I had friends, sons and grandsons of former members of the college, who were inclined to take on the character of laudatores temporis acti. Tony – Tony Mumford, whose rooms were across the landing from my own on our staircase in Surrey – was the most intelligent of these. Senior boys at English public schools, he said, enjoyed various powers and privileges – but they weren’t dispensed, for example, from trooping in to communal feeding three times a day. So the new Oxford system, in this seemingly trivial matter, didn’t provide them with the sharp contrast which had obtained under the old. A contented sense of having attained adulthood had resulted from having somebody like a decrepit private footman staggering up your own staircase with your very own bacon and eggs. Such tangible tokens of being grown-up kept people quiet – conned them, in fact. It was like putting ten-year-old brats in long trousers; their vanity was gratified and they did what they were told. The dons had always run things that way; they regarded you as Other Ranks and dolloped out a corresponding discipline – but got away with it by calling you ‘Mr Pattullo’ or ‘Mr Mumford’, arranging to have sundry plebs scurrying round calling you ‘sir’, and generally laying on the hollow appearance of independence. It would take dynamite really to change their ways. Potentially, however, there was dynamite in the simple physiological fact of earlier maturation. People were now going to grow up earlier because they were better fed – the lower classes in particular. And there were going to be economic and political factors too. Our children – Tony’s and my own – would find themselves coming legally of age at seventeen or eighteen: military service, earlier pay-packets in the wake of an expanding economy, a general loosening up of old family structures would make that inevitable. (Tony, the most frivolous of youths, had an uncanny nose for such things; I sometimes marvel that I didn’t then spot in him the successful politician in the making.) So life in a college like this would become more and more a schizophrenic affair. It would no longer be possible to run such places as, in essence, bloody convents. Which made it stupid not to go on running them as, superficially, tolerably decent hotels.
I don’t know that I was impressed by Tony’s arguments, but from the first I was a good deal impressed by Tony. But for him, I don’t think Oxford would have sold itself to me as completely, or at least as quickly, as it did. I was becoming aware of one thing and another as evoking in me an occasional complexity of response which might be professionally useful one day, but which had its simple origin in the fact of my parents’ belonging severally to distinct classes of society. If this endowed me with a certain detachment, that was a free bonus contingent upon my birth, and unrelated to any merit or effort of my own. Tony’s set-up was different. Although I learnt little about his people and their background throughout the few years of our first intimacy, it was obvious that what lay behind him were entrenched prejudices and assumptions of a formidably integrated sort. So all the odd reservations and ironies which – at least as a young man – he was able to bring to play upon the new world in which I found myself had to be chalked up, it seemed to me, to the credit of his own will and intellect. It was essentially, perhaps, a matter of brains. Long afterwards, I was to decide that what chiefly distinguished Tony from his son Ivo was the fact that Tony was intelligent and Ivo was not, and my disposition to support Ivo through his graceless university career was prompted by the feeling that an intellectually limited and over-privileged boy is peculiarly at risk if brought up within the shadow of a heavy-weight father prowling the corridors of power. But this is to run far ahead. At the moment, Tony and I are both still in our nonage. And I am a more serious youth than he has any intention of admitting himself to be.
In fact our acquaintance began in the moment when I put out a hand to stop Tony throwing an empty champagne bottle through a window. He was as astonished as he was indignant.
‘You bloody awful man,’ he said, ‘who the hell are you?’
‘Pattullo. You’re too tight to recognise your nearest neighbour.’
‘Bugger my neighbour!’ Having dropped the bottle, Tony paused to grope for it in the semi-darkness of Surrey. ‘You needn’t be in a hurry, young Pattullo, to come arsing round asserting your rotten neighbourliness. I didn’t arrange it, did I? Answer me that.’ Tony found the bottle, and there was a crash of broken glass. It added little to more extensive effects of the same sort going on in Surrey at the time.
‘It’s you that’s being in a hurry, you ass. Take a look at your pals. They’re thinking just that. How long have you been around, for Christ’s sake? Not long enough for them to welcome you as the life and soul of their silly riot. Another five minutes, and you’ll find yourself in that fountain.’
I must have turned on this intervention, and been inspired to the robust idiom in which I couched it, by nothing more worthy than the instinct to put on a bold front when thoroughly frightened. There could be no doubt about the riot – or at least the effect of riot – erupting around us. I don’t suppose that more than half-a-dozen youths were involved. But in addition to window-breaking they were expert in the noises of the hunting-field – and these, being unfamiliar to me, were alarming. Having read about such frolics in fiction was not proving an adequate armour when confronted with the fact.
Tony – upon whom I had stumbled casually in this situation – made a movement which I interpreted as preparation for a swipe at me. But this wasn’t so. The grass around us was littered with bottles; they glinted, dull green and gilt, like the dangerous projectiles they were. I wondered where on earth, after five years of war, so much champagne could have come from. Tony had his eye on another window and was feeling for further ammunition – which was, after all, the only honest response to my expostulation. But there was a clink of glass, and I heard him exclaim, ‘I say! I think you may be right. I’ve heard a word or two from them I don’t quite like. And—do you know?—here’s a full one! Some silly sod’s brought out a full one. Come on, young Pattullo.’
In another moment we had slipped unobtrusively away from the group of revellers. Although I found being addressed as ‘young Pattullo’ highly offensive, I registered a first feeling of respect for Tony Mumford. A man who, when very drunk, could take a hint, size up a false situation, and promptly extricate himself from its probable consequences (to wit, immersion in three feet of cold and fishy water) was a companion not to be despised. We found our corner of Surrey, and climbed the staircase.
‘Come in,’ Tony said, throwing open his door. ‘What’s your bloody name?’
‘I’ve told you. And you keep on repeating it. Pattullo.’
‘You don’t think I’m going to drink champagne with a man while calling him by a daft name like that?’
‘You can damn well leave my name alone.’
‘But it is daft. So’s mine. Mumford. Mumble, mum, bum, bumf. No good at all. Shame of my ancestors.’
‘All right. Duncan.’
‘Tony. Find a chair and I’ll find glasses. Champers shouldn’t ever be drunk in those things shaped like saucers. Vulgar invention of Edward the Pox-maker, I’ve been told. Deep glass, narrow at the top – that’s what’s proper. Keeps in the bubbles. Can find a couple of swizzle-sticks too, as a matter of fact. Had them off an aunt. Have you any swizzle-sticks—aunts, I mean? Useful creatures at times.’
I stated the number of my aunts, and wondered what Aunt Charlotte would make of Tony Mumford. He was much closer to her world, I suspected, than to Uncle Rory’s. On the other hand, she strongly disapproved of inebriety, and I had a suspicion that she regarded my father as a drunkard. If she apprehended that I was in danger of going the same way, she would deprecate this fresh association. Tony was opening the bottle with an expertness plainly bred of habit, but at the same time distinguishably with an effort after maximum effect. The cork accordingly flew across the room, and landed with a smack dangerously close to a large oil-painting which hung over the mantelpiece. In a dim light I could distinguish only that this appeared to owe its inspiration to classical antiquity.
It surprised me that an undergraduate should travel around with such an object. In the corresponding position in my own room across the landing I had hung, after some hesitation, what was at the time my most prized possession, a water-colour study for what had become one of my father’s most celebrated paintings, the Young Picts watching the arrival of Saint Columba. I reflected with satisfaction that, as compared with Tony Mumford, I was certainly the owner of the artistically superior article.
The champagne was already frothing into the first glass when I found myself almost saying, ‘But the bottle isn’t yours, is it?’ This legalistic ineptitude, urged upon me by the moral stance to which I had been brought up, I fortunately refrained from uttering – if only because the answer was already plain to me. Tony had stolen the bottle as definitely as if he had strolled through a wine-shop and slipped it into a brief-case. It wasn’t even as if he had belonged to the gang fooling around in the quad. He had simply butted in on them in an over-confident fashion – and had been induced by me to come away (I now saw) only when he had spotted the chance of liberating this quite costly means of refreshment.
‘Stolen sweets are best,’ Tony said contentedly. He had considerable power of reading one’s thoughts. ‘A remark first made in some shockingly bawdy context, I don’t doubt. But, of course, the point about champers is that it ought not to be sweet. I’m afraid this may be. But let’s try. Your health, Master Duncan Pattullo.’
‘Your health, Master Antony Mumford.’ I couldn’t say less than this. Indeed, I had sufficient sense to regard the moment as a serious one. At the same time, being of fanciful mind, I wondered whether some sombre symbolism attended my thus drinking a first Oxford toast in purloined Moet et Chandon. The bottle added, I noticed, the words Premiere Cuvee, which certainly meant ‘first tubful’. I wondered just how champagne was made in tubs. ‘Did they bring you up on champagne at Downside?’ I asked.
‘No – on cider. Monks and people put in a great deal of time making cider. How do you know I was at Downside? I don’t know where you were – nor care, either.’
‘It was the only word you condescended to utter to somebody who tried to make civil conversation to you in hall. When we were up for the scholarship examination, I mean.’
‘I was diffident, Duncan. Shy. Overawed.’
‘You were nothing of the kind. I thought you most disagreeable, as a matter of fact.’
‘Then you had the advantage of me. I didn’t think about you at all.’
‘Of course you didn’t. You weren’t aware of me.’
‘On the contrary, Duncan, I rated you the prettiest boy in the circus. That’s why I didn’t think about you. I just didn’t dare to.’
This was a kind of badinage new to me. I remembered that Tony Mumford and I had also stared at each other in stony nudity in a subterraneous bath-place in Rattenbury. It had surely been quite without any disposition to admire one another’s charms. His last remark was a matter of requiting one home truth with another. Tony had been disagreeable. (He was going to continue so, towards anybody he disliked or was merely indifferent to, for some time. But I was to watch him disciplining himself in point of this disadvantageous habit. By the time he went down he was being charming to everyone; could have been described, in fact, as well on his way.) But if Tony could justly be called disagreeable, it was no doubt equally true that ‘pretty boy’ represented an accurate description of me. I was slim and fair and looked even younger than I was; and it was from my mother that my features came to me. For some years I was going to find these harmless circumstances embarrassing.
Acknowledging that a certain immediate frankness had established itself between us, I decided that Tony Mumford and I were going to get on quite well.
‘I wouldn’t call it too sweet,’ I said judicially. Champagne had not, in fact, often come my way.
‘Not too bad. Mustn’t look a gift horse in the mouth. Nice that it’s a whole bottle. Last us for the outside of an hour in a lingering way. Particularly with the swizzle-sticks.’
Tony got up and wandered round the room. His movements – and, indeed, his articulation – obliged me to conclude that he wasn’t drunk at all. This puzzled me. I had yet to learn that he was one of those extraordinary people who can emerge from, and then again subside beneath, the effects of liquor at will. It is an enviable endowment, rather like that of an absolute command over sleeping and waking, and one probably particularly useful in political life.
‘Here they are,’ Tony said with casual pride. ‘Thought I’d unpacked them. Essential for the second glass.’
I made a note that I was being officiously counselled not to commit the solecism of using a swizzle-stick too soon. The contraption itself was familiar to me, Ninian once having brought one home from the twenty-firster of an older friend. But that had been a wooden affair like a pencil with a stumpy star-fish at the end; there had been room for everybody to sign his name on it. The instruments which Tony had had off an aunt were made of silver and on the principle of the umbrella; you pushed a ring along a shank and there bobbed out at one end a miniaturised version of such a thing blown inside-out and stripped of its fabric. The ribs were of fine silver wire, and tipped with tiny blobbles that looked shockingly like gold.
‘Elegant,’ I said, and was conscious of rather overdoing the sarcastic note.
‘Yes, aren’t they? Quite exquisitely vulgar. I’ll tell you what. We’ll stow them away after this, and you shall have them for a wedding-present. Commemorating our first uncouth meeting, you know.’
‘I think I’d rather have a crate of champagne – which would cost about the same money. Pink, if you feel an extra touch of vulgarity to be the appropriate thing.’
‘Well, well, well!’ Tony fiddled with his swizzle-stick as a man might do with a watch-chain, and treated me to a relaxed and friendly stare. ‘It looks as if we can drop those sophisticated remarks. So what? I suppose we could talk smut or cricket or rugger, or inquire into the existence of God. Be undergraduates, in fact. We’ve taken it on.’
‘Do you get a lot about God at a Catholic school?’
‘Nothing out of the way. It’s not exactly an optional extra – but nothing out of the way. Reasonable bunch of men. Civilised, in fact. I expect you get quite as much God in your Caledonian conventicles. Would you describe yourself as having been religiously brought up?’
‘Not particularly.’ I was at sea as to whether Tony’s question was seriously intended, and decided to give it the benefit of the doubt. ‘Conventionally, rather. My father’s an artist, and I don’t suppose he believes in the Incarnation, and things of that sort. But he thinks it’s proper to do a certain amount of going to church. It’s partly because he has a great respect for a brother of his who’s a minister – a clergyman. And it’s partly because he was brought up in a simple home of what’s called the God-fearing sort.’
‘Yes, I see.’ Tony looked at me thoughtfully. ‘Did your mother have the same sort of upbringing?’
‘Not exactly.’ I said no more. I was becoming aware of Tony Mumford as being, at least in some respects, a singularly acute youth.
‘Your father’s Lachlan Pattullo?’
‘That’s right.’ I felt a start of pleased surprise. ‘You know his work?’
‘Not precisely that.’ For the first time, Tony had hesitated. ‘As a matter of fact, I’ve been looking chaps up. You know that list of freshmen they give us? I’ve run through it with Who’s Who, spotting the papas. Came on yours in that way. I’m not very hot on modern painting. Of course I’m sure I’d know his work if I was.’
I suppose that astonishment held me silent. This action of Tony’s was beyond my mental range. Even odder was the fact that, after only a moment’s hanging fire, he had confessed to it. This, I can see now, was our definitive moment. Tony and I were to be other than mere neighbours. He had, so to speak, shown me the works.
‘It says,’ Tony went on easily, ‘that he’s going to be top man up there next year. That right
?’
‘Well, yes – in a formal way. President of something. It doesn’t mean he’ll paint any better.’ I said this kindly but firmly. Confronted by a young tycoon and silver swizzle- sticks, it was incumbent upon an artist’s son to show the flag.
‘Savvy,’ Tony said with a grin. ‘In fact – and in the same lingo – touché. Still, in the matter of commissions and all that it will make a bit of a difference?’
‘It will make Difference Number One.’ I found Tony’s sticking to his own standards attractive. ‘Difference Number Two will be when the appropriate people recognise the quality of what he turns out. A good many of them are in Paris and Rome and New York.’
‘Double savvy. And proper respect and all that, my wholesome child. My father’s a banker during the week and a country gent at week-ends. Takes all sorts, you know.’
‘Takes all sorts?’
‘To make a world.’
‘I suppose so.’
Having said this, I was silent again, and drank stolen champagne. Something faintly self-congratulatory and even smug was creeping into our colloquy. I distrusted it. I was aware – not quite for the first time – of having arrived in a place immensely armoured in assurance, in inherited confidence. I wondered whether it was going to be of much use to me.
‘I say!’ Tony said. ‘They’re not half stepping it up.’
This was indisputable. In Surrey there was now a notable hullabaloo. It drew Tony. A good part of him wanted to be out in it – which was why he had made that indiscreetly premature effort with an empty bottle. I took satisfaction in having yanked him out of that.
Young Pattullo Page 7
