Air and Angels Read Free

many college rooms, the lamps were lit and young men bent their heads over booksor the toasting of muffins.
    Thomas Cavendish leaned back in his chair, watched this one particular young man, shuffling papers together at the table. His name was Eustace Partridge.
    There is something wrong, Thomas thought. The boy had been vague, tense, had lost his train of thought several times, made elementary mistakes in the translation. It had happened before, the previous week, but thatfor the first time.
    ‘Is something troubling you?’
    The boy stood up, startled as a young horse, flushed, sent Munro’s Homeric Grammar flying to the floor.
    ‘You seem rather unsettled.’
    ‘No. Thank you, sir. There’s nothing wrong, absolutely not. Of course. Thank you.’
    He darted a glance across the table, apologetically, Thomas thought, as if to say, I am lying and you know it, and there’s nothingto be done. I’m sorry.
    ‘I’m sorry, sir.’
    ‘Very well.’
    He nodded his dismissal and Eustace made for the door.
    ‘The boy has’, his school High Master had written, ‘one of the finest minds it has ever been my fortune to encounter. He is in every way exceptional.’ So he had arrived in the college, garlanded, the Masterman scholar and set fair to sweep the undergraduate scholarship board. A runner,an oarsman, and of alarming beauty, fair-haired, Grecian-featured.
    Thomas went to the window and watched him go at a half-run across the court and under the archway. And suddenly, remembered another early evening standing looking out onto these buildings, the chapel tower, the court, the same horse-chestnut tree, set in the middle of the lawn. The first evening.
    He had been surprised by thesize of the rooms he was put in, had paced up and down the sitting-room and touched the furniture reverently, stood facing the blazing fire, and then with his back to it.
    The servant had brought a jug of hot water and a bowl, clean linen.
    ‘Dinner is at seven in Hall, sir, and if you would care for a glass of sherry now?’
    He had examined the books all round the room. Plato. Lehr’s Aristarchus.Plautus. Tulse’s Commentaries on the Epistles of St Paul. On another shelf, the complete novels of Sir Walter Scott.
    Then, he had gone to stand at the window and, after a moment’s hesitation, opened it wide and leaned out, and the smell of the damp, dank November air, of river and earth and coal smuts and fog, had filled his nostrils and gone deep down not only into his lungs but into the deepand permanent well of memory, so that over all the years that were to come, though there would be so many other evenings, in cold winter or high, drowsy summer, when the smell of Cambridge below and beyond and all round him, was quite different, it was this, exactly this, this autumnal mist and smoke, that became for him the one reliable trigger for nostalgia.
    He was not a man who, on the whole,yearned for his youth; he had often felt uneasy then, being young had not suited him in some essential way, he had felt ill at ease with it, as though he were wearing someone else’s suit of clothes. With the coming of middle age, he had relaxed and begun to feel settled in and with himself, and in a right relationship to the world.
    Now, at fifty-four, standing at the open window of this otherset of college rooms and smelling the damp, he remembered again vividly but without any yearning how it had felt to be eighteen years old and up for the scholarship examination. And how, smelling that smell, and hearing the sweet, gentle sound of the chapel bell begin to ring across the dark deserted spaces, a passionate desire to belong here, settle here for life, had risen up in him. The emotionhad been so strong that it had taken him aback, for he had never been given to any kind of passionate feeling, to yearnings and ambitions.
    ‘I have to,’ he had said to himself, and gripped the ledge, ‘I have to. I must .’
    And so he had. So that now, all those years afterwards,