Mungo's Dream

by J. I. M. Stewart

  ‘He’ll turn up presently, and say he’s been putting turnips through the chopping-machine, or grooming Ajax.’

  ‘Good old Ajax! You wouldn’t know – but he’s a damned decent mount. I intend to borrow him shamelessly, even if it means leaving Ian by the fire, dozing over some dreary book about the Norman Conquest. It’s a pity the Cardowers – this particular lot, I mean – haven’t a bean. Makes one ashamed of merchant banking, and a father who’s been Lord Mayor, and all that kind of thing. You’re bloody lucky, Mungo, not to be in the mun. At least, I suppose you’re not in the mun?’

  ‘Not yet – but who knows?’ Mungo found himself unresentful of this innocent patronage. ‘Do you know that an American publisher once offered a Victorian poet £5,000 for a poem of three stanzas?’

  ‘Good Lord!’ Perhaps for the first time in his life, Pons de Beynac was awed before the poetic character. ‘Just think how much that would be now.’

  ‘Yes,’ Mungo said. ‘Almost what you might call big money.’

  But in what followed there was no fun. Pons and Anne turned out to have known each other from childhood – and so well that they scarcely needed to converse. This couldn’t be called their fault, but nevertheless Mungo felt it to be unfair. Pons, although a decent enough oaf, was as thick as they come, so that if much in the way of intelligible speech had been required of him this near approach to idiocy would have appeared. As it was, he and Anne got along in terms of a code the mainstay of which appeared to be the more or less monosyllabic recall of former occasions. ‘Hailstones,’ Anne would say; Pons would reply ‘Bunn’s barn’; and both would laugh as if something extremely amusing had occurred. Or Pons would come out with ‘Snuffle?’ on an interrogative note; Anne would reply ‘Snaffle, boy, snaffle’; and this imbecile exchange would again occasion merriment. They would ride happily off together for a whole morning of this ridiculous commerce, leaving Mungo to help Ian with the turnips. This, it was true, was fair enough, since it was Pons’s turn for Ajax, a creature not to be treated as if he were a bicycle built for two. And it couldn’t be said that Anne was flirting with Pons, any more than it could be said that she had flirted with Mungo. She was just seeming extremely pleased with the one in the precise fashion that she had seemed extremely pleased with the other. In fact – Mungo told himself furiously – Anne was devoted to the wholly social thing very much as her father was; she put on a turn for whoever turned up.

  There was a mournful comfort in this last reflection – for as long, at least, as Mungo was able to maintain it to himself. But after a day or two he was obliged to decide – or imagine – that Anne and Pons were really a little more in each other’s pockets than that. And this seemed confirmed by Ian with a casualness which betrayed him as feeling on tricky ground.

  ‘Never could understand what Anne sees in old Pons,’ he said. ‘But she insists on my importing him every now and then.’

  ‘That’s why you asked him this time?’

  ‘Well, yes. And I’m sorry if it hasn’t turned out too well.’ Ian, it seemed, had not been unobservant. ‘Fact is, I was relying on my other sister – Mary, that is – to show you around. But she’s gone off on some stupid visit. Mary’s said to be much prettier than Anne.’

  Mungo naturally didn’t find this last piece of information consoling or interesting in the least. He began to hate Pons de Beynac. Even Pons’s exotic name appeared disgusting. And when Lord Robert pressed a further glass of claret on Pons, or Lady Robert asked him about the health of his aunts, Mungo told himself it was because these Cardowers hadn’t a bean, and Pons was a Lord Mayor’s son and absolutely rolling. Then he would see that this was nonsense, and become most depressingly ashamed of himself. But he did occasionally wish that Anne could see Pons sprawling dead drunk on the floor, or even just hear him talking drivel about the ready way to prevent strikes.

  It didn’t make things any better that Anne continued to be very nice to Mungo in the intervals of being very nice to Pons. She was doing it, he assured himself, as automatically as somebody with the correct manners turning now to the left and now to the right at a dinner-table. He himself had enough pride to talk to her on these occasions as gaily as before. But he kept on feeling that he was perhaps making a gauche fool of himself as he did so. Worse still, Anne seemed to be aware of his feeling, and to turn on a little extra niceness as a consequence. And what could be ghastlier than that?

  This was the state of affairs at Stradlings when, at breakfast one morning, Ian opened a letter, read it, handed it to his father, and said darkly, ‘It’s a summons.’

  Chapter Seven

  For a moment Mungo supposed that Ian had fallen foul of the fuzz, and was to be up before a magistrate for speeding or something of the kind. But then it turned out that the summons had nothing to do with police courts; it was an invitation to lunch from Ian’s grandfather, Lord Auldearn. Among the Cardowers this appeared to be equivalent to a royal command. Ian evidently saw it this way.

  ‘Your grandfather naturally expects a visit,’ Lord Robert said. ‘He still takes an interest in Oxford. In fact, he went to a college gaudy last year, and made them a speech. It appears to have been a little eccentric, but it was a success, all the same. And it would be my guess that he said a word about you to the Provost at the same time. Not by way of edging you in unfairly, of course, but simply as vouching for your character. And now it will be nice for him to hear about a new generation of undergraduates. Ian, don’t you agree?’

  ‘I suppose so.’ Ian spoke on something nearer an ungracious note than Mungo had yet heard at Stradlings. He looked gloomily round the table, and it was almost as if he momentarily caught his sister’s eye. ‘I’ll tell you what,’ he said suddenly. ‘I’ll ring him up, and ask if I can take Pons and Mungo over to Bamberton.’

  ‘An excellent idea,’ Lord Robert said briskly. ‘I would like Mungo to meet your grandfather.’ Lord Robert had suspended operations on a piece of toast – this in order to direct upon Mungo what had lately become a thoughtful as well as an amiable glance. Perhaps he had tumbled to Mungo’s feelings about Anne, and was benevolently trying to think up any possible ground for viewing Ian’s low-born friend in an eligible light after all.

  ‘Of course grandpapa has had Pons before,’ Ian was saying, ‘and won’t be much interested in him. But Mungo is new. He could have a go at Mungo, and Pons and I could play tennis.’

  ‘Super idea,’ Pons said amiably.

  Mungo didn’t feel that he agreed. He suspected Anne of having signalled to her brother that she would be glad of a quiet day to herself. Perhaps she was so bored with him that she wanted a holiday even at the expense of doing without Pons as well. Or perhaps – which was almost as discouraging – she was just tired of turning on the niceness business for either of them. Again – and although he was always willing to extend his acquaintance with men and their manners – he wasn’t sure that he wanted to be had a go at by Ian’s grandfather. And the proposal that Ian and Pons should play tennis seemed entirely odd. There was now snow on the ground at Stradlings. He didn’t know where Bamberton was. But if it was possible to go and lunch there it couldn’t be climatically all that different.

  Ian, however, put through the arrangement he had suggested, and in the middle of the morning they piled into his mini – a battered affair to which he was much attached, and which he had been furious to discover he couldn’t keep in Oxford while still a freshman. Pons, because he didn’t need so much leg room, was shoved in the back – a relegation which he accepted quite cheerfully. In fact they were all rather cheerful during the run, as young men together tend to be when under nobody’s regard but their own.

  ‘What about Ajax?’ Mungo asked. ‘Could you take him up with you? He’d be much better fun than this stinking little thing.’

  ‘I don’t know. Pons, could I take Ajax up?’ Being in his second year, Pons had to be deferred to in a matter like this.

  ‘You can hunt, if you want to.’ Pons was cautious. �
�But I suppose Ajax would have to be at livery somewhere. They wouldn’t let you drive into Howard with one of those transport affairs for horses.’

  ‘There’s a man who keeps a falcon,’ Mungo said. ‘So why not a horse – or an elephant with a howdah, for that matter? It wouldn’t do anybody any harm.’

  ‘There are a lot of statutes started in the middle ages,’ Pons said learnedly. ‘They twist them to fit anything they don’t like. Rutherford-Brown had a sporting rifle an uncle gave him for his twenty-first. His scout reported it – those chaps are all spies, and nothing else – and a nervous and teetering don told him it wouldn’t do. R-B asked why not. And the don produced some Latin rigmarole about prohibiting bows and arrows.’

  ‘I don’t want to hear about Rutherford-Brown,’ Mungo said. ‘What did he want with a rifle, anyway? A rifle isn’t like an elephant. It’s no use at all. The man must be an idiot. What I do want to hear about is Ian’s grandfather. And I want to know what you mean by saying he’ll have a go at me. I think it’s probably a hoax, like those end-of-term Collections. He’ll just shake hands, and say I’ve had a very good first week in civilised society. And I’ll remember to say thank you, sir – and give him more of a nod than a bow.’

  ‘Just you wait.’ Ian’s continuation of this nonsense sounded almost serious. ‘I’d back him even against your famous aunt, any day of the week.’

  ‘Then you’d lose your money. You’ll probably lose your life, by the way, if you go on driving at this pace.’

  ‘Rubbish.’ Ian endeavoured further to depress the accelerator, but it was already down as far as it would go. As they were descending a hill, however, the mini built up to a startlingly good pace. ‘Pons,’ Ian shouted, ‘sing us the Cambridge Boat Song. It may relax Mungo’s strained nerves.’

  So Pons sang – tunelessly but with vigour – an interminable obscene ditty. Mungo duly relaxed. They arrived surprisingly quickly at their destination.

  ‘Christ!’

  Mungo produced this pious ejaculation unaffectedly. He really was staggered by his first glimpse of Bamberton Court. Stradlings, although more roomy than any dwelling he had ever been in before, didn’t propose itself as built for any other purpose than living in. You could imagine a large family filling it comfortably – and able to shout at one another from top to bottom and wing to wing. Bamberton had been built for ostentation, in some age that didn’t understand either wealth or power unless they were expressed in outwardness and display. It was very much an architectural achievement, but it was a political and economic statement even more than that. Just as robes and wigs and all the archaic palaver of a law court existed to keep the vulgar in awe so did this monstrous pile exist to assert a vast remove from squires and merchants and parsons and all the people who are nowadays called middle or upper-middle class.

  Mungo, who had developed a sharpened social consciousness as a consequence of his recent exposure to new influences and assumptions, saw this before he saw the aesthetic virtues of the place. Bamberton wasn’t like a skyscraper or an air-terminal or a monstrous hotel. It did cunningly suggest, although baselessly, that it had preserved some sense of the normal human scale. You felt that you could at least drive a golf-ball from one end of it to the other, or a tennis-ball – if you were in the Wimbledon class – clean over any of its imposing facades into whatever courtyards lay beyond. You could comfortably perambulate its several terraces to the east before breakfast, its answering terraces to the west before dinner. It was a bit overwhelming – as it was meant to be – all the same.

  ‘Round about 1710,’ Ian said in a tone of self-conscious irony. ‘Vanbrugh and Hawksmoor, in off-times when they weren’t busy on Castle Howard.’

  ‘Still a bit short on baths and loos,’ Pons pronounced, ‘but otherwise a very reasonable sort of house.’

  ‘Don’t be idiotic, Pons.’ Ian spoke with a surprising snap. ‘There’s nothing reasonable about the place. Showy – that’s the proper word for Bamberton. But it’s one of the top things of its kind in England, all the same.’

  Mungo wondered whether Ian, thus displaying a divided mind over Bamberton Court, would one day own the place. He retained, from some bit of talk or other, a vague notion that it was a possibility, but it wasn’t a matter he had thought about. At the moment the house was like some monstrous toy on a turntable, for it seemed to be pivoting on them as the mini took a great curve of the beech-lined avenue.

  ‘How many people live in it?’ Mungo demanded.

  ‘Just my grandfather. My grandmother died ages ago.’

  ‘Nobody else?’

  ‘No – except that he sometimes puts up what he calls a chum, meaning another old gentleman like himself.’

  ‘But there must be somebody to look after him! Do you mean that he boils his own egg?’

  ‘Of course there are servants.’ Ian was amused. ‘Far more than make sense, probably.’

  ‘Is he a kind of recluse?’

  ‘Oh, no. It’s his eldest son, my Uncle David, who is that. He’s the one who lives in Scotland. I suppose he likes the morose temper of its inhabitants.’

  ‘Mungo will probably emigrate permanently,’ Pons said companionably from the back. ‘We have to give it to him that he’s one on whom cheerfulness sometimes breaks in.’

  ‘Good Lord!’ Mungo exclaimed, ‘Pons has produced an echo from the great world of books.’ Mungo had quite forgotten that he hated Pons de Beynac. For the moment he had even forgotten Anne. He was only reflecting that one could be friends with two fundamentally remote young men, and explore in their company an archaic way of life which normally one would catch only a glimpse of by paying at the door. ‘Do you know,’ he said over his shoulder to Pons, ‘what is called a great house in Scotland? Either a bogus little mediaeval castle, or a bogus little French chateau, or a decent four-square mansion by somebody with a name like Dreghorn or Gillespie. No wonder nobs like the Cardowers, when on the up-and-up, dig this sort of thing for all they are worth.’

  Mungo found this chatter silly even as he uttered it, which meant that he must be feeling nervous. What was Bamberton’s equivalent of the man wearing a bowler hat and sitting in a little glass box? It wouldn’t be long before he knew, for they had now come to a halt before a flight of steps broad and high enough to have looked quite well if shunted off to the palace of King Minos at Knossos. Against it, it was now the mini’s turn to look like a toy: a Dinkie toy or the kind you buy inside a matchbox. There was deep snow everywhere on the ground, but the steps had been swept clear of it as if for the passage of a platoon of grandees marching abreast. There didn’t seem to be any way of entering Bamberton Court – at least if one belonged to, or was temporarily affiliated with, the proprietary classes – other than by puffing one’s way up to the top and being engulfed within an enormous portico. In fact this imposing façade was on such a scale that from ground level you couldn’t see even the top of the great dome which, from farther back, showed itself as dominating the entire building.

  ‘We’re for it now, chaps,’ Ian said. ‘Pons, you great oaf, mind your manners. And up we go.’

  Ian had been right about the servants. The visitors’ mere arrival had produced two old men and several young ones. The young ones, who were distinguished from their seniors by wearing black and yellow striped waistcoats, offended Mungo at once. Ancient servitors, pottering round with trays, polishing silver, brushing clothes, or doing any other appropriate thing you could think of, were part of a picture vaguely hallowed by time. But that youths of your own age – no older and no younger – should step forward and deftly take your coat and scarf, or precede you with an unnaturally soft and unresilient step through the kind of marble mausoleum which the inside of Bamberton seemed to resemble, was somehow shameful all round. Not that he mustn’t keep such feelings to himself. He’d accepted Ian as Ian had accepted him – and along with the chap it was fair enough that you should buy his ambiance.

  In any case, this effect didn’t last long. They w
ere in a great square hall, with marble goddesses in marble niches staring at each other sightlessly, and overhead the dome swimming pink and blue. Across the hall, framed within tall columns, there was a glimpse of a further large, ornate, and seemingly empty chamber. Inexplicable splendour of Ionian white and gold, Mungo not very appositely quoted to himself. Then he was aware that, from some hidden entrance near the end of this vista, an old man had appeared and was coming towards them – soundlessly, because in carpet slippers which he scarcely raised from the floor. The old man lifted an arm briefly in an impatient gesture, and at this, almost as if a wand had been waved over them, the servants vanished. So here was Ian’s grandfather. He was shrunken within ancient and shapeless tweeds which he had no doubt reasonably filled out decades before, so that the present effect was rather of a dwarf who had been charitably accommodated from the cast-off wardrobe of some person of normal stature. He ought to have looked ridiculous, but was for some reason quite far from doing so.

  ‘Ian, Pons – and you are Lockhart.’ With this economical greeting, delivered in a low voice which seemed at once weary and alert, Lord Auldearn held out to Mungo a hand the limpness of which suggested that he had determined upon the nullity of such gestures a long time ago. But no impression of this sort attended his glance. Some degenerative process of old age, indeed, had painfully everted his eyelids, so that his pale blue eyes looked out from reddened circles and one had to wonder whether he found it agonising to blink. Yet this only enhanced the steely scrutiny of the regard he turned for a long moment upon his grandson’s new friend. Lord Auldearn followed this up with a curt nod which seemed obscurely to suggest his having made up his mind about something. Perhaps, Mungo thought, he had been thus instantly vetted and found presentable. At least Lord Auldearn now smiled. It was a curiously sweet smile, but not in the least of the artificial sort that such a description might convey. And you had scarcely received it before it was gone. You then realised that this old man’s habitual mood was melancholic. He had made up his accounts, you felt, and had concluded they didn’t amount to much. He was simply waiting to move on.