Young Pattullo

by J. I. M. Stewart

  ‘Why shouldn’t she be a London girl, for Christ’s sake? Do you want all your girls to come from Sydney or Dimboola or Dismal Swamp? I think this is a stupid conversation.’

  ‘Yes, it is.’ Fish’s agreement was cheerful and immediate. ‘Anyway, I suppose there will be lots of other people there.’

  ‘Sure to be. There always have been before. Brown girls, if you prefer it that way.’

  But my prediction proved wrong – and of course I might have reflected that one doesn’t hold tennis parties for mobs of people. There were no brown girls at all. There were only Mrs Triplett and Penny, and a muscular girl who was decidedly pinko-grey, and a man who was clearly of the tiresome Buntingford species of very young don, and a young woman attached to this young man and probably his wife. I judged the disposition of things, although unexpected, propitious on the whole – although to just what it was propitious I wasn’t very clear in my head. Then, only a couple of minutes after our arrival, a car drove up and the Provost and Mrs Pococke emerged from it. They were dressed for tennis like ourselves, and this for some reason startled me. Fish took it entirely in his stride. He hadn’t, as I had, disconcerting recollections of events on a golf course.

  Nothing could be more tedious than a blow-by-blow account of a tennis party, and I am glad to think that the athletic side of this one scarcely needs reporting. Whether surprisingly or not, the Provost (whom I thought of as an elderly man) proved the best player, with Fish not far behind him. My own tennis has to be described as stylish and ineffective: ineffective because I am by nature not much good at games, and stylish because through successive summers at Corry Hall Aunt Charlotte’s sense of family responsibility had obliged her to the effort of making something of my appearance on a court. I don’t doubt that an expert would have judged me pitiful and pretentious, but in a friendly company I got by. Through one set Mrs Pococke made me an admirable partner. I imagine that, comparatively early in her occupancy of the Lodging, she was finding that in undergraduates there is a great deal to be amused at, and that she cultivated this sense because she didn’t want too much to cultivate a similar sense about her husband. Of the form displayed by the muscular girl, or by the deutero-Buntingford and his wife, I remember nothing. As for Penny (who had so rapidly inquired about my interest in tennis), she was either hopeless or very much off her game. At one point, when Fish and I were both sitting out (if that is a correct expression), my friend confided to me – and with an obscure meaningfulness I didn’t take to – his sense that there had been a row.

  It was true that Mrs Triplett appeared better pleased with Fish and myself than with her young visitor; at the same time, she was unobtrusively concerned to recommend us both to Penny’s good graces. I was quite without the social experience to glimpse in this the dowager’s eye for the uses of totally ineligible and also in other regards harmless young men, and I simply felt it was amiable in her thus to preside over an advancing relationship.

  ‘What do you mean, a row?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, nothing much, I’m sure.’ Fish had an instinct for moderate statement. ‘It just strikes me that your girl-friend—’

  ‘Don’t be so idiotic, Martin. How can she be my girl-friend? I never set eyes on her before Thursday.’

  ‘Yes, I know – but she is quite something to set eyes on. I give you that. Penny’s rather pretty.’ Fish glanced round circumspectly, and satisfied himself that we were quite isolated for the moment. ‘I just feel she’s browned off about something, and has been letting the old lady know it.’

  ‘Why should she be browned off? I think you’re browned off yourself. You’re taking a jaundiced view of things.’

  ‘Then I’d be yellowed, not browned. It was your own idea that the girl might be finding life a bit dull. Well, I’m not certain she feels that you and I import an absolutely transforming liveliness into the situation. Perhaps it’s not an uncertainty that would occur to your robust Caledonian mind.’

  ‘Joke,’ I said, sarcastically. In fact this mild thrust by Fish rather pleased me. ‘And you’re talking nonsense, anyhow. Penny’s being very nice to both of us. In fact she’s on the job at this moment.’ I added this because Penny was advancing on us across the lawn, carrying three soft drinks on a tray.

  ‘She’s the perfect little hostess, of course. She’s nothing if not nicely brought up.’

  These words were unremarkable in themselves, but the tone in which Fish uttered them disconcerted me. For I seemed suddenly to realise – and with a disturbing mixture of feelings – that my benevolent plan for Fish hadn’t a chance of success. He had decided not to like Penny Triplett one little bit. I thought it extremely perverse of him, and I even vaguely understood that it summoned me to honesty about myself. What I didn’t yet understand was the extreme crudity of my own thinking, which had its origin in that fatuous conversation in Colin Badgery’s rooms. We had talked about handing Tindale’s typewriter to Fish, and heaven knew what else. Whereas, of course, Fish’s only sane and healthy reaction after his crash with Martine would be into a phase – if perhaps only a brief phase – of uncompromising misogyny. A man bruised as he had been might conceivably hurl himself upon hard liquor and harlots, but not upon anything that could be called falling in love.

  ‘You both looked to be rather puffing and panting,’ Penny said in a tone of friendly mockery. ‘Dr Pococke’s a bit out of our class, isn’t he? A Wimbledon man in his time, it seems. So I thought I’d bring over these.’

  ‘That’s awfully kind of you.’ Fish had got to his feet with less of a scramble than I contrived, and was pulling forward a chair in a manner more suggestive of Kensington (as we used then to express it) than of Dimboola or Dismal Swamp. ‘Do you like being in Oxford, Miss Triplett?’

  It is difficult to be confident about shades of usage over a long period of time, but I believe that, even at that date and upon so short an acquaintance, Fish’s ‘Miss Triplett’ was inadmissably on the formal side. Until he could manage ‘Penny’ he ought to have got along on nothing at all. And between ‘being in Oxford’ and ‘Oxford’ there was certainly a shade of difference; the exiled Ovid might have been asked if he liked being in Tomis. Fish had got the hang of Penny’s sojourn with Mrs Triplett much more clearly than I had; he had somehow collected it out of the air. Nothing of this occurred to me at the time. That Fish possessed a nice verbal sense would have appeared to me a proposition altogether implausible. It was self-evident that as a mathematician and a colonial he was doubly debarred from anything of the kind. Weeks were to pass before I discovered that he was usually worth listening to rather closely.

  ‘Oh, I absolutely adore it,’ Penny said. Her tone combined artless spontaneity with an absence of anything that could be called gush. But she looked only briefly at Fish, and then her glance strayed away beyond the tennis court and a stretch of garden to the drive. It was a long drive, and disappeared upon a gentle curve towards Linton Road. Except for that glimpse from Timbermill’s attic window, Mrs Triplett’s dwelling enjoyed complete seclusion; its air was more that of a large country house than I had encountered south of the border so far. The drive was empty. I thought it improbable that any more guests were expected. For tennis our numbers were just right as they stood, and it was for that number that tea-things had been set out on the terrace before the house. ‘I think you’re tremendously lucky to be at Oxford,’ Penny went on, returning her attention to Fish. ‘How did you come to hear of it?’

  ‘By what we call bush telegraph,’ Fish said easily. He was smiling as if Penny had simply said something amusing, but at the same time I thought he flushed slightly. I myself had to admit the cogency of the view that Penny was not in too good a mood. But Fish, I told myself, if he hadn’t been exactly hostile first, had certainly been lacking in any token of the admiration a girl like Penny had a right to expect. Moreover my heart was suddenly pounding, and I knew why. Penny had shifted fractionally on her deck-chair, fractionally towards me and away from Fish, and as she did so h
ad given me the look I remembered at our parting after Mrs Pococke’s dinner party. It wasn’t a look that could be called vulgarly meaningful; it was simply that it seemed modestly to acknowledge to itself that it had lasted fractionally longer than it should. Penny followed this up (although I wouldn’t have expressed the thing at all in that way) by a certain amount of conventional small-talk offered impartially to each of us, and I was thus able to decide that she was being very nice to Fish after all. Her nature was clearly such that she couldn’t for more than a moment be anything other than that to anyone. Fish’s response was unenthusiastic but decently responsive. I had an obscure sense that he was thinking something out, and not burning his boats meanwhile. This was to explain itself rather notably before the day ended.

  A tiny sound, like the papery tap of withered leaves against a bough, came from the far side of the tennis court. Mrs Triplett was applauding the conclusion of a set. It looked as if the time for tea might have come, but this proved not to be so. Penny, who had undertaken the organising of the athletic side of things on Mrs Triplett’s behalf, collected our glasses and stood up.

  ‘Time, gentlemen, please,’ Penny said. And she handed me the tray and smoothed down her skirt.

  It was in this moment, I believe, that I had my first significant experience not of wandering concupiscence but of the incomparably fiercer drive of a specific and exclusive physical desire. I had glimpsed the operation of the dark power in my brother Ninian and lately in Fish – and sufficiently clearly to judge it (as I still do) the most senseless of Nature’s whims. For what can it matter to Nature that Martin should or should not possess Martine, or that I should marry Penny Triplett and not some almost identical girl encountered only with a complete unregardingness elsewhere? Is sex, is procreation, so frightening or disagreeable an activity, so sluggish a machine, that this tremendous battery is required to start it into life? I was one day to observe a generation which believed itself to have tamed the thing, seeing in it (as Isis was to explain) a companionable and civilised indoor exercise. But it was a generation in no danger of going further on this reductive path, and giving over, turning celibate or even sterile. The human species would get along, would interbreed with a genetically desirable variousness, at the pressing of some button much less liable to release distraction and catastrophe. So why these fireworks, why such brouhaha? It is apparent that this particular liability we carry has no special power of building into sexual conjunctions that sort of stability and permanence biologically useful in a race so slow to reach maturition and independence as ours. Contrary-wise, if anything. Hard-wearing marriages emerge, on the whole, from a different context. The whole set-up is a puzzle, perhaps explicable only as occasioning laughter among unfriendly gods.

  ‘My turn again!’ Penny said with an assumption of dismay.

  ‘And I made such a fool of myself partnered with you, Mr Fish. Duncan, your turn too.’

  These two names, this ruthless and malicious distinction, finally pitched me into the condition of Penny Triplett’s lover.

  It was not Penny’s way to hold a stance for long. Half-way through tea – and with a precision recalling her turn from left to right when Mrs Pococke executed the same manoeuvre at dinner – Fish was on and I was off. I wasn’t staggered by this in itself. Stuffed with literary persuasions far more than with cucumber sandwiches and cream-cakes, I summoned up thoughts of the duel of sex and of jemina as in general varium et mutabile semper. It seemed something merely adorable in Penny that she should turn on this immemorial courtship convention. And I certainly didn’t at all remember the late Martine’s cruder exhibition of approximately the same technique.

  What did hit me hard and to a point of bewilderment was Fish’s reaction. To Penny’s first hints of interest of a new order Fish was so unresponsive as to be almost rude; he might have been telling her that she wasn’t his sort of girl and might as well lay off. But for the second time I had that curious sense of him as thinking something out. Then, all at once, I was seeing him rise from this austere entrenchment and go right over the top. He had become another man, and a remarkably attractive one for the business on hand. Penny, losing her poise, became slightly outrageous herself.

  The rest of the company can’t have seen anything particularly out of the way in this sudden sharp engagement. Tennis parties are sometimes virtually designed, after all, for the purpose of promoting harmless flirtation. The Provost may have betrayed a sense that well conducted young people ought not to get all that quickly off the mark; although unexpectedly brisk at the net, he favoured a largo effect in social intercourse at large. Mrs Triplett, on the other hand, appeared not disapproving; she might have been feeling that two admirers for Penny were better than one – and that four or six would be better still. My own confusion was extreme. Here – out of the blue and at an eleventh hour – my original design was unexpectedly fulfilling itself, and Fish was giving every appearance of falling head over heels in love with a girl he hadn’t set eyes on a couple of hours before. I felt this to be utterly indecent, and moreover a monstrous perfidy on Fish’s part. My totally illogical jealousy was now naked and unashamed. It seemed to me incredible that I had been entertaining the thought of spending a large part of the coming vacation in the company of a man who could undertake with such celerity a traitor’s part.

  This was the state of affairs at Mrs Triplett’s little party when the blast of a powerful motor-horn made itself heard on her drive. Everybody was startled – but Penny, I thought, turned a little pale as well. I told myself (for my perceptions were as acute as my thoughts were muddled) that this particular cacophony was familiar to her. Then the car appeared, travelling much too fast. It was an open Bentley of gigantic size and of what was probably a choice vintage antiquity. The figure at the wheel wore goggles and gauntlets, and with one of the gauntlets he offered us a familiar wave before addressing himself to the business of bringing his monster to a halt. He achieved this with notable skill, although with a rapid braking which didn’t leave quite unscathed the well-raked gravel on Mrs Triplett’s drive. His bonnet, however, was nearly beneath Mrs Triplett’s nose. He whipped off his goggles and smiled up at us: a handsome young man, fresh-complexioned and with a little military moustache. I seemed to know at once that some sort of fashionable soldiering was his line.

  ‘Fifty-seven minutes from Buckingham Gate,’ he called out to us with satisfaction. ‘And the devil of a snarl-up in Henley.’ He swung himself out of the car. ‘Hullo, Mrs Triplett. Hullo, Penny. Just in time for tea.’

  If Penny had indeed paled a little at the sound or signal from that horn, the fact was evident no longer. She was flushed now. It was my first impression that she was angry – but, if so, it was anger of an ambiguous sort. There was nothing ambiguous, however, about Mrs Triplett, who was distinguishably far from accepting as appropriate her new visitor’s confident address. She had stood up to receive him – and this, paradoxically, had the effect of almost not receiving him at all, particularly as her stance was that of a small but serviceable ramrod. Since her action had, moreover, the effect of bringing the assembled males to their feet as well, the notion of a favoured youth to be familiarly greeted went west in a moment. She performed introductions, however, without a pause – and while they went on I suppose I eyed the young man (whose name was Symington) very hard indeed. My immediate impression was of utter unfamiliarity. Edinburgh didn’t produce such a type, nor Glencorry, nor Oxford – although in my own college, perhaps, he might have been thought of as having first cousins a shade more intellectually endowed. What I was exhibiting could, I suppose, have been described as territorial behaviour. I was as stiff with hostility as Mrs Triplett was, but for different reasons. I judged wholly intrusive upon what was now my familiar academic stamping ground the irruption of this cub from the Blues or the Household Division or whatever it was called.

  I am certain that the feeling was entire in me before I caught a glimpse of either of two small definitive things that th
en happened. The first was Mrs Triplett’s elderly but alert parlourmaid advancing along the terrace with a fresh cup and saucer. When still some yards away she stopped, hesitated, turned and withdrew. The message she had received from her mistress was conceivably telepathic; more probably, Mrs Triplett had achieved some minute signal with her head. This was the minor phenomenon, and I think Fish also remarked it: certainly it was thus I interpreted a quick glance he gave me as he stood waiting to sit down again. The major phenomenon was itself a matter of a glance – one I caught passing with swift stealth between Symington and Penny. I don’t find it easy to describe. In the circumstances, one might have expected it to be, on Symington’s part, no more than a comical acknowledgement that in old Mrs Triplett he had caught a Tartar, had bitten off more than he could chew. And Penny, correspondingly, might have been indicating either mischievousness and admiration or a displeased sense that he had been unacceptably indiscreet. But their exchange was, in fact, not at all like that; had it been, it would not have affected me as it did. What passed between Penny and this intrusive young man in that moment of time declared a mutual consciousness of intrigue, of complicity, of high excitement that chilled my blood and numbed my mind by its remoteness from anything I had ever experienced or imagined.

  This sounds extravagant, but at least I am recounting something which, however absurd must seem an infatuation not four days old, spoke loudly to me of disaster and despair. I have to be a little more specific here. I didn’t in that moment believe – what an after-day was to confirm to me it would have been erroneous to believe – that Penny and this young man were lovers. It may well have been his intention that they should be, but he hadn’t got there yet. Penny had been breaking all the rules that then still largely governed the behaviour of young women and their escorts, and had been getting a great deal of change out of it. It seemed probable that, with a sound instinct for safety, she had started off doing this with any number of young men at once. But now she had nothing except this chap Symington in her head. She had been packed off to an aged relative in Oxford to cool down, and now in Oxford her pursuer had impudently turned up. As for either Fish or myself – and here lay the nub of the matter – we had existed for Penny only as so much material to file her claws on.