Dear Mr Pattullo,
You must certainly dine with us on Thursday! Seven-thirty for eight o’clock. Black tie. The Provost and I are very much looking forward to the occasion.
Yours sincerely,
Camilla Pococke
I found this note waiting for me when I got back from the nursing-home. It was almost as mysterious as the psychology of Martin Fish, and for the time being banished from my head all consideration of the hazards of foreign travel in Fish’s company. I was so conscious of bewilderment that I took the thing straight across the staircase to Tony. ‘What do you make of that?’ I demanded. ‘It’s an invitation to dinner. Such civilities are quite common in polite society.’
‘It’s nothing of the sort. You accept an invitation, or decline it, don’t you? I can’t do either with this. It’s not worded that way. Why should the woman send me a bloody summons, complete with exclamation-mark?’
‘I don’t think it’s a summons, exactly. It’s what you might call the vehement expression of a wish. She’s conscious of a prospect so enchanting that she expresses it as something that just must happen.’
‘Do talk sense. It’s very worrying.’
‘Worrying?’ Tony repeated the word with tolerant amusement. ‘Perhaps the lady’s conscious of usually comporting herself with excessive formality, just like her better-half. That’s what’s said of her. Here she’s taking a random stab at something else.’ Tony read the note a second time. ‘No,’ he said, ‘you’re right, in a way. There’s an unknown factor at work.’
‘That’s what I think. But what?’
‘She believes you already know something about her jollification, and in fact you don’t seem to. The affair’s one at which it’s so obviously appropriate that you should be present that here’s the agreeable way to express herself. She’s trying hard. It’s my impression that she does try hard.’
‘You don’t think it has to do with the golf course?’
‘Good God, that was ages ago! And how could it? Duncan, you’re bonkers. Symptoms of paranoia setting in. A consequence of association with poor old crack-pot Fish.’
‘Fish is absolutely okay again, as a matter of fact. Almost euphoric. He’ll be back tomorrow.’ I saw that the golf course had been a mistake. ‘But you must be on the right lines, in a general way. Somebody’s going to dinner in the Lodging on Thursday whom I might reasonably be asked to meet. But I just can’t think who.’
‘Then you’ll have to go and see.’
‘I suppose so. How do I reply?’
‘Pile it on a little. Dear Mrs Pococke, Thank you very much for your kind invitation. It will give me great pleasure to dine with the Provost and yourself on Thursday. Your loving Dunkie.’ Tony handed me back the letter. ‘I’ve got it!’ he exclaimed. ‘She has invited Bedworth, and she knows all about your consuming passion. She must be a very broad-minded woman.’
‘What you think to be funny is quite too pitiful. It occurs to me it might be Mrs Triplett.’
‘With a leash of brown girls? Have you become a pet of hers?’
‘More or less, I suppose.’
‘Give it to me again.’ Tony took back Mrs Pococke’s summons. ‘No,’ he said. ‘It’s not Mrs Triplett, even if she has been raving about you – which is improbable. It reads to me as if it must be about a relation. Listen! Have you any relations in Oxford? What about your dear old uncle, the retired brigadier – has he become bursar of Teddy Hall or something?’
‘He wasn’t ever a brigadier. He sometimes calls himself Captain, which it seems you can do if you were in his sort of regiment. And he certainly hasn’t become a college bursar. He couldn’t run a chicken farm. He has his hands full, anyway, running a private army.’
‘A private army?’
‘Oh, never mind.’ I realised that this had been a rash confidence. ‘I don’t have any relations in Oxford.’
‘Then one’s visiting the place. Have you heard from home lately?’
I stared at Tony, deciding he had said something to the point at last. There came back to me a strong impression that when my father, as he expressed it, entered me at the college he and the Provost had – rather surprisingly – hit it off. And there was always an unpredictable element in my father’s conduct. Suddenly I remembered, too, something I had heard at the end of the Easter vac. My father, who was now Lauchlan Pattullo, P.R.S.A., was going to attend a dinner, some time in the near future, given by his opposite number in London. (He had remarked, ungraciously, that he might look up some real painters as well. His attitude to distinction within an Establishment was whimsical and indeed equivocal.)
‘I think you may be right,’ I said. ‘I’ll go and ring up now.’
The line to Edinburgh was remarkably clear. Although I was telephoning from the porter’s lodge and traffic was roaring past outside, I could hear, behind my father’s voice, that of my mother, singing vigorously in the kitchen.
‘Dunkie?’ my father said. ‘Good man! But make it snappy. Taxi’s waiting.’
‘Where’s it taking you?’ My suspicion was instantly confirmed.
‘The Waverley, of course. I’m going to this old gentleman’s dinner on Wednesday. He paints horses. A kind of vet. And I’m coming to Oxford on Thursday, and taking you out to lunch.’
‘You haven’t told me.’
‘Haven’t I?’ My father’s voice was entirely innocent. ‘Well, book a table at wherever’s best.’
‘You’ll lunch with me in college.’ I was firm about this. ‘It’s the proper thing. It will be the nice thing as well. What else are you doing?’
‘I wrote to your Provost, and said I’d call. It wouldn’t be polite not to do that. He has replied I’ve to stay the night. He wants to show me your pictures. And I’m to dine in the Lodging. I thought it might be your high table.’
‘It’s because his wife’s giving a private dinner party. I’ll be there.’
‘That’s good! And dinna fash yoursel, Dunkie. I ken weel about the spoons and forks.’
This told me two things: that a faint apprehensiveness I had signalled was meeting with a proper rebuke, and that my father had been fortifying himself against his journey with a dram or two. It was chiefly when mildly elevated that he made these random incursions into dialect.
‘How are you, Dunkie?’
‘I’m fine, thanks.’ I hadn’t had a word from my father since the beginning of term. But his tone, anxious and therefore suddenly guarded, brought back to me how unhappy – and no doubt tiresome – I had been, only a few weeks before, during the Easter vacation. Oxford – no more, after all, than a second brief eight weeks of it – had lost reality, dissolved like a dream, before my train reached Durham. But Edinburgh had taken on no countervailing solidity; it was a ghost town in which I thought I knew nobody and felt like a tourist. I was astonished at a state of mind that seemed so like affectation, and sought various remedies. One day, for example, I tried visiting my old school. It was a regular thing for boys who had recently gone on to a university to drop in and wander round, and they would usually be invited to stay to lunch, or to witness some match or other judged to be of importance. Plenty of people with whom I had been on more or less equal terms were now putting in a third year in the sixth form. But I got no further than staring at the place from the gates and wondering if it had ever really harboured me. All these feelings of alienation stemmed from the single fact that Janet was at the other end of Scotland, a circumstance perhaps exacerbated by her having formed the bad habit of sending me an occasional picture-postcard. The island of Skye didn’t appear to run to anything very attractive of that sort. The messages were mostly brief accountings of what she had read, as if she was reporting to a tutor at a correspondence college while herself inhabiting a region in which real things happened. This was the facet of our developing – or attenuating – relationship which I distrusted most of all.
My father had to head off my mother from pouring sympathetic remarks and romantic laments over my dejected head, and he himself said nothing. But I found that I was spending more and more time in his studio, and this without any awareness that I was being coaxed into doing so. I would be squaring up a canvas for him, or doing the numerous cleaning and tidying jobs such a place requires, and which prosperous painters retain semi-skilled assistants to perform. He talked as he worked – rather, I thought, as a surgeon must do while he operates: wholly absorbed in his task, yet with an equal care to maintain in his pupils an unflagging attention to the work of his hands. That I wasn’t a painter myself seemed irrelevant; he was telling me where, in a general way, I belonged, and that for an artist there is no comfort except in the sweat and frustration and elusive triumph of making what it is in him to make. It was this stern message that was being carried in my father’s low-toned technical talk. He was perhaps looking forward to what time would falsify: my becoming something other than one of the competent entertainers of my day. Yet I knew I shouldn’t stand or fall in his regard according to any eventual revelation of my quality. It is part of nature’s general wastefulness that in art, too, only a few of the called are chosen. My father respected all the called alike, and appeared to have no difficulty in reconciling an affection for indifferent performers with a strong dislike of indifferent performances.
Thinking of all this as I hung up the telephone, I was ashamed of my uneasiness at the thought of my father let loose in the Lodging. It is an odd fact that when schoolboys transform themselves into undergraduates they scarcely shed at all their alarmed sense of parents, uncles, aunts and sisters (but not brothers) as fatally inclined to social solecism. I remember our Captain of Rugger at school – an almost god-like figure, with international caps most certainly ahead of him – as reduced to a state of nervous near-prostration by the liability of his father (an athlete with a Soccer background) to shout from the touch-line the wrong thing at the wrong time. These states of apprehensiveness are very little connected with social disparities or insufficiency. They may be remarked in the eye of young noblemen leading old noblemen around. Nothing better instances the edginess of lingering adolescence.
But I was to have a further anxiety about Mrs Pococke’s dinner-party. It cropped up as soon as I returned to Tony and told him the state of the case.
‘You’d better have your hair cut,’ he said. ‘And washed. It’s rather fetching, as a matter of fact, when floppy. It represents, incidentally, your best chance with Bedworth, if you ask me.’
‘I don’t think Bedworth notices carnal things.’ Except when irritable, I suffered Tony’s recurrent reference to this supposed passion of mine patiently. ‘But perhaps Mrs Pococke does.’
‘Certainly she does. An honest female animal lurks in your honoured hostess. I intend to essay the wench. Oh, by the way, don’t forget to wear a gown.’
‘Of course not.’ I looked at Tony stonily, supposing that this was a malicious attempt to have me make a fool of myself.
‘Seriously. You must put on your gown. At least it will match quite well with the natty d-j outfit.’
‘Don’t be a bloody fool. I don’t put on a gown to go to tea with the Talberts in Headington. Why should it be different dining with the Pocockes in the Lodging?’
‘Because, my child, our Provost has just started his spell as Vice-Chancellor of the university. Don’t you know that?’
‘Yes, I do.’
‘Very well. Gowns are always worn in the presence of the Vice-Chancellor. Repeat, always. If your Mrs Triplett sent you a card for a sherry party, it might say, The Vice-Chancellor will be present, and that means gowns. Until Pococke ceases being V-C, it’s the same drill even for the merest social binge in the Lodging. My father explained it all to me, as a matter of fact.’
‘I see. Well, thank you very much.’ I was appalled to think how easily I might have committed what would clearly be the staggering floater of appearing gownless as a guest bidden to Mrs Pococke’s feast. The advantages of having a father who had been a member of the college before one seemed for the moment enormous. Quite soon, however, doubts set in. They were to the credit, if not of my intelligence, at least of my canny nature. I tackled Tony again. ‘Look here,’ I said, ‘about that gown-business. Don’t you think it may apply only to senior members?’
‘No, I don’t.’
‘But look!’ Tony’s reply had been confident, but I thought I had spotted it as coming after a moment’s hesitation. ‘Listen!’ I said urgently – for this crisis was getting me down. ‘Last term I went to dinner with my old headmaster in Keble. He’s some sort of honorary don there, and turns up on them from time to time. He was moved to give me a square meal, along with an obscure man from Trinity who was the top physics egg-head of my school. Conversation didn’t exactly flow.’
‘Be relevant,’ Tony said.
‘But at least it was a slap-up high table affair, with no nonsense about post-war rationing. And floods of port and brandy in common room afterwards. The cigars came from Havana.’
‘Well, well!’ Almost for the first time, I had succeeded in impressing Tony.
‘Finally, there was a stuff called Mar. You pronounce it that way. But you spell it M-a-r-c.’
‘At Keble?’ It was evident that Tony was bewildered. ‘I thought Keble was just a place full of suckling black beetles.’
‘So it is. But of Marc, as well. These places have their ways. Like Campion Hall.’
‘Campion Hall? Duncan, you’ve been in there too?’ Never before had I quite got Tony down like this.
‘Oh, yes. The Jesuits are after me, you know. It’s perfectly natural. You’re an ordinary commonplace papist, who doesn’t much interest them. I had Catholic ancestors about two hundred years ago. Naturally, these people over the road have designs on me.’
‘Ancestors on that classy distaff side?’ With this, Tony rallied slightly. ‘And they have Marc at Campion Hall?’
‘Oh, no – and their cigars come from Jamaica. It’s an austere set-up, the Society of Jesus. But they do have the most marvellous malt whisky. From Islay. I’ll bet the Pocockes don’t have that.’
‘I suppose not.’ Tony seemed almost crushed by this idiotic display of what was soon to be called one-upmanship. ‘Duncan, what are we talking about?’
‘Wearing gowns. If a don goes to dine with a don at high table in another college, he wears a gown. But if an undergraduate goes to dine at a high table he doesn’t. That’s what we were told in advance about Keble, and it held for Campion Hall, too. If a high table dresses for dinner, your host tells you so, and you do, too. But you don’t go in a gown. I think the rule may apply to this Vice-Chancellor business.’
‘It does seem possible.’ Tony, acknowledging the sober gravity of the issue, had turned serious. ‘I’ll tell you what, Duncan. You ought to ask your tutor. Yes—ask Talbert. I’m told he’s very keen on the correct thing. It’s common among those of the learned late risen from the people.’
‘So it is.’ With a readiness unbecoming in a crofter’s grandson, I concurred in this blandly snobbish observation. ‘Talbert told me I mustn’t sign letters to him Yours faithfully. I’d never written a letter to him in my life.’
‘That’s what Robert Damian calls prophylaxis. Yes, I think you should ask Talbert. An answer straight from the donkey’s mouth.’
‘Albert Talbert is one of the most eminent scholars in the university – and the only don in this effete college who isn’t totally and absolutely obscure.’ It was our habit to reserve exclusively to ourselves the right of exhibiting our several tutors in any ludicrous light; aspersions by others we snubbed at once. ‘But that’s a good idea. Talbert will put me in the picture, right away.’
Having now begun to read for my Honour School, I was in the enjoyment of two full-dress tutorials weekly. Each of them was a tête-à-tête. At that time, although commoners were frequently taught ‘doubled up’, and thus had the support of a companion in masking their ignorance and idleness, scholars and exhibitioners (who might be equally idle and ignorant) were obliged to go it alone. This class distinction was later to be loosened up, and indeed progressive tutors were already ignoring it, and isolating or assorting pupils as their instinct (or their own idleness) prompted. Talbert, however, was scarcely progressive. As for Timbermill out in Linton Road, he appeared to occupy a perplexing position as a kind of gentleman or amateur tutor, and he told me that he had never had two undergraduates together in his room in his life.
At least I enjoyed variety, for they were a contrasting couple. Timbermill’s enormous room, for example, harboured much more than several thousand books. Most prominent was what I for long took to be the debris of an air-raid, oddly transported to the attic floor of the villa. It consisted mostly of heaps of broken pottery, mixed up with chunks of rusty or corroded metal here and there. Later I discovered that in one of the shadowy bays or open-ended subsidiary chambers into which the room on all sides dissolved a start had been made on arranging bits and pieces of this detritus on shelves. It had all, it seemed, been dug out of the rubbish dumps of Saxons and Angles round about what I thought of as Beowulf’s time, and Timbermill knew more about these vestiges of a heroic age than anybody else in the world. And he wasn’t only cataloguing them; he was piecing them together with seccotine. It was clearly a job requiring two or three expert assistants at the least, but it seemed that Timbermill wouldn’t let anybody else in on it. Oddly enough, I was myself going to be the first person in whose favour he breached this rule. But that wasn’t to be for some time yet. I simply thought of him as a near-manic character who taught me once a week. But who really taught me. I was mad keen on being taught by Timbermill, even when he was only insisting that I learn how to make Anglo-Saxon noises and sort out Anglo-Saxon verbs. This wasn’t exactly going to last a lifetime. But I was never to have a similar intellectual experience again.
Talbert was equally learned in his own line – and that two such men should have found themselves closeted solus for an hour a week with a raw youth indisposed to think about anything except how to write plays exemplifies the curiously prodigal character of what is called the Oxford tutorial system. But Talbert, unlike Timbermill, was incapable of putting his learning across; his tutorials, regarded other than in a spirit of comedy, could only be termed scandalous nullities. My sole real contact with him was during those rare and perplexing moments in which – commonly for the most tenuous or elusive of reasons – he manifested symptoms of suppressed but inordinate mirth or glee. And if the man himself didn’t do much communicating, neither did that room in which he no doubt thought of himself as conscientiously discharging his tutorial function. I have recorded that it was very small – smaller even than the rooms in his modest domestic abode in Old Road – and furnished with a square table, two upright chairs, and an empty bookcase. From an electric light depending from the ceiling there further depended one of those long strips of thickly sticky paper which represented in that era civilisation’s only means of liquidating flies. If, having read my essay, I was prompted to catch Talbert’s eye and endeavour to elicit from him the divine gift of articulate speech, I had to edge my head either to the right or left of this feebly lethal object. I used to long for Talbert to produce a pipe – having read of some great Victorian, perhaps Tennyson or Carlyle, as accustomed to brood in comfortable taciturnity behind clouds of smoke from one. But all Talbert smoked was a succession of small cheap cigarettes, Woodbines or ‘gaspers’, to which he probably regarded his honourable poverty as confining him. He invariably held these miserable objects between a finger and thumb in a manner somehow suggesting that he had never manipulated a cigarette before. The silence preserved between us was in these circumstances peculiarly trying.
But on the occasion upon which I presented Talbert with my problem he had proved in quite a conversable mood. I had not, it is true, had much success in interesting him in my views on John Lyly’s Euphues, the Anatomy of Wit or even in its stirring sequel, Euphues and his England, indeed, I had merely been instructed to write an essay on Sir Philip Sidney’s The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia for the following week. But then, after no more than five or six meditative minutes, Talbert communicated to me an anecdote, literary in flavour, which appeared to concern a dispute which had once arisen between Swinburne and Jowett on the substitution of a choriamb for an iambic metron somewhere in Aeschylus. This, although not directly relevant to Euphues, could be received with respect as interesting in itself, and I managed this so well that Talbert went on to describe a quarrel between Swinburne and Rossetti. (Talbert never said simply ‘Rossetti’ but always ‘the fat rogue Rossetti’ – and this invariably with his intimation of deep mirth.) So I plucked up courage and spoke out.
‘Sir, I have to go to dinner in the Lodging on Thursday. And I’m wondering—’ I broke off in confusion at this point, because Talbert’s amusement had in some indefinable manner switched from Rossetti to myself. What seemed a boring hour with Talbert could have the unexpected effect – again indefinable – of sharpening one’s wits, and I realised that he was extracting remote entertainment from a form of words betraying my sense that I was facing a chore. I then saw that this was encouraging. My tutor, although so unfathomably deep a scholar, was at least listening to me – something it would have been optimistic to predicate of him when I had been expressing opinions on the role of Euphues’s tiresome friend Philautus. ‘It’s about what to wear,’ I went on hopefully. ‘Mrs Pococke has said a black tie—’
‘Good heavens!’ Talbert was much shocked. ‘Has there been a death in the Royal Family?’
‘Sir?’
‘Has somebody fallen out of an aeroplane? Aeroplanes have become extremely hazardous since ceasing to be biplanar. You must certainly wear a black tie. All members of this college are expected to do so until after the state funeral.’
‘No, sir – that’s not it. A black evening tie.’
‘That is another matter. You don’t always make yourself clear, Monboddo.’
‘Pattullo.’
‘Pattullo.’ Talbert, who was now speaking with profound gravity, admitted the correction with his customary reluctance. ‘But you do very well to consult me. With a black tie of that description you must wear the shorter formal jacket. There is your answer.’
‘Yes, sir. Thank you.’ I wondered whether to give up, and decided to persevere. ‘But there’s the question of whether I ought to wear a gown.’
‘A gown?’ Talbert stared at me blankly. Although I was wearing my gown at that moment, and he himself wore his half-a-dozen times a week, he might never have heard of such a garment in relation to a male person. It was almost as if I had been making some flippant proposal to appear at the Lodging in drag.
‘This,’ I said desperately, and momentarily assumed a batlike posture on my hard chair. ‘Do I wear this on top of my dinner-jacket?’
‘Dear me, no.’ Talbert was now being entirely patient; he appreciated being appealed to as an authority on a matter of social form. ‘The gown would, of course, be proper were you summoned before the Provost formally. But on a social occasion, no. How wise of you to ask me, Pattullo. The Arcadia. You will find Feuillerat’s edition adequate to your purpose, although I am sorry to say it is gravely defective in many ways. I pointed this out – charitably, I hope – in the Review of English Studies some years ago.’
‘I’ll look you up, sir. But the point is that the Provost has just become Vice-Chancellor. So people say there’s a different sort of drill.’
‘Dear me! You are perfectly right. Yes. I think you will eventually perform creditably in the Schools.’
‘Thank you very much.’ I was childishly overjoyed at this irrelevant remark. ‘And I do wear my gown?’
‘Ah, that is an interesting question.’ Talbert’s deliberative manner would now not have disgraced the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council. ‘In the case of a senior member the position is entirely clear. We always wear gowns in the presence – other than purely fortuitously in the presence – of a Vice- Chancellor. But the correct thing for an undergraduate who is going to dine with one is harder to determine. Reflection is required, and inquiry may be possible.’
‘Surely there must be a rule?’
‘Precedent, yes, Monboddo – but a rule, no.’
‘Pattullo!’
‘Pattullo. It is a matter of courtesy rather than prescription. But I will let you have my opinion next week. The Arcadia.’’
‘But the dinner’s on Thursday,’ I said despairingly. ‘It looks as if I’ll just have to guess.’
‘Or you might use your common sense.’ Talbert produced this suddenly pungent remark without any change of tone. ‘What would that suggest to you?’
‘Erring on the formal side, I suppose.’
‘You appear to be a perfectly clear-headed young man.’ Talbert announced this conclusion much as if he had first set eyes on me fifty-five minutes before. ‘Don’t fail to consult Brunhuber.’
‘Sir?’
‘Sir Philip Sidneys Arcadia und ihre Nachlaufer. A most commendable monograph – published, I think, in Nürnberg in 1903.’
‘Thank you very much.’ I made an unconvincing show of jotting down this reference in the margin of my dreary remarks on Euphues. One more Talbert tute was over.
There were two ways in which I could entertain my father to lunch. I could take him into hall, in which case his surroundings would be magnificent and anybody I planted him down beside polite if not talkative. But he was not a man indifferent to what he ate, and as it was well on the cards that the meal provided would be appallingly bad he might be constrained to rise from it without any comment of a gastronomic sort. This would be unsatisfactory, and I decided for the alternative possibility. I’d give a luncheon party in my rooms.
I have already chronicled that such a manner of entertaining had ceased to happen at all freely; it was insisted upon only by the most obstinately privileged; and permission had always to be obtained against a good deal of resistance from the Domestic Bursar. This college officer (as was prescriptive with us) was a retired rear-admiral, although being diminutive and jumpy he suggested what used to be called a powder-monkey rather than one dominating a quarter-deck (if that is what rear-admirals dominate). His appearance, however, was declared to be deceptive. In particular, he was accounted to command a great deal of guile in circumventing the desires and devices of undergraduates. It seemed to me, however, that I was in a strong position, especially if I began by masking my batteries. So I presented myself in his office.
‘My name’s Pattullo,’ I said. ‘I’d very much like, please, to give a luncheon party on Thursday. Quite a small one. I think for six.’
‘Ah, yes – Pattullo.’ The Bursar spoke as if he had heard a good deal about Pattullo, and all to so favourable an effect that he had been much looking forward to encountering him. ‘What staircase are you on?’
‘Surrey Four, sir.’
‘Oh, dear!’ The Bursar was dismayed. ‘That is rather tricky. Yes, as dodgy as anywhere in college, I’m afraid. A faithful old fellow, Jefkins, but getting on. One has to be considerate.’
‘Yes, of course.’ Jefkins was my scout, and his decrepitude was incontestable. ‘But I’m only one up.’
‘That’s a point, I agree.’ The Bursar didn’t seem to find it a composing one, however, since he had jumped to his feet, whipped off his spectacles, and started walking rapidly round his office in circles. This gyratory effect he enhanced by elevating the spectacles in air and rapidly rotating them in the manner of a child’s windmill. ‘And, of course, you are perfectly entitled to give a luncheon party – perfectly entitled.’ The Bursar enunciated this with great emphasis, and in a manner suggesting one member of an officer-class vindicating the rights of another. ‘Every day of the week – in theory. I just have to make sure, you know, that a man isn’t outrunning his means. Piling up a bill that won’t be too welcome at home. That sort of thing. Definitely told it was part of my job.’ He paused by a table at the far end of the room. There, apparently in much absence of mind, he flicked over the pages of a college roll. He was discovering what school I came from.
‘I think I can stand it – just once in the term.’ I managed both to hint awareness of his manoeuvre and to appear entirely unhuffed by it. ‘So will it be all right?’
‘Probably, probably. See the chef, anyway, to be going on with. But I still can’t promise, you know; I can’t promise at all. Anything may turn up. I believe Jefkins is subject to lumbago. In fact I’m sure he is.’ The Bursar had resumed his agitated pedestrianism. ‘So I may have to ask you to take your guests into hall. The common meal, of course. Yes, I’m afraid it just may happen that way. I hope you understand, Pattullo. I do hope you understand.’
‘Yes, of course. And I’m sure my father would enjoy lunching in hall very much. Only, he’d have less opportunity of meeting my friends. One likes to arrange for that sort of occasion in a civilised way.’
‘Exactly, exactly!’ The Bursar waved his spectacles violently. I didn’t think his vehemence really indicated his being impressed by a father’s thus being brought on parade. It must happen a good deal. ‘I’ll let you know. Good morning.’
‘Good morning, sir. And thank you.’ I moved to the door, and there contrived the appearance of one struck by an afterthought. ‘I suppose a dinner-party might be easier,’ I said. ‘There are those extra men who come in to relieve the scouts a bit in the evening. But it wouldn’t be any good on Thursday. My father’s engaged to dine in the Lodging. He’ll be spending the night there.’
‘Ah, yes.’ The Bursar spoke as one distinctly not interested. But I caught his glance, and detected in it a glint of amusement that momentarily reminded me of Albert Talbert. ‘See the chef, anyway. And tell him to finish off with his crème brûlée. Morning to you, young Pattullo.’
I departed – with my sense of triumph mitigated by this further evidence of the wide currency of my sobriquet. I wondered whether I really looked years younger than anybody else in college.
My father, myself, Tony, Mogridge, Bedworth, and Fish newly restored to us from his nursing home. I had decided it was to be a staircase affair, partly on the calculation that Jefkins would be more likely to behave well if gaining merit with a number of his charges simultaneously. It looked like being a successful party, my father proving to be both in good humour and on his best behaviour – conditions which by no means invariably coincided in him. Strangely enough, I’d have been quite as happy if he’d been mildly outrageous. For what troubled both Ninian’s and my own relations with him was his well-founded belief that as children he had hardly noticed us; being a model of propriety was somehow his way of coping with an intermittent sense of guilt about this. It was a phase of family history which I never succeeded in analysing. He was an abundantly affectionate man, and must have been so all through our childhood. He had, of course, had my mother’s burdens to shoulder, and perhaps he had come to think more of us when we were old enough to help him there. It must also have been a matter of his work; of a sustained effort of creation so concentrated that it had drained him of the ability to turn away to anything more taxing than convivial meetings with his fellow-artists. But one consequence of this was that we now, as a family, existed for the most part in a state of relaxed luxury, a sense that everything had come right. Not that we weren’t normal enough – by which I mean that we were all four of us capable of flares of mysterious resentment and hostility between ourselves. Comparing notes in objective and dispassionate moments, for example, Ninian and I discovered that we both rehearsed a good many more injurious speeches for delivery within our family context than we ever actually uttered. And I have no doubt that there continued to be times when our father resented us as chronic nuisances who refused to go away. We were an affectionate family, nevertheless. And we all adored my erratic mother.
A son’s first formal entertainment of his father is obviously a milestone of note. If as a result of this I indulged in such reflections as are here set down, I also gave much thought to the party itself – an activity serving usefully to distract my mind from anything problematical in the contrasting feast with which the day was to close. I wondered whether I ought to have somebody of my father’s own age to keep him in countenance among what it would be natural for him to regard as a pack of children. I even had the thought of inviting Talbert, but decided that the notice was too short to be polite in the case of one’s tutor. What I had in mind was that deep in Talbert as the learned world knew him there lurked another Talbert, intimated only by that strange sporadic glee, and that my father was the man to liberate him – even perhaps to establish a second daylight Talbert, periodically eruptive and in full control, after the fashion of those agreeably bizarre dissociated personalities of whom I had read in the course of my psychological inquiries. This shows that one ought not to arrange luncheon parties on fanciful grounds; had Talbert been present it is probable that gravity and decorum would have held sway throughout the meal.
We did start off that way. There is no deference more unflawed than that accorded by young men to a friend’s parent on a first meeting, and my father was exposed to it stiffly even before we sat down. I’d foreseen this a little uneasily, feeling that he might become restive if confronted with too much English public-school stuff. Cyril Bedworth had been a kind of calculated hope here; if he ran to any awkwardness suggesting an odd-man-out my father would kindle to him at once. But Bedworth was unobtrusively respectful in the most orthodox way, differing from Tony and Mogridge, perhaps, only in being more aware of the eminent painter and less of the ordinary elder person as what should determine his attitude. And in this shallow matter of social responses Martin Fish as a contrasting note was no good at all. He was more royalist than the king. Nevertheless Fish attracted my father’s attention at once. This was because Fish was just back from the dead. Lazarus, I imagine, must for a time have found absolute wonder in the simplest sensuous qualities of the phenomenal world – been capable, as it were, of seeing a sherry glass as a chalice and a tablecloth as the garment of God. This is to exaggerate; I doubt whether, even with my knowledge of his recent adventure, I’d have divined Fish’s state if I hadn’t caught it telepathically from my father, who was himself intuitively aware of shades of feeling in this region. Certainly I saw that he was liking Fish – and as a result Fish shot up in my own regard. He was liking Fish rather more than he was liking Tony. I had told him on our drive from the station that my summer plans were changed, and that it wasn’t with Tony Mumford but with a man called Fish that I was going to Italy. Now, and as soon as he gathered which of these young men Fish was, he started talking about the Vatican. He had heard, whether correctly or not, that the galleries of the Vatican were already under siege by floods of post-war tourists, and he was insistent upon the importance of getting Fish and myself into those alarming proliferations out of hours. He knew just how to manage that. Fish took the information commendably in his stride. Bedworth was obviously impressed.
It emerged from this that Fish liked painting. He asked whether my father knew the work of Hans Heysen. My father said he did, and that he judged it, on the whole, even better than that of his own old friend D. Y. Cameron. Fish didn’t pretend to have heard of D. Y. Cameron (as Tony would have been liable to do). But he said he had a Heysen in his rooms upstairs, and it would be nice if my father had time to go and look at it after lunch. My father agreed at once.
‘I have another painting, as a matter of fact,’ Fish said, ‘which perhaps you’d like to see too. Just as being thoroughly Australian. I don’t expect you’ll have heard of the painter. His name’s Sidney Nolan.’
‘Man!’ My father had stiffened abruptly. ‘Is it a dead sheep?’
‘Yes, it is.’ Fish was surprised. ‘Awfully dead, I’m afraid.’
‘I haven’t seen one of them. No, I haven’t.’ My father was distinguishably in a moment of crisis. His fellow-guests must have found this perplexing, but I knew at once that Nolan was a power in the land. My father was an extremely conservative painter; Monet had remained his master – and Monet had died, almost as old as Titian, a couple of years before I was born. When my father heard rumour of some new thing – of some new and potent thing – he was accustomed to hold serious debate as to whether he should expose himself to it. ‘I’ll see it,’ he now said with resolution. He might have been deciding to accept major surgery. ‘Yes, I’ll see it. After Duncan’s good meal.’
‘Luncheon is served!’
Jefkins, who had been dozing on his feet in a corner of the room, was alerted by my father’s proviso, and now bawled out these words at the top of his voice. We sat down, and the conversation moved elsewhere. This was a relief. I had been afraid that Tony, who didn’t quite like Fish’s even so modestly holding the field, might assert his own status as a connoisseur and require my father to inspect his Roman bawdy-house across the landing. It was improbable that my father would behave himself before that triumph of Victorian kitsch. But this didn’t happen, and as the meal went on his contentment increased. His London trip had clearly gone well. (‘The man’s no Stubbs, but he knows his claret,’ he confided to the respectful Mogridge seated beside him – the reference being clearly to his host of the evening before, Sir Alfred Munnings.) He had particularly enjoyed what he called mysteriously ‘a grand crack with Jack about Will’, and had heard a number of good stories. He recounted the two or three of these which were likely to be intelligible to us.
Long before the crème brûlée, my father had established himself with my companions. I knew this when they all started asking him questions, since a quick-fire effect of that sort is a sure token of undergraduate approval. (It can also be exploited with hostile intent, but this never happens unless the adversary, too, is judged somebody to reckon with.) My father was good in this situation. He noticed small things, like their forgetting to keep on calling him ‘sir’, and took satisfaction in them. He seemed very open when they wanted to be told about his career.
‘Does a lot depend on having a good dealer?’ Tony asked. ‘Like Vollard when the Post-Impressionists were getting going?’
This question, although it betrayed Tony in a naive light (he had plainly been doing home-work), was benignly answered. My father explained that his own early work had been successfully handled by a school-fellow, happily established in a small greengrocery business in Kirkcaldy, who had taken the canvasses round in his cart. I had never heard this reminiscence before, and suspected it of being made up on the spot. The circumstance made me look round warily in the direction of Jefkins, who was standing by in charge of the wine. I was hoping there wasn’t too much of it still to come. It was only too likely that I had overestimated the needs of this part of the entertainment.
At least this anecdote particularly pleased Bedworth; it answered to some private mythos of his own.
‘Many of the greatest artists,’ Bedworth said on his familiar didactic note (hitherto happily in abeyance), ‘have had a terrible struggle at first. In some cases, indeed, for many years. There was, for instance, the late Vincent van Gogh.’
‘He had a brother called Theo,’ Tony struck in rapidly. This time, I believe it was his laudable aim to prevent my father from betraying amusement at being thus informed that van Gogh was dead: something he might, or might not, have done. ‘Theo tried to flog Vincent’s stuff, but I don’t think he had much luck. And Vincent went potty, didn’t he?’
‘Yes, he did.’ My father may have been conscious of saying this curtly, for he quickly added, gently and more seriously than he had yet spoken, that Theo had been a stout fellow, and that Tony might do worse than read Vincent’s letters to him.
‘Is it always desperately hard at first?’ Mogridge asked.
This time, my father didn’t answer at once. I saw that he realised a different issue was being put to him.
‘I mean’—Mogridge, never slow to feel he had been insufficiently explicit, amplified his thought—’I mean that it must be difficult if it’s desperately hard for too long. Not getting much of a green light from anyone, and yet carrying on. A man could come to wonder about himself. And it could be hard, having to go on wondering about oneself after a time. Would there have been great painters who took years to get going – rather at the rudiments, I mean?’
As Mogridge put this specific question, I almost felt myself to be hearing ghostly strains, ditties of no tone, seeping up through the floor-boards. What was much more remarkable, I felt that my father, who knew nothing whatever about Mogridge and his unfortunate ‘cello, was hearing them too.
‘There may have been,’ my father said. ‘Probably there have been. I can’t remember off hand. But certainly it hasn’t been common. A man may take years to find out even things that are radical and deep inside himself: whether his feeling is linear or malerisch, for example. But if I understand what you mean by the rudiments: no—not.’ My father gave this reply without any assumption of authority, but while looking seriously at Mogridge. ‘One’s on one’s own,’ he said. ‘That’s where the answers have to come from in the end. But blocked artists are often rather far from being ineffective in life. I’ve known some who have more than made their mark in the world.’
‘Hitler,’ Tony said.
‘I never claimed that wee blackguard’s acquaintance, Mr Mumford. But your naming him is no doubt fair enough.’
I again had a dim feeling that Tony and my father would never get along too well – and within seconds this was almost dramatically confirmed. The small contretemps took place, unhappily, only because Tony – civilly enough – ignored the faint snub he had received.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘but you know what I mean. If one has started as an artist, I’m sure the world of action must be a second best. Hitler failed to produce any nurslings of immortality, and set about slaughtering whole armies instead. Much easier, really. By the way, sir, Dunkie tells us he has an uncle who runs a private army. Is that true?’
I was conscious of my father as glancing at me swiftly. He would himself have had no impulse positively to conceal the mild lunacy of his brother-in-law the Glencorry, but he was surprised that I appeared to have been gossiping about it.
And I think he also resented Tony’s command of my pet name.
‘Laddie,’ he said, ‘ye maunna spier anent your host’s veracity o’ anither o’ his guests.’
I was furious with my father, who had in this freakish way drawn attention to a minute breach of manners. Tony, despite his father the week-end country gent and his own assured upper-class air, was not among those miraculous youths (of whom there were a number around the place) who had been so made that they couldn’t put a foot wrong. Shoving in a question on a family matter he knew nothing about had at least, so to speak, landed his toe in the water. But it was outrageous in my father so deftly to catch at an ankle and tumble him in head-over-heels. And now I saw that Cyril Bedworth was studying this ducking in a teacup attentively. Had I been able to think of him, clairvoyantly, as the future author of Proust and Powell, I might have guessed that he was reflecting upon the extent to which a whole social hinterland can be revealed in a dozen words. There was a second’s silence in which I could see Mogridge giving thought to a suitable change of subject. Fish cracked his crème brûlée, and exclaimed arrestingly at the result. Fish was one of the miraculous youths.
This awkward moment was ended by my father himself – which was only proper, considering that he had occasioned it, and considering too the responsibility of his years.
‘But I’m a havering body,’ my father said amiably, and raised his glass in front of him. ‘Tony, will you take wine with me?’
This eighteenth-century gesture was a great success. Tony, who had turned rather pale, grabbed his glass cheerfully. It came to me that I could recall no occasion upon which my father had proved unable to extricate himself from an awkward moment. And the wine-bottles, fortunately, were empty. Throughout the final stages of the party, and while inspecting Fish’s pictures, Lachlan Pattullo talked what was still at that time called the King’s English.
There remained, however, the Provost’s dinner-party to face.
And whether to wear a gown or not was an anxiety no longer finding room in my head.
I walked my father round Long Field, and was conscious that we were again very content with each other. If he was a hazard as a parent he was seldom other than a distinguished one. He owned, for a start, a satisfactory physical presence. Informed people, glancing at him, would conjecture him to be somebody of note. I found myself taking the simplest small boy’s pride in this.
‘It seems your friends keep cars, Dunkie.’
‘Not all of them. Not Bedworth or Mogridge. But Tony Mumford and Martin Fish run cars.’ I remembered that, early on during our meal, these two had engaged in a short technical discussion in their character as motorists. It was this that had attracted my father’s attention. ‘I sometimes go out with Tony. I think I’ve mentioned it in letters.’
‘I mind that now. It’s something your professors allow?’
‘Well, Fish’s car is legal, because he’s in his second year. Tony keeps his on the quiet. I don’t think the dons would much bother about it.’
‘You’ll be in your second year yourself soon.’
‘So I shall. If they don’t turn me out.’
‘Dunkie, they wouldn’t do that?’ My father, whose knowledge of Oxford remained sketchy, was alarmed.
‘No, of course not. I’m all right with them. I’m being silly.’ I guessed where this conversation was leading. I felt uneasy about it.
‘Dunkie, I’ll get you a wee car. In time for next term.’
‘Oh, but I don’t happen to want a car, thank you.’ I knew at once that this had been the wrong thing to say, or at least the wrong way to say it. For one thing, it wasn’t quite true. Owning a car had never entered my head, but the idea was instantly attractive to me. I’d have liked a car very much. And my father infallibly knew when either Ninian or I was prevaricating. I had taken the first step on an ungracious course.
‘You could get between Edinburgh and Oxford in a day easy, Dunkie. You could do it that way every holidays. It would save an awful lot of money in the end.’
This was transparent nonsense, but it was also my father’s customary tactic when he was prompted to do a generous thing. It had needed to be when we were really poor. We were that no longer. By his own simple standards, my father had quite recently become affluent. So here was a false issue. And I was handling the thing wretchedly because of feelings pretty deeply buried in my mind. I groped dully for my father’s motives. He was the crofter’s son who had prospered, and it was part of his pride to have his boys up with others. That was why I was at Oxford at all; he had been determined not to see me, as he conceived it, distanced by the son of a professor he’d taken a dislike to. If the Dreich’s boy was going there, I was going too.
Suddenly and shockingly, I found myself walking beside my father in a state of senseless resentment. Why should he give me a car now when for years he’d ignored the fact that I lacked a tooth-brush? Ninian was in the same case; there was to be nothing that was too good for him. We’d both been ugly ducklings, and we’d both of us – late in the day – turned out clever. Ninian was very clever indeed. We both counted with my father now simply because we had become appendages he could be conceited about.
I heard myself say – but it was only one of those rehearsed speeches that remain mercifully mute – ‘Bugger your car!’ The phantom words terrified me. And then – it had happened before – another voice came to my rescue. It was Ninian’s voice. Ninian was a passionate man in ways I was not. But, for me, his voice was the voice of intellect and reason. ‘Of course Daddy feels guilty,’ Ninian’s voice said to me half-way across Long Field. ‘Didn’t we walk to school with holes in our breeks? But we’ll have guilt enough on our own hands, Dunkie, by the time we’re his age. Or like enough we shall.’
‘I mean I’m not all that keen,’ I said to my father awkwardly.
‘Just Oxford’s a marvellous thing to have happened to me. Daddy, it’s almost indecent. I’ve utterly everything I want.’
‘Not quite everything, Dunkie.’ My father said this without embarrassing meaningfulness. But I knew what he was thinking of, and all my bad feeling was swept away by love. I even knew what to say.
‘Bugger your car!’ I said cheerfully, so that the words transformed themselves. ‘Not yet, anyway. I’d be wasting my time in it when I should be at my play. Next year. And if you’re wanting to give me something meanwhile, Lachlan Pattullo, give me another picture.’
‘We’ll make it that, then.’ My father spoke composedly, and all was well. Or almost. It was a stiff assignment, I told myself, having a parent who could peer inside your head when it was misbehaving.
There was a great deal of activity on the Isis, since Eights Week was drawing near. One was never out of the chock and plash of oars. Their painted blades glinted in the sun, dribbled diamonds, dipped into water, scooped, rose. Young bodies, bowed galley-slaves, heaved at them; from the tow-path and through megaphones muffled men bellowed, pedalled bicycles, bellowed again; coxes echoed or interpreted their exhortations on a shriller note. My father approved, but began to talk about the Seine at Marly. He wanted gentlemen combining straw hats with high collars, ladies with sunshades, full-fleshed attendant females bearing bocks. I myself was remembering telling Janet I was going to row, was remembering her saying it was a poor thing at my age to be going off to boarding-school. Not bearing long to think of her, I thought of Glencorry instead; thought of the absurd pepper-boxes and crenellations, snow-white like a cottage on a Christmas cake, of Corry Hall.
‘The folk at Corry,’ I said. ‘What’s happening there? Has Ninian had his invitation yet?’ Our annual Highland holidays had never become formally prescriptive; every year a carefully worded summons would come from Aunt Charlotte: one to Ninian, and a week or two later one to me.
‘That he has not – and now we don’t think it’s like to come. Nor to you either, Dunkie.’
‘There hasn’t been a row?’ I was more curious than apprehensive.
‘No, no—why should there be? They’re decent people enough.’
‘Nothing about Anna? That’s still all right?’
‘It’s to be called that. They’re lucky – or they think they are – that he was from the gentry.’
Uncle Rory’s instinct had been vindicated over the identity of my cousin’s seducer. Young Petrie of Garth had almost immediately owned up; it seemed necessary to conclude that Anna had been creating pretty well for the hell of it. A perfectly normal wedding had taken place – at which I’d have been present as an usher in hired morning dress if I hadn’t disingenuously pleaded an inescapable examination. Ninian had represented the obscure Pattullo relatives.
‘It seems they’re having a wee bit of trouble with the other one,’ my father said. He affected obstinate vagueness about the Glencorry connection.
‘Ruth, you mean?’
‘Aye. All that blatherskite you told us of must have unsettled her.’
I was silent, rather hoping that if Aunt Charlotte’s invitation did belatedly arrive it would prove to be for the time I was fixed to be abroad with Martin Fish. I recalled my rash promise myself to invite Ruth to Oxford, there to introduce her to abundant escorts elligibly back from the wars. As it had turned out, I hardly numbered one such among my acquaintance. Fish, it was true, seemed older than I was. But I didn’t think I wanted to give Fish to Ruth. She might ditch him if she found her own pukka laird. And he might then put on his turn again.
‘Yon uncle of yours is a much-tried man,’ my father said. ‘It’s on none of mine I’d wish a frigid wife. There was small promise in all that slam-banging of wee bit tennis balls.’
I was startled, for my father had never before said anything like this to me. He may have been anxious to acknowledge me as grown up and ripe for the world’s warnings. Or he may merely have still been a little flown with my wine. He had let the Doric – in the muted form I liked – creep back into his speech.