The Gaudy

by J. I. M. Stewart

  ‘I don’t think so. He probably feels just as he said. And you’re likely, Nick, to end up knowing more about the place than he does, just because you’ve been here from the start. Institutions like this are mysterious. They have a sort of secret life of their own. And it’s always in charge, too. The dons go huffing and puffing in this direction and that, and the college just holds on its own course. Or that’s my guess about it. I’m an outsider. I don’t really know.’

  ‘I suppose that’s how plays get written.’ Junkin offered this mordant conjecture without irony; rather admiringly, indeed. I admitted that playwrights grope around amid vast ignorances − this while secretly telling myself that Junkin’s character, at least, was something I was coming to know about. His realism and total incomprehension of social structures could be read as characteristic of his class; so, perhaps, could his crude but not unwholesome sexual precocity − although in this his attitudes must be diffused pretty well through his entire age-group. And I rather saw as the clou here the rationally measured-out hospitality which had put Tin Pin on the sofa and Junkin in his bed. Junkin was a sensible young man, and if he wasn’t intellectual he was far from stupid. If one had to endow him with an idiosyncrasy by which I mean thought to tip him into a play − it would be done by exaggerating his liability to mental inconsecutiveness and confusion and playing this off against a contrastingly stressed native sagacity. These simplicities of personality-structure belong, I suppose, to the theatre rather than to the novel. And if Junkin was, in fact, put together on simple lines, this was perhaps why the theatre attracted him.

  These vague notions went through my head as I drank my coffee, but I don’t think it occurred to Junkin that I was speculating about him; indeed, my manners would have been falling far short of his had I given him occasion for any thought of the sort. We talked in a relaxed and rambling way for some time. In fact the library was beginning to show in faint silhouette against a first flush of midsummer dawn before the hospitable youth − figuratively speaking − tucked me up in bed. I went to sleep at once, without taking time to reflect on the fact − not perhaps much to my credit − that the light comedy of Tin Pin and her unkindled rescuer had entirely driven the far from amusing, although indeed bizarre, history of Ivo Mumford from my head. It was, I had to suppose, rather more my sort of thing.

  X

  I woke up to what I supposed was the memory of a dream − and one constructed on fairly orthodox Freudian lines. Its sexual purport would need digging for, but it was compounded, as it ought to be, of experiences of the past twenty-four hours mingled with concerns drawn from remote childhood: all this to the effecting of a disturbing and fantastic whole. I had returned to college, where I had encountered my old friend Tony Mumford. And Tony had proved to have an undergraduate son called Ivo, who had suddenly got himself into deep disgrace (sex did come in here) and had then been secretly flown out of the country at an hour’s notice by Gavin Mogridge, who no longer tried to play the ‘cello and had become instead something very high up in what the Chancellor of the Exchequer still calls the Secret Service. I was just satisfactorily linking this last dream-element with that fantasy-life upon which I had retreated upon discovering myself not to be the cleverest boy in Miss Frazer’s form when I came to my senses and realised that Ivo Mumford’s abrupt expatriation (if, in fact, it had successfully taken place) belonged to the waking world. So did the prospect of becoming a reader − a kind of mini-professor, it seemed − in the university. And so did the episode of Nicolas Junkin and Tin Pin. The lady had, I hoped, departed for good. But her none-too-willing host was presumably still on his sofa in the next room.

  Even on that uncommodious perch, he would with luck be sleeping the untroubled sleep of youth. But I didn’t care to think of him as possibly tossing about, so I got out of bed and quietly opened the communicating door. There was no Junkin in the room. Was it perhaps Junkin who had been a dream? More probably he had gone out to the loo. Then I glanced at the mantelpiece, and saw an envelope perched just where the Provost’s had been perched the night before. I crossed the room and picked it up. It said simply ‘Mr Pattullo’ in a bold, unformed hand. I opened it.

  Dear Mr Pattullo,

  7 a.m. and I think I’d better be off. I hope it isn’t rude and I hope Plot will bring you tea. He does even me sometimes when he thinks I’m a bit down. It will be less akward − although Plot is really quite good when akward things happen as or course they sometimes must. And as a matter of fact I am meeting a man and we are going to Turky. I’ve always rather wanted to go to Turky and it is very much on now. We shall hike of course, although the college has given me a travel grant which is hansome of them considering how I stand with those rotten examiners. We wonder if we’ll have to have our haircut at the frontier. I asked my tutor and he said it wasn’t a thing English gentlemen stood for from wogs and wops in his time but that times change. He says ‘English gentlemen’ as a joke but not ofensively. He is called Lempriere, I wonder if you know him. I am so sorry about last night. It must have been very tiring for you after a Gaudy (which I now know about) and which must be particularly tiring when one is getting on. I hope to see more of your plays. If you don’t get a ppc from me from Turky it will be because the college hasn’t sent it on. They are often rather bad about male.

  Yours truly,

  Nick (Junkin)

  I went back to bed − partly because I wanted Plot to have the satisfaction of waking me up, drawing back the curtains, and, no doubt, reporting on the state of the weather. A second reading of Junkin’s letter confirmed me in the view that his examiners had at least certain superficial problems on their hands. It seemed improbable that Junkin’s spelling and epistolarly style were in the least a characteristic product of Cokeville G.S. They were native to the man. I was pleased by his manner of signing his name. It seemed to signal that I hadn’t been presuming in addressing him as Nick.

  I considered the shape of the advancing day. It had a train to Paddington at the end of it, but was going to run to several social occasions before that. They would be overshadowed, I saw, by the still-undetermined state of Ivo Mumford’s fortunes. One couldn’t ride away from an affair like that, or be other than oppressed by Tony’s anxieties, simply because its untoward nature draped it with a curious unreality. In any case, I was myself involved, if in a peripheral way, since Mogridge − following, it was to be supposed, some professional rule-book − had announced that he would use me as a first channel of communication with Ivo’s family.

  I was distracted from these thoughts by voices floating up from the Elm Walk in Long Field. They came to me, I believe, with a more immediate sense of familiarity renewed than anything else had occasioned since my arriving for the Gaudy. There is no such thing as an Oxford accent, since what phoneticians call Received Standard English came into existence without the university’s playing any very identifiable part in the process. But there is undoubtedly an Oxfordshire accent, and I had first become aware of it through the open window under which I was now lying. (The bed hadn’t moved between my time and Junkin’s, and the two of us had shoved it back into place after disposing of Tin Pin.) College servants arriving, perhaps at a rather later hour than long ago, to begin their daily round and common task were calling out to one another as cheerfully as if under the immediate inspiration of Bishop Ken’s morning hymn.

  It was going to be another hot day, and already the veil of mist over Long Field would be stirring, would here and there be catching gleams of golden light. Remembering this, I forgot my benevolent plan of being found comfortably asleep by Plot. Tossing aside a sheet and single blanket (although not to a far corner of the room), I scrambled to my knees on the mattress, pushed aside the curtain, and threw up the lower window-sash so that I could lean out. When I had got both arms flat on the stone sill, and my chin contemplatively lodged on them, I experienced one of those sensations of entire well-being and unflawed happiness which are never more than momentary, nor by any means always a
ssociated with nostalgic feeling, as this one appeared to be.

  It had been, of course, early October when I had arrived in Surrey to begin my first Michaelmas Term. I thought I remembered golden mornings in its opening weeks, and myself greeting them just as I was greeting this June morning now. My feelings I didn’t remember at all, but it was perhaps reasonable to assume that they had been buoyant, and that most of the sunshine I seemed to recall was supplied by my later imagination as a kind of climatic correlative to an inner weather. I had ended that term in love with the place to an extent which might have been said to constitute a disease, and it was fair to suppose that leading up to this there had been a substantial prodromal period when the bug was hatching.

  The mist hanging over Long Field was still thick and almost motionless; it was with only a suggestion of the faintest sprinkling of gold dust that sunlight as yet flecked it. Suddenly a number of creatures like performing brown bears emerged from the haze, baggy and upright. There were eight bears and a hedgehog − the eight being oarsmen and the ninth their cox. All were in enveloping track-suits except for one tall youth who walked in front carrying his blade and wearing, for some reason, no more than Junkin had been slumbering in when summoned to the rescue by Tin Pin. All vanished into vapour as they had come, making for the river. They were a crew that had recently done well in Eights, I uncertainly supposed, and whose training was unbroken because they were ambitious of equal distinction at Henley. Rowing had always been mysterious; indeed, the entire life of athletes had remained largely closed to me. Some of us, intellectuals or aesthetes (although this was an outmoded word) had professed a kind of connoisseurship in that species of our fellows, lithe or lumbering, flannelled or muddy. It had been a taste, this indulgent spectatorship, either genuinely or ironically homosexual in its prompting, and I had to be taught by Tony and others that it was ‘inhibited’ to disapprove of it. Now I should have liked to know what went on inside the supposedly thick skulls of these hearties. And under − for that matter − those great mops of hair. For I had several times noticed on television screens what I had glimpsed again now: that the devotedly athletic youth of England would be just as much at hazard on the frontier of Turkey as Nicolas Junkin could possibly be. The tall lad bearing his oar had been all raven locks brushing bronzed shoulders.

  At this point another college servant, arriving belatedly on a bicycle, glanced up at me with what I thought of as amusement. I reacted to this as promptly as I should have done in my earliest tenure of the window, ducking away from it as if detected in some eccentricity. I banged my head on the sash as a result, and as a result of that again gave the window a further and indignant upward shove. It moved a couple of inches, and I found myself looking at a faint but curious appearance thus disclosed. It was another bear. Only this time it was a Rupert Bear, tenuously scratched and then inked into the woodwork. I was sure that Rupert Bear had his first home in children’s comics when I was myself a child, but I had a notion that he had lived on to be adopted as some sort of mascot, or emblem of niceness and innocence, by young people believing that niceness and innocence are politically as well as morally feasible. So Rupert’s present appearance was perhaps the handiwork of Junkin. But it now struck me that the figure was designed not as Rupert but as Rupert’s sister − although I couldn’t recall whether such a character was, or was not, canonical. My reason for this conjecture was that the figure appeared to wear what might have been a ballet dancer’s tutu. This was balanced, and with a certain sense of composition or equipoise, by a balloon issuing from the figure’s mouth. The balloon had once said something, but no single scratch of the message remained. I looked again, and saw that here was Rupert himself, after all. What he was wearing was not a ballet-skirt but a kilt. And I could supply the vanished words. They had been, Ye maun thole it, Dunkie.

  So in fact my first Surrey days had not been so blissful after all. I had been obliged to remind myself of what I had elsewhere been taught: that he who endureth to the end shall be saved. And now my memory held the whole picture. Waking up in this strange place on those mild October mornings, I had only to push up the window-sash to its fullest extent to have Rupert emerge from his den and deliver his wholesome admonishment.

  I didn’t find this suddenly recollected behaviour at all astonishing. Perhaps it was surprising that I had so effectively screened it away, and my fellow freshmen would certainly have been puzzled had one of them come upon Rupert in his mint condition. I was an unsophisticated lad − but then so, in one direction or another, were most of them; and I doubt whether I had to put much effort into appearing as self-possessed, as inclined to amusement rather than alarm in these new surroundings, as anybody else. Geographically I had made a longer hop than most, but my schooling had been of the semi-Sassenach cast I have described; and this, together with being my mother’s son and certain other family associations, made me distinguishably the same sort of boy − if slightly exoticised − as those who, with a varying degree of the mysterious, referred to one another as Salopians, Wykehamists, or Carthusians. I don’t think I ever felt myself as floundering. It had been something deeper that obliged me to call Rupert Bear to my aid − frustrated first love, in fact, with which Oxford had nothing to do.

  ‘Dunkie’ was my father’s name for me. (He called my brother ‘Nennie’, believing Ninian to be the same name as that of the British historian Nennius.) His use of the vernacular to which he had been brought up − which Scottish journalists liked to refer to as the Doric − was on the whole confined to occasions upon which his habitual mild intemperance happened to take him in a cross-grained way; when its effect, as commonly, was merely mellowing, it amused him to talk in fluent although grammatically imperfect French. A ‘guid crop maun thole the thistle’, he might say, contemplating some vexatious commission in a bunch of those lying ahead of him. My mother, too, had some command of this speech, although mainly confined within the bounds of family anecdote. My Rupert Bear, indeed, was probably indebted to her. Her grandfather’s coachman, she would recount, being reproved for doffing his livery-coat on a hot day, had replied, ‘Sir, I can barely thole my breeks’. My mother, simple-minded and fond of gaiety, found a story like this very amusing. And I recalled now that at Oxford I had myself been inclined to show off my command of peasant speech − something which would have been held wholly pointless at school. I would tell Tony that he was a flea-luggit dafty, or pronounce P. P. Killiecrankie a fair scunner.

  During what I could now think of as three Mumford generations, the colleges of Oxford, as of Cambridge, must have been receiving a steadily increasing proportion of young men who had never been away from home before. There had been more Nicolas Junkins in Tony’s time than in his father’s, and there were now more in Ivo’s time than there had been in Tony’s. My own Oxford acquaintance with home-keeping boys had been in the main − and again those mysterious terms − with Paulines and Westminsters, who seemed to be encountering nothing out of the way. They may well have had their own Rupert Bears, all the same. Like Ninian and myself they had lived on the alarming fringe of boarding school life. For boys like Junkin that life was a fiction: exciting, enticing, romantic, horrifying − but securely confined within the covers of school stories. For boys in half-and-half places, whether English or Scottish, it was a presence, unnerving at least in some degree, just beyond a baize door. I seem to recall Graham Greene as describing this situation very well. Perhaps I myself had found more alarming than I consciously realised being pitched through the equivalent of such a door when I found myself on the staircase.

  Ninian and I, again, had spent a good many years under the intermittent threat of being turned into boarders. This was because my father − at least during periodic dangerous moments of attention to the matter − had been aware that our domestic discipline was ramshackle and disorganised, and had concluded, rationally enough, that punctual meals, baths, prep and bedtime, together with an occasional thwack with a gym shoe (which last was something he himse
lf lived a universe apart from any possibility of administering) would have exercised a bracing effect on our young lives as a whole. Fortunately he never had, when it came to the pinch, the money or perhaps the heart to do anything about it. I say ‘fortunately’ because our boarders, of whom there must have been something under a couple of hundred, were a displeasingly tough lot, to whom we gave as wide a berth as we could. Many were the sons of prosperous Lowland farmers. Others, coming from impecunious Service families without much intellectual pretension, would have been comfortably accommodated at Kipling’s Westward Ho! The day-boys − the sons of all those professors and advocates and doctors (to say nothing of such writers and artists as that part of the world managed to support) − viewed these young savages with fascinated horror. Every second one of them we regarded − exaggeratedly, no doubt − as a revolting bully with nasty (and by us only dimly apprehended) private habits. To be cast among them would be to suffer something like what we were hearing of as currently happening in concentration camps. This nightmare, if largely baseless, owned a considerable power of lingering on. Conceivably I sometimes imagined myself to catch a murmur of it from among the young bloods of the college to which my father’s eventual dramatic action and my own facility in English prose composition had transported me.

  My actual experience of being away from home, although of a different sort, had been almost equally daunting in its way. This was because of the broad facts of my family history. My parents had met in Rome when my father was an art student living there on some exiguous bursary and my mother was being ‘finished’ in an expensive school. They were thus both very young. Their first encounter was in the Sistine Chapel. There is something undeniably impressive in the thought of a life relationship having its inception in front of Michelangelo’s Last Judgement; and my mother, although I doubt whether she ever read A Room with a View, would declare that always thereafter she was to associate my father with that one among the twenty nude youths on the Chapel’s ceiling who carries a burden of acorns. The meeting is conceivable. How they contrived to continue to meet, and much more how they contrived to be married within the precincts of the British Embassy, I don’t profess to know − except, indeed, that my father was a hard man to beat.