Shadows On the Grass

by Simon Raven

  ‘“Well, little Nikkai, my stepmother is still young and juicy, but I had made love to my pillow not ten minutes before, and this I told her.

  ‘“You must be waiting perhaps one half-hour, mother,” I said, “before the sap will be rising once more.”’

  ‘“Aiai, my sweet son, we do not have half an hour. Your father will not linger in the market. Aiai, aiaia. But I am older and wiser than thou, and I have thought of a shift to achieve my delight. Thus and thus.”’

  ‘“Then she sat down on a stool, lifted her robe and spread her hams to show her lotus, the lips whereof she did lewdly part with her fingers.”’

  ‘“Rise from your bed, Samuel my son,” she cooed, “rise and make water upon me.”’

  ‘“So I rose and stood before her and being full of piss from the long night I let forth a mighty steaming jet straight into the shaft where she stores her sweet syrup. And she did moan and frot and fart, she did wriggle and jiggle and shudder and judder and shake. Thus and thus did she achieve her delight.”’

  Nikkai leaned forward to attend to the obsolescent fire.

  ‘Yes, oh yes,’ he said, ‘I shall miss these fires of coal.

  ‘Such then, Simon, were the tales with which Samuel did beguile the hours in the box, true or false I know not, but making my horn stand so stiff it nearly lifted the scoring desk. Nor did such merry talk make for prompt figures. Many were the times when my lor’ would call from his seat beside my lady, “Scoreboard, scoreboard,” because Samuel, in the midst of his bawdy discourse, had let the score mount by ten or even twenty runs without changing the numbers. Then, when my lor’ shouted at him, he would lean out of the box and say, “Truly I am grovelling, my dread lord and master, but the handles do be sticking again.” After which he would change the numbers and laugh and begin yet another tale of lust and infamy.

  ‘Now of all the people in Samuel’s tales – Rachel the fat whore, whose navel was more succulent than many a women’s oyster, or Deirdre her maid whose nose was perished from the pox, or Parmula the seventy year old doxy with no legs, only stumps, who did as much business as any woman in the stews – of all these people, I say, my favourite was Samuel’s stepmother, about whom he had some new lewdness to retail at almost every match. So one day, when we had been long in our box and Samuel was all but parched of stories, I cried out to him, “Come, Samuel, is there news of your stepmother?” And he replied, “Aiaia, you have reminded me. Such news, O one-pubic-hair, such news. Listen and learn.

  ‘“My stepmother,” Samuel said, “has invented a new device, or perhaps she has read of it in books, for I cannot feel she is the first woman in the world to discover it. She sits in a rocking chair and thrusts two large marbles through the mossy gate into her Cavern of Delights, first one, then the other. And as she rocks in the chair the two marbles roll slowly up and down, clicking together and inching apart, and thus affording, she says, the most wondrous sensation she has ever experienced – though not quite as violent as that which overcome her on the morning when I piped my piss into her nest.”

  ‘“Oh Samuel,” I entreated, “tell me that story again, for I never tire of hearing it.”

  ‘So Samuel began with the well loved words, “One morning, when the spirits had stolen her wits and she knew no shame…”, and I listened and made some shift to mark down the runs and balls of the cricketers, and little did either of us know that my lady Jollif (who, as I have said, was called Joy and though of a certain age was much younger than his lordship) was approaching the box from behind, having been sent by her husband to find out why no new runs had gone up on the board for nearly fifteen minutes. My lor’ had a mighty crapula and did not feel up to shouting, which hurt his head, and as the Gold Coast Xl was in the field he did not know any man in the Pavilion well enough to send him on this mission, and so he had commanded his wife. And even now, as Samuel described his stepmother’s antics on the stool in his bedroom, she was standing on the steps that led to our box and listening to every word.

  As Samuel concluded his tale, she burst into the box and said, “Simply too lust-making. I always thought I was missing out on something and now I know what. You’re sure you’re not exaggerating – about all that frotting and farting and juddering and stuff?”

  ‘“No, no, ladyship,” said Samuel. “She did heave like an earthquake and squeal like a banshee loose from the pit.”

  ‘I think Samuel rather hoped for an invitation to demonstrate there and then, but Joy my lady Jollif for all her heat, and for all she had revelled in lechery with half the blacks in Gold Coast was too discreet to take her pleasure in a scoring box with the entire Gold Coast team looking on from the field. Instead she whisked her husband home and refused to let him go to the closet till he had nearly burst asunder, then ordered him to do to her what Samuel did to his stepmother.

  ‘“Here’s your last chance,” she said. “If you can’t even manage this, then I’ll call in the kitchen boy.”’

  ‘How do you know all this?’ I enquired.

  ‘My dear friend, that is such a question you should never ask of a storyteller. It simply is not done. Let us say that Samuel knew one of the servants, who was listening outside the door. Thus and thus. So the poor old peer person did his best, but it was a sorry dribble, bringing his lady no delight. And worse than that. My lor’ Jollif had so much gin and whisky hanging about his kidneys that his staling was toxic and did cause her ladyship’s noble fesses to turn every colour in the Atlas, and never again could she romp in riggishness and make the four-buttocked beast with the men of Gold Coast, for shame that all the hairs had fallen from her crotch, leaving her mound of joy as bald as a sucking pig. Such misfortunes of her lord and herself, and the embarrassment of knowing the tale thereof had been bruited throughout Gold Coast, did cause them soon after to despair and depart. And yet let us note that no amount of previous scandal, about her cavortings and his imbibings, had brought this to pass. So true is it, my dear friend, that we human beings can endure, can rather enjoy, to be seen as wicked or debauched, but we cannot stay among people once they have seen us to be absurd. Obloquy we can withstand, but never mockery. Thus and thus. Such is the moral and melancholy tale of Joy my lady Jollif, and such fate may God keep from you and from me, my dear friend, and from all that are dear to us.’

  And what, you well may ask, has all or any of this to do with the promised account of the Founder’s Feast of 1948? Well, I said I must make a preface to this account, and so I have done. Had Patrick Wilkinson not tried my patience, and had I not answered back and angered him, Noël Annan would not have spoken to me as he did, and I should not have sought out Nikkai Urnandi. Had I not consorted with Nikkai, I should not have heard the tale of ‘Joy my lady Jollif,’ and I should not have been able to tell it, as I did, at Founder’s Feast, with such very far-reaching consequences. But I must not anticipate. Thus and thus, as Nikkai might have said. One thing at a time, and first to the commencement of the Feast.

  X

  ROYAL PURPLE

  The founder’s feast of December 6, 1948, at King’s College of Our Lady and St Nicholas in Cambridge, commonly known as King’s tout court, began with a sung Grace in Greek. When the Choristers and Choral Scholars had finished it (all ten minutes of it), there followed a spoken Grace in Latin, a cumbrous and euphuistic piece complete with detailed encomia of our Royal Founder and the more substantial of the College Benefactors. After this we all sat down at last and were served with Turtle Soup and Sherry.

  I was sitting at the bottom of one table next to J E (John) Raven, son of Canon C E Raven, who was Master of Christ’s College and present Vice-Chancellor of the University, but was more famous, perhaps, for his works of popular theology, in which he praised austerity with the condescending unction of a man who has twice married wealth. While eponymous we were not related, though I often found it convenient to hint at distant cousinhood with the Vice-Chancellor when opening new accounts with tradesmen.

  John Raven, who ha
d come from Trinity that Michaelmas at the age of thirty-three, was a profound Platonist and also a shrewd Scholar of Greek pre-Socratic philosophy; he was, furthermore, a botanist of international distinction, having recently unmasked some German rotter who had been planting things where they never grew before and then claiming to have discovered them there; and on top of all this he was prominent as Pacifist, Puritan and Prude. (He tried very hard not to be the last of these, but was defeated both by his genes and his enlarged moral sense, which sometimes seemed to have been force-fed by his upbringing as remorselessly as the liver of a Strasbourg goose.)

  Since I received tutorials from John, since I went to his dry but admirable lectures and was by way of being his friend (not a close one, but certainly a friend rather than a mere acquaintance), I knew all this very well, and it was exceedingly silly of me to behave as I did later on and am now about to relate. For it wasn’t as if John were being stuffy or disapproving, were wet-blanketing the occasion or grizzling about the extravagance of the refreshments in a world of want, etc, etc, as other Puritans might have done (and were doing in several parts of the Hall). Nor did he come on heavy with those of us near him who were making pigs of ourselves; nor did he try to limit the supply of wine at his end of the table. No: he was entirely genial and tolerant in every possible way, and why I should have tried to get a rise out of him, I cannot say for the life of me.

  It came about in this wise.

  After the Soup and Sherry had been followed by fish with a delicious Montrachet; after the Choir had sung a string of glees in celebration of food and drink and the lighter aspect of love; after we had devoured fat goose washed down by a seigneurial Chambolle-Musigny; after the Quiristers had melodiously reminded us of the transience of pleasure (‘Thus passeth in the passing of a day/Of human life the leaf the bud, the flowre’) and urged us to desport ourselves while the going was still good (‘Gather the Rose of Love whilst yet is time/Whilst loving thou mayst loved be with equal crime’); after the Pudding and the Yquem and the Port and the Bordeaux; after the Loyal Toast (drunk by many of us, I am proud to say, in bumpers); after a final and exquisite elegy by the Choir on the melancholy conclusion of fleshly delights

  For gone she is, the prettiest lass,

  That ever trod on toe.

  For why? She was her own foe

  And brought about her overthrow

  By being far too free of her

  Hey-nonny-nonny

  Hey-nonny-nonny

  Hey-nonny-nonny

  NO…

  after all of this, John Raven said: ‘I wonder what Nikkai Urnandi and the other Africans are making of the occasion.’

  And I, flown with insolence and wine, replied: ‘I can’t answer for the others but Nikkai will love it. He’s the jolliest thing out in any colour. You’ll never guess what he was telling me the other day…’, and then launched into Nikkai’s story of ‘Joy my lady Jollif’, beginning, as he had done, with the preface about his bedmaker’s fantasies, though I knew very well the distaste and the disgust, the real pain, with which John would hear it.

  In fact he heard very little of it.

  ‘That’s enough,’ he said quite mildly, before the bedder’s speech had really got off the ground.

  But I was not to be stopped. I now skipped to the first scene in the scoring box (thus completely losing continuity, but what did I care about that after the Sherry, the Montrachet, the Chambolle-Musigny, etc, etc?) and launched into Samuel Uziele’s story of his step-mother. As she sat down on the stool, ‘You really must stop this,’ said John gravely, ‘or I shall have to ask you to leave the table.’

  So I stopped. And I sulked. And when we were dismissed, a few minutes later, with instructions to rotate round the rooms of certain dons who were kindly putting up yet further potations, I resolved that I would boycott John’s rooms, though he had expressed, as we rose, a very civil hope that he would see me there.

  No, I said to myself: he can’t talk like that to me, he can’t interrupt my witty stories and expect to be forgiven in five minutes flat. I shall not go to his rooms, and this will be noticed and reckoned up against him. Simon Raven refused to go to John Raven’s rooms, the word will go round, because John got all priggish at dinner. Quite right, Simon, everyone will say… In those days, you see, I thought I was quite something.

  So I went first to an impromptu concert that was being given by Donald Beves, the Vice-Provost. Fat, good-natured Donald, who was named by some imbecile a few years back as the ‘Fourth Man’ in the Burgess-Maclean-Philby brou-ha-ha, had got himself up as a Victorian after-dinner entertainer and was standing by a potted palm singing,

  “Daddy’s on the Engine;

  Don’t be afraid:

  Daddy knows what he is doing,”

  Cried the little maid.

  “Daddy’s on the Engine,

  So nothing need you fear:

  Everything’s all, because

  MY DADDY’S THE ENGINEER.”

  After joining in three rousing choruses of this and hearing Donald’s Unique Rendition, as Given before Her Gracious Majesty Victoria Queen of England and Empress of India, of ‘One Night as I sat at the Organ’, I began to wonder where I should go next. According to the schedule, which was issued to prevent overcrowding in any one don’s rooms, freshmen from ‘M’ to ‘Z’ were meant to go first to Mr J E Raven, then to the Clerical Dean, then (if I remember correctly) to Mr Boris Orde the College Organist, and lastly to the Tutor. I had prohibited myself from going to John, and pride and pique still sustained me in the embargo; but I could not yet go to the Clerical Dean, as this would violate the schedule and upset the old fusspot. Donald’s concert was now concluding with Don Juan’s descent into Hades: so where should I go when the defiant fellow was finally engulfed?

  ‘I don’t think I can be bothered to go to John Raven’s,’ said somebody near me to somebody else, ‘he always looks so accusing and he’ll probably offer one beer.’

  The speaker was someone whom I very slightly knew, called Peter Dixon, now in his second year. (Second year men ‘A’ to ‘L’ were meant to go to John Raven’s rooms first and mix with first year ‘M’ to ‘Z’.) But while I was acquainted with Peter, I had never before seen the man to whom he was talking. This was a long-haired and heavily spectacled number, who carried his torso at a cant (about 15 degrees forward) which pushed his buttocks right back, till you could almost set a glass on top of them, and his nose right forward in a permanent attitude of close enquiry and wry (perhaps lewd) speculation.

  ‘Good point,’ this person now said to Peter, ‘let’s go to your rooms instead.’

  ‘We always go to my rooms,’ Peter said.

  ‘We can’t go to mine – now can we? – when they’re halfway to Fenner’s.’

  ‘I know we can’t. But I’m sick of being a sort of unpaid Mother Gin Sling.’

  ‘Are you calling me mean?’

  ‘No. I’m just hinting, ever so delicately, that you might like to bring a bottle along, because you finished the last one before lunch.’

  ‘All right,’ said the stranger, after a pause during which he seemed to be shivering quite violently despite the warmth of the room, ‘I’ll go to the Buttery, and I’ll buy some fucking gin, and then we’ll drink it in your rooms till it’s time to go to wherever we’re meant to go after John Raven.’

  He moved off, buttocks swaying imperiously like the stern of a man of war under canvas.

  ‘Do you mind if I come with you?’ I said to Peter. ‘I’m not keen on John Raven either.’

  ‘You’re welcome,’ said Peter. ‘There’s some wine if Muir can’t find any gin.’

  ‘Muir…? The chap you just sent to the Buttery?’

  ‘I only hope it’s still open.’

  ‘If he’s called Muir –’

  ‘– Temple Muir –’

  ‘– Or even Temple Muir,’ I said pedantically, ‘he’s under M to Z. Second year M to Z are meant to go first to the Tutor. But he seems to
think he’s on the same schedule as you.’

  ‘I know. Dickie doesn’t bother much with schedules. Anyway, I didn’t disillusion him because I was very keen he should get the gin. In fact he’s quite generous, but you have to know just when and how to operate him.’

  On our way to Peter’s rooms, Peter told me how he had learned, during their four years together at Uppingham, to ‘operate’ Dickie (Temple) Muir.

  ‘It’s all a question of making him feel guilty,’ Peter said. ‘It’s quite untrue, what I said, about his finishing the last bottle before lunch; and he knows it as well as I do. But if you accuse Muir, however unjustly, he will feel guilty because you will have reminded him, by the very act of impugning him, that other and truer and more damaging accusations might well have been laid against him. Guilt is never far from the surface in Dickie: all you have to do is summon it up, and then he will do whatever you ask in reparation.’

  ‘What else should I know of him?’

  ‘He was in the Rifle Brigade during the War, and he’s Captain of the College Squash Team.’ Peter giggled. ‘He gets a special ration of petrol for his car to take the Squash Team away to matches.’

  In those days an undergraduate who kept a car at Cambridge was one of a tiny and most delectable elite. This Temple Muir was clearly somebody and a half. My opinion of Dickie rose even higher when he arrived in Peter’s rooms ten minutes later, bringing not only two bottles of gin but also a bold, handsome, spring-footed, sandy-haired don, about as old as the century, whom he announced as ‘Dadie Rylands.’

  This, then, was the legendary George Humphrey Wills Rylands, the poet, the beauty, the wit, the actor, the sage (one of the most notable lecturers in English Literature at either university), the toast of the twenties and the ornament of the forties. I nearly fell on my knees. Instead I shook hands, mumbled my name and perspired copiously.

  We discussed the speeches at the Feast. Noël Annan had put on a witty performance, replying on behalf of the College to the guest who had proposed it.