Among the rest of the Thursgood community, opinion regarding Jim was less unanimous. The ghost of Mr Maltby the pianist died hard. Matron, siding with Bill Roach, pronounced him heroic and in need of care: it was a miracle he managed with that back. Marjoribanks said he had been run over by a bus when he was drunk. It was Marjoribanks also, at the staff match where Jim so excelled, who pointed out the sweater. Marjoribanks was not a cricketer but he had strolled down to watch with Thursgood.
‘Do you think that sweater’s kosher,’ he asked in a high, jokey voice, ‘or do you think he pinched it?’
‘Leonard, that’s very unfair,’ Thursgood scolded, hammering at the flanks of his Labrador. ‘Bite him, Ginny, bite the bad man.’
By the time he reached his study, however, Thursgood’s laughter had quite worn off and he became extremely nervous. Bogus Oxford men he could deal with, just as in his time he had known classics masters who had no Greek and parsons who had no divinity. Such men, confronted with proof of their deception, broke down and wept and left, or stayed on half pay. But men who withheld genuine accomplishment, these were a breed he had not met but he knew already that he did not like them. Having consulted the university calendar, he telephoned the agency, a Mr Stroll of the house of Stroll and Medley.
‘What precisely do you want to know?’ Mr Stroll asked with a dreadful sigh.
‘Well, nothing precisely.’ Thursgood’s mother was sewing at a sampler and seemed not to hear. ‘Merely that if one asks for a written curriculum vitae one likes it to be complete. One doesn’t like gaps. Not if one pays one’s fee.’
At this point Thursgood found himself wondering rather wildly whether he had woken Mr Stroll from a deep sleep to which he had now returned.
‘Very patriotic bloke,’ Mr Stroll observed finally.
‘I did not employ him for his patriotism.’
‘He’s been in dock,’ Mr Stroll whispered on, as if through frightful draughts of cigarette smoke. ‘Laid up. Spinal.’
‘Quite so. But I assume he has not been in hospital for the whole of the last twenty-five years. Touché,’ he murmured to his mother, his hand over the mouthpiece, and once more it crossed his mind that Mr Stroll had dropped off to sleep.
‘You’ve only got him till the end of term,’ Mr Stroll breathed. ‘If you don’t fancy him, chuck him out. You asked for temporary, temporary’s what you’ve got. You said cheap, you’ve got cheap.’
‘That’s as may be,’ Thursgood retorted gamely. ‘But I’ve paid you a twenty guineas fee, my father dealt with you for many years and I’m entitled to certain assurances. You’ve put here – may I read it to you? – you’ve put here Before his injury, various overseas appointments of a commercial and prospecting nature. Now that is hardly an enlightening description of a lifetime’s employment, is it?’
At her sewing his mother nodded her agreement. ‘It is not,’ she echoed aloud.
‘That’s my first point. Let me go on a little-‘
‘Not too much, darling,’ warned his mother.
‘I happen to know he was up at Oxford in thirty-eight. Why didn’t he finish? What went wrong?’
‘I seem to recall there was an interlude round about then,’ said Mr Stroll after another age. ‘But I expect you’re too young to remember it.’
‘He can’t have been in prison all the time,’ said his mother after a very long silence, still without looking up from her sewing.
‘He’s been somewhere,’ said Thursgood morosely, staring across the windswept gardens towards the Dip.
All through the summer holidays, as he moved uncomfortably between one household and another, embracing and rejecting, Bill Roach fretted about Jim, whether his back was hurting, what he was doing for money now that he had no one to teach and only half a term’s pay to live on; worst of all whether he would be there when the new term began, for Bill had a feeling he could not describe that Jim lived so precariously on the world’s surface that he might at any time fall off into a void; for he feared that Jim was like himself, without a natural gravity to hold him on. He rehearsed the circumstances of their first meeting, and in particular Jim’s enquiry regarding friendship, and he had a holy terror that just as he had failed his parents in love, so he had failed Jim, largely owing to the disparity in their ages. And that therefore Jim had moved on and was already looking somewhere else for a companion, scanning other schools with his pale eyes. He imagined also that, like himself, Jim had had a great attachment that had failed him, and which he longed to replace. But here Bill Roach’s speculation met a dead end: he had no idea how adults loved each other.