Jill (21 page)

“Yes, but——”

“We have the central club, you see, the main club with meetings every week to discuss questions of immediate general interest, when we get a speaker of pretty good reputation, as a rule. You’ll have seen the posters——”

“Oh, yes, but——”

“But in addition to that, we try to do something on our own. So many clubs just meet every week in order to be talked at—I won’t mention any names, but you probably know the kind I mean. Now we subdivide into college groups—each college, you see, has a discussion group and every term each group takes a certain question and examines it from all angles. Different members take different aspects. Let’s suppose, for the sake of argument, that our College group is discussing India. Then I take, say, the administration; you might take the aims and methods of the Nationalist Party; someone else would take the different religious bodies and their different political attitudes, and so on and so forth. In this way we get what is virtually a team of experts, each one making it his business to know all he possibly can about his particular subject. And we all pool our knowledge by reading a paper to the rest of the group each.”

“I——”

“Already, you see, you’re not just a rank-and-file member of the club—for that term you are the specialist on whatever particular subject you’ve been studying, and can pull the speaker up at club meetings if he goes off the rails. You have some sort of a position already. You see, we try to
do
something.”

“Yes, I see, but——”

“And after all, who is going to do it if we don’t? When this
war’s over, there’s going to be an enormous demand for well-informed, intelligent people to run groups and hold meetings in order to see that the politicians don’t go and make the same old mistakes all over again. A sort of advance-guard of the new world order.”

“Er—I——”

“Now, won’t you come along to the open tea meeting this afternoon? We’re very lucky—the President is coming along to talk to new and prospective members.”

“Well—it all sounds most interesting.… Where will it be?”

“In my rooms—you know. You might like to bring along pencil and paper, or think up some questions to ask. The half-term subscription is two bob.”

“Yes—if I can—but I’ve got to go now—appointment——”

And he managed to slip away, half running out into the quadrangle before he realized that of course that extraordinary clarity of perception that had been vouchsafed him for a few moments had gone, utterly gone. When he had pencil and paper in his room, nothing presented itself to his mind except a flat dullness, like a grey stone wall, and sighing he put them down and lent back on the sofa with his hands behind his head.

Shortly afterwards Eddy looked in, wearing a tweed cap, which he took off and threw on to the table.

“Chris not in?”

“I think he’s playing squash——”

“Ah,” said Eddy, settling in the armchair. “Mind if I wait.”

He put an unlit cigarette between his loose lips and stretched his legs, so that one of his feet knocked against John’s ankle, an action for which he did not apologize. John put away Jill’s diary and, having buttoned up his overcoat, went wearily out, not knowing where he was going or for how long. In the College lodge there was a letter for him from the Dean of the College, inviting him to tea at his house on Sunday: John noticed an identical envelope for Whitbread also. He put it away in his pocket.

Everyone at the cinema seemed in twos, threes or fours and, despite himself, when the lights went up, he was thinking about
Christopher and Elizabeth, half excusing the casual conversation he had overheard. He found it hard to recall the exact words, but had they, after all, been so insulting? Hadn’t they had some friendliness in them, patronizing, perhaps, but a certain good-humoured toleration? Elizabeth had not been round lately, for both she and Patrick had been occupied with some cousin who was staying in the town, so Christopher had occasionally chatted to John in a friendly manner and John had answered him quite affably and humbly. Perhaps the way they had spoken about him was the way they spoke about everybody; not significant of anything, but amiable amusement.

He felt as a child feels who has in a fit of temper run out of a game, and, looking round, watches the game still going on despite his absence, and is filled with a desire to rejoin it.

As he sat drinking tea in a cheap and rather dirty café, however, he experienced such a pang of absolute self-disgust that he wondered how he was going to live another hour. It was impossible to make friends with Christopher and Elizabeth, and that was the only thing he wanted to do, now that he had awoken hopelessly from his attempt to build a world around Jill. He knew that one more world had crumbled to bits under his hand. He paid a waitress in a grubby overall pinned at the hip, and walked out.

His footsteps turned naturally towards the College, but he remembered in time the political tea-meeting and stopped short. Ancient buildings were all around him; a few people in overcoats hurried this way and that; a girl on a bicycle fled by, as if escaping. A few cars were parked down the broad street and a dozen lights showed from a nearby college. A Negro passed him dressed in an enormous fur coat, wearing gold-rimmed spectacles and carrying an ivory walking-cane: John stood and stared vaguely after him, the wind stirring his hair, then with a sudden useless decision, he pushed open the glass-panelled door of a large bookshop, hoping to find something cheap enough for him to buy, and ready to enjoy the smell of the books, the electric light shining on glossy pages and the subdued tapping of a typewriter from behind an office door. He moved
thoughtfully from shelf to shelf, here and there taking a book to inspect it, not enviously, but with a distant curiosity. From the desk came the clink of coins and polite murmured inquiries.

Then as he was absently fingering the edges of an uncut page with a transient sense of frustration, his glance wandered along the aisle where he was standing and he received a shock that could not have been greater if a brick had been thrown through the plate-glass shop-window.

He saw Jill.

She stepped out from behind an alcove, working her way slowly along the shelves, moving eventually in his direction. For a moment she bobbed back into the alcove for a second look at an unseen book, but then reappeared, shifting gradually along the cases.

It was not a question of thinking: that girl is something like Jill. There was nothing casual in the resemblance: it was so exact that for a second his mind could not remember who it was, this over-familiar face. And he was too bewildered to think as the realization came upon him.

It was her hair, the colour of dark viscous honey, her serious face, her wild high cheekbones. Little hollows appeared and reappeared under these because, as John saw when he approached, she was whistling very softly. Her winter coat hung open and blue woollen gloves were stuffed into the pockets. Instead of stockings, she wore little socks, and her hands, now that she had taken a book down and was turning the pages—were small, bony and not well-cared-for. As John drew near to her, she glanced up at him and backed a few paces absently to allow him room to pass.

An interval elapsed, during which time John, making no effort to pass, stood staring at her. It was absurd, laughable, unbelievable. Then for a second time she looked up and met his wide eyes with her grey, utterly strange ones. Both of them, both so young-looking, stared at one another.

“I——” John began hurriedly, then paused. “You—er——Haven’t we met before, somewhere?”

She gave a tiny frown and said quickly:

“No, I don’t think so, not as far as I know.”

He did not realize she was nervous, imagining her to be snubbing him curtly. He blushed, flustered.

“Oh, then, I’m sorry.… I thought.…”

She gave a quick half-laugh.

“I’m sure I don’t know you,” she said, and lifted her book to close the argument.

Nobody had noticed the incident. John, still standing there, knew that he had to apologize and move away. Yet it was only on the reflex of his embarrassment that he did so, because it was all so ridiculous, he wanted to make her admit she knew him, to confess he hardly knew what. The sight of her awkward girl’s body afflicted him with a fearful longing, like some call of destiny. He had been ready for anything except non-recognition.

From behind another case he took stock of her again, hastily making sure by shutting his eyes and opening them again, that his impression remained undisturbed. This made his emotion all the keener: from wanting to laugh, he passed naturally into wanting to cry, to sob with a kind of relief. For above his astonishment, his humiliation, a grander feeling surged: that of thankfulness. He felt like a sailing ship running home into the estuary of a river after a long sea-journey.

But she was drifting away. She had slid the book back carelessly on to the shelf and was dragging slowly down the aisle between the shelves, her eyes on the titles of books, but her hands pulling out the blue woollen gloves in preparation to go for good. He lurked behind her. Architecture did not detain her, nor did cookery, nor music. John pushed all other questions aside in his resolution to follow her. She drifted to the door and pulled it open: outside in the November dusk a horse and cart were going by and down the street several shops had lighted windows before closing up. She walked away, doing up her coat and pulling her gloves on, and he followed, fifteen yards behind, trying to interpret every swing of her step. Once he had fallen into line behind her, he felt absolved from all decisions, satisfied by this mere act of devotion.

She walked slowly up the street, not looking back. He
quickened his pace till her fawn coat was within ten yards, anxious to reassure himself by the sight of her face that she remained who he thought she was, that it had not all been some fantastic trick of light. But it would be silly to get too close to her. What with eagerness and fear, his heart beat steadily and he found he was sweating under his clothes, as if he were hunting some rare and sensitive animal.

What actually happened had the deliberate tantalizing quality of a dream. She crossed the road to a cycle park which was arranged along one side of a small churchyard, bent to unlock the padlock from the back wheel, slipped the chain and lock into the saddlebag, screwed the flashlight till it came on, and scooted away into the dusk before rising fully into the saddle. He saw her pass the Martyrs’ Memorial, glance quickly about her for converging lines of traffic and pedal away out of sight. She was a hundred yards away in a minute.

He automatically ran after her, pelting as hard as he could go up the north-going road, knocking into people who were walking home after shopping or a day’s work. He ran fully three hundred yards up the road leading out of the town towards Banbury, between the lines of residential houses built in the last century, with gardens and trees overhanging the road, then he slowed down to a walk, brisk and useless. He knew it was useless. But what else could he do? He nourished a hope that she might turn back for some reason or have paid a call at one of these houses, so that he would see the bike waiting outside and be able to wait himself. In any case, he was too excited to go quietly home to sit in his room.

As he walked he turned the matter over in a bewildered mind, illogically, taking first one aspect of it and then hastily rushing to a different standpoint, making no effort to connect the two. Here, then, she was. Disconcertingly, the idea that he had concocted out of the world’s sight had suddenly showed itself as ordinary flesh and blood, as real, calling for real action on his part. What was he going to do?

She was real, then, and had a name and address. How was he going to find them out? He looked about him. The gutters were
filled with leaves and an absence of traffic allowed a stillness to brood over the front gardens, where there still remained a few Michaelmas daisies and late dahlias. Any one of these houses might be her home: he stared at them enviously, and the lighted front room with sometimes a white table-cloth laid for tea. There was nobody about, except for a maidservant who came out to post a letter, running to a pillar-box with a coat slung over her shoulders. In what crescent or deserted avenue had she at last jumped off her bicycle, opening the wooden gate carefully so as not to let the dog out?

He stopped under a tree, looking this way and that. And if he found her name and address, what then? He would not dare to approach her again after his rudeness that afternoon. All that would remain for him to do would be to discover her real life, to follow her about and not be noticed, to make lists of the clothes she wore and the places she went to, to make her the purpose of his life once more, now that he had just begun sniffing enviously again at the society of Christopher Warner and Elizabeth Dowling. In this quest his loneliness would be an asset: it would be mobility and even charm.

He was awake before daybreak next morning, lying excitedly in bed and looking forward to the day in front of him. As he dressed, he took pains with his appearance, tied his bow and put some oil on his hair. There were kippers for breakfast, a circumstance which Whitbread greatly appreciated, and he showed great skill in dissecting his own portion, talking to John as he chewed.

“It’s a knack, you know,” he said. “I’ve an uncle, now, who can get every bone out of a kipper in a hundred seconds. I’ve timed him, while he did it. And you couldn’t find a single one afterwards, large or small, not after he’d been through it. You just have to know where to look.”

John removed a handful of bones from his mouth.

“There’s the Bursar,” continued Whitbread, as the don entered the Hall by the upper door and sat down at High Table. A wartime regulation caused many of the dons living in College to breakfast communally, and the Bursar availed himself of the
provision with almost defiant regularity. “He looks as if he had a thick night. Too much S.C.R. port, I’ll lay.”

“That reminds me,” said John hurriedly, “I’ve a note for you. It was in the lodge last night and I wasn’t in to dinner. It’s from the Dean—most likely an invitation to tea. I’m sorry I forgot it.”