When the table, the glasses, the fire, which had retreated to the far distance, came back and focused themselves, I could still hear Tom Orbell deferentially baiting Winslow.
“Have you been to any services today, Winslow?”
“My dear young man, you should know by now that I don’t support these primitive survivals.”
“Not even for the sake of gravitas?”
“For the sake of what you’re pleased to call gravitas — which incidentally historians of your persuasion usually misunderstand completely — I am prepared to make certain concessions. But I’m not in the least prepared to give tacit support to degrading superstitions.”
The chaplain made a protesting noise.
“Let me bring it to a point, my dear chaplain. I’m not prepared to lend my presence to your remarkable rituals in the chapel.”
“But I’ve seen you set foot in the place, haven’t I?” I said.
Winslow replied: “I’ve now been a Fellow of this college for slightly more than fifty-eight years. I was elected fifty-eight years last June, to be precise, which is no doubt not a date which many of my colleagues would feel inclined to celebrate. During that period I have attended exactly seven obsequies, or whatever you prefer to call them, in the chapel. Each of those seven times I went against my better judgment, and if I had my time again I should not put in an appearance at any one of them. I believe you have never gone in for these curious superstitions, Eliot?”
“I’m not a believer,” I said.
“Nor you, Tutor?”
Winslow turned to Martin with a savage, cheerful grin.
“No.”
“Well, then, I hope you will keep my executors up to the mark. In my will, I have given strict instructions that when I die, which in the nature of things will be quite shortly, there is to be not the faintest manifestation of this mumbo-jumbo. I have endeavoured to make testamentary dispositions which penalise any of my misguided relatives who attempt to break away from these instructions. I should nevertheless be grateful to men of good sense if they keep an eye open for any infringement. Your co-believers, my dear chaplain, are remarkably unscrupulous and remarkably insensitive about those of us who have come perfectly respectably, and with at least as much conviction as any of you, to the opposite conclusion.”
Winslow was enjoying himself, so were some of the others. I thought the chaplain was not fair game, though Tom Orbell would have been, and so I said: “You’ve been in chapel more than seven times, you know.”
“My dear boy?”
“Electing Masters and so on.”
“I take the point,” said Winslow. “Though I’m not sure that those occasions can fairly be counted against me. But yes, I grant you, I’ve been inside the building four times for magisterial elections. Three of which, it became fairly clear soon after the event, showed the college in its collective wisdom choosing the wrong candidate.” He added: “Now I come to think of it, I suppose that by this time next year I shall have to go inside the building again for the same purpose. My dear Tutor, have you worked out when the election falls due?”
“December 20th,” said Martin without hesitation.
“Unless I die first,” said Winslow, “I shall have to assist in the French sense at that ceremony. But I’m happy to say that this time I can’t see even this college being so imbecile as to make a wrong choice. Just for once, the possibility does not appear to be open.”
“You mean —?”
“It’s not necessary to ask, is it? Francis Getliffe will do it very well.”
No one contradicted the old man. I could not resist making things slightly more awkward for Tom Orbell.
“I seem to remember,” I said, “having heard Brown’s name mentioned.”
“My dear Eliot,” said Winslow, “Brown’s name was mentioned last time. I then said it would mean twenty years of stodge. I should now say, if anyone were crass enough to repeat the suggestion, that it would mean seven years of stodge. It is true, seven would be preferable to twenty, but fortunately it is impossible for my colleagues, even with their singular gift for choosing the lowest when they see it, to select stodge at all this term.”
“Getliffe is generally agreed on, is he?”
“I’ve scarcely thought the matter worth conversation,” said Winslow. “The worthy Brown is not a serious starter by the side of Francis Getliffe. And that is the view of all the seniors in the college, who are showing surprising unanimity for once in a way. I had a word with the Bursar recently. We agreed that there would have to be a pre-election meeting, but we saw no reason why there should be more than one. Which, I may tell you young men” — Winslow looked round the table — “is entirely unprecedented in the last sixty years in this college. I even find that our late Senior Tutor, the unfortunate Jago, is completely at one with the Bursar and myself. As I say, we all think Getliffe will do it very well.”
As my eyes met Tom Orbell’s, his were bold, light, wide open. For whatever reason, he was not going to argue. Was it deference, or was he just not ready to show his hand? While Martin, listening politely to Winslow, gave no sign whether he agreed or disagreed. In a moment he got the old man talking of past college follies: of how a “predecessor of mine in the office of Bursar showed himself even more egregiously unfitted for it” by selling the great Lincolnshire estate. “If it hadn’t been for that remarkable decision, which shouldn’t have been made by anyone with the intelligence of a college servant, this institution would be approximately half as rich again.”
Further inanities occurred to Winslow. As we stood up while the waiters cleared the table and arranged chairs in a crescent round the fire, he was reflecting on the number of Fellows in his time who had been men of a “total absence of distinction”.
“A total absence of distinction, my dear Tutor,” he said to Martin, with even greater cheerfulness.
“Wasn’t there something to be said for old —?” said Martin, his own eyes bright.
“Nothing at all, my dear boy, nothing at all. He would have made a very fair small shopkeeper of mildly bookish tastes.”
He settled into the President’s chair, which was the second, as one proceeded anti-clockwise from the far side of the fireplace. In the middle of the room, the rosewood table shone polished and empty: when the college dined in the combination room, it was the habit to drink wine round the fire.
“It can’t be too often said,” Winslow addressed himself to Taylor and the youngest of the others, both in their twenties, well over fifty years his juniors, “that, with a modicum of exceptions, Cambridge dons are not distinguished men. They are just men who confer distinctions upon one another. I have often wondered who first uttered that simple but profound truth.”
The port glasses were filled as Winslow announced: “I believe this bottle is being presented by Mr Eliot, for the purpose — correct me if I am wrong, my dear Tutor — of marking the appearance here of his brother. This is a remarkable display of fraternal good wishes.”