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By Root 1167 0

away from her flicker of a smile. Well, it was a little lesson for Paul in how not to proceed with them. In the moment of uncomfortable silence that followed he perhaps had his chance: he raised his chin to speak, but a weird paralysis left him murmuring and blinking, looking almost as apologetic as the retreating questioner. He could have asked Ruth to introduce him, but he didn’t want Linette in particular to learn his name at this early stage—whether Dudley himself had ever seen his letters he doubted. Stiff-necked, Dudley seemed rarely to turn his head, and a call from his other side made him swivel his whole body away, with a well-practised lurch of his weight on to his stick. Paul was left with a sense of astonished near-contact, of greatness, it almost seemed, within arm’s reach.

At dinner it turned out he’d been placed next to Ruth again, and when he said, “Oh that’s nice!” he half-meant it, and half felt a kind of emasculation. The seating was on long benches, and they all remained standing, one or two bestriding the bench as they talked, until everyone was in. Dudley stumped past in a swaying line that was heading for the High Table, and proper chairs. Now the Master made a more official welcome to the conference, and said a long scurrying Latin grace, as if apologetically reminding them of something they knew far better than he did.

Paul was drunk enough to introduce himself to the very unattractive little man on his other side (there were far more men than women), but he soon found his shoulder turned against him, and for an awkward ten minutes he strained the patience of the two men opposite who were involved in complex discussion of faculty affairs into which there was no real point in trying to induct Paul, whose TLS credentials started to wear thin. He leant towards them with a smile of forced interest to which they were rudely immune. “I’m writing up the conference for the TLS”—Paul felt he’d said this too often—“though also, as it happens, I’m working on a biography of Cecil Valance.”

“Did he ever finish his work on the Cathars?” said the man on the right.

“Not as far as we know,” said Paul, absorbing the horror of the question with some aplomb, he felt. Was the man thinking of someone else? Cecil’s work at Cambridge had been on the Indian Mutiny, for some reason. Was that anything to do with the Cathars? Who were the Cathars, in the first place?

“Or have I got that wrong?”

“Well …” Paul paused. “His research—which he never finished, by the way—was on General Havelock.”

“Oh, well, not the Cathars at all,” said the man, though with a critical look at Paul, as though the mistake had somehow been his.

The other man, who was a little bit nicer, said, “I was just speaking to Dudley Valance, whom you must know, obviously, before dinner—he was up with Aldous Huxley and Macmillan, of course. Never took his degree.”

“Well, nor did Macmillan, come to that,” said the first man.

“Didn’t stop him becoming Chancellor,” said Paul.

“That’s right,” said the nicer man, and laughed cautiously.

“That was all bloody Trevor-Roper’s doing,” said the first man, with a bitter look, so that Paul saw he had ambled well-meaningly into some other academic minefield.

The meal unrolled in a further fuddle of wines, time was speeding past unnoticed and unmourned, he knew he was drinking too much, the fear of his own clumsiness mixing with a peculiar new sense of competence. He made it pretty clear to Ruth that he wasn’t interested in girls, but this only seemed to put them on to a more confusingly intimate footing. The Master clapped his hands and said a few words, and then everyone stood while the High Table filed out, the rest of them being invited to use a room whose name Paul didn’t catch for coffee and further refreshments. So perhaps tonight he wouldn’t get a shot at Dudley after all. But then outside in the quad, as cigarettes were lit and new groups formed and drifted off, Ruth kept him back, and then said, “Why don’t you slip into Common Room with me?”

“Well, if you think that would be all right …”

“I don’t want