The Gaudy

by J. I. M. Stewart

  ‘I suppose it’s inevitable.’ I found myself thinking about Tony’s father, and hoping that he had profited by this laxity. It might just conceivably become important that his coming and going had passed unremarked. ‘But what kind of liberty are you thinking of, Plot?’

  Plot silently held out the ashtray for my inspection. It contained a single cigarette end. This, most unfortunately, was heavily stained with lipstick. I remembered the behaviour of Tin Pin. Here, in fact, was what might be called a fair cop.

  ‘Dear me!’ I said weakly. What Plot was imagining, it would have been hard to determine. I almost expected him to conduct a further rummage in the bedroom there and then. Who goes with who—an excellent poet has recorded—the bedclothes say. Plot might well be concluding that I had rounded off a jolly evening by brazenly importing a mistress into Nicolas Junkin’s blameless rooms. It would have been a bold stroke. Not P. P. Killiecrankie himself − and in his own heyday − could have conceived of it. I found myself − weakly still − trying to remember how many five-pound notes I had in my wallet. But the situation was not one in which Plot would consent to be bribed. Nor, for that matter, was the attempt of a kind which a moment’s decent consideration would permit me to pursue. ‘It was a Chinese girl,’ I heard myself say with staggering boldness. ‘Probably from Hong Kong.’

  Plot’s reply to this − admirable in itself − was a stiff bow. He had the appearance of regarding the matter as closed. I was not an undergraduate, after all, and no charge of his. I found, however, that this conclusion to the affair was not supportable. It must all come out. If he didn’t believe me, then he could lump it.

  ‘We got her out,’ I said. ‘In the usual way. Mr Junkin and myself.’

  ‘Mr Junkin, sir?’ It was evident that, for the moment at least, I had been unpersuasive. It was also evident that Plot was angry. He was eyeing me in a very man-to-man fashion. I remembered my impression that Nicolas Junkin of Cokeville was a favourite of his. He didn’t intend to accept any made-up story about him.

  ‘He was in Oxford for the night, Plot, and not intending to come into college. But, somehow or other, he had this girl landed on him. So he brought her in here, not knowing his rooms would be occupied, and shoved her on the sofa. He wasn’t interested in sleeping with her. When I came back it all seemed a bit crowded. So we gave her the price of a railway-ticket and dumped her.’

  ‘I’ve heard that tale before.’ Plot made this offensive-seeming remark in a perplexingly relaxed manner. ‘On the very next staircase, it was, and not two years ago. Mr Withycombe, the gentleman’s name was. One of those that call themselves Christians in College.’

  ‘Christians in College?’

  ‘A group organised by the Chaplain, that is, of (them that take religious matters seriously. Very serious, Mr Withycombe was, and a nice gentleman by all accounts. But slow. Slower than Mr Junkin, by a long way.’

  ‘What happened?’ I asked. For I somehow knew that Mr Withycombe was going to see Junkin and myself through the wood.

  ‘He’d been with friends in Rattenbury, it seemed, discussing the Virgin Birth and deep matters of that sort. A very sober coffee-and-biscuits affair. Absorbing it must have been, though, since he didn’t get back to Surrey till two in the morning. Much your own case, it might be said.’

  ‘My dear Plot − don’t tell me he found a girl asleep on his sofa!’

  ‘Just that, sir. Fancied she was in somebody else’s rooms, she did, and had entered them at a lawful and respectable hour. So she sat down to wait for a gentleman who hadn’t come and didn’t intend to, and there she’d fallen fast asleep. It was a difficult situation for Mr Withycombe, particularly with him being slow, and his head full of the Immaculate Conception and other holy thoughts. Howsoever, he fetched a friend with better wits from across the landing, and they lowered her into Long Field and told her to make herself scarce.’

  ‘So it all ended happily?’

  ‘Well, not just at that moment. The night watchman happened to be going by, and all they managed was to lower the young lady into his arms. So Mr Withycombe was up before the Dean next morning, with nothing to say for himself except this cock-and-bull story.’

  ‘And what did the Dean do?’

  ‘Why, believed him at once, of course. A very experienced man is Mr Gender.’

  ‘And you’re a very experienced man yourself.’

  ‘Well, sir, I can advise you about breakfast.’ Plot was actually smiling broadly, an abundant sign that I had been restored to grace. ‘The porridge is something horrid and there’s no disguising it − particularly from a Scottish gentleman like yourself. But where it says kippers it means kippers, and not a kipper. And very tasty they commonly are.’

  I promised to profit from this inside knowledge, and Plot withdrew. But ten minutes later he returned, and for a moment I feared that he might have had second thoughts about his responsibilities in the grave matter of Junkin and Tin Pin. But he was merely handing me a note.

  ‘From Lord Marchpayne with his compliments, sir,’ he said. ‘His lordship having had to leave first thing. On account of parliament and the like, no doubt. Not their own masters, such gentlemen are not. But the beck and call of duty hangs over us all.’

  I accepted this improving thought, and tore open the envelope as soon as Plot had gone away again.

  Dear Duncan,

  I’m clearing out. Breakfast after the Gaudy isn’t all that enticing in itself, and I don’t like kippers − about which Plot has been chattering to me. I won’t pretend that I’m not frantically worried about this thunderbolt, and I’m thankful you were standing by. Gavin too. If he has really brought off what he proposed then we do have a chance, at least, of getting in the clear. But the unknown factors are appallingly numerous. Think of my father’s housekeeper. Think of Ivo’s car. Think of village kids perhaps fooling around that gardener’s cottage and coming on the boy. There are a dozen such hair-raising possibilities. It’s a dreadful gamble, and that first fib of my father’s started it. I’ve no illusions. People’s children do get into trouble − people in my position, I mean − and there’s a convention that it isn’t let reflect upon one’s public life or political career. But conspiracy, God help us, is another matter. If Gavin makes a muck of it and is boarded or something, of course I shan’t be able to leave him in the ditch. I’ll have to say I shoved it at him. And that will finish me as well as him − and without doing Ivo any good either. Oh, hell!

  But I’m sure − the die being cast − that Gavin is right to stick to his drill. (Who would have thought the chap was that) Please get through to me as soon as he gets through to you. Telephone numbers on the enclosed slip. On each of them ask first for my PPS. He’s called Arbuthnot and is a very discreet chap. Destroy this now.

  Yours ever,

  Tony

  XI

  I put a match to Tony’s letter, and held it over Tin Pin’s ash-tray (now emptied and wiped clean) until I had to drop it as the flame licked my fingers. Then − as if I were somebody in a spy-story or a romance of crime − I stubbed the ashes to powder with the matchstick. It made quite a mess for Plot to deal with later. I had a vision of him in a witness-box, offering a judge an unhurried account of this small unaccountable appearance. Under the influence of this fantasy, I almost took the remains downstairs to flush them away under the staircase’s (inferior) loo. But I drew the line at that, telling myself one oughtn’t to let funk be catching.

  Tony was admitting funk − but perhaps not as much as he had actually been feeling. I took his point about conspiracy. If some unknown development in Ivo Mumford’s situation defeated Mogridge and led to a more or less spectacular show-down, the plot hatched in Ivo’s rooms at midnight could turn out uncommonly uncomfortable for us all. Its context in a high academic bean-feast graced by sundry persons of eminence would make it a spot-lit affair. But all this was no reason for being too late to join in the Gaudy Breakfast. I went downstairs and walked across Surrey.

 
Other men were doing the same thing. Some of them were hurrying − having succumbed to the persuasion that they were undergraduates again, and that at the stroke of some hour the doors of hall would be inexorably closed against them. Although this obviously baseless apprehension amused me, I found myself hurrying too. As a result, I failed to take the evasive action which my preoccupation and the generally unsociable character of the hour might otherwise have persuaded me to, and found myself walking towards the Great Quadrangle side by side with P. P. Killiecrankie. We exchanged greetings.

  ‘Do you remember Plot?’ I asked.

  ‘Plot?’ The Prebendary had given me a sharp glance, but he repeated the name consideringly. ‘Let me see. Would he have been a Rhodes Scholar reading Law?’

  ‘He was a bicycle-boy, and he’s now the scout on my old staircase. I ask because he mentioned you. He seems to remember you very well.’

  ‘Ah! Well, I did have a bicycle. No doubt he cleaned it up from time to time. Not a service that one could expect nowadays, I imagine. But they tell me that the undergraduates still have their shoes polished for them. It seems to me unnecessary, and against the spirit of the time. It doesn’t happen at a theological college with which I am connected.’

  The Prebendary had changed the subject without haste. Unless he had really forgotten about Plot, he must have guessed that his former henchman had been indiscreet, and that my question was maliciously motivated. Undeniably it had been. So I thought better of going on to tell Killiecrankie that his exemplification of all the undergraduate virtues and graces had been such that the college servants still spoke with deep respect of Mr Killiecrankie’s year. Instead, I said I hoped he had continued to enjoy the Gaudy after we had risen from the dinner table.

  ‘Yes, indeed—extremely pleasant. Such convivial occasions seldom come my way, and are all the more appreciated when they do. My duties in the vineyard have become more onerous of late.’ Killiecrankie imparted to these last words that humorous inflection which the higher clergy are adept at lending to scriptural references without any unseemly effect of irreverence. ‘Of course, one sometimes finds good company in Irish vicarages. But I have to confess that it is the exception rather than the rule. As for last night, I met and talked with a number of old friends. The Provost, in particular. It is heartening that he continues so much a man in his prime. When a mere lad, I was deeply attached to him − as I have no doubt you were, my dear Pattullo. His conduct of College Prayers was an inspiration to us all. One or two of his sermons influenced me deeply, even in my freshman year.’

  ‘He might be astonished to hear it,’ I said − and added hastily, ‘being so modest a man.’

  ‘I was anxious to have a few words with Marchpayne − whom I remember to have been, as Antony Mumford, a close friend of yours. I myself barely knew him in those days − considering him, to tell the truth, to be rather a frivolous fellow. I wanted, of course, to congratulate him on his Cabinet post. As it happened, I just missed him. And in rather odd circumstances.’

  ‘Odd circumstances?’ I must have been more nervous than I realised, since these unremarkable words of Killiecrankie’s alarmed me.

  ‘It was very late − really very late, indeed − and I was returning to my rooms in Surrey when I became aware of two men crossing the Great Quad. They might have been making their way to the car park. One of them was faintly familiar to me, although I couldn’t put a name to him. The other appeared to be Marchpayne. But as I glanced at him I said to myself, “That’s not Antony Mumford. It’s his father, Cedric.” A curious aberration, wouldn’t you say? But it held me up for a moment, and the opportunity to have a word with Marchpayne was gone.’

  ‘Very curious. You know Tony’s father?’

  ‘We have met from time to time. Cedric Mumford is a keen supporter of a Catholic missionary society with which I have a certain amount of contact. It is a difficult, and therefore rewarding, field for oecumenical effort.’

  ‘I see.’ I reflected − irrelevantly − that if I had been inventing old Mr Mumford, and obliged to provide him with some interest or other on the side, missionary enthusiasm was about the last thing I could have reckoned to render plausible. ‘As a matter of fact,’ I said rashly, ‘Tony and his father are very alike.’

  ‘Ah! Then you too know Cedric Mumford?’

  ‘No, no − Tony has simply mentioned the fact − of the strong family resemblance, I mean.’

  It was with astonishment that I heard myself tell this blank lie. When one is acting a lie one has an impulse, I suppose, to tell lies as well. That he really had seen old Mr Mumford in college after the Gaudy was something which it was certainly desirable to keep out of P. P. Killiecrankie’s head. I was sure Mogridge very much hoped that his getting Ivo’s grandfather off the premises had been unobserved. But I needn’t have gone out of my way to assert that the pillar of missionary endeavour was unknown to me.

  We had reached the entrance to hall, and I adopted the resource of making some comment on its oddity. Wyatt’s solid, indeed chunky, staircase pushes incongruously upward beneath a late and elaborately traceried fan vaulting supported by a slender central shaft and dropping at regular intervals to pendentives like the ribs of an umbrella. A fantasticated and Brobdingnagian umbrella, indeed, is just what one feels oneself to be climbing beneath. But the Prebendary was inattentive to these appearances, or at least to my remarks on them, having fortunately espied a high dignitary of the church proceeding to breakfast just ahead of us. In the interest of making this contact he produced a graciously dismissive inclination of the head, much as if he were a very high dignitary himself. Thus happily released, I lingered behind for a moment and then went into hall.

  The scene − or at least its atmosphere − was altered. There was a faint smell of expensive tobacco-smoke gone stale. The ranked portraits looked pale and jaded, as if they hadn’t slept well. The shrunken body of breakfasting old members presented, many of them, the same appearance. Some had unsociably possessed themselves of newspapers, and one could guess that they were not all being sufficiently attentive to each other in the matter of passing the marmalade. Only the undergraduates looked cheerful − perhaps because they were getting a better breakfast than usual. There were a score of them at a table apart; and I noticed among them, looking extremely good-tempered and at ease, the youth who, the night before, had offered his companions the remark about self-exaggerating crap. The majority must be those still involved with examinations. I realised with a shock that the dead Paul Lusby ought to have been among them. The news about him had probably not yet got around.

  I sat down at random, rather wishing that I had a newspaper myself. One couldn’t exactly opt for a station apart, so I found myself at the end of a short row of my contemporaries. My neighbour turned out to be Robert Damian.

  ‘Hullo, Robert,’ I said. ‘Has your patient kept you at it all night?’

  ‘Oh, that.’ Damian gave me an abstracted nod. ‘Well, yes. The silly ass had convinced himself he was dying. How do you know about it?’

  ‘My scout. He was a gratified member of the stretcher party. He believes that what overcomes people isn’t the flesh-pots and the flagons, but the intense emotion stirred by our reunion. It’s a romantic thought.’

  ‘It’s a bloody silly one. The college has had a real fatality, as a matter of fact.’

  ‘You mean a lad called Lusby? I’ve heard of that too.’

  For a moment Damian made no reply, but stirred his coffee.

  ‘Those unpredictable things are never quite unpredictable,’ he said presently. ‘But with so many pins in the haystack it isn’t easy to spot the needle. Have you ever lived on an American campus, Duncan?’

  ‘Yes, for a time.’

  ‘They have counselling services going like mad, but it doesn’t improve the statistics. Ours aren’t too bad, as a matter of fact. The university’s as a whole, I mean. But this place, too. Unfortunately there’s no comfort in statistics when the individual shock comes along
. I had young Lusby talking several times. At risk a bit beyond the average, without a doubt. But nothing to panic about. Ordinary stress through over-anxiety to excel.’

  ‘In the Schools? Then why did he let himself be drawn into that idiotic wager?’

  ‘So you’ve heard of that too. An itch, it must have been, to establish some alternative image of himself, I suppose. The wager was with somebody not the least his sort. And who didn’t even go to their blasted Commem Ball.’ Damian hesitated. ‘Somebody we were mentioning last night, as a matter of fact. Cyril Bedworth got the story out of a third chap not half an hour ago.’

  I had a curious feeling that the hall had gone cold.

  ‘Not Tony’s boy?’ I said.

  ‘That’s right. Ivo Mumford. Rough on him. But, of course, rough on Lusby as well.’

  I found that I was looking at two kippers. It wasn’t Plot’s fault if I judged them unattractive. The lucklessness of Ivo was undeniably not to be divorced from certain displeasing facets of his personality. But for the moment I somehow felt myself to be, along with Tony and Mogridge, Ivo’s man. In imagination I had been unkind to him − just as, in imagination, I had been kind to Nicolas Junkin. Junkin had turned up − in circumstances which were extremely absurd − and I had been able to tell myself I hadn’t been wrong about him. He was an appealing lad. Ivo was yet to meet, and it was possible I should never set eyes on him. If I did, my facile build-up of an over-privileged young baddie might be vindicated too. But now I was hoping that it might at least have to be modified. And there was a good chance that it would be so. People commonly prove, when one makes their acquaintance, more mixed up and patchy than from hearsay one has concluded them to be.

  ‘Whining schoolboys and lovers sighing like furnaces,’ Damian said. ‘Shakespeare missed out on undergraduates, who obviously come in between. An eighth and awkward age. But now I’m off to mere oblivion in North Oxford.’