When a further hour and five minutes had passed I went downstairs, thinking Sparsholt might have fallen asleep. In fact he was sitting at my little table with his back to me, his head propped on his left hand as he read a book. ‘Anything doing?’ he said, as he looked round, and stood up, and stretched, and seemed to expand by some further factor of rediscovered muscular power, his fingertips swinging a looped bell rope overhead.
‘Not a thing,’ I said, unwinding my long scarf, and glancing down at the open page – a spread of scientific diagrams, with graphs crossing and diverging. ‘Oh, I thought you might be reading my novel.’ I’d been slow to see that I had a subject.
‘Mm, I had a look at it,’ he said, with a smile and a lift of the eyebrows, as if to say it confirmed his impression not only of novels, but of people who read them. The wary humour was new, and appealing.
‘You might not like it,’ I said. ‘I don’t myself, really – but its author is coming to talk to our Club next week, and I have to introduce him.’
‘Oh, I see . . . who is it?’ – turning over the book. ‘A. V. Dax . . .’ He shook his head.
‘I used to love his books, but now I’ve seen through them – if you know what I mean.’ I took off my overcoat and dropped it over the back of the chair.
‘Well, we all go off things,’ he said.
I winced. ‘It’s a bit delicate because his son’s a good friend of mine.’
‘Oh, is he?’
‘In this College,’ I said; ‘you may have met him?’ Again a little moue of unconcern. ‘Evert Dax, he’s reading English, in the second year.’
Now he nodded hesitantly. ‘Evert . . .’ he said, as though something improbable were being confirmed. ‘Yes, I think I’ve met him. I thought it was Evan.’
‘It’s a Dutch name – his father’s partly Dutch.’
‘And he’s a friend of yours’ – reassessing me in the light of this. I had a confused sense that I might have to defend Evert – that Sparsholt had already marked him down as a pest. Should I concede that he had strange habits – was, as we said then, ‘over-emotional’? Loyalty seemed pliable, for a moment. ‘Well, if he’s the person I’m thinking of,’ Sparsholt said, ‘he seems very decent.’ He pulled his cap down low on his forehead and shrugged on his greatcoat.
‘Why don’t you come along?’ I said, ‘ – to the Club.’
But he shook his head again. ‘I’ve got no time for reading,’ he said, and with that he clambered off up the narrow stair into the dark. I savoured the dry comedy of his remark, as I sat down and poured another inch of coffee into the Thermos lid; and then there was the knowledge that Evert, in so far as he figured at all in his mind, was ‘decent’: he’d been friendly, surely, was what he meant, unlike others in this cold college. Evert, besotted by this great hunk of a boy, his thoughts about him no doubt indecent in the extreme. I picked up Enid and Mark’s romance again but distracted and even guilty at the thought of the longings that had so far escaped young Sparsholt’s detection. My eyes passed across the scant features of the room, barely seeing the gilt-lettered boards that gave the age and weight of the bells, and the framed testimonials to feats of change-ringing.
I can’t now recall the exact order of our passing encounters, on the difficult ribbed leads or on the steep companionway. But as the slow night turned and intermittent winds piled up and then dispersed high continents of cloud, we fell into conversation of a kind that I’ve known only in the War, brief dislocated intimacies, a blurring of boundaries between person and person in the surrounding dark. One time he came up quickly, and stood next to me, saying nothing – I knew from the way his breathing stilled and he shifted almost noiselessly in his greatcoat that he was glad of the company, the mere proximity of another person watching. I pictured a dog, brought back on the invisible leash that links it to a man, standing panting at first, then merely waiting and breathing. Soon a plane was heard, the first of the night, silent after the first doubtful rumble, then more sustained, though distancing already: still we said nothing as we recognized a Wellington – the rumble of reassurance rather than fear. We were standing on the north side of the tower, the squat spire of the Cathedral close by, and beyond that mere conjecture. It was the moment when I sensed the real tenor of Sparsholt’s concern – I saw I had been slow, although something in him repudiated sympathy, or the weakness of requiring it. In that vast northward view (or lack of view) was the world he came from. I said, ‘By the way, I hope your people are all right?’
He said they were, so far, though they’d had a dozen or more air raids already. I asked what they did. His father was a manager at a steel-plant, and his mother worked on the drapery counter at Freeman’s, the local department store. He was an only child – ‘though we also have a cat,’ he said.
‘I suppose your father’s in a reserved occupation?’ I said.
‘That’s right,’ said Sparsholt. ‘To be honest, though, I’m more concerned about him getting killed up there.’
‘Yes, of course.’
‘It’s been bad already but we’re still expecting, you know, the big one.’
We stared blindly into the darkness, and I felt for him. To me home was a place tucked away, unsignalled, with the great stone bulwarks of the Moor between it and Plymouth, to the south, which had already been the target of the bombers. But to Sparsholt, gazing north, the world of home lay open as if on a tray, the factories, foundries, munition works offered up to the beak and claws of the enemy. They would have AA guns, he said, but we both knew these were badges of hope and faith more than practical defences.
‘Let’s hope they come through,’ I said. His silence might have covered any number of things, and I wasn’t sure in the dark if we had both settled down on the idea of his home, or if we had drifted apart into separate reflections. He didn’t ask about me; I felt my exemption from service made him uneasy, as if there might be something shameful and embarrassing about the whole Green family. I could have told him that my half-brother Gerald was in Crete right now, a captain in the special forces; and there were things I was prevented from telling him about what I was up to myself. ‘Right, I’ll go down,’ I said, and for a second I was startled to see, in the quick play of my flashlight, the face of a determined young stranger – in the darkness he’d softened into quite another figure, with subtle elements of several other people I knew, and who was I suppose a mere fantasy fathered by his presence.
At another change of the watch he must have found me asleep – and sleeping heavily too, with the weight of sleep postponed. A noise in a dream brought with it a complete rationale of history and consequence, which fled away as I opened my eyes to find Sparsholt staring into my face with mingled apology and impatience and saying again, ‘It’s five o’clock,’ or whatever lonely time of the night we had reached. I apologized myself, with a fuddled sense of foolishness and a trace of something else, a kind of mutinous pleasure in having succumbed. ‘It’s no good falling asleep,’ he said, as if about to list the reasons; but making do with a stare and a quick nod. I saw that something almost hidden was playing out through the night, a little game of seniority. As I pulled on my coat and reached in the pockets for my gloves I felt that my greater age and experience, the people I knew and the thousands of books I’d read, counted for nothing in his eyes. The War had levelled us, and on this platform he was already standing taller and stronger. I might have won the Chancellor’s Essay Prize in my first year, and the Gifford Medal in my second; but to him I was just an eccentric weakling, close friend of other eccentrics, with whom he was thrust into a fleeting alliance.