‘The Provost thought of giving the Mumfords an account of the Lusby disaster himself. Most sympathetically, and making it absolutely clear that the college wouldn’t countenance the slightest suggestion that Ivo had been other than merely thoughtless and silly in the matter, or do other than support him against any injurious misconceptions. It’s the Provost’s idea, of course, that this might be thrown into the balance against the examinations issue, and show that we are a fair-minded lot, perfectly well disposed to the boy.’
‘I see.’ For a moment the notion of the Provost’s thus exploiting the death of Paul Lusby in the interest of Tommy Penwarden and the idiotic Blunderville Papers absolutely revolted me. Yet he would be saying nothing about Ivo that wasn’t the proper thing to say, and would be putting himself on record as behind the boy to any academically admissible extent. I doubted whether there was much future for this, or if the Provost would suppose there was were he made aware of Ivo’s present intention of producing an indecent magazine. But this was not an issue to raise with Penwarden – from whom it was, in any case, time that I should disengage myself.
‘Does Cressy’—I asked by way of diversion, and as I got to my feet—’ever venture into this college nowadays?’
‘Oh, yes – from time to time. He has rights, you know, as a former junior fellow or the like, and he dines every now and then.’ Penwarden gave me this information without disapproval and as if it held nothing to surprise. ‘Christopher is very good company. He talks very well.’ These further remarks came in a tone of amiable indifference. ‘Have you read his last book? It’s very able – very able indeed. I recommend it to my pupils as a model of good historical writing. I’m afraid the library copy will be out. But you ought to get hold of it one day.’
‘Perhaps I might even buy it,’ I said.
‘Yes indeed.’ Penwarden spoke as one whose mind kindles to an unusual but not unattractive idea – that of conceivably accreting books around oneself other than willy-nilly. ‘And he’s concise,’ he said – this time with almost overt approval. ‘Doesn’t take up much shelf-room. I’ll say that for him.’
Retailing small concerns at leisure as I am, I may well be giving the impression that life in the university of Oxford is a slow-motion and even dolce far niente affair. In fact, things tend rather to hurry along. This may be due to the curious fact that a ‘full’ term (as statutes describe it) lasts eight weeks, and that there are only three such terms in a year. The tempo of undergraduate life is controlled by the ephemeral calendar thus created. Every activity is announced at short notice and achieved at the double, and the most exacting demands may be made in the confident expectation of their being fulfilled the day after tomorrow. The spectacle can at times resemble that presented by an old Keystone comedy in which the camera has been speeded up to achieve effects of ludicrous expedition. In the years about which I am now writing this was particularly evident in the field of juvenile politics. A term would begin in calm, while the young men and women rapidly hatched their plots in privacy. Then there would be eruptions. ‘Demos’ would be held, buildings sat in by sitters-in, strikes and boycotts decreed, walls scrawled over with cheerfully inflammatory graffiti – all in the interest of programmes beyond the power of man to achieve. It is very hard to render a correct impression of this. It could be peculiarly bewildering to wandering scholars from across the Atlantic, who were inclined to swing from the apprehension that their lives and property were in danger to the view, almost equally delusive, that it was all very much a matter of paper tigers. One strove to meet and acknowledge what it is nice to think of as the burning sincerity of youth, and what one was grappling with in no time was tiresome if innocent frivolity and a natural delight in rough-and-tumble games. Then suddenly it would all be over, since the proponents of various forms of revolution had switched to fixing up their charter flights for vacations in Isfahan or Cathay.
A little of this eight-week brio rubs off on senior members. They may pay not all that attention to the young – who in the regard of many of them, indeed, constitute a minor and even inessential part of the academic scene. The bright speed of their juniors influences them, all the same, and with results that may catch a newcomer off balance. Something of this sort was the effect of a letter from the Provost delivered to me on the morning after my visit to the library.
Dear Duncan,
Tommy Penwarden has told me of a most valuable discussion which you were good enough to hold with him about the small yet perplexed matter of the missing Blunderville letter-book. I confess that I have become tired of hearing of it over the past twenty-five years – as you may already have done over a much shorter period! An affair of the sort has indeed an odd power of rumbling on, and also a mischievous capacity for getting itself damagingly tied up with other issues. It is high time that it should be composed. We have now arrived – at least in my fallible judgement – at a propitious moment for something of the kind. The point is one upon which I shall greatly value your opinion.
But more – and let me be frank with you! I view you as a linchpin in whatever may be set rolling. Cedric Mumford’s accession to the trusteeship of which you have heard, and your own long-standing friendship with his son, may be much to our advantage. With the senior Mumford himself I have now had some correspondence, and I gather he would not be entirely averse to holding a further discussion of the matter in the course of a visit to him at Otby. You are, I know, busier than any of us at the moment, and it is therefore with the greatest diffidence that I suggest our running down there together. If by any chance you feel this to be possible, I shall be most deeply grateful. Mumford’s convenience once considered, I should be entirely at your disposal as to a date.
Yours ever, Edward
My first reaction on reading this letter was naturally to ask myself just what the Provost was after – a problem, I imagine, with which his correspondents frequently found themselves confronted. If Penwarden was to be believed, that most unsatisfactory junior member of the college, Ivo Mumford, was somewhere to be lurking in the picture. His grandfather was to be told about the unfortunate end of Paul Lusby, and to be assured that the college took the most temperate view of any blame that Ivo must bear – this with the notion of emphasising how even-handed the justice dished out by the place. It was in itself a harmless proposal, although I didn’t myself see Cedric Mumford making much of it. If, on the other hand, the Provost were to offer a deal – saying, in effect, ‘You get us back that letter-book and we’ll refrain from turning out your grandson’ – this would be something which Cedric Mumford would at once regard as talking sense. That the Provost would be capable of squaring anything of the sort with his conscience appeared to me, however, highly improbable. Again, he was a man very well able to distinguish between small issues and large ones, and it was hard to understand how he could regard the matter of the letter-book as meriting any great deployment of his diplomatic powers. There was certainly enough of a puzzle in this to set curiosity stirring. And it was stirred too, I found, at the thought of encounter between two characters so little likely to delight each other as Cedric Mumford and Edward Pococke. Otby, moreover, was quite unknown to me, so that the scene of Ivo’s grave and nearly disastrous misconduct in the course of the past summer existed only as a vaguely conjured up terrain in my head. All this prompted me to agree with a good grace to the Provost’s proposal, although I found it impossible to envisage any useful part I could play. But even if I had totally disrelished the plan I could scarcely have got out of it. It was the first request I’d received from the impeccably courteous Dr Pococke since returning to the college.
VII
The day appointed for our expedition was grey and chilly. When I turned up at the Lodging it was to find Mrs Pococke in the role of Andromache arming Hector for the field. Although it was a matter only of a warm overcoat and muffler the customary nobility of the Provost’s bearing makes the comparison not inapposite. He was now an elderly man, but to look at him was to th
ink of heroes – if not at windy Troy at least at Wimbledon, where his triumphs had been notable in their time. (He was probably the only Oxford scholar to be known by name to my Aunt Charlotte, whose historical sense had been confined to the chronicles of lawn tennis.)
This task had interrupted Mrs Pococke in another activity, in which she was being helped by Mabel Bedworth. A table in the hall of the Lodging was piled with chrysanthemums and late dahlias, and these the ladies were sorting through preparatory to decorating the college chapel. It was the custom, I imagine, to accord the Senior Tutor’s wife the privilege of this assistantship, and Cyril Bedworth would not have cared to have Mabel decline it. What Mrs Bedworth thought I don’t know, but it is possible that her satirical inclination conditioned her attitude to such performances. She might have been looking at me mischievously now had she been looking at me at all. But of course she wasn’t; her gaze was modestly on the floor. The habit was ascribed by some to the forthcomingness of her husband’s pupils, but I am inclined to think it constitutional, so that she would have continued to exhibit it even after withdrawal to a nunnery. The effect could be embarrassing. When we met in company I had to wonder whether she might not be suspected of ineffectively dissimulating some guilty association with me. The further thought that she was probably aware of the possibility of such a misconception and paradoxically extracting her own brand of amusement from it didn’t render these occasions any easier.
The Provost was being fussy about his gloves; it seemed important to him that he should be appropriately accoutred in this regard for arrival at Otby. As he seldom misjudged the relative status and consequence of one man or institution and another I found myself wondering whether I had got Otby and the Mumfords wrong. Otby might turn out to be a young Hatfield or Knole. Yet this wouldn’t make its present proprietor a Cecil or a Sackville. Cedric Mumford could evoke no aristocratic glamour in a mind so well informed as Edward Pococke’s; and this being so, I found puzzling a certain deference to the general Mumford idea which he seemed to be developing.
Mrs Pococke seemed puzzled too, and even disapproving. I supposed that she was judging incompatible with the dignity of her husband’s office this wild-goose chase in pursuit of a letter-book of the Fourth Marquis of Mountclandon. She owned a firm character and clear head, and one wondered to what extent her husband had the good sense to take her into his confidence about the problems of his job. Perhaps he was not by temperament likely thus to go all the way with anybody; he had an instinct to comport himself en prince and to act as his own Privy Council.
‘I hope the old man at least gives you both a decent meal,’ Mrs Pococke said briskly now. ‘But I very much doubt it. His son would be altogether more reliable in that department, I imagine. And even the grandson is said to have excellent champagne.’
‘Gossip merely, Camilla.’ The Provost – who was now deliberating before a row of hats – said this with good humour.
‘If the young man had the gumption to invite us to a party, Edward, I’d certainly take you to it. Mabel, you and Cyril are invited to undergraduate parties?’
‘Yes, we are – sometimes.’ Mabel Bedworth’s soft and motile features hinted alarm, as if some dangerous topic had been abruptly obtruded on her. ‘Yes, young men do ask us – Cyril and myself – to parties quite a lot. And Cyril thinks we should always make an effort to go.’
‘I’m sure he does. And, of course, men do ask their tutors and their wives to such things fairly regularly. But they stop short of Edward and myself.’
‘They regard you as beyond their star.’
‘Perhaps so. But it would be agreeable to be treated as a human being, all the same. I do manage to extort that from them when I get them into my drawing-room.’
‘You came to my going-down party,’ I said. ‘Mine and Tony’s.’
‘So we did. I remember it perfectly well. But that was because Tony Mumford borrowed the Lodging garden for it, and so you had to ask us.’
‘Mumford?’ It was Mabel Bedworth who had repeated the name – and with an odd sharpness. ‘There’s an undergraduate called Mumford.’
‘Yes, my dear. Ivo Mumford. His father is now called Lord Marchpayne – a name he must have chosen as a joke, one imagines – and it is his grandfather, a Mr Cedric Mumford, that Edward and Duncan are going chasing after now.’
‘I know quite a lot about the Mumfords.’ Mrs Bedworth perhaps resented Mrs Pococke’s instructive note. But this didn’t quite account for her having suddenly coloured – and much less for her looking, as she now did, positively dangerous. ‘Provost,’ she said, ‘has Cyril told you that this Cedric Mumford wrote him an exceedingly rude letter?’
‘Dear me, no. I am deeply sorry to hear it.’ The Provost looked less sorry than annoyed. ‘He is said to be occasionally a man of somewhat intemperate speech. And, of course, one must allow for age. Yes, Mabel – one must remember one always has to allow for that.’
‘Cyril knows very well what to allow for, Provost.’ Mrs Bedworth was not disposed to accept rebuke. ‘And it was Cyril who simply called the letter rude. I called it insolent. It was about his grandson – the boy who is up now.’
‘Parents must be bad enough,’ I said, ‘without grandparents piling in as well.’
“Yes, indeed.’ The Provost was quick to avail himself of my effort at an emollient word. ‘I sometimes think that it will come to our having to hold an annual parents’ day, in the manner of preparatory schools. But before a grandparents’ day I shall draw a line. Duncan, I think we had better be off.’
We all moved to the front door of the Lodging. Mrs Bedworth, I thought, had done rather well, and I actually managed to catch her eye for the purpose of indicating this sense of the matter. She responded with a smile so cautious and momentary, and therefore so suggestive of the darkest complicity, that a less well informed woman than Mrs Pococke might readily have inferred the worst. The Provost was now amply wrapped up, and not looking particularly martial after all. On the contrary, he might almost have been rehearsing the mildest, the most benign, of moods. Had his wife finally advanced upon him, not with shield and javelin, but with one of the pastoral staves from her own choice collection, she would have been making no more than an appropriate addition to the general eirenic effect. Nothing of all this abated my sense of a certain perplexingness as attending our expedition.
There had been some thought of my driving the Provost, but it had ended up with his driving me. He was, as one would have expected, the most considerate of road-users. It would have been impossible to imagine him impatiently touching the button of his horn or – a yet more fantastic thought – winding down a window, brandishing a fist, and uttering raucous yells. There was a steady purposiveness about our progress, all the same, and we were not often taken advantage of.
‘I ought to tell you, Duncan, that Cedric Mumford mentioned you in a recent letter – one of the two or three I have had from him of late about one thing or another. A flattering reference, I am happy to say. He had heard of your casting in your lot with us.’
We were approaching one of the big roundabouts on the outskirts of Oxford as the Provost made this disclosure, and as he now had to concentrate on negotiating the hazard I was dispensed from any immediate response to what had a good deal startled me. With a straight road before us again, the Provost continued his remarks.
‘He said he had found your head to be screwed on the right way – his manner of expressing himself is often more graphic than polished – and that I might do worse than take your advice. So, you see, he must be a wife man after all.’
The Provost made this comment with a lightness of air that didn’t come altogether easily to him; it was doubtful whether he would relish being told to take advice from anybody. As for myself, I was much more disturbed than gratified. Here on my neck was the hot breath of that nocturnal deception once more. Should the Provost proceed to question me on the extent and occasions of my acquaintance with Cedric Mumford it was hard to see how I
could avoid embarking on outright lies. I knew perfectly well why Cedric Mumford had a good word to say of me. It was I who, at our sole and clandestine meeting, had produced in Gavin Mogridge as it were the celestial machinery which had wafted Ivo Mumford to his alibi in New York. Ivo’s father now made light of all this, his resilient temperament enabling him to regard it as having been a ludicrous over-reaching to a mare’s nest. Ivo’s grandfather, harder-headed if less intelligent than Tony, would retain a better sense of the grim crisis we had faced. But nothing of all this could be recounted to the Provost without putting him in possession of the facts regarding Ivo’s most disreputable exploit. He wouldn’t take kindly to the thought of a member of the college having been at risk of appearing in court on a charge of violating a village virgin. In any case I couldn’t tell him that story now. I had promised Ivo not to tell it to anyone.
So for a time I was silent, and my doubts about our expedition grew. Cedric Mumford’s personality hadn’t commended itself to me; he had offered me, at the start of that nocturnal encounter, some singularly disobliging remarks; and he had struck me as an ageing man fast losing any realistic sense of what he could, and could not, get away with. A burst of arrogance from him might sink Ivo for good, and that was something I still hadn’t a mind to see. But all this, though tiresome, didn’t add up to calamity. Moreover it was aside from the actual purpose of our trip. It occurred to me to seek more light on that.
‘Was the particular letter-book of the fourth marquis that Cressy walked away with,’ I asked, ‘quite peculiarly important?’
‘It covers, we are given to understand, a period of major crisis in the then Cabinet.’
‘So it’s entirely concerned with affairs of State?’
‘I believe we are unable to say that.’ The Provost steered round a bend with care. ‘It is, of course, with matters of public consequence that Penwarden and the others are concerned.’
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