'What?'
'Well, I wondered . . . are you going in for a book or to do some work?'
'To do some work as it happens.'
'Oh, I shouldn't if I were you.'
Trefusis smiled.
'You've tried it and find it a disagreeable pursuit? I'm afraid in my case it has to be done. Someone, after all, has to write articles for future undergraduates to copy out.'
He put his hand
Adrian only just managed to stop himself from tugging at his sleeve.
'Full. Not a reading table to be had. That's why I wanted to speak to you. Wondered if you could show me a good place to work.'
'Well, I find the ninth-floor reading-room is generally free from distraction. You might try there. However I am bound to say that I would feel a little bothered working in the same room as you. I'll go and see if there are any private rooms free on this floor, I think.'
He pushed against the door. Adrian practically screamed.
'No that's all right, sir! You go to the ninth floor. I've just remembered, I've got to go anyway. Got a . . . meeting.'
Trefusis came away from the door, amused.
'Very well. I am greatly looking forward to your masterwork, you know. People think our subject is airy-fairy, namby-pamby, arty, not to put too fine a point on it, farty. But as you are no doubt discovering, it is grind and toil from Beowulf to Blooms-bury. Grind, grind, grind. Toil, toil, toil. I like the Kickers. Good morning.'
Adrian looked down at his shoes. They were indeed smart.
'Thank you, Professor. And your brogues are a riot.'
With breathless relief he watched Trefusis disappear round the corner towards the lifts.
Adrian got back to St Matthew's to find that Gary had pushed all the furniture back to the walls and cleared the floor, which was covered with a vast sheet onto which he was drawing in charcoals.
'How'd it go?'
'Fabulous. Like a breeze. Did you put a handkerchief in your mouth?'
'Nah! If there's one thing Trefusis sounds like, it's a man with no handkerchief in his mouth. I just went up two octaves and sounded pissed off.'
Adrian scrutinised Gary's activities.
'So. Second question. What are you doing to my room?'
'Our room.'
'Our room, that I furnish and pay for?'
'This is a cartoon.'
'A cartoon.'
'In the original sense.'
'So the original sense of cartoon is 'total fucking mess' is it?'
'The original sense of cartoon is a sheet of material onto which you draw the outlines of your fresco.'
Adrian picked his way through the debris and poured himself a glass of wine from a half-empty bottle on the mantelpiece. A half-empty bottle of the college's best white burgundy, he noted.
'Fresco?'
'Yeah. When I've designed it, I simply hang the sheet over the wall, prick the outline onto the wet plaster and get to work as quickly as possible before . . .'
'What wet plaster would that be?'
Gary pointed to a blank space of wall.
'I thought there. We just rip off the old plasterwork, bit of bonding on the laths, and Bob's your uncle.'
'Bob is not my uncle. I have never had an uncle called Bob. I never intend to have an uncle called Bob. If being Bob's nephew involves destroying a five-hundred-year-old . . .'
'Six hundred years actually. It's going to be a representation of Britain in the late seventies. Thatcher, Foot, CND marches, unemployment. Everything. I paint it, then we cover it with wood panelling. That's the expensive bit. The panelling will have to be hinged, see? In a hundred years' time this room will be priceless.'
'It's already priceless. Couldn't we leave it as it is? Henry James had tea here. Isherwood made love to a choral scholar in that very bedroom. A friend of Thomas Hardy's committed suicide here. Marlowe and Kydd danced a galliard on these exact floorboards.'
'And Adrian Healey commissioned Gary Collins's first fresco here. History is an on-going process.'
'And what's our bedder going to say?'
