Staircase in Surrey: The Gaudy Part 6

'I know you'd do it more skilfully than I shall, Jimmy. But you'd better remain, I think, on that bridge.' Quite simply, I realised, Bedworth was giving an order. 'Much the likeliest thing is that Lusby will turn up in college again rather battered and needing his hand held.'

'Very well. And if he does, I'll try to do a bit better than those chocolate Bath Olivers.'

This lengthy discussion, so oddly located and timed, had been increasingly surprising. I felt it to be based on some premise not revealed to me, but about which I might now without intrusiveness inquire.

'What sort of a young man is Lusby?' I asked.

'Erratic,' Gender said. 'But I suppose that's self-evident. His allowing himself to be lured into that silly wager shows it. A serious man, working hard for an examination that means a great deal to him. And suddenly this! It's dotty.'

'Or it's what Damian,' Atlas said, 'would call an aberrant episode during an ident.i.ty-crisis of adolescence.'

'Rubbis.h.i.+ng jargon, Charles. I'd only say that Lusby is withdrawn and not easy to know in addition to which he's probably very able indeed. He ought to be performing outstandingly in this examination, and he knows it. I suppose that will make the muck-up all the more bitter to him. Perhaps a hostile observer would say he had more brains than guts.

But that would be shallow and unfair.' Gender hesitated. 'As a matter of fact, and as Cyril knows, Lusby has a little come Damian's way already. He has a depressive tendency to contend with.'

'That has scarcely been concealed from any of us,' Lempriere said drily. 'It's plainly the occasion of this tizzy.'

'Very well. But it's my experience that such chaps often have an underlying toughness a sort of stoicism which keeps them in the race. I just hope Paul Lusby has. I've been rather looking forward to getting something really going with him over the next three years. I'm very distressed about this.'

'But you don't mind,' Lempriere said, 'requiring your Paul Lusbys to fight their way into the Examination Schools through harmless once-in-three-year flings. And if one only gives the matter a little thought, one realises that conspicuous expenditure is more prevalent in Bethnal Green than Mayfair.'

The sudden ferocity of this, expressed between men who clearly respected one another, disconcerted me. Perhaps it was something merely verbal, like a nervous tic. Perhaps it belonged with that order of ritualised combat under which one barrister briefly flashes out at another in the simple interest of keeping things lively. But certainly it reflected some condition of strain. These four men hadn't slipped away to confer merely because a young man had failed to sit through an examination. They had other fears about him. And Gender had touched on the ground for these.

So far, we had been talking undisturbed. Not a soul had strayed into Howard. The quad wasn't being used, presumably, to accommodate Gaudy guests; otherwise some of them would by this time be making their way through it to bed. It was past midnight, and every now and then I had been conscious of the starting up of an engine in the distant college car-park as somebody of the less leisured sort prepared to drive, or be driven, away. I was conscious, too, that the character of the warm still night was changing. To the west the stars had vanished behind an inky wash, and the air in the shadowy stone trough we stood in felt ominous and electrical.

'Yes, there will be a storm,' Atlas murmured to me, as if his observations had matched mine. 'We'll be driven under hatches.' His glance had been over the nautical-seeming litter on the gra.s.s, but now it travelled further, and my own followed. A figure was advancing on us from a far corner of the quad. He was in evening dress, but wore a bowler hat. For a moment I thought, absurdly, that it was Tony, who had at least arrived in Oxford in a bowler. Then I saw that here was a college servant perhaps the common-room butler dressed in the main for the formal evening occasion, but wearing in addition this token of day-time consequence. It certainly wasn't required against the night air, but did prove to have a function. He walked up to the acting Senior Tutor, and took it off in style.

'Mr Bedworth,' he said. 'A telephone call, sir.' He paused for a moment, and looked round the rest of us. 'A gentleman on a newspaper.'

'At this time of night! Haven't you told him ...?'

'I told him about the Gaudy, sir. He at once asked questions about it. And then about the Ball.'

'What did he want to know about that?' It was Lempriere who snapped out this question.

'What might be called its scope, sir. Whether most of the gentlemen attended, and the price of a ticket. I need hardly say I have given him no satisfaction. We are told always to be careful about the press.' The man glanced at me briefly, as if suspecting that I had a notebook in my pocket. 'I think we may presently have another call from elsewhere. But it might be wise for Mr Bedworth to have a word with this person now.'

Bedworth turned away without speaking, and the two men disappeared into the gloom together. The four of us remaining fell to walking slowly up and down the quad. n.o.body said anything like 'I hope it's not a disaster' or 'This sounds bad'. We were perfectly silent. I was surprised to find myself confident that I ought not to slip sway. Again a car started up in the distance, and then there was a brief straggling chiming of those of Oxford's bells that concern themselves with the quarter-hours. Gender produced a cigarette-case, thought better of the action, and shoved it away. And then Bedworth was walking slowly back to join us.

'That second call did come through,' he said. 'A police station.'

'Ah!' Atlas said softly. 'Where, Cyril?'

'Bethnal Green. Lusby did go home. There was only his mother in the house. He told her everything was fine, and persuaded her to go round the shops and collect him a nice supper. As soon as she went out he turned on the gas. He's dead.'

VIII.

I returned to Junkin's rooms. For me the Gaudy was over. For the men I had just been talking to it was going to continue for a time. They had come together out of an uneasy sense that Paul Lusby's foolish exploit ought to have been spotted; that it had const.i.tuted, in his particular case and together with his subsequent disappearance, a danger-signal plain to read; that a course of action must be decided upon. But action had been overtaken by event. And however they felt about the matter, they weren't dispensed from now returning to entertain their guests through the tail-end of this annual jollification. There would be old members rather short of company, who yet lacked the gumption to go to bed or drive away. There might be others who had drunk rather too much, and needed un.o.btrusive managing. When it was all over, and the guests were more or less tucked up, the hosts apart from the few who were bachelors and lived in college would return to their North Oxford or Headington homes, and to wives either asleep or grimly awake in bed reading The Decline and Tall of the Roman Empire. Even Mrs Bedworth and whatever other college ladies had gallantly dined together in style could not possibly have supported each other's company for nearly five hours at a stretch. They would be home by now, and laying the family breakfast table.

These fancies went through my head without amusing me. I was troubled by the death of the unknown young man. Looking around the miscellaneous possessions of Nicolas Junkin now, I even experienced a fleeting confusion of mind in which I believed that it was Junkin equally unknown to me who had died. I may just have been tired or perhaps the college's wine was at work. But such mental vagaries are not uncommon in sober states. Writers may be peculiarly vulnerable to them, since they have the habit of fragmenting and rea.s.sorting authentic experience in the interest of concocting fictions.

The muddle could last only for a moment, but its vanis.h.i.+ng produced the sensation of relief we feel when, awakening from a bad dream, we realise it isn't true. I suppose because his rooms had once been mine, my imagination had adopted Nicolas Junkin. I'd even been taking sides with him against his neighbour, Ivo Mumford, although Ivo was the son of my first close Oxford friend, whereas Junkin's c.o.keville background was a blank, and the boy himself I was unlikely ever to set eyes on.

There had been in my mind some notion that Tony and I might finish the evening tete tete I now felt disinclined for this. Lusby's fate was so much with me that I should probably be impelled to come out with an account of it, and if Tony was uninterested the effect would be cheerless and awkward. He might even react to it as he had reacted to my casual mention of Junkin's examination result seizing, with his swift political instinct, upon this miserable fatality in Bethnal Green as a useful exemplification of the fact that the college today was clumsy in its dealings with its young men. This would be unfair. Arguing about it with Tony didn't appeal to me.

So I ought to have gone to bed. Instead, I behaved in a manner which, although I scarcely realised it, reflected the fact that Junkin's room was my room too. I had often returned to it late at night, whether from a party or from some rambling discussion of abstract topics with serious men, and paced the carpet into the small hours in an effort to sort out not such issues as had been debated but the character or quiddity first of one of my acquaintances and then of another. I picked up on this habit now so that presently I found myself walking up and down, trying to feel my way, at least to the extent of a few initial inches, into the personalities of the men I had lately been involved with.

As a professional category I scarcely felt any special interest in them. Fellows of colleges existed for me merely as a species of part-time schoolmasters, some of them possessed of scholarly or scientific inclinations. This reductive view didn't conduce to lively curiosity and yet as soon as individual specimens detached themselves from the notional cla.s.s of instructing and investigating persons they began to demand attention. Three of the four men encountered in Howard I had never seen before nor, indeed, had I seen them as much more than obscure nocturnal presences then. I had glimpsed Arnold Lempriere by match-light, and I now realised he had fleetingly reminded me of somebody else. He was a short, stout man, grey-haired and grey-complexioned, with a closely-trimmed moustache over a firm mouth. He was much older than his companions, and they had treated him with an unemphatic but perceptible indulgence which might merely reflect this fact, but which could have another occasion as well. Alone of the group, Lempriere had suggested to me the possession of a stage sense. He had talked effectively, once or twice even pungently, from a p.r.o.nounced standpoint: that of a man sharply critical of the disposition of things around him. The compet.i.tive examination system Firsts, Seconds and Thirds was d.a.m.ned nonsense, and a hard-boiled att.i.tude was required before it. Even so, the nonsense, if subscribed to, ought not to be telescoped with turning the college into a ballroom; nor, in the interest of such revels, ought bewildered or bewilderable youths like Lusby to be picked up and dumped in Rattenbury.

In his talk Lempriere had seemed to prize an old-fas.h.i.+oned flair for the vivid and picturesque; in his brief description and a.n.a.lysis of Lusby's plight he had enjoyed deploying a certain rhetorical resource. But his colleagues had not struck me as all that impressed. If one of these were to be seriously convinced of the identical propositions Lempriere had been putting forward he might still, I obscurely perceived, not estimate highly the worth or reliability of Lempriere as an ally. For what I have called stage sense (a dramatist's possession, but one with which he must endow his characters) is a very unacademic thing. It is an alert waiting for a role, for an effective turn that can be put on. In a closely knit body of scholarly men such an impulse which is a kind of misplaced creativeness must always appear as irresponsibility. Perhaps something of the sort was imputed to Lempriere.

At this point I didn't exactly surprise myself by a yawn. I made to glance at the clock at my own clock, since this had become again my own room. My glance didn't go, however, to the corner in which there ought to have stood the Dutch bracket affair, but to the mantelpiece where, beneath Young Picts watching the arrival of Saint Columba, I had kept a small electric clock owning the pleasing ability to tick or not to tick according as one set a switch. There was no clock now, but only the demonic Is.h.i.+ Genzo. He looked more furious than ever, and I thought idly that this was because somebody had casually perched an envelope against his frame. I hadn't noticed this earlier. Before the Gaudy, certainly, there had been nothing there. A closer look revealed that it was a letter addressed to me, and I realised that it had been thus deposited according to the custom of some college messenger on an unhurried evening round.

I picked up the envelope and opened it and to a curiously melodramatic accompaniment. During the past half-hour thunder had been grumbling in the distance; prowling the Chilterns, the Berks.h.i.+re Downs; enfilading, circling the city of Oxford. Now there was a single brilliant flash of lightning, the effect of which was seemingly to bring the ma.s.sive facade of the library hurtling across Surrey and hard up against Junkin's windows. It was instantaneously followed by a loud peal of thunder directly overhead. And torrential rain was falling when I was still unfolding the Provost's letter.

Dear Pattullo, May I send you, without being too boring, a line of welcome to the Gaudy? I have, as you will find in a moment, an ulterior motive! But your turning-up really is a particular satisfaction to many of the older-established among us. The college, ill.u.s.trious (as we shall hear proclaimed tonight) in so many fields, has always been a little lagging in the possession of members who have attained, like yourself, to the highest distinction in the arts. And it is certainly many years since you and I met. It would not be easy for me to forget the pleasure of a conversation with you. I hope we shall manage one this evening. But I shall, of course, have to be a.s.siduous in all those proper attentions to Establishment figures, so the point is a little at hazard.

I wonder whether I may venture to beg you, if it can possibly be fitted in with your plans, to linger in Oxford tomorrow for at least as long as will permit you to lunch with us in the Lodging? My wife is particularly hopeful of a favourable response!

The fact is that we have on our hands the college corporately and the university, I mean a problem upon which I should be most deeply grateful for your advice. It has been decided to establish, and with all convenient speed, a University Readers.h.i.+p in Modern European Drama, and the appointment will carry with it a Professional Fellows.h.i.+p at this college. As a consequence and you probably know about this my colleagues and myself have a substantial (although, in formal terms, not preponderant) voice in choosing the Reader. We have already had a certain amount of debate: lively but not, I think, to the extent of being characterisable as dispute or controversy. There have been some 'away out' suggestions and some uncommonly dull ones. The wiser sort (among whom, with the pa.s.sing of the years, I am beginning to presume to see myself) are quietly maturing their own plan. I do hope that, by one means or another, you can spare a little time to talk it all over. Our luncheon hour is one o'clock.

Yours sincerely, Edward Poc.o.c.ke P.S. I heard with great pleasure of the brilliant success of your Harvard lectures. E. P.

Although a lightning flash and thunder clap had been an excessive prelude to the reading of Dr Poc.o.c.ke's letter, I concluded them, after only a moment's thought, all to come together appropriately enough. What dumbfounded me was not simply the perception of what 'the wiser sort' were deviously being depicted as after; it was also the character of my own response. I had, it was true, much enjoyed that American trip. My interest in drama has always been broader than my own tenuous achievement in the theatre might suggest. I can talk, or even lecture, about it at least with satisfaction to myself. But in the United States I had seen my role merely as that of temporary playwright on campus after the hospitable habit of that part of the world. And hadn't I, this very evening, been thinking of academic characters and courses in a mildly derogatory, perhaps even a disagreeably superior way? Yet here I was, suddenly suspecting that I wanted to be something called a Reader in Modern European Drama. Or was that really quite the point? I led it couldn't be denied I led a rootless and unattached sort of life. A small villa in Ravello and a smaller pied-a-terre in London: these were the limits of what I tangibly possessed, and among the intangibles had chiefly to be reckoned the mere s.h.i.+ft and drift of acquaintances.h.i.+ps and a.s.sociations held loosely and impermanently together by theatrical projects and literary interests. Were I to stop writing, to stop circulating in that amorphous and faithless world, I should within a year or two be as isolated as Robinson Crusoe. What lured me now was the idea of life within a society: a stable and closely-knit society changing, indeed, decade by decade or l.u.s.tre by l.u.s.tre as old men went and young men came, but preserving a constant sense of permanent and impersonal purposes.

I was here romanticising, it can't be doubted, the life of an Oxford college. But at least I now reread the Provost's letter with as rational a regard as I could muster. The scrutiny didn't in the least alter my view of what he was in effect saying, although I was more aware of how much of it was being said by implication only. Apart from that evening's glimpses, I possessed and had preserved no more than what had been a juvenile sense of Edward Poc.o.c.ke's character. But what one lacks of experience at nineteen or twenty-one may more than make up for in sharpness of observation and the alert intuitive judgements of a young and vulnerable animal. And in fact I found this letter to be wholly by the man I had been aware of twenty years before.

This led me to a sobering reflection. The references to lively debate, to 'away out' suggestions and dull ones, to the quiet maturing of a plan: these had not been idly penned. I was being, in some degree, softened up for the eventual discovery that I had come into the picture late and as a safe man, a compromise candidate whom n.o.body with any 'liveliness' exactly wanted to go to the stake for. There was diplomacy ahead so decidedly so that it would be injudicious overtly to cast me at the moment other than as somebody whose advice would be gratefully received.

But was that right? Or was I imagining things? The letter rendered intelligible a number of fleeting remarks that had been made to me that day; when I totted these up it looked much as if a considerable number of people were already taking it for granted that I was going to be 'in' and, for that matter, that I was going to consent to be 'in'. Some of these people had even seemed to suppose that the proposal must already, in some form, have come to me. I felt that I recognised in this the hush-hush technique frequently adopted in such affairs.

I suddenly much wanted to put this letter in front of Tony; to have a reading of it by one who was no less than a Cabinet Minister. I must have been conscious of the naivety of the impulse, but this didn't seem to mute its appeal. Poor Lusby, moreover, had been entirely banished from my head; if Tony was still around and to be talked to, it wasn't with that wretched business that I should burden him.

I took another turn round Nick Junkin's room. I walked to the window and stared into the darkness of Surrey. The night sky was still overcast. It seemed incredible that, only an hour before, it had been brilliant with stars. I could hear water trickling in the gutters. A damp smell came up warm from the gra.s.s.

It was probable that everybody had gone to bed. Nevertheless I went to the door and opened it. The light on the little landing was extinguished, but Ivo Mumford's oak had not been sported, and there was a pencil line of light under and to the side of the familiarly ill-fitting inner door. I walked over to it and again all-familiarly opened it and surveyed the ancestral Mumford room. Tony's had been the only door in college on which I had ended up by never thinking to knock.

Tony was standing in front of the empty fireplace, beneath the ancestral Mumford lupanar. He stared at me, and for a second I had a confused sense that something dreadful had happened and that as a consequence Tony had suddenly immensely aged. I had scarcely taken in the fact that this was not Tony when the man before me spoke.

'Who the devil are you?' he said. 'And where, in G.o.d's name, is my son?'

It was a coup de thetre which it would have pleased me to hit upon by way of livening up a third act. I explained myself to Lord Marchpayne's father, and he silently shook hands. It seemed to be his way of indicating that he had heard of me. I didn't think I could ever have met him, for it had been an oddity of my close friends.h.i.+p with his son that we had never done any vacation visiting in one another's homes.

'Will you have a drink?' Mr Mumford asked. 'There's bound to be plenty of the d.a.m.ned stuff in Ivo's cupboards.'

'Yes, there is. But, thank you, no. A Gaudy's a Gaudy, and mine's over. But Tony must still be keeping it up somewhere. He's bound to be back soon now. Only, I'm afraid I haven't a notion of where to go and look for him.'

'Do you happen to know if he's sober?'

'Tony?' For a second I had to play for time before this bald and sudden question. 'He says he can be, at the drop of a hat. And I believe him.'

'It's just as well.' Mr Mumford glowered at me darkly. He had been a heavy and fleshy man which was what Tony in a few years was going to be but had begun to shrink or shrivel. His skin hung on him loosely rather as if he had been deprived of it in some lurid martyrdom and then perfunctorily reinserted in it on the discovery that a mistake had been made. I looked at him curiously, conscious that this macabre fancy didn't exactly make me comfortable in his presence. His turning up in college at this unaccountable hour called for an explanation which he appeared for the present disinclined to advance. Some family bereavement, or accident, or sudden and critical illness was one possibility. Had anything happened to Ivo? At least the heir of the Mumfords couldn't, like Paul Lusby, have perished with his head in a gas cooker; if he had, it could scarcely have occurred even to this rather savage old man to snap out that remark about the d.a.m.ned stuff in his cupboards. Ivo might still be the occasion of this irruption, all the same.

'Has anything happened to Ivo?' I asked.

Mr Mumford glowered at me even more darkly than before. I concluded that he regarded the question as entirely impertinent. I was a total stranger to him, after all, even though I was far from being that to his son. And his next remark gave every appearance of supporting this view.

'Aren't you the fellow who writes plays?' he demanded. 'I thought all scribblers had dirty finger-nails and long hair.'

I replied to these scarcely obliging words by sitting down which would have been an odd response had I not suddenly realised that this vein of phrenetic insult was a consequence of the old man's being, for some reason, beside himself.

'My finger-nails were quite awful when I was a boy,' I said. 'And as for a hair-cut, the s.h.i.+lling for it didn't always come my way. Later on, your son successfully spruced me up. But I do write plays.'

'At least your head seems to be screwed on the right way.' Mr Mumford betrayed no sense that this was an extraordinary conversation. 'And, talking of heads, you've hit the nail on one smartly enough. Am I right in thinking you're a reliable man?'

'Yes.'

'Then I'll tell you. My precious grandson looks like being put inside. A pretty pickle, eh? Within a dozen hours of Tony's making that confounded Cabinet.'

'I see.' In fact, I didn't quite see, since the information just conveyed to me was ambiguous. 'Inside' might mean what we had been accustomed to call the bin. But it seemed more probable that it meant gaol. 'You must all make what you can of it,' I said. 'At least it's not all that uncommon. I've noticed that the children of successful politicians are a good deal at risk. More so than the children of scribblers for example. It's because their fathers don't find much time to attend to them.'

'Perfectly true.'

This was a notable reply. It told me both that hostilities were at an end and that old Mr Mumford if in a slightly senile way was quite as acute as his son. He had been able suddenly to reflect that it was allies that were required.

'I don't go to the theatres,' he said, 'so I know nothing about your plays. But I imagine a certain realism attends them.'

'That's their ambition, but it commonly goes unrealised. Too much sparkle, as a matter of fact.' I paused, and then amplified. 'Too much d.a.m.ned and confounded sparkle.'

'Sparkle isn't going to help us tonight.'

'I can see that. And neither is dramatic criticism. If I have anything that helps, I lay it on.'

'Thank you, my dear sir. It's something, I suppose, that we all belong to this place.'

'No doubt.' The flash of sentiment had disconcerted me and not the less because there was at least a wisp of substance to it.

'Not that the college hasn't gone to the dogs. Do you know? Ivo has just been elected to the Uffington. It's a thing the lad has been looking forward to immensely and now the dons are talking about sending him down. What colossal cheek!'

'I'm afraid it may be an aspect of the matter that hasn't occurred to them.' For a moment the Uffington had eluded me, but now I remembered about it. It was an undergraduate dining-club of the most exclusive sort. Its members had a resplendent evening dress all of their own, and were celebrated for uproarious and destructive behaviour. Tony had been a member of it, but had always been careful to speak of it with a whimsical tolerance. His father, clearly, belonged to an age in which it had been unnecessary to dissimulate one's satisfaction in enjoying such superiorities, and it seemed probable that Ivo himself was a throw-back in this regard. But although the social a.s.sumptions hovering behind old Mr Mumford's remarks didn't greatly appeal to me I felt it would be indecent to appear other than sympathetic while still in the dark about the nature and gravity of the sc.r.a.pe the young man had landed in. 'I'm afraid,' I therefore went on, 'that what I said about politicians and their children wasn't particularly called for in the present case. Tony is, in fact, extremely concerned about Ivo. I believe that all through this Gaudy his chief determination has been to see what can be done to influence any decision about the boy's immediate academic future. I'm not confident that the effort is all that well-judged, but there's no question of the will he's putting into it.'

'Into smas.h.i.+ng this nonsense of turning Ivo out? We can certainly settle that hash.' The senior Mumford produced this with what an unfriendly critic would have called a contemptuous snarl. 'I'm quite prepared to speak to the Provost myself. In which case he'll d.a.m.n well learn something.' The outraged grandfather glowered at me anew out of heaven knew what cloud-cuckoo-land of social self-importance. 'Haven't we,' he demanded, as if sensing my thought, 'subscribed to every tomfool appeal the place has put out for generations? And now they think to treat Ivo as if he were a charity-brat.'

'I doubt whether they'd treat anybody as if he were exactly that.' 'Charity brat', it occurred to me, would be Mr Mumford's term for Nicolas Junkin of c.o.keville, and this thought a little antagonised me again. 'But I gather it's not the mere question whether Ivo remains in residence or goes down that's on the carpet now. It's whether he goes inside. Tony's the man you've come to discuss that with.' I turned at the sound of an opening door. 'And here he is at last.'

Tony was standing in the doorway, eyeing us steadily. He had no time to waste in astonishment, but for an arrested moment he was unnaturally still.

'Well,' he said, 'speak up! What is it?'

'It's that confounded boy.' For the first time, old Mr Mumford's voice was gentle. 'It seems he's been a bit rough with a girl.'

We had presumably been treated to an understatement an instance of what the school-books call meiosis. It silenced Tony for a second, and I myself had no impulse to speak. Old Mr Mumford hadn't turned up at the tail-end of a Gaudy almost in the small-hours, indeed to announce that his grandson had been guilty of a breach of manners. Our failure to produce an articulate response had the effect of throwing him back upon his own more settled mode of utterance.

'And it doesn't even seem,' he snarled, 'that the incompetent young fool was the one who had her in the end.'

'In heaven's name, think what you're saying!' Tony had gone pale, and I could see with surprise, although surprise wasn't in the least reasonable that he was trembling. 'Just what are you talking about?'

'I'm talking about all h.e.l.l let loose. The trollop seems to have been fooling around with them for hours. But as soon as-'

'Them? ' Tony said.

'A gang of young louts from the village. But she put on a turn as soon as she got home. She ran into the house, screaming out that she'd been raped.'

The ugly word reverberated in the room. I had the grotesque thought that the ladies in the picture over the mantlepiece were shocked by it. But it was no moment for nonsense.

'Are you sure,' I asked, 'that the girl is really what you call a trollop?'

'Of course she is. The village harlot, I suppose. Not that I know anything about her.'

'It's an odd way for a village harlot to end an evening.' Tony had swallowed before making this ominous point, and his face was twitching. I felt a sudden certainty that, Cabinet rank or not, he was going to prove unequal to the catastrophe. His head had been full of a situation he was confident he could manage and it had suddenly announced itself, as with a thunder-clap, to be of no significance whatever. And his father, I saw, had shot his bolt. The effort of merely tumbling the thing out at us had at least for the moment finished him. I was left with a sense of being myself in Jimmy Gender's phrase on the bridge.

I felt, however, some way from being adequately clearheaded. I was trying to remember what had brought me in on this; what, at this outlandish hour, had persuaded me to enter Ivo Mumford's room. I failed to do so which was unimportant, since the point had no relevance to the crisis on hand. But I was somehow convinced that there was a crisis in the sense that, if the thing could be got clear, there might be something that needed doing at once. And now Paul Lusby's story came back to me. Something of the sort had held about that dead boy. Somewhere, as the short fatal chain of his misfortunes was fabricating itself, there had been a slip-up which a number of men were now feeling unhappy about. It hadn't in the least been a matter of pa.s.sing the buck between them. But there had been some division of responsibilities from which a certain inattention had flowed; and there had been that brief but fatal hesitancy while Cyril Bedworth (self-evidently the most conscientious of men) had weighed up this against that. If a few hours had been saved, Lusby might be sleeping soundly in his bed now.

I brought my mind away from this with a wrench, but not before glimpsing that I had gone after a false a.n.a.logy. The college fellows had been confronted with a lad put at hazard through a wholly blameless folly and his own socially-engendered misestimation of the disastrousness of failing a trivial examination. The Mumfords and myself had on our hands the problem of extricating Ivo from something dreadfully different. Supposing it could be done, there was still what might conceivably be a daunting moral problem interposed between ourselves and the doing of it. The degree of the dauntingness depended very much on the exact nature of the facts. As far as Tony and I were concerned, we were still unprovided with them.

But even in mulling over the business like this I asked myself wasn't I behaving as Bedworth had behaved over Lusby or like Hamlet, thinking too precisely on the event? I was sitting on a window-seat, uncurtained against the darkness of Surrey, that citadel of a secure and ordered life. Beyond it, all of a sudden, was this nebulous and perhaps horrible thing. I jumped to my feet nervously, as if there could be any help in that. I had taken a couple of paces forward when there came a tap on the door. Tony and his father called out irritably but simultaneously to come in. It was a small point of curiosity; each of them had commanded the place in his time. The door opened, and framed the figure of Mogridge.

'Oh, Tony,' Mogridge said mildly. 'I'd gone out to the loo on the next staircase it's a better one, you remember and I saw the light in your room. So I thought I'd look in and say goodnight.'

'Hullo, Gavin.' Tony managed the effort of being a host. 'I don't think you ever met my father? Father, this is Gavin Mogridge. We were up together.'

'How do you do.' Mr Mumford's concern for the intruder's welfare was curtly minimal. 'As it happens, Mr Mugbridge, we're in the middle of a private conversation.'

'Mogridge,' Mogridge said.

'Very well Mogridge.' Mr Mumford checked himself and stared. 'You wouldn't be the fellow who wrote that book the devil of a time ago?'

'Yes, I am.' Mogridge was presumably habituated to making this acknowledgement. What had been demanded of him was more or less the equivalent of that 'Do you still write plays?' with which I was myself so familiar. I now expected Mr Mumford's rejoinder to concern itself with hair and fingernails. But this proved to be an error.

'A close-run thing, that,' Mr Mumford said. 'And you must have been not long out of your baby-carriage. You didn't do too badly.'