They walked up St Aldate’s, which Cardower called St Old’s. Mungo didn’t bother to be surprised about the invitation he had received. Everything was so unfamiliar that his head wasn’t totally clear; he forgot his momentary persuasion that he was going to like this unexpected room-mate (just because of Bevis); but he did remember – or spontaneously feel – that he was ready for anything that was going. He wanted at least to know about this chap – and about his parents, if they were on offer. What had happened, he told himself, was simply drill. Cardower had gone into a routine. Suddenly confronted by the simple Scottish boy, he had turned on the noblesse oblige stuff. And Mungo would give it a go. Mungo judged it very important to maintain in all things an enquiring mind.
It occurred to him that there was one quite prosaic enquiry that he ought to make at once. Who was the Hon. Cardower’s father, and how did one address him? And who was his mother, and how did one address her? But this social curiosity could not have been as lively as it doubtless ought to have been, since in the act of implementing it he was distracted by a shop-window. The shop called itself an Academic Outfitter. The display was in part of blazers, jerseys, scarves, ties, and anything else upon which college crests or colours could plausibly be displayed; and in part of gowns, caps, hoods, surplices and similar adjuncts of the life of learning. Mungo halted to view this useless gear with disfavour.
‘Do they still,’ he demanded, ‘make us go swanking around in that stuff?’
‘Oh, yes – every now and then. But it’s not swanking. Academic dress is designed as a vesture of humility. Except, of course, if you’re a nobleman.’ Cardower produced this solemnly. ‘Then your square – that’s your cap – has a big gold tassel.’
‘Christ! Are you going to have a square with—?’
‘I’m talking rot. That was ages ago. And I shouldn’t have one anyway. I’m not a nobleman.’
‘I suppose not.’ Mungo decided to let this nomenclature business be for the moment. ‘I don’t see anybody walking about in gowns.’
‘That’s vanished too – but much more recently. You only wear a gown at rather formal times, like dining in hall and going to see your tutor. And squares and white ties and so on are just for examinations.’
‘Don’t you still think it’s a lot of rubbish?’ They had walked on, and were waiting to cross Carfax.
‘Oh, I don’t know. There’s something to be said for special clothes for special occasions. Going to a dance given by some awful woman for some awful girl, for instance: dressing up helps you to bear it.’ Cardower suddenly grabbed Mungo by the arm. ‘Come on!’ he shouted, and they dashed successfully across the nose of a bus. ‘Of course, I suppose I was a bit broken to outré clothes at school.’
‘Didn’t anybody rebel?’
‘Rebel? Oh, I expect so. All sorts of people had all sorts of ideas, you know. And digging in their heels about this or that was among them.’
‘With any result?’ Mungo asked. He was a little baffled by this vague conjuration of strange territory.
‘Result? None whatever – except, rather rarely, short sharp agony.’
‘Oh, that!’ Thus afforded some sense of a familiar world, after all, Mungo again felt an impulse of companionableness towards Cardower. ‘Are you glad to have left?’
‘I’m not sure that I know. Are you?’
‘Yes – definitely. There are things at home I almost can’t bear to have come away from. But not school. It hadn’t all that scope. I’d had the place.’
‘I see. Do you know? At school I felt like the chap in the Happy Valley – Rasselas. A land of contentment well hidden away – hidden away behind a popular picture of rigours and horrors, for one thing. But, in the main, just easy to be happy in. It becomes a bit of a bore, that.’
‘I expect there were a few chaps lucky enough to escape boredom. Bloody miserable, in fact.’ If Mungo said this roughly, it was in reaction to a sharpening sense that he had never talked to a contemporary like Ian Cardower before. He didn’t yet know whether Cardower was in any way remarkable or particularly clever. But he was civilised (a History Sixth character who had read Rasselas!), and from a kid he had been able to listen to people talking as, for Mungo, they had talked only in books. He also seemed not to object to being serious, Mungo acknowledged to himself beginning to feel impressed.
‘I say,’ Cardower exclaimed, ‘what awful women this town goes in for! No wonder sodomy is rampant among its young males.’
‘Is it?’ Mungo was startled by this sudden frivolity and impropriety in one whom he had just been crediting with higher qualities. ‘I quite see’—he added, recovering himself—’what you mean about the females in this street.’
‘But we’ll range the countryside, you and I, in quest of unsullied virginal beauty. We’ll leave Howard 4, 4 every afternoon at two o’clock precisely. There must be many a rose-lipped maiden between here and Bablockhythe.’ Without pausing in what had become a quick march down the farther end of the Cornmarket, Cardower gave Mungo a swift appraising look. ‘Correct?’
‘Excellent plan.’ Mungo had a notion that he was being required to vouch for the simplicity of his own sexual constitution. ‘We’ll start tomorrow.’
‘And here we are. Lick your hand and smooth your hair, my lad. For in we go for our square meal.’
‘Just a moment.’ Mungo wasn’t sure that the rustic admonition had amused him. ‘What do I call your father?’
‘Call him? Oh, I see.’ Cardower had probably never been asked this question before. ‘He’s Lord Robert Cardower, but it would be a bit heavy—don’t you think?—to Lord Robert him. Just give him the credit of his years, and call him Sir.’
‘What does he—I mean, does he do anything in particular?’
‘He’s a diplomat – but not a strikingly successful one. Too honest or something.’
‘But I don’t call your mother Madam?’
‘She wouldn’t mind in the least – but perhaps not. You’ll probably get away with calling her You. But if it turns out to be positively necessary to distinguish her from the barmaid or somebody, then it has to be Lady Robert. And that’s that.’ But on the threshold of the door Randolph Cardower hesitated. ‘Sticking to names,’ he said, ‘do you mind if we start calling each other Mungo and Ian? Unless we decided to hate one another like poison, we’d be doing it in a few days, anyway.’
‘For an Oxford man of six hours’ standing, Ian, you do have a ruddy good grip of the customs of the place. Go ahead.’
Robert Cardower was as tall as Ian, and even slimmer. The clothes of father and son obviously came from the same tailor. Viewed side by side from behind (Mungo thought – although this experience naturally wasn’t being offered him), they would probably strike you as being twins. Even face to face, Lord Robert was to be distinguished from his son less by physical appearance than by talking twice as fast. He couldn’t have had a clue that Ian, whose invitation had so clearly been a matter of sudden impulse, would be turning up with another chap. But he had grasped the situation straight away, and in no seconds at all slipped through every gear in the box.
‘How do you do? It is so nice of you to come. My wife and I have been looking forward with a great deal of curiosity to meeting Ian’s room-mate. I am very glad he is to have a room-mate. In my last year at school I shared quarters with an extremely clever boy who quite talked my head off – and to my great advantage, since I was most shockingly ignorant of virtually everything in the world. Almost my only genuine expertise was in keeping tame owls. And then I was sent up to Oxford – my father thought it would do me good – and put by myself in some rather large rooms in Surrey – the quad next to yours, that is. I felt the lack of stimulus at once. I had acquaintances here and there in the college, but it wasn’t at all the same thing. It seems to me that a single companion, whom one gets to know really well, is so much better than a crowd. But tell me – what do you think?’ Lord Robert accompanied this sudden question with a glance of anxious expectation, rather as if gathering Mungo’s thoughts on the matter in hand was a pleasure he had been anticipating for days. Unfortunately Mungo’s only genuine thought was that any school-friend who had managed to talk Lord Robert Cardower’s head off must have been a prodigy worth knowing. So all Mungo managed now – or thought he managed – was a mumble.
‘I couldn’t agree with you more,’ Lord Robert said, instantly and convincedly. ‘I think you are perfectly right. Elizabeth, don’t you agree?’ He had turned to his wife as if she must no longer be excluded from a mature vein of speculation which Mungo had been developing. ‘Ian, come over to the bar, and we’ll fetch some sherry. I’ve booked a table – “reserved” it, as the man says – so there’s no hurry in the world, no hurry at all.’
Elizabeth Cardower – Lady Robert – although neither so voluble nor so challenging as her husband, alarmed Mungo at first a good deal more. She was perfectly friendly, and she didn’t hint the slightest sense that the youth was to be put at his ease. But her glance was cool and appraising, and you could see she was turning over the questions it might presently be possible to ask. Perhaps – Mungo thought – she did more in the anxious mother way than her husband did father-wise. She was wondering whether Mungo would be a good moral influence on her son. (For many years a similar concern about one boy or another had been a regular preoccupation of Mungo’s aunt.)
‘I think it very clever of the college not to team up men reading the same subject,’ Lady Robert said. ‘If you and Ian were both historians it would probably be quite fun for a time, but you would end up by boring each other fearfully. Among professional people there seem to be a lot of marriages of that kind nowadays. Particularly among the dons. If there’s one at Balliol who knows all about Beaumont, he hastens to propose to a lady at Somerville, to whom Fletcher is an open book.’
‘Were you at Oxford – and did you read English?’ It was Mungo’s habit to ask any question that came into his head.
‘Yes, I was – and I did. I count myself almost a pioneer. Are you a pioneer – so far as your school is concerned?’
‘Not exactly.’ Mungo wondered whether this transition deserved to be called deft. ‘Boys come from time to time, although most go to the university at Aberdeen or Edinburgh. There aren’t any others at Oxford now.’
The college has been very sensible about you and Ian, I do think. Or did you have any say in it? Did you take an initiative?’
‘Oh, no. It was just a shock.’ Mungo felt this was a fair reply. He wondered whether Lady Robert could suppose that he had written in to some Dean or Senior Tutor asking to be doubled up, please, with a good-class Lord or Hon.
‘You mustn’t let Ian’s acquaintances be a nuisance to you. In your rooms in Howard, I mean. Just turn them out.’ Lady Robert paused, and suddenly smiled charmingly. ‘You have the inches for it. I do dislike stunted men.’
‘So long as we don’t try to turn each other out.’ Mungo wasn’t sure whether he’d liked Ian’s mother making a kind of pass at him, however innocent. But second thoughts inclined him to think he did. ‘It might be bad for the furniture.’
‘Yes – it would be the tug of war. But it’s convenient, isn’t it? You needn’t bother whose shirts and jeans are whose. Or shoes, probably. Ian raids his father’s clothes ruthlessly. Incidentally, I wonder why two husky males can be so long in securing four glasses of sherry.’
Mungo wondered whether this was a signal to him to spring smartly to his feet and say ‘I’ll see’. He decided to stay put. Lord Robert might be seizing the opportunity to utter a few Polonius-like final admonitions to his son.
‘But I’m grateful to them for not shoving at the bar,’ Lady Robert was saying. ‘I remember Oxford as a place where it was wonderful occasionally to encounter males just one at a time. They seemed always to hunt in threes and fours. Why are you reading English?’
‘Why?’
This abrupt transition took Mungo by surprise. ‘Well, it was what I did best at school. Nothing much more than that.’ Mungo was conscious that this was a guarded reply.
‘Ian was quite good at it too – although there was very little emphasis on it at his school. We suspect he does some writing from time to time, although he keeps dark about it. Of course, it’s in the family, in a distant way. But here they are.’
Mungo briefly wondered just how ‘it’ – which appeared to be writing – was distantly ‘in’ Ian’s family. At once, however, he had to pay attention to Lord Robert, who was certainly paying attention to him.
‘I do hope we have not diverted you from a pleasant first dinner in hall. But my memory is that not many people go in until Saturday. Some freshmen may be dining with parents, as Ian has so agreeably decided to do. Your own parents, I suppose, would have rather a long way to come, if they were to visit Oxford?’
‘My parents are dead, sir. I live with an aunt, my mother’s sister.’
‘As a townsman or a countryman?’ It was with his air of cordial, swiftly pouncing interest that Lord Robert contrived this skip-and-jump – but it was not before Mungo had glimpsed on his face the same tic or momentary grimace he had remarked in Ian earlier. Such things must be hereditary – and the father was no less displeased than the son that he had put a foot wrong. One oughtn’t to take it for granted that the parents of even the most stalwart lad are in the land of the living. Mungo, however, who didn’t even remember either his father or his mother, wasn’t offended.
‘Oh, as a countryman. My aunt, Miss Guthrie, lives at a little place called Easter Fintry, about half way between Forres and Nairn. I went to school in Forres.’
‘How extremely interesting!’ Lord Robert offered this gratifying but surely implausible comment with a curious abruptness; indeed, almost as if he had been told something startling. He turned to his son. ‘Ian,’ he began, ‘do you realise that Lockhart—’ But Ian was discussing the menu with his mother, and Lord Robert, as if thinking better of what he had been about to say, turned back to Mungo. ‘I am delighted you are a countryman. Particularly as you are going in for literature. I have always thought that English poetry must be hopelessly mysterious to young people brought up in a town. Do tell me what you think.’ This time, Lord Robert’s anxiety to have Mungo’s opinion appeared to have reduced him to a state of breathlessness, so that he actually paused upon his question.
‘I don’t suppose,’ Mungo said, ‘that it would make much difference with Shakespeare.’
‘I quite agree! I couldn’t agree with you more. But then Shakespeare is so absolutely universal. Consider Wordsworth, though. I’ve often thought how little I should make of him if I hadn’t had the good fortune to be brought up in a quiet country home. Ian, have you gathered that Mungo—I may call you Mungo? Do say!—is entirely the countryman?’
‘I’ve guessed it, more or less. He began to tolerate me when he saw I’d brought up a Bevis.’
‘Bevis might be the favourite book of a boy in a Glasgow tenement,’ Mungo said. He was impressed by Ian’s sharpness of observation, but he hated anything like rot being talked about reading.
‘Yes, indeed!’ Lord Robert was all eagerness. ‘But then Bevis is so very good a book. Wouldn’t you say? When Ian and his sisters were young, I inflicted a great deal of reading aloud on them. It’s a family habit, like tippling. And I started off with straight children’s books. Do you know the ones, Mungo, about Amazons and Swallows and Coots and so forth by Arthur Ransome? He was a dear man, and I liked him very much. But I’m afraid I came to regard him as a most dangerous writer. You do agree?’
‘I’m afraid I hadn’t thought,’ Mungo said. Then, feeling this to be a lame response, he added: ‘His kids are rather an upper-class lot.’
‘How very true! But what I chiefly felt was the unnerving absence of any darkness in their hearts. Trafficking with exemplary characters is always bad for us. As I recounted the adventures of these blameless young people I felt I was piling up a dreadful sense of guilt in my children. Ian, whom I believe to be not wickeder than other people, must have felt a moral outcast as he listened. But the marvellous thing about Richard Jefferies’s book is that, even in their idyll, Bevis and Mark can quarrel. Shall we go in to dinner? Just as you and Ian, if you become intimates, will certainly quarrel.’
‘I don’t see that we need. We’re probably quite a tolerant pair.’ Ian, who must be used to his father’s philosophic vein, turned to his mother as they moved towards the restaurant. ‘What do you think, mama?’
‘I’d rather you quarrelled than just disliked each other.’
‘I do so agree!’ Robert Cardower offered his wife the same urgent and gratified acquiescence that he had been offering Mungo. ‘Quarrels are extremely horrid, but salutary in a fashion. Elizabeth, is this table perfectly agreeable to you? They remind us of the fallen creatures that we are.’
‘I don’t see that I’m a fallen creature just because I have a row with somebody.’ Mungo’s disinclination to buy a theological view of the matter was so brusque that he hastily added a softening ‘sir’ to this declaration.
‘Ah, not in itself. Shall we take evasive action before the table-d’hôte? But a row can be a sudden perch from which one views a farther darkness which is darkness indeed. Dear me – upon what a morbid vein we have stumbled! Do tell me, what made you decide to come to Oxford?’
Mungo considered saying something like, ‘I thought I’d take the measure of the spoliators of my country.’ But finding himself to shrink from the expression of cordial interest such words would probably evoke, he found himself answering simply, and perhaps not less veraciously, ‘I got the chance, so I thought I’d come and have a look.’
‘Wandering scholar stuff,’ Ian said, and turned to engage his mother’s interest in the wine-list. It seemed to be his line to let his father make most of the going with casual guests.
‘How much I would like to do that again myself!’ Lord Robert contrived to indicate a friendly envy of Mungo’s lot. ‘There have been, I know, so many changes since my time. The colleges are said to insist on some decent appearance of a desire to study, and even the entrance requirements of the university itself are no longer derisory. The scene must be largely altered, indeed. I do so approve of that. The dolce far niente ethos was really a very great bore. Few of my undergraduate friends were absolute fools. Many of them are now in the City and the Cabinet and so on, where at least total imbecility must be gravely disadvantageous. But when up at Oxford we all considered idleness de rigueur. To cut things so fine that one ended up with a Fourth Class was very much the fashion.’
‘But one reads in the newspapers about a lot of Cabinet Ministers having taken Double Firsts and things.’
‘Perfectly true! And they are, of course, the invaluable men nowadays – and often extremely pleasant people to boot. Only’—and for a moment Robert Cardower looked perplexed—’one doesn’t seem to remember them from that time.’
‘Perhaps they were shut up in their rooms with their books, sir.’
‘That must have been it. And I do feel very strongly how admirable that kind of concentration is. But one ought to find a mean. Don’t you agree? Do tell me.’
‘I don’t think one should mug away just to impress a lot of examiners. But if something seems really relevant’—Mungo fleetingly wondered whether this vogue-word, recently arrived in North Britain, was already outmoded in the sophisticated south—’it’s natural to shut yourself up and go after it while you have the chance.’
‘That is so true! But, of course, a great deal of reading can be done in vacations. They are the proper time for the bulk of it, indeed. I try to impress that on Ian, who says he intends to peel potatoes at the Savoy for half the time, and spend the proceeds on the continent during the other. He tells us it is the usual thing.’
Mungo had heard about the impoverishment of the aristocracy, but understood it to be a myth cunningly fostered to secure them in their condition of unjust economic privilege. Yet there might be genuine cases, no doubt; and if that of the Cardowers was to this picturesque extent among such, he wondered whether he should be taking this fairly expensive meal off them now. But it might just be that Ian had a spirited notion of beginning early to pay his own way in life. Or perhaps his father was merely being funny.
‘If we get on tolerably during term,’ Mungo said, ‘we could peel potatoes together, and have a garret where we’d encourage each other in studious habits at night.’ This mild humour, although it wasn’t quite Mungo’s style, seemed acceptable to Lord Robert, who laughed agreeably. ‘But the vacations do seem a problem,’ Mungo added seriously. ‘The long one goes on for months and months.’
‘So it does. And when you are tired of the Savoy or Claridge’s, you and Ian must simply come and scrape carrots at Stradlings. We are all fond of carrots. You will allow me to join you sometimes, and Elizabeth as well. We can think of it as a reading party in the Victorian manner.’
Mungo realised that, from Lord Robert, this was an invitation, and not simply chat. Although conscious of holding a fairly good opinion of himself, he didn’t reckon to be a charmer of the fast-working sort, and there was something a little surprising, surely, in the speed with which these Cardowers were taking him on. Of course wealthy people had embraced D. H. Lawrence like that – and not always got a very good bargain out of it in the end. Perhaps Stradlings, although he had never heard of it, was a kind of Garsington Manor, where you had gone to tea and met characters like Aldous Huxley and Bertrand Russell. Mungo was modest enough to think that he wasn’t yet, perhaps, quite ready to be an ornament of that sort of salon. However, it needn’t be this that was expected of him. Probably it was Lord Robert rather than his wife who made the running in the way of moral concern about their young, and he had simply decided to spot in this wholesome and upstanding Scottish lad somebody who would be a good influence on his son. Ian might be a precocious roué, for all Mungo knew, or have taken to drugs or to haunting casinos.
‘You must certainly pay us a visit,’ Lady Robert said.
‘I’d like to enormously.’ Mungo offered this reply with as much of the politely conventional as his limited experience of such exchanges could manage. Lady Robert was almost certainly just obeying some rule in thus instantly backing her husband up. Her appraising glance was at work again. Mungo remembered Lord Robert’s mentioning that Ian had sisters. Perhaps (like their mother) they disliked stunted men, and were not recklessly to be exposed to others differently proportioned. Mungo had a notion that people like the Cardowers would expect a grown-up son to make more or less what friends he liked, but to bring home only those whom they would describe as of an eligible sort. Mungo was some way from seeing himself as that.
But this business of putting himself wise about the Cardowers didn’t – fleetingly, at least – altogether please him. He told himself that only three or four hours ago he hadn’t known of their existence, and that – really and truly – he would be quite glad to stop knowing about it any moment now. If he must be doubled up with a public-school boy, he’d have preferred somebody from Fettes, or Loretto, or any other establishment not absolutely in the van of that racket. He saw himself arriving at this Stradlings place, and everybody being perfectly charming to him, and himself developing in consequence into a kind of Julien Sorel (for nearly a month Mungo had been regarding Stendhal as the world’s greatest novelist): scheming, sensitive to imaginary affronts, hideously proud, very much out on a limb. That he wasn’t, as Julien was, a peasant’s son would make this all the more humiliating and absurd. The thing was to keep clear of the whole Cardower family-complex, and just see what was to be made of Ian Cardower by himself. He was pretty sure he liked Ian, and would continue to like him through any rows of the sort his father so cheerfully predicted.
Having arrived at this, as he felt, clear-headed view of the matter, Mungo found that he didn’t particularly want to be shut of even the senior Cardowers, after all. As the dinner went on, he progressively came to believe that Lord Robert was genuinely anxious to learn what, on this or that, his son’s new friend had to say. Mungo was aware of having shamefully little to say – or rather of having no technique for saying it at the tempo dictated by his host. But this was precisely the situation in which Lord Robert was astonishingly good. If you wrote him down – Mungo thought – he would sound quite comical; almost like Jane Austen’s Miss Bates. But in fact his monologue expertly created an illusion of your own scintillating participation – so deftly did he take up, respond to, agree with, question, qualify things you simply hadn’t said, although you might have done, if your wits had been about you. Perhaps this was what was called the aristocratic embrace. Mungo still had the modesty not quite to see why he should be hugged, but there would surely be something almost bloody-minded in resenting it. He ended the evening feeling that Ian’s parents could be reckoned among Ian’s assets. He’d known a good many boys – and girls, for that matter – about whom this couldn’t be said.