Mungo's Dream

by J. I. M. Stewart

  During most of the meal it was Pons, fortunately, who made the running with their host. Pons must have guessed he would be taken over to Bamberton during his visit to Stradlings, since he had plainly been getting up a suitable topic, the pros and cons of reforming the House of Lords. Ian’s grandfather, it appeared, had once been Lord Privy Seal, and thus the government’s top man there. But Mungo suspected he no longer took much interest in the concern. He answered Pons’s questions and listened to Pons’s views with a courtesy which only deepened whenever Pons was particularly absurd, but always with a hint of fatigued abstraction. His inner mind was elsewhere. Perhaps across a shortening future he was meditating death, or being dead. Or perhaps his concern was with the past, and with wrongs committed or suffered. Mungo would have liked to get inside his head and make a few rapid observations of what was going on there. But how could it be done? How could he so much as glimpse the inner being of a man more than four times his own age, and belonging to a totally remote social setup? Mungo remembered with shame brash things he had sometimes said about proposing to become an authority on how people tick. He had even said something of the kind to Anne.

  This was an unfortunate thought. For Anne Cardower, thus invoked, at once annihilated the context she had bobbed up in. Mungo continued his meal – he had a dim impression of its being meagre although protracted – with only Anne in his head. Or only Anne plus a bit of Pons – the bit that was so imbecile that the thought of her conceivably being in love with him was an outrage. He reminded himself that he hated Pons. But he was also fond of him. He had laid Pons out on the floor of Howard 4, 4. And Pons, on some more sober future occasion, was quite capable of laying him out. Pons, in fact, was an acceptable feature of a complex, if immature, masculine society which Mungo, within a space of eight weeks, had quite fallen for. But this could be a disagreeable thought in itself. Perhaps he was doomed to endure years and years of being a kind of time-lagged public-school boy.

  Mungo’s gloom now answered Lord Auldearn’s. Ian even glanced from one to the other curiously, as if wondering what his grandfather had been up to with his friend. Fortunately no gloom visited Pons. Encouraged by his host’s inflexible appearance of attention, he had moved on from the Lords to the mysterious region of the Constitution and the Crown Prerogative.

  The question of what the Queen, in given critical circumstances, could ‘do’ took Lord Auldearn and his young guests as far as coffee. This was served not at table but in a faded and indefinably feminine apartment which Mungo imagined to have been the boudoir (if one really used such a word) of Ian’s grandmother. Lord Auldearn, he decided, led a kind of peripatetic existence amid the immensities of Bamberton, covering as much ground as he could in the course of a day. The menservants presumably chased round after him, carrying bacon and eggs, decanters of port, bath towels, or hot water bottles according to the hour. For dinner Lord Auldearn changed into a different pair of bedroom slippers. Did he still have a nightgown, like Macbeth, or had he got round to pyjamas? Mungo found that these foolish speculations a little enlivened him. And he became aware that the conversation had at length got away from the grave issues canvassed by Pons de Beynac.

  ‘Ian,’ Lord Auldearn was asking on a sharp intonation, ‘when did you last see your Uncle David?’

  ‘A little over a year ago, sir.’

  ‘You stayed at Mallachie?’

  ‘No. I just dropped in to tea. I was staying with people near Fochabers, who have marvellous fishing, and a bit of shooting as well.’

  ‘It would have been proper to stay at Mallachie.’

  ‘I don’t think that would have been exactly gay.’

  ‘I’m not discussing occasions of gaiety.’ Lord Auldearn was suddenly at his most savage. ‘I’m discussing what is due within a family.’

  ‘I’m very sorry, sir.’ Ian wasn’t taking his grandfather’s admonition very well, Mungo thought. The ‘sir’ business surely showed that – and Ian had gone quite pale into the bargain.

  ‘Acquaintances drop in on you for tea. Kinsmen put up with you for a few nights.’

  ‘Very well. Next time I go north I’ll put up with Uncle David. It will be in both senses of the term.’

  ‘That is an unbecoming witticism, Ian. But I let it pass. Mallachie is no doubt a depressing house for the young. But stay there, all the same, when you next have the opportunity. Mungo tells me that you think of going to Scotland together. He appears to believe that he can improve your mind there. Indeed, he believes he could improve mine. He blithely suggests we might all three go in the Rolls.’

  ‘Well, sir, why not?’ Ian wasn’t going to let Mungo’s notion be treated as bizarre.

  ‘Super idea,’ Pons said. Pons mightn’t be quite clear what was going on, but he had an instinctive sense of when solidarity was the proper thing.

  ‘It has its charm.’ Lord Auldearn was now almost good-humoured again. ‘But I have had to plead age and infirmity. When you do go, Ian, draw on me for your expenses if you want to. And take Mungo to Mallachie with you. I particularly desire that. It is important to me.’

  ‘Very well – and thank you very much.’ Ian looked puzzled by the command. ‘There will certainly be room for both of us. But I don’t honestly see why Mungo need—’

  ‘If you are to meet his aunt, he should meet your kinsmen in those parts.’

  ‘Absolutely right,’ Pons said heartily. ‘I think it’s often frightfully interesting, meeting a chap’s people. They can turn out so fearfully odd. Wouldn’t you say, sir?’

  This interposition met with no favour. Lord Auldearn responded only with a stony glance, and Ian with a scowl.

  ‘Very well, sir,’ Ian repeated, as if accepting orders. ‘But you don’t call Leonard a kinsman, do you?’

  ‘There is a family connection. He and David didn’t come together fortuitously. And Mungo should be interested in him’—Lord Auldearn added—’from a professional point of view.’

  ‘Please, who is Leonard?’ What had just been said suggested to Mungo something so extremely odd that he asked this question boldly and at once.

  ‘He is a man called Leonard Sedley,’ Lord Auldearn said. ‘And he was regarded as a very promising novelist at one time.’

  ‘But isn’t he dead?’ Mungo realised that this was a stupid question. ‘But obviously not.’

  ‘Obviously not.’ Lord Auldearn was at his driest now. ‘He has fallen silent, as they say. But you should read at least one book of his – An Autumn in Umbria.’

  ‘But I have. It’s in our rooms in college. Ian and I have even talked about it. But Ian didn’t—’

  ‘Claim a distant relationship? Well, that’s his own affair. Do you think the book deserves its reputation?’

  ‘Of course it does. It’s a marvellous conversation novel. A bit sophisticated for me, really, but just as good as Norman Douglas’s South Wind. I’ve vaguely known that Sedley was—is—rather a one-book man.’

  ‘It’s said that he continues to talk well.’ Lord Auldearn stood up, clearly by way of bringing the visit to a close. ‘So go and listen to him, and see what you think.’

  Part II

  Scotland

  Chapter Nine

  Ten days at Stradlings left Mungo with four weeks at home. He was obliged to break his journey in Edinburgh because he had to see – or rather be interrogated by – Mr Mackellar S.S.C. This lawyer had been an intermittent and mysterious power in Mungo’s life for as long as he could remember. If he was even to have a bicycle, Mr Mackellar S.S.C. had to be written to. As he never heard the name uttered without these appended initials, he had at one time concluded that Mr Essessee would be a legitimate and more compendious form of address, and had even so employed it upon the only occasion of Mr Mackellar’s appearing in Moray. Whereupon Mr Mackellar had explained to Mungo that he enjoyed the distinction of being a Solicitor before the Supreme Court. Mungo received this with proper awe (if also with a tincture of precocious religious scepticism), and it was some time
before he could wholly free himself from the persuasion that Mr Mackellar was claiming to be an archangel. The general meaning of ‘solicitation’, which he managed to extract from a dictionary, supported on the whole this portentous view. Mungo had been required to spend considerable periods every Sunday listening, with properly screwed-up eyes, to extended exercises in intercessory prayer, and it seemed conceivable to suppose that Mr Mackellar was privileged to engage in the same activity on a direct access basis – like the saints who cast down their golden crowns around the glassy sea. For the universe, after all, could have one supreme court only.

  The prosaic truth about Mr Mackellar had emerged later. He controlled a small trust, vaguely intimated as of a charitable nature, which stumped up something towards the orphan Mungo’s keep and education from time to time. Mungo now knew that such institutions were quite in order; at his own college, as he had recently discovered, there was a similar benefaction for such of its junior members as were ‘ingenious, diligent, and of a godly conversation’. Roughly speaking, Mr Mackellar conceived it his duty to keep an eye on Mungo’s rating in qualities of this sort; and this was the purpose of the present interview. Mungo didn’t pretend to himself that he wasn’t ingenious; his having scrambled into Oxford must count as diligence, at least for a term or two; and as for godly conversation – well, he wasn’t likely to chuck at Mr Mackellar’s bald head the sort of words and images that so agreeably adorned Pons’s Cambridge Boat Song. So with luck Mr Mackellar should just be a bit of routine.

  Mungo left his bags at the station and climbed to windy George Street. He knew quite a lot about George Street. It contained more than the office of Mr Mackellar – which was as dingy as a lawyer’s office in Dickens, and filled with a metaphysical Calvinistic gloom almost as palpable as the superbly metaphorical fog in Bleak House. (Mungo was rather pleased with this; it wasn’t quite right, but it would work up.) In George Street Shelley and Harriet had lodged on their wedding-journey – about the time when Scott, a stone’s throw away, was thinking of getting busy on Waverley. Next to Frederick Street Peacock had stayed; and at the end of the vista, in St Andrew Square, had lived Peacock’s butt, Lord Brougham, and David Hume who had apparently been the Bertrand Russell of the eighteenth century. Even Kenneth Graham, who had thought up Toad and Ratty, had managed to get himself born in George Street; and from George Street had issued the number of Blackwood’s that had attacked Keats.

  Mungo Lockhart, Oxford undergraduate, quickened his pace (an operation easy enough to one with his length of leg). He hurried forward, if not like a guilty thing, at least like one who has made an ass of himself by selling out of a sound investment. It is the penalty of being ingenious to be susceptible to such awkward feelings. But as he mounted Mr Mackellar’s staircase he cheered up. He could have done without the coming inspection. But mild comedy was probably to be extracted from it.

  So he entered the lawyer’s room confidently, remembering not to trip on the holes in the carpet, and rather taking to the smell of mouldering leather that issued from the ranked volumes of Scots Law Reports on the shelves. There was an attractively weird picture on the wall. It showed a hundred or more legal characters (no doubt including Mr Mackellar’s father) assembled in an imposing hall, and its oddity consisted in its being a fake photograph – a collage, in fact, fabricated from individual portraits ranked with a rough and ready attempt at linear perspective. Mungo kept his eye away from this, having recalled that on a previous occasion the philosophic problem posed by this Assembly-that-Never-Was had distracted his attention from the admonitions of his paymaster.

  ‘Let me hear about you,’ Mr Mackellar said briefly.

  Mungo gave an account of himself – neither too bleak (he thought) nor too spirited, and certainly with a tight rein on the fancy.

  Mr Mackellar heard him out in silence. And when Mr Mackellar attacked (as it were) it was from an unexpected angle.

  ‘I seem,’ he said, ‘to detect a considerable alteration in your speech.’

  ‘Sir?’ As he produced this, Mungo realised that it was itself such an alteration; ten weeks before, he would have produced half a dozen words instead of this economical challenge.

  ‘Your accent has been influenced by your new environment to a degree which I judge remarkable in a mere two months.’

  ‘I didn’t know. I haven’t intended anything of the sort. I’m assimilative, I suppose. And in more important things, too.’

  ‘You would make a very tolerable advocate.’ Mr Mackellar, who, in a general way, could in the matter of grimness have given points to Lord Auldearn himself, distinguishably smiled at Mungo for the first time in their acquaintance. ‘A change in speech habits is inoffensive if involuntary; it is instantly resented if an element of intention or pretension appears.’

  ‘Well, that gets me clear.’ Mungo, encouraged by the smile, responded with his hit-or-miss grin. ‘And I don’t much mind what noises I make. I’m not going to be an actor.’

  ‘You certainly are not.’ Mr Mackellar, all Scottish thistle again, gave this a mandatory emphasis which Mungo didn’t quite like. ‘So let us talk sense. If you were to be called to the Scottish bar, Mungo, you would not derive any advantage from having come to speak what is called received standard English. Before the Senators of the College of Justice the point would be immaterial. It might not be so when pleading before a Scottish jury.’

  ‘I suppose not.’ Mungo wondered what was going on.

  ‘Several young advocates who were sent to English schools have made the point to me.’

  ‘I can imagine they have something there,’ Mungo said colloquially. He was a good deal startled by a new and unsuspected Mungo Lockhart who appeared to exist in Mr Mackellar’s eye. He had always supposed himself to be receiving, from this trust or whatever, assistance designed to place him, at the most, on some respectable office stool. This wasn’t his own idea of himself, and it hadn’t troubled him that it might be other people’s. He’d make his own way, he believed, when the time came. Mackellar had always treated him – not particularly offensively – as a plebeian on some sort of dole. Of course it was natural that this business of going to Oxford should a little alter the lawyer’s view. But that the old chap should be planning for him a career as a fellow legal shark was something of a facer. At the moment, it might be a good idea if diversionary tactics were applied. ‘About my work,’ Mungo said virtuously. ‘It looks as if I ought to tell you that I’ll be requiring a good many books. Not just out of libraries, I mean. You see—’

  ‘There will be no difficulty.’ Mr Mackellar had raised an authoritative hand. ‘Any reasonable disbursement by you in that regard will be honoured by me. And waste no time about it. Your tutor writes to me that vacation study is regarded as of the highest importance.’

  ‘Yes, of course.’ Mungo wasn’t too pleased at the revelation of this correspondence. For a moment, indeed, his indignation was such that he resolved to tell his tutor off about it at his next tute. Then he reflected that the poor man was probably obliged to reply to enquiries from properly accredited persons. And anybody who pays you money out of some fund or other certainly regards himself as that. ‘I’ve got a course of reading mapped out,’ Mungo added, as with a consciousness of modest worth.

  ‘I am glad to hear it – the more so in that I observe some part of your vacation to be already elapsed.’

  ‘Oh, yes. I went to stay with a friend.’

  ‘Ah.’ Mr Mackellar didn’t give this an overtly interrogative intonation. He paused on it, all the same.

  ‘A man called Ian Cardower. He’s in my own year, and reading History.’

  ‘Cardower, did you say?’

  ‘Yes. I found myself sharing rooms with him, which is how we got to know each other. His people live at a place called Stradlings, which is where I’ve been staying. It’s rather a nice house.’

  ‘Very pleasant,’ Mr Mackellar said. ‘Most agreeable.’ He was regarding Mungo curiously, and appeared momentaril
y at a loss. ‘Did you happen to discover if your friend is any relation of the well-known Scottish family of the same name?’

  ‘I’m afraid I don’t know, sir.’ At this point, Mungo allowed himself to look beautifully vague. ‘Perhaps there are several well-known families called Cardower? Ian’s grandfather is a Lord Auldearn. We went to see him at a house called Bamberton Court. I don’t know whether you’ll have heard of him.’

  ‘Of course I have heard of the Marquis of Auldearn.’ Mr Mackellar was now looking at Mungo hard. ‘He has had a most distinguished public career. But he must be a very old man now.’

  ‘Oh, yes. His clothes don’t fit him any more, and he wears carpet slippers all the time. Only, in the evening he changes into tartan ones.’ Mungo was unable to resist this single flight of fancy in the midst of so much perfectly veridical, if mischievously slanted, reporting. But he added hastily, ‘But he’s awfully impressive, all the same. He reminded me of Cicero’s cum dignitate otium.’

  It would have been hard to tell whether Mr Mackellar was impressed – and, if so, whether it was by this young Oxford scholar’s Latinity or his rapid progression into aristocratic circles. But he certainly had the appearance of a man confronted by a problem. As to what it might be, Mungo hadn’t a clue – until Mr Mackellar looked at his watch and stood up behind his desk.

  ‘I judge, Mungo, that our business is concluded.’ And then – as Mungo prepared to make himself scarce, with suitable expressions of gratitude – he added, ‘If your departure-time admits of it, I should be happy if you would lunch with me in my club.’

  ‘Thank you. I’d like to, very much.’

  Mungo got out this social prevarication with commendable expertness. He didn’t dislike Mr Mackellar, but he did dislike their relationship. This business of being periodically paraded as a charity boy was something he couldn’t even give Ian a burlesque account of. No doubt the old man was constrained by the terms of the trust to hold these interviews, and he did so quite decently, according to his lights. But Mungo thought they were now a bit out of time, as well as a shocking waste of the trust’s money on railway tickets. He had resolved to write Mackellar a letter or two over the next year which would be both a civil report on himself and a hint that these confrontations were a bore to somebody who was now quite grown up. And here was this invitation, which suddenly set the relationship on a new basis.