Later on, I was going to find that the vacations – periods of academic recess culpably generous in the regard of an outer world – afforded interesting evidence on the varying contours of my colleagues’ private lives. Alike among the married and the single, there were men who simply disappeared abruptly from the scene. In others the centre of gravity could be observed to shift substantially but not radically; they were around, but around less often. Yet others appeared to admit in their habits no necessity for change. And the fact of so many people being away made the continuing presence of these the more noticeable, so that they had the appearance of haunting the place, of hanging around the quads, of lunching and dining in an awkwardly pertinacious manner.
But it was the coming and going of the young men and women that controlled, finally, the rhythm of our year. For their own better ease the dons had evolved a system whereby their juniors never lingered for long on the academic stage, yet their lives – even the lives of those who would have declared themselves as at no time disturbedly aware of the phenomena of undergraduate existence – were much conditioned by these mass exits and entrances. It was as if the ebb and flow of strong animal spirits owned a subtle and not clearly acknowledged influence on the rest of us. I concluded that there was something schizogenous in the pulse of Oxford life.
In relation to all this I wasn’t yet clear where I myself stood. Excepting various short-term commitments entered into from time to time, I had never been other than a self-employed person before: now I had a permanent job – but one constructed on these patchy term-and-vacation lines. I had deliberately disrupted a good deal in the way of habit and assumption to make the change, my sufficient postulate being that when one feels a certain futility gathering around one it is wise to accept a break if it comes along. But now – and symptomatically in quite small and insignificant ways – I just didn’t know. Was I going to remain in Oxford over Christmas? My house in Ravello awaited me, but I had never wintered there and wasn’t sure I wanted to try. Should I go back to London; turn on the gas, the refrigerator, the immersion heater; ring up the Army and Navy Stores; resume (in default of a ministrant Plot) polishing my own shoes?
I found myself considering these questions as if they were matters of weight. Unattached people as a class have to be wary of self-absorption, and I decided I wasn’t doing too well in the way of subordinating my own concerns to those larger and more impersonal purposes that a university is about. I thought a good deal about Fiona – and a good deal, too, to the effect that any such thinking was of an irresponsible sort. It wasn’t merely a matter of my being old enough – so famously just old enough – to be her father. That was self- evident, and I’d come out with it at once when Timbermill had revealed his bizarrely motivated design on us. It was also that Fiona’s handling of the growth of our relationship exhibited so much waywardness and mockery and distancing persiflage that I’d be very well advised to think twice before thinking at all. What Fiona seriously thought about me, I couldn’t know. It would be only prudent to suppose I came seldom into her head. Her crisp and open address, commonly comradely and asexual in tone, supported such a view. But what about that problematical occasion when she had talked ironically about us as possible marriage partners? It hadn’t been serious, and it hadn’t quite been straightforward fun either. It was as if there were something hovering in her that I hadn’t got round to elucidating, and that I might or might not find agreeable if I did.
I didn’t in the least distrust myself in thinking about Janet. Our relationship at that time seemed to me so marked by non-complication as virtually to be marked by nothing else at all.
Janet’s having amazingly turned up in Oxford married to Ranald McKechnie struck me as one of those rare artistries of chance that are wholly beautiful and wholly innocent. It wasn’t in my mind that we should again tumble out our hearts and histories to each other as when we were boy and girl on the balcony of an Edinburgh tea-shop. That would be inappropriate to our situation and our years. But I had a vision of, as it were, the passage into eternity of that moment at Anthea Gender’s party in the middle of term when, across a crowded room, I had smiled at Janet and Janet had smiled at me.
And now I was going to lunch with the McKechnies at the end of this, the Seventh Week. It was a salient fact of the calendar, standing between me and those small perplexities over what I was to do with myself in the Christmas vacation, and it drove such college matters as I had been caught up in out of my head. Ivo Mumford had obligingly begged me not to worry about him. As I drove out of Oxford on a crisp late November morning I was worrying about nothing at all – except certain lacunae (as Albert Talbert would have called them) in the otherwise copious directions McKechnie had scribbled out for me.
Where a man chooses to live is commonly his own affair, provided he is prepared to clock in for work at some prescribed hour. Oxford knows nothing of such chronometrical demands, and therefore goes in for topographical ones instead. Colleges, I had gathered, could in theory house their fellows, like grooms and gardeners, in specified dwellings for which the laws applicable to tied cottages were in force. In practice, however, these people lived where they pleased: Cambridge, for example, if the fancy took them that way. The university, on the other hand, did in general insist that its professors and similar persons should live within a certain radius of the centre of the city. The distance may have been ten miles or twenty; living, as I did, in college, the point was irrelevant to me, and I had never inquired; what was now clear was that the McKechnies must dwell at, or even beyond, the extreme verge of this confine. I found myself driving across Berkshire with my distinguished schoolfellow’s crumpled envelope on the seat beside me.
I wondered whether it was Janet who had chosen a retreat so rural as I appeared to be heading for. McKechnie himself I’d have thought of as an urban man: the son and grandson and great-grandson of a scholar, he would surely think of civilised living in terms of ready access to learned colleagues and great libraries. Janet as a child had been a townee like myself, but whereas I had formed no more than a reasonably positive response to the kind of country life intermittently presented to me at Glencorry, Janet had nourished a steady passion for a region so remote in my imagination that I had thought of it, quite inaccurately, as among the farthest Hebrides. It seemed possible that, in some obscure fashion, the retired situation of her second conjugal dwelling had been made to mirror that of her first.
I was indulging in these reflections when I ought to have been keeping a wary eye on McKechnie’s itinerary at its crucial points, and as a result I made a false turn which presently looked like costing me a good deal of time. I didn’t know whether Janet’s was to be a party or, so to speak, a domestic Edinburgh occasion, but in either case I oughtn’t to be late for it.
The surrounding terrain was flat and with patches of woodland that precluded much of a view: only now and then there was a glimpse ahead of the line of the downs bounding the Vale of White Horse to the south. At one point I thought I saw the nick or hiccup on this skyline that marks the vallum of Uffington Castle. This put me in mind of the White Horse itself, to which J. B. Timbermill had once invited my attention as connected in some interesting and learned fashion with the coinage of a non-Belgic tribe called the Dobunni. In the hamlet of Uffington – he had on another occasion assured me – there were to be found a good many people of the name of Bunn – not necessarily connected (as in Happy Families) with the baking trade, but undoubtedly descended from those more or less Iron Age persons. Twenty years later, I knew, Timbermill had provided Fiona with the same picturesque if speculative information. So I was thinking of Fiona again when I eventually found what was undoubtedly the McKechnies’ drive.
It was a long and winding drive, with some tide to be called an avenue, and at present inches deep in fallen leaves which treacherously masked formidable potholes. Beyond it rose the outline of a large, or at least lofty, red-brick dwelling. I slowed up, and as I did so become aware simultaneously
of a great deal of noise and of the appearance of a small tornado or maelstrom of whirling leaves advancing with unnerving speed. I came to a halt, and a moment later was confronted by a Juggernaut-like mechanical monster swaying and bucketing alarmingly down upon me. Perched high on this, and clinging hazardously to its steering-wheel, was McKechnie himself.
At least he managed to stop the thing, with the result that our respective conveyances confronted each other nose to nose. I scrambled from my car. For a moment McKechnie stared down at me blankly. Then he spoke.
‘Oh, yes – of course,’ McKechnie said. And for a moment he seemed quite at a loss. ‘Duncan,’ he then added, ‘how nice to see you.’
‘I hope I’m not late.’
‘No, of course not.’ McKechnie descended from his perch, and I supposed that my last words had given him a clue to the situation. ‘You’re in very good time.’ He eyed my car. ‘Only, I’m terribly afraid you’ll have to back. To the foot of the drive, that is. You see, when I have this leaf-gathering thing on, I can’t back myself. I can turn easily enough where there’s room for it. Quite a tight U-turn, as a matter of fact. I’ll show you later. But with this in tow reversing tends to break the shackle. It’s the same when I’m using it with the flail-mower in the paddock. But not with the rotary mower that’s built into it. I can whizz backwards with that.’ As he offered these abundant particulars, McKechnie was making elucidatory gestures in the direction of various parts of the Juggernaut. ‘The leaves,’ he said happily, ‘are quite a job, just at the moment.’
I’m sure they must be.’ I inspected the leaf-gathering component. It was a gleaming metallic receptacle, and appeared to me to own the dimensions of a small cottage. There were no leaves in it. I had a dim impression that it had somehow or other been hitched on the wrong way round. The effect recalled one of those films of the Wonders of Nature which run to frank exposure of the bizarre copulatory postures favoured by certain denizens of the deep. Some such technical slip-up perhaps explained the dervish dance the leaves had been achieving. ‘I’ll back down,’ I said. ‘Just a matter of reculer pour mieux sauter.’ With this rather feeble witticism I returned to my car, reversed cautiously down the drive, and with equal caution swung round on the lane beyond. McKechnie’s vehicle had already sprung into action again – so abruptly as to recall those advertisements for sports-cars which deal in miles per hour to be achieved in so many seconds from a standing start. It charged down the drive and hurtled into the road. McKechnie waved to me with one hand and with the other swung the wheel. It was clear that I was to witness the U-turn there and then. It happened – beneath the bonnet of an advancing lorry and with wheels shaving the farther ditch. McKechnie shouted what I took to be an injunction to follow him, and went swaying back up the drive, with dead leaves gyrating madly behind him.
This rapid revelation of a Ranald McKechnie hitherto unknown to me was bewildering but satisfactory. I wondered whether his attachment to rural pursuits was extensive and catholic or confined to the triumphs of mechanisation in the manner just exhibited. But now we had turned a corner and the house was before us. Even if it hadn’t been possible to glimpse the village church standing just beyond a belt of trees I’d have been certain that it could have had only one start in life. Here was one of those architecturally unfortunate but abundantly commodious vicarages which the genius of the Anglican Church scattered around the countryside in the later decades of the nineteenth century. There would be a new vicarage now – one reflecting, if not the diminished consequence of the clergy, at least their more controlled procreative propensities. This one – together, no doubt, with the land constituting its glebe – had been acquired by the McKechnies when it had perhaps been in some disrepair. Although far from tumbledown, it didn’t look in very good order now. Neither McKechnie nor Janet, the children of academic fathers as they were, could have any money in the rentier’s sense of the term. But at least they weren’t poor. They had no bills, for example, coming in from public schools.
McKechnie turned into a stable yard, I followed him, and we dismounted together. He was wearing old flannel trousers and a black pull-over so clerical in suggestion that I wondered whether he had found it abandoned on the premises. To this extent he retained at home that clerkly or subfusc appearance which characterised him at Oxford.
‘I ought to have got changed earlier,’ he said – although I don’t think he could have noticed my eye on him. ‘But there really is such a lot to do. I’m badly behind with the winter pruning. The hedges take time, too. I must show you what I’ve just got for them.’ He dived into a shed, and reappeared a moment later carrying a complicated pair of shears on a trailing electric cable. ‘You compress both hand-grips,’ he said, ‘and it operates. Like this.’ The shears began to pulse, whirl and click violently. ‘But as soon as you remove either hand it stops at once. They call it a fail-safe arrangement. And it will cut through practically anything.’
Including the flex,’ I said.
‘Well, yes – I suppose you might damage it that way.’
‘I suppose you might.’ I glanced at McKechnie apprehensively, rather wondering whether he ought to be allowed even a toy train. As if to reinforce this rational fear, he had perched the shears negligently on a window-sill beside us. They failed to fail safe, and were, indeed, emitting sinister green sparks in an alarming manner. They were also perceptibly creeping in an undesirable direction. Immediately below the window was an open water butt. ‘Ranald,’ I said, ‘are you sure you’ve read all the directions? They don’t seem to be behaving quite as they should.’
‘You’re perfectly right.’ McKechnie looked at the shears in mild reproach and surprise. ‘I’ll switch off at the plug.’ He vanished again – this time, it seemed to me, much at leisure – into the shed. The shears gave a loud click and were still. My sense of relief occurred simultaneously with the loud clanging of a bell. My first thought was that, after all, something fatal had occurred. Then I realised that the sound came from the direction of the house. McKechnie emerged again – not at all at leisure this time.
‘Oh, dear!’ he said. ‘That’s Janet.’
‘Janet? Why, Ranald, it’s exactly like Miss Clarke!’
‘So it is!’
For a moment McKechnie and I stared at each other in an odd delight. Miss Clarke had been the head-mistress of the most junior department of that long-life Scottish academy in which we had both passed a full decade of our lives. And at the end of every ‘play-time’ she had certainly wielded just such a bell.
‘And do you remember, Duncan? She screamed at the same time. At the top of her voice. As if we couldn’t hear that ghastly tintinnabulation.’ For the first time in my acquaintance with him, Ranald McKechnie laughed boisterously. I remembered how, at the Gaudy dinner six months before, he had quoted Lord Chesterfield to me as deprecating anything so ill-bred as audible laughter. We were both being ill-bred now.
‘And clapped her hands,’ I said, ‘with demoniac violence.’
‘So she did! She used to be utterly terrified. Only she couldn’t have—could she? Clapped and tintinnabulated, I mean, simultaneously. It wouldn’t be possible.’
‘No more it would. But she did, all the same.’
‘Yes, indeed. There isn’t a doubt about it.’ For a further moment McKechnie and I contemplated this mystery with deep satisfaction. Then he waved a hand towards the house. ‘I’ve just remembered,’ he said. ‘There are several other people coming to lunch, Duncan. I think we’d better hurry.’
‘Yes,’ I said – and I believe I was as scared as my host. ‘I think we better had.’
The ‘several other people’ included, for a start, Fiona and her fellow-householder Miss Mountain. This puzzled me; indeed, I found it almost as perturbing as McKechnie’s injudicious enthusiasm for mechanical contrivances. At Anthea Gender’s party Janet hadn’t known Fiona from Eve. Her first glimpse of my cousin had been at the moment I was receiving that cousinly kiss. She hadn’t known Margare
t Mountain either; and although she had read The Orrery she had spoken of it without enthusiasm. All this made it remarkable that she had so briskly cultivated the acquaintance of the two young women.
A lesser surprise was the presence of Arnold Lempriere, whom I’d not have thought of as frequenting the drawing- rooms and luncheon tables of collegiate ladies. Then I realised that his presence could be very simply explained. McKechnie, although not commonly attentive to such matters, had heard that Lempriere and I were related, and when this information was relayed to Janet it had occurred to her that my Aunt Charlotte’s granddaughter was distantly related to him too. If she had invited him to lunch for the purpose of meeting Fiona he would certainly have accepted. He hadn’t been pleased, I remembered, that Fiona’s residence in Oxford had been unknown to him hitherto. And I had myself failed so far in my promise to bring them together.
However all this might be, it was plain that Lempriere and I were thought of as balancing the young people from the Woodstock Road. The other guests were the Bedworths.
Janet probably knew that Cyril Bedworth was my oldest friend in the college; indeed, it was quite likely that I had endeavoured to amuse her with some account of him long ago.
During sherry I addressed myself to eliciting from Miss Mountain some token of an ability to converse. It looked like the hardest job to hand at the moment. Not that Miss Mountain was exactly sulking. Her line was once more that of brooding in what I took to be a professionally attentive manner. At least I possessed the advantage of having read The Orrery by now. I thought better of it than Janet had apparently done. Being a writer who felt the twitch of his tether as soon as he had made an unassuming naturalism mildly amusing, I had a proper respect for fiction interwoven with symbolic implications of an elusive but presumably pregnant sort. The Orrery seemed to be like that. Its hero’s passion for his aunt had to be received (like much in Holy Scripture, the Provost would have said if pressed) in a mysterious sense. So, perhaps, had much else in the novel. The Orrery wasn’t like Le Rouge et Le Noir or Madame Bovary. But why should it be?
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