Perhaps it is over-dramatic to speak of such harmless and udder-encumbered brutes as charging – nor does ‘stampede’ seem an appropriate word. But at least the effect was disconcerting. The beasts’ heads were lowered in a menacing way; they slavered, as if emotionally disturbed; I formed the view that several were specifically eyeing me with a malign intention. It would be prudent to nip into Dr Timbermill’s garden and close the gate behind me.
‘Turn them, boy, turn them! Don’t stand there like a fool – turn them!’
There could be no doubt that these words were addressed to me. The voice was a woman’s – a cow-wife’s, it had to be supposed – and rose from an invisible source behind her errant charges. I judged the terms in which I had been addressed to be disobliging, and I had no impulse whatever to put on any species of rodeo-turn. I’d much rather have confronted even the infuriated (as I had come to think of him) Timbermill. Moreover, I now caught a glimpse of the cow-wife. She was of diminutive stature, suggesting some wretched peasant stock, who might well be left to the consequences of her own incompetence by a John Ruskin Scholar going about his learned occasions. But of course I was too well brought-up for such considerations to avail with me – and in the cow-wife’s tone, moreover, there sounded a sort of Glencorry echo which brought me literally to my toes. I believe I thought confusedly of Ninian’s fishwife. I found myself – with every appearance of an undaunted bearing – hurling myself upon the serried mass before me.
‘Coop, coop! Coop, coop, coop!’ This hullabaloo came from the cow-wife – injudiciously, it appeared to me, since it could only serve further to alarm the brutes and drive them forward. I had no choice but to produce my own counter-demonstration.
‘Coop, coop, coop, coop!’ I shouted. The result of this was striking. The cows felt it was up to them. Without intermitting their progress, they began to bellow – or if not to bellow to ululate or moo. I waved my arms. I yelled at the top of my voice, like whoever it is in Shakespeare who outroars the horned herd. (And this herd was horned; that unnecessary armament had not yet been bred out of dairy cattle.)
My intrepidity (if it was that) was rewarded. The enemy wavered, broke, turned, bolted – dividing before the cow-wife like a rushing stream on either side of a very small rock. Or the enemy did this with one exception. A single cow had slipped past me, and was galumphing off in the direction of the traffic on the Banbury Road.
‘After her, boy, after her!’
There could now be no doubt about the cow-wife. She was even more upper-class than everybody else in this weird corner of the globe – belonged, in fact, to what Nick Junkin was to be fond of calling the cream of the cream. I am afraid it was my sense of this that made me continue abjectly to obey her. I went hurtling after the escaped cow, my gown billowing behind me. It was clear that an outflanking movement was essential. I must overtake the creature – on the farther pavement, so as not to increase her pace – and shoo her back before we were submerged together in a thundering cavalcade of lorries and buses.
I was fleetingly aware of the polite children as continuing their plebeian diversion undisturbed, and of the aged millepedes arresting their already almost imperceptible progress to observe my efforts with mild interest and approbation. It appeared probable that I had become involved in what was quite a familiar spectacle in Linton Road.
Linton Road is intersected by Northmoor Road, and this circumstance proved inimical to the simplicity of my design. The cow, when I had successfully headed it and turned it towards home, executed a brilliant swerve into this alternative thoroughfare and lolloped off more or less in the direction of the English Channel. I went pounding after it. I found myself overtaking a casually conducted crocodile of schoolgirls; one of them, who appeared to be in charge, was as senior as my own Edinburgh love, Janet Finlay; and this, as a mere fleeting perception, sent a small stab to my heart. But at least I was once more gaining on the cow. And the file of girls, although amused, comported themselves with decorum.
The cow now made a mistake. Arrived at the bottom of Northmoor Road, it turned not right and towards uncharted liberty but left and thus round the block, so that what would presently confront it over its right horn would be its own front gate. This route, however, produced the further harassment of confronting me with a second juvenile audience. This time it was boys: a score or more of small boys wandering round the purlieus of what appeared to be a large preparatory school. Becoming aware of the chase, these actively disposed little creatures naturally joined in it. They brought imagination to it at once – cracking imaginary whips, whirling imaginary lassos, and urging each other on with a remarkable diversity of blood-curdling cries. Whether cows possess a homing instinct I don’t know, but the present cow did now seem to have formed clear notions on where to go. Within a further minute, it had vanished through the gates from which it had issued. So had all the other cows. The cow-wife, however, remained. At the sight of her, the rout of small boys scattered and fled with cries of dismay. I’d have liked to bolt myself, but felt it due to the dignity of my years to stand my ground. Recalling the terms in which I had previously been addressed, I expected to be robustly reproved for having so botched the business. The cow-wife (to continue thus absurdly to denominate her) was about four feet high, but appeared yet shorter through being bowed with age. There was something unnerving about her, all the same.
‘I am so extremely grateful to you. It has been most kind.’ The cow-wife, although dressed entirely as a cow-wife ought to be, had spoken much in the manner of a duchess at a ball – thanking a mere earl, perhaps, for picking up her fan or her handkerchief. She now glanced at my gown. ‘May I ask,’ she said, ‘your name, and the college you come from?’
I gave this information.
‘How very interesting! All my brothers were there – except Charles, who was clever and had for some reason to go to Balliol. I hope you will come to tea, as several of the young men are free to do. Sundays, as you no doubt know. So kind! I am so grateful!’
At this, the cow-wife withdrew up her drive – at the end of which I could just glimpse among trees a gloomy-looking mansion of no antiquity. I recalled the near-desperation of my position. Could I face Timbermill more than three-quarters of an hour after I had been due to present myself? Was it not very possible that he had been viewing through a window of his curiously unappealing villa the entire course of this farcical episode, and concluding it to be a pretty poor specimen of what Bedworth archaically called a rag? I was now in a most untidy state. There was even a rent in my gown. I must have caught it on a railing during the pursuit, but I could almost have believed it to be a consequence of the sort of thing that happens in a bull-ring. What if Timbermill judged me to be improperly attired for academic conference, and ordered me ignominiously from his presence?
By this time I was pushing open the garden gate again, since I knew perfectly well that I had to go through with it. Once on the path, I became aware of a young man emerging from a shed and wheeling a bicycle. He was obviously an undergraduate. He might conceivably be one of Timbermill’s pupils. I had a shot at addressing him.
‘Excuse me – am I right that a don called Timbermill lives here?’
‘Top floor.’ The young man looked at me curiously. I wasn’t only dusty and dishevelled; I was still, although I hadn’t realised it, blotched, puffing, and blowing. ‘Have you been in a fight, or something?’ I didn’t think the young man believed this to be a tenable hypothesis. He was merely being funny, and I resented what I now decided to be a glance of vulgar amusement.
‘As a matter of fact,’ I said crossly, ‘I’ve been chasing a bloody cow.’
‘Oh, that! Old Mrs Triplett’s brutes. Always getting out of hand. They’re a pedigree herd or something. The servants’ staircase for you, by the way.’ The young man laughed loudly, as if conscious of having achieved a notable stroke of wit. ‘No offence, man. They’ve mucked around with the house, you know, and made a perfect slum of it. Only the backstairs
now go right up to the top. Timbermill is pretty well all right at the moment, I believe. But you’ll soon find out. Seeing you.’ With this highly conventional expression, the young man jumped on his bike and rode out of my life.
Reflecting that front doors are not for backstairs folk, I walked round the house in search of some modest means of ingress. Until it reached a variously pitched roof, the whole structure was severely cube-like in suggestion, as if a Brobdingnagian child had put it together out of building-blocks. The walls were sheathed in the grey and gritty integument known to builders as pebble-and-dash; in patches here and there, however, this had come away and been replaced – in a spirit even more utilitarian than that animating the building at large – with plain plaster or cement. I had previously made one or two tentative excursions to North Oxford (which I understood to be inhabited almost exclusively by married dons), and had been chiefly struck by a domestic architecture much in the Gothic taste, and owning a close affinity with Rattenbury Quad. As a John Ruskin Scholar, I had a duty (it might have been maintained) to acquaint myself with these curious Venetian importations to the Thames valley. But now I was perhaps a quarter of a mile farther from the centre of the city than on any previous foray, and as a consequence had moved from one era to another so far as aesthetic matters were concerned. The historical sense was no doubt still active among the learned persons inhabiting these outer environs of the sacred town, but the play of economic forces now forbad them to lend it expression through mason’s work borrowed from the Palazzo Rezzonico or the Ca’ d’Oro.
Such reflections (if I really entertained them) can only have been a delaying tactic. I had by now built up Timbermill in my head as in a state of insensate fury at the non-appearance of Pattullo, and it would have been nice to persuade myself that I was sufficiently unperturbed to pursue speculative courses. But the moment of truth had come. I found myself confronting a side-door, badly in need of paint. Affixed to it by a drawing- pin, the head of which had long ago rusted away, was a discoloured scrap of pasteboard on which a scrawled ‘Timbermill’ could just be deciphered in an ink gone brown with age. Since there was no means at this point of making my presence known, I opened the door and walked into what proved to be a proliferation of coal-cellars, larders, sculleries and laundries, all as forlorn and untenanted as if they had been excavated in some dead city in the heart of Yucatan. Rising from a stone-flagged area at the end of all this was a staircase of meagre proportions, up which it would not be at all easy to carry coalscuttles or trays. It was certainly what I had been directed to. I climbed. There were three successive landings, each with a single door which had been bricked up. These must once have provided access to the main bedroom floors of the house. Then the staircase narrowed yet further, presumably because this terminal flight had led only to attics intended for such scant repose as was allotted to maid-servants long ago. Yet it couldn’t, of course, be all that long ago, since the whole place was of a hypertrophied jerry-built sort of the between-wars period. So it wasn’t, at least, heavy with memories of the doing to death of generations of menials. Even this part of Oxford had fairly soon began a slither into a modern world. As a consequence – and as the undergraduate with the bicycle had intimated to me – the house had been hacked into the semblance of a block of flats. Dr Timbermill (F.B. A. and whatever) appeared to occupy a modest if elevated station in it. I wondered what on earth would happen to him in the event of fire.
There was a final door, this time a practicable one, and again a discoloured card with the name of my appointed tutor. Was I really going to make this pilgrimage every week of every term for three years on end? The thought was dispiriting. Presumably I’d accumulate considerable expertness in coping with Mrs Triplett’s vagrant herd. I looked for a bell, but there wasn’t one – nor a knocker either. I tried a diffident rap with my knuckles. No response succeeded upon this application, and there was nothing for it but to try the door and, if it opened, walk in. I did so, expecting to find myself in some sort of small lobby or passage. It wasn’t so.
What must have been almost the entire area beneath the low-pitched roof of the house had been gutted to make a single enormous chamber. There was a central space which would have accommodated several billiard-tables without one’s much noticing them, and from this there ramified, yawning and cavernous, a number of tunnel-like extensions burrowing deep into the eaves. Since something was required to support the ceiling and tiles overhead, isolated wooden posts rose here and there from the floor to strategic points among the rafters. A stage designer, obliged to conjure up beyond a vast proscenium arch a plausible representation of Hjalmar Ekdal’s attic studio in The Wild Duck, might have gone for a very similar effect. Only here, instead of the miscellaneous clutter of a nineteenth-century photographer, there were simply thousands and thousands of books.
The books, of course, were entirely as expected. I dimly wondered (this because I was becoming at that time conscientiously Eng. Lit. minded) whether something like this had been Dr Johnson’s set-up in Gough Square. In fact the bizarre place surprised me less than had the habitat of my other tutor- to-be, Albert Talbert. Talbert, for reasons which over a great many years I was never to discover, inhabited in college a very small square room containing almost nothing except a small square table, two hard chairs, and a small empty bookcase. If stumped for a date (which he seldom was), Talbert would turn to this bookcase, appear perplexed, and murmur at his huskiest and weightiest that it had been for some time in his mind to shelve in it what he called ‘a succinct reference library’. I was in a real library now. In this particular, at least, I had not been at fault in imagining the surroundings of the infuriated Timbermill.
‘Nothing today, thank you.’
The voice had spoken from the near darkness of one of the tunnels. I was myself in near darkness too, and I supposed that this explained the words which had come to me. They might reasonably have been addressed to a baker’s boy or a milkman. I found them discouraging, all the same.
‘Sir,’ I said, ‘I’m extremely sorry to be so late.’
‘Not at all, my good fellow. I haven’t been incommoded in the slightest degree. There are empties, no doubt, but still, I believe, an untouched crate of bottled ale. Only I should be most grateful if, next week, you would bring a dozen of mead. It isn’t really mead. That distinction, I fear, cannot be granted it. But it serves. It serves.’
The tenebrous character of this attic region had been in part the creation of my own mind. I could now see Timbermill perfectly well. He was sitting at a desk (which did need a reading-lamp) at the far end of the room. His figure was indistinct, but a shaft of sunshine, striking through what must have been some small skylight, was at play upon his hair. It was silvery hair, and of the sort so fine-spun as to be virtually weightless, and thus to float above the scalp like a halo or penumbra. Because of this appearance, I decided at once that Timbermill had reached extreme old age. I was never quite to shake off this persuasion. In fact, he could have been no more than five years older than Talbert, and thus not much more than thirty years older than myself.
At the moment, however, I was less held by any visual impression than by an auditory one. Our conversation, so far, had held merely the mild madness which I was coming to associate with first encounters with dons. Timbermill’s misapprehension was precisely of the kind that Talbert might have entertained, and in addition to this he rendered much the same effect of learned absence of mind, of swimming into awareness of you across a sundering flood of recondite concern.
There was nevertheless a difference between the impression the two men gave. I had already come to know where Talbert appeared from when with an effort he heaved himself ashore to cope conscientiously (according to his lights) with one more pupil. He had been weighing a comma here or a turned letter there in some Elizabethan text photographed or projected upon an interior screen in the depth of his mind. Questions of taste, of the superior poetic propriety of one reading over another, might have som
e peripheral significance for what was in hand. But essentially Talbert inhabited in his abstraction a logical and rational world in which one shoved around ponderable counters until one got one’s answer right. Timbermill’s inner world, on the other hand, quickly became enigmatical. The queerness of this lodging, and Badgery’s casually intimated persuasion that its occupant never ventured out of it, suggested that I was simply in the presence of a university eccentric of the kind that emancipated undergraduates sometimes drop into first novels. But it wasn’t clear to me that Timbermill was in fact a real-life equivalent of this species. If he had been, I was persuaded I’d have had some sense, right at the start, of how he ticked – of the line he took in establishing himself that way. As it was, he puzzled me, and this largely on the score of his voice. It was nervous in the old sense of the word: sinewy and vigorous, indeed staccato. Even the business about ale and mead had come out like that. At the same time, and contradictorily, there was much more sensibility behind his barking at me than I’d yet heard from anybody at Oxford. It was no good, however, standing dumbly before him and confusedly speculating. For a start, I had the simple job of establishing my identity. I advanced into the room, so that he could at least see me as academically habited.
‘My name’s Pattullo,’ I said. ‘Mr Talbert has sent me to see you about Old English.’
Timbermill received this with a short explosive laugh, which for a moment I thought to be directed against some futility in my visit; then I realised that it acknowledged and dismissed the error under which he had addressed me so far.
‘About what}’ he said.
Young Pattullo Page 11
