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By Root 371 0

immediately. I would wait until the ticket collector came round. The excursion ticket was, suitably, fawn-coloured, contrasting with the regular ticket, which was green. If the girl proffered a fawn ticket I would put her down as a tourist like myself. I had taken care to provide myself with magazines, notably Punch, published as it still is on a Wednesday. Punch, then, I might offer; it would always be accepted. The way was then open for that type of conversation at which I was becoming adept. The slow French; the question about the Norwegian crossed o or the Swedish j; followed by the suggestion that we might do our exploring of the cultural centre together. At any one of three or four stages the encounter might have been rendered futile. But when one is in vein, as the French say, when dedication and commitment are total, mistake is rare. Will I be believed if I say that on four successive Wednesdays I made lucky strikes on the Oxford train? A Norwegian – what a country, Norway, its reputation in this respect dimmed by the somewhat inflated reputation of its vulgar neighbour Sweden; a French girl and a French woman; and a German Swiss. After the disturbance of this last adventure I transferred my attentions elsewhere.

It had been disturbing indeed. No walks up the twisted wooden steps of colleges on vacation, no exploring of the spacious sitting-rooms of undergraduates and their cramped bedrooms. We had just walked and walked, pausing occasionally for refreshment; and the day had ended with us back in London, in St John’s Wood, past one in the morning, still walking, after innumerable cups of hot tea from stalls, though excitement, of a sort never experienced by me in London, would have been enough to give me energy. In the deserted streets – and a detail like this enables us to judge change, for today streets are as noisy at two in the morning as during the day – in the deserted streets a declaration had been made to me, and it had moved me in spite of myself. Beatrice had decided that I was to be her friend. She explained the significance of the word, and I was afraid that some invitation to my book-shaped room was expected. But no; we walked round and round the house in St John’s Wood where she was staying; and when at last we stopped in front of the house and the moment for separation came, I saw with relief that nothing was expected of me. She kissed me lightly on the lips – observe how I had surrendered all will – and for a little pressed her hand on the side of my face as though learning its shape. She said it had been a good beginning.

I returned to the boarding-house in an agony of disturbance. I doubted whether I even knew what she looked like. I had fallen in so completely with her mood. She had led; I had followed. When she made her declaration I had felt called upon to respond. I had been careful not to perjure myself – it had never been my way in these encounters – but I had given her an Isabella dollar-note which I kept in my wallet and which had served me in the past as a useful topic of conversation when the hilarity of the Swedish j had faded. At the time the surrendering of this dollar-note seemed important – how we flounder when emotion overtakes us. Now, however, out of this emotion only disturbance and threat remained. The threat of the ‘good start’; the threat, frequently expressed, of a father arriving from Basle in a fortnight, a ‘man of culture’, to whom she desired passionately to present me since we had so much in common.

Luck intervened. The day remained whole, unsullied. Was it luck, though? Mightn’t I have found that order I looked for, mightn’t order have come with this complete break from the past, if I had pursued where I had been so moved? But I had my doubts then; I didn’t know whether during that day I had simply become what she had wanted me to be. Still, I wonder: wouldn’t it have been better, or at any rate more amusing, if I had met the father, the man of culture – these European phrases: how quaint they are when turned into English – and if I had gone away with that girl and