This was pitching it pretty steep – indeed, laying it on thick. From Mr Mumford it produced, disconcertingly, a cackle of harsh laughter.
‘Wisdom my arse!’ he said. ‘Cunning’s what you need to survive in the City, Pococke. Low cunning. You might be not too bad at it. Why not have a try, eh? Never too late to learn. Make your pile, my boy.’
These coarse pleasantries were naturally painful to the Provost. I didn’t much care for them myself. Uncle Rory, I thought, would detect something decidedly bogus in the most senior of the Mumfords; it was as if Cedric had treated himself to a persona based on the backwoods squires of English fiction from Fielding and Smollett onwards. This last was, of course, an implausible supposition – Cedric Mumford having so clearly never opened, or at any rate finished, a book.
‘Cedric, old chap,’ Mr Todd murmured, ‘ware wheat!’
This admonition (of a provenance chiming with what had been passing through my head) had considerable effect. Mr Mumford mumbled something in an abashed fashion, and the Provost took heart to proceed.
‘We know full well, Mumford, that you will have numerous onerous matters to perpend. We hope, nevertheless – and Pattullo and I have really come over to express this hope – that the interests of your old college will not be wholly absent from your mind.’
‘Are you talking about that confounded copybook you keep harping on in those damned pompous letters? I know nothing about it.’
The Provost was silent, as he well might be before Cedric Mumford thus at his hideous best. For a moment, even, he appeared to me uncertain that it was the confounded copybook he was talking about – and uncertain, too, whether there was any point in talking at all. For the first time in my experience, Dr Pococke was a little at a loss. I didn’t blame him. Our host’s latest return to civilised courses had lasted for not much more than a minute. But the Provost recovered himself, not being a man to give in. He expounded the matter of the letter-book. He represented the impropriety – almost the occasion of scandal – constituted by its remaining so irregularly in the possession of Christopher Cressy. To a man of affairs like Mr Mumford, he said, to a man habituated to taking broad views of momentous issues, it must all appear very trivial, almost absurd. He, the Provost, although living so secluded a life in the harmless pursuit of learning, was not without a glimmer of that. But the susceptibilities of scholars were not unworthy of some slight consideration, since they were a class of people who in their own unassuming fashion contributed something to the general seemliness of things. So if, happily, Mr Mumford could see his way to setting this small matter to rights he would decidedly deserve well of the ancient foundation within which he had for a time reposed so much to the satisfaction of all.
If the Provost didn’t employ exactly these words he did manage to convey their effect. I realised with dismay how much there was yet to come – notably the theme of kindness to Ivo as a topic much engaging the college’s corporate mind. This – to put it mildly – would be a distorted picture. I was sure that, at this moment, the majority of my colleagues would not so much as recognise the name of Ivo Mumford, and that it would take some quite striking activity on that young man’s part to elevate his affairs above the obscure sphere of purely administrative determination. If the Provost were really to pursue this line with the object of securing Mr Mumford’s admiring regard he would be permitting himself to draw a very long bow indeed. He would also be misjudging – I came back to this – the thickness of Cedric Mumford’s skull. Cedric might be no genius, but he was at least more astute than his grandson.
But I doubt whether the Provost would now have introduced Ivo – let alone the Lusby aspect of his affairs – into the conversation at all. The atmosphere created by our host’s ill-concealed animosity not only to ourselves but also to the universe at large would have overtaxed even the Provost’s power to go about anything of the sort with the slightest appearance of a maintained propriety. Softening up Mr Mumford (in whatever obscure interest it was being proposed) would have to await a less unpropitious occasion. To my relief, and also to Mr Todd’s, the Provost was showing signs of calling it a day. In the issue, however, Ivo did after all rear his handsome young head – through the agency, not of the Provost, but of Mr Mumford himself.
There could be no doubt that the squire of Otby was finding his Oxford visitors increasingly trying. He poured me more whisky – which this time I didn’t propose to touch – much as if he had been a Borgia turning unwontedly candid about the potion. Then he moved brusquely away, lurched across the room, and came back to us brandishing a piece of writing-paper. I saw Jiffy Todd stiffen. He knew his man, and was probably realising that he might murmur not merely Ware wheat! but even Ware wire! in vain. Indeed, our host was now yelling at us as some enraged MFH might yell at a couple of fools riding down the hounds.
‘What’s all this old wives’ fiddle-faddle?’ he shouted. ‘What about my grandson? Here’s a damned impertinent letter from God knows who – calls himself Piddlebed, or some such.’
‘Bedworth,’ I said, I hope stonily. ‘Our Senior Tutor.’
‘Bedworth, Bedpan – I don’t give a fart for the fellow’s name. A rigmarole about examinations in this and examinations in that. To hell with your messing the lad around with such pig-shit! A tiresome little brute I don’t doubt he can be. But if you have it in for him, why don’t you turn him over the buttery hatch for six on the backside and forget about it? That’s how such things were settled when ushers were still more or less men and not schoolmarms.’
This atavistic vision, which appeared to envisage the Provost in the flagellant character of a Busby or a Keate, struck me as not wholly without attractiveness. But it was devoid of utility, and merely witnessed to a certain obsession with posterior matters which Mr Mumford’s vocabulary betrayed from time to time. It brought Dr Pococke to his feet, and I could hardly suppose he had any thought except for his overcoat and muffler. He did, however, make one more effort.
‘My dear sir,’ he said, ‘I beg you to compose yourself. So far as my knowledge goes, your grandson has done nothing to merit castigation even in a metaphorical sense. He is at present sadly deficient in application, but we are not without hope of bringing him to a better mind.’
‘Bugger your better mind!’ This time, Mr Mumford bellowed. The Provost had made one measured speech too many. At least for the moment, our host was the helpless mouthpiece of a senile frenzy. ‘And bugger your Honorary What’s-it-called,’ he added for good measure, ‘and be damned to you both for a couple of arse-licking toadies.’
It was at this moment – or after a further moment which elapsed in not unnatural silence – that a fresh voice spoke in the room.
‘Hullo, Grandad,’ it said, ‘may Bobby Braine and I drift in?’
We all turned and stared at the doorway. Ivo and another young man were standing in it. It would have been impossible to say for how long they had been edifying themselves with the scene.
For a moment the Mumfords eyed each other silently. It seemed to me that Cedric’s glance wasn’t at all that of a man likely to approve of a stick being taken to his grandson. Those had been but wild and whirling words, or more probably a consciously mocking affront to the decorum which the Provost so constantly exhibited. The sort of family attachment that misses out a generation existed between these two. One evidence of this was that Ivo’s arrival had with bewildering abruptness put Cedric on his shaky tolerable behaviour once more. He had welcomed Bobby Braine civilly, and sat down again. So the Provost and I were in difficulty. Minutes before, we had been so grossly insulted by the owner of Otby as to be left with no resource other than that of quitting the house forthwith. Now here was the authentic snarling Cedric withdrawn into the depths of his den, leaving at its mouth an uneasily tail-wagging old creature momentarily deprived of either bark or bite.
The Provost, who had almost certainly never before been addressed by a host as an arse-licking toady, was admirably calm. Whether or not he rega
rded the extreme instability of Mr Mumford’s moods as wholly pathological he had clearly resolved that, for the moment, that was how to take them. His attitude became that of a practised visitor to the more taxing wards of a geriatric hospital.’Oh hullo, sir!’ Ivo said to him breezily. Ivo’s manner wasn’t too good. It was the habit of undergraduates who went in for nice behaviour to accord the Provost a formal deference which they would have judged it inappropriate to direct upon their tutors or anybody else. Ivo addressed the Provost precisely as, if in good humour, he would have addressed me. And he was in good humour – a condition in which I hadn’t seen him very securely established before.
‘Good afternoon, Mumford.’ The Provost may have been writhing inwardly at the thought that these young men had come upon him involved in a scene so grotesquely ludicrous that they could, if minded, dine out on it for the remainder of the term. But he was not likely to betray a discomfort of this sort. ‘How pleasant,’ he went on, ‘that your grandfather’s house is within jaunting range of Oxford.’
‘Yes, isn’t it? It means that when I have a good idea I can come straight out and put it to him. That’s what Bobby and I have tumbled in about now. Bobby’s at Trinity, poor chap, but he and I are going partners just at the moment. I’m letting him be the great Braine in the affair.’ Ivo, who was seldom at his best when reaching for a stroke of wit, paid this one the tribute of his vacuous laugh. ‘But the point is that I’ve had a brainwave myself. My grandfather can become a partner too. A sleeping one, that is. Grandad’—Ivo had turned gaily to Mr Mumford—’we see that what’s needed is a spot of the lolly.’
‘An infusion of capital,’ the young man from Trinity said. He was flaxen-haired, clear-complexioned, and without much chin. The correction he had offered may have been humorous in intention or merely designed to put the matter in a dignified light. ‘The fact is, sir, that printing turns out to be most damnably expensive. And illustrations and line-blocks and things. They do frightfully mount up.’
‘So it’s a fresh capital issue, is it?’ Mr Mumford asked. He spoke with a grimness which was to be detected as assumed.
‘There will, of course, be a return on it,’ Bobby Braine said. He clearly regarded himself as the business man of the venture, well-prepared to put a convincing proposition before a judicious investor. ‘Only there may be difficulties over the cash flow for a time.’
‘Ivo will have no difficulty making the cash flow.’ Mr Mumford, although producing this with a return of his familiar snarl, aimed at jocularity, and was rewarded with a quick laugh from his grandson. ‘And just what are you up to, eh?’
‘We’re starting a magazine. Don’t you think it a good idea we should start a magazine, sir?’ Ivo had turned to the Provost with this question, and its tone was so impudent that the wholesomeness of the buttery-hatch idea again came home to me.
‘It must depend, Mumford, on the quality of the venture. Are your interests in the main of a literary sort?’
‘Yes, of course. And artistic.’ Ivo felt there was a very good joke here. ‘It’s going to be no end artistic as well.’
‘Have you yet decided on a name for it?’
‘A name? Oh, I see.’ The Provost’s question, which struck me as acute, disconcerted Ivo for a moment. He had conceivably been finding out more about the associations of fertility gods. ‘As a matter of fact, that’s a tremendous secret.’
‘Ah, yes.’ The Provost now felt that the duties of civility had been discharged. ‘Pattullo and I’, he said to Cedric Mumford, ‘must not get in the way of these deliberations. A most delightful luncheon.’
Mr Todd took charge at this point, perceptibly in the conviction that the sooner we were out of the house the better. For a moment, however, he contrived to draw me aside.
‘A little sticky at times,’ he murmured. ‘A forbearing chap your Provost. Nice to the lad. How’s he getting on in college?’
‘Ivo has his difficulties,’ I said cautiously. ‘You’ve heard about some of them.’
‘No good at his books, eh? A pity, that. And there was a spot of trouble down here at the beginning of the long vac. Cedric rather close about it, even to me. But not too good a show, if village tattle is to be believed. I hope he’ll be able to stay at Oxford, and steady up. Make some clean-bred friends. Desirable thing.’
‘I entirely agree.’ It had scarcely occurred to me that Ivo’s escapade, although scotched at the level of police investigation and newspaper publicity, must continue for a time to have its reverberations in village legend. But Dr Pococke, fortunately, was not likely to go gossiping with smock-frocked boors in Berkshire pot-houses. ‘I suppose,’ I went on, ‘there’s no chance of dissuading Mumford from putting up money for that magazine?’
‘I don’t imagine so. What sort of an affair is it going to be – not too decent?’
‘Not too decent by any means, if my guess about it is right.’
‘Then that settles it.’ Jiffy Todd spoke decisively and in a spirit of sober realism. ‘Cedric will shell out.’
Our further farewells were predictably formal, and within five minutes Otby was behind us. The Provost drove with even more than his usual care. His lips were compressed and his brow was stern. He might have been a bearded Abdiel, retorting scorn upon the Satanic fastness behind him. I wondered what he would first find to say.
‘My dear Duncan, I do most profoundly apologise.’
‘I don’t see, Provost, that there can be any occasion for that.’
‘I apologise most profoundly.’ The Provost was not to be balked of his contrition, which was that of a monarch who has inadvertently trodden on the toes of some attendant courtier. ‘Had I known how little our poor friend is in control of himself I would not have dreamt of involving you in this luckless expedition.’
‘It certainly wasn’t comfortable, but at least it was instructive. It hardly looks as if Cedric Mumford will be a great deal of help in the matter of Lord Mountclandon’s letter-book.’
‘No indeed.’
‘It’s lucky it’s not a very momentous matter.’
‘The fate of the wretched letter-book certainly isn’t that. But one might still have occasion to value the foul-mouthed old ruffian’s good will – and I have had the thought that his ability to conjure the thing back for us, if proved in the event, might flatter his vanity.’
Having offered me this oblique and obscure view of the matter, the Provost hesitated, and I had a momentary impression that some less insubstantial confidence was to be offered me. But if this was so the Provost thought better of it. The mystique of the councils of princes was uppermost again.
‘Perhaps,’ I said, ‘the good-will may be recoverable. This could just have been one of Mumford’s bad days.’
‘It may be so.’ The Provost paused for reflection. ‘What did you make of that business about his grandson’s magazine?’
‘I’d heard about it before. Including their name for it, as a matter of fact. It’s to be called Priapus.’
‘That scarcely sounds propitious, Duncan – the less so if, as now seems probable, it is to be financed by our late host.’
‘Quite so, Provost. Don’t the Proctors have a say about the launching of such things?’
Indeed they have. But they are obliged to tread warily nowadays in anything suggesting censorship. At the lowest, the venture won’t make the young man any more attentive to his books.’
‘A lost cause that, perhaps.’
‘So his tutors are inclined to suggest. A pity. The lad didn’t show to advantage this afternoon – and this project of his holds a hint of the bloody-minded, if you ask me.’
‘I’m afraid I agree.’ I was rather impressed by the Provost’s making use of this expression. ‘But he has had bad luck.’
‘Quite so. And he is not, at other times, without something of his father’s charm. My wife has entertained him, and tells me she finds him not unattractive.’
‘Which is decidedly one up to Ivo.’
&
nbsp; The Provost’s response to this was no more than a grave inclination of the head, and we drove back to Oxford almost in silence. I meditated on old age – on old age and the dotage to which it is the grim portal. Lempriere, Timbermill, Cedric Mumford: they had been bringing rather a stiff dose of it my way.
VIII
Nick Junkin, on the other hand, was twenty, and thus of an age agreeable to contemplate, although not perhaps invariably to live through. Junkin, indeed, was often harassed and occasionally glum: moods which he attributed to a general mysteriousness and unaccountability in the world around him. I could remember something of the kind in my own near-nonage. And as he now occupied the rooms which had been mine during that phase of my career, I was disposed to see in him myself when young. I can’t imagine I told him this; on the contrary, I probably took care to give no hint of it. He wouldn’t have resented any communication of the sort, but it might have added to the burden of his perplexities. Any attractiveness I held for him must have been akin to that felt by an explorer when coming upon a primitive type of society unexpectedly preserved in tolerable working order. This didn’t in the least mean that Junkin condescended to me, or even bent upon me the objective regard of the cultural anthropologist. He took me flatteringly for granted alike as an equal and a repository of wisdom – although he perhaps saw the wisdom as standing in need of a certain measure of interpretation in terms of his own epoch, much as one might do if faced with sacred books dredged up from the drowned civilisation of Atlantis.
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