Staircase in Surrey: The Gaudy Part 8

'Of course she's not my girl. She's just a wandering sample. I don't have any exotic tastes. And as she's not my girl, I didn't see why she should have my bed. But the sofa was another matter.'

'I see.' I did in fact see that I was in contact with some chivalric code unknown to me. 'Then whose girl is she?'

'Whose girl are you, Tin? Did you say Julian?'

'Sure. Julian. The swine.'

'She says that swine Julian,' Junkin said, rather as if he were translating from whatever may have been Tin Pin's native tongue. 'He's a friend of mine, and it seems they had a date. Julian was going to take Tin somewhere for the night. Or probably for as many nights as his powers held out. And his money, of course. But Julian's quite in the money just now, because of somebody being dead and his father being mad and not allowed to spend any himself. I say, is this frightfully complicated?'

'Not really. But it doesn't just advance matters.'

'No, of course not. I'm afraid I'm not managing what you'd call a rapid protasis.'

'But I wouldn't. I'm not a Professor of Drama. Not even a Reader.'

'Aren't you really? I read plays a great deal. It's one of my troubles just like Tin is now, and as I'm explaining.'

'I can certainly see she's rather a blight.' Junkin's discursive manner, I was thinking, might not be to his advantage in the scurry of the Examination Schools. 'You got landed with her. Go on.'

'Just that. Well, I don't think Julian was ditching her. I think he just forgot. You'd say that was a bit unusual, wouldn't you, when you'd got it all fixed to lay a girl? Particularly one with advanced techniques and all that what the models in the shop-windows call special poses. I'd think the idea of Tin was that, wouldn't you, sir? At least I just can't see any other possibilities in her at all. Can you?'

'Well, frankly, Mr Junkin no. But we mustn't speak unkindly of her. Here she is, after all.'

'Just that. In our room.' It was handsomely, I felt, that Junkin thus described the chamber in which this curious colloquy was taking place. 'Of course we could tie the sheets together, and lower her through the window into Long Field. I expect you remember it's quite often done. Then you could have the bed and I'd have the sofa and we'd be quite all right for the rest of the night. There isn't much of it left as a matter of fact.'

'But that would be rather hard on her,' I said. 'You'd be going back on the very charitable att.i.tude you've taken up in the matter so far.' It occurred to me that I could simply return to Ivo's room and settle myself on the sofa there. But that might disturb Tony, whose circ.u.mstances made it improbable that he had got straight to sleep. And these same circ.u.mstances made me reluctant to involve him in this absurd travesty of s.e.xual misconduct. 'Look,' I said. 'I've got an acquaintance called Killiecrankie who's got a set on the next staircase for the night. I could-'

'Killiecrankie?' My involuntary host seemed struck by the name. 'Do you know? I mixed up Killiecrankie and Malplaquet in a b.l.o.o.d.y exam, and they took it very badly. Unreasonable of them, it seemed to me. Actually, they were battles or was it treaties? that took place exactly within twenty years of each other, so it was an easy mistake to make. But then examiners are unreasonable, aren't they? Just as dons, they're as decent to you as could be from one end of the year to the other. Then they turn themselves into examiners, and behave like that.' Junkin spoke less in anger than in sorrow. 'It's one reason why I'm in a bit of a b.a.l.l.s-up.'

'I'm very sorry. But I was saying that I can go over to this man Killiecrankie's rooms and fix it to sleep there.' I was discovering that this plan quite pleased me. The reactions of the Prebendary to the story promised interest.

'I go too,' Tin Pin said suddenly. I turned and stared at the girl, and saw her to be looking at me in a way that made my blood run cold. 'There's a sofa there, too sure?'

'There certainly is,' I said grimly. 'And it's been a battlefield in its time. All the same, Malplaquet's out.'

'You see the sort of s.l.u.t Tin is?' Junkin demanded. For the first time, he spoke with a touch of despair. 'I had the h.e.l.l of it to persuade her I was b.l.o.o.d.y well no soap myself. I have a girl. But Tin just has no sense.'

'I see that. Look, Nick may I call you Nick? I'm coming round to those sheets.'

'Right! We'll get cracking.' Nick Junkin was immensely relieved. 'If you can find her a quid, that is. We neither of us had a bean, you see, and I was just going to sleep rough. So that was how this started.'

'We'll wind it up. I'll run to a fiver. It may persuade her to get on a train.'

'You're a gentleman,' Junkin said with conviction. 'And-I say-I do admire your plays. They're better than Congreve. Right in the Wycherley cla.s.s, I'd say.'

'Thank you, Nick. And here goes.' Junkin's appraisal, although unlikely ever to be endorsed in any history of English drama, made me for the moment (for of course I was very tired) positively love the boy. 'Tin doesn't look very heavy, fortunately.'

'No. She's obviously the vest-pocket contortionist sort, isn't she?' He turned to Tin Pin. 'You hear that?' he said. 'You're financial again, and it's where you flake off.' Junkin was making decisively for his bedroom. 'The important thing,' he paused to say to me, 'is reef-knots.'

'Yes,' I said. 'I do remember that.'

Ten minutes after this, Nicolas Junkin and I were freely breathing a celibate air.

'It's a funny thing,' Junkin said, 'how quite sure I was she wasn't going to turn me on. I suppose I might have felt different after sleeping on it.'

'After sleeping on sleeping with her?' I liked this remark of Junkin's. A public-school boy, it struck me, however friendly he might be feeling, would have s.h.i.+ed away from such candour; an inbred sense of propriety, also attractive in itself, would have inhibited his speaking in this way to a much older man. I can't think it could be much good after having had to be deliberated on.'

'I suppose not.' Junkin was now detectably a shade wistful, after all. But I admit Julian is on to something, in a way. There are things you wouldn't do with your own girl that perhaps you shouldn't miss out on altogether. There's some of it in Lawrence.'

'I don't believe for a moment that Lawrence was any good in bed.'

'Oh, don't you think so?' For a moment Junkin was round-eyed with astonishment. 'I see what you mean,' he then said surprisingly. 'All that about loins of darkness and Loerke and the subtle l.u.s.t of the Egyptians and barely comprehensible suggestivity.'

Quite so. I doubt if it really takes one very far. There's a bishop asleep in this college now who's upset because he's found what he calls an erotic manual in his room. He needn't worry, if you ask me.'

'Kind of Perfumed Garden stuff?' Junkin asked, and stretched himself luxuriously.

'I suppose so. The bishop ought just to realise that not many people continue sold on that view of s.e.xual experience for very long.'

'It's the young being crude and ignorant and all that?'

'You can put it that way.' I saw that Junkin, unlike my dream children, would be quick to counter any instructive note with effective irony. 'By the way, what is Plot going to make of us in the morning?'

'Oh, Plot's all right. I like Plot. Of course he couldn't wink at a girl. His job's tied up with that. There are chaps who say the scouts are simply kept around the place as a b.l.o.o.d.y corps of spies. Not quite fair, I think. But it doesn't seem to me a man's job, all the same, running about with trays and emptying teapots. It's women's work. I've a couple of aunts who'd just love it waiting on apple-cheeked young gents and getting a civil thank-you every now and then. But Plot won't mind my sleeping here on the quiet. Not if you okay it.'

'Then that's fine.'

'Thank you very much. I say, can I make you some nescaf?'

'I'd be most grateful.' Coffee at 2 a.m. was scarcely my cup of tea, but I wasn't going to turn down an offer as polite as this. 'We're making a night of it, after all.'

'I've a queer sort of powdered milk,' Junkin said, and busied himself in this new interest. 'I say, who are all those people?'

'Those people?'

'All dressed up like you. Are they the governors?'

'The governors?' I was puzzled by this.

'Grand schools and colleges and places all have governors, don't they?'

'Oh, I see. No, they're just old boys. Up for a spree.'

'I suppose that's what a Gaudy is. I didn't know. This place puzzles me a lot. n.o.body ever explains it. They take it for granted you must know. I'm not even certain who bosses it. Perhaps it's the Senior Tutor.'

'I'm sure the Senior Tutor is a very important man. But if any one person bosses it, it's the Provost.'

'The Provost?' Junkin was surprised. 'I thought he was just some kind of clergyman. He dresses like that.'

'So he is. But he wears two hats.'

'Two hats?' Junkin, perhaps not conversant with the metaphorical use of this expression, looked as if the information only added to the general mysteriousness of the college. 'I told one of my tutors once that I didn't really understand the set-up. He said it was the same with him; he was a Balliol man, and had been here only twenty-five years, so he still couldn't make head or tail of it. He must have been making fun of me.'

'I don't think so. He probably feels just as he said. And you're likely, Nick, to end up knowing more about the place than he does, just because you've been here from the start. Inst.i.tutions like this are mysterious. They have a sort of secret life of their own. And it's always in charge, too. The dons go huffing and puffing in this direction and that, and the college just holds on its own course. Or that's my guess about it. I'm an outsider. I don't really know.'

'I suppose that's how plays get written.' Junkin offered this mordant conjecture without irony; rather admiringly, indeed. I admitted that playwrights grope around amid vast ignorances this while secretly telling myself that Junkin's character, at least, was something I was coming to know about. His realism and total incomprehension of social structures could be read as characteristic of his cla.s.s; so, perhaps, could his crude but not unwholesome s.e.xual precocity although in this his att.i.tudes must be diffused pretty well through his entire age-group. And I rather saw as the clou here the rationally measured-out hospitality which had put Tin Pin on the sofa and Junkin in his bed. Junkin was a sensible young man, and if he wasn't intellectual he was far from stupid. If one had to endow him with an idiosyncrasy by which I mean thought to tip him into a play it would be done by exaggerating his liability to mental inconsecutiveness and confusion and playing this off against a contrastingly stressed native sagacity. These simplicities of personality-structure belong, I suppose, to the theatre rather than to the novel. And if Junkin was, in fact, put together on simple lines, this was perhaps why the theatre attracted him.

These vague notions went through my head as I drank my coffee, but I don't think it occurred to Junkin that I was speculating about him; indeed, my manners would have been falling far short of his had I given him occasion for any thought of the sort. We talked in a relaxed and rambling way for some time. In fact the library was beginning to show in faint silhouette against a first flush of midsummer dawn before the hospitable youth figuratively speaking tucked me up in bed. I went to sleep at once, without taking time to reflect on the fact not perhaps much to my credit that the light comedy of Tin Pin and her unkindled rescuer had entirely driven the far from amusing, although indeed bizarre, history of Ivo Mumford from my head. It was, I had to suppose, rather more my sort of thing.

X.

I woke up to what I supposed was the memory of a dream and one constructed on fairly orthodox Freudian lines. Its s.e.xual purport would need digging for, but it was compounded, as it ought to be, of experiences of the past twenty-four hours mingled with concerns drawn from remote childhood: all this to the effecting of a disturbing and fantastic whole. I had returned to college, where I had encountered my old friend Tony Mumford. And Tony had proved to have an undergraduate son called Ivo, who had suddenly got himself into deep disgrace (s.e.x did come in here) and had then been secretly flown out of the country at an hour's notice by Gavin Mogridge, who no longer tried to play the 'cello and had become instead something very high up in what the Chancellor of the Exchequer still calls the Secret Service. I was just satisfactorily linking this last dream-element with that fantasy-life upon which I had retreated upon discovering myself not to be the cleverest boy in Miss Frazer's form when I came to my senses and realised that Ivo Mumford's abrupt expatriation (if, in fact, it had successfully taken place) belonged to the waking world. So did the prospect of becoming a reader a kind of mini-professor, it seemed in the university. And so did the episode of Nicolas Junkin and Tin Pin. The lady had, I hoped, departed for good. But her none-too-willing host was presumably still on his sofa in the next room.

Even on that uncommodious perch, he would with luck be sleeping the untroubled sleep of youth. But I didn't care to think of him as possibly tossing about, so I got out of bed and quietly opened the communicating door. There was no Junkin in the room. Was it perhaps Junkin who had been a dream? More probably he had gone out to the loo. Then I glanced at the mantelpiece, and saw an envelope perched just where the Provost's had been perched the night before. I crossed the room and picked it up. It said simply 'Mr Pattullo' in a bold, unformed hand. I opened it.

Dear Mr Pattullo, 7 a.m. and I think I'd better be off. I hope it isn't rude and I hope Plot will bring you tea. He does even me sometimes when he thinks I'm a bit down. It will be less akward although Plot is really quite good when akward things happen as or course they sometimes must. And as a matter of fact I am meeting a man and we are going to Turky. I've always rather wanted to go to Turky and it is very much on now. We shall hike of course, although the college has given me a travel grant which is hansome of them considering how I stand with those rotten examiners. We wonder if we'll have to have our haircut at the frontier. I asked my tutor and he said it wasn't a thing English gentlemen stood for from wogs and wops in his time but that times change. He says 'English gentlemen' as a joke but not ofensively. He is called Lempriere, I wonder if you know him. I am so sorry about last night. It must have been very tiring for you after a Gaudy (which I now know about) and which must be particularly tiring when one is getting on. I hope to see more of your plays. If you don't get a ppc from me from Turky it will be because the college hasn't sent it on. They are often rather bad about male.

Yours truly, Nick (Junkin) I went back to bed partly because I wanted Plot to have the satisfaction of waking me up, drawing back the curtains, and, no doubt, reporting on the state of the weather. A second reading of Junkin's letter confirmed me in the view that his examiners had at least certain superficial problems on their hands. It seemed improbable that Junkin's spelling and epistolarly style were in the least a characteristic product of c.o.keville G.S. They were native to the man. I was pleased by his manner of signing his name. It seemed to signal that I hadn't been presuming in addressing him as Nick.

I considered the shape of the advancing day. It had a train to Paddington at the end of it, but was going to run to several social occasions before that. They would be overshadowed, I saw, by the still-undetermined state of Ivo Mumford's fortunes. One couldn't ride away from an affair like that, or be other than oppressed by Tony's anxieties, simply because its untoward nature draped it with a curious unreality. In any case, I was myself involved, if in a peripheral way, since Mogridge following, it was to be supposed, some professional rule-book had announced that he would use me as a first channel of communication with Ivo's family.

I was distracted from these thoughts by voices floating up from the Elm Walk in Long Field. They came to me, I believe, with a more immediate sense of familiarity renewed than anything else had occasioned since my arriving for the Gaudy. There is no such thing as an Oxford accent, since what phoneticians call Received Standard English came into existence without the university's playing any very identifiable part in the process. But there is undoubtedly an Oxfords.h.i.+re accent, and I had first become aware of it through the open window under which I was now lying. (The bed hadn't moved between my time and Junkin's, and the two of us had shoved it back into place after disposing of Tin Pin.) College servants arriving, perhaps at a rather later hour than long ago, to begin their daily round and common task were calling out to one another as cheerfully as if under the immediate inspiration of Bishop Ken's morning hymn.

It was going to be another hot day, and already the veil of mist over Long Field would be stirring, would here and there be catching gleams of golden light. Remembering this, I forgot my benevolent plan of being found comfortably asleep by Plot. Tossing aside a sheet and single blanket (although not to a far corner of the room), I scrambled to my knees on the mattress, pushed aside the curtain, and threw up the lower window-sash so that I could lean out. When I had got both arms flat on the stone sill, and my chin contemplatively lodged on them, I experienced one of those sensations of entire well-being and unflawed happiness which are never more than momentary, nor by any means always a.s.sociated with nostalgic feeling, as this one appeared to be.

It had been, of course, early October when I had arrived in Surrey to begin my first Michaelmas Term. I thought I remembered golden mornings in its opening weeks, and myself greeting them just as I was greeting this June morning now. My feelings I didn't remember at all, but it was perhaps reasonable to a.s.sume that they had been buoyant, and that most of the suns.h.i.+ne I seemed to recall was supplied by my later imagination as a kind of climatic correlative to an inner weather. I had ended that term in love with the place to an extent which might have been said to const.i.tute a disease, and it was fair to suppose that leading up to this there had been a substantial prodromal period when the bug was hatching.

The mist hanging over Long Field was still thick and almost motionless; it was with only a suggestion of the faintest sprinkling of gold dust that sunlight as yet flecked it. Suddenly a number of creatures like performing brown bears emerged from the haze, baggy and upright. There were eight bears and a hedgehog the eight being oarsmen and the ninth their c.o.x. All were in enveloping track-suits except for one tall youth who walked in front carrying his blade and wearing, for some reason, no more than Junkin had been slumbering in when summoned to the rescue by Tin Pin. All vanished into vapour as they had come, making for the river. They were a crew that had recently done well in Eights, I uncertainly supposed, and whose training was unbroken because they were ambitious of equal distinction at Henley. Rowing had always been mysterious; indeed, the entire life of athletes had remained largely closed to me. Some of us, intellectuals or aesthetes (although this was an outmoded word) had professed a kind of connoisseurs.h.i.+p in that species of our fellows, lithe or lumbering, flannelled or muddy. It had been a taste, this indulgent spectators.h.i.+p, either genuinely or ironically h.o.m.os.e.xual in its prompting, and I had to be taught by Tony and others that it was 'inhibited' to disapprove of it. Now I should have liked to know what went on inside the supposedly thick skulls of these hearties. And under for that matter those great mops of hair. For I had several times noticed on television screens what I had glimpsed again now: that the devotedly athletic youth of England would be just as much at hazard on the frontier of Turkey as Nicolas Junkin could possibly be. The tall lad bearing his oar had been all raven locks brus.h.i.+ng bronzed shoulders.

At this point another college servant, arriving belatedly on a bicycle, glanced up at me with what I thought of as amus.e.m.e.nt. I reacted to this as promptly as I should have done in my earliest tenure of the window, ducking away from it as if detected in some eccentricity. I banged my head on the sash as a result, and as a result of that again gave the window a further and indignant upward shove. It moved a couple of inches, and I found myself looking at a faint but curious appearance thus disclosed. It was another bear. Only this time it was a Rupert Bear, tenuously scratched and then inked into the woodwork. I was sure that Rupert Bear had his first home in children's comics when I was myself a child, but I had a notion that he had lived on to be adopted as some sort of mascot, or emblem of niceness and innocence, by young people believing that niceness and innocence are politically as well as morally feasible. So Rupert's present appearance was perhaps the handiwork of Junkin. But it now struck me that the figure was designed not as Rupert but as Rupert's sister although I couldn't recall whether such a character was, or was not, canonical. My reason for this conjecture was that the figure appeared to wear what might have been a ballet dancer's tutu. This was balanced, and with a certain sense of composition or equipoise, by a balloon issuing from the figure's mouth. The balloon had once said something, but no single scratch of the message remained. I looked again, and saw that here was Rupert himself, after all. What he was wearing was not a ballet-skirt but a kilt. And I could supply the vanished words. They had been, Ye maun thole it, Dunkie.

So in fact my first Surrey days had not been so blissful after all. I had been obliged to remind myself of what I had elsewhere been taught: that he who endureth to the end shall be saved. And now my memory held the whole picture. Waking up in this strange place on those mild October mornings, I had only to push up the window-sash to its fullest extent to have Rupert emerge from his den and deliver his wholesome admonishment.

I didn't find this suddenly recollected behaviour at all astonis.h.i.+ng. Perhaps it was surprising that I had so effectively screened it away, and my fellow freshmen would certainly have been puzzled had one of them come upon Rupert in his mint condition. I was an unsophisticated lad but then so, in one direction or another, were most of them; and I doubt whether I had to put much effort into appearing as self-possessed, as inclined to amus.e.m.e.nt rather than alarm in these new surroundings, as anybody else. Geographically I had made a longer hop than most, but my schooling had been of the semi-Sa.s.senach cast I have described; and this, together with being my mother's son and certain other family a.s.sociations, made me distinguishably the same sort of boy if slightly exoticised as those who, with a varying degree of the mysterious, referred to one another as Salopians, Wykehamists, or Carthusians. I don't think I ever felt myself as floundering. It had been something deeper that obliged me to call Rupert Bear to my aid frustrated first love, in fact, with which Oxford had nothing to do.

'Dunkie' was my father's name for me. (He called my brother 'Nennie', believing Ninian to be the same name as that of the British historian Nennius.) His use of the vernacular to which he had been brought up which Scottish journalists liked to refer to as the Doric was on the whole confined to occasions upon which his habitual mild intemperance happened to take him in a cross-grained way; when its effect, as commonly, was merely mellowing, it amused him to talk in fluent although grammatically imperfect French. A 'guid crop maun thole the thistle', he might say, contemplating some vexatious commission in a bunch of those lying ahead of him. My mother, too, had some command of this speech, although mainly confined within the bounds of family anecdote. My Rupert Bear, indeed, was probably indebted to her. Her grandfather's coachman, she would recount, being reproved for doffing his livery-coat on a hot day, had replied, 'Sir, I can barely thole my breeks'. My mother, simple-minded and fond of gaiety, found a story like this very amusing. And I recalled now that at Oxford I had myself been inclined to show off my command of peasant speech something which would have been held wholly pointless at school. I would tell Tony that he was a flea-luggit dafty, or p.r.o.nounce P. P. Killiecrankie a fair scunner.

During what I could now think of as three Mumford generations, the colleges of Oxford, as of Cambridge, must have been receiving a steadily increasing proportion of young men who had never been away from home before. There had been more Nicolas Junkins in Tony's time than in his father's, and there were now more in Ivo's time than there had been in Tony's. My own Oxford acquaintance with home-keeping boys had been in the main and again those mysterious terms with Paulines and Westminsters, who seemed to be encountering nothing out of the way. They may well have had their own Rupert Bears, all the same. Like Ninian and myself they had lived on the alarming fringe of boarding school life. For boys like Junkin that life was a fiction: exciting, enticing, romantic, horrifying but securely confined within the covers of school stories. For boys in half-and-half places, whether English or Scottish, it was a presence, unnerving at least in some degree, just beyond a baize door. I seem to recall Graham Greene as describing this situation very well. Perhaps I myself had found more alarming than I consciously realised being pitched through the equivalent of such a door when I found myself on the staircase.

Ninian and I, again, had spent a good many years under the intermittent threat of being turned into boarders. This was because my father at least during periodic dangerous moments of attention to the matter had been aware that our domestic discipline was ramshackle and disorganised, and had concluded, rationally enough, that punctual meals, baths, prep and bedtime, together with an occasional thwack with a gym shoe (which last was something he himself lived a universe apart from any possibility of administering) would have exercised a bracing effect on our young lives as a whole. Fortunately he never had, when it came to the pinch, the money or perhaps the heart to do anything about it. I say 'fortunately' because our boarders, of whom there must have been something under a couple of hundred, were a displeasingly tough lot, to whom we gave as wide a berth as we could. Many were the sons of prosperous Lowland farmers. Others, coming from impecunious Service families without much intellectual pretension, would have been comfortably accommodated at Kipling's Westward Ho! The day-boys the sons of all those professors and advocates and doctors (to say nothing of such writers and artists as that part of the world managed to support) viewed these young savages with fascinated horror. Every second one of them we regarded exaggeratedly, no doubt as a revolting bully with nasty (and by us only dimly apprehended) private habits. To be cast among them would be to suffer something like what we were hearing of as currently happening in concentration camps. This nightmare, if largely baseless, owned a considerable power of lingering on. Conceivably I sometimes imagined myself to catch a murmur of it from among the young bloods of the college to which my father's eventual dramatic action and my own facility in English prose composition had transported me.

My actual experience of being away from home, although of a different sort, had been almost equally daunting in its way. This was because of the broad facts of my family history. My parents had met in Rome when my father was an art student living there on some exiguous bursary and my mother was being 'finished' in an expensive school. They were thus both very young. Their first encounter was in the Sistine Chapel. There is something undeniably impressive in the thought of a life relations.h.i.+p having its inception in front of Michelangelo's Last Judgement; and my mother, although I doubt whether she ever read A Room with a View, would declare that always thereafter she was to a.s.sociate my father with that one among the twenty nude youths on the Chapel's ceiling who carries a burden of acorns. The meeting is conceivable. How they contrived to continue to meet, and much more how they contrived to be married within the precincts of the British Emba.s.sy, I don't profess to know except, indeed, that my father was a hard man to beat.

My mother's people were deeply displeased the more so because the marriage proved to have taken place, most unfortunately, on the day of her father's death. Her eldest surviving brother, Rory (who thus became Roderick Glencorry of that Ilk and twenty-second Laird of Glencorry), regarded his sister as a feather-headed child who had been practised upon by some obscure crofter's son, and for several years he treated the couple as non-existent. But he was a conscientious man, with an honest if perhaps provincial sense of the consequence of the Glencorrys and the decorum that ought to obtain in the family of the Chief. So eventually he swallowed his resentment, and relations of a sort were established.

Even so, I can recall only one occasion upon which we visited Corry Hall in force. I had myself made the acquaintance of my Uncle Rory by then, and I was terrified lest he should treat my father with outrageous frigidity or condescension. Of course nothing of the kind happened. The Glencorry was cool, but very much the courteous host. He made a polite show of interest in my father's profession, inquiring about it with a correct diffidence which he certainly showed himself as having no t.i.tle to shed. It was about my father that I was then anxious; failing to be met with outrage, he was perfectly capable of turning outrageous himself. But this failed to happen either. The Glencorrys didn't run to a Raeburn, but there were several Allan Ramsays the family having been more prosperous in the mid-eighteenth century, I imagine, than later on. My father found it impossible to think ill of anybody who treated heirlooms of that sort with respect. The visit ended in good order.

But it had taken place perhaps ten years after my mother's marriage, and that settled a good deal. My mother was volatile and, I suppose, rather silly; she was also of those who were beginning to be called neurotics. But she was very well aware of what was due from the head of her family to the husband of her choice; and so stiff a quarantine could not be atoned for by a few amiabilities in front of canvases depicting deceased Glencorrys. The reconciliation remained formal, and things went on as before. Uncle Rory had already judged it right cto take an interest', as he expressed it, in Ninian and myself, and we were regularly invited to spend two or three weeks of the summer holidays at Corry. We didn't, however, go together. Ninian, as elder brother, had first innings; and I, as younger, had second. I never understood why this had to be so. Corry Hall would have held (and subdued) half-a-dozen boys much rowdier than the Pattullos. Possibly my uncle felt that the purpose of these visits was the improvement of our behaviour, and that it was best to concentrate upon us one at a time. As for my parents, I think my mother was always in two minds about our highland holidays. She disliked parting with her sons to a brother who was receiving them on a kind of sufferance, but at the same time she wanted us to be Glencorrys to be, in fact, a laird's nephews as well as an artist's sons. This divided feeling became a factor in forming what was to be my own ambivalent att.i.tude to my grand relations. My father was wiser, thinking not in terms of one side of our family and the other, and still less of painters and landed gentry. He simply judged it a good thing that we should get away from Edinburgh and run wild about the glens without any inconvenient cost to himself. Uncle Rory seemed not much to impress him one way or the other. My father had executed portraits of several men of that sort. They weren't quite his sort, but they belonged to an order he understood and after a fas.h.i.+on respected. They were certainly an improvement on people like the Dreich. Had he been invited (but he wasn't) to paint his brother-in-law he would have got on the canvas all the inner man there was. It might not have been a generous portrait, but it would have been alive.

Uncle Rory had an English wife, and two daughters who struck me as very English also. Indeed, my first fully formed, if not clearly formulated, impression of Corry Hall was that there seemed perplexingly little that could be called Scottish about it. I was grown-up before I realised that this was a superficial view. My expectation had been of kilts and bagpipes and even tartan carpets. (A school-friend with aristocratic pretensions had confided to me that the Duke of Argyll wore tartan bedroom slippers, at least at Inveraray.) I never saw Uncle Rory in a kilt, and he once astonished me by advancing the view that it was a garment which had been more or less invented by the Prince Consort. The only kilt in evidence about the place was worn by an elderly man who was provided with bagpipes as well, and whose duty it was to walk up and down in front of the house before breakfast, producing from the instrument all those disastrously emotive strains of which it is so capable. Ninian for some years more knowledgeable than myself, although I was to overtake him declared that this was a practice no longer current except in tourist hotels in the Trossachs. He may have exaggerated.

I found it unnatural that my uncle, who didn't hail from England, should talk like my masters at school, who did. At the same time, I found the fact fascinating, since it revealed to me the existence of a caste or cla.s.s unconfined by what I had accustomed myself to think of as unbreachable national boundaries. We had been taught that something of the sort obtained throughout Europe in the mediaeval period.

But there was a good deal else that was strange to me at Corry. By the time our visits there were an established routine, both my brother and I had made ourselves confidently free of two distinct worlds at home. We understood what I have called the Bohemian character of our domestic situation: its untidiness and disorder; its indecorous rows and rumpuses; the fas.h.i.+on in which, ignored as irrelevant brats one day, we would on the next be whirled as companions and equals into bewildering and exhilarating jollifications improvised by my father and his cronies this only to find ourselves, two or three days later still, groping through pervasive gloom or dodging nervous explosion because of some disaster in the studio or, it might be, merely in the kitchen. We were getting the measure of all this, and at the same time we were learning (as by rumour from afar) of the uses of toothbrushes and combs, of the polis.h.i.+ng of shoes, and of the comfortableness of clean socks. By means of such initial steps as 'staying to tea' in the houses of our schoolfellows we were coming to inspect and in many ways to approve the orderly fives of the professional cla.s.ses in what was still so unmistakably the capital city of an ancient kingdom. It was a society with strong intellectual traditions; if its a.s.sumptions and manners contrasted sharply with those which we knew at home, it yet presented to our fairly concentrated regard one facet, as that home presented another facet, of a more or less integrated urban life. We didn't of course Ninian and I put it to ourselves like this. It was simply a matter of our being intuitively aware that the Pattullos and the McKechnies in a last a.n.a.lysis hung together.

This conception gave us no yardstick for Corry, and three or four years must have pa.s.sed before I felt myself in a position to theorise to Ninian about this ancestral or demi-ancestral territory of ours. It just wasn't, I said, part of civilisation which meant the culture of cities at all. It didn't belong to any Brgerzeit, as Edinburgh did. It was a feudal set-up fossilised, and that was why it was so comically thin. Our uncle was the archetypal Thin Man. I admitted he was tough. But intellectually, aesthetically, spiritually (if one presumed to know anything about that), he was as thin as he was also undeniably thick. You could unwind him a little. But the result would be just a short length of string.

The animus in this suggests a divided mind, or at least reflects bewilderment in a strange situation. What had holiday life at Corry Hall been like when we were too small to defend ourselves? It had certainly been possible to run wild about the glens if a solitary boy can run wild about glens. But it hadn't been possible to do so without a cap. Without a cap (and it was a school cap, which was all I had, and a token of subjection which for years I'd have written any number of lines rather than been seen wearing in the street) without a cap one mustn't go beyond the front door. This wasn't because of any archaic persuasion that wandering bare-headed const.i.tuted a menace to health; I had to wear a cap in order to be able to doff it to any female, old or young, I met around the estate. The laird had the habit, and it was proper his young kinsmen should acquire it too. I also had to know these people's names, saying 'Good morning, Janet' to the girls and 'Good morning, Mrs Glencorry' (since most of them really were Glencorrys) to those who had attained to the dignity of being married women. Before setting out, moreover, I was under orders to visit the stable yard and consult a young man called Mountjoy, who acted as my uncle's general factotum. Mountjoy would determine whether there was a dog to be walked, and with the aid of a map would delimit as out of bounds any area in which a shoot was likely to be going on. He was an efficient person, who had attained a position of some responsibility early, but he was also benevolent, or at least he was benevolently disposed towards me. He would often keep me talking for some time, and would then add to the packet of sandwiches I had received from the cook a somewhat burdensome bottle of a fizzy red drink called Kola. He kept a stock of it from year to year simply for the refreshment of Ninian and myself Ninian being also a favourite of his. Neither of us could drink it, our palates having been vitiated by our father's insistence that we should be reared from an early age on claret and water. Ninian claimed that he seldom failed to find, paddling in a burn, some contemporary of simpler tastes into whom the stuff could be tipped. I was too shy for this, and also fearful that word might get round to Mountjoy of so illegitimate a largesse, to an effect of wounding his feelings. My own Kola, therefore, was apt to go into the burn itself, where it would fine away in crimson streaks and whorls, like the blood of a wounded grouse.

It will be seen that life at Corry was much a matter of traditionally determined modes of conduct. It was also pervasively low-keyed. The family's conversation was like that. At home I was accustomed to bouts of pa.s.sionate and sometimes hectoring and furious talk; to fierce arguments or absorbed discussions among all four of us on topics we often knew very little about. These exhausted, there would be silence for days on end mitigated only by the too-noisy eating habits of Ninian and myself or our mother's bursts of full-lunged bravura singing around the house when her nervous agitations took her that way. At mealtimes at Corry (and they were more prolonged than was necessitated by any abundance in the fare) conversation seldom stopped and never, never hotted up. It was a polite just as slow mastication was a dietic duty, and it certainly didn't much trespa.s.s on any realm of general ideas. Much was said about the dogs, their health and training; much about details in the not very complicated economy of the estate; a good deal about the tenantry (although they were few) and the moral hazards to which they were exposed through the encroachments of one or another modernisation. The affairs of the neighbouring gentry were also sometimes discussed, but invariably with an inflexible circ.u.mspection, so that nothing scandalous or otherwise interesting ever emerged. (Our father's policy if it was a policy was to examine in our presence absolutely any of the vagaries of human behaviour to have come to the notice of his inquiring mind although always against a background of stiff presbyterian probity which he had brought with him from his childhood to a much greater extent than he knew.) What worried me about the code of the Glencorrys was that its exactions were not in aid of anything I could distinguish. There didn't seem to be much around in the way of aims and targets; it all appeared depressingly a matter of the maintenance of a style. I thought I came to understand why my mother, in her readings to Ninian and myself from Scott's novels, kindled whenever she got away from the stodgy stretches to wild and romantic doings. There had been too much decorum in her childhood, and it looked as if there was going to be too much in that of my girl cousins as well, so that Uncle Rory might have rebels on his hands in the end.

Yet Uncle Rory remained formidable. On one occasion of Ninian's returning home and my own setting out I learnt with awe that my brother had actually been caned-and this at a date later than his sixteenth birthday-on the score of some gross and uncharacteristic discourtesy offered to a fishwife. That Ninian should have submitted to so humiliating and (as he a.s.sured me) fiendishly painful an experience, thus inflicted by one firmly declaring himself in loco parentis, showed that he at least, thought rather well of our kinsman. Had news of this sensational event reached my father it would certainly have been the end of our Glencorry holidays. That we kept it a deathly secret proves that, on balance, we prized and enjoyed them.

And it would be a good guess that during that summer at Corry Hall I behaved unnaturally well.

These pages which might be called Leaves from the Journal of our Life in the Highlands go a little way to suggesting that when I first went up to Oxford I was re-enacting, at least to some extent, my experience at a yet more vulnerable age of meeting a strange environment and almost a different culture. Later on, the Glencorry connection was to have a more considerable consequence. I have sketched in these people here very lightly but, as it were, 'straight' and without thinking to amuse. On future occasions, however, I was to treat them (and people more or less similarly stationed in life, of whom I was to meet plenty) much as I was to treat, say, the Talberts, expending a great deal of perhaps misdirected energy in the endeavour to elevate them within the sphere of comedy. I do not believe that comedy possesses, as the cla.s.sical theory of it would maintain, any particularly corrective or regulative function in society. But we do perhaps learn a little about ourselves by laughing at other people.

Plot might have been laughing at me now, had he owned the slightest inclination to such an impropriety. Having fallen upon the recollections I have here sketched, I was in fact still kneeling on my bed Nick Junkin's bed in a markedly juvenile fas.h.i.+on. Plot was standing patiently in the doorway, a large cup of darkish-looking tea in his hand, and an expression of solemnity rather than of amus.e.m.e.nt on his face. Perhaps he supposed himself to have disturbed me at my private devotions.

'A very agreeable morning, sir,' Plot said, handing over the tea. 'I hope you slept well. And most successful, the Gaudy appeared to me to be. Only one gentleman took bad.' Plot announced this with a satisfaction which might have been attributable either to the paucity of the casualties or to having something dramatic to intimate. 'Four of us it took, though, to get him back to his room. Right at the top of Harbage Six, it was, with a very awkward twist to the stair. A heart attack, they say, and Dr Damian with him still. Full-fleshed gentlemen ought always to be put in ground-floor sets, if you ask me. It would be only a reasonable precaution a Gaudy always having its chancy side for such types. Not that it isn't the emotion quite as much as the liquor, which is a creditable thing. I'm sorry those sheets look a bit crumpled, sir. How that could happen, I can't say.'

This was alarming. The sheets were crumpled for the good reason that they had been knotted together for the purpose of parting with Tin Pin. I hadn't made up my mind what, if anything, of the night's concluding adventure to communicate to Plot. Now, imprudently perhaps, I decided it should be nothing at all. 'I had a very comfortable night, thank you,' I said firmly. 'And I thought the Gaudy dinner was splendidly served. It must have been very hard work for you all. By the way, I found myself sitting next to Mr Killiecrankie. Prebendary Killiecrankie, I ought to say. I hadn't realised he'd become a clergyman.' I felt rather pleased with myself for thus introducing the name of my formerly scandalous contemporary. It might divert Plot from what could prove an awkward turn in our conversation. In an extremity, and supposing Plot to find (though it seemed improbable) any further inconvenient evidences in Junkin's rooms, Killiecrankie's history might even be exploited in a kind of counter-attack, since Plot had been so admittedly his henchman in that past time. 'He seems a changed man,' I added.

'It's only fitting, sir.' Plot paused on this in a fas.h.i.+on I didn't altogether like. 'Would the tea be to your satisfaction?'

'Oh, very much so. But now I suppose I'd better get shaved and dressed.'

'Breakfast is from eight-thirty, sir, so there's no call to hurry yourself. And I'll just be tidying round.' To my relief, Plot moved towards the door. There, however, he paused again. 'Adverting to what we were touching upon,' he said surprisingly, 'all in due season would be my motto. Mr Junkin, now, has a book on his shelf one of the bookstall sort, I'd think, that's done up in paperback called The Heyday in the Blood. I haven't looked into it, of course. It wouldn't be my place. But the t.i.tle explains itself, you might say. When I was a lad myself I used to get so that I just couldn't stop myself. But the vale of years isn't for such goings on. Change must come. Responsibilities.'

'Yes, indeed.' I had a moment's bemused sense of Plot as being in on the Yeats joke. 'And we are none of us getting any younger,' I added with desperate sententiousness. 'Still, we retain our sympathies with the young.'

'It wouldn't be proper not to.' With this judicial observation, Plot withdrew, closing the bedroom door behind him. As I shaved I could hear him moving around, and producing those exaggerated flappings and rattlings with which scouts habitually signal that they are hard at work. The demonstration continued while I dressed. Then there was a knock on the door, and Plot was confronting me again. He was holding an ashtray.

'It looks,' Plot said, 'as if somebody has been taking a liberty, sir. While you were dining, it might be. They get very slack on the gate, those porters do, when there's a Gaudy or the like.'

'I suppose it's inevitable.' I found myself thinking about Tony's father, and hoping that he had profited by this laxity. It might just conceivably become important that his coming and going had pa.s.sed unremarked. 'But what kind of liberty are you thinking of, Plot?'

Plot silently held out the ashtray for my inspection. It contained a single cigarette end. This, most unfortunately, was heavily stained with lipstick. I remembered the behaviour of Tin Pin. Here, in fact, was what might be called a fair cop.

'Dear me!' I said weakly. What Plot was imagining, it would have been hard to determine. I almost expected him to conduct a further rummage in the bedroom there and then. Who goes with who-an excellent poet has recorded-the bedclothes say. Plot might well be concluding that I had rounded off a jolly evening by brazenly importing a mistress into Nicolas Junkin's blameless rooms. It would have been a bold stroke. Not P. P. Killiecrankie himself and in his own heyday could have conceived of it. I found myself weakly still trying to remember how many five-pound notes I had in my wallet. But the situation was not one in which Plot would consent to be bribed. Nor, for that matter, was the attempt of a kind which a moment's decent consideration would permit me to pursue. 'It was a Chinese girl,' I heard myself say with staggering boldness. 'Probably from Hong Kong.'