Free The Masters by C. P. Snow Page A

Muriel was not exact. Lady Muriel, stiff as she was, would never have called men by their college titles. Lady Muriel would never have picked on the youngest there and said: ‘Mr Eliot, please help me with the sherry. You know it’s your duty, and you ought to like doing your duty.’
    For Mrs Jago wanted to be a great lady, wanted also the attention of men, and was never certain of herself, for an instant. She was a big, broad-shouldered woman, running to fat, physically graceless apart from her smile. It was a smile one seldom saw, but when it came it was brilliant, open, defenceless, like an adoring girl’s. Otherwise she was plain.
    That night, she could not keep up her grand manner. Suddenly she broke out: ‘I’m afraid you will all have to put up with my presence till Paul struggles free.’
    ‘That’s very nice for us all,’ said Arthur Brown.
    ‘Thank you, Tutor,’ said Mrs Jago, back for a second on her pedestal again.
    She had embarrassed Jago’s friends ever since he married her. She became assertive in any conversation. She was determined not to be overlooked. She seized on insults, tracked them down, recounted them with a masochistic gusto that never flagged. She had cost her husband great suffering.
    She had cost him great suffering, but not in the way one might expect. He was a man who gained much admiration from women. With his quick sympathy, his emotional power, he could have commanded all kinds of love. He liked the compliment, but he wanted none of them. He had loved his wife for twenty-five years. They had had no children. He loved her still. He could still be jealous of that woman, who, to everyone outside, seemed so grotesque. I had seen her play on that jealousy and give him pain.
    But that was not his deepest suffering about her. They had married when he was a young don, and she his pupil. That relation, which can always so easily fill itself with emotion, had never died. He wanted people to recognize her quality, how gifted she was, how much held back by her crippling sensitiveness. He wanted us to see that she was gallant, and misjudged; he was burning to explain that she went through acuter pain than anyone, when the temperament she could not control drove his friends away. His love remained love, and added pity: and the sight of her in a mood which others dismissed as grotesque still had the power to take and rend his heart.
    He suffered for her, and for himself. He loathed having to make apologies for his wife. He loathed all his imagination could invent of the words that were spoken behind his back – ‘poor Jago…’ But even those wounds to his pride he could have endured, if she had been happier. He would still, after twenty-five years, have humbled himself for her as for no one else – just to see her content. As he told me on the night we first knew the Master was dying, ‘one is dreadfully vulnerable through those one loves’.
    When Jago came in, his first words were to his wife.
    ‘I’m desperately sorry I’ve been kept so long. I know you wanted to get back to your book–’
    ‘It doesn’t matter at all, Paul,’ she said with lofty dignity, and then cried out: ‘It only means that the Dean and the Tutor and Mr Eliot have had to make conversation to me for half an hour.’
    ‘If they don’t get a greater infliction than that this term,’ he said, ‘they’ll be very lucky men.’
    ‘It’s wretched for them that because of parents who haven’t the slightest consideration–’
    Gently Jago tried to steer her off, and show her at her best. Had she talked to us about the book from which we had drawn her? Why hadn’t she mentioned what she told him at teatime?
    Then Chrystal said: ‘You’ll excuse us if we take the Senior Tutor away, won’t you, Mrs Jago? We have a piece of business that can’t wait.’
    ‘Please do not think of considering me,’ she retorted.
    This was a masculine society, and none of us would have considered discussing college business