The examinations were now in progress, and Dixon had nothing to do that morning but turn up at the Assembly Hall at twelve-thirty to collect some scripts. They would contain answers to questions he'd set about the Middle Ages. As he approached the Common Room he thought briefly about the Middle Ages. Those who professed themselves unable to believe in the reality of human progress ought to cheer themselves up, as the students under examination had conceivably been cheered up, by a short study of the Middle Ages. The hydrogen bomb, the South African Government, Chiang Kaishek, Senator McCarthy himself, would then seem a light price to pay for no longer being in the Middle Ages. Had people ever been as nasty, as self-indulgent, as dull, as miserable, as cocksure, as bad at art, as dismally ludicrous, or as wrong as they'd been in the Middle Age - Margaret's way of referring to the Middle Ages? He grinned at this last thought, then stopped doing that on entering the Common Room and catching sight of her, pale and heavy-eyed, on her own near the empty fireplace.
Their relations hadn't altered materially during the ten days or so since the arty week-end. It had taken him the whole of an evening in the Oak Lounge and a great deal of expense and hypocrisy to get her to admit that she still had a grievance against him, and more of the same sorts of commodity to persuade her to define, amplify, discuss, moderate, and finally abandon it. For some reason, periodically operative but impossible to name, the sight of her now filled him with affection and remorse. Rejecting coffee in favour of lemon squash, for it was a hot day, he got some from the overalled woman at the serving-table and went through the chatting groups over to Margaret.
She was wearing her arty get-up, but had discarded the wooden beads in favour of a brooch consisting of a wooden letter M. A large envelope full of examination scripts was on the floor beside her chair. A falsetto explosion from the coffee-urn across the room made him start slightly; then he said: 'Hallo, dear, how are you today?'
'All right, thanks.'
He smiled tentatively. 'You don't sound as though you mean that.'
'Don't I? I'm sorry. I'm perfectly all right really.' She spoke with extraordinary sharpness. Her jaw-muscles looked tight, as if she was suffering from toothache.
Glancing about him, he moved closer, bent forward, and said as gently as he could: 'Now, Margaret, please don't talk like that. It's quite unnecessary. If you don't feel too good, tell me about it and I'll sympathize. If you feel all right, that's fine. Either way we'll have a cigarette on it. But for God's sake don't try to pick a fight with me. I don't feel like one.'
She moved abruptly on the chair-arm she was sitting on so that her back was to everybody in the room except Dixon, who saw that her eyes were filling with tears. As he hesitated, she gave a loud sob, still looking at him.
'Margaret, you mustn't,' he said in horror. 'Don't cry. I didn't mean it.'
She gave a furious downward wave of her hand. 'You were quite right,' she said shudderingly. 'It was my fault. I'm sorry.'
'Margaret…'
'No, I'm the one in the wrong. I bit your head off. I didn't want to, I didn't mean to. Everything's so bloody this morning.'
'Well, tell me about it, then. Dry your eyes.'
'You're the only one that's nice to me and then I treat you like that.' However, she took off her glasses and started blotting her eyes.
'Never mind about that. Tell me what's wrong.'
'Oh, nothing. Everything and nothing.'
'Did you have another bad night?'
'Yes, darling, I did, and it's made me terribly sorry for myself, as usual. I keep thinking to myself, Oh hell, what's the use of anything, especially me?'
'Have a cigarette.'
'Oh thank you, James, it's just what I want. Do I look all right?'
'Yes, of course. Just a little tired, that's all.'
'I didn't get off till gone four. I must go and see the doc and get him to give me something. I can't go on like this.'
'But didn't he say you'd got to adjust yourself to doing without anything?'
She looked up at him in something like triumph. 'Yes, he did. But he didn't say how I'm going to adjust myself to doing without sleep.'
'Doesn't anything seem to help?'
'Oh, God, you know all about the baths and the hot milks and the, er, aspirins and the window shut and the window open…'
They talked like this for a few minutes, while the other occupants of the room began to disperse to their various tasks. These, since it was the one time of the academic year when everybody was simultaneously not lecturing, must have been largely self-imposed. Dixon sweated quietly as the talk went on, trying to repel the persistent half-recollection or half-illusion of having casually told Margaret a couple of days previously that he'd ring her up at the Welches' the next night - which was now last night. Some invitation or promise was obviously required, if only to smother the problem. At the first opportunity he said: 'What about lunch today? Are you free?'
For some reason, these queries provoked a partial return to her earlier manner. 'Free? Who do you imagine would have asked me out to lunch?'
'I thought you might have told Mrs Neddy you'd be back.'
'As it happens, she's having a little luncheon-party and asked me to turn up.'
'Oh well, somebody has asked you to lunch, then.'
She said 'Yes, that's right' in a puzzled, lost way that, by suggesting she'd forgotten what she'd just said or even what they were talking about, succeeded in alarming him more than her recent tears. He said quickly:
'What sort of a lunch-party is it?'
'Oh, I don't know,' she said with fatigue. 'Nothing startling, I imagine.' She looked at him as if her spectacles were becoming opaque. 'I must go now.' Slowly and inefficiently, she started looking for her handbag.
'Margaret, when shall I see you again?'
'I don't know.'
'I'm a bit short of cash until… Shall I get Neddy to ask me down for tea at the week-end?'
'If you like. Bertrand'll be there, though.' She still spoke in an odd, expressionless voice.
'Bertrand? Oh well, we'd better leave it, then.'
With an almost imperceptible increase in emphasis, she said: 'Yes. He's coming down for the Summer Ball.'
Dixon felt like a man who knows he won't be able to jump on to the moving train if he stops to think about it. 'Are we going to that?' he said.
Ten minutes later, it having been established that they were going to that, Margaret was on her way out, all smiles, to lock up her exam scripts, to powder her nose, and to phone Mrs Welch with the news that she wouldn't, after all, be attending the luncheon-party, which had turned out to be of much less importance than had at first appeared; Margaret would, instead, be lunching off beer and cheese rolls in a pub with Dixon. He was glad that his trump card had had such a spectacular effect, but, as is the way with trump cards, it had seemed valuable enough to deserve to win ten tricks, not just the one, and had looked better in his hand than it did on the table. He had in his possession, however, two pieces of information of which Margaret was ignorant. One was the connexion, whatever it was, between Bertrand Welch and Carol Goldsmith, which had suddenly leapt up again in his thoughts at the news, from Margaret, that Bertrand was taking Carol to the Summer Ball, her husband being committed to go to Leeds as Welch's legate for the week-end. Presumably Bertrand's blonde and busty Callaghan piece had now, to her credit, been discarded. The interest of this situation compensated, in large part, for the likelihood that Carol, Bertrand, Margaret, and himself would be going to the Ball together; 'as a little party', Margaret had put it. The second thing Dixon knew and Margaret didn't was that Bill Atkinson had previously agreed to meet him in the very pub he and Margaret were now about to go to. Atkinson's presence would be a valuable stand-by in case of renewed difficulty with Margaret (though God knew there shouldn't be any of that so soon after the playing of the trump card), and his taciturnity would rule out any risk of their arrangement to meet being suddenly and untowardly revealed. But, more important than any of that, Atkinson and Margaret had not yet met. Trying to imagine what each would say to him about the other afterwards made Dixon grin to himself as he sat down to wait (God only knew for how long) for Margaret. To fill in some of the time he found some College stationery and began to write: