I had no idea how Evert would greet his father – in fact they both avoided a greeting, Victor turning as he stepped down to address the woman behind him, with the wide hat, who I saw was a complete surprise to Evert. ‘This is Miss Holt,’ Victor said, ‘my secretary.’ We all shook hands, Miss Holt hanging back and looking after a large briefcase as well as her own handbag and two umbrellas. Victor wore a grey trilby and a red paisley scarf, between which his smooth blue-eyed face looked out blankly. His book jackets bore no photographs, but I had seen his picture in the paper, and imagined a much larger man. Evert stood two inches taller, but no doubt saw him in all the psychological grandeur of a parent; to me the first impression was of a humourless businessman of superior rank, neat, preoccupied, more likely to be a slave than a master of the word.
‘I don’t know what you’d like to do,’ I said, preparing my small menu of amusements.
‘We’ll go straight to the Mitre,’ he said. ‘I need to press on with an article for Sweden.’
Evert looked relieved, and I’m not sure what I felt.
A taxi was an expensive rarity, and I proposed that we go into town by bus. A bus was waiting, nearly full, at the station entrance, and we clambered on, Victor absorbing the indignity by pretending not to be in a bus at all; I paid their fares. Evert sat beside his father, and I squeezed up with Miss Holt and her bags in the seats behind them. Every now and then Victor turned and said loudly, ‘That’s Worcester College, Miss Holt . . . That’s Elliston & Cavell’s . . .’ At another time Evert might have been embarrassed by his father, but today he was barely with us; his yawns were his helpless tribute to the night before. If Victor was conscious of the minor stir he caused on the bus he perhaps put it down to his being known; and there was something unaccountably distinctive about him, it seemed to me, which made anyone who’d glanced at him once do so again. His voice carried, even in Oxford, a city of unstoppably self-confident talkers: it was crisp, autocratic, he had caught to perfection the drawl and snap of the upper classes, but with the charm and oddity of an ‘r’ rolled lightly in the back of the throat. In his mouth such familiar monuments as the Radcliffe Camera and the Clarendon Building emerged in a subtly glamorized light. ‘That’s Christ Church down to the right, Miss Holt, where my son is.’ Evert turned and smiled in confirmation and apology.
Evert, Charlie Farmonger and I went over at five-thirty to collect our guest for dinner; we planned a drink in the bar first. He came in with a small cigar going, and Miss Holt again just behind.
‘There’s one thing I’d ask,’ he said, as he took his glass of gin. ‘Will you be introducing me later on?’
‘I will, sir, yes. I thought—’
‘Keep it brief, if you don’t mind.’
‘I won’t go on long,’ I promised.
‘I gave a talk in Paris last year – chap went on for a good twenty minutes, full of praise, of course, finest writer alive and all that, but it eats into one’s own time.’
‘I’ll have to praise you a bit,’ I said. But this was close to teasing, and Victor showed by his congested frown over his cigar that I wasn’t to try anything in that line. I’d wondered for a second if Victor was teasing himself, but of course he wasn’t mocking his French introducer – he was in strict agreement with him. It appeared Miss Holt agreed with him too, though with a hint of anxiety, as if telling herself to concentrate.
When we sat down at a small round table with our drinks I looked more closely at her. She was about thirty-five, slender but not frail, with hesitant brown eyes, and dark hair pulled back from a face more intelligent than beautiful. ‘Have you been with Mr Dax long?’ I asked. ‘Hardly any time,’ she said, with an uncertain smile. I said it must be fascinating. She thought for a moment before murmuring, rather sweetly, ‘I’m still learning the ropes.’ Her accent was refined, she seemed to say ‘the reps’, and I guessed she was an educated woman making ends meet. I couldn’t help seeing her in that moment as Lorna Monamy in The Heart’s Achievement or Christine Lant in Horseman, What Word?, those obscurely troubled helpmeets to the war-blinded artist and the disillusioned sage. Her delicate fingers trembled slightly, and I noticed when she reached for her glass the soft ridge where a long-worn ring had been removed.
Poor Evert wasn’t really with us. He’d produced his famous father and now sat beside him with an empty beer glass, as if hardly knowing who he was. We shared a few long glances, which made me feel uncomfortably not merely his friend but his accomplice. Victor carried on as if his son weren’t there, and after a while Evert seemed to feel the need to remind him that he was. A silence had fallen over all of us before he said pleasantly, ‘How’s Herta, Father?’
‘Why do you ask?’ said Victor, rather crossly; and Miss Holt too looked uncomfortable. ‘I don’t know if you’ve heard about the German Blitzkrieg presently being waged over the very roof of your family home’ – he looked quickly round at us to enlist us in his sarcasm. Charlie laughed loudly, and Evert said he had heard, that was why he was asking; he was as unsure as the rest of us what he had said wrong. A silence fell, and I changed the subject and nervously asked Victor about the name Dax – was it Dutch? I think I must have known it was his mother’s family who were Dutch. ‘No, it’s an old Shropshire name,’ Victor said, ‘as a matter of fact.’
‘I wonder then if it’s a Norman name,’ I said, ‘that has lost its apostrophe.’ I thought myself it was extraordinary how he elicited this kind of flattery and submission merely by sitting there and staring at us over his drink. He seemed to compute the relative problems and advantages of the Norman idea – he blew up a big cloud of smoke in busy, rather wounded-looking thought before he said, ‘You may well be right,’ superbly making no claim himself to such ancient lineage, and making it sound as if I cared far more about the matter than he did.
Jill came to join us just as we were leaving the hotel. Victor perked up a bit at the sight of another woman, and as our little group trailed back down Alfred Street towards the College, they walked together, in the noncommittal good humour of such brief moments between strangers. Jill held the torch, Miss Holt and I came just behind, with Evert and Charlie in the rear. The night was so clear, after the earlier drizzle, and the moon already so strong that the torch was barely needed. The roofs across the street gleamed steeply, and the reflected moon slid from window to dark window like a searchlight. By now I was measuring the length of dinner, which was all that remained before my speech, but I watched Jill too. Her confidence with Victor had a touching new note of bravery to it – she flattered him, which was what he demanded, and where from a man the flattery, once secured, was treated with disdain, from her he was prepared to take it. ‘I hugely enjoyed The Gift of Hermes,’ I heard her say, and Victor said something about enjoyment being the least he hoped readers would get from it. ‘In my considered opinion,’ she said (and here I regretted that dear bossy tone of hers), ‘it’s the finest thing you’ve done.’
‘Well, it’s a great book,’ said Victor briskly, as if there were no point in either of them pretending otherwise. But he smiled as he turned to her. ‘Though not as good, I hope you’ll think, as the one I’m writing now.’ Like others of our writers he took no interest in his hosts, but with her there was a glint of engagement through the cigar-smoke. I suppose I was jealous.
We came in through the back gate of the College, the achievements of the Boat Club chalked up in the quad all glimmering in the moonlight. Though he was the guest of our Club, Victor dined with the Fellows on High Table: there was just a moment, when Evert left him at the SCR door, when I glimpsed the straightforward affection of father and son, a quick nod, a light pat of Evert’s upper arm as the great man turned away. In Hall he was seated next to the Dean, and I glimpsed him myself now and then between the backs of the nattering dons with a kind of proprietary affection, and a real anxiety, now the thing was unstoppably in motion, about how he would go down with the undergrads. Evert had stuck by me, counting on my understanding, and we wisely sat where we couldn’t see David. Even so, his presence somewhere behind us made the starving Evert turn his meal over incapably and gaze into the dark oak of the table as if it hid untold marvels, or miseries.