‘He broke in and tidied your room?’ said Dee. She looked around. It was certainly neater than usual.
Jolyon shrugged. ‘Maybe I should start thinking about locking my door. But I was only going to be two minutes getting cigarettes.’
‘Did he take anything?’ said Emilia.
‘No. Nothing.’
‘Just tidied up?’
‘That’s right.’
Chad let out a boozy bar-room snort. ‘Did he do a good job?’ he said.
‘Superb,’ said Jolyon.
‘Man, that does it for me,’ said Chad. ‘That guy is a freak.’
XLII(ii) Jack and Jolyon stood either side of Chad as they walked him.
In Jolyon’s room, Chad had finished the drink in a single gulp. Now he looked up at the latticed windows surrounding back quad and smiled as their diamonds of lead softened and the glass shifted woozily as if in a heat haze. The flags at the side of the tower were still and the rosettes of the college crest took on the appearance of eyes above a beaming chevron mouth. They walked through the passageway beneath Loser’s Leap and the chill of old stone soothed him. The world was cushioned and soft, he felt a sense of velvet, of feather-down and candlelight. He thought about his date later, remembering the milk running down Mitzy’s honey-nut legs, cute enough. This feeling had been mounting for days, Mitzy becoming sweeter the more he reasoned it through.
They walked back into the light and Chad felt Jolyon steady him gently at the elbow. The liaison officer had been insistent on the subject of dress code. Only subfusc was appropriate and the borrowed suit was snug to Chad’s body while the black gown above it flapped loosely as they walked. The white bow tie pinched the white shirt to his neck but it felt less uncomfortable now. The grass of the lawn was vivid in the late-winter sun and the heels of Chad’s dress shoes rang out in the stone theatre of front quad.
The liaison officer was waiting halfway up the steps. ‘Good show, good show,’ he said. ‘Brought some friends for moral support. Excellent, excellent. More the merrier.’ With a sweeping gesture he indicated the door to the Great Hall. ‘Shall we?’
As the liaison officer led the way, Jolyon removed something from his pocket and handed it to Chad. ‘Technically I’m not supposed to give this to you until after,’ he said. ‘But I thought it might bring you luck,’ he said.
Chad turned over the small piece of paper he had pulled from the pot five days earlier. ‘LUCKY JIM’ it said in large letters. ‘Thanks, Jolyon,’ he said, putting it in his pocket.
‘You’re going to do great, Chad,’ said Jolyon, ‘don’t worry about a thing. And if anything happens, I’ll be there, OK?’
Chad nodded gratefully.
‘Come on then,’ said the liaison officer, beckoning. ‘The rest of you should go in now. The warden’s ready to begin introductions. I’ll take care of Mr Mason here in the vestibule.’ He closed the ornate door and then he and Chad were alone amid the tawny panels and gold-framed oils. ‘Any jitters, Mr Mason?’ he said.
‘No way, José,’ said Chad.
The liaison officer flinched at the odd choice of words. But Susan Leonard really was a hugely well-endowed institution. And if one of their presumptuous Americans truly desired to give a speech in the Great Hall, then he supposed everyone was just bloody well going to have to fall into line.
XLII(iii) The Great Hall was far from crowded. There were three of Chad’s tutors, one of whom he was yet to meet, and the warden. There were the Americans, Mitzy and Jenna and Fredo. There were the four other players and Tallest and a handful of students whom Jolyon had talked into attending. The hall could have accommodated two hundred and there were maybe twenty or thirty, all of them bunched toward the far end where next to high table a lectern had been erected. As Chad walked the length of the hall a few heads turned. Mitzy beamed.
There was a video camera on a tripod. ‘Don’t worry about that thing,’ the liaison officer said. ‘I thought the benevolent Ms Leonard might be interested in a recording.’
There was a flutter of polite applause as they neared high table.
His charge delivered, the liaison officer waved to the warden who rose and said a few words concerning vitality and transatlantic cooperation and intellectual stimuli. He then expressed his huge disappointment that he was unable to stay and his shoes chimed his exit as he left, headed no doubt to the considerably greater enjoyment of a pipe in his quarters that lay in the opposite corner of front quad.
And there he was, Theodore Chadwick Mason, the boy from the swine-stead, game player, mouse, innocent, survivor, standing at a lectern in one of the world’s foremost centres of academia, nine parts drunk.
Chad looked down at the notes resting on the ledge. They had been typed up under more sober circumstances and he could read the title clearly because it was in a bold font and a large point size. ‘The United States, Britain and the Special Relationship: A Personal Perspective’. However, the text beneath it was lighter and smaller. And also moving erratically. In fact the text appeared to be behaving in a deliberately contrary manner. If Chad chased it to the left, it would skip to the right. If he moved his nose closer, the words would dissolve. Nose further back and the letters reassembled but then dropped away as if peered at through the wrong end of a pair of binoculars.
But this was precisely why Chad had memorised the speech.
‘Hi,’ he said, ‘I’m Chad. How’s it going?’ And then he laughed at himself for using such informality in so grand a place. His audience laughed along, even the three tutors. It was a good enough start.
‘The United States, Britain and the Special Relationship: A Personal Perspective,’ he said.
The drink seemed to be gathering at the top of Chad’s head in a layer about two fingers thick. But this left enough of his mind to recall his words and transfer them into speech. Although for some reason he appeared to be pronouncing certain sentences in a strange English accent.
The timbers of the hammerbeam roof were as dramatic as a thunderous sky, great arches and braces and posts and a tremendous sense of mass, of something unsustainable so high and so old. The glowering weight, the dim brooding of the dark timber, made Chad feel uneasy. And though he knew it unlikely that a roof that had been there for many centuries was about to collapse, he began to feel exposed and vulnerable. He shifted his focus to the ornate screen at the hall’s far end, as intricate as lace doilies, and continued to gather more lines from his memory.
‘And so for those first few weeks in a new country, you notice a thousand small and new and exciting differences that a month later must still be all around you but to which you have now acquired a spined blot.’
Chad stopped. He had just said ‘blind spot’, hadn’t he? He let his eyes unfocus and his inner ear loop back through his last sentence. No, in fact it seemed he had actually said ‘spined blot’.
Jenna and Mitzy and Fredo were laughing. They were good people trying to make everyone else in the crowd believe this had been a deliberate joke. But the three tutors weren’t laughing, they were shifting in their seats. One of them had crossed his arms, the second was pinching his brow, the head of the third was turned away completely.
Chad decided not to look at his crowd but instead to address his words to the side of the hall, the walls lined with paintings. Portraits of college founders and bygone luminaries, bewigged men of centuries long past. Chad had the vague sense of breaking off from what he was saying to point out a Pilgrim-style hat. And then he seemed to be imitating Emilia’s northern accent, although he couldn’t piece together the sound of her voice in his head any more. He sounded Canadian, or maybe Indian, or like a man impersonating the way a cow might talk.