visitor, a tall longhaired sod in his thirties, but caught the surname-Smith. Lancewood, himself tall but with neatly cut white hair and a bearing and manner of dress that suggested a retired general rather than a don, turned his blank-looking gaze on Jake.
'I think you could do with a glass of sherry.'
'I think so too. Thank you.'
Quite possibly it was Jake's sherry: he brought Lancewood a bottle now and then, a much nicer arrangement for everyone than returning hospitality in his own place. It came in a solid bit of glass that went with the way the room was fitted up, which in turn reflected its occupant's military style: nothing overtly martial or imperial but suggestive of bungalow here, club there, mess somewhere else, the many pictures showing horses, dogs, an occasional parrot or monkey, what could have been a troopship, what could have been a cantonment, portraits of dark-skinned persons no one had the authority to say were not sometime servants. They even included three or four watercolours of aggressively English scenes given that niggling, almost effeminate treatment characteristic of men of action.
'Thank God,' said Jake, sipping. 'I've just been closeted with a female pupil.'
Lancewood cocked his head. 'Was that such an ordeal for you?' This question Ernie would have understood perfectly, though his phrasing of it would have been quite different.
'You don't know her.' Jake was beginning to feel like an inefficient impostor, constantly putting his foot through his cover. 'Attractive enough, I ...'—no, not suppose—'grant you, but—well, you know the sort. A kind of celestial indifference to being seen to be, oh, lazy, stupid, ignorant, illiterate, anything you please.'
'Do you find the women worse than the men in that way?' asked Smith in an expressive adenoidal voice.
'I hadn't really thought about it,' said Jake, who if he had been strictly truthful would have gone on to say that now he had had a second and a half to think about it of course he bloody did.
'Well I bloody do,' said Smith. 'As a matter of fact we were on that very point when you turned up. Naturally Damon was taking the opposite view. He seems to have some sort of thing about women.'
'Indeed I have. Which reminds me of one of my favourite ones. How's my darling Brenda?'
'Fighting fit,' said Jake. And hay, he added silently.
'John had a rotten cold with all this vile weather but he's fine again now.'
This was of course the Abingdon chap. 'Good, give him my love,' said Jake, registering the adroit passing of the message that Smith knew about that. He (Jake) surmised that that sort of adroitness came in jolly handy for people like Lancewood, must be well worth the trouble of acquiring.
Lighting a French cigarette, Smith pursued his point. 'I mean, the levels to which they'll sink. And go on sinking because they stay the same and the problem stays the same, which is: a whole literature, six hundred years' worth, and virtually all of it written by male chauvinists. So, Wordsworth was no good because he abandoned Annette Vallon, no good as a poet that is, the Brontes and George Eliot went over to the enemy by adopting male pseudonyms so they were no good, Doll Tearsheet is the heroine of 'Henry IV', Part 2 at least, and of course the real—'
Lancewood gave a guttural sigh. 'Have a heart, she was joking.'
'Not this one,' said Smith firmly. 'The one who told her might have been, but not this one.'
'Well then somebody was or, or might have been. You really do—'
'Damon, it's nothing in 'them,' it's forced on them. The men would probably be just as bad if you could find a way of making them think of themselves as men all the time, if such a way were conceivable.' Smith caught sight of Jake. 'I say, this must be rather—'
'Go on, I want to hear.'
'Well—the bright ones can't help seeing that, right, Sapho....'
'Who was untypical?' said Lancewood.
'And who's mostly folk-lore anyway. Then you really come to, as far as they're concerned, the Matchless Orinda. Sorry, Katherine Philips, born in the same year as Dryden, died young, not as young as Shelley though, for instance, anyway she's quite good. Of course she is. What would you? Having taken the precaution of not being born with the digits one nine in front of her decade, but that's a..... Anyway, after her, let's stick to poetry for the moment, you get the Countess of Winchilsea, even more of a household name, and then you sit around for a couple of centuries waiting for Christina Rossetti, who's quite good, and that's that. If no female had ever emerged they'd have been able to put it down to male oppression but Katherine spoiled all that. Back in the middle of the seventeenth century she showed it was 'possible'. As I say, it works down from the top, so that the ones who don't know what the seventeenth century was feel it as much as the others, well, insofar as they can, hence collective inferiority feelings, hence collective aggression. Admittedly with the novel it's not quite such a—'
'All this 'they' talk.' Lancewood gestured with the decanter at Jake, who was all right as he was. then poured sherry for Smith and himself. 'The ones and the others. From the way you go on, most people would say you were the one with the thing about women.'
'Let's just nail that one right away. My relations with them, with women that is, have been and are normal to an unparalleled, even preternatural degree. Three-point-seven premarital affairs, the precise average, married at twenty-five-point-whatever-it-is, lived happily ever after, or since. Perhaps that's not so normal:
'It's probably a bit early to tell,' said Jake. 'What does your wife think about poetry?'
'She's a biologist,' said Smith. He seemed puzzled at the question.
'Curious you should mention centuries,' said Lancewood. 'One of 'them', which you must admit sounds like something quite different, brought me a new interpretation of 'Hamlet' yesterday. Now this, I want you to understand, is a thoroughly sweet, good-natured, charming little girl, no aggression in the wide world. As to brightness, well you shall hear. Hamlet was a woman.' He gave them both his blank look.
Smith gave a great groan but said nothing.
'Even I know that's not very new,' said Jake. 'Didn't Sarah Bernhardt play him, or her?'
