“Do you think,” she said, apparently at random, “that Laura ever had any doubts about him?”
“No,” I said.
“She’s totally wrapped up in him,” said Martin. “I don’t imagine she ever had a second’s doubt.”
“In that case, she must be the only person in the world who didn’t. I wonder what it’s been like for her?”
Margaret, I knew, was deliberately playing on our human interest. She, too, was subtle. She knew precisely what she wanted Martin — and, if I could take part, me also — to do.
But Irene sidetracked her by saying casually: “Well, she’d never tell me. She just can’t bear the sight of me.”
“Why ever not?” I asked.
“I just can’t think.”
“I expect she fancies,” said Martin, “that you’ve cast an eye at Donald.”
“Oh, she can’t think that! She can’t!” cried Irene, as usual hilarious (though she detested Howard and had been for years a faithful wife) at the bare prospect of adultery.
Then she said to Margaret: “It isn’t going to be fun, doing anything for them, don’t you see that?”
“I tell you, that’s putting it mildly,” said Martin.
“You won’t stick your neck out if you don’t need to? That’s all I’m asking you. Will you?”
“Do you think I ever have done?” said Martin.
None of us was certain how he proposed to act, or whether he proposed to act at all. Even when he sounded for opinion that night at the Master’s dinner table, he did it in the same ambiguous tone.
Until Martin began that sounding, the dinner had been a standard and stately specimen of the Crawford régime. It would not have happened if I had not been in Cambridge, for the Crawfords had only returned to the Lodge late on Boxing Day. But Crawford, who had never been a special friend of mine, had a kind of impersonal code that ex-Fellows who had achieved some sort of external recognition should not stay in Cambridge uninvited: so that night, in the great drawing-room at the Lodge, ten of us were drinking our sherry before dinner, the Nightingales, the Clarks, Martin and Irene, me and Margaret, and the Crawfords themselves, the men in white ties and tails, for Crawford, an old-fashioned Cambridge radical, had refused in matters of etiquette to budge an inch.
He stood, hands in pockets, coat-tails over arms, warming his back at his own fireplace, invincibly contented, so it seemed. He was a heavy, shortish, thickly made man who still, at the age of seventy-two, had a soft-footed, muscular walk. He looked nothing like seventy-two. His Buddha-like face, small-featured and round, had something of the unlined youthfulness, or rather agelessness, that one sees often in Asians, but very rarely in Europeans: his hair, glossy black, was smoothed down and did not show any grey at all.
He talked to each of us with impersonal cordiality. He said to me that he had “heard talk” of me in the “club” (the Athenaeum) just before Christmas, to Nightingale that the college had done well to get into that last list of American equities, to Martin that a new American research student seemed to be highly thought-of. When we had gone in to dinner and settled down to the meal, with the same cordiality he addressed us all. The subject that occurred to him, as we ate an excellent dinner, was privilege. He went on: “Speaking as the oldest round this table by a good few years, I have seen the disappearance of a remarkable amount of privilege.”
Crawford continued to deliver himself. The one thing on which all serious people were agreed, all over the world, was that privilege must be done away with; the amount of it had been whittled away steadily ever since he was a young man. All the attempts to stop this process had failed, just as reaction in its full sense had always failed. All over the world people were no longer prepared to see others enjoying privilege because they had a different coloured skin, or spoke in a different tone, or were born into families that had done pretty well for themselves. “The disappearance of privilege — if you want something that gives you the direction of time’s arrow,” said Crawford, “that’s as good as anything I know.”
Hanna could not restrain herself. With a sharp smile, she said: “It’s still got some way to go, shouldn’t you say?”
She looked round the table at the white ties, the evening dresses, the panelled walls beyond, the amplitude of the Lodge dining-room, the lighted pictures on the walls.
“Fair comment, Mrs Clark,” said Crawford, imperturbable, gallant. “But we mustn’t be misled by appearances. Speaking as the present incumbent, I assure you that I can’t imagine how my successors in the next generation are going to manage to run this Lodge. Unless indeed a society which is doing away with privilege decides to reward a few citizens for achievement by housing them in picturesque surroundings that no one else is able to afford. It would be interesting if a certain number of men of science in the next generation were still enabled to live in Lodges like this or the Carlsberg mansion at Copenhagen.”
As the talk became chit-chat, I was paying attention to Mrs Nightingale, whom I had not met before. She was a plump woman in the late thirties, a good twenty years younger than he was. Her shoulders and upper arms were beginning to ham out with fat; her eyes were full, sleepy, exophthalmic. But that sleepy plumpness was deceptive. Underneath she seemed energetic and quick-moving. When I said to her, pompously, as we were considering whether to pour sauce on to the pudding: “Now if we’re wise—”, she replied, dead-panned but instantaneous: “Don’t let’s be wise.” Between her and Nightingale there passed glances sparkling with both humour and trust. She referred to him as the Lord Mayor, a simple private joke which continued to delight him. They were happy, just as Martin and the others had told me. I was astonished that he had found such a nice woman.
I had been half-expecting Martin to lead in Howard’s name. All through dinner he did not mention him; he was still playing his part in the chit-chat when the women left us. But in fact it would have been surprising if he had not waited until the men were alone. College manners were changing in some of the young men, but not in Martin. He would no more have thought of discussing college business in the Lodge in front of wives than Crawford would, or Brown, or old Winslow. Though Martin was used to the company of women like Margaret or Hanna, though he knew how they detested the Islamic separation, Martin would not have considered raising his question that night until they had gone.
When the door had closed behind them, Crawford called for us to sit nearer to him. “Come up, here, Nightingale! Come beside me, Eliot! Will you look after yourself, Martin?” It occurred to me, still thinking of Martin’s manners, that while he kept some of old-style Cambridge, Crawford had, in just one respect, dropped his. Crawford called his contemporaries by their surnames, and that had been common form until the ’20s. Even in my time, there were not many Fellows who were generally called by their Christian names. But, since the young used nothing else, since Martin and Walter Luke and Julian Skeffington had never been known by anything but their Christian names to their own contemporaries, the old men also began to call them so. With the result that Crawford and Winslow, who after fifty years of friendship still used each other’s surnames, seemed oddly familiar when they spoke to the younger Fellows. As it happened, I came just at the turning-point, and to both Crawford and Winslow, though my brother was “Martin”, I remained “Eliot”.
The five of us had been alone for some time, the decanter had gone round, before Martin spoke. He asked, in a casual, indifferent, almost bored manner: “Master, I suppose you haven’t thought any more about the Howard business?”