Young Pattullo

by J. I. M. Stewart

  ‘Morning, Cyril,’ Tony called out – cheerily, but with a glint in his eye. ‘Wohin der Weg, my tender Juvenal?’ Tony was increasingly fond of showing off to the learned in this random way.

  ‘Oh, good morning . . . Tony.’ We had disciplined Bedworth in this matter of Christian names, but they still made him rather nervous, all the same. ‘Good morning, Duncan,’ he added, with rather more confidence. ‘It’s Bisson on Phèdre.’ He looked at me reproachfully. ‘He’s said to be frightfully good.’

  ‘0 del! Oenone est morte, et Phèdre veut mourir!’ I exclaimed despairingly. We enjoyed deluging Bedworth with crackpot erudition.

  ‘It is the first mild day of March,’ Tony shouted. ‘Why not with speed put on your woodland dress?’

  ‘Oh, but I don’t think—’ Surprisingly, Bedworth ceased to look censorious, and gave us his rare shy smile. Tony sparkling like this was something he was by now beginning helplessly to fall for. It represented an irresistible confluence of charms. ‘And bring no book?’ he asked, heroically playing up.

  ‘Just that.’ Tony actually took Bedworth by the arm. ‘Come on! You do play golf?’

  ‘Oh, no!’ But Bedworth’s helplessness grew. ‘I have an uncle who does,’ he added, rather wildly.

  ‘Then you know it’s extremely easy. Do come. We’re getting out my car.’

  ‘Your car?’ Bedworth was scandalised.

  ‘Yes. Doesn’t your uncle have a car?’ Tony could manage things like this without insolence. ‘Do come with us. It will be tremendous fun.’

  I think I had the decency to feel uneasy. In moments like this it was impossible to disentangle Tony’s genuine good nature from his propensity to extract amusement from malice.

  ‘We’ve got lots of clubs,’ Tony said, and actually made the words sound sensible and persuasive. ‘You won’t need your gown, of course. But we can leave it in the woodshed. It’s not a bad place for gowns – even scholars’ ones.’

  And thus, it may be said, the fall of Cyril Bedworth was accomplished. We marched across the Great Quadrangle, making the clubs clank as noisily as possible. An elderly don watched us with undisguised benevolence. My uneasiness didn’t abate. Bedworth was experiencing happiness, and it wasn’t really his thing. He continued in this unwonted state even when we had dumped or perched him on Rosinante’s dicky-seat. This was a feature of the car which peculiarly evidenced its archaic character; one felt it to be descended from something on which it had once been appropriate to accommodate a lackey or a small black page. It didn’t occur to me that it would be more graceful to take up this modest station myself. Bedworth had to clutch the two golf bags. We drove ostentatiously through Oxford in our illicit conveyance.

  On the golf course at Frilford Tony became a model of good conduct. He was a better player than I was, despite my nationality, but I had proved good enough to give him a decent game. This morning, however, that went by the board. Tony’s sole concern was to teach Bedworth the rudiments as effectively as he knew how. The fairways were almost deserted, and this helped a lot. But the salient fact of the situation was that Bedworth proved a surprisingly apt pupil. Commonly when one begins to play golf one finds that, more often than not, club and ball simply don’t connect; one’s swipes meet empty air. Quite soon, with Bedworth, this wasn’t often happening. He commanded notable concentration, and moreover was making a tremendous effort of the will. I can see him now, standing in a bunker and working out in his head a provisional theory of how to employ a niblick to chip his ball back to the turf. Tony was as intent as he was, and had utterly banished the notion that he was contriving comedy. It came to me, with a sense of the largest relief, that the occasion was a success. I don’t exactly mean by this that Bedworth was enjoying himself. What was going on in him was happiness still, which is a different condition. Unfortunately it didn’t last.

  There was, as I have said, no crowd. The nearest players were two or three holes in advance of us, and I was vaguely aware of them as suggesting a married couple in middle life. Our own progress was inevitably of a pottering sort. So it seemed certain that the people in front would draw yet further ahead. Behind us, I could see nobody at all.

  On most golf courses, however, one comes once or twice upon a couple of holes, not necessarily consecutive, running in parallel. Traffic-wise, the effect is much that of what was then beginning to be called a dual carriageway. You are advancing in one direction while just across a strip of no man’s land somebody else may be advancing on the other. Just such an accident of the terrain had suddenly brought the married couple much nearer to us. I glanced at them fleetingly, and was conscious of a faint sense of identification before I returned my attention to Bedworth. His drive had been commendably straight, but not exactly notable for length; the ball lay on promisingly smooth turf in the middle of the fairway. Tony decided to instruct him in the use of a brassy, a club which he had not attempted to employ hitherto. Bedworth examined it very carefully.

  The driver and the brassy are the most difficult clubs for the beginner to control. The basic idea of each is the gaining of length, and he is thus tempted to put sheer beef into his stroke to the neglect of anything else. Bedworth did this, essaying so violent a swing that I expected nothing to happen at all. But this was not the case. The ball sustained a very marked impact indeed, but had at the same time been badly sliced. A fraction of a second after I perceived this our ears were assailed by a howl of agony.

  What had happened was patent, for the man in the other fairway was hopping about on one leg and clutching his other ankle in both hands. The posture of the woman somehow suggested less solicitude for her husband than indignation against whoever had assaulted him. It occurred to me that it would be extremely bizarre if the person whom the innocent Bedworth had inadvertently winged turned out to be a don. Then I realised the truth.

  ‘Tony,’ I said, ‘it’s the Provost.’

  ‘My God, so it is!’ Tony glanced swiftly at the hapless Bedworth, upon whom recognition of his enormity was dawning with what was perhaps a merciful slowness. ‘Hell’s bells!’ Tony went on – but not at all despairingly. ‘Stay put, both of you. One’s enough. I’ll fix it.’ He strode off rapidly in the direction of the injured player, who was now consulting his dignity by managing to stand on two feet again. I myself did as Tony had ordered me. He believed he could control the situation much better on his own than with Bedworth and myself producing a chorus of apologetic gabble. He was probably right. And I didn’t have the slightest doubt that he was going to claim to have been the Provost’s assailant himself.

  I tried rapidly to estimate the awfulness of our situation. It seemed quite probable that neither the Provost nor Mrs Pococke would know any of us from Adam. The time hadn’t come when Tony and I were to be summoned to regular tea-drinkings in the Lodging. We had been to one large sherry-party there, and at the end of our first term joined a file of youths making a formal valedictory bow to the Provost in hall. There was no reason to suppose that Cyril Bedworth’s case was any different. And Tony could present adequate apologetic and solicitous remarks without any need to identify himself. So perhaps it wasn’t too bad.

  And I had by now been sufficiently drawn into Tony Mumford’s world to feel that it couldn’t in any case be as bad as it was funny. I was still, indeed, very much a schoolboy. It was hard not to think of the Provost as a headmaster, and of ourselves as three truants about to be summarily dealt with – although in point of fact (at least while Rosinante remained safely out of sight) we were spending the morning as we were perfectly entitled to do, and as scores of other undergraduates were certainly doing at this moment. But, confusing as the situation was, my memory tells me that it chiefly amused me. Had the Provost, tumbling to our identity, rusticated us on the spot, there would at least have been a story to tell which would vastly have entertained my father; and to be banished from Oxford for the remainder of the term would be infuriating but not precisely tragic. Unfortunately Bedworth was all too plainly in
a different case. His regrettable complexion had taken on a bluish tinge, rather as if the sky had literally fallen on him. He possessed, so to speak, no relevant context within which to place what had occurred, had no notion of the scale of it, was without even an approximate clue as to how the Head of an Oxford college behaves when reduced to yelping aloud on a golf course. I believe he saw his career as possibly in ruins. But this didn’t prevent him – after a moment’s sheer paralysis, indeed – from acting. I became aware that he was going after Tony at a run. There was no means of stopping him, and perhaps it would have been impertinent to try. All I could do was to run too.

  We came up with Tony when he was demonstrably making a tiptop job of his apologies. Mrs Pococke was, I thought, being a bit tart; it was her line that a radically inexpert player ought not to be loosed on a golf course at all. But the Provost, although still in pain, was all forbearance and urbanity. Previous glimpses of him more or less from afar ought to have told me that this would be so. ‘Edward Pococke,’ my kinsman Lempriere was to say to me one day, ‘believes the grandeur of life to consist in its decorum.’ And decorum certainly was having an outing now. It controlled the restrained but considered gestures with which the Provost acknowledged the propriety of Tony’s anxious concern while at the same time deprecating any excess in it. Tony, as I had suspected was his intention, had taken on the guilt of the deed. I was amazed to see that he was actually carrying a brassy.

  All this was a little troubled by the arrival of Bedworth and myself – particularly Bedworth. He had pushed in on an impulse deserving to be called noble, and it was sad that he cut so unfortunate a figure as a result. His own apologies, in addition to perplexingly falsifying what Tony had been representing, carried a lamentable suggestion of abject disarray.

  His accent had cracked up. The Provost, remarking this, turned extra gracious to Bedworth. He might have been all the Heads of Oxford colleges that ever had been, making up for all the snubs they had delivered to all the Jude Fawleys since the beginning of time. But was the Provost – I suddenly asked myself – now looking at all three of us curiously? At least I realised why Tony had wanted to go on his embassy alone. The Provost – or his wife, for that matter – was less likely to recognise a single junior member of his flock than he was three of them in a bunch. The instant perception of this not unsubtle psychological fact was a good deal to the credit of Tony’s intelligence.

  The episode was nearly over. The Provost had taken two or three steps to and fro, by way of showing himself – as the football commentators say – ‘restored’. For each of us he could be observed preparing a kindly and dismissive smile. He began with Bedworth – and on Bedworth his gaze momentarily paused. Again for the briefest space, his eyebrows elevated themselves. I looked at Bedworth myself. Bedworth – and neither Tony nor I had noticed it – was wearing a college tie.

  Our civil farewells were concluded. It had been a fair cop. I had a feeling that the Provost hadn’t even been amused. He was a man easy to make fun of, but he had a certain largeness, all the same. That he had been clobbered by youths from his own, and not another, college didn’t strike him as in the least an exacerbating circumstance, and if he felt that we ought to have been at our books he knew that the circumstances of the case didn’t admit of his saying so, or of his docketing the fact in his mind in any way.

  It was Tony who was furious, and before we had got back to our abandoned golf bags, before I could spot the danger and squash it, a certain amount of damage was done. And it wasn’t really forgiveable. There was nothing to prompt it except Tony’s wounded conceit that his masterly handling of the situation had been mucked up after all.

  ‘You bloody little fool!’ he said savagely to Bedworth. ‘What are you going about in a damned silly thing like that for?’

  Bedworth’s hand went to his throat. He was completely bewildered, but at the same time desperately hurt. I ought to say that there was no positive solecism in wearing a college tie. It was a discreet affair of little golden croziers on a dark blue ground. I believe it also came in other colour-schemes for those who had gained distinction in one or another athletic pursuit. In these choicer forms it was positively prized. Even the bedrock version was considered harmless enough. It tended to be favoured by dons who had drifted in on us from obscurer colleges. There were those undergraduates who maintained that in certain circumstances an actual propriety attended its exhibition. If you had occasion to wear a London suit, for example, when travelling abroad. Still, Tony Mumford wouldn’t have worn a college tie. He would have classed it with ash trays and biscuit tins bearing the college arms.

  Such canons were obsolete, I think, when I returned to Nick Junkin’s Oxford. But this wasn’t Nick’s Oxford; it was Tony’s Oxford still. I had a furious wish to step behind Tony and plant a golf shoe accurately where it would hurt. Bedworth’s humiliation was vivid to me. The tie represented a first movement of his imagination towards an idea of the college such as he had probably never entertained when sweating his way towards Oxford through the upper forms of an indifferent school. Moreover the money laid out on the thing must have given him anxious thoughts. Now he was being contemptuously told he’d got it wrong.

  I was to be glad I hadn’t assaulted Tony. (A kick on the arse is one boy’s ultimate insult to another, after all: worse, somehow, than any humiliation a prefect can inflict.) By that evening his remorse was extreme. For a time, indeed, his sense of guilt made him more insufferable than I’d ever known him before. He groped towards hideous and patronising schemes of atonement. He told me, for example, he’d take the poor devil out to a square meal. He ended, I believe, by bursting into Bedworth’s attic round about midnight and apologising in what I haven’t any doubt was very proper form. After that, and strangely, we became quite a trio for a time. But this, of course, didn’t last. Cyril Bedworth came to bore Tony, just as Gavin Mogridge did.

  VI

  They were both – Bedworth and Mogridge – rather quiet men. I’d have been quiet myself, I suppose, had not Tony and one or two others elected me into their company – in which case these blithe spirits would have thought of me dismissively as ‘dim’ or ‘grey’, and I’d have had a worthier academic career than in fact I achieved.

  Mogridge’s quietude was, of course, modified by his ‘cello. It drew me into his rooms from time to time, although more in a spirit of disinterested curiosity than of musical appreciation. I couldn’t be unaware of the instrument, since I heard it as I passed his door and also as I sat at my desk or lay in bed. The strains, the auditory effects (for it is hard to describe the total phenomenon) came up the chimney as well as through the floorboards and open windows. Many people round about the college must have been suffering similarly, although more frequently from pianos than from stringed instruments or wood-winds. The unassuming men hired upright pianos (cottage pianos, they were sometimes called) from shops in the town. Others were capable of arriving with grand pianos in their baggage. Of these I imagine that many had parents constrained to live in houses rather smaller than hitherto, and the monsters had been carried off from areas of relegation in furniture depositories or summer-houses or garden sheds. Their decrepitude was often detectable as soon as a chord was sounded. They may also have suffered in transit – and particularly its final stages. Few Oxford staircases are well-adapted to the humping up and down of outsize Bechsteins and the like.

  Mogridge’s ‘cello, on the other hand, was almost certainly in sound working order, since his ambitions were professional rather than merely amateur. This made more perplexing, and even distressing, the fact that the sounds emitted seldom seemed (even to my unsophisticated ear) quite right. But what positively worried me were certain mysterious concomitants of the performance. It was almost necessary to believe that something depraved was going on – although it was still in the womb of time that there slumbered that alarming fictional character whose quiet half-hours with sex (as Stumpe expressed it) took place to the accompaniment of Beethoven on
a record- player. Mostly it was a matter of grunts and a disturbed respiration, but these manifestations were occasionally punctuated by short, sharp cries of agony. It was as if Mogridge had the Provost cornered in his room, and was intermittently turning from a bow to a brassy.

  It proved a mystery not particularly hard to solve. Mogridge would not have cared for an audience in a general way, but seemed prepared to make an exception in my case – I imagine for no better reason than that I was an artist’s son, and that it was an artist he himself desperately wanted to be. He knew that I was friendly rather than critical, since I had explained to him how years of attending the performances of the Scottish Symphony Orchestra along with my mother enabled me to identify numerous musical compositions while leaving me at a merely primitive level of analysis and appreciation. So I used to sit on Mogridge’s sofa from time to time and watch what was going on. It was more interesting and even agreeable than just having to listen from upstairs.

  The maestri (and maestre) whom I had been accustomed to observe from a middling distance in Edinburgh’s Usher Hall had been detectably quite hard at work. There had been, for example, a magnificent Hungarian girl who could plainly have wielded a sledge-hammer or a wood-cutter’s axe at need, but who didn’t extract astounding things from her ‘cello without marked physical effort, so that I sometimes wondered whether this would have been doubled had her instrument happened to be a double-bass. The total effect was graceful and commanding nevertheless. Mogridge lacked these attributes so far. He copiously perspired, and at close quarters the grunts and gasps forced from him suggested an expenditure of the sort of energy required of one not yet habituated to the operation of a chain-saw or a pneumatic drill. It was his breathing technique that constituted the crux of the matter – as much, it seemed to me, as if he had dedicated himself to the trumpet or the loud bassoon. His entire muscular system, moreover, was in a state of high tension from first to last, and it was this that explained those sudden cries – equally interpretable as of agony or love’s ecstasy – which had arrested me from above. Mogridge, as he played, was subject to violent cramps. I had no knowledge that this was a hazard which most executants on fiddles of one sort or another have to be trained to overcome, so I judged the circumstance more bizarre than in fact it was. But at least I sympathised. At school I had been liable to sporadic and inept athletic ambitions, had gone privily into ‘training’ for one event or another, and would eventually succeed in jumping over eleven hurdles at the expense of thereafter rolling in anguish on the grass as a consequence of what had happened to my calves. It was thus that I arrived at the perception that Mogridge’s case was one of fundamental ineptitude too, and that he might crudely be declared to be fiddling up the wrong tree.