‘Time’s up, wouldn’t you say?’ she asked. ‘Whisky’ apart, these were the first words I had heard her utter.
‘Yes, it is. Off you go.’
The two girls faintly smiled at one another, but it was in a kind of understanding that didn’t, to my mind, at all definitively support what appeared to be Timbermill’s sense of their relationship. Then Miss Mountain picked up the machine and carried it from the room – an operation to which her inches lent the appearance of a child grappling with an unsuitably proportioned toy.
‘We share it, you see,’ Fiona said to me with a hint of amusement. ‘We’ve been planning to buy another. But unfortunately the mortgage rate has gone up.’
So had the price of whisky. Probably Fiona had little if any money of her own. The Petries might well be as hard-up as I knew the Glencorrys to be, and it would be her brothers who would come in for anything going.
‘So at the moment we Box and Cox,’ Fiona went on. ‘Now my paper, and now Margaret’s second novel. What did you think of her first, Duncan?’
I had to confess my ignorance of Miss Mountain’s profession, thus revealed, and attribute it to a culpable disregard of modern fiction in general. This can’t have interested Fiona, but the exchange seemed designed to give Timbermill time to recover from his unfortunate outburst. It succeeded, and if he continued in some agitation it was on the score of what he had picked up about the mortgage. He seemed to have concluded that the bailiffs might at any moment appear and turn Fiona out of her house, and he fell to evolving a rambling plan for circumventing them. His harangue was by turns serious and facetious, puerile and wickedly amusing. I was wondering how to assess the mental state behind it when Timbermill grabbed some papers and abruptly took his departure.
‘He can still work?’ I asked Fiona cautiously.
‘Lord, yes. A bit shaky in detail at times. I tidy things up for him in a general way.’
‘You were a pupil of his?’
‘Yes, of course – just as you were. He used to talk about you.’
‘You mean he knew that you and I are related?’
‘I doubt it.’ Fiona looked at me in frank cousinly amusement. ‘I don’t think the point ever turned up. You weren’t debated exhaustively between us. It was just that you were mentioned from time to time as somebody who’d stuck in his head. I remember finding it quite odd.’
‘I see.’ I found this information chastening. ‘You stick in his head too, don’t you? He’s rather jealous about you?’
‘Yes.’ Fiona said this as one closing a topic, and I thought it was time to take my leave. She came with me into the strip of garden before the diminutive house. I didn’t feel that we had made much of establishing our family connection, and concluded it would probably lapse from any acquaintanceship we might develop. Even that mightn’t come to much. I must be said to be at an awkward age for Fiona – too old for her, or not old enough.
‘Fiona,’ I said, ‘will you dine with me one evening? Not in college, with all those people. We could drive into the country somewhere.’
‘That would be very nice. I’d be delighted.’ Fiona’s reply was conventional, but I thought I detected her glancing at me with a kind of dry fascination. And at the garden gate she kissed me, after all – thus according me, it was to be supposed, a kind of uncle’s status.
As I walked back to college I wondered whether I ought to have included Miss Mountain in my invitation. Fiona hadn’t seemed to mind my neglecting to do so. And her friend, after all, was on the record as not having uttered a word to me throughout our encounter. I also found myself speculating as to which of these young women ran the other. But perhaps they were straight partners, comfortably pulling together.
VI
Curiosity rather than family feeling may have prompted this episode; if so, it was in the key of a good deal of my behaviour during these first weeks of return to Oxford. My colleagues seemed to regard intellectual curiosity as the first of human virtues, and the older among them would lament its virtual desuetude among latterday undergraduates. Over against intellectual curiosity, I imagine, they would have placed a vulgar variety, oriented towards, and flourishing upon, personal inquisitiveness and gossip. I don’t think that the intellectual sort is the prerogative of persons learnedly or scientifically inclined. No artist can get far without it. Yet here novelists and playwrights are in an equivocal position. The whimsies and vagaries of human conduct being an essential part of their stock in trade, they are obliged to go in for vulgar curiosity too, and there are instances in which major works of fiction are spun exclusively out of the prattle of drawing-rooms and the confidences of saloon bars. I myself hover between these two modes of mental operation – the first so much more exalted in its nature than the second. And Oxford touched me up on both flanks. I don’t think I’d otherwise have been prompted to the trip with Dr Pococke I must presently describe.
It would be difficult to say whether it is intellectual curiosity that prompts to the inspection of a copy of the first collected edition of Shakespeare’s plays which happens to bear on its fly-leaf the signature of John Dryden. Indeed, the interest of such a volume appears to be of a personal character, so here is a border-line case. I had never viewed – which would be the word – this notable college treasure, and the afternoon came on which I took it into my head to do so. The library was almost deserted, since the period between luncheon and tea is one at which the display of any inclination to study remains taboo in Oxford. For a little while I wandered around. The library had changed since the time when I used occasionally to work in it. The pictures had been bundled away elsewhere, and the ground floor was occupied by two reading-rooms. The effect, while lacking the magnificence of the single chamber overhead, was sufficiently impressive to suggest that the pursuit of polite letters is a dignified and gentlemanlike occupation, not to be entered upon by the inferior orders of society. The books, although constituting what was known as the ‘working’ part of the library, rested for the most part so undisturbed on their shelves as to hint an assumption of their owning a magical efficacy: perhaps raining down or radiating learning upon anybody who cared to drop in for a nap. There was, indeed, an old lady fast asleep in one snug and dusky corner. But as she had an expanse of manuscript music spread on a table before her and a pencil gripped firmly in her teeth it was to be conjectured that she had been overtaken when engaged upon some quite active pursuit of knowledge. For a moment I wondered whether she was dead – the pencil suggesting what one reads of in detective stories as the bizarre possibilities of rigor mortis. It seemed not possible to find out. If I were to bellow in her ear, and she was only asleep, my behaviour would be censurable as eccentric and unmannerly.
I now made my way to the librarian’s room, since it was clear that Shakespeare as given to the world in 1623 would be kept securely locked up in the nineteen-seventies. Penwarden received me without much enthusiasm. He had been librarian since I first entered the college, and had remained unchanged in the interval – except for its being averred that there had not unnaturally built up in him a librarian’s constitutional aversion to books. He had also put on weight, without – so far as I could see – having provided himself with a corresponding change of clothes; indeed, he appeared less clothed than corseted, and thus suggested one of those elaborated toy balloons, often hawked round fairs, which when inflated take on a manikin-form, with a trunk and limbs variously bulbous and randomly proportioned according to the strength of the puff that has gone into them.
It was only our second encounter. At the first, which had been over dinner, he had told me – if not censoriously yet as with a wise resignation to human frailty – that few of our colleagues entered the library from term’s end to term’s end. If this were so I thought my own quite prompt arrival ought to have cheered him up. In fact he exhibited a melancholy reserve. This deepened as we inspected the First Folio – the pages of which he turned over for me himself, as if suspecting my fingers of having been imper
fectly cleansed of shoe polish or raspberry jam. He thawed a little when I happened to remark that Shakespeare seemed to have been uncommonly careless in his shaving before submitting himself to sitting for Martin Droeshout’s portrait. There exists, he explained to me, an earlier and very rare state of the portrait in which this negligence is much less prominent.
I had thus been lucky enough to afford Penwarden an opportunity for the casual and unobtrusive deployment of a fragment of erudition. He closed the volume with a proper regard to its hinges, and then held up his hand to a surprising effect of muted drama.
‘I don’t know whether you’ve heard,’ he said. ‘There has been a development in the affair.’
‘The affair?’ The remark had left me at sea.
‘Christopher Cressy’s theft from us.’ Penwarden produced this amplification in a tone of surprise, as if nobody in the college ought to be ignorant that the phrase could refer to nothing else. I recalled Lempriere’s extravagant-seeming assertion that so cobwebby a depredation as Cressy’s ancient rape of the Blunderville Papers was still a live issue around the place. Penwarden was now glancing at me with a wariness it would have been easy to mistake for hostility. He might have been a barrister embarking upon a tricky but necessary interview with a hardened criminal whom it was going to be his business to defend. ‘Incidentally,’ he said, ‘it may be useful if you should prove to retain an exact recollection of the incident.’
I judged it doubtful whether it would prove useful to me. I wanted nothing less than any involvement in such a moth- eaten and surely nugatory vendetta. The truth, however, had to be told.
‘As a matter of fact,’ I said, ‘I have. I was a freshman, as you know, snatched up and exposed for the first time to the mores of his seniors. The occasion has revived itself quite remarkably in my head.’
‘Capital! Then you probably remember the precise sequence of events. Cressy had picked up the letter-book, realised its significance, and carried it over to Mountclandon. That’s right?’
‘Exactly right.’
‘Cressy said something to the effect that it ought to prove interesting.’
‘He said it would probably be amusing to turn over.’
‘Precisely. And Lord Mountclandon – a most courteous man – said, “Then do by all means glance over it”.’
Penwarden paused on this – which might have been fairly described, I felt, as a disguised leading question. But it would have been impossible to swear that he was being disingenuous. The thing had happened half a lifetime back. He might be innocently confusing fact with helpful fiction.
‘I don’t recall it as just like that,’ I said. ‘It was Cressy who suggested something like a simple glancing at the book there and then. Mountclandon said, “Entirely at your leisure, pray”. I remember noting that “pray”, used in that sense, couldn’t, as I’d have imagined, have wholly passed out of colloquial use.’
‘You must have been an uncommonly literary young man.’ Penwarden made this comment with a certain grimness.
‘Yes, I was. And Mountclandon then said, “It’s entirely yours”. I agree about the courtesy. He definitely wasn’t making Cressy a gift of the thing. It was only a kind of hyperbolical graciousness. But that, you know, isn’t evidence. It’s just an impression.’
‘You’ve never talked to Cressy about this?’
‘I’ve never talked to him about anything. I don’t know the man.’ Penwarden’s question had astonished me.
‘It’s simply that your report chimes with his.’ Penwarden got out this necessary avowal with difficulty. ‘But you agree that the man is impudently perverting the true facts of the case?’
‘It would seem so.’ I didn’t feel I need go further than this. And Penwarden, although sunk in gloom, evidently regarded me as behaving tolerably well. ‘But what’s the development?’ I asked. Is Cressy proposing to publish the stuff?’
‘That depends on the trustees. The copyright in all the unpublished material is naturally under their control. ‘
‘The trustees of what?’
‘Oh, the whole Blunderville concern. The settled estates and everything else.’ Penwarden here spoke vaguely, like a man on unfamiliar ground. ‘And, of course, they tend to be the sort of people that Cressy knows how to get in with. He has the art of making himself agreeable to the right people in the right clubs.’
‘I remember something of that too. And he certainly had Lord Mountclandon where he wanted him.’
‘It’s astonishing that the man’s a competent scholar as well. But what’s happened is this. The trustees have appointed a new boy. Co-opted him, perhaps – -I don’t know what the jargon would be. An old member of the college, as it happens. Marchpayne’s father, Cedric Mumford. Do you know him?’
If this information was surprising to me the question with which it concluded was positively awkward. I was aware, not for the first time, of the tangled web deception weaves. My sole meeting with Tony’s father had been in college on the night of the Gaudy, and its circumstances had been such (or young Ivo’s circumstances had been such) that it had seemed injudicious to divulge that the perturbed Cedric had been in the place at all. As a consequence I had blankly denied to somebody on the following morning that the most senior of the Mumfords had ever been known to me, and an hour later had admitted to somebody else having met him on an unspecified occasion. This uncandid behaviour couldn’t now be of the slightest moment. But for a perceptible instant the memory of it held me up.
‘I did once meet him,’ I said. ‘He wouldn’t strike one as a particularly appropriate person for such a job.’
‘Oh, he was a useful party man in his time, I suppose, and I believe he worked for old Blobs Blunderville in a small way. Money too, of course. Anyway, the point is we think a discreet approach should be made to him. There’s no doubt, you see, that the trustees could insist on the letter-book’s being restored to us if they had a mind to. We’ve taken counsel’s opinion as to that.’
‘I see.’ I wondered about the ‘we’ thus being referred to. It might mean the college’s Governing Body solemnly assembled, or it might mean some faction or cabal. At least here was evidence that the affair of the purloined papers did agitate other minds than that of the patently obsessed Penwarden. ‘How are you going to set about it?’
‘One thinks naturally of Marchpayne, with whom we have more recent associations than with his father himself. Marchpayne has been highly successful; he would be absolutely the coming man, they say, if he hadn’t so rashly got himself into the Lords. He regrets that, if you ask me.’
‘I know he does. He’s told me so.’
‘Of course, of course! I was forgetting, Duncan, that you were so close a friend.’ (This was the first occasion upon which Penwarden had addressed me by my Christian name, and I made a note that I must call him ‘Tommy’ before this conversation came to an end. It was the convention that one switched to this mode of utterance spontaneously and without palaver.) ‘So one might expect Marchpayne to carry weight with his father. Unfortunately our relations with him at the moment are a little delicate. I expect you know about that too.’
‘Ivo.’
‘Just so – if that’s his son’s name. The boy refuses to pass examinations—’
‘I doubt whether he’s up to them, Tommy. Ivo’s terribly stupid. I’d say he was a bad and hasty boy.’
‘You know the lad?’
‘He came to lunch with me earlier in the term.’
‘Well, what you say may be true.’ Penwarden appeared impressed by my modest exercise of hospitality. ‘And errors of that sort can raise perplexing questions. But the fact is that the boy’s father – Tony Mumford, as we naturally think of him – is very much exercised over the possibility of his son’s being sent down.’
‘So, I ought to tell you at once, is the grandfather. In fact Cedric Mumford is quite savage about it. He’s as unreasonably angry as Tony, and insolent into the bargain. Cedric’s a shocking old chap, Tommy.’
>
‘Oh dear!’ It was apparent that Penwarden was dismayed by this appraisal. It was also apparent that he was impressed by the degree of intimacy with the Mumfords which I had, perhaps rashly, revealed.
‘It certainly doesn’t make too good a climate,’ I said, ‘for getting at your blessed trustees. But aren’t there any other former members of the college among them? I’d suppose it almost certain there are. I’d drop the Mumfords, if I were you, and find another route in.’
‘You may be right, Duncan. It’s a point I’ve discussed, as a matter of fact, with the Provost. He’s reluctant to forgo what you might call the Mumford Passage – or at least to do so quite yet. I believe he has an instinct it can be navigated. And he’s a very astute man.’
‘I’m sure he is.’
‘There’s another point about the grandson. I don’t know whether you are aware of this, but it appears he bore a somewhat discreditable part in a sad affair at the end of last term.
A young man—’
‘Yes, Tommy – I do know about Lusby.’
‘Ah, yes. Well, I don’t suppose Marchpayne has heard of it.’
‘Yes, he has. I told him myself.’
‘You told him about that wretched wager?’ Penwarden didn’t sound pleased.
‘Yes – and about Ivo’s being rather out of favour as a result. With his contemporaries, that is.’
‘You were quite right, Duncan. In following your own judgement about telling him, I mean. You are his closest friend in the college. Nobody could criticise you.’
‘I should damned well think not.’ I didn’t react favourably to the notion of people debating whether I had spoken out of turn to Tony Mumford. ‘But what’s this about Ivo, anyway?’
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