"It's exactly what they're like. I didn't know anybody else had realised, it's never been said, not in my hearing anyway. Absolutely hit it off to a T. When you get past all the poise and the knowingness and the intimacy there's a tiny alien particle that doesn't understand." It came to Jake that he had been speaking with some warmth and he altered his tone. "You'll have to bear with a very ancient historian who spends most of his time coping with drop-outs from Kettering Catering College. Well, what a rarity, listening to two dons discussing their subject," and so on and so forth.
Not long afterwards Lancewood suggested that they should go over. Smith asked for a quick pee and was shown where. As soon as possible Jake said,
"Damon, what's a wanker?"
Lancewood hunched his shoulders with a jerk, showing that as well as being amused by the question lie wasn't totally surprised by it. Again in a way uncharacteristic of dons, or perhaps of the popular idea of them, he spent no time on prolegomena but went straight to what was intended.
"These days a waster, a shirker, someone who's fixed himself a soft job or an exalted position by means of an undeserved reputation on which he now coasts."
"Oh. Nothing to do with tossing off then?"
"Well, connected with it, yes, but more metaphorical than literal."
"That's a relief. Up to a point. Well. I got called it today."
"No really? By that pupil of yours?"
"No, by that picket of women's-lib women at the gate."
"Oh yes of course. It's quite clever, all that, their campaign to make people feel old and senile and clapped out and impotent—that's where the literal part of wanker comes in.!
"Clever? As a means of persuading us to admit women?"
"Certainly. I can think of several colleagues of our sort of age who'd be troubled and frightened by such treatment and inclined to do what they could to put a stop to it. Can't you?"
"I suppose so."
"Have you had anything unpleasant though the post? I gather there's been a certain amount of that."
"Yes, today I was sent a...."
Although Jake considered Lancewood one of his closest as well as oldest friends he found himself perfectly unable to tell him what he had been sent that day. Luckily Smith came back just then and the three set off. In the quad a fine drizzle was falling, so fine that it hardly had the weight to fall and wandered almost horizontally. The zenith was a weak grey but the sun showed for a moment or two. Lancewood mentioned that the question had come up of the admission of women to men's colleges.
"Oh yes, you're one of the last-ditch trio here, aren't you?" said Smith. "Comyns, Merton and Oriel. Rather grand in a way."
"How long have you been letting them in at your place?" asked Jake.
"Oh, we haven't let them 'in,' what do you take us for? At the end of "75 we published a Declaration of Intent that declared our intent to do something or other about it some time, and since then we've been consulting away like mad, pretty well without stopping, the JCR, the porters and the rest of the staff, the other colleges in our awards group, and the women's colleges of course, bloody funny that, and it all seems to have cooled off. We might just ride it out until the next thing turns up, World War III or whatever it might be. I often think my namesake in Rhodesia could have done with a touch of the Oxford spirit."
"What's bloody funny about the women's colleges?"
"What? Oh, just our Governing Body is about as solidly against the idea as any, nearly all for Victorian anti-feminist reasons in effect, and there they are or were in a secret alliance with the crowd who want to block it for Victorian feminist reasons. Like something out of who, Damon, C. P. Snow?"
"Or Shaw. Jake," said Lancewood rather patiently, "letting women into the men's colleges will damage the women's colleges for ten or twenty years, perhaps longer, because they'll only get the men and the women the men's colleges don't want. 'Jake,' because no man or woman is going to go to St Anne's when he or she could go to Balliol."
"I'm sorry, I don't seem to have been keeping up with things."
"It's tough," said Smith, evidently alluding to the likely state of the women's colleges, "but overall the case in favour is unanswerable."
"I thought you didn't care for women undergraduates, at least in your own subject," said Jake.
"As they stand I don't." Smith seemed slightly cross. "That's the whole point. Living and working among the men is bound to improve them. It's the only way they'll ever forget they're women and start behaving like, I know, not students, but—"
"You make them all sound the same," said Lancewood, seeming slightly cross himself. "Anyway, it'll mean the end of this."
This must have been in the first place the Senior Common Room, where they had just arrived. Considerable parts of the building that embodied it dated from the fifteenth century; the room itself had been radically reconstructed in the 1870s under the influence of a Master of advanced artistic taste, and was well known to those interested in such matters for its carved pillars, multi-coloured floor tiles, authentic Morris wallpaper and pair of stained-glass windows depicting respectively The Progress of Art and The Progress of Science. There were also some paintings from that period, a Burne-Jones, two Poynters, a Calderon, a Simeon Solomon and others and, from an earlier one, a Romney of an otherwise unnoted Fellow of the college; recent research had been at that too, though so far without managing to dislodge the reputed artist. Jake had liked the room and its furniture on sight in 1936, when his tutor had invited him up to dessert, and still did, despite certain changes he could not now have defined.
Its occupants for the moment were rather less to his taste, starting with Roger Dollymore, the Senior Tutor, and an elderly chemist called Wynn-Williams. Jake went over to them not because he much wanted to but to give Smith and Lancewood, whom he hoped to sit with in Hall, a rest from him meanwhile. Little enough was required of him by the other two, who seemed quite happy, or not significantly more unhappy than might have been expected, telling each other about the plays they had seen in London during the vacation. Jake thought briefly how he hated plays, then tried to remember how each of them stood on the women-in-or-out thing. He knew how they ought to stand if they had any sense; all he could remember about Wynn-Williams's wife was that she was impossible, but he knew Naomi Dollymore fairly well, or had done in the days when there were dinner-parties, and could have gone on for quite a long time without repeating himself about her readiness to share most details of her experience, recent or remote, with whoever she might be talking to, not in Alcestis pseudo-sequential, fool's-anecdote style but by as free a process of association as you could hope to come across. So both husbands ought to be ready to lay down their lives for the status quo: the feminisation of college, once begun, would lead irresistibly to the taking-over of common-room and High-Table life, of college life, by the wives. Just imagine the Way....
"What?" said Jake. "I'm sorry?"
"I said," said Dollymore in his sheep's voice, the only one he had, "where are you going."
"What? Well at the moment I...."
"Away. Abroad." Wynn-Williams might have been a Shakespearean king or other hero encouraging his followers into the saddle but of course he wasn't really, he just sounded like an old-style actor. "We go to Venice at the end of June."
"Naomi and I have rather fallen out of love with Venice," said Dollymore. His interest in Jake's holiday plans had perhaps never been deep. "So commercialised and full of Americans. That is the perennial struggle, to find a place that isn't. Naomi and I have been moving on almost every year for .... years. We've been driven out of one Greek island after another. It seems Nisiros is still comparatively unspoiled." After a long pause he went on at a reduced speed, "Though I'm sure it's very different nowadays from .... from the time when..."