I had expected not to recognise Elford. As the uncanny familiarity of his room came home to me I had told myself that one of life’s common ironies was about to be enacted for my benefit; that I was to be made sharply aware of the stubborn enduringness of chattels and impedimenta as compared with the mutability of those sentient beings who think to command them. In a fashion, of course, this was now happening; Elford had aged as the Chinese pots had not. He struck me, indeed, as looking more like a hundred-and-twenty than a hundred – so that for a fleeting instant I recalled a moment of horror in my boyhood, when for threepence, I’d been admitted to some tent or booth at a fairground in which was exhibited a human being, yet alive, who claimed to have fought with the armies of Napoleon. Elford was withered as that ghastly figure had been withered; his skin had the same tincture as of the grave. But I did – I say – recognise him at once; he was the elderly little man who had worn the dinner-jacket, smoked the cigar, gracefully apologised to the boy standing awkwardly before him. I recognised Elford. I had a very queer feeling that Arthur had failed to do so.
This, of course, was nonsense. But I did tell myself that Arthur had not, in fact, seen his old tutor for quite a long time, and that Elford’s appearance had produced a shock before which his mind had momentarily blacked out. I recalled that Arthur’s mind was like that – nervously so disposed as to throw up some protective barrier around traumatic occasions. The present encounter, it was rapidly to turn out, was going to produce matter a good deal more disconcerting than the mere sight of physical decrepitude.
Elford had paused by his desk, and something of the movement of his head made me think for a moment that – as was not improbable – he was nearly blind. Then I became aware that a very seeing, if sunken eye had rested on me, and had then passed on to Arthur.
‘Dear me!’ Elford said. His voice was so thin and whispering that the effect was as if dry leaves were being mysteriously stirred by a wind into the ghost of articulate speech. ‘You are before me again. I must apologise. But sit down, my dear lads, and let us to work. Whose turn to begin?’ As he asked this, Elford painfully ensconced his small shrunken person in the corner of an armchair. For a moment his right hand fumbled over a low table. I realised that he was reaching for a pencil, a scribbling-pad, which weren’t there. Elford was living through the beginning of a tutorial. Arthur and I were two of his pupils, being taken as a ‘pair’. It was up to one of us to start reading an essay.
It seemed quite evident that our visit was meaningless. I saw how absurd had been my own recent notion of reproaching this old man for an act of carelessness perpetrated a couple of generations ago. As for Arthur’s confession and apology, it would make no more impact than if it were being delivered to the dull cold ear of death. Or so I thought.
‘Well?’ Elford said. He spoke sharply as well as interrogatively, but at the same time with the air of unfailing courtesy that I remembered so well. ‘If you can’t agree, you toss a penny for it. That’s our rule, isn’t it?’ He paused, and neither of us said anything. Arthur had sat down obediently when told to, and I had done the same. We were staring at Elford dumbly – no doubt much as a couple of undergraduates might do, before nerving themselves to confess that they had prepared no written work for the occasion. ‘Not a penny between you?’ Elford said. ‘If you want to remedy that condition, don’t become a college tutor. You know young Mr Pym, the college chaplain? But of course you do. He has to invite you all to breakfast, poor devil. And read with the men taking theology, into the bargain – and we know what they are like, do we not? But I was speaking of worldly pelf, eh? And of what I said to Sammy Pym. “Here you are,” I said, “proud of having become a tutorial Fellow. But as far as having a sixpence of your own goes, you might as well have become a Franciscan.” Oddly enough, Sammy turned out to have been thinking of just that. It appears that there is a sort of Anglican Franciscan. A curious conception, you will agree. But, my dear lads, I am wasting your time. To work, I pray.’
‘Elford, I have come to tell you something.’ Arthur spoke in a loud voice, as if the only barrier to rational communication with George Elford was a little hardness of hearing. ‘I have already told the Provost, and I must apologise for that. It was to you that I should have come in the first place.’
‘You have told the Provost something?’ Elford’s courtesy was tinged with impatience. ‘My dear young man, what can you possibly mean? Hasn’t the Provost, poor soul, been in a madhouse these seven or eight years? But I will let you into a secret, gentlemen.’ Elford now spoke with some formality. ‘Only, I need hardly say, because this is the very day upon which it is to be a secret no longer. All the mumbo-jumbo has now been gone through with: the Privy Council, and the Visitor’s Deed of Deprivation, and all the rest of it. It has been a long drawn-out and distressing affair, God knows. But the thing’s done, and presently we shall be electing a new Provost. It will not surprise you that the mind of our Governing Body is turning towards Mr Cropley. Rightly, in my own view. I’ve long judged him a very promising man. But to work, I say. Salisbury’s first Ministry, is it not? 1885. Let me see. Victor Hugo died, Zola published Germinal, and poor dear Bridges came out with Eros and Psyche. Anything else?’
‘Meredith,’ Arthur said. ‘Diana of the Crossways.’
‘Excellent! My dear Aylwin, I can always rely on you.’
If I had to point to the most fantastic moment in Arthur’s affair, I suppose it would be this one. It was odd enough that my friend, presenting himself with the intention he had, should have been even fleetingly reduced to this helpless pupilary condition. But Elford’s response was odder still. I had heard enough of the college’s history to know that he’d not been raving; the mad Provost had indeed existed, and it was Cropley who succeeded him. Elford, as is common enough in the senile, was mistaking the past for the present. But in the very act of treating us as two undergraduates of a bygone age, he had recognised Arthur and called him by his name. It was bewildering – so bewildering that there came into my head the wild thought that Elford’s dementia was spurious; that he actually affected it as a kind of ‘sick’ joke. I don’t know whether I use this expression correctly. I hear it from my pupils from time to time, and perhaps it fits. At least I have to admit that the notion of Elford as a jester, although I recognise it as virtually incredible, has intermittently haunted me from that day to this.
‘Elford, I want you to carry your mind back to the year 1929.’ Arthur again spoke loudly and emphatically. He seemed to have drawn encouragement from having been addressed by name – rather as a penitent might do, when some word reaching him through the grille of the confessional assures him that the priest on its other side is not day-dreaming or asleep.
‘Back to 1929?’ Elford’s papery voice held an accent of bewilderment. ‘I fear I don’t follow you.’ He shut his eyes for a moment. I remember noticing that something had happened to his eyelids – presumably some degenerative process – so that they appeared to close from the sides rather than from above. The effect was disconcertingly reptilian. But in another moment Elford was looking at us again, and both his glance and his voice indicated some changed state of consciousness. ‘Did you say 1929?’ he asked. ‘That’s rather a long time ago.’
‘I’m afraid it is.’ Arthur spoke swiftly, as if seizing his chance. ‘You can hardly be expected—’
‘Almost sufficiently long ago for me to remember.’ Elford maintained his new tone, so that I think we both received the impression of sudden, complete lucidity. ‘I believe I should be a less unentertaining host were our talk to move back to 1919. That’s very vivid to me still. They came back, you know. The undergraduates, I mean. Not as boys, but as men. One felt they brought the very mud of Flanders into one’s room. I was prepared to accept any amount of it. Of the mud, that is, if I may labour the fancy a little. It was a wonderful time. 1929 is another matter. I have to think.’ Elford paused – perhaps not so much to recollect such thoughts as he had as to recover from the exertion of sustained speech. Suddenly he looked straight at Arthur. ‘Do you know,’ he said, ‘I think that may have been the year in which Arthur Aylwin came up. Did you know him, by any chance?’
There was silence. We seemed to be back where we had started. Arthur put out a hand in some gesture I failed to interpret, but I could see that a tremor possessed it. When he spoke, I noticed that he had abandoned the notion of Elford’s being hard of hearing.
‘I am Arthur Aylwin,’ he said. ‘Don’t you—’
‘But so you are, so you are.’ Elford spoke curiously gently. It’s a long time since you visited me, Arthur, so you must forgive me. Or I think it’s a long time. I know I may be wrong. Will you please introduce your friend again? I fear his name escaped me.’
‘This is my very old friend, Frank Deasy. We sat the History Scholarship examination together in Hilary, 1929. And that is why—’
‘To be sure you did. It comes back to me very tolerably, Arthur, very tolerably indeed. Mr Deasy, it is most kind of you to call. Let me tell you, in requital, that you wrote very well. Better than Arthur in some ways, if my memory does not fail me. And then we had some talk.’ Elford paused, as if anxious to find justification for some further commendatory word. ‘We had some talk,’ he repeated, and closed his eyes again.
‘What I have come to say,’ Arthur said, ‘is that I cheated in that examination. I ought not to have accepted the Scholarship.’
This, of course, was Arthur’s big moment; he had delivered to his old tutor, now and at last, the words over which he had been brooding obsessively for weeks. I could see that he had striven to control them in the utterance. They came out vibrant with emotion, all the same, and I was scarcely surprised when they appeared to have a shocking effect on their hearer. Hitherto I’d been aware of Elford’s features only as obliterated beneath a myriad fine wrinkles in a manner that seemed to render any play of expression impossible to them. But now his face took on for a moment a strange mobility; deeper lines appeared on it, as if impressed there by a blow. At the same time, he uttered an inarticulate sound, which I took to be of shock or pain.
The sound repeated itself, and repeated itself again. I realised that Elford was smiling, and that it was the ruins of human laughter that we heard.
‘A strange persuasion,’ Elford said. ‘Doubtless there will be those who, allotted their eternal station among the blessed saints, interrupt their hosannas to cry out that they cheated before the Judgement Seat. But Judgement Seats don’t work that way. They are cheat-proof – like my Scholarship examination.’ He paused, and his face resumed its former saurian inexpressiveness. ‘You will forgive me, if I have offered this profane comparison before. It’s a tutor’s fate to repeat himself progressively as the years wear on. And to know less and less, and forget more and more. There’s something that I’m forgetting now. But no! It comes back to me. We were speaking of Arthur Aylwin. And of a boy called Deasy. Deasy wrote the better papers, you know. But it was Aylwin who showed promise. And that’s what Scholarship examinations are about: promise. The award must go, not to present accomplishment, but to potentiality. That’s why, in my view, the written papers are of no use.’
‘Do you mean—’ Arthur had to break off. He was trembling violently. And Elford’s frail voice went on, unheeding.
‘I don’t know if you’ve met my colleague Drelincourt. An estimable young prig. One has a temptation to pull his leg. Only the other day I was speaking to him of this. “If you judge by the boys’ written work,” I said, “you might as well put their names in your hat, and invite your scout to pick out the winner.” He looked down his nose at me. He was very shocked.’
‘Do you mean that you used never to read what the candidates wrote?’ It was almost wildly that Arthur asked this question – as well it might be. Just what mingling of emotions was possessing him, I don’t know. But his vehemence disturbed Elford, who now seemed to let his mind drift away from us. There was a silence which I had to break myself.
‘I can’t think that Mr Elford means just that,’ I said. ‘He has mentioned an impression he formed – rather a surprising impression – of the comparative merits of your writing and mine. So he must have read the scripts. What he seems to suggest is that he then put them out of his head.’ I paused, and the silence continued. I need hardly say that Elford’s theory of competitive examination, so far as it had been revealed to us, was rather powerfully suggesting to me light at the end of the tunnel. But if Arthur himself was to emerge into daylight, he must be let do so at his own pace. The one thing I must not do was to make any motion of my own towards opening the throttle. ‘And if that is so,’ I went on, ‘it certainly modifies your problem, Arthur, in one way or another. Just how, it’s up to you to decide.’
The silence continued still, so that I glanced at Arthur in something like alarm. His expression was bewildered and even vacant, as if his mind has momentarily ceased to work in face of this new situation. I was wondering how to pull matters together, when Elford spoke again – and fortunately with some renewed effect of consecutive reasoning.
‘No, no,’ he said. ‘You mustn’t take too literally my little joke to Drelincourt. Of course one must read what the boys write. They have made the effort to express themselves on paper, and it would be discourteous not to peruse the result. The process is not, as I facetiously suggested, wholly without utility. It makes a little elimination possible. But I would not go further than that. Promise, potentiality – these emerge only in sustained conversation. And I don’t, you know, mean what they call an interview. I don’t care for interviews. They are no basis for a future relationship between scholars and gentlemen.’
As Elford said this, I had a sense of Arthur’s coming round again. Such a sentiment was very much to his taste. Indeed, he had no doubt picked up a good many attitudes from Elford.
‘We were speaking of Arthur Aylwin,’ Elford went on. He appeared quite to have lost his momentary consciousness that Arthur Aylwin was in the room with him. ‘He was a most interesting case in point – most interesting. But may I not offer you some refreshment? My housekeeper will be delighted to bring in tea.’
I made haste to decline this polite offer. It had occurred to me that Elford’s stamina must be limited. At any moment he could simply drift away from us, whether into reverie or sleep.
‘When Aylwin got talking,’ I prompted, ‘he revealed himself as quite an exceptional boy?’
‘Precisely. Here was a lad whose mind one could feel expanding as he spoke. Within half an hour, I had no doubt about him whatever. I said to myself that here was certainly the scholar of the year. In those days, you know, our small college ran only to a single annual award in History. “Here’s my scholar,” I said to myself. “And more than that. Here, conceivably, is my successor in the fullness of time.” Perhaps I ought to have said “in the exiguity of time”. For life is short, is it not? Few of us, I suppose, will live to see our eightieth birthday. But, dear me, I have been most remiss. I have failed to invite you to smoke.’
As Elford announced this discovery, he slid hazardously (as I thought) from the corner of his armchair, and began an erratic progress across his enormous study. He conceived himself, I suppose, as in search of cigars or cigarettes. He disappeared behind the Winged Victory, emerged again while rounding a vast and ornate cupboard, and within seconds the long perspectives of the room had so diminished him that he gave the impression of being near vanishing point. I thought I might as well seize the opportunity to sound Arthur out.
‘Well?’ I said.
‘What do you mean—well?’ Arthur made this reply almost childishly. It was evident that he was very greatly disturbed.
‘Elford’s mind obviously wanders – and a good deal more in the past than in the present. But he isn’t irrational, and it ought to be possible to make him understand what you have to say. Don’t you think?’
‘I suppose so. I mean, of course. But this is very bewildering, very bewildering, indeed.’ Arthur gave me a swift glance in which I almost felt calculation to be at work. ‘I just don’t know what to say. You see, one has to believe the old boy. He’s not romancing. I know him, and I can be sure of that. He didn’t give a damn for what I wrote in these papers, or for what you wrote either.’
‘That’s not quite true.’ I glanced rapidly down the room to make sure our host was not yet returning. ‘If the scripts had revealed either of us as hopelessly sub-standard, that would have been the end of us.’
‘Yes – but there was no question of that. My God, Frank, all that stuff I mugged up about the Peasants’ Revolt—’
‘And about Thomas Cromwell?’
‘Yes, yes. It all went for nothing at all. Elford and I didn’t exchange a word about either of these things in what he calls our conversation. It’s almost as if I had won the Scholarship fairly.’
‘A reasonable case could be made out that way.’ I was determined not to give Arthur the ghost of a nudge.
‘But not quite. In fact, essentially, not at all.’ Arthur said this with such complete conviction that my heart sank. ‘I tried to cheat. I meant to cheat. I left Oxford believing that I had successfully cheated. It’s that that counts.’
‘I must apologise for having been called away.’ Elford had emerged from behind a sofa. He had certainly forgotten about us altogether. But he was making the best of this. ‘Can either of you remember,’ he asked, ‘where we had got to? We mustn’t waste time.’ He climbed into his armchair again – and then immediately slid out of it. ‘My dear Arthur,’ he said, ‘I have just recalled why I left you. It was for the papers, was it not?’
That Arthur had been restored to his own identity after all was something which passed, I imagine, almost unremarked by either of us. For we both knew at once and instinctively what Elford meant by ‘the papers’. And Arthur was so staggered that he scrambled to his feet.
‘Do you mean to say,’ he demanded, ‘that you have kept all your old Scholarship scripts?’
‘Oh, most certainly. In university examinations, as you know, there is a statutory requirement that scripts be destroyed immediately after the posting of the results. A college, however, is not bound in any way.’
‘Isn’t it rather inconsistent,’ I asked, ‘to preserve these old papers, if you regard them as never having been of much use?’
‘Not at all, my dear sir, not at all. Early in my career as a tutor I realised that there was a possibility – statistically a slender possibility, but a possibility nevertheless – that among my pupils I should number a Newton, a Locke, or a Milton. Of such transcendent genius posterity prizes even the earliest or slightest academic exercises. I have always had this thought in my mind. I would again cite Milton. Consider his Prolusions.’
I had no disposition to consider these – nor, I am sure, had Arthur. That Elford could actually produce the very scribblings of those far-off, fatal hours struck me as alarming and obscurely indecent. As for Arthur, he had suddenly gone as pale as death.
‘But I fear I must ask one of you to assist me.’ Elford had been fumbling in the breast-pocket of a jacket which seemed almost coeval with himself; he now produced from it a pair of small, steel-rimmed spectacles; when he settled these on his nose they showed as so misted – even, I should have said, fly-blown – that one would have supposed them to render vision impossible. But Elford was stepping across the room confidently enough. ‘In the farther armoire,’ he said. ‘If one of you will be so good. 1929 will be rather high up.’
Arthur, although on his feet, seemed incapable of movement, so I was constrained to follow Elford towards the ornate cupboard – certainly the largest piece of furniture in the room – which he had lately rounded. It appeared impossible that, in his shrunken condition, he could reach even to its handle without mounting perilously on a library-ladder or a stool. I hastened, therefore, to open the doors myself. The result was a faint smell of mildew, a sizeable cloud of dust. It was some time since this particular archive had been disturbed. But the papers were there, without a doubt. One long, deep shelf was neatly labelled Hist. Schol., and on it were thirty or more manuscript bundles – each tied up with string, each with an attached luggage-label showing a date. I reached up – there was nothing else for it – and handed Elford the bundle for 1929. Perhaps I ought not to have adopted this course, since the small burden weighed him down painfully. He carried it, nevertheless, to his desk.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘here we are. And what shall we find, I wonder?’ He had addressed this question to me, and without the air of expecting an answer. Then he turned to Arthur, and spoke in another tone. ‘The pleasures of research,’ he said. ‘The excitement of it, one might almost say. But my fingers are all thumbs, Arthur. I think you are the man to untie this knot.’
My suspicion that Elford was playing the part of an elder brother to Shakespeare’s Prospero – teetering on the very brink of the grave but yet wholly in charge of the drama – returned to me at these last words, with their odd etymological hint of dénouement. Certainly we were all three of us in what is now called an archetypal situation: the curtain was about to be twitched, the casket opened, the oracle consulted. It can’t be said that Arthur here performed his part with dexterity, and I waited in painful suspense while he fumbled with the string.
‘Much comes back to me,’ Elford said. ‘Much comes back to me about that particular year. For example, there was a red-haired boy called Anstruther. He was from Harrow, if my recollection serves. Since the papers are in alphabetical order, this means that Aylwin is probably second on the pile. Ah, thank you, Arthur. Before me on the desk, if you please.’ Elford had taken off his spectacles and dabbed at them with a handkerchief which appeared to have been in use for some time. Now, as Arthur set the scripts in front of him, he restored them to his nose and studied what must have been the initial historical observations presented to him by Anstruther of Harrow. Indeed, he now offered us what might have been the beginning of a commentary on these. ‘Yes, yes,’ he said. ‘Boys are sometimes taught to open an essay with a broad and striking generalisation. Doubtless there was a time when history could be written in that fashion. But I deprecate it whenever it is pitched at me. And this makes me conscious of something else. I myself addressed a somewhat rash generalisation to you only a few minutes ago. Arthur, I’ve no doubt you know what I mean.’
‘No, I don’t.’ Arthur’s voice was unsteady, and I could sense his gaze as fixed on the page, a fraction of an inch below the generalising Harrovian’s, where his long-buried turpitude lay. ‘I’ve no idea what you’re talking about.’
‘The inutility of written papers, including your own.’ Quite slowly, Elford began to turn over Anstruther’s pages, one by one. ‘You certainly wrote nothing remarkable. Boys never do. If, however, I am not in error – and in a moment we shall see, shall we not?—you did contrive, you did rather oddly contrive, to give an impression of good judgement and a good nerve. Mr Deasy, you will be interested in this. Ah, yes – here we are.’ I had an oblique glimpse of Arthur’s handwriting as it had been at school, and then suddenly found that the script had been thrust into my hands. ‘Pray, read it, Mr Deasy, and tell me if your impression tallies with my own.’
It was an awkward demand, and I was prompted merely to hand on the little sheaf of foolscap to Arthur in disregard of it. Why I didn’t, I don’t know. Perhaps Arthur made some helpless and inhibitory gesture – or perhaps Prospero had simply cast a spell on me. I found myself reading Arthur’s answer to the question on the Peasants’ Revolt. The ink in which it had been written had faded a little on the yellowing page. So had the two bold diagonal lines which had been criss-crossed over it. I turned to the next page, and the next. It was a two-and-a-half page answer. And Arthur had cancelled the whole of it in the same way.
‘You see?’ The voice of George Elford came to me faintly – like a voice on the radio when something has gone badly wrong. Perhaps he was tiring, or perhaps my bewilderment was simply interfering with my own senses. ‘Poor stuff – even for Arthur, who was so far from his best on the written page. Heavily factual and totally uninspired. The sort of thing he might have mugged up in a library the night before. Arthur, have you any memory of this? Do you agree?’
Before Arthur could answer, I put the script in front of him. He stared at it in a manner at once so dull and dumb that I wondered whether he was at all taking it in.
‘There was good judgement,’ Elford said, ‘in striking the stuff out. But there was nerve as well. He had dropped thirty-five or forty minutes. And he’d the guts to cancel the whole answer, and start in on something else. His total script gives rather short-measure, as a result.’ Elford turned to Arthur. ‘So you see, my dear boy, why I ought not to have generalised. Your blessed paper told me nothing of any intellectual qualities you might have. But here’—and with surprising vigour Elford raised his right hand and sketched in air a bold St Andrew’s Cross—’here was a moral quality writ large.’
There was a long silence. I realised that Arthur was going to say nothing at all. If he had been speechless before the coming of this weird revelation, he was doubly speechless now. And suddenly I remembered something. I remembered that although Arthur had spoken of dishonesty getting up two questions, he’d been imprecise about the actual writing of them. His entire wretched neurosis – if that’s what it’s to be called – had its origin in a very real incident which had been upsetting enough. But it was an incident which had for long been available to him only in terms of a clouded or distorted recollection.
‘The other specialist paper,’ I said. ‘Did Arthur answer, or begin to answer, the question on Thomas Cromwell and the Dissolution of the Monasteries?’
I’m sure he didn’t.’ Elford turned over more pages. ‘He wouldn’t, you know. It was altogether too straightforward and unpromising. A well-taught boy would ignore it.’ He turned over a final page. ‘Nothing on poor Thomas. See for yourself.’
Our ordeal, our interview, our afternoon call (for it had been all of these things) was over. Elford had courteously accompanied us to his front door, and the respectable female had appeared for the purpose of opening it. We looked out upon a vista of North Oxford villas. They contrived to be at once commodious, commonplace, and unbeautiful.
It has been most kind of you,’ Elford said. He was looking totally exhausted, and I was once more unable to believe that he was other than a confused old man, incapable of design or guile. ‘I don’t receive many visitors nowadays – or at least that is my impression. I may be wrong. You will forgive me if it is so. And I fear I’ve not been very clear as to whether you are former pupils of mine, or not. But you, my dear sir, do remind me of someone.’ Elford reached up and for a moment placed a hand on Arthur’s arm. ‘A boy called Aylwin, Arthur Aylwin. An able boy, with a distinguished academic career before him. Something of a scholar, indeed, although not purely that. I can see him now, waiting in my room for an appointment I was ill-mannered enough to be late for. He was standing beside my desk – you’ve seen my desk – and studying something. Perhaps something on the wall. It might have been my little Monet. Did you mark my little Monet? Yes, it may well have been that. And thank you again. Good-bye . . . good-bye!’
We returned to college on foot, and I think we must have walked half-way across the university parks without either of us speaking a word. A group of small boys, strays from the industrial world of Cowley, were playing a primitive, quarrelsome, but satisfactory game of cricket. We actually stopped to watch them, and it was then that Arthur spoke.
‘His memory behaved queerly,’ he said. ‘Of course, it’s apt to happen in extreme old age.’
‘Yes.’
‘But somehow it never resulted in his making a fool of himself.’
‘No. But some tricks of memory do.’
We walked on again. Keble College chapel, strangely companioned by the monstrously-shaped buildings lately reared in the interest of modern science, loomed ahead of us. We were leaving the parks before Arthur spoke again.
‘Frank, can you in the least understand it?’
‘Certainly I can. There was something unreliable about your memory when you were a boy. You used to blame it for letting you down in written work.’ I paused, suddenly possessed by a fresh flash of recollection of my own. ‘Including those two specialist papers. You said they’d been “another bloody Jutland” because things had gone out of your head. Well, your forgetfulness seems to have extended to something you did in the actual examination itself.’
‘In God’s name, just what did I do?’
‘I don’t think Elford has the sequence of events quite right. It’s my guess that your answer on the Peasants’ Revolt stood until the very second in which they told us to stop writing – and that you then managed to cancel it when you were pretty well dead to the world.’
‘I don’t think that makes sense. It’s the painful aspects of experience that people contrive to forget in a pathological manner.’ Arthur hesitated. ‘Not the small redeeming gleam.’
‘Very well. We’ll just say your memory has an extra dash of perversity in its way of signing off.’ As I said this, I heard with compunction the note of impatience in my voice. ‘Listen, Arthur. The whole occasion was more trying than we can remember. But there’s something I do recall – and it’s how you looked when coming out from that first specialist paper. I’ve been saying you’re a sick man now. It’s the real point that you were a sick boy then. You managed to save your honour – for that’s the fair way of describing it – and then your memory closed queerly over the thing. From that day until the nonsense about Robin stirred things up, I doubt whether it ever recovered more than a confused sense that something painful and humiliating had happened during the exam. Wouldn’t that be about the size of it?’
‘Yes.’ In a renewed silence we walked the length of Keble Road. ‘Mary will be relieved,’ Arthur said. ‘And, of course, Robin. It’s been hard on him.’
‘Don’t forget Julian.’
‘Julian? Well, he’s different. A young intellectual in the making, and not really touched by things.’
‘Arthur, I ask you to promise to be rather careful with Julian. It’s in his mind that the whole queer affair will most linger – as a wound and humiliation.’
‘All right, I will.’ Arthur spoke so submissively that my heart went out to him. We walked on again without speaking, and turned into St Giles’. ‘I simply can’t understand it,’ Arthur said.
‘Arthur, I think you ought to try to—’
‘There he is, under sentence of death, poor chap, and he begins mucking about with the fabric of the college. He and his wife already inhabit the Lodge like mice in a cathedral. Why on earth should he start banging away at the apple-room? For all Cropley knows, the next Provost might particularly prize an apple-room. What do you think?’
Just what I thought at that moment – and continued to think during the remainder of our walk – it would have been inapposite to communicate to my friend. It was blessedly clear that his convalescence had begun. And it would be furthered, no doubt, by the absence of the boy who hadn’t won the Scholarship.
I left Oxford by train that evening.