Young Pattullo

by J. I. M. Stewart

  This larger contour of the affair was lucid to me at once, although it wasn’t entirely to remain so. And I can have spent very little time thinking it out, since we were still on our feet, and with the tea ritual suspended, when I heard Mrs Triplett addressing her unwelcome guest in unemotional tones.

  ‘But you must see that immediately, Mr Symington. Come with me now. Penny, please look after things.’

  In this fashion was the martial Symington led away. What ‘that’ was, I have no idea. Perhaps it was a new milking-parlour. Certainly Mrs Triplett must have made it a topic of conversation with remarkable speed, thus expeditiously to remove Penny’s follower from our society. I didn’t feel he would return, and I don’t think Penny did either. Her kinswoman had received from her a swift, hard glare which might well have heralded rebellion. But in a moment Penny was ‘looking after things’ as required. She handed me a cherry cake to take round; was attentive to empty cups; in her temporary role as hostess talked to the Provost first, as the person of principal consideration present. As a result of this, and even in the midst of my state of relegation and dismay, my feeling for Penny took on a fresh dimension, a new attribute. In addition to fascination, carnal commotion, love or infatuation, admiration marched in. I admired her self-control, her precocious command – as assured as her formidable chaperone’s was – of the social aspect of a dodgy situation. This was to prove the longest-lasting of my positive responses to Penny Triplett.

  With the exception of Fish and the Provost (a man who regularly noticed small things to an extent surprising in one who noticed himself so much), I doubt whether anybody was immediately aware of an interesting manoeuvre as having taken place. The exploring couple didn’t remain invisible all that long, and meanwhile conversation flowed sedately forward. When they did appear again it was from an unexpected direction, walking across a stretch of lawn on the far side of Symington’s car. Mrs Triplett was conversing, although sparingly; what was chiefly evident in Symington was a disposition to look rather fixedly ahead of him. They reached the car, and Symington climbed in. The engine started into life with a deep purr, Symington made Mrs Triplett a kind of bow, clashed his gears (something which, in a Bentley, is presumably not easy to achieve), and shot off round the building. What house agents call an imposing sweep made this a feasible escape route to adopt. The sound of the engine faded, and was briefly succeeded by an angry hoot signalling the car’s turning into Linton Road. Mrs Triplett paused briefly – not to compose herself but to pick up an untidy twig from the drive. Then she climbed to the terrace and retrieved her tea-cup.

  ‘Mr Symington,’ she said, clearly but without emphasis, ‘was unable to stay longer.’

  It was the Provost who produced a murmur of civil regret. Penny got to her feet and offered the old lady the cake.

  Fish and I were driven back to college in the Pocockes’ car. The Pocockes made a few suitable remarks about the pleasures of the afternoon. Fish found his own points of gratification to express. Although all I wanted to do was to weep like a child I believe I managed something of the same sort, but when we got out in front of the Lodging I just managed my ‘Thank you very much, sir’ before walking away. Surrey was deserted and sleepy. Even Provost Harbage on his pedestal, although he normally managed a hard, stony glare as one went by, seemed drowsy and inattentive. At the foot of the staircase the White Rabbit, dodging out of his rooms with a batch of letters, gave me a curious glance, so I supposed I was looking, as well as feeling, not too good.

  It must have been after eleven that night when there was a knock on my door and Fish entered.

  ‘Too late to barge in?’ he asked.

  ‘No.’

  ‘It’s just that it has occurred to me we ought to be fixing things up.’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘Booking the car across, and so on. The Continent’s all the go, and there may be a bit of a crush.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It’s my idea we ought to be off bang at the end of term.

  Unless you’re thinking of going to any Commem Balls or things in the ninth week.’

  ‘I’m not. Bugger Commem Balls.’

  ‘That’s better – a bit.’ Fish sat down – uninvited and decently diffident. ‘I don’t want to be a nuisance,’ he said. ‘But, Duncan, are you all right?’

  ‘What do you mean?’ I stared angrily at Fish. ‘And why the hell did you do that?’

  ‘Do what, Duncan?’

  ‘You bloody well know. Of course it’s utterly irrelevant and pointless now. Penny’s interested in nothing but that awful little shit—’

  ‘I don’t know that I’d call him that. I didn’t like him very much. But he may be a decent enough type really.’

  ‘Well, it’s not the point, anyway.’ This speech had made me furious. ‘Why did you suddenly start being all over Penny? You didn’t seem to like her in the least. I don’t believe you do now. Why did you get playing up to her like that?’

  ‘Didn’t you want me to?’

  The question bemused me – reminding me of an imbecile proposal cherished in what appeared an infinitely remote past, and telling me, moreover, that Fish must after all have tumbled to some sense of its existence.

  ‘It doesn’t matter what I wanted,’ I said stupidly.

  ‘I just thought a spot of diversion might be a useful thing. So that you could see the girl’s volatile, to say the least. I hope that Symington punched the point home.’

  ‘I don’t want your damned hopes – or your damned nannying around either. Frig off, Martin.’

  ‘Duncan, are you really going to be all right? You won’t mind my saying I’m a bit worried about you? I’m glad we’re getting off to Italy together. A change of scene will do you good.’

  Fish’s explanation of his abrupt and brief playing ball with Penny had amazed me – but only, as it were, dimly, since I was in a state capable of grasping singularly little. For example, the fact that he and I had switched roles with the precision of artificial comedy didn’t at this point occur to me. I did remember, although again dimly, that there had been a scene or scenes like this between us before, and that they had decidedly not been accompanied by Fish’s swearing at me. As this memory swam up in my mind I seized upon it as explaining something altogether more novel to me than it ought to have been: the sense of myself as a sinful creature. I didn’t like the feeling at all, and in particular I didn’t like an intuitive knowledge that it was going to grow.

  ‘Martin,’ I mumbled, ‘I’m fearfully sorry. I didn’t mean to be rude. I’m being a fearful nuisance to you.’

  ‘That’s rubbish.’ Fish was looking at me in real alarm. He was no doubt recognising a symptom. ‘I say, Duncan – have you any of that stuff left that your doctor gave you? If so, I’d have a go at it, if I were you.’

  ‘Oh, all right. It’s in that cupboard beside you.’

  ‘And Duncan – do you know? I think if you don’t mind I’ll just hang around till you’re in bed.’

  Despite the sodium amytal (which it was pretty feeble to have agreed to swallow: Fish hadn’t), I woke up in the small hours. My mind groped to discover anything it could be said to be thinking of. For minutes or through aeons nothing came. Then, instead of anything of a conceptual order, there floated into my consciousness an image of Janet’s picture-postcard, with its cross over Calum’s boat. That cleared me, I told myself. Janet had Calum and I didn’t have Penny, so I had even less reason to feel guilt than she had.

  Nevertheless, and in addition to being harmlessly miserable, I was to experience this guilt-feeling, intermittently and like a toothache, for quite a long time: in the following weeks Fish was to have to cope with it as he could. This first night of my dejection, however, was to end in a stranger echo of Fish’s own late condition. As I lay in what was still a pitch-black room there suddenly came upon me the impression of a crisis, a moment of truth, directly ahead. Still mildly drugged, I puzzled over it, and eventually knew what I had to do. I close
d my eyes very tight, buried my head under the bed-clothes, and groped for the switch of my bedside lamp. I found it and turned it. After that I think I prayed. Then I stuck my head out and commanded my eyelids to open. They obeyed. The bedroom was bathed in a flood of light.

  I turned the switch again and went to sleep.

  Humdrum resumed its sway. I was wretched, but these odd experiences had been contracted, after all, within a short span of days. I was young, and they hadn’t engraved themselves. I remembered to write a note to Mrs Pococke, thanking her for her dinner party. I managed to do the same thing by Mrs Triplett, whom I suspected of knowing as much as Fish did. My work for Talbert went to pieces, but he didn’t notice. For Timbermill, because I loved him, I performed heroically; he said that on The Seafarer and The Dream of the Rood he hadn’t read anything less inconsiderable than my essays for quite some time. (I had to work out these reduplicated negatives.) I pored over maps with Fish, bought guidebooks, operated on a bank balance a good deal healthier than its owner. I had very black spells indeed. But I listened to the vacation plans of my companions, which were all full of enterprise and hope. Bedworth had gained a ticket for the Reading Room of the British Museum, and felt that his learned career was assured. Tony was bound for Washington; he had a cousin in the Embassy, so everything was going to be laid on. Kettle was to absorb himself in an ambitious project for the moral regeneration of the nation through multi-confessional coffee parties. Mogridge proposed hastening to Paris. He had heard of a marvellous ‘cellist, quite young, called Paul Tortellier, who was with the Societé des Concerts du Conservatoire, and who had already been launched (Mogridge earnestly explained) on a solo career in Amsterdam.

  And thus my first Oxford Summer Term came to an end like a day.

  XIV

  At ravello, as in Surrey Quad, Fish and I had our staircase. This one was cut in rock, and pursued a devious course from the plateau on which the little town perches to the Gulf of Salerno a thousand feet below. There were places at which you could turn left for Minori or right for Atrani and Amalfi. The principal wayfarers on this Dantesque scala were mules. They perambulated the whole surrounding countryside in the same fashion, such staircases being the main feature of the region. It was only when they came to level ground that the brutes found it necessary to give their minds to the job, and pick their steps on the less familiar terrain with care.

  As far as one could look along the sharply indented coast the land tumbled steeply through stony but wooded or terraced slopes to final cliff-like bastions too sheer for anything to cling to. It was only where these natural fortifications broke down in some deep ravine that human habitation was possible at anything like sea-level, and the little concentrated clusters of dwellings, humble and ancient, white-washed and roofed in rusty red, showed in them like the compacted nesting-places of neighbourly-minded birds. Fish had bought a number of postcards portraying these picturesque localities. One of them was described as Angolo suggestivo, Suggestiv Ort and (for our own instruction) Fascinating noow. We extracted a number of indecent meanings from these harmless expressions, and Fish suggested that I should send the card to Janet, marking the position of our hotel with a cross.

  It will thus be seen that Fish was by now a good deal in my confidence. He was much more in my confidence than I was in his. Although in general the frankest of companions, he had never once opened up again about the Martine affair. I respected this reticence as indicating that, as between the two of us, his had been the deeper wound. It wasn’t quite evident why this should be so. I hadn’t, it was true, been ditched amid circumstances impugning my physical courage, and I hadn’t been carried off, more or less coram populo, to what had been bruited abroad as the bin. On the other hand, Fish hadn’t, so far as I knew, been implicated in what I saw in myself as a shameful infidelity, deserting the girl next door (which is what Fish firmly called Janet) almost at the very first glimpse of Penny Triplett.

  In general it may be said of Fish and myself that, if we came during this holiday to understand each other very well, it wasn’t in the main on any basis of talking things out. We’d had experiences that overlapped. They didn’t overlap very much – but they did so sufficiently for the generating of a mute communion. Nothing in my relationship with Janet (which might be viable still, or might not) could have told me anything about Fish’s experience. But my brief brainstorm over Penny gave me a genuine understanding of it. Penny and Martine had little more in common than the appearance (delusive, it might conceivably be) of belonging wholly to our respective shattered pasts, but they had left us with a similar revelation of how disruptive sexual excitement can be. We had now retreated – for the earlier part of this long vacation – upon the dumb decent comfort of a reliable asexual relationship. There was a kind of luxury in this which could almost be felt as a sexual thing in itself.

  Thus conscious of each other’s burdens as we conceived them, we had taken them very seriously at the start of our trip – each warily solicitous for the other, much as if we had been a couple of precocious and mutually considerate valetudinarians travelling for our health. If Fish was less communicative about himself than I was, he was also much more conscious of the social duty of decent cheerfulness. I doubt whether I gave him much credit for this, attributing it to that peculiarity of his constitution which had enabled him to regain composure so notably soon after his disaster. But he was responsible for the fact that I put in progressively less time being low-spirited as our wanderings continued.

  They were wanderings conditioned by an unsophisticated notion of the proper way to ‘do’ Italy, which we supposed to consist in moving rapidly from one large city – always understood to be an ‘art’ city – to another. The main occurrences in some of these places were not always of a kind foreshadowed in Blue Guides and Baedekers. In Milan, for example, we acted properly by the Cathedral and the Brera, but the really notable happening – notable because of its consequences – was Fish’s contriving to buy a copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. It was the first and limited edition of the novel published in Florence in 1928. If Fish’s attitude to his find was not that of a bibliophile neither could it have been called in any degree lubricious. He quickly convinced himself that it was an uproariously funny book, and was soon insisting on reading selected passages to me every night before we went to sleep. The appeal of the performance lay, I think, in the support it lent to a role naturally congenial to us at the time: that of experienced and disillusioned young men inclined to a ludicrous and harshly reductive view of sex. This was no doubt perverse and wrong-headed in us, since Lawrence’s intentions had clearly been of a high-minded sort not inclining that way. But if Lawrence hadn’t been in our heads we wouldn’t, in Naples, have made the decision we did.

  Naples was just one art city too many: a vast crowded noisy place, set in a tremendous natural theatre by man made variously vile. We sat in a pavement cafe and surveyed the spectacle discontentedly.

  ‘What does one see here, anyway?’ I demanded.

  ‘There’s an aquarium.’

  ‘Don’t be silly.’

  ‘It’s a very celebrated aquarium. The book says it’s in the middle of the Zoological Centre for research into the habits of marine fauna and flora. And it’s got a star.’

  ‘Are you kidding? Come again.’

  ‘The real thing is the National Museum. It’s housed in a vast palace.’

  ‘I’ll bet it is.’ I stared darkly at my black coffee. I was being difficult.

  ‘It has mosaics and paintings from Pompeii, including the dirty ones.’

  ‘What do you mean – the dirty ones?’

  ‘They’re from a brothel. It doesn’t say that in this book. It just says, “Certain Rooms: small gratuity”.’

  ‘Stupid.’

  ‘Mellors might have been interested. Or even poor Connie herself.’ Fish plainly judged my lack of interest in erotic paintings unwholesome rather than virtuous.

  ‘It might give Tony a tip,’ I said,
thawing a little. ‘He could charge a bob for a dekko at that vulgar affair over his mantelpiece. How dirty are these things?’

  ‘Dirt’s in one’s own eye, I suppose. I think the technical name for them is the postures.’

  ‘How boring. It can’t even be called multiplying variety in a wilderness of mirrors.’

  ‘What do you mean – multiplying variety in a wilderness of mirrors?’

  ‘It’s something in a poem.’ I looked gloomily at Fish, while Naples roared and screeched around us. It was a pandemonium of a place. ‘No,’ I said, suddenly seeing what I took to be a serious topic before us. ‘Painting obscene pictures is obscene.’

  ‘What about inside your own head, Duncan? Doesn’t it go on there sometimes? It does with me.’

  ‘Yes, of course. My imaginations are as foul as Vulcan’s stithy.’

  ‘I wouldn’t say quite that.’

  ‘Well, no. One mustn’t dramatise oneself.’ I said this in a judicious tone. ‘Inventive, though – and even a bit sadistic at times. But the point is that it’s one’s own affair. But painting an obscene picture is a squalid and demeaning thing to do.’

  ‘What about blue movies?’

  ‘I’ve never seen a blue movie. One just hasn’t come my way.’

  ‘But you’d be quite willing to pay your bob for that?’

  ‘Oh, yes. A good blue movie would be quite different. Only, it would probably be a lot more than a bob, so the simple question of value for money would arise. For me, I mean. It wouldn’t be operative with you, Martin. You’re rolling.’ It was because I saw myself in a weak argumentative position that I introduced this blatant irrelevance. It didn’t, however, side-track the discussion. We followed up our coffees with carafes of what we supposed to be Chianti, and went on talking for an hour. As was inevitable, the subject of our recent bedtime studies turned up.