At length I heard the problem being referred (by an exercise of firmness on Francis’ part) to the Buildings Sub-Committee. Sharply Francis called out “Item No. 7.” I gripped myself: I had to be with them now. It was hard to make the effort.
Focusing on Francis, I was puzzled that he didn’t ask the Vice-Chancellor to leave us. Whether Shaw knew it or not, he was going to be argued over.
Instead Francis gazed down the table.
“Professor Getliffe,” he said to his son, “I think you have something to say on this matter.”
“Yes, my lord chairman,” Leonard said to his father. “My colleagues and I want to suggest that we postpone it. We should like to postpone it until next term.”
“That would give me a chance,” said Shaw briskly, automatically (Good God, I was thinking again, still not reacting, how many months would he have survived in Whitehall?) “to send round a paper on the present arrangements for discipline. And how I propose to make one or two changes.”
“Thank you, Vice-Chancellor,” said Francis, who might have been thinking as I did. “Anyway,” he addressed the room, “I must say, I think there is some merit in Professor Getliffe’s suggestion, if it appeals to the Court. I know this seems an important piece of business to some of us, and it would be a mistake to rush it. I’m anxious that everyone should have the opportunity to give us his views. I believe Sir Lewis is interested, isn’t that so?”
“Yes, I am rather interested.”
“Well then. We hope you’ll be able to attend the Court next term. Completely recovered. Then I shall propose we might set aside the first part of the meeting for this business. We shall very much want to hear your opinion.”
I said, yes, I should try to attend the Court. In temper, in ultimate let-down, I could keep to the official language. Would anyone to whom the official language might as well have been Avar or Estonian, realise that they were considering me, that this was a put-up job between father and son?
Leaving the meeting in time to escape conversation, I got a university car to myself to take me to the Residence. There, among the smell of leather (to me an anxious smell), I sat in a state both harsh-tempered and depressed. The let-down, yes. The wasted effort, yes. The physical discomfort, yes. But this was a state, concealed from others, that I used to know, and didn’t often now. The bizarre thing was, I had got my way. Through the Getliffes’ indulgence I had won Shaw four months’ grace. If I had been at my most competent, I shouldn’t have done better than that. I might easily have done much worse (there would be time, there was still the residue of a planner working within me, to lobby Denis Geary and some of the others). I should never know whether — if the Getliffes hadn’t treated me with pity — I could have made my effort that afternoon at all.
When Margaret saw me enter our bedroom at the Residence, she said, “You’ve been doing too much.” I said, “I’ve been doing nothing at all.” Before I told her the story, she made me lie on the bed: then, reassured, she let me talk. This time I wasn’t using the official language: Margaret was used to me when I wasn’t giving events the benefit of the doubt. She sat beside me, looking down with a curious expression, clear-eyed.
She told me it was six o’clock, nearly time to dress for the dinner that night. Was I going to be able to manage it? I nodded. She didn’t protest: she just remarked that a drink would help, and she would find one. Soon she returned, with Arnold Shaw following her, in his shirt sleeves and carrying a tray, eupeptic, enjoying himself as butler. He poured a large whisky for her, and an even larger one for me. He splashed in soda, spooned the ice. Then, as he picked up the tray, ready to depart, he said to me, with a wise reproving frown: “It was irresponsible of you. To come here today. It was irresponsible, you know.”
The door shut behind him, brisk executive feet pattered down the passage. I took a gulp at my glass, and then I laughed. It was a sour laugh, but it was at least a laugh.
Margaret joined in. “I’ve been wanting to do that for quite some time,” she said. “I’ve been wondering just when you wouldn’t mind.”
Since I couldn’t knot a tie easily one-eyed, she did it for me, and I went down before her into the drawing-room. David Rubin and Francis Getliffe had already arrived, and as I joined them Rubin was saying that sometimes, this autumn, he had felt his intellectual analysis might be wrong. He meant, his analysis of the chances of peace. It had always been blacker than either of ours, more pessimistic than that of anyone we met. Yet he knew as much as we did, and more. He said he was inclined to trust his analysis, not his feelings: said it with a shrug and began to cachinnate. He was not the lightest of company when the cachinnation broke out and he was predicting the worst. Still, he said, sometimes he felt he might be wrong. If so, he went on sarcastically, it wouldn’t be any thanks to people like us. We had, all three of us, done our best, we had spent months and years of our lives, we had tried to find ways of action. It hadn’t affected the situation, said Rubin, by.001 of 1 %. If things did go right, it would be no thanks to us: it would be due to something as random and as incalculable as a change in the weather.
Others came up to us. Francis was being less fatalistic, when David Rubin took me aside. In a corner of the room he indicated my patched eye and said: “This is a nuisance, Lewis.”
It sounded brusque. But it wasn’t so. He looked at me with monkey-sad eyes, incongruous above his immaculate dinner jacket (his colleagues gossiped, why should a man of his morbid pessimism appear to be competing as the Best Dressed Man of the Year?). His eyes were sad, his nerve ends were as fine as Margaret’s. He wasn’t going to harass me with sympathy, or with alternative plans for surgical treatment.
“Yes,” I said, without any bluff.
“These retinas are getting rather common.”
I asked him why.
“Quite simple. We’re all living longer, that’s all. You’ve got to expect bits of the machine to break down.”
He had judged it right, he was being a support.
“You’ve played your luck, you know,” he said.
He went on: he had a check-up every six months. When did I last have a check-up?
I said something about American hypochondria.
“Maybe,” said Rubin, with astringent comradeship. “They’ll find something sooner or later. Let’s see, you’re ten years older than I am. But remember, I did my best work before I was thirty. I bet you, I’ve felt older than you have — I bet you I have done for years.”
But, when we had gone into dinner, the courses clattering in the most lucullan of all Arnold Shaw’s feasts, I sat with Rubin’s brand of consolation wearing off. The amnesia of the first drinks wore off too: going into hospital next day, I had to stop drinking early in the meal, though I didn’t want to. The mechanics of politeness jangled on: I turned from the honorary graduate’s wife on my right to the one on my left and back again: they found me dulclass="underline" I just wanted the day to end.
There was one diversion, though. Vicky had led the women out, and the rest of us had reseated ourselves at Shaw’s end of the table. Shaw was in excelsis. He had made four distinguished scholars honorary graduates. There was also Lufkin, who had been forced upon him by the engineers, but still he was good enough. Shaw saw them all round him. He was a man of uncomplicated pleasures, and he was content. He was also content because he had given them splendid wine, and drunk a good deal of it himself. Again, Lufkin was an exception. True to his bleak rule, he had drunk one whisky before dinner, another with the meal, and now, while the others were enjoying Shaw’s port, he allowed himself a third. But it was he who dominated the table. He was explaining certain circumstances, to him still astonishing though they had happened a couple of years before, surrounding his retirement.