Staircase in Surrey: The Gaudy Part 7

'Thank you very much.' Reasonably in view of what had been intimated to him, Mogridge made to withdraw. It was with an air, which was not the least self-conscious, of composed dignity. He might have been a white man of unquestioned standing on the frontiers of empire, retreating in good order after blundering in upon some native pow-wow or palaver that was no business of his. It was only another instance of the Mogridge imperturbability, but it somehow triggered off my one effective act that night.

'Tony,' I said, 'I think we ought to have Gavin in on our problem.'

It was perhaps because he was baffled and exhausted that Tony agreed with this strange-seeming suggestion. His father, surprisingly, made no protest; he may vaguely have supposed that the celebrated author of Mochica was now an equally celebrated silk at the criminal bar. As for Mogridge, he simply listened seriously to a recapitulation of what Tony and I had already heard. And then there was an expectant pause.

'Yes rape,' Mogridge said. He uttered the word so vaguely that he might have been wondering whether we were discussing one of the administrative districts of Suss.e.x or the kind of turnip which one feeds to sheep. But his next remark negatived this. 'It's regarded almost everywhere,' he said, 'as a very serious thing. The river-dwelling Mundugumor come to mind. And the Kikuyu and the Masai. There's a sharp distinction from marriage by capture.' He thought for a moment. 'I don't suppose Ivo would have any notion of marrying the girl?' Slantwise as usual, he glanced at us each in turn, and seemed conscious that the question struck old Mr Mumford as an idle one. 'One has to review the possibilities,' he said. 'One isn't being orderly if one goes about something in a random manner. It's a point that's missed by people who don't see it. Don't you agree?' Securing a savage mutter from the old gentleman by way of response to his striking tautology seemed to encourage him. 'Yes,' he went on. 'Rape, fortunately, is regarded very seriously indeed.'

'Very probably,' Tony said. 'But as we're not gathered here as guardians of public morals, I can't see that the fact's an encouraging one.'

'Oh, but Tony, you don't understand me. The point is that a judge won't let you be slapped down for rape at the drop of a handkerchief, as he will for a.s.sault or drunk and disorderly or even pa.s.sing a dud cheque. And that's because it is so serious. It isn't at all easy, as a matter of fact, to get convicted of rape. I've noticed that in Moa and Marundung. And you'd find that what goes for places like those commonly goes for England too. Of course, we don't know nearly enough about this business yet. But I'd be very surprised, Tony, if your son were actually convicted of rape before a judge of the High Court. On this occasion, that's to say.' Mogridge turned back to Tony's father. 'Where is Ivo now?'

'I told him to clear out and lie low.'

'I see.' Mogridge didn't look as if he thought well of this. 'Do you mean abroad? I doubt whether there are many countries that would be much good. Tibet would have been not too bad at one time. I had one or two friends in Lhasa who would have arranged it. But things have changed for the worse there in recent years, as you know.'

'No doubt.' Mr Mumford was patently feeling that my recruitment of this owlish character had been either an absurdity or a disaster. 'But Ivo isn't abroad. I packed him off to the gardener's cottage on the other side of the park. The gardener and his family are away on their holiday. And I simply told this fellow that Ivo couldn't have been involved, for the good reason that he wasn't staying with me.'

'But he was staying with you?'

'Of course he was. Or, at least, it appeared that he was intending to. He'd just arrived.'

'In fact, you promptly lied to somebody?'

'd.a.m.n it, man, I wasn't in a witness box. When an impertinent fellow-'

'It wasn't perjury, of course. And you had a natural impulse to protect your grandson. It mayn't have been judicious, all the same. The inference would be once the prevarication was discovered, I mean that you admitted to yourself that Ivo had got on the wrong side of the law. Perhaps he had. Perhaps he'd confessed it to you.' Mogridge looked at his watch. 'Anyway, I don't like the sound of that gardener's cottage, and we'd better be on the move about it within the next half hour. So we must have the full facts, and in proper order, as succinctly as may be.'

'Very well.' The firmness of this demand made old Mr Mumford brace himself perceptibly. 'Ivo turned up on me late yesterday evening. He had some supper-'

'How did he arrive? Where had he come from?'

'He drove up in his own car I don't know from where. He'd stayed a night or two with a friend, I think, after the end of term. I like him to turn up on me unannounced from time to time. I'm a widower, you know, living alone at Otby.'

'Alone? Haven't you any servants?'

'Of course I have servants. But there was only my housekeeper around. It was she who got Ivo some supper.'

'Just a moment. Where's that car now?'

'Ivo's car? He's taken it down to the cottage, I suppose. There's a shed.'

This kind of thing went on for some time. Except for the Mogridge slow-motion effect, which it would be tedious to reproduce, it was rather like one of those popular plays featuring a brilliant barrister or great detective disporting himself among the family skeletons. I kept a grip on the facts as they came together, since it would have been irresponsible to do anything else, but what I found myself wanting to get out of them was some clearer impression of the character of Ivo Mumford. Why had this newly elected member of the Uffington, this precocious connoisseur of brandy and champagne, engaged in what had proved so disastrous an escapade with a group of village lads? Part of the answer seemed to be that he had done it before. His visits to his more or less solitary grandfather were of their nature rather dull, and the neighbourhood was short of young people of his own sort. So as a schoolboy it had amused him occasionally to play around with whatever contemporaries he could get together. It was a picture, so far, of something as innocent, and indeed amiable, as could be. I didn't find this conclusion much vitiated by its appearing that on these occasions Ivo had insisted on enjoying the prerogatives of the squire's grandson in the way of bossing the other boys around. He had even at times Mr Mumford interpolated with a momentary satisfaction which could scarcely have been called sagacious- imposed a pretty stiff discipline on some of them.

It was Tony who pounced on the significance of this last point although I didn't, indeed, think it had for a moment eluded Mogridge. The lads of Otby village Tony was very clear about this would admire Ivo the more, the more commanding Ivo chose to be. They would also and Tony was quite intelligent enough to be equally clear about this hate his cla.s.sy little guts. In fact, a thoroughly ambivalent att.i.tude would build up in them, and at a pinch skilled advocacy could elicit this in a court and then exploit it. Here were young men, it could be said, who had it in for another young man, not of their own sort. It would be rash to accept a word they said about him, or about the degree of his partic.i.p.ation in whatever had taken place. Didn't Mogridge Tony demanded agree?

'But, Tony, we're not facing that yet,' Mogridge said. 'It's a last resort. One should always leave a last resort to the end. Otherwise, one gets it in the wrong place.'

'If you can see any first resort, Gavin, for heaven's sake let us hear it.'

'We don't know yet that this thing is ever going to come before a court. Affairs of the sort often don't. They're a muddle and a mess, with potential witnesses saying first one thing and then its opposite, and so on. The police and we don't even know as yet that the present trouble has got to them therefore often think better of telling themselves they have reason to suppose a crime was committed. And that's the end of the matter. But the real point is this: supposing the thing does go into court, we don't want Ivo to go with it. We don't want him mentioned at all. If he were shoved into the dock along with the whole bunch of them, and then acquitted as having been so much on the mere fringe of the affair as hardly to be aware of what was going on, it still wouldn't be at all healthy for him, either in college or anywhere else.'

'It certainly would not,' Tony said grimly.

'But that's looking farther ahead than we need at the moment. We mustn't go too fast. You know, I've sometimes noticed that being in too much of a hurry can result in one's not getting along as rapidly as one otherwise might do.' Mogridge paused on this, so that I thought he was going to repeat it just in case the thread had eluded us. 'We left Ivo at supper,' he said with a surprising briskness. 'Please go on from there.'

Mr Mumford went on. Ivo had drunk several gla.s.ses of wine with his meal, and had then announced that he was going to stretch his legs. It was getting on for dark but a splendid summer night. He might go as far as the river, so his grandfather had better not wait up for him. There was apparently nothing in this that Mr Mumford found particularly casual or out of the way. He seemed resigned, indeed, to the view that Ivo always found these duty visits boring, and that the occasion of them was simply the expectation of a large tip. On this particular evening Ivo had been restless from the start. Thinking about it afterwards, his grandfather con- eluded that he had glimpsed some of his plebeian friends as he drove through the village on his arrival. They would have been hanging around the telephone kiosk, Mr Mumford added on a note of sombre rural realism, talking s.m.u.t and abundantly prepared to be up to no particular good. It was a state of affairs which Ivo must have found perversely attractive.

That was the last to be seen of the boy until the murky incident was over. He had appeared in his grandfather's bedroom at six o'clock in the morning. Mr Mumford, awakened abruptly, had supposed his grandson to have heard burglars or to have been taken ill. In fact, a night of appalled realisation had broken Ivo down. He was in a tearful panic, and it had been hard to extract much sense from him. He said he hadn't known this girl wasn't another girl, whom he was sure lots of the louts had had before. So he hadn't at all seen why he shouldn't join in the mucking around. Not that in the end he actively had, since he had become aware that there was some nasty sort of hitch. The girl had really struggled. And quite as much with the second chap as with the first.

This last particular, which made me feel that I didn't want to catch Ivo's father's eye, Ivo's grandfather relayed with no particular emotion. But it had at least been at this point in Ivo's confession that Mr Mumford realised he had quite something on his hands. He roused his housekeeper, a notably faithful family retainer who adored Master Ivo, and very sensibly had her prepare a quick but substantial breakfast. When this had been partaken of (and between blubbering fits Ivo managed to eat a great deal) he had banished the indecisive rapist to the untenanted cottage and sat back to think.

He was still thinking, it seemed, when Fairlamb came in. Fairlamb was the local pub-keeper. Although not a tenant of Mr Mumford's he was to a certain extent an underling, since Mr Mumford was a director of the brewery company which maintained him in his hostelry. Fairlamb was also the father of the outraged, or reputedly outraged, girl. His att.i.tude, as it appeared through Mr Mumford's account, had been one of wary malevolence and furtive venality. It was clearly in his head that there was money in the thing.

Fairlamb, then, presented a narrative of his daughter's wrong, together with the information that Mr Ivo unfortunately had a hand in it if hand, indeed, was the word. It was at this point that Mr Mumford advanced his rash a.s.sertion that Ivo could not have been involved since Ivo was not visiting Otby Park. Had he waited a little longer he might have taken another line. Fairlamb, while stoutly a.s.serting his daughter's. .h.i.therto virginal state, did not deny that she had gone off freely with the group of lads, and that on previous occasions she had made similar but uncatastrophic nocturnal excursions with them. This particular jaunt had begun in the darkness of a moonless night and ended in repair to the deeper darkness of a barn. Miss Fairlamb wasn't confident that Mr Ivo had been with the group 'all the time'. Perhaps he had joined the others in the barn. But it was Mr Ivo who had begun doing things to her. Everybody knew Miss Fairlamb declared and her father regretfully reported that Mr Ivo was like that. Even when quite young, he had taught some of the other boys tricks so nasty that he, Fairlamb, quite declined to dirty Mr Mumford's ears with them.

This had almost been too much for Ivo's grandfather, and he had indulged the thought of continuing his colloquy with Fairlamb through the instrumentality of a hunting-crop. Alternatively, he had thought of getting out his cheque-book, which was the issue of the affair which the unspeakable publican pretty evidently had in mind. But, although aged and shaken, he had the wits to see that either of these courses would be injudicious. So he turned Fairlamb out of the house with the advice to take his slanderous rubbish to the police.

And Fairlamb although later in the day had gone to the police. He had perhaps done so only because others had gone before him. In thinking to see the matter resolve itself satisfactorily on a simple economic basis he had reckoned without something he was in a professional position very accurately to a.s.sess: the normal operation of village gossip. Miss Fairlamb had presented herself to her aunt (who kept the village shop and post-office) in the character of a ravished heroine; her aunt had told the story to the district nurse; the district nurse (as a lowly but unchallengeable auxiliary of the gentry) had told the vicar; and a conference with the local constable had been the result.

The constable spent an hour weighing things up, and then saw no help for it: he must march up the avenue and ring the front-door bell of the Park. Shown into the presence of its owner, he came out with the thing roundly enough. He had interviewed two of the lads; they had admitted there had been 'a bit of skylarking and mucking-around-like'; but nothing had happened that could be any business of the police until the young gent from the big house got silly and 'did what he oughtn't to have'. So could the constable see the young gent? Mr Mumford, keeping his nerve if not his judgement, declared that here was a pack of lies by a gang of revolting little brutes who ought to be in Borstal and that his grandson, being a hundred miles away, could demonstrably have had no part in the matter. The constable agreed that this must certainly be the state of the case; he then got himself hastily out of the house, plainly believing nothing of the sort; and Mr Mumford was left to digest what looked like a rapidly deteriorating situation.

'Was anything said?' Mogridge asked, 'about how anybody in that barn saw anything that was going on? There has to be some light, or one sees nothing at all.' He looked earnestly from one to another of us. 'Wouldn't you agree?'

'A two-year-old would have to agree,' Mr Mumford snapped. 'One of the louts seems to have said that somebody had a candle.'

'A candle?' Tony said. 'What utter nonsense! A torch or a bicycle lamp might make sense. But n.o.body wanders about the countryside proposing to light candles in barns.'

As a generalisation this struck me as valid. At the same time there was a gruesome picturesqueness about the image of that single flickering flame; one glimpsed a composition like a sort of unholy La Tour: a point of light glinting on so b.e.s.t.i.a.l a floor. Mogridge's mind, fortunately, was undistracted by this sort of thing.

'Darkness,' he said. 'Do you know? It can be rather terrifying. It often terrifies children.' He paused. 'As a matter of fact, it terrified some of those people who found themselves tumbled into the middle of Peru. They had to be dealt with.'

'Most interesting,' Tony said.

'But the point is, of course, that this whole Otby affair was played out in darkness or near-darkness, from start to finish. It makes me increasingly believe that the notion of any sort of successful prosecution is nonsense. For all we know, or a jury could know, one of those village boys was working away quietly on that girl for an hour before anybody penetrated her. I believe that's the term.'

'It's certainly the one they use in court,' Tony agreed. 'What we say is f.u.c.ked her.'

'Yes, of course. But you see what I mean. Plenty of young women who have been far from virtuous are capable of putting on a hysterical turn and screaming about rape. Every judge knows that. They're even capable, sometimes, of persevering in calumny in what appears the most malignant way one seemingly quite alien to their normal commonplace character. Known facts like that, added to the other fact of the whole thing's having been a mess and huddle in the dark, are all in our favour for a start. It's most improbable, I repeat, that anything absolutely dire is going to come out of the thing. Still, we don't want even the disagreeable'not if we can help it. So it's just a question which of two lines we adopt.' Mogridge glanced at his watch. It was apparent that he judged there was just so much time for talk, and that then action must begin. 'By the way,' he said to Mr Mumford, 'where did you eventually get Ivo off to?'

'Get him off to? He's still in the gardener's cottage, of course.' Mr Mumford spoke as if this ought to have been self-evident. I could see that some obscure territorial sense had been at work in him; he had felt that nothing could really happen to his grandson as long as the boy was within the shelter of the family estate.

'If n.o.body has come on him there,' Tony said, 'then so far, so good. But what's this about two lines we can adopt?'

'We can opt for the truth. That's to say we can somehow ease your father out of his story, admit that Ivo came to Otby and went fooling around with his village acquaintances, and deny that he had the faintest notion that anything like a s.e.xual a.s.sault was going on in that barn. Alternatively, we can maintain the whole thing to be a malicious village slander. We can have your father stick to his story, his housekeeper support it, and Ivo adopt it too, supposing they really chase him up. In fact, lies all round.' Mogridge turned his oblique and mild regard from Tony to myself, and for the first time in my experience I thought I detected in it what might almost be a remote glint of humour. 'I'm for lies all round.'

'And gaol all round too?' Tony asked. He spoke ironically but on a note of sharpened interest. 'My dear Gavin, you're daft. The boy would require something out of a story-book. An alibi, or whatever they call it.'

'Oh, certainly.' Mogridge was at his most deliberate. 'It won't be difficult. Always provided nothing has happened at this cottage. Has Ivo, by the way, had any definite plans for the vac? Knowing about that might help.'

'He ought to be in New York by now.' Tony, although I believe he was in a state of simple misery, said this with some exasperation. 'He'd been very keen to go there, and he was booked for a night flight on Monday. He probably thought he'd touch his grandfather for a big tip first, and just roll up at Heathrow a night or two later. He has no sense about such things.'

'Splendid!' Mogridge was standing up. He clearly regarded our conference as over. 'He'll pretty well be there for breakfast just as they say in the advertis.e.m.e.nts Mr Mumford, you'd better drive straight back to Otby. But don't try to contact Ivo. I'll have done that before you arrive. Go straight to bed. Tony, do the same here in college. And forget you know anything whatever. Talk to Duncan, but not to anybody else. It's only with Duncan I'll communicate at present. Duncan, how long shall you be staying here?'

'Until tomorrow evening. Longer, if you want me to.'

'No, no that will do. If you get a message including the word "satisfactory" you'll know all's well.'

'Gavin, this is nonsense.' There was something like desperation in Tony's voice now. 'It's not like going over to the continent, where they no longer bother to stamp your pa.s.sport. n.o.body gets past immigration control at Kennedy without being absolutely clocked through.'

'It's the usual thing, I agree. However, don't worry. And oh, by the way, there will be a number of respectable people who saw Ivo in New York yesterday. And now I must be off.'

'Would you mind telling us just how you imagine you can manage this?'

'Well, no. I mean we'd better not waste any time on mere details. Come along, Mr Mumford. I'll see you to your car.' As he said this, Mogridge was looking steadily at Tony and Tony steadily at him. 'Good night,' Mogridge said casually, and swept Ivo's grandfather out of Ivo's room.

Tony hadn't got to his feet, and now for some seconds he buried his head in his hands. A far-away bell chimed some hour or other. Tony looked up again.

'Duncan, is he mad?'

'You know he isn't mad.'

'You brought him in on this. Did you know something about him something that had never come into my head?'

'Short of clairvoyance or telepathy definitely not.'

'It's nonsense at this end too. n.o.body can get on to any kind of transatlantic flight without the day and hour-'

'But this one won't be just any kind of flight. It will be a rather particular one.'

'Yes.' Tony was staring at me rather as he had stared at Mogridge in the moment of their parting. 'He must be d.a.m.ned high up.'

'I wouldn't know.'

'More or less at the top. I'd like to find out.' 'Perhaps you could ask the Prime Minister.' 'Oh, no!' Tony was really shocked. 'That wouldn't do at all. Not the drill.'

IX.

It would have been indecent to say goodnight to Tony without managing some kind of murmur, however awkward, indicative of sympathetic feeling before his suddenly untoward family situation. But when I had managed this I came away at once. He may or may not have wanted to go to bed or had any thought that he was likely to get to sleep. He must have had a strong impulse, I supposed, to go to the support of his son himself, and that he had acquiesced in a waiting and pa.s.sive role was an index of the astonis.h.i.+ng grip that Mogridge had taken of the whole affair. I didn't imagine that I'd myself be sleepless, although I was far from any state of post-prandial contentment. On top of the Gaudy dinner and the Gaudy speeches at the end of which any reasonable man would have been disposed to call it a day had come (from off-stage and messengered, as in some orthodox neo-cla.s.sical drama) the successive reports of the unknown Paul Lusby's death and the unknown Ivo Mumford's disgrace. A disgrace it certainly was this even although the boy had been singularly luckless in his ugly escapade, so that I found myself all on the side of cheating the law if the law was after him. I saw these two catastrophes as belonging to different orders: Lusby's, I imagined, had a certain representative character as being the sort of thing that happens, whereas Ivo's was grotesque and alarming as something that doesn't. A young man is not on his way to the dock on a charge of rape or conspiring to rape simply because he mixes brandy with his champagne. Something abrupt and utterly senseless had happened in the life of Ivo Mumford.

Out on the landing, I found that, attractive as was the thought of bed, a vestigial restiveness prompted me to prowl. I groped my way downstairs and into Surrey, much as if I were Mogridge remembering about a more attractive loo. The storm hadn't greatly cleared the air, and the darkness was warm and muggy again. It was also entire; one couldn't have guessed that one was surrounded by the slumbers of two or three hundred heavily-dieted middle-aged men. Or was there a glint of light from the room briefly restored to the occupancy of P. P. Killiecrankie? It probably wasn't so, and in any case I had no inclination to call on him although he might, I reflected, have an informed view on just how far you could go without inviting opprobrium as a ravisher. Perhaps Ivo Mumford would end his days as a bishop since careers did seem so uncommonly unpredictable. Not all of them, of course; what could Ra.n.a.ld McKechnie have become other than Professor Ra.n.a.ld McKechnie? But n.o.body would have thought of Cyril Bedworth bedding with Proust. And it hadn't been Duncan Pattullo the Secret Service Boy who had become the Secret Service Man; it had been Gavin Mogridge the failed 'cellist.

My mind, wandering round like this in a drowsy fas.h.i.+on, came to rest on Mogridge. The secret life isn't the writer's sole concern. But it is a constant one; and here in Mogridge was the crude and archetypal thing, the kind of enigma to which there exists, awaiting discovery, the single all-sufficing clue. For a moment Mogridge seemed to stand before me, an apparition against the dark, in complete clarity. The vocational misfit who couldn't play that big fiddle; the active temper, the grip on perceived detail amid crisis and extremity; the inflexible will behind the achievement chronicled in Mochica some unrecorded years; the emergence of the traveller and amateur anthropologist, blamelessly wandering the globe, disappearing and turning up again, publis.h.i.+ng occasional stodgy books which breathed concerns about as contemporary as those, say, of some nineteenth-century country gentleman anxious to determine whether Victoria Nyanza or Albert Nyanza was of the greater significance in perpending the problem of the Nile: all this came together. Rather pleasingly, I thought. But more pleasing, even if also alarming, was the spontaneous and unquestioning old-boy solidarity under the impulsion of which Mogridge was acting at this moment. He might be high up, but that would scarcely help him if he were exposed as lavis.h.i.+ng public money on clandestine Atlantic flights, foxing the immigration officials of the USA, persuading or obliging numerous persons to tell lies about the whereabouts of a young man who might reasonably be represented as a fugitive from justice.

I was surprised by the completeness of my approval of this. There were relevant facts I didn't ignore: for example, that the Paul Lusbys and Nicolas Junkins are commonly unfurnished with the sort of good fairy or deus ex machina which I had so casually, if intuitively, called into counsel on the peccant Ivo Mumford's behalf. This didn't disturb me now, but something else did. I hadn't seen Gavin Mogridge for a very long time, yet he had greeted me as if our last meeting had been yesterday, so that I had felt (not that there had been any fuss of feeling in the matter at all) I had simply recovered a friend. But in what did his personality consist? Looking back over the past hour, I realised that there had been two Mogridges in Ivo's room. There had been the more familiar Mogridge of heavy pace and slow if reliable mind, given to ma.s.sive tautology and to proverbial remarks offered more or less as contributions to the general march of intellect. And there had been a Mogridge who was incisive, rapid, economical, unscrupulous, and in command. The first of these was surely the native Mogridge of long ago. But wasn't the second the real one now, so that the first had to be regarded as a blind, and as a blind cunningly preserved amid conditions in which entire candour ought to obtain? There seemed no doubt of Mogridge's integrity as a friend. He had unmasked himself in a manner which, professionally, he was quite certainly forbidden to do, and he had done so at the call of loyalty to Tony Mumford. I thought of those double agents upper-cla.s.s and therefore apt for the headlines of the popular press who have been willing to present wholly artificial personalities to their intimates for years, and who will yet suddenly take some fantastic risk in the interest of just such a loyalty within the sphere of private relations.h.i.+ps. It was unnecessary to suppose that Mogridge worked for the Kremlin in his off-time. But he belonged to a world if not of double agents, at least of deliberately double-faced men.

At this point I must have concluded that I had discharged my duty as a reflective person, since I found myself groping my way up the staircase again. I opened Junkin's door and switched on the light. As I did so I became aware that in my other hand I was holding a sheet of paper. It was a letter about a proposed Readers.h.i.+p in Modern European Drama. So this was why I had entered Ivo's room, and I had been clutching the thing all through what had then transpired. I made to shove it in a trouser-pocket now and failed to do so, the action being impeded by the black stuff of my M.A. gown. Unaccustomed to don such a garment, I had also forgotten to doff it; so I had stood or sat through that whole grim conference dressed like a schoolmaster in a comic strip. I removed this garment now, and tossed it impatiently, and therefore a little too vigorously, over the back of Junkin's sofa. It went over the top, and with a surprising result. There was a cry or squeal of indignation and alarm. I wasn't alone in the room. In fact I was confronting a young woman, Oriental in origin although not at all Oriental in impa.s.sivity, who seemed to be dressed in nothing but a s.h.i.+ft.

'Nick, Nick,' the girl shouted in an American English, 'come here there's a strange guy in your room!'

If, as I suspect, I said something like 'Madam, please compose yourself,' it must have been because I was indignant as well as surprised. It was true that I had snared the lady rather as a fowler might snare a roosting bird. But if this room wasn't in any full sense mine it was certainly more mine than this young person's. There wasn't, however, an opportunity to argue this, for the bedroom door was flung open and a youth stood revealed in it. I hadn't, of course, a doubt that this was Nicolas Junkin, although his appearance didn't at all answer to what I had been imagining of the lad from c.o.keville. My notion had been, for some reason, of a heavy, dark, and abundantly bearded junior citizen. Junkin was slim and fair; and his hair, although there was a lot of it, all flowed down the back of his neck. It was the slimness that was the most striking of these appearances. Perhaps because the night was sultry, or perhaps because he had been unable to find any pyjamas, he was wearing nothing except a pair of orange and green striped under-pants. It didn't seem to me that the Chinese or was she j.a.panese? lady could be indicted of poor taste. (But this was an opinion which, in the ensuing few minutes, was to prove itself based upon a false premise.) The Oriental lady continued protesting exclamations, but these were not well received by Junkin. He told her to stuff it quite inoffensively, although the expression is not one which should be addressed to a lady, whether Oriental or not. He then turned to me, and I could see that our situation didn't particularly bewilder him.

'Well,' Junkin said, 'here's a b.l.o.o.d.y mess! And all my own fault.'

'Not at all,' I said for I found the admission disarming. 'They're your rooms although they were mine a long time ago. They've made a muddle, I suppose, in shoving me in here.'

'Oh no, of course they do a lot of ruthless logistics when they have those awful banquets and b.a.l.l.s and things. It's rather funny that b.a.l.l.s should be called b.a.l.l.s. Rightly be they called pigs.' Junkin paused on this irrelevance, and I remembered that Aldous Huxley's Chrome Yellow was among the more antiquarian books on his shelves. 'I'm definitely supposed to have gone down for the vac, so I ought to have guessed there might be a lodger. Come to think of it, there do seem to be some foreign objects around. Particularly in the bedroom. I ought to have thought. I suppose I was distracted by the girl. She says she's called Tin Pin. At least it sounds like that.'

'How do you do?' I said to Tin Pin. I had decided that to take Junkin's last remark as a formal introduction might conduce to giving some semblance of urbanity to the proceedings. Tin Pin, however, did not respond. She had retired to Junkin's best chair, and was now in the proprietors.h.i.+p not only of her single diaphanous garment but also of a smouldering cigarette. She just surveyed us sombrely through the fume. Her appearance was little more congenial than that of Is.h.i.+ Genzo. And Junkin appeared to be aware of my impression as unfavourable, since his next speech was apologetic in tone.

'You see,' he said, 'I had to bring her here. There wasn't anywhere else.'

'Oh, quite.' It struck me that Junkin's lack of a full confidence as to the lady's name suggested that what I had tumbled into was an amour of the most casual sort. Yet the situation had features which it was difficult to reconcile with this. I hadn't been out of Junkin's room all that long, but what I had come upon was Tin Pin asleep on the sofa and Junkin himself snug in his bed. It seemed too expeditious and business-like to be true. 'The question,' I added, 'is where we go from here.'

'It's not exactly we,' Junkin said reasonably. 'I mean that it's rather a matter of how to split up, isn't it? Exeunt severally. Something like that.' Junkin was subjecting me to severe but not particularly hostile scrutiny. 'Did you say these had been your rooms years ago?'

'Yes. But it's not a point that much helps us now.'

'Aren't you Duncan Pattullo?'

'Yes.'

'My name's Nicolas Junkin. One of the dons ....'

'Nick,' Tin Pin said, 'this is no d.a.m.n good. Take me some place else.'

'Belt up, Tin. As I was saying, one of the dons told me you'd been on this staircase.' Junkin took a further appraising look. 'It's marvellous that you still write plays.'

'Yes, isn't it?' I hope I said this with spirit. Junkin's, I felt, was a remark which might have been offered appositely, if not with much tact, to the nonagenarian Bernard Shaw. 'One just soldiers on.'

'Sorry I suppose that was rude. But you know what I mean. Suddenly confronted with a past age, and so on. It's like meeting Noel Coward.' Junkin thought for a moment. 'Or Sir Arthur Wing Pinero.'

I found myself laughing much to Tin Pin's displeasure. Junkin wasn't being funny, and much less was he being impudent. He was just chronologically hazy. It was no doubt one of the intellectual insufficiencies which had got him into disfavour with his tutors and examiners.

'Look here,' Junkin said, 'you want to go to bed. Sorry about the sheets and it's quite probable I used your toothbrush. But there it is. Tin and I will go as we came.'

'Just walk out?'

'Well, no. The porter on the gate would probably have objected to my bringing in a girl. And if we go out that way now, he'll book my name and I'll be fined. They'll call it a room-fee, and produce a bit of talk about the necessity of putting up guests in a civilised manner. But it will be a fine, all the same. Tin and I will just scout round the college and find somewhere. She seems pretty tiresome to me.' Junkin offered the young woman a glance as candid as his speech. 'But I've taken her on, and I suppose I must see her through.'

'Do you mean she's not exactly your girl?'