Jill (7 page)

“Not very matey, the other students, are they?” said Whitbread, his knees apart. “Take some getting to know. Of course, you have to choose your friends carefully. No good going about with millionaires.”

“Well, I hardly chose Warner,” said John, flushing slightly.

“No, no, I didn’t mean it personal,” Whitbread protested, looking honestly at him through his metal-rimmed spectacles. “Of course you didn’t. An’ you can’t help but see a good bit of him. But if you take my advice, you’ll let him know where he stands, pretty sharp. Can’t have him mucking up your work.”

“Do you find it easy to work here?”

“Why, yes.” Whitbread was puzzled. They heard the kettle boil over, and as he went out to make the coffee John noticed the surprising stockiness of his shoulders and arms. “I didn’t do anything for the first day till I’d settled a bit. But now I’ve settled into a routine more—why, it’s easy.” He made the coffee by pouring boiling water into two cups, into which he had first added a little coffee essence, and stirring quickly. “My word, you don’t want to be one of these fellows that slacks off as soon as he gets his scholarship. Why, that’s only half t’battle.” He produced a bag of biscuits, and offered them. “I got these from home. Go on, take two.”

They sat sipping and munching, and discussed the scholarships they had won: John found that Whitbread had slightly more a year than he had himself, through his grammar school’s being more richly endowed. “I could make something if I liked,” said Whitbread, with a gnomish grin. “Nothing easier.”

“Why don’t you?”

“Eh, there’s no call to be stingy. Besides, it don’t do to get the reputation of being close. T’dons respect you if you have additional hardships to face, but they don’t like you to be miserly. You’ve got to cut your coat according to your cloth.”

“Yes, of course.”

John lay, a slight figure, in the armchair, holding his coffee-
cup and looking round the room once more. There were no pictures, but a calendar hung over the desk, on which lay an open classical text, a dictionary and some notes. The books in the bookcase were all classical texts, with a few sixpenny editions of popular works and five large scholarly books bearing the arms of the college, borrowed from the library. A card giving the programme for the term of preachers of the University sermons stood on the mantelpiece. Whitbread finished his coffee quickly and made some more. As he was doing so there was a tap on the door and another scholar looked in by the name of Jackson.

“Oh, sorry, I didn’t know you had a visitor.… Have you done with those Tacitus notes?”

“Come in, have some coffee,” said Whitbread, taking another cup from the cupboard and smiling broadly. “Yes, I’ve nearly done.”

“No, if you don’t mind—I’m working—I really mustn’t stop——”

“Ee, come in, just for five minutes. Kemp’s not staying long. I’ll be starting myself at half-past eight.”

So Jackson, who wore a curious stiff collar, came in and sat down, and the three of them sipped the thin coffee and talked about the College. John was surprised by the amount Whitbread knew,, not only about the College’s past history, but about the other undergraduates, the dons and the present conditions in the University itself. He knew, for instance, that Christopher came from Lamprey College, and Lamprey’s exact social status as a public school (which was less high than John had imagined), he knew that the Senior Common Room cellars were better stocked than those of the Junior Common Room; he knew the offences for which men had been debagged in the past; he knew where the ancient silver sconces had been sent in case Oxford was attacked from the air. John was impressed, but also slightly embarrassed: Whitbread’s eagerness was embarrassing: it was like watching a man scouring his plate with a piece of bread.

They broke up when half-past eight struck, Jackson going back to his own room with the Tacitus notes and Whitbread
switching off the main light, so that the room was dark except for a pool of light from the reading lamp on the desk. John watched him unscrew his fountain pen and settle himself in his chair, like a man preparing to answer an examination paper.

“Thanks for the coffee,” he said adding curiously, “How late will you work?”

“Oh, not late—eleven, perhaps.”

John felt his way down the dark stairs, seeing the light under other doors and hearing music from wireless sets, which were allowed to be played till nine o’clock. As he walked round the cloisters to his own room, he felt exceedingly depressed by the glimpse he had been given of this hard, tenacious life, and he was filled with grudging admiration of Whitbread. He remembered his own disciplined study, and raged at his powerlessness to carry it on: he was reminded, too, of his home, and the pride his parents had taken in seeing him work and be rewarded. For the first time since arriving at the College his home life and boyhood seemed vivid to him: he could almost hear the clinking of railway wagons from the sidings below the back garden and the sound of electric bells ringing simultaneously in all the classrooms of his grammar school.

As he went up the steps of staircase fourteen, he decided to work steadily all night till bedtime.

But he found Christopher and Patrick in his room, and Eddy had come round, bringing with him another Old Lampreian by the name of Tony, and although Eddy and Tony had kept their raincoats on, it was clear that they would not leave that evening. It was Christopher’s fault: he sat askew in an armchair, lazily refusing to go out and drink; he had no money, he said. And there was nothing on at the flicks. In the best of humours, he waved a burning cigarette at them all. “You men are restless, nervy types,” he admonished. “Calm yourself, Eddy. Suppress this itch to be on the move. Let’s have a quiet evening at home for once—Patrick, go to the Buttery and get some beer. We’re the hosts.”

“I shall get it all in your name,” said Patrick, leaving the room.

“Patrick’s a mean swine, if there ever was one,” said Eddy, unbuckling the belt of his raincoat. “Have you got enough cigarettes?”

Christopher stretched backwards to pull open one of the desk drawers, and took out a brand-new box that held two hundred. “Yes, he is cussed mean. He’s all right, though. Do you want one?” he added, breaking the seals of the packet and extending it, open.

“Where’s he from?” asked Tony, taking one.

“Nowhere in particular. D’you know, I only found out the other day that he was a Catholic? He goes to Mass on Sunday morning and has to cut breakfast.”

“Damned if I would.”

“No. Still, they get something to eat there.”

As the joke spread in ripples of appreciative chuckling, Eddy and Tony pulled chairs nearer the fire, stretching out their legs and expelling cigarette smoke in long contented breaths. Patrick came back with a large wicker basket full of bottles, which he placed on the hearthrug: John, feeling he should justify his presence in the room, took out some tankards from the cupboard, including one for himself, and handed them round.

“Oh, thanks. old man,” said Christopher. “I say, Pat, did you really put all this down to me?”

“Why not go and have a look?” suggested Patrick, grinning. “Are you overdrawn again?”

“Well, this stuff is blasted dear,” said Christopher complainingly, pulling out dark little bottles of stout. “We shall want an opener. Is there one in the drawer, John?”

There are numerous passages in music where the whole orchestra, which has previously been muttering and trifling along some distracting theme, suddenly collects itself and soars upwards to explode in a clear major key, in a clear march of triumph. Any of these moments would have described John’s feelings exactly as he bent over the drawer, repeating again and again to himself that Christopher had called him by his first name. When he turned round he could hardly keep from smiling. Almost the best part of the joke was his irrelevant
remembrance of Whitbread’s words: “If you take my advice, you’ll let him know where he stands, pretty sharp.”

“Thanks.” Christopher took it carelessly. “Now then, glasses forward.”

“Pale ale for me,” said Eddy.

“Those four there are College Old,” said Patrick, pointing with the stem of his pipe. “I asked Bill for some specially. I’ll have that.”

“Right,” said Christopher, pouring.

Tony—his second name was Braithwaite—was one of the people who become boisterously excited as soon as they take a sip of anything alcoholic. Holding out his glass tankard in both hands, he laughed till his fair wavy hair flopped uncontrolledly, his broad shoulders heaving. “And do you remember when Potty Hurst brought that white rabbit in, and the thing just sat in the middle of the floor, too scared to budge?”

“Lord, yes; I’d forgotten Potty Hurst.”

“And Baxter thought it was a bit of white paper, and bent down to pick it up. The thing jumped ten yards, and old Baxter had such a fright he banged his head on a desk.”

The conversation continued to circle around Lamprey College, and Patrick (the only person, bar John, who was not a Lampreian) sat filling his pipe with a sardonic smile, cramming the hanging ends into the bowl expertly, and rolling up his pouch with care. “I remember we had rather a good rag at our place. The trouble is, I really can’t remember how or why it started. I know a rotten little rat of a prae fell foul of our dorm—something about a House game, I think it was.”

The others listened contentedly, their eyes not on him.

“At any rate, a gang of us—four or five—called round on him one night after lights-out in his room—praes had separate rooms at our place—and shaved his bush off.”

Eddy gave a cackle. “I’m damned,” he said. Patrick grinned at them.

“We kept it up that we were going to castrate him, you know. Lord, I’ve never seen a man so white. Absolutely as white as paper, white as this bloody wall. And there was damn-
all he could do about it, either. It’s not exactly the kind of thing——”

“Ha, ha, ha!” roared Tony. “My God, no.”

“Of course, old Chris was a man for night work,” Eddy said, rubbing one eye with his finger. “Every night after lights out, you’d hear Christopher’s bed creak. ‘Where are you off to, Chris?’ ‘Oh, just a stroll round.’ Couple of hours later: ‘That you, Chris?’ ‘Sure thing.’ ‘Where was it tonight?’ ‘Oh, round and about.’ ‘Have a good time?’ ‘Fair to middling, thanks.’ Fair to middling. Ha, ha, ha! He was a close devil, was Chris.”

Christopher sat smiling softly, like one who is being praised. “Ah, those were the days,” he murmured. “Sound stuff.”

The glowing structure of embers in the grate collapsed, and Patrick added coal and two small logs, knocking out his pipe and relighting it. Sprawled in attitudes of enjoyment, the four of them lazily kept the conversation going, giving the impression of speaking on this subject for want of a better. Their stories were lustful and playfully savage, and John found they had extreme physical effect on him. He sat crouched on a hard chair, his fists clenched on his knees, gripped by an unreasoning terror that seized him whenever he heard of experiences that would have left him dumb. The life they described was intensely primitive to him. He tried to imagine himself set down amongst it, but blackness fortunately descended on his imagination before he could savour the whole impossibility of it. The astonishing thing was that he could catch here and there a note of regret in their voices, a nostalgia even. In the intervals of comparing notes and customs, they would sigh and gaze sadly at the fire, as if they were exiles gathered together far from their homes. And little by little John himself came to understand their sorrow, as what they had lost became clearer in his mind. To him it was wild and extravagant, a life that was panoplied and trampling compared with his own: it seemed to him that in their schooldays they had won more than he would ever win during the whole of his life. At first ill-treated, they had lived to be oppressors whose savagest desire could be gratified at once, which was surely the height of ambition. As
the picture grew in his mind, he ornamented it with little marginal additions, until in the end the thing was an unreal as a highly-coloured picture of an ancient battle, but he had no inkling of its untruth, and he looked on them with curious respect. The pimply Eddy; Christopher, dark and unshaven as a boxer; the selfish and smiling Patrick, and even Tony Braithwaite—all took on a picturesqueness in his eyes, as if they were veterans of an old war.

Later in the evening, when nearly all the beer had been drunk, a quarrel broke out between Eddy and Christopher about money. Christopher insisted that Eddy owed him fifteen shillings, and he only contradicted Eddy’s denials with a perverse smile, lying back in his armchair and kicking Eddy repeatedly on the shin with each contradiction.

“Chuck that,” said Eddy.

“Give me that fifteen bob.”

“I said chuck that, you——”

Eddy leant forward suddenly and gripped Christopher’s ankle, jumping up and dragging him off his chair with a bump on to the floor. The others started up in alarm. Eddy, exerting all his force, managed to keep Christopher’s foot high in the air, grinning down at him the while.

“There, you fool——”

But with a sudden wrench and twist, Christopher got Eddy’s legs, and the two of them rolled furiously about the carpet, knocking over a half-full bottle. The air was full of their panting and oaths as they struck at one another with intent to hurt, for they were both rather drunk. John stood behind his chair nervously, while Patrick leant against the chimneypiece, hands in his pockets.

Christopher was much the stronger and in a moment had a wrestler’s hold on Eddy, pushing his head down so that he was powerless, his neck and ears growing a deep crimson. With a sudden exultance Christopher threw his whole weight on the grip, and Eddy screamed, and Tony took a step forward, raising his hand, but in a few seconds the whole incredible scene had dissipated. Eddy squatted on the hearthrug, sticking his horseshoe tiepin into his tie again, saying, “God, Chris,
you are a swine,” while Christopher stood before the mirror combing his hair, and John picked up three pennies and a propelling pencil that had fallen during the struggle. As he put them on the table, he noticed his own unused glass tankard: Christopher had not noticed he had taken one and had not offered him any beer.