Memorial Service

by J. I. M. Stewart

  ‘There are plenty of other letter-books of more or less the same period still with us?’

  ‘Dear me, yes. There must be dozens of them.’

  ‘So one must be able to infer from them the general character of the one still in Cressy’s hands?’

  ‘One would suppose so.’

  I judged these brief replies unsatisfactory. I was, after all, being dragged into the country in quest of this vagrant volume – or so it seemed – and too much of the secrets-of-governance stuff just wouldn’t stand up.

  ‘What happened right at the start?’ I asked. ‘I mean immediately after Cressy borrowed the thing.’

  ‘At Tommy Penwarden’s instance, I wrote to Cressy – Penwarden himself being still rather a junior man. I said, if I remembered aright, that we judged it would be awkward to broach the matter with Lord Mountclandon, but that we were quite clear he had not intended that the volume should be lent away to Cressy. I received no written reply. But a few nights later Cressy came in to dine. He has always been a great accession to our table. He told me that his reading of the letter-book was almost concluded; that it would be back in our hands within the following few days; and that he had, of course, not the slightest intention of making any public use of it. This being so, he felt he had been acting quite within the spirit of the permission Mountclandon had so generously accorded him. In the circumstances, I judged it prudent to agree.’

  ‘I suppose you were quite right, Provost. But what about since then?’

  ‘There the matter has rested. Cressy, like Kipling’s soldier, would appear to have a faculty for misremembering things.’

  ‘I don’t understand the matter in the least.’ I said this perhaps too vigorously, since the Provost had contrived to annoy me. ‘A donkey’s age ago, Cressy undertook to return the letter-book at once. It sounds like a gentleman’s agreement to me. Then nothing further happens. Yet you don’t all forget about it as unfortunate but not all that important. It becomes a kind of folk memory around the place, and I’m not sure it hasn’t bred considerable animosities. But Cressy comes and goes, and everybody is delighted with him. I find it odd.’

  ‘It is odd.’ The Provost with the largest open-mindedness nodded over his wheel. ‘But we have our conventions, my dear Duncan. We have – as you will come to find – our ways.’

  Like Mabel Bedworth, I had been rebuked.

  Otby was rather smaller and a good deal more elegant than I had imagined it. Built of white chalk with bold stone rustications, it was very square and very tall, with a steep roof pierced with dormer windows rising to a balustrade, and above that again a lantern tipped with a big golden ball. The effect of a Brobdingnagian doll’s house baldly perched on a yet more Brobdingnagian nursery table was a little mitigated by the building’s being withdrawn behind a forecourt constituted by two blocks of domestic offices. I wondered when Mumfords had acquired the property. So dutchified an affair couldn’t date from long after the Restoration, and that must have been anything up to a couple of centuries before the Mumford family was much around.

  Its senior living representative received us with a considerable effort at civility. I couldn’t think why. On my previous meeting with him his attitude to the learned had been even more disparaging than his son’s. Perhaps he had decided that Ivo’s academic insufficiencies might be coped with better by guile than by a more spontaneous recourse to outrageous bluster;

  ‘Very glad you could spare a day from your scribbling,’ he said to me, plainly with this ideal of courteous behaviour in mind. ‘Afford it, I expect, since you’ve hitched on to that idle college crowd. Sitting on their backsides all day reading Julius Caesar.’ Mr Mumford barked out a laugh at this, as if the picture evoked were a very funny one – as indeed, perhaps, it was.

  ‘I assure you,’ I said, ‘that my new colleagues are a most conscientious body of men.’ This colloquy was taking place while the Provost had withdrawn to the loo. I wondered how matters were going to proceed when he emerged from it.

  ‘Conscientious?’ Mr Mumford said. ‘My arse! Conscientious in lining up for their pay packets, if you ask me. This is my old chum, Jiffy Todd.’

  Mr Todd, thus informally introduced, might have been judged to be, almost in the literal sense, out of Mr Mumford’s own stable. He was a small man, brown and wizened; and if I’d proposed to bring on stage an actor in the character of a groom I’d have expected him to be dressed in such garments as were now on view.

  ‘Jiffy,’ Mr Mumford went on, ‘here’s the author-fellow. Devilish smart at it, he’s said to be. Name escapes me. Potato, or some such.’ Mr Mumford laughed loudly.

  This was so far over the odds that I had to wonder whether my host was going to prove to be embarrassingly drunk. Albert Talbert, it was true, had long ago been prone to address me from time to time as Monboddo. But that error had arisen respectably from a familiarity with Boswell’s Life of Johnson, whereas Cedric Mumford appeared to be unseasonably reviving the wit of his private school.

  ‘Pattullo,’ I said placidly. The distinguishable fact was that, since our meeting less than five months before, the eldest of the Mumfords had taken a further dip into senescence. It seemed astonishing that anybody evincing such mental unreliability could be appointed a trustee of anything at all. His encroaching social disabilities, I supposed, must have been unknown to, or discounted by, those responsible.

  ‘How do you do? Mumford ought to add that I’m his nearest neighbour. That’s my sole title to having the great pleasure of meeting you.’

  These words from Jiffy Todd, which might have been excessive in other circumstances, were just right in the context of the Potato joke. It could be conjectured that his having been summoned to the forthcoming feast represented a further fond and doomed intention on our host’s part that a graceful amenity should obtain.

  Dr Pococke emerged from seclusion, and appeared not disconcerted by Jiffy’s presence, although our luncheon was presumably in furtherance of business matters of a confidential sort. On the contrary, he could be seen to take to the old chum at once. He almost certainly regarded Cedric Mumford with an inner horror, and I felt he was still far from sure about me. But he had an instinct for any quarter in which social decorum could be relied on. And here Jiffy Todd smelt, not (as might have been supposed) of saddle-soap, but of those who get a clear alpha mark.

  We drank whisky in a room which (to stick to one’s nose) smelt of the stuff already, as also of the aroma of long-since extinct cigars. It was the carpet and the curtains, I conjectured, which preserved these testimonies, redolent of the Edwardian age. They had probably been undisturbed for some time by any spring-cleaning campaign. I had no knowledge of when Tony Mumford had lost his mother. Otby pervasively suggested, although in indefinable ways, that it must have been a long time ago.

  Topics appropriate to our rustic situation were discussed. The Provost introduced them; he seemed equally well up in field sports and the problems of rural economy, and spoke with quiet confidence on the diet alike of turkeys and dairy herds. Mr Todd followed with attention, speaking in amplification and appreciation, rather than correction, of anything that was said. Mr Mumford on the whole behaved well. He may have been prompted occasionally to tell the Provost that he was talking damned nonsense, but when this threatened, Mr Todd chipped in with some more accommodating remark. Gratitude could then be deciphered on Mr Mumford’s features; there could be no doubt whatever that some dim notion of good behaviour struggled in him. But something like this was also observable in Dr Pococke. Had he been less courtly a man, or the word without inappropriately demeaning connotation, ‘ingratiating’ might have come to one’s lips as adequately descriptive of his manner. I have no doubt that one consequence of this was Cedric Mumford’s being more convinced than ever that the fellow was a damned parsonical sycophant, and being much prompted to say so aloud. This really would have set Jiffy a stiff problem in the preservation of bienseance, but I have little doubt that he would have acquitted himself
well.

  We went into a dining-room and sat down. Or rather we were about to do so when Jiffy Todd addressed himself to me in the most charmingly casual manner.

  ‘Do you know,’ he said, ‘I find myself becoming most pitifully absent-minded? If I were in Cedric’s position now I’d probably clean forget to ask Dr Pococke to say grace.’

  This deft prompting (in addition to drawing from Mr Mumford the robust assertion that he was damned if he himself hadn’t been going to forget the drill) seemed to tell me that the old chum hadn’t been a member of our college – since otherwise ‘the Provost’ and not ‘Dr Pococke’ would have been natural. It occurred to me to check up on this.

  ‘Were you at Oxford with Mumford?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes, indeed. We were exact contemporaries, but not at your distinguished college. I went up to New College.’

  ‘Then I wonder whether, by any chance, you knew an uncle of mine called Roderick Glencorry?’

  ‘Rory – how very interesting!’ Jiffy temperately signalled the gratification proper to be felt on establishing this sort of rapport with a stranger. ‘I knew him quite well; in fact I helped him to shoot his father’s grouse on one occasion at Corry. A delightful place. I’ve no doubt you know it intimately.’

  ‘Yes, I do.’

  ‘But it’s a long time, I’m afraid, since I had any news of him.’ This was Jiffy’s way of asking ‘Is he dead?’, and I took it in that sense.

  ‘He’s quite robust,’ I said, ‘at least as to the physical man. But he lives rather a secluded life from time to time.’

  Mr Todd received this information as fully explaining itself, and went on to talk about Glencorrys not within my recollection. The Provost listened with complacency. He would have heard from Arnold Lempriere, I imagine, of my possessing these respectable connections in a middle distance, and approved the circumstance as augmenting, in its microscopic way, the consequence of the college. Cedric Mumford, on the other hand, grew suddenly impatient, and manifested the fact by bidding us stop talking about ‘a pack of tin-pot bonnet- lairds’. This, being extremely rude, caused momentary embarrassment. I noticed it, however, as seeming to relieve the mind of the elderly woman waiting on us. One or two other servants had been in evidence, but this one was in charge, and I took her to be the devoted housekeeper who had providentially been unsupported at Otby on the night of Ivo’s escapade. She had been beginning to fear that her employer must be ill. His return to his proper form reassured her.

  Even so, this recrudescence of the natural man was momentary. We got through the predictable pheasant (which was predictably dry, and predictably accompanied by little deserts of dry breadcrumbs) in tolerably good order. Cedric Mumford even managed to inquire about Mrs Pococke’s health. I found myself rather admiring both the Provost and his host. The Provost had the easier role. He spent a certain amount of time every day exercising himself amid the pleasures of society, and the thing came to him as effortlessly as his round of golf. Yet it wasn’t quite without strain that he was making himself agreeable to Cedric Mumford – and all (so far as I could see) in aid of nothing more than restoring to the control of some of his colleagues a letter-book of a politically minded nobleman flourishing in the earlier part of the nineteenth century. Viewed in this way, Dr Pococke’s pertinacity was a meritorious instance of devotion to duty. Cedric Mumford had a more personal motive for the effort he was making. He had concluded, it must be believed, that if Ivo was to be served those damned Oxford ushers had to be spoken fair. This family piety, too, was wholly meritorious in its fashion.

  ‘And now,’ I heard the Provost say, ‘I propose to be a little indiscreet.’ He paused on this interesting announcement, and drank as much claret as was decent at one go – no doubt in the interest of converting into a swallowable bolus the last of his pheasant. ‘I know I can rely on your discretion, I need hardly say.’ Having thus built up expectation – or fancied himself so to have done – the Provost paused again, perhaps with the thought that his host would wave the elderly female attending upon us out of the room. But this didn’t take place, and the Provost had to proceed. ‘I am happy to say, my dear Mumford, that at its next meeting our Governing Body will unquestionably accept the advice of one of its committees, and elect your son into an Honorary Fellowship.’

  ‘And what the devil is—?’

  ‘How very nice!’ Mr Todd said firmly. ‘A most pleasant thing to happen.’

  This came from the old chum much as if designed to forestall in Mr Mumford a transport of enthusiasm excessive even in face of the announcement just made. It couldn’t quite obscure the fact that what Mr Mumford had been proposing to say was ‘And what the devil is an Honorary Fellowship?’ Since ignorance here was not possible in one of his standing, this was even more uncivil than had been the remark about bonnet-lairds. It produced pallor behind the Provost’s beard. He had, perhaps, been canvassing a little more gratification than was reasonable. The college couldn’t well do other than accord this titular distinction to a former member now forging ahead in the Cabinet; if anything, it had been a little belated on the job. Tony’s father could properly have received the news with polite reserve – instead of which he had let nature take another airing. But once more he manfully checked himself. I felt almost sorry for a man who, so accustomed to wound, was yet in the present instance so afraid to strike.

  And the Provost, aided by a receptive Jiffy, again played his part. The roll of the college’s Honorary Fellows, he explained, was unhappily not dilatable instantly and at will; there was a statutary ceiling on the number of persons who could hold the high distinction at any one time; so sometimes, before acting agreeably to its own wishes, the Governing Body had to wait for an Honorary Fellow to die. Fortunately – the Provost continued with a momentary roguishness – this happened fairly frequently, since not many elections were made of men so vigorously in their early prime as was Lord Marchpayne.

  By the time that Dr Pococke had given the matter this graceful turn I believe his rhetoric had caused him to forget what his intellect must have told him clearly enough: that to Cedric Mumford the laurels of a college could mean nothing at all. Oxford was a place at which you did, or did not, belong to the Uffington – and at which, if you did so do, you periodically smashed an appropriate number of windows as a result. The very simplicity of this archaic view of the student life made it hard for the Provost to grasp. Had it not been so, he would scarcely have proceeded as he now did.

  Over blancmange (which had been served to Mr Mumford’s guests before it became apparent that a handsome Stilton was to be regarded as an alternative rather than a sequel to this dish) we were treated to a short historical account of the institution of honorary fellowships. It didn’t seem a rewarding subject, objectively regarded, but the Provost talked about it (as he could talk about most things) very well. At first I thought he was simply carrying off any awkwardness that the first introduction of the topic had occasioned. But this proved not to be so. The Provost was discoursing by design, and the chase had a beast in view. The beast (almost literally that, one might be tempted to say) was old Mr Mumford.

  Was there any recorded instance, the Provost was asking, of a father and son holding honorary fellowships at their old college at the same time? He confessed to being unable to name one, and the thing must have happened rarely, if it had happened at all. The more the pity, so agreeable (even edifying, the Provost’s tone hinted) would such a coincidence of distinctions be. And it was certainly possible to think of circumstances in which the phenomenon might occur.

  What Cedric Mumford made of all this it would have been impossible to say. Conceivably it was very little. He was heavy alike with his years and his whisky and wine, and he may simply have switched off under the persuasion that the fellow was doing no more than produce his customary idle usher’s babble. Jiffy Todd on the other hand, was certainly not at sea, and I thought I detected as glimmering in his eye mild surprise, even gratification, before this comedy of m
isconceptions. It was certainly that. Mr Mumford saw as a self-important bore a man who was in fact capable of considerable subtlety of address. Dr Pococke believed himself to be dangling a kind of spectral carrot before somebody who would assuredly prove to be without the slightest impulse to snap at it. I don’t know whether I found all this amusing. I am sure I remained puzzled. If Cedric Mumford were known to have the missing letter-book locked up in the next room (rather than as being merely one whose voice might be listened to on the making of some demand for its recovery) there would still be something disproportionate about all these blandishments and manoeuvrings.

  But there was more to come, for the Provost proved to have worked out a two-pronged attack. When Mr Mumford had finished his Stilton (and the rest of us our wobbling nursery pudding) we returned to the chamber of our first resort for what our host declared to be coffee. Coffee, however, whether or not it had been prepared, did not appear. Whisky did – or rather it was on permanent view. Its consumption was obligatory, since our entertainer’s sense of hospitality was of that aggressive sort which treats a protesting hand or an unacquiescent murmur as a personal affront. It was impossible to imagine the Provost as ever flown either with insolence or wine; even in his greenest youth, one felt, he must have held himself proudly aloof from the sons of Belial. Yet something of the vigour with which he now developed a new theme may have been in part attributable to a hint of vinous warmth. Of Cedric Mumford’s temperature there was no doubt. He wouldn’t spontaneously combust, but I questioned whether we’d get away from Otby before some vexatious if minor explosion had occurred. Jiffy Todd was hovering over him like a fire-tender warily circling a smouldering tanker.

  ‘We must not fail to congratulate you, my dear Mumford,’ the Provost said, ‘on the new responsibility you have been invited to take up.’ He paused on this to give me a steady look, so that I was constrained to interpolate ‘Yes, indeed’ in a tone of earnest conviction. ‘It would appear,’ he went on, ‘that various crucial decisions have shortly to be arrived at by the men who administer the Blunderville Trusts. So much is common knowledge among those who read the more responsible journals reporting on such matters. Not everybody knows how fortunate the trustees are in having been able to persuade you to afford them the benefit of your unrivalled financial skill and experience – and your proven wisdom, let me add.’