‘But the Provost,’ I said, ‘doesn’t care twopence about what happened in 1929.’
‘That seems to me to be very wrong,’ Arthur said. He was sitting – not wholly uncomfortably – in one of the enormous armchairs in his room in college. It was the dead middle of the Long Vacation, and he’d taken, it seemed, to slipping in there by a back way and spending long hours brooding over his position.
‘Well, he just doesn’t. And I’d have thought him a more objective judge than you are. He knows the difference between a grammar school boy thrown off balance for a few hours and a man who has given years of devoted service to this college.’
‘One ought never,’ Arthur said heavily, ‘to trust the judgement of a sick man.’
‘And that’s precisely your state.’ I had travelled to Oxford without sleep, and I believe that this moment represented the point of my maximum exasperation with my old friend. ‘And let me ask you this, Arthur. Why are you sitting around? If you want to shout, why don’t you shout and have done with it?’
‘I want to see George Elford first.’
‘Don’t you realise that he’s nearly a hundred? What good is going to be served by dragging up this with him?’
‘It’s a question of honour. And good manners. He must be told first.’
I doubt whether I had realised until this moment how essentially Arthur – Arthur Fitzosbern Sackville Aylwin – was still the déclassé young man of my early memories. He had notions about the code of a gentleman. I wasn’t the less irritated because I had a lurking feeling that perhaps he was basically right – or at least that I wasn’t myself in a position to pronounce. My own code of morals is very homespun, and consists in the persuasion that with our own fallen nature we must do the best that we can; I certainly don’t believe, with some woman in one of Henry James’s novels, that ‘the forms are two-thirds of conduct’. I certainly disapproved of Arthur’s proposing to go through a turn with his incredibly old retired tutor. On the larger issue I had, as I say, a lurking doubt.
‘Well,’ I said, ‘Elford has been off-colour, and now he’s said to be all right again – if a man can be all right at that age. Why not get along?’ I suppose I was risking something by this challenge, but nevertheless I had been mysteriously moved to offer it. ‘It’s a reasonable hour. What about ringing up and saying you’re coming out?’
‘Yes – I think that’s right.’ Arthur glanced at his telephone. But – as once before – he didn’t stretch out a hand to it. ‘You see,’ he said, ‘I’ve been waiting for you, Frank. You must come too.’
‘Me?’ I must have stared at Arthur in astonishment. ‘I haven’t set eyes on the man since you and I were here together as schoolboys.”
‘That’s exactly it. It’s you who ought to be in my place now. I want to take you to Elford and explain that.’
‘So that we can fix it up?’ Unforgivably, I am afraid, I fell into impatient sarcasm. ‘You and I are to swap?’
‘Please come, Frank.’ For a moment Arthur had appeared simply bewildered by my words. But he now looked at me in direct appeal.
‘Very well. I’ll come.’ I paused for a moment. ‘Arthur, has it occurred to you that this old man, who seems still to keep a little in touch with college affairs, may be looking forward to seeing his former pupil and successor elected to the Provostship?’
‘That’s nonsense. Elford never thought much of me.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Well, not as his sort of scholar. And, anyway, the question’s quite irrelevant.’
‘Arthur, let me ask you something different. You’d like to be Provost, wouldn’t you? It’s the thing you’ve looked forward to?’
‘There’s no point in talking about that now.’ For a brief flash I had the sensation, which I had experienced before, that it was another Arthur Aylwin who was looking at me. ‘Besides, Jimmy Chilmead would be certain of it, in any case. He’s the present Provost’s man, whatever you may say about Cropley’s feeling about the Scholarship. And he’s Drelincourt’s man too – and Drelincourt carries a lot of weight.’
For some seconds I simply didn’t know how to deal with this. Arthur had got everything wrong in his head. I realised that this was in part a consequence of his awkwardness with people; he found it difficult to believe that anybody could be his man. But I was in a delicate position. If, for instance, I told him of Drelincourt’s true inclination it would be, I had to suppose, by way of violating a confidence; and in what I’d already said about Cropley I had perhaps gone far enough. But there was a much more substantial issue than this. Mary, after all, was right in feeling that Arthur must judge for himself. And there was a difference between arguing with him about the weight that could rationally be attached to that far-off boyhood mishap and actually bringing forward inducements to make him let it rest in secrecy. I saw this moral problem clearly enough. But even as I did so I heard myself speaking equally clearly, and aloud.
‘Arthur,’ I said, ‘you don’t know what you’re talking about. The Provostship isn’t exactly in your pocket, but it’s more than halfway there if you want it. Don’t kid yourself. Don’t imagine you’re renouncing something that wouldn’t come to you anyway. And that’s the truth. I know.’
‘I don’t believe it!’ It was with startling vehemence that Arthur said this, and at the same time he struggled out of his chair and stood before me. One glance at his stricken face told me that he had believed it. ‘They’ll have Chilmead. I know they will.’
They’ll have Aylwin, if Aylwin comes to his senses. That’s the truth, Arthur, and you ought to know it. The rest is up to you.’
‘It always has been up to me.’ Arthur stood quite still for a moment, looking at me with a smile. Strangely enough, he seemed extraordinarily young. I could almost imagine a cap in his hand, a bundle of books in a strap beneath his arm. ‘For too long,’ he said. And he reached out and picked up the telephone receiver.
I have forgotten why we had to make our pilgrimage to North Oxford by taxi. Presumably Arthur’s car was being serviced or undergoing repair. However this may have been, we certainly made our way to the nearest cab rank, and this took us out of the college by a gate at the back of the Provost’s Lodge. Mrs Cropley was in the habit of doing a little gardening there, and it occurred to me that as we might run into her I had better decide beforehand whether or not to inquire about her husband’s health. But instead of Mrs Cropley we met Jeremy Shefford, returning from the squash courts. In shorts and a sweater he looked quite as juvenile as any undergraduate the college would admit. It struck me, however, that he was growing a little sedate. There was an almost elderly courtesy in the way he dissimulated the least surprise at seeing me.
‘Good afternoon,’ he said. ‘Is there any chance of persuading either of you, or better both, to turn round and have some tea?’
‘Thank you.’ Arthur looked at the young man with what must have appeared an unnecessarily sombre mien. ‘But we have to pay a call in North Oxford.’
‘Oh, dear! Then I mustn’t seduce you from the path of social duty. But perhaps one of you can tell me something. Just what’—and he pointed to a corner of the quad with his racket—’is going on over there?’
I turned and saw that I was looking at a small projecting wing, one-storey high, at the back of the Lodge. Workmen were busily engaged in what seemed to be the task of stripping its interior of an abundance of shelving, and others nearby were tending the sort of rotary machine that mixes cement.
‘What is it, anyway?’ I asked. ‘A brew-house?’ I had learnt that such a building had at one time been an essential feature of the more august sort of Oxford residence.
‘It’s an apple-room,’ Jeremy said. ‘That’s why there’s all that shelving. The Provost has a whole room in which to store apples. I call that living in a big way.’
‘But the Provost hasn’t any apples.’ Arthur emerged with this remark from his rather gloomy reserve. ‘No Provost ever has had, so far as I know. There’s never been an orchard here. Still, the apple-room it’s certainly called.’
‘Provosts are traditionally sent apples in large quantity by their aunts in the country.’ Jeremy didn’t pause on the unlikely chance of raising any mirth by his mild nonsense. “But why should our present Provost have decided that an apple-room is an anachronism now? Presumably the place is being turned into something else. It seems odd.’
‘I see nothing odd about it.’ Arthur obviously disapproved of this approach to the subject of Cropley’s mortal illness. ‘It is to be presumed that Margaret Cropley has determined upon a new disposition of her domestic offices, and some structural alterations are required. The bursar will know about it, no doubt. Frank, I think we should be getting along.’
Arthur enforced this by moving on towards the gate, so that for a moment I was left alone with Jeremy. And Jeremy suddenly looked wholly mischievous.
‘I say,’ he murmured, ‘do you think it’s going to be the Cropley Mausoleum?’
‘Jeremy, don’t be outrageous. I was just beginning to think you are acquiring gravity.’
‘I’m a grave man. I move wild laughter in the throat of death. Do come and see me, Frank, if you’re not absolutely rushing through Oxford.’ Jeremy waved his racket by way of salute, and walked on.
I hurried after Arthur, and caught up with him at the gate. As I did so, he turned and looked back at the apple-room.
‘It is odd,’ he said. ‘I didn’t want to make anything of it before young Shefford, but it’s something that Cropley ought not to be doing.’
‘But, my dear Arthur, you don’t know what he is doing.’
‘At least he’s making some alteration to the Lodge. It’s not at all becoming or appropriate. It’s altogether untimely. When a man moves in, it’s a different matter.’
I couldn’t find anything to say to this, and we sought our taxi in silence. But I felt that the Provostship – and the consequent move from Greyswood to this imposing corner of the college – had been a good deal more in Arthur’s thoughts than he now cared to admit.
I have said that we must have taken a taxi because Arthur’s car was not available. It now strikes me as odd that we didn’t simply take a No. 2 bus up the Banbury Road. And with this thought there comes back to me the entire queerness of even that first stage of our expedition. It was a flawless summer day – but in addition to a hat and a pair of gloves Arthur had equipped himself with a neatly rolled umbrella. I have a pretty clear impression that none of this paraphernalia is requisite, or even normal, in the part of the world into which we were penetrating. Dons and undergraduates alike wander those respectable residential thoroughfares without giving the remotest thought to any formality of attire. But here was Arthur Aylwin dressed up in an urban manner – and moreover sitting up in an unnecessarily stiff posture in this unnecessarily hired cab. It came to me that socially inexperienced undergraduates in their first term of residence must occasionally approach North Oxford tea-parties with just this sartorial and vehicular elaboration.
I see there is something in the tone of this last sentence that I’m anxious to avoid. I am not a professional author; the writing I intend to do will never have other than the status of a hobby with me; in telling Arthur’s story, I’ve been reluctant to seize upon easy opportunities for obvious irony. Nevertheless I must be faithful to the feel of the thing as it was in itself. For Arthur our progress up St Giles’ and into the sedate world beyond had the character of some sort of Penitents’ Way or via dolorosa. I think I was sufficiently sensitive to feel this quite keenly. At the same time I felt it to be absurd. And if I continued to be in a state of irritation – as I believe I did – this must have been because I’d lost confidence in my power to estimate – to quantify, one might say – what was going on. What was preying on Arthur’s mind, what he was about to confess, what was heading him and his towards scandal and dismay, lay somewhere, it had to be presumed, upon a moral scale between enormity and nullity. I seemed myself, for the moment, to have ceased to know even approximately where. This had the effect of making our short taxi-ride dreamlike and insubstantial.
We had a glimpse of infirm persons precariously walking dogs in the university parks, and on the perimeter a little elderly tennis was going on – half-heartedly, I found myself irrationally pronouncing. Certainly I didn’t care for the near-vacancy of the central scene; I had become enough of an Oxford man to experience the melancholy of the Long Vacation, positively to miss the flannelled fools at the wicket and the muddied oafs at the goals. If the tennis players were well advanced through the vale of life, they yet represented (I was telling myself with increasing absurdity) an active and comparatively juvenile minority of the denizens of the sombrely hideous villas which now surrounded us. From one of these as we passed, indeed, some ancient creature was being shoved into an ambulance; we turned a corner, and our driver had to take rapid evasive action to avoid a hearse. On the footpaths old men tottered to and fro on sticks; one had an ingenious contrivance which he turned into a camp-stool at will. Every now and then, it is true, we came upon an incongruous oasis of the very young: children who, with beautifully modulated voices and much chalking of the pavement, were engaged in the sort of street games one commonly associates with the more vivid life of the slums. And then our taxi drew to a halt.
I glance over the preceding paragraph in some astonishment. It is ‘out of key’, as a critic might say, and might be the writing of an undergraduate, just released from one of those tea-parties, and determined to be funny. For suddenly – and for the first time in this chronicle – I have been inventing things; if the ambulance existed the hearse didn’t, and vice versa. Yet I have a sense that, in my amateur way, I have almost got something right. Ahead of me lies an episode wholly veridical yet substantially bizarre; and in my memory this operates, as it were, retroactively, spilling over into my small fore-scene. I haven’t entirely failed to capture the feel of that commonplace drive, as it now exists for me.
It was my first impression that we had stopped in front of some institution: a nursing-home, perhaps, or a residential establishment for aged gentlefolk. Either of these might harbour, appropriately enough, a superannuated college tutor well set to chalk up his century. Perhaps I was judging merely by the size of the place, which appeared improbably large to be – or ever to have been – an ordinary suburban residence; and perhaps I was aware, too, of something sparely utilitarian about a garden which was in part a coal-dump and in part a simple expanse of concrete slabs. When I glanced at some of the windows, however, I became aware of various appearances which seemed to negate this conception. In one, an Ethiopean stared out sightlessly while pounding a typewriter. In another, a lady of palpably transatlantic origin and learned inclination was swinging her head to and fro with the sharply controlled movement of one watching fast tennis; I was able to conjecture that she was, in fact, collating two texts disposed on an invisible table in front of her. Directly above, an attractive young woman was washing her hair, while above that again a hand and arm had just stretched out to some species of hanging meat-safe, and extracted from it a string of sausages. It was evident that this had indeed once been a single enormous house, and had been converted into a correspondingly large number of flats.
Properly enough, Arthur took it upon himself to pay the taxi-driver, and while he did so I walked towards the front gate. As a consequence of this movement I found myself looking into, or rather through, a ground-floor room the dimensions of which struck me at once as out of scale with the villa (as it must be called) as a whole. By this I mean that the room seemed too big: it ran the full breadth of the place to windows presumably equal in size to those in front, but which were so far away they had the appearance of dim and meagre apertures. Even so, they were adequate to define in silhouette a number of objects within; the largest of these was what could only be a full-scale copy of the Winged Victory of Samothrace. In the window immediately in front of me, and rather oddly facing outwards as if to scrutinise the North Oxford scene, was a bilious-looking marble bust of Julius Caesar.
‘Is that Elford’s?’ I asked, as Arthur came up to join me.
‘Yes, yes. He has part of the ground floor – or it may be the whole of it. There’s a woman who looks after him, and lets you in – or perhaps it’s a man.’
‘Don’t you know? I thought you visited him pretty regularly.’
‘So I do – but not very lately, as a matter of fact.’
‘And other members of common room too?’
‘Yes, of course. It wouldn’t be proper not to. All the older Fellows call on Elford from time to time. I don’t know who were the last to do so. But it’s the understood thing. As a matter of fact, people have rather a habit of going in couples. It’s easier. But people don’t report back, so to speak. So it’s difficult to say who was here and when.’
‘I see.’ I found myself wondering whether there wasn’t an element of decorous fiction in this faithful visiting of the college’s retired sage. ‘Well, we’re a couple now. So perhaps that will make it easier.’
Arthur received this remark – which I immediately recognised as fatuous – in silence, and we walked up the short garden path together. The front door lay beyond a somewhat cramped porch designed in what might be called the Gothic taste, and access was further impeded by the presence of a child’s tricycle and a Bath chair. Both of these conveyances can scarcely have been Elford’s, yet the door beyond turned out to be his sole property; the inmates of lesser consequence, I suppose, had an entrance at the side or the rear. Our ring was answered by an elderly woman of respectable appearance. She had the air, indeed, of a retainer of standing, so that I expected her to greet Arthur with some token of recognition. Nothing of the sort took place. But at least there seemed to be no difficulty about seeing Mr Elford. He had been resting, we were told, but would be prepared for visitors in a matter of minutes. We were shown into the enormous room which I’d glimpsed from outside.
The strangeness of this moment is difficult to describe. I’m inclined to think that the Winged Victory and the Julius Caesar contributed to it by having blocked a certain expectation which I might perfectly naturally have entertained. It was these that I had seen through the window – but it was now instantaneously apparent that they were virtually Elford’s sole fresh acquisitions over a period of more than thirty years. This was almost the identical room in which I had awaited interview, and into which there had presently walked, with a graceful air of apology, a small and elderly man, dressed in a dinner-jacket and smoking a cigar. It is commonly said that when one revisits a place after a long interval of time, one is surprised to find it smaller than one had imagined it. I believe this to be correct. But the quality of the few moments I am attempting to describe, consisted largely in the fact that here the reverse was true. Elford still had his French furniture, his Chinese pottery, his small Impressionist paintings. They were actually disposed, I am inclined to believe, in the same relative positions that they had held in that handsome and sufficiently spacious college room long ago. But they had been spread out in this vast area so that a kind of mental long jump was necessary whenever the eye thought to travel from one to another. My sensation must have been rather like that of a man who is abruptly introduced to some dramatically mounted demonstration of the modern astronomer’s Expanding Universe.
We were left to ourselves – as each of us had severally been in April, 1929. Once more, we were free to take what stock of the place we chose. As a boy, I’d been very impressed indeed, although more by a general sense of richness hitherto unknown than by the individual appeal of this or that. Arthur had no doubt been more discriminating; a Monet was something known to him; he had at least vague notions of Ming and T’ang. Now we were both, perhaps, chiefly conscious of a mise en scène which was decidedly the worse for wear. This impression would have been hard to justify in terms of any specific instance. French cabinet-work of the great age remains unchanged unless there are dogs to scratch it or children to kick it about. In a mere forty years nothing at all happens to the pigments spread on a canvas by Monet. Chinese vases, although they are never still, remain as inviolate as Keats’s Urn. Perhaps the carpet was now actually threadbare, or even had a hole in it. The chair-covers may have been faded and patched. The curtains may have been ragged in their linings and the lamp shades fly-blown or battered. But I doubt whether it was of any of these things that we were conscious. What we were feeling was simply the pervasively abrasive touch of time itself. The room was coloured for us, I don’t doubt, by our knowledge that its owner stood on the very verge of his confine. I was suddenly conscious of an enhanced sense of the absurdity – indeed, the blank impropriety – of what Arthur was about.
So strong was this feeling for a moment that I turned to my friend with the blunt intention of urging him to clear out; to let me remain and offer Elford whatever excuse for my presence should come into my head. But when I looked at Arthur any word to this effect died on my lips. He was gazing at the principal piece of furniture in the room: Elford’s desk. And something in the manner of his doing so told me that I should simply not be heard.
On this desk – in tidy piles contrasting with the general litter in the room – had lain those two examination papers which had respectively started off with a tricky question on the Peasants’ Revolt and a straightforward one on Thomas Cromwell and the Dissolution of the Monasteries. I hadn’t the faintest doubt that these were, in some sense, present to Arthur’s intent but strangely withdrawn gaze now. Suddenly all my irritation with Arthur – my sense (for it came to this) that he was setting the comfort of his own conscience above his overriding duty to others – vanished. My irritation vanished, and turned – uselessly, no doubt – to plain anger directed elsewhere. I was seeing Elford’s carelessness in that unforgotten past as blankly criminal; as something which had caused a child (for we had been children, after all) to stumble. Before the coming scene was played out I resolved to tell him so – even if, as seemed perfectly conceivable, we were presenting ourselves to him on his hundredth birthday.
This was my state of mind when the door opened. The door opened – and for a queer interval nothing else seemed to happen. Nobody had entered the room. And then George Elford appeared. He was so diminutive by nature, so shrunken and bowed by time, that he had simply rounded that fatal desk before we were aware of him.