“Golly! We’re not precisely hitting it off, are we?”
“If you burst into my room when I am working and insult me, and tuck up your muddy feet on my sofa, what do you expect? You’ve been given a glass of sherry; isn’t that courtesy above and beyond anything you’ve deserved?”
‘“Come off it! I’m your cousin, aren’t I?”
“I don’t know. Have you any papers of identification? Not that they would say any more than your face. You have the Cornish face.”
“So have you. I’d have known you anywhere. Face like a horse, you mean.”
“I have not said you have a face like a horse. I am too well-bred, and also too mature, for this kind of verbal rough stuff. And if that means to you that I am a complete ass, or even a fruit, so be it. Go and play with your own coarse kind.”
Francis was enjoying himself. At Spook he had learned the technique of bullying girls: bully them first and they may not get to the point of bullying you, which, given a chance, they will certainly do. This girl talked tough, but was not truly self-assured. She was untidily and unbecomingly dressed. Her hair needed more combing than she had given it recently and the soft woman’s academic cap she wore was dusty and messy, as was her gown. Good legs, though the stockings had been worn for too many days without washing. But in her the Cornish face was distinguished and spirited. Like several other girls he had seen in Oxford, she might have been a beauty if she had possessed any firm conception of beauty, and related it to herself, but in her the English notion of neglected womanhood was firmly in command.
“Let’s not fight. This is good sherry. May I have another shot? Tell me about yourself.”
“No, ladies first. You tell me about yourself.”
“I’m in my first year at Lady Margaret Hall. Scholarship in modern languages, so that’s what I’m doing here. You know Charlie Fremantle, don’t you?”
“I think I’ve met him.”
“He says you met at a card game. He lost a lot. You won a lot.”
“I won seven shillings. Does Charlie fancy himself as a card-player?”
“He adores the risk. Says it makes his blood run around. He adores danger.”
“That’s expensive danger. I hope he has a long purse.”
“Longish. Longer than mine, anyhow. I’m poor but deserving. My scholarship is seventy pounds a year. My people, with many a deep-fetched groan, bring it up to two hundred.”
“Not bad. Rhodes Scholars only get three hundred, at present.”
“Oh, but they get lots of additional money for travel and this and that. What have you got?”
“I look after my own money, to some extent.”
“I see. Not going to tell. That’s your Scotch side. I know about you from Charlie, so you can’t hide anything. He says your family is stinking rich, though a bit common. The kids said you were bone mean. Wouldn’t even stand them an ice cream.”
“If they wanted ice cream, they shouldn’t have put an adder in my bed.”
“It was a dead adder.”
“I didn’t know that when I put my foot on it. Why are you at Oxford? Are you a bluestocking?”
“Maybe I am. I’m very bright in the head. I want to get into broadcasting. Or film. If not Oxford, what? The days are gone when girls just came out and went to dances and waited for Prince Charming.”
“So I hear. Well—is there anything I can do for you?”
“Doesn’t look like it, does it?”
“If you have no suggestions, I suppose I could take you to lunch.”
“Oh splendid! I’m hungry.”
“Not today. Tomorrow. That will give you time to smarten up a little. I’ll take you to the O.U.D.S. Ever been there?”
“No. I’d love that. I’ve never been. But why do you say O.U.D.S.? Why don’t you call it OUDS? Everybody does, you know.”
“Yes; I know, but I wasn’t sure you would know. Well—my club, and ladies are admitted at lunch.”
“Isn’t it full of dreadful fruits? People with sickening upper-class names like Reptilian Cork-Nethersole? Isn’t it crammed with fruits?”
“No. About one in four, at the outside. But dreadful fruits, as you so unpleasantly call them, have good food and drink and usually have lovely manners, so no throwing buns or any of that rough stuff you go in for at women’s colleges. Meet me here—downstairs, outside the door marked Buys-Bozzaris—at half past twelve. I like to be punctual. Don’t trouble to wear a hat.”
Francis thought that he had sat on his young cousin enough for the moment.
The advice about the hat was not simply gratuitous insult. When Ismay found herself lunching in the O.U.D.S. dining-room the following day there were two elegant ladies wearing hats at the President’s table. They were actresses, they were beauties, and the hats they wore were in the Welsh Witch fashion of the moment—great towering, steeple-crowned things with scarves of veiling hanging from the brim to the shoulders. The hats, as much as their professional ease and assurance, separated them irrevocably from the five hatless Oxford girls, of whom Ismay was one, who were dining with male friends. The O.U.D.S. did not admit women as members.
Ismay was not the aggressive brat of the day before. She was reasonably compliant, but Francis saw in her eye the rolling wickedness of a pony, which is pretending to be good when it means to throw you into a ditch.
“The ladies in the hats are Miss Johnson and Miss Gunn. They’re playing in The Wind and the Rain at the New Theatre over the way; next week they go to London. Smart, aren’t they?”
“I suppose so. It’s their job, after all.”
But this indifference was assumed. Ismay was positively schoolgirlish when, after lunch, a handsome young man stopped by their table and said: “Francis, I’d like to introduce you and your sister to our guests.”
When the introductions and polite compliments to the actresses were over, Francis said, “I should explain that Ismay is not my sister. A cousin.”
“My goodness, you two certainly have the family face,” said Miss Johnson, who seemed to mean it as a compliment.
“Is that chap really the president of the club?” said Ismay, when the grandees had gone.
“Yes, and consequently a tremendous Oxford swell. Jervase Featherstone; everybody agrees he’s headed for a great career. Did you see him last winter in the club production of Peer Gynt? No, of course you didn’t; you weren’t here. The London critics praised him to the skies.”
“He’s wonderfully good-looking.”
“I suppose so. It’ll be part of his job, after all.”
“Sour grapes!”
Francis had achieved in a high degree the Oxford pretence of doing nothing while in fact getting through a great deal of work. He had learned how to study at Colborne, where success was expected, and he had improved on his technique at Spook. At Oxford he more than satisfied his tutor, hung about the O.U.D.S. meddling a little with the decorative side of its productions, contributed occasional caricatures to the Isis, and still had time to spend many hours at the Ashmolean, acquainting himself with its splendid collection of drawings by Old Masters, almost Old Masters, and eighteenth– and nineteenth-century artists whom nobody thought of as masters, but whose work was, to his eye, masterly.
The Ashmolean was not at that time a particularly attractive or well-organized museum. In the university tradition, it existed to serve serious students, and wanted no truck with whorish American ideas of drawing in and interesting the general public. Was it not, after all, one of the oldest museums in the Old World? It took Francis some time during his first year to persuade the museum authorities that he was a serious student of art; having done so, he was able to investigate the museum’s substantial riches without much interference. He wanted to be able to draw well. He was not so vain as to think that he might draw like a master, but it was the masters he wished to follow. So he spent countless hours copying master drawings, analysing master techniques, and to his astonishment surprising within himself ideas and insights and even flashes of emotion that belonged more to the drawings than to himself. He did not trust these whispers from the past until he met Tancred Saraceni.