Staircase in Surrey: The Gaudy Part 10

'Can you tell me about being a thingummy?' I understood very well what I was being teased about.

'You want the mortifying truth of the matter? A reader is somebody who won't quite do as a professor I imagine because he is too learned, and at the same time possessed of too little guile. Yes, that is it. Harmlessness has to be his hallmark.'

'I suppose he has definite duties?' The speech just offered me was quite inoffensive in its effect; its tenor was disobliging, but not its tone. 'The chap must do something for his pay. I suppose there is pay?'

'Readers are paid enormous sums, and in return they engage in advanced study and research. You will get a letter instructing you to do that, but permitting you to scratch your own head as to just how. Without particular effort, Lempriere contrived to make all this sound highly ridiculous. 'Come to think of it, you will also have to give a great many lectures. I believe it's thirty-six in a year. As you will deliver them triennially for the rest of your days, it's advisable to have them typed out on durable paper.'

'It sounds as if it might be formidable at first preparing all that eloquence. May I come to you for hints about it?'

'My dear chap, I've never delivered a lecture in my life. Lectures have always appeared to me completely pointless exercises. If I had to choose between lectures and examinations, I believe it would be examinations I'd plump for.'

It was obvious that Lempriere wasn't idly prevaricating, and I concluded that his freedom from what he regarded as a pointless obligation must be a matter of his possessing adequate private means. Such freedoms commonly are. This meant that further inquiry might sound impertinent nor, for that matter, was I as interested in the hierarchy of Oxford learning as, no doubt, I ought to have been. But having been made fun of over the readers.h.i.+p, I decided to try a shaft of my own.

'Not having to lecture,' I said, 'must give you a lot of time for research and writing books.'

What this drew from Lempriere was a swift glance of appreciation or amus.e.m.e.nt. He put a hand lightly on my elbow, and I had a sudden odd knowledge that he seldom touched anybody. It had been to draw me to a halt.

'And here is the river,' he said.

Nothing stays put not even the Isis. The iron railings over which we were peering, indeed, were no more rusty and untidy now than when I had first become acquainted with them. The river steamers moored nearby seemed to speak of aquatic pleasures of the most outmoded sort, but precisely so had they done long ago. Downstream, however, much was changed. The row of college barges along this bank had, with one or two exceptions, vanished, to be replaced in the middle distance by a huddle of boathouses which doubtless gained for commodiousness what they lost for the picturesque. Along the towpath opposite there stretched a long line of cabin-cruisers and motor-launches hired, it was to be supposed, by the week for the recreation of urban populations far away; women were hanging out nappies on them, and men were contentedly peeling potatoes into the sacred stream.

'It used to be the young barbarians all at play,' Lempriere murmured. 'But it's the middle-aged philistines now. Cam and Isis, ancient bays have withered round your brows.'

'Yes,' I said not troubling to sort out this mix-up of the poets. 'But there are nine young barbarians coming upstream at this moment.'

'Our own boat,' Lempriere said at a glance, but without much appearance of interest. 'I believe they go to some regatta or other tomorrow.'

We walked on in silence, listening to the plash of the oars, and to the voice of the c.o.x, obedient to a bellow from a coach on a bicycle, beginning to give his crew ten.

'Awful sport,' Lempriere said. 'I used to do it as a boy a good way further down this river. It's like living. People don't consider it at all the thing to stop off when you want to.' There was another silence, in which I guessed he was thinking of Paul Lusby. 'You probably did it yourself,' he added presently, 'on the Water of Leith.'

'No, I didn't,' I said. 'I played rugger. But the same consideration applied.' It struck me as curious that Lempriere should have acquainted himself with my provenance to this extent. 'You were grabbed by the ankles and pitched violently into the mud. But you had to jump up and chase after the d.a.m.ned ball again. My brother liked it. I didn't.'

'Ninian?' Lempriere asked.

'Yes-Ninian.' This really did pull me up. Lempriere seemed to have been doing research on the Pattullos. And now he had produced his chuckle again. It was like no more than a faint clearing of the throat. I saw that he was nursing some joke.

'Sit down,' he said, on his peremptory note, and pointed to a long wooden seat of the kind provided in public parks. It faced the river and was firmly bedded in concrete no doubt to prevent its being carried off to a bonfire on the last night of Eights. Cut into its back was an inscription: Presented by the Oxford College Servants' Rowing Club to Commemorate the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth the Second. 'Very nice,' Lempriere said, looking at this. It was almost his first remark uncoloured by some hovering irony. He sat down rather carefully, so that one felt his joints to be no longer in the best working order. 'It's at least decently warm. Not that you'll think much of it after Ravello. I like that bit of coast and it's only a short run to Paestum. I'll come and stay with you there one day.'

The college address list, I thought, would give him Ravello. But I was becoming restive. The joke appeared to be that my companion had up his sleeve something that would legitimate his employing my Christian name at a second meeting and announcing that he proposed to be my house-guest in Italy. But I wasn't going fis.h.i.+ng. I'd leave him to play the thing out.

'Paestum is invaluable,' I said, taking my place beside him. 'Greece without the Colonels. One couldn't ask for more.' At that time the misdeeds of those persons weighed heavily on all liberal minds.

'The Niobe of nations! there she stands, Childless and crownless, in her voiceless woe.'

This came from Lempriere with an effect rather different, I thought, from Ra.n.a.ld McKechnie's 'nothing so ill-bred as audible laughter'. He paused on it darkly. 'Or was that Rome?' he asked. 'You read English Literature, and ought to know.'

'Rome, I think. The bits about Greece come earlier on. Not that it wouldn't fit.' I didn't feel I wanted to be shunted off to Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. 'I really ought to say I'd be in two minds about the thingummy proposal, even if anything comes of it. That it should even be thought of pleases me enormously, and I have spasms of feeling there's nothing I'd like more. But you know seriously and apart from all that of fabricating lectures it strikes me as a stiff a.s.signment to come at one out of the blue. It's clearly not what can be called a visiting job.'

'You could make it the next thing to that, if you wanted to. n.o.body would object to your treating the place like a hotel, and dropping in on us for a couple of nights a week. But you mightn't find that particularly satisfactory yourself. We do have a certain corporate life of an amoebic sort. You might be drawn to study it. You were studying it last night, weren't you, when we were discussing that luckless affair in the dark?' Lempriere paused. 'And very much in the dark. Grandfather-figures or not, we have to admit the young as turning more and more baffling on us.'

'I was interested,' I said. 'I wouldn't like to be thought to have been studying anything. I suppose it would be a matter of pulling my weight in a general way. I doubt whether I could turn to at any sort of administration.'

'You wouldn't be asked to do anything of the kind although, of course, you'd be on the Governing Body of the college.'

'Good Lord! What's the Governing Body's line?'

'Governing, one supposes. I'd describe its meetings as festivals of pusillanimity relieved by sporadic dog-fights.'

'I'd be interested in that too.'

'It's most kind of you to say so.'

I was startled by the tone in which Lempriere had murmured these words. It was such as to make them almost as outrageous as old Mr Mumford's incredible remark on long hair and finger-nails. I was being rebuked, in fact, without ever so far as I could see having put a foot wrong. I hadn't been indignant with Tony's father, because I had been instantly aware of his being in some overwrought state. But I was thoroughly indignant with Arnold Lempriere. He had tipped over my head a sudden small bucket of ironic urbanity as unlicensed by anything I'd said as it was incompatible with the whole character of our talk hitherto.

I had indicated my feeling by taking the initiative in standing up before I recalled the abrupt acrimony with which this very senior man had more than once turned upon his colleagues during their nocturnal discussion. There had been differences of view, but at the same time a perfectly evident admission of common concern. And then Lempriere had suddenly flung out this or that. It had been something more, I now saw, than succ.u.mbing to the temptation of quick wit or a tart phrase. It was rather that in some obscure way he wanted the college to himself. He had an impulse to savage not only anybody who infringed his monopoly of criticising it but also (by way of a kind of warning off) anybody who might do so in the future. In fact there was a respectable pa.s.sion for the place at the root of his bad behaviour when he did sporadically behave badly. It was something his colleagues were certainly intelligent enough to understand. There was a high probability that most of them were fond of him.

This was a lot of considering to give to a tiny thing, and within moments we were continuing our walk as amicably as before. My sense of this was strong enough to prompt my next remark.

'You lose no time,' I said, 'in putting the new boys through their notions.'

'That's Winchester.' Lempriere now spoke humorously but I thought he had to conceal a sense that mixing up one school's slang with another's was a serious matter. And I felt I knew something more about him. He was one of those men and long ago I had discovered them to be quite thick on the ground in whom the schoolboy is irruptive still. Tony, I remembered, had been aware of them too. They kept caps and colours and house photographs, he used to say, like French letters under their clean s.h.i.+rts and handkerchiefs, and sometimes they tumbled embarra.s.singly out of the drawer. The more weighted with tradition the school, the higher was the incidence of such r.e.t.a.r.ded characters turned out. And Lempriere's role as champion of the Lusbys over against the Mumfords was a topsy turvy, and perhaps unstable, reflex from this. Believing there was only one real school (as he most certainly believed there was only one real college), he took a poor view (when this perhaps provincial view of things was bobbing up in him) of public schools at large as const.i.tuting any sort of club.

'Would you have been the same year as young Mumford?' Lempriere asked. 'Calls himself Marshmallow, or some such.'

'Marchpayne. Yes, Tony Mumford and I came up together.'

'Ah! That's why he wasn't a pupil of mine. But his father was.'

'Cedric Mumford?' For a moment this entirely astonished me. I had been reflecting, the day before, that Albert Talbert might now be teaching some old pupil's son. If Lempriere was not talking nonsense he was claiming to be at least in a position to teach an old pupil's grandson. But this, in fact, was perfectly possible. It merely meant that I had got the relative ages of these two old gentlemen slightly wrong. In an Oxford college an undergraduate of twenty may find himself with a tutor only two or three years older than himself. 'I think of him as old Mr Mumford,' I said with a shade of malice. 'What sort of a pupil was he?'

'Cedric Mumford? You know him?'

'We've met.' I said this before realising that it blankly contradicted the a.s.sertion I'd made to Killiecrankie. It was inconceivable that the discrepant statements could become of the slightest importance, but I detected myself wondering whether Lempriere's native or acquired skill in telling lies made him a hypersensitive detector of lying in others. I even wondered whether, had he been at my own school long ago, he would have joined McKechnie in holding out against the romancing of the Secret Service Boy. 'I believe Cedric isn't very pleased' I added with incredible rashness 'with the way the college is threatening to treat his grandson Ivo.'

'He wouldn't be. I've never had a pupil who gave himself such airs as Cedric Mumford. Positively intimated that he intended to put you at your ease.' Lempriere's chuckle followed upon this. 'And then, when you told him his essay was b.l.o.o.d.y pitiful, and that in fact you'd heard it from one of his chums the week before, he'd pretty well turn and snarl at you.'

'Yes Cedric still snarls.'

'And who are they, in G.o.d's name, those Mumfords? Catholics, of course but not old Catholics.'

'I suppose there's a big difference but as a Scottish presbyterian, I just wouldn't know.' I managed a little irony of my own this time. The distinction propounded again pleasingly echoed Plot on gentry and old gentry although, indeed, the ambiance wasn't the same. 'Tony Mumford' I added this firmly, and by way of standing up to be counted 'was my closest college friend.'

'Was he, indeed? Well, friendliness seems much his thing. He was scattering it all over the place last night.'

'I suppose he was.' I felt it would be disingenuous to deny this charge. Tony had a little overdone kissing the babies. In some minds, at least, he had as a consequence created the impression against which the sagacious Mogridge had warned him. 'But Tony's a politician,' I went on, 'and seemingly becoming a distinguished one. A slightly too lavish agreeableness has to be excused as part of the tool-kit.'

'Humph!' (Lempriere really produced this noise-one more frequently printed than articulated.) 'Public means that public manners breed eh? He needn't bring them into private places.'

'You evidently take a strong line on the Mumfords. Does it extend to Ivo in the present generation? And is Ivo your pupil now?'

'No, he's not. But he's a young man with a high nuisance value. I'm aware of that.'

'Impertinently putting his elders at their ease?'

'That I don't know. Quite probably not.'

'I'm afraid you're going to hear a bit more about his nuisance value.' There had been an instant fair-mindedness in Lempriere's last remark which encouraged me to take a chance in this way. 'It seems he was the man who made that wretched bet with Lusby.'

'Lusby! What the devil should young Mumford have to do with Lusby? They'd be poles apart.'

'Well, yes I'm afraid that that's the rub. You'd expect it to be an intimate' I thought it quite cunningly that I brought in this term of Lempriere's 'who'd make an idiotic wager like that with a man. Ivo must have gone out of his way to it, and I suspect that some of your colleagues may spy a certain malice in it as a result.' I rather held my breath as I thus, mere outsider that I was, ventured on this criticism of fellows of the college.

'Absolute rubbis.h.!.+' It was to my great relief that Lempriere snapped this out. 'Mere callow thoughtlessness in the brat Ivo. Nothing more.'

'That's what I'd rather suppose myself.' I felt things were now going well. 'And, of course, the boy's in trouble already. Something about some examination or other. And that's why Tony was busying round a bit too much last night making friends and influencing people. He's very concerned.'

'And why in heaven's name shouldn't he be?' Lempriere looked at me sternly, much as if I were setting up as advocatus diaboli in this affair. 'He is the lad's father, isn't he?'

'It's certainly very understandable,' I said. Lempriere as I rather suspected was his vulnerability had jumped at an att.i.tude, and I calculated it would be useful to leave him in it. All this was happening, so far as my own feeling went, against the background of the wretched events at Otby a couple of nights before. Ivo Mumford might be an undesirable youth. But on the small academic front I wanted Lempriere on his side. If I'd managed this it would be a contribution of sorts (staircase-wise, it might sentimentally be said) to the much more sensational turn being mounted by Mogridge.

We were now back within the bounds of the college. Lempriere, a good deal to my relief at this ticklish juncture, had halted and was proposing to take his leave of me. But he had something more to say.

'Do you see much nowadays,' he asked with a fine casualness, 'of those folk at Corry?'

This stroke had all the effect at which it rather childishly aimed. I stared at Lempriere for a full second before managing a reply.

'No,' I said, 'I don't.'

'A pity. A man should keep up with his family connections. I do, and tuck away sc.r.a.ps of information that come to me as a result for ages and ages, it sometimes is.' Lempriere's chuckle was even fainter and more internal this time. 'Ninian's licking, for example,' he said.

'How on earth ....'

'You don't even register or, at least, remember the names of your kinsfolk. Too busy inventing Lovelesses and Backbites and Wishforts for all those stage puppets, I take it. Your Uncle Rory's wife whom I hope you have the decency to think of as your aunt was a Lempriere.' This revelation, by which it was evidently intended that I should be a good deal struck, put Lempriere in excellent humour. 'Nice day,' he said, looking up approvingly at the sky. 'Ever swim at Parson's Pleasure? If so, come and renew your acquaintance with it this afternoon.'

'I'm afraid I can't.' Lempriere, I supposed, was just the sort of old gentleman who nostalgically frequented that bathing place of the young the male young. 'I have to go to tea with the Talberts, and that won't be long after I get away from the Lodging.'

'Ah, yes another time.' Lempriere spoke vaguely, as if already forgetting what he had proposed. 'Good day to you, Dunkie.' Once more he touched me on the elbow, and then he turned and walked away.

XII.

Nine or ten hours had now elapsed since the departure of Mogridge in quest of the lurking Ivo. I had said I should remain in Oxford until the evening, but I was already beginning to wonder when and how a message would come through to me. It was impossible to form any notion of what to expect, since we had been left both Tony and myself with only the vaguest intimation of what would be going on. I pictured Mogridge arriving at that gardener's cottage in some high-powered but un.o.btrusive car one equipped, no doubt, with telephonic devices enabling him to hold scrambled conversations with various quarters of the globe as he went along. Ivo would then be extricated from what must be his nerve-racking seclusion, rapidly disguised as an exiled Tas.h.i.+ lama (or perhaps as a giant panda, comfortably accommodated in an air-conditioned crate), and thus despatched across the Atlantic to the care of persons alerted to receive him and expeditiously retransmogrify him into Lord Marchpayne's son, who had been moving certifiably at need in impeccably respectable New York society during at least the past forty-eight hours.

This might not be accurate in detail, but it scarcely managed to fantasticate what in essence was happening. I wondered whether the crazy plan supposing it to succeed would exert an elevating influence on Ivo's future character and conduct. It seemed improbable. But then nothing of the sort was the object of the exercise. If matters were now going badly at Otby (only I had a dim faith that they were not) it was pretty well the unfortunate youth's bare survival that was in question.

The weight of this last, and quite realistic, thought gave me a restless half-hour in Junkin's room and even in the inferior loo, and at the end of it I made my way back to the Great Quadrangle. The vast enclosure, bleak in the staring suns.h.i.+ne, was alive with tourists. Here Jamshyd meaning the old members in their tails and gongs and gowns had lately gloried and drunk deep; now the Lion and the Lizard represented by the rest of the world and its cine-cameras were on the prowl. They poured in in clots and clumps, each with its voluble and gesticulating cicerone, from long lines of motor-coaches parked outside. Here and there were small superior groups who had arrived in hired Daimlers or in private Cadillacs brought across the Atlantic with the baggage. Within a couple of hours they would be in Stratford-upon-Avon. But they were doing Oxford at the moment.

There is nothing offensive to academic piety in these invasions, which testify to the haunting American suspicion that somewhere or other there has been a past. But it was evident that a certain physical inconvenience resulted from them. Oxford colleges are full of bottle-necks: one s.p.a.cious quad may be connected with another only by a tunnel of such modest dimensions that it is hard to spot. The builders appear to have lacked the conception even of persons walking conversably two abreast. When thronged with compacted gapers these incapacious channels almost cease to be negotiable.

I thrust my way through the scrum, and in the lodge pa.s.sed the time of day with a porter. College porters, and not aged dons reminiscing over their wine, are the men with the best memories in Oxford, and this one greeted me by name as casually as Mogridge had done the day before. Properly gratified, I went out into the street. It was as crowded as the Great Quad, yet as little frequented, so far as I could see or hear, by the indigenous inhabitants of the city. In addition to more Americans, black and brown and yellow people thronged St Aldates, Carfax, the Cornmarket, their close juxtaposition reminding me of an improving if implausible picture in a devotional work given to me in childhood: it had represented nicely dressed and well-nourished children of every clime congregated smilingly round the Good Shepherd. And the clothing of these tourists, wanderers, or pilgrims was not so westernised as to preclude here and there a jostling of brilliant colours tumbling on one another as closely as pigments on my father's palette at the end of a long day's painting. There were people who appeared to have come straight from the desert, or the arctic circle, or improbable tropical isles. There were even (as in Wordsworth's London) Negro ladies in white muslin gowns. I remembered spending a fortnight of my first long vacation in Oxford, when there had certainly been no such kaleidoscopic cosmopolitanism as this in evidence. But at that time the nations were still largely immobilised within their own territories, having been ravaged or exhausted by war.

Even in the mid-nineteenth century topographical painters and engravers could confidently represent the main thoroughfares of Oxford as almost free of wheeled vehicles: dons and undergraduates, alike voluminously gowned, stroll in a meditative calm those cobbled streets, impeded by nothing more formidable than an occasional flock of sheep. The city had become what was thought of as horribly noisy in my time; now it could be described journalistically as submerged beneath the roar of traffic. It is an inaccurate phrase. If some distance off, even heavy traffic mutters; near at hand, its chief characteristic is a restless miscellaneousness not easy to repel from one's attention. I had enough on my mind, however, to induce a state of the most old-fas.h.i.+oned abstraction, and if I was presently hearing anything as I walked it was the Corry burn.

This came to me by way of my recalling my Aunt Charlotte, and that in turn from remembering my first glimpse of Arnold Lempriere the night before. What had struck me then I realised it now had been the obscure sense of some family likeness as revealed to me. Yet his connection with my aunt could scarcely be closer than a cousins.h.i.+p. Had I ever known that her maiden name was Lempriere? There was a good reason for believing I had not. It is a name with an odd celebrity in English literary history. No inquiring boy who loves Keats remains ignorant of the existence of Lempriere's cla.s.sical dictionary, and the information sticks, since there is a curious fascination in the idea of somebody almost as young and ignorant as oneself quarrying a whole imaginative region out of such a book. So had I ever heard the name of Uncle Rory's wife I should have made this a.s.sociation in due course and the recollection would have remained with me.

What I happened to remember of Aunt Charlotte at the moment was her interest in careers for Ninian and myself. When I went fis.h.i.+ng an unproductive sport she would sometimes appear carrying a camp-stool or a shooting-stick and settle down to a discussion of this topic. The burn babbled and brawled; in its glinting waters there rarely flashed and vanished minute presences which I believed to be trout; my aunt spoke to me seriously about what she called 'adopting a profession'. She can scarcely have believed that Ninian and I could ever become a charge upon the Glencorrys, so her insistence must have been disinterested or more precisely animated by the persuasion that she had one of G.o.d's ordinances to propound. Boys who won't inherit acres must adopt some honest means to a livelihood. It was a perfectly sensible view. Offered to me in Edinburgh, and among companions nearly all of whose fathers were professional men, I would have accepted it at once. But with the heather round me, the burn murmuring messages I just couldn't catch, the peewits crying, and above me a pale blue sky as unflawed as a dunnock's egg: amid these presences I judged my aunt's conversation inept and boring. Whether I showed this I don't know, since I have little memory of the stages by which I became a tolerably polite and civilised boy. If I resented these exhortations, it was princ.i.p.ally because of what they were saying, by implication, about my father. Aunt Charlotte, who so plainly came of barbarians, contrived, far more than her husband, to be a philistine as well. Uncle Rory, although he seldom thought a thought or opened a book, had something in his blood which admitted the place of a certain strangeness in the world; to him my father was a crofter's son who had gone a little dotty but who, like other naturals, conceivably had a glimpse of something. A generation on, he would have muttered that the fellow was ent.i.tled to do his thing. To Aunt Charlotte my father had simply come from nowhere and was nowhere; if by marriage he had acquired sons who had some tide to be regarded as gentlemen, then it was essential that these sons should find an ordered place in society. As it was improbable that either of our parents were giving thought to the matter (and in this Aunt Charlotte was perfectly right) then it was inc.u.mbent upon their kinsfolk to direct Ninian and myself in the way we should go.

Aunt Charlotte possessed, although not as strongly as Uncle Rory, a sense of the duties of kins.h.i.+p; had this not been so, my brother and I would never have been received at Corry Hall. My mother, too, had this feeling intermittently, because most things were intermittent with her. My father had it not at all. His affections and interest (the latter, again, intermittent in its character) lay entirely within the nuclear family which his own household const.i.tuted, and about nearly all blood-relations.h.i.+ps beyond it he was entirely regardless and vague. Something of this att.i.tude both Ninian and I picked up which is why it would never have occurred to either of us to be curious about Aunt Charlotte's origins. I had been obliged to learn about them from Arnold Lempriere, and had so learnt because Lempriere himself took a significance in such ties for granted. Remote as our connection was, he thought of me as a kinsman, so that his relations.h.i.+p with me at once acquired a character distinguishable from that which he enjoyed even with colleagues of long standing. At present, at least, I could find nothing in myself that responded to this idea.

I certainly hadn't responded to Aunt Charlotte's ideas. For one thing, she was an astonis.h.i.+ngly ignorant woman a fact which my own ignorance somehow didn't obscure for a moment. She was interested in lawn tennis, a game at which she had herself excelled in youth which must have been at about the time, I had imagined, when women were first allowed to hit out hard at the ball. The absence of first-cla.s.s tennis in Scotland was a vexation to her (like the absence of first-cla.s.s cricket to my schoolmasters), so that she sometimes went to stay with relations in Kent in order to enjoy the satisfaction of watching it. But on the whole she disliked travel, and never left Corry except for this occasional purpose. Correspondingly, and apart from a few friends of her own sort, she didn't much care for any traffic in the other direction either. In particular she distrusted the importation of periodicals or books, as well as the invention of wireless, all of which she saw as likely channels of what she still called Bolshevism. She also disliked Americans, whom she regarded as pervasively ill-bred, boastful, and given to chewing tobacco and in consequence to the use of spittoons.

Confined within this universe of speculation and discourse, my aunt had, not unnaturally, little to say of relevance to the prospects and problems of penniless boys (as we should be) like Ninian and myself. It was her opinion that if I took Orders something might be done for me, and that Ninian was clever enough to become a barrister. In Scotland one doesn't take Orders but enters the Ministry, and barristers for sufficient historical reasons are called not barristers but advocates. But the only Scots words Aunt Charlotte ever employed were those applicable to various grades of menials notably grieve, gillie, and caddie. (A caddie is a cadet, and the term is thus one of the traces of French civilisation and influence which so oddly linger in North Britain. And this one has come down in the world. My aunt used it only when no decent tennis being available she ventured as far as the nearest horrible holiday resort for the purpose of playing a round of golf.) I myself wrote off Aunt Charlotte as a Careers Mistress at once. Ninian, being harder-headed, checked up on her, and was told by our headmaster that the Scottish bar was best left to those who had uncles on the bench. I imagine no particular imputation of nepotism was designed to be carried by this; our headmaster must simply have had plenty of opportunity to remark a certain closed quality about the society into which he had come. Ninian, he said, would do better to aim at chartered accountancy. A little later he was to tell me, with a good deal of gravity, that boys who couldn't make up their minds what to do commonly ended up as chartered accountants. These two speeches, when collated, implied a comparative judgement on Ninian's abilities and my own which was the more injurious to my brother for being based not at all on our school records. It was an intuitive judgement. Like many such, it was to prove entirely wrong. Ninian was to become an advocate, and his career was meteoric.

Walking down Oxford's Cornmarket, and preparing to turn into Broad Street with some thought of visiting Black- well's, I had thus in fact transferred myself to Corry Hall and then to Edinburgh. But I preserved at least half an eye for my actual surroundings, and into that half eye my native city now less insubstantially swam in the person of McKechnie. Carrying a shopping-basket, he was coming towards me on a pavement a little less crowded than I had been traversing hitherto. Unlike Lempriere's, his attire wasn't shabby, baggy, or in need of a vigorous brush-up. It was, however, notably drab, as if he felt most at ease moving permanently beneath a protective carapace of what the universities call subfusc. This clerkly habit was emphasised by a little row of pens and pencils clipped into his breast-pocket.

I ought to have been reflecting, during those moments in which we bore down on one another, that on the previous evening we hadn't done too badly even to the extent of feeling a certain solidarity vis-a-vis the brick-faced men and contriving a modic.u.m of properly reminiscent talk. And I ought further to have remembered that, having then taken one initiative in addressing my schoolfellow by his Christian name, it was inc.u.mbent upon me to take a further initiative now. But McKechnie, amazingly, had fixed his gaze upon the pavement. Equally amazingly and much more to an effect of revelation my own gaze had been attracted to the exceedingly unoriginal exhibits in the window of a chemist's shop. Within a second we had pa.s.sed one another by.

What was sobering about this weird re-enactment (apart from the acute embarra.s.sment it was going to occasion in both McKechnie and myself when we did next inescapably meet) was the extent to which I had been falsifying the original occasion or occasions. My memory put it, so to speak, all on McKechnie: I was the normally extravert and sociable boy, taking the establishment at least of some sort of friendly relations.h.i.+p for granted, and it was McKechnie alone who did the scurrying past with a gaze in the gutter. I now knew, as certainly as if some miraculous hand had veritably rolled back the years, that our juvenile fiasco had been a totally mutual affair. And if it hadn't had roots rather deep in our temperaments it wouldn't have produced this alarming and indecent late-flowering now.

I was so demoralised by what had just happened that I scarcely expected to reach the security of Sir Basil Blackwell's shop without some further grotesque disaster. Naturally nothing of the sort occurred. In the Balliol lodge two black men in commoner's gowns and white ties gossiped with two white men similarly attired; all four were relaxed and lounging, as if from the viva voce examination ahead of them they expected singularly little either way. An American gentleman was recording them but whether by their leave or not wasn't clear for exhibition to neighbours in Minneapolis or St Louis in the Fall; the industrious little whirr of his camera was for a moment the only sound in the Broad. Oxford, I thought, is an extravagantly easy place in which to pick up local colour.

Narrow is the entrance (appropriately, where such a temple of learning is in question) to Blackwell's shop; I jostled in it with a bearded sage who was emerging with every appearance of having bought a fis.h.i.+ng-rod; he was a professor of the university, I supposed, pursuing divided interests in this transitional week between term and vacation. Inside, I found just room to edge comfortably around. There were people browsing from table to table or shelf to shelf; there were others who looked as if their nose had been buried in a single book since immediately after breakfast. (A reader can often get a book more quickly in Blackwell's than in the Bodleian Library opposite.) If one wanted to buy a book there was a means of doing so, although it wasn't one much obtruded on the casual visitor. I could put in an agreeable hour in the place, after which I'd have to be preparing myself for the Provost's luncheon party. Not that I knew it was going to be exactly that. Possibly Mrs Poc.o.c.ke (of whom my memory was vivid) would be presiding over a board at which her husband and I confabulated tete-a-tete over the mysteries of readers.h.i.+ps.

I had a look at a table stacked with new novels; they presented, somehow, a suggestion of being less morally insalubrious than those one reads reviews of in newspapers and journals. But this may have been illusory, and a consequence of the highly respectable company they enjoyed in this enormous repository of the Word. The shelves of modern drama rendered a similar effect but then, again, they were being kept an eye on from the opposite wall by works with t.i.tles like A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage and Caterpillars of the Commonwealth and Playes Confuted in Fiue Actions. Undeterred by these minatory presences, I turned over a number of plays literally turned them over, since my interest was for the moment so idle that I looked chiefly at their back covers. John Arden (Junkin's favourite) was a decidedly photogenic young man, and Harold Pinter was a very serious-looking young man. But if both these were young men then I was myself not more than a couple of years past being quite a young man too. Heartened by this delusive discovery, I glanced up and saw that standing beside me was a lady more responsibly involved with the drama. She was my new acquaintance and the only female (not counting Tin Pin) with whom I had as yet exchanged a word during this Oxford episode Cyril Bedworth's wife.

'Good morning,' I said. 'I hope you had a pleasant dinner party? The Gaudy was everything I expected. It was even a little more.'

Mabel Bedworth's gaze went from her book to my shoes which fortunately had been handsomely polished by Plot.

'Oh, good morning!' Mrs Bedworth uttered this response as a nervous exclamation and in a very low voice; it was the identical voice, nevertheless, that had a little shaken me the evening before. She still didn't raise her eyes. She might have been said, I thought, to be doing a McKechnie on me. Two such evasive performances within fifteen minutes seemed a bit much. I had to conclude Mrs Bedworth to be feeling that, given the slightest opportunity, I would insult her with a lascivious leer. (Neither McKechnie nor I, in our disgraceful joint behaviour, could quite have feared that.) 'Do you go much to the theatre?' I asked. We had begun or at least I had a conversation rather than merely exchanged a greeting, and somehow or other it had to be carried on.

'Cyril and I really did see The Accomplices' As she thus named my own current play, Mrs Bedworth at last swiftly glanced at me. The effect was to lend to her features as a whole that appearance of floating behind a curtain of gossamer which might have returned to me in my dreams of the previous night had not coa.r.s.er intervening experiences got in the way. My head swims comparatively seldom in the presence of women, but it did a little swim now. One had to admit that Mabel Bedworth, as the chaste wife (as she certainly was) of a dim scholar, had a good deal to contend with.

But I wasn't sure that she coped with her liability by simply shunning the duel of s.e.x. She had just packed a good deal of mischief into three words. The a.s.surance in 'really did see' carried all the mockery of authorial vanity that might have been achieved by a Meredithian heroine. Having planted her shaft, moreover, she now turned aside gracefully enough.

'But Cyril and I,' she said, 'don't very often get to town together. It means baby-sitting for too long. So we miss things we'd like to see. That's why I'm in Blackwell's. I haven't seen Hartley's House, and I want to read it. But it doesn't seem to be here. What did you think, Mr Pattullo, of Hartley's House?'

'It probably isn't published yet but, of course, you could have them order it for you.' I made this point first because I hadn't myself seen Hartley's House, and for the moment could remember nothing about it. In the theatres of London a great many plays come and go. 'I haven't seen it either,' I then said briefly. Mrs Bedworth didn't pursue the topic. It was almost as if she felt it to have been rashly embarked on, and I had to think of something else. 'Does the vacation,' I asked, 'make a great difference to you when it comes along?'

'Oh, yes a lot!' Mrs Bedworth paused on this, and then added swiftly, 'For Cyril, I mean. He can get on with his own work. Term is terribly heavy, particularly since he has had to be Acting Senior Tutor. And I'm afraid they'll make him Senior Tutor permanently next year.'