‘Why?’
This abrupt transition took Mungo by surprise. ‘Well, it was what I did best at school. Nothing much more than that.’ Mungo was conscious that this was a guarded reply.
‘Ian was quite good at it too – although there was very little emphasis on it at his school. We suspect he does some writing from time to time, although he keeps dark about it. Of course, it’s in the family, in a distant way. But here they are.’
Mungo briefly wondered just how ‘it’ – which appeared to be writing – was distantly ‘in’ Ian’s family. At once, however, he had to pay attention to Lord Robert, who was certainly paying attention to him.
‘I do hope we have not diverted you from a pleasant first dinner in hall. But my memory is that not many people go in until Saturday. Some freshmen may be dining with parents, as Ian has so agreeably decided to do. Your own parents, I suppose, would have rather a long way to come, if they were to visit Oxford?’
‘My parents are dead, sir. I live with an aunt, my mother’s sister.’
‘As a townsman or a countryman?’ It was with his air of cordial, swiftly pouncing interest that Lord Robert contrived this skip-and-jump – but it was not before Mungo had glimpsed on his face the same tic or momentary grimace he had remarked in Ian earlier. Such things must be hereditary – and the father was no less displeased than the son that he had put a foot wrong. One oughtn’t to take it for granted that the parents of even the most stalwart lad are in the land of the living. Mungo, however, who didn’t even remember either his father or his mother, wasn’t offended.
‘Oh, as a countryman. My aunt, Miss Guthrie, lives at a little place called Easter Fintry, about half way between Forres and Nairn. I went to school in Forres.’
‘How extremely interesting!’ Lord Robert offered this gratifying but surely implausible comment with a curious abruptness; indeed, almost as if he had been told something startling. He turned to his son. ‘Ian,’ he began, ‘do you realise that Lockhart—’ But Ian was discussing the menu with his mother, and Lord Robert, as if thinking better of what he had been about to say, turned back to Mungo. ‘I am delighted you are a countryman. Particularly as you are going in for literature. I have always thought that English poetry must be hopelessly mysterious to young people brought up in a town. Do tell me what you think.’ This time, Lord Robert’s anxiety to have Mungo’s opinion appeared to have reduced him to a state of breathlessness, so that he actually paused upon his question.
‘I don’t suppose,’ Mungo said, ‘that it would make much difference with Shakespeare.’
‘I quite agree! I couldn’t agree with you more. But then Shakespeare is so absolutely universal. Consider Wordsworth, though. I’ve often thought how little I should make of him if I hadn’t had the good fortune to be brought up in a quiet country home. Ian, have you gathered that Mungo—I may call you Mungo? Do say!—is entirely the countryman?’
‘I’ve guessed it, more or less. He began to tolerate me when he saw I’d brought up a Bevis.’
‘Bevis might be the favourite book of a boy in a Glasgow tenement,’ Mungo said. He was impressed by Ian’s sharpness of observation, but he hated anything like rot being talked about reading.
‘Yes, indeed!’ Lord Robert was all eagerness. ‘But then Bevis is so very good a book. Wouldn’t you say? When Ian and his sisters were young, I inflicted a great deal of reading aloud on them. It’s a family habit, like tippling. And I started off with straight children’s books. Do you know the ones, Mungo, about Amazons and Swallows and Coots and so forth by Arthur Ransome? He was a dear man, and I liked him very much. But I’m afraid I came to regard him as a most dangerous writer. You do agree?’
‘I’m afraid I hadn’t thought,’ Mungo said. Then, feeling this to be a lame response, he added: ‘His kids are rather an upper-class lot.’
‘How very true! But what I chiefly felt was the unnerving absence of any darkness in their hearts. Trafficking with exemplary characters is always bad for us. As I recounted the adventures of these blameless young people I felt I was piling up a dreadful sense of guilt in my children. Ian, whom I believe to be not wickeder than other people, must have felt a moral outcast as he listened. But the marvellous thing about Richard Jefferies’s book is that, even in their idyll, Bevis and Mark can quarrel. Shall we go in to dinner? Just as you and Ian, if you become intimates, will certainly quarrel.’
‘I don’t see that we need. We’re probably quite a tolerant pair.’ Ian, who must be used to his father’s philosophic vein, turned to his mother as they moved towards the restaurant. ‘What do you think, mama?’
‘I’d rather you quarrelled than just disliked each other.’
‘I do so agree!’ Robert Cardower offered his wife the same urgent and gratified acquiescence that he had been offering Mungo. ‘Quarrels are extremely horrid, but salutary in a fashion. Elizabeth, is this table perfectly agreeable to you? They remind us of the fallen creatures that we are.’
‘I don’t see that I’m a fallen creature just because I have a row with somebody.’ Mungo’s disinclination to buy a theological view of the matter was so brusque that he hastily added a softening ‘sir’ to this declaration.
‘Ah, not in itself. Shall we take evasive action before the table-d’hôte? But a row can be a sudden perch from which one views a farther darkness which is darkness indeed. Dear me – upon what a morbid vein we have stumbled! Do tell me, what made you decide to come to Oxford?’
Mungo considered saying something like, ‘I thought I’d take the measure of the spoliators of my country.’ But finding himself to shrink from the expression of cordial interest such words would probably evoke, he found himself answering simply, and perhaps not less veraciously, ‘I got the chance, so I thought I’d come and have a look.’
‘Wandering scholar stuff,’ Ian said, and turned to engage his mother’s interest in the wine-list. It seemed to be his line to let his father make most of the going with casual guests.
‘How much I would like to do that again myself!’ Lord Robert contrived to indicate a friendly envy of Mungo’s lot. ‘There have been, I know, so many changes since my time. The colleges are said to insist on some decent appearance of a desire to study, and even the entrance requirements of the university itself are no longer derisory. The scene must be largely altered, indeed. I do so approve of that. The dolce far niente ethos was really a very great bore. Few of my undergraduate friends were absolute fools. Many of them are now in the City and the Cabinet and so on, where at least total imbecility must be gravely disadvantageous. But when up at Oxford we all considered idleness de rigueur. To cut things so fine that one ended up with a Fourth Class was very much the fashion.’
‘But one reads in the newspapers about a lot of Cabinet Ministers having taken Double Firsts and things.’
‘Perfectly true! And they are, of course, the invaluable men nowadays – and often extremely pleasant people to boot. Only’—and for a moment Robert Cardower looked perplexed—’one doesn’t seem to remember them from that time.’
‘Perhaps they were shut up in their rooms with their books, sir.’
‘That must have been it. And I do feel very strongly how admirable that kind of concentration is. But one ought to find a mean. Don’t you agree? Do tell me.’
‘I don’t think one should mug away just to impress a lot of examiners. But if something seems really relevant’—Mungo fleetingly wondered whether this vogue-word, recently arrived in North Britain, was already outmoded in the sophisticated south—’it’s natural to shut yourself up and go after it while you have the chance.’
‘That is so true! But, of course, a great deal of reading can be done in vacations. They are the proper time for the bulk of it, indeed. I try to impress that on Ian, who says he intends to peel potatoes at the Savoy for half the time, and spend the proceeds on the continent during the other. He tells us it is the usual thing.’
Mungo had heard about the impoverishment of the aristocracy, but unders
tood it to be a myth cunningly fostered to secure them in their condition of unjust economic privilege. Yet there might be genuine cases, no doubt; and if that of the Cardowers was to this picturesque extent among such, he wondered whether he should be taking this fairly expensive meal off them now. But it might just be that Ian had a spirited notion of beginning early to pay his own way in life. Or perhaps his father was merely being funny.
‘If we get on tolerably during term,’ Mungo said, ‘we could peel potatoes together, and have a garret where we’d encourage each other in studious habits at night.’ This mild humour, although it wasn’t quite Mungo’s style, seemed acceptable to Lord Robert, who laughed agreeably. ‘But the vacations do seem a problem,’ Mungo added seriously. ‘The long one goes on for months and months.’
‘So it does. And when you are tired of the Savoy or Claridge’s, you and Ian must simply come and scrape carrots at Stradlings. We are all fond of carrots. You will allow me to join you sometimes, and Elizabeth as well. We can think of it as a reading party in the Victorian manner.’
Mungo realised that, from Lord Robert, this was an invitation, and not simply chat. Although conscious of holding a fairly good opinion of himself, he didn’t reckon to be a charmer of the fast-working sort, and there was something a little surprising, surely, in the speed with which these Cardowers were taking him on. Of course wealthy people had embraced D. H. Lawrence like that – and not always got a very good bargain out of it in the end. Perhaps Stradlings, although he had never heard of it, was a kind of Garsington Manor, where you had gone to tea and met characters like Aldous Huxley and Bertrand Russell. Mungo was modest enough to think that he wasn’t yet, perhaps, quite ready to be an ornament of that sort of salon. However, it needn’t be this that was expected of him. Probably it was Lord Robert rather than his wife who made the running in the way of moral concern about their young, and he had simply decided to spot in this wholesome and upstanding Scottish lad somebody who would be a good influence on his son. Ian might be a precocious roué, for all Mungo knew, or have taken to drugs or to haunting casinos.
‘You must certainly pay us a visit,’ Lady Robert said.
‘I’d like to enormously.’ Mungo offered this reply with as much of the politely conventional as his limited experience of such exchanges could manage. Lady Robert was almost certainly just obeying some rule in thus instantly backing her husband up. Her appraising glance was at work again. Mungo remembered Lord Robert’s mentioning that Ian had sisters. Perhaps (like their mother) they disliked stunted men, and were not recklessly to be exposed to others differently proportioned. Mungo had a notion that people like the Cardowers would expect a grown-up son to make more or less what friends he liked, but to bring home only those whom they would describe as of an eligible sort. Mungo was some way from seeing himself as that.
But this business of putting himself wise about the Cardowers didn’t – fleetingly, at least – altogether please him. He told himself that only three or four hours ago he hadn’t known of their existence, and that – really and truly – he would be quite glad to stop knowing about it any moment now. If he must be doubled up with a public-school boy, he’d have preferred somebody from Fettes, or Loretto, or any other establishment not absolutely in the van of that racket. He saw himself arriving at this Stradlings place, and everybody being perfectly charming to him, and himself developing in consequence into a kind of Julien Sorel (for nearly a month Mungo had been regarding Stendhal as the world’s greatest novelist): scheming, sensitive to imaginary affronts, hideously proud, very much out on a limb. That he wasn’t, as Julien was, a peasant’s son would make this all the more humiliating and absurd. The thing was to keep clear of the whole Cardower family-complex, and just see what was to be made of Ian Cardower by himself. He was pretty sure he liked Ian, and would continue to like him through any rows of the sort his father so cheerfully predicted.
Having arrived at this, as he felt, clear-headed view of the matter, Mungo found that he didn’t particularly want to be shut of even the senior Cardowers, after all. As the dinner went on, he progressively came to believe that Lord Robert was genuinely anxious to learn what, on this or that, his son’s new friend had to say. Mungo was aware of having shamefully little to say – or rather of having no technique for saying it at the tempo dictated by his host. But this was precisely the situation in which Lord Robert was astonishingly good. If you wrote him down – Mungo thought – he would sound quite comical; almost like Jane Austen’s Miss Bates. But in fact his monologue expertly created an illusion of your own scintillating participation – so deftly did he take up, respond to, agree with, question, qualify things you simply hadn’t said, although you might have done, if your wits had been about you. Perhaps this was what was called the aristocratic embrace. Mungo still had the modesty not quite to see why he should be hugged, but there would surely be something almost bloody-minded in resenting it. He ended the evening feeling that Ian’s parents could be reckoned among Ian’s assets. He’d known a good many boys – and girls, for that matter – about whom this couldn’t be said.
Chapter Three
As soon as Ian and he left the Randolph, Mungo noticed that something odd had happened to the atmosphere of Oxford. To its atmosphere in the literal sense, that was; not as breathing the last enchantments of the Middle Age, and so forth. He didn’t feel rook-racked, river-rounded or summoned by bells (although one bell was banging away somewhere or other with unnecessary reiteration). He just wasn’t in contact with the ground as firmly as usual. It was precisely as if the air had thickened and was a little buoying him up. Or the terrestrial globe might somehow have lost a lot of its mass, so that the pull of its gravity was lessened, and one felt rather like the people who had taken to bouncing about the surface of the moon.
In whatever way Lord and Lady Robert Cardower were to be appraised in general, they were certainly not the sort to pour too much wine into a young man on his first night in the university, so Mungo was fairly sure he wasn’t drunk. Or was he, all the same? His acquaintance with alcohol was so tenuous that he would have blushed to reveal it – even to Ian Cardower, of whom he was suddenly very fond. It did seem possible that a certain floating and insubstantial quality about the people in the street was a subjective rather than an objective phenomenon. There was undoubtedly something out of the way about them.
‘Who are all those chaps?’ Mungo demanded, coming suddenly to a halt by the steps of the Martyrs’ Memorial.
‘We’re in a university city, aren’t we? They don’t look like students to me.’
‘Why shouldn’t they be students? They just happen to have disguised themselves as young heroes of labour from the motor-works at Cowley. Or they may be young heroes of labour disguised as students. Nobody can tell. And there’s always a third possibility. They may be young villains. You’ll know that if they put the boot in.’
‘Nobody’s going to put the boot in on me,’ Mungo said truculently.
‘Good Lord! You must have a head like a feather.’ Ian, although amused, had put a firm hand on Mungo’s arm. ‘Back to college with you, my bonnie Hielan’ laddie.’
‘I’m not your—’ But Mungo broke off. ‘Do you mean I’m tight?’ he demanded, shocked by this corroboration of his own suspicion.
‘Of course not. It just sometimes happens like that after drinking only quite a little.’ Ian was reassuring and knowledgeable. ‘For a minute or two after you go into the open air. We’ll wander around for a bit, if you like.’
They wandered around: along the Broad, round the Sheldonian Theatre and Clarendon Building, down Catte Street, across the High. A great many of the buildings – colleges, Mungo supposed – had recently had their walls cleaned or refaced; and on the inviting surfaces thus obligingly provided were scrawled all sorts of graffiti: plainly the work of rising young scholars in the university, but for the most part unintelligible even to Ian, whose line was so very much that of knowing all about Oxford already. Mungo, who found himself
disapproving of these doubtless sophisticated escapes of wit, explained at some length that in Scotland they were perpetrated only by agitators and street-arabs.
‘Keelies,’ Ian said.
‘Yes.’ Mungo was surprised by this command of a vulgar tongue. ‘I didn’t know—’ But his attention was distracted by the moon. It was the harvest moon, now waning, and it had occurred to it to take up a position behind Magdalen Tower. The young men looked at the resulting spectacle with proper respect, and walked on silently for a time. They came into a cobbled lane. It was dimly lit and deserted; only in the Cornmarket, indeed, had there been the effect of a nocturnal urban crowd. ‘In the deserted, moon-blanched street,’ Mungo said, ‘how lonely rings the echo of my feet … But, look. There’s an enormous meadow.’ They had stopped before high wrought-iron gates set between equally high stone walls. Through these glimmered an extensive prospect of grassland and trees. ‘It must be our meadow. Let’s go in.’
‘I expect—’ Ian tried the gates. ‘I thought so. Locked.’
‘They’ve no bloody business to lock us out of our meadow.’ Mungo’s truculence returned to him. ‘Let’s climb.’
‘Pretty high walls.’
‘Not pygmies.’
‘Right! You get on my shoulders and you’re over, Sir Mungo. But you’ll have to haul up my dead weight.’
‘Can do.’
This feat was creditably performed, with the consequence that Mungo was able to judge himself sober again. In a shadowy indeterminate space beyond a railing sheep were wandering – or so it seemed until they realised that the sheep were wisps of vapour drifting up from the river. So they decided that the river was their goal, and found it at the end of a broad avenue of untidy elms. On these Ian pronounced in disparaging terms – rather as if he were a territorial magnate given to arboricultural pursuits in a big way. Mungo, who would have preferred to think of the trees dreaming in the moonlight as green-robed senators of mighty woods, found such airs irritating, and wondered whether he cared for Ian Cardower after all. But then they found themselves surveying a cluster of ungainly river-steamers at their moorings below Folly Bridge, and wondered whether they could signalise their arrival in Oxford by setting one of these craft in motion, steering it down the Isis, and leaving it tied up at Iffley lock. Nothing – naturally enough – coming of this, they contented themselves with climbing on board what Ian said was one of the few surviving college barges, and discussing what the water would be like if they stripped and swam.
Mungo's Dream Page 3
