I was conscious of my father as glancing at me swiftly. He would himself have had no impulse positively to conceal the mild lunacy of his brother-in-law the Glencorry, but he was surprised that I appeared to have been gossiping about it.
And I think he also resented Tony’s command of my pet name.
‘Laddie,’ he said, ‘ye maunna spier anent your host’s veracity o’ anither o’ his guests.’
I was furious with my father, who had in this freakish way drawn attention to a minute breach of manners. Tony, despite his father the week-end country gent and his own assured upper-class air, was not among those miraculous youths (of whom there were a number around the place) who had been so made that they couldn’t put a foot wrong. Shoving in a question on a family matter he knew nothing about had at least, so to speak, landed his toe in the water. But it was outrageous in my father so deftly to catch at an ankle and tumble him in head-over-heels. And now I saw that Cyril Bedworth was studying this ducking in a teacup attentively. Had I been able to think of him, clairvoyantly, as the future author of Proust and Powell, I might have guessed that he was reflecting upon the extent to which a whole social hinterland can be revealed in a dozen words. There was a second’s silence in which I could see Mogridge giving thought to a suitable change of subject. Fish cracked his crème brûlée, and exclaimed arrestingly at the result. Fish was one of the miraculous youths.
This awkward moment was ended by my father himself – which was only proper, considering that he had occasioned it, and considering too the responsibility of his years.
‘But I’m a havering body,’ my father said amiably, and raised his glass in front of him. ‘Tony, will you take wine with me?’
This eighteenth-century gesture was a great success. Tony, who had turned rather pale, grabbed his glass cheerfully. It came to me that I could recall no occasion upon which my father had proved unable to extricate himself from an awkward moment. And the wine-bottles, fortunately, were empty. Throughout the final stages of the party, and while inspecting Fish’s pictures, Lachlan Pattullo talked what was still at that time called the King’s English.
There remained, however, the Provost’s dinner-party to face.
And whether to wear a gown or not was an anxiety no longer finding room in my head.
I walked my father round Long Field, and was conscious that we were again very content with each other. If he was a hazard as a parent he was seldom other than a distinguished one. He owned, for a start, a satisfactory physical presence. Informed people, glancing at him, would conjecture him to be somebody of note. I found myself taking the simplest small boy’s pride in this.
‘It seems your friends keep cars, Dunkie.’
‘Not all of them. Not Bedworth or Mogridge. But Tony Mumford and Martin Fish run cars.’ I remembered that, early on during our meal, these two had engaged in a short technical discussion in their character as motorists. It was this that had attracted my father’s attention. ‘I sometimes go out with Tony. I think I’ve mentioned it in letters.’
‘I mind that now. It’s something your professors allow?’
‘Well, Fish’s car is legal, because he’s in his second year. Tony keeps his on the quiet. I don’t think the dons would much bother about it.’
‘You’ll be in your second year yourself soon.’
‘So I shall. If they don’t turn me out.’
‘Dunkie, they wouldn’t do that?’ My father, whose knowledge of Oxford remained sketchy, was alarmed.
‘No, of course not. I’m all right with them. I’m being silly.’ I guessed where this conversation was leading. I felt uneasy about it.
‘Dunkie, I’ll get you a wee car. In time for next term.’
‘Oh, but I don’t happen to want a car, thank you.’ I knew at once that this had been the wrong thing to say, or at least the wrong way to say it. For one thing, it wasn’t quite true. Owning a car had never entered my head, but the idea was instantly attractive to me. I’d have liked a car very much. And my father infallibly knew when either Ninian or I was prevaricating. I had taken the first step on an ungracious course.
‘You could get between Edinburgh and Oxford in a day easy, Dunkie. You could do it that way every holidays. It would save an awful lot of money in the end.’
This was transparent nonsense, but it was also my father’s customary tactic when he was prompted to do a generous thing. It had needed to be when we were really poor. We were that no longer. By his own simple standards, my father had quite recently become affluent. So here was a false issue. And I was handling the thing wretchedly because of feelings pretty deeply buried in my mind. I groped dully for my father’s motives. He was the crofter’s son who had prospered, and it was part of his pride to have his boys up with others. That was why I was at Oxford at all; he had been determined not to see me, as he conceived it, distanced by the son of a professor he’d taken a dislike to. If the Dreich’s boy was going there, I was going too.
Suddenly and shockingly, I found myself walking beside my father in a state of senseless resentment. Why should he give me a car now when for years he’d ignored the fact that I lacked a tooth-brush? Ninian was in the same case; there was to be nothing that was too good for him. We’d both been ugly ducklings, and we’d both of us – late in the day – turned out clever. Ninian was very clever indeed. We both counted with my father now simply because we had become appendages he could be conceited about.
I heard myself say – but it was only one of those rehearsed speeches that remain mercifully mute – ‘Bugger your car!’ The phantom words terrified me. And then – it had happened before – another voice came to my rescue. It was Ninian’s voice. Ninian was a passionate man in ways I was not. But, for me, his voice was the voice of intellect and reason. ‘Of course Daddy feels guilty,’ Ninian’s voice said to me half-way across Long Field. ‘Didn’t we walk to school with holes in our breeks? But we’ll have guilt enough on our own hands, Dunkie, by the time we’re his age. Or like enough we shall.’
‘I mean I’m not all that keen,’ I said to my father awkwardly.
‘Just Oxford’s a marvellous thing to have happened to me. Daddy, it’s almost indecent. I’ve utterly everything I want.’
‘Not quite everything, Dunkie.’ My father said this without embarrassing meaningfulness. But I knew what he was thinking of, and all my bad feeling was swept away by love. I even knew what to say.
‘Bugger your car!’ I said cheerfully, so that the words transformed themselves. ‘Not yet, anyway. I’d be wasting my time in it when I should be at my play. Next year. And if you’re wanting to give me something meanwhile, Lachlan Pattullo, give me another picture.’
‘We’ll make it that, then.’ My father spoke composedly, and all was well. Or almost. It was a stiff assignment, I told myself, having a parent who could peer inside your head when it was misbehaving.
There was a great deal of activity on the Isis, since Eights Week was drawing near. One was never out of the chock and plash of oars. Their painted blades glinted in the sun, dribbled diamonds, dipped into water, scooped, rose. Young bodies, bowed galley-slaves, heaved at them; from the tow-path and through megaphones muffled men bellowed, pedalled bicycles, bellowed again; coxes echoed or interpreted their exhortations on a shriller note. My father approved, but began to talk about the Seine at Marly. He wanted gentlemen combining straw hats with high collars, ladies with sunshades, full-fleshed attendant females bearing bocks. I myself was remembering telling Janet I was going to row, was remembering her saying it was a poor thing at my age to be going off to boarding-school. Not bearing long to think of her, I thought of Glencorry instead; thought of the absurd pepper-boxes and crenellations, snow-white like a cottage on a Christmas cake, of Corry Hall.
‘The folk at Corry,’ I said. ‘What’s happening there? Has Ninian had his invitation yet?’ Our annual Highland holidays had never become formally prescriptive; every year a carefully worded summons would come from Aunt Charlotte: one to Ninian, and
a week or two later one to me.
‘That he has not – and now we don’t think it’s like to come. Nor to you either, Dunkie.’
‘There hasn’t been a row?’ I was more curious than apprehensive.
‘No, no—why should there be? They’re decent people enough.’
‘Nothing about Anna? That’s still all right?’
‘It’s to be called that. They’re lucky – or they think they are – that he was from the gentry.’
Uncle Rory’s instinct had been vindicated over the identity of my cousin’s seducer. Young Petrie of Garth had almost immediately owned up; it seemed necessary to conclude that Anna had been creating pretty well for the hell of it. A perfectly normal wedding had taken place – at which I’d have been present as an usher in hired morning dress if I hadn’t disingenuously pleaded an inescapable examination. Ninian had represented the obscure Pattullo relatives.
‘It seems they’re having a wee bit of trouble with the other one,’ my father said. He affected obstinate vagueness about the Glencorry connection.
‘Ruth, you mean?’
‘Aye. All that blatherskite you told us of must have unsettled her.’
I was silent, rather hoping that if Aunt Charlotte’s invitation did belatedly arrive it would prove to be for the time I was fixed to be abroad with Martin Fish. I recalled my rash promise myself to invite Ruth to Oxford, there to introduce her to abundant escorts elligibly back from the wars. As it had turned out, I hardly numbered one such among my acquaintance. Fish, it was true, seemed older than I was. But I didn’t think I wanted to give Fish to Ruth. She might ditch him if she found her own pukka laird. And he might then put on his turn again.
‘Yon uncle of yours is a much-tried man,’ my father said. ‘It’s on none of mine I’d wish a frigid wife. There was small promise in all that slam-banging of wee bit tennis balls.’
I was startled, for my father had never before said anything like this to me. He may have been anxious to acknowledge me as grown up and ripe for the world’s warnings. Or he may merely have still been a little flown with my wine. He had let the Doric – in the muted form I liked – creep back into his speech.
X
When I arrived at the door of the Lodging that evening I was wearing my gown. My uneasiness about it had surfaced again; it felt as if at any moment it might turn into the pyjama-jacket or whatever it was of Hercules when Deianira had treated it with the nasty dope provided by Nessus. This recondite thought, although it would have been appropriate in a young scholar, was not, of course, really present to my consciousness. I was just thinking that the Provost’s butler was eyeing me morosely. But this was said to be his normal manner.
In a superior kind of Gents (it was lined with photographs of former college fellows of the obscurer sort) I bumped into Buntingford. He was scrambling into his own gown, which he must have brought with him over his arm. It came to me at once that it was Buntingford and not the learnedly preoccupied Talbert whom I ought to have consulted.
‘Oh, hullo!’ Buntingford said amiably. ‘Been reading any more Tacitus lately?’
‘Of course not.’
‘Or composing in one of the ancient languages? I see you’re a writer. You might have a go at the Chancellor’s Prize for Greek Verse.’
‘Please don’t be silly.’ I felt that, on a social occasion, one spoke slightly differently to young dons. ‘And look here—ought I to be wearing this damned thing?’
‘Quite probably not. No, hold hard!’ (I had been about to get rid of the gown at once.) ‘It’s probably a very good idea. You will be well received. The praeposital self-consequence will be gratified. And it will please your father too – which provides a worthier motive for wearing it. Delighted I’m going to meet him. Come on. We start off in that Pre-Raphaelite mausoleum.’
‘Oh, very well.’ I let the gown be, although I didn’t feel that I’d been exactly encouraged about it. ‘I say, do you think this is going to be a frightfully senior gathering?’
‘Not a doubt of it, young Duncan. May I call you Duncan? Mrs P., poor soul, hasn’t a clue about who to ask with whom. You’ll have to hand in the Principal of St Hugh’s, or some such desiccated vestal. You’ll see.’
‘Oh, Lord!’ This was more depressing still. ‘I wish I hadn’t come,’ I said childishly.
‘Copy, Duncan, copy! You can write it up for his. I read you in Isis last week. Promising. Callow, of course – but promising. A shade humourless, perhaps.’
‘I could wring your neck,’ I said, and felt better at once. We were conducted to the enormous chamber known as the Provost’s Day-room, already familiar to me since I had there attended a promiscuous sherry-drinking by as many of my freshman year as had been sufficiently civil to turn up. It fully deserved the title Buntingford had given it, because the spirit of William Morris (although an Exeter man) brooded everywhere over its decor.
‘You’ll have one playmate of your own age,’ Buntingford breathed cheerfully in my ear. He was unoffended by my improper remark. ‘Madox Brown’s loony girl.’
I remembered that the Day-room contained three pictures – the only pictures in the entire Lodging not to represent deceased episcopal personages. The first was a heavy-jowled stunner by Rossetti; the second was one of Burne-Jones’s indigestive women, slumbering after having been oddly roped into what would later be called a see-through night-gown; the third was Madox Brown’s ‘Ophelia Singing’. I wondered whether my father would presently be making inappropriate remarks before these masterpieces. He had behaved well when being shown Fish’s pictures, chiefly because Nolan’s dead sheep had momentarily induced a subdued mood. But in general he hated being ‘shown’ works of art, and was inclined to signalise the fact through irresponsible commentary. Looking at the college pictures, I was sure, was going to be the tricky part of the evening.
My father, as a house-guest, was already in the room. Sure enough, he was being shown Ophelia by the Provost – whose fine hands were gesturing sensitively in front of the canvas much as if he had been Roger Fry, Clive Bell, Herbert Read, or another of the higher aesthetic pundits of that period. This was an alarming spectacle, but my father was nodding composedly and keeping quiet. He had a feeling for things perfectly fabricated, and was probably satisfying it quite as fully before the Provost as before Madox Brown’s canvas. The Provost’s wife was meanwhile receiving newcomers. Buntingford she seemed to treat a shade coolly, so that I wondered whether he was persona non grata in the Lodging, and his presence an indication that this was among its inferior feasts. But at least I myself came off much better; it was hard to believe (what must be true) that Mrs Pococke was recognising in Mr Pattullo’s undergraduate son one associated with a disgraceful attack upon her husband on a golf course. Being as yet unfamiliar with some of the received commonplaces of social behaviour, I fondly supposed that I was really being distinguished by special favour. This pleased me, since I thought I rather liked Mrs Pococke. In the way of comportment it was as if a good deal of her husband had temporarily rubbed off on her, so that (as Tony was to assert) with a scrub down she would be a different woman. Perhaps this was really a later perception or persuasion. It is true that I fairly rapidly came to stand quite well with Mrs Pococke – although of my year it was to be Tony himself who, in a blameless way, was to make a conquest of her.
‘Now, who do you know?’ Mrs Pococke asked me – as if there were the slightest possibility of my knowing anybody. She was all competence, and I felt she ought to be gesturing with a fan as adeptly as her husband was doing with his fingers.
‘Miss Basket? Cecilia, this is Mr Pattullo’s son, Duncan. Mr Pattullo, Mr Buntingford is taking Miss Basket down, so you must be very entertaining with her now.’ Whereupon Mrs Pococke turned away to greet fresh arrivals, and I was left to be very entertaining. Not unnaturally, I glanced at Miss Basket warily. She wasn’t all that older than I was; in fact she was about the same age as Buntingford. But, so far as my immediate impression went, she might h
ave been as old as the rocks amid which she didn’t sit. I suppose because of her name (although I was unconscious of this), I thought of her at once as a Sibyl – the one who was hung up in a cage or a bottle and who kept on saying she wanted to die. Miss Basket was pale and emaciated, and plainly capable, if not of prophesy, at least of conversation of the most awesomely intellectual order. I told myself not to be unnerved, and that here was nothing more out-of-the-way than a top schoolgirl on the classical side, now, half a dozen years on, become a Fellow of Somerville or something of that sort.
‘What are you reading?’ Miss Basket asked in a papery voice. There had been a bit of a pause.
‘The Arcadia,’ I said, and amplified, even more idiotically, ‘The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia.’ My answer, of course, ought to have been ‘English’. I had vaguely supposed Miss Basket’s gambit to have been of the ‘Have you read any good books lately?’ sort. ‘Together,’ I added (feeling it was now all or nothing), ‘with Brunhuber’s commentary. Nürnberg 1903.’ I observed Miss Basket to be producing a thin pained smile. ‘I was told to be entertaining,’ I concluded pleadingly.
In face of this desperate smartness, Miss Basket – entirely justifiably – looked round the room for help. She couldn’t have said more plainly, ‘Young man, you’ve made a rotten start.’ It was, of course, true. A few of my most sophisticated contemporaries liked to maintain that female dons were much better fun than male ones; you only had to poke them up a bit, and they could be quite astonishing. I wondered whether Miss Basket was like that. I was about to say, ‘I was only trying to poke you up a bit,’ but fortunately reflected in time that these words might be indelicate.
‘I’ve never read the Arcadia,’ Miss Basket said, bringing her eyes manfully back to me. ‘But then I’m a chemist.’
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