Young Pattullo

by J. I. M. Stewart

  ‘It has been a thing with me for a long time,’ Fish said. ‘In fact, since a kid.’

  ‘Kind of regular hydrophobia?’ I asked, and at once realised the ineptitude of a humorous note.

  ‘They say these things are quite unaccountable. It ought to be because of a sailing accident or something when I was a boy. But it may equally well have to do with the water going out of the bath when I was a baby.’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘In Australia, baths in the country are often rather primitive. The water just disappears through a hole in the floor. That could be more frightening than its just going down a pipe.’ Fish frowned. He was perfectly aware that these speculations had an awkward ring. ‘Anyway, I’ve never been able to get into the stuff at all. The sea, I mean, or a river or even a swimming pool. It could be pretty difficult at school. I had to pretend I had the wrong sort of skin.’

  ‘It’s just a specific thing?’

  ‘Oh, yes—absolutely.’ Fish had taken my meaning, and his response carried complete conviction. I knew that if I had to face a gang of toughs, or go under fire, Fish beside me would be not a liability but an asset. It would probably be me who’d be the funk. Unfortunately I couldn’t make the point to him without impertinence, and had to wait for him to go on. ‘As a matter of fact,’ he said, ‘it sometimes makes me a bit reckless at other ploys.’

  ‘I can understand that.’ I was suddenly liking Martin Fish. His last words had again been simple; they lacked the slightest suggestion of his seeking means to rehabilitate himself in my esteem. I had a feeling, too, that he’d like to tell me more, and that it would do no harm to encourage him. ‘Look,’ I said, ‘I don’t want to barge in. But has this happened partly because you told the girl you could?’

  ‘What do you mean, Pattullo—could?’

  ‘Could swim. You see, I happened to hear you tell her not to be absurd, and that of course you could. Coming from a boat, that sounded, somehow, a bit like swimming.’

  ‘That’s right.’ Fish had turned pale as he glanced first at me, and then at Martine who was coming up with us. ‘She’d somehow suspected I couldn’t, and was making fun of me. I suppose I got upset, and told that bloody stupid lie. Christ, Pattullo – I was a silly bugger! She’d said something about being able to capsize the dinghy so as to find out. And then—’

  Fish broke off. ‘Jump in, darling. You’ll be in a hot bath in no time.’

  Climbing into the dinghy, Martine rewarded this solicitude by stroking Fish’s cheek. She was giving me a Mona Lisa smile as she did so.

  During the next few days I thought a good deal about Fish and Martine, although I didn’t expect to see much of them again. Their relationship bewildered me, and this made me feel that I could learn from it; that it promised more instruction in an interesting sphere than did, for example, those scandalous glimpses of P. P. Killiecrankie’s amours with which Tony and I had on several occasions diverted ourselves. Anybody can sit back and imagine the beast with two backs. Fish’s mysterious predicament – as I felt it to be – messengered itself obscurely from unknown territory. Nothing in my own experience helped me to understand what was going on. Unless, very remotely, it was my cousin Anna’s amusing herself in the heather by first exciting me and then calling me humiliatingly to a halt. I took it for granted, however, that Fish and Martine had actually been sleeping together. This was because I perceived, intuitively rather than on the evidence so far, that Martine’s hold over Fish was for the time being absolute. She could entertain herself as she pleased, and I supposed that this malign privilege belonged only to a mistress. Of course it doesn’t, as I was later to realise. And in fact – although we were to become close companions for a time – I never did learn whether Fish and Martine had been lovers.

  ‘Could you come in to tea this afternoon?’ Fish suddenly asked me one day in the quad. ‘Martine’s coming, and she’d like to thank you properly for helping us out like that. I’d be awfully glad, Duncan, if you would.’

  I wasn’t sure I wanted to be thanked properly by Martine, but at the same time my curiosity was strong. I decided on a cautious acceptance.

  ‘Yes, of course,’ I said, ‘—and thanks awfully. I’ve got Talbert at five, but I’ll come at four.’ This lie (for I didn’t, as Fish did, feel bad about casual lies) struck me as a cunning way of controlling a situation which might develop awkwardly.

  Fish’s room, when I arrived in it, proved predictably full of business-like books, and of equally business-like cricket bats and pads and tennis rackets. There was a painting of arid hills and ghostly eucalypts slightly recalling my father’s manner, and there was another which, years later, I’d have known at once to be by Sidney Nolan. I judged these to be evidences of the substantial circumstances of the antipodean Fishes. It was the room of a most normal young man. I didn’t know whether Martin Fish had come to Oxford straight from school, or from an Australian university, or from the war. I thought of him as older than myself by a good deal more than the academic year currently separating us. His effect of maturity, of having firmed up and become less labile than the rest of us, was to give its edge to the developing situation.

  Martine was disposed on a window-seat, gazing out in an inappropriately romantic manner at the severely classical splendour of the library on the other side of Surrey. It was before girls at Oxford had been forced by male competition to adopt any bizarre note in their dress. It was also before the advent of tights, so there was apt to be a more abrupt sense of transition to arrangements one oughtn’t to be goggling at than obtained at a later time. Whatever dress Martine was wearing, moreover, was of sheath-like effect and, somehow, damp-looking, as if she had once more just bobbed up out of the river. I was later to find she had thought this out.

  Fish left the first greetings to Martine. It was as if he really expected her to make a speech. She did nothing of the kind. It was borne in on me that she had announced her intention of doing so merely out of an idly curious wish to see me again, and that Fish himself wouldn’t have had any strong prompting to ask me to tea. This was depressing. And now that I was in the room and on display, Martine felt no obligation to speak to me at all. Except with speaking looks. I got them, and Fish got such conversation as she offered. This wasn’t a comfortable division in itself. But Fish got something else. Martine had a technique of caresses which were not in the least affectionate or even merely sensual. They were taunting and lecherous. I had glimpsed this in the dinghy, when she had stroked Fish’s cheek. Now, moving around in order to make the tea, she ran her fingers through his hair, touched his upper lip as if stroking a non-existent moustache, suddenly blew softly in his ear. Later, she sat down on the floor at his feet and passed a hand stealthily up the inner side of his thigh. The Killiecrankie spectacle apart (and that was so comically bawdy as somehow not to count), I had never witnessed anything of the kind – or only perhaps as a boy stumbling amid the sand dunes of Dunbar or North Berwick upon the love-play of remote plebeian persons. I could actually now watch in fascination just what was happening to Fish as this went on. Martine herself wasn’t watching it. To a very uncomfortable effect, she was watching me.

  Of curious interest as this behaviour was, and effectively though it acted on my own nervous system, my one wish was to see ten-to-five, or thereabout, turn up on Fish’s clock. I was convinced that Martine’s actual interest in me was pretty well a zero quantity, and that if she saw any employment for me at all, it was simply as a handy little whip with which to operate on Fish. I also judged that, at least for the moment, this wasn’t coming off. It was very possible that Fish, who had decent feelings, would have preferred to be pawed in privacy. But these fond attentions were driving him too crazy for thought. And now I came on a cardinal point in the whole affair. Fish was blankly refusing to see what was to be seen. He was fatuously or obstinately blind to the whole nature and quality of Martine. If, for instance, he noticed her making those stupid eyes at me, he told himself that they simply took th
e place of that thank-you speech.

  The tea-party didn’t end without a further development of the Belle Dame Sans Merci theme. Fish had a record-player in his room, and Martine decided to turn on some music. So far as I could see, she chose a record at random, as if merely to provide a background for anything further it occurred to her to say. She did, in fact, go on talking sporadically to Fish. I don’t remember about what, and perhaps I didn’t even pick up much of the sense of it at the time. She was certainly trying to poke him up, to get some sort of response to challenge out of him, and the general effect was of murmured needling reference to matters which remained obscure to me. If Fish was worried, he didn’t show it. Actually, I don’t think he at all lucidly was; he was still besottedly regarding Martine as marvellous. I felt it to be a vision of her that might crack at any time; that he was exercising a taut will about the girl without, weirdly, allowing himself to become aware of the fact. He was doing some fondling himself, but it was mostly a chaste stroking of her head which there wasn’t the slightest impropriety in my witnessing. I’d had enough, nevertheless, and I was just going to mumble something and clear out when Martine got to her feet and began to dance. The record-player was still grinding out noises which may have been perfectly acceptable in themselves, but which didn’t seem apt for choreography.

  We were witnessing an exercise in free expression, or something of that kind. Martine was miming rather than dancing, and I told myself she did it damned badly and was putting up a thoroughly pointless show. Girls at her sort of school were probably taught that it was artistic to pretend to be the waves of the sea or a lonely cloud or the last rose of summer. Then I suddenly saw that she was rowing a boat.

  I must have stared at Martine in childish horror. She now had her hands above her head and was clawing wildly at air. Her features were contorted into a convention of panic which would have done credit to a fifth-rate Hollywood actress in a movie. And she did have that appearance of being dripping wet.

  ‘Do you like it?’ she demanded, and this time it was to me that she addressed herself. ‘It’s called the Australian Boat Song.’

  I glanced at Fish. He was actually managing to smile at Martine gently, rather as one might smile at a child who has unwittingly committed some trifling faux pas.

  ‘I don’t quite see the point of it,’ he said, and passed a hand over his eyes. ‘I don’t see it, darling.’

  ‘Well, I do see it,’ I said, and jumped to my feet. ‘I say—what a bore—Talbert-time. Thanks a lot for the tea, Martin. Seeing you, Martine.’ And at that I bolted from the room.

  There must have been similar occasions at which I wasn’t present, for Martine performed her job at leisure. It was presumably quite her thing. Working on the disintegration of Fish, she must have been looking ahead, and she even took to dropping in on me. I remained for a couple of weeks the only person who knew what was going on; and as she knew that I knew, it seems likely that I held a certain technical interest for her. I was very young and vulnerable – so could she line me up, even after I had been privileged to have a glimpse of the whip at play? But for circumstances necessarily unknown to her, it might have been a rational hope. As it was, I trembled at times, and when she disappeared I experienced a sense of physical frustration which surprised me.

  At least she did disappear entirely, having no doubt been called away elsewhere. Nobody ever saw her again. I don’t think even Fish himself did. Her activities being concluded to her satisfaction, and there being no more fun to be had, she simply walked out and forbad him to follow. Perhaps he didn’t, or perhaps he did. He never told me. He may have written, telephoned, hung around likely places, sent flowers, stood staring at curtained windows and closed doors. Or perhaps, beaten, he simply took what had visited him. I don’t know.

  I was left with Fish. The whole staircase was left with Fish, for his condition became such as was not to be concealed. I used to go in and sit with him, since he himself just sat. It wasn’t over his book, since he did no work at all. Quite as much as Bedworth, he must have been a model tutee. But now, not only did he write no essays, he cut his tutorials altogether. We had gathered that this was a hazardous thing to do. It mightn’t be long before Fish was sent to the Provost and given a rocket – or admonished, which would be the Provost’s own word. In which case he’d either have to mend his ways, or confess to the nature of his present disability, or risk being treated as merely contumacious. Any way on, it seemed a bit hard on Fish, who was so clearly an industrious and responsible character when in his senses.

  I wasn’t too sure about the uses of silent sympathy. It seemed a kind of giving in, an accepting of the pitch of the trouble at Fish’s own estimate. If I had been required to act as a guard in a condemned cell, and was unprovided or unhandy with the comforts of religion, I’d no doubt have sat mum in the same way. So I did try to talk. And Fish would often manage a polite reply; it was somehow one of the more trying aspects of the situation that simple good manners appeared to be, to his own mind, about all he had left to cling to. But nothing I could say really reached him, all the same.

  So it was necessary to seek help, and I started by consulting Tony. Everybody was aware that there was something wrong with Fish, but it was probably Tony alone who had noticed how much I was sitting in on him. Tony struck a practical note at once. His experience of even the most peripherally relevant sort was at least no more extensive than mine. (In fact, it was quite certainly a good deal less.) But Tony possessed what I lacked: a sense that he was born to handle things.

  ‘Oh, that little bitch!’ he said. ‘Yes, I’ve seen her around. Needs her bottom smacked, if you ask me.’

  ‘It’s a bit too late for that. Besides, Fish isn’t like you. He’s a gent, not your best type of English public-school boy.’

  ‘This is no time for joking,’ Tony said, virtuously and unexpectedly. ‘You’re sure she’s finally ditched him?’

  ‘Certainly she has. She’s getting on with her vampire act elsewhere. A Zuleika, or however she sees herself.’

  ‘Then the man must shop around. It’s the only thing in such cases.’

  ‘How do you mean – shop around?’

  ‘Go out and find another tart, of course.’

  ‘I don’t think Martine is a tart, exactly. More of a tail-twisting type. Pathological, really.’

  ‘If the man’s a masochist I suppose it narrows the field a bit. But he can still go shopping. He might put some sort of discreetly worded advertisement in Isis. Or in a news-agent’s window. That’s said often to bring remarkable results.’

  ‘Who’s being funny now?’

  ‘All right. But you’re probably being a bit morbid about the thing. A perfectly nice girl is almost sure to serve equally well. And if Fish is too glum to take an initiative, we must do the job ourselves. Find a wench, and damned well plant her on his mat.’

  ‘Listen, Tony – do we know any girls? They’ve all been booked by the bigger boys – and they tuck them away out of sight. A freshman hasn’t a chance. Even for himself, let alone as a pimp. So stop kidding.’

  ‘I’m only trying to help.’

  I realised that, in a way, this was true. Tony’s suggestions seemed merely frivolous. But in practice, and while still only suspecting the facts of the case, he had been trying to help already. Fish never now managed breakfast in hall – something not remarkable in itself, since the meal was generally regarded as a pretty grisly one, frequently to be abjured by right-minded men. But he did generally turn up to lunch and dinner. At dinner our freedom of association was restricted as a consequence of the college’s maintaining the archaic institution of a scholars’ table. Fish was some sort of scholar – I suppose a Rhodes Scholar – and this meant that, of the people on our staircase, only Bedworth and I could dine beside him. But lunch was a free-for-all, and Tony had taken to sitting with Fish when he could. He was very capable of carrying on a cheerful and assured talk with seemingly no awareness that he wasn’t getting much in r
eturn; capable of this and, it must fairly be said, of not overdoing the act. When I had – rashly, perhaps – told him all I knew, he didn’t use the information to force Fish’s confidence; in fact he probably didn’t admit to any consciousness at all of Fish’s depressed condition. Thoroughly ignorant of love and love’s shipwrecks though he was, he probably did a better job than he would have done twenty-five years on, when he had presumably gone through other experiences and vicissitudes than those which were to gain him his seat in the Cabinet. A harsh judge would say, indeed, that Lord Marchpayne was the sort of man whose sensibilities, at least in some directions, coarsen with maturity.

  It was otherwise with Cyril Bedworth. When I eventually became a fellow of the college, and found Bedworth about to take up the office of Senior Tutor, not much time was to pass before I realised that he was the man to whom to take any awkward thing. In many ways he remained awkward himself; you would have said that, in his mid-forties, he still had to fumble his way into personal relationships; he was even liable to produce touches of what might be called the old attic-varlet syndrome. But he had become rather a wise man as well as a wholly reliable one. He would have been thoroughly good about Fish. He wasn’t that now. Almost as soon as I had consulted him in his turn, I began to feel some reason to wish I hadn’t.

  ‘I’ll have a talk with him,’ Bedworth said, having listened to me carefully. ‘It’s true he’s a second-year man. But then, Duncan, we are scholars, all three of us. That’s an important point. It makes it more appropriate that I should speak to Fish than that Mumford—Tony, I mean—should. Or that man Mogridge downstairs. Yes, I’ll have a serious talk with Fish. From the point of view of his work. I can appeal to the sense he ought to have of his responsibilities in view of the fact that he is on the foundation of the college.’