Sasha blinked rapidly.
‘In this country,’ he said, ‘as I believe I once told Paul, a man feels needed. Surely to need someone is the greatest respect you can pay him?’
‘To need him, Sasha? To need him for some purpose? For what he can do? For the contribution he can make?’
‘Exactly.’
‘Isn’t that a rather sordid interest, Sasha? To need a man because you can make use of him is to treat him as a tool, as an object. It’s exploitation. We say that a man is to be respected not for what he can do for us, but for being the man he is.’
‘And you believe this of all men?’
‘In theory. In practice we take certain public personalities as symbols of mankind in general, and we attach our respect and interest to these representatives.’
Sasha brooded until the soup arrived.
‘Anyway,’ said Proctor-Gould, ‘the important thing is whether you’d like to come over to England yourself and let me handle you.’
‘You really think I’m one of your personalities?’
‘I think I could make you one.’
Sasha sighed.
‘I wonder,’ he said. ‘I wonder. I should like to visit England. But at first sight, I must tell you frankly, being a personality in your sense seems to me a little like being a prostitute.’
‘A prostitute, Sasha?’
‘Offering my person for hire.’
Proctor-Gould’s soup spoon had halted half-way to his mouth in astonishment at ‘prostitute’. Now he put it carefully back in the soup and fixed Sasha with his special gaze.
‘I honestly don’t think that’s right, Sasha,’ he said. ‘If it’s like anything, it’s like an artist offering himself to the public through his art.’
‘Would you agree to become a personality yourself, Gordon?’
Proctor-Gould stared at Sasha for some moments, pulling at his ear. Then he suddenly lowered his gaze to the silver university.
‘It’s a funny thing,’ he said, ‘but no one’s ever asked me that before. I’ve never thought about it.’
He gazed at the skyscraper for a long time, pulling at his ear as if he would drag it out by the roots. Sasha and Manning watched him over their soup spoons.
‘I think I would,’ he said at last. ‘I think I would. But I see it’s not an entirely straightforward choice.’
‘No,’ said Sasha, ‘it’s not. But your ideas are certainly interesting, Gordon. I should like my colleagues in the Faculty to meet you. Perhaps I could arrange a little dinner some time?’
‘I should like that, Sasha. Very much.’
‘Perhaps towards the end of term? Will you still be here then?’
‘Until June at least, Sasha.’
‘All right. Meanwhile I shall think about your offer.’
Afterwards, Manning walked back with Proctor-Gould towards his hotel through the cool spring night.
‘You won’t get him, you know,’ said Manning.
‘I think I will, Paul.’
‘He’ll always put his obligations first.’
‘But what will he consider his obligations to be? He’s an ambitious man, you know.’
‘Ambitious?’
‘I think so, Paul. I should know – I am myself. That’s why we get on so well together. Anyway, we shall get that dinner out of him, if nothing else. It’s rather convenient, as a matter of fact – I have a number of messages and presents for people in your Faculty.’
‘You never said.’
‘No.’
They were outside the Hotel National.
‘Will you come up for a late-night Nescafé?’ asked Proctor-Gould. Manning shook his head.
‘I hadn’t thought about Sasha being ambitious,’ he said, as they hesitated on the pavement. ‘But he’s a good man, you know.’
‘Oh, yes.’
‘Are you good, do you believe, Gordon?’
Proctor-Gould shrugged his shoulders.
‘It’s a question I ask myself,’ he said.
9
Manning fell in love, in a way. It was on a suburban train, on the Mozhaisk line, and the girl was sitting in the seat opposite him. She was not, as he had envisaged, sunburnt and wearing a slight cotton dress. She was pale, with very fair hair, and she was wearing a quilted anorak and thick trousers. So was Manning himself, and almost everybody else in the carriage. They were going on a rally or ramble organized by the Faculty Sport Club in the forest outside Moscow under Sasha’s leadership.
‘Which is it, Paul?’ Proctor-Gould had asked Manning when Sasha invited him. ‘A rally or a ramble?’
‘It depends how far they walk,’ Manning had explained gloomily. ‘If it’s over about ten kilometres it will be rather less of a rally and rather more of a ramble.’
‘Ten kilometres? They might go as far as that?’
‘Easily. It’ll be freezing cold, too, and I should think at this time of year the woods are a sea of mud.’
Proctor-Gould had fingered his ear dubiously. Manning, anxious to avoid the occasion, had urged another drawback.
‘They’ll sing songs, Gordon.’
Proctor-Gould had at once ceased to finger his ear.
‘They’ll sing songs, will they, Paul?’
‘They’ll probably expect you to sing them something, too.’
Proctor-Gould’s attitude had changed entirely.
‘I rather enjoy a bit of a sing-song, Paul. If the company’s congenial. I used to be rather in demand at parties in college. “My Father was the Keeper of the Eddystone Light” – that kind of thing. Top of the hit parade at John’s, setting all false modesty to one side.’
So Manning found himself on the Mozhaisk train, sitting opposite the girl with fair hair. He was not entirely right about the weather. The air temperature was low, but the woods on either side of the train were filled with the most brilliant spring sunlight. Already, however, people had begun to sing. They sang different songs in different parts of the carriage. Manning could hear Sasha’s clear, sweet tenor cutting through the confusion of sound, and Proctor-Gould, uttering the curious tuneless booming that comes from a man doing his best to join in a song he has never heard before. Manning hoped he would soon be allowed to get back to his home ground on ‘The Eddystone Light’.
The girl with the very fair hair was singing, too. Manning watched her covertly. She had a broad face, with distinct cheekbones and clearly defined eyebrows which were much darker than her hair. She looked as if she might be a postgraduate student or a lecturer, but Manning knew them all, and he had never seen her about the Faculty before. She caught his eyes, and at once stopped singing and lowered her eyelids.
The sight of her disturbed Manning. It threatened him with the necessity for making decisions and taking initiatives. The long and involved processes of human courtship might be about to start. If he made a move … If she responded at all … He hedged himself about with conditions and concessions. Already he could see how stupid the things would be that he would tell her to try and impress her. Already he could feel the terrible uncertainty he would go through about whether to take her hand, whether to put his arm round her and kiss her. As if it was already past history he knew exactly what he would feel on the days when she said she couldn’t see him, and how irritatingly plain she would look as she came towards him along the street. He shifted uneasily in his seat at the thought of it. This really was the worst moment in the whole awful business of courtship, the moment before it started. If indeed it did start.
He caught her eye again. They both quickly looked away. He turned his head slowly from the view out of the left-hand window to the view out of the right-hand one, so that he could let his eyes travel over her face in passing. Almost immediately he had to turn his head back from right to left to take another look at her. Once more their eyes met, and hastily parted again. He stared out of the window at the telegraph poles going by, knowing his face was loaded with a meaningless frown. What a stupid business! Did he really have to go ahead with it? He could have groaned aloud, he felt such a fool. And yet, beneath all the confusion and indecision, the current of sweet excitement ran on. It was like a brook one could hear rippling unseen beneath tangled undergrowth.