This presently they had to do – for no better reason than that they had talked themselves awkwardly into it. In fact it was fun while it lasted, although they weren’t without anxiety that the proctors (or even perhaps a party of women undergraduates, nocturnally perambulating) might turn up on their splashing and puffing. When they scrambled back to the deck of the barge, however, they began to feel foolish. They couldn’t get inside the blasted thing to scrounge for a towel or something, since it was firmly locked up. So there they were on its deck – actually on view from Folly Bridge, if anybody was idle enough to be interested in them – and finding that the night air of an Oxford October was neither balmy nor possessed of any notable properties in the drying way. The screen of trees between them and the centre of the city had already shed enough leaves to provide them with the enjoyment of a vista of Oxford’s dreaming spires. From Magdalen Tower, once more, on their right, to the answering terminus of Christ Church’s Tom Tower on their left, there the whole bag of tricks lay expansed. It was everything that Matthew Arnold could have declared it to be – or Wordsworth, had he chosen to contemplate it instead of London from Westminster Bridge. Earth had not anything to show more fair. It was a spectacle which ought simultaneously to have elevated and calmed the mind. But Ian – perhaps from a sense of what was silly in their situation – reacted differently. He glanced at Mungo, and his eyes suddenly glinted maliciously in the moonlight.
‘It’s no like the wee laddie’s Lossiemouth,’ he said mockingly. ‘And yon river’s a muckle puir thing compared wi’ the Findhorn.’
‘Shut up, you!’ Mungo was outraged by this brutal burlesque of his northern tongue.
‘Or, for the matter o’ that, wi’ the bonnie Drochet burn.’
‘What the hell do you know about the Drochet burn?’ For a moment Mungo was bewildered. ‘Put on that idiotic turn again, and I’ll scrag you, Ian Cardower.’
‘And now the young dominie’s fashed. For it’s that that the loon’s going to be? A braw doup-skelper.’
Mungo hurled himself at Ian, and in a moment they were wrestling desperately. The barge, although it was a kind of house-boat and as massive as the Queen Elizabeth, swayed beneath them. Their naked bodies were cold, slippery, hard to get a hold on. It wasn’t an expert affair.
‘I can’t take the pants off you,’ Mungo gasped savagely. ‘But I can take—’
‘No, you don’t!’ Ian gave a violent heave that sent Mungo tumbling across the deck. In a moment they were at it again – warmed up, ready for quite a lot. Mungo did something clever with an instep against Ian’s ankle, and this accession of skill was still delighting him when he was catastrophically confronted with its consequence. Ian, as he fell, had cracked his head against an iron stanchion. He lay quite motionless – no longer like a young man but like a big dead fish. Mungo saw that he had celebrated the first day of his university career by committing manslaughter. Ian sat up.
‘Rupert!’ Ian exclaimed rapturously.
‘Gerald!’
They sprawled side by side on the deck, alternately panting and laughing. The notion that they had been comporting themselves like the nude gentlemen in Women in Love amused them vastly.
‘At least they had the sense to do their scrapping in a well-appointed library,’ Ian said.
‘And before a large fire in a bogus baronial fireplace. How’s your thick skull?’
‘Fine thank you. My private parts too.’
‘Then let’s get dressed, and off this bloody tub. You frightened me, Ian Cardower.’
‘And whose fault was that? But I agree. Let’s briefly put on manly readiness – as another Forres loon once said.’
‘Shut up, you!’
‘Christ, are we beginning again? He was very respectable – a thane of Cawdor, and all that. I suppose we’ve got to get back over that wall.’
‘What about after that? Will the college be locked up?’
‘Lord, no. We just walk in.’
‘Offering a courteous good-night to the chap in the bowler.’
‘Just that.’
Chattering amiably, they scrambled into their clothes, and retraced their steps along the New Walk. The moon, having bestirred itself and moved off in a south-westerly direction, was shedding impartial light on the most esteemed monuments of Oxford at large and Christ Church’s despised and outcast Meadow Building. Mungo, whose aunt had brought him up on Ruskin as well as Carlyle and Scott, rather liked this Venetian Gothic performance. He wondered when he would get to Venice. There, he thought, people would be singing on the water on a night like this. Monteverdi, perhaps. Monteverdi had been maestro di capella at St Mark’s, but had by no means confined himself to sacred music. Here, there was only another bell or two at the moment; the sound came muffled because it had to leap-frog over the architectural mass before them. People had probably been tugging away at those same bell-ropes when Monteverdi was composing Orfeo – and Shakespeare rehearsing all that thuggery at Forres and Dunsinane and Inverness. Mungo began humming from the opera, and then broke off.
‘Have you ever been to Venice?’ he asked.
‘Never been to Italy at all. My parents have a fixation on France, and were always taking us there, or bundling us off there. But I’ll bet Italy’s better. Particularly the girls. France for guzzlers, but Italy for passionate spirits like you and me. We’ll go there in the Easter vac.’ As Ian made this startling proposal in the most casual way, they found themselves before the high stone wall again. ‘Brace your puny frame, my motile Mungo,’ he said briskly. ‘You’re the ladder this time.’
It was nearly midnight, but there was quite a lot of noise in Howard. People were clattering up and down stairs, banging doors, shouting, and singing in ragged and raucous chorus. When the racket happened indoors it had one sort of resonance, and when it was continued in the quadrangles – for there seemed to be a lot of wandering from one part of the college to another – it had quite another.
‘It sounds more like an end of term than a beginning,’ Mungo said, his lately terminated schooldays in his mind.
‘Happy reunion stuff, I expect. The terrified freshmen – that’s you and me – cower in their attics.’
‘We haven’t got an attic.’
‘True.’ Ian had paused on the ground floor of staircase 4. ‘And we’re right on top of old Pons. Well, well.’
‘Who’s Pons?’
‘You can see who he is, there above his door. P. de Beynac. I was at school with him.’
‘Another freshman?’
‘No, he came up last year. Seems to be quite holding his own, wouldn’t you say?’
There was certainly a considerable volume of sound coming from the rooms of Mr P. de Beynac. They were the same rooms, Mungo realised, in which the hunting-horn had been in requisition that afternoon. He wasn’t sure that he found all this exuberance exhilarating, and he was quite clear that he wouldn’t care for it every night of the week. He’d rather supposed it to be an aspect of English polite life already on the wane in the time of Evelyn Waugh’s Paul Pennyfeather. But apparently not. (A loud crash of splintering glass confirmed this negative conclusion.) Ian seemed quite uninterested. They climbed the stairs to their own rooms.
‘Shall I shut this big outer door?’ Mungo asked.
‘The oak? No – I don’t think that would quite do. Inhospitable. Somebody might want to call on us.’
Mungo thought poorly of this, but refrained from saying so. They tumbled on their respective sofas – certain rules for territorial behaviour were already forming themselves in Howard 4, 4 – and stared at each other with an attention much relaxed from that which had obtained earlier in the day. Ian yawned and Mungo yawned. But they didn’t seem quite to want to go to bed. It wouldn’t have been much use anyway – not till joy had a little abated around and below them.
‘Ought we to be exchanging any more credentials,’ Ian asked lazily, ‘or be enquiring into each other’s nasty habits?’
‘They’ll ju
st emerge. But I don’t mind a shot at credentials. Your room-mate comes of poor but honest parents, long-since deceased. His father was a schoolmaster. It’s why he didn’t much like the term doup-skelper.’
‘I apologise,’ Ian said quickly.
‘You don’t need to. We fought it out.’ Mungo produced this robust etiquette seriously. ‘I say, are we going to find ourselves a bit different from all those chaps?’
‘Not in the least.’ Ian was surprised. ‘Only rather more articulate. That’s because we both resisted much of the education provided, and picked up our own instead. Curious that we’ve made the grade in this joint, really.’
‘Certainly curious that I have.’ Mungo was impressed by the diagnosis just offered him; he thought it extremely perspicacious. ‘Why do you seem to know about Moray, and even about the Drochet? Have you a seat there?’
‘A seat? I haven’t any seat, except the one I’m on now. And it feels as if its springs are broken.’
‘Your father, then?’
‘Nothing of the kind.’ Ian was impatient. ‘We live in a farm-house in Wiltshire. Howard’s End kind of place. You’ll come and see.’
‘But somebody?’ In Mungo’s voice was the suggestion that Ian was being dishonestly evasive. ‘Come back to Moray.’
‘All right, all right. My grandfather.’
‘The dear old duke?’
‘The dear old duke?’ Ian, who had looked puzzled, now frowned, and Mungo realised that he thought this facetiousness poor form. ‘There isn’t any duke. Dukes are a damned queer lot. My grandfather is a marquis, if you want to revel in that sort of thing. Lord Auldearn. You may have heard of him up there, since he does have a house in Moray. Not that he ever goes near the place.’
‘But you do.’
‘Occasionally I do. Since they gave me a gun. The grouse and all that.’
‘All that? You mean the blackcock and the golden plovers!’ Mungo was vehement in a moment. ‘And even the herons, because they eat your bloody trout. And a truck-load of hares and rabbits, just happily potted on the side. Not to speak of a gillie or two now and then.’
‘Rubbish! That’s out of a song by Tom Lehrer.’
‘Gent fires, gillie falls. “Sir,” gillie gasps, “you’re ma laird: the guid God bless ye.” Death of gillie. Gent has to catch a first-class sleeper south before the funeral. But he sends a nice wreath of English roses, scientifically packaged in dry ice.’ Mungo paused, almost as breathless as if he had been the Marquis of Auldearn’s younger son, Lord Robert Cardower. ‘Well, that’s it. I’ve feelings about all that in Scotland.’
‘And enjoy flinging them around.’ Ian looked at his companion dispassionately. ‘I don’t know that I’ve thought about it very much.’
‘At least you’re quite right about dukes. Do you know about the behaviour of a dead-and-gone Duke of Sutherland?’
‘Haven’t a clue, I’m afraid. I don’t know the family at all well.’
‘Christ! Well, ask the crofters he shoved into the sea.’
‘Oh, come!’ Ian had sat up. ‘Quite a lot of prosperous crofters now. There are Commissions and things to see about it. Fisheries, too, in the islands. Really getting going again.’
‘Man, do you know the load of debt put on a family there, if they’re to have a boat and equipment that can fight it out against the big people round from Aberdeen?’
‘Glad to know there are big people in Aberdeen.’
‘Why, you blasted—’
But at this point in their discussion of the economics of depopulated regions Mungo was obliged to break off. The door had been flung open and there were four more young men in the room.
Three of the visitors were drunk and belligerent. The fourth (as is often to be remarked on such occasions) was a little less drunk than the others, and ineffectively disposed to play a dissuasive or moderating role.
‘It’s that bloody man Cardower!’ The leading young man had come to a halt with a clumsy affectation of surprise.
‘Hullo, Pons.’ Ian, who had been confronting Mungo stiffly, resumed his relaxed sprawl. ‘Try to remember your manners, my boy. And take them off to bed with you.’
‘And who’s that?’ Having sheered away a little from Ian’s reception, Pons de Beynac pivoted uncertainly on a heel, and stared insolently at Mungo. ‘Why, if it isn’t a young gentlewoman! Robin, it’s a young gentlewoman.’
‘So it is.’ The youth appealed to nodded solemnly. ‘And in college after hours. Let’s put her out.’
‘Wasteful,’ the third youth said, and advanced uncertainly on Mungo – who, so far, had judged it incumbent upon him to imitate Ian’s air of unconcern. ‘Let’s—’
‘Oh, come on, you chaps. Let’s go. This is a bore.’ The fourth youth was waving vaguely towards the door.
‘A winsome gentlewoman.’ Pons, who perhaps believed that he was being enormously funny, advanced a little farther. ‘A tight poppet.’
‘Belt up!’ Mungo had jerked himself erect on his sofa.
‘Chuck her under the chin for a start.’ Pons made a gesture as if to put this gallant proposal into effect.
‘Get out!’ Mungo said, and got to his feet.
The effect of this was to make Pons drop the gentlewoman business. He took Mungo’s measure, and spoke with a great air of cold sobriety.
‘Perhaps, sir,’ Pons said, ‘you don’t quite care for my manners either?’
‘I don’t give a damn for your manners. But I don’t like your face. So bugger off.’ There was a moment’s uncertain pause, in which it was Mungo’s turn to assess Pons’s physique. Pons wasn’t a tall man. He barely came to within six inches of either of his involuntary hosts. He reminded Mungo, all the same, of a pocket battleship – the German kind which, long before Mungo was born, had displayed an awkward ability to take on craft twice their size. Mungo saw no appeal in a sustained gladiatorial encounter. He’d had one with Ian, after a fashion, not much more than an hour before. So he repeated his injunction to Pons, only turning it up a bit. ‘Fuck off,’ he said. ‘I’m going to count three. If you’re not making for the door by then, I’ll lay you out.’
Pons de Beynac’s very proper reply to this was to take a swipe at Mungo. And at this Mungo, decisively rather than expertly, hit Pons on the chin and put him flat on the floor. Since Pons was so drunk, it was an inglorious victory – and the more disagreeable in that Pons promptly vomited. And at this Pons’s friends took him by the heels and hauled him out of the room. Then one of them turned and politely shut the door. There was the sound of a bumping progress down stairs. It seemed time to go to bed.
‘Well, well!’ Ian said, and stretched himself. ‘The scout comes in at eight o’clock with some cheery nonsense about a beautiful morning. But you needn’t pay any attention to him.’
‘Informative to the last.’ Mungo, deciding against clearing up the mess, made for his bedroom. ‘Good-night, Ian.’
‘Good-night, Sir Mungo of the Lea.’
Chapter Four
During the next few weeks Mungo put in much of his time confronting the unexpected, and coping with it as well as he could. Quite small things could be disconcerting. Thus when, on the morning after the violent delights of his first night in college, he put his head out of his bedroom door, it was to have a glimpse of Ian (who fortunately didn’t see him) dressed in a manner suggesting the condition of a tramp in reduced circumstances. Mungo dodged hastily back, scrambled out of his already rather crumpled best suit, and vigorously insinuated his person into his oldest jeans. As they made him feel a good deal more at home, he told himself that his action hadn’t been a matter of craven conformity. But was he to go and see his tutor – or the Provost or somebody like that – in these informal if pleasingly virile garments? He would have to ask Ian. He could foresee asking Ian as becoming rather a bore.
Again, Pons de Beynac turned out to be one of Ian’s close friends; there had been some mysterious relationship between them at school. Pons, moreover, within twe
nty-four hours of their fracas, was saluting Mungo himself with civility in the quad, and very shortly after that was even cultivating his acquaintance. For reasons which were obscure to Mungo, Pons had decided to credit him with an intimate knowledge of working-class life. Pons was conscious that his future career in industry and politics was going to confront him (although perhaps at something of a remove) with the problems of proletarian feeling, and he was anxious to obtain early bearings on the subject. Although rather stupid, Pons was a serious young man (superficially, at least, more serious than Ian); he would ascend to 4, 4, curl up comfortably on a window-seat in the mellowing autumn sun, and debate with Mungo on articles he had been conscientiously reading in Crossbow or New Society. Mungo, although pleased to be treated as a sage (particularly by a second-year man), sometimes wished himself livelier employment. He even had a hankering to see the meritorious Pons blind drunk again.
They didn’t by any means – Ian and Mungo – live in each other’s pockets: they were less intimate than might have been predicted on the strength of the agreeableness of their first diversions in common. They ignored one another for quite a lot of the time. But Mungo (who went in for analysing personal relationships) felt this to be a sign, if anything, of something established between them.
They shared some interests, but no associations. Ian owned a considerable ready-made acquaintance around the place, and was constantly having visitors; Mungo, at first, naturally had none at all. Ian’s visitors took Mungo for granted, regarding him as one of the facts of contemporary life. They were entirely nice to him, but much of their conversation was unintelligible and they didn’t try to haul him into it. He found that, on the whole, idle listening was the best means of coping with this situation. Reading would be unsociable; disappearing into his bedroom impossible; simply clearing out feasible only in moderation if Ian wasn’t to be rendered unreasonably annoyed. Ian’s sociabilities were effortlessly companionable affairs, since he and his friends had hand-picked each other long ago. On the other hand when Mungo started in on making acquaintances every second one was a fiasco or a misfire. This amused Ian to a tiresome extent. ‘Exit another grey man,’ he would say with satisfaction when some singularly flat coffee-drinking had come to an end.
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