‘Then, Plot, how do you know he proposes to turn up? He certainly hasn’t replied to me.’
‘And too casual that is by a long way. But I think you can take it from me he’ll be here. These lads are a study of mine, as I think you know.’ In conversing with me Plot had abandoned his conventional ‘the gentlemen’ as indicating the youths within his care – an indication, I felt, that I was making my way with him. ‘Just how Mr Ivo gets on with his lordship, I couldn’t be sure about. There’s an inwardness to the relations of fathers and sons.’
‘I suppose so.’
‘But you being his father’s oldest friend and all will count with Mr Ivo, if you ask me. I just hope he’ll behave himself. He can be very nice, his lordship’s son can, when he’s feeling that way and things are going well with him.’
‘But they’re not exactly doing that at present?’
‘That they’re not. There was a bottle through his window last night – the very night his lordship was dining with yourself. That’s a disgraceful thing, to my mind – not to speak of the trouble of clearing up.’
‘Yes, Plot. And I’m afraid Lord Marchpayne heard it happen, as a matter of fact. There was quite a shindy, and there might have been more of it but for a spirited performance by Mr Junkin. I don’t suppose the men making the row had any notion that Mr Mumford’s father was around. But it wasn’t particularly pleasant. Mr Mumford himself lay low. It made his father hope he was at his books.’
‘That would be the day.’ Plot must have picked up this expression of scepticism from one of his charges. ‘Not that he isn’t up to something with pen and ink to it. He’s to be the editor, he tells me, of some magazine or the like that’s to be out for the first time in a week or two. It’s a fancy the young men have, every now and then. Them with money, of course. You can’t set printers to work on chicken-feed. Not in these days, by a long chalk.’
‘That’s very true.’ I had got out of bed and was assembling shaving-gear – behaviour which Plot seemed to mark as being, in his presence, an agreeable informality. ‘Do you know what he’s calling his magazine?’
It’s something in the learned way, taken from the ancient languages. But I can’t just put my tongue to it. Ah! There’s that idle lad with the milk. I’ll be back in a moment, sir, and we can fix up about the luncheon. Mr Ivo Mumford alone, would it be?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Mr Ivo Mumford alone.’
‘I’m Ivo Mumford.’
Dead on one o’clock, the young man was standing in my doorway, although with no immediate appearance of proposing to enter the room. He was looking at me defiantly, challengingly, and (I somehow divined) out of some deep inward panic. He wasn’t at all like his father or – as far as my recollection served – his grandfather either. His good looks were of a fine-boned order, and perhaps he had them from his mother’s side. It struck me as odd that I knew nothing about Tony’s wife: not even whether she was alive. That lvo had two younger sisters was the sum of my knowledge about the family.
‘I forgot to answer your invitation. Sorry.’ Ivo’s face twitched faintly as he made this minimal apology. It looked like the beginning of what might become a tic or habit spasm.
‘I’m glad you’ve turned up. Come in, and let me find you some sherry.’
‘Thank you.’ Ivo took the sherry stiffly. ‘You know my father. He’s told me.’
‘Yes, indeed. And you probably know he was dining with me last night. You may have seen us in hall.’
‘I don’t often dine in hall.’ Ivo’s tone was nakedly contemptuous. He might have been saying ‘I don’t often drink plonk’ or ‘I don’t often eat fish and chips’. ‘I’m sure he enjoyed it very much,’ he added, formally and unexpectedly.
‘I hope he did. It was nice of him to come. He must be a fearfully busy man.’
‘Oh, all that! He’s always been that.’ This time, the contempt was fused with grievance. ‘It doesn’t prevent him from talking a lot of faithful old-boy stuff from time to time. Makes up for his not being able to sport an O.E. tie. He seems rather to like this place.’
‘I hope, Ivo, you’re finding you like it too?’
‘Look – I don’t want to be chatted up. If that’s the idea, I mean.’
The saving clause didn’t much mitigate the blank hostility of what had preceded it. It did, however, speak of a certain indecisiveness in Ivo’s stance. There could be no doubt that he was a difficult young man. I had come back to Oxford as a university employee; I wasn’t, I understood, going to be any undergraduate’s tutor; but I glimpsed the challenge that the Ivo Mumfords of the place must present to conscientious men with the maieutic instinct. But how on earth with such a boy did one set about bringing anything to birth?
‘Relax,’ I said.
‘Sir?’ At least I had made Ivo furious.
‘And for goodness sake don’t call me Sir – or not by way of putting me in my place. I repeat, relax. You can, you know. You wouldn’t be Tony Mumford’s son if you couldn’t.’
This was a rash throw, but what it produced was a quick smile – as transforming for its moment as a shaft of sunshine piercing cloud. It seemed certain to me that Ivo existed amid a crush of resentments that frightened him, and that his father came in for as much hostility as anybody or anything else. But there was something else; Ivo’s condition wasn’t pathological; it was simply that his adolescence was still on top of him, and that he was a tumble of ambivalences that he didn’t know how to cope with. Or this, at least, was how I resolved to read him in a provisional way.
‘Let’s sit down,’ I said, ‘and see what Plot has fished up for us. What I’ve got hold of is a bottle of Andron-Blanquet.’ I was about to add ‘I’ll value your opinion of it’, but reflected in time that this, as well as being silly, would be decidedly a chatting-up. I’d had it from more than one source that Tony’s son was very far from possessing Tony’s brains. But this didn’t mean that he wouldn’t be alert to detect and dislike patronage.
We moved to the table. Ivo sat down with a superplus of composure suggestive of a man taking the dentist’s chair. I wondered if our meal was going to be merely awkward. Perhaps it would have been better not to have invited the boy alone on a first occasion like this. I might have asked his neighbour Nick Junkin as well, and at least gathered something from how they got along together. But that would have cut out the possibility of any reference to a number of things about which something must be said if Ivo and I were in the fixture to hold any useful commerce at all.
‘My father has told me something about you,’ Ivo said abruptly.
‘About the time when we were both on this staircase?’ It seemed encouraging that the boy was prepared to take any conversational initiative.
‘No, not that. About what happened at Otby in the vac. He said you know.’
‘Yes, I do know.’
‘And do all the rest know?’
‘All the rest of who, Ivo?’
‘The bloody ushers, of course.’ Ivo said this with a sudden savagery that would have done credit to his atrabilious grandfather.
‘The dons? Absolutely not.’
‘You haven’t told them yet?’
‘No.’ I suppose I was staring at Ivo in astonishment. It was in order to ask these questions that Ivo had come to lunch with me.
‘And you never will? And not to any undergraduates you may get thick with?’
The notion that I might start gossiping to Ivo’s contemporaries about his having nearly been had up for rape could form itself, I felt, only in a mind uncommonly hard to reach. But I could just conceive circumstances in which, on a considered judgement, it might be in Ivo’s best interest that some older man – Gender, say, or Lempriere – should be told that wretched story. It would be impossible to make such a thought comprehensible to Ivo himself, however, and the contingency was very remote. I weighed this up, and decided to tie my hands.
‘I give you my word.’ I said, ‘that I’ll never mention the thing to anybod
y who doesn’t already know about it. Or not without your permission.’
‘That’s something, I suppose. Thanks a lot, sir.’ It had cost Ivo a struggle to get out these last words, and he was in fact scowling at me darkly. ‘But there was that other chap,’ he said suddenly. ‘The one who got me away to New York. Is he a don? I’d never seen him before. I don’t even know his name.’
I’m pretty sure he isn’t.’ It was with dismay that I heard myself thus equivocate. Ivo was the last person by whom I’d care to be detected in a fib, but the secret of Gavin Mogridge’s identity was not mine to reveal. I couldn’t possibly divulge to Ivo that he had been rescued – most irregularly – by a top man in something probably called MI5. ‘Listen, lvo,’ I said. ‘He’s a man who had to stretch a point to help us out. And no names, no pack drill. But he’s a man of honour, and you can be easy about him.’
‘I’d rather like to thank him some time, as a matter of fact. I somehow didn’t get a chance.’ Ivo said this with extreme awkwardness; it went dead against some image of himself that he had set up and was determined to live with. ‘Christ,’ he burst out as if in reaction to this, ‘I’ve had the foulest luck! Those days in New York – the ones before I knew it was okay at Otby after all – were sheer hell. Skulking at parties and trying to remember which lies I had to tell.’
‘It must have been very trying.’ I said this as little drily as I could. Tony, I recalled, had envisaged his son in those days as rejoicing in his escape and recklessly painting New York red. It seemed one could be as far at sea about the state of mind of a son as about that of a stranger casually reflected upon in a railway-carriage. ‘But it was soon over,’ I added.
‘Then there was that next thing. I read about it in an English paper I picked up – there in America. I’d got dead drunk at one of the parties. I read it when I was like that.’
‘About Lusby’s death, you mean?’
‘Yes, of course. And everybody knows about that.’ Ivo was looking up from an untasted dish, plain horror in his eyes. ‘Every silly fool in the quad! Every rotten sniggering sod! How could I have known he’d do that? How could I?’ Ivo now looked as if he was about to burst into tears. ‘First the one thing and then the other – with their filthy exams thrown in. It’s just a bit too much!’
I sat silent for a moment. It still seemed to me that, when the matter was dispassionately considered, Ivo was right. A hysterical and quite improbable vagary on the part of a common village slut had landed him in one trouble; an unsuspected nervous vulnerability in a simple lad from Bethnal Green had landed him in another. In both cases his own conduct had been deplorable. But chance had swollen the penalties – of which the latest had been a bottle through a window. It was because I felt Ivo to have had bad luck that I was anxious to back him if I could. It would be quite wrong, however, to tell him I felt anything of the kind. He was a young man among whose frailties a tendency to facile self-pity was to be distinguished. It wasn’t for me to encourage him in its exercise.
‘You have to face up to things,’ I said. ‘And you might as well begin with that chop.’ And I poured Ivo another glass of wine.
Ivo obeyed my injunction to eat. His distresses didn’t seemingly deprive him of appetite for long. Plot may have been aware of this, for the chops were in abundant supply. In what was possibly a spirit of experiment, I let Ivo have most of the wine.
‘They’re going to turf me out,’ he said abruptly.
‘Who are going to turf you out, Ivo?’
‘The damned ushers, of course.’
‘I’m sorry – but these people have become my colleagues. If you use that sort of language about them I’ll have to turf you out myself.’
‘Fair enough.’ This time I had guessed right. My words had evoked not an explosion but Ivo’s quick smile. ‘May I call them just the bastards?’
‘It’s a shade less offensive, Ivo. But, you know, they’ll only turn you out if you fail that examination again. Isn’t that so?’
‘No, it isn’t. Not now.’ Ivo was again scowling at me. “They’ll have their knife in me.’
‘That isn’t true.’
“What the hell do you know about it? You’ve only just turned up in the place.’ Ivo gulped claret. ‘They’ll have their knife in me, I tell you. Because of that chap who died.’
‘You mean who killed himself. Listen, Ivo – listen till the end of what I have to say. Paul Lusby killed himself at the conclusion of a chain of events which you set going in a thoroughly unamiable way. It was callow and heartless and malicious, as well as being class-slanted in a rather despicable fashion. The point is that you know all this, but that you couldn’t remotely have known what the affair was to lead to. You’ll live with it for the rest of your days. That’s not a situation before which any grown man is going to have a knife in you. You’re facing nothing at all except a dons’ common-or-garden fair deal in the light of their own thing – which is a bit of mucking in at the sort of work this place is here for.’
‘So it’s not a chatting up. It’s a dressing down.’
I thought of saying something heavy like ‘It’s because I’m your father’s very old friend.’ But I reflected instead that I was entirely an amateur in coping with what my own father would have called a kittie loon. I also thought of saying ‘It’s neither a chatting up nor a dressing down, but I’d rather like it to be a talking round’. But I rejected this too, perhaps as feeling that it would have been a little aside from Ivo’s wave-length. The epigrammatic cast of his last remark had surely come to him unnoticingly and by accident. Wherever his future lay, it was along no path trodden by astute and able men like his father. I’d do best to try once more to bring the simple facts of his situation home to him.
‘Dons,’ I said, ‘aren’t all that different from any body of men who have to run something. A regiment, for example. You might go into the army, Ivo – pretty well straight away, I imagine, if you wanted to. And you might get a good deal of fun out of it. But it wouldn’t quite do to refuse blankly to go on parade.’
‘This place isn’t like a decent regiment.’ As he made this obvious reply, Ivo smiled again – but this time it wasn’t a smile that was even faintly engaging. ‘And it’s just no good your trying to sell me those rotten dons. I tell you, I’m not taking this lying down! Before they put that toe in my arse I promise to give them the hell of a run for their money.’
It was as if suddenly I was listening to Tony – to Tony in one of those resilient moments I remembered very well. Or rather I was listening both to Tony and to Cedric: to echoes (for it was no more than that) alike of the father’s power to bounce up again and the grandfather’s displeasing liability to exhibit a malignant glee. The twitch had repeated itself on Ivo’s face; it could clearly be an index of excitement as well as of other sorts of nervous tension.
‘What do you mean,’ I asked, ‘by a run for their money? Getting as near passing their examination as you can?’
‘Don’t make me laugh.’ Ivo’s recourse to this expression, which would have been more native to his neighbour Junkin, marked his sense of the extreme absurdity of my question. ‘I’m just going to shake them up a bit, along with a couple of men at Trinity. Haven’t you heard of our magazine?’
‘I believe I have. Are you really taking to literary pursuits, Ivo?’
This rather feeble irony did no harm. Ivo was now alive with antagonism anyway, but suddenly so pleased with himself that the effect was almost genial.
‘I’m not doing any of the scribbling,’ he said. “That sort of rot isn’t my thing.’
‘Your grandfather would be relieved to hear it. He believes that all writers have long hair and dirty finger-nails.’
I don’t quite know why I reported this. Perhaps it was simply because entertaining Ivo, even with the best of intentions, was a bit of a strain. But again no harm was done. Ivo uttered rather a vacant laugh, much as if I had produced a keen witticism he hadn’t understood.
‘I’ve
been doing some photography,’ he said. ‘Particularly last summer term. Candid camera stuff.’
‘I see.’ Conscious of a dim sense of danger, I waited for more.
‘In the Easter vac there was a Japanese gent toadying round Otby for a contract or something. You see, my grandfather has to hold a lot of my father’s directorships now. Until my father’s out of government. Or, I suppose, until I come along.’
‘You’ll become a director of companies when you’ve been turfed out?’
‘Joke,’ Ivo said – again with a hint of Junkin. ‘But well – yes, I suppose so. Such are the facts of life.’
‘What are the facts of this Japanese gent?’
‘I was hanging around. Just shooting rabbits, and that sort of thing. It’s a rotten time of year. But I was dead broke, and there it was. Well, this little yellow man gave me this camera, just as part of his sucking-up-to-Mumfords act. It’s a marvellous job. Pretty well able to work through a buttonhole. Would you care to see it?’
‘One day, perhaps.’ I didn’t like the sound of this prized possession of Ivo’s. I even felt that there would be a kind of complicity in taking a glance at it. ‘What do they use such things for in Japan?’
‘Oh, industrial espionage, I suppose. I can’t say that would be a line of mine. A bit squalid, don’t you think?’
‘Yes, I suppose so. But you use it in the interest of candour.’
‘Call it that.’ Ivo had glanced at me warily. ‘Anyway, about our mag. The first number will be out in no time.’
‘Then I take it you’ve already hit on a title for it?’
‘Yes, of course. It’s to be called Priapus.’
‘What?’ I thought I had conceivably misheard.
‘Priapus. He was some sort of god, it seems. There were a lot of statues of him. They had jokes written on their pedestals. Rather like limericks. I think there are some in the Ashmolean.’
‘I’ve no doubt there are.’ All this classical erudition emanated, I supposed, from Trinity. ‘We’d better have some coffee,’ I said.
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