‘Why did she ask Margaret and me to lunch?’
‘The slighter your acquaintance, the nicer of her it was.’
‘One can look at it that way.’
‘If you can’t look at it more graciously, you’d better not look at it at all, Miss Petrie.’
‘Wasn’t she—’
‘Stop calling your hostess “she”. It’s monstrously uncivil.’
‘You’re quite the Glencorry, Duncan. My grandfather would have said just that.’
‘No, he wouldn’t. Uncle Rory would have said nothing at all. Or just given an order to leave the room.’
‘Your memory’s good, too. I suppose it comes with age. Do you remember a lot about Mrs McKechnie?’
‘Yes, a great deal. But not quite as much as I’d like to.’
‘I love our chats, Duncan.’ But Fiona, as she made this light remark, had stopped, and was looking at me gravely. ‘What’s Janet McKechnie after?’ she asked.
‘You mustn’t impute designs to people. It’s small-minded.’
‘Please, that’s enough of the governess-in-trousers turn, Duncan. Answer me seriously.’
‘There’s no serious answer. Janet’s not after anything.’
‘Would you say there’s a standard resource when old adorers turn up?’
‘There may be.’
‘You were an adorer?’
‘Yes. We were both extremely young. Much younger than you are now, Fiona.’
‘Has it occurred to you she’s match-making? That at this moment, as she shows your dotty old colleague her herbaceous border, she’s hoping we’re already clasped in one another’s arms?’
‘Shut up, Fiona!’
‘I call that monstrously uncivil.’
‘Then just be quiet.’ I was myself silent for a moment. I believe I was very displeased. Once had been enough for Fiona’s mockery at the notion of a lovers’ relationship between us, and I’d had that at another party. But I was upset less by this than by the imagination of Janet’s in any sense planning for me. It was a wholly disconcerting importation into our new relationship as I’d been thinking of it. ‘We’d better go and find the others,’ I said.
‘Duncan’s scared. Duncan’s fetting.’
I hadn’t heard this insulting Scots word since I left school, and I wondered where Fiona could have picked it up. Conceivably her brothers used it when prompted to impute abject terror to somebody. So potent are childish associations that it at once turned me childishly truculent.
‘You’re a very tiresome young person,’ I said. ‘You ought to be spanked.’
‘Try it.’
At this the years rolled back in earnest. For the first time in my acquaintance with Fiona I was really aware of her as my cousin Anna Glencorry’s daughter. Her challenge had been flung at me as an immediate physical possibility, sharply actual. Just so, in fact, had Anna and I occasionally initiated those tumblings and pantings in the heather which still sometimes returned to me in dreams. And suddenly I thought I saw where the power of Fiona’s pull on me lay. She wasn’t a bit like her mother: this I had been aware of on my first glimpse of her. She was like my own mother – which doubtless imported a Freudian factor into our situation. But the crucial fact was the depth at which, in Fiona, a sexuality quite as strong as Anna’s moved beneath the androgynous or ‘unisex’ persona she had created for herself. Her rebarbative surfaces were like the barrier of thorn surrounding the desirable mistress in the mediaeval allegory.
If this poetic image really came to me it didn’t help much to clarify my feelings at the moment. I was simply aware of Fiona as being more attractive to me than it was at all likely I could be to her.
‘No sadism today,’ I said. ‘And not when we go to town for that lecture and dinner either.’
‘Then come on.’ Fiona tossed her head and laughed. She may have felt that she had gone a little far in inviting castigation in the garden of a Regius Professor. ‘I’ll ring you up about it. And shall I send you a preliminary reading list?’
‘Fiona, dear,’ I said, ‘don’t make me laugh.’
XVI
Lempriere had come out to the McKechnies’ house by taxi in the confident expectation of getting a lift back to Oxford from a fellow-guest – and this it was up to me to provide, since I could drive him straight into college. He made an irritable business of settling into the car, and snubbed me when I offered him a rug. Here was confirmation of the view that he had formed an unfavourable impression of his new-found kinswoman. Learned women must have come his way professionally from time to time, but he was of a generation that still hadn’t schooled itself to take them for granted. He suffered from what somebody at that period was calling the flying pig syndrome, or a disposition to marvel that a woman could do this or that at all. With women content to be treated to courtliness and banter he would get on tolerably well, although he mightn’t be easy with them. But a stringent young scholar like Fiona, existing with that prickly hedge all round her and emerging briefly with intent to shock, was beyond the scope of his sympathy. He would be restored to good humour, I judged, only if he made a satisfactory effect with whatever news he had to give me.
He wasn’t in a hurry to begin. Or rather he was, but didn’t care to admit it. Just as on the occasion when he had thought to inform me of the existence of Peter Lusby, he preserved silence for a time. It may have been his calculation that he was building up a high state of expectation in me. This wasn’t so. For one thing, I had no belief in sensation of any sort as likely to be associated with Edward Pococke. For another, I was busy thinking about Janet.
We had not had much talk together at her luncheon party: almost notably little, indeed, considering that it had been a small-scale affair. The fact didn’t worry or offend me, since it seemed to me that we had our remaining lifetimes to be fast friends in. And as I took even casual glances to be a kind of communion this was a satisfactory thought. Perhaps I was in a peculiar state of mind. If some of my feelings about Fiona were thrown in, it became very peculiar indeed. John Keats’s Endymion, in a high old muddle between his elusive goddess and the Indian Maid, commanded cold clarity in comparison. Not that my brains were in a whirl, or anything of that kind. I was giving the situation (if there was a situation) what journalists had not yet begun to dub a low profile. I did pay further attention to the one thing that had disturbed me at the party, which was Fiona’s attributing some match-making intention to our hostess. And here was something I felt lucid about. It wasn’t true. In no circumstances could such an activity (although blameless in itself) be other than foreign to Janet’s character. And that was that. If any further conclusion flowed from this, I didn’t trouble to hunt for it.
We were skirting Frilford golf course. It had been the scene, long ago, of that famous misadventure which had befallen Tony Mumford, Cyril Bedworth and myself in our freshman phase. The memory of this might well have set my thoughts dwelling on the Provost, since it was he whom Bedworth’s inexpert brassy-shot had winged. Instead, I was wondering whether I had ever told the story to Janet; whether the extent of my communication with her in that ill-starred year had still been such as to make it likely. My memories of those days were various and abundant, and they couldn’t in the nature of things be other than vivid; some of them were painfully so. Yet it was extraordinary how they lay in my mind in a state of chronological confusion. Had this come before that? In which vacation had one or another sign appeared or definitive occasion occurred? I had kept a journal throughout the period, but it had aimed at being an intellectual chronicle of impressive scope. It still lay in a drawer. It would be more interesting now had it concerned itself with a more unassuming Duncan Pattullo, the confused youth whom I had judged unworthy of the dignity of chronicle.
‘Remember that confounded letter-book, Dunkie?’
Lempriere came out with this question as I slowed to join the main Faringdon-Oxford road. I turned and glanced at him blankly.
‘Letter-book, Arnold?’ I rep
eated.
‘Good God, man! Stop wool-gathering. That Blunderville thing.’
‘Yes, of course. What about it?’
‘It’s in the news.’ Lempriere’s tone and accompanying chuckle conveyed a malicious effect which was new from him in my experience. The sardonic was his mode. ‘You know about poor old Edward’s having suddenly become mad keen to get hold of it?’
‘I suppose it might be put that way. You and I have discussed this before. I don’t think I’d always be quite confident about what the Provost’s after.’ (I had heard ‘poor old Edward’ from Lempriere several times that term; it seemed a perverse way in which to refer to a man a good deal younger than himself.) I’d say he’s given to windlasses and assays of bias, you know.’ It was sometimes tempting to tease Lempriere with nonsense of this sort. ‘By indirections finding directions out.’
‘A Polonius complex, Dunkie?’ This time Lempriere’s was an innocent chuckle. ‘Perhaps so – although the man’s no dotard. But the point is that this thing’s all over Oxford.’
‘This thing that you’re going to tell me about so confidentially?’
‘One wouldn’t care to be identified as a principal agent of dissemination.’ The chuckle had gained by several decibels, now seeming to involve Lempriere’s nose as well as his gullet. I supposed him to have been recalling the jargon of his diplomatic days. ‘I hear,’ he went on, ‘you’ve met that fellow Cressy?’
‘Yes, I have.’
‘Charles told me. Charles says you were a bit close about it.’
‘Perhaps I was, Arnold. I have a feeling I was being invited to spread gossip – act as a disseminating agent, in fact.’
‘Did Cressy say anything about this rubbishing collection of Blunderville letters and so forth?’
‘Yes, he did.’ I had an instinct that there was no longer any point in being cagey about the encounter at the dining club. ‘He said the volume has a lot to do with Blunderville domestic affairs. There would be, for example, material for what he called an interesting little paper on the relations of masters and servants at that time.’
‘Exactly! The letter-book reveals that poor old Edward’s great-grandfather was the fourth marquis’s butler.’
Lempriere’s words had been offered as a bombshell. I believe he expected me to brake sharply, or swerve madly towards the kerb. Keeping without much effort on a steady course, I gave a moment to finding an appropriate reaction.
‘So what?’ I asked.
‘Don’t be silly, Dunkie.’ Lempriere was seriously displeased with me. ‘How would you feel yourself at such a thing bobbing up about your great-grandfather?’
‘I take it I had four great-grandfathers, just like other people. The Pattullo one I’ve always supposed to have given most of his time to thinning out his turnips and carrots. So if I heard he’d really been butler to some grandee I’d think of it as a rise in the world.’
‘I detest the affecting of robust egalitarian sentiments.’
This was Lempriere in one of his explosively arrogant moments, but I had in honesty to wonder whether he had a point. I owned that tenuous connection by marriage with his family – old-established gentry, I vaguely imagined, of Huguenot extraction. But wasn’t I also the lineal descendant of King Gorse – a personage of an antiquity so extreme that it was highly probable he had never existed at all? What was Charlemagne to that – or even Pippin the Short? Perhaps there lurked in me a strain of feeling in these matters as dotty as that animating my Uncle Rory himself.
But this was irrelevant, and I turned back to the nub of the situation.
‘Whatever you think of the Provost,’ I said, ‘and I have a wholesome regard for him myself, you can’t claim he’s silly.’
‘He’s a very sensitive man.’
‘Arnold – just what’s the idea? Did Christopher Cressy stumble on this piece of backstairs history, sit on the evidence out of regard for a former colleague, and then launch the ludicrous disclosure, for no reason at all, twenty years on?’
‘Ludicrous – that’s precisely it.’ Lempriere waited for some response I didn’t produce. ‘A ludicrous time-bomb. I don’t condone the thing. You mustn’t think that. The Cressys came over with William. But, like any other family, they can produce a beggar on horseback from time to time.’ Lempriere paused on this gleam of sanity. Then, for the first time in my memory of him, he laughed aloud. ‘Poor old Edward,’ he said, ‘might set up a kind of trade union in the Lodging with that fellow Honey.’
This flash of glee baffled and dismayed me. It was a relief when the gates of the college were before us.
There was a note from the Provost on my mantelpiece. I opened it at once.
Dear Duncan,
I wonder whether you can possibly dine with me, en garçon, in the Lodging tomorrow? (Camilla has to be in town.) Marchpayne is coming up, not without some matters of moment to discuss. As, I believe, his oldest friend in college, and as one having some insight into our affairs, your presence would be invaluable to me. So I do hope I may prevail upon you – whose kindness is so invariable. Eight o’clock for a little later. Marchpayne has a Cabinet committee in the afternoon.
Yours ever, Edward
Having briefly considered this summons, I rang up Tony, and was surprised to get through to him at once. I think I’d have done my best to have him hauled out of the Cabinet Room itself.
‘Tony, this is Duncan. I’ve been asked to muck in at your dinner with the Provost tomorrow.’
‘That’s fine.’
‘It’s nothing of the sort. I don’t think I like what it’s in aid of.’
‘What do you think it’s in aid of?’
‘More airing of your obsession with Ivo’s academic career. And an attempt at horse-trading about it.’
‘Oh, come! It’s not quite like that, Duncan. I’ve got the chap to see sense.’
‘Ivo?’
‘Pococke, you idiot. All that’s needed now is just a little dignified accommodation all round. So come and do your bit, like an old pal.’
‘Listen, Tony. I’ve something to tell you. It’s about that damned letter-book.’
‘That what?’
‘Those Blunderville papers that Christopher Cressy filched, and that I went with the Provost to Otby to see your father about, because of your father’s having become some sort of trustee. You know perfectly well what I’m talking about.’
‘Oh, yes – I do remember.’ Tony said this perfectly composedly. ‘I’m not quite sure you’ve got that occasion right. But never mind for the moment. What about the blessed letter-book?’
‘The Provost’s reason for going madly out of his way to get it back—’
‘Yes, you have got it cock-eyed, all right. But go on.’
‘It’s because it chronicles the portentous information that the fourth marquis’s butler was Edward Pococke’s great-grandfather. Tony, you just can’t trade on such an absurd and demeaning—’
‘How absolutely splendid!’ Tony had shouted with most indecent delight. ‘What an awful pity it isn’t true.’
‘Isn’t true?’
‘My dear Duncan! Cressy still has this thing?’
‘You know perfectly well he has.’
‘It’s because he has told somebody or other about Pococke the butler that somebody else has been able to tell you?’
‘Yes – and half Oxford as well, it seems.’
‘God, Duncan, you are an innocent.’
‘What the hell do you mean by that?’
‘My dear man, did you ever write a bedroom comedy?’
‘A bedroom comedy?’ I was so bewildered that for a moment the point of the question actually eluded me.
‘Your precious friend Cressy clearly goes in for such impromptu inventions. And do you know where I think that letter-book is now? On the way back to your librarian, I’d say, with a polite note apologising for having retained it rather longer than he’d intended. And no depth of research will find a menial Pococke in it.
Don’t you know the Provost is descended from an eminent Orientalist of the same name, who flourished in the seventeenth century? Cressy has simply thought up a new joke that can’t last a week. Look, it’s nice of you to have rung up. But can we now talk sense?’
‘Very well. Can you tell me why, on your view of the thing, the Provost was so keen of a sudden to recover this Blunderville lumber that he dragged me out to Otby, all set to explain to your quite impossible father—’
‘You leave my old dad alone.’
‘All right. But all set to explain how anxious the college was to be fair to Ivo, and how wonderful it is to be an Honorary Fellow, and heaven knows what?’
‘Because of the Trust, of course.’
‘The Trust?’
‘The Blunderville Trust, or the Mountclandon Trust, or whatever it’s called.’
‘I don’t know very much about it.’
‘Nor did I, till the other day – except that they were making my father a key man on it, God help them. But it’s clear your blessed Provost did. Only he’s been keeping it under his hat.’
‘Keeping just what under his hat? For the Lord’s sake, Tony!’
‘The glorious truth. Our trump card, my boy.’ The telephone suddenly made strange noises which must have been occasioned by boisterous laughter. ‘The whole concern has to be wound up next year, and there’s provision for enormous charitable benefactions. They’re to be entirely at the discretion of the trustees. I’d be inclined to estimate – having made an inquiry or two – that what the Provost has his sights on for the college may be half a million or thereabout. Well, Paris vaut bien une messe.’ Again Tony laughed loudly, apparently much pleased with this historical parallel. ‘Which is more than that absurd letter-book is. Your wily boss was using that simply as a stalking-horse. By way of sounding out my father’s temper, if you like.’
‘He certainly managed that.’
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