The demo was now passing beneath the Genders’ windows. It was a slow-moving affair, partly because of the display of a number of large banners which it appeared difficult to keep poised in a condition of adequate legibility. A few of these claimed, whether veraciously or not, the status of a kind of personal standard of one individual college or another; others announced various Marxist-Leninist, Maoist, and Trotskyist affiliations; and a surprising number spoke of regions remote from Oxford’s dreaming spires. These last appeared to afford Professor Babcock considerable satisfaction.
‘Mr Elijah,’ she said, ‘is clearly gaining my beloved college, hitherto obscure, a far-flung fame. Mr Pattullo, did you remark the Dotheboys Hall Anarcho-Syndicalist Group? And here are the Boiler-makers. It is eminently proper that Mr Elijah should enjoy their support.’
‘There really are people from half a dozen other universities,’ Bedworth murmured to me seriously – so that I somehow felt that Professor Babcock annoyed him. ‘That takes a certain amount of organising. The immediate issue’s plainly nonsense, but I don’t think the whole thing’s just funny.’
‘Neither do I.’
‘One almost has to admire their being so good at being so unreasonable.’ Bedworth paused to make a clumsy bow to the lady, who was now carrying her wit elsewhere. ‘It’s the same in college. Of course I don’t think many of our men turn out to affairs like this—’
‘It might be better if they did,’ Damian interrupted briskly. ‘As a college we’ve always been considered superior and standoffish – and with bloody good reason.’
‘Perhaps so,’ I said. ‘But I want to hear how Cyril struggles with the unreasonableness of the young. Deans and Senior Tutors are obviously on the job all day, but they keep uncommonly close about it. Cyril goes round with a weight of public care on his brow, but never lets me in on its specific occasions.’
‘I don’t think I’d be popular if I prowled the college pouring out tales of woe.’ Bedworth, although always perplexed when made fun of, usually responded with a manful attempt to achieve his own lighter note. ‘There are quite enough Doom-Watch characters around, wouldn’t you say? And one must guard against going about making gossip and small-talk out of people’s private problems – or even out of their group conspiracies.’
I felt admonished, and accordingly held my peace. Damian glanced through the window.
‘The circus has come to a halt,’ he said. ‘The police have a trick of holding up these affairs pretty frequently in order to clear the traffic ahead. They hope people will grow bored and go home. It’s equally likely to produce bad temper, I’d suppose.’
I looked down at the marchers. Halted, they were continuing their monotonous shouting about poor Miss Basket. It seemed a singularly profitless exercise – unless, indeed, it served to keep people warm on what was turning a chilly evening. I saw no sign of bad temper, but no more did I see much sign of that eruptive jollity or gamesomeness which might lend support to the ‘students’ rag’ reading of the occasion. The demonstrators, like Cyril Bedworth, were seriously disposed. About the precise contours of the Elijah affair the majority of them were not likely to be well-informed. Generously propelled, it might have been said, by that most hazardous of fuels, a sense of righteousness, they were marching and shouting under the simple large persuasion that their seniors had pervasively made a criminal mess of things. It struck me as a tenable view.
We continued silently to watch the halted mob. It seemed in some literal sense steamed up; a faint miasma now hung above it, as above a lowing herd. The appearance of many of the males contributed to the bovine suggestion; shaggy in their persons, many of them affected jackets streaked and patched with fur, so that the general effect was of moulting or tettered yaks. Among the females a majority favoured duffle-coats worn over what seemed to be superannuated ball-dresses gone ragged and trailing at the hem. For some years nothing had more struck me about the external appearance of the young than the ability of both sexes to extract elegance from garments as unpretending as a charity child’s. On a present view it looked as if a cult of ugliness had taken over. I found myself hoping that this was a passing phase or my own subjective conclusion.
‘Then I’ll tell you what’s bothering me today,’ I heard Bedworth say suddenly. He must have been brooding over my very mild joke about his reticence. ‘It’s this french-letter machine.’
‘This what, Cyril?’
‘I suppose most people have heard about it. They’re demanding one in the J.C.R. A coin-operated machine for dispensing male contraceptives. That’s what they call it in a letter. They do exist, you know. You come across them, for instance, in the wash-places of transport cafes.’
‘How very difficult,’ I said.
‘Difficult? Not a bit of it!’ Damian spoke briskly. ‘Aren’t french letters, Cyril, eminently objects for which a sudden need rises up every now and then? I advise the more elaborate form of equipment. You put in five p. or ten p., and the thing comes out plain or coloured accordingly.’
‘It’s not a subject for ribaldry, Robert.’ Bedworth’s glance, despite these words, admitted amusement. Long ago Tony and I had subjected him to a pretty stiff training in the reception of facetiae of this sort. At the same time he was very properly looking round Mrs Gender’s drawing-room to make sure that nobody else could overhear and be offended. ‘And I’ll tell you my feeling. Funny or not, the notion just isn’t decent.’
‘Rubbish, man. The machine needn’t be stuck up next to the colour television, or among the beer kegs in the buttery. Shove it in one of the loos. Or shove two in two of the loos. That will obviate all embarrassment among the modest or furtive patrons. And I expect the machines are rent-free. The college might even get a rake-off on sales if you pressed for it.’
‘Robert, have you any serious thoughts about this?’
‘Yes, I think I have. Consider the main point you make – I mean that the college makes – about all this sexual activity around the place. You’ve abandoned an orthodox Christian view—’
‘We’ve done nothing of the kind!’
‘All right. I amend that. You’ve abandoned the right to impose old views on young people who subscribe to new ones. What you stand by is the fact that a college is a place of learning. Most people turn up because they want to learn, and it’s your duty to provide them with a reasonably undistracting environment for just that. Is that right?’
‘Perfectly right.’
‘You have to take any rational steps you can to protect them from the graver anxieties incident upon the sexual development of young males?’
‘All right, Robert. Go on.’ Bedworth gave me a surprisingly whimsical look. He wasn’t at all at sea as to the drift of Damian’s argument.
‘Do you know what it’s like, Cyril, to be a decent and penniless young man who isn’t sure he hasn’t got his girl up the stick?’
‘Yes, I do.’
This reply, being unexpected, momentarily threw Damian off his stride. I myself supposed that Bedworth was merely indicating by it a certain capacity for imaginative identification with the predicament described. Yet what did I know of the intimate life of the adolescent Bedworth? Nothing at all.
‘Or to be the girl?’ Damian demanded. ‘I’m at the receiving end of the mess quite often, and I can tell you it’s the very devil. Pregnancy tests, depressions, anxiety states, covert inquiries about abortion – all the works. And every now and then – for don’t let us exaggerate – it could all have been obviated had this harmless facility been to hand.’
‘But Robert – this is nonsense!’ Bedworth had become distressed. ‘Any reasonably intelligent young man who thinks he’s going to make love, and who isn’t sure his girl is on the pill or something, provides himself with these things well in advance. He’d be a moron not to.’
‘Then he’s sometimes a moron. Or sometimes the situation just jumps at him and he takes a chance. Whereas he could, you see, nip over to the J.C.R. while the wench is getting
into bed! So think of this poor chap, Cyril. Think of him in concrete terms. One of your own pupils, perhaps. He wants to get on with his essay for you but he just can’t. He can’t fix his mind on the job because of this awful fear that he’s put his girl in the club. The poor benefit of a bewildering minute, you know. Or a single crafty reef and all’s confusion.’
Damian’s first-hand familiarity with his theme struck me as authenticated by elements in his vocabulary, which presumably came to him in the conversation of agitated young men. Bedworth’s perturbation had increased; it was evident that the picture of the pupil impeded in his studies by a consciousness of the possible consequences of his irregular behaviour had caught his imagination.
‘But Robert,’ he cried, ‘just think of bringing such a proposal before a college Governing Body!’
‘Administrative action is all that’s required. You and Jimmy Gender just run up to town, inspect the latest models, and have your particular fancy sent down the following day.’
‘Talk sense, for goodness sake! The idea simply bristles with difficulties. Imagine the attitude of our clerical members.’
‘It’s not the attitude of those members that’s most relevant, surely? It’s—’
‘If you can do nothing but produce indecent cracks, Robert, we’d better shut up.’ Bedworth wasn’t really offended. His own conversation never deviated from the academic proprieties, but he was a resolutely tolerant man.
‘Here’s Albert Talbert advancing on us,’ I said. ‘Shall we put the problem to him? He might be worth hearing on it.’
This suggestion, itself frivolous, was at once rendered abortive by the circumstance that Talbert proved to be accompanied by his wife. Damian rapidly took in this situation.
‘I leave the literati to it,’ he said cheerfully, and plunged into the thick of Mrs Gender’s party. It was now a very populous affair.
X
More, perhaps, than any couple in Oxford, the Talberts maintained an air of learned concern upon social occasions. The modest entertainments upon which they themselves ventured amid the domesticities of Old Road were inaugurated and brought to a conclusion with a ritual closing and reopening of enormous folio volumes upon their sitting-room table. At parties like the present you almost expected them to appear unarming such objects in a symbolic manner, much as saints and martyrs parade with gridirons and wheels and hatchets in sacred iconography. And Mrs Talbert in particular did in fact carry round with her a certain emblematical suggestion. Tall and gaunt, with crag-like features disconcertingly crowned with an outmoded coiffure of small serpentine ringlets, and addicted to trailing diaphanous scarves which at a breath would rise and curl like scrolls awaiting explanatory annotations, she might have appeared with acceptance in a Jacobean masque (a literary kind upon which she was an acknowledged authority) as a figure of imposing if somewhat imprecise allegorical signification.
The Talberts were invariably much at one in the direction of their current research. If Talbert pondered the possibility that The King of England and the Goldsmith’s Wife might be nothing other than Heywood’s King Edward IV his wife would develop the theory that The Proud Woman of Antwerp was a lost piece by Day and Haughton. Rightly maintaining that their function was not merely to make knowledge but to diffuse it as expeditiously as possible, and too eminent to think of scoring scoops in learned journals, they were never slow to embark upon informative talk in general society. They did, however, exhibit here a slight difference the one from the other. Mrs Talbert, the more enthusiastic of the two, would scarcely pause to be handed a drink before plunging in with Crafty Cromwell, or Far Fetched and Dear Bought is Good for Ladies, or even Give a Man Luck and Throw him into the Sea, for the benefit of anybody who came to hand. She was commonly listened to with interest even by agronomists and cyberneticians, since her articulatory eccentricities were becoming more pronounced with age and there was something curiously compelling in her ability to produce entire sentences on an indrawn breath. Talbert, possessing beyond everything else a sense of the high consequence (or deep import) of all fruits of scholarly labour, was accustomed to look round such a gathering as the present for persons of the gravity which he himself – except upon rare and perplexing occasions – habitually exhibited. But if nobody measuring up to this standard was on view he would accord honorary status as a full-fledged savant to any receptive-looking individual with whom he could claim acquaintance. Bedworth, his immediate colleague, must have enjoyed a position in the first category, and I myself was at least not sunk beneath the second. These estimations were now bringing Talbert towards us at a brisk toddle. His wife had detached herself from him in the middle of the room for the purpose of addressing herself to Professor Babcock – possibly about Mr Elijah, but more probably about Lust’s Dominion or The Two Sins of King David.
The demo was in movement again, and had raised a ragged cheer in consequence. Alerted by this, Talbert walked up to the window and looked out.
‘A political rally,’ he said huskily and informatively. He might have been a connoisseur of ceramics who, glancing into a show-case, at once identifies for uninstructed companions the dynasty or whatever of the objects on view. ‘A remarkable turn-out.’ Talbert added this approvingly – a circumstance which might have surprised a stranger, since his complexion was that which, in a coloured comic-strip, conventionally indicates that the baby has swallowed its rattle. This fiery hue, which would have entitled him to take his place beside his wife, pageant-wise, as representing Furor, Ira or some similar personification, was the more striking for being set off by his large white moustache and the mild glint of his gold-rimmed spectacles. Yet any reading of Talbert as a choleric man would have been in error. Disapprobation, even measured indignation, could be aroused in him by the fact or fancy of insufficient scholarship being somewhere abroad in the land. But I couldn’t recall his ever having allowed himself anger even at times when my own juvenile silliness must have been very trying indeed.
‘It may well be the university branch of the Fabian Society,’ Talbert added on reflection. ‘I am told that they have been very active of late. This may be an anniversary celebration – of the birthday, maybe, of Mrs Sydney Webb. I see that one of the young men is waving at me.’ Talbert raised a hand in measured response to this supposed greeting – which had actually, I imagine, been the random elevating of a clenched fist in an approved revolutionary fashion. ‘A pupil, no doubt. Cyril, might it be Montgomerie – or perhaps Skeffington-Jones? Yes, I think it may have been Skeffington-Jones.’ Talbert paused on all this fallacious rambling, and must have found it good, since he gave a pregnant and approbatory nod not apparently directed at anything else. ‘A pleasant party,’ he went on. ‘Gender’s wife has the art of contriving such things. Misce stultitiam consiliis brevem – eh, Duncan? The injunction affords some of our colleagues singularly little difficulty.’ Suddenly Talbert’s eyes lit up: a small but arresting phenomenon, like that of dipped headlights coming on full-beam very far away. Or it was as if glints from those gold-rimmed spectacles had floated free and were now harbouring deep within the irises of this learned man. Simultaneously, moreover, there was manifested that curious auditory effect, again peculiar to Talbert, faint as visceral noises emanating from some gnome or elf, which one took to reveal the existence of a deeply internalised mirth. Was Talbert’s amusement a simple tribute to his wit in quoting Horace or whoever it may have been? Or was he tickled by a just sense of his own mild absurdity? As often before, I found it impossible to say. And abruptly and with an equal familiarity, I was aware that he had switched to an extreme of the Talbertian gravitas. It had been one of his disconcerting habits in tutorials. Confident that merriment was being hinted, pleased with one’s own acuteness in detecting it upon evidence so slender, one would still be obsequiously guffawing when made aware that nothing but the most uncompromising intellectual severity was any longer present in the small bleak room.
‘It ought to have been cancelled, nevertheless,’ Talbe
rt said.
Into these mysterious words my old tutor had put a maximum of ex cathedra effect, so that one felt the verdict to do no more than articulate the silent judgement of concurrent centuries.
‘Cancelled?’ The word was echoed by Bedworth, who seemed as much at a loss as I was. ‘What ought to have been cancelled, Albert?’
‘The present entertainment.’ Talbert (who was provided with what looked like whisky on ice) glanced darkly round Mrs Gender’s now thronging and animated guests. ‘So hard upon so sad an event! But, hearing nothing, it was civil to attend.’ Making a deft half-turn, Talbert succeeded in getting his far from empty glass usefully in the path of some ministrant person carrying a decanter. Like many men notably abstemious at home, he enjoyed getting full value out of parties. ‘On one of their treacherous motorways,’ he resumed. ‘Crushed between Juggernauts, in the popular phrase. One might better say Symplegades, particularly since he was so brilliant a classical scholar. Your own classical training, Duncan, will have enabled you to appreciate his last opusculum. To my mind, there has not been its like since Housman’s Manilius.’ (Talbert, although so eminent an ‘English’ scholar, frequently emphasised that he was originally a classical man.) ‘One of Oxford’s finest minds is extinguished, Cyril.’
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