“Just so,” said Roy. “You can’t leave her now, can you? You couldn’t if you tried. You need to go on looking after her. You need to go on looking after her always.”
“Yes,” I said.
He put his arm round my shoulders.
“You know, old boy,” he said, “you’re not the one I pity. Should you be? I’m extremely sorry, things must be made as easy for you as they can. But you’re interested in life, you’ve got tremendous spirits, you can bear anything. No, it’s she whom I pity desperately. I don’t see what she has to hope for.”
He was utterly right. I knew it too well. Again we walked under the fragrant trees. “You mustn’t lose too much,” said Roy. I had forgotten by now how young he was, and he was talking as though we had each been through the same darkness.
“As you’ve just said,” I replied, “there’s nothing to be done. One has to go on, that’s all.”
“Just so,” said Roy. “Life’s very unfair. Why should this happen to you?”
Yet I felt he liked me more because it had happened.
I told him one other thing, which helped explain why I had taken a job in Cambridge at all. As he knew, I had been born poor. Through a mixture of good luck and good management, I had done well in the Bar examinations and in my period as a pupil. By the time I married, I was making a fair living at the Bar. But I was overstrained, my inner life racked me more after marriage than before, I wanted to rest a little. Some of my influential friends made enquiries, and soon Francis Getliffe told me there might be an opening in his college for an academic lawyer. At last, after a long delay, the offer was officially made: I accepted it, and was elected late in 1933, a few months before this talk with Roy. The college did not object to my keeping on a consultant’s job with an industrial firm, and I spent some days each week in London, where my wife was still living in our Chelsea house. I usually stayed in Cambridge from Thursday to Monday, and slept in my college rooms on those nights, as though I had been a bachelor fellow.
It was since I came to live so much in college that Roy began to call on me. I had met him once when he was a boy (his father was a very wealthy man in the provincial town where I was born), and occasionally in his undergraduate days. I knew he was a member of the college when Getliffe first approached me and I had heard several conflicting rumours about him — that he was drinking himself to death, spending all his nights with women, becoming an accomplished oriental scholar. But it was a coincidence that his rooms should be on the next staircase to mine, and that we should be waited on by the same servant. The first weekend I spent in college he ran up to see me, and since then it was very strange if I did not hear his light step on my stairs once or twice a day.
I had come to the end of what I could tell him: we stood under the trees in the bright sunshine; Roy said “just so” again to lead me further, but the clear light reedy voice died away without reply from me, for I had finished. He smiled because he felt I was less careworn, and took me to his rooms for tea.
They were a curious set of rooms, in a turret over the kitchen, right in the middle of the college. From a window on the staircase one could look out over the first court to the front gate, and his sitting-room window gave on to the palladian building in the second court and the high trees in the garden beyond. It was for strictly nepotic reasons that Roy was allowed to live there. He had ceased to be an undergraduate nearly three years before; he would normally have gone out of college then. He was a rich man, and it would have been easy for him to live in comfort anywhere in the town. But he was a favourite pupil of the Master’s and of Arthur Brown’s, the tutor who arranged about rooms: and they decided that it would be good for his researches if he stayed where he was.
The sitting-room itself struck oddly and brightly on the eye. There were all kinds of desks in a glazed and shining white — an upright one, at which he could work standing and read a manuscript against an opalescent screen, several for sitting at, one with three arms like a Greek pi, one curved like a horseshoe, and one very low which he could use by lying on cushions on the floor. For the rumours about him had a knack of containing a scrap of truth, and the one which to many of his acquaintances sounded the most fantastic was less extraordinary than the fact. He had already put a mass of original scholarship behind him; most days he worked in this room for seven or eight hours without a break, and he had struck a field where each day’s work meant a discovery both new and certain.
The whole room was full of gadgets for his work, most of which he had designed. There were holders for his manuscripts, lights to inspect them by, a small X-ray apparatus which he had learned to work, card indexes which stood up and could be used with one hand. Everything glistened in its dazzling white, except for some van Goghs on the walls, a rich russet carpet all over the floor, and a sofa and armchair by the fire.
A kitchen porter brought us a big tray wrapped in green baize; underneath stood a robust silver teapot, a plate of toast, a dish of mulberry jam, a bowl of thick cream.
Roy patted the shining silver.
“You deserve some tea,” he said. “Reward for interesting conversation.”
He gave a smile, intimate and kind. He knew now that he had helped bring me somewhere near a normal state. He was sure enough to laugh at me. As I spread jam and cream on a piece of toast and tasted the tart mulberry flavour through cream, butter, burned bread, I saw he had a mocking glint in his eyes.
“Well?” I said.
“I was only thinking.”
“What of?”
“Women.”
“Well?” I said again.
“Each to his métier,” said Roy. “You’d better leave them to me in future. You take them too seriously.”
In fact, he attracted much love. He had been sought after by women since he was a boy: and he enjoyed making love, and threw it lightly away.
Five o’clock struck, and Roy sprang from his chair. “Not much time,” he said. “We must be off. I need you. I need to buy some books.”
“What is it?” I asked, but he smiled demurely and secretively.
“You’ll know quite soon,” he said.
He led the way to the nearest bookshop. “Quick,” he said as I followed through the press of people on the narrow pavement. “We need to get through them all in half-an-hour.”
He was playing a trick, but there was nothing to worry about. He was cheerful, settled, enjoying himself. When we arrived at the shop, he stared round with an expression serious, eager, keenly anxious. Then he moved over to the shelf of theological works, and said with intensity: “There are still some here. We’re not too late.” He had taken hold of three copies of a thin volume. The dust cover carried a small cross and the words: The Middle Period of Richard Heppenstall by Ralph Udal.
“Who in God’s name was Richard Heppenstall?” I asked.
“Seventeenth century clergyman,” Roy whispered. “Somewhat old-brandy, but very good.” Then in a loud clear voice he greeted the manager of the shop, who was coming to attend to him.
“I see I’ve just got here in time. How many have you sold?”
“None as far as I know, Mr Calvert. It’s only come in today—”