the. publishing and writing scene, and moreover failed to realize this fact. But her heart in its treachery now swelled with an access of warmth for Tilly. She telephoned and invited her to supper on Friday. Jane had already calculated that, if Tilly should be a complete bore, they would be able to fill in an hour with Mrs G. Felix Dobell’s lecture. The club was fairly eager to see Mrs Dobell, having already seen a certain amount of her husband as Selina’s escort, rumoured to be her lover. ‘There’s a talk on Friday by an American woman on the Western Woman’s Mission, but we won’t listen to that, it would be a bore,’ Jane said, contradicting her resolution in her effusive anxiety to sacrifice anything, anything to George’s wife, now that she had betrayed and was about to deceive George.
Tilly said, ‘I always love the May of Teck. It’s like being back at school.’ Tilly always said that, it was infuriating.
*
Nicholas arrived early with his tape-recorder, and sat in the recreation room with Joanna, waiting for the audience to drift in from supper. She looked to Nicholas very splendid and Nordic, as from a great saga.
‘Have you lived here long?’ said Nicholas sleepily, while he admired her big bones. He was sleepy because he had spent most of the previous night on the roof with Selina,
‘About a year. I daresay I’ll die here,’ she said with the conventional contempt of all members for the club.
He said, ‘You’ll get married.’
‘No, no.’ She spoke soothingly, as to a child who had just been prevented from spooning jam into the stew.
A long shriek of corporate laughter came from the floor immediately above them. They looked at the ceiling and realized that the dormitory girls were as usual exchanging those R.A.F. anecdotes which needed an audience hilariously drunken, either with alcohol or extreme youth, to give them point.
Greggie had appeared, and cast her eyes up to the laughter as she came towards Joanna and Nicholas. She said, ‘The sooner that dormitory crowd gets married and gets out of the club, the better. I’ve never known such a rowdy dormitory crowd in all my years in the club. Not a farthing’s worth of intelligence between them.’
Collie arrived and sat down next to Nicholas. Greggie said, ‘I was saying about the dormitory girls up there: they ought to get married and get out.’
This was also, in reality, Collie’s view. But she always opposed Greggie on principle and, moreover, in company she felt that a contradiction made conversation. ‘Why should they get married? Let them enjoy themselves while they’re young.’
‘They need marriage to enjoy themselves properly,’ Nicholas said, ‘for sexual reasons.’
Joanna blushed. Nicholas added, ‘Heaps of sex. Every night for a month, then every other night for two months, then three times a week for a year. After that, once a week.’ He was adjusting the tape-recorder, and his words were like air.
‘If you’re trying to shock us, young man, we’re unshockable,’ said Greggie, with a delighted glance round the four walls which were not accustomed to this type of talk, for, after all, it was the public recreation room.
‘I’m shockable,’ said Joanna. She was studying Nicholas with an apologetic look.
Collie did not know what attitude she should take up. Her fingers opened the clasp of her bag and snapped it shut again; then they played a silent tip-tap on its worn bulging leather sides. Then she said, ‘He isn’t trying to shock us. He’s very realistic. If one is growing in grace — I would go so far as to say when one
Nicholas beamed lovingly at this.
Collie gave a little half-cough, half-laugh, much encouraged in the success of her frankness. She felt modern, and continued excitedly, ‘It’s a question of what you never have you never miss, of course.’
Greggie put on a puzzled air, as if she genuinely did not know what Collie was talking about. After thirty years’ hostile fellowship with Collie, of course she did quite well understand that Collie had a habit of skipping several stages in the logical sequence of her thoughts, and would utter apparently disconnected statements, especially when confused by an unfamiliar subject or the presence of a man.
‘Whatever do you mean?’ said Greggie.
‘Sex, of course,’ Collie said, her voice unusually loud with the effort of the topic. ‘We were discussing sex and getting married. I say, of course, there’s a lot to be said for marriage, but if you never have it you never miss it.’
Joanna looked at the two excited women with meek compassion. To Nicholas she looked stronger than ever in her meekness, as she regarded Greggie and Collie at their rivalry to be uninhibited.
‘What do you mean, Collie?’ Greggie said.
‘You’re quite wrong there, Collie. One does miss sex. The body has a life of its own. We do miss what we haven’t had, you and I. Biologically. Ask Sigmund Freud. It is revealed in dreams. The absent touch of the warm limbs at night, the absent —‘
‘Just a minute,’ said Nicholas, holding up his hand for silence, in the pretence that he was tuning-in to his empty tape-machine. He could see that the two women would go to any lengths, now they had got started.
‘Open the door, please.’ From behind the door came the warden’s voice and the rattle of the coffee tray. Before Nicholas could leap up to open it for her she had pushed into the room with some clever manoeuvring of hand and foot like a business-like parlourmaid.
The Beatific Vision does not appear to
While coffee was being served and the girls began to fill the room, Jane entered, fresh from her telephone conversation with Tilly, and, feeling somewhat absolved by it, she handed over to Nicholas her brain-work letter from Charles Morgan. While reading it, he was handed a cup of coffee. In the process of taking the cup he splashed some coffee on the letter.
‘Oh, you’ve ruined it!‘ Jane said. ‘I’ll have to do it all over again.’
‘It looks more authentic than ever,’ Nicholas said. ‘Naturally, if I’ve received a letter from Charles Morgan telling me I’m a genius, I am going to spend a lot of time reading it over and over, in the course of which the letter must
