and sit beside her nurse, though I heard her more than once being told that she might play with me if she wished.
Then she began to come near to me when I was petting the dog, and once when I was sitting on the grass with the dog lying beside me she came and sat down beside the dog too, and I asked her the dog's name. I can still feel the warm smooth feeling of the dog's back on which I had put my hand and I can see her hand near to mine stroking the dog's ears, and now I can see her face as I first saw it clearly for the first time, a round rosy rather shiny glowing face. She had short very fair hair and a funny little cross mouth and I loved her. We talked a little bit and then she asked me to play with her. I was an only child and I did not know how one played with another child. I knew no games which could be played except alone. I said I would play with her but did not then know what to do.
She tried to teach me a game, but 1 was too foolish and too much loving to understand, and I think anyway it was a game needing more people. In the end we just played with the dog, running races with it and teasing it and trying to make it do tricks. Now I wanted every day to come to the public gardens to see the little girl and I was very very happy. I think I was happier in those days than I have ever been since in my whole life. Then one day I thought I would like to bring a present to the little girl and the dog, and I persuaded my parents to buy a little yellow bouncing ball for the dog to play with and for us to throw and for him to bring back. I was so impatient for the next morning, I could hardly wait to show my friend the yellow ball and to throw it for the little dog. Next morning then I went to the gardens, and there was the girl in her blue coat and her blue boots and the black and white dog frisking round about her. I showed her the yellow ball and I threw it for the dog and he went running after it and he caught it and it stuck in his throat and he choked and died.'
'Oh God!' said Mary. She knelt up in the ivy. The climax of the story had arrived so suddenly she did not know what to say. 'Oh how – Oh Willy – What happened then – 'I did not see all as my nurse took me away. I was in a hysteria for that day and had the next day a fever. Then it was time for us to go home. I never saw the little girl again.'
'Oh Willy,' she said, 'I am sorry, I am so sorry – '
There was a silence. The distant cuckoo call hollowed the quiet air. The scene, like a faded brown picture postcard, hovered in Mary's mind, making the graveyard invisible. She saw the formal public garden, the gossiping nursemaids, the sedate quaintly dressed children, the frisky dog. Desperately searching for speech, she meant to ask, What was the little girl's name? She asked, 'What was the dog's name?'
The silence continued. She thought, he cannot remember.
She looked up.
Willy was sitting perfectly still, his arms clasped round his knees, and tears were streaming down his face. His mouth drooped, half opened, and after two attempts he said, 'Rover.
It was an English terrier and it was fashionable then to call them by English names.'
'Oh my darling – 'said Mary. She moved awkwardly, trying to lever herself upon the springy surface. She leaned against him, thrusting one arm along his back, bowing her head on to his shoulder. Willy dabbed his face with a clean folded handkerchief.
Mary put her other arm round him and clasped her hands tight upon his other shoulder, her cheek crushed against his jacket. She felt his body rigid in the ring of her clasp and she thought desperately, this does not comfort him, this does not comfort him at all. She squeezed him closer and then drew away. The bright airy light surprised her as if she had been in a dark place.
She said, 'Listen, Willy, listen, and don't think me mad. Will you marry me?'
'What?'
'I said will you marry me?'
Mary was kneeling opposite to him now. Willy continued to mop his face. He shifted himself, tucking one leg under him.
His gaze moved slowly across the graveyard and by the time it had come to rest on Mary his face had changed completely, plumped out into the radiant, perky, puckish face which she had seen him wear once as he jigged about his room to some music of Mozart.
'Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful!' said Willy. 'No one has ever proposed to me beforel' Then as Mary began to say something he added in a low voice, almost under his breath, 'I am impotent, you know '
'Willy, Willy!' A shrill cry came to them across the graveyard and they turned to see Barbara climbing hurriedly over the wall. She came bounding towards them, her blue sandals scarcely touching the dark green matting.
'Oh Willy, Mary, have you see Montrose?'
They both said no.
'I've been looking for him and he isn't anywhere, not anywhere.
It's been so long and he's never been away like this; ever and he didn't come for his milk and Pierce says he must be drowned and'
'Nonsense,' said Mary. 'Cats don't get drowned, they've got far too much sense. He'll turn up, he's sure to.'
'But where is he, he's not like some cats, he never goes away 169 'Now then,' said Willy, getting up rather stiffly from his ivy couch. 'We'll go back to the house together and I'll help you look for him. I expect he's quite near, lying asleep under a bush. I'll help you find him.'
'But I've looked everywhere and it's long past his tea-time and he always comes in '
Willy was speaking to her in a soft sing-song comforting voice as he led her away.
Mary stayed where she was. After a while she began slowly to get to her feet. With a start of alarm she remembered the piece of green glass which Willy had given her, throwing it into her lap like the prince finding the princess, only of course in the story it was the'other way round. When she had sprung up to put her arms about him it must have rolled somewhere away. She began to search, thrusting her arm down above the elbow into the dark dry twiggy interior of the ivy thicket, but though she went on searching for a long time she could not find the piece of green glass again.
Twenty
The immense literature about Roman law has been produced by excogitation from a relatively small amount of evidence, of which a substantial part is suspect because of interpolations.
Ducane had often wondered whether his passion for the subject were not a kind of perversion. There are certain areas of scholarship, early Greek history is one and Roman law is another, where the scantiness of evidence sets a special challenge to the disciplined mind. It is a game with very few pieces where the skill of the player lies in complicating the . rules. The isolated and uneloquent fact must be exhibited within a tissue of hypothesis subtle enough to make it speak, and it was the weaving of this tissue which fascinated Ducane.
Whereas he would have found little interest in struggling with the vast mass of factual material available to a student of more recent times. There was in this preference a certain aestheticism, allied perhaps to his puritanical nature, a predilection for what was neat, enclosed, demonstrable and highly finished: What was too empirical seemed to Ducane messy. His only persistent source of dissatisfaction with his dry and finite subject matter was that the topics which interested him most frequently turned out to have been thoroughly investigated some years previously by a German.
At the moment Ducane, who had just returned from his evening with Octavian during which, contrary to their intention, they had talked shop, was sitting on his bed and turning over a paper which he had written while he was still at All Souls on the problem of 'literal contract' and wondering whether to include it in a collection of essays which he was shortly going to publish under the title of Puzzle and Paradox in Roman Law. He knew quite well that he ought to be other wise engaged. He ought to be writing a letter to Jessica to suggest a time of meeting. He ought to be drafting an interim report on his inquiry into the Radeechy affair. He was putting off the former because anything he was likely to write was likely to be at least half a lie. He was putting off the latter because he had not yet decided what to do about Richard Biranne.
Attempts by Ducane's various minions, George Droysen and others, to get on to the track of 'Helen of Troy'
