work, for the room, as well as being a general dumping-ground for unwanted anthropological specimens, was also regarded as a kind of no-man’s land, where former students of the department, who had nowhere else to go, might find a corner in which to write up their field-notes. There were one or two tables spread with papers and these were spasmodically occupied by these shabby hangers-on. They lived in the meaner districts of London or in impossibly remote suburbs on grants which were always miserably inadequate, their creative powers stifled by poverty and family troubles. It would need the pen of a Dostoievsky to do justice to their dreadful lives, but they were by no means inarticulate themselves, often gathering in this room or in a nearby pub to talk of their neuroses and the pyschological difficulties which prevented them from writing up their material. Some of them had been fortunate enough to win the love of devoted women—women who might one day become their wives, but who, if they were thrown aside, would accept their fate cheerfully and without bitterness. They had learned early in life what it is to bear love’s burdens, listening patiently to their men’s troubles and ever ready at their typewriters, should a manuscript or even a short article get to the stage of being written down.
On this particular morning one pale wretched-looking young man sat in a corner, murmuring a strange language into a kind of recording machine, while another banged furiously at a typewriter for a quarter of an hour, then tore out the sheet of paper, crumpled it up on the floor and hurried out of the room, his hand to his brow in a stricken gesture. Nobody took any notice of Deirdre, but she found it hard to concentrate and was glad when lunch-time came. She was just gathering her books together when the door opened yet again and another young man came in. He was of about the age of the desperate ones—twenty-eight or nine—but Deirdre could not remember that she had ever seen him before. He was tall and dark, with thin aristocratic features and brilliant grey eyes—or this was how Deirdre always described him afterwards. Perhaps at the time she was conscious only of the shabby raincoat and the battered brief-case, and the fact that he stood over her rather disconcertingly, as if he expected a welcome.
‘I suppose we don’t know each other,’ he said at last, smiling at her. ‘I’ve been away nearly two years and feel like Rip Van Winkle,’
Deirdre was so astonished that he should take notice of her that she could think of nothing to say and at the best of times she was always too shy to have a quick reply ready. ‘I think most people are at the seminar,’ she ventured.
‘Of course-the Friday seminar I One might just as well come back on the Judgment Day and expect to find things normal and I believe one would. I’m Tom Mallow, by the way,’ He began walking about the room, taking books out of the shelves and making derogatory comments on them, as if he could not decide whether to go or stay. ‘And what’s your name?’ he asked.
‘Deirdre Swan,’ she mumbled, thinking what a silly name it was.
‘Deirdre of the Sorrows,’ he said, but somehow she did not mind the old joke from him. ‘And you do look rather sad sitting here all by yourself. Shall we go and have a drink?’
‘Oh, thank you, that would be nice . . ,’ She hardly knew what to say, being unused to drinking in general and in the middle of the day in particular. She hoped she hadn’t appeared too eager to go with him; the male students in her year never asked her to drink with them, though there were one or two of her contemporaries who were more favoured as they were thought to be ‘good value’, whatever that rather sinister phrase might imply.
‘Drinking alone is rather depressing, I always think.’
So he had been going to have a drink anyway, she noted.
But of course he had. He had expected to find a crowd of people he knew. She
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