Doctors Wear Scarlet

by Raven, Simon

  “But you didn’t find that at all,” said Tyrrel, rising and stretching and looking out on to the midnight square.

  “No.”

  “What did you find, Mr Seymour? Not a lover – which in any case you did not want. But a friend, a real friend this time. So the reserve must have gone – some of it anyhow. And you must have learnt some of Mr Fountain’s…secrets.”

  I remained silent.

  “Because there were secrets, weren’t there?” he went on. “You had been right at the very beginning – when you thought there was something mysterious, something disastrously twisted even, about Richard Fountain. You were right then and wrong later – when you gave him up as an ordinary and priggish little boy. And you were wrong to expect…a husk in a suitable blazer…when you went to Lancaster College. So what did you find, Mr Seymour? I want to know,” he said, striding fiercely back across the room and sitting down sharply and without relaxation in the armchair opposite me.

  “You may be disappointed,” I said.

  “Not if you tell the truth, Mr Seymour. The truth is never disappointing – in the end.”

  So once more I fetched us both drinks. And once more I tried to conjure up the past for Tyrrel: a nearer past this time and, despite Tyrrel’s hints of black secrets, a brighter one: the meadows and the chimes of Cambridge, the slow river moving through the summer afternoons.

  It is not easy, now, to tell you exactly what seems to be required of me. It is true that when I arrived at Lancaster and met Richard again for the first time in over four years, I did not find him boring or unpleasing, as I had expected, but indeed became his very close friend. It is also true that my original interest in him, the kind of almost obsessive interest I had felt after the Stein incident, was revived and did not, this time, give way to indifference. But these secrets… I knew of no secrets as such; and yet I did come to feel, with more and more conviction as time went on, that there was…something, something impalpable in essence but definitely wrong, some dissatisfaction or perversity or flaw, that had a great deal more to do with Richard’s life than was evident from its apparently smooth and successful progress. Perhaps this was really all I did learn – that I had been right to have doubts about Richard at Charterhouse, wrong to abandon them and write him off as just a gifted but conventional schoolboy. But, you will say, if I got as far as deciding this, I must have had some clear reason – something concrete must have happened. Perhaps it did, but I never knew of it: my surmise was based, I can only tell you, on a feeling in the air. I have already admitted, of course, that intuition is not my strong point; but in this case it seemed altogether too insistent to be ignored. Yet how to convey the quality of this feeling to you? I can best do so, I think, by trying to describe Richard’s relationship, not with myself (though you will hear something of that), but with Walter Goodrich. For the more I think of it, the more Walter seems to have dominated those years at Cambridge, to have joined in the conversation at the crucial point, to have poured the wine when one was thirsty, to have made the casual but memorable comment, to have been always and inevitably there.

  Doctor Walter Goodrich was the Senior Tutor of Lancaster College. This meant that he was broadly responsible for discipline among undergraduates and their correct pursuit of academic studies. Of course, he only actually taught in his own subject, the Classics; and then again, disciplinary questions only came to him if they were too serious for one of the Deans to handle. But this was just what Walter liked: not for him the petty irritations of minor administration and everyday misdemeanour; his was the big picture, the vaguely outlined but all-embracing sphere of influence, the final decision when all the painstaking reports had been drawn up by other people. Next to the Provost, he was the most powerful man in the college; and indeed the Provost’s overlordship was scarcely more than theoretical, for it would have been unthinkable that this kindly, withdrawn and scholarly old man should either desire or dare to upset a decision of Walter’s.

  Nor was Walter without influence outside the college gate. He was one of the senior lecturers in the Classical Faculty. A professorship had never been likely and was by now out of the question, but he was well enough regarded by his fellow scholars and had indeed been allowed a Doctorate of Letters on the strength of some five or six general and wholly readable books – Day to Day Life in Periclean Athens, that kind of a thing. Furthermore, Walter was by way of being one of those dons with a network of well sorted strings outside the University, one of those smiling and dining eminences grises, whose “nights up in London” were always resulting in some nice little appointment, in the Foreign Office, the City, or even the lower reaches of Government, for one of his many protegés. Walter’s protegés, I should add, by no means ceased to be so when they left Lancaster. He battened them to his soul with hoops of steel, and many middle-aged Civil Servants have had good reason to be thankful to Walter. And Walter, of course, to them: for men whom he had advanced (or merely pre served) in their careers were inclined to be helpful when fresh cheeked candidates in their last year at Lancaster were presented for accommodation … You will always hear his name if you happen to be in the haunts of the great world, in the clubs or the chambers or the country houses.

  “Oh, so you’re at Lancaster?” an Admiral, a Press Lord, an Impresario will say: “well, give my love to Walter.”

  In this and other ways, Walter Goodrich was not very typical of Lancaster. For it is not a worldly college. It is a puritanical institution – in the intellectual sense at least: its Fellows follow with dedication the most remote paths of scholarship, those least rewarding in money or sensuous enjoyment; and its graduates, who tend to come from poor homes, go out to be of service to the world (despite Walter’s efforts on their behalf) rather than to make their mark there. I myself must be almost alone among my contemporaries in having had a substantial private income as an undergraduate and in being able to live, when I came down, a comfortable life with an undemanding job – a job I only do for the mildly cultural value it seems to possess. But if I too was untypical of Lancaster, at least I had an inkling of the austere tradition of learning and service which the college represented. I don’t think Walter understood this at all; certainly he could not have raised much sympathy for it (beyond discreetly smiling lip-service) any more than he could find sympathy for the rather joyless left wing politics which most of his colleagues professed or the highly moral brand of rational agnosticism for which the college was famous.

  This brings us to a further and very significant point. Just as Walter showed undeniable equivocation in professing a scholar’s humility but relishing worldly success, so his attitude to religion, which should have been founded, in his circumstances, on an honest intellectual appraisal, was in fact dictated by the requirements of convenience and mere good form, these in turn being slightly discounted by his anxiety to appear neither gullible nor unsmart. Such various and shifting factors placed him in what might have been an intolerable situation. As the humanist, on the one hand, which he claimed through his books to be, he had to acknowledge – and probably genuinely admired – the non-Christian tastes and virtues of the pagan world: on the other hand, however, he could neither adopt these tastes wholeheartedly nor even link them with the traditional agnosticism of Lancaster, for the world he wished to influence – the established, Athenaeum world – required at least a nominal deference to the Christian faith. As far as that went, Walter was quite happy to go to church occasionally, to refrain from attacking Christianity in his published works, and even partially to accept its tenets as a form of life insurance policy; but one would have thought that the consequent and enforced modification of his enthusiasm for Greek and Roman values might have made even books so general in tone as Dr Goodrich’s rather difficult to write with conviction. But if one thought thus, one thought wrong. For Walter, with impeccable insight, had adopted a thoroughly respectable and well tried formula for the reconciliation of these conflicting interests: it was the old schoolmaster’s tric
k of enthusing over the Ancients with one breath and then lamenting, in the next, that Christ had not been born a thousand years earlier so that they too could have had the benefit of his teaching. “Socrates was a truly great philosopher – but he might have been a Christian saint.” “Virgil was obviously reaching out, though he did not know it, towards the Christian faith.” “Catallus…humph…well, Catallus would have diverted some of his undoubted passion away from the lusts which clearly made him so unhappy: Catallus would have been a natural convert.” And so on. An excellent fashion of having it both ways, if, that is, you are not deeply concerned with either. No doubt Walter quite liked the Classics and what they stood for: but in the last resort he was not deeply concerned about the Classics or anything else save for his satisfying and slowly seeping influence in the College, in the University and in the World. A realist if ever there was one, he saw that one must offer the right brand of every commodity – from cigarettes to religious faith.

  For the rest, you should know that he was a widower and had one daughter called Penelope, with whom he lived in a pretty house at Grantchester. But this did not prevent him from spending nearly all his time in the college – often he spent the nights there – and from making it the centre and base for his social activities. There he gave many entertainments – far too many by the plain standards of his colleagues; but then none of them was given just for the joy of it, they all had some official or covert purpose. At such of these as were sexually mixed, Penelope acted as hostess; and it was at a “mixed” party of Walter’s, given the day after my arrival at Lancaster and designed to introduce the freshmen to the Fellows and their wives, that I met Richard Fountain again for the first time since I left Charterhouse.

  Having gone, quite literally, to the wall in order to recover from the barrage of introductions which Walter had levelled at me, I was surprised, for I thought I knew no one there, to hear a very firm voice saying almost into my ear: “And how are you, Anthony?”

  Turning towards the voice and failing to recognise the owner, I reflected that if manners at Lancaster entailed addressing strangers by their Christian names, then I had chosen the wrong college. And then the contours of the face I was looking at fell into place, as it were, and I was examining the grown Richard Fountain, a tall, well cut, mature young man, who smiled faintly and said: “I knew you were going to be here. You don’t mind if I use your Christian name? Now we’re no longer at school?”

  “No… Richard.”

  “People call me Dick.”

  “I dislike abbreviations,” I said, “though I can see what people mean.”

  For “Dick” was clean and manly and sensible and short, and would have had great appeal in the world of school which Richard had, after all, so recently left. “Dick” meant centuries against Winchester and defending the North West Frontier; and of such was the kingdom of Fountain.

  “What have you been doing all this time?” he said.

  “Just soldiering. The war was nearly done by the time they commissioned me. I saw a little fighting in Germany. And you?”

  “Just being educated. Do you think they did a good job?”

  “I wouldn’t know,” I said; “I’ll tell you in a month or so.”

  “You would like us to see something of each other then?”

  “Why not?”

  “I just thought… There was something very final about the way you said goodbye at Charterhouse.”

  So you spotted that, I thought, you sharp little cookie, you. And remembered it. Another talent for Richard Fountain: long memory for potentially important subtleties of behaviour.

  “I thought that I was going to a war and would probably be killed. In such circumstances it is prudent to say firm ‘adieux’.”

  “Very plausible, Anthony,” he said, “but untrue. You were bored with me and hoped you’d seen the last of me.”

  Before I could reply to this remark, or even think about its significance, Walter Goodrich was standing in front of us with his hand on the shoulder of a tall and lumpish girl – badly dressed, thick in the calf and ankle, but with a sweet face; a face in no way beautiful or even pretty, yet thoughtful, charitable, and possibly handsome in consequence.

  “So you’ve met each other,” Walter said succulently. “But of course you were at Charterhouse together… Richard was your study fag,” he said to me with the suspicion of a leer. “Was he…industrious?”

  “Passably so.”

  “Well, now you must both meet my daughter… Penelope, this is Richard Fountain and – er – Major Anthony Seymour.”

  I had already told Walter that I had no intention of using this ridiculous title, which represented the most tenuous of temporary appointments. The fact that he used it now, with the slight hesitation, could only mean that he wished to imply that I was wilfully clinging to an artificial sense of my past importance which he himself deprecated but was prepared, out of courtesy, to humour. For whose benefit was this deceitful little charade? Penelope’s? Richard’s? And why?

  But Penelope had scarcely noticed what her father said. Her eyes, her ears, her being were for Richard. In a well bred way, of course. She stood there, superficially placid and cow-like, but gazing at him, taking him in, with a fierce intensity that was almost the more indecent for its surface calm.

  “I’ve got someone I want you to meet,” said Goodrich to me. Clearly he wanted his daughter and Richard left alone. What a lot of different games he seemed to be playing. But of course it was all really the same game. Discredit the old, and supposedly influential, school chum in front of Richard: make him seem pompous and ridiculous in front of Penelope: then leave Penelope and Richard together. You crafty brute, I thought.

  As Walter was leading me away, however, Richard turned from Penelope and said very clearly: “Come to my room tomorrow morning, Anthony. T 5. Come early, and then we can look at Cambridge together. New places are more exciting in the company of old friends.”

  I think the remark was sincere. But its secondary purpose – to annoy Walter and shake his possessive smugness – was very plain. Good for you, Richard, I thought. As for Walter, he turned a defensive smile in Richard’s direction, and then led me up to a tall and angular man who was apparently sitting with some difficulty on the fence which divides youth from middle-age.

  “This is Mr Honeydew,” said Walter, “College Tutor in mathematics.”

  “But you may call me Marc, Anthony Seymour,” said Honeydew in a precise and high-pitched voice, “Marc, my dear child, with a ‘c’.”

  Marc Honeydew, who had been imported, I found out later, from King’s, was even less typical of Lancaster than Walter or myself. I suppose that was why Walter had introduced us. But if Walter’s social sense was not at fault, his sense of tactics very definitely was. For Honeydew missed very little, had observed the scene between the four of us against the wall, and now started immediately on analysis and speculation.

  “So of course you know Dickie Fountain,” he said. “Now that one, my dear, has really caught our Walter’s eye. You should have heard Walter when Dickie came up to take his scholarship exam. ‘A real winner,’ Walter said, as though poor Dickie were in for the Stewards’ Cup. ‘Will go a long way,’ Walter boomed. But of course we should have elected him anyway, if only because he wrote such a charming essay. Do you know what he wrote about?”

  “No.”

  “‘The Dying Gods’, my dear. Not original, you think? Ah. But you see, it wasn’t one of those dreamy, melancholy little pieces, pretending to think Pan is still alive but only just, you know the kind of thing, and sometimes to be seen crying in the woods if you look very carefully. It was a great big angry essay, saying that the Gods were dying indeed but not fast enough, that they were still a menace and ought to have been done with long since. He got very cross about it and seemed really to believe what he was saying.”

  “I don’t quite see why this ensured his election,” I said.

  “Well, it didn’t really, because al
l his translations and things were so good anyhow. But it made an impression. Such style, you see. Such vigour. Such attack.”

  “I’m glad to hear it,” I said. And then for some reason I felt impelled to tell Honeydew about my own view of Richard. How I still wasn’t sure whether he was just an efficient examinee, or something very much more. How his school career supported the former view; whereas I did not yet know enough about him, as he now was, to say whether there was anything to uphold the latter.

  “As to that, my dear,” said Marc Honeydew, “it’s early days to say yet. Though you might think about that essay… But I’ll tell you something that is for sure. Conventional public schoolboy or little monstrosity, Walter’s taken to your Richard and he’s going to give him the works. He’s going to push him and groom him and drill him; and by the time he’s finished, Dickie’s going to be one streamlined little go-getter – in whatever line Walter chooses for him – just for a start. The University’s a good taking-off point – if you know when to take off…”