Once more Pym embraced everything, loved everything, stretched every sinew to excel. He joined the societies, paid more subscriptions than there were clubs, became college secretary of everything from the Philatelists to the Euthanasians. He wrote sensitive articles for university journals, lobbied distinguished speakers, met them at the railway station, dined them at the society’s expense and brought them safely to empty lecture halls. He played college rugger, college cricket, rowed in his college eight, got drunk in college bar and was by turn rootlessly cynical towards society and stalwartly British and protective of it, depending on whom he happened to be with. He threw himself afresh upon the German muse and scarcely faltered when he discovered that at Oxford she was about five hundred years older than she had been in Bern, and that anything written within living memory was unsound. But he quickly overcame his disappointment. This is quality, he reasoned. This is academia. In no time he was immersing himself in the garbled texts of mediaeval minstrels with the same energy that, in an earlier life, he had bestowed on Thomas Mann. By the end of his first term he was an enthusiastic student of Middle and Old High German. By the end of his second he could recite the
I shall stay here for ever, he decided. I shall become a don and be hero to my pupils. To entrench this ambition he worked up a selective stammer and a self-denying smile, and at night sat long hours at his desk keeping himself awake on Nescafé. When daylight came he ventured downstairs unshaven so that all might see the lines of study etched upon his eager face. It was on one such morning that he was surprised to find a case of vintage port waiting for him, accompanied by a note from the Regius Professor of Law:
For half the day, Pym did not know where to put himself. He turned up his collar, wandered miserably in Christ Church Meadows, cut his tutorial for fear of being arrested and wrote letters to Belinda who was working as an unpaid secretary to a London charity. In the afternoon he sat in a dark cinema. In the evening, still in despair, he carted his guilty parcel to Balliol, determined to tell Sefton Boyd the whole story. But by the time he got there he had thought of a better version.
“Some rich shit in Merton is trying to get me to go to bed with him,” he protested, in the tone of healthy exasperation he had been practising all the way to the gates. “He sent me a Harry great case of port to buy me over.”
If Sefton Boyd doubted him he did not let it show. Between them they carried their booty to the Gridiron Club where six of them drank it at a sitting, fitfully toasting Pym’s virginity till morning. A few days later Pym was elected a member. When the vacation came he took a job selling carpets at a shop in Watford. A lawyers’ vacation course, he told Rick. Similar to the holiday seminars he had attended in Switzerland. In reply Rick sent him a five-page homily, warning him against airy-fairy intellectuals, and a cheque for fifty pounds that bounced.
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