‘Oh he’ll be all right with them. Nick’s turning teachable, more or less. And we have several weeks in hand. I’ll show him a trick or two to outwit the brutes.’
‘That’s a good tutor’s job?’
‘Cokeville Junkin will think so by the time I’ve finished with him. But to get back to Ivo. He’s said not to be teachable, I admit. All the more occasion for his having a friend at need, eh? And it’s going to be a chap who has never so much as passed the time of day with him. No chance of somebody like Charles Atlas going round murmuring that Mumford is one of the old dotard’s little chums.’
‘I see.’ This primitive guile on Lempriere’s part was something I had glimpsed already. ‘Would you so much as recognise the boy?’
‘Lord, yes! I’ve taken a good look at the heir of the Mumfords often enough. A handsome lad in his way. Keeps his hair clean, too. Glint of bronze in it.’
‘Yes, so there is.’
‘But I doubt whether he could put a name to me. Astonishing how little curiosity the young men can have about the old men in their midst.’
The Cherwell was now in front of us, but behaving not entirely as I remembered it. They had been messing it about. Here and there it sluiced its dirty skin over concrete as it had always done, carrying autumn leaves and autumn litter indifferently down to Thames. But the weirs had shifted their positions and so had a couple of bridges. Or so I thought. The contraption known as the rollers, however, was exactly as it had been; it helped you – although not much – to haul your punt to a higher level of the stream. On our left, beyond a muddy swamp, was a large dismal structure that rang no bell at all: a system of wooden and corrugated-iron palisades, some eight feet high. It vaguely suggested a small abandoned concentration camp, too inefficiently designed ever to have been in a good way of business.
‘What on earth’s that?’ I asked.
‘That’s Parson’s Pleasure.’ Lempriere was staring at me, really shocked. ‘Don’t tell me you never came to swim here?’
‘Well, yes – I did sometimes. And took a punt through quite often. Only I just didn’t recognise it.’ I was struck by a recent memory. ‘You suggested our coming the afternoon after the Gaudy – but I had to go to tea with the Talberts. Do you bathe here often, Arnold?’
‘Not at this time of year.’ Lempriere surveyed the depressing scene, chuckling softly. ‘But we might just take a peep. Come on, Dunkie.’ Abandoning his usual cautious gait, he plunged into the mud. It seemed not decent to decline to follow him, and I plunged forward too. Submerged under an inch or two of the stuff there was some sort of footpath. If Lempriere managed to keep to it I did not. We reached the barrier in front of us where it stopped off at the river-bank, and where there proved to be a notice reading Ladies are not allowed beyond this point. I stared at it much as if I had met a traveller from an antique land.
‘It really happens still?’ I asked.
‘Of course it does. They had a place for mixed bathing next door for a time. But it faded out.’
‘Nude mixed bathing?’
‘Certainly not.’ Lempriere was displeased.
‘Why did it fade out? Perhaps the ladies judged the Cherwell rather too dirty for their children and themselves?’
‘I don’t know what anybody judged. Take a look round the corner, Dunkie. But mind the barbed wire.’
I minded the barbed wire and surveyed the empty bathing- place. It naturally didn’t afford much interest.
‘Truce awhile to toil and tasking,’ Lempriere said.
‘What’s that?’ I had recovered my balance without falling into the Cherwell. It really looked very uninviting indeed.
‘Truce awhile to toil and tasking,
Dream away the hours with us,
With a bun and towel basking:
Pur is naturalibus!’
Lempriere recited these lines with affection – despite their having their origin, I believe, not at his own but at a rival school. He recited them, too, with the largest innocence, although nothing could be more certain than that an old gentleman’s fondness for summer bathing and basking amid naked striplings must nowadays occasion ribald comment from time to time. I felt no doubt about the innocence. Lempriere belonged, spiritually if not chronologically, to the pre-Freudian era, when bachelors were respectable and you prompted little speculation if not ‘a ladies’ man’. And he was certainly not the only representative of his generation to frequent this guarded stretch of the Cherwell – now so forlorn, but doubtless joyous and Arcadian in June. In my own time it had been a recognised foible, and the ribaldry no more than amusement, muted in a civilised way.
‘It could do with chlorination,’ I said. ‘But I’ll risk it with you in the summer term. Swimming’s something I can still manage.’
‘That’s a promise, Dunkie. It’s not the Corry or the Garry, I’ll admit. But it serves, it serves.’
We made a circuitous return to the city, managing to take in Addison’s Walk and Magdalen Grove. Lempriere was tiring and again fairly silent, but perceptibly in a contented mood. My undertaking had pleased him. I reminded myself (as I frequently had to do) that he regarded me as a kinsman, and this suggested to me something that might engage his interest.
‘Talking of the Corry,’ I said, ‘do you know that I’m not your only kin in Oxford from across the border? There’s another Glencorry – and she’s a Lempriere by descent, not just by devious alliance. She’s a grand-daughter of my Aunt Charlotte, called Fiona Petrie. And she was a pupil of J. B. Timbermill, as I was long ago.’
For a moment I thought I’d put a foot wrong, having failed to reckon with the indignation Lempriere was likely to feel at having been left so long in ignorance of this tenuous family connection. Fortunately he took it well, and I told him whatever I knew about Fiona. By this time she had been out to dinner with me, and I found her straying quite frequently into my head. That she could be represented as one of the up-and-coming learned women of the university, however, didn’t please Lempriere at all. He seemed to take the view that, had he been – as would have been proper – apprised of her presence at an earlier stage of her career, he might have headed her off from a walk of life so unbecoming to her sex.
‘And you say,’ he demanded challengingly, ‘that she shares a house with a lady novelist?’
‘Yes.’ I hadn’t actually described Miss Mountain in these archaic terms. But as she wrote novels and was undoubtedly a lady the description couldn’t well be taken exception to.
‘Oxford seems an odd place for lady novelists.’ Lempriere reflected for a moment. ‘Of course,’ he said concessively, ‘there was Mrs Humphry Ward.’
‘I believe there are several at the moment. Perhaps it’s an odd place for gentleman novelists as well.’
‘So it is. I’ve never heard of one.’
‘I don’t think many dons persist in the practice.’ This conversation was amusing me. ‘But a surprising number of them might be found to have perpetrated a single novel in their youth, or even a single novel in their riper age. Professional novelists, on the other hand, are hurrying themselves into university chairs and fellowships all over the country. They must suppose theirs is a dying industry.’
‘At least we know a dramatist who has done that.’ It delighted Lempriere to plant this just if obvious barb. ‘Eh, Dunkie? But did you say something about J. B. Timbermill? I suppose that rum book of his might be called a novel of sorts.’
‘I said that it seems he was Fiona’s tutor. It’s my guess that she was his favourite pupil, a kind of child of old age. And she appears very fond of him.’
Is she very fond of this Margaret What’s-her-name?’
‘Mountain.’ This question struck me as surprising from a pre-Freudian man. ‘I really don’t know.’
‘You must bring her to see me. Miss Petrie, that is. You can leave What’s-her-name behind you.’
‘I’ll do that sometime.’ I thought this promised rather an odd encounter.
‘Good.
Up Longwall, I think.’
This was a further detour from our route back to college. It proved, surprisingly, to be because Lempriere wanted to survey the late battle-field. A single policeman stood at the door of the Indian Institute, and there was a second on the steps of the Clarendon Building. The only other sign of the afternoon’s manifestation was a thin scattering of abandoned hand-outs here and there in the gutters. Lempriere impaled one of them on the spike of his walking-stick and examined it cursorily. He seemed to judge it not interesting.
‘Plenty of riots in mediaeval Oxford,’ he said. ‘Knives as well as staves at times, and no end of broken sconces. Probably not much vice in them, all the same. Still, a mob’s a mob, and there’s not much to be done with it. Except ignore it, eh?’ He shook his stick, and the crumpled little sheet fluttered to the ground. ‘No good beginning except with the individual, you know, or with three or four reasonable people gathered in a room. I’m convinced of that, and it’s why I’ve never been other than what they call a college man. See that the college does the right thing by its own people, and the university will look after itself. A sermon, Dunkie, a sermon. Take it to heart.’
IX
I received Lempriere’s sermon in good part, perhaps because at this time I was myself turning rapidly into a college-oriented man. My job was with graduate students and undergraduates from all over the university, but the college held for me very much the centre of the stage. And this is an accurate image. I was a playwright still, with an instinct for the compassable scene. Surrey, Howard, Harbage and Rattenbury: lurking in these four quadrangles and in the dozen half-hidden but commodious nooks disposed around them were enough goings-on to stoke a modest imagination for quite a long time.
There were plenty of people around whose temperaments might have been called non-collegiate, and whose habits largely removed them from the public eye. J. B. Timbermill was one of them. As I had discovered in my first undergraduate term before running him to earth in his hideous North Oxford villa, there was a small string of colleges in which he was entitled to lunch and dine. Even at that time, however, he was understood never to enter any of them. Indeed, among the many legends attaching to his name there was one declaring that, even as an undergraduate, he had insisted on occupying strictly inviolable apartments in the Mitre Hotel. Unlike some other reclusive eccentrics indulgently regarded around the university, Timbermill was an authority of the first eminence in his field – and virtually a ‘private scholar’, as it used to be called, without the need of regular employment since provided with independent means. I now knew, what had never occurred to me as an undergraduate, that I had been Timbermill’s pupil simply because it was with a small amount of teaching that he cared to lighten his solitude, and not on the score of any financial consideration at all.
There were other men, in some degree akin to Timbermill in temperament, who had worked perhaps for a long span of years as college tutors before attaining to university posts which left them free to attenuate their college connections as they pleased. Here I am thinking not of those heavyweights moving out to the university in search of scope for administrative and organising talent, but of men whose interest is so exclusively in scholarship and research that appointment to a university professorship or the like virtually removes them from the public ken. They appear in their lecture-rooms with decent regularity, but are seldom otherwise on view.
It was into this last group that I had concluded there must fall somebody I hadn’t yet glimpsed during the course of the term, but who was for a sufficient reason occasionally in my thoughts. It wasn’t because we had been schoolfellows that Ranald McKechnie would thus bob up in my head. There were several other dons in Oxford who had been my contemporaries or near-contemporaries amid the Doric colonnades and pebbled yards of that citadel of a bleakly classical education. To these I never gave a thought. McKechnie – ‘Wee Dreichie’ to my irreverent father – had a different claim to my consideration.
Not having run into the elusive McKechnie, I had been unable to inquire about McKechnie’s wife. Could Janet – I asked myself rather needlessly – be ill? Some weeks of term had gone by without her having made me a sign. I did obscurely feel that it was up to Janet to do this, although the book of rules might have it that I ought to go and ring her front-door bell. My coming back to Oxford made me an intruder on her settled scene; if only ever so faintly, there might be something disturbing about it that she acknowledged as calling for reflection. I was conscious of this last notion as generating in me an interest, almost an excitement, that wasn’t at all sensible. At Oxford, I had ended by telling myself, everybody runs into everybody else sooner or later, and Janet had decided that a key to our future relationship would be prudently set by letting this happen now. It wasn’t a course of conduct that would have recommended itself to the Janet of my first love. But Janet was now a mature woman on the threshold of a tranquil middle age.
It was in the expectation of this sort of meeting that I accepted in those weeks every invitation I received, and a few days after my walk with Lempriere I went to a party given by the Genders. They owned, in St Giles’, a beautiful Georgian house which made discreetly evident the possession of means not of an academic order, and on this solid basis they entertained a good deal. Jimmy Gender, although not invariably a resourceful conversationalist, was an accomplished host of the diffident sort. There was nothing diffident about his wife. To be Anthea Gender’s guest was to be conscious of being very much in her hands.
‘Does one ever see anything of the McKechnies?’ It was with some surprise that, quite early in my conversation with her, I heard myself ask this somewhat gauche question. I had no doubt designed that it should carry only the suggestion of a topic reached for at random in the interest of sustained chat. But it hadn’t come out like that. I might have been charging my hostess with a culpable failure in not having the McKechnies on parade.
‘Ah, they’re both shy birds – but particularly Ranald. They may be here later this evening, but Janet couldn’t be definite. She has the excuse of only just having got home.’
‘She’s been away?’ I was overjoyed at this obvious explanation of Janet’s silence – the possibility of which hadn’t occurred to me.
‘Visiting her father, Professor Finlay, in Scotland. I believe he has been ill.’ Mrs Gender was looking at me with a quickened interest I distrusted. ‘You know the family?’
‘I don’t remember Professor Finlay at all well. His wife died and he made a second marriage. I rather supposed he’d be dead. My own father is, you know.’
I had made an indefinably awkward little speech – but it didn’t perturb Mrs Gender. She glanced round her drawing- room and apparently decided she could allow me another minute or two.
‘The McKechnies did come to Camilla Pococke’s luncheon party the day after the Gaudy,’ she said. ‘Perhaps you remember that.’
‘Yes. I do. Decidedly.’
‘Tell me, Duncan, was that your first meeting with Ranald for a long time? I know you were at school together.’
‘Yes, it was.’
‘And with Janet? You knew her when you were a boy?’
‘Yes, with Janet too. And I did.’
I was disturbed by these plain intimations of knowledgeableness. Women can behave with staggering unpredictability – yet I didn’t for a moment believe that Janet had communicated our history to Mrs Gender. I myself in youth had buried it all in my heart. I hadn’t even told Tony Mumford about Janet.
‘I was rather in love with Janet once,’ I said. ‘But you couldn’t know that – could you?’
I was now laughing at Anthea Gender, since I had to make the best of this small situation. Moreover, the explanation of it had come to me. The Glencorrys must have known at the time something about my abortive love-affair with Janet Finlay; Arnold Lempriere, obscurely my Aunt Charlotte’s kinsman, had got hold of it through circuitous family channels I knew nothing about; quite recently he must have passed it on to An
thea Gender – again as a piece of Forsyte-like family intelligence.
‘It was long before your marriage, Duncan? That you were in love, I mean, with Janet McKechnie?’
‘Oh, yes – long before.’
‘Was your wife English or Scotch?’
‘English.’
‘And if you were to marry again? Would it be a Scotch girl or an English one?’
‘Scotch.’ I was more surprised by the unthinking decision with which I said this than I was by the outre character of Anthea Gender’s catechism – although indeed the very crispness of her address made her assumption of intimacy inoffensive. And now she did see fit to change the subject.
‘I believe,’ she said, ‘that Jimmy wants to talk to you about his latest crisis. He has heard you actually encountered the boy.’
‘You mean the second Lusby? Yes, indeed.’
‘He’d be Jimmy’s pupil. It would be all on Jimmy, once the boy was here. But what Jimmy says at the moment is that the college mustn’t plump too readily for playing safe.’
‘Meaning?’
‘Concluding there’s a clear case that Lusby’s not up to it, and that disappointment now is preferable to humiliation and disaster later on. By the way, do you know that Arnold has the boy on his mind?’
‘Yes. He harangued me on the subject the other afternoon during a walk to Parson’s Pleasure.’
‘Good heavens! He’s not disporting himself there at this time of year?’
‘Lord, no. The place is locked up and rather gruesome. We just took a nostalgic peep. But Arnold was quite impressive on Peter Lusby. He has a talent for making that sort of thing come vividly home to one. He did it over the first Lusby’s plight. I was there, as it happened, and heard him.’
‘I remember you were. But here is Charles. We must ask him what he thinks.’ This was a reference to Charles Atlas, who was now approaching us. ‘Ah, and Dr Cressy!’ Mrs Gender broke off to welcome this new arrival. ‘Dr Cressy, you know Mr Pattullo?’
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