“He may get away with it there,” Vicky said, “but that won’t be the end of it.”
Once again, both of us knew. He put people off. They said that he was a shellback, with no sympathy for the young.
“Of course,” she said, “he was wrong anyway. He ought to have told them to go and do it somewhere else. But he couldn’t say that, you know.”
I found it impossible to keep back a vestigial grin. Arnold Shaw could bring himself to say that about as easily as John Calvin in one of his less libertarian moods.
“Why in God’s name, though,” she said, “didn’t he play it cool?”
Did she have to ask me? I replied.
Reluctantly she smiled. She knew, better than anyone, that he was incorruptible: rigid: what he believed, he believed. If everyone else in the country were converted to sexual freedom, he would stay outside the swim: and be certain that he was right.
She put more whisky into my tumbler. She said: “And yet, you know, he was a very good father to me. Even when I was little. He was always very kind.”
“I shouldn’t have thought you were difficult to bring up,” I told her.
She shook her head. “No. I wasn’t all that disciplined.” She broke off: “Anyway, do your best with him tonight.”
I said she mustn’t bank on anything I could do. With a frown, she replied: “He’s as obstinate as a pig.”
There was nothing else useful to say. So, businesslike, she cut off short, and told me who was coming to dinner. It was a small party. The Hargraves, the Gearys — yes, I had met Hargrave on the Court, I knew the Gearys well — and Leonard Getliffe. As she mentioned the last name, I glanced at her. She had the delicate skin common among her own kind of blonde, and she had flushed down to the neckline.
Leonard Getliffe was the eldest son of my friend Francis, whom I had met almost as soon as I first went to London from this town: ever since, our lives had interweaved. But their connection with the university was no credit to me, only to Arnold Shaw. Since Francis gave up being an influence in Whitehall, at the time of Quaife’s failure and mine, his scientific work had gone better than in his youth, his reputation had grown. And, though probably not as a consequence, he had recently been made a life peer. So Arnold Shaw, whose academic standards were as rigorous as his moral ones (and who, incidentally, was by no means averse to titles), had schemed for him to be the second Chancellor of the University: and for once Arnold had brought something off. He had brought something else off too, more valuable to the place: for he had persuaded Leonard, before he was thirty, to take a professorship. Leonard was, in the jargon of the day, a real flier. He was more gifted than his father: he was, so David Rubin and the others said, one of the best theoretical physicists going. All he needed was a bit of luck, they said, talking of luck exactly as people did in more precarious fields: then they would be tipping him for a Nobel prize. He might be more gifted than his father, but he was just as high-principled. He could do his theoretical work anywhere; why not try to help a new university? So, when Arnold Shaw invited him, he had without fuss left Trinity and come.
Vicky was blushing. She met my glance, and her eyes were blue, candid and distressed. It might have seemed that she was pining for him. In fact the opposite was true. He was eaten up with love for her. It had happened a year before, almost as soon as they met, perhaps on the first day. He was begging her to marry him. Her father passionately wanted the marriage: the Getliffes would have welcomed it. All their children were married by now, except Leonard, their eldest and their particular star. The only person who didn’t want the marriage was Vicky herself. She couldn’t respond. She was a kind girl, but she couldn’t see any way to be kind. Sometimes, when she saw him, she felt — there was no repressing it — plain irritated. Often she felt guilty. People told her this was someone of a quality she would never meet again: they told her she was interfering with his work. She knew it. For a while it had been flattering, but that wore off. Once, when I had been staying in the Residence, she had broken out: “It’s not fair! I look at myself in the glass. What have I got to produce this sort of passion? No, it’s ridiculous.”
She had little conceit. She could have done with more, I thought. She wanted to shrug the responsibility off, and couldn’t. She was honest, and in some ways prosaic. But she didn’t seem prosaic when she talked about the man she loved.
She had fallen in love herself — but after she had met Leonard Getliffe. The man she loved could scarcely have been more different from Leonard. I knew him, I knew him better than she did, or at least in a different fashion, for he was my nephew, Martin’s son.
She wanted to tell me. Yes, she had seen Pat last week. In London. They had gone to — she brought out the name of a Soho restaurant as though it were embossed, just as she brought out the name of Pat. We had all done it, I thought: the facts, the names of love are special facts, special names: it made the air bright, even to hear. But it also made the air uneasy.
After all, I was looking at him with an uncle’s eyes, not with those of an adoring young woman. I thought he was an engaging youth, but I had been astonished when she became enraptured. To begin with, he was only twenty, four years younger than she was. True, he was precocious, and she probably the reverse. Yet I had seen my brother, a steady-natured man, but also a possessive father, trying to cope with that precocity. It had taught my brother what fatherhood could mean. Pat’s name wasn’t even Pat. He had been christened after me, but had renamed himself when he was an adolescent. He had rebelled against his first school, and been lucky to survive a second. Martin had managed to get him a place at our Cambridge college: he had given up after a year and gone to London to paint. How he managed to get support out of Martin or anyone else, I didn’t know: but I thought there weren’t many means that he would consider inappropriate. Had he any talent? Here for once Vicky, in the midst of her delight, became half-lucid. “I do hope,” she said, “that he’s as good as he wants to be. Sometimes I worry because he might get bored with it.”
Then she asked me favours: could they come and see us at our London flat? Could I bring him down to the university some time? She was innocent and shameless: yet anyone would have said that she was one of the stablest of young women, and it would have been true. That was why it was a liberation to abandon herself like this. If he arrived that moment, I was thinking, she would be proud to throw her arms round his neck.
I asked for another drink. With a shake of her head, coming back to other people’s earth, she poured me a small one.
“Go slow on that,” she said, tapping the glass, talking to me like a brisk, affectionate and sensible daughter. “You’ll get plenty tonight. Remember, you’ve got to stay up with him (her father) when they’ve all gone.”
Once more she was businesslike, thinking of her duty. How could I handle him? We were talking tactics, when Arnold Shaw himself entered the room. At first sight, he didn’t look a martinet, much less a puritan. He was short, well-padded, with empurpled cheeks and a curving, malicious, mimic’s mouth. He kissed his daughter, shook my hand, poured himself a lavish Scotch, and told us: “Well, that’s polished off the paper for today.”