The Gaudy

by J. I. M. Stewart

  ‘It certainly would not,’ Tony said grimly.

  ‘But that’s looking farther ahead than we need at the moment. We mustn’t go too fast. You know, I’ve sometimes noticed that being in too much of a hurry can result in one’s not getting along as rapidly as one otherwise might do.’ Mogridge paused on this, so that I thought he was going to repeat it just in case the thread had eluded us. ‘We left Ivo at supper,’ he said with a surprising briskness. ‘Please go on from there.’

  Mr Mumford went on. Ivo had drunk several glasses of wine with his meal, and had then announced that he was going to stretch his legs. It was getting on for dark but a splendid summer night. He might go as far as the river, so his grandfather had better not wait up for him. There was apparently nothing in this that Mr Mumford found particularly casual or out of the way. He seemed resigned, indeed, to the view that Ivo always found these duty visits boring, and that the occasion of them was simply the expectation of a large tip. On this particular evening Ivo had been restless from the start. Thinking about it afterwards, his grandfather con- eluded that he had glimpsed some of his plebeian friends as he drove through the village on his arrival. They would have been hanging around the telephone kiosk, Mr Mumford added on a note of sombre rural realism, talking smut and abundantly prepared to be up to no particular good. It was a state of affairs which Ivo must have found perversely attractive.

  That was the last to be seen of the boy until the murky incident was over. He had appeared in his grandfather’s bedroom at six o’clock in the morning. Mr Mumford, awakened abruptly, had supposed his grandson to have heard burglars or to have been taken ill. In fact, a night of appalled realisation had broken Ivo down. He was in a tearful panic, and it had been hard to extract much sense from him. He said he hadn’t known this girl wasn’t another girl, whom he was sure lots of the louts had had before. So he hadn’t at all seen why he shouldn’t join in the mucking around. Not that in the end he actively had, since he had become aware that there was some nasty sort of hitch. The girl had really struggled. And quite as much with the second chap as with the first.

  This last particular, which made me feel that I didn’t want to catch Ivo’s father’s eye, Ivo’s grandfather relayed with no particular emotion. But it had at least been at this point in Ivo’s confession that Mr Mumford realised he had quite something on his hands. He roused his housekeeper, a notably faithful family retainer who adored Master Ivo, and very sensibly had her prepare a quick but substantial breakfast. When this had been partaken of (and between blubbering fits Ivo managed to eat a great deal) he had banished the indecisive rapist to the untenanted cottage and sat back to think.

  He was still thinking, it seemed, when Fairlamb came in. Fairlamb was the local pub-keeper. Although not a tenant of Mr Mumford’s he was to a certain extent an underling, since Mr Mumford was a director of the brewery company which maintained him in his hostelry. Fairlamb was also the father of the outraged, or reputedly outraged, girl. His attitude, as it appeared through Mr Mumford’s account, had been one of wary malevolence and furtive venality. It was clearly in his head that there was money in the thing.

  Fairlamb, then, presented a narrative of his daughter’s wrong, together with the information that Mr Ivo unfortunately had a hand in it − if hand, indeed, was the word. It was at this point that Mr Mumford advanced his rash assertion that Ivo could not have been involved since Ivo was not visiting Otby Park. Had he waited a little longer he might have taken another line. Fairlamb, while stoutly asserting his daughter’s hitherto virginal state, did not deny that she had gone off freely with the group of lads, and that on previous occasions she had made similar but uncatastrophic nocturnal excursions with them. This particular jaunt had begun in the darkness of a moonless night and ended in repair to the deeper darkness of a barn. Miss Fairlamb wasn’t confident that Mr Ivo had been with the group ‘all the time’. Perhaps he had joined the others in the barn. But it was Mr Ivo who had begun doing things to her. Everybody knew − Miss Fairlamb declared and her father regretfully reported − that Mr Ivo was like that. Even when quite young, he had taught some of the other boys tricks so nasty that he, Fairlamb, quite declined to dirty Mr Mumford’s ears with them.

  This had almost been too much for Ivo’s grandfather, and he had indulged the thought of continuing his colloquy with Fairlamb through the instrumentality of a hunting-crop. Alternatively, he had thought of getting out his cheque-book, which was the issue of the affair which the unspeakable publican pretty evidently had in mind. But, although aged and shaken, he had the wits to see that either of these courses would be injudicious. So he turned Fairlamb out of the house with the advice to take his slanderous rubbish to the police.

  And Fairlamb − although later in the day − had gone to the police. He had perhaps done so only because others had gone before him. In thinking to see the matter resolve itself satisfactorily on a simple economic basis he had reckoned without something he was in a professional position very accurately to assess: the normal operation of village gossip. Miss Fairlamb had presented herself to her aunt (who kept the village shop and post-office) in the character of a ravished heroine; her aunt had told the story to the district nurse; the district nurse (as a lowly but unchallengeable auxiliary of the gentry) had told the vicar; and a conference with the local constable had been the result.

  The constable spent an hour weighing things up, and then saw no help for it: he must march up the avenue and ring the front-door bell of the Park. Shown into the presence of its owner, he came out with the thing roundly enough. He had interviewed two of the lads; they had admitted there had been ‘a bit of skylarking and mucking-around-like’; but nothing had happened that could be any business of the police until the young gent from the big house got silly and ‘did what he oughtn’t to have’. So could the constable see the young gent? Mr Mumford, keeping his nerve if not his judgement, declared that here was a pack of lies by a gang of revolting little brutes who ought to be in Borstal − and that his grandson, being a hundred miles away, could demonstrably have had no part in the matter. The constable agreed that this must certainly be the state of the case; he then got himself hastily out of the house, plainly believing nothing of the sort; and Mr Mumford was left to digest what looked like a rapidly deteriorating situation.

  ‘Was anything said?’ Mogridge asked, ‘about how anybody in that barn saw anything that was going on? There has to be some light, or one sees nothing at all.’ He looked earnestly from one to another of us. ‘Wouldn’t you agree?’

  ‘A two-year-old would have to agree,’ Mr Mumford snapped. ‘One of the louts seems to have said that somebody had a candle.’

  ‘A candle?’ Tony said. ‘What utter nonsense! A torch or a bicycle lamp might make sense. But nobody wanders about the countryside proposing to light candles in barns.’

  As a generalisation this struck me as valid. At the same time there was a gruesome picturesqueness about the image of that single flickering flame; one glimpsed a composition like a sort of unholy La Tour: a point of light glinting on so bestial a floor. Mogridge’s mind, fortunately, was undistracted by this sort of thing.

  ‘Darkness,’ he said. ‘Do you know? It can be rather terrifying. It often terrifies children.’ He paused. ‘As a matter of fact, it terrified some of those people who found themselves tumbled into the middle of Peru. They had to be dealt with.’

  ‘Most interesting,’ Tony said.

  ‘But the point is, of course, that this whole Otby affair was played out in darkness or near-darkness, from start to finish. It makes me increasingly believe that the notion of any sort of successful prosecution is nonsense. For all we know, or a jury could know, one of those village boys was working away quietly on that girl for an hour before anybody penetrated her. I believe that’s the term.’

  ‘It’s certainly the one they use in court,’ Tony agreed. ‘What we say is fucked her.’

  ‘Yes, of course. But you see what I mean. Plenty of young women who have been
far from virtuous are capable of putting on a hysterical turn and screaming about rape. Every judge knows that. They’re even capable, sometimes, of persevering in calumny in what appears the most malignant way − one seemingly quite alien to their normal commonplace character. Known facts like that, added to the other fact of the whole thing’s having been a mess and huddle in the dark, are all in our favour for a start. It’s most improbable, I repeat, that anything absolutely dire is going to come out of the thing. Still, we don’t want even the disagreeable’not if we can help it. So it’s just a question which of two lines we adopt.’ Mogridge glanced at his watch. It was apparent that he judged there was just so much time for talk, and that then action must begin. ‘By the way,’ he said to Mr Mumford, ‘where did you eventually get Ivo off to?’

  ‘Get him off to? He’s still in the gardener’s cottage, of course.’ Mr Mumford spoke as if this ought to have been self-evident. I could see that some obscure territorial sense had been at work in him; he had felt that nothing could really happen to his grandson as long as the boy was within the shelter of the family estate.

  ‘If nobody has come on him there,’ Tony said, ‘then so far, so good. But what’s this about two lines we can adopt?’

  ‘We can opt for the truth. That’s to say we can somehow ease your father out of his story, admit that Ivo came to Otby and went fooling around with his village acquaintances, and deny that he had the faintest notion that anything like a sexual assault was going on in that barn. Alternatively, we can maintain the whole thing to be a malicious village slander. We can have your father stick to his story, his housekeeper support it, and Ivo adopt it too, supposing they really chase him up. In fact, lies all round.’ Mogridge turned his oblique and mild regard from Tony to myself, and for the first time in my experience I thought I detected in it what might almost be a remote glint of humour. ‘I’m for lies all round.’

  ‘And gaol all round too?’ Tony asked. He spoke ironically but on a note of sharpened interest. ‘My dear Gavin, you’re daft. The boy would require something out of a story-book. An alibi, or whatever they call it.’

  ‘Oh, certainly.’ Mogridge was at his most deliberate. ‘It won’t be difficult. Always provided nothing has happened at this cottage. Has Ivo, by the way, had any definite plans for the vac? Knowing about that might help.’

  ‘He ought to be in New York by now.’ Tony, although I believe he was in a state of simple misery, said this with some exasperation. ‘He’d been very keen to go there, and he was booked for a night flight on Monday. He probably thought he’d touch his grandfather for a big tip first, and just roll up at Heathrow a night or two later. He has no sense about such things.’

  ‘Splendid!’ Mogridge was standing up. He clearly regarded our conference as over. ‘He’ll pretty well be there for breakfast just as they say in the advertisements − Mr Mumford, you’d better drive straight back to Otby. But don’t try to contact Ivo. I’ll have done that before you arrive. Go straight to bed. Tony, do the same − here in college. And forget you know anything whatever. Talk to Duncan, but not to anybody else. It’s only with Duncan I’ll communicate at present. Duncan, how long shall you be staying here?’

  ‘Until tomorrow evening. Longer, if you want me to.’

  ‘No, no − that will do. If you get a message including the word “satisfactory” you’ll know all’s well.’

  ‘Gavin, this is nonsense.’ There was something like desperation in Tony’s voice now. ‘It’s not like going over to the continent, where they no longer bother to stamp your passport. Nobody gets past immigration control at Kennedy without being absolutely clocked through.’

  ‘It’s the usual thing, I agree. However, don’t worry. And oh, by the way, there will be a number of respectable people who saw Ivo in New York yesterday. And now I must be off.’

  ‘Would you mind telling us just how you imagine you can manage this?’

  ‘Well, no. I mean we’d better not waste any time on mere details. Come along, Mr Mumford. I’ll see you to your car.’ As he said this, Mogridge was looking steadily at Tony − and Tony steadily at him. ‘Good night,’ Mogridge said casually, and swept Ivo’s grandfather out of Ivo’s room.

  Tony hadn’t got to his feet, and now for some seconds he buried his head in his hands. A far-away bell chimed some hour or other. Tony looked up again.

  ‘Duncan, is he mad?’

  ‘You know he isn’t mad.’

  ‘You brought him in on this. Did you know something about him − something that had never come into my head?’

  ‘Short of clairvoyance or telepathy − definitely not.’

  ‘It’s nonsense at this end too. Nobody can get on to any kind of transatlantic flight without the day and hour—’

  ‘But this one won’t be just any kind of flight. It will be a rather particular one.’

  ‘Yes.’ Tony was staring at me rather as he had stared at Mogridge in the moment of their parting. ‘He must be damned high up.’

  ‘I wouldn’t know.’

  ‘More or less at the top. I’d like to find out.’ ‘Perhaps you could ask the Prime Minister.’ ‘Oh, no!’ Tony was really shocked. ‘That wouldn’t do at all. Not the drill.’

  IX

  It would have been indecent to say goodnight to Tony without managing some kind of murmur, however awkward, indicative of sympathetic feeling before his suddenly untoward family situation. But when I had managed this I came away at once. He may or may not have wanted to go to bed or had any thought that he was likely to get to sleep. He must have had a strong impulse, I supposed, to go to the support of his son himself, and that he had acquiesced in a waiting and passive role was an index of the astonishing grip that Mogridge had taken of the whole affair. I didn’t imagine that I’d myself be sleepless, although I was far from any state of post-prandial contentment. On top of the Gaudy dinner and the Gaudy speeches − at the end of which any reasonable man would have been disposed to call it a day − had come (from off-stage and messengered, as in some orthodox neo-classical drama) the successive reports of the unknown Paul Lusby’s death and the unknown Ivo Mumford’s disgrace. A disgrace it certainly was − this even although the boy had been singularly luckless in his ugly escapade, so that I found myself all on the side of cheating the law if the law was after him. I saw these two catastrophes as belonging to different orders: Lusby’s, I imagined, had a certain representative character as being the sort of thing that happens, whereas Ivo’s was grotesque and alarming as something that doesn’t. A young man is not on his way to the dock on a charge of rape or conspiring to rape simply because he mixes brandy with his champagne. Something abrupt and utterly senseless had happened in the life of Ivo Mumford.

  Out on the landing, I found that, attractive as was the thought of bed, a vestigial restiveness prompted me to prowl. I groped my way downstairs and into Surrey, much as if I were Mogridge remembering about a more attractive loo. The storm hadn’t greatly cleared the air, and the darkness was warm and muggy again. It was also entire; one couldn’t have guessed that one was surrounded by the slumbers of two or three hundred heavily-dieted middle-aged men. Or was there a glint of light from the room briefly restored to the occupancy of P. P. Killiecrankie? It probably wasn’t so, and in any case I had no inclination to call on him − although he might, I reflected, have an informed view on just how far you could go without inviting opprobrium as a ravisher. Perhaps Ivo Mumford would end his days as a bishop since careers did seem so uncommonly unpredictable. Not all of them, of course; what could Ranald McKechnie have become other than Professor Ranald McKechnie? But nobody would have thought of Cyril Bedworth bedding with Proust. And it hadn’t been Duncan Pattullo the Secret Service Boy who had become the Secret Service Man; it had been Gavin Mogridge the failed ‘cellist.

  My mind, wandering round like this in a drowsy fashion, came to rest on Mogridge. The secret life isn’t the writer’s sole concern. But it is a constant one; and here in Mogridge was the crude and archetypal thi
ng, the kind of enigma to which there exists, awaiting discovery, the single all-sufficing clue. For a moment Mogridge seemed to stand before me, an apparition against the dark, in complete clarity. The vocational misfit who couldn’t play that big fiddle; the active temper, the grip on perceived detail amid crisis and extremity; the inflexible will behind the achievement chronicled in Mochica some unrecorded years; the emergence of the traveller and amateur anthropologist, blamelessly wandering the globe, disappearing and turning up again, publishing occasional stodgy books which breathed concerns about as contemporary as those, say, of some nineteenth-century country gentleman anxious to determine whether Victoria Nyanza or Albert Nyanza was of the greater significance in perpending the problem of the Nile: all this came together. Rather pleasingly, I thought. But more pleasing, even if also alarming, was the spontaneous and unquestioning old-boy solidarity under the impulsion of which Mogridge was acting at this moment. He might be high up, but that would scarcely help him if he were exposed as lavishing public money on clandestine Atlantic flights, foxing the immigration officials of the USA, persuading or obliging numerous persons to tell lies about the whereabouts of a young man who might reasonably be represented as a fugitive from justice.

  I was surprised by the completeness of my approval of this. There were relevant facts I didn’t ignore: for example, that the Paul Lusbys and Nicolas Junkins are commonly unfurnished with the sort of good fairy or deus ex machina which I had so casually, if intuitively, called into counsel on the peccant Ivo Mumford’s behalf. This didn’t disturb me now, but something else did. I hadn’t seen Gavin Mogridge for a very long time, yet he had greeted me as if our last meeting had been yesterday, so that I had felt (not that there had been any fuss of feeling in the matter at all) I had simply recovered a friend. But in what did his personality consist? Looking back over the past hour, I realised that there had been two Mogridges in Ivo’s room. There had been the more familiar Mogridge of heavy pace and slow if reliable mind, given to massive tautology and to proverbial remarks offered more or less as contributions to the general march of intellect. And there had been a Mogridge who was incisive, rapid, economical, unscrupulous, and in command. The first of these was surely the native Mogridge of long ago. But wasn’t the second the real one now, so that the first had to be regarded as a blind, and as a blind cunningly preserved amid conditions in which entire candour ought to obtain? There seemed no doubt of Mogridge’s integrity as a friend. He had unmasked himself in a manner which, professionally, he was quite certainly forbidden to do, and he had done so at the call of loyalty to Tony Mumford. I thought of those double agents − upper-class and therefore apt for the headlines of the popular press − who have been willing to present wholly artificial personalities to their intimates for years, and who will yet suddenly take some fantastic risk in the interest of just such a loyalty within the sphere of private relationships. It was unnecessary to suppose that Mogridge worked for the Kremlin in his off-time. But he belonged to a world if not of double agents, at least of deliberately double-faced men.