Jill (17 page)

“Technically, it’s criminal assault. It is, you know, legally.”

“The Dean should do something.”

“I don’t care who hears me say it,” said Whitbread, putting a plate of buns he had bought for yesterday’s tea on the table.

“It’s just guttersnipe hooliganism, that’s all it is.”

“What is?”

“Why, haven’t you heard? Warner and Semple. D’you mean to say you haven’t heard? I sh’d have thought——”

“I sh’d have thought you’d ’ave been the first to hear,” said Jackson, with a laugh. “I sh’d think Warner’s pretty proud of himself.”

“I’ve hardly seen Chris today,” John explained carelessly. “What’s he done?”

“Why, you know Semple? Fellow who goes round tryin’ to make you join the Oxford Union. Well, he lives next door to Dowling—you know that fellow——”

“Yes, well?”

“Well, last night Warner and Dowling came in a bit tiddly, you know. They’d had one over the eight——”

“More like five or six,” interjected another scholar with a grin.

“—and Semple’s suddenly woken up by a tremendous crash. He gets up and finds Warner and Dowling in his sitting-room,
beginning to break it up. All his china smashed and all. And when he asks them what they’re up to, Warner knocks him down. Just that.”

“Haven’t you seen Semple’s eye?” asked Jackson.

“That does sound a bit——”

“A bit! I sh’d like to know what he thinks he’s doing. It’s just rank hooliganism, that’s all. A fellow like that reckons he owns the earth.”

There was an air of hesitant agreement over the company caused by the unadmitted fear that John might report all he heard when he left. But John had no such intention. Studying the tea-leaves at the bottom of his cup (“coffee”, with Whitbread, very often turned into tea by a majority vote), he was thrilling to the anecdote and delighting in the contrast of the two worlds he inhabited. Whatever one might think of Christopher Warner, he could not be neglected; one could not pass over these sporadic flowerings of violence. That night he was privileged to hear Christopher and Patrick (chiefly Christopher) relate the story to Eddy after dinner. Christopher had handed out sherry glasses filled with port and was standing on the hearthrug waving a cigarette.

“Well, it all started with us getting back after we left you, Eddy, and going up to Patrick’s room because Patrick said he’d got some bread. Not that dry bread is a meal for a man who’s had no food since lunch-time—but I was prepared,” Christopher said emphatically, “I was prepared to waive that point provided that the bread was forthcoming, so I sat down, and Pat here dragged out a pretty mouldy-looking hunk and cut it in half. One half he bit, the other half he put on a plate and handed to me. Now, mark you, I was devilish sharp set. I was in no mood to quibble about trifles: I was not, shall we say, in a finical mood. But I was just opening my mouth when I noticed what looked to me like mouse-turd on the bread. ‘I say, Pat,’ I said, d’you keep your bread in a tin?’ ‘No,’ he said, with his mouth full. ‘Well, look at that, you rat! Is that fit to offer a guest?’ I was aggrieved. I didn’t take it in good part. I don’t consider myself fussy,” said Christopher, with a grandiloquent air, “but there are certain rules, certain laws of hospitality, you
know, which I will stand out for till I perish. And one of these is that no man shall offer his guest bread with mouse-turd on it.”

“My dear Chris, how was I to know——”

“However, we’ll pass over that,” continued Christopher, waving the interruption aside. “I was more than compensated by the sight of Pat spitting out his mouthful into the fire. But the nub of the matter was clear to me at once. I was still hungry. I’d had nothing to eat since lunch-time, and then only a couple of pies in the Bull. And apparently this mouse-turd was the only damned thing available!

“Things were grim. Still, I did not, mark you, lose heart. It takes more than a mouse to get a Warner down. I got up and went out into the corridor, where, I may parenthetically state, I proceeded to micturate. Then I knocked at someone’s door. They said, ‘Come in,’ so I came in. There was some little runt working. ‘Have you’, I said politely, ‘any bread-and-butter, toast or cake?’ He went as red as a turkey and said, ‘No.’ I bowed gracefully and went out. Then I fumbled along to the next door. When I opened this one, the room was in darkness, so I concluded that the man was either in bed or still out, and I put on the light and prepared to investigate his cupboard. Now this is the most curious part of the whole business,” said Christopher impressively. “I went up to that cupboard. I pulled at the door in a sober and sensible way and the whole bloody thing came toppling over forward, very near maiming me for life!”

“Ha, ha, ha!” roared Eddy, slobbering.

“Well, of course, that made a row. I defy anyone to pull over a damn great cupboard without making the devil of a din, and as luck would have it, the man was in bed. At least, he pretty quickly got up and came out into the sitting-room. He was sporting rather an offensive line in blue-and-white pyjamas, I may add, but I decided to let that pass. ‘What the hell are you up to?’ he demanded. Now I admit,” said Christopher, stabbing the air with his cigarette precisely, “I admit that he had, to a certain extent, right on his side. To find one’s cupboard overturned by a perfect stranger in what must have appeared the
middle of the night might conceivably be a shade trying, so I overlooked his tone. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘As a matter of fact, old man, I was wondering if you had any toast, bread-and-butter or cake handy—you see I’ve had no dinner——’ And I never got any further. It was incredible. There was something in what I said—or perhaps even in the way I said it, though, mark you, I spoke in as gentlemanly a manner as I could—there was something, anyway, that seemed to infuriate him. Plainly something had got under his skin. He burst out into a positive torrent of insults. ‘Get out!’ he said”—Christopher made a histrionic flourish— “‘Get out! I’m sick of your noisy, boozing gang. How dare you come into my room and start breaking everything you can lay your hands on?’ And so on and so forth, though I must say I offered to pay for any cups that were cracked or broken.

“But after a while—he didn’t slacken, you know: he seemed to warm to his work rather—after a while I began to take offence. He was being just plain bad-mannered, you know: wasn’t swearing, just being plain rude. I didn’t like his tone. I told him so. I said: ‘I don’t like your tone.’ He told me I could do the other thing. Well, I wasn’t going to stand that,” said Christopher, in a reasonable tone of voice. “After all, one will only stand so much, and I thought this had got beyond a joke. So I slapped his face—and as luck would have it, I just caught the edge of his spectacles and they went
flying
”—Christopher illustrated the arc—“flying right over to the corner of the room. And he came at me like a tiger. Like a bloody tiger. We sparred for an opening”—Christopher made ludicrous sparring movements across the hearthrug—“then I hit him in the eye. And he went down.”

“And stayed down,” finished Patrick.

Christopher drank off his glass of port while Eddy mopped his eyes with a gaily-coloured silk handkerchief. “Oh, lord!” he gurgled. “Damn good, Chris! Damn good!” In fact he liked the story so much that when Semple complained to the Dean and Christopher had to pay three pounds damages, he and some friends of his caught Semple unawares and “crucified” him with croquet hoops over his wrists, ankles and neck on the
College lawn. This caused a great stir, as Semple lay wriggling on the lawn all night and caught bronchitis, but both Christopher and Patrick had been provably out of College that night and obviously had nothing to do with it. Semple went home and with proper care presumably recovered health.

John basked in all this violence as he would in a hot climate. He was excited and admired Christopher without envying him. The week passed unnoticed and when Christopher poked irritably about for John’s essay on the night before their weekly tutorial, John had to confess with a start that he hadn’t touched it yet. Christopher took his hand out of his pocket with an incredulous movement.

“Not touched it?”

“No, I’m afraid I really.… It’s all right, I can cut tomorrow——”

“Can you, hell!”

Christopher approached so that his face came within the immediate circle of the lamp. His expression would have been the same had he detected John in an effort to swindle him out of some money.

“Come on, play the game,” he said, in a threatening voice. “What am I going to do?”

John knocked a pencil against his cheek, still smiling, still unable to grasp that the situation was serious.”

“Oh, you can hash up something.…”

“Look here, Kemp.” Christopher’s voice was harsh now. “This isn’t good enough, ratting like this. Don’t be a louse.”

His broad shoulders filled the light and John, like a swimmer rebreaking the surface after a dive, awoke to fear again. He saw Christopher’s face as Semple must have seen it, tightening to deliver a blow. He began talking quickly:

“All right, give me time. What was the subject? I’ll have it done by ten. If I work tonight I can get it done by ten.”

“Ten? That’s damn late,” said Christopher, nevertheless backing away from him again.

It took John some time to get the incident into perspective, by which time he had written the essay and Christopher, having been too lazy to copy it, had himself cut the tutorial. It revived
in him the memory of the conversation he had overheard. He grew angry with himself and with Christopher. Where there had been indifference to him, there was now resentment. Tears pricked his eyes because he had no means of retaliation—only Jill. He wondered dubiously if that trick would ever work again. The letter had lain around the room for several days, but though John examined it periodically he never found the slightest sign that it had been tampered with. On the evening of the Friday, while Christopher was changing his shirt in front of the fire before dinner, John said ostentatiously, “I suppose I shall have to answer Jill’s letter some time,” and began to write. “Dear Jill,” he wrote. He bit his pen, flushing awkwardly, acutely conscious of the soft sounds of Christopher dressing behind him.

Dear Jill,

Thank you for your letter.

You ask for details—I wish you could be here and see for yourself: it is really impossible for me to tell you everything about this place, and you would enjoy seeing it much more.

He paused again. Christopher had gone into the bedroom to choose a necktie.

I haven’t got used to the fact yet that I’m really-and-truly here. Every time I put on my big black gown I feel an indefinable “frisson” at being a life-size member of Oxford University.

Somehow this was wrong. He started a fresh paragraph.

Nobody does any work here—we all live like lords. I can tell you, I often think of you sweating
—(he crossed this word out and substituted “swotting”)—
away at all your “favourite” subjects while I lounge about here condescending to do perhaps a couple of hours between getting up and going to bed. What do we all do? We are kings in our nutshell. It is so pleasant simply to exist, to breathe the air, to inspect the architecture, to walk beneath the trees, to see the sky reflected in puddles. One could spend a whole morning walking the length of one street—High Street, for instance: “The High,” as we call it here. It runs from the centre of the town.…

He broke off and started another fresh paragraph.

First the tobacconists, with their crested tobacco jars, exotic brands of cigarettes, pipes, little wooden bowls heaped with special blends. Then the music shops, with rows of sound-proof cabinets where one is allowed to spend hours playing selections of the most esoteric records. Then the tailors—such tailors!—whose windows are invariably full of bedragoned silk dressing-gowns, velvet waistcoats with brass buttons, flowery ties, fleecy gloves, where one can linger for twenty minutes turning over, say, a selection of bow-ties, choosing one that takes your fancy. Then the bookshops, that sell old prints for hanging in your rooms, as well as all manner of old and new volumes, the old ones rich in their age, the new ones crisp and …

But above all this, there is a continual parade of fresh buildings as you progress down towards the river. All Souls’, St. Mary’s Church, University College, the Examination Schools, Queen’s, until you come to Magdalen at the bottom, the last and best.…

He tore this second sheet off and turned it over.

As a scholar, one has a certain standing and certain privileges, but also certain obligations towards the less gifted members of the community. Poor Christopher, for instance, with whom I share these rooms, is pathetically dependent on me for his weekly essay. I don’t know how you write essays, but I find I tend to plan them out in my head beforehand almost word for word. Yesterday it was after tea and I still hadn’t made the least sign of putting pen to paper, so he began to get restless. “Look here, what about that essay?” “Yes, yes, in an hour or so, I haven’t thought out the ending yet.’ ‘Come off it, damn the ending, I want some solid dope!” “My dear Christopher, you shall have it by ten o’clock.” “Ten! But I shall be drunk by then!” I pointed out that that was his affair and not mine. To cut a long story a trifle shorter, I drew a line under the last paragraph just as ten was booming out from Tom Tower, and shortly afterwards in stumbled Christopher, fuddled as usual, hiccoughing “Where’s ’at essay?” I pushed it across to him, and while pretending to continue reading my essays of Montaigne, watched him covertly as he spelt it out line by line. When he had finished the first page, he pulled out his fountain pen and then fell asleep. I read for another half-hour, then “turned in”, leaving him sleeping at the table like a child. In consequence, he had to “cut” the tutorial this morning and has just received a very sarcastic note from our tutor.…

As he reached the end of the page John looked round: the room, to his surprise, was empty. The hands of the clock had fallen to nearly twenty-five past seven: Christopher had taken his gown and gone to dinner. John opened his mouth slightly as panic at missing a meal struggled to control him and failed. He looked at what he had written, correcting a spelling mistake, then added hastily at the bottom: