"Thank God," said Jake, sipping. "I've just been closeted with a female pupil."
Lancewood cocked his head. "Was that such an ordeal for you?" This question Ernie would have understood perfectly, though his phrasing of it would have been quite different.
"You don't know her." Jake was beginning to feel like an inefficient impostor, constantly putting his foot through his cover. "Attractive enough, I ..."—no, not suppose—"grant you, but—well, you know the sort. A kind of celestial indifference to being seen to be, oh, lazy, stupid, ignorant, illiterate, anything you please."
"Do you find the women worse than the men in that way?" asked Smith in an expressive adenoidal voice.
"I hadn't really thought about it," said Jake, who if he had been strictly truthful would have gone on to say that now he had had a second and a half to think about it of course he bloody did.
"Well I bloody do," said Smith. "As a matter of fact we were on that very point when you turned up. Naturally Damon was taking the opposite view. He seems to have some sort of thing about women."
"Indeed I have. Which reminds me of one of my favourite ones. How's my darling Brenda?"
"Fighting fit," said Jake. And hay, he added silently.
"John had a rotten cold with all this vile weather but he's fine again now."
This was of course the Abingdon chap. "Good, give him my love," said Jake, registering the adroit passing of the message that Smith knew about that. He (Jake) surmised that that sort of adroitness came in jolly handy for people like Lancewood, must be well worth the trouble of acquiring.
Lighting a French cigarette, Smith pursued his point. "I mean, the levels to which they'll sink. And go on sinking because they stay the same and the problem stays the same, which is: a whole literature, six hundred years" worth, and virtually all of it written by male chauvinists. So, Wordsworth was no good because he abandoned Annette Vallon, no good as a poet that is, the Brontes and George Eliot went over to the enemy by adopting male pseudonyms so they were no good, Doll Tearsheet is the heroine of 'Henry IV', Part 2 at least, and of course the real—"
Lancewood gave a guttural sigh. "Have a heart, she was joking."
"Not this one," said Smith firmly. "The one who told her might have been, but not this one."
"Well then somebody was or, or might have been. You really do—"
"Damon, it's nothing in 'them,' it's forced on them. The men would probably be just as bad if you could find a way of making them think of themselves as men all the time, if such a way were conceivable." Smith caught sight of Jake. "I say, this must be rather—"
"Go on, I want to hear."
"Well—the bright ones can't help seeing that, right, Sapho...."
"Who was untypical?" said Lancewood.
"And who's mostly folk-lore anyway. Then you really come to, as far as they're concerned, the Matchless Orinda. Sorry, Katherine Philips, born in the same year as Dryden, died young, not as young as Shelley though, for instance, anyway she's quite good. Of course she is. What would you? Having taken the precaution of not being born with the digits one nine in front of her decade, but that's a..... Anyway, after her, let's stick to poetry for the moment, you get the Countess of Winchilsea, even more of a household name, and then you sit around for a couple of centuries waiting for Christina Rossetti, who's quite good, and that's that. If no female had ever emerged they'd have been able to put it down to male oppression but Katherine spoiled all that. Back in the middle of the seventeenth century she showed it was 'possible'. As I say, it works down from the top, so that the ones who don't know what the seventeenth century was feel it as much as the others, well, insofar as they can, hence collective inferiority feelings, hence collective aggression. Admittedly with the novel it's not quite such a—"
"All this 'they' talk." Lancewood gestured with the decanter at Jake, who was all right as he was. then poured sherry for Smith and himself. "The ones and the others. From the way you go on, most people would say you were the one with the thing about women."
"Let's just nail that one right away. My relations with them, with women that is, have been and are normal to an unparalleled, even preternatural degree. Three-point-seven premarital affairs, the precise average, married at twenty-five-point-whatever-it-is, lived happily ever after, or since. Perhaps that's not so normal:
"It's probably a bit early to tell," said Jake. "What does your wife think about poetry?"
"She's a biologist," said Smith. He seemed puzzled at the question.
"Curious you should mention centuries," said Lancewood. "One of 'them', which you must admit sounds like something quite different, brought me a new interpretation of 'Hamlet' yesterday. Now this, I want you to understand, is a thoroughly sweet, good-natured, charming little girl, no aggression in the wide world. As to brightness, well you shall hear. Hamlet was a woman." He gave them both his blank look.
Smith gave a great groan but said nothing.
"Even I know that's not very new," said Jake. "Didn't Sarah Bernhardt play him, or her?"
"Indeed she did, and I'd said as much before I realised that of course my little girl would never have heard of her. Quite senseless to expect it. Cruel in a way. Well what could I do, great actress of the nineteenth century, quite natural she should want to play one of the greatest parts, different approach in those days, all that, but I indent have bothered because I'd lost her, as she would have expressed herself, at the nineteenth century. Now she'd clearly heard of it, she even knew it was something to do with a tract of time but all the same there was more to it than that, just as the Age of Johnson or the Nineties, say, don't refer merely to a pair of dates. To her it was, the nineteenth century I mean was, not exactly when old people were young because there can be no such period, but awful and squalid and creepy, with all sorts of things going on—she could easily have come across figures like Dracula and Frankenstein and Jack the Ripper and Dr Arnold and realised they were nineteenth century. Well, the look she gave me, you should have seen it." Lancewood half turned his face away, narrowed his eyes and peered out of their corners. "Suspicion and morbid curiosity and a hint of distaste."
"If you're doing it properly it was more like ungovernable lust," said Smith to Jake's agreement.
"In that case I'm not. She was wondering what I used to get up to with Sarah Bernhardt, whom I must have known at least or why bring her up? Actually quite funny it should have been the great Sarah, in view of her reputed..... I think if one actually challenged my little girl up to the hilt, as it were, she'd say that the years beginning with nineteen were in the nineteenth century up to about 1950, after which it became the twentieth. That would cover the years of birth of even her most senior contemporaries. One understands very well. All these references to people being dragged kicking and screaming into the twentieth century when it's agreed that that's the number of the century we're in, it must be most frightfully confusing. One does sympathise.
"Well. Her .... 'her' case was roughly that since Hamlet is far too nice and intelligent to be a man, he must be a woman because there's nothing else for him to be. I was ready to come back smartly with what about the way he treats Ophelia, male chauvinism if there ever was such a thing, but she'd thought of that—that was how all the men went on in those days, still do really, and it would have been suspicious if she, Hamlet, had behaved differently. What about old Hamlet and Gertrude?—you'd have expected them to notice. Old Hamlet had noticed, but he needed an heir, so he got Polonius to rig things, which gave Polonius the leverage he needed to be kept on at court when all he was fit for was talking balls. I liked that, quite as good as any other explanation I've come across if you think that's what he did talk. Gertrude hadn't noticed because women weren't allowed to bring up their own children then, any more than they are now really. I must say I thought that part was a little weak. Horatio guessed, naturally, but he couldn't say anything. And what did I suppose it was that had driven Ophelia mad? Obviously a sexual shock, eh?
"I shouldn't be
going on like this because it'll only feed your prejudices, but, well, I said what about the whole of the play, there's nothing in it that suggests that things are any different from what they seem. She didn't know about that, she said; 'she thought' Hamlet was a woman."
"I hope you told her she needed weightier authority than that," said Smith. "A Radio 1 disc-jockey thinks Hamlet was a woman. An unemployed school-leaver in Wapping thinks Hamlet was a woman. A psychiatric social worker—"
"That's just sneering, my boy. What she also 'thought', in a different sense, was that Hamlet was a woman in some other .... realer sphere than the play or Shakespeare's sources or anything that might historically have taken place at Elsinore or any other actual spot. Some third domain beyond fiction and fact. That's the terrifying thing."
At the end of a short silence Smith said, "I used to get that from one of my three-point-seven as it might be after films. How did they get on when they started having kids in that place? Did she come back to him in the end? Not might, assuming for fun and for the moment that it's life we're talking about. No—did."
"Not too dull for you I hope, Jake?"
"It's exactly what they're like. I didn't know anybody else had realised, it's never been said, not in my hearing anyway. Absolutely hit it off to a T. When you get past all the poise and the knowingness and the intimacy there's a tiny alien particle that doesn't understand." It came to Jake that he had been speaking with some warmth and he altered his tone. "You'll have to bear with a very ancient historian who spends most of his time coping with drop-outs from Kettering Catering College. Well, what a rarity, listening to two dons discussing their subject," and so on and so forth.
Not long afterwards Lancewood suggested that they should go over. Smith asked for a quick pee and was shown where. As soon as possible Jake said,
"Damon, what's a wanker?"
Lancewood hunched his shoulders with a jerk, showing that as well as being amused by the question lie wasn't totally surprised by it. Again in a way uncharacteristic of dons, or perhaps of the popular idea of them, he spent no time on prolegomena but went straight to what was intended.
"These days a waster, a shirker, someone who's fixed himself a soft job or an exalted position by means of an undeserved reputation on which he now coasts."
"Oh. Nothing to do with tossing off then?"
"Well, connected with it, yes, but more metaphorical than literal."
"That's a relief. Up to a point. Well. I got called it today."
"No really? By that pupil of yours?"
"No, by that picket of women's-lib women at the gate."
"Oh yes of course. It's quite clever, all that, their campaign to make people feel old and senile and clapped out and impotent—that's where the literal part of wanker comes in.!
"Clever? As a means of persuading us to admit women?"
"Certainly. I can think of several colleagues of our sort of age who'd be troubled and frightened by such treatment and inclined to do what they could to put a stop to it. Can't you?"
"I suppose so."
"Have you had anything unpleasant though the post? I gather there's been a certain amount of that."
"Yes, today I was sent a...."
Although Jake considered Lancewood one of his closest as well as oldest friends he found himself perfectly unable to tell him what he had been sent that day. Luckily Smith came back just then and the three set off. In the quad a fine drizzle was falling, so fine that it hardly had the weight to fall and wandered almost horizontally. The zenith was a weak grey but the sun showed for a moment or two. Lancewood mentioned that the question had come up of the admission of women to men's colleges.
"Oh yes, you're one of the last-ditch trio here, aren't you?" said Smith. "Comyns, Merton and Oriel. Rather grand in a way."
"How long have you been letting them in at your place?" asked Jake.
"Oh, we haven't let them 'in,' what do you take us for? At the end of "75 we published a Declaration of Intent that declared our intent to do something or other about it some time, and since then we've been consulting away like mad, pretty well without stopping, the JCR, the porters and the rest of the staff, the other colleges in our awards group, and the women's colleges of course, bloody funny that, and it all seems to have cooled off. We might just ride it out until the next thing turns up, World War III or whatever it might be. I often think my namesake in Rhodesia could have done with a touch of the Oxford spirit."
"What's bloody funny about the women's colleges?"
"What? Oh, just our Governing Body is about as solidly against the idea as any, nearly all for Victorian anti-feminist reasons in effect, and there they are or were in a secret alliance with the crowd who want to block it for Victorian feminist reasons. Like something out of who, Damon, C. P. Snow?"
"Or Shaw. Jake," said Lancewood rather patiently, "letting women into the men's colleges will damage the women's colleges for ten or twenty years, perhaps longer, because they'll only get the men and the women the men's colleges don't want. 'Jake,' because no man or woman is going to go to St Anne's when he or she could go to Balliol."
"I'm sorry, I don't seem to have been keeping up with things."
"It's tough," said Smith, evidently alluding to the likely state of the women's colleges, "but overall the case in favour is unanswerable."
"I thought you didn't care for women undergraduates, at least in your own subject," said Jake.
"As they stand I don't." Smith seemed slightly cross. "That's the whole point. Living and working among the men is bound to improve them. It's the only way they'll ever forget they're women and start behaving like, I know, not students, but—"
"You make them all sound the same," said Lancewood, seeming slightly cross himself. "Anyway, it'll mean the end of this."
This must have been in the first place the Senior Common Room, where they had just arrived. Considerable parts of the building that embodied it dated from the fifteenth century; the room itself had been radically reconstructed in the 1870s under the influence of a Master of advanced artistic taste, and was well known to those interested in such matters for its carved pillars, multi-coloured floor tiles, authentic Morris wallpaper and pair of stained-glass windows depicting respectively The Progress of Art and The Progress of Science. There were also some paintings from that period, a Burne-Jones, two Poynters, a Calderon, a Simeon Solomon and others and, from an earlier one, a Romney of an otherwise unnoted Fellow of the college; recent research had been at that too, though so far without managing to dislodge the reputed artist. Jake had liked the room and its furniture on sight in 1936, when his tutor had invited him up to dessert, and still did, despite certain changes he could not now have defined.
Its occupants for the moment were rather less to his taste, starting with Roger Dollymore, the Senior Tutor, and an elderly chemist called Wynn-Williams. Jake went over to them not because he much wanted to but to give Smith and Lancewood, whom he hoped to sit with in Hall, a rest from him meanwhile. Little enough was required of him by the other two, who seemed quite happy, or not significantly more unhappy than might have been expected, telling each other about the plays they had seen in London during the vacation. Jake thought briefly how he hated plays, then tried to remember how each of them stood on the women-in-or-out thing. He knew how they ought to stand if they had any sense; all he could remember about Wynn-Williams's wife was that she was impossible, but he knew Naomi Dollymore fairly well, or had done in the days when there were dinner-parties, and could have gone on for quite a long time without repeating himself about her readiness to share most details of her experience, recent or remote, with whoever she might be talking to, not in Alcestis pseudo-sequential, fool's-anecdote style but by as free a process of association as you could hope to come across. So both husbands ought to be ready to lay down their lives for the status quo: the feminisation of college, once begun, would lead irresistibly to the taking-over of common-room and High-Table life, of college life, by the wives. Just imagine th
e Way....
"What?" said Jake. "I'm sorry?"
"I said," said Dollymore in his sheep's voice, the only one he had, "where are you going."
"What? Well at the moment I...."
"Away. Abroad." Wynn-Williams might have been a Shakespearean king or other hero encouraging his followers into the saddle but of course he wasn't really, he just sounded like an old-style actor. "We go to Venice at the end of June."
"Naomi and I have rather fallen out of love with Venice," said Dollymore. His interest in Jake's holiday plans had perhaps never been deep. "So commercialised and full of Americans. That is the perennial struggle, to find a place that isn't. Naomi and I have been moving on almost every year for .... years. We've been driven out of one Greek island after another. It seems Nisiros is still comparatively unspoiled." After a long pause he went on at a reduced speed, "Though I'm sure it's very different nowadays from .... from the time when..."
Wynn-Williams came in quite quickly. "The time when Jake's .... Jake's...."
"Jake's pals from the .... the..."
"From the long-ago were...."
"There. Were there."
"Were there, yes."
The two laughed in simple pleasure at having jointly recollected Jake's subject and succeeded in bringing that fact to utterance. He laughed too. It was at any rate nicer over here than it could possibly have been in the larger group by The Progress of Art. They were all young, under about thirty-five anyway: the philosopher who was co-editor of a London weekly paper, the political scientist who ran a current-affairs programme on TV, the historian of drama who put on plays full of naked junior members of the university torturing one another, the writer in residence with his look of eager disdain for his surroundings, somebody's guest with his look of unearned eminence—a wanker of the future, if when the future came it tolerated any judgements of worth.
Jake's Thing Page 12
