David glanced at him with a quick provisional smile and took a swallow of beer before he answered. ‘I’m in trouble with the Censor.’
‘Oh, yes . . . ?’
‘I didn’t know the ropes, you see – I see that now.’
‘Ah,’ said Evert, pretending even to himself he didn’t see what was coming. But then, ‘You mean to do with Connie?’
David pursed his lips and nodded. Was he going to make Evert come out with it for him? ‘I see,’ said Evert, feeling there was still some welcome ambiguity.
‘Yep,’ said David, and drank some more. ‘No, what happened, if you want to know, was that my scout came in first thing two days ago and found us together. And he’s reported me to the Censor. He’s never liked me, since that business with Sangster downstairs – well, you wouldn’t know about that.’
‘The scout hasn’t, you mean . . .’
‘Well, or the Censor.’ It was that baffling idea, for Evert, of anyone not liking Sparsholt, or giving him the widest licence.
‘So what did the Censor say?’ Evert found he was picturing the moment of discovery, the threshold of the blacked-out bedroom where he himself had first met Gordon Pinnock. He was appalled to think David might be about to leave in disgrace, never to be seen again. ‘He can’t send you down for that,’ he said, in solid defiance of the truth.
‘Oh, he’s not sending me down,’ said David. ‘Don’t worry.’
‘Ah good,’ said Evert.
‘No, he says in view of the fact that I’m about to leave anyway, he doesn’t want to mess up my service career.’
‘Well, that’s a relief.’
‘And of course the fact that we’re engaged, which must make a difference.’
‘Yes . . .’
In the pause that followed, while David nodded and then drank and set down his glass, it was as though there were no problem after all. ‘No,’ said David, ‘but he is going to fine me.’
‘Oh, well . . .’ said Evert, and thought he sounded too careless. ‘A lot?’
‘Twenty quid,’ said David.
Evert winced sympathetically. ‘Quite a lot.’ It was exactly what he was going to pay his North Oxford contact for a second little landscape by Stanley Goyle – in another two weeks, when his December allowance from his father came through. ‘Can you manage?’
David flung himself back in his chair, in a gesture of defeat that was also a kind of display. He showed his wounded magnificence, his sweater tight across his chest as he spread his arms and shrugged. And he looked directly at Evert, with the perfect blankness of someone calculating a move. ‘I can’t ask my parents, of course’ – he gave a curt laugh, and now his look at Evert seemed faintly accusing.
‘I can see that might be difficult.’
‘I mean, they’re very strict – you know what parents are.’
‘Yes,’ said Evert kindly. He thought his own father, though he’d complain about it, would be hugely relieved to hear that he’d had a woman in his room. David sighed deeply, and slid further down in his chair, in a strange abandonment of his normal alertness; one leg pressed against Evert’s calf. ‘Will you be able to manage?’
‘I haven’t got it,’ said David, curtly. ‘We’ve got a bit put away, you know, for the wedding. But that’s untouchable.’
‘No, quite,’ said Evert.
‘That has to be untouchable.’
The word seemed to Evert oddly provoking. His eyes played over his friend in a stunned inventory of his merits. It was a reckless, sickening decision, that must be made briskly and completely. ‘Can’t I help you out?’ he said. David stared back at him, with respect, as well as the proper gloom of someone who must decline the offer they have just solicited.
‘I couldn’t accept,’ he said; but there was something else, as he sat up and leant forward, the dull glint of the tactician, to whom winning is everything.
‘I don’t have a lot of money,’ said Evert, ‘but I could probably lend you, you know . . . what you need . . . tomorrow.’
‘Really?’ said David. Now he seemed all anxious solicitude for him. ‘Isn’t it too much? It’s a hell of a lot. Well, that’s grand’ – sticking out a hand, to shake on it, in a way both gracious and inescapably businesslike. Before he let the hand go he jerked Evert forward, flung his other arm round him and hugged him; did he even kiss his ear? – clumsily spontaneous, it was too as if he’d found a moment to do something long planned. Or so Evert was to feel the next day. ‘You’re a real friend.’ And he sat back, manly and capable again, staring at the table as at the barely doubted outcome of a daring act: he seemed to see his rightful future given back to him.
With the third pint they moved away from the fine and the loan, though the question still gaped darkly for Evert. The beer carried them along for the moment. ‘So tell me more about your family,’ said David, a diplomatic new line. And for a minute or two Evert did so, but stumbling and exaggerating out of worry that he wouldn’t find them interesting. David nodded and gave occasional small smiles of recognition. His question was (Evert sensed it already) the inattentive politeness of a man who still wanted mainly to talk about himself, or who had not yet quite learned the art of conversation. Evert said how his sister was living in Tenby with their mother.
‘Is she pretty?’ David wanted to know.
‘Yes, she is,’ said Evert, ‘well, they both are!’ – annoyed by his mechanical interest in Alex instead of himself.
‘Perhaps she’ll come and visit you,’ said David.
‘You can meet her if she does,’ said Evert. ‘If you’re still here.’
‘Ah . . . well!’ said David, and nodded over his pint at the justice of the remark. ‘Anyhow, you’re not bad-looking yourself, you know.’
‘Well . . .’ said Evert, astonished, and grateful, but caught at once in the maze of impossible replies. David’s own beauty was the unspoken context, and of course his incalculable modesty and vanity shaded any such compliment. ‘As I say, my mother’s very pretty,’ he said.
‘There,’ said David, almost reproachfully, and for the first time, miraculously, he blushed.
It was on their brief walk back to College, in the barely penetrable dark, that the new possibility took shape, unseen, between them. That it couldn’t be happening, was only a possibility, gave it a kind of terror to Evert. The walk by the bickering river, that had been stiff and self-conscious on the way out, now was hurried along home on a giddy-making swirl of altered meanings. When David abruptly took his arm Evert stumbled to get into step – ‘Shape up!’ said David, and the unstated promise of the light grip and then squeeze of his elbow against David’s ribs had to struggle with the wild unlikeliness that anything further could happen. The white rings painted round tree trunks marked out their passage to the footbridge. Surely it was a mean and wicked game, to encourage a belief without putting it in words, ready to rebuff it if Evert dared to act on it. But not to dare would leave him with tormenting regret. Their element was the night and the unspoken, in all its queasy ambivalence. When they reached the great gateway and ducked through its small postern Evert’s pulse was bouncing in his ear. Then inside, with the vast unseen courtyard a mere intuition beyond them, he said, ‘I’ve got whisky in my room, if you’re on for another drink.’ There was something in him that hoped David would say no, and restore him to his accustomed state of unbreachable longing; but something else that made him smile in the face of the darkness when he said, ‘Yes, all right,’ and then, ‘Show me the way!’
Evert seemed to retain just a few impressions of what happened in the room. To him it raced with tension, and David himself showed a jocular unease as he hung up his coat and flung himself down in the armchair by the grey fire. Then he sprang forward, poked the embers gently to uncover them before he put on the last two pieces of coal from the box. They both watched the fire as if it were the most important thing in the world. Evert saw that the room, which he disliked, and its precious books and pictures, were not of the slightest interest to David.