Lucky Jim

' You haven't had a reply to your letter asking for something definite about when he's publishing your thing?'

'No, not a word.'

'Well then, you must certainly write to him again, Dixon, and say you must have a definite date of publication. Say you've had an inquiry from another journal about what you're writing. Say you must know definitely within a week.' Such fluency, like the keen glance which accompanied it, Welch seemed to reserve specially for telling people what to do.

Til certainly do that, yes.'

'Do it today, will you, Dixon?'

'Yes, I will'

'After all, it's important to you, isn't it?'

This was the cue he'd been hoping for. 'Yes, sir. Actually I've been meaning to ask you about that.'

Welch's shaggy eyebrows descended a little. 'About what?'

'Well, I'm sure you appreciate, Professor, that I've been worrying rather about my position here, in the last few months.'

'Oh yes?' Welch said cheerfully, his eyebrows restored.

'I've been wondering just how I stand, you know.'

'How you stand?'

'Yes, I… I mean, I'm afraid I got off on the wrong foot here rather, when I first came. I did some rather silly things. Well, now that my first year's nearly over, naturally I can't help feeling a bit anxious.'

'Yes, I know a lot of young chaps find some difficulty in settling down to their first job. It's only to be expected, after a war, after all. I don't know if you've ever met young Faulkner, at Nottingham he is now; he got a job here in nineteen hundred', here he paused, 'and forty-five.

Well, he'd had rather a rough time in the war, what with one thing and another; he'd been out East for a time, you know, in the Reet Air Arm he was, and then they switched him back to the Mediterranean. I remember him telling me how difficult he found it to adapt his way of thinking, when he had to settle down here and…"

Stop himself from dashing his fist into your face, Dixon thought He waited for a time, then, when Welch produced another of his pauses, said: 'Yes, and of course it's doubly difficult when one doesn't feel very secure in one's - I'd work much better, I know, if I could feel settled about…'

'Well, insecurity is the great enemy of concentration, I know. And, of course, one does tend to lose the habit of concentration as one grows older. It's amazing how distractions one wouldn't have noticed in one's early days become absolutely shattering when one… grows older. I remember when they were putting up the new chemistry labs here, well, I say new, you could hardly call them new now, I suppose. At the time I'm speaking of, some years before the war, they were kying the foundations about Easter time it must have been, and the concrete-mixer or whatever it was…'

Dixon wondered if Welch could hear him grinding his teeth. If he did, he gave no sign of it. Like a boxer still incredibly on his feet after ten rounds of punishment, Dixon got in with:' I could feel quite happy about everything, if only my big worry were out of the way.'

Welch's head lifted slowly, like the muzzle of some obsolete howitzer.

The wondering frown quickly began to form. 'I don't quite see…'

'My probation,' Dixon said loudly.

The frown cleared. 'Oh. That. You're on two years' probation here, Dixon, not one year. It's all there in your contract, you know. Two years.'

' Yes, I know, but that just means that I can't be taken on to the permanent staff until two years are up. It doesn't mean that I can't be … asked to leave at the end of the first year.'

'Oh no,' Welch said warmly; 'no.' He left it open whether he was reinforcing Dixon's negative or dissenting from it.

'I can be asked to leave at the end of the first year, can't I, Professor?' Dixon said quickly, pressing himself against the back of his chair.

'Yes, I suppose so,' Welch said, coldly this time, as if he were being asked to make some concession which, though theoretically due, no decent man would claim.

' Well I'm just wondering what's happening about it, that's alL* 'Yes, I've no doubt you are,' Welch said in the same tone.