Young Pattullo

by J. I. M. Stewart

  ‘Buntingford.’

  ‘Very well – Buntingford. And you may certainly bring Mr Fish to tea. I shall be delighted to receive him.’

  I got to my feet, and prepared to cut in on my late guide to Latin syntax. My sense of guile burgeoned. And I judged ‘receive’ to be a very grand word.

  Penny Triplett, however, was to be beyond my further reach that evening. The Provost, with motions evoking some choreographic activity, was assembling his little party of art-lovers. In addition to my father and myself there was to be Lord Mountclandon, with a glimpse of whose family papers it now appeared we were also to be favoured. There were to be included in the party, too, the frozen-faced don who had been sucking up to him, and Buntingford (whom I believed to be completely Philistine), and a plump untidy don called Penwarden who was the college’s librarian, and Professor Babcock, and an anonymous woman who moved amid much glinting and clinking of tinny ornaments, like a small perambulating pagoda. As we went downstairs my father came over to me in what I thought of as his conspiratorial manner. This was unpropitious. I knew that he would much rather have walked round the college’s pictures either by himself or under my sole guidance; he had, indeed, expressed himself to that effect earlier in the day. But it turned out not to be the pictures that were on his mind now.

  ‘Dunkie,’ he demanded (and he spoke with unnecessary caution, as if we were in the midst of a press of hostile natives), ‘who’s that girl you’re after?’

  ‘She’s called Penny Triplett. Her guardian – the tiny old woman I was talking to – claims to be some relation of the Glencorrys. I told you about that in a letter.’

  ‘That you did—but not about the lassie.’

  ‘This is the first time I’ve ever met the lassie. She’s just in Oxford for a short visit.’

  ‘You’re not letting the grass grow under your feet.’

  ‘You’ve got it entirely wrong. I’m not after Penny, as you call it.’ My father’s tone had surprised me. In general it was his instinct to approve of most evidences of the power of sexual attraction. So far as Ninian or I could tell, he had always been completely faithful to our mother, and he was moreover carrying through life with him at least substantial traces of the restrictive morality within which he had been brought up. But his deepest impulse was to acknowledge the holiness of the heart’s affections, as had been perfectly clear in his attitude (which later would have been called ‘permissive’) to Ninian’s precocious affairs with girls. In my own case I knew that he took, for some reason, a far from sanguine view of my chances with Janet, and I’d have expected him to be alert to further any movement of my fancy elsewhere. Penny, moreover, ought surely to delight his eye. I expressed this sense of the matter now. ‘I’m not after her,’ I repeated. ‘But anybody might be. She’s absolutely lovely, don’t you think?’

  ‘Aye. She’d do fine on a packet of rock.’

  ‘Oh, come off it, Daddy!’ ‘A packet of rock’ was my father’s equivalent for a chocolate-box, and I was surprised and even indignant at so unjust and atrabilious a remark. ‘What I’m thinking is that Penny would be just right for Martin.’

  ‘Martin?’

  ‘Martin Fish. The man I’m going to Italy with. You met him at lunch.’

  ‘That I did. I liked Martin. Dunkie, what is this you’re blethering about?’

  ‘I’m not blethering. Martin has had an awful crash with an utterly ghastly girl, and I think Penny Triplett would be just right for him. I’m planning it that way.’

  ‘Duncan Pattullo!’ This exclamation came from my father in a decently low voice, but he had halted ostentatiously at the foot of the staircase and was gazing at me fixedly as he spoke. Such a hint of drama alarmed me; I was afraid that in a moment the Provost’s other guests would come to suppose some family contretemps in progress. ‘Are you for telling me,’ my father went on, ‘that you first set eyes on this girl not two hours ago, and think her absolutely lovely, and are managing to believe foreby that there’s nothing in your heid but acting as a wee pimp for your friend Fish? The guid God forgie me for having begotten a daftie!’

  ‘Daddy, for Christ’s sake move on.’ My father’s words had shaken me a good deal. Their deepening plunge into the accents of his youth must betoken, as usual, that a Bacchic mood was in the ascendant with him. This being so, his wilful misinterpretation (as I conceived it) of my admittedly sudden interest in Penny was particularly inopportune. At the moment – and for whatever reason – he was merely cross. He was quite liable to turn outrageous as well. Ahead, moreover, I thought I saw one flash-point of particular hazard. ‘And listen!’ I said – having resolved to take this bull by the horns. ‘After Cuyp and Caravaggio and all that, there’s to be something different. I’ve told the Provost about my Young Picts, and he says we’ve got to go and look at that. Just stick to being on your best behaviour, will you? Remember I like it very much.’

  This avowal – the first I had ever made, since I had certainly accepted the gift in the first place with an affectation of casual grace – was decidedly a gambler’s throw. It might have incited my father to any mischief. And his immediate response (although we were at least now walking soberly on) could have been taken as ominous, since it was marked by a return to his conspiratorial vein.

  ‘Dunkie,’ my father said, ‘ye’ll no mind your doup? Ye dinna think it may affront the ladies?’

  ‘And stop being Harry Lauder, will you?’ It was always best to stand up to my father. ‘It’s a braw brave doup, as he’d no doubt call it. But you needn’t say so.’

  This reference was to one of the felicities of the finished picture, already shadowed in my sketch. My father’s historical sense (as Timbermill had once hinted to me) was casual. He had attired his Pictish children (Ninian and myself) in kilts. We were lurking in the whins with a stiff wind blowing from behind us. The whole atmospherics of the picture depended on this; it controlled what the spindrift was doing to the vision of Columba’s craft coming heroically through the breakers to the bay. The achievement was, to my mind, quite beyond Monet’s wishy-washy scope, and the key to it was what had happened to my own kilt, which had blown clean up from my prone bottom. The bottom itself (at least in the finished picture) was a triumph: ahead – again to my own mind – of any of Renoir’s dealings with that part of a human anatomy. But my father was capable of ribaldry before the most consummate passages in his own work – a psychological idiosyncrasy which I was only too conscious might disconcert persons like Professor Babcock and the pagoda lady.

  ‘Dinna fash yoursel, laddie. Do not be apprehensive, my dear boy.’

  I felt a large childish relief, for it was apparent from this joke that my father’s good-humour was restored. I saw, too, that he judged it entirely in order that the company should be led from the contemplation of Cuyp and Caravaggio into the presence of his water-colour. And had I been capable of further thought on the matter at this moment I would have realised that his response indicated a significant change in him.

  It was the year in which his reputation was not so much enlarging itself as soaring. More than I had yet tumbled to, he was no longer a Fiddes Watt or a D. Y. Cameron or any other locally esteemed Scottish Academician. He had become a European painter. He was to prove not averse to the consequences of this, whether for good or evil so far as his art was concerned. I have indicated that he was a handsome man, well equipped to carry himself en prince when an occasion required it. He had a European sense of these matters. As a young man he had observed from afar the manner in which the grandees of French culture are expected to conduct themselves.

  But now the Provost’s little expedition had run up against a hitch. We had left the Lodging by a side-door giving directly on Surrey. The library, imposing even in flank, was before us. And it had suddenly transpired that the library’s custodian, the plump Penwarden, was not merely untidy but inefficient into the bargain. He had failed to transfer to a pocket of his evening garments the key that could alone admit us to the p
romised splendours within.

  In this situation I was the company’s obvious resource. The Provost had only to say to me, ‘Pattullo, cut along to the gate, will you, and get the master-key from the porter.’ And in effect the Provost did this, although with a polished elaboration which would have been not inappropriate had he suddenly taken it into his head to despatch Lord Mountclandon himself on this useful boy’s office. I departed into the darkness of the Great Quadrangle at a run – with such goodwill, indeed, that I almost knocked down Robert Damian. Damian, as was frequently the case when one encountered any contemporary at this hour, had demonstrably been at a party.

  ‘In God’s name, you bloody young Pattullo, you!’ Damian was clearly feeling friendly. ‘And what’s this in aid of, anyway?’

  ‘Go home, Robert. I’m getting a key for the Provost. We’ve got to go and look at a lot of junk in the library.’

  ‘Oh, your grand party! Was the gown all right?’ Damian must have heard of my doubts in this matter. ‘And were you the only undergraduate?’

  ‘Yes, I was. I still am. Piss off, Robert, for Jesus’ sake.’ Damian was amusing himself by playing the infantile game of skipping into my path as I tried to dodge him. ‘I’ve got quite enough on my plate without your buffoonery. We’ve got to go on and look at my blessed Picts. And there’s something about a lot of political papers as well.’

  ‘A feast of learning and art and culture generally. I do think Mrs P. might have asked some circumspect youth to support you. Tony, perhaps. He could have whispered to you about the right spoons and forks.’

  ‘Tony has gone to a funeral. At least that’s what he’s told his tutor. I damn well wish it was yours.’ I had now managed to elude Damian, so this was a parting shot.

  ‘Look for me at breakfast, Duncan.’ Damian bellowed this after me in a voice that might well have reached our seniors waiting by the library door. ‘We’ll want the whole uproarious tale.’

  The library, as soon as entered, struck a perceptible chill over our expedition. This was chiefly a physical matter. The building had been unheated during the day, and we were now experiencing the kind of May night that rapidly turns from cool to cold. Moreover, Oxford colleges and similar prosperous proprietors of art collections of modest interest had not yet been sold the notion that such things fade, decay and fall apart unless housed amid conditions approximating to those obtaining in an intensive care unit of a great hospital. So the picture gallery was still innocent of air-conditioning, thermostats, humidity control or anything of the sort, and our cautious progress across its slippery marble floor suggested not only the uncertain poise of unpractised skaters on a rink but the slow freezing of their toes as well. I detected Professor Babcock and the pagoda lady exchanging glances to the accompaniment of those slightly raised shoulders by which women cautiously signal to each other an acknowledgement of such discomfort. I wondered whether the correct-behaviour business required that I should volunteer to undertake another dash through darkness in the interest of fetching their coats or cloaks from the Lodging. I decided that this would be officious, and interpretable as a reproach to the Provost, who might have considered the exigency himself. Besides, I didn’t quite want to leave my father even for a brief period to his own devices. He had the appearance of being all decorum. But one never knew.

  The state of the thermometers was not quite all; there was in addition a sense, perhaps intensified even by that brief wait before a closed door, that our cultural foray was a shade voulu. The Provost was an efficient cicerone; he would certainly remember how, at their first meeting, he and my father had talked about Dürer; and would equally certainly show him the Suss von Kulmbach and the little Schauffelein as a result. So there would be a small success there. But did anybody really want, at this time of night, to trail right round the place? We weren’t in the presence of a small private collection, miscellaneous perhaps, but in some degree brought together through reflecting the taste of an individual collector, or at least of an age. Still less were we in a large public gallery, with its vistas of great paintings significantly juxtaposed. Here one was just bumped about – the more perceptibly so since the viewers were as haphazard a bunch as the objects they were to survey. Total strangers are quite undistracting when one is trying to look at pictures, but I saw that with my present companions I’d fail to manage it at all. They had broken up into twos and threes and were wandering at random from exhibit to exhibit. I couldn’t decide to whom to latch on, and yet I knew I mustn’t for more than a minute or two stalk about by myself. I very much wished that I was out of the whole stupid affair.

  ‘Well, Mr Pattullo, at least you had a good innings at dinner. So you mustn’t look so bored now.’

  It was Professor Babcock who had remarked my state, and separated herself from Penwarden to take benevolent if also astringent notice of me.

  ‘Yes, I did,’ I said. ‘She was an awfully nice girl. And I’m sorry if I’m looking bored. I thought I was just managing proper unobtrusiveness and diffidence. Please, who is the man who goes on making himself so agreeable to Lord Mountclandon?’

  ‘Your question suggests disapprobation. But it does appear, I agree, that Lord Mountclandon is being a little courted. His assiduous interlocutor is Christopher Cressy, known as the brilliant young historian. You can’t have been in Oxford for a year without being aware of him.’

  ‘I’ve seen him in the streets, I think. Do you know? There are about a dozen men in Oxford who walk around as if acknowledging themselves to be in the small class of the inescapably identifiable. I can’t quite work out how it’s done. Perhaps they just turn out their toes or something. This Mr Cressy is one of them. And why’s he here, anyway? It’s he who’s dead bored, not me. Look how he’s looking at the pictures. He might have strayed into the wrong class of shop, and be turning down samples of wallpaper that are too cheap and nasty for him.’

  ‘Then it’s nice that he judges the spectacle of Lord Mountclandon so agreeable.’

  Professor Babcock and I found ourselves glancing at one another with momentary caution, perhaps as feeling some impropriety in this chirpy conversation carried out across the chasm of our years. But if I myself had no business to be thus smart and impatient, my description of the brilliant Cressy had been fair enough. It wasn’t clear to me that Lord Mountclandon was any more interested in the pictures than his companion, but he was moving about among them with engaged glances and murmured appreciative words – much as he would do, I imagined, if called upon to inspect the labours of the blind or the handywork of Boy Scouts. Cressy saw no need to expend this sort of courtesy upon the treasures of his hosts, perhaps because everything he possessed of that order he was concerned to lavish upon Lord Mountclandon himself. What seemed interesting about this effort was its success. One would have supposed that a man who had held the highest offices of the state must long since have ceased to feel gratified at being made the recipient of even the most deftly deferential address. And this would hold even in greater degree – again one would imagine – of Lord Mountclandon, whose forbears had held like offices for generations. Yet such was not the spectacle presented to Professor Babcock and myself. Cressy, whose efforts had already been so discernible when Tindale ineptly interrupted them after dinner, was now enjoying marked success. Lord Mountclandon was judging him more worth attending to than Hugo van der Goes or Bartolomeo Passarotti. I was to learn later that snobbery, far from being confined to the lower and middling reaches of society, can obsess persons of the most unassailably lofty station; it is equally true that flattery, if expertly cooked and served, continues to please the palate of those who have for long been able to command it at will. Lord Mountclandon was being regaled after that fashion.

  At this point Buntingford joined us. His approach was made with care, as if he was no more sober than the company of ladies requires. It may have been only the slippery floor that produced the impression. Reflecting that he had suffered my Latin unseens and that Professor Babcock had enjoyed
Ranald McKechnie’s Greek verses, I guessed that these two must operate in the same territory. This conjecture was supported by a faint sense of confrontation which I now received. Buntingford addressed Professor Babcock as ‘Professor’ – which I’d have supposed to be eminently correct if I hadn’t observed it to make the lady thus addressed bristle. I made a note to communicate this observation to Cyril Bedworth in aid of his studies in English idiom. In Edinburgh McKechnie’s father was certainly addressed as ‘Professor’; it was evident that at Oxford such a title, divorced from a surname, could be uttered only with some facetious or ironical implication.

  ‘And what do you make of Duncan?’ Buntingford asked easily. ‘Has he told you he’s a pillar of Isis?’

  Here was more about English usage, for now I was a little disposed to bristle myself. It was true that Buntingford had asked, ‘May I call you Duncan?’ But he hadn’t paused for a reply, and as to what his own Christian name might be I hadn’t a clue. Timbermill by this time called me ‘Duncan’, and even Talbert had got as far as calling me ‘Donald’ or ‘David’ from time to time, and it wouldn’t have occurred to me that in their case the familiarity ought to be on a reciprocal basis. But then they were old enough (or so I imagined) to be my grandfathers.

  ‘Mr Pattullo and I,’ Professor Babcock said crisply, ‘have been exchanging, not at all properly, observations on our fellow-guests.’

  ‘Including me?’ Buntingford rashly asked.

  ‘Not so far. I will not say that your obscurity spares you. But you are not in the van.’

  ‘Duncan’s father is that.’ Buntingford had to make an effort to be good-humoured. ‘And, I suppose, old Blobs Blunderville.’

  ‘Ah! We are not of the magic circle, Mr Pattullo and I. We have heard from afar that Lord Mountclandon is so termed by his intimates. But we do not feel—do we, Mr Pattullo?—that we are ourselves in that galley.’