'After all, it's important to you, isn't it?'
This was the cue he'd been hoping for. 'Yes, sir. Actually I've been meaning to ask you about that.'
Welch's shaggy eyebrows descended a little. 'About what?'
'Well, I'm sure you appreciate, Professor, that I've been worrying rather about my position here, in the last few months.'
'Oh yes?' Welch said cheerfully, his eyebrows restored.
'I've been wondering just how I stand, you know.'
'How you stand?'
'Yes, I… I mean, I'm afraid I got off on the wrong foot here rather, when I first came. I did some rather silly things. Well, now that my first year's nearly over, naturally I can't help feeling a bit anxious.'
'Yes, I know a lot of young chaps find some difficulty in settling down to their first job. It's only to be expected, after a war, after all. I don't know if you've ever met young Faulkner, at Nottingham he is now; he got a job here in nineteen hundred', here he paused, 'and forty-five. Well, he'd had rather a rough time in the war, what with one thing and another; he'd been out East for a time, you know, in the Fleet Air Arm he was, and then they switched him back to the Mediterranean. I remember him telling me how difficult he found it to adapt his way of thinking, when he had to settle down here and…'
Stop himself from dashing his fist into your face, Dixon thought. He waited for a time, then, when Welch produced another of his pauses, said: 'Yes, and of course it's doubly difficult when one doesn't feel very secure in one's - I'd work much better, I know, if I could feel settled about…'
'Well, insecurity is the great enemy of concentration, I know. And, of course, one does tend to lose the habit of concentration as one grows older. It's amazing how distractions one wouldn't have noticed in one's early days become absolutely shattering when one… grows older. I remember when they were putting up the new chemistry labs here, well, I say new, you could hardly call them new now, I suppose. At the time I'm speaking of, some years before the war, they were laying the foundations about Easter time it must have been, and the concrete- mixer or whatever it was…'
Dixon wondered if Welch could hear him grinding his teeth. If he did, he gave no sign of it. Like a boxer still incredibly on his feet after ten rounds of punishment, Dixon got in with: 'I could feel quite happy about everything, if only my big worry were out of the way.'
Welch's head lifted slowly, like the muzzle of some obsolete howitzer. The wondering frown quickly began to form. 'I don't quite see…'
'My probation,' Dixon said loudly.
The frown cleared. 'Oh. That. You're on two years' probation here, Dixon, not one year. It's all there in your contract, you know. Two years.'
'Yes, I know, but that just means that I can't be taken on to the permanent staff until two years are up. It doesn't mean that I can't be… asked to leave at the end of the first year.'
'Oh no,' Welch said warmly; 'no.' He left it open whether he was reinforcing Dixon's negative or dissenting from it.
'I can be asked to leave at the end of the first year, can't I, Professor?' Dixon said quickly, pressing himself against the back of his chair.
'Yes, I suppose so,' Welch said, coldly this time, as if he were being asked to make some concession which, though theoretically due, no decent man would claim.
'Well I'm just wondering what's happening about it, that's all.'
'Yes, I've no doubt you are,' Welch said in the same tone. Dixon waited, planning faces. He looked round the small, cosy room with its fitted carpet, its rows of superseded books, its filing cabinets full of antique examination papers and of dossiers relating to past generations of students, its view from closed windows on to the sunlit wall of the Physics Laboratory. Behind Welch's head hung the departmental timetable, drawn up by Welch himself in five different-coloured inks corresponding to the five teaching members of the Department. The sight of this seemed to undam Dixon's mind; for the first time since arriving at the College he thought he felt real, over- mastering, orgiastic boredom, and its companion, real hatred. If Welch didn't speak in the next five seconds, he'd do something which would get himself flung out without possible question - not the things he'd often dreamed of when sitting next door pretending to work. He no longer wanted, for example, to inscribe on the departmental timetable a short account, well tricked-out with obscenities, of his views on the Professor of History, the Department of History, medieval history, history, and Margaret and hang it out of the window for the information of passing students and lecturers, nor did he, on the whole, now intend to tie Welch up in his chair and beat him about the head and shoulders with a bottle until he disclosed why, without being French himself, he'd given his sons French names, nor… No, he'd just say, quite quietly and very slowly and distinctly, to give Welch a good chance of catching his general drift: Look here, you old cockchafer, what makes you think you can run a history department, even at a place like this, eh, you old cockchafer? I know what you'd be good at, you old cockchafer…
'Well, these things aren't as easy as you might imagine, you know,' Welch said suddenly. 'This is a very difficult matter, Dixon, you see. There's a great deal, a lot of things you've got to keep in mind.'
'I see that, of course, Professor. I just wanted to ask when the decision will be taken, that's all. If I'm to go, it's only fair I should be told soon.' He felt his head trembling slightly with rage as he said this.
Welch's glance, which had flicked two or three times at Dixon's face, now dropped to a half-curled-up letter on the desk. He muttered: 'Yes… well… I…'
Dixon said in a still louder voice: 'Because I shall have to start looking for another job, you see. And most of the schools will have made their appointments for September before they break up in July. So I shall want to know in good time.'
An expression of unhappiness was beginning to settle on Welch's small-eyed face. Dixon was at first pleased to see this evidence that Welch's mind could still be reached from the outside; next he felt a momentary compunction at the spectacle of one man disliking to reveal something that would cause pain to another; finally panic engulfed him. What was Welch's reluctance concealing? He, Dixon, was done for. If so, he would at any rate be able to deliver the cockchafer speech, though he wished his audience were larger.
'Let you know as soon as anything's decided,' Welch said with incredible speed. 'Nothing is yet.'
Left with nothing to say, Dixon realized how wild a notion the cockchafer speech had been. He'd never be able to tell Welch what he wanted to tell him, any more than he'd ever be able to do the same with Margaret. All the time he'd thought he was bringing the matter of his probation to a head he'd merely been a winkle on the pin of Welch's evasion-technique; verbal this time instead of the more familiar physical form, but a technique adapted to meet stronger pressure than he himself could hope to bring to bear on it.
Now, as Dixon had been half expecting all along, Welch produced his handkerchief. It was clear that he was about to blow his nose. This was usually horrible, if only because it drew unwilling attention to Welch's nose itself, a large, open-pored tetrahedron. But when the familiar miraculously-sustained blares beat against the walls and windows, Dixon hardly minded at all; the noise had the effect of changing his mood. Any statement that could be battered out of Welch was invariably trustworthy, so that Dixon was back where he started. But how lovely to be back where he started, instead of out in front where he didn't want to be. How wrong people always were when they said: 'It's better to know the worst than go on not knowing either way.' No; they had it exactly the wrong way round. Tell me the truth, doctor, I'd sooner know. But only if the truth is what I want to hear.
When he was sure that Welch had finished blowing his nose, Dixon got up and thanked him for their chat almost with sincerity, and the sight of Welch's 'bag' and fishing-hat on a nearby chair, normally a certain infuriant, only made him hum his Welch tune as he went out. This tune featured in the 'rondo' of some boring piano concerto Welch had once insisted on playing him on his complicated exponential-horned gramophone. It had come after about four of the huge double-sided red-labelled records, and Dixon had fitted words to it. Going down the stairs towards the Common Room, where coffee would now be available, he articulated these words behind closed lips: 'You
