Tam Lin

  "I think I'd probably better go now," she said. "I've still got some reading to do."

  Her parents got up and accompanied her outside, examined the tires on her bicycle, made sure the light worked, hugged her, and waved her off. Back to summer camp, thought Janet.

  The yellow leaves still fluttered down in the light of the street lamps. The old, sad, spicy smell of autumn was beginning to overtake late summer's baked scents. A light wind blew from the north with the promise of cold. Maybe she should have cadged another wool blanket; her bedspread wasn't very heavy, and Tina always wanted the windows open at night.

  She had never asked Peg or Sharon about those bunk beds. Well, she thought, pedaling faster, I will. I'll make sure Peg and Sharon know that Peg sleepwalks, and I'll ask about the bunks, and I'll ask to borrow those books.

  She wrestled her bicycle into the basement of Ericson and went slowly up all the stairs. The first floor smelled of popcorn, the second of cider, the third of some sweet and vaguely sickly thing she did not recognize, and the fourth of pizza. Janet went along to the lounge, and found Nick and Tina and Robin and Molly sitting around in a litter of soda bottles and white cardboard boxes spotted with tomato and bits of cheese. They hailed her enthusiastically and offered her the last limp slice and a bottle of orange soda. Janet accepted the soda, and watched with amusement as Tina moved to the middle of the sofa she was sharing with Nick so that Janet could sit on the end.

  "So how's your family?" said Molly.

  "Very much themselves," said Janet. She grinned. "My father's got to teach Modern Poetry this term, because Tyler's sick; I wish there were some way I could add it."

  "I thought you hated the moderns."

  "So does my father."

  "What period?" said Nick, confusing Janet momentarily. Oh. He meant the time the class met. "I don't know," she said.

  "I'll look into it," said Nick, "and give you a report."

  "I told him about the piper," said Janet, "and he said they used to be chosen by committee."

  "Oh, they still are," said Robin, "and a very select one it is, too."

  Molly rolled her eyes at him; he looked first puzzled, and then a little affronted.

  "That reminds me," said Janet, getting up again, "I want to ask Peg and Sharon something before they go to bed. I'll be right back."

  She walked down the hall, turned into the bathroom, and rescued her lakey clothes from the sink, wringing them out and hanging them over the walls of the shower cubicle nobody liked because it had a draft. She washed her hands and went along to her own room. Tina and Molly weren't there. Janet sat down on her bed, and hoped the spread would be warm enough. She shook her head suddenly. My mind is going, she thought. She got up and went back down the hall. Halfway down the stairs, s he thought, I forgot to take

  the clothes out of the bathroom, so why am I going down to the laundry room?

  Or was she going to wash the bedspread?

  "Hell," said Janet, setting up a mild echo, and sat down hard on a terrazzo step. She fixed her goal firmly in her mind and stood up again. With her hand on the door to the fourth floor, she stopped. She had had her mind on her goal before. Suppose she tried not thinking about what she was doing? Considering the peculiar physics of Aristotle, she marched along the red-carpeted hall for the third time, and stopped outside Peg and Sharon's door. She knocked, rather harder than she had intended.

  Sharon, unsmiling, opened the door. She was wearing a very short red dress and a necklace of shells. Janet wondered if she were going out at this hour, or if she had come back from a date rather early. Nobody had yet set eyes on Sharon's boyfriend.

  "Hi," said Janet. "Is Peg there?"

  "Library," said Sharon.

  "Well, maybe that's just as well. Did you know she walks in her sleep?"

  "Sure," said Sharon. She looked hard at Janet. "She doing it recently?"

  "Last night," said Janet. "She was wandering around outside our windows picking up books."

  "Huh," said Sharon. "I thought I had that fixed. Okay, I'll take care of it."

  "I also wanted to borrow one of the books," said Janet.

  As before, Sharon stood aside and waved at Peg's shelves. "Take a look," she said, and sat back down at her own desk, where a fat book of dense print was open next to a notebook full of tiny, neat writing.

  Janet knelt on Peg's blue-and-purple Indian bedspread and inspected the books. There was Liddell and Scott, crisp and blue and small. She opened it to the title page. Just the same. She turned to the next pages. The Advertisement was the same, too; but the copyright page said, "Impression of 1970." She looked for the Arnold and the McGuffey, but they were not there. She checked all four shelves again, running her finger along the spines of the books to prevent missing a title or two. Nothing.

  "The ones I want aren't here," said Janet, climbing off the bed. "Thanks anyway, Sharon."

  "Probably got them at the library," said Sharon, not looking up.

  Janet went out and shut the door quietly.

  CHAPTER 6

  Janet slept badly, dreaming of heavenly spheres that were like sweet bells jangled, out of tune and harsh, with consequent unpleasant reverberations in the lower world. She overslept (if Tina whistled, it did not disturb her), and awoke with a tremendous start with fifteen minutes to get to her fencing class. She arrived just in time, hungry, disheveled, and reeking of deodorant, since there was some chance they might actually get some exercise this time. The students were arranged in two lines, and at the end of one line was an extra figure. Nick. Of course; she was his partner. She hurried into place just as Miss Swifte emerged from her office with the attendance sheet in her hand.

  Nick, in a pair of brand-new, stiff-looking jeans and a maroon sweater that was too big for him, winked at her. He looked freshly scrubbed, and had even combed his hair. Janet scowled at him, a forgotten question making her even more irritable than she had been.

  "What's the matter?" said Nick.

  "What are you doing here, after that exhibition on Saturday? You don't need this class."

  "Ah, but that was stage fencing," said Nick. "All style and no substance. This probably won't help you kill somebody in fair fight—but it's a little more solid than Benfield's and my little game."

  "It looked real," said Janet.

  "Well, that's its job, isn't it?"

  That was a neat answer; Janet was too irate to consider its actual merits. Arguing with him was not going to accomplish anything. Maybe she could beat him in their first fencing match instead.

  They spent half an hour in stretching exercises and then in practicing the lunge without the foil. Then they were taught how to hold the foil, and spent considerable time choosing grips that suited them. Miss Swifte had some undersized and some oversized grips, and a few that were exotic; Janet chose an odd but comfortable one called a Belgian, which felt as if it gave more support to the wrist. Then they practiced thrusting at the uninspiring concrete block wall; and finally, with five minutes of the class period to go, they lined up facing their partners again and learned how to parry. Janet knew perfectly well that being angry would not do her any good; nor would a burning desire to impress Nick. What was required was a burning desire to make her foil do a particular thing at a particular moment; who was standing in its way was irrelevant.

  Nick didn't have much reach on her, but he was very fast. Miss Swifte came along and corrected his grip, which was a comfort; but then she corrected Janet's, which, with the Belgian sword, should have been rather more difficult to get wrong. Janet vowed to practice for an hour a day. Stage fencing, indeed.

  Nick came up behind her as she was hanging up her jacket, and said, "Have you got time for lunch before your next class?"

  "Sure," said Janet, rather ungraciously.

  "Where should you like to go?"

  "Well—I said I'd meet Peg and Molly in Taylor, but it's suc h a gloomy day, I'd rather

  eat in Eliot. They'll forgive me. We can probably sit wi
th Nora and Sharon."

  "Let's make it Dunbar," said Nick. "I'd like to eat with you without a crowd of my friends or yours; I don't know so many people in Dunbar."

  That was promising; it was a pity he was being promising when she was sweaty and irritable. They walked out of the Women's Center into the misty noon. Bell Field was half-hidden; the stream was invisible, and only the tops of the trees, sickly yellow and drained red, showed above the blank wisps that twined whitely in the woods. They went down the steep steps and along the side of Eliot, down the eroded gully and across the wooden bridge, as Janet and Molly had gone Saturday night to meet the piper.

  "How long has Robin Armin been playing the bagpipes?" said Janet as they walked up the hill to Dunbar.

  "As long as he's known there were bagpipes to play," said Nick.

  "Was he playing last night, do you know?"

  "He ought not to have been," said Nick, "it wasn't the time. Why?"

  "Oh, I dreamt of horrible music. It was probably just the orange soda on top of too much Aristotle."

  "I should certainly hope so," said Nick. "Robin makes excellent music."

  There was beginning to be a crowd in Dunbar, but it was all of strangers. They dawdled along in line, talking about what a good teacher Miss Swifte was, and whether it was possible to compare her methods to Evans's. Dunbar's food line was set up with its desserts first: today, an uninspiring collection of limp grapefruit slices, little bowls of chocolate pudding topped with whipped cream that was far too stiff to be natural, and soggy-looking squares of yellow cake with some arcane red stuff in their middles.

  "Every time I actually look at the food they give us," said Nick, helping himself to three bowls of pudding and shaking a plate of cake gently, "I remember that passage in

  That Hideous Strength. "

  "Oh, you mean what Merlin says about the twentieth century?"

  "'Your people eat dry and tasteless flesh but it is off plates as smooth as ivory and as round as the sun.'"

  "Right. That cake's not very dry."

  "If there's any left over it might be good tomorrow," said Nick, withdrawing his hand from the plate and taking another helping of pudding instead. Janet considered all the little bowls on his tray and suppressed a dreadful desire to ask him if he were having his period.

  She missed Molly suddenly, and was aware of an impatience with this acquaintance with Nick, so fraught with emotion and so imperfect she could not even make a careless remark.

  Well, there was no way out but through.

  The room was furnished with unprepossessing chrome-and-vinyl chairs, of the stackable sort, and rectangular tables for two, which could be pushed together for people who wanted to eat in large groups. It occurred to Janet that you could not get a table for two in Eliot or Taylor. She and Nick set their trays down on the end table of a long row. Nick then picked the table up and separated it from its fellows.

  "Sit down," he said, "and tell me about yourself."

  "That's a very foolish request," said Janet, sitting down anyway. Nick waited until she was settled, and then fell casually into his own chair, as if he would not much have minded missing it and sitting on the floor instead. He looked a little put out; Janet went on ruthlessly. "Nobody you'd want to listen to for five minutes could possibly respond sensibly to it."

  "I could," said Nick, in an injured voice.

  "Tell me about yourself, then."

  "I eat the air, promise-crammed," said Nick, in melancholy tones. "You cannot feed capons so."

  "Who's usurped your rightful place, then?"

  "You are too sharp by half," said Nick.

  "Oh, come on. My father's a professor of English; of course I know Hamlet."

  "You didn't know Milton the other day," said Nick.

  "Well, but Daddy's a romantic; he loves Shakespeare, especially because Keats seems so much like him; but he can't stand Milton." Having rattled this off, she felt herself going extremely hot in the face, and rapidly dumped the bowl of tomatoes into her plate of macaroni.

  Nick, however, either had not intended to embarrass her in the first place or was easily distracted. "Keats seems so much like whom? "

  "Shakespeare."

  "Keats? That querulous, agonizing little emotion-ridden pestilence-befuddled liverer's son?"

  "What have you been reading?" said Janet, staring at him with her fork suspended.

  "What do you fancy he was like?"

  "Keats? I don't know. I meant the poetry. Daddy says he's the only poet since Shakespeare who sounds remotely like him—whose imagery is anything like as varied and as well controlled, and who can convey so many layers of emotion at one time. I haven't read everybody in between—and neither has Daddy, he missed the Jacobeans—but even I can see the resemblance."

  "Say me some Keats, then."

  Janet looked at him with a certain alarm. He sounded quite grim about it. His glasses had slipped down his nose, and he was looking at her half over and half through them, without seeming to notice. He had crossed his arms on his chest, and both his hands were in fists. "All right," said Janet. "All right." What in the world could she recite? He knew the sonnet on Chapman's Homer; most of the rest he would probably have labeled "querulous."

  Not "Ode to a Nightingale," which had illness and drugs in it; not "La Belle Dame Sans Merci," which, in Nick's mood, would probably be labeled not only querulous, but pestilence- and emotion-ridden. Something out of "The Eve of St. Agnes" or "Hyperion"

  might do the trick, but she had only recently discovered them and did not trust her memory to do them justice.

  I'll give you querulous, thought Janet, and cleared her throat. "'This living hand, now warm and capable Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold And in the icy silence of the tomb, So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights That thou wouldst wish thine own heart dry of blood So in my veins red life might strea

  m again, And thou be

  conscience-calmed—see here it is—I hold it towards you.'"

  Nick's hands had fallen to his sides. Janet, looking straight at him now that she had done remembering, and feeling a little smug, realized with a shock that he had turned rather pale. He pushed his glasses up his nose with a hand that shook. "That's Measure for Measure, " he said, just audibly. "Or The Winter's Tale? Or Troilus and Cressida; I always forget what gems are hidden in that dungheap. That's not Keats. Is it?"

  "Yes, it is," said Janet; to her fury, she sounded apologetic.

  "As you love me, don't tease me. If it's Keats, what's it from?"

  "It was written in the margin of The Cap and Bells, " said Janet; she thought the "as you love me" showed a great deal of assurance, but now was not the time to fuss at him about it; he was seriously upset. "His unfinished play. My father says—"

  "I cry you mercy," said Nick, getting up, "I'm unwell. No, it's all right, don't bother. I'll call you later."

  No you won't, thought Janet, watching him with a maddening mixture of worry and annoyance. He got out of the room without falling over, so he was probably all right. She went back to her own lunch, though she felt very little enthusiasm for it. She looked at Nick's abandoned tray, and suddenly giggled. In some peculiar way, he was having his period.

  She was struggling with a desire to eat the bowl of pudding Nick had left behind when a resonant and charming voice, made more charming by its diffidence, said, "Excuse me."

  Janet looked up, half smiling, and then firmly closed her mouth. It was not Kit Lane, but his abominable brother—John, they said—no doubt about to exercise upon her some of his famous sarcasm.

  "Excuse me," he said again, so shyly that she was rendered speechless, "did we have a fight in the library over The Romance of the Rose? "

  "We?" said Janet, rather more feebly than she had intended. He was perfectly gorgeous; it was indecent. She wondered, suddenly, what it might be like to go through life having that effect on everybody. How could you possibly live up to it? If you were homely, or merely cute, or plain
but nice like Molly, or austere like Sharon or even healthy like Christina or normally pretty like Nora, you could always startle people with your eloquence or your intelligence or your athletic ability. What did you have left to startle them with if you looked like this?

  "All right. You are the girl I was rude to?"

  "Yes," said Janet. Honesty and a curious feeling of pity prompted her to add, "I did bait you a little, maybe; but I just wanted some basic information, like when I could have the book."

  "Oh, I've got no excuse; I was just in a foul temper. May I sit down?"

  "Sure," said Janet.

  The young man sat down in Nick's chair and pushed Nick's tray to one side. "I'm very sorry indeed," he said. "I wonder if you'd allow me to make it up to you?"

  All these people were always offering to make something up to you. Would this one offer pizza, too? Janet contented herself with looking inquiring, and he said, "The Old Theater is doing Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead in repertory with Hamlet; should you like to go see one of them?"

  "Both," said Janet instantly; he laughed, she blushed. "But that's not fair, you weren't that rude. Make it Hamlet. "

  "No, I think I was. Both, then. Have you any Saturday classes?"

  "One-B," said Janet, mournfully.

  "I'll get tickets for Saturday nights, then." He got up, looking more relieved than seemed reasonable. "Oh," he said. "I'm Thomas Lane."

  Janet got up, too, and held out her hand. "Janet Carter," she said.

  His hand was very cool and light. He grinned. "Ought I to have offered a performance of The Cenci instead?"

  He had recognized her name, then. Her father was the only professor who taught that play. "No, thank you," said Janet, who did not care for Shelley, "Shakespeare will do just fine."

  "I'll call you, then, when I've got the tickets." He vanished into the surge of the noontime crowd.

  Janet sat down again and stared at Nick's abandoned tray. She felt as if she had betrayed a child. She wondered, in parallel with feeling guilty, if it was wise to accept invitations to the theater from strangers whose only observed behavior prior to the invitation had been discourteous and odd in the extreme. Perhaps she could get Anne or Kit to tell her something about Thomas.