A strange conversation had ensued between the two intruders, though Evert was so thrown that it didn’t strike him at first that the other man’s story was a very odd one. Both of them were confused, which saved the situation up to a point. They introduced themselves; the stranger was called Gordon Pinnock, he was at St Peter’s College, and he came from Nuneaton – he had been at school with Sparsholt, and claimed outright to be his best friend.
Over the next few minutes Evert seems to have found out a good deal about him, though whether he revealed as much of himself I doubt. They had quite a chat; and Evert found him attractive, in a peculiar way, with a smile he couldn’t help thinking somehow suspicious. If Pinnock and Sparsholt were such close friends it seemed horribly likely to Evert that Sparsholt must have mentioned him, the strange second-year man who was always staring and hanging about in odd places. And it was certain that after this present encounter Pinnock would tell Sparsholt just what had happened – Evert himself was now listening for footsteps outside, while conscious of the need to use the small time available to make his case. I didn’t like to say I thought it quite likely that Sparsholt had hardly taken Evert in at all.
Pinnock looked at him a bit comically and said, what was it about? Evert said he just wanted to leave him a message. And of course Pinnock said, ‘Oh, I’ll tell him, what was it?’ – which made Evert feel there was definitely a game of some kind going on. ‘I wonder where he’s got to,’ said Pinnock. Evert said it was all right, he’d leave his message in the lodge, and he mumbled something about the fire-watching roster. He was turning to go when Pinnock surprised him. They were standing beside Sparsholt’s desk, with the heavy discs of the weights on the floor beside them. And Pinnock said, with a strange little smile, ‘Are you an admirer of the male form?’ ‘Well . . .’ said Evert. ‘I know, funny isn’t it,’ Pinnock said; and then he told him something very revealing, which was that up until two years before Sparsholt had been ‘a total weed’, he was ‘weak and skinny’. As a schoolboy he was always being pushed around, and the only sport he was good at was running – running away, in effect. So at some point, he decided to make a man of himself. ‘Get him to show you a picture,’ said Pinnock, ‘the next time you see him: you won’t believe the change.’ ‘Right, yes, I will,’ said Evert. And with that he made his excuses and left.
He emptied his glass and turned to face me. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘that doesn’t sound too bad.’ But I could see that his mind was lurching round new loops, and had seized on Pinnock, who sounded to me like a hundred other affable and lonely freshmen, as a new hazard and a further rival.
When Evert had left I went over to the lodge to see if some papers I was expecting had arrived, and found a brown cardboard tube in my pigeonhole. I recognized the Art Nouveau writing on the label, and felt I had better not open it till I was back in my room. Once there I coaxed out, tightly rolled so that it seemed to spring free (or half-free, since it kept the disposition to curl), a sheet of pale grey cartridge paper. In fact it curled up coyly in the second I reached away for a book to weight it on the desk. On the back were the pencilled initials, ‘D. S.’ and ‘P. C.’, and the date, 30. X. 40. Was I supposed to imagine a heart and an arrow between them? I held it down flat with Myles on the Papacy and The Code of the Woosters, and had a look at Peter’s effort.
What did I think of it, really? I was torn between wanting to see genius in a friend’s work and a very much drier view. I had a sense of being provoked. Why, after all, had he sent it, or possibly given it, to me? I suppose it was to prove his point, his seducer’s speed; but I felt he was mocking too at my interest in the matter, which he seemed to feel was excessive: I think he thought he could excite me as he himself had been excited.
In fact my position gave me a larger scope for criticism, since I’d seen very nearly as much of this model as Peter had: in the strokings, or fingerings, of red chalk, there was a rush to enhance and ennoble Sparsholt’s body beyond the already enhanced reality. Those two years of incessant press-ups and weights had been outdone in ten minutes. It was the portraitist’s usual flattery, no doubt, but fed by Peter’s own desire to worship: a somehow unwholesome collusion of two men with quite different tastes over a question of male beauty. I have always thought the male nude drawing a sadly comical genre. At one time my half-brother Gerald collected those woeful ‘académies’ produced by the thousands in the art schools of Europe – the moustache, the ropy muscles, the merciful cache-sexe, or if not that the intractable silliness of the genitals themselves, were obstacles only the finest artists could surmount. Well, David Sparsholt had as yet no moustache, and no silk pouch was seen in Peter’s drawing of him. Had it not been for the pencilled note, the heroic torso might just as well have been his gardener from Corpus, or any other of his subjects. In an art so prone to exaggeration it was hard to tell. What Peter had created was a portrait of a demigod from neck to knee, the sex suggested by a little slur, conventional as a fig leaf, while the neck opened up into nothing, like the calyx of a flower.
6
It was meatless dinner in Hall on Friday – perhaps a bad night to have signed in Jill as my guest. She fell on the charred pilaff with greed and dismay, forking through it in search of bits of carrot and cauliflower; she might almost have been on one of her digs. Her decisive gestures, her bunchy brown hair pushed back behind her ears, those large grey eyes and that jutting jaw, all stirred me more now than they had before – I watched her fondly, and I seemed to watch myself, intrigued by my own deepening feelings. Our talk was academic, in fact archaeological, for the most part. She spoke with earnest excitement about some small Etruscan cups or jars she had been allowed to handle when the contents of the Ashmolean were being packed up and sent away in case of bombing. I’d never been interested in such things myself, but I smiled at her enjoyment and after five minutes I started to wonder if I didn’t share her enthusiasm. We sat facing each other between the yellow lamps, the sleeves of our scholar’s gowns sweeping the table. With those small artefacts, I felt, she must have shown a delicacy of touch she had not yet shown to me; or perhaps to any other person.
After dinner I sensed she would have liked to come to my room for coffee, but I was due to start my fire-watching almost at once. I lit her through to the Canterbury Gate, and this time as she shook my hand I leant over it and placed a light kiss on her cheek: I still remember its surprisingly available softness and warmth, just threatened by the cold November evening. Her own reaction was hard to make out exactly in the dark, but horrified alarm seemed the main part of it; she muttered something as she quickly went off. I popped up to my room, rather pleased none the less with what I had done. It paved the way for doing it again. Three minutes later I was crossing Tom Quad for my vigil with Barrett. I brought with me, as well as a Thermos flask and a coat and scarf, The Wicket Gate, volume one of A. V. Dax’s Dance of Shadows trilogy. As I was to introduce Evert’s father at the Club, I wanted to be sure of my footing in the crowded twilight of those earlier novels.
Barrett was another Brasenose refugee, a small northern scientist of some sort, but it struck me he might know Sparsholt and might throw out inadvertent titbits that I could pass on to Evert, before his encounter with him tomorrow night. I was uneasy about this deviously engineered plan, and afraid that Sparsholt himself might think it so odd as to turn against him. As Evert’s confidant I wished the painful story a happy conclusion, and as his friend I saw my duty to prepare him for the worst. When two friends are pursuing the same hopeless object, one with more apparent success than the other, all advice is subtly compromised. I went carefully up the steep dark stair of the tower, and into the square ringing-chamber that was our base for the night, with the sallies of the bell ropes, striped red, white and blue, looped up like bunting just above our heads. It was now four months since they’d been used, and I imagined the bells overhead in their downcast vacancy, and seemed almost to hear the strange creaks of ropes and wheels on the day, perhaps not too far off, when they would be raised again and rung. A few church chairs, with slots for hymn books, had been brought up, and a folding table. The small window was blacked out and the room was starkly lit. Barrett and I would each spend half the night here, and the rest of it up on the leads above, looking out for any kind of trouble from the sky. It was the duty of the one who was resting to run with any message called down by the watcher. So far it had always been wearily eventless work, enemy aircraft sometimes at the limit of hearing: in the black early hours after midnight, while nightly raids were burning London, Oxford, in its bowl of hills, was fixed in a new and generalized silence.