‘That’s good! And dinna fash yoursel, Dunkie. I ken weel about the spoons and forks.’
This told me two things: that a faint apprehensiveness I had signalled was meeting with a proper rebuke, and that my father had been fortifying himself against his journey with a dram or two. It was chiefly when mildly elevated that he made these random incursions into dialect.
‘How are you, Dunkie?’
‘I’m fine, thanks.’ I hadn’t had a word from my father since the beginning of term. But his tone, anxious and therefore suddenly guarded, brought back to me how unhappy – and no doubt tiresome – I had been, only a few weeks before, during the Easter vacation. Oxford – no more, after all, than a second brief eight weeks of it – had lost reality, dissolved like a dream, before my train reached Durham. But Edinburgh had taken on no countervailing solidity; it was a ghost town in which I thought I knew nobody and felt like a tourist. I was astonished at a state of mind that seemed so like affectation, and sought various remedies. One day, for example, I tried visiting my old school. It was a regular thing for boys who had recently gone on to a university to drop in and wander round, and they would usually be invited to stay to lunch, or to witness some match or other judged to be of importance. Plenty of people with whom I had been on more or less equal terms were now putting in a third year in the sixth form. But I got no further than staring at the place from the gates and wondering if it had ever really harboured me. All these feelings of alienation stemmed from the single fact that Janet was at the other end of Scotland, a circumstance perhaps exacerbated by her having formed the bad habit of sending me an occasional picture-postcard. The island of Skye didn’t appear to run to anything very attractive of that sort. The messages were mostly brief accountings of what she had read, as if she was reporting to a tutor at a correspondence college while herself inhabiting a region in which real things happened. This was the facet of our developing – or attenuating – relationship which I distrusted most of all.
My father had to head off my mother from pouring sympathetic remarks and romantic laments over my dejected head, and he himself said nothing. But I found that I was spending more and more time in his studio, and this without any awareness that I was being coaxed into doing so. I would be squaring up a canvas for him, or doing the numerous cleaning and tidying jobs such a place requires, and which prosperous painters retain semi-skilled assistants to perform. He talked as he worked – rather, I thought, as a surgeon must do while he operates: wholly absorbed in his task, yet with an equal care to maintain in his pupils an unflagging attention to the work of his hands. That I wasn’t a painter myself seemed irrelevant; he was telling me where, in a general way, I belonged, and that for an artist there is no comfort except in the sweat and frustration and elusive triumph of making what it is in him to make. It was this stern message that was being carried in my father’s low-toned technical talk. He was perhaps looking forward to what time would falsify: my becoming something other than one of the competent entertainers of my day. Yet I knew I shouldn’t stand or fall in his regard according to any eventual revelation of my quality. It is part of nature’s general wastefulness that in art, too, only a few of the called are chosen. My father respected all the called alike, and appeared to have no difficulty in reconciling an affection for indifferent performers with a strong dislike of indifferent performances.
Thinking of all this as I hung up the telephone, I was ashamed of my uneasiness at the thought of my father let loose in the Lodging. It is an odd fact that when schoolboys transform themselves into undergraduates they scarcely shed at all their alarmed sense of parents, uncles, aunts and sisters (but not brothers) as fatally inclined to social solecism. I remember our Captain of Rugger at school – an almost god-like figure, with international caps most certainly ahead of him – as reduced to a state of nervous near-prostration by the liability of his father (an athlete with a Soccer background) to shout from the touch-line the wrong thing at the wrong time. These states of apprehensiveness are very little connected with social disparities or insufficiency. They may be remarked in the eye of young noblemen leading old noblemen around. Nothing better instances the edginess of lingering adolescence.
But I was to have a further anxiety about Mrs Pococke’s dinner-party. It cropped up as soon as I returned to Tony and told him the state of the case.
‘You’d better have your hair cut,’ he said. ‘And washed. It’s rather fetching, as a matter of fact, when floppy. It represents, incidentally, your best chance with Bedworth, if you ask me.’
‘I don’t think Bedworth notices carnal things.’ Except when irritable, I suffered Tony’s recurrent reference to this supposed passion of mine patiently. ‘But perhaps Mrs Pococke does.’
‘Certainly she does. An honest female animal lurks in your honoured hostess. I intend to essay the wench. Oh, by the way, don’t forget to wear a gown.’
‘Of course not.’ I looked at Tony stonily, supposing that this was a malicious attempt to have me make a fool of myself.
‘Seriously. You must put on your gown. At least it will match quite well with the natty d-j outfit.’
‘Don’t be a bloody fool. I don’t put on a gown to go to tea with the Talberts in Headington. Why should it be different dining with the Pocockes in the Lodging?’
‘Because, my child, our Provost has just started his spell as Vice-Chancellor of the university. Don’t you know that?’
‘Yes, I do.’
‘Very well. Gowns are always worn in the presence of the Vice-Chancellor. Repeat, always. If your Mrs Triplett sent you a card for a sherry party, it might say, The Vice-Chancellor will be present, and that means gowns. Until Pococke ceases being V-C, it’s the same drill even for the merest social binge in the Lodging. My father explained it all to me, as a matter of fact.’
‘I see. Well, thank you very much.’ I was appalled to think how easily I might have committed what would clearly be the staggering floater of appearing gownless as a guest bidden to Mrs Pococke’s feast. The advantages of having a father who had been a member of the college before one seemed for the moment enormous. Quite soon, however, doubts set in. They were to the credit, if not of my intelligence, at least of my canny nature. I tackled Tony again. ‘Look here,’ I said, ‘about that gown-business. Don’t you think it may apply only to senior members?’
‘No, I don’t.’
‘But look!’ Tony’s reply had been confident, but I thought I had spotted it as coming after a moment’s hesitation. ‘Listen!’ I said urgently – for this crisis was getting me down. ‘Last term I went to dinner with my old headmaster in Keble. He’s some sort of honorary don there, and turns up on them from time to time. He was moved to give me a square meal, along with an obscure man from Trinity who was the top physics egg-head of my school. Conversation didn’t exactly flow.’
‘Be relevant,’ Tony said.
‘But at least it was a slap-up high table affair, with no nonsense about post-war rationing. And floods of port and brandy in common room afterwards. The cigars came from Havana.’
‘Well, well!’ Almost for the first time, I had succeeded in impressing Tony.
‘Finally, there was a stuff called Mar. You pronounce it that way. But you spell it M-a-r-c.’
‘At Keble?’ It was evident that Tony was bewildered. ‘I thought Keble was just a place full of suckling black beetles.’
‘So it is. But of Marc, as well. These places have their ways. Like Campion Hall.’
‘Campion Hall? Duncan, you’ve been in there too?’ Never before had I quite got Tony down like this.
‘Oh, yes. The Jesuits are after me, you know. It’s perfectly natural. You’re an ordinary commonplace papist, who doesn’t much interest them. I had Catholic ancestors about two hundred years ago. Naturally, these people over the road have designs on me.’
‘Ancestors on that classy distaff side?’ With this, Tony rallied slightly. ‘And they have Marc at Campion Hall?’
‘Oh, no –
and their cigars come from Jamaica. It’s an austere set-up, the Society of Jesus. But they do have the most marvellous malt whisky. From Islay. I’ll bet the Pocockes don’t have that.’
‘I suppose not.’ Tony seemed almost crushed by this idiotic display of what was soon to be called one-upmanship. ‘Duncan, what are we talking about?’
‘Wearing gowns. If a don goes to dine with a don at high table in another college, he wears a gown. But if an undergraduate goes to dine at a high table he doesn’t. That’s what we were told in advance about Keble, and it held for Campion Hall, too. If a high table dresses for dinner, your host tells you so, and you do, too. But you don’t go in a gown. I think the rule may apply to this Vice-Chancellor business.’
‘It does seem possible.’ Tony, acknowledging the sober gravity of the issue, had turned serious. ‘I’ll tell you what, Duncan. You ought to ask your tutor. Yes—ask Talbert. I’m told he’s very keen on the correct thing. It’s common among those of the learned late risen from the people.’
‘So it is.’ With a readiness unbecoming in a crofter’s grandson, I concurred in this blandly snobbish observation. ‘Talbert told me I mustn’t sign letters to him Yours faithfully. I’d never written a letter to him in my life.’
‘That’s what Robert Damian calls prophylaxis. Yes, I think you should ask Talbert. An answer straight from the donkey’s mouth.’
‘Albert Talbert is one of the most eminent scholars in the university – and the only don in this effete college who isn’t totally and absolutely obscure.’ It was our habit to reserve exclusively to ourselves the right of exhibiting our several tutors in any ludicrous light; aspersions by others we snubbed at once. ‘But that’s a good idea. Talbert will put me in the picture, right away.’
Having now begun to read for my Honour School, I was in the enjoyment of two full-dress tutorials weekly. Each of them was a tête-à-tête. At that time, although commoners were frequently taught ‘doubled up’, and thus had the support of a companion in masking their ignorance and idleness, scholars and exhibitioners (who might be equally idle and ignorant) were obliged to go it alone. This class distinction was later to be loosened up, and indeed progressive tutors were already ignoring it, and isolating or assorting pupils as their instinct (or their own idleness) prompted. Talbert, however, was scarcely progressive. As for Timbermill out in Linton Road, he appeared to occupy a perplexing position as a kind of gentleman or amateur tutor, and he told me that he had never had two undergraduates together in his room in his life.
At least I enjoyed variety, for they were a contrasting couple. Timbermill’s enormous room, for example, harboured much more than several thousand books. Most prominent was what I for long took to be the debris of an air-raid, oddly transported to the attic floor of the villa. It consisted mostly of heaps of broken pottery, mixed up with chunks of rusty or corroded metal here and there. Later I discovered that in one of the shadowy bays or open-ended subsidiary chambers into which the room on all sides dissolved a start had been made on arranging bits and pieces of this detritus on shelves. It had all, it seemed, been dug out of the rubbish dumps of Saxons and Angles round about what I thought of as Beowulf’s time, and Timbermill knew more about these vestiges of a heroic age than anybody else in the world. And he wasn’t only cataloguing them; he was piecing them together with seccotine. It was clearly a job requiring two or three expert assistants at the least, but it seemed that Timbermill wouldn’t let anybody else in on it. Oddly enough, I was myself going to be the first person in whose favour he breached this rule. But that wasn’t to be for some time yet. I simply thought of him as a near-manic character who taught me once a week. But who really taught me. I was mad keen on being taught by Timbermill, even when he was only insisting that I learn how to make Anglo-Saxon noises and sort out Anglo-Saxon verbs. This wasn’t exactly going to last a lifetime. But I was never to have a similar intellectual experience again.
Talbert was equally learned in his own line – and that two such men should have found themselves closeted solus for an hour a week with a raw youth indisposed to think about anything except how to write plays exemplifies the curiously prodigal character of what is called the Oxford tutorial system. But Talbert, unlike Timbermill, was incapable of putting his learning across; his tutorials, regarded other than in a spirit of comedy, could only be termed scandalous nullities. My sole real contact with him was during those rare and perplexing moments in which – commonly for the most tenuous or elusive of reasons – he manifested symptoms of suppressed but inordinate mirth or glee. And if the man himself didn’t do much communicating, neither did that room in which he no doubt thought of himself as conscientiously discharging his tutorial function. I have recorded that it was very small – smaller even than the rooms in his modest domestic abode in Old Road – and furnished with a square table, two upright chairs, and an empty bookcase. From an electric light depending from the ceiling there further depended one of those long strips of thickly sticky paper which represented in that era civilisation’s only means of liquidating flies. If, having read my essay, I was prompted to catch Talbert’s eye and endeavour to elicit from him the divine gift of articulate speech, I had to edge my head either to the right or left of this feebly lethal object. I used to long for Talbert to produce a pipe – having read of some great Victorian, perhaps Tennyson or Carlyle, as accustomed to brood in comfortable taciturnity behind clouds of smoke from one. But all Talbert smoked was a succession of small cheap cigarettes, Woodbines or ‘gaspers’, to which he probably regarded his honourable poverty as confining him. He invariably held these miserable objects between a finger and thumb in a manner somehow suggesting that he had never manipulated a cigarette before. The silence preserved between us was in these circumstances peculiarly trying.
But on the occasion upon which I presented Talbert with my problem he had proved in quite a conversable mood. I had not, it is true, had much success in interesting him in my views on John Lyly’s Euphues, the Anatomy of Wit or even in its stirring sequel, Euphues and his England, indeed, I had merely been instructed to write an essay on Sir Philip Sidney’s The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia for the following week. But then, after no more than five or six meditative minutes, Talbert communicated to me an anecdote, literary in flavour, which appeared to concern a dispute which had once arisen between Swinburne and Jowett on the substitution of a choriamb for an iambic metron somewhere in Aeschylus. This, although not directly relevant to Euphues, could be received with respect as interesting in itself, and I managed this so well that Talbert went on to describe a quarrel between Swinburne and Rossetti. (Talbert never said simply ‘Rossetti’ but always ‘the fat rogue Rossetti’ – and this invariably with his intimation of deep mirth.) So I plucked up courage and spoke out.
‘Sir, I have to go to dinner in the Lodging on Thursday. And I’m wondering—’ I broke off in confusion at this point, because Talbert’s amusement had in some indefinable manner switched from Rossetti to myself. What seemed a boring hour with Talbert could have the unexpected effect – again indefinable – of sharpening one’s wits, and I realised that he was extracting remote entertainment from a form of words betraying my sense that I was facing a chore. I then saw that this was encouraging. My tutor, although so unfathomably deep a scholar, was at least listening to me – something it would have been optimistic to predicate of him when I had been expressing opinions on the role of Euphues’s tiresome friend Philautus. ‘It’s about what to wear,’ I went on hopefully. ‘Mrs Pococke has said a black tie—’
‘Good heavens!’ Talbert was much shocked. ‘Has there been a death in the Royal Family?’
‘Sir?’
‘Has somebody fallen out of an aeroplane? Aeroplanes have become extremely hazardous since ceasing to be biplanar. You must certainly wear a black tie. All members of this college are expected to do so until after the state funeral.’
‘No, sir – that’s not it. A black evening tie.’
‘That is another m
atter. You don’t always make yourself clear, Monboddo.’
‘Pattullo.’
‘Pattullo.’ Talbert, who was now speaking with profound gravity, admitted the correction with his customary reluctance. ‘But you do very well to consult me. With a black tie of that description you must wear the shorter formal jacket. There is your answer.’
‘Yes, sir. Thank you.’ I wondered whether to give up, and decided to persevere. ‘But there’s the question of whether I ought to wear a gown.’
‘A gown?’ Talbert stared at me blankly. Although I was wearing my gown at that moment, and he himself wore his half-a-dozen times a week, he might never have heard of such a garment in relation to a male person. It was almost as if I had been making some flippant proposal to appear at the Lodging in drag.
‘This,’ I said desperately, and momentarily assumed a batlike posture on my hard chair. ‘Do I wear this on top of my dinner-jacket?’
‘Dear me, no.’ Talbert was now being entirely patient; he appreciated being appealed to as an authority on a matter of social form. ‘The gown would, of course, be proper were you summoned before the Provost formally. But on a social occasion, no. How wise of you to ask me, Pattullo. The Arcadia. You will find Feuillerat’s edition adequate to your purpose, although I am sorry to say it is gravely defective in many ways. I pointed this out – charitably, I hope – in the Review of English Studies some years ago.’
‘I’ll look you up, sir. But the point is that the Provost has just become Vice-Chancellor. So people say there’s a different sort of drill.’
‘Dear me! You are perfectly right. Yes. I think you will eventually perform creditably in the Schools.’
‘Thank you very much.’ I was childishly overjoyed at this irrelevant remark. ‘And I do wear my gown?’
‘Ah, that is an interesting question.’ Talbert’s deliberative manner would now not have disgraced the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council. ‘In the case of a senior member the position is entirely clear. We always wear gowns in the presence – other than purely fortuitously in the presence – of a Vice- Chancellor. But the correct thing for an undergraduate who is going to dine with one is harder to determine. Reflection is required, and inquiry may be possible.’
Young Pattullo Page 21
