the other one stand the strain if he carried the case by its handle in the normal way?—he didn't want his belongings all over the floor. So should he try to carry it held horizontally out in front of him? He could. Then he must. Quick. Now. He wriggled his forearms underneath the bugger and, no doubt looking rather like a man who risks his life to remove a bomb from a place of public resort, took himself and burden off at top speed. Thank Christ the communicating door wasn't latched.
The scripts were on top, as he could have seen earlier with little trouble. Miss Calvert's wasn't among them. Yes it was. There was something worrying about it but he took it straight back into the sitting room, where Miss Calvert had failed to sit as requested. Although she had been his pupil. for two terms he had never properly looked at her before. Now he did. He saw that her eyes were darker than most fair-complexioned girls' and that her jaw was firm, not much more than his original vague impression of generic blue-clad blondeness; he certainly made no progress in estimating whether she could be, should be, surely must be considered attractive or not. This failure wasn't the result of loss of interest, in the way that morbid failure of appetite for food might be expected to impair the palate: he had had no trouble over Professor Trefusis. That was because the comely scientist was in her middle thirties, well above the decisive age-limit. No, it wasn't an age-limit in the usual sense, because the ones just below it were getting older all the time. The whole thing was a matter of date, of year of birth : 1950 would be about right. So when he was seventy he wouldn't be able to tell whether any female under thirty-seven was attractive or not. A curious world that would be.
Enough. He tried to bring himself round. 'Ah. Of course. Miss Calvert.'
'Yes, Mr Richardson?'
The sound of his name reminded him of the last time he had heard it uttered by a female, not long ago and not far from here. Someone in the picket had known it, had recognised him, and he was an obscure person, never on TV or in the papers, in no sense an Oxford character, more or less of a stranger even to many undergraduates of his own college, one who taught a subject neither soft nor modish nor remunerative. Was it this girl who had identified him? And of course what had bothered him about her script was that it was written in green ink, like the words on the object he had locked up in his desk. He glanced at the script, saw immediately that the respective hands were quite different and even the ink was a bit different, then looked wordlessly at the girl.
'Are you all right?' she said, taking a short pace towards him.
The movement brought to mind what he must have noticed before, how slim she was, her middle hard looking and yet flexible, more like a thick electric cable than any thin living creature. He had embraced slim girls in his time and could remember consistently finding them more substantial then than the sight of them suggested. Perhaps fellows found the same thing today. 'Oh—yes,' he said. 'Yes, thanks. Do sit down. Been rather a hectic day one way and another. Here we are.'
He pushed the padded chair back to its usual place. It wasn't very comfortable and it certainly looked nasty but it was the second-best in the room to the battered old dining-chair at his desk, its leather scuffed by generations of academic bums. Everything else was wine- or ink-stained, fire- or water-damaged, extruding springs, possessed of legs or arms that fell off all the time, impossible to open, impossible to close and repulsive. For years lie had lived here most of the week, most weeks, not only in term-time, and without meeting Brenda's standards the place had been quite decent. Since then, by ruse, hard bargaining and straightforward theft-and-substitution the Domestic Bursar had plundered it into the ground. Well, not easy to complain when you spent no more than a tenth of the year in it.
'I hope you had a pleasant vacation?'
'Yes thank you.'
'Settling down all right this term?'
'Yes.'
'Good.' He picked up a lecture-list. 'Now I presume you went to Sir Clarence Frankis yesterday and will continue to do so.'
'I didn't actually.'
'Why not?'
'Well, there's a lot to do, you know, and a lot to get through, and it isn't in my special subject, Minoan, and you said yourself it would be more detailed than I needed.' For some reason she had a deep voice.
'Yes. I did. But, er .... Minoan .... 'civilisation' is fairly interesting, and Sir Clarence is probably the most— er, rather good. It's not really a question of need, not totally. You ought to go. Sorry, I mean try to go whenever you can. No difficulty with the others? Right. Now your collection paper, Miss Calvert. I don't quite know what to say to you about it.'
But he quite knew what he wanted to say to her about it and related matters. One, see if you can't work out some way of getting yourself just a bit ashamed and scared of not wanting to know anything about anything or to be any good at anything. Two, if that fails, at least try to spell a bit and write legibly and write a sentence now and then—you can forget, or go on never having heard, about punctuation. Three, when you see a word you recognise in a question, like Greek or Tyre or Malta, fight against trying to put down everything remotely connected with it that you may have—oh stuff it. And four, go away and leave your place at St Hugh's to someone who might conceivably—oh stuff it.
Jake didn't say any of this because he wanted Miss Calvert's benevolent neutrality at least in the coming struggle for power at his Wednesday lectures, where that little bastard from Teddy Hall seemed about to escalate his campaign of harassment into a direct bid to seize the lectern. So he said as gently as he thought he could,
'Your handwriting. You do realise, don't you, that we're allowed to ignore anything we can't read or else have it typed up and make you pay the typist?'
'Why could a typist read it if you couldn't?'
Once, he might have been able to tell if this was defiance or ingenuous inquiry. Now, he couldn't or couldn't be bothered.
'Because the typist would have you there with your script reading out to her what you'd written. With incidentally an examiner looking over your shoulder to see you didn't correct anything or put new bits in.'
'Her? Why not him? Why shouldn't a typist be a man?' Oh for..... 'No reason at all. It's just that in fact the typists in this case are as far as I know all women.'
'I didn't know that. And I'm sorry, I didn't understand about the typing.'
