Mungo's Dream

by J. I. M. Stewart

  ‘It’s not a matter of what you don’t see – or of what I didn’t see, either.’ Mungo, having something pithy to say, gave a deftly illogical twist to Ian’s speech. ‘I didn’t apply myself to the keyhole. I’m not a voyeur. But if there’s such a thing as an écouteur, then I damned well had a front seat in the stalls. And I’ll tell you what it sounded like. All the nasty little manuals on the subject rolled into one.’ Having discharged himself of that one, Mungo’s fury (for he was as furious as Ian) suddenly left him. ‘I don’t really know what I want to say,’ he finished. ‘So I’d better shut up.’

  ‘I don’t want you to shut up.’ Ian said this spontaneously and oddly. ‘Get it clearer. I’m listening.’

  ’Well, don’t get me wrong. I’m all for harmless pleasure. But I think you’re kidding yourself somehow, Ian Cardower.’ Mungo paused, this manner of address having put quite a new idea into his head. ‘Have the Cardowers ever been thorough-going Calvinists?’

  ‘Of course not.’ Ian managed to find this notion entertaining. ‘Or not since I took any interest in them.’

  ‘Perhaps these things are deeply ancestral.’

  ‘Perhaps – but it sounds pretty far-fetched.’

  ‘Guilt and so on – a sense of sin – can be powerful even when unconscious.’

  ‘Rubbish.’

  ‘Yes, it can. And it can result in joyless exhibitionism – bedwise, I mean. Byron, for instance.’

  ‘All right – Byron.’ Ian was accustomed to Mungo’s resources in literary biography. ‘But “joyless” is a bit steep.’

  ‘So it is – but I think there’s something in the general idea.’

  ‘Could be. Anyway, I grant you the exhibitionism. Sorry about it. I won’t manage such things just that way again. Get out the bottle, Sir Mungo.’

  In this manner amity was restored. Mungo felt that he had acquitted himself with credit as a plain-dealing friend. Unfortunately there was a tumble in front of him.

  The Vera affair continued, but with more regard to decency. Every now and then Vera would turn up of an afternoon in Howard, and Ian would promptly march her off to destinations unknown. On these flying visits Mungo spoke to her, and eyed her, frankly enough. He felt he had a vicarious knowledge of her person – and this, if it wasn’t very nice, was intriguing. He rather thought her breasts were growing larger. Once, when Ian was late, he gave her a cup of tea and two chocolate biscuits. She remained totally strange, and he was without a clue as to the feelings operative at her end of the affair. Perhaps she was in love with Ian. Perhaps she thought it clever to have landed an Hon., and went round bragging about it. Or perhaps she was presently going to do a walk-out on her current boyfriend. It was impossible to tell.

  Nor was it possible to tell whether Ian on his side was getting tired of the affair. Mungo had a robust faith in his own empathic power; it was going to be, after all, his chief stock in trade as a writer. Hadn’t he, for instance, got himself perfectly inside the skin of that tortoise-like old don in his short story? It ought to be much easier to get inside the skin of Ian, who was his closest friend. And so he did, in a way. But not to the extent of knowing for how long Ian was likely to consider a girl like Vera any sort of good buy. Mungo had to admit to himself that here he lacked a necessary basis in analogous experience. He’d never been in Ian’s position – if it might be put that way – or anywhere near it.

  Ian was certainly becoming cavalier with Vera. At least in the brief periods when Mungo saw them together, his manner towards her was a displeasing mixture of familiarity and contempt. Of course Ian was by disposition fastidious and rather intolerant: these were not readily apparent truths about him which Mungo had now got a secure hold of. But if he had nothing except these qualities to direct upon this wretched girl he just shouldn’t be continuing to go to bed with her. It would be more honest to let her find a truer admirer. And there were times when Ian seemed to have had enough. This was how Mungo interpreted his abruptly announcing one Saturday morning that he was going home for the week-end. Mungo watched him pitch a few things into a bag. It was plainly a spur-of-the-moment decision.

  ‘Have you got leave from the Dean to go down?’ Mungo asked.

  ‘Bugger the Dean. You just get a summons from him, and you go along and make a polite apology. He fines you a quid, and asks you to drinks a couple of evenings on.’

  ‘You do know all the ropes, don’t you? I remember telling Anne you did. Give her my love.’

  ‘O.K. And you can finish the whisky.’ On this brotherly note Ian departed.

  Mungo decided on a long reading day. Instead of going into hall he lunched agreeably on bottled beer and digestive biscuits. He was in the last chapter of The Idiot – it was a marvellous novel – when there was a perfunctory knock at the door, and Vera walked in.

  ‘Where’s Ian?’ She had taken a rapid look round the room. ‘Is he going to keep me waiting again?’

  ‘Yes, he is – until Monday morning.’ Mungo had stood up politely, which he felt gave an extra edge to this not very kind reply. ‘And I don’t remember he left you a message.’

  ‘You’re not very civil, Mungo.’ Vera showed no sign of withdrawing; instead, she surveyed Ian’s disapproving friend at more leisure than he recalled her ever allowing herself before. ‘Have you got any cigarettes?’ she asked.

  ‘No, I’m afraid not.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’ Vera said this quite vaguely, rather as if she had forgotten her own question. She sat down on Mungo’s sofa, made some self-conscious gesture of propriety with regard to her skirt, and looked at Mungo in renewed speculation. ‘Say something,’ she said. ‘Say something that could reasonably be called nice. I’m rather tired of bad manners in this room.’

  Mungo failed to say anything. He wanted to get shut of Vera quickly. His breathing had gone slightly odd, and he wasn’t fool enough not to know why.

  ‘Or do something, if you’re dumb. You’re big enough to do something quite dramatic, if you try.’

  ‘Only digestives left.’ Mungo had done something, although it wasn’t dramatic. He had picked up the biscuit tin and was holding it out to Vera. He meant the action to be faintly derisory, but it didn’t work out like that. She took a biscuit, nibbled it, stood up, strolled to the window, and turned round. Something hit Mungo sharply on the cheek. She had chucked the biscuit at him, and hadn’t missed.

  ‘You are very odd,’ Vera said, and began dancing round the room.

  Mungo watched her in what he supposed for a moment to be deep dismay. His heart was now behaving in a fantastic manner, only to be described in the most horrible literary cliches. Hammering in his chest. Pounding against his ribs. That sort of thing. All this had built up very quickly. There hadn’t been time to think. It had been like rounding a bend on a tranquil river and becoming aware of uncontrollable rapids dead ahead.

  ‘Is your bedroom just the same as Ian’s?’ Vera asked. She had halted before the fireplace, and was looking from one bedroom door to the other.

  ‘Yes, it’s exactly the same.’ Mungo wondered just how strange his voice sounded. ‘Except that there’s a stuffed badger.’

  ‘I know all about his.’ Vera seemed to think she was putting on a seduction act of the utmost subtlety. ‘So I’m going to have a look at yours.’ She walked over to Mungo’s door and opened it. ‘I think perhaps it’s nicer,’ she said, and went inside. The door swung to behind her. There was a long pause – so long that Mungo knew just what must be happening. He found that he was trembling all over.

  ‘Mungo, there’s a funny picture here. I can’t work it out. Come and explain it to me.’

  Some observer – but an impotent observer – deep inside Mungo was saying that Ian’s Vera was even more of a drab than he’d supposed. All the same, he was crossing the room. And another voice – again his own, and more audible to his inner ear – was repeating the Greek alphabet. Because he didn’t know it very well, there was a small mental effort in finding each next letter. He
wasn’t experienced in situations like the present, but he was well-read in them. This tip must have come out of a novel. Timing was the whole thing.

  ‘Vera was here on Saturday. We made love.’

  It was Monday morning, and Mungo said this the instant the returning Ian was in the room. Laying your best friend’s girl was the worst sin you could commit. He had spent Sunday feeling that the end of the world had come.

  ‘Good God!’ There was chiefly astonishment in Ian’s glance. ‘Did she let you kiss her?’

  ‘You heard what I said, didn’t you? And you know your own language? We made love. It’s the accepted expression – although it’s a bloody bad one.’

  ‘You had her?’ Ian put down his suitcase. He seemed completely bewildered. ‘It must have been Vera,’ he said slowly, ‘who had you.’

  Being bad at lying, Mungo failed to deny this promptly. He had a muzzy notion that it was his duty to say he’d pretty well raped the girl. But perhaps, in such a context, ‘duty’ was a bogus substitute for ‘vanity’. When he’d entered his bedroom Vera had been without a stitch. She’d known it would work. She’d known she could escape a boring afternoon by taking on a blundering boy. But – just at the moment – Mungo felt he’d rather die than get this explicitly across to Ian. It was bad enough that Ian knew. Which he certainly did. Through Mungo’s head there floated the notion that they’d have to go to the bursar and ask for a change of rooms. For Ian and all the fun they’d had was now just part of his past. If only—

  ‘I don’t mind,’ he heard Ian say. Ian had crossed the room and sat down on his sofa. And Ian repeated, as if he hadn’t heard himself, ‘I don’t mind.’

  It was now Mungo who was bewildered. He knew about complacent husbands – fiction was full of them – and he supposed that there could be complacent lovers too. Perhaps Ian was going to suggest going shares in Vera as the convenient thing. In L’Éducation Sentimentale, he remembered, Arnoux and Frédéric had pretty well shared Rosanette for a time. But then Arnoux was a vulgarian, and Frederic – although the hero – decidedly wet.

  From this useless literary excursion Mungo’s mind came back to a realisation of just how Ian had produced that reiterated ‘I don’t mind’. There had been nothing cynical or relaxed about it. He had said something with which he had surprised himself. And perhaps troubled himself, as well. Just this appeared in the next thing Ian said. For although Ian used every word in the language he did so more sparingly than most.

  ‘Because I don’t give a fuck for her,’ Ian said. He was staring at Mungo in dismay. ‘Not a fuck.’

  ‘I’d have thought it was just about what you did give. And me too.’ Mungo sat down on his own sofa. This wasn’t working out as the confrontation it ought to be. Perhaps it was something more complicated. ‘Ian, are we making a joint effort to ditch Vera?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Of the two young men, Ian now appeared to be the more perplexed. ‘Do you?’

  ‘It’s like one of those queer Renaissance—’

  ‘Oh, not that gen, for goodness sake.’ Ian smiled faintly.

  ‘But yes – it’s rather relevant.’ This recourse to his own stuff almost cheered Mungo up. ‘The Two Gentlemen of Verona kind of thing. Chaps with high-flown notions of romantic friendship saying “After you” as they hand the heroine around.’

  ‘I don’t remember The Two Gentlemen of Verona as quite showing that.’ Ian said this as if he were playing for time. He was like a man groping for the facts of the case. ‘Anyway, Vera isn’t a heroine.’

  Mungo, who was going to say ‘She’s a bitch’, checked himself – partly as not knowing how Ian would take it, but mostly because he felt it a shabby thing to say about any girl you’d been in bed with a couple of days before. It was a sense of what was due to Vera that produced his next speech.

  ‘I do think you ought to feel I’ve done something pretty bad.’

  ‘Oh – I can manage resentment, if you require it. You’ve shown me up to myself, I rather think – and naturally one resents that.’ Ian’s smile came back, faint but wicked. “Ay me! but yet thou mightst my seat forbear.” More Shakespeare.’

  Mungo was scandalised to find himself laughing at this joke. He still wanted to be serious.

  ‘Ian,’ he said, ‘be sensible. Where do we go from here? It might be – well, a recurrent situation.’

  ‘I don’t think so.’ Ian seemed to be gaining confidence. ‘And if it is, we’ll play it by ear.’

  ‘But we have to be fair to the girl. It wouldn’t—’

  ‘Never mind about Vera.’ Ian paused. He might have been a comedian, counting a calculated three or four to his next gag. ‘She’ll take anything that comes.’

  So their relationship was unchanged, or if not unchanged, unimpaired. Mungo felt, and guessed Ian felt, that there had been something rather shaming in the strain upon it having proved no greater than it had. If they’d parted forever, or even had a fight, it would have spoken a little for a maturity which, in the actual event, had been decidedly missing from the affair. Mungo, despite his talent for finding first-aid in fiction, and Ian, despite his for clearing the air with the right bawdy joke, for some time intermittently looked at each other, if not misdoubtingly, yet in a decent embarrassment.

  As for Vera, she was not seen again. Later on, enquiry elicited the rumour that she had set up in a relationship of the most sternly monogamous character with an inorganic chemist in the most obscure of the thirty-seven constituent colleges of the University of Oxford. Ian, whether seriously or not, declared that all had been for the best, and that her experiences in Howard had mercifully pulled her up on the brink of an ignoble promiscuity.

  Hilary is the tricky term at Oxford, the term in which unsatisfactory things tend to happen. Mungo and Ian had experienced this fatality of the place. The trouble was that there remained something unresolved in the affair. It had, of course, been discreditable all round. And it had, undoubtedly, been more discreditable to Mungo than to Ian, since the incontinence of Mungo had involved an element of treachery absent from the incontinence of Ian. Yet it was Ian who had been more marked by the episode. Mungo, as soon as he was assured that Vera had cleared out and that Ian was his friend still, let his natural resilience take charge. He continued to go round with a grin for anybody who would respond to it, and in fact found himself becoming popular. Pons invited him to the annual dinner of a club dedicated to the defence of Church and King, and even third-year men conversed with him in the J.C.R.

  Almost at the end of term, Mary Cardower appeared briefly in Oxford, as Ian had said she would. It turned out that she was a little younger than Mungo, had just left school, and was presenting herself for some sort of interview at Somerville. She came to tea in Howard, but with a train to catch not much more than an hour later. Mungo, the yet faithful lover of the betrothed Anne, found this flying visit upsetting. He quite saw the point of admiring Mary. She was ravishingly beautiful, she was clever, she was friendly, she was mocking, she was joyous and gay. It was the complete Zuleika Dobson effect – except that Max Beerbohm’s heroine was a bitch and Ian’s younger sister was dead nice every way on. She seemed to have heard a good deal about Mungo, and to take it for granted that he was the chief exhibit around the place. Mungo stood up to this, and to Ian’s artless satisfaction in having contrived the meeting, as well as he could. When Mary had to depart for the railway station Ian declared that, left to herself, the feather-headed creature would infallibly get on the wrong train. Unfortunately he was resolved to attend an evening lecture which promised to be of absorbing interest, so Mungo was to take charge of the concluding stage of her visit.

  So they sat on top of a Number One bus, and Mungo talked sixteen to the dozen. It was either that or stricken silence, he felt, and putting on a turn was the less embarrassing alternative. He got back to college resolved to denounce Ian’s Pandarus-like behaviour. But he found Ian so pleased with what he had contrived that he hadn’t the heart to make a portentous speech about
it. And Ian wasn’t getting pleasure out of many things during this fag-end of term. Except for Mungo’s companionship, upon which he asserted an absolute claim on demand, he had fallen into a solitary habit. The casual but constant sociability taken for granted by his school-fellows seemed in particular to irk him.

  Mungo knew that it was still the Vera business that was responsible. It had confronted Ian with perplexities which he, Mungo, hadn’t the key to. He knew that he mustn’t fumble at it to Ian’s knowledge. He just wondered when the key would turn in the lock.

  It was to be in Scotland that this was to happen.

  Chapter Thirteen

  But the plan for a combined operation in Scotland, as distinct from Mungo’s dutiful return to Fintry, was left over to a vaguely envisaged Long Vacation. During one’s second term at Oxford the end of one’s third seems astronomically far off.

  So at Easter Mungo and Ian went to Italy in the mini. They were assured that Italian youth hostels were without any particular dedication to the virtues of long-distance pedestrianism, and would see no reason to exclude persons arriving in a mechanically-propelled vehicle. But they had a diminutive tent as well, and proposed to use it whenever they could. Although neither said so, they envisaged these three weeks hard up against each other as a clear assertion of their old relationship. And it did turn out that way.

  Mungo had never been abroad, a species of insularity which a young writer finds it peculiarly embarrassing to admit. He was therefore unperturbed that the trip looked like costing him his savings. In fact it didn’t quite do this. The college, which was said to have amassed over the centuries far more money than it knew what to do with, proved to have a travel fund out of which its junior members were assisted to improve their knowledge of men and manners in foreign parts. Moreover in a controlled way – mainly connected with the buying of wine – Mungo sponged on the rather more affluent Ian. This was a symbolical matter; a token that they were (as Mungo would have said if trying to impress Mr Mackellar) Arcades ambo.