It didn’t seem much to have changed, Clout’s authentic University, during the four years he had been away. Except, he remembered, that now it was a University, awarding its own degrees. When he had taken his finals it had been only a University College. That was why he was styled BA London, although he had never spent two consecutive nights in London in his life. C Clout, BA London, B Litt Oxford: it was precisely wrong – he robustly told himself as his walk ended and the familiar buildings came into view – because it obscured the basic fact that he was provincial and of the North. But it was right, or so he was hoping, for the business he had in hand.
Clout walked faster. It’s better to arrive hopefully than to dawdle and have doubts. Besides, it looked as if it was going to rain. The sky had been clear when he set out from the town, but since then banks of black cloud had piled up, and sunshine was managing to shoot through them only here and there. This made the scene in front of him theatrical. The rather grandly bleak Georgian façades of Old Hall possessed, in their barely controlled disrepair, the rubbed abraded appearance of something done on canvas to an improbably stupendous scale. The sprawl of army huts, Nissen and Spider, on the one flank, and the raw brick boxes housing laboratories and workshops on the other, didn’t look like anything that a responsible human being would pitch down beside an eighteenth-century mansion in a seventeenth-century park. But they might have been a run of fortuitously jostling sets waiting to be shoved severally on-stage in some supernal theatre – that or the kind of décor that Hollywood knocks up by the acre.
Nevertheless, although the elements of the scene were heterogeneous, the suddenly lowering heavens were sweeping them powerfully together into a well-composed piece full of lurking alarm. Spirits Sinister and Spirits Ironic might be gathering in the wings for the purpose of appraising a drama lavishly accommodated to the principles of Sturm und Drang; and at the moment a single tremendous shaft of light was striking down upon a corner of the crumblingly balustraded terrace, so that one rather expected the striding forward of some principal personage, intent upon announcing that so foul and fair a day he had not seen. The whole prospect had taken on a momentary distinction, operatic and hallucinated. It was like a John Piper version of the unassuming adage that it’s nice to see a little bit of sunshine.
These reflections, which had brought Clout to a halt, now made him impatiently shake his head. He had an idea that there is something debilitating in arty or booksy musings. One ought to see and feel things absolutely unmediated and direct. It was only in that way that they nourished, even modified, the sensibility.
But shaking his head made Clout self-conscious, and self-consciousness made him aware of being not alone. Somebody had got off a bicycle and was standing quite close to him. He glanced sideways. It was a girl. And there was no doubt about her coming to him direct and unmediated. For the first time in his life, his sensibility was modified so that he knew it without a period of conscientious introspection or serious discussion with friends. The only comparison was the occasion when somebody had put a knee in him in a barrack-room scrap and taken his breath away. The girl beside him had now done just that.
Suddenly, with the plain intent of signalizing Clout’s new life, the heavens opened and the rain fell.
He discovered, rather to his own surprise, that he was carrying an umbrella. It was a concession to his recent sojourn in the South, for here such a thing would be considered rather soft in the hands of anyone below middle age. But it was a wonderful object to command now. Clout opened it, stepped forward, and held it over the girl. Very naturally, he had spent the second or so needed to perform this action in wondering about the words which should accompany it. Now he discovered that he might have saved himself this trouble. He was bereft of the power of speech. In fact he opened his mouth, found that absolutely nothing happened, and had the presence of mind to shut it again as quickly as possible. At least he needn’t seem to gape. And fortunately, he wasn’t in any sort of tremble or dither. He concentrated on holding the umbrella quite steadily and plumb-centre over the amazing girl.
This absence of civil phrase in Clout didn’t seem to offend her. He even felt an obscure intimation of its pleasing her. But she wasn’t awkwardly silent herself.
‘Oh, thank you,’ she said. ‘Thank you very much. But please don’t bother. These clothes won’t come to any harm.’
And now Clout did slightly tremble. Not only was the girl’s voice inexpressibly thrilling. It seemed to Clout that the words which she used had a choiceness, a perfect appropriateness, an exquisite tact and taste, such as must convey to any ear, not wholly unworthy of its office, full assurance that here outward beauty was abundantly matched by riches within. At the same time he saw that what she said about her clothes was prosaically accurate. She was dressed in tweeds – the sort that books call well-worn and good. So it seemed unlikely that she was a student. At the same time she was much too young, and immeasurably too rare to be conceivably one of the considerable number of learned ladies on the staff. Probably she had nothing to do with the University. She had got off her bicycle, here at the main gates, merely to take a curious glance at the place.
In Clout’s excited imagination this conjecture made the girl less remote – or, if not less remote, at least more accessible. Her action had confessed an interest in something he knew about and had a share in. Perhaps it was only a fleeting interest in the picturesque turn the jumble of buildings could put up under this sort of sky. But even that was a start. And Clout found his tongue. ‘It makes rather an unlikely fantasy, doesn’t it, on a day like this? But when you strip away the atmospherics it becomes a bit of naked English social history. You might say a show piece, if that didn’t suggest a museum. For it’s not that. I mean, it isn’t dead. It knows it hasn’t a past, and it’s bound to doubt whether it has a future. But, here and now, it’s really full of life. I know. I belong to it.’
For a moment the girl was silent. But he was sure she wasn’t disconcerted by these philosophical remarks, much less bewildered by them. If she had betrayed any faint surprise it was perhaps at his accent, to which his tie and his hair and even the way he stood on his two feet were no longer reliable pointers. His D H Lawrence phase had lasted well into the Oxford period, and during it he had zealously guarded his native intonations. By the time it was over – and himself once more clean-shaven – it would have been silly to start making a new set of noises. And indeed he could never be certain that the Lawrence business was utterly over. At this moment, at which his fate had declared itself with a certainty that ought to leave no room for foolery, he had a faint grotesque persuasion of himself as dressed in cap and breeches, as nursing a shot-gun, as feral and nobly savage, obedient only to some deep centre of consciousness somewhere behind his navel, and murmuring unprintable words with triumphant effectiveness into the ear of this upper-class woman. Here was a sad relapse into the booksy, and he would have blushed for it if he hadn’t instead suddenly wanted to laugh at the glorious incongruity of this shadowy gamekeeper persona and the actual words upon which he had ventured. And then he did laugh. For some reason it seemed perfectly natural to do so. Clout shouted with laughter.
This time the girl was disconcerted. As she was huddled shoulder to shoulder under the dripping umbrella of one who had followed up a certain amount of sage sociological small talk with this inconsequent and maniacal mirth, it wasn’t at all surprising that she should be. But at least she stood her ground and spoke entirely calmly. ‘What’s funny?’ she asked.
‘I am. But it would be difficult to explain.’ Clout, who had become conscious of the girl’s arm as touching his, and of everything else in the universe as fainting and fading, felt these to be wholly sufficient words.
‘Then perhaps this isn’t just the moment to try.’ The girl peered out from under the umbrella. ‘I think it’s blowing over.’
Clout wanted to cry out that it would never do that; that things would simply fall apart if it did; and that in fact for ever and ever the rain would continue to descend, just missing her shoulder and just getting his neck, while the two of them, eternally side and side, gazed and gazed at an unremarkable, a makeshift university made strangely beautiful by a glint of sunlight through tumbling cloud. But to the girl (to whom, presumably, a like revelation to his own had not yet come) these would probably seem extravagant observations. ‘We’d better give it another minute or two,’ Clout said diplomatically. ‘Just in case.’
‘If you’re sure you have the time.’ The girl took up the matter where convention demanded. ‘It’s frightfully kind of you to be so patient. And I was an ass not to bring a mac.’
Clout was silent. Innocent of all but the vaguest appositeness, yet carrying with them the melancholy of love defeated by circumstances and time, lines of remembered verse were floating through his head:
Why didst thou promise such a beauteous day
And make me travel forth without my cloak…
He was realizing in a great horror that the shower must in fact entirely stop, the umbrella be furled, the girl get on her bicycle and prosaically pedal out of his life. As if to drive the point home in mockery, a raindrop, flicked by the wind, landed with cold precision on his nose.
’Tis not enough that through the cloud thou break,
To dry the rain on my storm-beaten face…
And it’s not enough, he told himself savagely, to go poetical wool-gathering after Shakespeare and his lovely boy. Here is your own lovely girl going to slip from you if you don’t wake up. Resource. Initiative. Enterprise. At least say something. ‘Do you know the University?’ he asked.
As a positive move made in a great crisis, it was pretty dim. But it did at least get a reply. ‘No,’ the girl said. ‘I know hardly anything about it.’
‘I thought perhaps you might be a student.’
This was a new low. It wasn’t even true, since he had almost at once decided that she wasn’t. Moreover she might regard it as derogatory. She was shaking her head. ‘Oh, no,’ she said. ‘I’m not a student. I’m somebody’s secretary.’ Her tone was faintly self-depreciatory and yet more faintly ironical – so that he knew it was the product of some confident social background. ‘What about you?’ she asked.
Clout’s heart gave a leap, so that the umbrella trembled and a shower of rain-drops fell in front of them. It seemed incredible that the girl herself should advance to this easy curiosity. ‘I took my Arts degree here,’ he said. ‘Since then, I’ve been away for four years. And now I’m rather hoping to get a job – perhaps only just the ghost of one – in my former Department – the English Department, that is.’
‘You can put down the umbrella.’
Very reluctantly, Clout accepted this suggestion. The girl took a step away from him, so that he saw her in a new focus and against an open sky. In spite of the shelter he had provided, drops of moisture glinted in her hair. Again he couldn’t think of anything to say. Or rather he couldn’t think of anything irrelevant to say. What was relevant would sound absurd and might be fatal. All he could do was to gaze. At the moment this was safe enough, for she was once more looking at the sprawl of buildings in the middle distance.
‘Is your Department – English, did you say? – in the old part?’ She turned to him in a way that made the question, indefinably, seem a shade more than merely casual.
‘Yes. All the Faculty of Arts is in Old Hall – that and the administrative people. English isn’t, of course, considered at all important, so it’s right up near the top. At least there’s a good view over the park, and you hardly notice the huts and the labs.’
‘It sounds very nice.’
It seemed a highly conventional response. But Clout had an inspired glimpse of it as something to rise to. ‘Would you care’, he asked, ‘to come and see?’