‘A professional risk.’ A shaft of morning sunshine had sought out Howard 4, 4, and Mungo on a window-seat was trying to squeeze himself into it. ‘You have to take them.’
‘Are you saying you mean to be what they call a professional writer?’
‘It sounds daft, put like that. But it’s the only way I have of explaining myself to myself – to suppose something of the kind. Am I beautifully clear?’ Mungo paused, and Ian at least didn’t say he wasn’t. ‘And I suppose the real professional risk is not having quite enough bread and lard in your garret.’
‘I think there are others – just in possessing that sort of mind. Always being agog to make things up.’
‘Man, you’re havering.’ With Ian, Mungo now allowed himself an occasional plunge into the Doric. ‘I think the first Cardowers must have been Covenanters. Sour first cousins of sour English Puritans. Believing that poets tell lies.’
‘They were nothing of the sort.’ Ian was amused. ‘On the other hand, they haven’t – not so far as I know – produced a professional fairy-tale merchant. Only I have to admit I’m not the only Cardower to cohabit with one. My Uncle David does. Oh, damn!’ The big college bell was banging out noon, and Ian had scrambled to his feet and was rummaging for his gown. (The sunshine having been pre-empted by Mungo, he had been toasting himself on the hearth-rug.) ‘Bloody tute.’
‘Ho, ho!’ Mungo said lazily, and edged a bare chest into the November warmth. Although he had registered Ian as saying something odd, he was too drowsy to feel curious, and the door hadn’t closed behind his room-mate before he was very comfortably asleep. Being Henri Beyle dit Stendhal through the small hours had quite taxed the energies even of six-foot two and eighteen years.
In the eighth week Ian finished his essay quite early – not much after one a.m. Mungo hadn’t gone to bed. Having grown tired of Stendhal, he was reading L’Éducation Sentimentale and wondering whether he would ever experience such an obsession as Frederic Moreau’s for Mme Arnoux.
‘I say,’ Ian said, ‘why not come home with me when we go down? The house will fill up with relations for Christmas, but you could stay until just before then.’
‘I’d have to be home myself by then, anyway. But a few days would be very nice. Do you think your parents would mind?’
‘Of course not. You have their invitation already. But probably you’ve forgotten. You got so frightfully tight.’
‘I did nothing of the sort. I mean, they might find this a bit prompt.’
‘Rot. Fugerit invida whatever it is. As a matter of fact, I’ve had a letter from my father suggesting I should invite you. But I was going to, anyway.’
‘Then that will be fine.’
This uneffusive exchange seemed satisfactory to both, nor was Mungo in the least displeased when Ian a little unexpectedly added: ‘Do you know? I think I’ll ask old Pons too.’
The plan having been settled, Ian carefully collated his essay and secured it with a paper-clip: when you were reading these things aloud it could be disconcerting if the pages proved to be out of order. Mungo turned off the fire: you paid for your own electricity. They made for their bedrooms. It was rather their habit, however, to pause with a hand on the door-knob and swop final remarks.
‘I say,’ Mungo said, ‘do you dress for dinner at Stradlings?’
‘Well, yes, as a matter of fact. Dinner jackets.’
‘Hooray! I can wear mine. It’s still all wrapped up in auntie’s tissue-paper. She was quite clear it’s essential to young Oxford life.’
‘I sometimes don’t believe in auntie. But you must let me meet her one day, if she does exist.’
‘Agreed,’ Mungo said – and added seriously: ‘She’ll put you in your place, my boy. You wait.’
Chapter Five
Term was over. Like a traveller hurtled across the globe in a jet, Mungo felt that only part of himself was going to arrive on schedule, leaving another part either staying put or struggling along behind. For there are psychological just as much as there are physical discontinuities to which the human frame simply does not stand up. Of course if you have been at a boarding school you are conditioned to them. But to be confronted for the first time, when virtually on the threshold of middle age, with the prospect of three years of schizophrenic existence is surely insupportable. Mungo – who was actually in high spirits – expatiated on this to Ian, and received in return practical advice on how to comport himself at the valedictory ceremony known as College Collections.
‘Don’t stand as if you were on parade,’ Ian had said, ‘and don’t lounge, either. Keep your great paws out of those bloody pockets. Smile, if you like, but don’t unleash that awful great grin. Say thank you, sir – particularly if he blows you sky-high – but smartly enough not to make it sound ingratiating or even grateful. And if you must bow, make it as near a straight nod as you can manage.’
‘I suppose all that’s what you call protocol. And it’s nice of you to be so anxious about me. Not that you can know anything about it, anyway. It’s just what you’ve been told by the bigger boys.’
‘You’ll see.’
Mungo saw. It must have been an occasion of awful solemnity once upon a time; indeed, it retained a trace of that now. But it had gone schizophrenic in its own way. Some people had put on their most formal clothes, while others had kept the appearance of being crept out of a dust-bin invented by Samuel Beckett. You were herded in batches into hall, and there at high table, just as if about to attack one of their gargantuan dinners, were the Provost and a squad of dons. Someone bellowed out your name, and you had to march up the whole length of the place, with your hobbledehoy footfalls coming back at you from the lofty raftered roof. When Mungo reached the Provost the old chap was consulting, or effecting to consult, an enormous Domesday-Book affair in which it was to be supposed that all one’s sins were recorded. ‘A good first term, Mr Lockhart,’ the Provost said, cocking up a bird’s nest of a beard in order to manage a glimpse of Mungo’s chin. ‘A very good first term.’ And that was the whole of that particular goon show (whatever a goon show may have been). At a hasty gulping of coffee in the J.C.R. afterwards it became apparent that the hundred-odd freshmen had all scored a very good first term.
‘It’s called the psychotherapy of warm praise,’ Ian said. ‘We’re supposed all to be wanting to tear the university to pieces. And gracious words are going to temper those bad devices and desires in our hearts.’
Elizabeth Cardower had driven over to Oxford in an estate car, which was divided into first and second class compartments by wire netting. Presumably the inferior passengers were commonly basset hounds and the like. But on the present occasion Ian and Mungo piled in their suitcases (Pons had to go to London, and was coming down to Stradlings by train a few days later) and Lady Robert drove across Oxford to the supermarket in Cowley. They shopped in such a big way that both young men had to push round capacious trolleys. Mungo liked this. Lady Robert was a good shopper; she had it all in her head, and reached out with quick decision to the shelves and into the frosty bins. When they had finished loading up, the estate car looked like a grocer’s van. They drove back over Donnington bridge and turned south, and soon the towers of Oxford were no more than an improbable spectacle, rinsed in winter sunshine, floating into distance. They were unreal, scarcely to be held on to at all. Mungo looked back on his eight weeks as if they were a dream which he knew to have been vivid and coherent, but which was dissolving away and eluding him, all the same. Fortunately he had been wrong in supposing the change would be traumatic. He was going to learn all about life at Stradlings. And it was a gorgeous day.
Ian had said that his home was a farm-house, and added that it was rather like Howard’s End. Mungo didn’t remember much of the actual setup in Forster’s novel, except that there were pig’s teeth in a tree and the bookcases were unsteady on their feet. Stradlings stood in a downland coomb, sheltered by beeches which were the only trees within sight. It was a low-roofed house, built rou
nd three sides of a courtyard in the middle of which was an old well. The centre part was in stone, and looked to Mungo like a small monastic building which had been knocked about in aid of non-monastic living. One wing was a black and white half-timbered structure of the Life in Shakespeare’s England order, and the other was in fairly modern red brick.
‘It’s not my idea of a farm-house,’ Mungo announced as they drove up.
‘Perhaps it’s God’s idea of a farm-house.’ Bringing the car to a halt, Elizabeth Cardower offered this reply in a tone making it impossible to tell whether it was a pious reflection or a joke. ‘And there’s Anne.’
‘God’s idea of a sister,’ Ian said. ‘But where’s Mary?’
‘Didn’t I tell you? Mary has gone to stay with her friend Polly Pope. She won’t turn up until Christmas.’
‘I hadn’t heard. Well, all out.’ Ian appeared disconcerted, as if his younger sister’s absence had upset some calculation. ‘Anne, this is Mungo Lockhart.’
Anne Cardower shook hands briskly, and at once turned to give a hand with the suitcases. She was tall and fair like her brother, dressed in riding-breeches, and had come out of the house followed by a lollop and slaver of spaniels. Mungo told himself that it was all going by the book – a pretty simple-minded book. But from the first moment he was a good deal struck by Anne.
And she was interested in him. At first he thought it was her father’s kind of interest: a polite appearance of setting more store by your opinions (or even non-opinions) than was plausible. But he found that when Anne asked questions she waited for answers. And more of her conversation was in the form of questions than would have been approved by the superior school-mistresses who had ‘finished’ her. For Anne was obviously ‘out’. (Mungo told himself that to keep his chin above water at Stradlings he would have to make heavy demands upon his knowledge of the not-so-modern English novel.) She was also a straight-glancing sort of person, rather as Ian was. Mungo was instantly confident that he was going to get on well with Anne Cardower.
‘Do you know this part of the country?’ she asked as she handed him tea.
‘No. I’ve never been here before.’
‘Do you ride?’
‘Yes. But I haven’t brought anything to ride in.’
‘The important thing is can we mount you. And I think we can. You can borrow breeches from Ian. Are you older than Ian?’
‘No – nine months younger. Do I look older?’
‘Oh, yes. Or you look more responsible. A firm and formed character. You’ll be good for Ian.’
‘Ian runs me, as a matter of fact.’ Mungo saw he was being made fun of. ‘He knows all the ropes, and hands them to me at the right moment. He has an instinct for ropes – and for all the wheels and pulleys. I’m no good at them.’
‘What are you good at?’
‘Well, I know what I want to be good at. Not at manipulating the social structure, but just knowing – or feeling – how individuals tick.’ Mungo was conscious that this must sound pretentious and half-baked, but at least he believed what he was saying.
‘If you’re nine months younger than Ian, then you’re two years younger than me – and about ages with my sister Mary.’
‘I see.’ Mungo found these precise calculations disheartening. ‘So we know where we are.’
‘Oh, I hope not. That would be dull. We are almost completely unknown to each other. And that’s much more interesting.’
‘Finding out about other people,’ Lord Robert said, ‘is one of the major pleasures of life. But it should always happen at first hand, and through the medium of conversation, so that anybody who doesn’t want to needn’t play. And one mustn’t treat the other fellow as if he were in the witness-box.’ Lord Robert paused on this, a thing he didn’t commonly do in mid-stream. Perhaps he was obliquely rebuking his daughter, or Mungo, or both, for going so baldly to work. ‘Take Mungo, Anne. I hope to learn a great deal more about him. But it will be from himself, and without his being aware of the process.’ Lord Robert made another pause here, and Mungo was aware of a momentary regard more thoughtful than quite matched the lightness of this talk. ‘Mungo, you see, will be too busy feeling that he is finding out something about me.’
‘Mungo’s own method is different,’ Ian said. Ian was sprawled on a sofa, much as if he had been in Howard 4, 4. The Cardowers treated each other rather formally, Mungo had been noticing. But this effect of cool courtesy, such as one adopts with strangers, didn’t, somehow, prevent the whole effect from being relaxed and easy. ‘Mungo fires away with direct questions, just like Anne. It’s part of his turn as the simple Scottish boy.’
‘It’s not a turn,’ Mungo said.
‘All right – it’s not a turn. But the point is that the blunt demands for information are deceptive. What he really uses are antennae. That’s why he’s going to be a writer.’
‘Why not a diplomat?’ Lord Robert asked. ‘My own career has been impeded precisely by the lack of such an endowment. Metternich owned antennae, and I’m inclined to think Talleyrand had them too. Mungo, what do you think?’ He put down his cup, and moved towards the door; he seemed to have some occupation which prevented his being much around. ‘Exactly!’ he said – although Mungo, who was ignorant of nineteenth-century diplomatic history, had said nothing at all. ‘I entirely agree with you.’ And he drifted from the room.
‘Now we can go on,’ Anne said. ‘Have you any brothers or sisters?’
‘No. I missed out on any chance of them when my parents were drowned. They’d only had time to have me.’
‘How were they drowned?’
‘They were going to visit relations in Invergordon, and the ferry between Fort George and Fortrose went down. It was probably a rotten old tub in those days. I ought to have been on it too, but I was left behind with my aunt because I had chickenpox. I’ve lived with her ever since.’
‘Is she married?’
‘No. She’s a school-teacher. It was a great bit of luck.’
‘The chickenpox?’
‘Oh, no! It’s not at all certain that one is lucky in being alive. Sophocles and a good many other—’
‘Don’t be pedantic, Mungo. This isn’t a tute. What was a bit of luck?’
‘My aunt, of course. If you are going to be alive – for more than half a century, quite probably – you do want to look around.’
‘Survey mankind from China to Peru,’ Ian said over his shoulder. He was following his mother from the room, so that Mungo and Anne were now alone. It didn’t look as if the Cardowers were all that nervous, after all, about ineligible young men.
‘There’s your brother being pedantic too, and quoting Dr Johnson. He does it quite often. It’s funny. Johnson usually appeals to people with a sombre temperament, and Ian certainly hasn’t got that.’
‘Hasn’t he? I suppose the antennae must know. But go on.’
‘Well, I wanted to survey at least a little more of mankind than would be possible from, say, behind the counter in a corn-merchant’s office in Elgin. So it was lucky that my aunt had all the teaching of me until I was twelve. Latin included – although I don’t think she’d ever had to teach anybody else Latin. I believe she got it up for the purpose.’
‘It all sounds very Scottish.’ Anne Cardower said this seriously, and it was seriously that she engaged Mungo’s glance. ‘And then?’
‘I went to school in Forres. It was six miles on a bicycle. There was no difficulty, except when there was heavy snow. It was a school on a shoe-string, but good in a frugal way. Rather brutal, perhaps. I don’t know that I was worried by that.’ Mungo’s short sentences revealed an inward eye bent on already distant things. ‘But philistine, too. I think that would be the word. By the time I was sixteen it had really run out on me. So I more or less went into opposition. That was a bit premature, because they could still leather me. It was rather an awkward time.’
‘But it must have come straight, somehow. Because—well, here you are.’ Anne seemed
to feel that this might be misinterpreted. ‘At Oxford, I mean.’
‘Yes – but ought I to be? I find it hard to tell.’ Mungo felt that he had been coaxed into talking about himself in a big way. But he went on, all the same. ‘What happened was that I read a lot, and they came to notice that. And I can’t have been hopeless at the school subjects, since the headmaster decided to shove me in for Oxford. I wouldn’t have allowed him to, if I hadn’t seen my aunt wanted it as well. Even so, he was suffering from delusions of grandeur about his school. When the papers came they were totally beyond me – or most of them were. They called for a critical patter that hadn’t reached Moray. But there were two hours in which to write an essay on Landscape. Just like that: Landscape. It sounds idiotic. So I scribbled away – I think in a prose-poemish fashion – about the few square miles of the stuff I knew.’
‘That sounds sensible to me. It wouldn’t have been much good writing about Mont Blanc or the Bay of Naples.’
‘Of course it was sensible. And what happened was that some don or other – I suppose it must have been my present tutor – took a fancy to this rhapsody, and as a result I got an interview. That’s how it works, you know. All the candidates write their examination papers at school, and then the possible ones are summoned to Oxford. There was a lot of resistance in me still to the whole idea. It seemed exotic and absurd. But when this summons came it bowled me over. I’d cleared one hurdle in an unexpected way, and I was damn well going to do my best to clear the next.’
‘Good,’ Anne Cardower said briefly.
‘I expected a tremendous great oral examination – a kind of super viva. So I mugged away like stink – reading Dr Leavis, and Dr Tillyard, and God knows what.’
‘Was it useful?’
‘Absolutely not. When I got to Oxford all I found was a notice stuck up on a board saying I was to call on the Provost at eleven a.m. on the following day. And the next man was down for eleven-ten.’
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