Staircase in Surrey: The Gaudy Part 9

Plot's reply to this admirable in itself was a stiff bow. He had the appearance of regarding the matter as closed. I was not an undergraduate, after all, and no charge of his. I found, however, that this conclusion to the affair was not supportable. It must all come out. If he didn't believe me, then he could lump it.

'We got her out,' I said. 'In the usual way. Mr Junkin and myself.'

'Mr Junkin, sir?' It was evident that, for the moment at least, I had been unpersuasive. It was also evident that Plot was angry. He was eyeing me in a very man-to-man fas.h.i.+on. I remembered my impression that Nicolas Junkin of c.o.keville was a favourite of his. He didn't intend to accept any made-up story about him.

'He was in Oxford for the night, Plot, and not intending to come into college. But, somehow or other, he had this girl landed on him. So he brought her in here, not knowing his rooms would be occupied, and shoved her on the sofa. He wasn't interested in sleeping with her. When I came back it all seemed a bit crowded. So we gave her the price of a railway-ticket and dumped her.'

'I've heard that tale before.' Plot made this offensive-seeming remark in a perplexingly relaxed manner. 'On the very next staircase, it was, and not two years ago. Mr Withycombe, the gentleman's name was. One of those that call themselves Christians in College.'

'Christians in College?'

'A group organised by the Chaplain, that is, of (them that take religious matters seriously. Very serious, Mr Withycombe was, and a nice gentleman by all accounts. But slow. Slower than Mr Junkin, by a long way.'

'What happened?' I asked. For I somehow knew that Mr Withycombe was going to see Junkin and myself through the wood.

'He'd been with friends in Rattenbury, it seemed, discussing the Virgin Birth and deep matters of that sort. A very sober coffee-and-biscuits affair. Absorbing it must have been, though, since he didn't get back to Surrey till two in the morning. Much your own case, it might be said.'

'My dear Plot don't tell me he found a girl asleep on his sofa!'

'Just that, sir. Fancied she was in somebody else's rooms, she did, and had entered them at a lawful and respectable hour. So she sat down to wait for a gentleman who hadn't come and didn't intend to, and there she'd fallen fast asleep. It was a difficult situation for Mr Withycombe, particularly with him being slow, and his head full of the Immaculate Conception and other holy thoughts. Howsoever, he fetched a friend with better wits from across the landing, and they lowered her into Long Field and told her to make herself scarce.'

'So it all ended happily?'

'Well, not just at that moment. The night watchman happened to be going by, and all they managed was to lower the young lady into his arms. So Mr Withycombe was up before the Dean next morning, with nothing to say for himself except this c.o.c.k-and-bull story.'

'And what did the Dean do?'

'Why, believed him at once, of course. A very experienced man is Mr Gender.'

'And you're a very experienced man yourself.'

'Well, sir, I can advise you about breakfast.' Plot was actually smiling broadly, an abundant sign that I had been restored to grace. 'The porridge is something horrid and there's no disguising it particularly from a Scottish gentleman like yourself. But where it says kippers it means kippers, and not a kipper. And very tasty they commonly are.'

I promised to profit from this inside knowledge, and Plot withdrew. But ten minutes later he returned, and for a moment I feared that he might have had second thoughts about his responsibilities in the grave matter of Junkin and Tin Pin. But he was merely handing me a note.

'From Lord Marchpayne with his compliments, sir,' he said. 'His lords.h.i.+p having had to leave first thing. On account of parliament and the like, no doubt. Not their own masters, such gentlemen are not. But the beck and call of duty hangs over us all.'

I accepted this improving thought, and tore open the envelope as soon as Plot had gone away again.

Dear Duncan, I'm clearing out. Breakfast after the Gaudy isn't all that enticing in itself, and I don't like kippers about which Plot has been chattering to me. I won't pretend that I'm not frantically worried about this thunderbolt, and I'm thankful you were standing by. Gavin too. If he has really brought off what he proposed then we do have a chance, at least, of getting in the clear. But the unknown factors are appallingly numerous. Think of my father's housekeeper. Think of Ivo's car. Think of village kids perhaps fooling around that gardener's cottage and coming on the boy. There are a dozen such hair-raising possibilities. It's a dreadful gamble, and that first fib of my father's started it. I've no illusions. People's children do get into trouble people in my position, I mean and there's a convention that it isn't let reflect upon one's public life or political career. But conspiracy, G.o.d help us, is another matter. If Gavin makes a muck of it and is boarded or something, of course I shan't be able to leave him in the ditch. I'll have to say I shoved it at him. And that will finish me as well as him and without doing Ivo any good either. Oh, h.e.l.l!

But I'm sure the die being cast that Gavin is right to stick to his drill. (Who would have thought the chap was that) Please get through to me as soon as he gets through to you. Telephone numbers on the enclosed slip. On each of them ask first for my PPS. He's called Arbuthnot and is a very discreet chap. Destroy this now.

Yours ever, Tony

XI.

I put a match to Tony's letter, and held it over Tin Pin's ash-tray (now emptied and wiped clean) until I had to drop it as the flame licked my fingers. Then as if I were somebody in a spy-story or a romance of crime I stubbed the ashes to powder with the matchstick. It made quite a mess for Plot to deal with later. I had a vision of him in a witness-box, offering a judge an unhurried account of this small unaccountable appearance. Under the influence of this fantasy, I almost took the remains downstairs to flush them away under the staircase's (inferior) loo. But I drew the line at that, telling myself one oughtn't to let funk be catching.

Tony was admitting funk but perhaps not as much as he had actually been feeling. I took his point about conspiracy. If some unknown development in Ivo Mumford's situation defeated Mogridge and led to a more or less spectacular show-down, the plot hatched in Ivo's rooms at midnight could turn out uncommonly uncomfortable for us all. Its context in a high academic bean-feast graced by sundry persons of eminence would make it a spot-lit affair. But all this was no reason for being too late to join in the Gaudy Breakfast. I went downstairs and walked across Surrey.

Other men were doing the same thing. Some of them were hurrying having succ.u.mbed to the persuasion that they were undergraduates again, and that at the stroke of some hour the doors of hall would be inexorably closed against them. Although this obviously baseless apprehension amused me, I found myself hurrying too. As a result, I failed to take the evasive action which my preoccupation and the generally unsociable character of the hour might otherwise have persuaded me to, and found myself walking towards the Great Quadrangle side by side with P. P. Killiecrankie. We exchanged greetings.

'Do you remember Plot?' I asked.

'Plot?' The Prebendary had given me a sharp glance, but he repeated the name consideringly. 'Let me see. Would he have been a Rhodes Scholar reading Law?'

'He was a bicycle-boy, and he's now the scout on my old staircase. I ask because he mentioned you. He seems to remember you very well.'

'Ah! Well, I did have a bicycle. No doubt he cleaned it up from time to time. Not a service that one could expect nowadays, I imagine. But they tell me that the undergraduates still have their shoes polished for them. It seems to me unnecessary, and against the spirit of the time. It doesn't happen at a theological college with which I am connected.'

The Prebendary had changed the subject without haste. Unless he had really forgotten about Plot, he must have guessed that his former henchman had been indiscreet, and that my question was maliciously motivated. Undeniably it had been. So I thought better of going on to tell Killiecrankie that his exemplification of all the undergraduate virtues and graces had been such that the college servants still spoke with deep respect of Mr Killiecrankie's year. Instead, I said I hoped he had continued to enjoy the Gaudy after we had risen from the dinner table.

'Yes, indeed-extremely pleasant. Such convivial occasions seldom come my way, and are all the more appreciated when they do. My duties in the vineyard have become more onerous of late.' Killiecrankie imparted to these last words that humorous inflection which the higher clergy are adept at lending to scriptural references without any unseemly effect of irreverence. 'Of course, one sometimes finds good company in Irish vicarages. But I have to confess that it is the exception rather than the rule. As for last night, I met and talked with a number of old friends. The Provost, in particular. It is heartening that he continues so much a man in his prime. When a mere lad, I was deeply attached to him as I have no doubt you were, my dear Pattullo. His conduct of College Prayers was an inspiration to us all. One or two of his sermons influenced me deeply, even in my freshman year.'

'He might be astonished to hear it,' I said and added hastily, 'being so modest a man.'

'I was anxious to have a few words with Marchpayne whom I remember to have been, as Antony Mumford, a close friend of yours. I myself barely knew him in those days considering him, to tell the truth, to be rather a frivolous fellow. I wanted, of course, to congratulate him on his Cabinet post. As it happened, I just missed him. And in rather odd circ.u.mstances.'

'Odd circ.u.mstances?' I must have been more nervous than I realised, since these unremarkable words of Killiecrankie's alarmed me.

'It was very late really very late, indeed and I was returning to my rooms in Surrey when I became aware of two men crossing the Great Quad. They might have been making their way to the car park. One of them was faintly familiar to me, although I couldn't put a name to him. The other appeared to be Marchpayne. But as I glanced at him I said to myself, "That's not Antony Mumford. It's his father, Cedric." A curious aberration, wouldn't you say? But it held me up for a moment, and the opportunity to have a word with Marchpayne was gone.'

'Very curious. You know Tony's father?'

'We have met from time to time. Cedric Mumford is a keen supporter of a Catholic missionary society with which I have a certain amount of contact. It is a difficult, and therefore rewarding, field for oec.u.menical effort.'

'I see.' I reflected irrelevantly that if I had been inventing old Mr Mumford, and obliged to provide him with some interest or other on the side, missionary enthusiasm was about the last thing I could have reckoned to render plausible. 'As a matter of fact,' I said rashly, 'Tony and his father are very alike.'

'Ah! Then you too know Cedric Mumford?'

'No, no Tony has simply mentioned the fact of the strong family resemblance, I mean.'

It was with astonishment that I heard myself tell this blank lie. When one is acting a lie one has an impulse, I suppose, to tell lies as well. That he really had seen old Mr Mumford in college after the Gaudy was something which it was certainly desirable to keep out of P. P. Killiecrankie's head. I was sure Mogridge very much hoped that his getting Ivo's grandfather off the premises had been un.o.bserved. But I needn't have gone out of my way to a.s.sert that the pillar of missionary endeavour was unknown to me.

We had reached the entrance to hall, and I adopted the resource of making some comment on its oddity. Wyatt's solid, indeed chunky, staircase pushes incongruously upward beneath a late and elaborately traceried fan vaulting supported by a slender central shaft and dropping at regular intervals to pendentives like the ribs of an umbrella. A fantasticated and Brobdingnagian umbrella, indeed, is just what one feels oneself to be climbing beneath. But the Prebendary was inattentive to these appearances, or at least to my remarks on them, having fortunately espied a high dignitary of the church proceeding to breakfast just ahead of us. In the interest of making this contact he produced a graciously dismissive inclination of the head, much as if he were a very high dignitary himself. Thus happily released, I lingered behind for a moment and then went into hall.

The scene or at least its atmosphere was altered. There was a faint smell of expensive tobacco-smoke gone stale. The ranked portraits looked pale and jaded, as if they hadn't slept well. The shrunken body of breakfasting old members presented, many of them, the same appearance. Some had unsociably possessed themselves of newspapers, and one could guess that they were not all being sufficiently attentive to each other in the matter of pa.s.sing the marmalade. Only the undergraduates looked cheerful perhaps because they were getting a better breakfast than usual. There were a score of them at a table apart; and I noticed among them, looking extremely good-tempered and at ease, the youth who, the night before, had offered his companions the remark about self-exaggerating c.r.a.p. The majority must be those still involved with examinations. I realised with a shock that the dead Paul Lusby ought to have been among them. The news about him had probably not yet got around.

I sat down at random, rather wis.h.i.+ng that I had a newspaper myself. One couldn't exactly opt for a station apart, so I found myself at the end of a short row of my contemporaries. My neighbour turned out to be Robert Damian.

'Hullo, Robert,' I said. 'Has your patient kept you at it all night?'

'Oh, that.' Damian gave me an abstracted nod. 'Well, yes. The silly a.s.s had convinced himself he was dying. How do you know about it?'

'My scout. He was a gratified member of the stretcher party. He believes that what overcomes people isn't the flesh-pots and the flagons, but the intense emotion stirred by our reunion. It's a romantic thought.'

'It's a b.l.o.o.d.y silly one. The college has had a real fatality, as a matter of fact.'

'You mean a lad called Lusby? I've heard of that too.'

For a moment Damian made no reply, but stirred his coffee.

'Those unpredictable things are never quite unpredictable,' he said presently. 'But with so many pins in the haystack it isn't easy to spot the needle. Have you ever lived on an American campus, Duncan?'

'Yes, for a time.'

'They have counselling services going like mad, but it doesn't improve the statistics. Ours aren't too bad, as a matter of fact. The university's as a whole, I mean. But this place, too. Unfortunately there's no comfort in statistics when the individual shock comes along. I had young Lusby talking several times. At risk a bit beyond the average, without a doubt. But nothing to panic about. Ordinary stress through over-anxiety to excel.'

'In the Schools? Then why did he let himself be drawn into that idiotic wager?'

'So you've heard of that too. An itch, it must have been, to establish some alternative image of himself, I suppose. The wager was with somebody not the least his sort. And who didn't even go to their blasted Commem Ball.' Damian hesitated. 'Somebody we were mentioning last night, as a matter of fact. Cyril Bedworth got the story out of a third chap not half an hour ago.'

I had a curious feeling that the hall had gone cold.

'Not Tony's boy?' I said.

'That's right. Ivo Mumford. Rough on him. But, of course, rough on Lusby as well.'

I found that I was looking at two kippers. It wasn't Plot's fault if I judged them unattractive. The lucklessness of Ivo was undeniably not to be divorced from certain displeasing facets of his personality. But for the moment I somehow felt myself to be, along with Tony and Mogridge, Ivo's man. In imagination I had been unkind to him just as, in imagination, I had been kind to Nicolas Junkin. Junkin had turned up in circ.u.mstances which were extremely absurd and I had been able to tell myself I hadn't been wrong about him. He was an appealing lad. Ivo was yet to meet, and it was possible I should never set eyes on him. If I did, my facile build-up of an over-privileged young baddie might be vindicated too. But now I was hoping that it might at least have to be modified. And there was a good chance that it would be so. People commonly prove, when one makes their acquaintance, more mixed up and patchy than from hearsay one has concluded them to be.

'Whining schoolboys and lovers sighing like furnaces,' Damian said. 'Shakespeare missed out on undergraduates, who obviously come in between. An eighth and awkward age. But now I'm off to mere oblivion in North Oxford.'

'Your nonagenarians?'

'Yes. I get through two or three of them before morning surgery.' Damian had looked at his watch and stood up. 'Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything except the remorseless application of scientific gerontology. One sometimes forgets that while there is death there is hope.'

Left alone, I glanced round the hall. At this meal it seemed the guests were expected to fish for themselves. The only one of our hosts in evidence was Arnold Lempriere, and I took this to indicate that he was a bachelor and lived in college. Even so, and particularly since he was so senior a fellow, he must have owned abundant facilities for breakfasting in private. I concluded that, alone among his resident colleagues, he regarded turning up in hall as a proper civility. He wasn't, indeed, going at all out of his way to make conversation: a spare remark, offered now on his one hand and now on the other, appeared to be what he regarded as the requisite thing. He was untidily dressed in ancient tweeds which might with advantage have gone to the cleaner's. I had a sense that this was less a matter of standards slipping in senescence than a deliberately contrived manner of setting an accent on something he would have retained if dressed in sackcloth or cap and bells. I wondered whether Plot would have credited him with belonging to the old gentry. He certainly didn't suggest any sort of gentry recently unpacked from the straw. He was indicating this now (much as if I had invented him in a light comedy of Edwardian flavour) by the nonchalant employment of a toothpick.

It was over this implement that Lempriere presently glanced at me across the hall. His eyebrows, which were grey like the rest of him, immediately elevated themselves; he might have been registering an injurious astonishment, if not before my actual existence (which would have been unreasonable), then at the fact of my having been detected as still hanging around the place. But this vertical movement was immediately succeeded by a horizontal one, the eyebrow switching across Lempriere's otherwise immobile features rapidly from left to right. The main door of hall lay that way. I realised that I had received, with an extreme economy, instructions to join Lempriere there at the conclusion of our meal.

Following him out a few minutes later, I noticed that his clothes were not only old, but baggy as well. I was reminded of Cyril Bedworth in his tails the night before. But if Lempriere's garments were too big for him it wasn't as a consequence of ill-considered purchase off the peg; it was because they had been tailored when he was a bulkier man than now. My first impression of a stout figure, gained in the dark, had been an error similarly induced. Physically, Lempriere was of much the same type as old Mr Mumford. It occurred to me that these two must be close contemporaries.

'We'll do a Long Field,' Lempriere said. He spoke as peremptorily as if I had been a pupil he judged badly in need of exercising.

'I'll be delighted to.' This seemed to me a suitable reply, although it wasn't exactly an invitation that I had received. 'It's very much a morning for it.'

Lempriere gave a sombre grunt. I clearly hadn't done too well in introducing climatic considerations after this fas.h.i.+on. There were those who 'did' a Long Field at some period of the day, wet or s.h.i.+ne, throughout the year, and Lempriere was probably one of them. Perhaps I was fortunate in not being required to do the mile-and-a-bit involved at the double. It wasn't only athletically inclined undergraduates who kept in form that way. Elderly men did it often modestly after dusk. And possibly some old members did it too, as part of the general nostalgic exercise upon which they were engaged.

'At least you're not going to be a tutor,' Lempriere said as we set out. He advanced this surprising remark in what he seemed to design as a comforting tone. 'Unless, I suppose, you positively ask for it.'

'I'm not positively asking for anything.' I made this reply with a slight asperity, having grown tired of these odd obliquities. 'And I have nothing but hints and nudges to tell me what you're talking about.'

'But hasn't Talbert put it to you?'

'Talbert hasn't put anything to me. I'm going to tea with the Talberts this afternoon.'

'Then he's deferred it till then. Or perhaps it has just gone out of his head. For years he has put on a turn as the absent-minded scholar, and now the real thing is catching up on the old chap. It's a professional risk with poseurs, I know.'

'I suppose he must be getting on.' The 'old chap' couldn't, I thought, be as old as Lempriere himself. 'After all, he was my tutor ages ago.'

'Of course he was. That's why he was the appropriate man to broach the thing. He was absolutely instructed to do that.'

'But I think the Provost has the job in hand at lunch-time.'

'No doubt. But you were to be softened up first.' Lempriere chuckled softly. (I have always regarded this verb as one to be avoided as a tired word for a not particularly pleasing activity. But Lempriere certainly chuckled: it was the faintest of noises in his throat, and I rather liked it.) 'You think I'd be no good as a tutorial fellow?' I asked.

'You'd be the wrong age, Pattullo. You'd be the wrong age even to hold down the job, let alone start in on it. It's a young man's job as it was until the university turned silly in the middle of the nineteenth century. Of course an old man can do it, after a fas.h.i.+on. I can do it myself, although I no longer know anything about my subject worth speaking of. On the whole, the young men don't care for father-figures. They make what that college doctor of ours calls a negative transference, as often as not. But they'll accept a grandfather-figure. In addition to which, as one turns senile, one comes very much to like the young. And they like being liked much more than they like being understood. Any intelligent middle-aged man can understand them like mad. But they find that unnerving. They much prefer mute communion and a decent gla.s.s of madeira.'

'I'm not sure that you aren't busying around proposing to understand me.'

'Understanding people is one of the minor satisfactions of life.' Lempriere chuckled again over this indirect reply. 'But it's best to go about it without letting on. And I don't expect other than a negative transference from you. What do your intimates call you?'

'Duncan. Or Dunkie.'

'So you can go away if you want to, Duncan.' Lempriere's choice between the alternatives offered him seemed to indicate his estimate of the degree of intimacy proper at the moment. It was surprising in itself, and I dimly felt there must be some reason for it. 'You and I, come to think of it, are at that disabling father-and-son remove.'

'I'm having a very enjoyable walk, thank you. And similarly, coming to think of it, you might have been a grandfather-figure to me if you'd been around when I came up. And surely you ought to have been. Why weren't you?'

'You're muddled. You probably drank too much last night. I warn you that it's another professional risk. You're thinking of me as being then the amiable dotard I am now.'

'So I am. But you're not a dotard, and I still require evidence of your being amiable. But I repeat: why weren't you around?'

'Because they kept me on in Was.h.i.+ngton for three years after the war was over. I'd proved a superb liar in high places, and they had a conviction that more lies were essential if the Empire was to survive. They were quite right. So I went on telling lies for all I was worth. It turned me most d.a.m.nably truthful for the rest of my days. That's my liability in this place now.'

I laughed at this, not very sure that it was a justifiable claim. I had meant what I said in a.s.serting that I still required evidence of this formidable old gentleman's amiability. And he seemed to me not quite impartial as between one sort of truth and another. The impression I had gained at our midnight conference was of his liking the uncomfortable kind best, and I suspected that a proposition sometimes appealed to him less because he thought it valid and consistent with whatever were his genuine convictions than because he spotted it as a useful peg on which to hang a pungent rhetoric.

'Were you an amba.s.sador?' I asked. 'They've been said to be honest men sent to lie abroad for the good of their country.'

'That was certainly the object of the exercise. But my position was a modest one among the indispensable obscure. It remains just that barring the indispensability.'

Silence was the only civil response to this. I had never heard of Arnold Lempriere as a scholar which didn't, of course, mean that he mightn't be a most distinguished one in a recondite way. I wondered about the effect of Hitler's war on dons of his generation. They had been young enough to fight, and many of them had fought. But many more had become back-room boys whose abilities had eventually brought them close to the great centres of power and responsibility. And this sounded like Lempriere's story. I was curious to know whether his ambitions had been touched by that vaster theatre, and whether he regretted his return to quiet academic courses.

'But apart from that break,' I said, 'you've been here all your days?' If a man asks what you are called by your intimates, you are presumably ent.i.tled to fire direct questions at him.

'Yes, indeed. Another of those early points of no return. The fatal day came when I failed to go out of residence.'

'You mean you accepted a fellows.h.i.+p?'

'My dear Duncan, it is customary to speak of gaining one. But the terminology is unimportant. That was it, and here I am. They haven't even made me a thingummy.'