Young Pattullo

by J. I. M. Stewart

  ‘Surely there must be a rule?’

  ‘Precedent, yes, Monboddo – but a rule, no.’

  ‘Pattullo!’

  ‘Pattullo. It is a matter of courtesy rather than prescription. But I will let you have my opinion next week. The Arcadia.’’

  ‘But the dinner’s on Thursday,’ I said despairingly. ‘It looks as if I’ll just have to guess.’

  ‘Or you might use your common sense.’ Talbert produced this suddenly pungent remark without any change of tone. ‘What would that suggest to you?’

  ‘Erring on the formal side, I suppose.’

  ‘You appear to be a perfectly clear-headed young man.’ Talbert announced this conclusion much as if he had first set eyes on me fifty-five minutes before. ‘Don’t fail to consult Brunhuber.’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘Sir Philip Sidneys Arcadia und ihre Nachlaufer. A most commendable monograph – published, I think, in Nürnberg in 1903.’

  ‘Thank you very much.’ I made an unconvincing show of jotting down this reference in the margin of my dreary remarks on Euphues. One more Talbert tute was over.

  There were two ways in which I could entertain my father to lunch. I could take him into hall, in which case his surroundings would be magnificent and anybody I planted him down beside polite if not talkative. But he was not a man indifferent to what he ate, and as it was well on the cards that the meal provided would be appallingly bad he might be constrained to rise from it without any comment of a gastronomic sort. This would be unsatisfactory, and I decided for the alternative possibility. I’d give a luncheon party in my rooms.

  I have already chronicled that such a manner of entertaining had ceased to happen at all freely; it was insisted upon only by the most obstinately privileged; and permission had always to be obtained against a good deal of resistance from the Domestic Bursar. This college officer (as was prescriptive with us) was a retired rear-admiral, although being diminutive and jumpy he suggested what used to be called a powder-monkey rather than one dominating a quarter-deck (if that is what rear-admirals dominate). His appearance, however, was declared to be deceptive. In particular, he was accounted to command a great deal of guile in circumventing the desires and devices of undergraduates. It seemed to me, however, that I was in a strong position, especially if I began by masking my batteries. So I presented myself in his office.

  ‘My name’s Pattullo,’ I said. ‘I’d very much like, please, to give a luncheon party on Thursday. Quite a small one. I think for six.’

  ‘Ah, yes – Pattullo.’ The Bursar spoke as if he had heard a good deal about Pattullo, and all to so favourable an effect that he had been much looking forward to encountering him. ‘What staircase are you on?’

  ‘Surrey Four, sir.’

  ‘Oh, dear!’ The Bursar was dismayed. ‘That is rather tricky. Yes, as dodgy as anywhere in college, I’m afraid. A faithful old fellow, Jefkins, but getting on. One has to be considerate.’

  ‘Yes, of course.’ Jefkins was my scout, and his decrepitude was incontestable. ‘But I’m only one up.’

  ‘That’s a point, I agree.’ The Bursar didn’t seem to find it a composing one, however, since he had jumped to his feet, whipped off his spectacles, and started walking rapidly round his office in circles. This gyratory effect he enhanced by elevating the spectacles in air and rapidly rotating them in the manner of a child’s windmill. ‘And, of course, you are perfectly entitled to give a luncheon party – perfectly entitled.’ The Bursar enunciated this with great emphasis, and in a manner suggesting one member of an officer-class vindicating the rights of another. ‘Every day of the week – in theory. I just have to make sure, you know, that a man isn’t outrunning his means. Piling up a bill that won’t be too welcome at home. That sort of thing. Definitely told it was part of my job.’ He paused by a table at the far end of the room. There, apparently in much absence of mind, he flicked over the pages of a college roll. He was discovering what school I came from.

  ‘I think I can stand it – just once in the term.’ I managed both to hint awareness of his manoeuvre and to appear entirely unhuffed by it. ‘So will it be all right?’

  ‘Probably, probably. See the chef, anyway, to be going on with. But I still can’t promise, you know; I can’t promise at all. Anything may turn up. I believe Jefkins is subject to lumbago. In fact I’m sure he is.’ The Bursar had resumed his agitated pedestrianism. ‘So I may have to ask you to take your guests into hall. The common meal, of course. Yes, I’m afraid it just may happen that way. I hope you understand, Pattullo. I do hope you understand.’

  ‘Yes, of course. And I’m sure my father would enjoy lunching in hall very much. Only, he’d have less opportunity of meeting my friends. One likes to arrange for that sort of occasion in a civilised way.’

  ‘Exactly, exactly!’ The Bursar waved his spectacles violently. I didn’t think his vehemence really indicated his being impressed by a father’s thus being brought on parade. It must happen a good deal. ‘I’ll let you know. Good morning.’

  ‘Good morning, sir. And thank you.’ I moved to the door, and there contrived the appearance of one struck by an afterthought. ‘I suppose a dinner-party might be easier,’ I said. ‘There are those extra men who come in to relieve the scouts a bit in the evening. But it wouldn’t be any good on Thursday. My father’s engaged to dine in the Lodging. He’ll be spending the night there.’

  ‘Ah, yes.’ The Bursar spoke as one distinctly not interested. But I caught his glance, and detected in it a glint of amusement that momentarily reminded me of Albert Talbert. ‘See the chef, anyway. And tell him to finish off with his crème brûlée. Morning to you, young Pattullo.’

  I departed – with my sense of triumph mitigated by this further evidence of the wide currency of my sobriquet. I wondered whether I really looked years younger than anybody else in college.

  My father, myself, Tony, Mogridge, Bedworth, and Fish newly restored to us from his nursing home. I had decided it was to be a staircase affair, partly on the calculation that Jefkins would be more likely to behave well if gaining merit with a number of his charges simultaneously. It looked like being a successful party, my father proving to be both in good humour and on his best behaviour – conditions which by no means invariably coincided in him. Strangely enough, I’d have been quite as happy if he’d been mildly outrageous. For what troubled both Ninian’s and my own relations with him was his well-founded belief that as children he had hardly noticed us; being a model of propriety was somehow his way of coping with an intermittent sense of guilt about this. It was a phase of family history which I never succeeded in analysing. He was an abundantly affectionate man, and must have been so all through our childhood. He had, of course, had my mother’s burdens to shoulder, and perhaps he had come to think more of us when we were old enough to help him there. It must also have been a matter of his work; of a sustained effort of creation so concentrated that it had drained him of the ability to turn away to anything more taxing than convivial meetings with his fellow-artists. But one consequence of this was that we now, as a family, existed for the most part in a state of relaxed luxury, a sense that everything had come right. Not that we weren’t normal enough – by which I mean that we were all four of us capable of flares of mysterious resentment and hostility between ourselves. Comparing notes in objective and dispassionate moments, for example, Ninian and I discovered that we both rehearsed a good many more injurious speeches for delivery within our family context than we ever actually uttered. And I have no doubt that there continued to be times when our father resented us as chronic nuisances who refused to go away. We were an affectionate family, nevertheless. And we all adored my erratic mother.

  A son’s first formal entertainment of his father is obviously a milestone of note. If as a result of this I indulged in such reflections as are here set down, I also gave much thought to the party itself – an activity serving usefully to distract my mind from anything problematical in the contrasting feast wi
th which the day was to close. I wondered whether I ought to have somebody of my father’s own age to keep him in countenance among what it would be natural for him to regard as a pack of children. I even had the thought of inviting Talbert, but decided that the notice was too short to be polite in the case of one’s tutor. What I had in mind was that deep in Talbert as the learned world knew him there lurked another Talbert, intimated only by that strange sporadic glee, and that my father was the man to liberate him – even perhaps to establish a second daylight Talbert, periodically eruptive and in full control, after the fashion of those agreeably bizarre dissociated personalities of whom I had read in the course of my psychological inquiries. This shows that one ought not to arrange luncheon parties on fanciful grounds; had Talbert been present it is probable that gravity and decorum would have held sway throughout the meal.

  We did start off that way. There is no deference more unflawed than that accorded by young men to a friend’s parent on a first meeting, and my father was exposed to it stiffly even before we sat down. I’d foreseen this a little uneasily, feeling that he might become restive if confronted with too much English public-school stuff. Cyril Bedworth had been a kind of calculated hope here; if he ran to any awkwardness suggesting an odd-man-out my father would kindle to him at once. But Bedworth was unobtrusively respectful in the most orthodox way, differing from Tony and Mogridge, perhaps, only in being more aware of the eminent painter and less of the ordinary elder person as what should determine his attitude. And in this shallow matter of social responses Martin Fish as a contrasting note was no good at all. He was more royalist than the king. Nevertheless Fish attracted my father’s attention at once. This was because Fish was just back from the dead. Lazarus, I imagine, must for a time have found absolute wonder in the simplest sensuous qualities of the phenomenal world – been capable, as it were, of seeing a sherry glass as a chalice and a tablecloth as the garment of God. This is to exaggerate; I doubt whether, even with my knowledge of his recent adventure, I’d have divined Fish’s state if I hadn’t caught it telepathically from my father, who was himself intuitively aware of shades of feeling in this region. Certainly I saw that he was liking Fish – and as a result Fish shot up in my own regard. He was liking Fish rather more than he was liking Tony. I had told him on our drive from the station that my summer plans were changed, and that it wasn’t with Tony Mumford but with a man called Fish that I was going to Italy. Now, and as soon as he gathered which of these young men Fish was, he started talking about the Vatican. He had heard, whether correctly or not, that the galleries of the Vatican were already under siege by floods of post-war tourists, and he was insistent upon the importance of getting Fish and myself into those alarming proliferations out of hours. He knew just how to manage that. Fish took the information commendably in his stride. Bedworth was obviously impressed.

  It emerged from this that Fish liked painting. He asked whether my father knew the work of Hans Heysen. My father said he did, and that he judged it, on the whole, even better than that of his own old friend D. Y. Cameron. Fish didn’t pretend to have heard of D. Y. Cameron (as Tony would have been liable to do). But he said he had a Heysen in his rooms upstairs, and it would be nice if my father had time to go and look at it after lunch. My father agreed at once.

  ‘I have another painting, as a matter of fact,’ Fish said, ‘which perhaps you’d like to see too. Just as being thoroughly Australian. I don’t expect you’ll have heard of the painter. His name’s Sidney Nolan.’

  ‘Man!’ My father had stiffened abruptly. ‘Is it a dead sheep?’

  ‘Yes, it is.’ Fish was surprised. ‘Awfully dead, I’m afraid.’

  ‘I haven’t seen one of them. No, I haven’t.’ My father was distinguishably in a moment of crisis. His fellow-guests must have found this perplexing, but I knew at once that Nolan was a power in the land. My father was an extremely conservative painter; Monet had remained his master – and Monet had died, almost as old as Titian, a couple of years before I was born. When my father heard rumour of some new thing – of some new and potent thing – he was accustomed to hold serious debate as to whether he should expose himself to it. ‘I’ll see it,’ he now said with resolution. He might have been deciding to accept major surgery. ‘Yes, I’ll see it. After Duncan’s good meal.’

  ‘Luncheon is served!’

  Jefkins, who had been dozing on his feet in a corner of the room, was alerted by my father’s proviso, and now bawled out these words at the top of his voice. We sat down, and the conversation moved elsewhere. This was a relief. I had been afraid that Tony, who didn’t quite like Fish’s even so modestly holding the field, might assert his own status as a connoisseur and require my father to inspect his Roman bawdy-house across the landing. It was improbable that my father would behave himself before that triumph of Victorian kitsch. But this didn’t happen, and as the meal went on his contentment increased. His London trip had clearly gone well. (‘The man’s no Stubbs, but he knows his claret,’ he confided to the respectful Mogridge seated beside him – the reference being clearly to his host of the evening before, Sir Alfred Munnings.) He had particularly enjoyed what he called mysteriously ‘a grand crack with Jack about Will’, and had heard a number of good stories. He recounted the two or three of these which were likely to be intelligible to us.

  Long before the crème brûlée, my father had established himself with my companions. I knew this when they all started asking him questions, since a quick-fire effect of that sort is a sure token of undergraduate approval. (It can also be exploited with hostile intent, but this never happens unless the adversary, too, is judged somebody to reckon with.) My father was good in this situation. He noticed small things, like their forgetting to keep on calling him ‘sir’, and took satisfaction in them. He seemed very open when they wanted to be told about his career.

  ‘Does a lot depend on having a good dealer?’ Tony asked. ‘Like Vollard when the Post-Impressionists were getting going?’

  This question, although it betrayed Tony in a naive light (he had plainly been doing home-work), was benignly answered. My father explained that his own early work had been successfully handled by a school-fellow, happily established in a small greengrocery business in Kirkcaldy, who had taken the canvasses round in his cart. I had never heard this reminiscence before, and suspected it of being made up on the spot. The circumstance made me look round warily in the direction of Jefkins, who was standing by in charge of the wine. I was hoping there wasn’t too much of it still to come. It was only too likely that I had overestimated the needs of this part of the entertainment.

  At least this anecdote particularly pleased Bedworth; it answered to some private mythos of his own.

  ‘Many of the greatest artists,’ Bedworth said on his familiar didactic note (hitherto happily in abeyance), ‘have had a terrible struggle at first. In some cases, indeed, for many years. There was, for instance, the late Vincent van Gogh.’

  ‘He had a brother called Theo,’ Tony struck in rapidly. This time, I believe it was his laudable aim to prevent my father from betraying amusement at being thus informed that van Gogh was dead: something he might, or might not, have done. ‘Theo tried to flog Vincent’s stuff, but I don’t think he had much luck. And Vincent went potty, didn’t he?’

  ‘Yes, he did.’ My father may have been conscious of saying this curtly, for he quickly added, gently and more seriously than he had yet spoken, that Theo had been a stout fellow, and that Tony might do worse than read Vincent’s letters to him.

  ‘Is it always desperately hard at first?’ Mogridge asked.

  This time, my father didn’t answer at once. I saw that he realised a different issue was being put to him.

  ‘I mean’—Mogridge, never slow to feel he had been insufficiently explicit, amplified his thought—’I mean that it must be difficult if it’s desperately hard for too long. Not getting much of a green light from anyone, and yet carrying on. A man could come to wonder about himself. And it co
uld be hard, having to go on wondering about oneself after a time. Would there have been great painters who took years to get going – rather at the rudiments, I mean?’

  As Mogridge put this specific question, I almost felt myself to be hearing ghostly strains, ditties of no tone, seeping up through the floor-boards. What was much more remarkable, I felt that my father, who knew nothing whatever about Mogridge and his unfortunate ‘cello, was hearing them too.

  ‘There may have been,’ my father said. ‘Probably there have been. I can’t remember off hand. But certainly it hasn’t been common. A man may take years to find out even things that are radical and deep inside himself: whether his feeling is linear or malerisch, for example. But if I understand what you mean by the rudiments: no—not.’ My father gave this reply without any assumption of authority, but while looking seriously at Mogridge. ‘One’s on one’s own,’ he said. ‘That’s where the answers have to come from in the end. But blocked artists are often rather far from being ineffective in life. I’ve known some who have more than made their mark in the world.’

  ‘Hitler,’ Tony said.

  ‘I never claimed that wee blackguard’s acquaintance, Mr Mumford. But your naming him is no doubt fair enough.’

  I again had a dim feeling that Tony and my father would never get along too well – and within seconds this was almost dramatically confirmed. The small contretemps took place, unhappily, only because Tony – civilly enough – ignored the faint snub he had received.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘but you know what I mean. If one has started as an artist, I’m sure the world of action must be a second best. Hitler failed to produce any nurslings of immortality, and set about slaughtering whole armies instead. Much easier, really. By the way, sir, Dunkie tells us he has an uncle who runs a private army. Is that true?’