‘Old English, sir.’
‘Anglo-Saxon, please!’ This too came explosively. ‘Would you call Latin Old Italian?’
‘No, sir.’ Being much confounded, I felt I had to keep my end up. ‘But I suppose it is, in a way.’
‘It’s nothing of the kind. Did Mr Talbert call it Old English?’
‘I don’t think he did. I think he called it Anglo-Saxon too.’
‘Then well and good. But we must report to one another accurately, you know. It’s our business. Otherwise we get nowhere. Do you understand me?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘I believe you do.’ Timbermill said this as if he were convinced of something thoroughly surprising. ‘Sit down.’
I sat down – hurriedly, and on what I took to be a chair, but which turned out to be a stack of bound journals. All this was very intimidating. But there was no effect – as the words set down on a page must suggest – of anything like bullying about it. Timbermill was seriously concerned to establish a relationship with me. And, once recalled to his present surroundings, he was entirely on the spot. I knew at once that, unlike Talbert, he would never suppose on one day that I was Jones and on the next that I was Merryweather or Montgomery.
‘Duncan Pattullo,’ he said. He hadn’t referred to a note.
‘Yes, sir.’ I was tremendously impressed.
‘Talbert says your father is the eminent painter. He hasn’t got it wrong? He does get things wrong, God bless him.’
‘Mr Talbert is right this time, sir.’
‘Young Picts, eh?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘And Saint Columba. A most distinguished performance. You must do as well, Duncan. I shall call you Duncan.’ Disconcertingly, the explosive laugh came again. ‘But in a kind of long ship of the Saga Age.’
‘Sir?’ I knew that historical accuracy wasn’t my father’s strong point. But Timbermill had thrown in something handsome and acknowledging about him, so I didn’t need to be offended.
‘Dear old Columba – God bless his memory as He blessed his mission – in the sort of contraption popularly supposed to have been favoured by Vikings. Eh?’
‘I suppose so, sir.’ I hesitated, and added venturesomely, ‘I’m one of the young Picts, as a matter of fact.’
‘Ah! So you have your niche already, Duncan. A precocious corner in the Temple of Fame. Where have you read about a Temple of Fame?’
‘In Chaucer, sir.’ I wondered whether I was overdoing the Sir business. At least it came naturally to me.
‘You’ve come up unusually young, haven’t you?’
‘I don’t think so. Just a little short of the average, I’m told. Among the freshmen straight from school, I mean.’
‘You look round about your sixteenth birthday to me.’
I ought to have been annoyed by this – not the less because I knew it was a justifiable impression. I used absolutely to long, at that time, to be a little less slim and pink and white. A generation later – in Nick Junkin’s generation – I’d have endeavoured to tackle this problem by growing a downy beard.
‘I do beg your pardon.’ Timbermill said this so rapidly and jerkily that the effect of unforced courtesy the words conveyed was remarkable. He was apologising for the offence he hadn’t, in fact, given. ‘That toil of growing up. Eh, Duncan?’
It was at this moment that the Yeats joke was born. I must have carried it straight back to college from this curious encounter – perhaps to murmur pityingly to a flamboyant Tony Mumford of the distress of boyhood changing into man. Certainly by the end of term the whole little group of us – my intimates, as Arnold Lempriere would have expressed it – were fooling around with the poet much as the doomed battery fools around with Jane Austen in Kipling’s story. But my present reaction was simply to be startled. Albert Talbert would have heard of Yeats, but have regarded him as a person active only after the history of English literature had come to a close. I’d have taken it naively for granted that a man like Timbermill, who had presumably become a Fellow of the British Academy on the score of large traffickings with Beowulf and similar deliverances of hoary eld, must be even more unsullied by modernity.
‘What books have you bought?’ Timbermill asked briskly.
‘For Old—for Anglo-Saxon? None, so far.’
‘Then here you are.’ Timbermill reached into an extremely disordered pile of papers, and without any effect of rummaging pulled out a duplicated sheet. ‘Get along to Blackwell’s now. And Fridays at eleven, please. From next week. You and I aren’t supposed to get together until Hilary Term. But an early start will do you no harm. There’s a grammar to learn. Begin learning it.’
This was adequately dismissive, and I scrambled gingerly off my perch, which had been giving hints of proposing to disintegrate under me. Timbermill got to his feet too – an act of politeness that revealed itself as having the further aim of taking a keen look at me in a clear light. The effect on me was notable; it was like turning a street corner and running straight into the Ancient Mariner. I told myself I hadn’t met quite that sort of glitter before. I even felt – perhaps because the interview had been stretching while it lasted – that there was an element of the preternatural about it, and that I might be in the presence of a mage or wizard in disguise. Even the room seemed to change as I made my way across it to the door. The posts which in a prosaic and utilitarian way held up the roof might have been dead timber in some sacred grove which a magic stronger than its own had blasted; the tunnel-like openings beneath the eaves and gables of the big house were as glades and ridings in a forest haunted by trolls and norns. This nonsense would scarcely have come to me, I imagine, had I not supposed – accurately enough – that Germanic mythology must be very much Timbermill’s sort of thing. Long afterwards, I was to think that there had been something pre- cognitive at work in me during these moments.
Timbermill opened the door to show me out – something which Talbert would have done only if not quite sure whether he had been teaching one of his own male pupils or a girl from Lady Margaret Hall. For a second he laid a hand lightly on my arm.
‘Your college,’ he said, ‘has a most notable history. It also happens to be prolific in young idiots. Have a thought to that. Good-bye.’
I made my way down the narrow staircase and out into Linton Road. I glanced round cautiously, but there weren’t any cows. There was only my bicycle, with that tiresome flat tyre. I wondered whether I was going to get any lunch, for it didn’t occur to me that I could do other than visit Mr Basil Blackwell’s book shop straight away in quest of Sweet’s Anglo-Saxon Reader and related works. At the corner of Northmoor Road I ran into the old gentleman with the Anthony Eden hat. He seemed to have progressed by several yards since our previous encounter. He addressed me more familiarly this time – almost as if we were established acquaintances.
‘Find him all right?’
‘Yes, thank you, I did. But I was fearfully late.’
‘Remarkable man, I believe. Not that we see much of him.’
‘I’m going to see him quite a lot,’ I said. And I went on my way, the bicycle bumping beside me in the gutter. I wondered whether, as Buntingford had hinted, I was really destined to be bored by Dr Timbermill. His suburban retreat, at least, already had a charm for me. I was sorry when I left it for the bustle of the Banbury Road traffic.
V
Tony Mumford ran a car. He might have been said, indeed, to keep a car, much as a man keeps a mistress. Clandestine arrangements were necessary, and Tony’s vehicle had its love- nest in the woodshed of a compliant old lady – retired, I think, from service in the Mumford family – some way down the Abingdon Road. Freshmen were not supposed to possess cars. Their seniors were permitted them, but the vehicles had to be segregated in authorised garages which might have been regarded as a species of maisons de tolérance. After dark, moreover, they were required to display little green lamps, and thus acquired the air of mobile establishments of the same sort. But such assoc
iations were in the main without substance. I have read that an astonishingly high proportion of the citizens of the United States lose their virginity in automobiles, but I doubt whether they were thus much employed among us – perhaps because most of them were rather on the small side for anything of the sort. People used their cars for such blameless purposes as dashing up to theatres in London, or running out to golf-courses and point-to-points by day, and by night to such hotels in the surrounding countryside as were reputed to offer a superior cuisine to young gourmets. It was when Tony discovered I could play golf that he divulged to me the fact of his having this sort of pleasurable resource under, as it were, his protection.
Whether he was at risk of being subjected to any proctorial severity because of his irregularly maintained possession is doubtful. As cars became, in those immediate post-war years, easier to acquire, the regulations about them probably broke down or crumbled away in the comfortable fashion characteristic of Oxford life. For one thing, the returned soldiery (contrary to the expectations of Stumpe) proved to be more often matrimonially than licentiously inclined, and mechanical transport cannot reasonably be denied to a man, however pronounced his academic juniority, who has a wife who needs to go shopping.
My immediate acquaintances were nearly all young celibates. Tony, I believe, was as innocent of active heterosexual experience as (again) Stumpe, but free from Stumpe’s anxieties concerning the risks of holding out too long against nature in this regard. He may conceivably have been in what was my own state at the time: that of an adolescent lover whose imagination is in a phase of total ascendancy over the more immediate demands of the flesh. It wasn’t a state, I am sure, about which I allowed Tony the slightest hint in myself, so the possibility of his having been practising a similar reticence himself can’t be ruled out. I judge this, however, to be improbable. Tony’s attitude to sex was consistently ribald. The picture over his fireplace, being a ‘conversation piece’ in the curious modern sense of an object generating agreeable talk, was a kind of advertisement of what you had to expect of him. He exhibited, moreover, remarkable powers of indecent invention, and commonly with enough wit thrown in to prevent his performances being indictable as mere smut. It took me months to catch up with him in this particular social accomplishment.
But if his motor-car was his sole mistress, he showed himself capable, at least on one occasion, of exploiting the fact in the interest of libertinism of an advanced sort. Nobody could call unresourceful in the quest of amusement a man who proposes to employ his mistress for the seduction of an innocent companion. Tony employed Rosinante in just this way. Rosinante was his name for the car: rather a grand car, but one disinfected of pretentiousness by being of marked and ramshackle antiquity. His victim was Cyril Bedworth.
I don’t think we’d much have made fun of Bedworth if we hadn’t rather liked him, and if we regarded him as fair game it was because, being a serious man, he was staggered by the amount of frivolity he found around him. He was also a man of firm character – an underlying fact which his general inconsiderableness of appearance, and the timidity with which he so clearly had to wrestle, were quite sufficient to conceal at first from our callow regard. He knew that his seriousness was right and our frivolity wrong. His remarks were frequently censorious. His exceptional poverty (which we were also slow to tumble to, and which must have been the consequence of a more than customary stinginess on the part of some grant-dispensing authority) didn’t help.
I used to have much more conversation with Bedworth than Tony had, but this was chiefly because I treated him as a handy crib at the time when my efforts at Latin were receiving only the decidedly casual assistance of Buntingford. Bedworth could construe Latin fluently, and I might bang on his garret door half-a-dozen times in a morning for this purpose without appearing to tax his patience in the least. If this at all struck me as remarkable, I doubtless told myself that Bedworth enjoyed an opportunity for showing off. He certainly showed himself the master of whatever simple Latin text it was that I had become involved with. On the other hand he had done no Greek at school and I had; indeed, Greek, which I had liked, wasn’t in quite as bad a way with me as Latin, which I hadn’t. So Bedworth and I would usually have a kind of return match. He would ask me the etymologies of obviously Greek words, and I would tell him that something was clinical if it happened at a bedside, and that cynics and cynosures both had to do with dogs. It never occurred to me that Bedworth could get this sort of information as expeditiously and more reliably from a dictionary, and that in establishing the fiction of an equal give-and-take between us he was acting out of considerable delicacy of feeling.
It is true that Bedworth could also be very boring, and even rather irritatingly self-righteous. He felt I needed organising (which was true) and that I’d benefit from taking this or that leaf out of his own book. He had a wall decorated with an array of charts and time-tables and work-schedules which he kept up to date with various coloured pencils from day to day, and he was tiresomely quick to detect any tendency of my mind to wander from them as he urged upon me the merits of his system. In addition to this pedagogic trait, he frequently betrayed embarrassing symptoms of social unease. He would have agreed with Timbermill that our college was peculiarly prolific in young idiots. His own word was ‘socialites’, which he occasionally varied with ‘butterflies’ or (here, perhaps, with a humorous intention) ‘effete sprigs of aristocracy’. He was a proud man, and moreover he admired all the right things, courage among them. Hiding in a doorway during that nocturnal tumult in Surrey had been entirely rational, but I believe he had found it traumatic, all the same. I had been, as I have recorded, thoroughly frightened myself. But I had announced the fact blithely at the time, and couldn’t now recall my condition to any effect of humiliation. Nevertheless, I probably rated myself as a vastly more sensitive person than Cyril Bedworth.
I don’t think that Tony regarded our top-floor neighbour with other than a tolerant eye, but what he said about him was apt to be disparaging. ‘Kind of chip-on-the-shoulder type,’ he would say. ‘Inferiority complex, and so forth. Can’t think what you see in him, running up and down his staircase all day. Or, rather, I blush before the evident truth. Oh thou my lovely boy. That’s it.’ Maintaining that the spotty Bedworth roused irregular desires in half the college was one of Tony’s favourite extravagances.
In fact, the truth lay rather the other way on. I discovered this some time before Rosinante enters the story, and I became much more interested in Bedworth as a result. Before the spectacle upon which he peered down from his chart-bestrewn eyrie he was of a divided mind. The young idiots were young idiots, and he would shake his head over them in what was often an insufferably holier-than-thou way. But it was a head in which there lay concealed a spark of what must have been at first wholly reluctant admiration at least for aspects of the life into which he had tumbled. Not that ‘tumbled’ is quite right. It was I who had tumbled into Oxford – first tripped up, as it were, by a vagary of my father’s, and then on the strength of a flair for scribbling in which no merit inhered. Bedworth – there could be no doubt of it – had sweated at the job when he was a kid. He was an obscure Jude, born into a slightly more liberal age than Hardy’s hero; a career had been open to his talents, and he would certainly carry on, unseduced, as he had begun. But that spark was there. At times it glowed perceptibly enough. It almost – if the thing can be expressed without patronage this way – kindled his imagination. So many happy youths, so wide and fair a congregation: Bedworth at Oxford, like the equally solemn Wordsworth at Cambridge, was not quite capable of surveying them with an undelighted heart. The comparison, however, is delusive. Cyril Bedworth wasn’t going to be a poet.
I could have been sure of this, but not of any more positive direction in which his secret and unacknowledged enlargement of feeling might lead him. I was in less doubt about myself. My surrender to Oxford was almost entire. Unlike Bedworth, I had no sharp ambivalences to cope with. I didn’t believ
e that industry was virtuous and frivolity to be deprecated; even although owning a certain seriousness, I didn’t believe in this; so frivolity gained for me no additional relish from being associated with guilt. Retrospection has revealed to me that I was sometimes home-sick. But I approved of the place extravagantly and, again unlike Bedworth, was willing to announce the fact – although I was careful to add that this made me doubt whether I was right in the head. Yet I knew no marriage was being consummated, and that when my three years were up out I’d go. Albert Talbert’s embarrassing persuasion, frequently to be expressed many years later, that as an undergraduate I had indulged what he was pleased to call ‘the mad thought of a fellowship’ was a flight of fancy which I can’t, to this day, recall without annoyance.
I don’t quite know why it should have been of Tony and me that Bedworth first allowed himself more or less overtly to approve. It may have happened simply because we were among his nearest neighbours, and were seldom other than polite to him, even if it was sometimes in a teasing way. But I think, too, he was attracted to us as, so to speak, a well-balanced package. I hadn’t a scrap of his scholarship – and as a consequence of this was a good deal more widely read than he was. I thus ranked as an improving association. (Tony claimed to have spied on a kind of diary of Bedworth’s which had contained the entry: 7.30 – 8.50p.m. Talked to D. Pattullo in hall about major works of Dostoevsky. The marathon conversation certainly did take place.) Tony, on the other hand, must have represented for Bedworth something unholy and glamorous: the very flower of the care-free and insouciant jeunesse dorée of the college, as confident in their total ownership of their surroundings now as they had formerly been of their childhood’s ponies or their infancy’s rattles. The spectacle of Tony and myself as what Tony, with an affectation of the old- fashioned, called chums was somehow gratifying to Bedworth.
He would occasionally cast on us a disapproving regard, all the same. Had he not done so one morning half-way through our first Hilary Term the Rosinante episode would simply not have taken place. We had clattered down the staircase, Tony and I, with our golf-clubs clanking in their bags, and had overtaken Bedworth in the quad. He was gowned as he commonly was, and carried an armful of books, together with an elaborate contrivance for unfolding on a desk and taking notes. He was bound for a lecture, and pained that we were not.
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