The Noonday Devil

by Alan Judd

  ‘Try again.’

  His lines lost timing and rhythm and he lacked all conviction. Despite Robert’s frequent admonitions he scarcely glanced at Gina. The result was so bad that the others stared at him as if he had some horrid and fascinating disease.

  Robert no longer thought his plan would work but it was too late to change now. He had to go farther or give up altogether. As soon as the last speech was finished he told the others to form a semi-circle around Malcolm with their chairs and take it in turn to feed him his lines in the same expressionless way as Gina.

  Malcolm folded his arms. ‘I can’t do it. You’d better find someone else for the part. You’re just trying to humiliate me.’

  Robert continued to stare at Malcolm but was no longer thinking of him. The production could fold then and there and everything else in the world would remain the same. It made no difference what he did. The thought made him bold. ‘It will work, Malcolm,’ he said quietly. ‘You can do it. To prove it I’ll make it even worse. Everyone will feed you the lines in unison so you’ll be acting before a chorus. It will be awful but you must force yourself to dominate them. Make them respond to you, not you to them. You can do it. You will make it work.’

  Malcolm still stood with his arms folded. He was near to tears but did not walk out, inhibited perhaps by the semi-circle that had formed around him. It occurred to Robert that some of the cast might object but they seemed cowed, or perhaps were secretly excited. Gina’s expression was unaltered.

  Malcolm began in a weak, brittle voice. Robert stopped him, told him to unfold his arms and slow down. He began again and again Robert stopped him. ‘Stand in the middle. Face people when you’re speaking.’

  Malcolm started for the third time. His voice trembled now on the edge of tears but as he went on the tears became incipient rage. The rage sounded more petulant than angry but Robert was encouraged by it. Malcolm flinched each time the chorus chanted its lines but after ten minutes of stops and starts he acquired a desperation that bred something like conviction.

  ‘You’re doing it, you’re nearly there,’ said Robert, gently now. ‘But the chorus is helping you because it’s being carried along by you. Chorus, please keep all expression out of your voices.’

  Malcolm was still upset but now he wanted to succeed. He breathed deeply, paused, then delivered his lines rapidly and loudly as if he were angry with the chorus. There was a power and presence absent from his previous deliveries. It was no longer normal, nervous, touchy Malcolm. He had discovered a new part of himself.

  ‘That is De Flores,’ Robert said at the end. ‘You’ve got there. You’ve done it.’ He exaggerated deliberately. Malcolm looked drained but was unprotesting and thoughtful, absorbed in his discovery.

  The others were chastened by the spectacle. They rehearsed three short scenes, the acting crisp and sharp. Gina listened impassively to what Robert said and reproduced his directions exactly with no acknowledgement other than the doing of them. At the end she left without speaking, though without appearing deliberately to avoid speech. She conveyed hostility as she conveyed sexuality, something she was aware of but could not be bothered with.

  Robert locked the panelled room and returned the key to the lodge. He was very tired but until now he had not let himself admit it. It was as if his brain were being shut down section by section, like street lights in a city. He stood outside the lodge trying to remember where he had left his bike. Now that he thought about it, however, he could not remember bringing it, nor the last time he had ridden it. There was a cricket fixture list on the notice board. Yes, he had played cricket recently against Oriel. They had gone to the King’s Arms to celebrate victory by three wickets and he had drunk too much. He had then lent the bike to someone from Oriel who lived a long way out and there had been some arrangement about its return or about his picking it up somewhere. Probably he would remember later. He had not always been so forgetful.

  ‘Are you thinking or dead?’

  He realized with a start that the pale, smiling figure by the wall was Tim, and felt unreasonably defensive. ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘On my way to St Hilda’s.’

  ‘You’re going to see her?’

  ‘That’s the idea. Come with me.’

  ‘You don’t want me there.’

  ‘I do. That’s what I’m saying.’

  It was easier to go along than to say no and make the effort to go to bed. They walked down the Turl and on to the High. There was a fine soft rain and the road reflected the headlights of passing cars. Robert clutched his vital marked script to his stomach.

  ‘She isn’t going to like you,’ he said. ‘She spends half her time telling you to keep away and you don’t.’

  ‘She spends the other half saying she wants to see me.’

  ‘She might not even be in yet. She might still be swilling port in our own Senior Common Room with whoever invited her.’

  Tim nodded slowly and grinned again. ‘Exactly. I am horribly jealous so I have to know, even if I don’t like it.’

  ‘Wait till the morning. It’s not so easy to be jealous in daylight.’

  ‘It is. I can be jealous of anything and without limit. In fact, I am jealous of her hairbrush.’ A Headington bus stopped outside Queen’s and they waited while half a dozen people shuffled from the shelter of the wall like demoralized infantry. ‘Think about it. She uses it every day, pulls it through her hair, picks it up, fondles it with careless familiarity, drops it on her dressing table, permits it to remain in her room at all times. She won’t do any of those things with me. I’ve come very near to chucking it out of the window.’

  ‘Might as well chuck yourself out if that’s the state you’re in.’

  ‘One day I’ll do one or the other. Depends how I feel.’

  They paused on Magdalen Bridge to look into the river. The Cherwell was mesmeric and inviting. Robert felt heavy and faintly sick with tiredness.

  ‘You don’t want me there,’ he said. ‘She certainly won’t.’

  Tim spat carefully into the water. ‘Don’t want to go myself. That’s why I asked you.’

  ‘Why go at all?’

  ‘To make something happen.’ He grinned, humourlessly. ‘Have a nice sleep.’

  The atmosphere in women’s colleges always made Tim feel keenly predatory. When he stopped outside her door, though, it was as if his stomach had left him. He could hear music, something classical and quiet, and it struck him for the first time that she might not be alone. He waited but heard no voices, then pushed open the door.

  She was working at her desk. She wore a red silk dressing gown with wide sleeves pushed back to her elbows. Her black hair was loose and she looked tired.

  He leaned against the wall with affected casualness. ‘I’ll go if it’s too late.’

  For a second or two she looked more tired, then she got up. ‘I was going to stop anyway.’ She took the kettle from the corner by the window and walked past him to fill it. The silk dressing gown clung to her body and he could feel her warmth as she passed. She gave him a brief dark look. He went to the cushioned bench by the window where he usually sat.

  ‘I suppose you did it?’ she asked.

  He nodded.

  She smiled, showing the gap in her teeth upon which he used to compliment her until discovering she didn’t like it. ‘So it’s you I have to thank.’

  ‘You don’t have to.’

  ‘You must have known how embarrassing it would be, in front of hundreds of men. Is that why you did it?’

  ‘Probably.’

  ‘I think Peter was a little resentful. He seemed to think it was directed at him in some way.’

  So it was the Chaplain who had invited her. ‘Not at all. I didn’t know who’d invited you. I didn’t know you were coming.’

  ‘That was it, wasn’t it? Revenge because I hadn’t told you.’

  He smiled. ‘Something like that.’

  ‘And did you also come into my room before
I was up and tie my tights in a knot?’

  ‘I came to wake you.’

  ‘I’d rather you had. It was horrible finding my tights like that.’ She sat at the desk and rolled her fountain pen backwards and forwards with the tip of her finger.

  ‘How’s your work?’ he asked.

  ‘Stale. I used to enjoy revising but it’s gone on too long this time. I’m not thinking about it any more. What about yours?’

  He shrugged.

  ‘How do you revise for philosophy?’ she continued. ‘I mean, there’s not much you have to read, is there?’

  ‘Not as much as you have. You’re supposed to do some reading and a lot of thinking.’

  ‘Are you doing any of either?’

  ‘Not really. None, actually.’

  ‘And Robert’s doing his play. I don’t understand how you can both go around not caring.’

  ‘We started by not letting ourselves. It’s become easier.’

  ‘I wish I could be as nonchalant.’

  ‘You’ll get your first instead.’

  The kettle boiled. She poured for him then went to the bed, propping herself up with pillows and folding her legs beneath her.

  ‘Aren’t you having any?’ he asked.

  ‘It keeps me awake. I wish you wouldn’t mention firsts. Everyone goes on and on about it and it makes me feel worse. I’m not going to get one. I’ve worked hard but I’m not brilliant, like David Long.’

  ‘Is he?’

  ‘I think so. He’s certainly very high powered.’

  ‘Brilliant’ and ‘high powered’ featured frequently in her vocabulary, as did David Long, a classicist from Magdalen. Tim found him exasperatingly pleasant and intelligent but was not sure whether to regard him as a serious rival. Nor was he sure that she really thought so much less of herself than she merited. She had got a first in history prelims and had worked hard since.

  ‘Why did Robert do theology when he’s not going into the Church?’

  ‘He’s never actually said he’s not going to. He just seems to have switched off. You’d better ask him yourself.’ She mentioned Robert uncomfortably often.

  She pulled at the tassels on the bedspread. ‘I know someone who’s going to a monastery. He’s taking a vow of celibacy.’

  She often spoke about monks and priests and the incurably sick, all the unattainables. Tim had at first tried to make himself one but had had to give up when she did not seek to attain him.

  ‘Your monk friend?’

  ‘He’s not quite a monk yet but he soon will be. He’s interesting. He’s a man who has everything, very bright, very positive, tremendous energy, very attractive. Now he’s giving it up – dedicating it, is how he puts it. He believes he’s called by God. You don’t believe in anything, do you?’

  ‘I don’t know what I believe.’

  ‘That’s the same as not believing or it’s nonsense.’ She folded her legs the other way. ‘Anyway, if you believe the news we might all be dead next week. I don’t suppose you mind much about that, either.’

  ‘I mind dying. I don’t know whether I mind being dead.’

  ‘David Long is a pacifist. Would you ever consider that?’

  ‘I could murder millions. Daily.’

  She looked down quickly to hide her smile. He knew now which game they were playing. It was necessary to appear serious.

  ‘Why do you keep coming to see me?’ Her eyes were still lowered and her tone was dull and flat.

  ‘I’m trying to make you want me.’

  She sighed dramatically. ‘Men are always so inept on the subject of emotions. They never make them interesting. They shovel them on you until you can’t breathe and then get upset when you tell them to stop.’

  He put down his cup and stood. ‘I’ll go then.’

  ‘Please do.’

  She did not look up as he passed the bed. ‘I don’t believe you even like me. Lock the door behind you.’ Her eyes closed and her face creased in sudden laughter. She held up one bare arm. He took it, knelt quickly and kissed her on the lips. She continued laughing and he had to break off. Her lips still smiled but she looked hard into his eyes. ‘The last bit’s true. I don’t believe you do like me.’

  ‘I do.’

  She ran her fingers through the hair on his neck. ‘You do not.’ He kissed her again. ‘No,’ she said a short while later. ‘That really was horrible, finding my tights this morning.’

  ‘I was only seeing if you wanted to come to the May morning ceremony.’

  ‘It was a horrible, sinister thing to do. It made me feel awful.’

  He allowed her to push him slowly off the edge of the bed until he was sitting on the floor, the back of his head resting against her thigh where the red gown had come open. ‘What can I do to convince you?’ he asked.

  ‘You don’t have to do anything. Just stop trying.’ She stroked his hair again. ‘You look dreadfully tired.’

  ‘I’m not that tired.’

  ‘Well, I am. I don’t suppose that had occurred to you.’

  As usual, he let her talk him into giving up. Once he had given up it wasn’t too bad; conversation was easier. It was getting to that point that was difficult.

  The outside doors were locked when he left and he had to climb out of the first floor window next to the stairs and jump. It felt gratifyingly illicit. He crossed the lawn quickly and picked his way through the flower bed to the wall. Once over it he was soon on Magdalen Bridge, where again he indulged in a ritual pause.

  It was raining harder now. The walk was solitary and soothing, long enough for a delicious and painful reconsideration of word and gesture. It was like having some incurable but not incapacitating disability which refused to claim him utterly but prevented him from giving himself wholly to anything else. He liked the comparison but as he reflected on it he wasn’t sure whether it was his own or whether Robert had once said something similar about Anne. Nevertheless, he could smile about it. It mattered and it didn’t, like everything. The rain beat hard on the slates and windows of his rooms that night and, despite the residue of restless excitement, he fell quickly asleep.

  Chapter 3

  One night in the JCR bar Robert had described Chetwynd as ‘immensely’ thin, and had been teased about it ever since. It had almost become a college convention to describe anything small as vastly small or immensely tiny. But Chetwynd was certainly very thin, more so even than Tim whom by the same token might have been described as ‘largely’ thin.

  He was a mature student in his late thirties, jaunty and opinionated, with cropped hair and an angry jutting beard. He was a notorious eccentric, a popular subject of gossip and exaggeration. His eyes were sad and soft, though, which gave him a lugubrious look. He always wore a baggy pair of brown corduroys, claiming they were a rare variety called ‘agricultural corduroy’, and in his Lovat pipe he smoked a secret mixture of his own. He had published a volume of poetry and owned a ruined vicarage in Shropshire. Weeks would pass when he would see or speak to no one. He would be glimpsed like some latterday Scholar Gypsy, silent, withdrawn, evasive, then would burst into a three- or four-day storm of garrulous drunkeness, neither sleeping nor working. These storms had more than once brought him to the attention of the proctors. He read English, specializing in Anglo-Saxon.

  Since normally he was either invisible or drunk no one knew him well, but Robert knew him better than most. In their first year they had had night-long conversations but now saw less of each other. Robert felt vaguely that this was his fault, though for no particular reason. At lunchtime on the day following the rehearsal in Lincoln they ran into each other, coming out of lectures at Trinity. Attendance was rare for either. For Robert, at least, it was a conscience-salving alternative to revision since no actual work was required but it felt like work. They went to the White Horse, a narrow pub squeezed between Trinity and Blackwells, possessing, Chetwynd said, a desirable barmaid.

  ‘A great heifer of a woman. Bovine passivity. Thighs like pill
ars of marble. She could crush me and swallow me and think she had a little wind.’

  ‘You like them big and strong?’

  ‘And little and weak. It’s this hot weather. I have a near-permanent erection. Can you believe that?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘It’s true but sadly not at this moment.’ His pipe jerked in his mouth.

  They had steak pies and beans, normal fare for both. Robert shook his head when Chetwynd bought two pints of draught Guinness to the table.

  ‘I can’t take this stuff at lunchtime. It knocks me out all afternoon.’

  ‘Peace and oblivion – why worry? The first papers will be a day nearer and we’ll be incapable of caring. Lesson here in how to prepare oneself for death.’

  The sun came in through the small window. The Guinness was heavy and solid with the right amount and consistency of froth. Dust particles toiled in the sunbeams. Chetwynd looked round the bar which was beginning to fill with other undergraduates, most of them drinking halves. ‘She’s not here. Grazing peacefully with her bull somewhere.’

  ‘You working?’

  ‘Don’t be obscene.’ Chetwynd wiped the froth from his moustache. ‘Woke up drunk yesterday evening in Balliol JCR. Christ knows how I got there. Hateful people, appalling buildings. Everyone serious and political.’

  ‘I thought you were political.’

  ‘Oh, I am, I am, more than any of them. But I recognize the futility of it. There isn’t going to be a revolution. No one wants it. No one. Not even the revolutionaries. They like the idea, the romantic appeal and they’d love the power, simply love it; but they’d be horrified if it actually happened because then they’d have to go on with it, and on and on and on. It wouldn’t be a revolution any more. And then they’d be dead, victims of the tyranny to come. I used to be a card-carrying member of the Communist Party of Great Britain. Did you know that? Looking for my Spanish Civil War when there wasn’t one. Now the only reasons I would go to Spain are sun, wine, women and boys. Though I’m no longer sure about the last.’

  ‘Didn’t know you were interested.’

  Chetwynd arched his eyebrows. He talked so rapidly and with such fervour, whatever the subject, that it was hard to tell whether he meant all of what he said or none. There were no variations, no degrees of seriousness. ‘My dear, you know nothing. Until I was twenty-five I was a virgin who thought himself homosexual and wanted to be a priest. Now that I’m no longer a virgin and no longer religious I no longer think I’m homosexual. Is that progress, I wonder? Have you ever been tempted?’