'Yes really. If that's what was bothering you you can forget it—honour was satisfied. In fact considering how pissed you were you did quite well. It was what happened afterwards that you might consider feeling sorry about.'
He waited but in the end had to say, 'What was that?'
'Fuck-all. You said Good night love, turned over and went to sleep.'
'I was tired. And pissed.'
'That's when we show what we're like. You practically went on your knees to get me to play, when you'd promised not to try when you first asked me, right? and I told you twice at least I'd be breaking eight years of being faithful to Syd, yes we've been married quite a bit longer but it took me a while to give up my old ways, and then you do that. A nice man would have tried to make a girl feel it had been worth while, however tired and pissed he was. No that's not fair, a man who sees more in women than creatures to go to bed with, a man who doesn't only want one thing. So you see I've rather come round to Brenda's way of thinking. Suddenly. Before last night I couldn't have agreed with her less.'
Again he could think of nothing to say, though on a larger scale than before: he had the awful part squarely in front of him now.
'Don't worry about me.' Eve picked up the paper again. 'I'll get over it. You're the one with the problem. Turn right outside and you'll be in the Banbury road in three minutes.'
He found his raincoat in the hall and saw himself out. When he got to the Banbury road he saw he was only about half a mile north of St Giles', say a mile all told from Comyns. It wasn't actually raining and a walk would do him good. It did, in that it brought about in him an additional form of physical exhaustion to help take his mind off his other troubles. He stepped through the wicket with what alertness he could muster: he must not run into Ernie, be found by him entering college at a quarter to nine in the morning. At first sight there was nobody about. He tiptoed over to the lodge and had a peep: one of the tinder porters behind the glass partition. Moving quite naturally now he went in, nodded good morning, wished he hadn't nodded anything, went to his pigeon-hole and was turning over a couple of pieces of mail when he heard the approach of a familiar and dreadful creaking sound. Perhaps he could just..... He was still a yard or two from the doorway when Ernie was there, filling it, well not filling it but making it hard for any creature much larger than a rabbit to get past.
'Morning, Ernie,' said Jake, taking a half-pace diagonally forward as if he somehow expected the porter to make way for him.
'Morning, Mr Richardson.' Of course he didn't budge. 'You're up early.' He looked more closely; it wasn't going to do Jake any good not to have been actually witnessed at the gate.
Had a night on the tain have you sir?'
'Staying with, with friends.'
'Yes, you always were a bit of a night-ale, like, but never much of a .... If I didn't know you better I'd have said you'd been draining your sorrows. I just hope you don't feel as lazy as you look.'
'Oh yes. No. Now if you—'
'Oh well, in for a penny, in for a bloody—' Ernie advanced suddenly and with a loud creak, his head twisting round over his shoulder. 'Sorry sir, I didn't know you was there.'
'Well, now you do, now you do. Morning, Jake.'
It was Roger Dollymore, looking offensively fit and spruce. The sight of him was an instant reminder of the College Meeting to be held that afternoon and the hortations to be delivered there for and against the admission of women. No doubt Dollymore's was already prepared. Jake's wasn't. He stumbled off to his room to see if he could think of anything to say.
20—Girls Everywhere
He thought of something quite soon and wrote it down on the spot, and that was a good idea, because not long afterwards he was just wondering whether he could possibly feel worse, given present circumstances, in other words not given epilepsy or impending execution, when he put his mind at rest about that by starting to feel not only worse, but worse and worse. The newcomer among his sensations was anxiety. By the time he reached the lectern in Parks Road it was advanced enough to reduce his entire audience, the little bastard from Teddy Hall along with the rest, to immobile silence. They were all keyed up for the moment when he should collapse and die or start screaming and tearing off his clothes. But he disappointed them. When he had finished he cancelled his tutorial with the Bradfordian, savoured an all-too-brief moment of self-congratulation at his own sagacity and fought his way back to Comyns through a medium that seemed appreciably denser than air. In his sitting room he ran his eyes over the print of some of 'The Hippogriff Attache-Case'. He wanted to lie down but what he didn't want was another dose of those bloody thought-substitutes.
Having (purposely) missed breakfast he decided he had better try to eat some lunch and managed to get quite a decent way through a portion of steak-and-kidney pie with cabbage and mashed potatoes. It was slow work but he left the SCR in bags of time to get over to his rooms, throw up and stroll back so as to arrive in the Grade Room on the stroke of two. Inside him there continued to lie a dissolving Mogadon, taken with the object not of inducing sleep, which your true-to-form College Meeting could do on its own, but of soothing his nerves: Curnow had said when prescribing the stuff that it was a muscle relaxant, which surely must mean that it relaxed the muscles, and offhand he couldn't think of any muscle of his that couldn't have done with some relaxation bar his sphincter, which for the last four hours or so had notably excepted itself from the tension that possessed him.
Lancewood was already settled in his usual place, half-way down the left-hand vertical, so to speak, of the hollow square of baize-covered tables, at the top horizontal of which sat or shortly would sit the Master, the Dean, the Senior Tutor and other holders of office. Jake went round and joined Lancewood, who at first sight of him said,
'Hallo, how terrible you look.'
'Ernie was saying much the same thing this morning.'
'Even Ernie is right sometimes. I think it's your eyes mostly. No, that's too easy—it is your eyes, but it's your mouth mostly. Its shape has changed. What have you been up to?'
'Oh Christ. Are you in to Hall?'
'Yes, and at a loose end afterwards. Skip dessert and come straight over to my rooms.'
'Christ. I mean thanks.'
