‘That second call did come through,’ he said. ‘A police station.’
‘Ah!’ Atlas said softly. ‘Where, Cyril?’
‘Bethnal Green. Lusby did go home. There was only his mother in the house. He told her everything was fine, and persuaded her to go round the shops and collect him a nice supper. As soon as she went out he turned on the gas. He’s dead.’
VIII
I returned to Junkin’s rooms. For me the Gaudy was over. For the men I had just been talking to it was going to continue for a time. They had come together out of an uneasy sense that Paul Lusby’s foolish exploit ought to have been spotted; that it had constituted, in his particular case and together with his subsequent disappearance, a danger-signal plain to read; that a course of action must be decided upon. But action had been overtaken by event. And however they felt about the matter, they weren’t dispensed from now returning to entertain their guests through the tail-end of this annual jollification. There would be old members rather short of company, who yet lacked the gumption to go to bed or drive away. There might be others who had drunk rather too much, and needed unobtrusive managing. When it was all over, and the guests were more or less tucked up, the hosts apart from the few who were bachelors and lived in college − would return to their North Oxford or Headington homes, and to wives either asleep or grimly awake in bed reading The Decline and Tall of the Roman Empire. Even Mrs Bedworth and whatever other college ladies had gallantly dined together in style could not possibly have supported each other’s company for nearly five hours at a stretch. They would be home by now, and laying the family breakfast table.
These fancies went through my head without amusing me. I was troubled by the death of the unknown young man. Looking around the miscellaneous possessions of Nicolas Junkin now, I even experienced a fleeting confusion of mind in which I believed that it was Junkin − equally unknown to me − who had died. I may just have been tired − or perhaps the college’s wine was at work. But such mental vagaries are not uncommon in sober states. Writers may be peculiarly vulnerable to them, since they have the habit of fragmenting and reassorting authentic experience in the interest of concocting fictions.
The muddle could last only for a moment, but its vanishing produced the sensation of relief we feel when, awakening from a bad dream, we realise it isn’t true. I suppose because his rooms had once been mine, my imagination had adopted Nicolas Junkin. I’d even been taking sides with him against his neighbour, Ivo Mumford, although Ivo was the son of my first close Oxford friend, whereas Junkin’s Cokeville background was a blank, and the boy himself I was unlikely ever to set eyes on.
There had been in my mind some notion that Tony and I might finish the evening tête à tête I now felt disinclined for this. Lusby’s fate was so much with me that I should probably be impelled to come out with an account of it, and if Tony was uninterested the effect would be cheerless and awkward. He might even react to it as he had reacted to my casual mention of Junkin’s examination result − seizing, with his swift political instinct, upon this miserable fatality in Bethnal Green as a useful exemplification of the fact that the college today was clumsy in its dealings with its young men. This would be unfair. Arguing about it with Tony didn’t appeal to me.
So I ought to have gone to bed. Instead, I behaved in a manner which, although I scarcely realised it, reflected the fact that Junkin’s room was my room too. I had often returned to it late at night, whether from a party or from some rambling discussion of abstract topics with serious men, and paced the carpet into the small hours in an effort to sort out not such issues as had been debated but the character or quiddity first of one of my acquaintances and then of another. I picked up on this habit now − so that presently I found myself walking up and down, trying to feel my way, at least to the extent of a few initial inches, into the personalities of the men I had lately been involved with.
As a professional category I scarcely felt any special interest in them. Fellows of colleges existed for me merely as a species of part-time schoolmasters, some of them possessed of scholarly or scientific inclinations. This reductive view didn’t conduce to lively curiosity − and yet as soon as individual specimens detached themselves from the notional class of instructing and investigating persons they began to demand attention. Three of the four men encountered in Howard I had never seen before − nor, indeed, had I seen them as much more than obscure nocturnal presences then. I had glimpsed Arnold Lempriere by match-light, and I now realised he had fleetingly reminded me of somebody else. He was a short, stout man, grey-haired and grey-complexioned, with a closely-trimmed moustache over a firm mouth. He was much older than his companions, and they had treated him with an unemphatic but perceptible indulgence which might merely reflect this fact, but which could have another occasion as well. Alone of the group, Lempriere had suggested to me the possession of a stage sense. He had talked effectively, once or twice even pungently, from a pronounced standpoint: that of a man sharply critical of the disposition of things around him. The competitive examination system − Firsts, Seconds and Thirds − was damned nonsense, and a hard-boiled attitude was required before it. Even so, the nonsense, if subscribed to, ought not to be telescoped with turning the college into a ballroom; nor, in the interest of such revels, ought bewildered or bewilderable youths like Lusby to be picked up and dumped in Rattenbury.
In his talk Lempriere had seemed to prize an old-fashioned flair for the vivid and picturesque; in his brief description and analysis of Lusby’s plight he had enjoyed deploying a certain rhetorical resource. But his colleagues had not struck me as all that impressed. If one of these were to be seriously convinced of the identical propositions Lempriere had been putting forward he might still, I obscurely perceived, not estimate highly the worth or reliability of Lempriere as an ally. For what I have called stage sense (a dramatist’s possession, but one with which he must endow his characters) is a very unacademic thing. It is an alert waiting for a role, for an effective turn that can be put on. In a closely knit body of scholarly men such an impulse − which is a kind of misplaced creativeness − must always appear as irresponsibility. Perhaps something of the sort was imputed to Lempriere.
At this point I didn’t exactly surprise myself by a yawn. I made to glance at the clock − at my own clock, since this had become again my own room. My glance didn’t go, however, to the corner in which there ought to have stood the Dutch bracket affair, but to the mantelpiece where, beneath Young Picts watching the arrival of Saint Columba, I had kept a small electric clock owning the pleasing ability to tick or not to tick according as one set a switch. There was no clock now, but only the demonic Ishii Genzo. He looked more furious than ever, and I thought idly that this was because somebody had casually perched an envelope against his frame. I hadn’t noticed this earlier. Before the Gaudy, certainly, there had been nothing there. A closer look revealed that it was a letter addressed to me, and I realised that it had been thus deposited according to the custom of some college messenger on an unhurried evening round.
I picked up the envelope and opened it − and to a curiously melodramatic accompaniment. During the past half-hour thunder had been grumbling in the distance; prowling the Chilterns, the Berkshire Downs; enfilading, circling the city of Oxford. Now there was a single brilliant flash of lightning, the effect of which was seemingly to bring the massive facade of the library hurtling across Surrey and hard up against Junkin’s windows. It was instantaneously followed by a loud peal of thunder directly overhead. And torrential rain was falling when I was still unfolding the Provost’s letter.
Dear Pattullo,
May I send you, without being too boring, a line of welcome to the Gaudy? I have, as you will find in a moment, an ulterior motive! But your turning-up really is a particular satisfaction to many of the older-established among us. The college, illustrious (as we shall hear proclaimed tonight) in so many fields, has always been a little lagging in the possession of members who have attained, like
yourself, to the highest distinction in the arts. And it is certainly many years since you and I met. It would not be easy for me to forget the pleasure of a conversation with you. I hope we shall manage one this evening. But I shall, of course, have to be assiduous in all those proper attentions to Establishment figures, so the point is a little at hazard.
I wonder whether I may venture to beg you, if it can possibly be fitted in with your plans, to linger in Oxford tomorrow for at least as long as will permit you to lunch with us in the Lodging? My wife is particularly hopeful of a favourable response!
The fact is that we have on our hands − the college corporately and the university, I mean − a problem upon which I should be most deeply grateful for your advice. It has been decided to establish, and with all convenient speed, a University Readership in Modern European Drama, and the appointment will carry with it a Professional Fellowship at this college. As a consequence − and you probably know about this − my colleagues and myself have a substantial (although, in formal terms, not preponderant) voice in choosing the Reader. We have already had a certain amount of debate: lively but not, I think, to the extent of being characterisable as dispute or controversy. There have been some ‘away out’ suggestions and some uncommonly dull ones. The wiser sort (among whom, with the passing of the years, I am beginning to presume to see myself) are quietly maturing their own plan. I do hope that, by one means or another, you can spare a little time to talk it all over. Our luncheon hour is one o’clock.
Yours sincerely,
Edward Pococke
P.S. I heard with great pleasure of the brilliant success of your Harvard lectures. E. P.
Although a lightning flash and thunder clap had been an excessive prelude to the reading of Dr Pococke’s letter, I concluded them, after only a moment’s thought, all to come together appropriately enough. What dumbfounded me was not simply the perception of what ‘the wiser sort’ were deviously being depicted as after; it was also the character of my own response. I had, it was true, much enjoyed that American trip. My interest in drama has always been broader than my own tenuous achievement in the theatre might suggest. I can talk, or even lecture, about it at least with satisfaction to myself. But in the United States I had seen my role merely as that of temporary playwright on campus after the hospitable habit of that part of the world. And hadn’t I, this very evening, been thinking of academic characters and courses in a mildly derogatory, perhaps even a disagreeably superior way? Yet here I was, suddenly suspecting that I wanted to be something called a Reader in Modern European Drama. Or was that really quite the point? I led − it couldn’t be denied I led − a rootless and unattached sort of life. A small villa in Ravello and a smaller pied-a-terre in London: these were the limits of what I tangibly possessed, and among the intangibles had chiefly to be reckoned the mere shift and drift of acquaintanceships and associations held loosely and impermanently together by theatrical projects and literary interests. Were I to stop writing, to stop circulating in that amorphous and faithless world, I should within a year or two be as isolated as Robinson Crusoe. What lured me now was the idea of life within a society: a stable and closely-knit society − changing, indeed, decade by decade or lustre by lustre as old men went and young men came, but preserving a constant sense of permanent and impersonal purposes.
I was here romanticising, it can’t be doubted, the life of an Oxford college. But at least I now reread the Provost’s letter with as rational a regard as I could muster. The scrutiny didn’t in the least alter my view of what he was in effect saying, although I was more aware of how much of it was being said by implication only. Apart from that evening’s glimpses, I possessed and had preserved no more than what had been a juvenile sense of Edward Pococke’s character. But what one lacks of experience at nineteen or twenty-one may more than make up for in sharpness of observation and the alert intuitive judgements of a young and vulnerable animal. And in fact I found this letter to be wholly by the man I had been aware of twenty years before.
This led me to a sobering reflection. The references to lively debate, to ‘away out’ suggestions and dull ones, to the quiet maturing of a plan: these had not been idly penned. I was being, in some degree, softened up for the eventual discovery that I had come into the picture late and as a safe man, a compromise candidate whom nobody with any ‘liveliness’ exactly wanted to go to the stake for. There was diplomacy ahead − so decidedly so that it would be injudicious overtly to cast me at the moment other than as somebody whose advice would be gratefully received.
But was that right? Or was I imagining things? The letter rendered intelligible a number of fleeting remarks that had been made to me that day; when I totted these up it looked much as if a considerable number of people were already taking it for granted that I was going to be ‘in’ − and, for that matter, that I was going to consent to be ‘in’. Some of these people had even seemed to suppose that the proposal must already, in some form, have come to me. I felt that I recognised in this the hush-hush technique frequently adopted in such affairs.
I suddenly much wanted to put this letter in front of Tony; to have a reading of it by one who was no less than a Cabinet Minister. I must have been conscious of the naivety of the impulse, but this didn’t seem to mute its appeal. Poor Lusby, moreover, had been entirely banished from my head; if Tony was still around and to be talked to, it wasn’t with that wretched business that I should burden him.
I took another turn round Nick Junkin’s room. I walked to the window and stared into the darkness of Surrey. The night sky was still overcast. It seemed incredible that, only an hour before, it had been brilliant with stars. I could hear water trickling in the gutters. A damp smell came up warm from the grass.
It was probable that everybody had gone to bed. Nevertheless I went to the door and opened it. The light on the little landing was extinguished, but Ivo Mumford’s oak had not been sported, and there was a pencil line of light under and to the side of the familiarly ill-fitting inner door. I walked over to it and − again all-familiarly − opened it and surveyed the ancestral Mumford room. Tony’s had been the only door in college on which I had ended up by never thinking to knock.
Tony was standing in front of the empty fireplace, beneath the ancestral Mumford lupanar. He stared at me, and for a second I had a confused sense that something dreadful had happened and that as a consequence Tony had suddenly immensely aged. I had scarcely taken in the fact that this was not Tony when the man before me spoke.
‘Who the devil are you?’ he said. ‘And where, in God’s name, is my son?’
It was a coup de théâtre which it would have pleased me to hit upon by way of livening up a third act. I explained myself to Lord Marchpayne’s father, and he silently shook hands. It seemed to be his way of indicating that he had heard of me. I didn’t think I could ever have met him, for it had been an oddity of my close friendship with his son that we had never done any vacation visiting in one another’s homes.
‘Will you have a drink?’ Mr Mumford asked. ‘There’s bound to be plenty of the damned stuff in Ivo’s cupboards.’
‘Yes, there is. But, thank you, no. A Gaudy’s a Gaudy, and mine’s over. But Tony must still be keeping it up somewhere. He’s bound to be back soon now. Only, I’m afraid I haven’t a notion of where to go and look for him.’
‘Do you happen to know if he’s sober?’
‘Tony?’ For a second I had to play for time before this bald and sudden question. ‘He says he can be, at the drop of a hat. And I believe him.’
‘It’s just as well.’ Mr Mumford glowered at me darkly. He had been a heavy and fleshy man − which was what Tony in a few years was going to be − but had begun to shrink or shrivel. His skin hung on him loosely − rather as if he had been deprived of it in some lurid martyrdom and then perfunctorily reinserted in it on the discovery that a mistake had been made. I looked at him curiously, conscious that this macabre fancy didn’t exactly make me comfortable in his presence. His tu
rning up in college at this unaccountable hour called for an explanation which he appeared for the present disinclined to advance. Some family bereavement, or accident, or sudden and critical illness was one possibility. Had anything happened to Ivo? At least the heir of the Mumfords couldn’t, like Paul Lusby, have perished with his head in a gas cooker; if he had, it could scarcely have occurred even to this rather savage old man to snap out that remark about the damned stuff in his cupboards. Ivo might still be the occasion of this irruption, all the same.
‘Has anything happened to Ivo?’ I asked.
Mr Mumford glowered at me even more darkly than before. I concluded that he regarded the question as entirely impertinent. I was a total stranger to him, after all, even though I was far from being that to his son. And his next remark gave every appearance of supporting this view.
‘Aren’t you the fellow who writes plays?’ he demanded. ‘I thought all scribblers had dirty finger-nails and long hair.’
I replied to these scarcely obliging words by sitting down − which would have been an odd response had I not suddenly realised that this vein of phrenetic insult was a consequence of the old man’s being, for some reason, beside himself.
‘My finger-nails were quite awful when I was a boy,’ I said. ‘And as for a hair-cut, the shilling for it didn’t always come my way. Later on, your son successfully spruced me up. But I do write plays.’
‘At least your head seems to be screwed on the right way.’ Mr Mumford betrayed no sense that this was an extraordinary conversation. ‘And, talking of heads, you’ve hit the nail on one smartly enough. Am I right in thinking you’re a reliable man?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then I’ll tell you. My precious grandson looks like being put inside. A pretty pickle, eh? Within a dozen hours of Tony’s making that confounded Cabinet.’
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