The Question of Max

by Amanda Cross

  Kate kicked off her shoes and tucked her feet under her on the chair. The absence of tables was partly explained by the ease with which one could balance a glass on the wide arms of the ancient chairs. She had read in a book that Colette, whom Kate enormously admired, had said that friendship, like love, naturally speaks its true language only in a duet. It occurred to her that one of the problems she had begun to encounter in recent years arose from the impossibility of such conversations in the ordinary routine of life. Everyone was either too busy, if they were worth talking to, or too dull, if they were available. She had, to recover herself, chosen occasional solitude in the cabin Reed had given her in lieu, perhaps, of friendship. Or, once past youth, did one find one’s conversations, if any, only with those with overlapping interests or those met by serendipity, in foreign parts, both of you orbiting outside the usual gravitational forces, like Phyllis? She asked the question.

  “You,” said Phyllis, “are growing to resemble a psychiatrist or a Jewish comedian, always answering a question with a question. Of course, I know just what you mean. I’ve never been lonelier in my life, and I, unlike you, haven’t newly discovered writers to think about. My major aim in life, I shall confess to you, is to eat in one of those halls in the men’s colleges. Hugh says that that’s still impossible, and even if he got me invited to one of those colleges that admit women exist—because I am a professional, actually head of a school on a year’s leave, though no one ever seems to remember it here, or care—it would all be immensely strained and lonely. The poor dear dons haven’t eaten with women in so long, Hugh says, they would think the food was tainted. Either they’re bachelors and live in college, or they’re married men who leave their poor wives and children home for a supper of corn flakes, and arrive in hall to dine elegantly and with proper service. One of the perks for dons, you know, is a full and elaborate dinner. All that was written into the rules before dons married. I think with what relief they leave the domestic scene and repair to their safe masculine precincts. Which are in danger, I’m glad to report, of being no longer safe. Some colleges, like Exeter, I think, have never had a woman in hall and claim they never will. Not that the dear English are all that welcoming even to male visitors. Some prominent male American professors have been known to die of social chills. Nonetheless, damn it, I still admire the trees and gardens and lawns this side of idolatry. Sometimes I go to look at the deer at Magdalen and think that they brought them there to make the boys from large estates feel at home, and that probably the descendants of those boys think that women ought to be kept in more or less the same attractive and confined way. That world is over, but it had its beauty.”

  “What a beauty,” Kate sighed. “Imagine life in the nineteen twenties when there were still rules about mixed parties and, as L. P. Hartley said, hope took for granted what in these days fear takes for granted. Phyllis, if I utter one more word of nostalgia, hit me.”

  “I’ll hit you with another Scotch,” Phyllis said. She returned with the bottle, no more ice being, as she had explained, available, and placed the bottle on the floor between them. Kate poured herself another drink. “What I don’t understand,” Phyllis said, “is what you’re doing here, besides rescuing me. Ought I to have heard of Dorothy Whitmore?”

  “Not really. We were both too young to see the movie they made of her novel; she was a good friend of Cecily Hutchins. In fact, I’d better make a clean breast of it—where in the world did that expression come from, do you imagine?—and tell you the whole story. Have you met Max Reston?”

  “Have I not? He knows Hugh through his brother, Reston’s, I mean, and now and then he turns up at the Cosmopolitan Club, Reston, I mean, not his brother.”

  “He turned up there recently with me, as a matter of fact, but that was later. It began in March when I was up at the cottage Reed gave me. But of course, I haven’t told you about that. I’m beginning to sound like my oldest sister-in-law, who is always going so far back to explain all the elements in every story that I begin to wonder if she is dull on purpose; one couldn’t, I sometimes feel, be that boring by accident.”

  “You’re not boring me. I’ve only learned to know the meaning of boredom these last months.”

  Kate ended up telling the story, in almost sister-in-law detail, as she thought of it. She concluded with an admission of her profound excitement at the thought of reading Whitmore’s letters, which she had already established were in the Somerville library. “Whitmore left her letters to Max’s mother, who left them to Somerville. I long to read them, of course on my way to visit you. How fortunate your situation is for Whitmore research.” This brought her back to Gerry Marston. Kate’s tale was, as tales are with friends who understand conversation, full of digressions that eventually rejoined the main stream neatly, as in medieval literature.

  “Are you suggesting,” Phyllis asked, “that Max killed her?”

  “No, of course not. At least, I don’t think so. Max might freeze someone to death with disdain, but violence isn’t his style. Even if he had the smallest reason for killing her, which he hasn’t. Max is a true gentleman in that he is never rude unintentionally, but surely not even his withering intentions reach as far as mayhem. But it all does seem odd. And it’s left me with a hunger to know more of Whitmore and Hutchins. Phyllis, do we have to go out? Couldn’t we have a Marks and Spencer shepherd’s pie here and get beautifully sozzled?”

  “Why not. I’ve even got some beer, in returnable bottles, bless the English. I’ll go and light the oven now, so that we can eat in three hours. The explosion you are about to hear is part of the scenario, and should not be regarded in the light of a catastrophe.”

  When she came back soon, no sound of an explosion having intervened, it was to announce that she had been inspired. “We shan’t eat shepherd’s pie and drink bottled beer, we’ll walk along the river to Binsey and have cheese and pickle sandwiches in the garden of the Perch. Are you still the greatest walker as ever was?”

  “Still. I remember the path, and the boats and swans.”

  “They’re there yet,” Phyllis assured her, “with the addition of much litter, here as the world over, alas. In England, needless to say, one cannot function without first memorizing opening and closing times—why should the English make life simple and let you drink whenever you feel like it? At least it gives a shape to my day. Ah, I say, I’ll walk to the market and then, on the way back, the Lamb and Flag will have opened and I’ll have a beer. Let’s see; we’ve got time for one more drink and a wash and brush up; I do hope that’s the correct English phrase—I keep trying to use them but always get them wrong, somehow. Hugh will be here when we return, and you can get the male side of life at Oxford from him. Believe me, compared to the lives of females not lucky enough to be attached somewhere, it’s pure heaven, even if Hugh constantly complains that the English love of animals makes the use of even one laboratory mouse a matter of state. Someone in Hugh’s lab got called on the carpet for cruelty to shrimp, if you’ll believe it.”

  They set off in a direction not usually recommended to those visitors invited to All Souls. They walked toward what Phyllis called the working-class end of St. Bernard’s Road, past a pub which was apparently the local youth meeting place. Certainly neither the litter nor the noise suggested that English adolescents had anything over their American counterparts in neatness or discretion. “What Leo would like,” Kate said, “is that in England one can, it seems, begin drinking beer before puberty. He’s always asked to prove he’s eighteen in the States, difficult, because he isn’t.”

  They crossed Walton Street and continued down Walton Well Road. Almost immediately they were on the bridge over the railway tracks, with a clear view of a factory, product indeterminable, and then they were in the country. This quick transition from pavement to fields was, Kate always felt, close to the heart of England (whatever that meant), and she wondered how long England would be able to preserve it
against the encroachments of suburbia and council housing. So far she had noticed that their town planning, like their broadcasting, was superior to America’s, if their urban architecture was not. They crossed the river, passed through a gate, and were on the tow path to the Perch. This establishment was so picturesque, at least from the outside, that Kate began, as she always did at such moments, to wonder about the possibility of a job in England and a cottage nearby. Perhaps Phyllis, who had ended up on St. Bernard’s Road beached on the shoals of boredom, had dreamed the same thing.

  They went inside, which was rather more modern, and found their cheese and pickle sandwiches, ordered a pint of beer each, and passed through a good deal of rather noisy conviviality into the garden. Here, as it happened, they were alone, possibly because the English drink indoors in a properly civilized manner. On the roof of the pub there rested, looking like something from a Blake drawing, two large white doves with fanlike tails.

  “Not an hallucination,” Phyllis said, following Kate’s glance. “They live here. They’re moulting or breeding or something sedentary at the moment, which is why they have that statuesque look. Hugh and I asked the owner about them not long ago. Well, Kate, here’s to your adventure among the postwar Oxford generation. Keep me informed, will you? I feel like one of those dreary women who take up pottery or baking when the children start school, because there is no demand for their services from outside themselves. We always think we want life to be impromptu when we’re middle-aged, but I expect I never meant as impromptu as all this.” For a moment the boredom and depression showed forth from behind the glib talk.

  “I shall certainly keep you informed,” Kate said. “How about splitting another cheese and pickle?”

  * * *

  * Chiefly in Vera Brittain, The Women at Oxford, London: Harrap, 1960.

  Chapter Ten

  So Kate settled down to read Whitmore’s letters, sitting in one of the bays of the Somerville library looking out over the lawn-tennis courts and the great beech trees beyond. Kate was particularly intrigued with Whitmore’s letters to her family from France, where she had served in the women’s army corps. She had written stories at night by candlelight, and talked to the men for the fun of it. Of course, she had come back from the war thinking she could save the world. The League of Nations, and all that. She had been wrong; no one could save the world. But how wonderful, even for a short time, to have supposed that possible.

  Kate, reading these letters and gazing out at the quadrangle, would picture it at an earlier time when Whitmore had come up in Michaelmas term, 1919. The following year, Whitmore’s last, the statute giving women degrees came into force, and the first degree-giving ceremony in which women took part must have transformed the Sheldonian, Kate thought, into the sort of ceremony with which movie directors in the innocent days of Hollywood films used to end their pictures. In the words of Vera Brittain: “Inside the Sheldonian Theatre, its atmosphere tense with the consciousness of a dream fulfilled, younger and older spectators looked down . . . upon the complicated ceremony in the arena below. Then the great south doors opened and the five women principals, arrayed for the first time in caps and gowns, entered. . . . After a second’s silence the theatre rang with unrehearsed applause, and the Vice-Chancellor rose to receive the first women Masters of Arts ever to appear in that historic place.”

  In the world outside. Parliament had granted votes to women, thus freeing Oxford from the threat of appearing eccentric. In 1920, Kate thought, the new sight of women in scholars’ and commoners’ gowns whirling about the town on bicycles and running, as they are now, to the clamor of bells must have encouraged hope of progress. It must indeed have been a time of hope. And war, of course, was finished and would never return.

  In the mornings, before Kate left the hotel for Somerville, her own letters would arrive. In this, too, England had clung, however precariously, to standards. They no longer had several deliveries a day; few even spoke now of the time when one could order from the grocer by postcard, and he would deliver your order the same day. But at least the mail arrived before nine o’clock in the morning, so that one started the day knowing where one was.

  On the morning of the sixth day, Kate had three letters. She opened Reed’s first. He assured her in his penultimate paragraph that the mess at St. Anthony’s was progressing rather as expected. The faculty had been stunned by the news, not least of all, Reed suggested, because it had reached them through students. Their response had been varied and, as Reed had suspected, Leo and the other students had withstood a certain amount of sharp remarks. This, Reed thought, would pass. She wasn’t to worry. He was asking Leo to write.

  Leo’s letter, which Kate opened next, was remarkably reassuring, particularly since he did not mention the matter of the College Boards at all. He had apparently grasped that the purpose of his note was to reassure her that life was unchanged. “Dear Kate,” he had written. “Everything fine here. Nothing special happening, though Reed said he would tell you what there is. I’ve been reading all the books I’m supposed to have read already for finals at the end of May. As you know, I took only bull shit courses my last term [by which, as he knew Kate knew, Leo meant literature courses]. In the midst of all your highbrow activities, why don’t you go to see a professional soccer game. It’s the great game all over Europe and South America, and you ought to see one, even if it isn’t upper class. It’s great to watch. Sit next to some man who’ll explain the moves, if you can manage it. I’m sure you can. Love, Leo.” Kate admired Leo’s way of administering assurance, and the way he had moved onto the safe ground of athletics, even from afar.

  Her third letter, a much fatter one, was from Crackthorne.

  Dear Kate [he wrote]. The end of the basketball season has left me with time for literary researches on your behalf; I reread a bit of Graves, and of course he was not only at Oxford with your crew, but at Somerville! Not that Whitmore, Hutchins, or any other female students are mentioned, but one certainly gets another view on the same life, if that’s what you’re looking for. Needless to add, Somerville was a hospital when Graves was sent there before he was demobilized. They posted him for a time at Wadham to train officers, but the damp and hard work got the better of him, and he ended back at Somerville, where the men used to lounge around the grounds in their pajamas and dressing gowns, and even walk down St. Giles thus arrayed. What can Oxford have been coming to? But, as Graves points out, the social system had been dislocated. The don who was to be his moral tutor when he came up (the same time as your chaps, I think) was now a corporal and saluted Graves, who was a captain, every time they met. Aldous Huxley, of whom we were speaking at St. Anthony’s great basketball victory, was there also, one of the few undergraduates in residence at the time. Graves used to visit Garsington, where everyone, but everyone, my dear, went, and where Clive Bell was passing the war looking after cows on the Garsington farm. All the CO’s congregated there, apparently, because the Morrells were pacifists. But I must not get carried away with Graves’s tales.

  When Graves finally resigned his commission and came up to Oxford he was at St. John’s college, but lived on Boar’s Hill with all those other poets—I bet your trio visited there, if truth were told. What’s more, Graves married a feminist who sounds rather amazingly up-to-date, actually, but must have seen pretty much eye-to-eye with Whitmore et al., shouldn’t you think? Graves’s wife kept her own name, was against religion (“God is a man, so it must be all rot” was her unforgettable comment), and nearly refused to marry when she read the marriage service for the first time on their wedding day, just like the lady in Shaw’s play. I wish Graves had actually mentioned your people, but he didn’t apparently go back to Somerville after he came up, being too busy meeting T. E. Lawrence at All Souls, an anti-feminist place if ever one there was. I suppose all this is more worthy of conversation at a basketball game than as correspondence between two scholars, not to mention between a diss
ertation writer and his sponsor, but as you have no doubt gathered by now, frivolity is my long suit. Speaking of All Souls, Graves and Lawrence (T. E. again, D. H. being always committed to sterner and more important things) once planned to steal the Magdalen College deer and drive them into the small inner quadrangle of All Souls. The plan fell through, more’s the pity, or the deer might have made it even if the women never did. Keep well, dear Kate, and send a postcard to your devoted friend and admirer, John Crackthorne.