'No use pretending, is there? Doesn't take much imagination to see what you're thinking.' The tip of her nose wiggled slightly as she talked, in the way it always did. She stood with her feet apart and her arms crossed on her breast, as Dixon had seen her many times, making small-talk in this room or one of the little teaching-rooms upstairs. She didn't look at all strained, or excited, or ill-at-ease, or annoyed.
Dixon heaved a sigh of weariness before plunging in with the kind of protests and excuses laid down for him by the conventions of this particular pursuit. As he talked, he reflected how easily, by what deft sleight-of-hand, he'd been deprived of his one moral advantage in recent dealings with Margaret: his uninfluenced decision to take no more active interest in Christine. It was a bit rough to be reproached for hankering after what he'd voluntarily turned down. His spirits were so low that he wanted to lie down and pant like a dog: jobless, Christineless, and now grand-slammed in the Margaret game.
With no conclusion reached, their conversation was brought to an end by the drift of the Principal's group towards the door. Gore-Urquhart was apparently deep in talk with Bertrand and Christine. Welch called: 'Ready, Dixon?' With Mrs Welch at his side, he more than ever resembled an old boxer, given to a bit of poaching now and then, standing with his ex-kitchenmaid wife.
'See you in the Hall, Professor,' Dixon called back; then, with a word to Margaret, he hurried out and into the Staff Cloakroom. Stage-fright was upon him now; his hands were cold and damp, his legs felt like flaccid rubber tubes filled with fine sand, he had difficulty in controlling his breathing. While he was using the lavatory, he began making his Evelyn Waugh face, then abandoned it in favour of one more savage than any he normally used. Gripping his tongue between his teeth, he made his cheeks expand into little hemispherical balloons; he forced his upper lip downwards into an idiotic pout; he protruded his chin like the blade of a shovel. Throughout, he alternately dilated and crossed his eyes. Turning away, he found himself confronted by Gore-Urquhart, allowed his face to collapse, and said: 'Oh, hallo'.
'Hallo, Dixon,' Gore-Urquhart said, walking on past him.
Dixon went to the mirror above the wash-basin and examined his eye. It looked a good many shades brighter than he'd remembered it. In the circumstances, any attempt at smartness of clothes or hair seemed beside the point. He took from a shelf the stolen R.A.F. file that contained his lecture-script and was about to leave when Gore-Urquhart called: 'Hold on a minute, Dixon, will you?'
Dixon stopped and turned. Gore-Urquhart approached and stood gazing at him intently, as if planning a funny sketch of him, in charcoal, perhaps, or ink-wash, to be begun as soon as the lecture was over. After a moment, he said: 'Are you maybe feeling a little nervous, laddie?'
'Very nervous.'
Gore-Urquhart nodded and produced a sum but substantial flask from his ill-fitting clothes. 'Have a swig.'
'Thanks.' Deciding not to bother about coughing, Dixon took a good pull at what was evidently neat Scotch whisky - more evidently than any drink he'd ever had. He coughed wildly.
'Ah, it's good stuff, that. Have another swig.'
'Thanks.' Dixon did exactly as before, then, gasping and wiping his mouth on his sleeve, gave the flask back. 'I'm very grateful for that.'
'It'll do you a power of good. Out of my sherry-cask. Well, we'd best get along if we don't want to keep them waiting.'
The last stragglers were still leaving the Common Room and moving up the stairs. At the stairhead a little group was waiting: the Goldsmiths, Bertrand, Christine, Welch, Beesley, and the other lecturers in the History Department.
'We may as well go up the front, sir,' Bertrand said.
They began moving into the Hall, which was disconcertingly full. The front row of the gallery held an unbroken line of students. There was a loud mixture of conversations.
'Well, give it to them, Jim,' Carol said.
'All the best, old boy,' Cecil said.
'Best of luck, Jim,' Beesley said. They all moved away into their seats.
'Here you go then, laddie,' Gore-Urquhart said in an undertone. 'No need to worry; to hell with all this.' He gripped Dixon's arm and withdrew.
Aware that a shuffling for places was going on behind him, Dixon followed Welch on to the platform. The Principal and the fatter of the two aldermen were already there. Dixon found that he felt rather drunk.
XXII
WELCH uttered the preludial blaring sound, cognate with his son's bay, with which he was accustomed to call for silence at the start of a lecture; Dixon had heard students imitating it. A hush gradually fell. 'We are here tonight', he informed the audience, 'to listen to a lecture.'
While Welch talked, his body swaying to and fro, its upper half more strongly illuminated by the reading- lamp above the lectern, Dixon, so as not to have to listen to what was said, looked furtively round the Hall. It was certainly very full; a few rows at the back were thinly inhabited, but those nearer the front were packed, chiefly with members of Staff and their families and with local people of various degrees of eminence. The gallery, as far as Dixon could see, was also packed; some people were standing up by the rear wall. Dropping his eyes to the nearer seats, Dixon picked out the thinner of the two aldermen, the local composer, and the fashionable clergyman; the titled physician had presumably come for the sherry only. Before he could look further, Dixon's vague recurrent feeling of illness identified itself as a feeling of faintness; a wave of heat spread from the small of his back and seemed to become established in his scalp. On the point of groaning involuntarily, he tried to will himself into feeling all right; only the nervousness, he told himself. And the drink, of course.
When Welch said '… Mr Dixon' and sat down, Dixon stood up. His knees began shaking violently, as if in caricature of stage-fright. A loud thunder of applause started up, chiefly, it seemed, from the gallery. Dixon could hear heavily-shod feet being stamped. With some difficulty, he took up his stand at the lectern, ran his eye over his first sentence, and raised his head. The applause died away slightly, enough for sounds of laughter to be heard through it; then it gathered force again, soon reaching a higher level than before, especially as regards the feet- stamping. The part of the audience in the gallery had had its first clear view of Dixon's black eye.
Several heads were being turned in the first few rows, and the Principal, Dixon saw, was staring irritably at the area of disturbance. In his own general unease, Dixon, who could never understand afterwards how he came to do it, produced an excellent imitation of Welch's preludial blaring sound. The uproar, passing the point where it could still be regarded as legitimate applause, grew louder. The Principal rose slowly to his feet. The uproar died down, though not to complete silence. After a pause, the Principal nodded to Dixon and sat down again.
Dixon's blood rushed in his ears, as if he were about to sneeze. How could he stand up here in front of them all and try to talk? What further animal noises would come out of his mouth if he did? He smoothed the edge of his script and began.
When he'd spoken about half a dozen sentences, Dixon realized that something was still very wrong. The murmuring in the gallery had grown a little louder. Then he realized what it was that was so wrong: he'd gone on using Welch's manner of address. In an effort to make his script sound spontaneous, he'd inserted an 'of course' here, a 'you see' there, an 'as you might call it' somewhere else; nothing so firmly recalled Welch as that sort of thing. Further, in a partly unconscious attempt to make the stuff sound right, i.e. acceptable to Welch, he'd brought in a number of favourite Welch tags: 'integration of the social consciousness', 'identification of work with craft', and so on. And now, as this flashed into his labouring mind, he began to trip up on one or two phrases, to hesitate, and to repeat words, even to lose his place once so that a ten-second pause supervened. The mounting murmur from the gallery indicated that these effects were not passing unappreciated. Sweating and flushing, he struggled on a little further, hearing Welch's intonation clinging tightly round his voice, powerless for the moment to strip it away. A surge of drunkenness across his brain informed him of the arrival there of the advance-guard of Gore-Urquhart's whisky - or was it only that last sherry? And how hot it was. He stopped speaking, poised his mouth for a tone as different from Welch's as possible, and started off afresh. Everything seemed all right for the moment.
