The Late Scholar

by Jill Paton Walsh

  Then he switched off the enlarger, placed a sheet of printing paper in the frame, and switched it on again. A metronome, pressed into service as a time-elapsed clock, ticked through ten seconds. Then with the dexterity born of experience, Bunter removed the paper from the frame, and slid it into the first tray of liquid.

  ‘Now we rock the dish,’ he said. The dish was designed to rock; pressing gently on one corner achieved it. At first the print lay submerged pure and undefiled; then a just perceptible shadow appeared on it. And then the little phrase Jackson had pointed out showed ghostly, and alone.

  ‘Whew!’ said Peter. But very rapidly the rest of the words on the page sprang into view, and darkened, along with that first appearing phrase, until the whole print looked like the manuscript. Bunter whipped the print out of the developer, slid it through the adjacent tray of water, and then slipped it into the final tray of fixer. Then he switched on the light, leaving Peter blinking.

  The two friends gazed at the print. They could not now see any difference in the darkness of the various inks on the print; it abolished the colour difference between Latin and Old English text, showing only that the gloss was not quite so dark.

  ‘Can you see any difference now?’ Peter asked.

  ‘No,’ said Bunter, sounding triumphant. ‘When the print is fully developed it is just the same as looking at the original. But on the way there, the difference in tone shows, as I hoped it would.’

  ‘You are a genius, Bunter,’ said Peter. ‘Can we do it again?’

  ‘Indeed we can,’ said Bunter, ‘and we should.’

  The second print got whipped out of the developer when the solitude of the phrase was just being challenged by the rest of the text. Bunter got it into the fixer at that stage.

  ‘I believe this is a proof, my lord, that the ink of those words is indeed darker,’ said Bunter.

  ‘Jackson ought to see this,’ said Peter. ‘I shall go and get him.’

  Jackson of course had not left his desk in the library, and though he demurred, Peter insisted that he come. ‘It’s worth your while to see this,’ he said. ‘Trust me.’

  Grumbling a little, Jackson followed Peter up the stairs, and into the darkroom.

  ‘I don’t get this,’ he said.

  ‘Watch,’ said Peter.

  And so Jackson saw the phrase emerge on its own, pursued by shadows of the other words.

  His reaction was not at all what Peter had suspected; he burst into tears.

  ‘Why does it do that?’ he asked Bunter.

  ‘Because you are right,’ Bunter told him. ‘Those words are written in a different and darker ink.’

  ‘Don’t get carried away, old chap,’ said Peter. ‘There might be other reasons; it might be that when they ran out of ink and mixed a new pot it varied a bit.’

  ‘It doesn’t otherwise vary on this page,’ said Bunter. He switched on the light, and they could see a row of prints he had made while Peter fetched Jackson; the procession of prints had been stopped at different moments in the developer. They showed gradients of depth in the words, starting from the phrase entirely alone and changing till the whole page looked equally dark.

  ‘Can I have those?’ Jackson asked, in an incredulous voice, like one asking if he had won the football pools.

  ‘You can when they are dry,’ said Bunter.

  While Peter and Bunter were playing happily with hypo behind blackout curtains, Harriet received an unexpected visit from her sons, Bredon and Paul. Harriet, who was sitting in the window-seat, had as much warning as the time it took them to cross the quad.

  She expressed delight, and received their manly embraces before asking them what accounted for their appearance. She learned that a whole party of sixth-formers were in Oxford, looking round, and talking informally to college tutors, where the school had been able to arrange that. Next term they would decide which college to apply to. Bredon had inspected Balliol and Hertford the day before. Paul had come along just to get a look at Oxford; his turn to apply was not yet. The school charabanc would return them to Eton mid-afternoon, leaving them a free morning in Oxford.

  ‘Thought we’d just drop in on you, Ma,’ said Paul, with his crooked grin.

  ‘We’re not interrupting something, are we?’ asked Bredon.

  ‘Nothing as good as a morning with you two,’ said Harriet.

  ‘Where’s our father?’ asked Bredon.

  ‘I believe he is buried in a darkroom somewhere with Bunter, conducting a photographic experiment,’ said Harriet.

  ‘Well, that’s good in a way,’ said Bredon.

  Paul said, ‘I think I’ll go and find Blackwell’s, Ma, and have a look around.’

  ‘Shall we all go?’ Harriet asked.

  ‘No, thanks,’ Paul said, ‘I can manage,’ and he left.

  Harriet immediately clicked into emergency mode. This suddenly looked serious.

  ‘All right, son,’ she said to Bredon, when Paul had left them, ‘what is this about?’

  ‘Can’t you guess?’ he asked her.

  ‘You preferred Hertford to Balliol?’ she hazarded.

  ‘Worse,’ he said. ‘Much worse. I don’t want Oxford at all.’

  Harriet flinched at the thought of how Peter might react to this. ‘Explain yourself,’ she said severely to her son.

  ‘I want to go to Reading,’ he said.

  ‘Reading?’ Harriet failed to conceal her surprise. ‘Why ever do you want to do that? And what do you know about Reading?’ At his age, she thought, I wouldn’t even have heard of a university there.

  Bredon tackled the easy part of this inquisition first. ‘The school has us all apply to Reading, Ma, as a practice for being interviewed. We aren’t supposed to want to go there. I’m surprised they go on interviewing us; they must have noticed that we don’t take up the places we are offered there. As a rule, that is. Of course if you fail Oxford and Cambridge, then at least you have got somewhere.’

  ‘Is that what it is? You don’t think you will make it into Oxford?’

  ‘No, that’s not it, Ma,’ said Bredon, sounding insulted. ‘I think I might make it here if I really tried. I’m trying to tell you that I don’t want to try.’

  ‘Don’t get agitated, son,’ said Harriet. ‘Just tell me what’s in your mind.’

  ‘I don’t want to do Greats, or History, or English,’ Bredon told her. ‘I’m not bright enough. Everyone thinks I will follow in Father’s footsteps. My housemaster thinks Balliol will be kind to me because of Father. If that’s true I think it’s all wrong. I don’t think I should have to follow Father’s footsteps, or not to Balliol, anyway. And they shouldn’t let chaps in for reasons like that.’

  ‘I completely agree with you,’ said Harriet, ‘and I don’t think they do. Not unless it’s choosing between two people so exactly matched that it amounts to tossing a coin. However it is very high-minded of you to object to being looked on favourably for a reason you don’t approve of. Perhaps you are following in your father’s footsteps more than you know you are.’

  ‘He’s so damned clever,’ complained Bredon. ‘And you are no slouch. And Peter Bunter can run rings round me any day of the week, whatever we are talking about.’

  ‘That might all be true, my dear, and not amount to your being stupid,’ said Harriet.

  Bredon was silent. He was looking as miserable as his mother had ever seen him.

  ‘Enough of what you don’t want, Bredon,’ she said. ‘Tell me what you do want.’

  ‘I want to do Estate Management,’ he said. ‘Or, failing that, Forestry.’

  ‘Talk to me about that idea,’ she said.

  ‘I want to be useful,’ he said. ‘And estate management is what I am interested in, and what I might be good at, and what I seem likely to be called upon in the long run to do.’

  ‘That sounds sensible to me,’ said Harriet. ‘But you could do that, or, failing that, Forestry, here.’

  ‘But I like the look of the course at Reading, M
a. It’s got something of everything in it: agriculture and forestry, and buildings . . . and I shan’t feel overshadowed by people expecting me to be like Father.’

  It occurred to Harriet that Bredon was not only Peter’s son, but Gerald’s nephew. She remembered crusty, preposterous old Gerald talking about planting oaks that would take a hundred years to reach maturity. She remembered him caring for the Denver estates as conscientiously after his own son died as while that wild young man lived. It wasn’t for Peter and then Bredon that he lived and laboured as he had; it was some sort of sense of duty to the land itself. Not a bad thing for her son to inherit. And since it would hit him eventually, in all probability it had to be a good idea that he was embracing it gladly, and wanting to be ready for it. It wouldn’t be as hard for him as it had been for Peter.

  She realised that her long musing silence was tormenting her son.

  ‘You realise, do you,’ she asked, ‘that things are changing? That a government might arrive that will confiscate landed estates, or grind them down with death duties? That a choice to be the manager of Bredon Hall all your life might not be viable all your life?’

  ‘I’ve thought of that. There will still be land,’ he said. ‘Farms and houses and woods and rivers. Somebody will have to look after them, even if it isn’t the owners any more.’

  ‘Very well, son, you have my blessing,’ said Harriet.

  And then the killer question: ‘Will you tell Father?’

  ‘No,’ said Harriet. ‘It will be much better if you tell him. But if necessary, I will speak up for you.’

  There was a knock on the door. ‘Is it safe to come in?’ asked Paul, putting his head round the door.

  ‘One down, and one to go,’ said Bredon to Paul.

  It wasn’t long before Peter and Bunter turned up, bearing damp prints that needed to be squeegeed to mirrors and windows to dry. Peter was delighted to see his sons, and demanded an account of the interviews that Bredon had had.

  ‘Peter, take Bredon punting, why don’t you?’ said Harriet.

  ‘Of course,’ said Peter happily. ‘He’ll need a bit of instruction. Makes a fellow look an awful fool in his first term if he doesn’t know how. Shall we all go?’

  ‘Paul might get seasick,’ said Harriet.

  A brief, speaking glance between her and Peter was exchanged. ‘I’ll look after Paul,’ Harriet said.

  ‘Off we go, then, Bredon,’ said Peter.

  Standing at the now familiar viewpoint window, Paul and Harriet watched them go.

  Bredon had grown to about the same height and build as his father. He had not inherited Peter’s ridiculously blond hair; Harriet’s contribution had generated a tawny-bronze shade for him. It was extraordinarily painful, Harriet found, to watch two people she loved more dearly than her life going off together to hurt each other badly.

  ‘I’m glad I’m not in Bredon’s shoes,’ said Paul feelingly.

  That gave Harriet a thought. ‘No, indeed, Paul,’ she said. ‘If Bredon can be his own man, so can you. Let me show you something.’

  She picked up the Warden’s gown, and they set off together to climb into the cupola on the roof of the Sheldonian Theatre. As they went she explained to Paul that the Sheldonian had been built by Christopher Wren to serve as the assembly hall for the university. Harriet’s gown would admit them without fuss.

  ‘Does it still count when you have left long ago?’ Paul asked.

  ‘You don’t exactly leave Oxford,’ Harriet told him. ‘You can, of course. But if you take your MA you’re a member for life. I can still use the Bodleian Library; in fact it’s easier by far to work here than at home.’

  ‘I didn’t know you had an MA,’ Paul said.

  ‘You just leave your name on the books, and pay the fees for five years, and then your BA becomes an MA,’ Harriet admitted.

  ‘Not fair,’ said Paul.

  They were both preoccupied. But when they reached the little cupola, scrambling up a narrow and rather ramshackle ladder through dusty space between the roof timbers, and came out into the light, Harriet let the view speak for itself for a while.

  Then she said, ‘Towery city, and branchy between towers, Cuckoo-echoing, bell-swarmed, lark-charmed, rook-racked, river-rounded . . . It’s lovely, isn’t it, Paul?’

  Visible from the cupola is a southerly vista of extraordinary beauty. First the little Gothic lancets on the roof of the Bodleian; then the large rounded mass of the dome on the Radcliffe Camera, which convinces the eye at once that every city should have a dome; then the airy Gothic spire of the university church, St Mary the Virgin, the square tower of Merton. And Tom Tower off to one side and beyond it all in every direction soft and gently rising vistas of green hills.

  ‘Worth going on paying those fees, I should think,’ said Paul.

  ‘I think so,’ said Harriet.

  ‘Would it please you if I had a shot at coming here?’ asked Paul.

  ‘It would please your father immeasurably,’ Harriet said.

  ‘I asked if it would please you,’ said Paul.

  ‘It would please me very much if you were happy here,’ said Harriet. ‘But then I would be pleased for you to be happy anywhere.’

  ‘If I was a dustman in Notting Hill?’ he asked her, extending a supporting hand to her as they negotiated the steep steps down again.

  ‘As long as you were a happy dustman, son,’ she said firmly.

  Then he gave voice to what was on both their minds: ‘I wonder how that punting lesson is getting on?’ he asked.

  When they reached base it was immediately apparent that the punting lesson had not gone perfectly. Pools of water on the floor indicated that somebody had taken a dipping. Hearing them come in, Peter emerged in a dressing gown, and with very damp hair.

  ‘Heavens, Peter,’ Harriet exclaimed, ‘you haven’t fallen in after all these years?’

  ‘I didn’t fall,’ said Peter, outraged, ‘I was pushed!’

  ‘Bredon pushed you?’ asked Paul, round-eyed.

  ‘Not Bredon, I’m glad to say,’ said Peter, ‘but some incompetent person swinging their pole around horizontally without looking who else was on the river. But it did serve me right.’

  ‘How so? You sound like an innocent victim.’

  ‘I was demonstrating to Bredon how to propel a punt from the Cambridge end, in case he ever needed to. It’s hard to get a firm foothold on the deck end. So I just slid off. And all in vain, I gather.’

  ‘Where is Bredon now?’ asked Harriet.

  ‘Being dried off by Bunter,’ said Peter. ‘He jumped in after me.’

  ‘To save you?’ said Paul incredulously.

  ‘He said he didn’t know if I could swim,’ said Peter, beginning to laugh. ‘He said there had to be something I couldn’t do, and he was afraid it might have been that.’

  Just then Bredon appeared, wearing Peter’s clothes. There was no hope of drying off his own in time for the charabanc.

  ‘Right,’ said Harriet firmly, ‘hot food before you two have to get on that bus back to school. The Turf Tavern, as fast as we can get there.’

  Over soup and steak and kidney pie Harriet deduced that the crucial conversation had taken place, duckings notwithstanding. Bredon had lost his tense apprehensive manner, and Peter did not seem sunk in gloom. They were entertaining herself and Paul with vivid descriptions of the dismay of Peter’s inadvertent assailant. He too had jumped in, and hogged the limelight, since he really couldn’t swim, and having been rescued, gasping, he was held upside down by a burly friend to drain out.

  Talk and laughter over food – just what family life should be like. Peter would confide in her later.

  It was much later before he broached the subject. They were lying in bed by moonlight. He said into the silence, ‘I am bitterly disappointed, Harriet, and bitterly ashamed of myself.’

  ‘Why are you ashamed, Peter?’ she asked.

  ‘Because I am disappointed,’ he said.

  ‘Raisi
ng children is not like doing topiary, Peter,’ she said. ‘One has to wait and see what comes up. I find I am rather proud of him myself.’

  ‘Am I tyrannical, Harriet? As my own father was? Why did he find it so hard to tell me?’

  ‘Not because you are a tyrant, Peter, but because he knew it would hurt you, and he loves you.’

  ‘Meanwhile you were doing a bit of opportunistic topiary yourself, weren’t you, taking Paul to a high point and showing him all the kingdoms of the world, and the glory thereof?’

  ‘I shouldn’t have done that, should I?’ said Harriet. ‘It was the devil who took Christ to a high place, after all.’

  ‘You are a benign and maternal devil, my dear,’ he said.

  ‘It’s a fine line, though, isn’t it, Peter, between loving someone and wanting to control them?’

  ‘We do our best. We haven’t made too bad a job so far,’ he said.

  ‘So it isn’t a disaster if the eldest son doesn’t go to Balliol?’

  ‘Not when I’ve had an hour or two to think about it. Of course not. He’s making perfect sense to me.’

  ‘Peter, exactly when did you and Bredon have this showdown? Before or after you fell in?’

  ‘I didn’t fall; I was pushed.’

  ‘Before or after you were pushed, then?’

  ‘After. We had only just got going upstream past Mesopotamia when it happened.’

  ‘So you were talking about it while both soaking wet?’

  ‘Yes. I suppose that standing together in dripping clothing at the epicentres of a pair of spreading puddles of river water was a great leveller. Perhaps it would improve political life if our masters were given a thorough soaking before entering the House of Commons, and not allowed to dry off before reaching agreement . . .’

  ‘I’m glad you’re straight with Bredon,’ she said. ‘I love you, Peter.’

  ‘Don’t change the subject,’ he said.

  ‘I wasn’t,’ she said, and then they were soon asleep.

  Chapter 18