Then that’s fine.’
‘It’s no such thing.’ Roddy was almost angry. ‘You’re in an unco confused state of mind, man. And if that’s all England can do for you, you’d be better coming home again.’ Roddy stood up. ‘And now I’ll be on my road,’ he said.
Mungo went to bed thoroughly unhappy about himself. As he bloody well deserved to be, he thought. He couldn’t see that what he was after was indecent, although Roddy plainly thought it was. It was just that Roddy’s parents were alive, whereas his own had, in a sense, never been alive at all. They were mere intellectual constructs to him. For some moments Mungo, a slave to words, took comfort from this idiotic expression. Then he returned to swearing at himself. It was true that he knew surprisingly little about his parents, and that his aunt had always been undeviatingly silent about them, the bare facts of their accidental death apart. So he had been conscious for quite a long time of something which could be called a mystery, and Mackellar S.S.C. had given that consciousness a fresh nudge. But all this was no reason for turning his oldest friend into a kind of private enquiry agent. What would emerge, he now knew intuitively, would be some small circumstance of an embarrassing sort, such as most families have the good sense to tuck away and forget about.
The intuition was confirmed a few days later, when a note came from Roddy. It stated, bleakly and without comment, that Mungo’s parents had been married in Forres just five months before he was born. That Roddy still thought poorly of having been made the instrument of this not very significant discovery appeared in the fact that he made no suggestion for his and Mungo’s getting together again before Mungo went south.
And now all this left Mungo bewildered over what could possibly have been happening to him. Mackellar’s mysterious trust, even if it was an ad hoc affair established for Mungo’s benefit alone, could perfectly well have been set up by some wealthy person of a charitable disposition, who had been touched by the story of an infant suddenly bereft of both parents, and who had the habit of doing good by stealth. Very probably what was to come to Mungo at twenty-one would be some such recital as this. And what he had made Roddy dig out was irrelevant.
Having got so far, Mungo now went all the way with Roddy in censuring his own curiosity. It is possible to commit an impiety even towards parents you have never seen. He’d done just that. But at least he’d never do it again.
Mungo locked up his typewriter – viewing it, for the moment, as a symbol of the perils of the imagination as Ian had extracted them from Rasselas. He then plunged furiously into his vacation work. Since at Oxford he was reading English, this plunge was almost entirely into the reckless imaginings of other people. But it was too late to consider whether this constituted a wholesome education. In three weeks he had read quite enough to surprise his tutor.
Part III
England and Italy
Chapter Twelve
When Mungo was writing to Ian from Fintry Ian was writing to Mungo from Stradlings. The letters crossed. And so too did two further letters which each fired off at the other. For no very clear reason, Mungo was surprised that Ian should write long letters during the vac. Mungo was inclined to think of epistolary correspondence, when not of a purely business order, as being engaged in solely by persons of literary inclination – something that Ian stoutly professed himself not to be. Mungo’s own letters, moreover, were composed (even if at breakneck speed) in the potent if not very clearly formulated persuasion that they would one day occupy the early pages of The Collected Letters of M. G. Lockhart. As a consequence they were inclined to show off, and their progress was as random as a domestic firework display in a back garden. Ian’s letters were quite different: serious rather than exuberant; much more sparing of wit; and confined, in the main, to two or three topics which were really exercising their writer’s mind. This made them better letters than Mungo’s were, and Mungo, whose intermittent power of self-criticism was considerable, several times condemned his own performances as thoroughly meretricious – although not quite in the root sense of that ugly word. When he addressed himself to another letter, however, it turned out not very different from the one preceding it.
In face of such a world as lay around one now, what on earth was one to do? This was Ian’s largest question, not exactly a novel one, which he posed – very honestly, Mungo thought – more or less from within the tradition in which he had been brought up. His father would like him to enter the Diplomatic Service. But what use were career diplomats in an age in which politicians went charging round and round the globe in jets, irritating or confusing each other whenever they met? Whistle-stop diplomacy wasn’t much of a life to aspire to tag on to. There were relations who could shove him into banking, industry, shipping, stockbroking, and what have you. All he would have to do was to buy himself an umbrella and a bloody bowler. But none of these activities looked like cutting much of a figure in an England or a Europe when on the brink of the twenty-first century. Perhaps by that date he could be in politics – in a fashion that did a little count – if he started off at something else. He supposed he had sufficient brains to be called to the bar, and even practice in some obscure branch of the law, until an opportunity came along. But it did look – Mungo when he had visited Mallachie would see that it did look – as if the title would come to him one day. In which case – but this must sound terribly silly – he wasn’t at all sure that he’d want to renounce it in exchange for the privilege of continuing to scrap away in the House of Commons. So what did Mungo think?
Mungo wasn’t able to think anything, except that he mustn’t deliver himself of a purely jocular reply. That Ian was almost certainly going to be Marquis of Auldearn was something he had really known already, although it made rather more impact now that he realised Ian’s way of looking at it. He remembered Ian’s promptly squashing Pons about Bamberton Court: it mightn’t be a reasonable sort of house, but it was one of the few of its kind in England, all the same. When it came to the crunch, Ian would stand up and be counted as an aristocrat – and as a nobleman if he became one. Firm and disdainful on the scaffold. All that.
Ian’s other main topic was sex. This astonished Mungo. He had supposed Ian to be the sort of person who wraps sex up in several distinct and tidy packages: (i) practical exploration of the subject in its several branches (2) bawdy talk and bawdy song (3) private feelings about the thing’s larger challenges and possibilities. But there was nothing tidy about Ian’s mind here. He wrote so gropingly that it was very odd he should write at all. There seemed to be a great deal about himself that Ian didn’t know; that he felt to be obscure and wanted to be clear about. He even wanted to know – bang in the middle of this context – why he and Mungo had become friends more or less at the drop of the handkerchief. It wasn’t, almost to a puzzling degree it wasn’t, a matter of their having got interested in the colour of each other’s eyes. So when you had something that wasn’t a sex-thing, just what was it that you had?
Mungo got the point, but again didn’t find himself coming up with an answer. He was a little aggrieved that such problems should be more urgent in the consciousness of Ian, who was going to be a man of action, than in his own, which was to be dedicated to a more than Dostoyevsky-like plumbing of the mind of man. He remembered that it had been Ian who had shouted ‘Rupert!’ and he who had understood and answered ‘Gerald!’ at the crazy climax of their fight on the barge. It had been nothing but extremely funny. Yet here was Ian suggesting the same sort of analysing of their straightforward relationship as occupied a good part of the energy of the lavishly enigmatic Birkin and Crich in Lawrence’s novel. Mungo didn’t find this too strange, but it strengthened his sense of there being a lot in Ian that he hadn’t got hold of.
Once they were back in Howard these matters vanished from their agenda. It was Ian, on the whole, who seemed most disposed to forget them for a while. And this happened, too, with Mungo’s dive into his parentage. When he told Ian as much as he had told Roddy about that, Ian’s reac
tion was much what Roddy’s had been. He listened, but disapproved of the whole enquiry. It seemed not very decent, for instance, to dig up the fact that one may have been the consequence of a shotgun marriage. Mungo couldn’t really disagree, and the subject dropped dead. For one thing, something else turned up that had a good deal of awkwardness to it. One day Ian announced, baldly but with a certain embarrassment, that Anne was engaged.
‘One up to Pons,’ Mungo said stoutly, although the news was a terrific shock. ‘And good luck to them.’
‘Pons? Good heavens, Anne isn’t going to marry Pons! What on earth should put that in your head?’
‘Just that they seemed pretty thick.’ Mungo was so puzzled that he could only mumble. ‘Weren’t they?’
‘Anne has always liked having old Pons around – just in a kids-together way. But of course she wouldn’t get married to him. It would be absurd.’
‘I don’t see why.’ Mungo’s confusion of mind was now such that he almost felt injured that Pons should be held a self-evident impossibility in this context.
‘Well, it’s just not happening. So that’s that.’ Ian simply declined argument. ‘Anne’s marrying somebody who’s only been in the running for six months or so – quite a decent chap, five years older than she is, with some kind of job in the City.’
‘And an umbrella and bowler.’
‘I suppose so.’ Ian hesitated. ‘Mungo, I’m bloody sorry about that.’
‘Bloody sorry about what?’ Mungo demanded furiously. But that wouldn’t do, for his incomprehension was insincere and his fury, if not spurious, at least shameful. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘Cancel that. It’s just that – although I thought you probably didn’t notice – I spent some days falling in love with Anne. But of course there couldn’t have been anything in it.’
‘Why couldn’t there be anything in it?’ It was now Ian who seemed angry.
‘She’s two years older than I am, for one thing. And it will obviously be years before I earn a bean: that’s another. Don’t think I hadn’t an atom of sense about it. I had.’ Mungo managed a smile. ‘I can even see it now as just one of those adolescent things.’
‘Of course what Anne’s doing now is what’s called suitable.’ Ian continued to be troubled. ‘As I’ve said, he’s five years older than she is, and no doubt quite a breadwinner in his way. Besides, she’s in love with him. She was, months before you came to Stradlings. She’d be horrified at the suggestion she’d done anything—’
‘I’m quite clear she didn’t. Didn’t, I mean, intend to lead me an inch up any garden path.’ Mungo felt it desperately important to get all this right. ‘You see, I’m not a socially experienced person. Let’s forget it, for Christ’s sake. You’re not fated to make a brother-in-law of your faithful old college chum.’
‘It would be a bit of a strain, I agree.’ Ian frowned, as if judging this swing towards routine facetiousness all wrong. ‘I’m sorry Mary wasn’t at home. She is your age, and I think you’d like her very much.’
‘It will be nice to meet her one day,’ Mungo said. He was conscious of speaking not coldly exactly, but more conventionally than was admissible in Howard 4, 4. He remembered Ian’s mentioning his younger sister in just this way at Stradlings, when he had perhaps guessed that Mungo was expecting a little more from Anne than he was going to get. It was, somehow, disconcerting that Ian should have been laying benevolent plans for him – perhaps thinking of his old college chum as a brother-in-law after all. And Mungo was – wrong-headedly, no doubt – certain that he was never going to fall in love with Anne’s sister, however pretty and otherwise delightful she might prove to be. It would be an infidelity, and possibly a disastrous one. Wordsworth—or was it Coleridge?—had got tied up with the wrong sister. And so, surely, had Dickens. It looked to be just another of those professional risks of authorship which he was always hearing about.
With this fairly characteristic mingling of nonsense and sense, Mungo placed at least a large question-mark against the name of the Hon. Mary Cardower. Ian didn’t mention her again, except to say vaguely one day that she might be visiting Oxford towards the end of the term. Harmony reigned in Howard 4, 4. Lord Robert, who had predicted that if Ian and Mungo became intimates they would certainly quarrel, might have been judged very wide of the mark indeed. And then – not exactly suddenly, but with a final acceleration to the brink of catastrophe – trouble appeared. It was girl-trouble, and of a different sort from that which had been satisfactorily ironed out.
Ian’s early proposal that he and Mungo should range the countryside in quest of unsullied virginal beauty had not fulfilled itself, and had indeed clearly not been meant as other than an extravagance. Hunting in couples was perhaps something they were both too fastidious for. During his first term Mungo hadn’t managed more than a few blameless encounters with unexciting young women of the lecture-attending or society-joining sort. When he came back from the vacation he still had Anne too much in his system to bear to be thinking of girls at all. He was aware it wasn’t so with Ian. Ian would disappear (rather as he used to do at Stradlings, but for longer periods), and when he turned up again was not disposed to deny Mungo’s conviction – advanced banteringly at first – that some amatorious occasion had been involved. He was rather secretive, all the same – more than Mungo expected, considering the large frankness existing between them. He was also quite often in a bad temper, or at least in a wicked one. When he said anything relevant, it was in a mock-Byronic vein. The curse of the Cardowers was upon him, he would declare. And he drank rather more whisky than his mother would have approved of. Mungo wondered whether he was indulging in what aunt Elspeth would have called low pleasures, and not getting too much change out of them. Certainly he never produced a presentable-looking girl – or, for that matter, any girl at all. Until about mid-term Howard 4, 4 was monkishly monosexual. And then, one wet afternoon, Ian marched in with a girl he perfunctorily introduced as Vera.
There could soon be no doubt about Vera. She was as fully Ian’s girl-friend as she could possibly be. Mungo was too much a child of his age to disapprove, either with his head or his heart, of his best friend’s having a mistress. It was their affair, and bless them. This didn’t mean that he liked either Vera herself or Ian’s having settled for laying her. He couldn’t think that she was a particularly nice person, although there was no arguing against her as a bedfellow on a short-term basis. She was pretty in a bold way; she was also, and quite staggeringly, what he supposed was meant by the word seductive. Mungo didn’t gather where she came from. He supposed it must be from one of the women’s colleges. But she was something so far outside his social experience that he couldn’t really give a guess.
The Vera business began to go really bad when Ian took – it was the only possible word – to flaunting the girl. With Mungo in the room, he’d bundle her into his bedroom, and that was that. He turned her over his knee and spanked her under Mungo’s eyes. Probably she damn well deserved it. But the excitement that this caused in Mungo was something he didn’t care for a bit. And it wasn’t in aid of anything. Obscurely but pretty massively, Mungo came to feel that, for Ian, Vera was for some reason just wrong.
He said so, and there was a scene – a theatrical scene with Ian in the role of the bold bad patrician that was in some way incredibly bogus. Mungo was horrified. He just couldn’t get at the reason for the falseness of the turn. He told himself in bewilderment that Ian must absolutely hate sex. And then Ian did a crazy thing. He had Vera in for a night.
This – or rather being discovered as contriving this – seemed to be about the one thing you couldn’t with impunity do. If you managed to be found out in such an idiocy – it seemed to be the dons’ view – you were too stupid for the blessings of higher education. Moreover you were upsetting people who had come to Oxford to work and had the right to be protected from the distractions of the brothel. Mungo found this limited judgement fair enough.
Ian had found a large unused cupboard
on the staircase of Howard 4, and in the morning he was going to shove the girl into it until the hour (which was noon) when it was legal for women to be around. Mungo thought this a revolting rather than an amusing idea. It would be all right in low comedy – or, for that matter, in very refined comedy of a vaguely Restoration sort. Putting it into practice in real life ought just not to be on. It was like a kid hastily hiding a dirty postcard in his desk. Mungo thought well enough of this comparison (which was perhaps not quite a fair one) to fire it at Ian as the climax of an injurious speech. Ian was furious. They had quite a rumpus.
Mungo regretted having gone to town about the thing. He didn’t believe it could really happen, because he didn’t believe even Vera would stand for it. He proved wrong. It all went off without a hitch. One consequence was that Mungo, just on the other side of not much of a partition, didn’t have a very good night. He turned on the light and tried to read about Prince Myshkin. The chunk of Indian temple sculpture in the photograph eyed the attempt sardonically. Dawn found Mungo in a humiliated condition.
He and Ian avoided each other during the rest of that day. When they met in the evening Ian failed to suggest the satisfied lover who has brought off something more or less out of the Decameron. He was in a black temper.
‘I don’t see what call you have to create about it,’ he snapped. ‘It’s not your affair.’
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