‘Perhaps.’ I hesitated on this dishonest reply. In relation to his son, Tony had an astonishing capacity for wishful thinking. ‘The magazine,’ I said, ‘is to be called Priapus.’
‘Oh, Christ! I did think the senile old rascal sounded suspiciously pleased with it.’ It was entirely affectionately that Tony contrived to refer to the most senior of the Mumfords in this way. ‘There’s my car,’ he said abruptly. ‘Let me give you a lift back to college. It’s confoundedly late.’
Just as on our previous nocturnal parting at the beginning of term, Tony’s big ministerial limousine had nosed its way out of darkness, bodyguard and all. The men on motor-cycles weren’t on view, but no doubt they were around.
‘Thanks awfully,’ I said. ‘But I think I’ll walk. It clears the head.’
‘Clears the head? Stuff and nonsense! Your head’s as clear as mine, and I work on papers all the way back to town. Anyway, what about the muggers? Oxford’s said to teem with them.’
This was almost true. Amazingly, the sacred town had become one in which nervous people didn’t altogether like to walk alone at night. Drunken undergraduates had become a rare and reassuring sight.
‘I never carry more than a couple of pounds,’ I said. ‘That’s held to be enough to get you off without having them put the boot in for luck. The bloody government should do something about it, all the same.’
‘You’re a rotten socialist,’ Tony said. And at this we punched each other in the chest and parted with good feeling.
I wasn’t myself fearful of a mugging. Late at night the streets of Oxford are quite deserted, but behind the colleges’ sober facades there is always a good deal of wakefulness going on, chiefly because undergraduates have the habit of writing their weekly essay through the small hours. One is seldom out of sight of several lighted windows. I felt that, if attacked, I’d only have to give a shout to have these flung open and a shower of bottles and cricket-bats and handy bits of furniture descend in the happy faith that they would brain the villains and not their victim.
But Radcliffe Square lay in darkness. Brasenose, at least, had suspended the pursuit of learning, and in All Souls, which houses nothing but dons, nobody had turned up the lamp. The Radcliffe Camera, and beyond it the university church of St Mary the Virgin, were only uncertainly silhouetted masses against a dull starless heaven. Amid all these solemn presences I paused. In the deserted, moon-blanched street How lonely rings the echo of my feet! Arnold’s lines didn’t quite fit, but it was perhaps to still such an echo for a moment that I had come to a halt. And in the resulting silence I was prompted to abandon my direct route back to college in favour of a meditative detour among the dreaming spires.
I retraced my steps for a little and walked down New College Lane. My uncle Rory had been at New College, the only kinsman of mine whom I had ever heard of as an Oxford man. This surprising episode in his past had always pleased me, and it may have been the memory of it that led me in the direction I was now walking. The lane twists, narrows, and displays a good deal in the way of high blank walls before, on a further turn, it broadens again and calls itself something else. There was a single street lamp, set high up in the angle of a building, but otherwise the place was pretty dark. My own footfalls were the only sound still. I had placed myself, it came to me, in something like a cliched situation from a gangster film. The hunted man is in some tunnel-like space: only a long way in front of him and behind him is there any way out. Sinister figures suddenly appear ahead; perhaps they wait, perhaps they slowly advance. He turns, and an identical menace closes the vista. He is trapped. This hackneyed fantasy was actually in my head when, some thirty yards before me, a figure – a single figure – did appear, walking towards me. The figure came to an abrupt halt, and I felt that it was the sight of me that had occasioned this. There was nothing alarming about it, but I looked swiftly over my shoulder, all the same. The lane behind me was empty. I looked ahead again. The figure had vanished. There was plenty of shadow to vanish into, but it had happened too quickly not to be disconcerting. Perhaps it had slipped through some doorway I’d forgotten about; perhaps, for some sufficient reason of its own, it was lurking unobserved until I went past. The man’s movements or motives – for I thought it was a man – were no business of mine. I quickened my own pace – not particularly perturbed, I imagine, but nevertheless quite willing to gain Queen’s Lane and a straight walk back to bed. There was a faint ribbon of light before me, and I walked down it without attempting to peer into the shadows on either hand. Then I heard a step behind me, and in the same moment felt myself gripped firmly by an arm. One tends to act instinctively in the dark. I flung off this grasp not at all gently, and swung round as if to defend myself.
‘Duncan, son of Lachlan!’ J. B. Timbermill said.
I hadn’t seen the author of The Magic Quest since the afternoon upon which he had burst in on Fiona Petrie, Margaret Mountain and myself in the house on the Woodstock Road. I knew that he still lived in his old attic dwelling – thus remaining the Wizard of the North – and I had twice made my way there in quest of him. Faded ink on a discoloured card and a drawing-pin from which the head had rusted away constituted, as long ago, the only intimation of his tenancy. On both occasions I had knocked on his door in vain and then, as when I was his pupil, attempted simply to walk in. But the place had been locked up and that great shadowy space – Hrothgar’s Heorot, as I thought of it – denied me.
The first thing I had ever learnt of Timbermill was that he never left home, and thus twice drawing blank discomposed me. His visit to Fiona was evidence that he had to some extent changed his ways, but I found it hard to suppose he had done so radically. Fiona herself, of whom I was now seeing a good deal, was noticeably reticent about our old teacher; it was almost as if she were harbouring a slightly jealous indisposition to go shares in him. I didn’t press her on the subject. But I ought to have been more pertinacious in my efforts to contact a man whose personality had once so powerfully impressed me. And now here he was, casually encountered round about midnight in an Oxford street.
‘J. B!’ I exclaimed, and took both his hands in mine – a gesture prompted by the fact that, moments before, I had been prepared to do my best to knock him down. ‘Where have you been dining?’
I asked this question – in the circumstances a very ordinary Oxford question – before I had really seen my old tutor clearly. His behaviour on spying my approaching figure had been nothing out of the way; he may have had the same thoughts of possible marauders in his head as I had, and it had been only prudent in an old man rapidly to conceal himself until it was apparent no such threat existed. But we weren’t now in anything like complete darkness; a second lamp, again clamped high up on a building, faintly illumined the narrow street where it turned between St Edmund Hall and Queen’s. I now saw that Timbermill didn’t look like a man who has been dining – even as an acknowledged eccentric – in academic company. His clothes were ragged and I suspected them of being dirty as well; he had neglected to attach a collar to his shirt; his feet were in carpet slippers which had seen better days. Yet it wasn’t these matters of external appearance that were striking, so much were they overshadowed, dominated by the inner being of this great scholar in his decline. Not that he looked like a scholar, great or small. It would have been hard to say what he did look like – except that, if one tried, contradictory literary associations would be likely to jostle in one’s head. I could have viewed him instantly as a Dickensian grotesque – Oxford dissolving round us and being replaced by some bizarrely-conceived mid-Victorian London decor. Or alternatively – and this perhaps did more justice to the effect – here was a wild and preternatural figure as conceived by the original Wizard of the North – bobbing up on some darkened Scottish moor to affright a lonely traveller with mysterious intimations of doom.
‘Dining, Duncan?’ There was the old vibrant note in Timbermill’s voice as he took up my question sharply. ‘I’m soon to be dining with the crows, my
dear lad. Not with the feasters but with the feasted upon, as the old sermon has it.’
‘Donne,’ I heard myself say. ‘Mundus Mare, J. B. Both the dishes and the guests.’
‘Good, Duncan, good!’
This was astonishing. Just for the moment, Heorot was around us again, and the favourite pupil was showing off. Or say he was loyally keeping his end up – I don’t know. But I did in the succeeding seconds realise it wasn’t an hour for histrionic effects. Timbermill had better be got home. It mightn’t be much good, but that was the present job. I believe I knew at once that I was in the presence not of an aberration but of a habit. The eremitic Timbermill had become a nocturnal wanderer. There must be a medical term for this manifestation of senescence; by per kinesis, it might be – or something ending in agitans.
‘It’s fairly late,’ I said. ‘Walk back to college with me, J. B., and I’ll get out the car and run you out to Linton Road.’
‘That’s too kind of you, Duncan.’ Suddenly it might have been Jimmy Gender speaking, and I tried to take comfort from this switch to the commonplace polite Oxford man. At the same time I was thinking that Fiona, if she was fully aware of the state of affairs now revealed to me, might reasonably have been a little more confiding about it. I had no idea whether Timbermill had any living relations to be at all concerned about him. He had certainly never been married. When I was his pupil I had already been aware of him as strangely isolated, and I believe I had thought of him when, at the beginning of this present term, Bedworth had remarked to me that an Oxford college is not a terribly good place to grow old in. Timbermill hadn’t even a college. Or rather he had three of them according to the book, but for years had never entered one of them. He must have had contacts with fellow-scholars; he had, I knew, gained real satisfaction from taking a handful of pupils. But that had been it. Of course there had been the creatures of his imagination and he must have done a lot of living with them. Yet that insubstantial pageant had faded, and he had been left with his vocation as a philologist. I supposed that such a man, long habituated to much solitude, was all right as long as he kept his grip on that sort of exacting intellectual work. When that slipped there was the void. I imagined Timbermill to be facing that now.
We walked on together. Even in carpet slippers one of which had a flapping sole Timbermill didn’t totter or dodder; he was firmer on his feet by a long way than Arnold Lempriere, a younger man, had become; the tree would perish from the head down. This gloomy thought was in my head when he spoke again.
‘The question is,’ he said with sudden amazing incisiveness, ‘are you going to marry her?’
Since Fiona had been in my head only a minute earlier it was to be presumed that a telepathic process had been at work. And I couldn’t pretend to be in the dark.
‘Dear J. B.,’ I said, ‘only think! She’s young enough to be my daughter.’
‘Have you spoken to her about it?’
‘No, I haven’t. But she has spoken to me.’ It was impossible not to own any relevant truth to Timbermill.
‘To the laggard in love? Duncan, you made a mess of things long ago through not speaking out to a girl. You didn’t know that I knew it, but I did. It was written all over you. And then you went further and fared worse. Years afterwards, when you hadn’t even youth as an excuse. I heard about it, although our ways had parted by then. Duncan Pattullo that way went.’
I believe I said ‘Meredith’ to myself dumbly. J. B. Timbermill suddenly restored to his demonic character was hard to cope with.
‘Listen, J. B. It wasn’t like that – Fiona’s way of speaking to me.’
We walked on through a minute’s silence. The High was deserted. We could have walked down the middle of it from end to end unthreatened by traffic, like gowned and capped scholars in some old print. No – I told myself – it hadn’t been at all like that, Fiona’s perplexing banter at Mrs Gender’s party. If Timbermill, possessed by some idee fixe, was now badgering me about her, he had already badgered her about me. Faced with this embarrassing nonsense, Fiona had taken care to show me that she placed the whole notion in the region of the absurd.
‘You could do great things together,’ Timbermill said.
‘Do great things? We could have children, I suppose.’
‘Children?’ Uttering the word vehemently, Timbermill came to a halt, and I realised I had said something which would never have entered his head. ‘Between you, you could complete my corpus. And finis coronat opus, Duncan.’
I had no idea what precisely Timbermill’s corpus was, but clearly he referred to some large labour of systematic scholarship. Perhaps it had something to do with all those broken pots and kitchen-midden shards. There was a certain relief in our being back on demonstrably obsessional and impersonal ground. It wasn’t ground on which I could conceivably have a place. My talent, slender as it was, stood committed to men and women; to what I could make of the bewilderment and vehemence – or mere comedy – of human life. Ink had replaced seccotine on my fingers long ago.
‘But there’s a further thing.’ I knew before he went on that Timbermill was up to another of his intuitive performances. ‘There’s a human thing. You can rescue her from that unnatural woman.’
‘From Miss Mountain? I’ve no evidence that Miss Mountain is what can be called that, and I hope I wouldn’t condemn her if I did. Emotional attachments between women can be happy and stable and rather beautiful. Think of the Ladies of Llangollen, J. B.’
‘Rubbish, Duncan!’ It was evident that my attempt at a whimsical note hadn’t been a success. ‘Women ought to bear children. If an emotional attachment, as you call it, isn’t within hail of that, then it’s of no use to them. You agree there, don’t you?’
I supposed I did agree, although the generalisation was rather sweeping. But if I could have been angry with Timbermill I’d have been so now. It was I who had introduced the theme of children, and he had unscrupulously appropriated what would not spontaneously have occurred to him.
‘It’s fair to mention,’ I said, ‘that the girl you think I ought to have proposed to as a schoolboy now lives in Oxford.’
‘Married?’
‘Happily married, I think – and to an old schoolfellow of mine that I’ve a considerable regard for.’
‘Then the fact’s irrelevant. Try to think clearly, Duncan.’
I don’t believe I resented this tutorial accent, but I couldn’t think of more to say. We were both silent again, but not for long. This was because Timbermill began to mutter to himself, and was presently doing so vehemently and quite incoherently. He had shot his bolt. More exactly, he had made a tremendous effort in what he conceived to be Fiona’s interest and mine, and now his mind was wandering. I was distressed by this, as well as upset by the general tenor of our talk. Perhaps it was true that I hadn’t been thinking clearly; that I had been thinking increasingly unclearly, indeed, about Fiona Petrie since my first meeting with her not many weeks before.
Timbermill wouldn’t come into my rooms for the brandy I thought might do him good. So I got out my car at once – a manoeuvre of some complexity at night – and we drove off to North Oxford. Heorot was just as I remembered it: a vast cavernous room, overflowing with books and periodicals and pots, with subsidiary caves disappearing into darkness under the various eaves of the house. It now struck me as strange that I had once felt in so close a discipleship to its owner without ever thinking to find out what his domestic dispositions were. He had ceased any continuous muttering and seemed to have forgotten our odd debate; for a minute or two he was reluctant to let me go; then suddenly he said ‘Dear Duncan, how like a former time!’ and waved me from the room.
XIV
The following morning brought me a letter from Peter Lusby. He must have sat down and written it immediately upon hearing he had gained a place at the college.
Dear Sir,
I write, please, to thank you very much for your help. It has been a most timely interposition and I am sorry fo
r the inconvenience I have caused you. However I get on at Oxford, and I do promise to do my best to justify the confidence reposed in me, I shall be grateful always for your lending a hand in trouble. I have explained certain matters to my parents and they are a bit upset about my untoward reticence as they must feel it to be but are coming round as I knew they would do because we are all right as a family, at least nearly always. Please pray for me when you are next in the college chapel. I didn’t like to tell you that night that I’d gone in to do that, pray I mean.
Yours respectfully, Peter
(P. L. Lusby)
It was, perhaps, a laboured composition, but I reflected that Peter was at least one up on Nick Junkin in being able to spell. I also wondered whether Peter would be disturbed to discover that the fellows of the college didn’t file into their chapel with any great regularity. Perhaps it was a subject upon which Paul hadn’t been communicative. I liked the letter, and felt that, at least for the present, the Peter Lusby problem was adequately tied up.
Yet it wasn’t quite – or not so far as I myself was concerned. Nobody was going to ask me questions about the mystery I’d solved in Bethnal Green. But what was I to do about Arnold Lempriere? I hadn’t set out to spy on him. But spy I had, and up he’d bobbed in the path of my investigation. I couldn’t ask Peter to keep mum about me in the further contacts he was bound to have with his eccentric benefactor; to do so would be unfairly to commit the boy to prevarication precisely as Lempriere himself had done. But if I left it to Peter to come out with the story of my ‘interposition’ Lempriere mightn’t like it at all. The ticklish communication, in fact, was up to me. I’d promised Peter not to let the secret go any further. But he’d find it quite natural that I should speak to Lempriere about it.
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