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By Root 1171 0

known. He had been at Exeter College—but had he had friends across the road here in Balliol? Paul saw him entirely at home in the university, as if they had been destined for each other. He went out to the lavatory, in a queer little angled turret, and when he looked down from the window into the gloomy quad he saw a dark-haired figure moving swiftly through the shadows and into the lit doorway of a staircase who might almost have been Peter, before he knew him, fifteen years ago, calling on a friend, some earlier lover—that was what his unselfconscious evenings had been like.

By the time he set off for drinks, Paul already felt cautiously cheerful. In the large lamp-lit Common Room, a surprisingly sleek modern building, he rather got stuck with a secretary from the English faculty office, a nice young woman who’d been responsible for much of the conference arrangements. A mutual shyness tethered them in their corner, beside the table on which all the papers were laid out, including the TLS. “Well, there you are!” said Ruth, his friend, blushing with satisfaction, so that Paul formed the wary idea she had taken a shine to him. The room itself, full of confident noise, brisk introductions, loud reunions, was a breathtaking plunge for him. He realized the man standing near him was Professor Stallworthy, whose life of Wilfred Owen had fought rather shy of Owen’s feelings for other men. Paul suddenly felt shy of them too. Beyond him was a white-haired man in military uniform of some splendour—General Colthorpe, Ruth said, who was going to speak about Wavell. She confirmed that the broad-faced, genially pugnacious-looking man talking to the Master was Paul Fussell, whose book on the Great War had moved and enlightened Paul more than anything he’d read on the subject—though sadly, like Evelyn Waugh’s Letters, it had only mentioned Cecil in a footnote (“a less neurotic—and less talented—epigone of Brooke”). Paul looked around admiringly and restlessly, his tiny empty sherry glass cupped behind his hand, waiting for the Valances to come in. “Were you at Oxford?” said Ruth.

“No, I wasn’t,” Paul said, with an almost bashful smile, as though to say he understood and forgave her error.

He was introduced to a young English don, and chatted to him in a keen but rather circular way about Cecil, the long sleeves of the don’s gown brushing over Paul’s hands as he moved and turned. Paul couldn’t always follow what he meant; he found himself in the role of lowly sapper while Martin (was he called?) talked in larger strategic terms, with a pervasive air of irony—“Well, quite!” Paul found himself saying, two or three times. He felt he was boring him, and he himself was soon achingly tense and distracted by the presence of the Valances in the room, and merely nodded genially when Martin moved off. Dudley’s voice, both clipped and drawling, the historic vowels perhaps further pickled and preserved by thirty years’ exile in sherry country, could be heard now and then through the general yammer. He was easy to lose, among the taller, younger figures milling round him, the swoop of gowns, the odd barbaric intensity of people connecting. Linette’s sparkly green evening jacket was a help in tracking their gradual movement through the crowd. Then for a minute they were alongside, Linette with her back to Paul, Dudley in stooped profile, and again with a look of short-winded good-humour as he tried to follow what a young Indian man was saying to him, in fashionably theoretical terms, about life in the trenches.

“Yes, I don’t know,” said Dudley, maintaining a precarious balance between mild modesty and his fairly clear belief that the Indian was talking rot. He smiled at him widely in a way that showed Paul the conversation was over, but which the Indian scholar took as a cue for a further convoluted question:

“But would you agree, sir, that, in a very real sense, the experience of most writers about war is predicated on the idea that—”

“Darling, you mustn’t tire yourself!” said Linette sharply, so that the Indian, mortified, apologized and backed