Nick Junkin, on the other hand, was twenty, and thus of an age agreeable to contemplate, although not perhaps invariably to live through. Junkin, indeed, was often harassed and occasionally glum: moods which he attributed to a general mysteriousness and unaccountability in the world around him. I could remember something of the kind in my own near-nonage. And as he now occupied the rooms which had been mine during that phase of my career, I was disposed to see in him myself when young. I can’t imagine I told him this; on the contrary, I probably took care to give no hint of it. He wouldn’t have resented any communication of the sort, but it might have added to the burden of his perplexities. Any attractiveness I held for him must have been akin to that felt by an explorer when coming upon a primitive type of society unexpectedly preserved in tolerable working order. This didn’t in the least mean that Junkin condescended to me, or even bent upon me the objective regard of the cultural anthropologist. He took me flatteringly for granted alike as an equal and a repository of wisdom – although he perhaps saw the wisdom as standing in need of a certain measure of interpretation in terms of his own epoch, much as one might do if faced with sacred books dredged up from the drowned civilisation of Atlantis.
When Junkin felt harassed it was often for the same reason that his immediate neighbour Ivo ought to have felt harassed but seemingly didn’t. He could be charged, in the august terminology of the Provost, with being sadly deficient in application. Every now and then he made good resolutions, deciding to get clear at last on which had been treaties and which battles: Ramillies, Oudenarde, Utrecht. But in no time the siren-voices of theatrical activity would have seduced him again. Sticking his head through my door, he would demand to know whether I judged it feasible to produce Fear and Misery in the Third Reich, or would consent to furnish the college dramatic society, in three weeks time, with a stage adaptation of the latest novel by John Updike or Alexander Solzhenitsyn. As I was around the place at all only as being the university’s speciously accredited authority on this sort of thing, I was scarcely in a position to tell Junkin to go away and mind his book.
This field of common concern, however, had resulted in Junkin and myself meeting – briefly and casually, for the most part – two or three times a week. I didn’t look in on Junkin except by invitation, it being my memory that senior members refrained from violating the privacy of their juniors by unheralded calls. Junkin looked in on me when the fancy took him – or rather tumbled in, since I was frequently not aware of him until he was half across the room. Something of the sort happened on the morning after my visit to Otby. Junkin burst in and flung himself on the sofa.
‘I say,’ he said, ‘are you fearfully busy? Do you mind if I come in?’
‘Not a bit, Nick. Please do.’
‘May I sit down?’ By this time Junkin had put his feet up on the sofa cushions and let one arm drop limply to the floor. The posture, and his marked inability to synchronise words and deeds, suggested a more than common perturbation on the young man’s part.
‘Yes, of course. Take a pew. How are you?’
‘Confused. Don’t know whether to be chuffed to the bollocks or not. Quid loquor aut ubi sum? It’s like that.’
‘I see.’ What I had been treated to represented, I believe, Junkin’s only preserved fragment of Latinity, and I had heard it before. ‘But why?’
‘It’s Lempriere. You know he’s my tutor? Yes, I’ve told you that. He doesn’t take many pupils, being so frightfully old, but for some reason he does take me. And I’ve just read him the week’s essay, you see. It seemed to me as big a balls-up as I’d managed yet. Do you know what he said at the end of it?’
‘I’m not likely to, am I? What did he say?’
‘He said, “Well, I’m blessed!” Just like that.’
‘Encouragingly, you mean?’
‘I hadn’t a clue. And then there was what he said next. “Here I’ve been taking you,” he said, “for a true and amiable son of Goodman Dull. And now it dawns on me that you’re simply a dead-idle little brute.” Would you call that encouraging?’
‘Yes, Nick, I would.’
‘Well I didn’t think so – or not at first. As a matter of fact, I thought it rather rude. And who is Goodman Dull, anyway?’
‘You ought to know that one. He’s a constable in Love’s Labour’s Lost.’
‘With sons?’
‘I don’t recall their being mentioned. But it’s scarcely a relevant point.’
‘I suppose not. Then the old chap suddenly said, “I’d call that one a beta-query-plus”. What do you make of that?’
‘What you do, probably. That he was uncommonly pleased.’
‘Well yes – exactly. And he went on with something about the denser fogs thinning out a bit inside my skull. Quite casually, you know. No drama. And then he turned me out of the room. Only, you see, I wasn’t back in the quad again before I remembered something I was told by a man who’s reading Greats. His tutor’s another old party – not quite so old – called Buntingford. Do you know Buntingford?’
‘Yes, I do. He taught me for a time, as a matter of fact, when he was a very young don.’
‘Good Lord!’ Junkin was impressed. ‘When you were both back from the Kaiser’s War or something?’
‘Not exactly that.’ Junkin’s chronological haziness exceeded even that of my Uncle Rory. Neither, one could feel, had acted judiciously in devoting himself to historical studies. ‘But what was it Buntingford said?’
‘He told this man that that sort of thing is called the medicinal buttered bun. I think it means something like buttering you up. Don’t you?’
‘It sounds like that, Nick. I’ve heard it called the psychotherapy of warm praise.’
‘So Lempriere was just kidding me?’ Although himself plainly inclining to this view, Junkin was dashed at my appearing to support it.
‘No – not exactly that, I’d say. He’s seen reason to feel you might have a juster confidence in yourself.’
‘It might be that.’ Junkin brightened. ‘He has that sarky manner, you know. But he’s very kind, really.’
I was struck by this. ‘Kind’ is the undergraduate’s ultimate in commendatory words about a tutor – a fact which witnesses, perhaps, to the chronic desperation attending upon the happiest days of one’s life.
‘Of course,’ Junkin went on, ‘it depends on whether there was an objective basis for it.’ He had sat up and was glancing cheerfully around the room. Judging that his eye tended to linger on the table where I kept some drinks, I got up and poured sherry. ‘I mean,’ Junkin continued, ‘it depends on whether the wretched essay did have some small gleam to it. If I believed that, I think I’d work like mad. And I’ll know by the end of the week. Because of the Mumford test.’
‘What on earth is that, Nick?’ This had left me quite at a loss.
‘You know Mumford, the man opposite me on the staircase?’
‘Indeed I do.’
‘Well, we’re rather in the same boat, you see. Only, he’s not going to anybody here – not this term. They’ve farmed him out to a chap in some obscure college across the High – a kind of crash-course crammer disguised as a don.’
‘They’ve done that, have they?’ The information, although obviously containing a dash of undergraduate mythology, interested me. ‘So what?’
‘It seems that part of this chap’s technique is to tell you to write your next essay on whatever most interests you in the rotten course. So now Mumford just borrows my last essay and takes it along.’
‘I see.’ The morality of this procedure didn’t seem to fall within my province. ‘Have you two become friends?’
‘Mumford and me? Oh, no. I don’t think I frightfully care for him really.’ This remark of Junkin’s had to be received as an understatement; thus firmly to employ a contemporary’s surname was a stiffly distancing gesture. ‘But it’s reasonable to do the friendly turn. Mumford’s been rather up against things lately. He did something damned silly at the end of last term.’
‘Yes, I know.’
‘Pitiful character, in a way. You won’t have seen it, but he has an enormous great wank picture in his room. Makes the place like a porn shop.’
‘I know that picture too, as a matter of fact. It’s wanky, all right.’ I wasn’t sure that Junkin quite approved of my taking over this modish word. ‘But what’s all this in aid of?’
‘I was explaining. If this last essay of mine really has beefed itself up a bit this crammer is sure to notice and tell Mumford so.’
‘And you’ll see that as a green light for doing a bit of work?’
‘For doing an awful lot of work. That’s sensible, isn’t it?’
‘Nick, I don’t think I ever heard anything sillier. This crammer, as you call him, will have a pretty clear view of Ivo Mumford by now, and he mayn’t just be alert for that gleam of dawn. The chap for you to trust is Arnold Lempriere himself.’
‘I suppose you’re dead right. Only, you know, your tutor’s the last man you can rely upon for a straight word about your chances. Everybody says that. I suppose it’s the buttered bun again. They’re always softening the harsh truth, and so on.’
Junkin paused broodingly for a moment. I said nothing, having reason to believe there was a modicum of fact in the proposition he had just advanced. Long ago – I asked myself – hadn’t Timbermill got a vast amount of work out of me by pretending I was a born scholar? The analogy was imperfect, but it did exist. ‘Look here,’ Junkin said suddenly, ‘you know Lempriere quite well, don’t you?’
‘Tolerably well. We’re distant relations, as a matter of fact.’
‘You mean he’s your uncle or something?’
‘Of course not. An uncle isn’t a distant relation. We’re simply cousins in some obscure fashion. But what of it?’
‘Couldn’t you chat him up, and ask him casually what he thinks of my chances? We might get at something objective that way.’
‘I suppose I could. In fact, I will – if you think it useful. But I just wish I was your uncle, Nick. A Dutch one.’
‘You’d advise eight hours a day in the History Library?’
‘Six.’
‘From now till the end of term? You must be joking. I’d be in the funny-farm.’ Junkin paused, and seemed to read scepticism in my silence. ‘Right off my squiff,’ he elaborated. ‘And you’d be responsible.’
‘Go away, Nick. You’re wasting my time.’
‘And we might manage Fear and Misery. It could be absolutely marvellous.’ Nick got to his feet and scowled at me. ‘Oh, all right,’ he said. ‘I’ll think about it.’
‘You’ll be wasting your own time in that case. Just try getting cracking straight away for a change.’
‘You’re getting more and more like a don every day.’
‘I’m paid to get like a don. But I shan’t go in for the psychotherapy of warm praise.’
‘That’s something.’ Junkin, having reached the door, turned and grinned at me cheerfully. ‘Seeing you,’ he said. A moment later his feet were pounding up the staircase.
It was the staircase, I decided, that would make it possible for me to inquire of Arnold Lempriere about Junkin’s examination chances. In Lempriere’s Oxford (which was becoming a dream-Oxford, no doubt) there was what politicians would call a special relationship between a senior member and the half-dozen or so youths who happened to run up and down the same flight of steps as himself. Lempriere would approve of my taking a fatherly interest in Junkin, whereas if I asked about the academic progress of one of his pupils living elsewhere in college I might receive a strong hint that the matter was no business of mine. The same consideration, of course, licensed my interest in Ivo.
I decided to come at Junkin by way of Ivo. Indeed, I was under some obligation to give Lempriere an account of the late Otby episode. He was perfectly capable of enjoying any comedy it contained.
Things didn’t, however, work out quite this way. I had intended to drop in on Lempriere that evening, but was forestalled by an initiative of his own. When I went into common room to lunch he spotted me at once and gestured me brusquely over to him. But there was no vacant place beside him, and our exchange was necessarily brief. It was also of that obtrusively confidential order of which he was fond – his hand going up to the side of his mouth and his voice coming in a hoarse but penetrating whisper.
‘A delicate matter blowing up,’ he said. ‘Come for a walk. Howard Gate two o’clock. Say absolutely nothing to anyone.’
I was obliged to give a conspiratorial nod, while being aware of the cautious amusement of two young lecturers on the other side of the table. Lempriere’s particular version of the councils-of-princes idea must have been well known. He had been Senior Tutor in his time, and believed that the college’s affairs, ostensibly so democratically controlled by the entire Governing Body, were in fact most properly in the hands of an inner ring of persons holding, or having held, such offices. Whether this was really so nobody seemed to know, and men who had been fellows for a dozen years would dispute the issue warmly. There may, for that matter, have been such a caucus without Lempriere’s any longer belonging to it. Having become prone in old age to form eccentric judgements, he might no longer be thought of as ‘sound’ or ‘reliable’ as these qualities are interpreted in close cabals. But it would be my guess that he had no sense of any exclusion or relegation, and he evidently derived genuine enjoyment from occasionally divulging to some favoured outsider one or another supposed secret of this hypothetical oligarchy. Albert Talbert sometimes evinced a similar disposition. Only whereas Lempriere’s arcane confidences were invariably on what might be termed the inner mind or higher thought of the college, Talbert had the air of cautiously admitting one to some aspect of universal knowledge normally available only to the deepest and most capacious scholarship.
Our afternoon walk began in a silence that Lempriere indefinably indicated as properly to be maintained for some time. This was perhaps by way of emphasising the portentousness of whatever disclosure was to be afforded me. It seemed improbable that he proposed an expedition of major scope. He was wearing stout walking-shoes, and carried a stick which terminated in a once-formidable but long-since blunted steel spike. The shoes, however, appeared a little too heavy for his feet, and with the stick he was inclined to feel forward on the pavement as if it were uncertain moorland terrain. Much more then when commandingly prowling common room, he revealed himself as quite as old as his years.
We went up the Turl – the colleges fronting upon which own in a singular degree that effect of mild conventual presence which Oxford at large once hinted to Henry James. The grisatre effect is very soothing, and as Lempriere was so grisatre too I was drawn to reflect upon how well he composed with the scene. Apart from those Washington days, he had presumably spent his whole adult life in Oxford, and had thus become one with its stones and with its grey misty uneventful vistas. It was not, I told myself, a place by which he could ever be betrayed – or even, in his old age, bewildered or surprised.
The narrow street was quiet. Much traffic had lately been filtered out of the centre of Oxford by civic authorities of a pedestrian turn of mind; and around us, at least for the moment, was an almost Venetian tranquillity. There wasn’t a vehicle in sight, and the only sound was the click of a typewriter from some upper chamber in Jesus. As if judging this calm propitious for his revelation, Lempriere raised a hand to command my full attention. No words came from him, however, and for a moment I wondered why. The empty Oxford afternoon was still around us; an elderly don, a gown slung over his shoulder, was approaching at a moderate pace on a bicycle; on the other pavement a young woman had stopped to switch from one hand to the other a recalcitrant child and a heavy shopping-bag; in the doorway of a travel agency a fair-haired youth in rowing kit had paused to study some brochure or hand-out which he had just obtained in the interior. Thus sparsely peopled, the Turl was still entirely silent. Only from somewhere away on our left, perhaps in the Cornmarket, a low-toned indeterminate sound was making itself heard – a sound the chief suggestion of which was multitudinousness, as if a long way off great waves were churning up the pebbles on a stormy beach, or as if, equally far in distance, contending rugger teams were being cheered on by armies of dwarfs. Then, with surprising abruptness, this mysterious phenomenon explained itself. We were listening to a great deal of shouting of that semi-organised sort favoured by marchers and demonstrators of a political cast. It was, in fact, a ‘demo’ that was going forward.
‘We seem to be running into a certain amount of liveliness,’ I said.
Lempriere made no reply. He simply walked on.
It was a large demo, as Oxford demos went. By the time we reached Ship Street the gates of Trinity, straight ahead of us across the Broad, had vanished behind a mass of young people. The Broad is a thoroughfare most appropriately named, since it is very broad indeed. Even so, the procession – or whatever it was to be called – jammed it, bringing all traffic to a stop. Any space the marchers didn’t take up was occupied by bystanders, male and female, of their own age. The marchers carried banners and placards of a somewhat unimpressive showing, but there was no mistaking the sheer physical exuberance at their command. The bystanders, on the other hand, seemed concerned to exhibit an air of nonchalant ease, as if they found the whole spectacle absurd rather than alarming. Yet alarming it undeniably was. Even a mob of clergymen yelling its head off would be not without a perturbing effect. And university students in the mass (I suddenly saw) are capable of being a good deal less pleasing than they commonly are as individuals or in small groups.
What Lempriere was thinking I don’t know. His silence was now so resolute that I decided not to be chatty myself. It was impossible to cross the street, but we edged our way eastwards in the direction of the Sheldonian Theatre. This, one of the two masterpieces achieved in Oxford by Christopher Wren, is guarded (as all readers of Zuleika Dobson know) by a semicircle of gigantic carved heads set upon pillars. The busts (believed by the uninstructed to represent Roman emperors but known to the learned to be learned persons like themselves) had lately emerged from near-obliteration in new and staring stone. These colossi were now surveying some four or five hundred pygmy undergraduates who had sat down on the road in front of them; they were also surveying perhaps a score of pygmy policemen lined up on the steps of the Clarendon Building and before the portals of the Indian Institute. Their mute spectatorship added a bizarre touch to what was already a surprising scene. I had myself, indeed, seen something like it only a few months before. That had been in Florence. There, the students had appeared younger, and their concern had been with matters far away: in Chile, I think it was. Here, such manifestations were understood to be in the interest of establishing a kind of super-cafeteria – declared by the insurgent forces to be essential to their well-being, and believed by many of their seniors to be in fact a demand for the building of a miniature Kremlin on the Isis. Here, the policemen were ‘stolid’ – as if they must abide by the journalists’ description of them; in Florence, they had been demonstratively bored. In Florence, there had been water-cannon lurking in the side-streets; here, the police had solemnly brought out a kind of Black Maria or prison van. It didn’t look as if it could do anybody any harm. I felt it to be a somewhat tactless object, all the same.
One aspect of the spectacle was without continental parallel. It is among the facts of Oxford life that the civil power (meaning the Thames Valley Constabulary) treats as territorially inviolate all university and collegiate property. The buildings of the university, and those of its constituent colleges, are a kind of Vatican City in the midst of England’s green and pleasant land. The police are never ‘called in’ – or if they are (as they must of necessity be in the event of murders, major larcenies and the like) it is in an unobtrusive fashion. The university provides its own police, even its own fortifications; and these were in evidence now. The Clarendon Building, its administrative nerve-centre, is traversed at ground level by a tunnel which, within daylight hours, serves as a public thoroughfare. At the Broad Street end of the tunnel are massive wrought-iron gates; at the other end there had lately been erected (in preparation for such field-days as the present) a whimsically insubstantial wooden door, topped by ornamental metal spikes so diminutive that they would scarcely have served to impale a sparrow. It was the iron gates that were under siege now – or at least it was the iron gates that the squatting mob seemed to be shouting at. Without, it was guarded by helmeted policemen; within – but peering through the bars not without a certain comic effect of the menagerie sort – were the university’s own forces of law and order: half a dozen bowler-hatted men with a Proctor in their midst. The Proctor – whether Senior or Junior I couldn’t tell – was in full battle-dress, which in his case consisted of an elaborate gown fabricated largely from black velvet, together with a kind of bifurcated white linen bib which my Uncle Norman, as a minister of the Kirk, would have described as his Geneva bands.
Lempriere continued to push ahead. His edging through the crush was something he contrived to an effect of its not being there at all. It was true that the young savages now sprawling or dancing around us, and bellowing with the full force of their lungs that somebody or other should be ‘out’, parted before him the moment they had taken a glance at his years. Even so, I found myself wondering whether for Lempriere they really weren’t there; whether he owned some power simply to exclude from consciousness a situation in its essentials totally incomprehensible to him.
This extravagant speculation was interrupted by a sudden change in the scene. The police may have decided they must clear a lane for traffic, or they may have succumbed to their innate persuasion that it is the prime duty of a citizenry to ‘move on’. For one reason or another, a number of them had advanced upon the sitters down, and this move had been interpreted by a few as a declaration of war. Above the general confusion a single voice made itself heard shouting ‘Scrag the fuzz!’ The response to this was a certain thin scattering of objects in air. They weren’t stones but they were undoubtedly missiles – eggs and tomatoes, for the most part, brought along by persons with Dickensian views on what is requisite on political occasions. The police didn’t like being pelted; the whole lot of them charged in what looked like a well- rehearsed snatch raid. Within seconds – in the newspaper phrase – scuffles broke out.
Lempriere and I, having seen some delusive chance of quickly gaining Parks Road, spent a couple of minutes in the middle of this melee. Under our noses a couple of policemen grabbed a girl and attempted to march her off to their van – an essay in incarceration which may or may not have been deserved but which was injudicious in either case. Angry young men piled in; the girl was rescued and vanished; an ugly fight was still continuing when we gained the pavement outside the New Bodleian. Free of the fracas, I turned round to take a look at it. The police were on top, and quite a number of young men were being dragged ungently into captivity. It was no doubt a historic occasion – any number of demos having taken place in Oxford without even this mild approximation to ‘mass arrests’ succeeding upon them.
Lempriere had walked on, and I hastened to catch up. He was a little breathless, but he still said nothing. I might have been conducting someone blind and deaf through the whole commotion. It was a commotion that faded behind us with surprising speed. On our right Wadham slumbered; on our left the great gardens first of Trinity and then of St John’s reposed in their autumnal dignity. As we rounded Rhodes House and moved down South Parks Road the last hint of tumult faded on our ears.
‘Something disconcerting has happened,’ Lempriere said. ‘That poor lad who made away with himself – Lusby, you remember? – proves to have a brother. A brother who is seeking entry to the college next year. It’s as tricky as anything on the horizon.’
‘Peter Lusby,’ I said.
‘No, not Peter, Paul. The poor boy’s name was Paul.’
‘I mean the brother – the one who wants to come up. He’s Peter.’
‘You’ve had the papers?’ Lempriere was surprised and perhaps offended. ‘They’re not supposed to have gone round yet.’
‘I haven’t had any papers, Arnold. I doubt whether that lot come to a professorial fellow. But I’ve met the boy.’
‘You’ve met Lusby’s brother?’ Lempriere paused in his cautious progress to stare at me. ‘Where on earth did you do that?’
‘In the college chapel, quite late one night.’
‘At prayer?’
‘I don’t at all know. He may have been praying, but I didn’t see him at it.’ I found myself surprised that this possibility hadn’t occurred to me. ‘He’d come to sight-see in Oxford with a party from his school, and had stayed on to look around.’
‘He’d probably been praying. It seems he’s a religious boy. His headmaster says so. A serious family, and so on. Did you gather anything more about him, Dunkie? It may be most important.’
‘I don’t quite see that. But we had a certain amount of talk. He came and had coffee with me before catching his train.’
‘Humph.’
When Lempriere produced the ungracious noise commonly thus written it meant that he was inwardly approving of you. I had gained a good mark by my unspectacular hospitality to Paul Lusby’s brother.
‘He told me about wanting to come to the college,’ I said. ‘I wished him luck.’
‘I suppose we all do.’ Lempriere’s voice had abruptly taken on the acrid tone I remembered from my first acquaintance with him. ‘You’d have done better to wish him a larger dash of brains, it seems. Did he strike you as at all clever?’
I’m not prepared to give any guess at that.’
‘I don’t ask you for a guess. I asked you for an impression.’
‘You’re not going to get it, Arnold.’ I had decided by this time that there were occasions when a certain arrogance in Lempriere had to be firmly dealt with. ‘The boy was my guest for half an hour. I’m not going to offer any judgement on him. Examiners can do that.’
‘Humph.’ Lempriere resumed his silence. We were passing through what had come to be known as the ‘Science Area’ of the university – a development of which he probably took a dark view.
‘The boy wants to read law,’ I said.
‘Of course he wants to read law. His brother was reading law. You can see what he has in his head, can’t you?’
“Indeed I can.’
It seems his brother gave promise of being very clever indeed. Although not clever enough to keep clear of that damnably silly wager with young Mumford. The fact is, Dunkie, that Charles Atlas—you know that Charles is Tutor for Admissions?—is uncommonly worried about the situation. This present Lusby doesn’t look promising at all.’
‘On paper?’
‘Yes. His O Levels or A Levels, or whatever the confounded things are called.’
‘Does it matter all that?’
‘It didn’t use to. We’d take on boys we liked and begin with the alphabet if they needed it. But times are said to have changed.’
‘Can Peter Lusby come up so far as the university is concerned?’
‘Lord, yes. That hurdle wouldn’t stop the village idiot. But Charles will maintain it’s what comes afterwards that matters. And he has a case, as you can plainly see. This Peter Lusby isn’t an Ivo Mumford – not caring a damn about his work so long as he has the run of the place for a time. He wants to come to us to redeem his brother’s disaster, to honour his memory – Lord knows what. So one has to honour him.’ Lempriere had quickened his pace, as if his feet were coming with less difficulty off the ground. Sideways, he threw me a challenging glance. ‘But the boy mustn’t come up and then crash. That’s imperative, eh? So it requires an uncommonly hard look.’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I agree.’
‘There’s not a stiffer problem, I’d say, blowing around the whole university at the moment.’ With this extravagant remark Lempriere had nailed a flag to his mast. It appeared to have done him good. For a score or so of paces he strode ahead like a young man.
‘Have you any idea, Arnold, how Jimmy Gender, who was Paul Lusby’s tutor and would be Peter’s too, is likely to view the problem?’
‘It will worry him even more than it worries Charles. If we do find the boy a place Jimmy will feel an enormous burden of responsibility towards him. He’d work like a beaver to get him through his blasted Mods or Prelim or whatever it is, and then his Schools. That goes without saying. It would be a kind of memorial service.’
We had entered the University Parks – which are quite obviously one park only, although of considerable extent. We proceeded now on firm asphalt and now on a slippery carpeting of russet leaves. Lempriere trod with a similar care on each. Here and there vigorous youths were pursuing hockey or lacrosse: spectacles before which we paused one by one. Lempriere, I believe, possessed or retained no informed interest in athletic activities, but was attracted to them in a general way. Much the same sort of panting and pounding was going on as we had been witnessing in front of the Clarendon Building, but here it was of a sanctioned sort: the playing fields of Eton stuff. Gleams of sunshine filtered down through the October sky, and these encouraged us to seat ourselves on a park bench for a time. On the path before us elderly academics exercised dogs, young academics pushed prams, and academics yet to be – the juvenile population of North Oxford – darted to and fro on prohibited bicycles and tricycles.
I became aware that a very senior academic citizen had paused before us. He was an emaciated and even cadaverous man, and what trembled above his neck was much less like a head than a skull.
‘Ah, Lempriere!’ this person exclaimed. His tone suggested displeased surprise. ‘Good afternoon, good afternoon.’
‘The President of Magdalen,’ Lempriere said grimly. ‘Dr Duncan Pattullo.’
I was becoming accustomed to ‘Dr Pattullo’ or even to ‘Professor Pattullo’, although the one was as inaccurate as the other. Lempriere, of course, was merely being silly.
‘And are you here for long, Lempriere?’ The President had acknowledged our introduction with no more than a curt if wobbling nod. ‘Are you here for long?’
‘My tenure is as indefinite as yours, President.’ Lempriere’s reply had an incisiveness in which I found myself taking a loyal collegiate satisfaction. ‘The common lot, I suppose, since they did away with the death penalty.’
‘Good, Lempriere, good!’ The President of Magdalen was delighted. He swayed uncertainly forward, and punched Lempriere on the shoulder with surprising vigour. ‘Good day to you, good day to you I’ He tottered on his skeletal way.
‘Malicious old devil!’ Lempriere said – again with the chuckle that might have been a clearing of his throat.
‘Just what did he mean?’ I asked. The senatorial exchange had surprised me.
‘It’s what you say—isn’t it?—to a man who has retired and taken himself decently out of Oxford. You suppose him to be visiting his great-grandson at St Catherine’s or Pot Hall. The President and I took Schools together. No doubt it was in Victoria’s golden reign.’
We appeared to have enjoyed an interlude of comic relief. In Oxford at that time I was always learning things. And the idea of comedy put me in mind of Otby. I now gave Lempriere an account of the visit upon which I had accompanied the Provost. He made an appreciative listener.
‘Dear old Edward,’ he said. I’ve nothing against the man. He gives an honest attention, God bless him, to the duties of his station. But this Ivo Mumford, now – he’s another matter.’ Lempriere was suddenly grave again. ‘Part of the problem, eh?’
‘He’s certainly a problem. But I don’t know what problem he’s a part of.’
‘Lusby’s, of course – the second Lusby. Suppose young Mumford rescues himself, or suppose we do the job for him. And suppose this Peter Lusby comes up to the college. They’re not going to be exactly comfortable bedfellows, are they?’
‘I don’t see, Arnold, they need be bedfellows at all.’
‘Be serious, please.’ Lempriere, disconcertingly, had supposed me to be extracting a salacious joke from his figure of speech, and had come down on me hard. ‘Peter Lusby would be in residence with the man who – indirectly, of course – was responsible for his brother’s death.’
‘But he’s not going to know that! The business of the wager didn’t emerge at the inquest, did it?’
‘Thank God, no. But everybody in college has heard about it.’
‘I know a lot of people have. But they wouldn’t hand the story on to the dead boy’s brother. It’s inconceivable.’
‘It certainly ought to be.’
‘There’s an unpleasant outside chance, certainly.’ I paused for a moment, aware that for Arnold Lempriere matters of this sort were very important indeed, and anxious to say anything that might be useful. ‘Jimmy Gender might think it wise to tell Peter Lusby about that aspect of the thing himself. It would at least be better than the boy’s hearing about it in a confused way from some young drunk. But it’s not an urgent matter now. The chance of Mumford’s surviving and staying up isn’t going to be made a reason for not taking on Lusby – or Lusby’s coming up a reason for turfing Mumford out.’
‘Of course not – or not in anybody’s conscious mind. But there’s an awkwardness in the situation that might imperceptibly strengthen a sense that Ivo Mumford is a general nuisance about the college.’
‘So he is, for that matter.’ I said this incautiously, being preoccupied by the sudden perception that Lempriere’s concern over the affair might conceivably become obsessional.
‘Damn it, Dunkie! You’re for the boy, aren’t you?’
‘For Ivo?’
‘Yes, for Ivo, confound you. Why, at almost our first meeting you put him to me as a hard-luck story! And he’s the son of your oldest friend in the place.’
‘Arnold, I’m very anxious that Tony’s boy should have the best possible chance of a good start in life. Only I’m not confident – I think I have ceased to believe – that his remaining in college for nearly another two years is his likeliest way to that.’
Lempriere got to his feet, painfully but at the same time abruptly. I realised – without his speaking a further word – that I had said something which appeared to him outrageous and nonsensical. We all have somewhere in our minds a patch of madness. Lempriere’s was a large overestimating of the particular privilege which, over all other inhabitants of earth, Ivo Mumford and some four hundred of his contemporaries at present enjoyed. Everybody alive might go to heaven on Judgement Day. But these young men were members of the college now.
We rounded the Parks in a resumed silence, and I supposed that we should head back for the centre of Oxford. But Lempriere turned east, in the direction of those windings of bits and pieces of the Cherwell which provide Magdalen’s Water Walks and the region known as Mesopotamia. I took the extending of our perambulation to indicate that I was not totally disgraced. And although the subject of Ivo Mumford was becoming tedious I resolved to have another go at it.
‘Look,’ I said, ‘I’ve told you about my encounters with that boy, and more or less what I make of him. He’s stupid – I’ll bet a good deal stupider than Peter Lusby—’
‘Aha! An impression of Lusby after all.’
‘Fair enough.’ I was lucky thus to have put Lempriere in good humour again. ‘Ivo hasn’t got his father’s brains, and not even his grandfather’s low cunning—’
‘I hope he has better manners than that old ruffian.’
‘Yes, he has – up to a point. But you must have judged for yourself.’
‘I haven’t met the boy.’
‘Never?’ I was surprised by this. ‘But if he’s reading history—’
‘I do very little teaching now. They think me past it, you know, and so they say I’m entitled to a very senior man’s very large leisure.’ Lempriere was amused rather than indignant at this. ‘I’ve stopped even arranging who’s to be taught by whom.’
‘I see. Still, I’d have expected you to entertain an old pupil’s grandson, Arnold. It’s your sort of thing.’
‘Boys aren’t interested in meeting their grandfather’s tutors. But the fact is, you know, that I have an eye on the strategy of the affair. By which I mean edging or wangling the boy round their damned rules and regulations.’ Lempriere now chortled happily; he must have seen that I had been startled by this scandalously subversive speech, almost worthy of Cedric Mumford himself. ‘Trouble is, Dunkie, I’ve been thought to make pets of people in my time.’
‘What sort of people?’
‘Nice lads from my old school. Or nice lads like your neighbour Nicolas Junkin, who can scarcely be said to be from any school at all.’
‘You’re quite wrong there. Cokeville G.S. is one of the best schools in Yorkshire. They get about as many open awards as Ampleforth.’
‘Is that so?’ This statistic (which I had made up on the spur of the moment) impressed Lempriere. ‘Then it’s a pity they didn’t teach Junkin to spell.’
‘Will that spoil his chances with his examiners?’
‘Oh he’ll be all right with them. Nick’s turning teachable, more or less. And we have several weeks in hand. I’ll show him a trick or two to outwit the brutes.’
‘That’s a good tutor’s job?’
‘Cokeville Junkin will think so by the time I’ve finished with him. But to get back to Ivo. He’s said not to be teachable, I admit. All the more occasion for his having a friend at need, eh? And it’s going to be a chap who has never so much as passed the time of day with him. No chance of somebody like Charles Atlas going round murmuring that Mumford is one of the old dotard’s little chums.’
‘I see.’ This primitive guile on Lempriere’s part was something I had glimpsed already. ‘Would you so much as recognise the boy?’
‘Lord, yes! I’ve taken a good look at the heir of the Mumfords often enough. A handsome lad in his way. Keeps his hair clean, too. Glint of bronze in it.’
‘Yes, so there is.’
‘But I doubt whether he could put a name to me. Astonishing how little curiosity the young men can have about the old men in their midst.’
The Cherwell was now in front of us, but behaving not entirely as I remembered it. They had been messing it about. Here and there it sluiced its dirty skin over concrete as it had always done, carrying autumn leaves and autumn litter indifferently down to Thames. But the weirs had shifted their positions and so had a couple of bridges. Or so I thought. The contraption known as the rollers, however, was exactly as it had been; it helped you – although not much – to haul your punt to a higher level of the stream. On our left, beyond a muddy swamp, was a large dismal structure that rang no bell at all: a system of wooden and corrugated-iron palisades, some eight feet high. It vaguely suggested a small abandoned concentration camp, too inefficiently designed ever to have been in a good way of business.
‘What on earth’s that?’ I asked.
‘That’s Parson’s Pleasure.’ Lempriere was staring at me, really shocked. ‘Don’t tell me you never came to swim here?’
‘Well, yes – I did sometimes. And took a punt through quite often. Only I just didn’t recognise it.’ I was struck by a recent memory. ‘You suggested our coming the afternoon after the Gaudy – but I had to go to tea with the Talberts. Do you bathe here often, Arnold?’
‘Not at this time of year.’ Lempriere surveyed the depressing scene, chuckling softly. ‘But we might just take a peep. Come on, Dunkie.’ Abandoning his usual cautious gait, he plunged into the mud. It seemed not decent to decline to follow him, and I plunged forward too. Submerged under an inch or two of the stuff there was some sort of footpath. If Lempriere managed to keep to it I did not. We reached the barrier in front of us where it stopped off at the river-bank, and where there proved to be a notice reading Ladies are not allowed beyond this point. I stared at it much as if I had met a traveller from an antique land.
‘It really happens still?’ I asked.
‘Of course it does. They had a place for mixed bathing next door for a time. But it faded out.’
‘Nude mixed bathing?’
‘Certainly not.’ Lempriere was displeased.
‘Why did it fade out? Perhaps the ladies judged the Cherwell rather too dirty for their children and themselves?’
‘I don’t know what anybody judged. Take a look round the corner, Dunkie. But mind the barbed wire.’
I minded the barbed wire and surveyed the empty bathing- place. It naturally didn’t afford much interest.
‘Truce awhile to toil and tasking,’ Lempriere said.
‘What’s that?’ I had recovered my balance without falling into the Cherwell. It really looked very uninviting indeed.
‘Truce awhile to toil and tasking,
Dream away the hours with us,
With a bun and towel basking:
Pur is naturalibus!’
Lempriere recited these lines with affection – despite their having their origin, I believe, not at his own but at a rival school. He recited them, too, with the largest innocence, although nothing could be more certain than that an old gentleman’s fondness for summer bathing and basking amid naked striplings must nowadays occasion ribald comment from time to time. I felt no doubt about the innocence. Lempriere belonged, spiritually if not chronologically, to the pre-Freudian era, when bachelors were respectable and you prompted little speculation if not ‘a ladies’ man’. And he was certainly not the only representative of his generation to frequent this guarded stretch of the Cherwell – now so forlorn, but doubtless joyous and Arcadian in June. In my own time it had been a recognised foible, and the ribaldry no more than amusement, muted in a civilised way.
‘It could do with chlorination,’ I said. ‘But I’ll risk it with you in the summer term. Swimming’s something I can still manage.’
‘That’s a promise, Dunkie. It’s not the Corry or the Garry, I’ll admit. But it serves, it serves.’
We made a circuitous return to the city, managing to take in Addison’s Walk and Magdalen Grove. Lempriere was tiring and again fairly silent, but perceptibly in a contented mood. My undertaking had pleased him. I reminded myself (as I frequently had to do) that he regarded me as a kinsman, and this suggested to me something that might engage his interest.
‘Talking of the Corry,’ I said, ‘do you know that I’m not your only kin in Oxford from across the border? There’s another Glencorry – and she’s a Lempriere by descent, not just by devious alliance. She’s a grand-daughter of my Aunt Charlotte, called Fiona Petrie. And she was a pupil of J. B. Timbermill, as I was long ago.’
For a moment I thought I’d put a foot wrong, having failed to reckon with the indignation Lempriere was likely to feel at having been left so long in ignorance of this tenuous family connection. Fortunately he took it well, and I told him whatever I knew about Fiona. By this time she had been out to dinner with me, and I found her straying quite frequently into my head. That she could be represented as one of the up-and-coming learned women of the university, however, didn’t please Lempriere at all. He seemed to take the view that, had he been – as would have been proper – apprised of her presence at an earlier stage of her career, he might have headed her off from a walk of life so unbecoming to her sex.
‘And you say,’ he demanded challengingly, ‘that she shares a house with a lady novelist?’
‘Yes.’ I hadn’t actually described Miss Mountain in these archaic terms. But as she wrote novels and was undoubtedly a lady the description couldn’t well be taken exception to.
‘Oxford seems an odd place for lady novelists.’ Lempriere reflected for a moment. ‘Of course,’ he said concessively, ‘there was Mrs Humphry Ward.’
‘I believe there are several at the moment. Perhaps it’s an odd place for gentleman novelists as well.’
‘So it is. I’ve never heard of one.’
‘I don’t think many dons persist in the practice.’ This conversation was amusing me. ‘But a surprising number of them might be found to have perpetrated a single novel in their youth, or even a single novel in their riper age. Professional novelists, on the other hand, are hurrying themselves into university chairs and fellowships all over the country. They must suppose theirs is a dying industry.’
‘At least we know a dramatist who has done that.’ It delighted Lempriere to plant this just if obvious barb. ‘Eh, Dunkie? But did you say something about J. B. Timbermill? I suppose that rum book of his might be called a novel of sorts.’
‘I said that it seems he was Fiona’s tutor. It’s my guess that she was his favourite pupil, a kind of child of old age. And she appears very fond of him.’
Is she very fond of this Margaret What’s-her-name?’
‘Mountain.’ This question struck me as surprising from a pre-Freudian man. ‘I really don’t know.’
‘You must bring her to see me. Miss Petrie, that is. You can leave What’s-her-name behind you.’
‘I’ll do that sometime.’ I thought this promised rather an odd encounter.
‘Good. Up Longwall, I think.’
This was a further detour from our route back to college. It proved, surprisingly, to be because Lempriere wanted to survey the late battle-field. A single policeman stood at the door of the Indian Institute, and there was a second on the steps of the Clarendon Building. The only other sign of the afternoon’s manifestation was a thin scattering of abandoned hand-outs here and there in the gutters. Lempriere impaled one of them on the spike of his walking-stick and examined it cursorily. He seemed to judge it not interesting.
‘Plenty of riots in mediaeval Oxford,’ he said. ‘Knives as well as staves at times, and no end of broken sconces. Probably not much vice in them, all the same. Still, a mob’s a mob, and there’s not much to be done with it. Except ignore it, eh?’ He shook his stick, and the crumpled little sheet fluttered to the ground. ‘No good beginning except with the individual, you know, or with three or four reasonable people gathered in a room. I’m convinced of that, and it’s why I’ve never been other than what they call a college man. See that the college does the right thing by its own people, and the university will look after itself. A sermon, Dunkie, a sermon. Take it to heart.’