Cushing's Crusade Read Free

really was; well informed moreover on a wide range of subjects; not simply a narrow specialist scholar. He had not told Diana a great deal about his work since he had felt sure than an air of mystery would lend it a greater dignity than any detailed exposition. So Diana, who had been reading a great many Russian novels at the time, had mistakenly supposed thatDerek’s research, even though in a confined field, would throw light on universal matters: objective reality, the nature of truth and similarly exalted concepts. Diana had married her scholar before the publication of his first two books: Economic  Imperial ism and Cultural Relativism, and Economic Imperialism: A Reassessment. Her disillusion with scholars and scholarship dated from her reading of these books, both of which she found turgid, wordy and narrow.
    For a while, by flogging his rapidly tiring intellect into bursts of energy that left him nervous and exhausted, Derek had managed to preserve a little of his wife’s former admiration for the variety of his knowledge and interests. But this could not, did not last. He needed time to take on new ideas, but since he was with Diana all the time he never had a chance. Her demands increased; like an eager oil magnate she tapped her husband’s head, without restraint or an eye to the future; soon she had sucked his resources dry. Once she had seen businessmen, lawyers and scientists as men pursuing mundane and trivial objects in comparison with the scholar’s elevated pursuit of pure knowledge. Now she could not conceal from Derek that, in her opinion, to be an academic was to be an emotional and mental bankrupt: a man who had never had the courage to take his chances in the real world.
    At half-past four Derek woke with a start, his shirt soaked with sweat; somebody was telling him something. He recognized Diana’s voice and sat up abruptly.
    ‘Another arduous day in the archives,’ she said, looking down at him.
    ‘Must have dropped off,’ he muttered. Since Diana had not been out of the flat for over a month, he suspected she had come to cause a scene. He braced himself for the coming onslaught. But she seemed unnaturally cheerful and amiable.
    ‘Time we went shopping together. You need some new clothes.’
    ‘Do I?’ asked Derek hesitantly.
    ‘I’ll meet you outside the tube station at half-past five.’ She had not bothered to lower her voice and Professor Elkin waslooking at her disapprovingly. She gave him a friendly wave as she went out. Derek was still trying to work out what her evident change of mood meant when five o’clock came.
    Having politely ejected Elkin and the Kenyan, Derek locked all the manuscript boxes used by readers during the day into the safe upstairs. Security arrangements at the Institute amused him. He liked to imagine a small band of historians with masks, sticks of gelignite and metal-cutting-gear, blasting their way into the main archives and making away with everything. But scholarly thieves, he reflected bitterly, were rather less spectacular than bank robbers in the manner of their operations: a letter furtively slipped into a briefcase or casually folded between innocent pages of notes, all under the archivist’s eye—that was their cowardly way. That was how almost the entire Raffles collection had disappeared two years before.
    Outside in the evening sunlight Derek started walking towards his rendezvous with Diana. Across the road on the building-site the pile-driver thumped out a brisk marching rhythm. Buses, cars, motor-bicycles, taxis, even the occasional invalid-carriage swept by as the heart of the city pumped men and metal outwards towards far-flung suburbs. The sun glittered on office windows and secretaries hurried home on high heels. Cotton frocks and flimsy underwear. Women wear less in summer. To rub genitals against the thighs or buttocks of strangers in the tube is called ‘frotteurism’ and is an offence: technically an assault. It is virtually