Haldane grew in stature. In London he was a slow-walking man; he picked his way pedantically along the corridors as if he were looking for footholds; clerks and secretaries would hover impatiently behind him, lacking the courage to pass. In Oxford he betrayed an agility which would have astonished his London colleagues. His parched frame had revived, he held himself erect. Even his hostility acquired the mark of command. Only the cough remained, that racked, abandoned sob too heavy for such a narrow chest, bringing dabs of red to his thin cheeks and causing Leiser the mute concern of a pupil for his admired master.
“Is the Captain sick?” he once asked Avery, picking up an old copy of Haldane’s Times.
“He never speaks of it.”
“I suppose that would be bad form.” His attention was suddenly arrested by the newspaper. It was unopened. Only the crossword had been done, the margins around it sparsely annotated with permutations of a nine-letter anagram. He showed it to Avery in bewilderment.
“He doesn’t read it,” he said. “He’s only done the competition.”
That night, when they went to bed, Leiser took it with him, furtively as if it contained some secret which study could reveal.
So far as Avery could judge, Haldane was content with Leiser’s progress. In the great variety of activities to which Leiser was now subjected, they had been able to observe him more closely; with the corrosive perception of the weak they discovered his failing and tested his power. He acquired, as they gained his trust, a disarming frankness; he loved to confide. He was their creature; he gave them everything, and they stored it away as the poor do. They saw that the Department had provided direction for his energy: like a man of uncommon sexual appetite, Leiser had found in his new employment a love which he could illustrate with his gifts. They saw that he took pleasure in their command, giving in return his strength as homage for fulfillment. They even knew perhaps that between them they constituted for Leiser the poles of absolute authority: the one by his bitter adherence to standards which Leiser could never achieve; the other by his youthful accessibility, the apparent sweetness and dependence of his nature.
He liked to talk to Avery. He talked about his women or the war. He assumed—it was irritating for Avery, but nothing more—that a man in his middle thirties, whether married or not, led an intense and varied love life. Later in the evening when the two of them had put on their coats and hurried to the pub at the end of the road, he would lean his elbows on the small table, thrust his bright face forward and relate the smallest detail of his exploits, his hand beside his chin, his slim fingertips rapidly parting and closing in unconscious imitation of his mouth. It was not vanity which made him thus, but friendship. These betrayals and confessions, whether truth or fantasy, were the simple coinage of their intimacy. He never mentioned Betty.
Avery came to know Leiser’s face with an accuracy no longer related to memory. He noticed how its features seemed structurally to alter shape according to his mood, how when he was tired or depressed at the end of a long day the skin on his cheekbones was drawn upward rather than down, and the corners of his eyes and mouth rose tautly so that his expression was at once more Slav and less familiar.
He had acquired from his neighborhood or his clients certain turns of phrase which, though wholly without meaning, impressed his foreign ear. He would speak, for instance, of “some measure of satisfaction,” using an impersonal construction for the sake of dignity. He had assimilated also a variety of cliches. Expressions like “not to worry,” “don’t rock the boat,” “let the dog see the rabbit,” came to him continually, as if he were aspiring after a way of life which he only imperfectly understood, and these were the offerings that would buy him in. Some expressions, Avery remarked, were out of date.
Once or twice Avery suspected that Haldane resented his intimacy with Leiser. At other times it seemed that Haldane was deploying emotions in Avery over which he himself no longer disposed. One evening at the beginning of the second week, while Leiser was engaged in that lengthy toilet which preceded almost any recreational engagement, Avery asked Haldane whether he did not wish to go out himself.