘She’s an intelligent girl,’ Oliver repeated. ‘Has it occurred to you she may have worked all that out already? And not mind?’
‘I don’t think so. In any case, she’s wasting time she won’t have again. And if she does know – how you feel about me – it doesn’t dispose of the effect of your feelings about me on her. Does it?’
Oliver stood up, put his small hands on the table in front of him and addressed Henry in a harsh, low voice that startled Henry although he had meant to make him angry. Later he remembered the hands, one turned each way, out from the other, the pointed fingertips yellow with the pressure Oliver was putting on them, and then, half-way down the nail, flushed dull purple. And those thin little bones looking ready to splinter if any more pressure were applied.
‘Perhaps we might both have found your country gentleman’s horsewhip more satisfying in the end? Who do you think you are? All of us like dead albatrosses tumbling out of the sky to be hung round your neck as evidence of your spiritual progress? My wife – Margaret – what’s she to do with you? Why do you suppose I should enjoy your paddling about in my family affairs any more than you enjoy me in yours? I suppose you think the fact that you’re not really interested, have no real motive, no need, gives you a right to meddle? Well, it doesn’t. I don’t see that you’re any less irresponsible because you don’t care, than you accuse me of being because I do. Margaret thinks you’re a wise man, I suppose? She’d better think again. And you think I am only capable of loving where it concerns you, where I can get at you, to use your own elegant phrase –’
‘Anna is my daughter.’
‘Anna,’ Oliver bore down, ‘is Anna. Herself. Anna. She has her way to make, let her make it.’
‘You let her, that’s what I ask.’
‘Will you let me finish? I don’t know why you’ve suddenly started going all over jelly when Anna’s mentioned, and rolling your fine eye, and promising to do this and that for her. I’d have thought it was a bit late. And if you think I’m not in a position to help her, how much less are you? Fons et origo, you are, by your own account. But you aren’t God and you’d better remember it.’
‘At least I’ve faith in her.’
‘Since when? And haven’t I? Perhaps a more realistic faith at that.’
‘Reality’s what you make of yourself.’
‘It’s what you’re allowed to make of yourself. Have you any more to say?’
‘I still consider myself responsible for Anna.’
‘And me. And my wife if she wants. Why not? But what are you going to do? What can you do?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Henry honestly. ‘I shall have to think.’
‘I’ll leave you to it then,’ said Oliver. ‘And I don’t advise you to order Anna to come home. She won’t, and what’s more she won’t speak to you again if you do. And I must warn you, I’ve no intention of helping you at all, myself. You must save yourself – or us – your own way. If you can find time to remember that was what you were going to do.’
That was a final speech, Henry thought; he’ll go now.
‘Good morning,’ said Oliver.
‘Good morning,’ said Henry slowly. Oliver turned and pushed his way out of the tea room, now filling rapidly with trailing gowns and a hum of voices.
He could not sit any longer, rose suddenly and violently, leaving his coffee untouched, ran to the desk in the entrance lobby and commanded ‘Call me a taxi’ with such desperate authority that no one stopped to explain that this was not a customary service, and a taxi was duly called. Henry waited on the steps until it came, a huge, black, hearselike vehicle, flattening muddy puddles into spray. He said, ‘To the station, please,’ and could not explain what train he was trying to catch; any train in almost any direction would have done; it was only to get away. He sat, tall and solid, a solitary mourner, clutching the silk ball and cord, and swaying from side to side as the taxi, its driver infected by some of Henry’s urgency, rushed ponderously down Trumpington Street, jerking round cyclists, its radio cackling. A small dark man stepped out into the road and Henry for a moment felt a thrill in imagining the car proceeding over him, toppling him like a peg and leaving him flat and finished in the road behind it. So easy, so easy to destroy; only a hairsbreadth between this civilized truce and a real dead man in a gutter.
He paid the taxi-driver outside the station. The rain fell heavier and heavier, but without force to rain itself out. He believed it might rain forever, or for weeks anyway; at the moment it was absolutely damping to him, a real limitation, it was he who was getting wet.
There was a train in ten minutes; this was his usual luck reasserting itself; he felt obscurely guilty on account of it and wasn’t sure whether the omen was good or bad.