‘Albert, who are you talking about, in heaven’s name?’
‘Or, better still, one might say crushed by the Planctae. Duncan, the twelfth book of the Odyssey will be familiar to you. The Wandering Rocks. And so young a man! Far short of fifty, I believe. An irreparable loss to scholarship.’ Talbert pronounced this last opinion with his unvarying effect of weighed and considered utterance. ‘Poor McKechnie,’ he concluded.
In the romances of my boyhood it was frequently stated that, as a consequence of one or another well-nigh insuperable challenge to his young manhood – from a Martian, say, or an unexpectedly surviving Brontosaurus – the hero’s blood ran cold. The sensation which has generated this cliche beset me now. But I was unaware of any interpretable conflict of emotions, and the possibility of anything of the kind was to be short-circuited in a moment. I knew only that the appalling thought of Janet bereft by fate of her second husband as she had been of her first left me utterly numb. It is surprising that I heard as clearly as I did Cyril Bedworth’s immediately ensuing Words.
‘Good God, Albert, you’ve got it utterly wrong!’ It was very rarely indeed that Bedworth allowed himself, as now, any hint of impudence with our old teacher. ‘You must have been hearing of an obscure man called McNally, who teaches some outlandish lore at Wadham. He’s had a smash-up on the motorway, sure enough. But he isn’t even dead. They’re busy putting him together again in the Radcliffe at this moment. As for Ranald McKechnie – can’t you see that he’s in this room – and his wife as well, for that matter?’
Fleetingly, I remembered that this was a line of Talbert’s; that he was prone to getting his disasters a little mixed up. Dimly, I was conscious that his immediate reaction to Bedworth’s correcting him was also familiar; being indicted of a factual error went against the grain of his calling; he was showing some disposition to dispute the facts of the matter, even in the face of the evidence. It was that evidence which was now before me. Scanning the crowded room, I had spotted McKechnie, undeniably alive and well, in the same moment that he spotted me. He had actually flicked up a hand – jerkily, like an old-fashioned ‘trafficator’ on a car – in greeting. From McKechnie, this was an oncoming and uninhibited gesture, by which I’d have been touched had I taken leisure to give it a thought. But this I didn’t do. He and Janet, although they could not have been at the party long, had already separated as well-conducted couples do on such occasions, and my glance had taken another sweep to find her. As our eyes met I had the impression that she had already seen me, and even that she had been studying me seriously across the length of the room. Now she smiled. It was the smile – a dispersal of some more thoughtful regard – which she had given me from the other end of Mrs Pococke’s luncheon-table a few months before, and which had re-established between us I didn’t quite know what. But I did know that we were going to be perfectly easy together. I knew this so clearly, indeed, that, despite all I had been asking myself about our new relationship, what I now sent her in reply across the room was nothing more complicated than a cheerful grin. At this, and to my joy, Janet began disengaging herself from the people she was talking to. I spent no time on any such civilities with Bedworth and Talbert, and within seconds Janet and I were converging upon one another – purposively, although necessarily on a zigzag course. This joint impulse, spontaneous and innocent, evoked in me a moment of extraordinary happiness. The fact must have been apparent in my features – for suddenly a woman’s voice spoke at my shoulder.
‘Duncan,’ Fiona Petrie said, ‘you look as if you’d had a very good day.’ And Fiona kissed me.
I probably comported myself reasonably well, and I suppose it must be said that Janet did too. She turned away and was presently talking with her host. But this correct behaviour on Janet’s part happened only after she had taken a sideways step in the interest of a clear view, and studied the ambiguous rencontre between Fiona and myself with a brief dispassionate regard such an anthropologist might direct upon two primitive persons rubbing noses or engaging in some similarly commonplace social behaviour. This mischievous action – it wasn’t in the least obtrusive – disconcerted me more than it need have done. Here I was, a middle-aged man, the next thing to a bachelor, enjoying the mild pleasures of cultivated female society. And there was Janet, remembering other times and laughing at me.
It mayn’t have been like this at all – and in any case I hadn’t further time to think about it, since I had to cope with Fiona.
‘Perhaps,’ she was saying, ‘you’ve just finished another play?’
‘No, I haven’t just finished another play. How can I finish another play, Fiona, when I’ve turned myself into a don in this desperate fashion?’
‘But it has been your own choice, hasn’t it? And arrived at in what may be called full maturity?’
‘Chock-full, I suppose.’ It occurred to me that Fiona and Janet had more than their nationality in common. They both went in for mockery, and neither overdid it. But then had I ever known a woman who hadn’t regarded it as a weapon in her armoury? Penny had mocked me – and with her the mockery had eventually grown claws. My cousins Anna and Ruth Glencorry both used to have a go; being rather stupid girls, however, they had seldom got beyond a jeer. What attracted me in Fiona was largely the oddity of her being a Glencorry who exhibited an intelligence nowhere distinguishable on her genetic horizon. It was a rum reason for fancying a girl. But there it was.
‘How is Margaret?’ I asked. ‘Has she finished another novel?’ I had not met Fiona’s fellow-householder Miss Mountain since our first encounter, and mentioned her in this light-hearted manner now out of a vague sense that her existence ought to be taken account of.
‘She’s very well, thank you. But she works rather slowly. Even although we do now have a second typewriter. It arrived last week.’
‘Congratulations. By the way, is Margaret a don too? I scarcely know about her.’
‘You must be found an opportunity. No, she isn’t. She got a senior scholarship, and there was almost certainly a junior fellowship coming along. But she decided she wanted to be a full-time writer. Could you get me another drink?’
I got Fiona another drink. Like Talbert, she was drinking whisky. I remembered that – unlike Talbert – she drank it at home as well. One could speculate as to whether here at least was something that had come to her in a hereditary way. Uncle Rory had drunk glass for glass with his fellow lairds, but his dottiness (related, I suppose, to my mother’s) certainly wasn’t the consequence of inebriety. Aunt Charlotte drank at all socially requisite times, but caused sherry to be dispensed in glasses like thimbles, and at table added water to her wine as one might do to a distasteful tonic from the apothecary. About the Petries of Garth I knew, of course, nothing at all.
All this, although interesting, scarcely seemed a feasible topic for conversation, and in the few steps I had to take to satisfy Fiona’s demand I tried to find something that would be brief and lively: lively, because I found Fiona lively; brief, since I had Janet still, as it were, waiting in the wings. It was Fiona, however, who spoke first.
‘Duncan, has it occurred to you that when I’m sixty you’ll be eighty or thereabout?’
‘Of course it hasn’t. And why on earth should it have occurred to you?’
‘It’s as a result of looking round at all these people. Their ages range from the twenties to the eighties, but it’s something very little acknowledged in any formal way. Wouldn’t you say that there’s a convention in Oxford to minimise the fact that the young are young and the old are old?’
‘Perhaps there is – but, if so, it only reflects and possibly exaggerates a drift of behaviour in society at large. You’d have to go a good long way to find old ladies still wearing lace caps. Do you think we ought to return to a Victorian Oxford?’
‘Why not? Take those people stumping around shouting in the streets. They’re extremely young. Younger even than I am, Duncan.’
‘So they are.’
‘T
hey’ve been suddenly treated as grown-up; told they have to stand on their own feet, organise their own time, and so on. In every sort of social situation their seniors treat them as contemporaries. It bewilders them a good deal. Then they discover it’s all a sham; that as far as the government of the university goes we’re a rigid gerontocracy. They’ll be listened to with an inexhaustible courtesy that becomes irritating in itself. But damn-all happens, so far as their demands and proposals are concerned. And that’s why they start this idiotic demo stuff when they ought to be at their books or playing their muddy games or making love.’
I don’t see what it has to do with my approaching eightieth birthday.’
‘Older and younger getting along in terms of acknowledging themselves as being so. I was thinking about our getting married.’
‘But we’re not getting married.’ The odd challenge had been disconcerting; it seemed to come from an area of Fiona’s mind I knew nothing about.
‘Quite so. It’s a pure hypothesis, and we can speculate about it freely. It would be a Victorian marriage – although in a non-Victorian Oxford.’
‘Why would it be particularly Victorian?’
‘Victorian husbands were often a good deal older than their wives, at least in the middle classes. A girl’s husband might look like her father. The disparity in years was something economically determined, I suppose. Commerce, industry, the professions were largely based on the family. Every letterhead said Dombey and Son, or something of that sort. So the sons came to any measure of independence late; they often couldn’t afford to marry – set up an establishment, as it was called – until they were middle-aged. But they still wanted fresh young brides, with plenty of kick ahead of them. So you see how you and I would have been.’
‘You make it sound quite awful.’
‘Nothing of the kind. Those marriages were completely stable, more often than not. There’s a paternal component in every normal male, isn’t there? Well, it got off to a good start.’
‘I see. I’d be protecting and counselling my child-wife, and making sure she toed the line?’
‘Just that. And it works very well.’
‘Fiona, what an extremely unfashionable view!1’
‘So much for twenty and forty. Now pass on to sixty and eighty. The snag’s supposed to lie there. If I told my parents I was marrying Duncan Pattullo they’d pipe up with this tail-end of life stuff at once. But they’d be wrong. Or, at least, they wouldn’t necessarily be right.’
‘Because when I’m eighty and a helpless dotard, Fiona, your maternal component will get its chance?’
‘Just that. There’s a reversal of roles, but it’s in consonance with basic sexual differences still.’
‘Fiona, I feel we’d better not get married. Our first sprightly running would be splendid, more likely than not. But sixty and eighty might be trickier than you reckon. As far as that maternal component goes, you’ll do well to stick to Timbermill.’
Fiona looked at me in surprise, and for a moment I thought she was offended. But she had merely detected me as having stopped talking nonsense.
‘When I’m sixty,’ she said, ‘J.B. will be round about a hundred-and-twenty.’
‘And you’ll still be keeping an eye on him?’
‘I hope so. I went to see him the other day. He talked about you quite a lot. In fact, he might be said to have been recommending you to my regard. Strange, don’t you think?’
‘Good heavens, Fiona! Is that what has put this rum chat into your head?’
‘Perhaps it is.’ Fiona was suddenly smiling at me like the very young woman she was. The effect was oddly incongruous with the dry precise quality of her voice and idiom – and was the more fetching in consequence. ‘Will you come and dine in college?’ she asked abruptly. ‘Face up to the full-dress Princess stuff?’
‘Yes, of course.’
‘I’ll call you, or write. And now we’d better go and talk to other people. It wouldn’t do to be judged singular, would it, Duncan?’
It wouldn’t do at all.’ I realised, as I turned away, that I hadn’t known what, if anything, to make of this ironic archaism. Perhaps Fiona, leading some kind of way-out life of which I knew nothing, had typed me as a very conventional, as well as elderly, cousin.
XI
Dunkie,’ Janet asked at once, ‘who is she?’
‘The girl I’ve just been talking to? She’s a very learned young person called Fiona Petrie, an authority on Anglo-Saxon pots.’
‘I’d say she was setting her cap at you.’
‘You weren’t being unobservant. But it wasn’t exactly that. She appears to have rather a peculiar sense of humour. And we have warrant for a certain intimacy of manner and address. We’re cousins.’
‘You’re old enough to be her uncle.’
‘Yes, indeed. It’s something she was making quite a point of. And she’s that sort of cousin – an uncle’s grandchild.’
‘Would it be one of your grand lairdly relations that she’d be, Dunkie?’
‘Yes, it would.’ This hadn’t been Janet’s natural idiom; it was one – supposedly catching the rhythms of cottage talk – with which she had sometimes teased me long ago when the vexatious topic of the Glencorry connection came up. ‘She’s my cousin Anna Glencorry’s eldest child. And I’ll tell you another thing, Janet McKechnie. There was a point at which I did my best to father her.’
‘To what?
‘To father her. After she was conceived, you see, but before she was born. It looked for a time as if a father would be the missing factor in the affair. So I volunteered.’
‘Dunkie, when was this?’ It was apparent that Janet had realised I wasn’t producing some foolish joke.
‘In my last school holidays, just before I came up to Oxford. When you and I—’
‘Yes, Dunkie. And what happened?’
‘Anna’s parents failed to entertain the suggestion seriously. And then the authentic father turned up. A thoroughly eligible youth, who’d just been a trifle backward in coming forward.’
Isn’t this rather an odd story to tell me now?’
‘No.’
There was a silence. Janet appeared to be considering my reply with some seriousness. Her first gay remark about my encounter with Fiona had been designed to set a tone which would at least be a useful start between us. But now we had got on different ground. She was pretty well the only person in the world to whom I could have divulged this ancient story of the circumstances of Fiona’s birth with any shred of decency.
‘No,’ I repeated. ‘I’d have told you almost at the time, I think, if matters hadn’t taken to moving as they did. We’d probably have managed, even then, to see it as rather comical and touching.’
‘It certainly presents itself as that now.’ Janet was smiling again. ‘Who would have thought that young Duncan Pattullo was capable of making a proposal of marriage?’
��’It wasn’t exactly what one thinks of as that.’ I had myself smiled – distinctly feebly, I imagine – at this shaft. I didn’t put forward the idea to Anna herself – only to her father.’
‘Well, well! The worthy laird might well have suspected—’
‘I think he did, for a moment.’
‘But then he took another look at you, and realised you were the soul of honour. Juvenile honour, perhaps – but honour, all the same.’
‘Stop making fun of me, Janet.’
‘I’m not – or not just at that precise point. And now, Dunkie, we can stop being sentimental.’
‘So we can.’
‘In fact, I think I’ll drop Dunkie and use Duncan.’
‘You’ll do no such thing. Not if you ever want to see me again.’
‘I hope I’ll always want that.’ Janet had returned to gravity. ‘It would be a pretty kettle of fish if I didn’t. Here’s Ranald.’
McKechnie and I hadn’t done too well on first re-encountering one another at the Gaudy, and I wondered whether this was again going to be a
constrained occasion. We were all three of an age: myself the eldest, Janet the youngest, and McKechnie in between – with a total span of a couple of years covering all our birthdays. We had been brought up within bowshot of one another in Edinburgh’s new town. We probably shared, it occurred to me now, a variety of more or less unconscious assumptions alien to anybody else in this crowded room.
One would have taken McKechnie to be a good deal older than his wife. He was stringy to the point of desiccation, a state of affairs suggesting nothing if not durability; short of authentic disaster on a motorway, he would infallibly celebrate his ninetieth if not his hundredth birthday. Although an unobtrusive man he was keen-eyed and nervously alert as many very shy people are; he suggested a formidably specialised creature, and I felt that a single glance at him would leave me disinclined to question Albert Talbert’s persuasion that here was another A. E. Housman in our midst. Not, I imagine, that these two classical scholars were temperamentally akin. If McKechnie wasn’t a man readily to conjure up warmth around him he had at least an impulse to try. I could see that he was anxious to make some genuine contact with me now. It was possible to feel that he was seeking means to this as he talked – thinking me out, as it were, as the problem currently on hand. This might well have been off-putting, but I don’t think I took it that way. It was my duty to develop a cordial regard for Janet’s second husband; my consciousness of this didn’t seem off-putting either. I began to suspect that between McKechnie and myself there was some positive if tenuous bond going back quite a long way and having nothing to do with the fact (still strange to me) of his marriage. Perhaps we had each of us lurkingly admired something the other possessed. There would be a sort of bond in that. Or perhaps I was imagining things and had scarcely ever been in McKechnie’s head. I had been an idle boy, day-dreaming when I wasn’t simply fooling around. He had been a purposive and intellectually precocious child, unexampled – I don’t doubt – in his command of Greek irregular verbs.
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