The Gaudy

by J. I. M. Stewart

  ‘Come, come, Arnold.’ Atlas spoke quite amiably. ‘Don’t run away with yourself, my dear chap.’

  ‘Very well. But then there’s this notion of Cyril’s that they’re asked to move in order to have a chance of a quieter night. Complete poppycock. Of course there’s no quiet to be had anywhere in college on such an occasion. They’re herded over to Rattenbury − and they’re still there, you know, at this moment − because it makes it easier to prevent them gate-crashing that opulent and ostentatious revel. Cyril, that’s not to be denied, is it?’

  ‘It was one consideration involved, I agree.’ Bedworth spoke slowly. ‘It’s best not to put temptation to plain dishonesty in people’s way.’

  ‘I don’t think I’d like to call it that,’ Gender said judiciously. ‘Gate-crashing is only a lark − at least when it’s an affair at another college. But attending one’s own dance without a ticket isn’t perhaps quite the thing.’

  ‘Well, it’s what this unfortunate boy Lusby decided to do.’ Lempriere had turned to me as if minded to enter upon a narrative. ‘We know that he actually made it the subject of a wager. He’d borrow a dinner-jacket − for you can attend these things in dinner-jackets nowadays − and go right through the ball undetected.’

  ‘Didn’t he own a dinner-jacket?’ Atlas asked.

  ‘Apparently not − and why should he? He’s a very simple lad − which I see as part of the mischief. Anyway, the hopeful young Lusby succeeded in his design, so that dawn found him still among the revellers. Cyril, that’s right?’

  ‘Quite right.’

  ‘Among them, but not of them. That, I imagine, is the nub of the matter. There was nobody he could dance with, and he felt in constant danger of being detected and chucked out. For a more privileged lad that would just have been part of the fun, and a matter of losing his bet. But Lusby would view it as a humiliation. He had misjudged the thing, he was strained and miserable, and he never got to bed. He simply changed his clothes, walked to the Examination Schools, sat down at his place, and fell fast asleep. He’d probably been working into the small hours, remember, over the weekend. He’d treat an examination that way.’

  ‘I suppose somebody woke him up?’ I asked. As I was plainly to be told Lusby’s whole story it seemed polite to show some interest in it.

  ‘Nobody did. No doubt it’s a point the college could make itself unpleasant about, and it reflects small credit on whichever of the examiners were doing the invigilating. I imagine any of them who took a glance at the boy supposed him to have closed his eyes for a few moments in the interest of more powerful cerebration. However that may be, he woke up − or more or less woke up − at the end of three hours, and found that he had only a blank manuscript-book to hand in. He did so, and staggered out of the Schools.’

  ‘We don’t know that he staggered,’ Bedworth said. ‘There was still really nothing to alert anybody to the fact that trouble was brewing. If only Lusby had been sitting near any of the other men from the college, they’d probably have tumbled to the situation and yanked him along to his tutor. Or got on to his tutor themselves. Undergraduates are extremely reliable in such situations.’

  ‘Perfectly true,’ Lempriere said. ‘The young pests can be trusted to rally round in an astonishing way. It’s one of the few traits that sharply distinguishes theirs from other criminal societies. If one must get in a scrape, an Oxford college isn’t a bad place to choose for it.’

  ‘Yes,’ Atlas said. ‘They need any alphas they can pick up, the Lord knows. And they do generally raise one on the primitive loyalty paper.’

  And James Gender produced his acquiescent murmur again.

  It had never occurred to me, when an undergraduate, that our tutors could take any sort of pride in us − except, conceivably, on account of some exceptional agility displayed in jumping through the paper hoops of the Examination Schools. But here were these four men, oddly disturbed about poor Lusby and betraying certain signs of being not quite at one on the matter, making each other this passing token of accord. They had the good luck to be in a decent regiment. It was something like that: the assertion, almost in a secret code, of those convictions about the college which, earlier that evening, it had been the Provost’s business to express in terms of public eloquence. And the effect of this perception on me was to make me feel a genuine if necessarily tenuous concern for the unknown Lusby myself.

  ‘This examination,’ I asked, ‘is a full-scale, day-after-day affair?’

  ‘Pretty well,’ Lempriere said, and glanced at Gender. ‘Jimmy, would it be nine papers?’

  ‘Six, which is almost as bad. Two on Tuesday, the day after the Ball. Two today, Wednesday, and two tomorrow, Thursday.’ Gender glanced at his watch. ‘And tomorrow will be with us in no time at all, which shows what a successful Gaudy this is turning out to be.’

  ‘Gaudies last till midnight-plus, but Commem Balls carry on into late breakfasts round the town?’ I asked.

  ‘One sees you remember the drill,’ Lempriere said. ‘And now we return to Mr Lusby. He needs help. He has emerged from that non-paper, and is wandering around. Does he get any luncheon? We don’t know, but we conjecture not. He will be shy of going into hall and facing all that cheerful gabble about what the paper was like.’

  ‘Bad,’ I said. It was evident that the sardonic Lempriere possessed imagination.

  ‘Half-past two arrives, and Lusby is back in the Schools. What he chiefly feels now is that he must not turn in another wholly blank paper. So, every twenty minutes or so, he manages to write down a disconnected sentence. This at least takes him right out of any category of persons whom invigilators need concern themselves about, but it isn’t going to help him to pass his Moderations, whether with credit or otherwise. He is realising now that he ought to have gone straight to Jimmy Gender after the morning’s fiasco. Jimmy

  Gender is his tutor. He quite likes Jimmy. Jimmy, a competent performer, has afforded Mr Lusby certain cautious tokens that he, Jimmy, quite likes him. Jimmy, the situation might be more or less that?’

  ‘We needn’t romanticise it,’ Gender said. ‘When this kind of thing happens, one simply has to acknowledge having fallen down on the job. Of course my pupils knew I’d be on the bridge. It’s only simple sense to make that clear to them. But Lusby didn’t come along.’

  There was a silence in which I made the further discovery that the fact or fantasy of a close personal relationship with the near-children who were their pupils was important to all four of these variously assorted men. I tried to relate this to my memories of Albert Talbert, who would sometimes take me for one of his undergraduates (which I was) and sometimes for a tenuously identifiable research student from another college (to say nothing of being Dalrymple every now and then). And I saw, with a kind of sudden awe, that there had been nothing in those bizarre intermittencies of memory to prevent Talbert’s having been rather fond of me.

  ‘To continue,’ Lempriere said. ‘The mischief in these affairs is that the point of no return comes so quickly. If those damned examiners had spotted their young Rip Van Winkle straight away, and got on the telephone, all might have been well. Lusby would have had his luncheon − sherry, chocolate Bath Olivers, and black coffee, I rather imagine − in Jimmy’s rooms, and enough of the right chat from Jimmy to take him through some sort of show in the afternoon. By that time we’d have had in Robert Damian, who’d sign on the dotted line − and honestly enough − that Lusby had been under strain, and so forth. We’d have had a very good chance of selling that successfully to the proctors, who wouldn’t be too keen on having negligent invigilation in the examination-room publicised. So Lusby, if he’d performed with any shadow of competence in the rest of the papers, would have been sure of an aegrotat, and might even have got a class. As it is, it’s no go.’

  ‘And not all that important,’ Atlas said, ‘except in Lusby’s head’.

  ‘Just so.’ Lempriere’s voice had returned to its sardonic mode. ‘But the state of Lusby’s
head is what we wonder about.’

  ‘Where is Lusby now?’ I asked.

  ‘Where, indeed? But let me return to an orderly exposition. At the end of his disastrous day, Lusby slept in college. But, remember, as a displaced person in Rattenbury. The scout on the staircase didn’t know him from Adam, or pay any attention to him. Which was a pity. It’s well known that a boy’s best friend is his scout. And Lusby didn’t want to talk to any of his acquaintances − those, that is, who were taking the same examination, and remaining in residence during this first week of the vacation for that purpose. They would all just be wondering whether they had done rather better, or rather worse, than they had hoped. Lusby couldn’t bear the thought of revealing himself as in a position so remote from that. He was right back with the sort of loneliness of his very first days in college. Only, he’d had his hopes and ambitions to help him then. He didn’t have them now.’

  ‘Arnold,’ Atlas said, ‘stop so obligingly making things vivid for us.’

  ‘Very well, Charles. But we do want to arrive at the young man’s state of mind.’

  ‘We want to arrive at his whereabouts, for a start.’

  ‘Then let me tell Pattullo what we know about that. This morning, Lusby didn’t turn up at the Schools at all. And that, of course, at last started something. When he hadn’t appeared in his place within the prescribed twenty minutes of the first hour the examiners contacted our Senior Tutor. Or rather − since he is away ill at the moment − our acting Senior Tutor, who is Cyril here. And Cyril set inquiries going. We’re still waiting for an answer to them.’

  ‘The scout on that staircase in Rattenbury has a notion Lusby said something about going home.’ Bedworth, anxiously precise, had taken up the story. ‘Unfortunately he’s not at all an intelligent man − and moreover, as Arnold has hinted, he hadn’t much interest in Lusby. So that piece of evidence is rather unreliable. Lusby has certainly vanished, but he doesn’t appear to have taken any of his possessions with him. And perhaps you see, Duncan, that I’ve had rather a difficult decision to make. The problem does crop up from time to time, but I think it can be dealt with only on an ad hoc basis. In terms, I mean, of one’s sense of the particular situation and the particular man.’

  ‘I can imagine that.’

  ‘You know how chary the police are of classifying anybody as a missing person. If your husband, or your grown-up daughter, doesn’t choose to come home, or walks out of the front door and fails to turn up for tea, it’s no good expecting a hunt to be set instantly on foot. Roughly speaking, people are entitled to take themselves off where they please. And that goes for an undergraduate member of a college. He has come of age, and is free to choose between one lawful course of conduct and another. So you see what I mean. If Lusby has run away, we can only try to catch up with him in some unspectacular way, and reason with him. If it is really home to his parents that he has bolted, that would seem to be simple. But then there’s the question of confidence. The theory that college authorities stand in loco parentis with these young adults has worn pretty thin by now. Suppose Lusby has got himself a job on a building site, and is going to receive a pay-packet for the first time in his life. Surprising his parents with that in a week or a fortnight’s time may be his notion of rehabilitating himself in his own regard. So am I right in going clucking to them now—and it may be alarming them very much?’

  ‘I see the problems,’ I said. It struck me that Bedworth, although now an authority on two writers distinguished for a subtle movement of mind, retained a certain laboured explicitness of his own characteristic note.

  ‘But my dear Cyril,’ Lempriere said, ‘the art of administration consists largely in ignoring the problems, or at least in not being diverted by them. Lusby’s hypothetical pay-packet simply has no business in your mind. What are you going to do?

  ‘Drive to Bethnal Green in the morning.’

  ‘Bethnal Green?’ Atlas repeated blankly.

  ‘Certainly.’ Bedworth now spoke briskly; his rise to challenge had been immediate. ‘It’s where the lad’s parents live. If there’s no news by morning, I’ll go and see them. Until I’ve seen how things lie, they need have no notion such a call is anything out of the way. They’re not university people.’

  ‘That’s the right thing,’ Gender said quietly. ‘Only, Cyril, it ought to be me. I’m the boy’s tutor. I should have thought of it.’

  ‘I know you’d do it more skilfully than I shall, Jimmy. But you’d better remain, I think, on that bridge.’ Quite simply, I realised, Bedworth was giving an order. ‘Much the likeliest thing is that Lusby will turn up in college again − rather battered and needing his hand held.’

  ‘Very well. And if he does, I’ll try to do a bit better than those chocolate Bath Olivers.’

  This lengthy discussion, so oddly located and timed, had been increasingly surprising. I felt it to be based on some premise not revealed to me, but about which I might now without intrusiveness inquire.

  ‘What sort of a young man is Lusby?’ I asked.

  ‘Erratic,’ Gender said. ‘But I suppose that’s self-evident. His allowing himself to be lured into that silly wager shows it. A serious man, working hard for an examination that means a great deal to him. And suddenly this! It’s dotty.’

  ‘Or it’s what Damian,’ Atlas said, ‘would call an aberrant episode during an identity-crisis of adolescence.’

  ‘Rubbishing jargon, Charles. I’d only say that Lusby is withdrawn and not easy to know − in addition to which he’s probably very able indeed. He ought to be performing outstandingly in this examination, and he knows it. I suppose that will make the muck-up all the more bitter to him. Perhaps a hostile observer would say he had more brains than guts.

  But that would be shallow and unfair.’ Gender hesitated. ‘As a matter of fact, and as Cyril knows, Lusby has a little come Damian’s way already. He has a depressive tendency to contend with.’

  ‘That has scarcely been concealed from any of us,’ Lempriere said drily. ‘It’s plainly the occasion of this tizzy.’

  ‘Very well. But it’s my experience that such chaps often have an underlying toughness − a sort of stoicism − which keeps them in the race. I just hope Paul Lusby has. I’ve been rather looking forward to getting something really going with him over the next three years. I’m very distressed about this.’

  ‘But you don’t mind,’ Lempriere said, ‘requiring your Paul Lusbys to fight their way into the Examination Schools through harmless once-in-three-year flings. And if one only gives the matter a little thought, one realises that conspicuous expenditure is more prevalent in Bethnal Green than Mayfair.’

  The sudden ferocity of this, expressed between men who clearly respected one another, disconcerted me. Perhaps it was something merely verbal, like a nervous tic. Perhaps it belonged with that order of ritualised combat under which one barrister briefly flashes out at another in the simple interest of keeping things lively. But certainly it reflected some condition of strain. These four men hadn’t slipped away to confer merely because a young man had failed to sit through an examination. They had other fears about him. And Gender had touched on the ground for these.

  So far, we had been talking undisturbed. Not a soul had strayed into Howard. The quad wasn’t being used, presumably, to accommodate Gaudy guests; otherwise some of them would by this time be making their way through it to bed. It was past midnight, and every now and then I had been conscious of the starting up of an engine in the distant college car-park as somebody of the less leisured sort prepared to drive, or be driven, away. I was conscious, too, that the character of the warm still night was changing. To the west the stars had vanished behind an inky wash, and the air in the shadowy stone trough we stood in felt ominous and electrical.

  ‘Yes, there will be a storm,’ Atlas murmured to me, as if his observations had matched mine. ‘We’ll be driven under hatches.’ His glance had been over the nautical-seeming litter on the grass, but now it travelled further, a
nd my own followed. A figure was advancing on us from a far corner of the quad. He was in evening dress, but wore a bowler hat. For a moment I thought, absurdly, that it was Tony, who had at least arrived in Oxford in a bowler. Then I saw that here was a college servant − perhaps the common-room butler − dressed in the main for the formal evening occasion, but wearing in addition this token of day-time consequence. It certainly wasn’t required against the night air, but did prove to have a function. He walked up to the acting Senior Tutor, and took it off in style.

  ‘Mr Bedworth,’ he said. ‘A telephone call, sir.’ He paused for a moment, and looked round the rest of us. ‘A gentleman on a newspaper.’

  ‘At this time of night! Haven’t you told him …?’

  ‘I told him about the Gaudy, sir. He at once asked questions about it. And then about the Ball.’

  ‘What did he want to know about that?’ It was Lempriere who snapped out this question.

  ‘What might be called its scope, sir. Whether most of the gentlemen attended, and the price of a ticket. I need hardly say I have given him no satisfaction. We are told always to be careful about the press.’ The man glanced at me briefly, as if suspecting that I had a notebook in my pocket. ‘I think we may presently have another call from elsewhere. But it might be wise for Mr Bedworth to have a word with this person now.’

  Bedworth turned away without speaking, and the two men disappeared into the gloom together. The four of us remaining fell to walking slowly up and down the quad. Nobody said anything like ‘I hope it’s not a disaster’ or ‘This sounds bad’. We were perfectly silent. I was surprised to find myself confident that I ought not to slip sway. Again a car started up in the distance, and then there was a brief straggling chiming of those of Oxford’s bells that concern themselves with the quarter-hours. Gender produced a cigarette-case, thought better of the action, and shoved it away. And then Bedworth was walking slowly back to join us.