Poetic Justice by Amanda Cross Read Free Book Online

discussion. What’s he got to do with University College?”
    “He’s against it. Lock, stock, and barrel—or do I mean hook, line, and sinker? Anyway, he hates it, he wants to crush it underfoot, he has joined with Jeremiah Cudlipp to defeat it, and do I want to go into battle with those two?”
    “Why not? Growing up consists in fighting our former heroes.”
    “Maybe. I’m not that grown up. I don’t want to get close enough to Clemance to discover he’s not as great as I prefer to suppose he is.”
    “I don’t know about the labials but the sibilants are doing fine. If I remember correctly Auden’s poem on the death of Yeats, which isn’t all that difficult since you cannot have read it to me fewer than eighteen times, Auden found no difficulty in recognizing that Yeats wasmagnificent and silly at the same time. Something about time forgiving those who wrote well. Clemance, if I am to believe you, wrote well. Let time forgive him, and get on with your college.”
    “But Clemance isn’t silly; he’s always been large of soul when all about him were nit-picking. Anyway, I’ve been hero-worshipping him since before I got into his special seminar as a student, and that, God help me, was nearly twenty years ago.”
    “If Clemance is as large-souled as all that, why does he associate himself with Jeremiah Cudlipp?”
    “I don’t know. Love for the College, maybe.”
    “Maybe.”
    Kate got to her feet and wandered over to the book-case. Clemance’s books were there, ranged together, biographies, essays, plays, poems—all together, a rare tribute in itself, since Kate divided her library ruthlessly into categories: poetry, fiction, drama, biography, criticism, cultural history, and books-not-worth-keeping-with-which-I-cannot-bear-to-part. “And if this were a movie,” Reed said, “we would flash back to eager young Kate, eyes shining, hair streaming down her back, listening to Clemance in the glory of his prime, explaining us to ourselves.”
    “My hair never streamed down my back, surely it’s the prime of his glory, and I wish they still made movies like that.”
    “He must be almost as old as Auden.”
    “We’re all almost as old as Auden, ‘in middle-age hoping to twig from/What we are not what we might be next.’ ”
    “I’ll tell you what you and Clemance are going to be next.”
    “What?”
    “On opposite sides. Do you think I could be present at the opening fusillades of what promises to be a most interesting skirmish?”
    “You can if you want to join us tomorrow. Frederick Clemance, though you may not believe it, has invited me to lunch. Why should you want to support a small canary?”
    “Why should I want to support a wife? The only woman I think of marrying has long supported herself, with the aid of a meager salary and a large private income, and is presently concerned with founding a new college.”
    “I’m not founding a college, I’m allocating resources—that is, if you’re describing me. Are you thinking of marrying me for my money?”
    “Odd you should mention that,” Reed said. “It’s the only reason for marrying you I hadn’t thought of. Now, when it comes to the reasons for
not
marrying you, there isn’t an argument I’ve missed. But I’m like the Jew in Boccaccio who was converted to Catholicism on the sensible grounds that if the Church has succeeded despite all the corruption he found in Rome, it must have God behind it.”
    “The world is full of beautiful young women aching for a handsome man like you, all graying sideburns and youthful demeanor. I am aging, cantankerous, given to illogical skirmishes and the drinking of too much wine. There must be at least fifty young women waiting for you, Reed.”
    Reed walked then, in his turn, to the bookcase (poetry), extracted a volume and read from it: “ ‘One deed ascribed to Hercules was “making love” with fifty virgins in the course of a single night: one might on that account say that Hercules