The Gaudy

by J. I. M. Stewart

  I looked now at the refurbished facades and found they gave me no particular pleasure. The library, unflawed and glittering in stone which faithfully reproduced its pristine alternations of milk and cream, had gained in sheer mass from its renovation, and appeared more than ever a large-limbed Gargantua in the refined cradle of Surrey. Along the strong horizontals of Surrey itself the eye, no longer impeded by the old jumble of pied and peeled masonry, ran with a facility emphasising the slight jolt with which, in each of the building’s two angles, it was suddenly held up. This is an odd phenomenon, which I have heard attributed to the amateur inspiration of the design. It is as if no advance warning has been given that each of the three sides is not to be of indefinite extension.

  But now the staircase was before me. I grabbed my suitcase, and climbed.

  By this time other guests were arriving; and among them numerous men, eminent as I was not, were similarly humping bags up wearisome treads. For the Lord Chief Justice of England himself, I supposed, the laying on of a porter would not have been the thing. Grandees, scribblers, assistant masters ageing in obscure private schools: we were all old members and nothing more. Such pious conventions induce an ‘in’ feeling irritating to those without, but surely harmless as manifestations of the gregarious instincts go. Not that the very top grandees were yet around; it was the university’s day of high festival as well as the college’s; august preliminary junketings elsewhere probably still detained those of the most superior regard. These dignitaries, festooned with medals and orders like so many Christmas trees, would appear at the Gaudy dinner later on.

  Undergraduates are exhorted to remove their private property from college rooms during the long vacation − chiefly because the college, like every other college in the university, moves into the hotel business at that season of the year. Officials of the National Coal Board, oecumenically minded prelates, Byzantinists, associations of learned women, the liberated spawn of American colleges and high schools: all indifferently throng these guarded courts for the time. A useful revenue is thus raked in. But no young man is prepared to believe that his rooms can really be thus stolen from him, and few do much clearing out. I was not surprised to find my old quarters, as I entered them, present very much a lived-in appearance. Somebody − probably not the owner − had done a superficial tidying up. Nevertheless a firm individual proprietorship everywhere declared itself, and the sharpness of its accent had the effect, for some moments, of calling up for me more vividly than might otherwise have been the case, the appearance of the room during my own occupancy. Over the mantelpiece hung a reproduction of that most popular of Japanese actor prints, Sharaku’s Mitsugoro II as the ferocious Ishii Genzo drawing his sword. It is a kind of ultimate in bug-eyed monsters, and was in the place once occupied by a preliminary water-colour sketch for my father’s celebrated if historically dubious painting, Young Picts watching the arrival of Saint Columba. (The young Picts had been Ninian and myself; we had been required to crouch uncomfortably for hours in the middle of a clump of prickly whins.) In once corner of the room, in which I had kept an elegant but totally unfunctioning Dutch bracket clock bought in Edinburgh’s Grassmarket for eight shillings, lay a tennis-racket, a hockey-stick and a guitar, tumbled together in a manner suggesting an early composition by Braque; and on the walls this motif might be said to be caught up in a number of large but inexpensive reproductions of works of art which had been affixed to the panelling with scraps of sellotape. From these last the eye, upward travelling, came upon a less sophisticated exhibition. The whole room was dominated by bottles which had been ranged side by side, dozens and dozens of them, on a substantial cornice near the ceiling as if convenient to the hand of a barman nine-foot high. They were empty bottles: exhausted wells of champagne, beer, gin, claret, cider, hock, ouzo, tokay and chianti all juxtaposed in a spirit of the finest egalitarianism. It was an innocent ostentation, and attractive to me; in fact I received from it a first hint of how fascinating I might find − moving through those middle years as I was − a closer view of the mysterious business of growing up.

  So once I had unpacked and washed in the little bedroom I settled down comfortably enough amid the possessions of an unknown young man. There were a couple of shelves of books − paperbacks for the most part, but interspersed with three or four bound volumes which turned out to be prizes bearing the inscription:

  Nicolas Junkin

  History Sixth

  Cokeville G.S.

  This was one discovery; another was that Mr Junkin possessed two of my early plays. The circumstance naturally predisposed me in his favour, and I even entertained the thought of purloining an empty brandy-bottle from the forthcoming festivity and leaving it on his writing-table as a species of rent. Meantime, I looked at my watch, and decided that it would have been agreeable if, for early arrivals, there had somewhere been a cup of tea. I filled a pipe instead, found myself without matches, and searched the room for a box in vain. Deciding to seek further, I left Nicolas Junkin’s set and went out to the landing. But I don’t smoke heavily, and had no urgent need of the matches. What drew me from the room was the staircase itself.

  Except in colleges of modern foundation, the corridor is not an Oxford institution. One lives on a staircase: commonly one set of rooms on either hand, storey by storey, from ground floor to attics. A hospitable man will give a party for the whole staircase. It is to that extent an entity. Indeed, there is a kind of mystique of the staircase; it has, in any one year, its tone − this however diverse the temperaments, interests, backgrounds of the persons who pound up and down it, bang its doors, exploit its resonances in the interest of nocturnal disturbance.

  Or so it had formerly been. For all I knew, it might be different now. The bond of simple contiguity used to knit together even men who in some instances scarcely acknowledged one another’s existence as their shoulders brushed. Perhaps this no longer obtained.

  Yet staircases, significantly, are still being built − although to dispose young men laterally would be the rational procedure today. Rooms on a corridor can be tidied and swept through by arthritic old women wheeling vacuum cleaners, whereas staircases require the services of a virtually vanished race of menservants, able and prepared to trudge up and down round the clock. Nevertheless I had been told that, when some extension of undergraduate accommodation is proposed in the form of a new quadrangle, it has to be on a staircase plan − this lest the sentiment of old members (whose pockets must be touched if the project is to succeed) should be alienated by a more rational design. ‘We were on the same staircase in ‘25,’ elderly gentlemen report of one another. It is in the spirit of such reminiscence that the cheque-book is brought out.

  At the moment, the staircase feeling certainly commanded me. For example, Tony Mumford had lived in the rooms immediately opposite mine. I wondered what had recently happened to Tony, with whom I hadn’t at all kept up. Hadn’t he been moving ahead in politics? I didn’t really know. But the memory of his rooms came back to me as vividly as that of my own. I wondered what they looked like now.

  At least they, too, were being occupied by a Gaudy guest: a fact apparent because (as in my own case) a hand-written card had been attached to the oak by the staircase’s scout. I crossed the landing and looked at this. It read Lord Marchpayne. The name obscurely touched my mind, but to no particular illumination. I wondered whether Lord Marchpayne had yet arrived. Still telling myself that my foray was a matter of matches, I banged on the door with a lack of ceremony which testified to the extent of my having recovered the spirit of the place, and walked boldly in.

  There was nobody around. A first glance told me that here was the term-time abode of an undergraduate distinguishable from the one over the way. There was nothing to correspond to the bottles. There seemed to be no books at all. A few aquatints, illustrative of sporting occasions and probably of some value, ornamented the walls; so, with marked aesthetic regardlessness, did a peculiarly hideous Cecil Aldin colour print in which
an aggressive clerical thruster, with the hounds almost beneath the hoofs of his mount, was deservedly taking a toss into a ditch. That the proprietor of these objects owned a practical as well as an artistic interest in field-sports was attested by the presence in a corner of the room of a saddle and a pair of hunting boots with shiny tops. The entire spectacle was one to which nothing very out-of-the-way attached. It was my second glance that momentarily astonished me.

  Over the mantelpiece hung a large oil painting in a strikingly erotic Late Victorian taste: it might have been by some libidinous follower of Sir Laurence Alma-Tadema. Adequately clothed but suggestively posed on couches and amid marbles evocative of the last decadence of Rome, several languorous ladies awaited appointments the nature of which, in what was so evidently an antique maison de tolerance, it wasn’t hard to guess. Tony Mumford had set great store by his heirloom, of comparatively recent accession in the family though it must have been. I could recall numerous jokes, not of the most refined, which had turned upon his supposed recurrent emotional dependence on this private lupanar. It seemed odd that Tony should simply have abandoned the picture to the college on going down a quarter of a century ago.

  I was still puzzling over this when a sound made itself heard on the staircase − a sound so familiar that I at once turned to the open door behind me in the simplest expectation of what was going to appear. And I was not mistaken. A man of about my own age was framed in the doorway, carrying a tray from which the small rattle of crockery had come.

  ‘Good afternoon, my lord. I thought you might have a fancy for a cup of tea. Plot is the name, my lord. I haven’t been on the staircase all that long. But I remember you, if I may say so, very well. Very well indeed, my lord.’ Plot (and I remembered, on my part, his not unmemorable name, but not the man himself) advanced towards a table in the centre of this room the just occupancy of which I had so rudely usurped. It was a situation requiring immediate clearing up.

  ‘That’s very kind,’ I said. ‘But I’m not Lord Marchpayne. My name is Pattullo, and I’ve been put in the rooms opposite. I was only looking for matches.’

  ‘On the bedside table, sir.’ Plot touched a reproachful note. ‘We keep having those power-cuts. Strikes, go-slows, refusing an honest bit of overtime: quite shocking, it seems to me. As bad as them in the motorworks, who come out if they have to walk through a small puddle to their job. So the matches, you see, are sometimes a convenience to the gentlemen in the night.’

  ‘Yes, of course. It was stupid of me not to look in the bedroom.’ The neutrality of Plot’s ‘the gentlemen’ had caught my ear. It would not have been possible to say whether this traditional manner of designating the young men on his staircase existed in a comfortable and uncoloured way in his mind or was there conditioned by ironic reservations. Certainly he was not the man indiscriminately to abnegate the distinctions of class. There would be lads in the college kitchens whom he would address as from a just remove. Correspondingly, although his manner had turned a shade less deferential upon his discovery that I was not a peer of the realm, it still held quite enough deference for any reasonable commoner to be going on with. I concluded that there had been Plots around the college for generations, and that with this one it would be possible to establish excellent relations.

  ‘I’ll just take the tea into your own rooms.’ Plot made to pick up the tray he had set down. ‘As you see, I thought I’d make a little anchovy toast, and it oughtn’t to be let grow cold. I think I’m right in saying the gentlemen were partial to it in your time.’

  ‘That’s perfectly true.’ The anchovy toast was something I had already become aware of, its aroma being the more striking since some time happened to have elapsed since this particular delicacy had been offered to me. ‘But what about Lord Marchpayne? He may turn up at any moment.’

  ‘Plenty more, sir, where this came from.’

  ‘I’m delighted to hear it,’ somebody said from the doorway. ‘Another cup and saucer will be just the thing.’

  The newcomer was certainly Lord Marchpayne: he had a suitcase by his side. And Lord Marchpayne was certainly Tony Mumford. The voice was a little changed, having become distinguishably a public voice. The figure and even the features had changed too; both were heading towards the massive. But I hadn’t the slightest doubt about Tony. Nor had he about me.

  ‘Well I’m blessed—Duncan! And Plot, isn’t it?’ Tony had turned instantly to this ministrant character and shaken hands with him. It was something it hadn’t occurred to me to do, and I tried to remember whether it had been our habit with our scouts at the beginning and end of term. Plot appeared not overwhelmed.

  ‘Quite correct, my lord. And pleased to be looking after you. I was telling Mr Pattullo that I hadn’t been on this staircase long. I take it you’ll hardly object to using this young gentleman’s crockery?’ Plot, who was opening a cupboard door, asked this with some humorous intention which I was dull enough to fail to elucidate. ‘Promotion comes rather slowly, you might say, in my department of college life. All the better when it does, of course.’

  ‘Capital!’ Tony had tossed a bowler hat on the table, and I found myself questioning this slightly archaic object as if it might tell me something about its owner. What was eluding me was whether as an undergraduate Tony had been in some sort of succession to a barony or the like, or whether he was now Lord Marchpayne as a consequence of services rendered to the nation. It was not a point of which he would expect a former intimate to be ignorant. ‘Capital!’ Tony was now repeating. ‘Bicycle-boy, wasn’t it? Any of them around today?’

  ‘No, my lord − and not all that many bicycles, either. Nothing but motor cars. Why, a freshman is let run a motor car, if only he can produce a scrap of an excuse for it. Go down to where the piggeries were, and you’ll find − in term-time, that is − a whole car-park of them.’

  ‘Ah, changed days.’ Having briskly established relations with Plot, Tony as briskly switched off. And at this Plot, having satisfied himself that our hot-water jug was adequate to the replenishing of our teapot, and impressed upon us the circumstance that he would be within call, retired to his pantry. Tony and I were left regarding each other with the ghost of constraint.

  ‘This is quite splendid!’ Tony said − and added (having paused to pick up a finger of toast), ‘I rather thought you never came to these affairs, Duncan? For our generation they happen every three or four years, you know. You must get the invitations?’

  ‘Yes, I do. But I’m afraid I’ve never been to a Gaudy in my life. I’ve been living abroad a good deal.’

  ‘Dodging the tax-gatherer − eh, Duncan? But hang abroad! Cut out of it, my boy. Live at home and look about you. Your plays will improve no end.’

  ‘That’s an amateur fallacy,’ I pronounced firmly − but wondering whether what Tony had said was true. And even although there was something factitious about his bold reaching out towards our juvenile candour, I rather admired the prompt force with which he had gone after it.

  ‘You’re losing your command of modern English idiom, for one thing,’ Tony pursued with bland authority. ‘Your people − even the young ones − talk exactly as we talked in this room God knows how many years ago. And we went in for something rather archaic then, for that matter. It was an affectation of yours, Duncan.’

  I felt that this brutality was something at which I, too, must play.

  ‘Were you always going to be Lord Marchpayne?’ I demanded. ‘It must have been on the strength of being somebody’s grandson or nephew, if you were − since you were plain Tony Mumford, without a doubt. Or is it a hastily improvised disguise?’

  ‘Oh, quite the latter.’ Tony was amused. ‘I’ve been pushing around − perhaps not in departments of activity you keep an eye on. Nothing dramatic, let alone theatrical, about being a reliable junior Minister with the right contacts in the City.’ Tony smiled charmingly. ‘That’s me. Unfulfilled renown, and all that.’

  ‘I write about obscurely private life, you
know, and keep my eye on that. My characters are all virtually idiots − in the original sense of the word.’

  ‘You always had a smack of the don in you, Duncan.’ Tony’s thus greeting my inconsequent piece of pedantry was fair enough. But his renewed smile told me he wasn’t too pleased at my ignorance of his career. If we were to horse around innocently as in days of yore we should have to watch our steps, at least in the initial stages.

  ‘I suppose,’ I asked, ‘that these are your son’s rooms?’ Plot’s question about the crockery and my own familiarity with the picture over the mantelpiece had belatedly come together in my mind, and the inference to be drawn was clear. ‘When he came up, you arranged for him to have your old rooms here in Surrey?’

  ‘More or less. Ivo − that’s my boy − liked the idea. You see, they were my father’s rooms too − although I mayn’t ever have mentioned the fact. Do you know? Not long ago I met a very nice chap who’d written a book. Blameless bit of literary history of some sort. And he’d talked about undergraduates who might turn over letters written by their great-grandfathers when they were undergraduates. Idea was to show how totally incomprehensible one generation’s interests may be to another. Husky lads solemnly concerned over Dr Pusey’s latest sermon, or the Eastward Position, or whether it is edifying to visit the good poor. And this chap was rebuked in some public print by an egg-head professor from heaven knows where for being snobbish or, as they say, divisive. Comical, wouldn’t you say? After all, everybody has great-grandfathers − I suppose with the sole exception of Jesus Christ.’ Tony paused, and I felt he had thrown in this as an appeal to what he thought of as the pervasively sceptical spirit of modern literature as embodied in my person. ‘Still, one has to mind one’s p’s and q’s, no doubt. Pointless to get thought of as snooty in such matters. Make your standing clear and then be gracefully modest about it. Think of that convention at Cambridge. I wonder if it still goes on.’