‘Why have you come up to Oxford at all?’ I asked one day, during a pause in which Mogridge was massaging his fingers. ‘If you just want to play that thing, I mean. Oughtn’t you to be in Vienna, or somewhere like that?’
‘It would be better, I agree.’ Mogridge, like most English schoolboys of his sort, was habituated to a dispassionate casual candour, and didn’t resent it in the least. ‘A conservatoire would suit my book better. It’s the right place to study music, a conservatoire. Because it’s what it’s for, don’t you see?’
‘Yes, I do see.’
‘But you know what parents are. Parents are—well, you know what parents are, Duncan, don’t you? Only perhaps you don’t.’
‘Why shouldn’t I know what parents are?’ The suggestion that I might be in some state of ignorance in this regard offended me.
‘Well, I mean you might be an orphan. You mightn’t have parents. One oughtn’t really to take it for granted – not when one’s getting to know a man. The assumption might be painful – if his people had lately been killed in an accident, or even put in gaol, or something like that.’
‘Well, I have parents, as you perfectly well know. They’re alive and kicking, and they haven’t even been put inside. And it was my father who took it into his head to dump me in this place.’
‘But, Duncan, hadn’t you been thinking of it yourself?’
‘Well, yes I had, as a matter of fact.’ I was getting accustomed to the sagacity of Mogridge peeping out from time to time. ‘But it was my father who brought it off.’
‘It seems just right for one with your literary interests.’
‘I suppose so.’ It hadn’t occurred to me that I had been going around revealing anything describable in this way. ‘But, Gavin, isn’t there a lot of quite decent music in Oxford?’
‘Oh, yes – there’s that. But it isn’t Vienna or Paris or Rome, all the same. Rome and Paris and Vienna are quite different. But, you see, I haven’t got to the point at which I can seriously think of a musical career. Or rather, at which my parents can seriously think of it. They feel that I ought to have something else to fall back on. It’s reasonable enough. It’s not as if we had money. My father, as you know, is just an ordinary Cambridge professor, like everybody else.’
‘But there must be all sorts of musical careers. You mayn’t ever be a Suggia—’
‘Oh, I couldn’t be that, anyway, Duncan. She was a woman. Suggia wasn’t a man.’
‘Well, you know what I mean. You could have a very honourable career with your ‘cello not quite at that level. Just in an orchestra, for instance. Isn’t there always a clump of the things in an orchestra? Or playing in a tea-shop.’ It wasn’t easy to refrain from making fun of Mogridge. ‘Or as a busker.’
‘A busker, Duncan?’ The term seemed unfamiliar to Mogridge.
‘The sort of chap who entertains theatre queues.’ Whenever I got to London much of my time was spent in such queues, and I felt I knew what I was talking about. ‘Of course, it’s violins, mostly. But I’ve noticed an old man with a ‘cello, and he was proving very popular.’
‘But, you see, Duncan, I’d rather never be heard of than not be among the greatest.’
This silenced me. I couldn’t even – at the risk of obtruding literary interests – tell Mogridge that he had echoed certain words of John Keats. I recognised that I had got near to jeering, and that Mogridge knew I had, and that he didn’t propose to be offended as a consequence. Cyril Bedworth under a similar assault would have been much hurt in mind. I wondered whether hidden beneath Mogridge’s mild manner there lay some maniacal confidence in his own destiny which acted as a kind of waterproofing against any sort of cold douche. It came to me uncomfortably that his people in Cambridge were probably a pretty liberal and cultivated crowd, and that they hadn’t vetoed a great conservatoire for their son without giving him a run for his money and consulting expert opinion. And music was like that. It wouldn’t have been possible for my parents to send me for a time to a top teacher who would then have a very fair notion of what sort of playwright was latent in me. But Mogridge’s promise must be more or less predictable.
It seemed necessary to speculate on what a failed ‘cellist could do, particularly if temperamentally prompted to be among the greatest. On subsequent calls I used to glance around Mogridge’s sitting-room in search of clues to any subsidiary interests he might possess and be in a position to develop in the quest for an alternative career. He had put up on his walls a number of photographs too small for such a decorative purpose but of excellent quality in themselves.
Some of them carried the familiar silhouette of Mount Everest – at that time, of course, unconquered – with ant-like creatures manipulating ice-axes and snow-ladders in the foreground. Others were close-ups – secured it was impossible to tell how – of men of like mind improbably clinging to horrific but unidentifiable precipices. Questioning, however, elicited the fact that mountaineering and rock-climbing were not among Mogridge’s own activities; he explained to me, more abruptly than I recall his speaking on any other occasion, that the state of his vision would have precluded his ever being more than a pottering sort of climber.
If there was no line in his pictures, neither was there in any books he kept in evidence. One of these, indeed, was a Bible – an object in those days not much obtruded in undergraduates’ rooms. But it was unsupported by anything further of a devotional or theological nature, so that its importance, if any, remained problematical. On the whole I judged it no more likely that Mogridge would enter Holy Orders than that I should do so myself (even although it was the career that Aunt Charlotte was in the habit of recommending to me). There was a short row of textbooks obviously bought on the advice of a tutor, and the other volumes on view had a similar air of having landed up with their owner without any very positive volition on his part. I could see things like The Oxford Book of English Verse, The Essays of Elia, Romola, The Poems of Tennyson, Shakespeare (just like that), Birds of the Wayside and Woodland, Stories from Dante, The Seven Lamps of Architecture – all heavy with the suggestion of edifying benefaction on the part of elderly relatives. There were no paperbacks, although these had become fairly common. All in all, one didn’t get the impression of Gavin Mogridge as a restless and penetrating intelligence.
I found this unassuming set-up attractive, if only because I was a good deal involved with people who, like myself, were rather too much concerned to be clever. Even Bedworth was touched by something of the sort, although with him the effect aimed at didn’t include the flippant. So Mogridge and I were quite thick for a time, and once or twice a week we would join up either in his rooms or mine and make tea. Mogridge was fond of toasting anything toastable in front of a gas-fire, and had considerable skill in doing so: an accomplishment which I have ever since regarded as a by-product of the English public-school system. It was as a result of this habit that I made an odd discovery.
‘Duncan – will you get out a bigger plate from the cupboard?’
Mogridge had called this out urgently. He was engaged in producing anchovy toast – a delicacy which was enjoying what was perhaps a brief post-war revival – and the butter was getting out of hand. I jumped up obediently, made for a cupboard, and opened its door. It wasn’t, however, the right cupboard. And it contained not crockery but books. I don’t doubt that there was some subconscious prompting behind my mistake. It was almost the same action as I was to perform – and with an equally surprising result – in Ivo Mumford’s room and in the presence of Ivo’s father, Tony Mumford, Lord Marchpayne.
There was plenty of unoccupied shelf-room around, so I had to conclude at once that some reticence on Mogridge’s part was responsible for his keeping a large number of books as he did. It was my first conjecture that they were improper books, and that he surprisingly owned a substantial collection of what would later be termed pornography, but which then appeared in booksellers’ catalogues as Erotica or Curiosa. Had this been so, he would, I imagi
ne, have been unique in the college. We were a generation quite without a sophisticated taste in such matters. The fact that Tony possessed a copy of Justine and that I had a Fanny Hill probably placed us among the major proprietors of anything of the sort. And they lay about casually for any of our acquaintance to have a go at who pleased.
A single glance at the actual contents of Mogridge’s cupboard embarrassed me. I don’t think I’d have been more so had the door opened on, say, a Teddy Bear, redolent of the fabulous Oxford of Evelyn Waugh. The first thing I saw was a batch of ‘Biggles’ books, stacked beside several of their Kaiser’s War equivalents, written by a man called Percy F. Westerman. Then I saw – rapidly – The Scarlet Pimpernel, The Riddle of the Sands, King Solomon’s Mines, The Four Adventures of Richard Hannay, Revolt in the Desert. There were dozens of books of that sort. The majority, which I didn’t have time to scan, appeared designed for juvenile rather than adult readers.
‘Wrong cupboard,’ I said briskly, and closed the door and moved to the right one. The natural thing would have been to make fun of Mogridge’s retarded condition in this unimportant matter of literary taste. But something told me not to, and I handed him in silence the largest plate I could find. He received it placidly and without comment, and certainly he didn’t appear in the slightest degree discomposed. But then he never did. I concluded, weighing the matter up, that he had been too occupied with his cuisine to remark the observation I had made.
A certain loyalty to Mogridge was born in me out of this episode. When I had left him and climbed to my own landing I paused outside Tony’s door, and then turned away and went into my own rooms. Provided, as I was, with an amusing story, it would have been the natural thing to barge in on Tony and treat him to a twopence-coloured account of it. The impulse to refrain must have risen from a dim notion, unclarified in my conscious mind, that I was myself rather more Mogridge’s sort of person than I was Tony’s. Tony had never confided to me what walk of life he intended to pursue. It was a subject (as was that of his family) about which he had an instinct to be cagey. But I was sure he and I should never, when the great world had received us, row in the same boat; his attraction for me was that of a temperament contrasting with my own. But when I thought of Mogridge’s ‘cello, certainly when I listened to it through the floorboards again, I was visited, perhaps for the first time, by some sense of the artist as one condemned to envy this man’s art and that man’s scope. If Shakespeare felt this strongly enough to tip it into a sonnet then so, presumably, did Ibsen and Tolstoi and Stendhal. It got you, in fact, even if you were no end of a big fish. It would certainly get you if you were among the minnows. I didn’t think I was going to be, as Mogridge was, blankly wrong about myself. I’d learn to play, roughly speaking, according to the score. But I did know, already I intuitively knew, that I’d never make the damned instrument behave wholly as I wanted it to. Long afterwards I was sometimes to wonder whether, if I had like Mogridge been utterly wrong, Chance would at length have mended the error as brilliantly and arbitrarily as it did with him when he tumbled, roll of bumf in hand, out of that wrecked aeroplane in the company of a gaggle of bewildered professors of archaeology. In a sense, of course, he possessed from the start that other life. Those books cast longer shadows than I could see – or than anybody, for that matter, could have seen even when Mochica won its just but astonishing acclaim. I myself didn’t possess, metaphorically speaking, any secret books in a cupboard. So I was really, as I plugged away at a tragedy modelled on Eugene O’Neill or heaven knows whom, more at risk than Mogridge was when the relevant bits of Saint-Saens’s Concerto wouldn’t emerge from his big fiddle even quite in tune.
VII
Since they were all – Tony Mumford, Cyril Bedworth, Gavin Mogridge – on my own staircase and in my own year, they had been my natural associates at the start. There were other men on the staircase as well. Opposite Mogridge on the ground floor was an elderly don called Tindale, familiarly known to us as the White Rabbit. He did have a scurrying air. Although he said ‘Good morning’ if he met you in the doorway it was in a manner suggesting that intimacy would be carried too far were he put in a position obliging him to say ‘Good afternoon’ later in the day. Tindale possessed several rooms, including (unfairly, as we thought) a bathroom and loo private to his own necessities. Tony and I came next, and above us were two men in their second year. Their names were Kettle and Fish, so it was to be supposed that some waggish bursar or dean was responsible for their present propinquity. There is always an initial difficulty in taking seriously persons with absurd names, particularly if they come in tandem. Kettle and Fish, however, had to be taken seriously, as will appear. It was naturally some time before they felt it proper much to acknowledge the existence of a new set of juniors. Above them, and almost concealed behind the balustrade of Surrey, lived Bedworth; his low-hutched chambers sprawled over the whole area, and were in consequence (as he had assured me on our first encounter) commodious enough. In various corners and cubby-holes they tended to disappear beneath the leads, so their effect was of a miniaturised version of Dr Timbermill’s quarters in Linton Road. Bedworth didn’t, it is true, run to thousands of books. He had a surprising number, all the same. I was myself just ceasing at that time, and not to my advantage, to be distinctly a poor man’s son, and I recognised on Bedworth’s shelves what I was to recognise in the Headington abode of the Talberts: certain assumptions in choosing between this and that familiar in my own home. The purchase of each of Bedworth’s books, it was to be supposed, had been a matter of the same anxious financial consideration as must have attended his sole known excursion into vanity in the unlucky matter of the college tie.
It seemed to be quite in order to take very little interest in women. Anybody who did so pertinaciously and to patently practical effect (like that P. P. Killiecrankie who later became a prebendary) was rather looked down on. This surprised me. My brother Ninian had possessed several girls when no older than I was now. My own case was different. While still sexually inexperienced I had formed with Janet Finlay a boy-and-girl relationship which I thought of as holding the seeds of maturity. I owned no notion that hurrying time never permits without risk a pause or intermission in the ripening of love, and in my ignorance or conceit I must be said to have banked Janet while absorbed in other enterprises. The bank was to be robbed, and it served me right. But my condition meanwhile had the effect of making me only a detached spectator of this aspect, or non-aspect, of college life.
The only girl who appeared regularly on the staircase belonged, strangely enough, to the White Rabbit. She turned up on two afternoons a week, vanished into Tindale’s rooms, and the oak banged to behind her. The circumstance at least provided us with the material of ribaldry. Bedworth, who knew all about the learned occasions and interests of our senior members, explained to us that Tindale was writing a book on the Pelagian Heresy; that he had reached a critical stage in his research turning on the action of Pope Zosimus in a.d. 418; and that the young person was simply steering him through it with a typewriter. Detective-work did, it was true, track her down to some sort of secretarial agency in the town, but we were far from feeling that this proved much. We formed the habit of terming any known womaniser (such as Killiecrankie) a Pelagian.
Freshmen on their arrival were provided with a book of rules and regulations which nobody would own to having taken the trouble to peruse. I had myself at least turned over its pages. Approximately every second paragraph began with the word ‘Gentlemen’ and went on to particularise one or another thing that gentlemen might or might not do. They were, for example, not permitted to have ladies in their rooms after 11 p.m. This astonished me not because of either the earliness or the lateness of the hour, but simply as being on the record at all. These sanctioned visitors, if they existed except notionally, were uncommonly unobtrusive. Apart from the residual returned-warrior element, the undergraduates among whom I found myself were schoolboys lately or all but lately liberated from weirdly mon
astic educational establishments, and they were still nervous and cautious about the whole thing. They contacted girls in lecture-rooms (indeed, frequently attended such places merely for that purpose) and took them out for walks or to cinemas and tea-shops. But positively having them around the college obtruded an element of publicity and commitment they appeared to think twice about. The exception took the form of occasional big parties, as if there were a general sense of safety as lying in numbers. The dimensions of the sexual revolution which had come about by Junkin’s time were to be among the more striking impressions of my middle years. But young manhood, and womanhood too, will out, and in my own time a main consequence of all this lingering reluctance frankly to grow up was that when adult sex did strike it tended to strike hard. Much harder, certainly, than when girl-trouble turned as much a matter of everyday as broken limbs brought back from winter sports in Switzerland.
Young Pattullo Page 14
