‘I see.’ In fact, I didn’t quite see, since the information just conveyed to me was ambiguous. ‘Inside’ might mean what we had been accustomed to call the bin. But it seemed more probable that it meant gaol. ‘You must all make what you can of it,’ I said. ‘At least it’s not all that uncommon. I’ve noticed that the children of successful politicians are a good deal at risk. More so than the children of scribblers for example. It’s because their fathers don’t find much time to attend to them.’
‘Perfectly true.’
This was a notable reply. It told me both that hostilities were at an end and that old Mr Mumford − if in a slightly senile way − was quite as acute as his son. He had been able suddenly to reflect that it was allies that were required.
‘I don’t go to the theatres,’ he said, ‘so I know nothing about your plays. But I imagine a certain realism attends them.’
‘That’s their ambition, but it commonly goes unrealised. Too much sparkle, as a matter of fact.’ I paused, and then amplified. ‘Too much damned and confounded sparkle.’
‘Sparkle isn’t going to help us tonight.’
‘I can see that. And neither is dramatic criticism. If I have anything that helps, I lay it on.’
‘Thank you, my dear sir. It’s something, I suppose, that we all belong to this place.’
‘No doubt.’ The flash of sentiment had disconcerted me − and not the less because there was at least a wisp of substance to it.
‘Not that the college hasn’t gone to the dogs. Do you know? Ivo has just been elected to the Uffington. It’s a thing the lad has been looking forward to immensely − and now the dons are talking about sending him down. What colossal cheek!’
‘I’m afraid it may be an aspect of the matter that hasn’t occurred to them.’ For a moment the Uffington had eluded me, but now I remembered about it. It was an undergraduate dining-club of the most exclusive sort. Its members had a resplendent evening dress all of their own, and were celebrated for uproarious and destructive behaviour. Tony had been a member of it, but had always been careful to speak of it with a whimsical tolerance. His father, clearly, belonged to an age in which it had been unnecessary to dissimulate one’s satisfaction in enjoying such superiorities, and it seemed probable that Ivo himself was a throw-back in this regard. But although the social assumptions hovering behind old Mr Mumford’s remarks didn’t greatly appeal to me I felt it would be indecent to appear other than sympathetic while still in the dark about the nature and gravity of the scrape the young man had landed in. ‘I’m afraid,’ I therefore went on, ‘that what I said about politicians and their children wasn’t particularly called for in the present case. Tony is, in fact, extremely concerned about Ivo. I believe that all through this Gaudy his chief determination has been to see what can be done to influence any decision about the boy’s immediate academic future. I’m not confident that the effort is all that well-judged, but there’s no question of the will he’s putting into it.’
‘Into smashing this nonsense of turning Ivo out? We can certainly settle that hash.’ The senior Mumford produced this with what an unfriendly critic would have called a contemptuous snarl. ‘I’m quite prepared to speak to the Provost myself. In which case he’ll damn well learn something.’ The outraged grandfather glowered at me anew − out of heaven knew what cloud-cuckoo-land of social self-importance. ‘Haven’t we,’ he demanded, as if sensing my thought, ‘subscribed to every tomfool appeal the place has put out for generations? And now they think to treat Ivo as if he were a charity-brat.’
‘I doubt whether they’d treat anybody as if he were exactly that.’ ‘Charity brat’, it occurred to me, would be Mr Mumford’s term for Nicolas Junkin of Cokeville, and this thought a little antagonised me again. ‘But I gather it’s not the mere question whether Ivo remains in residence or goes down that’s on the carpet now. It’s whether he goes inside. Tony’s the man you’ve come to discuss that with.’ I turned at the sound of an opening door. ‘And here he is at last.’
Tony was standing in the doorway, eyeing us steadily. He had no time to waste in astonishment, but for an arrested moment he was unnaturally still.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘speak up! What is it?’
‘It’s that confounded boy.’ For the first time, old Mr Mumford’s voice was gentle. ‘It seems he’s been a bit rough with a girl.’
We had presumably been treated to an understatement − an instance of what the school-books call meiosis. It silenced Tony for a second, and I myself had no impulse to speak. Old Mr Mumford hadn’t turned up at the tail-end of a Gaudy − almost in the small-hours, indeed − to announce that his grandson had been guilty of a breach of manners. Our failure to produce an articulate response had the effect of throwing him back upon his own more settled mode of utterance.
‘And it doesn’t even seem,’ he snarled, ‘that the incompetent young fool was the one who had her in the end.’
‘In heaven’s name, think what you’re saying!’ Tony had gone pale, and I could see − with surprise, although surprise wasn’t in the least reasonable − that he was trembling. ‘Just what are you talking about?’
‘I’m talking about all hell let loose. The trollop seems to have been fooling around with them for hours. But as soon as—’
‘Them? ‘ Tony said.
‘A gang of young louts from the village. But she put on a turn as soon as she got home. She ran into the house, screaming out that she’d been raped.’
The ugly word reverberated in the room. I had the grotesque thought that the ladies in the picture over the mantlepiece were shocked by it. But it was no moment for nonsense.
‘Are you sure,’ I asked, ‘that the girl is really what you call a trollop?’
‘Of course she is. The village harlot, I suppose. Not that I know anything about her.’
‘It’s an odd way for a village harlot to end an evening.’ Tony had swallowed before making this ominous point, and his face was twitching. I felt a sudden certainty that, Cabinet rank or not, he was going to prove unequal to the catastrophe. His head had been full of a situation he was confident he could manage − and it had suddenly announced itself, as with a thunder-clap, to be of no significance whatever. And his father, I saw, had shot his bolt. The effort of merely tumbling the thing out at us had − at least for the moment − finished him. I was left with a sense of being myself − in Jimmy Gender’s phrase − on the bridge.
I felt, however, some way from being adequately clearheaded. I was trying to remember what had brought me in on this; what, at this outlandish hour, had persuaded me to enter Ivo Mumford’s room. I failed to do so − which was unimportant, since the point had no relevance to the crisis on hand. But I was somehow convinced that there was a crisis in the sense that, if the thing could be got clear, there might be something that needed doing at once. And now Paul Lusby’s story came back to me. Something of the sort had held about that dead boy. Somewhere, as the short fatal chain of his misfortunes was fabricating itself, there had been a slip-up which a number of men were now feeling unhappy about. It hadn’t in the least been a matter of passing the buck between them. But there had been some division of responsibilities from which a certain inattention had flowed; and there had been that brief but fatal hesitancy while Cyril Bedworth (self-evidently the most conscientious of men) had weighed up this against that. If a few hours had been saved, Lusby might be sleeping soundly in his bed now.
I brought my mind away from this with a wrench, but not before glimpsing that I had gone after a false analogy. The college fellows had been confronted with a lad put at hazard through a wholly blameless folly and his own socially-engendered misestimation of the disastrousness of failing a trivial examination. The Mumfords and myself had on our hands the problem of extricating Ivo from something dreadfully different. Supposing it could be done, there was still what might conceivably be a daunting moral problem interposed between ourselves and the doing of it. The degree of the dauntingness depended very much
on the exact nature of the facts. As far as Tony and I were concerned, we were still unprovided with them.
But even in mulling over the business like this − I asked myself − wasn’t I behaving as Bedworth had behaved over Lusby − or like Hamlet, thinking too precisely on the event? I was sitting on a window-seat, uncurtained against the darkness of Surrey, that citadel of a secure and ordered life. Beyond it, all of a sudden, was this nebulous and perhaps horrible thing. I jumped to my feet − nervously, as if there could be any help in that. I had taken a couple of paces forward when there came a tap on the door. Tony and his father called out − irritably but simultaneously − to come in. It was a small point of curiosity; each of them had commanded the place in his time. The door opened, and framed the figure of Mogridge.
‘Oh, Tony,’ Mogridge said mildly. ‘I’d gone out to the loo on the next staircase − it’s a better one, you remember − and I saw the light in your room. So I thought I’d look in and say goodnight.’
‘Hullo, Gavin.’ Tony managed the effort of being a host. ‘I don’t think you ever met my father? Father, this is Gavin Mogridge. We were up together.’
‘How do you do.’ Mr Mumford’s concern for the intruder’s welfare was curtly minimal. ‘As it happens, Mr Mugbridge, we’re in the middle of a private conversation.’
‘Mogridge,’ Mogridge said.
‘Very well − Mogridge.’ Mr Mumford checked himself and stared. ‘You wouldn’t be the fellow who wrote that book the devil of a time ago?’
‘Yes, I am.’ Mogridge was presumably habituated to making this acknowledgement. What had been demanded of him was more or less the equivalent of that ‘Do you still write plays?’ with which I was myself so familiar. I now expected Mr Mumford’s rejoinder to concern itself with hair and fingernails. But this proved to be an error.
‘A close-run thing, that,’ Mr Mumford said. ‘And you must have been not long out of your baby-carriage. You didn’t do too badly.’
‘Thank you very much.’ Reasonably in view of what had been intimated to him, Mogridge made to withdraw. It was with an air, which was not the least self-conscious, of composed dignity. He might have been a white man of unquestioned standing on the frontiers of empire, retreating in good order after blundering in upon some native pow-wow or palaver that was no business of his. It was only another instance of the Mogridge imperturbability, but it somehow triggered off my one effective act that night.
‘Tony,’ I said, ‘I think we ought to have Gavin in on our problem.’
It was perhaps because he was baffled and exhausted that Tony agreed with this strange-seeming suggestion. His father, surprisingly, made no protest; he may vaguely have supposed that the celebrated author of Mochica was now an equally celebrated silk at the criminal bar. As for Mogridge, he simply listened seriously to a recapitulation of what Tony and I had already heard. And then there was an expectant pause.
‘Yes − rape,’ Mogridge said. He uttered the word so vaguely that he might have been wondering whether we were discussing one of the administrative districts of Sussex or the kind of turnip which one feeds to sheep. But his next remark negatived this. ‘It’s regarded almost everywhere,’ he said, ‘as a very serious thing. The river-dwelling Mundugumor come to mind. And the Kikuyu and the Masai. There’s a sharp distinction from marriage by capture.’ He thought for a moment. ‘I don’t suppose Ivo would have any notion of marrying the girl?’ Slantwise as usual, he glanced at us each in turn, and seemed conscious that the question struck old Mr Mumford as an idle one. ‘One has to review the possibilities,’ he said. ‘One isn’t being orderly if one goes about something in a random manner. It’s a point that’s missed by people who don’t see it. Don’t you agree?’ Securing a savage mutter from the old gentleman by way of response to his striking tautology seemed to encourage him. ‘Yes,’ he went on. ‘Rape, fortunately, is regarded very seriously indeed.’
‘Very probably,’ Tony said. ‘But as we’re not gathered here as guardians of public morals, I can’t see that the fact’s an encouraging one.’
‘Oh, but Tony, you don’t understand me. The point is that a judge won’t let you be slapped down for rape at the drop of a handkerchief, as he will for assault or drunk and disorderly or even passing a dud cheque. And that’s because it is so serious. It isn’t at all easy, as a matter of fact, to get convicted of rape. I’ve noticed that in Moa and Marundung. And you’d find that what goes for places like those commonly goes for England too. Of course, we don’t know nearly enough about this business yet. But I’d be very surprised, Tony, if your son were actually convicted of rape before a judge of the High Court. On this occasion, that’s to say.’ Mogridge turned back to Tony’s father. ‘Where is Ivo now?’
‘I told him to clear out and lie low.’
‘I see.’ Mogridge didn’t look as if he thought well of this. ‘Do you mean abroad? I doubt whether there are many countries that would be much good. Tibet would have been not too bad at one time. I had one or two friends in Lhasa who would have arranged it. But things have changed for the worse there in recent years, as you know.’
‘No doubt.’ Mr Mumford was patently feeling that my recruitment of this owlish character had been either an absurdity or a disaster. ‘But Ivo isn’t abroad. I packed him off to the gardener’s cottage on the other side of the park. The gardener and his family are away on their holiday. And I simply told this fellow that Ivo couldn’t have been involved, for the good reason that he wasn’t staying with me.’
‘But he was staying with you?’
‘Of course he was. Or, at least, it appeared that he was intending to. He’d just arrived.’
‘In fact, you promptly lied to somebody?’
‘Damn it, man, I wasn’t in a witness box. When an impertinent fellow—’
‘It wasn’t perjury, of course. And you had a natural impulse to protect your grandson. It mayn’t have been judicious, all the same. The inference would be − once the prevarication was discovered, I mean − that you admitted to yourself that Ivo had got on the wrong side of the law. Perhaps he had. Perhaps he’d confessed it to you.’ Mogridge looked at his watch. ‘Anyway, I don’t like the sound of that gardener’s cottage, and we’d better be on the move about it within the next half hour. So we must have the full facts, and in proper order, as succinctly as may be.’
‘Very well.’ The firmness of this demand made old Mr Mumford brace himself perceptibly. ‘Ivo turned up on me late yesterday evening. He had some supper—‘
‘How did he arrive? Where had he come from?’
‘He drove up in his own car − I don’t know from where. He’d stayed a night or two with a friend, I think, after the end of term. I like him to turn up on me unannounced from time to time. I’m a widower, you know, living alone at Otby.’
‘Alone? Haven’t you any servants?’
‘Of course I have servants. But there was only my housekeeper around. It was she who got Ivo some supper.’
‘Just a moment. Where’s that car now?’
‘Ivo’s car? He’s taken it down to the cottage, I suppose. There’s a shed.’
This kind of thing went on for some time. Except for the Mogridge slow-motion effect, which it would be tedious to reproduce, it was rather like one of those popular plays featuring a brilliant barrister or great detective disporting himself among the family skeletons. I kept a grip on the facts as they came together, since it would have been irresponsible to do anything else, but what I found myself wanting to get out of them was some clearer impression of the character of Ivo Mumford. Why had this newly elected member of the Uffington, this precocious connoisseur of brandy and champagne, engaged in what had proved so disastrous an escapade with a group of village lads? Part of the answer seemed to be that he had done it before. His visits to his more or less solitary grandfather were of their nature rather dull, and the neighbourhood was short of young people of his own sort. So as a schoolboy it had amused him occasionally to play around with whatever conte
mporaries he could get together. It was a picture, so far, of something as innocent, and indeed amiable, as could be. I didn’t find this conclusion much vitiated by its appearing that on these occasions Ivo had insisted on enjoying the prerogatives of the squire’s grandson in the way of bossing the other boys around. He had even at times − Mr Mumford interpolated with a momentary satisfaction which could scarcely have been called sagacious— imposed a pretty stiff discipline on some of them.
It was Tony who pounced on the significance of this last point − although I didn’t, indeed, think it had for a moment eluded Mogridge. The lads of Otby village − Tony was very clear about this − would admire Ivo the more, the more commanding Ivo chose to be. They would also − and Tony was quite intelligent enough to be equally clear about this − hate his classy little guts. In fact, a thoroughly ambivalent attitude would build up in them, and at a pinch skilled advocacy could elicit this in a court and then exploit it. Here were young men, it could be said, who had it in for another young man, not of their own sort. It would be rash to accept a word they said about him, or about the degree of his participation in whatever had taken place. Didn’t Mogridge − Tony demanded − agree?
‘But, Tony, we’re not facing that yet,’ Mogridge said. ‘It’s a last resort. One should always leave a last resort to the end. Otherwise, one gets it in the wrong place.’
‘If you can see any first resort, Gavin, for heaven’s sake let us hear it.’
‘We don’t know yet that this thing is ever going to come before a court. Affairs of the sort often don’t. They’re a muddle and a mess, with potential witnesses saying first one thing and then its opposite, and so on. The police − and we don’t even know as yet that the present trouble has got to them − therefore often think better of telling themselves they have reason to suppose a crime was committed. And that’s the end of the matter. But the real point is this: supposing the thing does go into court, we don’t want Ivo to go with it. We don’t want him mentioned at all. If he were shoved into the dock along with the whole bunch of them, and then acquitted as having been so much on the mere fringe of the affair as hardly to be aware of what was going on, it still wouldn’t be at all healthy for him, either in college or anywhere else.’
The Gaudy Page 16
