I smelt blossom everywhere as I walked through the town that afternoon. The sky was bright, cloudless and pale, and the wind cut coldly down the narrow Cambridge streets. Round Fenner’s the trees flared out in bloom, and the scent was sweet, heady and charged with one’s desires.
I had been walking all the afternoon weighed down by a trouble. It was a trouble I was used to, there was no help for it, it could only be endured. It gnawed acutely that day, and so I had tried to comfort myself, walking alone; but I should have said nothing, if Roy Calvert had not asked me direct.
I had turned towards the college, and was still engrossed in my thoughts; it was not until he called out that I saw him moving towards me with his light, quick, graceful stride. He was over middle height, slightly built but strong; and each physical action was so full of ease and grace that he had only to enter a room for eyes to follow him.
“You look extremely statesman-like, Lewis,” he said, mimicking an acquaintance’s favourite word of praise. His eyes were glinting a clear transparent hazel yellow, and his whole expression was mischievous and gay. It was often otherwise. In repose, his face became sad and grave, and in a moment the brilliant high spirits could be swept away and he would look years older, more handsome, more finely shaped. And once or twice already I had seen his face, not sad, but stricken and haunted by a wild melancholy, inexplicably stricken it seemed for so young a man.
Now he was cheerful, gay and mocking. “Do you need to address your colleagues? Do you need to make something clear to unperceptive persons?”
I said no, and at the sound of my voice he glanced at me sharply. He walked at my side under the trees by the edge of Parker’s Piece. When he next spoke, his tone had changed.
“Lewis, why are you unhappy?”
“There’s nothing the matter.”
“Why are you unhappy?”
“It’s nothing.”
“Not true,” he said. “I can’t get you to smile.”
Then I did smile. To put him off, I asked about a predicament of his own which I had heard about, week by week, for some time past. Roy shook his head and smiled. “No,” he said. “You mustn’t escape by talking about me. It’s very like you. It’s the way you protect yourself, old boy. You mustn’t. You need to talk.”
I was twenty-nine, and Roy five years younger. I was fond of him in a casual, protective fashion, and I expected to be told of his adventures and have him seek me out when he was despondent. I knew a good deal of his life, and he very little of mine. This was the habit I had formed, not only with him but with most people that I cared for. It had become second nature to listen to confidences and not to offer them. And so I was not used to Roy’s insistence, clear, intimate, direct. With another I should have passed it off for ever, but about his affection there was something at the same time disarming and piercing. It seemed quite free from self. To my own surprise, I found myself beginning to talk.
We walked along the back streets to Maid’s Causeway, over Midsummer Common to the river, came back to Christ’s Piece and then, still intent, retraced our steps. It was bitterly cold in the shade, but we walked slowly: the dense snow-white masses of the chestnuts gleamed in the sunshine: there was a first hint of lilac in the wind. Once, after I had fallen silent and Roy had said “just so” and was waiting for me to start again, I heard a series of college clocks clanging out the hour, very faintly, for the wind took the sound away.
The story I told Roy need not be set down until I describe my own life; it would not add anything to this account of him. All I need say here is that I told him about my marriage. No one else knew what I told him, though one or two must have guessed something near the truth. I had been desperately in love with Sheila when I was a very young man; when at twenty-six I married her, I still loved her, and I married her knowing that she did not love me and that her temperament was unstable. This was three years before. I went into it thinking I might have to look after her: it had turned out worse than I feared.
“Just so,” said Roy. “You can’t leave her now, can you? You couldn’t if you tried. You need to go on looking after her. You need to go on looking after her always.”
“Yes,” I said.
He put his arm round my shoulders.
“You know, old boy,” he said, “you’re not the one I pity. Should you be? I’m extremely sorry, things must be made as easy for you as they can. But you’re interested in life, you’ve got tremendous spirits, you can bear anything. No, it’s she whom I pity desperately. I don’t see what she has to hope for.”
He was utterly right. I knew it too well. Again we walked under the fragrant trees. “You mustn’t lose too much,” said Roy. I had forgotten by now how young he was, and he was talking as though we had each been through the same darkness.
“As you’ve just said,” I replied, “there’s nothing to be done. One has to go on, that’s all.”
“Just so,” said Roy. “Life’s very unfair. Why should this happen to you?”
Yet I felt he liked me more because it had happened.
I told him one other thing, which helped explain why I had taken a job in Cambridge at all. As he knew, I had been born poor. Through a mixture of good luck and good management, I had done well in the Bar examinations and in my period as a pupil. By the time I married, I was making a fair living at the Bar. But I was overstrained, my inner life racked me more after marriage than before, I wanted to rest a little. Some of my influential friends made enquiries, and soon Francis Getliffe told me there might be an opening in his college for an academic lawyer. At last, after a long delay, the offer was officially made: I accepted it, and was elected late in 1933, a few months before this talk with Roy. The college did not object to my keeping on a consultant’s job with an industrial firm, and I spent some days each week in London, where my wife was still living in our Chelsea house. I usually stayed in Cambridge from Thursday to Monday, and slept in my college rooms on those nights, as though I had been a bachelor fellow.
It was since I came to live so much in college that Roy began to call on me. I had met him once when he was a boy (his father was a very wealthy man in the provincial town where I was born), and occasionally in his undergraduate days. I knew he was a member of the college when Getliffe first approached me and I had heard several conflicting rumours about him – that he was drinking himself to death, spending all his nights with women, becoming an accomplished oriental scholar. But it was a coincidence that his rooms should be on the next staircase to mine, and that we should be waited on by the same servant. The first weekend I spent in college he ran up to see me, and since then it was very strange if I did not hear his light step on my stairs once or twice a day.
I had come to the end of what I could tell him: we stood under the trees in the bright sunshine; Roy said “just so” again to lead me further, but the clear light reedy voice died away without reply from me, for I had finished. He smiled because he felt I was less careworn, and took me to his rooms for tea.
They were a curious set of rooms, in a turret over the kitchen, right in the middle of the college. From a window on the staircase one could look out over the first court to the front gate, and his sitting-room window gave on to the palladian building in the second court and the high trees in the garden beyond. It was for strictly nepotic reasons that Roy was allowed to live there. He had ceased to be an undergraduate nearly three years before; he would normally have gone out of college then. He was a rich man, and it would have been easy for him to live in comfort anywhere in the town. But he was a favourite pupil of the Master’s and of Arthur Brown’s, the tutor who arranged about rooms: and they decided that it would be good for his researches if he stayed where he was.
The sitting-room itself struck oddly and brightly on the eye. There were all kinds of desks in a glazed and shining white – an upright one, at which he could work standing and read a manuscript against an opalescent screen, several for sitting at, one with three arms like a Greek pi, one curved like a horseshoe, and one very low which he could use by lying on cushions on the floor. For the rumours about him had a knack of containing a scrap of truth, and the one which to many of his acquaintances sounded the most fantastic was less extraordinary than the fact. He had already put a mass of original scholarship behind him; most days he worked in this room for seven or eight hours without a break, and he had struck a field where each day’s work meant a discovery both new and certain.
The whole room was full of gadgets for his work, most of which he had designed. There were holders for his manuscripts, lights to inspect them by, a small X-ray apparatus which he had learned to work, card indexes which stood up and could be used with one hand. Everything glistened in its dazzling white, except for some van Goghs on the walls, a rich russet carpet all over the floor, and a sofa and armchair by the fire.
A kitchen porter brought us a big tray wrapped in green baize; underneath stood a robust silver teapot, a plate of toast, a dish of mulberry jam, a bowl of thick cream.
Roy patted the shining silver.
“You deserve some tea,” he said. “Reward for interesting conversation.”
He gave a smile, intimate and kind. He knew now that he had helped bring me somewhere near a normal state. He was sure enough to laugh at me. As I spread jam and cream on a piece of toast and tasted the tart mulberry flavour through cream, butter, burned bread, I saw he had a mocking glint in his eyes.
“Well?” I said.
“I was only thinking.”
“What of?”
“Women.”
“Well?” I said again.
“Each to his métier,” said Roy. “You’d better leave them to me in future. You take them too seriously.”
In fact, he attracted much love. He had been sought after by women since he was a boy: and he enjoyed making love, and threw it lightly away.
Five o’clock struck, and Roy sprang from his chair. “Not much time,” he said. “We must be off. I need you. I need to buy some books.”
“What is it?” I asked, but he smiled demurely and secretively.
“You’ll know quite soon,” he said.
He led the way to the nearest bookshop. “Quick,” he said as I followed through the press of people on the narrow pavement. “We need to get through them all in half-an-hour.”
He was playing a trick, but there was nothing to worry about. He was cheerful, settled, enjoying himself. When we arrived at the shop, he stared round with an expression serious, eager, keenly anxious. Then he moved over to the shelf of theological works, and said with intensity: “There are still some here. We’re not too late.” He had taken hold of three copies of a thin volume. The dust cover carried a small cross and the words: The Middle Period of Richard Heppenstall by Ralph Udal.
“Who in God’s name was Richard Heppenstall?” I asked.
“Seventeenth century clergyman,” Roy whispered. “Somewhat old-brandy, but very good.” Then in a loud clear voice he greeted the manager of the shop, who was coming to attend to him.
“I see I’ve just got here in time. How many have you sold?”
“None as far as I know, Mr Calvert. It’s only come in today–”
“That’s extremely odd,” said Roy.
“Is it a good book, Mr Calvert?”
“It’s a very remarkable book,” said Roy. “You must read it yourself. Promise me you will, and tell me what you think of it. But you need to buy some more. We shall have to take these three. I’m extremely sorry, but you’ll have to wait before you read it. I want one myself urgently tonight. I need to send one at once to Mr Despard-Smith. And of course Lord Boscastle needs one too. You’d better put that one down to Mr Lewis Eliot–” he walked the manager away from me, whispering confidentially, the manager responding by wise and knowing nods. I never learned for certain what he said; but for the rest of my time in Cambridge, the manager, and the whole of the staff of his shop, treated me with uneasy deference, as though, instead of being an ordinary law don, I might turn out to be a peer incognito.
I was half-ruffled, half-amused, when Roy rushed me away to another shop.
“I’m buying these books,” he said before I could protest. “Just lend me your name. I’ll settle tonight. Talking of names, Lord B. is staying at the Lodge tomorrow” (for Lord Boscastle was a real person, and his sister, Lady Muriel, was the Master’s wife).
Breathlessly we hurried from bookshop to bookshop, buying every copy of Udal’s book before half-past five. Roy sent them as presents, had them put down to my account, asked me to enquire for them myself.
As we left the last shop, Roy grinned.
“Well, that was quite a rush,” he said.
He insisted on paying three pounds for the books that had been put down to me – and, to tell the truth, I did not feel like stopping him.
“I suppose I’m right in thinking that Udal is a friend of yours?” I said.
Roy smiled.
On our way back to the college, he asked:: “Tell me, Lewis, are you extremely tired?”
“Not specially.”
“Nor am I. We need some nets. Let’s have some.”
We changed, and he drove me down to Fenner’s in the cold April evening. The freshman’s match was being played, and we watched the last overs of the day; then Roy bought a new ball in the pavilion, we went over to the nets, and I began to bowl to him. Precisely how good he was I found it difficult to be sure. He had a style, as in most things, of extreme elegance and ease; he seemed to need no practice at all, and the day after a journey abroad or a wild and sleepless night would play the first over with an eye as sure as if he had been batting all the summer. When he first came up, people had thought he might get into the university team, but he used to make beautiful twenties and thirties against first class bowling, and then carelessly give his wicket away.
He was fond of the game, and batted on this cold evening with a sleek lazy physical content. Given the new ball, I was just good enough a bowler to make him play. My best ball, which went away a little off the seam, he met with a back stroke from the top of his height, strong, watchful, leisurely and controlled. When I over-pitched them on the off, he drove with statuesque grace and measured power. He hit the ball very hard – but, when one watched him at the wicket, his strength was not so surprising as if one had only seen him upright and slender in a fashionable suit.
I bowled to him for half-an-hour, but my only success was to get one ball through and rap him on the pads.
“Promising,” said Roy.
Then we had a few minutes during which I batted and he bowled, but at that point the evening lost its decorum, for Roy suddenly ceased to be either graceful or competent when he ran up to bowl.
The ground was empty now, the light was going, chimes from the Catholic church rang out clearly in the quiet. We stopped to listen; it was the hour, it was seven o’clock. We walked across the ground and under the trees in the road outside. The night was turning colder still, and our breath formed clouds in the twilight air. But we were hot with exercise, and Roy did not put on his sweater, but knotted the sleeves under his chin. A few white petals fell on his shoulders on our way towards the car. His eyes were lit up as though he were smiling at my expense, and his face was at rest.
“At any rate, old boy,” he said, “you should be able to sleep tonight.”