In the evening following this London venture I was the guest of a man called Alexander Pentecost at a dining club of the traditional Oxford sort that meets now in one college and now in another according to who is host for the occasion. Pentecost was a physicist, and as he had won a Nobel prize more or less in childhood it was to be presumed that he was one of the most distinguished scientists in the university. But he also owned a consuming interest in the theatre. He was active in producing plays for the OUDS and for college societies, and the highlight of his life appeared not to be the occasion on which he was summoned to Sweden to be handed a cheque or scroll or whatever by the king of that country, but one on which he had successfully stormed the West End stage. It had been a matter, I think, of propitious acquaintance with certain top stars powerful in that area. But as the play had been the Prometheus of Aeschylus, and as Prometheus may be regarded as the archetypal atom-buster, a certain eclat no doubt attended its superintendence by so highly nuclear a character. Pentecost was interesting to me because he presented the odd spectacle of a supremely intelligent man (as he must certainly have been) in whom there lurked a Nicolas Junkin who had never grown up.
We had met several times without my having felt that he had any designs on me in my professional character, but now this proved not to be so. At least he had something to discuss, and he got going on it over the champagne before we sat down at table. There was still prejudice, he was maintaining, blowing around against the Junkins in general. It was often asserted in senior common rooms that no human activity – not even playing cricket for the university – was more disastrously time-consuming than play-acting. As soon as a college began to do damned badly in the Examination Schools it started a witch-hunt in this regard. And it couldn’t be said—could it?—that my own college was exactly at the head of the academic league-table. So was this sort of persecution going on there? He only wanted to know.
I said that on the general situation I didn’t yet feel competent to pronounce, but that so far as the narrower issue went I was unaware of ducking-stools, let alone faggots, being prepared around me. On the contrary, the college subsidised juvenile dramatic aspirations with ready cash to a tune unimaginable in my own undergraduate days. We even allowed ourselves – and it was a much harder thing – to be bundled out of our hall for nights on end in the interest of staging in it theatrical ventures which sometimes proved extremely bizarre. Pentecost wasn’t to mistake me. I was all for this more liberal and accommodating attitude. As for what militated against the success of the academic studies of the young – and again I was all for modest success being there achieved – I was perpetually being treated to all sorts of theories, the kind of distraction we were discussing being only one of them.
Pentecost said he was glad to hear it. But he didn’t let up. Instead, he went into what I sensed as a routine about aristocratic education in the Elizabethan age. The great schoolmasters of that golden time had regularly encouraged skill in the actor’s craft as a proper part of their curriculum; the same attitude had obtained in the great houses of England as well; there were recorded instances of former wards having instituted actions against their guardians – men puritanically inclined, perhaps – for having denied them, in this as in other particulars, the due education of a gentleman.
Not having heard of this evidence from the law courts, I asked for details. Pentecost produced them at once. He had got the whole thing up – I imagine without the slightest effort – and now gave me the benefit of that not inconsiderable aid to intellectual eminence which consists in the humble endowment of a photographic memory. This lasted us well through the dinner, and the attention Pentecost exacted from me made me slow to take stock of the company. I was the only man from my college, although one old member of it was present in the perplexing person of Lord Marchpayne. I say ‘perplexing’ because I was at first at a loss as to why Tony should have turned up – presumably as a guest, like myself – at such an unassuming academic jollification. Ministers of the Crown, I believed, were very busy people. And Tony’s presence could scarcely be part of his campaign to have Ivo retained in residence – a matter with which none of the dons present could have any connection or concern. Then I remembered recently reading that the government was judged likely soon to undergo one of those ‘shuffles’ that English political mythology declares to be periodically essential for prolonging the tenure of administrations. Being in the Lords must make Tony’s political life particularly tricky, and if his present job was wanted for somebody else it mightn’t be easy to find him another Cabinet post which could reasonably be held by a peer. Perhaps – I didn’t at all know – the Ministry of Education was one capable of being so regarded, in which case Tony might well be accepting a round of engagements designed to assert his keen interest in pedagogy at its every level. This would have been so like him that I was presently taking it for granted that I had found the key to the riddle.
So far, I’d had no more from him than a wink across the room, and had myself given more attention to something else. Entirely to my surprise, the host of the evening had turned out to be Christopher Cressy. This made me, in a formal sense, his guest at one remove, and I rather thought it also meant that he was paying for my dinner. I couldn’t, indeed, be certain that this was the set-up, but the structure of the thing had that feel. Dining clubs like this one were a survival from more spacious days. With due permission asked, a man might bring along another man and there would be no thought of splitting bills. Cressy – so chilly at our first encounter – had welcomed me benignly on my arrival; had made a few remarks which, although conventionally polite, contrived an amusing turn of phrase; and had actually managed to keep his eyes on me in an interested way for twenty seconds on end. I tried to feel this as a gratifying promotion in his esteem. It seemed paltry to be speculating on whether he was paying for my entertainment or not.
‘Cressy must have given thought to this meal,’ the man on my other hand said when I had disengaged myself momentarily from Pentecost. ‘It’s what must be called serious dining, wouldn’t you say?’
‘Decidedly. And the company owns a certain gravity as well.’
‘Indeed we do. This club is seldom gamesome. My name’s Corlett. How do you do.’
‘How do you do. My name’s Pattullo. I’m Pentecost’s guest.’
‘So I see. And yes – gravity in every sense. We get up weightier than when we sat down. Vino gravis too, of course, although not to any point of indecorum. Do you like getting to bed early?’
‘Moderately.’
‘A pity. A sustained discussion ensued, and the club dispersed after midnight.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘It’s what an enthusiastic secretary minuted of some meeting round about 1910. Nobody has ever ventured to drop the formula since.’
‘Or to disperse until the small hours?’
‘I wouldn’t say that. Occasionally a bold spirit will wait for eleven o’clock, cry “Aha! The witching hour of twelve has struck”, and reach for his muffler and galoshes.’
‘What is sustainedly discussed?’
‘A paper. Somebody reads a paper. Sometimes it’s the host and sometimes not. About fish-names in mediaeval Spain, or recent developments in biblical exegesis in Holland, or the Yamato-E tradition of narrative scrolls in twelfth century Japan.’
‘I see. Can one do a bit of homework? Is one told of the subject in advance?’
‘Oh, no. Everybody’s likely to know something, of course.’
‘Of course.’ I hope I looked round with respect at a company so erudite as this must be. ‘What’s your own subject?’ I asked at a venture.
‘International liquidity,’ the man called Corlett said. ‘I’m an economist.’
We went into another room for coffee and whatever further drinks we had a mind to. The lighting was dim, and there was a spread of sofas and chairs of the capacious leathery sort – the rich relations of Mrs Lusby’s three-piece suite. The dominant suggestion was of comfortable repose. Several members of the club, happily provided with brandy and cigars, closed their eyes and sank back into obscurity with the deep sighs of men relaxing after toil. A very old man, making use of spectacles tethered to him by a broad silk ribbon, contrived some inaudible dealings with a minute book; he was presumably reminding his fellow-members that at their last meeting a sustained discussion had taken place.
At this point there was a short break, occasioned by Cressy’s need to make additionally sure of the comfort of his guests. He made a circuit of the room, and it was again curious to remark how, although endowed by nature with that vagrant eye and features of a notably immobile cast, he could radiate mild charitableness at will. This ambiguous regard now fell upon me, and he appeared to become aware that I had not been introduced to the man next to whom I had sat down.
‘Clark,’ he said in a clear and penetrating voice, ‘do you know Duncan Pattullo? He is the author of that dazzling series of purified bedroom comedies.’
I didn’t think it necessary to seem amused. Tony, near-by, struck a match with a gesture sufficiently large to attract attention, and in the resulting spurt of flame was to be observed as directing raised eyebrows upon our host. I felt grateful to him. Cressy’s joke had been what used to be called a start of wit: an improvisation floating free of the facts of the case. He may have guessed that I hadn’t taken to him at our previous meeting, and been prompted to this mild slap in consequence. Or it was possible – I told myself – that he was one of those habitually malicious men whose victims can comfort themselves with the Freudian thought that their impulse to self-destruction must be very strong. But it seemed uncharitable to credit our host with being in the grip of Thanatos, and I gave my attention – or tried to give my attention – to the next stage in the evening’s proceedings.
It was a paper, as Corlett had promised, and read by another man noticeably stricken in years. Strangely enough, I recalled his voice at once, although not his name; he must have delivered one of the half dozen or so lectures that I had thought fit to attend during my three years of undergraduate residence. His present theme was the order in which Shakespeare’s sonnets must be rearranged if the poet’s original intentions are to be disclosed. There are 154 sonnets, many of them enormously famous, and it was at least reasonable to rely upon most of us being more familiar with them than with the Yamato-E tradition in ancient Japan. This venerable scholar, however, owned a faith in us more robust than that, and proceeded on the assumption that he had only to give the number of an individual sonnet to recall it in toto to our minds. The postulate conduced to mental fatigue and, I am afraid, inattention. I found myself recalling the only fact in this field of investigation to have stuck in my head. An American inquirer of sceptical habit had computed that the number of possible rearrangements of these 154 poems considerably exceeded the number of electrons credited by Arthur Edding- ton as being in the universe. The universe, of course, had been a more primitive affair in Eddington’s time than it now was in Alexander Pentecost’s. But the computation probably remained sufficiently valid to be discouraging. The witching hour of twelve would certainly have struck before the possibilities of the subject were exhausted.
The club, however, didn’t fidget, and those of its members who had fallen asleep had the good manners not to snore. The paper came to a close on whatever its just conclusion was. There was a long silence. It didn’t appear to be the convention that somebody was required to say ‘Thank you very much’. Such of the members as I could at all clearly see had opened their eyes and assumed thoughtful expressions, as if here had been much to perpend. Then somebody shrouded in darkness spoke.
‘Each changing place with that which goes before,
In sequent toil all forwards do contend.’
Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore . . . that was the sonnet the lines must come from, and the quotation had been notably pat. It didn’t, however, sound like a beginning to discussion, and I wondered what could follow. But the man who had read the minutes, pouring himself a little more brandy, said something over his shoulder about the Dark Lady – a disreputable person who has always held a strong attraction for the academic world. Amid various long pauses for consideration, half a dozen people made remarks about her. One or two others framed questions, and to these the man who had read the paper gave judicious answers. General talk went on for some time. It wasn’t exactly animated, but I found it quite impressive, all the same. Here were a dozen people representing a wide diversity of learned and scientific interests, all perfectly capable of keeping this rather specialised ball rolling.
They didn’t do it, however, until midnight. By imperceptible stages the talk ceased to be general, and equally imperceptibly Shakespeare and his sonnets faded out of it. Once dropped, I don’t think they were referred to again. The man who had read the paper stuffed it unobtrusively into the pocket of his dinner-jacket, and was among the first to talk contentedly to his neighbour about other things. The evening had turned into one of the common gossiping sort.
People had begun, moreover, to drift around, and I was about to cross the room to join Tony when Cressy came up to me, a decanter in either hand. Very properly, he was again making the round of his guests in this way – pausing, I think, to talk punctiliously to anybody insufficiently thus favoured earlier in the evening. He had left me to the last, and now he put the decanters on a small table beside me and sat down.
‘We are so delighted,’ he said, ‘that you have been able to dine with us. Lintot read a most worthy paper, didn’t you think? But I found myself wishing that it had been you on the job. We might have heard something as distinguished as your Shakespeare’s Use of Song.’
I expect I was foolishly taken aback by this reference to something of mine which was at least a far cry from bedroom comedy. The remark didn’t strike me as in the nature of a palinode. What Cressy’s manner seemed to suggest – if he felt, indeed, that any suggesting was necessary – was the untroubled assumption between us that a man says now this and now that. I had an impulse to thank him for having referred to me so kindly earlier in the evening, but managed to refrain.
He continued to talk, and he talked uncommonly well. I had heard about this endowment of Christopher Cressy’s, and here it was. There was nothing excessive about it. He didn’t propose himself as out of charm. He was tentative, thoughtful, considered; he listened; when he looked away it was in quest of his theme and not of more exalted society. His manner at first had a little reminded me of the Provost’s. Edward Pococke could have said just that about Shakespeare’s Use of Song. But Cressy had a wit which the Provost either didn’t command or judged inapposite to his station. Cressy in his talk could be as brilliantly wicked as he chose to be. He had perfect command, as it were, of the tap labelled ‘malice’, and could let just as much of this quality percolate into the stream of his talk as was appropriate or permissible in its context. I wouldn’t describe myself as captivated. But I’d have been a poor wooer of the Comic Spirit if I hadn’t listened with respect and kept my end up as I could.
‘By the way,’ Cressy said, after consulting his tumbler at leisure, ‘have you ever chanced to hear about the famous letter-book?’
‘To hear about it?’ I experienced the feeling of coming awake with a jerk. ‘I was there.’
‘I beg your pardon?’ There was the effect of a sudden glare in the cold eyes Cressy had turned on me.
‘At the fons et origo of the entire affair. I happened to be standing beside Lord Mountclandon when you approached him with your interesting discovery.’
‘My dear Pattullo, how excessively odd!’ As Cressy said this I felt confident that he was really surprised. Our present conversation wasn’t a consequence of his having got wind of the facts of the case. ‘You must forgive me,’ he went on. ‘Your presence has left no mark on my memory.’
‘I was an undergraduate, and only at that dinner-party because my father was staying in the Lodging. You may just possibly remember him. His name was Lachlan Pattullo.’
‘My dear man!’ As he uttered this exclamation softly, Christopher Cressy actually laid a hand – equally softly – on my arm. He was indicating that one wouldn’t readily forget meeting a person of my father’s eminence. I am delighted,’ he said. ‘Quite delighted.’
‘You have reason to be. I can’t say I make much of this letter-book affair. Its longevity seems incommensurate with its consequence. But I must tell you, Cressy, that my recollection of the precipitating occasion is substantially yours – in the matter of words actually spoken, that is.’
‘How very interesting.’ Cressy didn’t in fact sound interested, but I felt he was perhaps weighing the qualified character of my statement. ‘The whole thing probably strikes you as a rather tediously sustained academic joke. It may be the best way to look at it. Of course Tommy Penwarden takes a serious view. But then Tommy, although a dear man, is almost pervasively absurd.’ Cressy paused as if soliciting some reaction to this sudden impropriety. Not getting it, he proceeded as smoothly as before. ‘Nobody else can really be much concerned. Your Provost for example. I have a small collection of his wonderful letters on the subject. But they render, to my mind, an impression of solemn shadow-boxing. He isn’t honestly exercised.’
‘You’re quite wrong there.’ I hadn’t uttered these words before acknowledging to myself that I had perhaps been deftly led into a trap. But I was a little impatient of the whole thing, and decided to go ahead. ‘The Provost, as a matter of fact, has been taking almost dramatic steps in the matter quite recently. And once more – strange as it must sound – I was there.’
‘Really? Dear Edward! Whatever can be in his head?’ I saw that Cressy wasn’t going to seek any elucidation of these gnomic utterances of mine. ‘Why should he be interested in a lot of mid-Victorian kitchen accounts?’Kitchen accounts?’
‘Ah! Perhaps you don’t know. That’s the peculiarity of that particular letter-book – it’s having considerable concern with Blunderville domestic affairs. Social history, you might say. The relations of masters and servants, for example, in that curious age. One could get an interesting little paper out of it on that. I wonder, by the way, whether any of Tommy’s colleagues – still around, perhaps – had glanced through it before dear old Blobs so kindly presented me with it? The whole subject is very boring, Pattullo – very boring indeed. But the more I turn the matter over in my mind, the more inclined I am to judge it may be wise and charitable in me to continue holding on to the thing. Won’t you have a little more brandy?”
‘No – I’m very happy, thank you.’ This conventional response wasn’t true. I had become uneasy, and for two reasons. It was clear to me that I was being fed through the bars with intriguingly mysterious gobbets which I was then to run around with among the other animals. And I had a feeling that the evening had treated me to what the musical comedy people call a reprise. Just as when he had produced his flight of fancy about my plays, Cressy had been beginning to fabricate something suddenly perceived as susceptible of exploitation in pursuit of the ludicrous. The victim now appeared to be the Provost. If I disliked this it was no doubt because I myself had a weakness that way. Hadn’t I often, for instance, built up Albert Talbert as a figure of fun? And I was fond of Talbert, whereas I didn’t imagine Cressy cared twopence for Edward Pococke. So it wasn’t for me to be censorious. Not, therefore, having anything to say, I was relieved to observe a couple of men hovering with the evident intention of thanking their host for their dinner and taking their leave. I got to my feet, and fairly promptly ceased wondering what all this had been about. I had myself two hosts to thank and extricate myself from. I set about this at once.
Tony and I left together, emerging into the darkness of an alien quad. It was our first chance to talk.
‘Damned cheek, that fellow’s crack at you,’ Tony said. ‘Bedroom comedy, indeed! Not that your plays mightn’t be more entertaining, Dunkie, if they sometimes inclined a little that way.’
‘Thank you, Tony, You’re a true friend.’
‘That’s right – plain words by thy true-telling friend. And what were you nattering to the man about, anyway?’
‘Heaven knows.’ I had become clear that I wasn’t reporting Cressy’s obscure remarks to anybody. ‘But he’s a notably entertaining talker.’
‘Just another confounded usher a damned sight too pleased with himself, he seemed to me.’
‘Still down on the dons, Tony?’
‘Blast the dons.’ Tony was silent for a moment, and I saw that this had prompted another train of thought in him. He came to a halt half-way to the college gate. ‘I say! Have you heard that Ivo is starting a magazine?’
‘Yes. He told me about it himself. He did come to lunch with me, you know.’
‘I’m very glad to hear it. Ivo’s grandfather is putting up some money, it seems. It might be quite a good thing, don’t you think? Blameless literary activity earns him a mark or two.’
‘Perhaps.’ I hesitated on this dishonest reply. In relation to his son, Tony had an astonishing capacity for wishful thinking. ‘The magazine,’ I said, ‘is to be called Priapus.’
‘Oh, Christ! I did think the senile old rascal sounded suspiciously pleased with it.’ It was entirely affectionately that Tony contrived to refer to the most senior of the Mumfords in this way. ‘There’s my car,’ he said abruptly. ‘Let me give you a lift back to college. It’s confoundedly late.’
Just as on our previous nocturnal parting at the beginning of term, Tony’s big ministerial limousine had nosed its way out of darkness, bodyguard and all. The men on motor-cycles weren’t on view, but no doubt they were around.
‘Thanks awfully,’ I said. ‘But I think I’ll walk. It clears the head.’
‘Clears the head? Stuff and nonsense! Your head’s as clear as mine, and I work on papers all the way back to town. Anyway, what about the muggers? Oxford’s said to teem with them.’
This was almost true. Amazingly, the sacred town had become one in which nervous people didn’t altogether like to walk alone at night. Drunken undergraduates had become a rare and reassuring sight.
‘I never carry more than a couple of pounds,’ I said. ‘That’s held to be enough to get you off without having them put the boot in for luck. The bloody government should do something about it, all the same.’
‘You’re a rotten socialist,’ Tony said. And at this we punched each other in the chest and parted with good feeling.
I wasn’t myself fearful of a mugging. Late at night the streets of Oxford are quite deserted, but behind the colleges’ sober facades there is always a good deal of wakefulness going on, chiefly because undergraduates have the habit of writing their weekly essay through the small hours. One is seldom out of sight of several lighted windows. I felt that, if attacked, I’d only have to give a shout to have these flung open and a shower of bottles and cricket-bats and handy bits of furniture descend in the happy faith that they would brain the villains and not their victim.
But Radcliffe Square lay in darkness. Brasenose, at least, had suspended the pursuit of learning, and in All Souls, which houses nothing but dons, nobody had turned up the lamp. The Radcliffe Camera, and beyond it the university church of St Mary the Virgin, were only uncertainly silhouetted masses against a dull starless heaven. Amid all these solemn presences I paused. In the deserted, moon-blanched street How lonely rings the echo of my feet! Arnold’s lines didn’t quite fit, but it was perhaps to still such an echo for a moment that I had come to a halt. And in the resulting silence I was prompted to abandon my direct route back to college in favour of a meditative detour among the dreaming spires.
I retraced my steps for a little and walked down New College Lane. My uncle Rory had been at New College, the only kinsman of mine whom I had ever heard of as an Oxford man. This surprising episode in his past had always pleased me, and it may have been the memory of it that led me in the direction I was now walking. The lane twists, narrows, and displays a good deal in the way of high blank walls before, on a further turn, it broadens again and calls itself something else. There was a single street lamp, set high up in the angle of a building, but otherwise the place was pretty dark. My own footfalls were the only sound still. I had placed myself, it came to me, in something like a cliched situation from a gangster film. The hunted man is in some tunnel-like space: only a long way in front of him and behind him is there any way out. Sinister figures suddenly appear ahead; perhaps they wait, perhaps they slowly advance. He turns, and an identical menace closes the vista. He is trapped. This hackneyed fantasy was actually in my head when, some thirty yards before me, a figure – a single figure – did appear, walking towards me. The figure came to an abrupt halt, and I felt that it was the sight of me that had occasioned this. There was nothing alarming about it, but I looked swiftly over my shoulder, all the same. The lane behind me was empty. I looked ahead again. The figure had vanished. There was plenty of shadow to vanish into, but it had happened too quickly not to be disconcerting. Perhaps it had slipped through some doorway I’d forgotten about; perhaps, for some sufficient reason of its own, it was lurking unobserved until I went past. The man’s movements or motives – for I thought it was a man – were no business of mine. I quickened my own pace – not particularly perturbed, I imagine, but nevertheless quite willing to gain Queen’s Lane and a straight walk back to bed. There was a faint ribbon of light before me, and I walked down it without attempting to peer into the shadows on either hand. Then I heard a step behind me, and in the same moment felt myself gripped firmly by an arm. One tends to act instinctively in the dark. I flung off this grasp not at all gently, and swung round as if to defend myself.
‘Duncan, son of Lachlan!’ J. B. Timbermill said.
I hadn’t seen the author of The Magic Quest since the afternoon upon which he had burst in on Fiona Petrie, Margaret Mountain and myself in the house on the Woodstock Road. I knew that he still lived in his old attic dwelling – thus remaining the Wizard of the North – and I had twice made my way there in quest of him. Faded ink on a discoloured card and a drawing-pin from which the head had rusted away constituted, as long ago, the only intimation of his tenancy. On both occasions I had knocked on his door in vain and then, as when I was his pupil, attempted simply to walk in. But the place had been locked up and that great shadowy space – Hrothgar’s Heorot, as I thought of it – denied me.
The first thing I had ever learnt of Timbermill was that he never left home, and thus twice drawing blank discomposed me. His visit to Fiona was evidence that he had to some extent changed his ways, but I found it hard to suppose he had done so radically. Fiona herself, of whom I was now seeing a good deal, was noticeably reticent about our old teacher; it was almost as if she were harbouring a slightly jealous indisposition to go shares in him. I didn’t press her on the subject. But I ought to have been more pertinacious in my efforts to contact a man whose personality had once so powerfully impressed me. And now here he was, casually encountered round about midnight in an Oxford street.
‘J. B!’ I exclaimed, and took both his hands in mine – a gesture prompted by the fact that, moments before, I had been prepared to do my best to knock him down. ‘Where have you been dining?’
I asked this question – in the circumstances a very ordinary Oxford question – before I had really seen my old tutor clearly. His behaviour on spying my approaching figure had been nothing out of the way; he may have had the same thoughts of possible marauders in his head as I had, and it had been only prudent in an old man rapidly to conceal himself until it was apparent no such threat existed. But we weren’t now in anything like complete darkness; a second lamp, again clamped high up on a building, faintly illumined the narrow street where it turned between St Edmund Hall and Queen’s. I now saw that Timbermill didn’t look like a man who has been dining – even as an acknowledged eccentric – in academic company. His clothes were ragged and I suspected them of being dirty as well; he had neglected to attach a collar to his shirt; his feet were in carpet slippers which had seen better days. Yet it wasn’t these matters of external appearance that were striking, so much were they overshadowed, dominated by the inner being of this great scholar in his decline. Not that he looked like a scholar, great or small. It would have been hard to say what he did look like – except that, if one tried, contradictory literary associations would be likely to jostle in one’s head. I could have viewed him instantly as a Dickensian grotesque – Oxford dissolving round us and being replaced by some bizarrely-conceived mid-Victorian London decor. Or alternatively – and this perhaps did more justice to the effect – here was a wild and preternatural figure as conceived by the original Wizard of the North – bobbing up on some darkened Scottish moor to affright a lonely traveller with mysterious intimations of doom.
‘Dining, Duncan?’ There was the old vibrant note in Timbermill’s voice as he took up my question sharply. ‘I’m soon to be dining with the crows, my dear lad. Not with the feasters but with the feasted upon, as the old sermon has it.’
‘Donne,’ I heard myself say. ‘Mundus Mare, J. B. Both the dishes and the guests.’
‘Good, Duncan, good!’
This was astonishing. Just for the moment, Heorot was around us again, and the favourite pupil was showing off. Or say he was loyally keeping his end up – I don’t know. But I did in the succeeding seconds realise it wasn’t an hour for histrionic effects. Timbermill had better be got home. It mightn’t be much good, but that was the present job. I believe I knew at once that I was in the presence not of an aberration but of a habit. The eremitic Timbermill had become a nocturnal wanderer. There must be a medical term for this manifestation of senescence; by per kinesis, it might be – or something ending in agitans.
‘It’s fairly late,’ I said. ‘Walk back to college with me, J. B., and I’ll get out the car and run you out to Linton Road.’
‘That’s too kind of you, Duncan.’ Suddenly it might have been Jimmy Gender speaking, and I tried to take comfort from this switch to the commonplace polite Oxford man. At the same time I was thinking that Fiona, if she was fully aware of the state of affairs now revealed to me, might reasonably have been a little more confiding about it. I had no idea whether Timbermill had any living relations to be at all concerned about him. He had certainly never been married. When I was his pupil I had already been aware of him as strangely isolated, and I believe I had thought of him when, at the beginning of this present term, Bedworth had remarked to me that an Oxford college is not a terribly good place to grow old in. Timbermill hadn’t even a college. Or rather he had three of them according to the book, but for years had never entered one of them. He must have had contacts with fellow-scholars; he had, I knew, gained real satisfaction from taking a handful of pupils. But that had been it. Of course there had been the creatures of his imagination and he must have done a lot of living with them. Yet that insubstantial pageant had faded, and he had been left with his vocation as a philologist. I supposed that such a man, long habituated to much solitude, was all right as long as he kept his grip on that sort of exacting intellectual work. When that slipped there was the void. I imagined Timbermill to be facing that now.
We walked on together. Even in carpet slippers one of which had a flapping sole Timbermill didn’t totter or dodder; he was firmer on his feet by a long way than Arnold Lempriere, a younger man, had become; the tree would perish from the head down. This gloomy thought was in my head when he spoke again.
‘The question is,’ he said with sudden amazing incisiveness, ‘are you going to marry her?’
Since Fiona had been in my head only a minute earlier it was to be presumed that a telepathic process had been at work. And I couldn’t pretend to be in the dark.
‘Dear J. B.,’ I said, ‘only think! She’s young enough to be my daughter.’
‘Have you spoken to her about it?’
‘No, I haven’t. But she has spoken to me.’ It was impossible not to own any relevant truth to Timbermill.
‘To the laggard in love? Duncan, you made a mess of things long ago through not speaking out to a girl. You didn’t know that I knew it, but I did. It was written all over you. And then you went further and fared worse. Years afterwards, when you hadn’t even youth as an excuse. I heard about it, although our ways had parted by then. Duncan Pattullo that way went.’
I believe I said ‘Meredith’ to myself dumbly. J. B. Timbermill suddenly restored to his demonic character was hard to cope with.
‘Listen, J. B. It wasn’t like that – Fiona’s way of speaking to me.’
We walked on through a minute’s silence. The High was deserted. We could have walked down the middle of it from end to end unthreatened by traffic, like gowned and capped scholars in some old print. No – I told myself – it hadn’t been at all like that, Fiona’s perplexing banter at Mrs Gender’s party. If Timbermill, possessed by some idee fixe, was now badgering me about her, he had already badgered her about me. Faced with this embarrassing nonsense, Fiona had taken care to show me that she placed the whole notion in the region of the absurd.
‘You could do great things together,’ Timbermill said.
‘Do great things? We could have children, I suppose.’
‘Children?’ Uttering the word vehemently, Timbermill came to a halt, and I realised I had said something which would never have entered his head. ‘Between you, you could complete my corpus. And finis coronat opus, Duncan.’
I had no idea what precisely Timbermill’s corpus was, but clearly he referred to some large labour of systematic scholarship. Perhaps it had something to do with all those broken pots and kitchen-midden shards. There was a certain relief in our being back on demonstrably obsessional and impersonal ground. It wasn’t ground on which I could conceivably have a place. My talent, slender as it was, stood committed to men and women; to what I could make of the bewilderment and vehemence – or mere comedy – of human life. Ink had replaced seccotine on my fingers long ago.
‘But there’s a further thing.’ I knew before he went on that Timbermill was up to another of his intuitive performances. ‘There’s a human thing. You can rescue her from that unnatural woman.’
‘From Miss Mountain? I’ve no evidence that Miss Mountain is what can be called that, and I hope I wouldn’t condemn her if I did. Emotional attachments between women can be happy and stable and rather beautiful. Think of the Ladies of Llangollen, J. B.’
‘Rubbish, Duncan!’ It was evident that my attempt at a whimsical note hadn’t been a success. ‘Women ought to bear children. If an emotional attachment, as you call it, isn’t within hail of that, then it’s of no use to them. You agree there, don’t you?’
I supposed I did agree, although the generalisation was rather sweeping. But if I could have been angry with Timbermill I’d have been so now. It was I who had introduced the theme of children, and he had unscrupulously appropriated what would not spontaneously have occurred to him.
‘It’s fair to mention,’ I said, ‘that the girl you think I ought to have proposed to as a schoolboy now lives in Oxford.’
‘Married?’
‘Happily married, I think – and to an old schoolfellow of mine that I’ve a considerable regard for.’
‘Then the fact’s irrelevant. Try to think clearly, Duncan.’
I don’t believe I resented this tutorial accent, but I couldn’t think of more to say. We were both silent again, but not for long. This was because Timbermill began to mutter to himself, and was presently doing so vehemently and quite incoherently. He had shot his bolt. More exactly, he had made a tremendous effort in what he conceived to be Fiona’s interest and mine, and now his mind was wandering. I was distressed by this, as well as upset by the general tenor of our talk. Perhaps it was true that I hadn’t been thinking clearly; that I had been thinking increasingly unclearly, indeed, about Fiona Petrie since my first meeting with her not many weeks before.
Timbermill wouldn’t come into my rooms for the brandy I thought might do him good. So I got out my car at once – a manoeuvre of some complexity at night – and we drove off to North Oxford. Heorot was just as I remembered it: a vast cavernous room, overflowing with books and periodicals and pots, with subsidiary caves disappearing into darkness under the various eaves of the house. It now struck me as strange that I had once felt in so close a discipleship to its owner without ever thinking to find out what his domestic dispositions were. He had ceased any continuous muttering and seemed to have forgotten our odd debate; for a minute or two he was reluctant to let me go; then suddenly he said ‘Dear Duncan, how like a former time!’ and waved me from the room.