Mungo's Dream

by J. I. M. Stewart

  Copyright & Information

  Mungo’s Dream

  First published in 1973

  Copyright: John Stewart Literary Management Ltd. 1973-2013

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  The right of J.I.M. Stewart to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.

  This edition published in 2013 by House of Stratus, an imprint of

  Stratus Books Ltd., Lisandra House, Fore Street, Looe,

  Cornwall, PL13 1AU, UK.

  Typeset by House of Stratus.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library and the Library of Congress.

  EAN ISBN Edition

  0755130383 9780755130382 Print

  0755133285 9780755133284 Kindle

  0755133595 9780755133598 Epub

  This is a fictional work and all characters are drawn from the author’s imagination.

  Any resemblance or similarities to persons either living or dead are entirely coincidental.

  www.houseofstratus.com

  About the Author

  John Innes Mackintosh Stewart (who also wrote as Michael Innes) was born in Edinburgh where his father was Director of Education. He attended Edinburgh Academy before going up to Oriel College, Oxford where he was awarded a first class degree in English and won the Matthew Arnold Memorial Prize and was named a Bishop Frazer scholar. After a short interlude travelling with AJP Taylor in Austria, including studying Freudian psychoanalysis for a year, he embarked on an edition of Florio’s translation of Montaigne’s Essays. This subsequently helped him secure a post teaching English at Leeds University.

  In 1932, Stewart married Margaret Hardwick, who practised medicine, and they subsequently had three sons and two daughters. By 1935, he had been awarded the Jury Chair at the University of Adelaide in Australia as Professor of English and had also completed his first detective novel, ‘Death at the President’s Lodging’, published under the pseudonym ‘Michael Innes’. This was an immediate success and part of a long running series centred on ‘Inspector Appleby’, his primary character when writing as ‘Innes’. There were almost fifty titles completed under the ‘Innes’ banner during his career.

  In 1946, he returned to the UK and spent two years at Queen’s University in Belfast, before being appointed Student (Fellow and Tutor) at Christ Church, Oxford. He was later to hold the post of Reader in English Literature of Oxford University and upon his retirement was made an Emeritus Professor. Whilst never wanting to leave his beloved Oxford permanently, he did manage to fit into his busy schedule a visiting Professorship at the University of Washington and was also honoured by other Universities in the UK.

  Stewart wrote many works under his own name, including twenty-one works of fiction (which contained the highly acclaimed quintet entitled ‘A Staircase in Surrey’, centred primarily in Oxford, but with considerable forays elsewhere, especially Italy), several short story collections, and over nine learned works on the likes of Shakespeare, Kipling and Hardy. He was also a contributor to many academic publications, including a major section on modern writers for the Oxford History of English Literature. He died in 1994, the last published work being an autobiography: ‘Myself and Michael Innes’.

  J.I.M. Stewart’s fiction is greatly admired for its wit, plots and literary quality, whilst the non-fiction is acknowledged as being definitive.

  Part I

  England

  Chapter One

  ‘Howard four, four,’ the porter in the bowler said, consulting a typewritten list. The porter was committing the solecism known in Mungo Lockhart’s youth as Wearing your Hat in the House. Indeed, he was indoors twice over, since he inhabited a glass box built into the gate – ‘gate’ being the word for the lofty yet claustrophobic tunnel which pierced the entire thickness of this part of the college. But although the bowler must therefore be a token of dignity, its wearer’s attitude was friendly. If you were nervous (as Mungo was) you might suspect it of being commiserating, but probably it was simply designed to hearten. It was true that the man gave no hint of how to find Howard 4, 4 (which must mean a quadrangle and staircase and ‘set’ of rooms). But that was perhaps by way of putting it to Mungo that he now belonged to the place, and was not to be supplied with information like a tourist. Mungo picked up his two heavy suitcases with a comforting lack of effort and walked on.

  He had, after all, been here before – for the interview that had turned him into an Oxford undergraduate. So his nervousness wasn’t terror or anything approaching it. ‘Mungo,’ his headmaster had said, ‘we despatch you with confidence among the Sassenachs. There’s been plenty of porridge gone to the making of you. And we’ll hope it was of the same boiling that nourished John Keats.’ This had been a humorous allusion to Mungo’s poems in the school magazine. ‘Not too much of that impulsiveness,’ he had added seriously. ‘Still, don’t sit on it.’ And he had shaken hands. It was almost the first time Mungo had attained the dignity of being shaken hands with, except by the minister after Sunday school.

  Howard turned out reassuring; it was a small, almost domestic, quadrangle opening unexpectedly off a corner of a very large one. It had, indeed, a disproportionately large gate of its own, which gave on the outer world (if any part of Oxford was to be called that) and was crowned with an incomprehensible Latin inscription. But it was nice to have this note of almost private grandeur, and Mungo decided that he was going to like his corner of the college. Perhaps they put the quieter undergraduates here: those he had seen termed in old-fashioned novels ‘the reading men’. He was a reading man himself, although not always of the books enjoined upon him, and for a time at least he was prepared to be moderately quiet. So they had guessed right about him.

  He found his staircase. It must shelter a reading man who was musically inclined, since on the ground floor somebody had just begun to play what might be a cornet. Only it was an odd sort of cornet – or rather not a cornet at all. Could it be, of all things, a hunting-horn? Mungo had just admitted this odd conjecture when it was substantiated by a sudden outburst of yelling, view-hallooing, tally-hoeing, and gone-awaying in surprising proximity to his left ear. Some of the reading men must be hunting men as well. Their hullabaloo, although it ceased at once and was apparently no more than a brief ebullition of animal spirits, had conveyed, in its sudden eruptiveness, rather a spine-chilling effect. Not that Mungo’s spine would have registered much change on a thermometer. If faced by a band of savages (and these people sounded virtually that) he would still have had the advantage of being six-foot two and in the modest habit of regarding himself as a fairly reasonable specimen all round.

  The rooms down here were numbered 1 and 2, and had people’s names in white paint over the door. Number 4 must be on the next storey. Mungo flexed his arms to cope with the suitcases, and climbed. He stopped on a small landing and looked at a door on his right. Here was 4, sure enough. And over the lintel it said:

  The Hon. I. A. V. O. Cardower

  Mr M. G. Lockhart

  Mr M. G. Lockhart eyed the announcement with misgiving. But, he thought, you probably went through this door and found two other doors. Perhaps Cardower – it was a faintly familiar name – was a don and so extremely eminent as a lawyer or something that he had been made a Privy Councillor. But no – that wasn’t right. Privy Councillors were the Right Hon. And plain members of parliament weren’t Hon., although they referred to each other formally
as honourable. Straight Hon. like that was what was called a courtesy title. Cardower was probably an undergraduate, after all. Perhaps the two of them were going to be on either side of a little corridor.

  Mungo put down one suitcase, turned the door-handle, picked up the suitcase again, and barged through. He found himself in a large and lofty room. Its walls were panelled, and had been painted white rather a long time ago. The furniture looked as if it had started quite high up on the social scale but been through a good many junk shops since. This was as much as Mungo noticed before he became aware that there was a young man of his own age in the room. The young man had been lounging in a window-seat, but now he stood up – almost as if Mungo were a lady, Mungo thought.

  For a moment they looked at one another in a faint surprise which was to become memorable.

  ‘Oh, hullo,’ the young man said. ‘Are you Lockhart? My name’s Ian Cardower. We’re going to be doubled up.’

  ‘With laughter?’ Mungo asked, and felt foolish. He hadn’t intended a feeble joke. It had just been that the phrase held no other association in his head.

  ‘Not exactly.’ The Hon. Ian Cardower hadn’t stared. ‘Sharing this set.’

  ‘Oh, I see. I didn’t know. Does everybody do that?’

  ‘Not the Scholars. They have their own sets from the first. Just the Commoners – the ignorant gnomes like you and me – in their first year.’

  ‘I wasn’t told.’ Mungo disapproved of being called an ignorant gnome, even if some element of irony had been intended. At his Scottish school his gaining a place in an Oxford college had been regarded (except, perhaps, by his headmaster) as an intellectual triumph of the first order. Mungo himself had been viewing it rather that way. ‘I suppose we can manage,’ he said – and was aware of an ungracious note. ‘Loneliness is said to be the awful thing at Oxford. We’ll have one another at whom to glower, Cardower.’

  ‘So we shall.’ Cardower was decently quick to extract a whimsical rather than a surly intention from this. ‘One way or another, we’ve both mucked in with unknown characters already, I suppose.’

  ‘Not me. I’ve never been away from my aunt, you see. It’s traumatic.’ Mungo was furious with himself for producing this twaddle, and also aware of being under a level and judicial gaze. ‘What does the set consist of?’

  ‘This, and a small bedroom each. Even in my grandfather’s time, the sets used to be used the other way: this as a dorm, and two little rooms to go away and work in. Not that I imagine he—’ Cardower checked himself. ‘And mod cons, in the basement,’ he added. ‘As for the bedrooms, they seem identical, so I’ve just moved into one straight away. I’ll help you shove yourself into the other. If you think there is a difference, we can toss.’

  As he spoke, Cardower stooped and picked up one of Mungo’s suitcases. He did it as effortlessly as Mungo himself would have done, and he had to stoop as far. Mungo had only noticed that his room-mate was slim and fair; now he saw that he was tall as well. In fact, he was very tall. They were alike in that, if in nothing else.

  The bedroom had running water and a new-looking bed. Otherwise it was shabby and seemed to let in the damp. A previous owner had abandoned on the wall an enormous unframed photograph, now torn and flapping, of a lugubriously erotic chunk of Indian temple sculpture. The same man, or another, had left a stuffed badger, upon which some depilatory art appeared to have been practised, under a cracked marble-topped table.

  ‘It’s not just the Hilton, is it?’ Mungo asked. The sight of the bedroom had somehow cheered him up.

  ‘Well, no – but the Hilton wouldn’t run to that.’ Cardower was pointing to the monstrous photograph. ‘Complicated, isn’t it? You can lie in bed and try to work out just what’s going on. Decent of me to let you have the benefit of it.’

  ‘I’ll keep it for long lazy Sunday mornings.’ Mungo wasn’t going to shy away from a bit of bawdy. ‘Doesn’t your room run to anything of the sort?’

  ‘No – but otherwise it’s just the same. You can come and look. They’ll do very well, it seems to me.’

  ‘I suppose it’s quite something to you – a bedroom of your own.’ Mungo’s good humour grew. ‘After some awful dormitory.’

  ‘Dormitory? At my—’ Cardower again stopped abruptly. ‘Your aunt did you better, I dare say,’ he said.

  ‘Well, yes – but I agree with you they’ll do very well. Each of us retires into his hutch, and continues to scowl at the other through the wall.’

  ‘I do hope not.’ Ian Cardower said this with an assumption of mature politeness which Mungo felt to be distancing, although it was perhaps only a hint that more in this vein would be tiresome. ‘By the way, we have to trundle over our own trunks from the lodge. But that can keep. Let’s return to our common ground and relax for a bit.’

  This they did, with a literalness which involved a sprawled posture on the room’s two sofas.

  ‘I wonder how they work it out,’ Mungo said. ‘Pairing boys—men—off, I mean. You’d think they’d do it by schools.’

  ‘Not unless people ask, I imagine. Are there many people from your school here?’ In the instant that Cardower asked this a curious twitch – perhaps what they called a tic or habit spasm – passed over his face. Mungo, who wasn’t slow, realised that Cardower felt he’d put a foot wrong – and that this was one of the major crimes in his remote and alien code.

  ‘None at all,’ Mungo said easily. ‘And not in the whole university.’

  ‘There are plenty of mine. Even some on this staircase.’

  ‘I’ve heard them,’ Mungo said composedly. ‘The young barbarians at play.’

  ‘The young—? Oh, I see. It occurs to me that it’s perhaps according to what we’re going to read – the doubling us up, I mean. Are you reading History?’

  ‘English.’

  ‘Then that isn’t it. Do you think it might be by inches? The tallest chaps in the loftiest rooms.’ Cardower was using this fancy as a friendly lead in, Mungo supposed. ‘What are you?’

  ‘Six two and a quarter.’ Mungo almost didn’t carry on – but that would have been uncivilised. ‘What about you?’

  ‘Six two exactly.’

  ‘Ho-ho!’ Mungo said mockingly – and wondered why this juvenile signal of amiability felt a little forced. He was all keyed up, after all, to plunge into things utterly new, and a mob of Etonians or Harrovians or suchlike seemed certainly that. But feelings he hadn’t much suspected in himself were stirring in him, and in part they appeared prompted by humiliatingly superficial things. For this business of ‘coming up’ to Oxford he’d put on his best suit. And Cardower was wearing what Mungo (whether rightly or wrongly) conjectured to be his best suit too. Only they weren’t the same sort of suit.

  This species of awareness was so squalid that Mungo grabbed at something more reputable. All the exploring he was going to do would be under the eye of a chap who wouldn’t himself be exploring at all. Cardower had brought all the answers up with him. His venerable grandfather, summoning the young scion to the ancient ducal seat or whatever it was, had given him the entire gen. Life at the varsity is essentially unchanging, my dear boy. Get your wine from Sucksmith’s in the High. A thoroughly sound claret, and they take away the empty bottles. Bless you, my dear lad, and be a rowdy credit to your ancient name. That kind of thing.

  With these thoughts Mungo Lockhart was on his own ground. He wasn’t too good (although he wasn’t all that bad) at the general run of school subjects. But he had always come top in English, and from as far back as he could remember had enjoyed verbalising whatever daydreams visited him. More recently this innate endowment, as it seemed to be, had been exercising itself – often restlessly and urgently – on actual people and situations. His acquaintances had taken to talking in absentia, as it were; they formed surprising combinations, landed themselves in queer predicaments, quarrelled and made love, all inside his head. So much had his brain become a kind of story-telling machine that he had lately formed the conclusion tha
t something sober and permanent would have to come of it.

  So the paradoxical consequence of Mungo’s sudden burlesque glimpse of the old duke who must be Cardower’s grandfather was to turn him serious.

  ‘Do you know?’ he said. ‘I think the real reason they put you and me together is that they have some theory of social motility.’

  ‘Of—? Yes, I see.’

  ‘The melting-pot idea.’ Mungo thought a less abstract vocabulary might be better accommodated to a young barbarian. ‘It can’t much be managed in schools – not as they still are. And I expect it doesn’t much happen afterwards, when we’re in jobs – not as they still are. But there are a few years for it here. Dons may have well-meaning notions of that kind.’

  ‘Well-meaning? You think it’s bosh? You wouldn’t play?’

  ‘No, not that a bit.’ Mungo saw that Cardower was being serious too – although rather with the air (he told himself perversely) of a liberal-minded laird anxious to get on with a difficult gillie. ‘Only I don’t know that I want it shoved at me. To be honest, I’d rather have, at least, my own base – although I don’t think I’d just sit and sulk in it. You see, it’s less of a bore, this doubling-up business, for you than for me. You’ve got things laid down – settled lines and expectations, established friends who’ll be in and out of this room. But I’ve got to push around and see what’s what.’ Thus launched, Mungo was really a little enjoying himself. ‘The simple Scottish boy,’ he said.

  ‘You’re a damned articulate Scottish boy.’ Cardower had been listening with grave attention. ‘For that matter, I’m a Scottish boy myself.’

  ‘Then you’re a shockingly anglicised one.’ Rather against his will, Mungo grinned disarmingly. ‘I’m sorry rather to talk rot,’ he said.