‘That was another man on my staircase. His name’s Cyril Bedworth.’
‘Ah, so that is Bedworth?’ This time, the Provost sounded interested. ‘I must make his better acquaintance. Your friend Mumford was perhaps being a shade officious. Bedworth could very well have looked after himself.’
‘Yes, sir. I think he could.’
‘You are at one with me in this, Pattullo?’ The Provost looked at me curiously as he asked this question. It struck me that he was perhaps more interested in undergraduates than was commonly supposed.
‘Yes, I am.’ I almost added a qualifying remark, designed to exhibit my own refined perception of Bedworth’s staunchness of character and limited command of the social graces. But I was surprisingly sober, and thought better of this. (The butler at this moment was bringing round brandy. It was in observably small tots, and I accepted one with confidence. Being—again—my father’s son, I was already coming to drink rather freely from time to time. But I seemed to have an adequate head for it, and used to tell myself there was nothing to worry about.)
‘Your father is getting on very well with the President,’ the Provost said. ‘At our first meeting, when he came to talk to me about you, I discovered him to be decidedly a Kunstgeschichtler. It is a kind of learning with which not every practicing artist of high distinction troubles himself, I am told.’ The Provost paused on this accolade. The effect was rather that of Penny (my mind kept straying to Penny) ticking off plays seen and disposed of. There were no doubt a dozen people at the dinner-party to whom some specific civility of this sort had to be offered. ‘So we must consider,’ he went on, ‘the question of showing him our own paintings. My idea is to form a small group later, without breaking up the company. Would that be right?’
‘Yes, Provost. I’m sure my father will enjoy it very much.’
‘I am only sorry we don’t possess one of your father’s own works. But it is true that most of the college’s pictures came to us rather a long time ago.’
‘I have something of my father’s in my own rooms as a matter of fact, sir.’ This was my first incautious remark. ‘It’s only a small water-colour,’ I added hastily. ‘But it’s a sketch for quite a well-known picture.’ The fame of Young Picts was something dear to me.
‘That is most interesting, Pattullo. Perhaps you will be so hospitable as to take us over there later. Some of my guests would be quite delighted.’
‘Yes, of course.’ This was appalling. The notion of the Provost’s inviting himself into an undergraduate’s rooms seemed to me quite unheard of. I hadn’t even bothered to notice whether Jefkins had very effectively tidied up the debris of my own modest repast. And the thought of my father standing by while a gaggle of dons and their wives goggled at Ninian and myself bottom-up in whins intimidated me.
‘We have a few more minutes here,’ the Provost said, ‘before joining the ladies. Perhaps we should move around. Do you go and talk to Dr Tindale.’
I obeyed this command – a reasonable one, since Tindale had a vacant chair beside him. He gave me a casual nod as I sat down, and it appeared that I had to open the bowling.
‘Has turn-over been brisk recently?’ I asked. ‘Through that window, I mean.’
‘A most accurate word for it. But no. Traffic has been rather sluggish, I am sorry to say. It almost looks as if some other route is becoming fashionable. By the way, am I right in thinking that one of the men up above me has been ill?’
‘I suppose you mean Fish. He’s all right again now.’
‘Yes, Fish – the Australian. I’m afraid I scarcely know him. But I heard some murmur about a disastrous affair of the heart. Was it really that?’
‘Something went wrong with his eyesight. Perhaps he’ll have to wear spectacles.’ I didn’t intend to have any conversation with the White Rabbit about Fish’s misfortune.
‘He’s a friend of yours?’
‘I’ve got to know him quite well recently. We’re going abroad together, as a matter of fact, at the beginning of the vac. To Italy.’
‘Splendid! Where are you making for?’
‘We’ve no particular plan yet.’ It didn’t seem to me that Tindale had any real occasion to pursue these inquiries; and I saw no attractiveness whatever in the boring elderly men round about me. I hoped the Provost had spoken literally when he had said we should join the ladies in a few minutes. My impatience to return to Penny was suddenly extreme. This, I told myself, was because of Fish’s name cropping up. I was now quite convinced I was destining Penny for Fish. ‘We’re going in Fish’s car,’ I went on, finding that something further had to be said. ‘So I expect we’ll get at least as far as Naples.’
‘Oh, dear! You did say the beginning of the vac?’
‘Yes. Isn’t that a good time for Naples?’
‘Ah, it’s not that at all.’ Tindale was registering unaccountable distress. ‘It just happens that at Amalfi, which isn’t all that far south of Naples, I happen to own a very modest villa. I’d have been delighted to lend it to your friend and yourself.
‘Most unfortunately, I’ve already promised it at that time to a very old companion of mine.’
‘That would have been extremely kind of you,’ I said, and hoped I’d got my tenses right. It didn’t seem to me there had been much point in Tindale’s trotting out a benevolent impulse of this promptly frustrated sort.
‘But I hope you will go to Amalfi, all the same. It’s where Webster’s duchess came from, of course. I see you’ve been writing about plays in Isis’
‘Yes, I have.’ I probably said this ungraciously. It was the evening’s second reference to my current literary activities. Buntingford had already made fun of me on the score of them. It seemed to me unfair that dons should peer into our lispings in Isis.
‘Are you thinking of going on the stage, by any chance? You might do quite well.’
‘No, I’m not.’
‘If you change your mind you must let me know. I happen to enjoy the acquaintance of several actors quite at the top of that tree. They could be useful.’
‘Thank you very much.’ I went about Oxford, it occurred to me, uttering these words without particularly meaning them. And it struck me as odd that a reclusive authority on Pope Zosimus, one giving the effect of having to break an unnatural amount of ice before beginning to say ‘Good afternoon’, should frequent theatrical society. But then I knew nothing about such society; the world of the theatre still existed for me only behind a proscenium arch. At the moment I felt myself to be sitting through a tedious interval. ‘Do we stay down here for long?’ I asked. ‘The Provost seemed to say something about joining the ladies almost at once.’
‘Ah, you’re bored, Pattullo!’ Tindale’s bilberry eyes met mine for a moment to signal amusement. He might very well have been offended at a demand which hadn’t exactly been polite, but I felt the amusement to be genuine. He was probably attracted by the blundering minds of young men, just as he was by their blundering bodies somersaulting through a window. ‘I don’t blame you,’ he added easily. ‘Academic labour – although you’ll hardly believe it – is utterly absorbing. I lose myself in my wicked old popes. But academic society is another matter. Not that all these worthies are academic. There’s your father, for instance. He talked to me before dinner, and I found him delightful. And, of course, there’s Lord Mountclandon. Have you met him?’
I followed Tindale’s glance, and said I hadn’t met Lord Mountclandon. I was considerably impressed, since it had never fallen to my lot before to be in the same room with a former prime minister. It was curious I hadn’t spotted him. He looked to be by some way the oldest person present: a thin worn abraded man, silver-haired and distinguished. He was being talked to by a don youngish as dons go, vaguely familiar to me although he didn’t belong to the college, with what I thought of as dignified obsequiousness. No doubt that was the correct bearing in encounters with eminent statesmen.
‘Mountclandon is an old member, as you know,’ Tindal
e said. ‘He has just presented us with some very important papers. Come along.’ Much before I had collected myself, Tindale was getting me to my feet and marching me round the table. Lord Mountclandon shook hands. He half rose from his chair to do so. Like the Bursar when I had presented myself to arrange my luncheon party, his manner was that of a man who had been expecting to make my acquaintance for some time. He then paused, however, to be given bearings. Tindale explained that I was Mr Pattullo’s son. I wasn’t confident that this conveyed much, and I had the impression that Tindale’s degree of acquaintanceship with Lord Mountclandon didn’t quite justify what he had done. Tindale was showing off to a young man he was concerned to cultivate. This was scarcely pleasing. Lord Mountclandon, as if he understood the whole thing, was careful to be particularly courteous to me. As for the youngish don, who had a smooth expressionless face and oddly combined abundant black hair with cold blue eyes and a fair complexion, he simply stared at me with frozen hostility. I felt he was entitled to. He had been interrupted in a cultivation job of his own.
‘I suppose you are in Surrey,’ Lord Mountclandon remarked. He might have been saying, ‘Didn’t we meet at Balmoral?’ or ‘I think I’ve seen you in White’s.’ In his time, I supposed, college rooms had been allocated on strictly segregationist principles. But Lord Mountclandon at once disposed of this idea. ‘I had rooms in Surrey myself,’ he said, ‘because it was convenient for the library. I did most of my work there. People couldn’t confoundedly interrupt. If a fellow did come up to me with some useless chatter – and some did – I had an arrangement with a pleasant library clerk whose business was to be in the place all the time. He’d call out, “Silence, gentlemen, in the reading-room”. That did the trick. I got through quite a number of books.’
‘Which is what got you your Double First,’ Tindale struck in promptly.
‘I don’t remember much about the examinations. Probably they passed off tolerably enough.’ Lord Mountclandon couldn’t fairly have been said to be administering a snub. ‘I’d like to have a look at the library again. And the Provost speaks of going over there later.’
The college pictures were at that time housed in the library, so I knew this was the same expedition on which my father was to be conducted. I wondered whether Lord Mountclandon too would be told that I was prepared to put Young Picts on exhibition. ‘That’s me,’ I heard myself idiotically saying, ‘and that’s my brother Ninian.’ Tony, jealous of my incursion into high life, would affect to find the episode extremely comical. It might actually turn out that way.
Meanwhile, my only hope lay in the Provost. In pitching me at this top guest of the evening Tindale seemed to have exhausted his social resources, and I couldn’t very well take the initiative by jumping up, making my bob, and bolting for Buntingford or my father, who were the only other men I knew. Lord Mountclandon, on his part, appeared determined not to dismiss an innocent youth who had been willynilly thrust upon him, and he continued to converse. I wasn’t – not under my father’s eye – going to flounder with a prime minister as I had floundered with the female chemist Miss Basket, and I did my best to use any wits left to me. (Penny Triplett appeared to have carried off most of them.) It felt as if this was going on for an hour, although it was probably no more than three or four minutes by the clock. Then the Provost really did move; there was a short interlude in, or hanging around, the superior Gents; finally we went upstairs again to the Day-room.
XI
I decided that, having sat beside Penny at dinner, it wouldn’t do to make a bee-line for her again now. This was nonsense; had I done so, nobody taking notice of the fact would have been other than benevolently amused. But I was still much more in a foreign land than I’d have admitted even to Tony, and apt to be a good deal concerned with notions of correct behaviour.
What I could do – and it struck me as an immensely guileful move on Fish’s behalf – was to present myself at once to Penny’s guardian – which was what I took Mrs Triplett more or less to be. Although I didn’t know her very well (for I had simply been one of a crush at three or four of her tea-parties) I did know her rather better than I knew anybody else in the room. So here was the entirely natural thing to do.
Mrs Triplett was sitting on a settle, which had no doubt been carpentered and decorated by William Morris himself. Everything in the Day-room had that sort of provenance, since Mrs Pococke inflexibly preserved it as the notable museum piece it was. One could have argued whether the general stiffness of effect – for everything was pitched on the perpendicular and there wasn’t a cushion or upholstered surface to be seen – served to accent the stiffness of the Pocockes themselves or to render it a less obtrusive feature of the scene. The settles, although beautiful, were as uncomfortable as anything on view, but Mrs Triplett was clearly not incommoded by hers. Since she never permitted her back to touch anything (except, presumably, in bed) the irrational rectangularity of the object was in no way detrimental to her ease. The height of the seat was such, and her own stature so diminutive, that her heels hung in air – like those of a child who might be expected at any moment to drum them noisily on the box-like structure that the base of a settle is. But Mrs Triplett’s heels, like her hands, were composed; it was only with her head that she indicated I was to take a seat beside her. I sat down on the settle, and thoughtlessly tried to tuck my heels under me. The settle at once responded like a sounding-box, and as the surface I had thus clownishly hacked at was a delicate predella-like affair of angels blowing trumpets and clashing cymbals I was a good deal confused. I was quite sure, however, of its being boldness that was required of me.
‘I think Penny is absolutely beautiful,’ I said. ‘So, please, may I come to tea on Sunday?’
My credit with Mrs Triplett was a matter of the Glencorry connection; she held a vague relationship with the family, and the barbarous name of Pattullo had stuck in her head as denoting something regrettable that had happened to them. It had given me the entree, nevertheless, to her enormous North Oxford dwelling, and I believed myself to have built up with her a small fund of good will which had generated itself out of my vigorous if unpractised efforts in the matter of the errant cow. And as I now thought the ingenuousness of my comment and request a masterpiece of diplomatic manoeuvre I was surprised that the aged cow-wife’s response was something less than enthusiastic.
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘you may certainly come to tea. And it appears that my present ward is at least extremely pretty. I had better tell you at once that a number of young men have lately been taking that view of her. She has come to Oxford to benefit, Mr Pattullo, from a vacation from that kind of thing.’
‘What a very odd place to come to for that!’ I smiled cheerfully at Mrs Triplett, having resolved to be unaffected candour all over. ‘Far more young men to the square mile here than in Mayfair, or wherever Penny lives. I hope’—I added anxiously —‘it isn’t cheek to call her Penny?’
Mrs Triplett, who was incredibly old, eyed me with rather more approval than a few moments earlier. Perhaps I had got the right wave-length in making muted and respectful fun of her.
‘Are you reliable?’ she asked. ‘Or shall I have to send Penny out to tea elsewhere? I don’t mean deeply reliable. No young man ought to be asked to answer for that. But superficially reliable – which is almost as important.’
‘Oh, yes – I think so.’ I had a sense of gaining merit in thus getting on well with Mrs Triplett. I knew that, ages ago, she had married what Tony called some Foreign Office type. But I also knew that, ages before that again, she had emerged from one of the great English aristocracies of the nineteenth century. Arnolds, Darwins, Huxleys, Stracheys, Trevelyans, Greens were names much more glamorous to me than any number of Argylls and Atholls and Buccleuchs. (A literary education has this effect for a while.) Mrs Triplett’s house was full of portraits and engravings of these worthies: Darwin holding a skull, Huxley pointing at a microscope. And Mrs Triplett had heady artistic connections too. Incredibly but u
naffectedly, she would refer to the artist from whose handiwork I was now nervously averting my heels as ‘Topsy’. Burne-Jones was ‘poor Ned’, and others named with a similar reminiscent familiarity would probably have been equally impressive if I could have identified them. Talking to Mrs Triplett was thus like talking to a legendary personage; she might have been George Eliot, or one of the Misses Pater, or Mrs Humphry Ward. I was convinced she was a brilliant survivor from a more spacious age. ‘Oh, yes – absolutely,’ I said. ‘I can promise not to kiss Penny among your raspberry canes. And may I stop and help milk the cows? I haven’t told you, but I can milk cows.’
‘At least you may pass round the sandwiches, while Penny pours the tea.’ Mrs Triplett glanced at me appraisingly, and for a moment she might have been Penny herself. She enjoyed eliciting a mild madness from a young man.
‘And I wonder,’ I asked, ‘whether you’d allow me to bring a friend?’
‘A friend?’ Mrs Triplett’s look of appraisal sharpened; she was probably accustomed to her young men making this request. ‘Who will serve among the raspberry canes?’
‘Oh, no – it’s not a girl. Just a man on my staircase. He’s called Martin Fish. He’s an Australian, as a matter of fact.’ I knew this to be a strong card. Mrs Triplett was prominent among those Oxford great ladies who encouraged wandering children of the Empire – as well as princesses from the Shan States – to feel countenanced and at home. ‘The Fishes are good people out there.’ (I had this expression from the novels of Ford Maddox Ford – who was probably known to Mrs Triplett as ‘Fordie’.) ‘They have a tremendous number of sheep. And Martin probably knows a bit about cows as well.’
‘Mr Pattullo, go away and talk to somebody else. To Penny again, if you can rescue her from that Mr Buttertub.’
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