‘Depressing.’
‘Well, I went along. He asked me, not very hopefully, if I’d ever read any of Scott’s novels. I said I’d read quite a number. I think he felt from all the marks that I hadn’t a hope, and was pretty cross with somebody for bringing me 500 miles on a fool’s errand. At least I could see he was determined to cut short the agony, for he started asking me about Anne of Geirstein. Honest, Anne! The old ruffian did just that.’
‘And Super-Mungo, the wonder boy, knew this obscure romance backwards.’
‘Well, it did happen I’d read it.’ Mungo took this sally in good part. ‘And that seemed to me to make the Provost furious. My only sense was that I was drowning, swiftly but painfully. But when I surfaced at last it was to discover we’d been talking about Scott for nearly an hour. What happened to the eleven-ten chap and those following him, I never knew. Anyway, that was it. I was in.’
‘Mungo, that was absolutely splendid!’
Mungo had the sense of coming to with a jerk. It was as if he had been drowning again – and this time had discovered on surfacing not an old gentleman with a bird’s- nest beard but the girl of all his dreams. He told himself that this wouldn’t do. Quite spontaneously, and after cheerful mockery, Anne Cardower had said something very nice and rather admiring. But that was no warrant for falling in love with her on the strength of half a day’s acquaintance. Ian had invited him to Stradlings, and loyalty to Ian had to be the first thing. He mustn’t have Ian cursing his stupidity in introducing the Forres loon into his home.
Mungo had these creditable feelings genuinely and quite strongly; he also had a clear enough head to wonder how long they could be made to last. Perhaps it rather depended on Anne.
The next day he and Anne went riding together on the downs. It was sunny and cold; the ground was firm but unfrozen beneath the horses’ hoofs. Mungo had been afraid that English horses might not be like Scottish horses – or not like the Scottish horses he had ridden. But this anxiety proved to be without substance; he knew during their first canter that if he didn’t ride elegantly he did ride confidently and well. And he found after their long gallop, when they had drawn rein and turned into the wind, that he was far from being too breathless for talk.
‘We had me yesterday,’ he said, ‘so it’s your turn now. To tell me about yourself, I mean. What sort of things do you like doing?’
‘I like doing what I’m doing now: riding with a young man who tells me he’s a shade taller than my brother.’
‘You asked me if I was.’
‘Did I? I don’t remember. I must have been trying hard to keep up a polite conversation.’
‘You were doing nothing of the kind, Anne. What else do you like?’
‘Fox-hunting. And coursing – but we do that only in Ireland.’
‘What a blood-thirsty crowd you are.’ Mungo kindled to what he knew was Anne Cardower’s mockery again. ‘Even Ian wouldn’t come riding with us because he wanted to clean his gun – just to have something lethal in his hands.’
‘As a matter of fact, you’re on Ian’s horse now.’
‘I wondered if I was.’ Mungo was abashed. ‘I think perhaps we should go back and let him take over.’
‘Don’t be silly.’
‘I’m not being silly. Come on.’
‘Mungo, please. He’d be furious with me for telling you. He was frightfully bucked to have you go out on Ajax. You must have seen that in the stable yard.’
‘Well, yes – I did. Your brother is always madly nice to me. Did you ever read Peacock’s Melincourt?’ Rather fatally, a bizarre analogy had come into Mungo’s inventive mind.
‘I’ve never even heard of it.’
‘It’s quite funny. There’s a country gentleman in it who gets hold of an orang-utang in order to prove some theory or other. He grooms it carefully, and buys it a baronetcy – it’s called Sir Oran Haut-ton – and a seat in the House of Commons. Sir Oran is a great success. I wonder if I’ll be that once Ian has desegregated and integrated and assimilated me.’
‘Mungo, I call that a stupid joke.’ Anne was angry, and showed the fact by nudging her mount into motion. ‘Or at least it is when offered to me. I suppose it might be all right as part of the rubbish you and Ian talk together. But my brother doesn’t make friends because he has designs upon them. He likes them for what they are, and not for what they might be groomed into.’
‘You’re quite right.’ Mungo’s freckled face had flushed. ‘Stupid things occur to me, and I come bang out with them. I’m sorry.’
‘Forget it, Mungo. And I promise to read Melincourt.’
It seemed to Mungo that this small contretemps, although it would dismay him in the watches of the night, had in fact advanced his intimacy with Ian’s sister. There was no occasion to fall into discouraged silence.
‘Do you know,’ he said, ‘something that puzzles me? Your family seems to belong to my part of the world, and yet I’ve hardly heard of them. Auldearn is near where I live, and your grandfather is Lord Auldearn. But the name as attached to a person rings only the faintest bell with me.’
‘My grandfather never goes near Scotland.’
‘I suppose that’s it. Is your father his heir?’
‘Oh, no. The immediate heir is my Uncle David.’
‘You do seem to stick to more or less Scottish Christian names, which is something not particularly fashionable in the Scottish aristocracy. What’s your Uncle David called?’
‘Well, if you were inviting him to a party, what you’d put on the envelope would be The Viscount Brightmony.’
‘That’s another place-name. But I’ve never heard of him.’
‘He does live in Scotland, as a matter of fact. But, as far as that invitation goes, you might save your postage stamp. Uncle David never goes anywhere. You might say he lives in seclusion.’
‘I see.’ Mungo didn’t pursue his enquiries about this relation of Anne’s, because he felt that people described as living in seclusion are commonly lunatics. Instead, he tried a spot of mockery himself. ‘I’d like the Cardowers to have romantic associations in my mind. But it seems no go.’
‘The surname can hardly be called romantic – can it?’ Anne was amused by this conversation. ‘You know what a cardower is?’
‘How very odd! I never thought of it. He’s a chap who goes round mending old clothes.’
‘Yes. The original Cardower, you see, rose from that lowly occupation to the honourable office of Court Tailor at Dunsinane. When Macbeth proposed to get out of his nightgown it was my ancestor who came forward with an appropriate pair of breeks.’
Mungo’s condition was by now such that he judged this mildly funny nonsense to be brilliantly witty.
‘Do you know,’ he said, ‘that only the king was allowed a nightgown? Poor old Banquo and the others are in their skin – and on a very dirty night. “When we have our naked frailties hid,” Banquo says, “That suffer in exposure, let us meet.” So the Elizabethans enjoyed nudity on the stage, just like us.’
Having discovered this ability to entertain each other, Mungo and Anne rode back to Stradlings in a highly companionable way. They had to stop at a level-crossing while a train went by, and Mungo had some difficulty with Ian’s horse. He controlled the situation with an ease highly agreeable to the innocent vanity in his heart. Women in Love being his idea of the supremely good English novel (and so almost as good as Le Rouge et le Noir), this made him think of Gerald Crich in a similar situation. This in turn reminded him of how he and Ian had wrestled in the darkness on the deck of a college barge. He told Anne about this, only omitting one or two things which, in the heat of the fray, he had promised Ian to do to him. He was about to go on to the later events of that memorable night, including the splendid drunkenness of Pons de Beynac. But he remembered that Pons was coming to Stradlings, and a prudent instinct – which his aunt would have called canniness – told him to leave off. This was to prove extremely wise.
‘I’ve thought of
a Cardower you may have heard of,’ Anne said, when they were walking back to the house. ‘The bad Lord Douglas.’
‘Yes, I think I have heard of him – as a kind of legend. He sounds as if he were in a Border ballad.’
‘Well, he isn’t. He was just my other uncle, and he lived like his brother – my Uncle David, that is – in Scotland. I don’t remember him, because he died about fifteen years ago. Probably I shouldn’t have been allowed to see him anyway, on account of his being so bad.’
‘He must have been Lord Douglas Cardower, just as your father is Lord Robert?’
‘Of course.’
‘How strange that he should be the only one of you I ever heard of – before Ian and I got to know each other, I mean. And that it should have been at a kind of folk level. The bad Lord Douglas was just a bogey-man. It never occurred to me he’d been real. And now he turns out to have been your uncle. And here are you and I talking about him.’ Mungo was in high spirits, as he sometimes was when something had struck his imagination. ‘I call that rather fun.’
‘I don’t think my father would call it that. Poor uncle Douglas is distinctly taboo.’
‘Too bad for words?’
‘It isn’t quite that – not quite simply that. At least, so I feel.’ Anne halted before the door of Stradlings, as if anxious to get something clear before going inside. ‘I suspect that, in addition to being very bad, or before being very bad, he was very lovable. I believe they all – his parents, his brothers, everybody – adored him. And then there was some terrible disgrace, and they can’t bear to think of it all.’
‘Yes, I see,’ Mungo said, and fell silent. It wouldn’t be a good idea, he felt, to pursue this family skeleton further. People like the Cardowers, he supposed, were particularly sensitive to the stirring of anything of the sort in their cupboards. ‘I’m going to find Ian,’ he said, ‘and have it out with him about that horse.’
Chapter Six
In the course of the next few days Anne Cardower became the prompting occasion of everything that went on inside Mungo’s head. This didn’t mean that he thought of nothing and nobody else. When he was with her – as she seemed pleased he should be for most of the time – his talk was of shoes, ships, sealing wax, and the problem of whether pigs have wings. When he was away from her he sometimes found these conversations continuing silently and of their own momentum; at other times he was showing himself notably in command of a variety of striking situations of which she was a spectator; at yet others she had retired into the wings in favour of one or more of her relations. In these last fantasies Mungo’s maturity, breadth of view, and soundness of judgement impressed more than favourably Anne’s parents, her grandfather Lord Auldearn, her uncle Lord Brightmony (although he was mad) and even her other uncle the bad Lord Douglas (which was surely the extreme of imaginative debauch, since the bad Lord Douglas was dead). There were also times when Mungo quite forgot about the Cardowers, Anne included, and found his inward eye contemplating with amazement and awe the masterpieces which he now knew he was going to write.
Al this mene I by love, he told himself satirically out of Chaucer. But it was really no use affecting to be detached about himself. He had taken a header, and he knew it.
His acquaintance with girls hadn’t been extensive or impressive, partly on account of the social persuasions of his aunt, Miss Guthrie. He could make Ian laugh with a scathing account of the class structure of a small Scottish town. But it was something quite real, and stiff enough to have to be counted as among the facts of life. He had hardly known a girl with whom he hadn’t been at Sunday school. For every attendance at this institution you were given a little religious picture to stick in a scrapbook, so that his first experience of the commerce of the sexes had been a matter of swopping a Good Shepherd for a Lamb of God, or a Light of the World for a Wise Virgins. This hadn’t led anywhere very much. And as they grew older it was only a minority of these girls who showed much promise of exciting the imagination or even the nervous system – and only a minority of these again who qualified for party-going status in Miss Guthrie’s mind. Of course other regions existed, and Mungo hadn’t been so unenterprising as not to explore them. He had gone sprunting with the farm lads – an activity reticently defined in Scots dictionaries as running among the stacks after the girls at night. It had proved – and even before turning what might be called definitive – not quite his thing. He found he couldn’t certainly work out what kind of fastidiousness was responsible for this disappointing result. It didn’t seem to be a straight sexual fastidiousness, nor a moral one either. Perhaps it was an aesthetic fastidiousness. Probably it was simply and shamefully snobbish. When young and silly, and given to reading of a romantic and chivalric order, he had been prone to dream that he dwelt in marble halls with vassals and serfs at his side. It might be some hangover from that which was responsible for his not much taking to what Donne calls coarse country wenches.
So here he was – his aunt’s nephew, precipitated into the society of a girl so remote from these as to be distinguishable from the minister’s or the doctor’s daughter as well. Not that Miss Guthrie would much approve of the Hon. Anne Cardower. Her attitude to the aristocracy was not ambivalent, and Mungo had never detected her as obtaining the smallest vicarious satisfaction from their doings as reported in the popular press. She believed in superiors, equals, and inferiors – and also in the wisdom of keeping clear of either outside of the sandwich. At the same time, and because she had a proper respect for his talents, she was inclined to treat her nephew – although cautiously – as a special case. She judged it right and proper that the exceptionally endowed should rise in the world, provided it was through strenuous efforts of their own. This had been the basis of her uncompromising vote for Oxford. She couldn’t have foretold Mungo’s tumbling into a set of rooms with the grandson of an absentee Scottish landowner. But she certainly held an exaggerated idea of the upper-crust flavour of the place as a whole.
Mungo wondered whether any of his excitement about Anne had got through to Ian. He rather hoped not, and he couldn’t somehow see himself adding the precipitate fact to the stock of confidences which he and Ian had exchanged during the latter part of the Oxford term. He might have done so – have baldly announced ‘I’m terribly in love with your sister’ – if Ian hadn’t in some way become for the time being rather a background figure. It was as if being at home were drawing him back within a family pattern. He had taken on some of his father’s gestures and intonations, and even his father’s air of being alert to be perfectly charming to absolutely anybody who turned up.
Yet Ian’s likeness to Lord Robert didn’t seem to Mungo more than superficial. Perhaps in character Ian skipped his father and harked back to earlier generations of Cardowers about whom Mungo could only guess. Perhaps, too, he was ambitious. Every now and then he would disappear for hours on end, to turn up again with some vague remark about having been helping the stable boy, or carrying out one or another handy-man’s job about the place. Mungo thought that he might really have been tackling the vacation reading which his tutor had no doubt urged upon him. Mungo himself read hardly anything at all. He was too busy living his own dream.
Dreams commonly dissolve and fade. But sometimes they are shattered – by a shake on the shoulder or a loud noise in the street. It was a loud noise in the courtyard of Stradlings that told Mungo of the arrival of Pons de Beynac. Mungo had been out looking for a missing spaniel – and in consequence of this simple commission feeling rather like a son of the house – when the row drew him round a corner and confronted him with a bright yellow sports car which had come to a halt before the front door. It had the sleek lines and hypertrophied snout of a really classy specimen of its kind, and its provision of space for mere human beings was so scanty that an effect of surprise attended the unloading from it not only of Pons himself but also of a good deal in the way of suitcases and sporting impedimenta. The morning was frosty, and only a diminutive windscreen had prote
cted Pons from a nipping air; in consequence he was as pink – Mungo told himself – as a hunk of good quality salmon out of a tin.
‘Hullo, Mungo!’ Pons shouted amiably. ‘You here still?’
‘Hullo, Pons.’ Mungo didn’t see why he should positively confirm that he was here still. Indeed, the question didn’t please him a bit.
‘I thought you might be gone.’ Pons was struggling out of an overcoat fabricated from dark leather and snowy fleece. ‘Glad you haven’t. There are things I want you to tell me about. Shop stewards, for example.’
‘I don’t know anything about shop stewards. I’ve never met one.’
‘I was reading rather a good thing in some rag or other.’ Pons, whose references tended to be vague, ignored Mungo’s disclaimer. ‘It seems shop stewards are the real mischief. So I think they oughtn’t to be allowed – not into the factories, I mean. That would solve the whole problem, it seems to me. But I want to know what you think.’
‘Shop stewards work in factories.’
‘That’s it. That’s what’s wrong. I don’t think they should be allowed into the industrial areas at all. Or not without permits, or something of that kind. You could take away the permit if one of them started a strike. Where’s Anne?’
‘I don’t know.’ The suddenness of this transition would have given a duller youth than Mungo a jolt. ‘If you want to clock in, Elizabeth’s writing letters in the drawing- room.’
‘Then I’ll go and pass the time of day.’ Pons had looked sharply at Mungo, almost as if he were bright enough to glimpse some hinterland to so firm a suggestion. ‘But I’ll shove these things in my room first. Of course, I know which it is.’
‘I’ll lend you a hand.’ Mungo heaved a suitcase and a gargantuan golf-bag out of the car. ‘You ought to have a valet, Pons, to cope with all this.’
‘A valet?’ Pons, who was incapable of detecting irony, laughed loudly. ‘My dear chap, taking a man around went out with George the Fifth and Bertie Wooster. Trouble with you is, you get everything out of books. Where’s that awful man Cardower?’
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