Young Pattullo

by J. I. M. Stewart

  ‘Look,’ I said. ‘I can honestly tell you that Anna hasn’t the slightest interest in me. Even less than Ruth. As a matter of fact I’ve felt – ever since getting here this time – that she’s more remote than usual. Of course I realise I don’t know much about these things. But I can assure you it’s all in the clear – absolutely.’ I paused for a moment, a fresh thought striking me. ‘Sir—has Mountjoy been talking to you about me?’

  ‘Mountjoy? My dear Duncan!’ Colonel Morrison smiled at me whimsically, but I realised I was being made aware (as I sometimes was made aware at Corry) that I didn’t quite know the ropes. ‘I have a word with Mountjoy from time to time. He’s a capital chap, and invaluable to your uncle. But I’d hardly touch on intimate matters with him.’

  ‘No, of course not.’ I was suitably abashed. ‘It was just something came into my head.’

  ‘Then enough said.’ Colonel Morrison contrived a glance of modified gaiety, and turned to make his way out of the garden. I thought he was going to give over, but he proved to have something more to say. ‘Anna dropped into tea with me only yesterday, as a matter of fact. Quite a tramp for her. Nice of her. Lonely old chap, and so on. Something you do yourself, Duncan, from time to time. Appreciate it.’

  ‘I always enjoy coming over, sir.’

  ‘Good, good. Stayed quite a long time. Mrs Ogilvie did us a very good tea, I’m bound to say.’ Mrs Ogilvie was the colonel’s housekeeper and, in a certain degree, companion; as the linchpin of his comfortable establishment, she was held by him in high esteem. He didn’t much care for a wider female society. By the surrounding gentry he was generally believed to have been something of a lady-killer in his youth, but to have suffered some experience which had induced a marked and no doubt meritorious retreat upon celibate life. ‘Yes, a capital tea,’ he now continued. ‘You know those drop-scones of Mrs Ogilvie’s, eh? And always had a kindness for both the girls. She chatted with Anna. Hardly out of the room, as a matter of fact.’

  I felt I had scarcely ever heard more amazing words. They had the effect of illuminating, moreover, my recent confabulation with Mountjoy. The one man was as scared of Anna – or of what Anna’s imagination might get round to – as was the other; and this conversation, too, had been for the record. Nor was that quite all. Blowing about, I felt, had been something yet more surprising: a kind of generalised irrational panic before the mere female animal.

  I hoped Uncle Rory wasn’t going to prove subject to this malaise. Certainly he wasn’t immediately infected. Colonel Morrison joined him, drank his whisky, smoked a companionable pipe, and walked away – leaving his neighbour wholly unperturbed. Life at Corry Hall showed every sign of going on precisely as before.

  It was during the succeeding few days, I remember, that I read Anna Karenina. Perhaps the name had exercised some unconscious pull. I wasn’t made much aware of the padding which, in the colonel’s view, was a marked feature of Tolstoy’s writing. Being in love, I found much of the novel unbearably moving, even though I was aware of it as traversing areas of feeling about which I knew very little.

  I wasn’t merely in love with Janet Finlay; in a few brief weeks before being banished to Corry Hall I had rocketed from mute adoration of her to the status of an articulate and, as I saw it, masterful suitor. But this didn’t prevent me from now thinking about Anna a good deal. I approached the suddenly perplexed subject cautiously, even persuading myself that it was Tolstoy’s novel which was leading me to ponder on the nature of sexual desire in women. Since Anna remained, however, so very much the immediate instance, her image was soon accompanying me monotonously on my solitary walks.

  All my discoveries at that time were mixed up with the discovery of words, and Anna appeared to become clearer in my head when I remembered a recent accession to my hoard. This was nymphomania. My Shorter Oxford Dictionary (which was in two huge volumes) marked the word as ‘alien or not naturalised’; my Pocket Oxford Dictionary (from which I was tardily learning to spell) was of slightly later date, and printed the word without any such qualification in its Addenda. I was fond of this category of incoming words, and had a good command of them. So I now imagined myself as going home and exclaiming to Ninian, ‘I say—a frightful thing about Anna Glencorry! She’s gone completely nympho.’ (I supposed that the contraction would have been my own contribution to the growth of language.) I felt that I had now solved the enigma of my cousins. An elderly bachelor like Colonel Morrison might well be nervous about perfectly normal women. But a husky young man like Mountjoy was another matter. His apprehensions of a dangerous involvement with his employer’s daughter could only be occasioned by conduct thoroughly out of the way. Anna had been tearing off her clothes and screaming in his presence. Something like that.

  There was also, of course, hysteria, which wasn’t quite the same thing. My mother was hysterical at times, but I was quite sure she wasn’t nymphomaniac. Yet hysteria came from a Greek word meaning ‘womb’, and Ninian had solemnly warned me that in a fit of hysteria a normally respectable girl could baselessly accuse one of the most frightful sexual excesses. Like many high-powered lawyers in the making, Ninian had begun by interesting himself in the criminal and sensational side of legal practice.

  So I carried these semantic ruminations with me around the glens. An obvious question emerged. Could I have been astray in assuring Colonel Morrison that Anna nowadays didn’t take the slightest interest in me? Wasn’t it the colonel who was right in endeavouring to alert me to her as a menace? And it would be a menace. Although when I lay awake at night imagining that the door might softly open and Anna slip into my room the fantasy was sufficiently exciting to make my head swim, I knew perfectly well that such an episode would be at once a disaster and a fiasco. There was nothing unnatural in this. It just so happened that my emotional orientation at that time had suddenly become such that anything of the kind was bound to strike me as horribly degrading, and in consequence to turn out humiliatingly anaphrodisiac. I felt rather ashamed of my own puritanical nature as thus revealed. I thought of the robust behaviour of Tom Jones and of similar eventually irreproachable lovers not in an interim immune to what came casually along. It was no good. I decided to lock my bedroom door. When I discovered that the lock was without a key it is true that some spark of renewed anticipation momentarily lit up in me. But nothing like a conflagration followed.

  Then all this proved to be nonsense.

  ‘I’m going to have a baby.’

  Anna made the announcement to her parents, her sister and myself one day in the middle of lunch. We all stared at her dumbfounded. She had spoken much as if saying, ‘I’m going to be sick’, and the impression was enhanced by her then at once getting up and hurrying from the room. Ruth burst into tears, but refrained from following her. Aunt Charlotte didn’t follow her either; she turned pale, crumbled bread, and said, ‘Elspeth must be told that Anna is unwell.’ (Elspeth was the aged and creaking parlourmaid, who was fortunately occupied in fetching ground-rice pudding from the kitchen.) Uncle Rory, too, hadn’t moved. I caught him looking at me inquiringly, as if he judged me to be the person present who was most likely to have kept his wits. Probably he was uncertain that he hadn’t suffered some aberration of hearing or even of the imagination, and wanted to ensure against making an ass of himself. I had jumped to my feet and was heading for the door. Anna’s words had been in a sense quite vague to me; I scarcely had their bearings at all; in my mind there was even the confused thought that somebody might have had the decency to tell me that my cousin was married. Yet this didn’t cloud my knowledge that she was in the sort of fix that makes some immediate gesture of solidarity important. But my aunt’s voice stopped me.

  ‘Duncan, sit down. It is kind of you, but sit down at once.’

  I did as I was told. That it should occur to Aunt Charlotte at such a moment to offer me an approbatory word astonished me and gave her authority.

  ‘But will she be all right?’ I asked. I was already seeing the situation mor
e clearly, and was morbidly envisioning my cousin as climbing to one of the bogus battlements of Corry Hall and pitching herself over its crenellations.

  ‘She will be as right as is at all suitable. What must not happen is that she should be encouraged to make scenes—to make a further scene. Ruth, stop crying at once.’

  I passed Ruth my handkerchief, and acknowledged to myself that, if in a hard way, Aunt Charlotte was doing rather well. It was perfectly true that, whatever the dimensions of Anna’s misfortune, she had revealed its general existence to us in a self-dramatising or exhibitionistic fashion. I was shocked to find myself suspecting (what indeed proved to be true) that she was going to make the most of the thing.

  Yet any thought of this sort occupied only one side of my head. In the other a sense of the matter was building up that was to produce a minor dramatic manifestation of its own.

  But that lay a little ahead. At the moment I was wondering how Uncle Rory would make himself felt in the affair. When outraged by Ninian’s incivility to the fishwife he had made himself felt in the most literal sense, and it seemed to me probable that he would at once seek out his daughter’s seducer, this time armed with a horse-whip. But Uncle Rory made no immediate move, and the thought of Ninian brought other considerations to my mind. Ninian had been precocious in his love-affairs, and numerous treatises on sexual psychology, to which I had gained access with some difficulty at the prompting of this situation, had persuaded me that I was well-informed in the field. I wondered whether Uncle Rory knew nearly as much about it as I did. He might well be totally innocent of the ways of the modern world. Did he know, for instance, that nowadays young people quite often slept with one another in an experimental spirit, and were sometimes careless or clumsy at it, with the result that they had hastily to get married? It looked, after all, as if such was Anna’s case.

  But if this came to me from life something else now came to me from literature. I had lately read a tremendous little play by Yeats called Purgatory, the most accessible theme of which appeared to be the dismal consequences certain to succeed upon a high-born lady’s going to bed with a drunken groom. Anna would pass very well as a high-born lady; she had King Gorse behind her, after all. (I was rather fond of King Gorse. If he was my uncle’s ancestor he was thereby my own as well.) Was it conceivable that Anna had found a drunken groom? At this point I naturally thought of Mountjoy.

  Mountjoy wasn’t exactly a groom – nor, so far as my knowledge went, was he of an intemperate habit. Still, he was, so to speak, within the bracket. And wasn’t it precisely out of it that he had been trying to wriggle during our strange conversation? The unscrupulous young Mountjoy was going to deny his paternity. At a pinch, he would blame Anna’s condition on somebody else.

  My phase of irrational horror before the situation must have begun at this point. It signalled its arrival in terms of another recent accession to the word-hoard: ‘sleeping around’. This was taking the place of terms like ‘promiscuous’ and ‘loose-living’ in colloquial speech. And now I thought of Colonel Morrison. Just what I thought I can’t imagine. But I had a nightmarish vision of Anna roaming the moors in darkness.

  Perhaps I had started her off. We had roamed the moors, with the result that things had happened to me known hitherto only in wet dreams. If Anna had a more inflammable imagination than I had it was possible that she had just never looked back. I was confronting this squarely when I realised that lunch was over, and that I had actually consumed a plateful of the ground-rice pudding, helped down by cold stewed prunes. The inflexibility of life at Corry had asserted itself. We parted without further word. My uncle, in fact, hadn’t spoken at all. But something in his mere movement as he left the room told me that he was a bewildered man.

  I wondered what to do. To seek out Anna herself would be intrusive – in addition to which it must be supposed that she would be closeted with one or both of her parents. Perhaps I could do something to cheer up Ruth. But I had no idea of what Ruth knew, and I therefore had a fear that, if I sought her out, she might suppose me to be fishing for information. My other thought was that I should follow my uncle; that there existed an almost ritual need that, at least for a few minutes, the men of the family should be in consultation together. I had received from Uncle Rory, in the very moment of revelation, that frankly appealing glance. But it was for Uncle Rory to take an initiative here. Moreover, a nephew doesn’t belong to a family in the narrow sense. Struck by this, it now occurred to me that the correct procedure would be to pack up and leave Corry forthwith. A gleam of sense, however, told me that, as an entirely junior person, I couldn’t properly take an initiative here either.

  So I moved into the least frequented room in the house. This was the library: an ungenial apartment of considerable size and one actually containing a great many books – nearly all of them for some reason kept under lock and key in glazed bookcases. It was now quite familiar to me, since I had recently taken the momentous step of letting it be publicly known (even at Corry) that my idea of a normal day included a couple of hours’ ‘work’, and that by ‘work’ I meant writing. At Corry the library was my chosen spot for this. I remember that I liked to have several dogs with me during these sessions. A picture of Sir Walter Scott in similar surroundings at Abbotsford was probably at the back of my mind.

  I certainly couldn’t ‘work’ at present, but I might be able to read. Because I had lately taken to planning literacy in a big way, War and Peace was to follow Anna Karenina, and both books were lying on a window-seat now. I was about to start on the new one when I recalled the opening of the old. I picked up Anna Karenina and read the brief paragraph again:

  All happy families resemble one another, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

  Did such categories mean much? I remembered that, long ago, Anna and Ruth and I had occasionally lightened the tedium of Corry evenings by playing the primitive card-game called ‘Happy Families’, and this recollection suddenly submerged me in morbid feelings about lost innocence.

  This spurious nostalgia wore off, and gave place to something which was at least genuine. There came to me a sense of what, in its nakedness and absoluteness, had been done to Anna’s body, and of what was happening within the mysterious darkness of her body now. Day after day in that darkness, a child was growing towards the light. The thought roused in me more than the simple awe natural to such a contemplation. I had feelings of revulsion and horror as well. These I was helpless to understand, or at least to understand fully, but perhaps I was not wrong in telling myself that the possibility of the child’s being harshly and unregardingly fathered, or even not fathered at all, affected me deeply. Yet no romantic sentiment attached to Anna herself in my mind. I remembered her rather too beefy body, wriggling stupidly and shamefully beneath my own, with a dispassionate distaste which appeared unrelated to any sort of strong emotion at all. Perhaps I somewhere felt guilty, all the same; felt guilty not on account of those trivial, sticky, clothes-encumbered episodes in the heather, but rather on account of all the blind itch and impatient lust which I was coming to realise men brought to sex – to ‘having sex’, as I was one day to hear my juniors habitually express it.

  I must have spent quite some time with these growing-pains that afternoon, since I became abruptly aware of my uncle entering the library with the words, ‘I have asked Elspeth to bring us tea’. There was nothing unprecedented about this. Some such occasion took place nowadays whenever either Ninian or myself stayed at Corry. And it wasn’t that Uncle Rory thought it proper to hold, in this private manner, an inquisition into our affairs. He was concerned for our manners and bearing, and also – to the extent his understanding reached – over the problems of our careers. But, unlike Aunt Charlotte, he was too punctilious to have regarded explicit reference to such matters on his part as in order unless undertaken at the suggestion of our parents. And such a use for Uncle Rory would certainly never have entered our parents’ heads.

  I had come to suspect
that my uncle, although so much given to notions of lineage and primogeniture, would have been quite content to see the Canadian Glencorrys swallowed by an earthquake, and my brother in consequence become, by favour of the Lord Lyon King of Arms or some such person, heir to the Chiefship. Uncle Rory was fonder of Ninian than of myself – intuitively aware, I think, of the man of public consequence in the making. I had once found myself reflecting, with an odd jealousy, that if it had been I who was rude to the fishwife I should probably have been less intimately corrected; that the walloping had established something. Nevertheless Ninian was not the heir; we were both simply nephews out on a female line; we were treated on a strict equality, one effect of which was my periodic admission to these tea-table conferences.

  What Uncle Rory would discuss – or rather make rambling remarks about – was an assortment of small current problems connected with the administration of the estate. They were effectively matters in Mountjoy’s control, and the play of my uncle’s own sagacity over them was so unimpressive that one ended up fervently hoping that Mountjoy was an honest man. As I now watched Elspeth bring in the tea – with more ceremony than if it had been into my aunt’s drawing-room – and my uncle standing with no more than his familiar air of worried abstraction before the empty fire-place, I wondered whether his sense of a proper drill was such that nothing uncustomary was going to pass between us now. But this was to stumble in my always slightly uncertain sense of Uncle Rory’s mind. He waited only for Elspeth to close the door, and then spoke at once.