An Audience with an Elephant by Byron Rogers Page B

one of those clear-eyed Americans who look out of place anywhere except on the Great Plains.
    ‘So what do you do?’ I asked.
    ‘I own newspapers.’
    ‘How many do you own?’
    ‘Fifty.’
    ‘Do you really. . . sir?’
    And it was time to change for dinner. I called on an old friend and a head came round the door. ‘Oh it’s you, come in.’ he said. He was in his vest. ‘I don’t mind you seeing my stick-like arms.’ Ah yes, the stick-like arms, once as familiar as a piece of heraldry; he had spent most of our three years together tuning self-deprecation until this was an art form. It was strange. With others it had been like members of some trade delegation meeting, but with him, families and careers were irrelevant and we were again the silly young men we had once been. We walked to the pub.
    As I ordered drinks, I overheard an extraordinary conversation. The two men at the bar, both in dinner jackets, were talking intently. ‘You remember Watkins then, surely he was your year?’ ‘No, but Jim Hill was.’ ‘Never heard of him. What about Highcock?’ ‘Didn’t know anyone by that name. Chris Horne?’ ‘No.’
    The litany went on and on, each man looking more and more bewildered as it became clear they did not have a single acquaintance in common. I was sitting down when there was a sudden roar of laughter from the bar, and after one had left, still laughing, the other joined us.
    ‘God,’ he said. ‘That was terrible. That chap made me feel older than Rip van Winkle. He kept telling me names and I couldn’t remember any of them. But then it turned out he was up for a different reunion; he wasn’t at our College at all.’
    Over dinner in Hall the Master reproached us for not being sufficiently rich and famous. I had forgotten how much worldly success meant to dons. When the present head of the Civil Service returned to college, whispered someone, his testicles were supported on a velvet cushion held by the Head Porter. Reproaches over, the Master got down to the serious business of fundraising. Old members’ contributions, he declared, had so far made possible a Fellowship in English Literature. ‘Stand up.’ And the Eng. Lit. don, a small bearded man, stood. His contribution to the College was enormous, said the Master relentlessly; his lectures on structuralism were guaranteed to put anyone to sleep.
    In my time the College had no female undergraduates, but these were now waiting on us, having spent much of the long vac waiting on various conferences. Some wore black stockings, others no stockings at all, and their skirts were short. One girl was beautiful. ‘They must be wondering who all these old farts are,’ I told my neighbour. ‘Perhaps not,’ he said. ‘Perhaps they’re thinking, “It’s all very well, young men with beautiful bodies. Perhaps some of those old boys have real feelings.’”
    I knew he was wrong when the beautiful waitress went by and awarded me the brisk, unfocused smile of a vicar’s wife. Over brandy the stipendiary gave me a cigar (‘Perhaps you’ll shut up now’). Some men grew confidential in drink, one telling me he had thought of committing suicide when we were up, which stunned me, for he had been such a cheerful man and played rugby. In others, the ugliness of an all-male society surfaced.
    One man told another he had subsequently employed his former girlfriend. ‘So I know all about you.’ ‘Do you really?’ ‘Yes, and I bet you had a good time there, didn’t you?’ ‘You do know she’s dead.’ ‘Of course I know she’s dead.’
    After breakfast I met a man with his bags packed outside the Porter’s Lodge. ‘I can’t take anymore of this,’ he said. ‘I was sitting in Hall just now and for a moment I felt the familiarity of everything. I knew that panelling, those pictures. Then I looked around me and saw faces I didn’t know at all. It was like a horror story.’
    And what Philip Larkin called ‘this frail travelling