Mungo's Dream

by J. I. M. Stewart

  They decided to make for Gubbio – this for the reason that they were amused by the sound of it, and that Ian declared it to be the ancestral home of Gub-Gub, a creature in the entourage of Dr Dolittle, and so familiar to both of them in the nursery. Italy turned out to be attainable only through a tunnel, so they had to abandon the proposal to drink champagne when picnicking on the summit of some tremendous Alpine pass. But the tunnel was impressive in itself, and they emerged from it into a clear warm sunshine which they innocently concluded to obtain throughout the year in this southern land.

  Italy did its best to send Mungo off his head. Gubbio (although it was a bit chilly, after all) was alone worth their money; it seemed particularly so, somehow, because, until this trip was proposed, he had never so much as heard of the place. Moreover Gubbio was no distance from Sansepolcro, where he had known that there hung the greatest picture in the world; and Sansepolcro no distance – although over the icy Apennine – from Urbino itself, that grammar-school of courtesies, that windy hill. Mungo spouted Yeats and a great deal else. Because of his upbringing in a remote and lowly situation, there was as yet little of the avant-garde about his literary taste. He could describe Arezzo out of Browning or Ravenna out of Byron – or Venice out of Byron and out of Ruskin as well. (It was this old-world quality that kept him, although not notably docile or industrious, substantially in his tutor’s good books.) Ian was indulgent to his companion’s naïve behaviour, and at the same time appeared to draw satisfaction – even a sense of security – from the impunity with which he could pepper it, nevertheless, with injurious remarks. He said that Mungo was behaving like an excited American schoolmarm; he said (with recourse to Pope again) that he was raving, reciting and maddening round the land. Mungo accepted these and similar gibes in good part.

  Perhaps it was true (as Ian also, and more seriously, averred) that he would have seen more of the actual Italy of today if he hadn’t been so constantly popping on and peering through the spectacles of Englishmen either outmoded or dead and gone. Did he suppose it really likely, Ian demanded, that Poggibonsi or San Gimignano had consented to staying put as the Monteriano of Morgan Forster’s Where Angels Fear to Tread? Or that Florence teemed with knife-brandishing desperadoes and comical Dickensian cabmen as in A Room with a View? Or that the Abruzzi were a haunt of cave-men of the kind Lawrence had dumped there in The Lost Girl? Or that there lurked on off-shore islands the picturesque anachronisms of South Wind, or in Perugia the loquacious expatriates that poor old Leonard Sedley had pinched from Henry James and paraded in An Autumn in Umbria?

  Mungo was accustomed to Ian’s spirited travesties of sacred books, and he wouldn’t have much attended to this particular tirade but for its mention of the last specimen. He had been struck by Lord Auldearn’s revelation that Leonard Sedley was distantly related to the Cardowers and lived with Ian’s reclusive uncle, Lord Brightmony. Mungo had never met a famous writer, so that possessing this information had made him feel as close to a literary scene as he had come. Even to his own mind this was an ingenuous feeling, particularly as Sedley, although he possessed his niche and his acclaim, in the end had rather noticeably not come off. Mungo had refrained, therefore, from confiding the liveliness of his interest to Ian. But he had brought his copy of An Autumn in Umbria with him to Italy. He remembered that on first reading it he had been as much bewildered as impressed.

  When they had exhausted Gubbio and its environs, where it couldn’t be asserted that a great deal went on, they had driven to Perugia and established themselves there. It was in a precariously terraced little garden, with the Prefettura behind him and the valley of the Tiber swimming in spring sunshine a thousand feet below, that Mungo reread Leonard Sedley’s notable work. Ian had gone off on his own. To sit down in Perugia, he said, and there read a novel set in and around that city, was just another schoolmistressy turn. Mungo didn’t apologise. He had noticed before that Sedley’s name moved Ian to one or another rather acrid comment. Mungo, perhaps because he was always making things up, felt that there was the tip of a mystery in this.

  Perugia lives on chocolate but was nurtured on blood. As late as 1859 – Mungo’s guide-book told him – ‘the papal Swiss Guards occupied the city after an indiscriminate massacre’, and much the same sort of thing seemed to have been going on in the place, at least intermittently, since round about 300 b.c. Mungo doubted whether, walking the streets unprompted, he would have been conscious of what Yeats called odour of blood on the ancestral stair. But it was present in Sedley’s book. It was present not oppressively, as in some laboured historical romance, but unassertively in low-keyed descriptions which yet took a lurid colouring through the spare and deft employment of apposite imagery. Mungo’s first fresh discovery in An Autumn in Umbria was how securely the novelist commanded the spirit of place. And it was all done very much without showing-off – a term which Mungo often had to import into his critical vocabulary when overhauling his own work.

  And then there was the conversation. Mungo fairly goggled – just as he had done on a first reading – before its dry speed, its copiousness which yet never seemed to be without a passionate relevance. But a relevance to what? It wasn’t that the talk, as it flashed and flickered around, served very obviously to differentiate the several characters engaged in it. The characters were there – or at least they were confidently stated to be there. But, perhaps to some aesthetic end Mungo hadn’t yet got the hang of, they were all much of a muchness in the manner of their talk. One didn’t find in tone and cadence, in vocabulary, range of allusion, and what not, anything that carried one to the individual contours of their minds. So far as these things went, they were all flattened to their creator’s idiosyncratic palette.

  But everything Sedley’s subtle and intellectually athletic people so resourcefully said did have a relevance, relevance to a plot. If one remembered An Autumn in Umbria as a constantly talkative book (a conversation novel, as Mungo had called it out of some text book on such matters), that was merely because of the general brilliance of dialogue which was in fact driving narrative forward all the time. It was almost like a play of Ibsen’s, Mungo thought, in this moving like an arrow to its catastrophe. And to pretty pervasive catastrophe. The whole action took place within a restricted circle of wealthy and cosmopolitan people whose villas were – a shade imaginatively, perhaps – sited amid and against a landscape Mungo could glance up at as he read. It was all drawing- rooms and gardens and polite entertaining of a sort that must have seemed pretty archaic even when the book was first published. One couldn’t point to a stroke of overt violence from cover to cover. Yet nobody (or nobody except a lady who served more or less as the villain of the piece) was left unprecipitated into disaster – here dire, and there ironically trivial. There was a wonderful manipulating of events and relationships in the interest of this sad state of affairs. You never heard a creak – nor, for that matter, a tear fall. The swift speed of the performance allowed nothing to a pausing sympathy. There was almost an effect of malice – a kind of dry electric crackle of it – in this unintermitted continence.

  Of course Sedley’s story wasn’t, as might be the case in a thriller or a romance, constantly present on the very surface of the page. As you read, you had to dig for this, reach out for that; inferences, implications, momentary pointers, hints lightly dropped: all these had to be marked. Still, Mungo was puzzled that so basic an aspect of An Autumn in Umbria should not have remained more firmly in his memory. Perhaps this, in some paradoxical way, was because Sedley had been more in love with his own contrivance than with the characters he was enmeshing in its intricacies. Nobody remembers a yarn through which you shove people you don’t give a damn for.

  The practice of literary criticism had as yet made no great appeal to Mungo, and he didn’t for long persevere with it in regard to An Autumn in Umbria. He was content to conclude that he still admired the book very much, and in particular that it stood up wonderfully to being read in situ. And about its writer he
felt an even livelier interest than before. What sort of a person was Leonard Sedley? Why had he almost stopped writing? (It seemed a very dreadful thing to do.) And how had a man who seemed so in love with Italy settled down to living in a remote and seemingly little-frequented Scottish country house? Ian must know. And Ian must tell him.

  Chapter Fourteen

  ‘My mother’s in Rome with Mary,’ Ian said. He had been to the poste restante and picked up some letters. ‘Let’s go and collect a meal and a night’s lodging off them. It’s no distance.’

  ‘Why not?’ Mungo said at once. But he wasn’t sure that he meant it. This was the first he’d heard of Lady Robert and her younger daughter being in Italy, and for some reason he found the news disturbing. It was as if he had discovered that Ian was under surveillance, and had to clock in and report to his family in Rome. That, of course, was wholly irrational. The Cardowers were very much the sort of people who went here and there, and mother and daughter were probably in Rome without giving Ian a thought. They might be finding somewhere for Mary to live and learn Italian in the interval between leaving school and coming up to Somerville. In which case it was natural enough that Ian should suggest looking in on them. But Mungo felt that he and Ian were doing very well as things stood; and that, in any case, Rome obviously wasn’t a city it would be satisfactory to bob in and out of.

  What Mungo was really feeling, as he very well knew, was that he didn’t quite trust himself with Mary Cardower – and still less (he found) did he trust Ian’s impulse to throw them together. It was no doubt nice of Ian, but not too sensible. That he had enjoyed a brief madness over Anne was not perhaps quite the insurance against falling in love with Mary that he was romantically disposed to believe. And everything that was prudent in Mungo told him by just how much that wouldn’t do. The Robert Cardowers, he knew from Pons, weren’t a bit wealthy. Mary’s husband would have to support her from the moment they’d finished having their photograph taken outside St Margaret’s Westminster, or wherever else the Cardowers had the habit of getting married. Mungo had no dreams of wealth, and only distant prospects of earning anything at all. Mary wasn’t a girl he could conceive of having an impermanent affair with, and Ian obviously wouldn’t envisage such a thing for a moment. So Ian was being more benevolent than clear-headed in rather insistently bringing his friend and younger sister together. Mungo decided he had better say something to this effect now.

  ‘There’s no difficulty,’ Ian was saying. ‘We don’t even have to leave early if we’re to be in Rome in time for lunch.’

  ‘But we can’t batten on your mother. At least I can’t.’

  ‘Rubbish. She’s been lent an apartment in something called the Via Torino. Oceans of room.’

  ‘All right. But what I really feel is that it’s a little tagging after Mary. You chuck us together on a bus. And now—’

  ‘You have the most imbecile notions!’ Ian was angry and uncomfortable. ‘And, what’s more, you invite the most grossly sentimental remarks. Aren’t we each other’s best friend?’

  ‘It’s beginning to look like it, I agree.’

  ‘Well, then – isn’t it natural I should want you and my sisters to see each other and get to like each other?’

  ‘You know I fell in love with Anne in the most absurd and useless way. And now you seem—’

  ‘Oh, stow it, Mungo! You’re getting a one-track mind. You’re treating me like an old match-making dowager. Can’t you just enjoy—’

  ‘All right, all right.’ Mungo realised he was on untenable ground, even although he wasn’t quite confident that Ian was being wholly ingenuous. ‘I’m an ungracious ass, and we’ll leave for Rome in the morning. Now let’s go and get something to eat.’

  This brief conversation had taken place beside their tent, which they had by now contrived to use on a number of occasions. Italy is not a country in which it is easy to find a patch of ground secluded from the view of somebody with proprietory feelings about it. But it was much more interesting to try than to let oneself be shoved into a campeggio and the society of solemn German and Scandinavian students. Negotiation was rendered difficult by the fact that they hadn’t a dozen words of Italian between them. Mungo was ashamed of this, and was forming nebulous plans for acquiring an advanced familiarity with the language before coming back next year. Ian maintained that French was the only language that an Englishman need be ashamed of not employing with facility. When it came to confronting a voluble farmer Ian believed in producing 500 lire, and Mungo in shaking hands. They had lately concluded that both these operations could with advantage be performed simultaneously.

  Here, just outside Perugia, they had done rather well, the 500 lire being evidently regarded as gaining them the lease of a sufficient territory for as long as they chose to remain, and a moderate daily sum securing the further convenience of a small boy prepared to guard their property whenever they were away from it. They walked, or rather climbed, back to the city now, and did themselves extremely well on the strength of being likely to enjoy a free dinner on the following evening. The wrongfulness of battening on Elizabeth Cardower had quite gone out of Mungo’s head.

  It was dark when they returned. Mungo, who had Boy Scouting in his past, fussed contentedly over a vapour lamp; Ian, with recent memories of absurd J.T.C. camps, loosened guy-ropes. The tent was so small that they agreed they might as well have planned to sleep in the boot of the mini. But they enjoyed its narrow room, and enjoyed cursing each other as clumsy restless angular louts. Insinuated into their sleeping-bags, and with a flap of the tent left open while they smoked a last vile Italian cigarette, they sometimes fell asleep so rapidly as to be in danger of burning to death, and sometimes started a desultory conversation that went on for hours. There was something very luxurious about the isolation in which these talks were conducted.

  ‘Do you ever try to account for yourself,’ Mungo demanded, ‘in terms of heredity?’

  ‘You’ve fired that one off before. And why should I try accounting for myself at all? I’m a prosaic fact. And I don’t go in for morbid artistic introspection.’

  ‘You think about yourself quite a lot. Anybody can see you do. I can tell it even in the dark. I lie here and suddenly I can say to myself “There’s Ian Cardower started chewing over Ian Cardower”.’

  ‘Talk sense, Mungo, or go to sleep.’

  ‘Well, the heredity business must be interesting. Incidentally, it’s one of the differences between us, isn’t it? You have a heredity and I haven’t. I’m a filius terrae, so I can’t play.’

  ‘Those silly Latin tags are growing on you. As for heredity in any scientific sense, it’s very complicated. Genes and so on. Has to be worked out with mice or rabbits.’

  ‘That’s primitive, like doing your computing with match sticks. The depth of the thing can only be got at intuitively. Do you feel you’re like your father? You do have some of his tricks.’

  ‘I didn’t know my father went in for tricks.’

  ‘Mannerisms, then. And drop that silly aristocratic reserve. Do you?’

  ‘I suppose he and I share a lot of assumptions. But, no – I don’t think I do. And I don’t think I’m particularly like my mother, either. Are you like your auntie?’

  ‘What about your grandfather?’ Mungo had ignored Ian’s question. ‘Would you say you were like him?’

  ‘Yes – in a way. Sixty years ago, he may have been quite like me now. And sixty years on, I may be quite like him now. This is a very academic conversation.’

  ‘I don’t think it is. As a matter of fact, I’m beginning a short psycho-analytical investigation – no end beneficent, too – free, gratis and for nothing.’ Having offered Ian this absurdity, Mungo took a last acrid puff at his cigarette, and chucked it accurately through the opening in the tent. It vanished into the darkness in a brief parabola of tiny sparks. ‘What about your uncles? Lord Brightmony—David, isn’t he?—must be older than your father. But there was the one that died. Was he older to
o?’

  ‘Yes. I think Douglas was born within a couple of years of David. I don’t know much about him. He died when I was quite a small boy.’

  ‘Just when?’

  ‘Just when?’ Ian sounded surprised. ‘I think it was 1955.’

  ‘Anne told me he was very wicked. And I believe I’ve heard of him as a legend among the folk. Is that right?’

  ‘Yes, it is. I think your psycho-analysis is very boring.’

  ‘No, it isn’t. You’ll see. Because I’ve got a theory about you.’

  ‘How dare you have a theory about me, you beastly youth!’ Ian sounded entirely serious. ‘Just drop it into the rubbish-bin of your mind, or I’ll turf you out of this bloody tent.’

  ‘We’ll be fighting till dawn, my child, if you try.’

  This was probably true, but not significant. They both knew that no fight was going to take place. The Gerald and Rupert business again, far from being uproariously funny, would be embarrassing and stupid. So there was silence for some moments, during which first Ian and then Mungo largely yawned. A few frogs were monotonously croaking near at hand, and from farther away came the growl and grind of some vast articulated lorry toiling up to the city.

  ‘Is there a fee?’ Ian asked humorously and by way of making peace.

  ‘Not just at the moment. Consultation free, cure guaranteed.’

  ‘The Doctor’s Dilemma.’

  ‘Quite right. I do like a well-educated infant. But back to the bad Lord Douglas. What’s the charge? Did he stain the family honour by passing bad cheques, or was he simply a large-scale voluptuary?’

  ‘What an idiotic word. But, yes – I gather he was that. There wasn’t a girl in Moray who was safe from him, and when he went to stay at Bamberton it was impossible to keep a maidservant in the house. But it doesn’t seem to have been just as a seducer of innocent girls that he was attractive. Everybody liked him, including his much-tried family. Now ask me if I feel I’m a second Douglas.’