‘Economics? All nonsense. The stuff merely makes confusion worse confounded. What the universities will do is keep young men and women off the labour market for three or four years at comparatively inconsiderable expense. I favour more universities – and I am reliably told you can run one up within eighteen months. But there’s your tennis again. Your friend’s too good for you at it, by the way. I don’t say he’s much to look at. But that thoroughbred strain counts.’
‘You and I must do what we can, sir.’
Lord Furlong stared, being unfortunately quicker to recognise impertinence than his guest had reckoned on. It had been extremely rash in Gillie – potential suitor for Diana’s hand as he hoped to be – thus to imply that Eatwells and Pillmans were much of a muchness in point of social origins.
‘I hope that you and Mr Gethin will stay to luncheon,’ Lord Furlong said – suddenly with the frigid courtesy of one of ancient lineage.
‘I’m sure Francis and I would like to very much.’
Lord Furlong inclined his head with a senatorial dignity that would have done credit to any of those marble noblemen he had taken over with the house. But his final words for the moment were not quite in keeping with this.
‘And now,’ he said, ‘go back and make a fool of yourself again on that court.’
IV
The tennis party was repeated on two or three subsequent occasions during the university’s summer term, but stopped short of becoming a regular thing. This wasn’t because Gilbert Pillman and Lord Furlong had been rather rude to one another. Lord Furlong clearly judged Gillie to be an inconsiderable person who needn’t be much thought about, and Gillie was perfectly prepared to put up with Lord Furlong in general society on Sunday provided he continued to be an absentee the day before. As for Diana Eatwell, she liked her tennis and was improving her game quite fast, since she practised hard at it at school. Her friend Judy (whose other name Gillie either kept forgetting or never picked up) seemed to be short of access to young men, and simply clocked in whenever this particular opportunity for it arose. It was Francis Gethin who wasn’t keen, or who at least wasn’t consistently and reliably so. Franco was becoming rather a puzzle to Gillie. It was understandable that he should find it boring to have to play with three people markedly below his own form, yet he seemed to look forward to these occasions almost with impatience. When they arrived, however, he changed to being irritable and baffled by them. This had something to do with Diana, and in the circumstances it was natural enough. If Franco had become interested in Diana (as he seemed to have done) he would obviously take a poor view of the fact that she was now so definitely Gillie’s girl. But this wasn’t quite the feel of the thing. Franco, Gillie thought, was at times like a man who sees some enchanting prospect straight ahead of him, makes a dash at it, and bumps his nose against a sheet of plate glass. This odd state of affairs, however, was to be resolved in a peculiar manner quite soon.
And Gillie didn’t think much about it. He was far too absorbed in his Saturdays. These were now weaving a kind of magic carpet for him. His attendances in the Furlong Library became shorter and shorter (a fact of which the Furlong Librarian fortunately failed to take notice) and the confabs became correspondingly longer and longer. They hadn’t turned into what could vulgarly be termed spooning matches or petting parties. In fact anyone coming in on them would have judged himself to be in the presence of something wholly edifying: a species of mini-seminar in English poetry. Gilbert Pillman, that promising young tutor and lecturer, had found a pupil equally promising in Diana Eatwell, and was bringing her along at a great pace. They read a lot of standard verse, particularly Wordsworth’s, to one another, skipping the boring bits and allowing plenty of time for cogent exposition on Gillie’s part. Gillie, needless to say, had entirely ceased to think of Diana as a schoolgirl with a silly pash for the stuff; he had honestly decided that she had talent as a writer which it was his business to educe and fortify. In other words his manner of falling in love with her was by that sort of imaginative and seemingly unsensual route which is apt to have sudden and explosive consequences.
Wordsworth, like Milton, is all very well if one simply wants the patently top-class article. But nobody (or not in Gillie’s view) is going to get far by making a direct model of them. Contemporary poetry had to come in here, and Gillie worked out a little reading plan from the beginning of the decade. They had a go at Wystan Auden’s Poems (1930) and then at Stephen Spender’s Twenty Poems (1930) and then Gillie cast around for a third volume of the same date. He found it in Richard Aldington’s A Dream in the Luxembourg.
The shade of Dante, if present to witness Gillie’s opening this book, might well have trembled. No chronicle of how love constrained Lancelot could be quite so potent a nostalgic performance. The bereft young Troilus, waiting in vain for his lost Cressida as the watch-fires pale at dawn before the tents of the Achaeans, is scarcely better calculated to unlock the callow heart than is Richard Aldington’s dreamer in a Parisian garden. The moment came when Gillie’s voice trembled and the overwhelming thing happened. The lovers would have read no further in that book that day even if Lord Furlong (at home and in a bad temper because of a touch of gout) had not walked into the den to find his daughter and the obscure young man from the university locked in a first passionate embrace.
In the ensuing scene, which was very brief, Gillie was assisted to a certain semblance of dignity by a consciousness of virtue. The instantaneous mutual avowal had happened, the book had dropped from his hand, only a very few minutes before. If Diana’s clothing had somehow become a little disarranged his own had not. Although unpractised in such situations, he was sufficiently sensitive to understand the substantial improbability outside fiction of matters having taken a more definitive turn that day, even without this luckless interruption. For as well as loving Diana dearly did he not also respect her very much? Unfortunately it did not occur to Lord Furlong to view the matter in this light. Containing himself only until the wretched youth had withdrawn his hands from cupping Diana’s breasts, he uttered a roar of rage, and glanced wildly round the den much as if in the expectation of finding in it a conveniently disposed horse-whip or cane. Gillie got to his feet, prepared for respectful but not craven speech. Lord Furlong, abandoning the thought of castigation, turned to the technique of ejection instead. Striding forward (despite the gout) and with a sudden exercise of physical strength totally unnerving in one of his years, he grabbed Gillie, whirled him around, seized him by the collar and the seat of his pants (yes, even that, as in a comic strip!), and pitched him through the door which he had left open behind him. Then, only briefly taking breath, he fell to bellowing again. Gilbert Pillman was being bidden to leave his house instantly and never again venture to enter it.
It was an impossible, it was a nightmarish situation. He couldn’t attempt, in a daughter’s presence, to retaliate upon the man – and it didn’t look as if any such effort would be crowned with much success anyway. He was in the man’s own house. He was even, since William Shenstone was no longer the honest occasion of his visits, in the man’s own house under false pretences. The uncivilised old ruffian hadn’t given him the slightest chance of apology, profession of honest intentions, promises of discreet and open courses in the future. There was nothing for it but to leave. And between him and Diana, Lord Furlong barred the way. All he could do was to call out, incoherently enough, what were designed to be words of encouragement and pledges of enduring devotion. Then he left. At his last glimpse of her his beloved (a shade disappointingly, somehow) had straightened up on the sofa which had been accommodating them, and had begun to cry.
By this misadventure Gilbert Pillman must be described as a good deal cast down. He could think of nothing he could do about it, so his suffering was of that passive order which has been held to be particularly painful since it falls short of the stir and struggle of tragedy. He did, indeed, make one or two attempts at action. He rang up Notton Grange and asked to be put throug
h to Miss Eatwell, but was told at once that she was not at home. He wrote Diana a long letter which he was quite sure would not be delivered to her. He wrote almost as long a letter to her father, but got no reply. The notion of boldly presenting himself again at the front door of the mansion had to be abandoned when he considered how certain it was that somebody would have been instructed to unleash a cry of hounds at him were he to do so. It was perfectly clear that Lord Furlong, a doting father in some regards, was an atrociously tyrannical father in others. And Diana, after all, was only a schoolgirl, and he supposed that an outraged parent could banish her instantly at will to one hideous doom or another. She was probably even now on her way to some ghastly convent or ‘finishing school’ in France or Switzerland. Of course Diana had enormous courage; she must have, since all conceivable virtues were hers; nevertheless it must be considered that she was a spirit too finely attuned easily to resist the buffetings of a universe which had turned fiendishly cruel overnight.
There were also embarrassing professional complications. Gillie was involved in them, if not up to the neck at least well above the ankles, with regard to beastly Shenstone. He had even staked out a kind of formal claim on the man through the ‘Work in Progress’ column in an appropriate learned journal. What would Hedger say – Hedger who had ordained that his assistant should, after many years of labour, attain to the position of a world authority on the productions and personality of this trivial scribbler and garden-maniac? Hedger had fixed him up at Notton; how would Hedger take the news that Notton was suddenly not on at all? Gillie Pillman almost howled aloud as he detected himself perpetrating this weirdly involuntary pun. He would be lucky to keep his job, were Hedger to penetrate to the inward occasion of the catastrophe. At best, he believed, he would now remain a junior lecturer all his days, on a salary generously subject to an increment of fifteen pounds every second year.
At this particular point in his miseries, indeed, he did bethink himself of Sir John Suckling. It was distinctly within his recollection that on one occasion Hedger had debated with him the rival claim to current attention of this Caroline character. Suckling, it seemed, was almost as much in need of a leg-up as was Shenstone. Perhaps Gillie could brazenly tell Hedger that he had belatedly yet firmly opted for this alternative learned resource. So he got out of the university library a volume declaring itself to be A Collection of all the Incomparable Peeces written by Sir John Suckling, and read it through between supper and breakfast. There was a play called Aglaura, in which it appeared that the actors were clothed in lace hammered out of real gold and silver, but which was distinctly lacking in dramatic interest. He decided that only a sucker could fall for Suckling. So he took the book back to the library and faced despair.
It was at this nadir in point of Gillie’s nervous tone that Franco perpetrated his strange indiscretion. Gillie had told Franco nothing at all about what had befallen at Notton Grange, since the thing was simply too painful for speech. But Franco had of course marked his dejection, and since his own disposition was at least intermittently melancholic he must have fabricated the notion that he and his room-mate were thus more in some sort of spiritual harmony than usual. It was a moment propitious for avowal. So it came about that one evening, as the two young men sat in front of their now empty grate without even the flagon of burgundy between them, Franco made Gillie a declaration of passion. And Gillie was still gaping at his friend in mere bewilderment when he found that Franco had cast himself down at his feet, wildly declaring his willingness, if better might not be, to settle for a kiss.
It is not possible that Gilbert Pillman can have been without at least an occasional fleeting glimpse of something unsettled in Francis Gethin’s sexual inclination. But, if so, he had put it down to some insignificant hangover from his friend’s schooldays. He was totally without first-hand experience of any such course of action as Franco was urging, perhaps because he hadn’t himself been at the right sort of school. Moreover there was much in their recent experience together, and notably at Notton Grange, that seemed incomprehensible in terms of what was now, so to speak, on the carpet. Hadn’t Franco quite plainly been a bit hooked on Diana? As this thought came into Gillie’s head, as the image of Diana rose before him, he felt a sudden quite uncontrollable revulsion before the scene now transacting itself. He jumped to his feet, punched the kneeling Franco on the jaw, and ran from the room.
He spent a wretched night – the more wretched because at one point he believed he could hear Franco quietly sobbing in the next room.
First Diana and then Franco: he was spreading behind him a trail of woe. And he knew that with Franco he had behaved very badly indeed. He had behaved like a thug in the street! The more he thought about his motives, the more beastly did he see himself to be. For one thing, there had even been injured vanity behind that brutal blow. He had believed himself to be liked and indeed admired by Franco on account of his cleverness, his various acquirements, his cheerfulness, the dash and vivacity of his general make-up. And what he had really been in his friend’s eyes was a sexual object! Yes, there had been this absurd and unbeautiful resentment operative (he now realised in the small hours) in his manner of rejecting the strange homage Franco had been offering him. But there was worse than this. It came to him that, in that utterly unexpected and utterly naked moment, what had motivated him was the fact that in no conceivable circumstances could Francis Gethin ever have turned him on. He could perfectly well imagine himself, at least when a good deal younger, getting quite something out of sporadic homosexual behaviour. But it wouldn’t have been with Franco. It just happened that for him, although not in the least necessarily for other people, whether male or female, Francis Gethin was rather the reverse of physically appealing. And Franco, in that horrible revealing moment, had known this. Gillie now found himself wishing that, if only for seconds, he had felt himself tempted by Franco, or even that he had consented to go through some mild ritual of love with him. Nothing lasting would have come of it; it would just have been embarrassing; since he was himself in love in an ordinary sort of way it would probably have been a bit revolting as well. And it was certainly true that most men who happened to be much attached to a virtuous girl would react pretty sharply to being suddenly propositioned in an irregular fashion. He ought to have managed something more civilised with Franco, all the same.
They were civilised, both of them – in the useful if imprecise sense of the word which was coming into vogue at that time. It might have been expected, therefore, that on a basis of reciprocal candour and goodwill relations would have been patched up, or even repaired, on the following morning. It didn’t happen. Gillie’s contrition was entire, but he couldn’t convincingly announce a change of heart and mind so hard upon having hit out at his friend so wildly. Franco’s key was not contrition but abjection; his apologies were for his very existence as the vilest and most worm-like of men. It was evident that he believed this unwholesome nonsense, or believed that he believed it; at the same time Gillie perceived that where he himself had felt that sense of injured vanity Franco was choking down something much more formidable: an injured pride. Franco was ashen with distress, but Gillie wondered whether it was not with anger too. Nobody abasing himself like this to you, he told himself, is going to be other than your enemy for life. So Franco, of whom he had really become rather fond over the past year, was going to be as lost to him as Diana was.
Later in the morning, however, Franco revealed that something of the sort was going to happen in any case.
‘There’s a thing I heard about last week,’ he said, suddenly at his most nervous and diffident. ‘Only I haven’t mentioned it, because it’s all going to be rather a bore. Some people in Cambridge—’
‘What do you mean – some people in Cambridge?’ It was now apparent to Gillie that he and Franco would henceforward talk to one another in a perfectly commonplace way, although never with intimacy again. ‘Do you mean they’re finding you a job there?’
�
��Well, yes. I wrote a couple of stupid papers last year, and they were published in some rag or other a few months ago. And these people have taken it into their heads that I can do sums in a fashion after all. So they’ve offered me a Fellowship, and I suppose I’d better go.’
‘Franco, that’s absolutely splendid!’ It was difficult, Gillie found, to get the right note of congratulation into this: partly because Franco was treating what was in fact dazzling promotion as if it were one of the sadder incidents of life; and partly because it meant that they would not have to suffer the embarrassment of one another’s company for more than a few days longer, since they were already in the last week of the summer term.
‘Perhaps it’s just as well, since I’ve made such a filthy fool of myself.’ Franco was going to be abject again, but he was also lurkingly mutinous. ‘I can’t think how I imagined things about you. I can’t think how I was led to. After all, I could take a good guess as to how you felt about the girl out there at the beer hall.’
‘Let’s drop it, Franco.’ Gillie remembered that he had promised himself to scrag Franco – possibly tumbling about on the carpet with him – the next time he talked that offensive rubbish about beer. It was an unthinkable diversion now. ‘And it’s all over, anyhow, that business. Lord Furlong won’t have me in his house ever again. I’m not enough of a gentleman for him, I imagine. So you can have a go there yourself, if you bloody well want to try commonplace girl and boy.’
This unpremeditated savagery had come from Gillie to his own immediate complete dismay. It seemed to betray a feeling in him about Franco and Franco’s late solicitation and Franco’s coming Fellowship which was not at all agreeable to contemplate. And now Franco was looking at him with what he took to be a moment’s overt hostility. But there was nothing of this in his tone when he next spoke.
The Bridge at Arta Page 7
