When Junkin felt harassed it was often for the same reason that his immediate neighbour Ivo ought to have felt harassed but seemingly didn’t. He could be charged, in the august terminology of the Provost, with being sadly deficient in application. Every now and then he made good resolutions, deciding to get clear at last on which had been treaties and which battles: Ramillies, Oudenarde, Utrecht. But in no time the siren-voices of theatrical activity would have seduced him again. Sticking his head through my door, he would demand to know whether I judged it feasible to produce Fear and Misery in the Third Reich, or would consent to furnish the college dramatic society, in three weeks time, with a stage adaptation of the latest novel by John Updike or Alexander Solzhenitsyn. As I was around the place at all only as being the university’s speciously accredited authority on this sort of thing, I was scarcely in a position to tell Junkin to go away and mind his book.
This field of common concern, however, had resulted in Junkin and myself meeting – briefly and casually, for the most part – two or three times a week. I didn’t look in on Junkin except by invitation, it being my memory that senior members refrained from violating the privacy of their juniors by unheralded calls. Junkin looked in on me when the fancy took him – or rather tumbled in, since I was frequently not aware of him until he was half across the room. Something of the sort happened on the morning after my visit to Otby. Junkin burst in and flung himself on the sofa.
‘I say,’ he said, ‘are you fearfully busy? Do you mind if I come in?’
‘Not a bit, Nick. Please do.’
‘May I sit down?’ By this time Junkin had put his feet up on the sofa cushions and let one arm drop limply to the floor. The posture, and his marked inability to synchronise words and deeds, suggested a more than common perturbation on the young man’s part.
‘Yes, of course. Take a pew. How are you?’
‘Confused. Don’t know whether to be chuffed to the bollocks or not. Quid loquor aut ubi sum? It’s like that.’
‘I see.’ What I had been treated to represented, I believe, Junkin’s only preserved fragment of Latinity, and I had heard it before. ‘But why?’
‘It’s Lempriere. You know he’s my tutor? Yes, I’ve told you that. He doesn’t take many pupils, being so frightfully old, but for some reason he does take me. And I’ve just read him the week’s essay, you see. It seemed to me as big a balls-up as I’d managed yet. Do you know what he said at the end of it?’
‘I’m not likely to, am I? What did he say?’
‘He said, “Well, I’m blessed!” Just like that.’
‘Encouragingly, you mean?’
‘I hadn’t a clue. And then there was what he said next. “Here I’ve been taking you,” he said, “for a true and amiable son of Goodman Dull. And now it dawns on me that you’re simply a dead-idle little brute.” Would you call that encouraging?’
‘Yes, Nick, I would.’
‘Well I didn’t think so – or not at first. As a matter of fact, I thought it rather rude. And who is Goodman Dull, anyway?’
‘You ought to know that one. He’s a constable in Love’s Labour’s Lost.’
‘With sons?’
‘I don’t recall their being mentioned. But it’s scarcely a relevant point.’
‘I suppose not. Then the old chap suddenly said, “I’d call that one a beta-query-plus”. What do you make of that?’
‘What you do, probably. That he was uncommonly pleased.’
‘Well yes – exactly. And he went on with something about the denser fogs thinning out a bit inside my skull. Quite casually, you know. No drama. And then he turned me out of the room. Only, you see, I wasn’t back in the quad again before I remembered something I was told by a man who’s reading Greats. His tutor’s another old party – not quite so old – called Buntingford. Do you know Buntingford?’
‘Yes, I do. He taught me for a time, as a matter of fact, when he was a very young don.’
‘Good Lord!’ Junkin was impressed. ‘When you were both back from the Kaiser’s War or something?’
‘Not exactly that.’ Junkin’s chronological haziness exceeded even that of my Uncle Rory. Neither, one could feel, had acted judiciously in devoting himself to historical studies. ‘But what was it Buntingford said?’
‘He told this man that that sort of thing is called the medicinal buttered bun. I think it means something like buttering you up. Don’t you?’
‘It sounds like that, Nick. I’ve heard it called the psychotherapy of warm praise.’
‘So Lempriere was just kidding me?’ Although himself plainly inclining to this view, Junkin was dashed at my appearing to support it.
‘No – not exactly that, I’d say. He’s seen reason to feel you might have a juster confidence in yourself.’
‘It might be that.’ Junkin brightened. ‘He has that sarky manner, you know. But he’s very kind, really.’
I was struck by this. ‘Kind’ is the undergraduate’s ultimate in commendatory words about a tutor – a fact which witnesses, perhaps, to the chronic desperation attending upon the happiest days of one’s life.
‘Of course,’ Junkin went on, ‘it depends on whether there was an objective basis for it.’ He had sat up and was glancing cheerfully around the room. Judging that his eye tended to linger on the table where I kept some drinks, I got up and poured sherry. ‘I mean,’ Junkin continued, ‘it depends on whether the wretched essay did have some small gleam to it. If I believed that, I think I’d work like mad. And I’ll know by the end of the week. Because of the Mumford test.’
‘What on earth is that, Nick?’ This had left me quite at a loss.
‘You know Mumford, the man opposite me on the staircase?’
‘Indeed I do.’
‘Well, we’re rather in the same boat, you see. Only, he’s not going to anybody here – not this term. They’ve farmed him out to a chap in some obscure college across the High – a kind of crash-course crammer disguised as a don.’
‘They’ve done that, have they?’ The information, although obviously containing a dash of undergraduate mythology, interested me. ‘So what?’
‘It seems that part of this chap’s technique is to tell you to write your next essay on whatever most interests you in the rotten course. So now Mumford just borrows my last essay and takes it along.’
‘I see.’ The morality of this procedure didn’t seem to fall within my province. ‘Have you two become friends?’
‘Mumford and me? Oh, no. I don’t think I frightfully care for him really.’ This remark of Junkin’s had to be received as an understatement; thus firmly to employ a contemporary’s surname was a stiffly distancing gesture. ‘But it’s reasonable to do the friendly turn. Mumford’s been rather up against things lately. He did something damned silly at the end of last term.’
‘Yes, I know.’
‘Pitiful character, in a way. You won’t have seen it, but he has an enormous great wank picture in his room. Makes the place like a porn shop.’
‘I know that picture too, as a matter of fact. It’s wanky, all right.’ I wasn’t sure that Junkin quite approved of my taking over this modish word. ‘But what’s all this in aid of?’
‘I was explaining. If this last essay of mine really has beefed itself up a bit this crammer is sure to notice and tell Mumford so.’
‘And you’ll see that as a green light for doing a bit of work?’
‘For doing an awful lot of work. That’s sensible, isn’t it?’
‘Nick, I don’t think I ever heard anything sillier. This crammer, as you call him, will have a pretty clear view of Ivo Mumford by now, and he mayn’t just be alert for that gleam of dawn. The chap for you to trust is Arnold Lempriere himself.’
‘I suppose you’re dead right. Only, you know, your tutor’s the last man you can rely upon for a straight word about your chances. Everybody says that. I suppose it’s the buttered bun again. They’re always softening the harsh truth, and so on.’
Junkin pa
used broodingly for a moment. I said nothing, having reason to believe there was a modicum of fact in the proposition he had just advanced. Long ago – I asked myself – hadn’t Timbermill got a vast amount of work out of me by pretending I was a born scholar? The analogy was imperfect, but it did exist. ‘Look here,’ Junkin said suddenly, ‘you know Lempriere quite well, don’t you?’
‘Tolerably well. We’re distant relations, as a matter of fact.’
‘You mean he’s your uncle or something?’
‘Of course not. An uncle isn’t a distant relation. We’re simply cousins in some obscure fashion. But what of it?’
‘Couldn’t you chat him up, and ask him casually what he thinks of my chances? We might get at something objective that way.’
‘I suppose I could. In fact, I will – if you think it useful. But I just wish I was your uncle, Nick. A Dutch one.’
‘You’d advise eight hours a day in the History Library?’
‘Six.’
‘From now till the end of term? You must be joking. I’d be in the funny-farm.’ Junkin paused, and seemed to read scepticism in my silence. ‘Right off my squiff,’ he elaborated. ‘And you’d be responsible.’
‘Go away, Nick. You’re wasting my time.’
‘And we might manage Fear and Misery. It could be absolutely marvellous.’ Nick got to his feet and scowled at me. ‘Oh, all right,’ he said. ‘I’ll think about it.’
‘You’ll be wasting your own time in that case. Just try getting cracking straight away for a change.’
‘You’re getting more and more like a don every day.’
‘I’m paid to get like a don. But I shan’t go in for the psychotherapy of warm praise.’
‘That’s something.’ Junkin, having reached the door, turned and grinned at me cheerfully. ‘Seeing you,’ he said. A moment later his feet were pounding up the staircase.
It was the staircase, I decided, that would make it possible for me to inquire of Arnold Lempriere about Junkin’s examination chances. In Lempriere’s Oxford (which was becoming a dream-Oxford, no doubt) there was what politicians would call a special relationship between a senior member and the half-dozen or so youths who happened to run up and down the same flight of steps as himself. Lempriere would approve of my taking a fatherly interest in Junkin, whereas if I asked about the academic progress of one of his pupils living elsewhere in college I might receive a strong hint that the matter was no business of mine. The same consideration, of course, licensed my interest in Ivo.
I decided to come at Junkin by way of Ivo. Indeed, I was under some obligation to give Lempriere an account of the late Otby episode. He was perfectly capable of enjoying any comedy it contained.
Things didn’t, however, work out quite this way. I had intended to drop in on Lempriere that evening, but was forestalled by an initiative of his own. When I went into common room to lunch he spotted me at once and gestured me brusquely over to him. But there was no vacant place beside him, and our exchange was necessarily brief. It was also of that obtrusively confidential order of which he was fond – his hand going up to the side of his mouth and his voice coming in a hoarse but penetrating whisper.
‘A delicate matter blowing up,’ he said. ‘Come for a walk. Howard Gate two o’clock. Say absolutely nothing to anyone.’
I was obliged to give a conspiratorial nod, while being aware of the cautious amusement of two young lecturers on the other side of the table. Lempriere’s particular version of the councils-of-princes idea must have been well known. He had been Senior Tutor in his time, and believed that the college’s affairs, ostensibly so democratically controlled by the entire Governing Body, were in fact most properly in the hands of an inner ring of persons holding, or having held, such offices. Whether this was really so nobody seemed to know, and men who had been fellows for a dozen years would dispute the issue warmly. There may, for that matter, have been such a caucus without Lempriere’s any longer belonging to it. Having become prone in old age to form eccentric judgements, he might no longer be thought of as ‘sound’ or ‘reliable’ as these qualities are interpreted in close cabals. But it would be my guess that he had no sense of any exclusion or relegation, and he evidently derived genuine enjoyment from occasionally divulging to some favoured outsider one or another supposed secret of this hypothetical oligarchy. Albert Talbert sometimes evinced a similar disposition. Only whereas Lempriere’s arcane confidences were invariably on what might be termed the inner mind or higher thought of the college, Talbert had the air of cautiously admitting one to some aspect of universal knowledge normally available only to the deepest and most capacious scholarship.
Our afternoon walk began in a silence that Lempriere indefinably indicated as properly to be maintained for some time. This was perhaps by way of emphasising the portentousness of whatever disclosure was to be afforded me. It seemed improbable that he proposed an expedition of major scope. He was wearing stout walking-shoes, and carried a stick which terminated in a once-formidable but long-since blunted steel spike. The shoes, however, appeared a little too heavy for his feet, and with the stick he was inclined to feel forward on the pavement as if it were uncertain moorland terrain. Much more then when commandingly prowling common room, he revealed himself as quite as old as his years.
We went up the Turl – the colleges fronting upon which own in a singular degree that effect of mild conventual presence which Oxford at large once hinted to Henry James. The grisatre effect is very soothing, and as Lempriere was so grisatre too I was drawn to reflect upon how well he composed with the scene. Apart from those Washington days, he had presumably spent his whole adult life in Oxford, and had thus become one with its stones and with its grey misty uneventful vistas. It was not, I told myself, a place by which he could ever be betrayed – or even, in his old age, bewildered or surprised.
The narrow street was quiet. Much traffic had lately been filtered out of the centre of Oxford by civic authorities of a pedestrian turn of mind; and around us, at least for the moment, was an almost Venetian tranquillity. There wasn’t a vehicle in sight, and the only sound was the click of a typewriter from some upper chamber in Jesus. As if judging this calm propitious for his revelation, Lempriere raised a hand to command my full attention. No words came from him, however, and for a moment I wondered why. The empty Oxford afternoon was still around us; an elderly don, a gown slung over his shoulder, was approaching at a moderate pace on a bicycle; on the other pavement a young woman had stopped to switch from one hand to the other a recalcitrant child and a heavy shopping-bag; in the doorway of a travel agency a fair-haired youth in rowing kit had paused to study some brochure or hand-out which he had just obtained in the interior. Thus sparsely peopled, the Turl was still entirely silent. Only from somewhere away on our left, perhaps in the Cornmarket, a low-toned indeterminate sound was making itself heard – a sound the chief suggestion of which was multitudinousness, as if a long way off great waves were churning up the pebbles on a stormy beach, or as if, equally far in distance, contending rugger teams were being cheered on by armies of dwarfs. Then, with surprising abruptness, this mysterious phenomenon explained itself. We were listening to a great deal of shouting of that semi-organised sort favoured by marchers and demonstrators of a political cast. It was, in fact, a ‘demo’ that was going forward.
‘We seem to be running into a certain amount of liveliness,’ I said.
Lempriere made no reply. He simply walked on.
It was a large demo, as Oxford demos went. By the time we reached Ship Street the gates of Trinity, straight ahead of us across the Broad, had vanished behind a mass of young people. The Broad is a thoroughfare most appropriately named, since it is very broad indeed. Even so, the procession – or whatever it was to be called – jammed it, bringing all traffic to a stop. Any space the marchers didn’t take up was occupied by bystanders, male and female, of their own age. The marchers carried banners and placards of a somewhat unimpressive showing, but there was no mistaking the
sheer physical exuberance at their command. The bystanders, on the other hand, seemed concerned to exhibit an air of nonchalant ease, as if they found the whole spectacle absurd rather than alarming. Yet alarming it undeniably was. Even a mob of clergymen yelling its head off would be not without a perturbing effect. And university students in the mass (I suddenly saw) are capable of being a good deal less pleasing than they commonly are as individuals or in small groups.
What Lempriere was thinking I don’t know. His silence was now so resolute that I decided not to be chatty myself. It was impossible to cross the street, but we edged our way eastwards in the direction of the Sheldonian Theatre. This, one of the two masterpieces achieved in Oxford by Christopher Wren, is guarded (as all readers of Zuleika Dobson know) by a semicircle of gigantic carved heads set upon pillars. The busts (believed by the uninstructed to represent Roman emperors but known to the learned to be learned persons like themselves) had lately emerged from near-obliteration in new and staring stone. These colossi were now surveying some four or five hundred pygmy undergraduates who had sat down on the road in front of them; they were also surveying perhaps a score of pygmy policemen lined up on the steps of the Clarendon Building and before the portals of the Indian Institute. Their mute spectatorship added a bizarre touch to what was already a surprising scene. I had myself, indeed, seen something like it only a few months before. That had been in Florence. There, the students had appeared younger, and their concern had been with matters far away: in Chile, I think it was. Here, such manifestations were understood to be in the interest of establishing a kind of super-cafeteria – declared by the insurgent forces to be essential to their well-being, and believed by many of their seniors to be in fact a demand for the building of a miniature Kremlin on the Isis. Here, the policemen were ‘stolid’ – as if they must abide by the journalists’ description of them; in Florence, they had been demonstratively bored. In Florence, there had been water-cannon lurking in the side-streets; here, the police had solemnly brought out a kind of Black Maria or prison van. It didn’t look as if it could do anybody any harm. I felt it to be a somewhat tactless object, all the same.
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