‘I’d like it suppressed.’ This was Miss Mountain’s response, drily uttered rather in Fiona’s manner, to the civil remarks I’d offered about the book – a legitimate conversational resource, I’d felt, in the light of my standing as a confrere of sorts.
‘You’ve come on the scene too late for that, I’m afraid. Fifty years ago it would have been suppressed, without a doubt.’
‘I don’t think you think I mean that.’ Miss Mountain, although continuing to regard me broodingly, seemed unoffended and even amused. ‘Withdrawn by the publisher – or called in, or whatever the proper phrase is. I’d like to write it again. I see it differently. But publishers don’t like that sort of thing.’
‘I suppose not. Couldn’t you forget about it as it now lingers in the bookshops, and rewrite it for reissue some years ahead?’
‘I’m not a don, Mr Pattullo. I have to make a living, and I’m in the middle of another book.’ ‘I see the difficulty.’ It hadn’t hitherto occurred to me that by becoming a don I had ceased to be under the kind of economic necessity Miss Mountain had invoked. ‘You must just press ahead.’
‘The Orrery – and where it goes wrong in the most ghastly and juvenile fashion – keeps on coming between me and this other thing. Fiona says I ought to develop two independent working personalities – and keep one in England and one in France.’
‘Have you a base in France?’
‘My parents live in Paris – if that can be called having a base.’
I didn’t see why it couldn’t. Miss Mountain’s schooldays were barely behind her – or so it was possible to feel – and there seemed nothing inappropriate in the idea of her periodic domestication in a parental home. She had spoken however, as of an evident absurdity. I wondered whether Fiona thought that Paris would be a good idea from time to time. The relationship of these two young women remained opaque to me. They might be devoted to each other or simply stuck with each other’s society. I didn’t know.
But I had at least succeeded in transforming Miss Mountain into quite a talkative person, and I wondered whether this new disposition would survive our being joined by anybody else. The question looked like receiving an immediate answer, for Lempriere now came up to us. I wondered whether he would introduce the subject of lady novelists in the succession to Mrs Humphry Ward. It proved, however, that there was another matter on his mind. Having already been introduced, he came out with it at once.
‘Do you happen,’ he demanded, ‘to be descended from poor Armine Mountain, who died at Futtyghur?’
‘I don’t think so.’ Miss Mountain was not discomposed. ‘Was he a friend of yours, Mr Lempriere?’
‘He died round about 1850. One of the Quebec Mountains. I’ve some connection with them.’
‘Oh, the Quebec Mountains! Bishops and people. I’ve heard of them. Not relations of mine at all.’
‘Well, it’s something to be positive.’ Lempriere gave his chuckle in a somewhat perfunctory or half-hearted manner. He was not in a good temper, so that I wondered whether he had failed to impress Fiona with the significance of their consanguinity. ‘Duncan here wouldn’t bother to inform himself about his own grandmother.’ As he said this Lempriere glanced at me severely, and his eyebrows effected the curious horizontal glide intimating his wish that one should retire with him into a corner for some confidential purpose – a code- signal to which I had first tumbled at the Gaudy breakfast. Since we were isolated for the moment with Miss Mountain it was an impracticable proposal; he might have been imagining himself in a common room, where one man can break away from another in mid-sentence with no more than a ritual glance of apology. Now, realising that I was going to stay put, he resolved upon confidence on the spot, and actually raised his hand to his mouth by way of indicating the fact.
‘Uncommonly awkward cat got out of the bag, Dunkie.’ He contrived to speak in what must be called a gruff whisper. ‘Concerns poor old Edward. Say nothing to anybody. Tell you later.’ He nodded to the two of us indifferently, and walked away.
Miss Mountain offered no comment on this behaviour, although she must have been conscious of it as censurable in one who had plainly enjoyed the advantages of a well-conducted nursery. The subject to which she turned, however, suggested that Lempriere had brought the theme of tristis senectus to mind.
‘Fiona,’ she said, ‘is very anxious about Dr Timbermill.’
‘So am I.’
‘She thinks something ought to be done, and I believe she’s right. But I’m afraid I’m out of it. The old man doesn’t like me.’
‘So I noticed.’ ‘It sticks out a mile. He thinks I’m a bad influence on Fiona.’
‘It’s a very arbitrary point of view.’
‘Do you mean that it’s Fiona who is a bad influence on me?’
‘No, I don’t. Why ever should I! I haven’t thought of either of you that way at all.’ I realised that this comprehensive disclaimer wasn’t quite honest, since I had at least wondered whether one of these young women notably ran the other.
‘I’ve heard it’s said that Fiona has deflected me in my writing – that it has taken a slant from her cast of mind.’
‘People get all sorts of ideas about writers.’ This was a feeble remark. But Miss Mountain’s statement, although interesting, had been a little awkwardly on the self-absorbed side. She was very young, indeed, and the very young have the privilege of taking themselves seriously even on socially inapposite occasions. I felt back to our previous topic. ‘But, Margaret, why should Timbermill disapprove of you?’
‘Because I’m not a scholar, I suppose.’ Miss Mountain had given me a swift look. ‘He’s convinced I’ll lead Fiona into frivolous courses – intellectually speaking, that is. He sees it that way on. Of course he’s conscious of something of the sort in himself.’
‘I don’t quite follow that.’
‘The Magic Quest thing. It kept him from completing some enormous academic labour or other, and now he regrets having been lured away by it.’
‘Then he’s wrong.’
‘I agree.’ Miss Mountain’s head – which just came up to my shoulder – gave a decided nod. ‘It mayn’t be a work of the most enduring quality, but it’s miles ahead of any labour of conservative scholarship. So what the old man has is a false conscience.’
‘You may be right.’
‘Not that he isn’t still capable of scraps of imaginative thinking. That’s what enables him to say the most frightful things from time to time. Do you understand me?’
‘Yes, I do. Frightful things should be said only in novels. But I suppose we must put up with old people’s notions. Unless, of course, we believe in euthanasia, or something of that kind.’
‘I don’t.’
‘Or that the old can be quietly tucked away.’
‘I’m afraid I don’t believe in that either, Mr Pattullo. Or not for somebody like J. B. Timbermill.’
‘He must be let go down with his colours flying?’
‘Something like that. Which is why there’s a problem.’
This colloquy came to an end upon a summons to luncheon. We had assembled in a drawing-room which had been rescued only in part from somewhat oppressive ecclesiastical associations. The windows were high, pointed, embellished with tracery in their upward parts, and pervasively fringed or scalloped in stained glass; through them one looked across a leaf-strewn lawn to a rustic summer-house and the surviving framework of a child’s swing. Within, a seemly clerical austerity was conveyed through the instrumentality of much highly varnished pitch-pine, and there was an enormous fireplace guarded on either hand by sword-bearing archangels hewn from the same material. The hall through which we made our way to the dining-room contrived a similar effect, particularly in being entirely floored with slippery encaustic tiles in a pattern of obscurely liturgical association. It struck me what a barn of a place the whole house was for a childless couple.
I had gone ahead with Janet, and it was hard upon this thought that I found myse
lf alone with her for a moment – and viewing, over a less intimidating mantelpiece, something totally unexpected: a small landscape painting by my father.
‘Isn’t it fun?’ Janet said. She was suddenly more animated than I had known her since we were restored to each other. ‘It’s probably worth as much as everything else in the house put together.’
‘Getting on that way.’ I was so delighted by this outrageous remark that – although it was nonsense – I concurred at once. ‘I like it very much. Have you had it long?’
‘Yes, of course, Dunkie. Your father gave it to me as his wedding-present. I love it. Calum loved it too.’
This unexpected information quite overwhelmed me. The act had been my father all over. He had liked Janet. He had liked her without – I had long since come to understand – remotely sharing my mother’s persuasion that she would ever be his daughter-in-law.
‘Janet,’ I said, ‘I used to imagine you and your family in your home. By your fireside, mostly. But I didn’t know to put this above it.’
‘You can do that now. Mr Duncan Pattullo, where are you going to sit?’
I came to my senses as this problem was being coped with. Placement-wise, four married couples are an impossibility, and even four males and four females require thought. Janet put Mabel Bedworth at one end of the table and herself at the other. I was on Mrs Bedworth’s right and Fiona was on mine with Bedworth on her other side. Opposite me was McKechnie and opposite Bedworth was Lempriere with Miss Mountain between them. As this got Mrs Bedworth on the right of her host and Lempriere on the right of his hostess it must have been eminently correct. Watching these middle-aged convenances transacting themselves, however, I might have been asking myself, with the poet, about the whereabouts of the penny world I bought to eat with Pipit behind the screen. Janet and I had buried our eagles and our trumpets. Or so it was proper to believe.
‘I want you to come to London with me,’ Fiona announced.
‘I’d love to. For a show?’
‘A lecture at Burlington House.’
‘Oh.’ I didn’t make this an exclamation of delight. ‘I suppose we could have dinner somewhere afterwards. What’s the lecture about?’
‘It’s about Types of Manorial Structure in the Northern Danelaw.’
‘You must be joking.’ I had tried to remember Nick Junkin’s manner of making this rejoinder.
‘It might interest you very much. It would have at one time, wouldn’t it?’
‘No, Fiona. You’ve got that impression from Timbermill, and he remembers it all wrong. I admired him enormously, as I think I’ve told you, and it made me work for him like a black. But it wasn’t honestly my sort of thing. And I’m miles and miles away from it now. An infant as clever as you are must see that clearly enough.’
‘Well, yes. But J. B. thinks we could rekindle your interest. He’s very keen you should hear Steenstrup.’
‘Is that the lecturer’s name?’
‘Yes. He’s a great authority on Danish institutions in England.’
‘Steenstrup? How very interesting!’ It was Bedworth on Fiona’s other side who broke in with this, no doubt feeling that interruption was in order on a learned topic. ‘Is it at the British Academy, Miss Petrie? I can’t have had a card about it. The period isn’t exactly mine, of course. But I’ve read in it to some extent.’
I had no doubt that this was true. Bedworth, although scarcely advanced in middle age, was the old-fashioned kind of don who despised what he would have called narrow specialisation and went in for encyclopaedic studies. To what extent anything in his mind pulled them together, I didn’t know. But he was now well launched with Fiona. They discussed the Great Commendation to King Edgar, which appeared to be something that had happened in the year 973.
I was left for a short space to my own thoughts. The unexpected sight of my father’s painting’ had bumped me back a quarter of a century, and I was asking myself why I hadn’t sent my own wedding-present to Janet and her Calum. I had written a letter I couldn’t recall, although I knew I needn’t be ashamed of it. But I had left undone the thing I ought to have done – which was to pack up my Young Picts watching the arrival of Saint Columba and despatch it to her. The obviousness of this, starting up after half a lifetime, was daunting. I stared at it.
Suddenly I became aware that Mabel Bedworth, although continuing to lend her ear to McKechnie, had her eye on me. This would have been noteworthy at any time – her ocular habits being as they were – but now it arrested me. I was confirmed in the perception that, like Margaret Mountain sitting opposite her, she was a person of an observing habit. I’d hardly reflected on the fact before it struck me that Janet at the head of her table was doing a certain amount of observing too. We were like a bunch of candidates – I told myself – at some horrible newfangled Civil Service examination, manipulating knives and forks while keeping a wary regard on one another.
At this point my right shoulder, as if mysteriously sensitised, told me that Fiona was becoming restless, and I detached her with some ruthlessness from the affairs of King Edgar or whoever.
‘Look,’ I said, ‘I’ll come to that lecture, and we’ll have a tremendous feast afterwards. But it must stop there.’
‘The feasting, Duncan?’
‘No, not at all. The lecture-going, or any other charade for J.B.’s benefit. It wouldn’t be for his benefit. Margaret’—I felt that Miss Mountain must be thus referred to now—’has more sense than you have. A great man isn’t to be cosseted.’
‘Very well.’ Fiona took this instantly. ‘But it puts his ball in your court, cousin. Rescue’s up to you.’
I was about to say that the conception of rescue was a dubious one when a small distraction occurred. McKechnie had got to his feet and was effecting a belated distribution of wine. He was far from being an inhospitable man but was undeniably an absent-minded one. And Bedworth – who ought to have been talking to Janet, since Lempriere had fallen into an abstraction – addressed him across the table, it having apparently come into his head that his host ought to be publicly congratulated on the spaciousness of his dwelling. Bedworth admired spaciousness. Had he not, in the very first half-hour of my acquaintance with him, commented favourably on the dimensions of his low-hutched attic study on Surrey Four?
‘Yes, indeed,’ McKechnie said. He was gauging with some exactness the point to which he should fill Miss Mountain’s glass. ‘It’s rather too large for us, really. For instance, there’s a whole nursery wing. But that will be quite useful as the books pile up.’
I have been conscious, from time to time, of men echoing with a total unawareness words celebrated on the lips of a dramatic personage, but as a prime example this would have taken some beating. McKechnie was perhaps quite like George Tesman, although his scholarship was certainly of a weightier sort. Janet, on the other hand, wasn’t in the least like Hedda Gabler.
Because effected across the table, the exchange had been heard by everybody, and its infelicitous character remarked. Curiously enough, the situation was dealt with promptly by Lempriere. A moment before, he had appeared totally withdrawn after the fashion he often exhibited at high table. Now he was smiling at Janet with an air of alert attention, and offering an adequate emergency remark on the subtle character of the dish in front of him. It was a flicker of the social expertness which had no doubt been in full play during the period of his telling lies for his country abroad. Janet named with composure the ingredients of a sauce.
Miss Mountain was to be observed as paying more attention to Lempriere during the remainder of the meal, her interest having been caught by such prompt action on the part of one whom she probably regarded as virtually ready for entombment or incineration. I wondered whether, like numerous English novelists at that time, she was projecting a romance devoted to octogenarian and nonagenarian persons. I also wondered, but almost equally idly, what grave matter Lempriere had to communicate to me about the Provost. He had spoken of a cat being let out of a bag
, an expression commonly used in a context of emergent scandal. But it was impossible to think of scandal in connection with Edward Pococke; one could as plausibly postulate some wild frivolity on the part of the Dalai Lama or the Pope of Rome. Nor was I impressed by Lempriere’s deploying of his habitual injunction to reticence, since he commonly underestimated the existing currency of the intelligence he proposed to confide to one. So much did I see it this way, indeed, that had the opportunity occurred I’d have asked Bedworth whether Lempriere had made him a similar promise of piquant disclosure. But after lunch we all went into the garden, where there was bright sunshine but not much warmth in the air, and Bedworth was carried off by McKechnie, no doubt to have sundry resources in the way of mechanised horticulture exhibited to him. I found myself still with Fiona. We surveyed a derelict tennis court. It was a hard court, but cracked and undulating. Bindweed was at work on it in a big way.
‘You’d think they might at least have a dog,’ Fiona said.
‘It wouldn’t do. It would get chewed up by one of McKechnie’s monsters. Or be electrocuted.’
‘Canaries, then. Or budgies.’
‘Fiona, don’t be disagreeable.’
‘How long have they been married?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘How odd!’
‘There’s nothing odd about it.’ I said this with the more emphasis because it wasn’t true. There was indeed something surprising in my having avoided the acquisition of this simple information. ‘But for several years, I’d suppose.’
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