‘I’m frightfully sorry about Lou,’ he said. ‘It was terribly awkward, but I just couldn’t help it.’
‘Just what was terribly awkward?’
‘Our giving Lou lunch like that. In that rotten restaurant.’
‘I don’t know that it was awkward particularly. But it was certainly bloody mysterious.’ Gillie didn’t quite know why he wanted to sort this out. ‘Why on earth, Franco, should you chuck Lou at my head, or her at mine, if—’ Gillie hesitated, and then turned almost brutal again,’—if, all the time, you had other views for me.’
‘It was none of it my idea, at all. Lou insisted on it. She was interested in you, just as I said.’
‘I can’t see why she should have been, since she’d never before set eyes on me. But I admit she was making passes at her brother’s friend before the meal was over. And I did, come to think of it, find that a bit awkward.’ Gillie didn’t make this last comment with much conviction. In fact a certain complacency might have been detected as attaching to his memory of certain aspects of Lou Gethin’s behaviour.
‘I don’t think it was quite as you’re imagining, Gillie.’ For the first time during this dreadful morning Franco managed a faint smile – which might have cheered Gillie up a little had he not imagined it to be malign rather than friendly. ‘Lou was being an ambassador,’ Franco went on. ‘Or it might be better to say a spy.’
‘I can’t think what you mean. It sounds merely crazy.’
‘It’s not exactly that. My family get worried about me, you see. I suppose you can understand that?’
‘Well, yes, if they know—I mean—’
‘Quite so. They have a notion that I ought to make wholesome friends. Husky heteros. Lou was sent to look at you, and to report if you turned out to be another fancy boy. Of course I saw her stirring you up a bit. Lou’s good at it, wouldn’t you say? I was quite proud of her. It was all a put-up thing, you see. But she had you fairly panting for it, hadn’t she?’
‘What utter balls! Of all the revolting—’
‘Don’t be a hypocrite, Gillie. There you were, fresh from the embraces of the trusting Maid of Notton, getting a kick out of an ogling match with a girl you hadn’t known the inside of an hour before. So you’d been vetted and proved O.K. A manly little chap.’
‘Do shut up, Franco. All this is no good at all.’ Gillie was on the verge of losing his temper. What he had just heard was uncommonly humiliating in itself, he felt, without having nasty half-truths added to it.
‘I’m sorry. I’m a beast. I wish I had the guts to shoot myself.’
‘Franco, I do want—’ Once more, Gillie broke off in mid-sentence, since ‘I do want to help’ sounded impossibly patronising. And as he hesitated, Franco jumped up and ran from the room. But within five minutes he was back again, pausing in the doorway and staring at Gillie from under his most tremendous frown.
‘I think I ought to tell you something else,’ he said, abruptly and huskily. ‘It’s rather confusing, really. Well, I suppose not. But it did confuse me.’
‘What on earth are you talking about this time, Franco?’
‘I’m talking about Diana Eatwell’s brother – her twin brother, I think he was. He died, you know. I expect you’ve heard about him.’
‘Yes, I have.’
‘He was the Eatwell I knew at my prep school – the boy they didn’t treat too well. But it just didn’t occur to me to connect up until I saw Diana. She’s the split image of Tony.’
‘Tony must have been a good deal younger than you.’
‘Yes, he was. He was a new boy in my last year. He was marvellously beautiful, and I was very fond of him.’
‘I see.’
‘No need to be horrified. Nothing came of it, you know. Not even five minutes’ misconduct in the boot cupboard. In fact it wasn’t like that at all. I was thirteen, and it was first love. That’s something painful but to be recommended, Gillie. You may find the right girl and run into it one day.’
V
A few days later Francis Gethin packed his bags and departed. Since his destination, eventual if not immediate, was Cambridge, his going was regarded with some awe by a good many junior members of what this provincial university called its staff. Gilbert Pillman, whose own academic prospects now seemed so dim, was conscious of a certain envy of the blissful security of tenure which his late room-mate was now to enjoy. Franco’s new job could under almost no conceivable circumstances be terminated during the next forty years or so. Envy of such a condition was natural enough. But Gillie also felt (so strangely mingled is our clay) a distinct pang of jealousy when he reflected that in his new college Franco would certainly find himself surrounded by numerous highly agreeable young men. And who was going to admire Gillie now? There seemed to be nobody at all who was in the least inclined to do so.
In this dismal state, and with no particular plans for the vacation, Gillie had little to do except think about Diana. And he had one very uncomfortable thought. Although Lord Furlong could intercept, or cause to be intercepted, any letter addressed to his daughter, he could scarcely prevent the passage of a letter in the opposite direction. It couldn’t be believed that he had actually locked up Diana – like a heavy father in some mouldy eighteenth-century play or novel – and forbidden her all communication with the outside world. So why hadn’t Diana written to him? As day succeeded day, this became a very dark mystery indeed.
Perhaps Diana was ill. Perhaps the shock of that horrible scene in the den had cast her into a fever of an obstinately delirious sort. Perhaps she was dead! This last possibility so haunted him for a time that he actually raked through the notices of death in the local newspaper. Then he was horrified that he had done this. Only some dire death-wish complex could account for so morbid an activity. Gloomily, he played Wagner to himself on his portable gramophone. But no clarification of his state succeeded upon this. He only became further confused. He told himself that he loved Diana but that Diana didn’t love him. He told himself that Diana loved him but that he didn’t really and truly love Diana. Into things that Franco had said he read a disparaging estimate of the seriousness of his and Diana’s mutual attachment. Hadn’t Franco said that he, Gillie, might fall in love one day? And love did seem to be something that Franco – if in a peculiar fashion – knew about. Gillie felt his confidence to be ebbing from him in every direction.
And then all this – or nearly all this – cleared away. Not only a letter arrived from Diana, but a parcel as well. On the outside of the parcel was written: Do not open this parcel until you have read my letter. He felt at once that there was something childish about this. Diana was childish. It was part of her charm – not that ‘charm’ was at all a nice or adequate word when you had thought about it. Probably Romeo himself had viewed Juliet as on the childish side. There was absolutely no harm in it. Gillie opened and read the letter.
Darling Gillie,
I’ve only just been able to discover where you live. You never told me! And I’ve thought that if I wrote to you at the university my letter would probably be opened and read by some horrid secretary. But now I’ve found out, ever so cunningly, from that stupid Bounce. Now, for a start, I’m sending you a birthday present. Don’t open the parcel till your birthday – which is next week, isn’t it? I’ll only tell you it’s books. Haven’t I told you how books and birthdays go together in this family? There’s something in one of them – the books, I mean – I hope you’ll like them for. xxxx (Kisses)
Darling, darling Gillie, I think we must wait – just for a little. Daddy will come round – particularly if I’m obedient even when his ideas are quite horrid as they are because he’s sending me away today to some relations even although it isn’t the end of the school term yet. Of course I don’t mind about school because I’m fed up with it anyway. But I hate being made a parcel of myself!
I’ll write to you again quite soon, darling, darling Gillie. I do so love you, darling, darling Gillie. In haste in case he comes in.<
br />
Diana xxxxxx
P.S. Give my love to Franco. He’s rather funny but I like him very much because he’s your friend, Diana xxxxxxxx
Gillie was overjoyed at receiving this letter. When he had read it over five or six times, however, he found it to be capable of prompting some unexpected reflections. He suddenly saw Diana as a considerable responsibility. She probably wouldn’t be this in the financial sense which he knew so formidably faced many of his contemporaries in the university: the dubious prospect, when contemplating marriage, of raising a mortgage and that sort of thing. Lord Furlong, if he came round at all, would come round to the necessity of substantial subsidy. The burden of responsibility he apprehended was something more difficult to define. It had to do with his feeling that whereas he himself was at least more or less grown up Diana was rather far from being anything of the kind. It was true that Diana, with all her poetry reading and poetry writing, was just a kid, with a character almost wholly fluid and unformed. Somehow or other, her letter suggested this quite strongly. When the thing was honestly confronted it was difficult to feel that she was ready to embark upon so serious a business as marriage.
If Gillie was discomfited by these thoughts it may have been partly from a dim sense that they spoke of something immature and unconsidered in his own condition. But he clung to the idea of Diana as his eternal beloved, and he even clung to her birthday present – which he wasn’t going to open until the proper day, but which he meanwhile took to carrying about with him. When he went to work in the university library, intending to prepare some lectures since he had nothing better to do, he propped it up in front of him in the little tin cubby-hole, rather like the inside of a filing cabinet, which was his very own to labour in. And here he was found one day by Professor Hedger.
Professor Hedger, who had a professorial and therefore slightly larger cubby-hole three or four cubby-holes away, came to a halt and looked at Gillie suspiciously. Gillie felt that he even looked at Diana’s parcel suspiciously, as if imagining it might conceal an explosive device with which this disaffected young man was proposing to blow up the very core of the university’s centre of learning. It was so universal a rule that those junior lecturers as yet unencumbered by wife and child invariably put several counties between themselves and the scene of their professional endeavours on the very first day of a vacation that Hedger certainly regarded young Pillman’s continued haunting of the place to be alarmingly unaccountable in itself.
‘Ah, Pillman!’ Hedger said heavily. ‘Busily occupied with Shenstone, no doubt.’
So here it was. Such was the degree of Gillie’s intellectual and moral disarray at this stage that the book open in front of him was, in point of fact, Fanny Hill: or, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, a work of culpable diversion known to a select few to have escaped the vigilance of the university librarian, and therefore to harbour in a dusty corner of the book-stack rather than in the library’s strong room. Gillie wondered whether, at a pinch, he could represent it as having been among Shenstone’s favourite books, and therefore proper to be read in the interest of advanced research. But he was a little doubtful about the dates – and dates were things that Hedger was known to be very hot on. So Gillie closed the volume as if courteously signifying that his full attention was to be given to his professor. Its back cover, at least, afforded no clue to the agreeably distracting salacities that lurked within.
‘I’m giving Shenstone a rest for a few days, sir,’ he said. (Franco had judged it peculiarly absurd that in his wretched place of employment one was expected to address professors in this fawning way; at Cambridge, no doubt, different conventions obtained.) ‘I’m getting up a few lectures, as a matter of fact. I always try to remember that the teaching must come first.’
‘Ah!’ Hedger seemed not particularly to approve this blameless profession. ‘It’s a moot point, my dear Pillman. Decidedly, it is a moot point. We are not schoolteachers, remember – although I am bound to admit that some of us are little qualified to be anything else. Radically regarded, our function is to transmit the knowledge which we are granted the leisure to make. I hope you are getting along well with the worthy Bounce – although the man is no scholar, I fear.’
‘No, sir. He hasn’t a clue to much of what he has got in the Furlong Library, for one thing.’ Gillie saw a hopeful diversion in this. ‘The accessions, in particular, are all at sixes and sevens. He busies himself with a pretentious catalogue. It’s quite pitiful, bibliographically regarded. He seems to think he ought to turn it into a kind of dictionary of received opinions. What Sir Edmund Gosse thinks of Sir Thomas Browne. That kind of thing.’
‘Gosse – dear me!’ Professor Hedger had frowned at the mere mention of this successful but insufficient person. ‘But tell me how Shenstone is going, Pillman.’
‘Well, sir, there is a difficulty.’ (Here it was again.) ‘I’ve discovered there’s an American professor who’s doing a good deal of work on Shenstone, and I wouldn’t like to be duplicating the research of a much more senior man. In fact I think I may have to rethink things a bit.’
‘I see.’ Hedger said this so weightily that Gillie felt the confounded man’s suspicions to be on the up-grade again. ‘Well, keep me informed, Pillman. The Committee on Advanced Studies will want a preliminary report at the beginning of next term, you know.’
‘Yes, of course, sir.’ The existence of the Committee on Advanced Studies was news to Gillie. ‘I’ll bear it in mind, sir.’
At this, Hedger went away. Gillie made guilty haste to restore Fanny Hill (who now seemed a symbol of his own shocking disintegration) to her hiding place on the shelves. He felt quite desperate again. His distress increased, moreover, whenever, as frequently happened, he found himself ceasing to think for a time either of William Shenstone or of Diana Eatwell and thought of Francis Gethin instead. He didn’t suppose he’d ever see Franco again, and for that matter he didn’t feel he particularly wanted to. But he had wounded Franco as well as punched him, and it had been in a way that Franco could surely never forgive. He took Franco’s resulting enmity for granted, and hated the thought of it. This wasn’t really very sensible. But it was a notion that did firmly lodge itself in his head.
And then something transforming and at the same time bewildering occurred. His birthday arrived and he opened Diana’s parcel. It proved to contain two leather-bound volumes, plainly of the eighteenth century. He opened the first on the fly-leaf, to find inscribed on it in browned and faded ink:
Wm. Wordsworth 1791
Gillie stared at the signature unbelievingly for a minute, and then realised that this was why Diana had thought he would like her present. Hadn’t she said at their first meeting that she would never forget his having said ‘Wordsworth’ when she had asked him who was his favourite poet? He turned to the title page of this two-volume work and read:
Observations on Man, his frame, his duty, and his expectations
That Wordsworth should have possessed David Hartley’s treatise was, Gillie knew at once, extremely curious. He began to turn over the pages. It was to find that, over and over again, their broad margins had been copiously annotated in Wordsworth’s hand. The discovery was entirely staggering, and it told him two things at once. These volumes must have a high monetary value, and it had been extremely rash of Diana to raid the Furlong Library and simply steal for him – for it came to that – so costly a present. But there was more to it than this. For certain learned reasons with which Gillie was perfectly familiar, what he had in front of him was likely to prove the greatest Wordsworth sensation since there had erupted into fame the poet’s love affair in France with Annette Vallon, and as a consequence his having fathered an illegitimate daughter. Poor Diana could have no notion of what she had unearthed. Nor would anything at all be known about it by that pretentious ignoramus Bounce.
Gilbert Pillman sat quite still for a long time as he contemplated these facts, and it is to his credit that his first conviction was of the paramount ne
cessity of not giving Diana away. He must somehow conceal how these volumes had come to him. But they had come to him. Suddenly he felt that the finger of destiny had pointed at him, and it was not for him to take evasive action. It would not be as an authority on William Shenstone (or Sir John Suckling either) that Professor Pillman would make his name.
He turned back to that fly-leaf. Wm. Wordsworth 1791. Now, where was Wordsworth in that year? Gillie’s eyes rounded and his breath quickened as he found the answer. He wrapped up the books again and went back to his digs. But on the way he called at his bank and drew out all but a few shillings of what he possessed there. And that afternoon, with high enjoyment, he wrote a note to Professor Hedger.
Dear Professor,
When I saw you the other day, and you talked to me so kindly about Wm. Shenstone, I forgot to mention that I have it in mind to take a short holiday in France. The chateaux of the Loire attract me, beginning at Blois, and I think I may also visit Orleans. I feel that I shall come back in a better state to get some effective work done.
With kind regards to Mrs Hedger and the Misses Hedger,
Yours sincerely,
Gilbert Pillman
When Gillie had posted this letter he felt so relaxed that he went to see a Russian film at the local cinema, and then dined out. He marvelled at himself – a scholar of such potential distinction – for having sought solace with Fanny Hill in that shamefully juvenile way. Morally considered, he was now a man regenerated and made new.
VI
When Gillie returned from his holiday the first thing he looked for, very naturally, was some communication from Diana. And a letter proved to be waiting for him, perched on the mantel-shelf at his digs and bearing a French stamp. It was odd that he and his beloved, without knowing it, had been in France simultaneously. For a moment he liked the idea of this, and then it came to him suddenly that the French stamp was ominous. Diana had certainly been immured by her unspeakable father in that convent or finishing school he had himself foreboded for her. He didn’t doubt that it was a perfectly frightful place, little short of what might be called a house of correction. The nuns, or whoever they were, probably strove to chasten her rebellious spirit by keeping her on bread and water, or even scourging her in front of an altar. Unbelievable things, he was sure, happened in such places, and their perpetrators thought nothing of them.
The Bridge at Arta Page 8
