Mungo's Dream

by J. I. M. Stewart

  The first few days at Mallachie were perhaps the more difficult because Leonard Sedley was away. He was making one of his very rare visits to London. Ian said that he disliked Sedley as much as he disliked Balietti, but that he was at least conversable, and would have kept up some reasonable chit-chat at meals if he’d been around. As it was, these occasions were far from gay. But as Sedley had been one of the proposed exhibits, he supposed that they’d better remain at Mallachie until he turned up again. He himself could at least do a bit of fishing, although the river was some way off. And Mungo could either come and sit on the bank, or remain at Mallachie and get on with his book.

  In fact, things fell out a little differently. Lord Brightmony, however withdrawn upon his peculiar devotional life, was sensitive to what was going on inside the heads of young men. This appeared in a proposal he made at lunch on their third day.

  ‘Ian,’ he asked, ‘am I right in thinking that your plans, and Mungo’s as well, are fluid so far as the rest of your vacation is concerned?’

  ‘Yes – but, although we’ve got nothing fixed, there’s quite a lot that we can do.’

  ‘No doubt there is.’ Lord Brightmony’s gaze dropped to the floor. ‘Still in each other’s company, I suppose?’

  ‘Quite probably.’ Ian had stiffened, and there was a small silence in which Father Balietti could be distinguished as engaged in prayer.

  ‘We keep each other out of mischief, you see.’ Mungo struck in with this under some impulse to import a note of cheer into the talk.

  ‘You would both be most welcome so to do while remaining at Mallachie.’ Lord Brightmony gave Mungo one of his rare direct glances, and at this Father Balietti signed himself rapidly with the cross. ‘But I am conscious that our manner of life here is not well accommodated to the entertainment of lads of your age. I am sorry that Leonard is away. You must at least stop until his return in a couple of days’ time. Mungo, with his interest in literary pursuits, would enjoy meeting him. However, I have a further proposal to make. I think, Ian, that you would appreciate as much time on the water as possible.’ Lord Brightmony actually smiled faintly. ‘Until the fatal first of September arrives.’

  ‘Well, yes.’ Ian – rather absurdly to Mungo’s sense – had brightened at once. ‘But one can have a go at the partridges after that.’

  ‘While waiting for the pheasants,’ Father Balietti said smoothly.

  ‘Yes, indeed.’ Lord Brightmony never let a remark by his chaplain pass unacknowledged. ‘But let me tell you what I have in mind. You remember the water-bailiff’s cottage, Ian? Recently it has been in the occupation of the reeve at that end of the estate. But Urquhart came in this morning—’

  ‘Mr Urquhart,’ Balietti explained to Mungo in a courteous aside, ‘is Lord Brightmony’s factor.’

  ‘—and told me that the man has left us, so that the cottage is vacant. It is a pleasant little place and, I am told, very reasonably fitted up. Would you and Mungo care to take it over for as long as you please? It is splendidly situated for the salmon. And at the same time’—on this occasion Lord Brightmony didn’t glance at Mungo—’it enjoys the seclusion which I understand writers to prize.’

  ‘That would be extremely nice,’ Ian said – with a formality signalling caution.

  ‘It would, of course, be pleasant if you came over to dine with us. I am sure it would give Leonard particular enjoyment.’

  ‘It sounds splendid,’ Mungo said. He could see that the fisherman in Ian was all for the idea. And he himself did want an opportunity of meeting Leonard Sedley, and discovering what a real writer was like.

  So Mungo’s verdict settled the matter. After lunch he and Ian went into the garden to talk about it.

  ‘Do you know,’ Mungo said when they had got some details settled, ‘it seems to me that those two worthies have a very odd notion of us?’

  ‘I think they have.’ Ian didn’t seem to be as amused as Mungo. ‘Meanwhile, what shall we do this afternoon? I think I’d rather like a bathe.’

  ‘In the river?’

  ‘No. We’ll make a dash for the sea.’

  ‘Good!’ Mungo’s spirits rose, for there was undeniably something claustrophobic about life within the curtilage of Mallachie Castle. ‘We’ll hit it at Nairn. That’s where I used to be chucked in as a kid. You’ll find it freezing. And I bet I’ll stay in longer than you.’

  Chapter Sixteen

  ‘Mungo, do you identify with the salmon, or with the fisherman? I believe “identify” is the word.’ Leonard Sedley regularly made a small humorous business of being distrustful of modern terminologies.

  ‘I don’t know. It’s exciting, I suppose.’ Mungo paused on this, and looked at Ian waist-deep in the rapid river. In the presence of a professional writer, he was chary of making any claim to special sensibility. ‘But I don’t think I identify with either.’

  ‘Oh, but surely you must. This combat has been going on for twenty minutes. It will probably be Ian’s biggest catch of the season. And you have been watching intently.’ As Leonard Sedley said this, he didn’t himself cease intently to watch the spectacle in the tumbling brown water.

  ‘Very well. I think I identify with the fish. I certainly feel that hook in my throat. And I’m wriggling.’

  ‘Wriggling?’

  ‘No. Worms wriggle – and perhaps belly-dancers.’ Mungo was like a child being corrected and prompted in school. ‘It’s convulsive, or a kind of flailing. Or what you’d do if somebody was sending electric shocks through you for kicks.’

  ‘Ah, for kicks. There’s some virtue in that expression.’

  Sedley was sitting on a tree-trunk in the sun. He wore Lovat tweed, and some of Ian’s big salmon-flies were stuck in his cap. Yet he somehow wasn’t altogether congruous with the scene. Perhaps it was merely that the soft pastel shirt, the considered tie, faintly belonged elsewhere. That was as it should be, perhaps. For he had an elsewhere, after all: that niche in the history of the English novel from which he had so unaccountably stood down.

  ‘But what about Ian?’ Sedley went on. ‘It’s a tremendous struggle. Isn’t your body at play with his?’ Sedley paused. ‘Almost imperceptibly of course. Empathy works like that.’

  ‘It couldn’t work like that if one was trying out a bit of empathy with a billiard ball.’ Mungo didn’t yet know whether he liked the eminent novelist who had taken so flatteringly to conversing with him, but he did enjoy these bursts of talking to him on equal terms. ‘Didn’t somebody say he knew what it’s like to be a billiard ball?’

  ‘Then he was saying quite something.’ Sedley smiled, as if signalling that he had consciously used a quaint figure of speech. ‘But take a tortoise, Mungo. A tortoise is not as remote as a billiard ball, but it is very tolerably remote, all the same. Yet one knows, doesn’t one, what it’s like to be a tortoise? There are dreams in which one has to move in just that clogged and painful way.’

  ‘That’s atavistic. It’s a stirring, in sleep, of some incredibly ancient racial memory. We struggled out of the sea millions of years ago. Like shelled turtles, pink and defenceless.

  ‘It’s a wonderful picture.’ Sedley laughed agreeably. He did seem to find Mungo worth talking to. Almost every afternoon he made the quite long trek to the cottage by the river, and the two chatted together while they watched Ian fishing. ‘Ian will be doing some struggling out of the flood himself, if he’s not careful. Getting these queer waterproof breeches full of water isn’t funny. And he almost went over now.’

  ‘Oh, Ian will be all right. He has this ritualised slaughter all taped. Perfect timing of the wretched creature’s movements, and all that. Show-business without an audience, really.’

  ‘But we’re an audience. And he’s certainly exciting to watch, as you said.’

  Mungo didn’t think he had said quite this. And with Sedley it seemed important to get things exactly right. Sedley had told him, seriously although not pontifically, that if he didn’t think and conclude precisely he would ne
ver come near writing precisely. So now he didn’t pass this point by.

  ‘I only meant I can see it’s exciting,’ he said. ‘When I feel something’s exciting I generally want to have a go at it. But I don’t want to catch fish, any more than I want to shoot birds. Their life’s their own affair – so why mess it up? In any case, it’s obvious that fishing is pretty boring for most of the time.’

  ‘Ian certainly isn’t bored at this moment. Will you admit you are rather jealous of that salmon, Mungo, just because Ian is so completely and absorbedly alone with it?’

  ‘Oh, I hope not!’ Mungo’s grin felt a little awkward on his face. He couldn’t believe that Sedley nourished the erroneous idea about Ian and himself that Lord Brightmony and his chaplain had to be suspected of indulging. Sedley, with all the talent for understanding people that his writing revealed, must be immune from going so far astray. But there was an element of penetration in his question, all the same, and Mungo tried to respond to it. ‘But perhaps you’re right. Ian and I have become friends, but we’re from totally different backgrounds. And sometimes—’

  ‘It’s what so interests me,’ Sedley said softly. ‘But I beg your pardon. Go on.’

  For a moment Mungo didn’t go on. He had been startled – both by the tone of Sedley’s voice and by something enigmatical in the manner of his glancing from Mungo beside him to Ian in the river and back again. The novelist might almost have been trying to match them in some way, to bring them together in his imagination – not in terms of any indecent fantasy, Mungo quickly told himself, but rather as a producer, a choreographer might do. Or an out-of-work puppet-master, Mungo brilliantly added – and became aware of this ungoverned imagination as being responsible for an awkward pause.

  ‘I’m sorry. I was saying that Ian and I have those different backgrounds. There have been times when Ian’s background has stepped forward and nobbled him for a time in a perfectly natural way, and then I have felt a childish kind of jealousy. But that’s not happening now. I just hope he’ll net that unfortunate salmon before tea-time.’

  ‘And he has!’ Sedley stood up and pointed dramatically. He owned a pleasing ability to turn on a spontaneous gaiety of a kind which, at Mallachie, was otherwise in lamentably short supply. ‘And we’ve been so idle that we’ve forgotten to put on the kettle. My dear lad, remedy that now.’

  They had tea at a rough table which Ian planted before Sedley where he sat. Mungo brought forward a bench, and he and Ian sat down side by side facing the novelist.

  ‘How sad that I don’t operate a camera,’ Sedley said. ‘It would be pleasant to have a photograph of the two of you as you are now, simply as a reminder of this very interesting holiday of yours. But we are all cameras ourselves, I suppose; only some more efficient than others. Mine isn’t bad, and I think I shall retain this picture fairly well.’ Sedley made these remarks the occasion of holding each young man in turn in a considering, and perhaps faintly puzzled gaze. ‘Yes,’ he continued, ‘you will certainly flash upon that inward eye which is the bliss of solitude. Dear me! What a hackneyed quotation.’

  ‘I don’t much care for being photographed,’ Ian said rather coldly. ‘Not after any fashion.’

  ‘Then I put my camera away at once.’ Sedley gave no sign of having registered Ian’s tone. ‘How much you two must be learning from one another! I wonder which of you is the more curious of the two? The more inquisitive, that is to say.’ He paused, but neither of the young men offered a reply. ‘But there seem to be limits to the profitable exchange. Mungo, for instance, refuses to learn salmon fishing from you, Ian. On moral grounds, I gather. Mungo, would you take up the same position if trout fishing were in question?’

  ‘I suppose so – if it’s to be called a position. Catching salmon and catching trout are more or less the same thing, I suppose.’

  ‘But not at all!’ There was amusement in Sedley’s voice. ‘Ian will put you right on that at once. When he goes after trout, he places himself in quite a different relationship to his victims.’ Sedley paused, as if expecting Ian to join in. When Ian was silent he stooped, picked up his cap from the ground, and tossed it on the table in front of him. ‘Observation, Mungo! Always observation! What have you to say about Ian’s salmon-flies?’

  ‘They’re rich and gaudy.’

  ‘Quite so. Have you ever seen their like in real life?’

  ‘I’m sure I haven’t. I think you’d have to go to the tropics for them.’

  ‘And trout-flies? You must often have looked at trout-flies; even if you have never angled with them.’

  ‘They’re shocking little miracles of deception. They’ve got fancy names, like roses: Wickham’s Fancy and Greenwell’s Glory. But they’re as like real insects of one sort or another as can be made.’ Mungo paused, frowning. ‘Salmon don’t feed in fresh water.’

  ‘Exactly! The trout snaps at Ian’s trout-fly because it believes it is a fly, and wants to eat it. But the salmon snaps at Ian’s salmon-fly because it is annoyed by something unaccountable invading its territory. So trout fishing has the beauty of being pure treachery. Salmon fishing is more like a bull fight.’

  ‘Except, I suppose,’ Ian said, ‘that there’s no danger to matador or picador.’

  ‘Perfectly true.’ It struck Mungo that Leonard Sedley’s complexion was registering an odd flush as of pleasure, at Ian’s thus having been drawn into the talk. ‘Except, I suppose, that you can get drowned. I was pointing out that possibility to Mungo. I’ve heard of it happening on the Spey.’

  ‘Well, I’m going to put myself at risk for another hour after tea.’ Ian appeared to have turned civil again. But at once he added, ‘Is pure treachery all that beautiful?’

  ‘It can be made so by art. Are you still fond of Pope? Think of the angler in Windsor Forest.’ Sedley turned from Ian to Mungo, and his voice underwent some subtle change as he did so. Defensively, Mungo called this the great man’s cher confrère manner – but he found it slightly intoxicating, all the same. ‘Aren’t some of the greatest novels in the world about betrayal? Think, Mungo! The Wings of the Dove, The Golden Bowl, Under Western Eyes.’

  ‘They’re not mere exhibitions of it, or gloatings over it.’ Mungo didn’t know quite why he said this. ‘It’s made the occasion for a rising up of other things: endurance, fidelity, repentance – all that.’

  ‘As Ian’s father would say, Mungo – how perfectly I agree with you.’ Sedley shot a glance at Ian, as if to see how he was disposed to take this just and harmless family joke. ‘In a last analysis, the interest of treachery lies in the response to its challenge which rare spirits can achieve. “Commend me to my kind Lord: 0 farewell!” One scarcely ventures to speak of such heights. But, at another level, treachery holds a perennial fascination for the writer. It is the sheer technical fascination of rendering it as at once visible and invisible, plausible yet startling. Nothing can be more beguiling. “Pleasure and action make the hours seem short” – as one connoisseur in deception rightly says.’

  ‘I rather like the look of the water in this light,’ Ian broke in. He had stood up suddenly, and it was clear that his remark was to be taken in a practical and not an aesthetic sense. He picked up his rod, and strode back towards the river.

  ‘It’s a mania with the dear lad at present,’ Sedley said indulgently. ‘But a fortunate one for David and myself if it makes him contented with Mallachie for a while. We are two elderly men who have come to live too much in solitude, so there is something heartening about a stir of young life around the place. But how is it with the junior bachelor ménage? You’re not finding cottage life dull?’

  ‘Not in the least. Ian doesn’t fish all day, and we’ve been doing plenty of walking. Besides, I’m getting quite a lot of reading and writing done.’

  ‘I’m delighted to hear it. I had feared that you might be becoming a little bored by so celibate a society. How long is it, Mungo, since you set eyes on a girl?’

  ‘Quite some time,’ Mungo said, and said n
o more. He was a little startled by this poking around. Mallachie Castle itself certainly did nothing to mitigate boredom of the sort Sedley was speaking of. There didn’t seem to be a woman in the place. The entire staff consisted of a few morose elderly men.

  ‘I don’t think I’d venture to ask Ian such a question,’ Sedley went on humorously. ‘He is not a very simple person, and in a way I feel I am only just getting to know him again. As you have probably heard, he doesn’t come to Mallachie very often. But I take a great interest in his fortunes. In spite of the disparity of our years, he and I have always liked each other. One doesn’t know how these things – affinities, they may be called – come about. But it is very pleasant when they do. As, for Ian, they have again done in his joining forces with you.’

  ‘Yes, of course.’ Mungo didn’t find this speech of Sedley’s easy to reply to. Could so perceptive a man as the novelist possibly be so far at sea as he appeared to be in supposing himself liked by Ian? It seemed so. Sedley had spoken more unaffectedly than was common with him. Seeing this, Mungo felt he might be put in a false position, and have to lie his way out of it, if the conversation came to rest on Ian’s supposed affection for Leonard Sedley. So he boldly gave the talk a shove forward. ‘Did you and Lord Brightmony,’ he asked, ‘feel such an affinity from the first? Was it what made you decide to set up house together?’

  ‘Ah, but it was so long ago!’ Sedley smiled whimsically. ‘And one is scarcely able to give an account of some of one’s dead selves. But, yes. We recognised confirmed bachelors in each other – almost from the first, I suppose – and a joint establishment seemed not a bad idea.’

  ‘Was he as devout then as he is now?’