In this room, against this background, Sillery’s machinations, such as they were, had taken shape for half a century. Here a thousand undergraduate attitudes had been penitentially acted out. Youth, dumb with embarrassment, breathless with exhibitionism, stuttering with nerves, inarticulate with conceit; the socially flamboyant, the robustly brawny, the crudely uninstructed, the palely epicene; one and all had obediently leapt through the hoop at Sillery’s ringmaster behest; one and all submitted themselves to the testing flame of this burning fiery furnace of adolescent experience. Such concepts crowded in only after a few minutes spent in the room. At the moment of entry no more was to be absorbed than the fact that another guest had already arrived, to whom Sillery, with much miming and laughter, was narrating an anecdote. Any immediate responses on my own part were cut short at once, for Sillery, as if ever on his guard against possible assassination, sprang from his chair and charged forward, ready to come to grips with any assailant.
‘Timothy?… Mike? … Cedric?… ’
‘Nick—’
‘Carteret-Owen? … Jelf?… Kniveton? … ’
‘Jenkins — how are you, Sillers?’
‘So you’ve come all the way from New South Wales, Nick?’
‘I —’
‘No — of course — you were appointed to that headmastership after all, Nick?’
‘It’s—’
‘I can see you haven’t quite recovered from that head wound…’
The question of identification was finally established with the help of the other caller, who turned out to be Short, a member of Sillery’s college a year senior to myself. Short had been not only a great supporter of Sillery’s tea-parties, but also vigorously promulgated Sillery’s reputation as — Short’s own phrase — a ‘power in the land’. We had known each other as undergraduates, continued to keep up some sort of an acquaintance in early London days, then drifted into different worlds. I had last heard his name, though never run across him, during the war when Short had been working in the Cabinet Office, with which my War Office Section had occasional dealings. He had probably transferred there temporarily from his own Ministry, because he had entered another branch of the civil service on leaving the University.
Short’s demeanour, now a shade more portentous, more authoritarian, retained, like the sober suit he wore, the same consciously buttoned-up character. This mild, well-behaved air concealed a good deal of quiet obstinacy, a reasonable amalgam of malice. Always of high caste in his profession, now almost a princeling, he stemmed nevertheless from the same bureaucratic ancestry as a mere tribesman like Blackhead, prototype of all the race of fonctionnaires, and, anthropologically speaking, might be expected to revert to the same atavistic obstructionism if roused.
Sillery, moustache a shade more ragged and yellow, blue bow tie with its white spots, more likely than ever to fall undone, was not much changed either. Perhaps illusorily, his body and face had shrunk, physical contraction giving him a more simian look than formerly, though of no ordinary monkey; Brueghel’s Antwerp apes (admired by Pennistone) rather than the Douanier’s homely denizens of Tropiques, which Soper, the Divisional Catering Officer, had resembled. Even the real thing, Maisky, defunct pet of the Jeavonses, could not compare with Sillery’s devastating monkeylike shrewdness. So strong was this impression of metempsychosis that he seemed about to bound up on to the bookcases, scattering the photographs of handsome young men, and pile of envelopes (the top one addressed to the Home Secretary) as he landed back on the table. He looked in glowing health. No one had ever pronounced with certainty on the subject of Sillery’s age. Year of birth was omitted in all books of reference. He was probably still under eighty.
‘Sit down, Nick, sit down. Leonard and I were talking of an old friend — Bill Truscott. Remember Bill? I’m sure you do. Of course he was a wee bit older than you both’ — Sillery had now perfectly achieved his chronological bearings — ‘but not very much. These differences get levelled out in the sands of time. They do indeed. Going to do great things was Bill. Next Prime Minister but three. We all thought so. No use denying it, is there, Leonard?’
Short smiled a temperate personal acquiescence that could not at the same time be interpreted for a moment as in any way committing his Department.
‘Wrote some effective verse too,’ said Sillery. ‘Even if it was a shade derivative. Mark Members always sneered at Bill as a poet, even when he respected him as a coming man. Rupert Brooke at his most babbling, Mark used to say, Housman at his most lad-ish. Mark’s always so severe. I told him so when he was here the other day addressing one of the undergraduate societies. You know Mark’s hair’s gone snow white. Can’t think what happened to cause that, he’s always taken great care of himself. Rather becoming, all the same. Gives just that air of distinction required by the passing of youth — and nobody got more out of being a professional young man than Mark when the going was good. He was talking of his old friend — our old friend — J. C. Quiggin. JG’s abandoned the pen, I hear, perhaps wisely. A literary caesarean was all but required for that infant of long gestation Unburnt Boats, which I often feared might come to birth prematurely as a puling little magazine article. Now JG’s going to promote literary works rather than write them himself. In brief, he’s to become a publisher.’
‘So I heard,’ said Short. ‘He’s starting a new firm called Quiggin & Craggs.’
‘To think I used to sit on committees with Howard Craggs discussing arms embargoes for Bolivia and Paraguay,’ said Sillery. ‘Sounds like an embargo on arms for the Greeks and Trojans now. Still, I read a good letter from Craggs the other day in one of the papers about the need for Socialists and Communists hammering out a common programme of European reconstruction.’
‘Craggs was a temporary civil servant during the war,’ said Short. ‘Rationing paper, was it? Something of the sort.’
‘That was when JG made himself useful as caretaker at Boggis & Stone,’ said Sillery. ‘I expect that explains why JG dresses like a partisan now, a man straight from the maquis, check shirts, leather jackets, ankle-boots. “Well, Quiggin’s always been in the forefront of the Sales Resistance where clothes were concerned.” That was Brightman’s comment. “Even if he did live ‘reserved and austere’ during hostilities — ‘reserved’ anyway.” We all enjoy Brightman’s rather cruel wit. Brightman and I are buddies now, by the way, all forgiven and forgotten. Besides, I expect JG’s circumscribed by lack of clothing coupons. All right for such as me, still wearing the suit I bought for luncheon with Mr Asquith at Downing Street before the Flood, but then it was a good piece of cloth to start off with, not like those sad old reach-me-downs of JG’s we’re all so familiar with. No doubt they disintegrated under the stress of war conditions. Why not ankle-boots, forsooth? I’d be glad of a pair myself in winter here.’