Staircase in Surrey: The Gaudy Part 3

Had I been asked in recent years (as I certainly had not) about Cyril Bedworth's undergraduate studies, I should probably have believed myself able to recall them as concerned with the extreme antiquities of English literature. But this would only have been a consequence of a generally held persuasion that the more reclusive personalities around the college tended to occupy themselves in that field. In fact, Bedworth must have begun by reading Modern Languages, and it was I myself who, inspired by an elderly don called Timbermill, had for a time absorbed myself in the pursuit of mere-dragons, marsh-steppers, eldritch wives, whales, loathly worms, and argumentative nightingales and owls. Yet even if Bedworth had been bred among monsters, the preparation would not have been inapposite to encounter with Charlus and Widmerpool, both of whom own that dimension of the grotesque without which, as Proust himself remarks, major art cannot be.

This rumination took me into the Great Quadrangle, and simultaneously out of the company of Mogridge, who drifted away with as little stir as he had drifted up. His goal, one felt, might have been indifferently a gla.s.s of sherry or whatever today is the equivalent of the sources of the Nile. It was part of the mystery of his career that, ever since Mochica, he had doggedly if intermittently projected himself as a traveller and natural-born travel writer without ever attaining striking success again. He seemed not a man who came alive before a mere itinerary, even if it was of a tolerably taxing sort. Mogridge needed all too plainly, he needed an occasion, an hour, a crisis of the most absolute order. If he had a second time found such, it had hitherto pa.s.sed unrecorded. The published episodes of his later wandering life were, if the truth be told, a little dull. I thought it appeared the idlest of thoughts that it would be fun to be present when, or if, his moment came again.

I had a few minutes to look round. It was an animated scene: animated in compressing within the view some three hundred living souls, and literally a scene to the extent that their setting held its hint of the theatrical. The Great Quadrangle was like a child's fort as such things were when my father was a boy: this chiefly because battlemented within as well as without, as if in a less urbane age rival factions of the learned, although all quartered within the curtilage of the college, had been accustomed to direct cross-bows at one another from behind these lurking places. The inward-facing crenellations had replaced a bal.u.s.trade during some phase of Gothicising exuberance in the early nineteenth century. Equally suggestive of the nursery was the large flag exactly square, like the Great Quadrangle itself which at moments blew so stiffly out on its staff above the leads that it might have been made not of fabric but of tin, like those which astronauts round about that time had taken to planting on the surface of the moon. This one displayed in an improbable-seeming blazon the personal standard of the most magnificent of England's kings.

Suns.h.i.+ne slanted into the quadrangle still. It caught the jets flung up by the central fountain. In the surrounding lily pool it glittered on the scales of the great chub and its attendant goldfish, ide, and orfe, so that these became a watery a.n.a.logue of the land monsters now a.s.sembling around them. It fell, too, on the long linen-covered tables (where the drinks were) along the terrace to the east. On one hand it already showed the college's lovely tower in gentle semi-silhouette; and on the other continued to bathe in a full summer warmth the hidden chapel's ancient spire.

If all this made up the toy castle, the guests were the toy soldiers. The majority, whose black tails were for the most part concealed beneath equally black M.A. gowns like my own, presented a predominantly sombre show. But the gleam of their s.h.i.+rts and waistcoats and the glitter of their decorations (for it was remarkable how many of these middle-aged men had picked up something of the kind) provided enough relief to suggest at least those splendidly dark-uniformed but braided and beribboned hussars who formed the aristocracy of the toy-box. One missed, it was true, the horses to say nothing of the field-guns. But the more learned, or at least senior, academics outshone in splendour the redcoats, the Highland regiments, the whole Household Division. 'Scarlet' was no more than a code-word for the doctoral finery; one could rehea.r.s.e the whole spectrum or palette without exhausting the gorgeousness of their array.

Quite suddenly, I understood about Mrs Bedworth and Virginia Woolf. Like that spirited feminist, the serious Cyril's wife found masculine hierarchy, pomp, circ.u.mstance and adornment exquisitely absurd. Three Guineas (which contains a satirically presented photograph called 'A University Procession') was one of her sacred books and no doubt A Room of One's Own was another. Whenever, but it can't have been often, she raised her eyes to the Oxford spectacle, she found in it perhaps a prompting to indignation, but certainly an enormous joke. She must at this moment be settling down, with other dons' formally attired wives, to what she had called the little women's poached egg. I made a note of Mabel Bedworth in my mind as one new acquaintance I wanted to meet again.

A servant bore down upon me with a tray laden with gla.s.ses of sherry; the stuff came in two steeply contrasting shades, so that there should be no mistaking sweet for dry. Another servant, seemingly of greater consequence, handed me a sheet of folded pasteboard which proved to provide a menu, information about a number of wines, a toast list, and a seating plan for the entire company. I was about to consult this vade mec.u.m in order to discover on whom I should presently be dependent for my more immediate entertainment when I found that Albert Talbert was once more confronting me.

'Ah,' Talbert said at his huskiest, 'Dalrymple again!' But upon this, his distant seismic mirth immediately followed, and I realised that what was being registered was the absurdity of his ever having mistaken me for so unlikely a personage. I might, I knew, be Dalrymple to him once more in an hour's time, but it was nice to be securely Pattullo for the moment. 'I believe the Provost is bound to have much to discuss with you,' Talbert went on mysteriously and with an instant switch to his inexpressible gravity. 'But there is tomorrow. It would give my wife great pleasure if you could come to tea in Old Road.'

This was verbatim a formula from twenty years back, and disconcerting for that reason. But it was disconcerting, too, because I had no thought of lingering in Oxford more than an hour beyond breakfast next morning, nor any belief that the college would in the least want to put up with me (or anybody else) for longer than that. But I saw that I must either plead another engagement or return a genuine acceptance at once. It was likely, indeed, that the proposal would vanish from Talbert's recollection almost on the instant. I couldn't risk a mere diplomatic murmur, all the same; in addition to which I found even the polite fiction that Mrs Talbert would like to see me unexpectedly pleasing.

'Thank you,' I said, and just stopped myself from adding a respectful 'Sir'. 'I shall look forward to it very much.' This, too, was formulaic, but more sincerely uttered than sometimes in the past. 'I think it's four o'clock? I'll walk up.' Talbert had always liked to hear of his pupils as engaging in pedestrianism, which he regarded as the most wholesome employment of periods of leisure.

'Four o'clock.' Talbert nodded weightily, almost as if some sombre astrological significance attended this hour, and prepared to move away. But he paused for a moment longer, and I saw he was making sure I had put on my white tie. His own tie was white, but so yellowed at the edges that it had the appearance of a rare species of b.u.t.terfly. I noticed that his shoes, correspondingly, although now decently black, showed signs of having begun life as brown, and I remembered that Dekker and Ma.s.singer hadn't brought him a penny. I was still feeling decently ashamed that half a dozen over-sprightly comedies had put me within reach of a modest competence when he turned and toddled off. 'Toddled' is the necessary word. I recalled a stage direction in which, somewhat extravagantly, I had required the actor playing some Talbert-figure of my imagination to progress in the manner of that sort of street toy (for I love such things) constructed thus to move down a gentle inclined plane. It wasn't a motion that seemed to cohere with Talbert's rather spare figure; one would think of it as right for a tubby man with short legs. The explanation lay in Boanerges, the Talberts' dog. Boanerges was an ill- trained dog having suffered, I suppose, like the Talberts' children in some respects, through that excessive household addiction to folios and quartos. For years Boanerges, straining (doggedly, one may say) on his lead, had hauled Albert Talbert at a precarious bodily incline all over Oxford and its countryside. I had frequently been privileged to accompany them. Boanerges must long since have pa.s.sed away. But the inclination remained, and produced the forward-slanted toddle.

There was now much noise in the Great Quadrangle, and I got the impression that an unnatural proportion of the guests a proportion, that is, in excess of the moiety that balanced conversation would posit must be talking simultaneously. Hunger, nervousness, exuberance, and perhaps a persuasion that in such a hubbub it is easier to utter than to hear, contributed to this conduct. People were also doing much charging at each other, laughing loudly in one another's faces, and vigorously shaking hands. As group behaviour this perhaps represented a syndrome of middle-age. Old Mr Mumford's lot would show more restraint, and the younger generation due to turn up to the Gaudy following this one would not quite have forgotten the casual grace that attends undergraduate social intercourse. I decided that I hated this nel mezzo cammin business and being myself like all these men so inescapably entered upon what another poet has called the stupidity of one's middle years. Although already aware of a number of people whom it would be mannerless not presently to greet, I elected for the moment a watching role. Some others were doing the same thing. There were men who combined an odd-man-out stance with a composure in which nothing fact.i.tious appeared; wine gla.s.s in hand, these simply contemplated the scene as one might contemplate a waterfall or the monkey-house in a zoo. Others were uneasy and irresolute doubtful here of a welcome, and suspecting there the hint of an amused regard. A few behaved in a manner I have observed among practised party-going women awkwardly circ.u.mstanced amid strangers or uncongenial persons moving rapidly here and there, now with a parting glance or gesture over a shoulder, and now with the air of edging their way towards some suddenly glimpsed boon companion in a farther corner of the quad. I was wondering how this particular vagary of self-consciousness could be made lucid on the stage when I became aware that the evening's activities were entering a new phase.

So far, I hadn't remarked what, in another context, would be termed the top bra.s.s. The Provost, the Chancellor of the University, the Vice-Chancellor, the personages of high distinction whether academic, political, or even artistic who had elsewhere been receiving sundry honours earlier that day: these and others of consequence had not been provided with their sherry, as had the majority, en plein air. They had been hobn.o.bbing together in the senior common room, appropriated for the occasion to the uses of a VIP lounge. Now a door of this arcanum giving on the Great Quadrangle had been thrown open, and these important people were emerging in a kind of half-hearted formal procession, and with a diffident dignity at once comical and impressive. The Provost walked beside the Chancellor, a former Prime Minister. The Pro-Provost guided the tottering steps of a Swedish physicist, even more eminent than aged. Similar notabilities followed, and then came a few of the more senior fellows, together with a handful of old members who were to be presumed marginally more distinguished than the main body of their contemporaries whether in Church or State, Learning, the Law, or the armed forces of the Crown. I was edified to see that Tony Lord Marchpayne, as I ought now to think of him had made the top grade. He was far from looking out of place in it.

The appearance of this company in multi-coloured shambling state, like a file of richly caparisoned camels emerging from a caravanserai caused some abatement, although not anything so absurd as an awed silence, in the larger concourse dispersed as with an appropriate symbolism at a slightly lower level around it. The drop in volume was the occasion, as it happened, of a curious effect of orchestration. As when the trumpets and the tubas, breathless, cease to blare, and are succeeded by the melody of the wood-winds calling from a different world, so now there percolated into the Great Quadrangle from some adjacent corner of the college the clear voices and brief laughter of young men enjoying themselves. They may have been outrageously skylarking, or they may have been playing croquet but they were certainly undergraduates, and probably in one way or another expelling the stale air of the Examination Schools from their lungs. The sound ceased. It was as if it had floated through glades and ridings to touch the ear of a bustling rout or hunting party this only for a moment, since the alien folk producing it were departing under the hill.

I was probably alone in thinking of the fairies. General salivation was taking place at the promising signs that dinner was going to happen at last. The procession moved on towards the broad staircase leading up to the hall. Only one incident interrupted its progress, and Tony was responsible for this. He had observed some elderly acquaintance down below: a retired fellow of the college, perhaps, who had modestly taken his station amid the herd. Tony's gesture was to break ranks, run down two or three steps, shake hands with this person, compress into seconds what had the appearance of a leisurely exchange of talk, and skip back into his place just as the Provost's party began its climb. It would have been easy crudely put to make a muck of this turn; a breath of the over-affable, the slightest forcing of the cordial note, and any observer of the kind congregated here would have judged that the chap thought too much of himself. I saw at once, however, that Tony owned skill in such small performances.

'A pleasant fellow, Marchpayne.' A clergyman vaguely known to me, and with whom I had already exchanged a nod murmured this as we fell into step together. 'I'm delighted by his signal promotion.'

'I haven't heard about it.'

'Marchpayne has gained a seat in the Cabinet. The reshuffle came over on the six o'clock news.'

I said that I was delighted too, and it struck me that Tony must have known about his elevation while we were consuming Plot's tea and anchovy toast together. But he had kept it under his hat the bowler hat that had lain on the table between us and spoken of himself casually as a reliable junior Minister. Perhaps it would have been awkward in him to say anything else particularly since I had so culpably known hardly a thing about him. He was evidently hard-working, and didn't readily take time off. That handshake had seemed to me entirely political as much a reflex action as the patting or kissing of babies. Yet I already possessed evidence that it was not in the interest of his career or his party that Tony, on the present occasion, was pertinaciously engaged.

I might have got further with this had I not, on the very threshold of hall, at last consulted my vade me c.u.m, and discovered to my surprise that Ra.n.a.ld McKechnie would be seated on my right.

V.

Retrospection may be among the pleasures of advancing age, but it can prove an unnerving indulgence as well. Memory trundles us at will back to any point on the lengthening corridor and there waiting for us is not a dead but an unfinished self. We join him on his journey and walk with him for as long as we please, yet our companions.h.i.+p is on unequal terms, since as revenants we command a forward vision which he lacks. The corridor turns, darkens, deceives with whispering ambitions. We, because we have walked this way before, cannot be surprised or disillusioned like our doppelganger, but of the two it is we who are the more aware of the constant play of the contingent upon the small unfolding history. Were we philosophers surveying the macrocosm, we might view unperturbed what tiny accidents, unidentifiable by the most pertinacious historian, have controlled humanity's dance through recorded time. But as seen in the microcosm of our personal fortunes the unslumbering, pouncing inconsequence alarms.

This is a portentous way of introducing McKechnie in whose company I was about to eat (as the vade mec.u.m told me) a number of uncomplicated dishes beginning with smoked trout and ending with strawberry meringue. But the point is that he and I had been at school together, and that his coming to Oxford had been the sole occasion of my coming too. I was to be sitting beside a man who had brought Chance into my life very prominently indeed.

Our school, a mixed affair of day-boys and boarders after a fas.h.i.+on infrequent in the English scheme of things, had been founded as a device of the haute bourgeoisie of Edinburgh for segregating their sons from less privileged boys and thereby gaining them a firmer grip on the professional hierarchies of the city. That had been when the Modern Athens was enjoying its Indian Summer. Bleak and Doric (as I have said), brutal (until shortly before my generation), Philistine (still): the school was 'cla.s.sical' in the severest way, treating drill in the ancient languages as the sole purpose of education. It dominated the Scottish bench and bar, the university, the consulting-rooms and, to a lesser extent, the established presbyterian Kirk. It was a highly successful monopoly affair, erected on a strong regional basis, and I don't know why, by my time, it had taken to slanting itself southward as it had. Its Rector was a diminutive Etonian; its masters were nearly all large, expatriate, and slightly bewildered Englishmen, dismayed by the absence of county cricket, murmuring to us of Balliol and New College, Emmanuel and King's. On Sundays we went the day-boys in kilts to St Giles' or St Cuthbert's, and along with our parents and aunts hearkened to persons of quasi-Calvinistic persuasion wrestling with the Lord in conceived prayer. But on weekdays the whole school temperately hinted to the same deity that he should fulfil the desires and pet.i.tions of his servants as might be most expedient for them, or direct and prosper the High Court of Parliament, under our most religious and gracious King at that time a.s.sembled. (These extraordinary Anglican prayers, given a final polish by a flock of divines at the command of a defected Scottish monarch, were among my first glimpses of the urbanity of the English tongue.) Nearly all the alert and clever boys had a notion of going to Oxford. With some of us the pull appeared to be romantic and poetic rather than intellectual. The Scholar Gipsy fled our gaze amid the contours of the Pentland hills. The Last Enchantments blew around us as we played our barbarous games with wooden bats (employed, too, as instruments of correction by prefects) and napless tennis-b.a.l.l.s in the pebbly playgrounds we called the 'yards'.

My father professed to be an Anglophobe. Next after the French, whom he regarded as our nearest civilised neighbours, he liked the Irish this even although they had never produced a great painter. He liked seeing Shaw's plays. He would sometimes pore over Ulysses, although he was a man who didn't often read a book. Had I, at seventeen, gone to him and announced that the time had come for me to take up residence in Dublin, or even better in Paris, I believe he would at once have consulted his bank manager about what could be done. But the idea of Oxford he didn't care for at all. If I wanted to write, he said, I had better keep clear of a country that had produced H. G. Wells and John Galsworthy. Such talk on my father's part was mere random prejudice. But he was an obstinate man.

Then he received a commission to paint Professor McKechnie. At that time he still undertook occasional oil portraits, as well as more numerous portrait-sketches in crayon or pastel: these last for what he called dentist's money, although I imagine the proceeds were quite enough to pay my brother's school fees and my own. He would almost certainly have become a distinguished portrait painter had he not so firmly settled his allegiance elsewhere.

Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night: G.o.d said, Let Monet be! and all was light.

I remember his delight when I thus perverted for him Pope's couplet.

The occasions with Professor McKechnie were not a success; nor, I imagined, was the portrait, although I had never set eyes on it. There were both social and temperamental incompatabilities. My father was a man of the people, and an artist; in my mother he had married, by what was virtually a mesalliance, the daughter of a Highland laird. The McKechnies had been scholars and allied to scholars for generations; the present one was a philosopher, a belated representative of a branch of the species known, I believe, as the Scottish Hegelians. He was very shy, but very chilly as well; he must have hated having his likeness taken by an ill-dressed limner smelling of whisky; no spark could be struck out of him nor the acceptance of anything except a cup of tea and a minimum of polite conversation.

Even so, the odds would have been on my father's merely laughing at Professor McKechnie, and perhaps making ludicrous sketches of him for the amus.e.m.e.nt of fellow artists in congenial hostelries. For some reason, however, he took an active dislike to his sitter, and thereafter referred to him as the Dreich, a Scots word so inherently expressive as to require no gloss. The Dreich appeared to have been a little less than dreich only on one topic, that of his son Ra.n.a.ld, whose accomplishments my father took it into his head he exhibited with a tedious particularity as being comprehensively superior to my own. There was certainly plenty of scope for such a comparison. Ra.n.a.ld McKechnie, although nearly a year younger than myself, was already what we called Dux of the school; he had graduated from Virgil and Horace and Herodotus and Euripides to more mysterious writers such as Lucretius and Pindar; he had been the recipient of sundry medals, prizes, and bursaries; and he had lately gained an Open Scholars.h.i.+p to Oxford. Moreover, it appeared that Ra.n.a.ld was a promising performer on the violin. (To this last brag it pleased my father to a.s.sert that he had responded with the information which was totally untrue that I had lately switched from the bagpipes to the big drum in the JTC band.) This episode in my father's professional life, which I had no difficulty in accepting as gospel at the time, has come with the years to bear a character altogether implausible in my mind. It is impossible that Professor McKechnie should have delivered the sustained comparative discourse attributed to him. My father must have made up at least the greater part of the encounter, a recital of which would keep him happily employed for half an hour on end. But as virtually his own brain-child he was all the fonder of it, so that he rapidly came to believe in its substantial reality. At the same time, there must have been a kernel of truth in the little saga of the boastful Hegelian; otherwise my father would not so dramatically have proceeded from words to action.

I have recorded that he was in many ways a negligent and even scandalous parent. It would not normally have occurred to him that my progress at school ought to be the subject of encouragement, admonishment, or any sort of notice at all, any more than it would have occurred to him that I needed a bath or a new pair of shoes. He was aware that I had taken to scribbling, but would have supposed this in a normal order of things even had I persisted in the activity twelve hours a day. He occasionally read what I had written, and commented on it not as to the schoolboy I in fact was but as if I were a contemporary of his own. This could be disconcerting, but I was to come to regard five minutes of it as having been a good deal more useful than five hours of Talbert's tutorials. It was these tutorials that now lay unexpectedly ahead of me.

Because of his indignation against the Dreich, it occurred to my father to rummage through some drawer of my mother's until he found a stack of my school reports. I doubt whether he had so much as glanced at them when, twice a term, they arrived by post. Now he read them through, and his main discovery was that over a period of ten years (for it was a school at which one was expected to spend a quite dauntingly high proportion of one's total life-span) I had been wholly undistinguished in the studies princ.i.p.ally approved by the place. But I had always come first in the subject vaguely known as English, and within the previous twelve months had collected in this field prizes open to compet.i.tion by the entire school. On the basis of these facts my father conjectured correctly, although he might well have been quite wrong that I had twice triumphed over Ra.n.a.ld McKechnie (whom he now referred to as Wee Dreichie) as a juvenile authority on Old Mortality, Idylls of the King and, I seem to remember, The Advantages and Disadvantages of Civilisation. What then came to my father was the thought that I could repeat this performance on other territory.

My father packed a bag, called a taxi, and went off to the Waverley station. We supposed his destination to be London, since he had a number of friends there, for the most part senior to himself. (Sickert and Steer, his early masters, had both died m a great age a few years before, but he kept in touch with some minor men who had remained faithful to the ideas of the Camden Town Group.) He was in fact on his way to Oxford.

He put up at the Mitre and walked around. Tony Mumford would have said that he was casing the joint. I have an idea that it shook him much as Carca.s.sonne or Albi had once done. He walked up to Boars Hill, and from that modest alt.i.tude surveyed the city in late-afternoon suns.h.i.+ne. He was sufficiently impressed to make the same expedition five hours later thereby coming to identify, I don't doubt, the line of festal light in Christ-Church hall. On the next day he took a fuller view of the several colleges. He was later to admit having expended almost an hour in studying Magdalen Tower from several viewpoints. Why he decided against that particular place of education I don't know. Conceivably he had once dipped into Gibbon's Autobiographies, and derived the impression that matters were rather slackly conducted there. He eventually plumped for the Radcliffe Observatory, for he had once seen the real Temple of the Winds and judged that here was a pretty good English imitation: he was distressed upon discovering this particular architectural landmark to be unprovided with residential accommodation. But a further prowl brought him within what was to become known to me as the Great Quadrangle. He traversed it, turned, and was looking at another tower one under which he had pa.s.sed on entering. It was only one look, since he owned a practised eye. He walked back to the gate, and asked to be directed to the office of the Princ.i.p.al.

I have failed, I see, to mention that my father was an impressive person. I should be giving a misleading sketch if I were to let the whisky and the unpromising attire suggest that he was any sort of Gully Jimson. Within a few minutes he was in the presence of the Provost, and informing him that he proposed to commit his younger son Duncan to his charge.

It was to be a moot point on the staircase whether the Provost, in his early prime, was more handsome than urbane or more urbane than handsome, but there was agreement that a certain masked and even august indecisiveness attended his character. Certainly he didn't know how to cope effectively with my father. It was a date at which a couple of generations must have pa.s.sed since even a Duke of Buccleuch could reasonably have walked into the place and announced such a simple disposition of things. The Provost professed an extreme of interest. Told that my particular line lay with Old Mortality and The Advantages and Disadvantages of Civilisation, he may have thought that he saw a gleam of light. The college, he explained, offered a single Open Scholars.h.i.+p for young men proposing to study English Language and Literature, and nothing could be more agreeable to him than that Mr Pattullo's son should offer himself for the examination the more so as all other places were unfortunately booked up. My father brought out a pocket diary, and begged to know the date upon which I should present myself for the compet.i.tion.

The Provost, as was proper in one in his position, was a respecter of persons. He was also a judge of them, and he was presumably beginning to like his visitor. He amiably suggested that it might a.s.sist my candidature were I to be provided with some printed particulars of the test, and on this pretext he got himself out of his library. Perhaps he employed his short absence in consulting the current issue of Who's Who in his secretary's room a volume in which it happened to be recorded that my father was President-Elect of the Royal Scottish Academy. (This was a circ.u.mstance which was to produce a dramatic change in the Pattullo domestic economy.) When he returned it was with an invitation to stay to luncheon. It appears that the meal produced some conversation about Albrecht Drer. My father was thereafter to judge the Provost, as a scholar, a decided improvement on the Dreich.

Chance had not closed its innings with me. The examination, when I presented myself for it a few weeks later, had every appearance of a shambles, so that I understood the whimsical but kindly regard which my headmaster had cast upon me when I told him it was going to happen. English literature turned out to occupy rather less of the show than I had expected, and the questions about it posited a kind of teaching and sophistication although not, perhaps, an extent of reading of which I was innocent. The ordeal ended with an essay paper. 'Intolerance,' I read, 'is twin-brother of conviction. Only those who believe in nothing can tolerate absolutely anything. Do you agree?' Whether or not I agreed was something, I felt sure, about which I could arrive at no decision in two hours flat. So could I 'discuss' as a 'proposition': 'No theatre is worth supporting that cannot support itself'? My subsequent fortunes suggest that I ought to have had a go at that one. But what arrested me was the last of the lot. It asked simply: 'Why do painters paint?'

I can see now that this was a stupid question, fudged up by a tired examiner. It asked eighteen-year-old boys to produce some sort of coherent thought in the field of aesthetic theory, which is absurd. But I saw it at the time as a very pertinent question indeed; one I was staggered to find had never entered my head, and which I somehow owed it to my father to get clear now. I unscrewed my pen and waded in.

I was sometimes to wonder, later on, under whose examining eye this last-ditch and fateful effort came. Could it conceivably have been Albert Talbert's own, reluctantly diverted to the ch.o.r.e from the more responsible task of determining whether Keep the Widow Waking can indeed be a lost play by Dekker, while Charles and Mary played Scrabble on the well-worn carpet at his feet? Whoever read it must have had a good deal of rational opposition to crush among those who had acquainted themselves with the rest of what I had written. But it was as a transformed personage styled John Ruskin Scholar that, in the following October, I again walked into the Great Quadrangle, and then on into Surrey, like a man entering his own house.

I seem to have been recounting these incidents as exemplifying the reach of the fortuitous in life. Had that portrait commission not come my father's way, and had his sitter not irritated him by dwelling on a son's precocious scholastic attainments, my career would have been shaped for me by quite other impulsions, probably as arbitrary as these. And at the time, excited and elated though I was, I certainly owned an occasional alarmed sense of being freakishly shoved around.

But were my father's motives quite as he represented them? He was a highly intelligent man, as most good artists are, although like many artists of his time he felt that this was something artists were wise to keep to themselves, since it wasn't intelligence that clients and patrons felt they were coming forward to buy. Again, inattentive to his children as he commonly appeared, it is probable that he took a hard look at us from time to time, and he may have thought to discern in me some slender talent which would be the better of removal for a time from its home ground. His own training had taken him far afield; at an age when I was still messing around with my bad Greek and worse Latin his eye had been already fixed on Rome. He had a feeling for the larger traditions and the major centres. If I were to write, he may have reflected, it would be in English and better that, pace Wells and Galsworthy, than in some cranky synthetic Scots, comprehensible to n.o.body north of Perth or south of the Tweed. And he may have thought, finally, that if I could bring off something rather surprising it might do me a lot of good, and that if I failed I should only be learning what most of life is like. All these rational considerations may have been behind his descent on the Provost, and may have prompted him to sink his itself rational distrust of the hideous materialism of mid-twentieth century England. At the same time I don't doubt that my father genuinely pleased himself with the idea that Wee Dreichie and I were to continue in compet.i.tion on the larger stage of the University of Oxford. This was sheer fantasy. Ra.n.a.ld McKechnie and I were going up to different colleges, to read different subjects, and there was no conceivable manner in which we could ever be thought of as rivals again.

I didn't suppose that we should become intimates. He had been regularly ahead of me, and we were arriving in Oxford simultaneously only because the John Ruskin business had erupted on me after an improperly brief period in the Cla.s.sical Sixth. Moreover, Ra.n.a.ld McKechnie was an un.o.btrusive boy, much taken up with his books. Still, I did now a.s.sume we should acknowledge each other, and I was startled when, in my first Oxford week, he scurried straight past me in the street. More than that, he adopted a ducking posture which was unnerving; he was a pallid youth with a tip-tilted nose which he was now directing at the pavement of the Cornmarket much like a maniac deep in some fantasy of being a plough or a bulldozer. I ought to have told myself that the man was extravagantly shy as I had my father's word for it that his father was. There was no other reasonable interpretation of the incident. I had never been in a position to insult or bully him, even had I wanted to; indeed, I believe there must have been at least a brief period in which he would have been ent.i.tled to thrash me with one of the wooden bats had he been inclined that way. No doubt I had regarded him with the easy contempt that an impatient, facile, and versatile boy feels for anybody he regards as a swot. But then he must have been fairly widely acquainted with the similar opprobrium, rather more vicious in its incidence, visited upon learned children like himself by the merely stupid and oafish always in generous supply in any school.

What I did upon the occasion of this abortive encounter feel was that the sight of me in Oxford's Cornmarket disconcerted McKechnie in a way that the similar sight of me in Edinburgh's Princes Street would not have done. Oxford was his place; it was territorially his by a sort of hereditary right rather as it was to be Ivo Mumford's after a different fas.h.i.+on. I belonged to an alien order. Since the Dreich had probably thought of my father like that, here was a pattern repeating itself in a younger generation. Subsequent experience was to suggest to me that I had not been wholly astray in admitting this persuasion. Scholars and artists often feel a strong mutual attraction, and the history of literature or of painting, as of philosophy, displays processes of cross-fertilisation constantly at work. But antipathies exist as well. Talbert was one day to confide to me that he regarded poets as unreliable and disagreeable people, to whom he would always accord a wide berth; yet Talbert's fife was wholly devoted to the minutiae of their accomplishment.

This is almost the whole story of my relations.h.i.+p with Ra.n.a.ld McKechnie during our undergraduate years. No circ.u.mstance existed to bring us into contact in default of some specific move by one or other of us. Our schoolfellows at Oxford were sufficiently numerous to hold an occasional dinner or to field an eleven or a fifteen, but McKechnie was not a man for affairs of that sort. As for myself, I was in a phase of regarding my native town as a provincial, sn.o.bbish, Philistine place, which my own cleverness had triumphantly thrust behind me. I managed to feel this even although I was in love with an Edinburgh girl, so I must have been more or less drunk not only on Oxford itself, but also on England and the English at large. Today I am inclined to view as a simple ethnographical or topographical truth the proposition that persons and things become steadily more chewed up and rubbis.h.i.+ng as one moves down Great Britain from north to south. But this may also be a judgement on the sweeping side.

And now here I was, standing behind my chair beside Ra.n.a.ld McKechnie while grace was being sung. It was an elaborate affair. The college organist (in the most gorgeous of all Oxford's robes) conducted a whole squad of choristers and singing men, and between bursts of song the Provost and chaplain antiphonally chanted. Thus edified, we sat down. McKechnie had taken the initiative in murmuring a good evening with a courtesy that told me one thing at once: he was, of course, another of my hosts. By one of those mysteries of the Oxford scene, he had been accorded the sort of promotion, presumably to a Chair, which involved being shunted from one college to another for the purposes of such social life as he cared to enjoy.

It wasn't, I felt at once, an enjoyment that came to him easily, and I myself took a glance of misgiving round the immediate set-up. So far, I have in the main been recording contacts with academic persons, or with Lord Marchpayne (who had that day joined the Cabinet), or with Gavin Mogridge (the celebrated writer and traveller) with this or with glimpses of men yet more distinguished. But the character of the gathering at large was quite different. Here were simply several hundred former members of the college, fairly close to each other not only as an age group but also in social stratification. Most of them had been putting in the last twenty years or so pus.h.i.+ng ahead in the financial or industrial or professional life of the community. Their success-quotient was high. They interlocked through marriage relations.h.i.+ps and sundry fields of common activity, and they shared a large stock of common a.s.sumptions. Individually they weren't all that remarkable, but collectively they suggested and not least to themselves a formidable reservoir of power. Collectively again, one wouldn't much have identified them with the life of the mind.

I took a quick glance at McKechnie's other neighbour. He was a brick-faced man, and wore a monocle; he would certainly be, among other things, a rider to fox-hounds. Beyond him was another brick-faced man, wearing what his friends would call the right sort of gongs, meaning the DSO and MC. On my own other hand sat a bearded person in clerical dress. The dining-list named him, not too informatively, as the Prebendary of Tullytumble. I recognised him as the man glimpsed by Tony and myself in P. P. Killiecrankie's old rooms, holding up a jacket and then composing himself for a pre-party snooze. Beyond him was another cleric, in attire running to much purple and lace.

It wasn't, I told myself, too good a look-out. Whoever had arranged the placement for this small corner of the feast had thought in terms of two ecclesiastics chumming up, two brick-faced men doing the same, and between them McKechnie and myself as a couple of happy schoolfellows. And like that it would have to be. I mightn't for my own part have all that difficulty when turning to the Hibernian clergyman. But I doubted whether Ra.n.a.ld McKechnie had any future worth speaking of with the fox-hunting man.

'I hope that your play is enjoying considerable success?'

McKechnie asked this as we settled down, and I am afraid I received the inquiry without pleasure. It was even more depressing, somehow, than 'Do you still write plays?' Since an eternity of fame I took it to imply was unlikely to attend my effort, or even the approbation of the judicious either, it was reasonable to hope that I was getting out of it the modest monetary reward with which it was alone apposite to a.s.sociate such a concoction.

'It's doing well enough,' I replied, not the less shortly because I was perfectly aware that my reaction was absurd. 'One writes these things, and rather yearns that they may make somebody a moment merry. I hope this Gaudy is going to make you just that.'

'Oh!' McKechnie looked at me in a startled way, as he well might upon such a graceless performance. 'Well, as a matter of fact, I know hardly anybody here. I expect you know nearly everybody. I've only recently become attached to the college, and begun to get the hang of common room. I try to dine three or four times a term.' McKechnie spoke as if of facing up to the dentist or some other species of possibly painful therapy.

'Yes, of course. And, Ra.n.a.ld, it's a great pleasure to congratulate you, even belatedly, on your appointment. I've forgotten whether it's what is called a Regius Chair?'

'Yes-yes, it is.' 'Ra.n.a.ld' had made McKechnie blink, as it well might. He had waived any words of self-introduction, but not otherwise acknowledged our previous a.s.sociation; and certainly we had never been on Christian-name terms in youth. I saw him take a quick glance at his list of diners: it did record the fact that I was Mr Duncan Pattullo. 'And thank you very much, Duncan.' He paused. 'I suppose we never knew each other very well. Although I think we might find we actually came up to Oxford in the same year.'

'I think so, too.' I judged this presumably genuine vagueness impressive. 'Of course, I went down immediately after taking Schools. And I haven't always lived in England, which is something which curtails one's acquaintance a good deal.'

'Yes.' McKechnie appeared to weigh the sufficiency of this reply. 'Obviously so,' he amplified, rather as Mogridge might have done.

'Do you have to do a lot of lecturing?' I inquired. My tone must have been that in which one asks an elderly gentlewoman to whom one has been introduced at some rural occasion whether there is a good vicar in the parish.

'A certain amount. And, of course, there is examining every few years. But none of it is sufficiently burdensome to interfere with one's work.'

A quick vision of Talbert absorbed in his folios enabled me to understand this remark, which a stranger to the place might have found perplexing enough. I wondered whether McKechnie and I could be said to be doing well. It wasn't difficult to feel a terminus to our small-talk as looming uncomfortably close ahead. And more than an hour must elapse before the important people ranged at high table began delivering themselves of their speeches, so that we could sit back and listen. It was clear that my schoolfellow and I must either open up some joint area of boyhood reminiscence, or find a topic of current interest as a basis for conversation. What I tried was, roughly, in the first of these categories.

'Do you still keep up your violin?' I asked.

It seemed a harmless question, although its phrasing was perhaps unfortunate. It echoed, after all, a form of words I didn't judge too happy when addressed to myself, and moreover it faintly invoked an image of McKechnie with the instrument tucked under his chin. But this was no reason for McKechnie to greet it, as he did, with a surprised and even offended glance. I realised that at school we had probably known nothing about his violin-playing; that it had been as it now possibly remained an activity cherished in privacy; and that I owed my knowledge of it to an occasion between our fathers which I couldn't with any discretion refer to.

But McKechnie's discomposure, although momentary, told me something beyond this. As I moved up the school, and gained a certain confidence militating against the clinging sense of inferiority suffered by Ninian and myself as a consequence of our permanently scruffy tenue, I had come to exercise myself a good deal in the character of a wit. It hadn't, of course, been wit, but merely juvenile mockery, prompted by a quite wholesome sense of fun and an awakening eye for the absurd. And at this moment, as a result, Ra.n.a.ld McKechnie was recalling me as one whose proper image was that of thorns crackling under a pot.

So, at least, I now thought. Perhaps I was confused by the two-tier time-s.h.i.+ft or double regress in which I was involved. Almost everybody round about me, everybody I had encountered since Tony had turned up in his son's room, belonged to my undergraduate years. And now here in the person of Ra.n.a.ld McKechnie were my schooldays as well.

But at this moment there came an interruption to the imperfect communion between McKechnie and myself. In hall the behaviour of the college servants had always been less that of professionally qualified waiters than of under-keepers in a zoo, concerned to get through feeding time as expeditiously as possible and in consequence putting a good deal of raw vigour into thrusting the gobbets through the bars. This code of conduct had now brought a shoulder sharply between us, its owner having been prompted to grab an empty plate from the other side of the long table. So I had a second or two in which to recollect myself. Could I retreat from McKechnie's violin by way of a brief ludicrous account of the difficulties of the young Gavin Mogridge with his 'cello? This idea, not too felicitous in itself, came to nothing. The nearer of the brick-faced men had taken advantage of McKechnie's disengaged state to bark a question at him. And in the succeeding moment I was addressed by the bearded ecclesiastical dignitary on my left.

'The Bishop and I,' he said with grave courtesy, 'are discussing current standards of conduct among the undergraduates. Disturbing rumours reach one.'

I felt this to be unpromising. The topic would certainly produce no gaiety. Presently the permissive society would be mentioned; I should advance the vain contention that we live in the most multifariously repressive society yet achieved by man; mutual irritation would be the result. Meanwhile, it was only a question of whether s.e.x or drugs would be the first evil to raise its ugly head. It turned out to be s.e.x.

'In the rooms I am occupying for the night,' the Bishop said across his colleague's stomach, 'I have found, I am grieved to say, an erotic manual and a package'-he hesitated, as if seeking some approximation to decency-'and a package of s.e.xual engines.'

'It sounds,' I said, 'as if the owner switches his interests during vacations.'

'As he well may do, if there is anything in the saying that variety is the spice of life.' It was the Prebendary who produced this, the Bishop having regarded my remark as meriting no direct response. But any liveliness of mind it might have suggested evaporated at once, and the Prebendary turned solemn. 'It is hard not to feel that a great mistake has been made.' He had a gla.s.s raised to his nose as he spoke, and became conscious of a possibility of misunderstanding. 'An excellent madeira,' he said. 'A grave mistake by the dons.'

'A grave mistake, indeed.' The Bishop had taken another look at me. 'Heaven forbid that I should be so muddle-headed as to treat fornication as among the gravest sins-'

'Yet it is scarcely a venial one,' the Prebendary said rather to the effect of one ecclesiastical court cautiously correcting the judgement of another.

'It is at least a cheapening activity.' The Bishop, finis.h.i.+ng his own madeira almost synchronously with his last spoonful of soup, again glanced at me across the Prebendary (who, as a physical barrier, was already in an expanding phase). 'It is what I say, simply and frankly, in any confirmation address I give at a public school at a boys' public school, I need hardly add. I tell them that they are free to consider me an old square, but that a bishop, like any other chap, has to do his thing.' The Bishop paused, perhaps to admire his command of expressions supposed to be popular with the young at that time. 'The lads take it very well. I see them murmuring comments to each other.'

'Isn't it possible,' I asked, 'that they are laying wagers on how long you will continue to talk? I can remember doing just that.' I felt instantly that this sally was rude rather than funny, and wasn't too pleased to hear it draw from the Prebendary who struck me as rather a coa.r.s.e-fibred man a quickly repressed guffaw. 'As for a grave mistake,' I went on for I felt I could best redeem my error by speaking seriously 'I don't know that it's quite fair to charge university authorities with that. Not if what you are talking about is, as I suppose, changing s.e.xual behaviour in a place like this. If it is changing-'

'Of course it's changing,' the Bishop interrupted briskly. And he added, a shade elliptically, 'You'd have to be an ostrich to deny it.'

'All right, it's changing but to an extent which I suspect is much blown-up in newspapers. Of course if it's really true that these young men put in an inordinate amount of time chasing young women hugger-mugger into bed, then I agree with you that it debases honest s.e.xual currency. But the main point must be what the dons supposing them to subscribe to traditional Christian views on the matter can effectively do about it. I suspect them of having such scant room for manoeuvre that very little in the way of making grave mistakes is open to them. It's as with the politicians. They're much given to denouncing each other as making colossal mistakes. But the whole thing is no more than delusions of grandeur. You can only make quite small mistakes when you are simply being b.u.mped around by forces over which you have no control.'

'I rather agree with you although the a.n.a.logy is perhaps an imperfect one.' The Bishop seemed a practised conversationalist. Tor undergraduates, after all, are not intractable economic forces. They are young people in statu pupillari.'

'Fair enough. But there's a limit to declaring a college, or any similar place, a closed society, to be unaffected by whatever is going on outside. And I'm not sure that a s.h.i.+ft in s.e.xual mores begins typically with the young. They take a great deal of their colour from their seniors. So perhaps we ought to begin by shaking our heads and wagging our fingers at our own generation.'

'A sobering thought,' the Prebendary said.

'The effective argument has to be from function and purpose.' Hearing myself say this might have pulled me up, since I am not insensible that the dinner table is an inappropriate setting for harangue. But I was too well launched on my theme. 'Young people come to a university to study most of them to study quite hard. I don't a.s.sert that their motives are altogether of the scholar's disinterested sort. They want to do well in their examinations, and so gain merit with the powerful, and so get themselves decent jobs. But it follows that they don't want to be all that distracted by boy-and-girl stuff. From which it follows again at least to some extent that the problem is a statistical one.'

'I have gone with you so far,' the Bishop said. 'But your last point eludes me.'

'Admit a hundred young women on easy terms to something rather more than the fringes of an adolescent male society like this, and a considerable amount of distraction must result. But nothing like the amount you will get if the young women number only fifty. The spectacle of the males in possession and they will be the most confident and personable ones, on the whole will drive a fair proportion of the others mildly dotty.' I did pause on this, conscious that it owed a good deal to my recent conversation with Plot. 'So if you are constrained to have girls all over the place,' I concluded rather abruptly, 'it's up to you to see they're in adequate supply.'

'On one view of the matter,' the Bishop said judiciously, 'your argument is perfectly sound.'

'But it is essentially a pragmatic and utilitarian view,' the Prebendary p.r.o.nounced. 'I should a.s.sociate it with what is now so loosely called humanism. And we must have other thoughts in mind. Notably-'

'A remarkable gathering, this.' The Bishop, although vainly, attempted a diversion. Bating a legitimate dash of episcopal pomposity, he was a sensible man.

'Notably,' the Prebendary said with firmness, 'the absolute value of pre-marital chast.i.ty.'

Not altogether surprisingly, this brought us to a halt. The Bishop turned discreetly to his other hand, and between the Prebendary and myself there was an uncertain pause. Then he appeared to remind himself of something unsaid, and turned again with some formality to address me.

'I ought to have introduced myself,' he announced. 'We were up together, but scarcely acquainted, and I don't think you remember me. My name is Killiecrankie.'

'As I'm Pattullo, and the man on my other side is called McKechnie, we must sound rather a Hyperborean trio.' This was the best I could manage by way of covering a moment of considerable astonishment. Prebendary Killiecrankie's beard (to say nothing of his opinions) had served to obscure any memory of him. But here he was, established for the night in his old rooms. And in the enjoyment, it could be added, of his old sofa.

For some moments I couldn't think how to continue conversing with P. P. Killiecrankie. He was presumably unaware of the scandalous and indecent use to which Tony Mumford and I had occasionally put our vantage-point in Tony's window. (This, incidentally, recurring to me again now, suggested that I had been talking a certain amount of nonsense only minutes before; for upon Tony and myself, at least, the spectacle of the Killiecrankian conquests had been wholly without dire nervous impact.) But Killiecrankie must be conscious that a considerable number of his contemporaries present at the Gaudy could recall at least the report of his amorous courses, and this struck me as an odd piece of awareness for so obviously respectable a member of the higher clergy to carry around. His past did not, of course, impugn his present in the least, since the rolls of sanct.i.ty are alive with reformed rakes. But there was the breath of comedy in it, all the same. I wondered whether I might a little tease Killiecrankie, perhaps calling upon him to remember Plot, that useful bicycle-boy. For the moment, at least, I turned this frivolous idea down. Instead, we discussed the curious fact that, in an oec.u.menical age, certain professors of theology in the university were still required to be in Anglican orders. This was a most blameless subject, even if not to my mind a momentous one. Killiecrankie talked about it with a gravity which could scarcely have been exceeded by Albert Talbert himself.

It was a failure in gravity, however, that now occasioned a rea.s.sortment of interlocutors in our corner of the feast. The brick-faced men, who had again become absorbed in their own conversation while leaving McKechnie to his own thoughts, must have hit upon something highly entertaining, since they had simultaneously emitted a roar of raucous merriment. Locally, at least, the effect was startling, since the dinner, although becoming animated, was plainly not of the sort that turns rowdy. McKechnie, being the main recipient of the full acoustic effect, was more startled than most, and when he turned to me I had the absurd thought that he was going to beg me to change places with him. I must have been accustomed to think of wee Dreichie as what we called a rabbit, meaning a timid boy wholly without apt.i.tude either for games or for ragging around.

'Nothing so illiberal and so ill-bred,' McKechnie murmured in my ear, 'as audible laughter.'

There is a popular persuasion that the learned cla.s.ses go in for quotation-dropping rather as the sn.o.bbish go in for name-dropping. But I have never observed this to be particularly true, and I felt that in thus invoking Lord Chesterfield McKechnie had boldly stretched a point in order to make me a sign approximately of the order in which Freemasons communicate some sort of token of solidarity by way of a peculiar handshake in face of the mere Boeotia represented by the brick-faced men. And now he took a step bolder still.

'I always remember,' he said with firmness, 'those tall stories you used to tell us. And many boys didn't know they were stories. It was something quite remarkable, Duncan and, of course, it pointed to your future career. I've never had such an experience since.'

I glanced at McKechnie, and again caught his eye. He was trying hard. Indeed, it was almost as if he were prepared to like me, which was an att.i.tude to which I felt absolutely no ent.i.tlement at all. But there was still something alarmed in him as well.

And I remembered, quite suddenly and for the first time in years, that I had been a pathological liar.