The Guardians

by J. I. M. Stewart

  It had been an eminently sensible reply on Marianne’s part. But as he left the room Quail discovered, rather to his surprise, that he would have preferred to hear even a perfectly conventional expression of pleasure at Miss Fontaney’s news.

  CHAPTER III

  The succeeding weeks constituted for Quail a period of extraordinary intellectual excitement. Looking back on them, he was to be astonished that they could have held room for anything else. Arthur Fontaney’s journals were all he had hoped for. Indeed, that they were more than he had bargained for was perhaps the apter phrase, since they moved at times into philosophical territory with which his own acquaintance was only the interested amateur’s. It was this that started him on his benevolent scheme.

  He hardly thought of it as that. But from the very start of his own prosperous course with Miss Fontaney the position of Tandon worried him. Quite literally it was a matter of Tandon’s position, for there was surely something disturbing in the notion of a devoted scholar and busy teacher who took time off to lurk outside a North Oxford villa. Presumably Tandon didn’t inordinately indulge his impulse; and Quail himself never, in fact, had the embarrassment of coming upon him at his vigil again. But there could be no doubt that on Marianne’s meeting with him he must have been obeying the same curious prompting as on the occasion when Quail had first become aware of him. There was nothing alarming in it. Tandon, having let his interest in Fontaney’s remains get a little out of hand, was no doubt simply repeating in his mature years a pattern of behaviour formed in childhood. He would have been the sort of boy fated to do quite a lot of peering over fences – at some impromptu game, say, for which he had failed to be picked up; or at gangs of more conversible children, gossiping and larking around. Quail had reflected earlier that Tandon wouldn’t have the resource of railroads in the event of his getting Fontaney on the brain. And that sort of obsession must be just what his job encouraged. The nineteenth century, prolific of queer trades, had invented for Oxford that of college tutor. Previously, most of the Tandons had been young clergymen waiting for a living, and the business of coaching undergraduates for examinations had stopped off when they secured one. Nowadays there was a career in it – a career, it seemed to Quail, in which a certain happiness with personal relations was essential to success. This must be particularly true of the celibate dons. They spent their working hours closeted with young men in ones and twos; and, when they knocked off, it was for a life which, once you had removed sundry appearances of amenity, must be rather like that in a small private hotel. For those who carried through life the persuasion that they were not quite like the other boys – and to this fairly numerous tribe, as he guessed it to be, Quail was approximating Tandon for the sake of the argument – it couldn’t really all be a matter of enormous fun. No doubt the result was that a lot of learned work got done; this justified the system in general, and in particular seemed to point the propriety of putting the materials of learned work in Gavin Tandon’s way. Tandon was narrow – but for that very reason he might get far more out of Fontaney’s stuff than ever Quail would. In fact, he ought to be brought in.

  In all this – Quail was to acknowledge later – he was treating Tandon rather as someone to push around. The man had aspirations, and was a good subject for rumination upon approved psychological principles. It didn’t quite come to Quail that Tandon was an individual who might form and execute a design. Quail had once himself taken an unnecessary stroll down the Bradmore Road. But if he had ever found himself stationary on the pavement he would have judged the time come to drop not only Arthur Fontaney but railroads as well – as one demonstrably unfit henceforth to be other than a passenger on any permanent way whatever. And it was with something of the officiousness of a well-intentioned conductor – or, as his friends would say, guard – that he might have been viewed as insisting that Tandon should have a seat. But at least, having resolved on it, he did manage it – and without Tandon’s being much aware of the agency involved. Quail had gained the confidence of Miss Fontaney – enough of it, indeed, to suspect that there was a great deal he might not gain – and his assurance that there were passages in the journals that ought to have Tandon’s scrutiny was something that she accepted at once.

  The arrangement, oddly enough, didn’t quickly conduce to the closer acquaintance of the two men. Miss Fontaney, who continued here and there to expose areas undeniably quirky, disliked being outnumbered by the other sex. And so the custom established itself of Quail’s setting aside matter which Tandon would find peculiarly interesting, and of Tandon’s paying his own less frequent visits to the Bradmore Road by himself and on other occasions. It wasn’t until their walk together – the walk tentatively proposed by Tandon on their first meeting – that Quail had much sense of coming nearer to the other’s mind. It was a mind which he had, perhaps, no great expectation of finding interesting; and he might have been excused for feeling that, at the moment, his growing acquaintance with Arthur Fontaney’s was enough. And yet, he had to acknowledge, it wasn’t—quite. He was a little concerned to get to know Marianne Fontaney’s as well.

  It almost looked as if Tandon had felt a similar interest for a time. The queerest thing about his stroll with the lady, it seemed to Quail, was surely that he had chosen to say nothing about the literary remains of her father. A disquisition on unprovable theorems wasn’t, it was true, just the most personal of approaches or intimate of topics. But persevered with in the face of what must have been an overwhelming impulse to plunge into something else, it did seem to betoken a large effort to treat Marianne as an independent being. That Tandon had in any way followed this up, or been disposed further to cultivate the younger sister either for her own intrinsic interest or for any aid she might afford, Quail had no reason to believe. And he was inclined to think that, in point of fresh acquaintance, Marianne for her part felt herself to have quite enough on her hands with him, Quail. She wasn’t trying to dodge him; she did appear to feel that a definite duty was owing to him as her sister’s new counsellor and guest; but it could always be felt as a minor crisis with her when, in supporting this relationship, she had to take some small further step.

  It was because she was thus in her staid elderly way kittle, or at least hard to coax towards any sort of intimacy, that Quail found her as interesting as he did. Not that his attending to her was chiefly a matter of the entertainment he might get from the effort of understanding her. What was most in his mind was that her life was rather bleak, and that as her sister’s health further declined, it was likely to become bleaker still. There seemed no reason why he should not, being himself so elderly and staid, unobtrusively contrive for her some occasional enlargement or release. She couldn’t, certainly, be jumped or bounced into anything very out of the way, but his plans acknowledged an element of growing ambition, nevertheless. A project of hiring a car, and positively taking her to London for a day, quite largely occupied his thoughts at one time. It appeared that there was to be somewhere an exhibition of skills, crafts, and impedimenta germane to Brownies; and upon this, with some daring, he envisaged a triumphant descent.

  He liked this mild planning for Marianne, and such actual achievements as accompanying her to the lectures so agreeably diversified by the lantern slides of the Slade Professor; he liked this the more because it was so plain that for Arthur Fontaney’s other daughter there would soon be very little that could be done. He had received no confidence about Eleanor’s illness. But it was visibly progressive, and he soon saw that it was going to be a significant factor in the grand questions yet to be decided. What he chiefly glimpsed ahead was difficulty and perhaps embarrassment. Miss Fontaney had still no notion of not being entirely in control of her family affairs. But it seemed doubtful how long this could last. She mightn’t herself come to need controlling. Managing, however, was another matter. And he wondered how, at a pinch, Marianne would manage Eleanor.

  Miss Fontaney, he knew, could make what disposition of her father’s property she plea
sed. And what he foresaw was a period in which she might act upon eccentric principles which he still suspected rather than clearly perceived in her. He had felt at the start that he was getting along with her swimmingly. But as the days grew shorter, and as he gained a longer and larger view of the riches which Arthur Fontaney’s library contained, his misgivings mounted. He was ahead of Lord Michael Manningtree, and almost certainly that peculiarly absurd competitor would not, whether consciously or unconsciously, enter the lists again. But that Lord Michael had ever so much as come into Miss Fontaney’s head was a sort of warning – a warning that at any moment the whole affair might take an uncomfortably crazy turn.

  This was how Quail’s mind was moving when the walk with Tandon happened.

  CHAPTER IV

  There was a chill wind, a grey sky, and enough mud in the streets of Oxford to suggest that the surrounding countryside must be deep in it. Tandon called for Quail at his hotel and they climbed to the top of a bus. The appearance of the Senior Tutor conveyed the impression that an expedition of some hazard was in hand. He wore an old raincoat which might have been borrowed from a much larger man, and he carried a haversack in which he began to rummage as soon as they had sat down. He was looking for a purse – it seemed extremely characteristic of Tandon that he should possess a purse – and in the course of doing so, he produced a map, a pair of heavy gauntlet gloves, and a powerful instrument for cutting wire. All this, but rather more something of wary intentness in the man, gave him the air of an escaping prisoner of war. When he had bought tickets he continued for a moment to rummage, and then turned with urgency to Quail. “Have you got a sixpence?” he asked huskily.

  Quail conducted a rummage of his own, and confirmed that he had the coin.

  “Good. It is the proper sum to tender. I mean, if one finds one isn’t on one of the footpaths after all.”

  “I see.” Quail did dimly see that their excursion was to combine learned conference with what might be termed an ethical end. Tandon – and again it was characteristic – went in for vindicating the rights of the wayfarer.

  “Without prejudice, and in satisfaction of damage, if any. And of course one gives one’s name and address, and asks to be directed to the nearest public road. It’s perfectly simple.”

  Quail rather wondered if it was perfectly simple to offer sixpence and a legal rigmarole to a savage dog. But he only said: “You go in regularly for that sort of thing?”

  “The by-paths and rights of way must be kept open. It is most important . . . most important. Many of them, you know, are of historical significance. A study of them may still tell us a great deal about the mediaeval rural community. Are you interested in the tun?” There was a brief pause, occasioned by Quail’s having a substantial doubt whether he were. And then Tandon continued. “It is utterly scandalous that farmers should be allowed to put wire across thoroughfares that are virtually immemorial . . . virtually immemorial. The landlords ought to come down on it. But colleges, I am sorry to say, are often the worst offenders. Naturally, the colleges are very large landowners round about Oxford. But, in matters of this sort, college bursars are the worst people in the world. No historical sense—none whatever. Merely financial men. There was a very shocking incident on our last progress.”

  Quail, with a suitably humble sense that he was himself not much more than a merely financial man, asked to be informed about this.

  “We make a progress, you know, round our own properties in summer. I don’t often go. Wives are taken, which is a great mistake, to my mind. But on this occasion I did go, because I wanted to see a hovel. It is on one of our oldest farms – distinctly an ancient possession. And this hovel was said to have interesting dripstones . . . very interesting indeed. You don’t often get interesting dripstones on a hovel.”

  “I suppose not.”

  “But one of the cottages had something more striking still. My attention was drawn to it by the tenant – who was, of course, one of the labourers. I was trying to explain to him that his dripstones were most important. One should never lose that sort of opportunity – to enlarge the mind, I mean, of the labouring classes. You can never tell, you see, that it mayn’t have consequences for the next generation.” Tandon was glaring past Quail in a sort of passion. “If I had managed a little to touch this man in point of historical imagination, it might encourage him in the education of a son. You follow me?”

  Quail said that he did. Tandon had some art, he was feeling, in mingling absurdity with matter one could only respect.

  “Unfortunately he didn’t like the word drip. It seemed that his roof leaked, and that they had to put all their pots and pans under the rafters to catch the water, and that the noise kept them awake at night. I suggested that the pots and pans be given a layer of rags or sand.” Tandon paused on this piece of prosaic good sense. “The man then said something about the age of his cottage, and took me out and showed me a stone above the door. It had a date carved on it – a most unusual thing in a labourer’s cottage. It was 1694. The door was so low that one could put up one’s hand, clear a little lichen from the crumbling stone, and decipher the date quite clearly. I drew the attention of our bursar to it at once. It appeared to me the sort of thing that should be noted. It could have significance in a county history. And do you know what I detected him at later, when he supposed us all to be handing pies to those wretched women during our picnic lunch? Obliterating the date with a hammer!” Tandon had become so husky as to be scarcely audible in the rumbling bus. “When I challenged him, he was quite frank about it. The date might be awkward, he said, if some officious authority wan ted to condemn the cottage as unfit for habitation . . . my dear Quail, what can one do with such people?”

  Quail, partly as being pleased with this familiar address, did his best to answer suitably. Tandon, he noticed, was absently manipulating his wire-cutters in air in a manner hinting absolutely horrific ideas on what one might in fact do with insufficient bursars. “Do you manage to get out into the country often?” he asked pacifically.

  “Not as often as I’d wish.” Tandon put the wire-cutters back in his haversack and brought out the map. He opened this and pored over it for some minutes on his knee, so that when he next spoke Quail supposed it was going to be on their proposed route. But, in fact, it was to amplify his last statement. “And particularly not during term. Which is when one is most glad to get away.”

  For some time it seemed to Quail that getting away would be precisely what they’d fail to do on this occasion. Tandon’s map was of recent date, but nevertheless where it showed a succession of fields, each with its red dotted line indicating a sacrosanct right of way, there was now in fact a seemingly interminable spread of small monotonously rectangular dwellings, single-storeyed and flat-roofed, which Quail didn’t know whether to take as permanent or temporary in intention. And Tandon, not surprisingly, was a purist; he wasn’t going to cede a point by beginning farther on; there was, he explained, an obligation upon the housing authority to keep the ancient paths open. If they had so been kept, Quail found, it was in the form of narrow concreted lanes running between endless patches of garden, and better adapted to serve as speed-tracks for the local children than to provide quiet walking for meditative persons from a university. For some time their rural ramble promised to be entirely of this order. Quail was just indulging himself in the reflection that the Scholar Gypsy would have thought poorly of it, when Tandon burst out with an exclamation which didn’t immediately explain itself. “If only, you know, he’d had a son!”

  “Fontaney, you mean?”

  “Yes, of course – Fontaney. What a difference!”

  Quail was puzzled. “Can one tell? I guess some men feel like that, sure enough. If I were married, I’d hope for a son myself. But I don’t remember that Fontaney ever wrote or spoke of it. His daughters may have been as much joy to him as a son would have been.”

  “I mean to us.” Tandon had to step aside to avoid a child in a hurtling toy motor
-car – a motor-car, Quail noticed, much grander and shinier than any that had eddied round the Venetian mansion of Lady Elizabeth Warboys in Norham Gardens. “Think, Quail, how much simpler it would be if we had a man to deal with, and not those unaccountable women.”

  Something in Quail obscurely resented this. “Are you not making rather a rash generalisation? A great many men are neither easy nor pleasant to deal with. I’ve been at it on quite a scale, I may say, for more years than I care to remember. And if I could begin again in a world where nearly all the deals had to be with women, I’d be quite willing to give it a trial.”

  For a moment Tandon made no reply – perhaps because this time he was squeezing out of the way of a particularly vicious miniature conveyance got up like an aeroplane. Indeed, he dropped his map – Quail saw that its cover was most fallaciously embellished with a design of winding lanes, mossed cottages, and ancient church-towers amid embosoming trees – and briskly rubbed a grazed calf. “I consider,” he presently said rather snappishly, “that Miss Fontaney is very unlikely to be a satisfactory person to deal with.”

  Quail stooped and picked up the map. “I don’t know that I’m inclined to disagree. But I wouldn’t, all the same, put it down absolutely to her being a woman. There’s no particular virtue in just being a man, if you ask me. Put it this way, Tandon. Would you prefer to find yourself negotiating with Jopling?”

  This wholly undramatic challenge had a surprising effect. Tandon stopped in his tracks. “You think it will come to that?” he asked.

  “My dear chap, I was only putting a case. I don’t conceive of the Warden’s being involved at all. His name simply occurred to me as that of somebody we both know.”

  Tandon walked on in silence. He moved in a hurrying uncomfortable way, with his body canted forward as if thrusting against a gale – or as if, Quail absurdly thought, bears might emerge from all the little houses if he broke some magical rule and allowed his feet to get ahead of his nose. When Tandon next spoke, it was with a new abruptness. “You’ve talked to him?”