Young Pattullo

by J. I. M. Stewart

  ‘I’m not sure that, technically, he is quite that.’ It was in some dismay that I took refuge in this quibble.

  ‘No matter. It has been judged proper that he should wear a scholar’s gown. That is extremely important.’

  ‘I’ve an idea it’s what’s called a senior-status gown.’

  ‘No matter, Duncan. We mustn’t be pedantic before a grave issue like this.’ Bedworth spoke as if in serious reproof. ‘Fish dines with us, and that, for me, settles the matter. I shall appeal to him, as I say.’

  ‘Perhaps it’s not exactly—’

  ‘This young woman has no doubt behaved very badly, and I deeply sympathise with Fish. I shall tell him so. But he must set his face against unmanly repining. I shall urge that upon him. I shall mention the case of Keats.’

  Bedworth, if chargeable in those days with a touch of self-importance, was a man of his word. That afternoon I saw him walking slowly round Long Field with Fish. He was doing all the talking – presumably expounding the view that a morbid obsession with Fanny Brawne, and not the severities of Blackwood’s and the Quarterly, had been responsible for expediting Keats’s decline into the grave. It seemed improbable that Fish’s melancholy, or whatever it was to be termed, would be much alleviated by such considerations – if only because Fish, an absorbed mathematician when in his right mind, might well have only the dimmest notion of who Keats was. I didn’t reflect that Fish’s state was one in which any sincere concern, honestly expressed, would be at least in some degree comforting and supportive. I thought of Bedworth as perpetrating an assault upon his privacy, and felt that I was myself responsible for this through having gone busy-bodying around. But this didn’t prevent my now hurrying off to Mogridge. He seemed to be my last resource, so far as the more responsible characters in my immediate circle were concerned.

  ‘Does Fish have an instrument?’ Mogridge asked at once. ‘I’ve a notion I’ve heard music coming from up there. If so, we could possibly do something together. Anything that’s distracting is good when it’s distraction that’s needed.’

  ‘No doubt. But all he has is a gramophone, and I think it’s just what may be called standard equipment. I’ve heard it only once. It was when this Martine woman turned it on in order to produce a particularly nasty gibe at him.’

  ‘It sounds a bit low – employing music like that.’ Mogridge was deeply shocked. ‘I’d imagined I’d heard somebody playing a piano.’

  ‘That’s Clive Kettle, on the other side of the landing. He’s sometimes playing his piano above my head while you’re playing that thing of yours under my feet, as a matter of fact.’

  ‘Oh, I see.’ Mogridge was unaware of any element of irrelevant complaint in this. ‘Kettle’s another second-year man. He ought to know Fish quite well. Has it ever struck you, Duncan, that it’s funny having a Kettle and a Fish like that?’

  ‘It has crossed my mind.’

  ‘Perhaps Kettle could be encouraged to have Fish in and play to him. Or perhaps Kettle and I could play to him together. I believe Fish is a mathematician. I think I’ve heard that maths is his thing. They’re often musical, mathematicians. Einstein is said to be very fond of music. Do you know that Einstein lived in this college for a time? It would have been rather interesting to meet Einstein, don’t you think?’

  ‘Yes, I do.’

  ‘But, of course, that’s not the point at the moment. I see that.’

  ‘Quite so, Gavin. It’s you and me and Fish who live in the place at the moment.’ I didn’t feel at all impatient with Mogridge. As not infrequently, I had a sense that his mind was working quite effectively behind all these sagacious remarks. ‘The question is, what’s to be done. The chap really is in a state. He simply broods on the thing all day. It’s melancholia, or something like that. They’ll have him in the Warneford, if he doesn’t look out. Or if we don’t look out.’

  ‘Mental hospitals are said to be very advantageous sometimes. When it’s a question of madness, I mean. Still, it’s no doubt to be avoided, if possible.’ Mogridge paused. ‘If music’s no good,’ he said, ‘the proper thing is foreign travel.’

  ‘It’s an idea.’ I was impressed by this piece of traditional wisdom. ‘But how the hell is Martin Fish going to do foreign travel? Here we are, not too far on in the summer term. And Fish is supposed to be working hard for Schools in a year’s time.’

  ‘I have a notion Fish is quite well off. I happened to go to lunch in the Lodging last term. Because of my father’s being a professor at Cambridge, I rather think. This Fish was there. Mrs Pococke introduced us to each other in a formal way. She does some rather odd things – I suppose because the Pocockes are more or less new to the job. And she murmured to me something about pastoralists. In Australia, that means whacking great landowners. So Fish is probably in the mun. He could try Samarkand. Or Totonicapan. Or Titicaca. Or even the Friendly Islands.’

  ‘The Friendly Islands sound just right. Or the Society Islands might do equally well.’

  ‘Yes, of course, Duncan!’ Mogridge kindled to my appreciation of these places. Not that, again, I wasn’t impressed. He had made their names ring out in a startling fashion. As Tony had maintained, he was a great Romantic – perhaps as much so as Bedworth’s John Keats. ‘So you see,’ Mogridge said, ‘it boils down to jockeying him through the rest of this term, and then getting him out of the country. And you’d better go with him, if you ask me.’

  ‘But I’m certainly not in the mun, Gavin!’ I said this before remembering that it wasn’t true. Not long before, the Metropolitan Museum had bought a Lachlan Pattullo, and my father had promptly divided the considerable proceeds between Ninian and myself – disguising this characteristically impulsive action as a manoeuvre prompted by deep financial cunning. So I was more prosperous than I had any title to be for some years ahead. ‘In any case,’ I added feebly, ‘I’ve an idea of going abroad with Tony.’

  ‘You’ll have to change your plans,’ Mogridge said placidly. ‘Unless, of course, you have some strong family obligation. A parent who is very ill, or something of that sort. One has to put first things first, or there’s a danger of getting them in the wrong order.’

  ‘My parents are both perfectly well,’ I said. ‘I’ve told you so.’

  ‘Yes, of course. You wouldn’t be thinking of going away with Tony otherwise. So there’s no difficulty there.’

  ‘I’ve been thinking only of a fairly quick trip, Gavin. As a matter of fact there’s a girl at home that I don’t want to miss out on for too long.’

  I was extremely surprised to hear myself telling Mogridge this. Girls at home – individual girls at home, as distinct from libidinously conjured up flocks of them – tended to be a taboo subject. Moreover it was my instinct to be very close indeed about Janet – and the more so of late, when I was becoming increasingly conscious of some unknown factor in our relationship. On this ground even Tony was no confidant of mine. Perhaps it was because I had possessed myself, quite accidentally, of the secret of those romantic books of Mogridge’s that I thus – as it were in requital – divulged a secret of my own.

  ‘That’s important, of course.’ Mogridge had received my communication with characteristic sobriety, but at the same time seemed prompted – even at the cost of irrelevance – to a confidence himself. ‘It’s a sort of thing I think about sometimes. It seems to me that anybody who wants to be an artist – if it’s only to play the fiddle, Duncan – should think very carefully about love, and getting married, and that sort of thing. They can be tremendous distractions, don’t you think? Particularly if one starts in when very young.’

  ‘My father’s a tolerably undistracted painter. And he fell in love and got married when very young indeed.’

  ‘As young as you are now, Duncan?’

  ‘Well, no—I suppose not quite.’

  ‘Are you really in love, Duncan?’

  ‘Yes. At least it feels like that.’ Mogridge had asked his straight question so simply that I found myself
answering without constraint.

  ‘And the girl?’

  ‘Well, I hope so. Perhaps this summer I can make sure.’

  ‘Then that is a priority.’

  ‘Only Janet’—I was even more surprised to hear myself uttering my beloved’s very name—’will be away for quite some part of the holidays. So perhaps I could go off with Martin Fish.’

  ‘I honestly think you must, Duncan. You see, you’ve taken the chap on.’

  I nodded submissively. Mogridge’s power of lending weight to the self-evident had never struck me so forcibly before.

  VIII

  Fish was indeed my affair to the extent that, if anything was to be organised for him, I’d have to do the organising. I had been pitched into his disaster – or rather had kicked off my shoes and dived into it – fortuitously, but I had to see him through it nevertheless. The first essential seemed to be to get some signal from Fish himself. I had been spending hours with him, and had at least an inkling of how he was feeling. But of what he thought I hadn’t a clue. Was he doing anything that could be called thinking at all? Baffling questions surrounded his state. Did he, for instance, still have in his head a picture of Martine which wasn’t Martine in any objective regard? Or had he gained an accurate but impotent sense of her as the little slut she was? Did he know what she had done: exploited her discovery of a ludicrous Achilles’ heel in him to ditch him contemptuously and with a slow-motion sadism when she had become bored? Floundering ignominiously in the Cherwell, he had in effect been put through a symbolic enactment of impotence. There had been no doubt of his irrational terror; it must have been like a clutch at his vitals. Perhaps one had to put down the unmanned Fish as suffering the ravages of a primitive castration complex.

  These speculations, if extravagant, had their modish fascination; we were most of us depth-psychologists at that time. They didn’t prevent me from coming to the fairly sensible conclusion that Fish must be got to talk. Words, in fact, must damned well be shaken out of him. As soon as I saw this I had a go. I ran upstairs, banged loudly on his door in the manner customary with us, and pushed in. Fish was sitting at his writing table. It had the same dismal sort of serge covering as I remembered adorning the room in which I had discussed with Stumpe how to start having women – but this was partly obscured beneath a litter of papers scrawled over with mathematical computations. I drew encouragement from the sight; it looked as if Fish was at last managing to do some work for his tutor, or at least obtaining solace or forgetfulness by absorbing himself in his own thing. There was a character in The Prelude, I remembered, who, when having a bad time on some desert island, managed to cheer himself up by drawing geometrical figures in the sand. Then I took another look, and saw that the exercises being performed by Fish were concerned with addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. He was merely assuring himself that he hadn’t gone completely mad.

  ‘Martin,’ I said, ‘quit it. Lay off.’

  ‘Oh, Duncan!’ As Fish said this, he looked for a moment startled and abashed. This was quite something, since for days it had been impossible to wring out of him any kind of emotional response at all. ‘I was just getting on with a spot of work,’ he added, and rapidly shuffled the scattered papers into a pile.

  ‘You were doing nothing of the sort – nothing except doodling. Can’t you do something useful for a change? Be a real pal, and make me some coffee. Proper coffee, in that bubbling thing.’ Fish’s well-appointed rooms ran to a complex percolator.

  ‘Coffee? Yes, of course.’ Fish got up obediently, and blundered around. I thought the percolator was going to suffer, but in fact he coped with it competently enough. ‘I know I’m being a nuisance,’ he said suddenly. ‘It’s just that I don’t seem able to get this straight. What has happened. How it can have happened. I try to see it clearly, but it’s behind a kind of cloud. Have you ever lived in absolute darkness? It’s just hell. Christ! I don’t suppose you even know what I’m talking about.’

  ‘Of course I know what you’re talking about. Martine.’

  ‘That’s right!’ There was an imbecile surprise in Fish’s voice which I found daunting. But I saw nothing for it but to charge ahead.

  ‘Listen,’ I said. ‘If you’re not clear about Martine I can put you right at once. She’s a girl in your past, and she was a damned bad buy. Or let’s be frank, Martin. She was a third-class harlot, but made up for it by being a first-class shit.’ I paused on this; it had been a little too elaborate to be quite right. ‘Honestly,’ I added. ‘Honestly, honestly, Martin, she was just no bloody good. Face up to it, man. Take a straight look at her, and you’ll see the thing was about as wholesome as trying to get kicks out of a corpse.’

  This random vehemence I’d no doubt have disapproved of if I’d been behind my typewriter; it was my idea to get a reaction out of Fish at any cost. If he’d chucked the percolator at my head I’d have done my best to dodge the coffee and the glass, and counted it another scrap of ground won. The young psychologist, that’s to say, was thinking in terms of what he’d have called abreaction therapy – meaning, I suppose, the securing of a violent and cathartic emotional discharge. As often with amateur experiments, it failed to work. Fish simply dismantled the percolator, and poured me a cup of coffee with care.

  ‘But I don’t see it that way,’ he said mildly, and in a tone conveying faint bewilderment rather than strong indignation. Then he did, for a moment, become slightly agitated. ‘Oh, God!’ he said. ‘I know I’m no bloody good. I’m making a pest of myself to anybody who knows me. Do believe, Duncan, that I feel awfully bad about it. I feel so miserably guilty. And you’re a true cobber, Duncan. Really you are. I see I haven’t any sugar. I’m terribly sorry.’ He relapsed into mournful passivity.

  This was dreadfully embarrassing. As I’d myself, with a hollow gamesomeness, exhorted Fish to be a real pal I couldn’t fairly take exception to being acclaimed as the same thing in honest Australian English. But Fish’s impulse more or less to apologise for his existence, and the revelation that his kind of depression and defeat could unloose irrational feelings of guilt, were aspects of the situation which took some facing up to.

  I had to be firm with myself in sitting down and continuing to talk.

  ‘How much have you got around the Continent?’ I asked, thus evidencing at once that I was a good deal under Gavin Mogridge’s thumb.

  ‘The Continent?’ It appeared that Fish had to run the meaning of the word to earth somewhere deep down in his mind. But he continued with the unfaltering politeness he seldom failed to manage. ‘I’ve never been there at all. Except as a kid. My parents brought me on a trip home before I was old enough to have to go to Geelong, and they traipsed me around quite a bit. I remember hardly anything about it – except seeing a very fast ball-game, rather like what’s called pelota, played somewhere in Italy. I think pelota’s Spanish, but I’m pretty sure this was in Italy.’ Fish paused. He had made a big effort. ‘I’m afraid this is awfully dull for you, Duncan,’ he added idiotically.

  ‘Why don’t we go? In the long vac. That’s in no time now, Martin.’

  ‘Go abroad?’ Fish stared at me in inert surprise. ‘That would be terribly nice,’ he added quickly. ‘But you see, I’ll be having a good deal of work to do in the long vac. Catching up, as a matter of fact. The truth is that I haven’t been a hundred-percent lately. Not altogether. A little worried. I don’t know if you’ve noticed it.’

  It looked like a point at which to give up. But I was getting annoyed with Fish, and this unreasonable reaction in myself made me decide for another round.

  ‘You run a car, don’t you?’ I demanded.

  ‘A car? Oh, yes—I have a car. Somehow, I don’t seem to have been using it much lately.’

  ‘We could go in it. That would be marvellous for me, Martin. Of course, I’d go shares in the petrol, just as in everything else.’

  ‘But there’s been this war. We don’t really know anything about the conditions.’


  ‘Bugger the conditions. American tourists talk about the conditions. The conditions are quite good enough for you and me. I’ve been in France, and I know.’ I said this with all the air of a travelled man. I had spent a fortnight with a school party in Normandy immediately before my most recent – and alarming – stay at Corry, and we had enjoyed horrifying glimpses of whole landscapes blighted and cities blown to bits. This had been my only experience of travel, although I wouldn’t have been in a hurry to admit it. When Ninian and I were quite small, and before the barriers of war had gone up, it had never occurred to our father, deep though his attachment to France was, to take us or despatch us there. Or perhaps it had – since sporadically he was by no means neglectful of us – but he had judged the proper age for it would come when we were not quite children any longer. He would certainly have thought it money poorly spent if all we had been equipped to retain in memory had been, as with Fish, a notably exciting ball-game.

  I urged my project for a Grand Tour upon Fish for some time, but he didn’t respond. Indeed, after having emerged from himself to the extent of exhibiting a mild play of feeling about this and that, he now seemed to be retreating again into his own misery more deeply than ever. He sat looking at me unrecognisingly, and with a frown creasing his brow. It may fleetingly have struck me that the frown was new, and at least belonged to a man who had started thinking of something. But I went away more discouraged than before, feeling that there was nothing for it but to bring in dons and doctors. Perhaps this was why I hesitated when I ran into the White Rabbit.

  It had been one of those odd hesitations which take the form of not knowing on which side to pass the other person. Quite suddenly, and although there is plenty of room for orderly and composed behaviour, one is dodging right and left like a panicked and incompetent rugger player. It is a phenomenon that probably figures in Freud’s Psychopathology of Everyday Life, a work with which I had no doubt become familiar by that time. But at the moment I was thinking only of being properly apologetic to Tindale, whose entrance to his own rooms I appeared to be obstructing in a spirit of tiresome and disrespectful frolic. I was there at all – down on the ground floor – only because it had come into my head to seek further advice from other of my contemporaries, and notably from Colin Badgery, who had rooms in Howard. Badgery – that John Ruskin Scholar a year ahead of me who had assisted in my frantic hunt for Timbermill – I was inclined at this period to treat as something of a guru. It may have been because my mind was on this quest that the dodging business in front of Tindale overcame me.