That was a change. But it made no difference to the curious tang that the court gave one in October, quite independent of one’s deeper moods, springy, pungent, a shade wistful. Was that climatic, or was it because the academic year had the perverse habit of beginning in the autumn? Anyhow, it had been pleasurable when I lived there, and was so visiting the place that night.
The guest room lay immediately under my old sitting-room, and it was up the stairs outside that callers used to climb, as light-footed as Roy Calvert, or ponderous as Arthur Brown, during various bits of college drama. Not that I thought twice, or even once, about that. It was fairly early in the evening, but I had some letter-writing to do. It was already too late to get a written answer to the private office by the time I had promised: but all day I had been half muddling through, half planning that I could telephone the secretary (that is, the principal private secretary) in time enough, and have the letter reach him tomorrow.
I waited till seven o’clock before I called on Francis. The first hall-sitting was noisy, rattle of plates, young men’s voices, the heavy smell of food, as I pushed through the screens. In the second court, the seventeenth-century building stood out clean-lined under a fine specimen of a hunter’s moon, rising over the acacia. Francis’ lights were shining, from rooms which in my time had been the Dean’s. But, now Francis had stripped off the hearty decorations, they were handsome to look at as soon as one stepped inside, moulded panelling, Dutch tiles round the fireplace. Francis gave me a friendly cheek-creased smile, and then, absent-mindedly, as though I were an undergraduate, offered me a glass of sherry. When I said that, except in Cambridge, I didn’t touch that dispiriting drink once a year, Francis’ smile got deeper; but he wasn’t surprised, he was waiting for it, to hear me continue without any break at all.
‘I’ve got the offer of your job, you know,’ I said.
‘Yes,’ said Francis. ‘I was given a pretty firm hint about that. Otherwise I wouldn’t have said anything on Tuesday night.’
We were sitting on the opposite sides of the fireplace. Francis looked at me, eyes lit up over the umber pouches (misleading perhaps, that anyone now so content should carry indelibly all those records of strain) and asked:
‘Well, what about it?’
I hesitated before I replied. Then I said: ‘I’m inclined to think that I ought to give the same answer as you did.’
‘I don’t want to persuade you either way. I just don’t know which is better for you.’
He was speaking with affectionate, oddly gentle, concern. Maybe I had expected, or hoped, even with the letter written, that he would say something different. But I should have known. When he had seemed curt or uninterested in the Lords bar, that was nothing like the truth. He cared a good deal for what happened to me. On the other hand, or really on the same hand, he was too fine-nerved to intrude – unless he was sure that he was discriminating right. Only once or twice in the whole of our lives had he intervened into my private choices. On politics, of course he had. On pieces of external behaviour, yes. But almost never when it would affect my future. The only time I could bring back to mind that night was when he told me, diffidently but exerting all his strength, that whatever the cost and guilt I ought, after Margaret and I had parted and she had married someone else, to get her back and marry her myself.
None of my friends, certainly no one I had known intimately, was as free from personal imperialism as Francis. He didn’t wish to dominate others’ lives, nor even to insinuate himself into them. Sometimes, when we were younger, it had made him seem – side by side with the personal imperialists – to lack their warmth. As they occupied themselves with others, the imperialists were warm for their own benefit. In the same kind of relation, Francis, within the human limits, wasn’t concerned with his own benefit. That was a reason why, after knowing him for a lifetime, one found he wore so well.
‘I think I probably ought to turn it down.’ I still said it as something like a question.
‘I just don’t know for you.’ Francis shook his head. ‘I dare say you’re being sensible.’
A little later, he observed, with amiable malice: ‘Whatever you do, you’ll be extremely cross with yourself for not doing the opposite, won’t you?’
Soon we left it. We could have retraced the arguments, but there was nothing more to say. The quarter chimed from one of the churches beyond the Fellows’ Garden. Francis, opening a cupboard to pick up his gown, said: ‘By the by, the Master’s dining tonight. You can’t say I don’t sacrifice myself for you.’
This was the third Master since Francis was an undergraduate, a man called O S Clark. Francis detested him, and even Martin took his name off the dining list when he found the Master’s on it. Clark was a man of the ultra-right (the present gibe was that he monitored all BBC programmes marking down the names of left-wing speakers, including the Archbishop of Canterbury), and he and his supporters had taken over the college government, so that Martin, as Senior Tutor, was left without power and on his own.
The college bell began to ring, undergraduates were running along the paths, Francis and I walked to the combination room. It was already full, men, most of them young, pushing round the table, panel lights glowing over their heads. When I was a fellow, there had been fourteen of us; now, in 1965, the number was over forty; more often than not, they told me the high table overflowed. Before the butler summoned us into hall, the Master welcomed Francis and me with simple cordiality. ‘We don’t often have the pleasure,’ he said. He had been a cripple since infancy, and had a fresh pink-skinned juvenile face as though affliction, instead of ageing him, had preserved his youth. His smile gave an impression both of sweet nature and obstinacy. Martin and Francis had certain comments to make about the sweet nature. Everyone agreed that he was a strong character, so much so that, although he dragged his useless leg about, no one thought of him as a cripple, or ever pitied him.
By his side stood his chief confidant, an old enemy of mine, the ex-bursar, Nightingale. To my surprise, he insisted on shaking me strongly by the hand.
In fact, the forms were being preserved. As soon as grace was ended and we settled down at high table, at our end, the senior end, conversation proceeded rather as though at an international conference with someone shouting ‘restricted’ when a controversial point emerged. The immemorial college topics took over, bird-watching, putative new buildings, topics in which my interest had always been minimal and was now nil. I turned to my left and talked to a young fellow, whose subject turned out to be molecular biology. He seemed very clever: I suspected that, when he heard the name of one bird trumping another, when he listened to that beautiful display of non-hostility, he was amused. With him and his contemporaries, so Francis and others told me, there was a change. A change for the better, said Francis. These young men were much more genuine academics than their predecessors: most of them were doing good research. They mightn’t be such picturesque examples of free personality as those I used to sit with; but a college, Francis baited me, didn’t exist to be a hothouse of personality. These young men were high-class professionals. I should have liked to know what they thought of relics of less exacting days.
When we arrived back in the combination room, Francis asked me if I wanted to stay for wine. No, I said, the young men were hurrying off; and anyway Charles would presumably be calling at the guest room soon. With a nod, not devoid of relief, Francis led me out into the first court. He said: ‘What was all that in aid of?’