7
My chemistry tutor at Cambridge was called A. R. Woresley. He was a middle-aged, shortish man, paunchy, untidily dressed and with a grey moustache whose edges were stained yellow ochre by the nicotine from his pipe. In appearance, therefore, a typical university don. But he struck me as being exceptionally able. His lectures were never routine. His mind was always darting about in search of the unusual. Once he said to us:
'And now we need as it were a tompion to protect the contents of this flask from invading bacteria. I presume you know what a tompion is, Cornelius?'
'I can't say I do, sir,' I sa
id.
'Can anyone give me a definition of that common English noun?' A. R. Woresley said.
Nobody could.
'Then you'd better look it up,' he said. 'It is not my business to teach you elementary English.'
'Oh, come on, sir,' someone said. 'Tell us what it means.'
'A tompion,' A. R. Woresley said, 'is a small pellet made out of mud and saliva which a bear inserts into his anus before hibernating for the winter, to stop the ants getting in.'
A strange fellow, A. R. Woresley, a mixture of many attitudes, occasionally witty, more often pompous and sombre, but underneath everything there was a curiously complex mind. I began to like him very much after that little tompion episode. We struck up a pleasant student-tutor relationship. I was invited to his house for sherry. He was a bachelor. He lived with his sister who was called Emmaline of all names. She was dumpy and frowsy and seemed to have something greenish on her teeth that looked like verdigris. She had a kind of surgery in the house where she did things to people's feet. A pedicurist, I think she called herself.
Then the Great War broke out. It was 1914 and I was nineteen years old. I joined the Army. I had to, and for the next four years I concentrated all my efforts on trying to survive. I am not going to talk about my wartime experiences. Trenches, mud, mutilation and death have no place in these journals. I did my bit. Actually, I did well, and by November 1918, when it all came to an end, I was a twenty-three-year-old captain in the infantry with a Military Cross. I had survived.
At once, I returned to Cambridge to resume my education. The survivors were allowed to do that, though heaven knows there weren't many of us. A. R. Woresley had also survived. He had remained in Cambridge doing some sort of wartime scientific work and had had a fairly quiet war. Now he was back at his old job of teaching chemistry to undergraduates, and we were pleased to see one another again. Our friendship picked up where it had left off four years before.
One evening in February 1919, in the middle of the Lent term, A. R. Woresley invited me to supper at his house. The meal was not good. We had cheap food and cheap wine, and we had his pedicurist sister with verdigris on her teeth. I would have thought they could have lived in slightly better style than they did, but when I broached this delicate subject rather cautiously to my host, he told me that they were still struggling to pay off the mortgage on the house. After supper, A. R. Woresley and I retired to his study to drink a good bottle of port that I had brought him as a present. It was a Croft 1890, if I remember rightly.
'Don't often taste stuff like this,' he said. He was very comfortable in an old armchair with his pipe lit and a glass of port in his hand. What a thoroughly decent man he was, I thought. And what a terribly dull life he leads.
I decided to liven things up a bit by telling him about my time in Paris six years before in 1913 when I had made one hundred thousand pounds out of Blister Beetle pills. I started at the beginning. Very quickly I got caught up in the fun of storytelling. I remembered everything, but in deference to my tutor, I left out the more salacious details. It took me nearly an hour to tell.
A. R. Woresley was enraptured by the whole escapade. 'By gad, Cornelius!' he cried. 'What a nerve you've got! What a splendid nerve! And now you are a very wealthy young man!'
'Not wealthy enough,' I said. 'I want to make a million pounds before I'm thirty.'
'And I believe you will,' he said. 'I believe you will. You have a flair for the outrageous. You have a nose for the successful stunt. You have the courage to act swiftly. And what's more, you are totally unscrupulous. In other words, you have all the qualities of the nouveau riche millionaire.'
'Thank you,' I said.
'Yes, but how many boys of seventeen would have gone all the way out to Khartoum on their own to look for a powder that might not even have existed? Precious few.'
'I wasn't going to miss a chance like that,' I said.
'You have a great flair, Cornelius. A very great flair. I am a little envious of you.'
We sat there drinking our port. I was enjoying a small Havana cigar. I had offered one to my host but he preferred his stinking pipe. That pipe of his made more smoke than any other pipe I had ever seen. It was like a miniature warship laying a smokescreen in front of his face. And behind the smokescreen, A. R. Woresley was brooding on my Paris story. He kept snorting and grunting and mumbling things like 'Remarkable exploit!... What a nerve!... What panache!... Good chemistry, too, making those pills.'
Then there was silence. The smoke billowed around his head. The glass of port disappeared through the smokescreen as he put it to his lips. Then it reappeared, empty. I had talked enough, so I kept my peace.
'Well, Cornelius,' A. R. Woresley said at last. 'You have just given me your confidence. Perhaps I had better give you mine in return.'
He paused. I waited. What's coming, I wondered.
'You see,' he said, 'I myself have also had a little bit of a coup in the last few years.'
'You have?'
'I'm going to write a paper on it when I get the time. And I might even be successful in getting it published.'