One body of people, however, never came near me. These were my colleagues, and here was one of those conventions of the place which I was being left to find out for myself. It obtained, if not quite rigidly, even at after-dinner hours. Conversation (and compotation) was something that happened in common room, and when people did get together in each other’s sets it was usually to listen to music or stare at television. During the day a certain amount of communication took place by telephone, but this was limited because some of the older fellows (including Talbert and Lempriere) refused to have such an instrument in their rooms, judging summons and interruption by bell or buzzer at a caller’s whim to be an uncivil practice to be discountenanced in a polite society. It was my impression that even those who declared the prejudice absurd substantially agreed with it. As a result people were perpetually writing notes to one another, and I don’t think there was a man in college who would not have had to be adjudged highly skilful at rapid and succinct performance in that medium.
This being so distinctly one of what the Provost would have called ‘our ways’, I was surprised one morning when Jimmy Gender walked in on me at breakfast. The irruption was not achieved without ceremony. Plot, who could never so much as dodge into my room to replace an egg-cup without knocking, in this instance simply flung open the door and said ‘Mr Gender’ in an unnaturally loud voice – a nuance of behaviour in dealing with one entitled to command the grande entree which he had presumably acquired through watching the comportment of butlers and majordomos in television plays of high life.
Gender was in a dark suit, wore a bowler hat, and carried a tightly furled umbrella. It was evidently his London day. A number of my colleagues maintained this weekly institution, in one manner or another combining duty and some more recreative side of life. Gender, I imagined, lunched at his club, attended private views, went to auction sales at Sotheby’s or Christie’s, and frequented one or another of the inns of court in the discreet furtherance of the future careers of his more promising pupils. He had called on me on his way to the railway station, and he started off on a note of anxious apology.
‘That dead boy’s brother.’ Gender spoke at his quietest. ‘Peter Lusby. I’ve been seeing him, Duncan. And I’m just a little worried.’
‘I’m sorry to hear it. But he can’t be other than a bit of a headache, I’d have thought. And other people have been perturbed about him. Arnold Lempriere, for instance.’
‘Yes, of course. It seems you mentioned something of the sort to Anthea.’
‘So I did – at her very enjoyable party. Near the beginning of term Arnold marched me round Oxford, haranguing me on the college’s moral duty to take young Lusby on.’
‘He may well be right. But he hasn’t put the point to me.’ Gender was not too pleased. ‘Arnold is becoming just a shade eccentric, wouldn’t you say?’
‘Perhaps so. He was certainly in one of those “Say nothing to anybody” moods that afternoon.’
It’s the dead Lusby he’s mentioned to me, not the living one. And that’s because he’s turned rather odd about that tiresome Mumford boy. He professes to hold a poor opinion of the Mumfords over several generations, but is obviously keen in a devious sort of way that we should keep the present brat on the strength. That’s how Paul Lusby has cropped up in his talk. He says the lad’s suicide must have been such a terrible shock to Ivo Mumford that it wouldn’t be fair not to give him the rest of this year to recover. What do you think of that, Duncan?’
‘Not a great deal, I’m afraid.’
‘Quite so. But about the younger Lusby. Of course he’s a headache – and now there’s something extra and unexpected. I oughtn’t to bother you with it – only you were so kind to him when he came exploring the college, and did have a chance to size him up. So may I tell you about this development? Not that it perhaps deserves to be called quite that. It’s entirely tenuous – which is just what makes it troublesome.’
‘Go ahead. And will you have some coffee, Jimmy? It’s still hot.’
‘That’s most terribly kind of you.’ Gender produced this extravagant assertion with his customary grace. ‘But I’ve just bolted my breakfast, as a matter of fact. So do you yourself go ahead. Well, it’s like this. Charles Atlas and I decided to have Lusby up for early interview. You know the system.’
I’m afraid I don’t.’
‘Of course not. I’m so sorry. It’s just a practice we have developed of seeing a few schoolboys ahead of the entrance examination on the strength of their school record and ‘A’ levels and so forth. If we judge them to be genuinely impressive we offer them a firm place at the college straight away. It began as a method of preventing Cambridge getting ahead of us – but I needn’t explain all that. We call this small group of candidates the supermen.’
‘You and Charles had Peter Lusby up before you as a superman?’
‘Of course the boy can’t be called that – which made the move a shade delicate. It always has the appearance, you know, of a short-cut in, which means we have to go carefully. We’d think twice, for instance, of having some don’s son, or an old member’s son, present himself as a superman. As Tutor for Admissions, Charles is careful to avoid possible misconceptions as to what’s going on.’
‘I’m sure he is. But Lusby is at least an old member’s brother.’
‘Quite so.’ Gender said this after what might have been taken for a moment’s deep thought, much as if I had presented him with a highly perspicacious remark. ‘The fact is, we’d both made up our minds about Peter Lusby – about what course it’s proper to adopt, I mean. He has gained the modest qualifications for university matriculation; he has a claim on us of a very unusual – indeed, of a quite exceptional – sort. We decided the honourable thing was to admit him through a channel more or less formally acknowledging the claim’s validity, and chance his proving up to taking a degree. I don’t know whether you’d approve.’
‘It would be cheek in me, Jimmy, either to approve or disapprove. But I’m glad – and simply because I liked the boy. I will say he struck me as a staunch sort of lad – and a trier.’
‘Good. And Charles and I were both encouraged in that view – up to a point.’
‘Jimmy, just what happened at your blessed interview?’ As I asked this I realised it was graceless of me to sound a note of impatience. Dons – I must have been thinking in a juvenile fashion – are a fussy crowd, much given to hesitating before molehills as if the Andes or Himalayas were confronting them. If two experienced men had made up their minds about young Lusby they should back their hunch and not start vacillating over something that Gender had characterised as entirely tenuous. But this was a deplorable thought in a new fellow of the college, and I tried to retrieve myself. ‘For instance,’ I went on, ‘did the boy have a clear notion about reading law, and where it was going to take him? Or was it all vague to him, except that he must do what his brother had done?’
‘He was quite good on all that – quite clear-headed. At the lowest, you might say he knew the answers. He’s been to the courts; he reads the Times law reports; all the proper things. Of course he’d have had a lot of the gen from Paul, but he did strike us as uncommonly well-informed. Would you have called him well-informed, Duncan?’
‘No.’
‘Well, they must be working hard on him at school. A certain amount of what he said came rather pat, of course. But that’s to be expected from well-taught schoolboys. Charles must keep an eye on that school; it sounds surprisingly tiptop.’
‘So what, Jimmy? What went wrong?’
‘The boy wasn’t candid with us. You might almost call it not quite straight.’
‘That surprises me very much indeed.’
‘We both felt it – and it wasn’t something we wanted to feel, heavens knows! Things were going well, and then suddenly there was this cagey and evasive effect.’
‘Nothing of the sort registered with me, Jimmy.’ I thought I was entitled to say this firmly; I’d been credit
ed, after all, with having had a useful opportunity to size Peter Lusby up. ‘In just what context did this unfortunate impression emerge?’
‘It was quite late on. We’d been pretty testing with the lad one way and another, and Charles was moving to relieve the pressure. A little concluding bit about spare time and hobbies and so on. “What have you been doing lately out of school?” That sort of thing.’
‘And what had he?’
‘He wouldn’t say. In fact, he dropped straight into panic. It was most uncomfortable. It was as if we’d taken him unawares and he could only flounder.’
‘Dash it all, Jimmy, need you call that being not quite straight? Perhaps he frequents railway stations and writes down the numbers of the diesel engines – and realised it would sound incredibly childish if he told you about it.’
‘It didn’t sound quite like that.’ This time, Gender spoke so very quietly that I knew I was being reproached. He had practiced at the bar, and was entitled to regard himself as unlikely to get this sort of thing wildly wrong. ‘And East End boys, one supposes, indulge in slightly less blameless spare-time activities now and then.’
‘I don’t doubt they do.’ I may well have been staring at Gender in astonishment, so much had this flicker of class prejudice taken me unawares. And I found it had also irritated me quite a bit. ‘Would it have been your sense of the matter,’ I asked, ‘that Lusby is the sort of person who might go Paki-bashing?’ And I might almost have added, ‘Or on a gang bang, like Tony Mumford’s boy?’ had I not remembered that Ivo had my word that I’d keep silent about that.
‘No, of course not.’ Gender in his turn was not unreasonably surprised. ‘But there are all sorts of wretched possibilities. Pot smoking, for example.’
‘But when I cast my own eye on the courts I seem to notice that, so far as juveniles are concerned, drugs are a middle-class thing. In a working class it’s precocious drinking that makes all the running at present. Perhaps Peter Lusby’s a young drunk.’
‘Duncan, you’re getting this all wrong.’ Gender looked most unhappy. ‘I’m desperately concerned to see this boy as in the clear and fit to come up to the college. If he did, we’d work hard to see him through. But we can’t risk two crashes in that family. And, well, there was this small unaccountable thing. He ended up by saying something quite odd. That there was something he didn’t feel at liberty to talk about.’
‘In connection with how he spends his spare time? Dash it all, isn’t he entitled to a bit of private life, just like you and me? He may go and look after a grandmother in a state of senile dementia. That kind of thing – if I may unload another scrap of common sociology on you – is thought of as an awful disgrace among the sort of people I’m assuming Peter Lusby comes from.’
‘Yes, I know. And I suppose I’m being a fool, Duncan. It’s just that I distrust a whiff of mystery in what’s already a tricky situation.’
‘That’s perfectly proper, and I’ve no business being critical. But – look here – would you let me go and try to find out?’
‘Let you? I’d be grateful for any help whatever. That’s why I’ve come in and taken up your time.’
‘I do feel that, if only in the most fleeting way, I did establish a kind of relation of confidence with that boy. It might just stretch to having a go at him, or at his people. It wouldn’t be much fun, setting up as an amateur private eye. I’d only dream of it because I feel – if you’ll forgive me – that there may be a mare’s-nest element in the affair. So do you think that I could, at least with some shred of decency, manage a small job of work that neither you nor Charles could properly do? What do you think?’
‘What we could do, Duncan, is to rely on you entirely.’
‘Then that’s it. I’ve a couple of men coming in this morning. But I’ll take the lunch-time train.’
So I found myself eating a bumpy meal with British Rail, and trying to give my tricky embassy some preliminary thought. I was clear that I must at once declare myself – to Peter, or even to his parents, if it was his parents that I encountered first. Even so, I’d be a kind of spy. As I faced this, much misgiving assailed me. And I was still of this doubtful mind when I arrived in Bethnal Green before a block of flats, old rather than new, fronting a small public park full of swings and seesaws and climbing-frames. The building was so large that on passing through a passage-way from the street I found myself in a spacious quad. The word came to me at once before this familiar spectacle of grass, two or three small trees, staircases at regular intervals round about. In another part of London Barker Buildings – thus surprisingly academic in suggestion – would have been called Barker Mansions, and been essentially similar in architectural conception but pitched to incomes four-fold beyond those obtaining in the Lusby world.
I rang the Lusbys’ bell: theirs was a ground-floor flat. The door was opened to me at once – and to an instant banishing of any sense of spaciousness that the exterior design of the building might suggest. The woman standing before me wasn’t generously framed; on the contrary, she was small and spare; but the passage in which she stood was so exiguous that I couldn’t see how, were I to be admitted, we could both occupy it at once. For the moment, at least, the woman gave no ground, and when I caught her glance it suggested a swift suspicion the more striking because, at a glance, she didn’t seem made that way. She may have been wondering whether I had come about the rent or the rates or the gas, or possibly to sell her an encyclopaedia guaranteed to set her children on the road to wealth and fame. She looked to me the sort of woman who is likely to be a better hand at that than any reference book – at least if for ‘wealth and fame’ one substituted expressions more consonant with a sober and moral view of things. This was undoubtedly the mother of the boy who had munched my biscuits and been careful about the crumbs.
‘Mrs Lusby?’ I said. ‘My name is Duncan Pattullo, and I come from Oxford. I met your son Peter when he was there some time ago. And as I know he hopes to come to the college where I work I felt I’d like to call and ask him how he’s getting on.’
I suppose that with these words I was keeping to a bargain with myself. They said nothing untrue. They were disingenuous, all the same, and I wondered at once whether Mrs Lusby found them so. Her moment’s silence was apprehensive rather than suspicious. But when she spoke it wasn’t in any sort of agitation.
‘That is very kind of you,’ she said. ‘But I’m afraid Peter isn’t at home. He’ll be working in the public library. His school sends him there in the afternoon, now that he’s one of the older boys and going for his Oxford entrance. And my husband’s out as well. He’s disabled – one of the hundred per cent war-disabled – but has light work of an afternoon and evening at the cinema. In the foyer, it is. Only what they like is that he can go in and make the children behave. He has a way with them. But won’t you please come in?’
I thanked Mrs Lusby and followed her into a sittingroom. It was very small, and being provided with all the prescriptive furniture made it appear smaller still.
‘Peter won’t be long,’ Mrs Lusby said. ‘For a boy of his age he’s very regular in his ways. Can I make you a cup of tea?’
‘Thank you. I’d like that very much.’
This reply had the effect of taking Mrs Lusby quickly into her kitchen. Perhaps it gave her an opportunity to collect herself. I was left standing between an over-stuffed sofa and an over-stuffed chair – and not without a fear that I was going to exhibit a kind of physical awkwardness. I looked about me and then sat down. As I did so I became aware of what was the dominant object in the room. It hung over the mantelpiece: the photograph of a boy, blown up from a snapshot, and coloured, one could feel, by a conjecturing hand. There could be no doubt who it was. And when Mrs Lusby reappeared I spoke on impulse and at once.
‘Mrs Lusby, is that Paul?’
‘Yes, Paul.’ Mrs Lusby answered quietly, but then produced a small determined rattle of tea-cups. ‘Don’t you think it’s like him?’
‘I never knew Paul. I haven’t been back at the college long enough.’
‘I see.’ Mrs Lusby was disappointed. People who had known Paul interested her much more than people who had not. It being chiefly Peter who was in my head, I was inclined to forget what a short space of months had elapsed since the elder boy’s death. ‘But you’ll know,’ Mrs Lusby said, ‘how Provost Pococke came to the funeral. And Mr Gender, who had been Paul’s teacher. Then a Mr Bedworth, rather a quiet gentleman, came home with us – just for a few minutes, because he wanted to tell us how much Paul had been liked.’ Mrs Lusby paused on this, and I murmured what I could. ‘And some weeks later,’ she went on, ‘there was a little service in the college chapel: a memorial service, they called it. Peter came with us to that. It was in the holidays, of course, but several of Paul’s friends came back for it specially. Provost Pococke read the lesson. One John four, seven to the end: “Beloved let us love one another, for love is of God.” Paul’s life was short, Mr Pattullo. But we gave thanks for it.’ Mrs Lusby paused again. ‘And then,’ she added, ‘Mrs Pococke gave us tea.’
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