A Word Child (16 page)

An Oxford college is an odd little democratic society. As the fellows run the college, personalities can gain an importance which is far from frivolous. I was well aware (because such things get around) that my election had not been uncontested. There were those who held that I was merely, in the narrowest and dullest sense, a linguist. ‘Burde reads poetry for the grammar,' was a
mot
of my college enemy, Stitchworthy, who had, I was of course rapidly informed, bitterly opposed my fellowship. Gunnar's good opinion must have counted for a lot. When I knew that I had been elected, that the thing that I wanted most in the universe was now mine, I trembled with joy but also with fear. I had fought every inch of the way to where I was, and I could not have done so without having a good deal of confidence in myself as a scholar. However I also knew that I was still very far from the highly desirable condition of having ‘caught up'. There were huge areas of ignorance, holes into which I might stumble, lacunae which men like Gunnar or Eldridge or Clifford Larr had quietly filled up during their schooldays without even noticing what they were doing. I was terrified of making some memorable public blunder. And I was, as I entered my paradise, secretly very vulnerable to the sarcasm of Stitchworthy and his friends and correspondingly grateful for the protection of Gunnar's respect.

I settled in. My pupils took me for granted and did not fall off their chairs laughing at the idea of being instructed by me. My colleagues turned out to be less formidable (and also in some cases considerably less brilliant) than I had imagined beforehand. The younger dons made a joke of Stitchworthy, calling him Dame Stitch. I began timidly to decorate my rooms, copying heartily from Gunnar and others whom I imagined to have good taste. I began to make plans to bring Crystal to Oxford and settle her there in some elegant nest and possibly even select some very superior person to be her husband. I also began to draw up a plan for her education, which was now at last to be taken in hand. During this time Crystal and I were both mad with happiness. Crystal was still in the north where she was finishing her course in dressmaking. (Aunt Bill was dead by then, thank God.) She was, I think, a bit nervous about coming to Oxford, in case she should ‘disgrace me'. She was not at all concerned about her hypothetical grand marriage, and nor in any serious sense indeed was I. What delighted her most, after my success, was the idea that now I would teach her. I would tell her to read books and she would read them. She would work for me, work to become, for me, a worthier, more useful, more presentable sister.

I began to relax a little bit more into my surroundings, to acquire protective colouration. I bought a motor car. This absolutely delighted Crystal. I was soon on fairly easy terms with most of my colleagues, but without quite making friends. I was still awkward, separatist, aggressive, touchy. Gunnar treated me as his protege in a way which sometimes annoyed me, though he was unfailingly kind. I admired him, I wanted to be friends with him, and yet at the same time I snubbed him. We once nearly quarrelled seriously in fact over Stitchworthy. Stitchworthy, who was also a historian, had written an article for a learned journal concerning Cromwell, in which he had included a discussion of Marvell and a reference to Horace's
Epistles.
He quoted a piece of Horace and made clear from his remarks that he had misconstrued it. When I spotted this I could hardly believe my luck. I wrote a short dry note designed for the journal in question, pointing out Stitchworthy's howler, and concluding, ‘grammarians may or may not read a poem adequately, but those ignorant of grammar are not reading it at all.' I showed this little masterpiece to Gunnar, expecting him to be amused; but he was on the contrary rather annoyed and said I ought not to publish it. He said the note was spiteful in tone and that it was bad form so soon after my election, to attack a senior don in my own college, and crow over his mistakes. He said we were all capable of making mistakes. I thought his attitude was absurd and we parted angrily. I published the note. Gunnar forgave me. Stitchworthy of course never did.

Before this I had met Anne Jopling. I first met her when I was looking over my new rooms, before I had actually moved in. It was July, a blazing hot day, and I was looking out of one of the windows in a mindless daze of happiness, surveying the extremely elegant front quad of my new college, when Gunnar and Anne came in under the archway. She was wearing a flowery mauve dress of some very light veil-like material, with a broad mauve belt. She was very slim. She looked up at the window and saw me and smiled, thereby making clear that she knew who I was. Then she said something to Gunnar. He called up, ‘Can we come and see your rooms?' I said yes, of course, please. ‘We'll be up in a few minutes.' Then he and Anne arrived with a bottle of champagne and three glasses. ‘I thought we should toast your arrival.' I was incoherent with gratitude and joy. It was one of those perfectly happy moments, which must be fairly rare in any life, when good will and circumstance glorify a human encounter. Gunnar introduced Anne, who said she had heard so much about me and had long been wanting to meet me.

Anne is not easy to describe. Her face still seems to me the most beautiful human face I ever saw, although she would perhaps not generally have been thought excessively good-looking. Her face had a secret private inward pure dewy beauty which, to me,
blazed
forth. Her hair was mousy-brown and straight and cut in a simple sort of bob. She had a large brow and a rather bony face, with slightly prominent blue-grey eyes and a long sensitive mobile beautifully shaped mouth. She never wore make-up. Her skin was very fine, as if transparent, and always seemed very slightly moist. Her eyes had a moist bright look and absolutely
shone
with intelligence. To say it was ‘a clever face' would quite misdescribe it, though of course it was a clever face. It was a shining face, shining with interest and warmth and wit and a benign intelligent curiosity about everything. It shone upon me now as we drank the champagne in my empty rooms on that sunny summer day, and we chattered and laughed and were utterly happy. We were very young. I was twenty-three. Gunnar was twenty-seven. Anne was twenty-five. They had been fellow students. They had a son of four.

I said I hoped I would see them at my party, which was to take place next week in my old undergraduate rooms, the party at which Crystal was so happy, and they said they would come. (It was the first party I had ever given.) And they came and they both went out of their way to be absolutely angelic to Crystal and I could have kissed their feet. I suppose Crystal was a funny little object at that party. I daresay I was a funny object myself. During that long vacation the Joplings, lingering in Oxford, asked me to dinner. Then asked me again. They lived in an untidy large Victorian house in north Oxford, full of beautiful things but not a bit like a museum. Both their families were (as I conceived it then) well off. Their little son, called Tristram, was clever and pretty and well-behaved. (Only I did not like children.) They were obviously very happy. They were extremely kind to me. The Michaelmas Term began, my first term as a college tutor, and I saw quite a lot of Gunnar and Anne, I met them at their house, at other houses, in college.

As an undergraduate I had of course felt, in the mechanical way that men do, interested in the girls whom I saw about me. I joined no societies (I only briefly mistook my love for Russian for a love for Marx) and the sports I practised were exclusively male. Everyone else seemed much better at making friends, of either sex, than I was. I occasionally talked to the girls whom I got to know through my work (a rather clever one attended Gunnar's classes), but they tended to giggle at me and I immediately became offended and withdrew. On a few occasions I even invited girls to tea, but I found it so hard to talk to them and felt so awkward and embarrassed that I thoroughly bored them, and indeed they bored me. And I could hardly ask them to come into my bedroom and lie down without having made at least a little genial conversation first. (Or so I thought. Perhaps I was wrong.) I remained virgin throughout my undergraduate days without feeling the anxiety which so often afflicts men who have been unable to test themselves in this respect. I was far more anxious about my exams. I was
busy.
Like a knight upon a quest I was dedicated, under orders. I had to rescue myself and Crystal, to get us out of the dark hole in which we had grown up and out into the sunlight, into freedom. I had to
win
the inalienable advantages necessary for the completion of the rescue. I had to make myself absolutely
safe.
Until this was done nothing else really mattered much. On that day in July when I stood in my new rooms and looked out of the window I felt that at last I was safe. I had pulled it off. I had done it.

To say that I then felt free to fall in love puts it too simply. That was an aspect of the matter. A pair of blinkers which had kept me narrowly to a single task had been removed. I suddenly saw much more of the world. I rested. Or at least I tried to. The habit of relentless activity is hard to break. Yes, I was ready to fall in love. But I did not fall in love with just anybody, I fell in love with Anne, in spite of there being every reason why I ought not to, because those shining clever gentle eyes somehow, and from the very first moment, looked right into my soul and I felt myself
known
for the first time in my life. Of course Crystal knew me, but Crystal and I were so much jumbled up together that it might be more accurate to say that Crystal was me. There was no element of discrimination and shaping judgment. Anne met me as a stranger, saw me as a stranger, and miraculously understood me. Her presence made me rest, every muscle, every atom, became quiet and relaxed. I lived, I saw, I was. Time, which had been a clock ticking away the dangerous moments of my urgent trial, the test I simply must not fail, suddenly became silent and huge. It was not that, at first at any rate, we had any very significant talk. Her presence simply gave me some absolute calm joy which I did not at first recognize as a form of love.

It was not until the beginning of the Hilary Term that I put it to myself that I was really in love for the first time, that this was it, that I had fallen madly in love with Anne Jopling. The discovery that one is in love is automatically delightful, unless there are very strong contrary factors. There were strong contrary factors'. She was the wife of a man I liked and respected and who was by way of being my benefactor. She was happily married. She was not in love with me. But since I did not envisage any attempt to seduce her or indeed to bother her at all with the news of my extraordinary condition, I felt free to enjoy it privately, to experience that amazing enlargement of the world, its mythical transformation, its beatification, which being in love brings about. Of course I was also a martyr, I was pierced and pinned, I writhed in agony. I went about Oxford in a secret daze of pain and joy, not thinking of the future at all, and certainly not even remotely meditating upon the capture of the beloved. Then one day she kissed me.

Of course this was not the first time. Grown-up Oxford kisses a lot, in a way which surprised and rather shocked me when I was first made free of that rather peculiar society. Oxford is a very hedonistic place. (I am told Cambridge is quite different.) At dinner parties, even at cocktail parties, people who scarcely know each other embrace and kiss. Anne surprised me very much by kissing my cheek on the second occasion of my being invited to dinner. I was then not yet in love, or at any rate not aware of it. I can still vividly recall the unexpected fresh touch of those lips upon my cheek, suddenly in the porch of that big house, in the summer dark nearly twenty years ago. But that, as I say, was the sort of kiss which everyone at Oxford was constantly bestowing and receiving, and meant absolutely nothing.

The serious kiss happened in my rooms on the second of March; it was the sixth week of the Hilary Term. By then it was a custom that she would come sometimes to bring me things, stuff for the rooms, curtain hooks, picture hooks, ashtrays, a little cushion. She did this for other people too, she enjoyed giving little presents and ‘mothering' the younger bachelor dons. She had (perhaps unwisely? She and Gunnar often discussed this) given up her own academic career. (She too had got her ‘first'.) There was only one child, though they ardently hoped for more. Anne had time and creative energy to spare. I had by now been fully in love for over a month. I had managed to do my teaching and behave like a sane person, only my social life, such as it was, had completely ceased as I had to stay in my rooms all the time in case Anne should decide to call. On this day, it was about eleven o'clock in the morning and the sun was shining. I had a pupil, but I dismissed him as soon as Anne turned up. She chided me for this. She had brought me some blotting paper. (I had once complained that somehow or other I never seemed to have any.) She had brought a large packet of sheets of different colours. She pulled the package open and displayed the sheets on my table fanwise, laughing. I offered her some sherry, and she refused, saying it was too early and anyway she was in a rush and must go now. I had not seen her for six days, during which time I had not left my room except for dashes to the dining hall. Now she had come and was at once proposing to go. We were both standing leaning against the mantelpiece, she admiring her fan of blotting paper, I staring at her. She was making some jest and laughing. Then she turned to me, and stopped laughing. Of course my expression was unmistakable and concealment was at an end. I suppose in the agony of that threatened departure, I had deliberately brought it to an end. She looked at my grim face for a moment, then she kissed me on the lips.

I became instantly mad. I grasped her violently in my arms and drew her closely up against me and held her there in a blind ecstasy of motionless passion. I held her furiously in silence for what seemed ages and ages. She was at first quite still, then she began to struggle.