Muttering to herself, Miss Calvert studied the paper for a space. At last she said, "I think "Culture is the most profitable export." Discuss with reference—"
"Oh yes. Well, suppose you take that as your subject for next week." This favourite tactic not only gratified his perennial need, strangely exacerbated today, to avoid having to think up essay subjects whenever remotely possible, it also relieved him, having just marked several exam answers on the topic, from the slightest mental exertion about it till next week came, if then. He tried to turn his complacent grin into a smile of friendly dismissal, but before the process was finished felt his face stiffen at the tone of the girl's next remark.
"Mr Richardson .... 'you' know that article of yours in JPCH you asked us to look at? On Ionian trade-routes?"
"Yes?"
"Well, the copy in the Bodleian's all .... well, people have been writing things on it."
"Writing things? What sort of things?"
"Like graffiti."
"Really."
"I sort of thought you ought to know."
Malice or goodwill? Those two should on the face of it be no trouble to tell apart, but not much thought was necessary to recall that in practice they mixed as readily and in as widely-varying proportions as coffee and milk, no sugar, no third element, needed. But then what of it? He would look in at the library on the way to or from his lecture the next morning; for now, he thanked Miss Calvert, gave her her script back and sent her off, noticing at the last moment that she bore a handbag like a miniature pack-saddle, all flaps and buckles. He watched out of the window to see if she tossed the script over her shoulder as she left, but she held on to it at least until after she had vanished into the tunnel. Her walk showed that their interview had entirely left her mind.
12—I Have Heard of Your Paintings Too
Jake stood at the window in thought, though not of any very purposeful description, for a couple of minutes. It took him as long to make quite sure that the locked drawer of his desk was indeed locked, secured, made fast, proof against anything short of another key or a jemmy. Then he collected himself and went into the bedroom to unpack. It was small and dark but dry and not particularly draughty, and had in it the only decent object in the set, the bed that filled about a third of it, his own property from long ago and as such safe from the Domestic Bursar's depredations. By the time he had finished in here and glanced through his notes for the next day, the chapel clock, the nearest among innumerable others, was striking six. He slung his gown over his shoulder and sauntered across the grass, looking about at the buildings, which had once been attributed to Nicholas Hawksmoor; recent research, after the fashion of a lot of recent research, had disproved this without producing any certain reattribution. Never mind: they were pleasing to the eye for two sufficient reasons—someone had put them up well before 1914, and no one, out of apathy, lack of money, instinctive conservatism or sometimes even perhaps deficiency of bad taste, had laid a hand on their exterior since except to clean them. Until about a quarter of a century back, Jake had had no architectural sense that he knew of but, like every other city-dweller in the land with eyesight good enough to get about unaided, he had acquired one since all right, had one doled out to him willy-bloody-nilly. So it was no great wonder that he halted and looked about all over again before entering the staircase in the far corner.
Here, on the first floor, there lived an English don called Damon Lancewood, like Ernie in being an almost exact contemporary of Jake's but unlike him in an incalculable number of ways. One of the fewer ways in which he was unlike Jake has already been mentioned: he lived where Jake only popped in and out. Lancewood belonged to the lonely and diminishing few who still treated college as home. It was true that he had a cottage near Dry Sandford and also true, while less well known, that he was joined there most week-ends by the owner of a small business in Abingdon, a man of fifty or so to whom he had been attached for the past twenty-two years.
Jake knocked at the door, which had a handsome brass fingerplate and other furniture on it, and obeyed the summons to come in. He saw that Lancewood had somebody with him and spoke up at once.
"I'm sorry Damon, I didn't realise you were—"
"No no no, my dear Jake, I was expecting you. I'd like you to meet a colleague of mine...."
Introductions were made. Jake failed to gather or shortly forgot the Christian name and college of the visitor, a tall longhaired sod in his thirties, but caught the surname-Smith. Lancewood, himself tall but with neatly cut white hair and a bearing and manner of dress that suggested a retired general rather than a don, turned his blank-looking gaze on Jake.
"I think you could do with a glass of sherry."
"I think so too. Thank you."
Quite possibly it was Jake's sherry: he brought Lancewood a bottle now and then, a much nicer arrangement for everyone than returning hospitality in his own place. It came in a solid bit of glass that went with the way the room was fitted up, which in turn reflected its occupant's military style: nothing overtly martial or imperial but suggestive of bungalow here, club there, mess somewhere else, the many pictures showing horses, dogs, an occasional parrot or monkey, what could have been a troopship, what could have been a cantonment, portraits of dark-skinned persons no one had the authority to say were not sometime servants. They even included three or four watercolours of aggressively English scenes given that niggling, almost effeminate treatment characteristic of men of action.
"Thank God," said Jake, sipping. "I've just been closeted with a female pupil."
Lancewood cocked his head. "Was that such an ordeal for you?" This question Ernie would have understood perfectly, though his phrasing of it would have been quite different.
"You don't know her." Jake was beginning to feel like an inefficient impostor, constantly putting his foot through his cover. "Attractive enough, I ..."—no, not suppose—"grant you, but—well, you know the sort. A kind of celestial indifference to being seen to be, oh, lazy, stupid, ignorant, illiterate, anything you please."
"Do you find the women worse than the men in that way?" asked Smith in an expressive adenoidal voice.
"I hadn't really thought about it," said Jake, who if he had been strictly truthful would have gone on to say that now he had had a second and a half to think about it of course he bloody did.
"Well I bloody do," said Smith. "As a matter of fact we were on that very point when you turned up. Naturally Damon was taking the opposite view. He seems to have some sort of thing about women."
"Indeed I have. Which reminds me of one of my favourite ones. How's my darling Brenda?"
"Fighting fit," said Jake. And hay, he added silently.
"John had a rotten cold with all this vile weather but he's fine again now."
This was of course the Abingdon chap. "Good, give him my love," said Jake, registering the adroit passing of the message that Smith knew about that. He (Jake) surmised that that sort of adroitness came in jolly handy for people like Lancewood, must be well worth the trouble of acquiring.
Lighting a French cigarette, Smith pursued his point. "I mean, the levels to which they'll sink. And go on sinking because they stay the same and the problem stays the same, which is: a whole literature, six hundred years" worth, and virtually all of it written by male chauvinists. So, Wordsworth was no good because he abandoned Annette Vallon, no good as a poet that is, the Brontes and George Eliot went over to the enemy by adopting male pseudonyms so they were no good, Doll Tearsheet is the heroine of 'Henry IV', Part 2 at least, and of course the real—"