‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ Trefisick said, rubbing his neck, abashed; he added, despite himself, ‘All the same, Veronica, you’ve proved my point about their being a menace.’
‘Not at all,’ she said. ‘For the first time my husband and I are free to be perfectly honest with each other. I have only hope for the future; forced to acknowledge the facts at last, we may reach something better than a dead compromise.’ She paused. ‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have …’
‘Dear Mrs Wolf,’ Scryban said, lifting his hands from his knees and replacing them there, ‘I refuse to allow you to apologise. What you say only makes us respect and admire you the more; our vegetable love for you grows marvellously quicker than empires. You do show—’
‘I’m just trying to show you,’ she interrupted a little breathlessly, ‘that these Norman Lights really should have our utmost faith: they are the first scientific invention ever to make us face ourselves.’
They had been embarrassed by revelations about Mrs Wolf’s marriage before. Silence burst over them like an exploding muffin.
‘Well, thank you all very much for coming up and giving me your ideas. We’ll think along the political line, shall we?’ Scryban said, with more haste than usual. ‘Now I’m sure I’m keeping you all from your coffee. I would just like to say, if I might, that though I disapprove of ERs personally, I find it difficult to understand why all the criticism of them from the culture camp, from people like Betjeman and Clark and Ayrton, has confined itself to aesthetic principles. I find those of you here who have your Registers installed’ – this was said with a deprecatory smile – ‘of an enhanced appearance.’
As they left Scryban’s room, Donald Hortense materialised at Jimmy’s left elbow. He was one of Jimmy’s closest friends, which made him rather less than more endearing at present, Jimmy’s lover’s soul feeling far from chummy.
‘I don’t believe you said one word in there,’ he accused Donald.
‘That takes bags of courage, especially when one has nothing to say. Did you get that portrait for your exhibition off Sir Richard Clunes?’
‘I got the promise of it when we’re ready for it, which is all I wanted,’ Jimmy said. ‘And I went to a cocktail party he gave last night. A business do.’
‘Oh? And what do the Corridors of Power boys think about nun chasers?’ This was Donald’s method of referring to anyone in bureaucratic or scientific circles, however lowly.
They seem on the whole to take to the idea of them a deal more enthusiastically than do we Corridors of Eng. Lit. boys.’
‘Not surprising; we’re a backward-looking lot. Our glories lie behind us, pace Nitkin,’ Donald said, without much interest. ‘Come on down to the café for a chat. There isn’t a blessed thing to do this morning in the library.’
Jimmy agreed, catching a glimpse in his mind’s eye of a pair of faultless breasts thrusting towards him on the road to Walton. The IBA seemed curiously insubstantial this morning.
‘What did you think of the she-wolf washing and ironing her dirty linen in public?’ Donald asked.
‘I thought it was jolly brave of her to speak out to Bloody Trefisick the way she did. I admired her for it.’
‘You’re hopeless, Jimmy. That wasn’t bravery, you ass, it was masochism, if ever I saw it. She’s a masochist and her hubby must be a mash-assistant.’
‘You don’t believe a word you say, Donald,’ Jimmy reproved, but he felt slightly tired of the other’s habit of jokingly imputing perverted values to every conceivable relationship; it was, of course, the result of Donald being what he was, and of the law’s attitude to what he was. ‘When allowances are made, it’s what I’ve always said, It’s only ’uman nature after all,’ Jimmy rhymed to himself. All the same, he would not dream of mentioning Rose to Donald, much as he longed to rhapsodise about her to someone.
In the cafeteria they sat at a corner table, just out of striking distance of a giant American aloe cactus. Donald sat genially with his elbows on the table. Despite the too beautiful tailoring which enveloped him, he looked like a rugger forward just off the field, his hair spikey, his nose slightly flat. He had a healthy look about him; Jimmy already accepted the fact that Donald’s light glowed intermittently in his presence.
‘Had a poem accepted this morning, me boy,’ Donald said. ‘Mandragora took it – the one about the turds, that Tambimuttu turned down.’
‘I remember. Good! Congratulations. It should appear in about three years.’ Jimmy enjoyed none of Donald Hortense’s poems, but he found them oddly memorable – partly because, as a member of the Scribist movement, Donald only composed poems which were seven brief lines long.
‘Of course, I’m going to have to change my entire method of writing poetry,’ Donald said thoughtfully. ‘What a lot of people have not realised is that Norman Lights are going to put a new aspect on everything,’ Donald said. ‘For literature, it’ll be a far more sweeping change than any of the multitude of changes it’s already undergone this century. It’ll mean writers having to learn a new language even more difficult than Shaw’s forty-letter alphabet would have been: the language of changed mores and responses in the external world. Willy nilly, poetry and the novel are dunked back into a realm of exploration.’
‘I suppose so,’ Jimmy agreed. ‘A writer writes most richly of his childhood. Facing the new set-up will be a tax on him. Any novelist not tackling the immediate present will be classed as an historical novelist.’
‘Not only that. The NLs will bring a state of flux which is going to last for years, as all the ramifications seep through every level of society. A synthesis, an analysis, will be a more demanding task than ever – and its value more questionable. Because no sooner do you get the novel or what-have-you written than your specimen is out of date. Have you seen Vogue?’
Jimmy shook his head. He had never seen Vogue; Donald always had. Women’s fashion magazines were irresistible to the librarian; through them he caught glimpses of a vast, busy world with which he had not the slightest connection.
‘There’s an interesting article in it by Grigson,’ Donald said. ‘Versatile type, Grigson; I admire him for it. He’s attempting to predict the effect NLs will have on such womanly wiles as make-up and hats – and hence on the whole conception of female beauty. He thinks that at first hats will be designed to conceal NLs and then, later, to reveal them. As a long-range prediction, he emphasises that we have supplied our bodies with a new sexual focus, which he thinks may supplant some of the others in superficial importance. So that by about the mid-seventies bare breasts may be quite the thing; they just won’t seem anything to be excited about any more.’
‘It’s something to look forward to, anyhow.’
‘Infantile traumas springing up right, left and centre,’ Donald exclaimed, gulping down his coffee in disgust. ‘Well, I must be awa’.’
When Jimmy returned to his little room, he pulled the Haiti folder out of the desk and opened it. On the first sheet of paper, he had written boldly, ‘Books in Haiti since 1804.’ It was going to be a good and unusual exhibition: his exhibition. He ought to write straight away to the faculty of Pisa for photographs of Queen Marie-Louise’s grave; sufficiently enlarged, they would fill the awkward alcove at the far end of the Main Exhibition Hall. He began a rough sketch to indicate the sort of camera angle he required.
In no time, his pencil stopped. Blankly, gently, he gazed into space. The soft and nutritious thought of Rose slid over him. As if silent upon a