Chrystal had not been able to avoid Winslow’s side, but he talked diagonally across the table to Francis Getliffe.
‘Have we fixed the date of the next feast, Getliffe?’ he asked.
‘You should have written it down in your pocketbook, my dear Dean,’ said Winslow. Chrystal frowned. Actually, he knew the date perfectly well. He was asking because he had something to follow.
‘February the 12th. A month tomorrow,’ said Francis Getliffe, who had during the previous summer become Steward.
‘I hope you’ll make it a good one,’ said Chrystal. ‘I’m asking you for a special reason. I happen to have a most important guest coming.’
‘Good work,’ said Francis Getliffe mechanically, preoccupied with other thoughts. ‘Who is he?’
‘Sir Horace Timberlake,’ Chrystal announced. He looked round the table, ‘I expect everyone’s heard of him.’
‘I am, of course, very ignorant of these matters,’ said Winslow. ‘But I’ve seen his name occasionally in the financial journals.’
‘He’s one of the most successful men of the day,’ said Chrystal. ‘He controls a major industry. He’s the chairman of Howard and Haslehurst.’
From the other side of the table, Francis Getliffe caught my eye. The name of that company had entered his wife’s life, and I knew the story. In the midst of his annoyance, he gave a grim, intimate smile of recognition.
Nightingale smiled.
‘I suppose,’ he said, ‘he might be called one of these business knights.’
‘He’s none the worse for that,’ retorted Chrystal.
‘Of course he’s none the worse for that,’ Pilbrow burst out from the lower end of the table. ‘I’ve never been much addicted to business-men, but really it’s ridiculous to put on airs because they become genteel. How else do you think anyone ever got a title? Think of the Master’s wife. What else were the Bevills but a set of sharp Elizabethan business men? It would be wonderful to tell her so.’ He exploded into joyful laughter. Then he talked rapidly again, this time to Winslow, several places away at the head of the table. ‘The trouble with your ancestors and mine, Godfrey, isn’t that they made money, but that they didn’t make quite enough. Otherwise we should have found ourselves with titles and coronets. It seems to me a pity whenever I order things in a shop. Or whenever I hear pompous persons talking nonsense about politics. I should have liked to be a red Lord.’
‘Of course,’ he said, following his process of free association, ‘snobbery is the national vice. Much more than other things which foreigners give us credit for.’ He often talked so fast that the words got lost, but phrases out of Havelock Ellis bubbled out — ‘le vice anglaise’, I heard.
Pilbrow was delighted with the comparison. When he had quietened down, he said: ‘By the way, I’ve hooked an interesting guest for the feast too, Getliffe.’
‘Yes, Eustace, who is it?’
Pilbrow produced the name of a French writer of great distinction. He was triumphant.
In matters of art, the college’s culture was insular and not well informed. The name meant nothing to most men there. But nevertheless they wanted to give Pilbrow the full flavour of his triumph. All except Chrystal and Nightingale. Chrystal was piqued because this seemed to be stealing Sir Horace’s thunder; Sir Horace had been jeered at by Nightingale that night, and Chrystal was sensitive for his heroes; he also liked solid success, and a French writer, not even one he had heard of, not even a famous one, was flimsy by the side of Sir Horace. He was huffed to notice that I took this Frenchman seriously, and told Pilbrow how much I wanted to meet him.
Nightingale did what seemed impossible, and detested Pilbrow. He was full of envy at Pilbrow’s ease, gaiety, acquaintance with all the cultivated world. He knew nothing of Pilbrow’s artistic friends, but hated them. When Pilbrow announced the French writer’s name, Nightingale just smiled.
The rest of us loved Pilbrow. Even Winslow said: ‘As you know, Eustace, I understand these things very little — but it will be extremely nice to see your genius. I stipulate, however, that I am not expected to converse in any language but my own.’
‘Would you really like him next to you, Godfrey?’
‘If you please. If you please.’
Pilbrow beamed. All of us, even the youngest, called him by his Christian name. He had been a unique figure in the college for very long. He would, as he said, have made a good red Lord. And, though he came from the upper middle classes, was comfortably off without being rich (his father had been the headmaster of a public school), many people in Europe thought of him in just that way. He was eccentric, an amateur, a connoisseur; he spent much of his time abroad, but he was intensely English, he could not have been anything else but English. He belonged to the fine flower of the peaceful nineteenth century. A great war had not shattered his feeling, gentlemanly and unselfconscious, that one went where one wanted and did what one liked.
If nostalgia ever swept over him, he thrust it back. I had never known an old man who talked less of the past. Long ago he had written books on the Latin novelists, and the one on Petronius, where he found a subject which exactly fitted him, was the best of its kind; all his books were written in a beautifully lucid style, oddly unlike his cheerful, incoherent speech. But he did not wish to talk of them. He was far more spirited describing some Central European he had just discovered, who would be a great writer in ten years.
He went round Europe, often losing his head over a gleam of talent. One of his eccentricities was that be refused to dress for dinner in a country under a totalitarian regime, and he took extreme delight in arriving at a party and explaining why. Since he was old, known in most of the salons and academies of Europe, and well connected, he set embassies some intricate problems. He did not make things easier for them by bringing persecuted artists to England, and spending most of his income upon them. He would try to bring over anyone a friend recommended — ‘everything’s got to be done through nepotism’, he said happily. ‘A pretty face may get too good a deal — but a pretty face is better than a committee, if it comes to bed.’
He had never married, but he did not seem lonely. I believed that there were days of depression, but if so he went through them in private. In public he was irrepressible, an enfant terrible of seventy-four. But it was not the exuberant side of him that I most admired; it was not that no one could think of him as old; it was that he, like other people who do good, was at heart as tough as leather, healthily self-centred at the core.
Chrystal came back to the feast.
‘There’s one thing we can’t overlook. I’ve already warned my guest. I don’t know how others feel, but I can’t bring myself to like having a feast here with the Master dying in the Lodge. Still, we’ve got no option. If we cancel it, it gives the show away. But, if they’ve told the Master the truth before the time of the feast, we should have to cancel it. Even at an hour’s notice. I shouldn’t have much patience with anyone who didn’t agree.’
‘I think we should all agree,’ said Winslow. ‘Which is a very surprising and gratifying event, don’t you think so, Dean?’
He spoke with his usual caustic courtesy, and was surprised to find Chrystal suddenly rude. He had not realized, he still did not, that Chrystal had spoken with deep feeling and was shocked by the sarcastic reply. In turn, Winslow became increasingly caustic, and Nightingale joined in.
I noticed young Luke, the observant and discreet, watching this display of conflicts, and missing nothing.
There was no wine that night. Pilbrow left for a party immediately after hall; cultivated Cambridge parties were not complete without him, he had been attending them for over fifty years. Between the rest of us there was too much tension for a comfortable bottle. Winslow gave his ‘Goodnight to you’, and sauntered out, swinging the cap, which, in his formal style, he was the only one of us to bring into the room. I followed, and Francis Getliffe came after me.