Young Pattullo

by J. I. M. Stewart

  ‘Well, yes – it is right. But not wenches, exactly. I’d say approved young gentlewomen.’

  ‘No matter,’ Tony interposed. My report on Mrs Triplett’s set-up was interesting him. Later, he would denounce me scathingly for having kept dark about it. ‘Fish is quite presentable, despite his obscure colonial origins.’

  ‘The girls are mostly foreigners. The deceased Triplett was Foreign Secretary, or an ambassador, or something of that kind; and when the widow Triplett isn’t milking cows she likes to have the old polyglot stir around her.’ I caught Badgery’s eye, and realised he was taking note of my being not quite easy about these tea-parties. ‘”Foreigners” probably isn’t quite right,’ I said. ‘There’s a strong bias towards the Empire, or the Commonwealth, or whatever it is.’

  ‘Favourable milieu for Fish,’ Damian said.

  ‘Well, I’m not sure. Some of them are black—’

  ‘Black?’ Tony repeated, surprised.

  ‘Quite, quite black. And others are quite, quite yellow. An acquired taste, I’d suppose, in either case.’

  ‘Unlike cows,’ Tony said.

  ‘Oh, shut up!’ If I snapped this at Tony, it was because I was conscious of myself becoming sillier and sillier. ‘But most of them are brown. Brown girls in all sorts of subtle shades. I like the ones from the Shan States best. They’re rather small, and their brown has a hint of gold to it.’

  ‘The Shan States?’ Tony was round-eyed before my unwary admission of this exotic interest. ‘Does that mean the Road to Mandalay?’

  ‘More or less, I suppose.’

  ‘Where the flying-Fishes play,’ Damian said.

  There was a moment’s silence, nobody thinking highly of this rudimentary joke. The pause was broken by Badgery, who was clanking hospitably among the beer-cans.

  ‘Do we understand,’ he asked me, ‘that you feel much attracted by these dusky beauties?’

  ‘I’d say I do, rather.’

  This was another of the occasions upon which, in the middle of much laboured nonsense, Badgery displayed his power of eliciting a fragment of truth. I had found one or two of the girls we were discussing very exciting. Their appeal lay as much in their miniaturised dimensions as in their complexions; they’d have been, fantasy hinted to me, marvellously handlable. But something deeper was involved. Formative months were passing over me; I was tidying up on a late adolescence; I was more aware of necessities not to be coped with in what Stumpe had called quiet half-hours with sex. These were commonplace circumstances; added to them was the quality of my relationship to the distant, and now elusive, Janet. I had begun to whisper to myself that this had been a boy-and-girl affair; at the same time I was unwilling to think of Janet except in the context of a life-time’s fidelity. So Mrs Triplett’s Burmese princesses (for I believe they were mostly that) became for me the channel for a tide of feeling which I told myself could run blamelessly in parallel with one both more ideal and more realistic – realistic in the sense of being supported within the embankments of a common culture and shared interests. (Janet Finlay, to put it more simply, was the girl next door.) I was telling myself that East is East and West is West, and that the two can be quite reasonably separated for certain purposes. It was ignoble, this phase of feeling; and I think it made me sometimes see myself as potentially in some not very edifying short story by Colonel Morrison’s friend Willie Maugham. But it was to be a situation which, like the majority of situations, never came to anything much. I wasn’t – I have to face it – a young man particularly good at forcing the moment to its crisis.

  ‘It seems to me,’ Tony was saying, ‘that our sly young friend Pattullo here has been behaving in a meanly dog-in-the-mangerish way. And he has told me quite a packet of lies from time to time about his Sunday afternoon toddles.’

  ‘The point is Fish,’ I said. ‘And I see no solution du côté de chezTriplett. The Australians have something called a Colour Bar, after all.’

  ‘But we propose no more than an emergency and salubrious liaison,’ Badgery said reprovingly. ‘And I’m interested, by the way, in this business of brown girls. There’s a don somewhere – I think it’s at Magdalen – who has written a book about a chap called John. It’s one of those pilgrimage fables of an edifying sort. John is rather like Duncan, as a matter of fact. He wants to be serious and truthful, like those boring people in E. M. Forster. He even wants to find God, which is outside the Forsterian terms of reference.’

  ‘Not at all,’ Tony said with one of his random admissions of literacy. ‘God si Love.’

  ‘God si Balls,’ Badgery said robustly. ‘That’s just a jab at Hindu toshery. The point about this John is that, as he piously journeys, he’s continually ambushed by brown girls. That’s what they’re called: brown girls. They tumble him in the hay. I’m wondering whether they have their origin in Mrs Triplett’s salon. It might be a fruitful field for literary research. That laborious man Bedworth might do his B.Litt. on it.’

  ‘Isn’t it time,’ Robert Damian demanded abruptly, ‘that we were talking sense about this hapless Fish? He doesn’t sound a bit funny to me.’

  ‘The night is yet young,’ Badgery said. He glanced at the depleted crate. ‘But yes – perhaps you’re right. Midnight has come, and the great Christ Church Bell – as your pet poet says. We now listen to Robert. He’s the first I call.’

  ‘Very well.’ Damian was attractive to me as possessing almost my own disabling juvenility of appearance – a matter of being pink and white – but he owned much self-confidence too.

  ‘This talk of an instant replacement for the disgusting Martine is futile. She’d be as useless as instant coffee.’

  ‘Could any of these girls,’ Tony asked me, ‘be described as coffee-coloured? It sounds less glamorous than brown with a hint of gold.’

  ‘You, Mumford, belt up,’ Damian said. ‘If you’re going to listen, you’re going to listen. And, for a start, let me tell you Duncan’s right on the bloody ball when he says the man needs a doctor. He’s a cot case, if ever I heard of one. Still, his condition’s obviously benign.’

  ‘Benign?’ I asked.

  ‘Opposite of malignant. Fish is clearly an ordinary virile Australian who happens to be in a mild depression. But it’s reactive and not endogenous. So the prognosis is O.K. It’s what we nearly always find. Handle the thing vigorously, and Fish can be safely returned from deep misery to ordinary human unhappiness. That’s what Freud liked to promise his patients at the end of Interview One. Not, of course, that Freud knew how to go about it. We do.’

  ‘”We”,’ I said, ‘meaning yourself and that equally eminent Behaviourist?’ Damian, a freshman reading Physiology as Oxford’s regular start to becoming a doctor, commonly used this pronoun to indicate persons working on the furthest frontiers of scientific medicine.

  ‘Well, no—not really.’ Damian remained serious. ‘I do think it will become possible to tinker with human personality, and control human behaviour, on Pavlovian or Watsonian lines. What they call brain-washing is obviously a crude start on that – which is why Colin here thinks of it as sinister. Perhaps it is. Anyway, it looks like being about as laborious as psychoanalysis. At present, you can just get a bad joke out of it – like that one of confronting Fish with his Martine to the accompaniment of loud bangs and nasty falls. What we’re really working on most hopefully is psychotropic drugs.’

  ‘Giving Fish pills?’ I asked. We were being attentive now. I felt that, in a broad way, Robert Damian knew his stuff.

  ‘There are quite a lot of pills, and others are coming along.’

  ‘He’ll have to take them three times a day after meals?’ I was disliking what I heard. If Damian had recommended that Fish should take to the bottle and drown his sorrows as he might, I’d probably have been slightly revolted. But now I’d been given a vision of Fish fumbling furtively in a little chemist’s box for something that would mysteriously take hold of what, whether fallaciously or not, he probably thought of as the core
of his being. This wasn’t revolting; it was frightening. It was much more frightening then, no doubt, than it would be now.

  ‘More or less that,’ Damian said. ‘And for weeks and weeks. They’re not like narcotics or crude hallucinogens. They get to work rather slowly.’

  ‘Do you know how they get to work?’ Tony asked.

  ‘No we don’t. Different chaps have different theories. But all medicine is surprisingly empirical. People just notice things. As in the penicillin business.’

  ‘But that’s not quite the same,’ Badgery said. ‘You can’t just go on mixing recondite drugs in endless permutations and feeding them to loonies to see if anything happens. It would be like the monkeys producing Shakespeare’s plays on typewriters.’

  ‘Quite true. But we needn’t go into that. Anyway, I don’t think they’ll give Fish pills. They’ll deal with him by other methods. I don’t mean asking him if he can remember what happened to him in the wood-shed, or if he ever misinterpreted the behaviour of mum and dad in bed. Other physical methods.’

  ‘Mightn’t it be better,’ I asked, suddenly turning round on myself, ‘if he were just left alone, after all? By doctors and people, that is. Just having us do our best in a companionable way. There is that thing I was being funny about. Time the healer, or whatever I said. These things must wear off.’

  ‘Almost certainly, but we can’t ever be quite sure. If he has a certain constitutional vulnerability, then this neurotic bout, if left untreated, may just possibly deepen into an untouchable melancholia. No, the only safe thing will be ECT. And the sooner they get cracking the better. In other words, we ought to get cracking ourselves.’

  ‘Just how?’ Tony asked.

  ‘Go straight across to the Dean, yank him out of bed, and panic him. Or the Provost himself, for that matter; I’d like to see that bland hauteur with the wind up. But the main thing is to have Fish hospitalised within the next hour or two. So come on.’

  Damian had stood up, a simple action which shook the other three of us considerably. I told myself that he was going to be a good doctor, and that in the future he’d save lives by simple decisiveness of this sort. I felt I had to say something, nevertheless.

  ‘Look!’ I said. ‘Hold hard a minute. Is this ECT thing electric shocks?’

  ‘That’s right – although it’s an uninformed way to put it.’

  ‘I don’t believe it’s anything of the kind. And isn’t it another of those irrational things, hit on by sheer chance?’

  ‘Oh, quite probably.’ Damian didn’t hesitate for a moment. ‘Like insulin, you know. You pump it in for diabetes, and find it’s controlling schizophrenia.’

  ‘Fish is going to be taken away, and be tied up, and have electrodes or whatever they’re called—’

  ‘Don’t get excited, Duncan. It can be made to sound horrific – and I suppose it really is, in a way. But they have various dodges for toning the drama down. Besides, he won’t feel anything at all.’

  ‘Won’t he writhe in his bonds, and produce noises commonly heard only by the Gestapo?’

  ‘Oh, stuff it, Duncan! Fish can’t be subjected to any treatment without his consent. And it mayn’t be that treatment. I’m not a doctor.’ Damian seemed just to have remembered this. ‘I may be quite wrong on what will be thought about him. But he should see someone now.’

  ‘Yes,’ Badgery said, ‘that’s true.’

  ‘We ought to wait till tomorrow,’ I said, my change of front hardening. ‘We ought to sleep on it, before setting so drastic a ball rolling.’

  ‘I don’t agree.’ Badgery had got up too. ‘Come on – all three of you.’

  ‘No.’

  It was Tony who had spoken, and we all stared at him. The single monosyllable had come from him with a startling effect of command. It wasn’t a turn I recall his ever putting on again during his remaining undergraduate days. We were brought to a halt as abruptly as by a shout on a parade ground.

  ‘We’re all concerned about this Fish,’ Tony went on. He was entirely relaxed again. ‘Half-a-dozen other people are as well. But it’s Duncan who has been carrying the can. Think, you two. If you go off to the Dean or somebody now, you’ll be gabbling to him about a situation you hardly know about except at second-hand. And that pretty well goes for me too. So if Duncan’s instinct has turned against this, I back Duncan. I’m most impressed by what Robert says – and I can see, as I’d expect, that you, Colin, are as well.’ Tony paused – it might have been said to radiate a sense that he held the highest opinion of us all. I could once more have reflected, had I not been too anxious about other things, that homo politicus in his embryonic form was before us. ‘But it just happens to be Duncan who has an intimate sense of the thing, and I think we must leave the responsibility with him for the moment.’

  ‘For twenty-four hours,’ I said.

  ‘Something like that.’ I could see that Tony disapproved of being unnecessarily specific about one’s pledges. ‘And now we’d better go to bed.’

  This carried the day – or rather the night. Tony and I walked back to Surrey together. It was late; the quads were deserted; only once did we hear revellers conscientiously bawling and breaking things in some distant rooms.

  ‘He’s still got his light on,’ Tony said quietly.

  I took this to be counsel.

  ‘All right,’ I said. ‘I’ll have another go.’

  Tony turned into his own quarters, and I continued upstairs. Before I reached Fish’s landing I encountered his neighbour, Clive Kettle, coming down. The light was dim. He stopped as soon as he recognised me.

  ‘Pattullo,’ he said, ‘are you by any chance on your way to see Martin Fish?’

  ‘Yes, I am.’ Kettle might have supposed it more probable that I was going on further to call on my own contemporary, Cyril Bedworth.

  ‘I was coming down to see you, as a matter of fact,’ Ketde said nervously. ‘Because I know you’ve been trying to help Martin.’

  ‘Well, yes.’ Kettle’s choice of words embarrassed me. I might have said to Bedworth, ‘Cyril, help me with this bloody awful text’, but I couldn’t possibly have said to Fish, ‘Martin, I do want to help you if I can.’ I searched for a further reply. ‘He does seem to need sorting out.’

  ‘He desperately needs sharing,’ Kettle said – thus further revealing that we were of different tribes. ‘He’s been in deep distress.’

  ‘Girl-trouble can be pretty grim while it lasts. But that’s all it has been, as I expect you know.’ I produced this coarse-grained remark quite against my own sense of the matter. A kind of instant jealousy was involved. ‘Have you turned the chaplain on him?’ I asked, more brutally still.

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  The manner of Kettle’s saying this pulled me up. I hardly knew him at all. Tony and I – and probably Badgery and Damian as well – regarded Christians in the college as harmless eccentrics with whom it wasn’t awfully easy to get on. For the moment, however, I felt rebuked.

  ‘I’m sure that’s all to the good,’ I said. ‘It’s no doubt the chaplain’s thing, in a way. But I feel there’s a certain urgency about Martin’s case. Medically, one might say.’

  ‘Medically?’ Kettle looked blank. ‘Well, yes—perhaps.’

  ‘Do come down and have a word about it before I see him. I’m glad you thought of me. I have been seeing him quite a lot.’

  On this conciliatory note, we went downstairs together. I found myself hoping Tony wouldn’t stick his head out and observe this new development. I was certain he wouldn’t think much of it.

  ‘What some of us feel,’ I said when we had sat down, ‘is that it’s clinical, really.’ I didn’t gain much confidence from this vogue word. ‘Martin’s in a depression – the sort that can take a man into the bin. And he’s just not reasonable. Have you met the girl?’

  ‘Oh, no!’ The idea of this appeared to alarm Kettle. ‘I don’t think she can have behaved too well.’

  ‘That’s the understatement of
the year. Martine’s a real horror. After the first nasty shock of being expertly tortured, and if he had any sanity at all, Martin ought to have been damned glad to be shut of her. But you might as well put that point of view to the college cat. I can’t make any impression on him. But what about you? I suppose you’ve known him longer than I have.’

  ‘Yes, I have. And he has always been very friendly. He is still, in a way. That’s why I’ve tried getting him to pray with me.’

  ‘I see.’ Again I felt foolish embarrassment. ‘And he wouldn’t play—pray, I mean?’

  ‘Oh, but yes. He agreed to try.’

  ‘He’s always very polite.’

  ‘Polite?’ Kettle took this fresh brutality gravely. ‘We did pray together. An hour or so ago, as a matter of fact. And I don’t think it’s been quite in vain. One or two things he said made me feel that. It seemed to me he was coming to a better sense of the matter. And yet I’m puzzled, all the same. That’s why I thought I’d come in and have a talk with you. He mentioned you several times.’

  ‘What sort of things did he say?’ I was disconcerted to think of Fish offering a word or two about me between bouts of intercessory prayer. Still, if he pulled himself straight by way of the comforts of religion, that was all right by me. If he spent the rest of his undergraduate days scurrying in and out of the chilly college chapel, he’d be in a blessed state indeed compared with his recent experience, and I’d continue to like him quite a lot. I was coming rather to like Kettle, for that matter. His concern was clearly serious and admirable. ‘Did he say anything about Martine?’ I amplified.

  ‘He didn’t mention her specifically. But I’m sure he was thinking about her. I believe he was realising it had been an unsanctified relationship. Something entirely of the flesh.’

  ‘I’d say it was that, all right.’ This time, I had less difficulty with Kettle’s vocabulary. ‘But the flesh does seem able to take bloody awful swipes at the spirit, doesn’t it? I’m not an authority. But it seems to me you go after something you call cunt, or tail, or a free poke – there are any number of care-free words for it – and before you know where you are it’s making you shiver in your private parts. Your real private parts, right in your ruddy soul.’