Old Filth - Jane Gardam [42]
“Feel sure I know you,” Eddie called. “Very odd.”
Then the man waved and padded out of sight down a side street and Eddie was trying to rouse his college.
As he fell asleep in a monkish bed in a mullioned room he thought: How can I possibly leave all this for Malaya?
A few days later, “I suggest,” said the man who might in time become his tutor after the War, if that time ever came, “I suggest that you come up as soon as possible.”
“Does that mean I’m accepted, sir?”
“Of course. Goes without saying. You wrote excellent papers yesterday. Well taught. Were you at Sir’s? I thought so. And your public school is very clever with closed scholarships, though I hear you are rich enough not to need one.”
(Am I? thought Eddie. I’ve ten shillings a week.)
“Now, I suggest you volunteer for the Navy. It takes them a year to process you, so you can get your Prelims done with here, before you go, and you’ll have a toe in the door for when you’re demobilised. You’ll be reading history?”
“I’m not quite sure, sir, what . . .”
“Your father was here. How is he? Still about, I hope?”
“He lives in Malaya. Well, I think he may be in Singapore now. I hardly know him.”
“I’m sorry. I heard shell-shock? Poor chap. But he’ll be proud of you now.”
Eddie swam with guilt. Ought he to say? His father had ordered him out of the country. His father had no notion or memory of Oxford. His father had—shell-shocked or not—organised a passport and visa and made his sisters get Eddie his jabs. He was to be “an evacuee.” Well, he would not do it. No. He would come to Oxford where he was welcome and admired and befriended and a familiar ghost had directed him to a safe haven after midnight. He would say nothing.
“May I come up next term, sir?”
“Ah, not quite so fast. But leave it to me. We’ll find you a room in Meadow Buildings, where your father was.”
As he fell asleep in the beautiful ice-cold room with his coat and the hearth-rug over the blankets, and watched the moon light the snowy rooftops, he briefly wondered about money. Will my father pay my fees if I refuse to go out to him? Will my scholarship be enough? I might be poor. I’ve never been really poor. Well, hell, so what? And he watched the moon bowling along, lighting the sky for the bombers.
I could live and die here, he thought. They’ll never destroy this. I’ll stay and fight for it.
And with these noble thoughts he slept.
By morning the snow had gone as if it had been dreams and it was raining hard and the pavements soiled and splashy. From the mullioned window could be seen people hurrying, bent forward, miserable and mean along the streets, and it was not the fairy city any more. The bedroom door opened and a lugubrious man called a Scout came carrying hot water in a jug across to a washbowl and asked if he would be taking breakfast early so that his room might be cleaned? For some panic- stricken reason Eddie said, No, he would be leaving before breakfast. “Very good, sir,” said the Scout, eyebrows raised, and Eddie wondered whether to leave him a tip and, if he didn’t, whether it would be remembered next term and held against him. In the end he left a shilling on the dressing-table, took his bag and went head forward into the slushy street. As he butted along against the wet and the umbrellas, bicycles wetting his trousers as they passed him, melancholy struck. Was this place after all a delusion? It was criminally cold. Nobody had said goodbye to him. Hot water in a jug and the W.C. three flights down. Not a word about the date of his return. And he was bloody hungry. He turned into a tea-shop because the steam on its windows promised warmth, but once inside it was cold and crowded and dark, with people sitting in buttoned-up clothes. A long and silent queue stood by the counter, each one holding a ration book in a gloved hand and hoping for an extra cake.
But yet there was a sort of warmth there in the fug and Eddie edged further in to the shop where there were tables and chairs. They were all