‘Your nonagenarians?’
‘Yes. I get through two or three of them before morning surgery.’ Damian had looked at his watch and stood up. ‘Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything except the remorseless application of scientific gerontology. One sometimes forgets that while there is death there is hope.’
Left alone, I glanced round the hall. At this meal it seemed the guests were expected to fish for themselves. The only one of our hosts in evidence was Arnold Lempriere, and I took this to indicate that he was a bachelor and lived in college. Even so, and particularly since he was so senior a fellow, he must have owned abundant facilities for breakfasting in private. I concluded that, alone among his resident colleagues, he regarded turning up in hall as a proper civility. He wasn’t, indeed, going at all out of his way to make conversation: a spare remark, offered now on his one hand and now on the other, appeared to be what he regarded as the requisite thing. He was untidily dressed in ancient tweeds which might with advantage have gone to the cleaner’s. I had a sense that this was less a matter of standards slipping in senescence than a deliberately contrived manner of setting an accent on something he would have retained if dressed in sackcloth or cap and bells. I wondered whether Plot would have credited him with belonging to the old gentry. He certainly didn’t suggest any sort of gentry recently unpacked from the straw. He was indicating this now (much as if I had invented him in a light comedy of Edwardian flavour) by the nonchalant employment of a toothpick.
It was over this implement that Lempriere presently glanced at me across the hall. His eyebrows, which were grey like the rest of him, immediately elevated themselves; he might have been registering an injurious astonishment, if not before my actual existence (which would have been unreasonable), then at the fact of my having been detected as still hanging around the place. But this vertical movement was immediately succeeded by a horizontal one, the eyebrow switching across Lempriere’s otherwise immobile features rapidly from left to right. The main door of hall lay that way. I realised that I had received, with an extreme economy, instructions to join Lempriere there at the conclusion of our meal.
Following him out a few minutes later, I noticed that his clothes were not only old, but baggy as well. I was reminded of Cyril Bedworth in his tails the night before. But if Lempriere’s garments were too big for him it wasn’t as a consequence of ill-considered purchase off the peg; it was because they had been tailored when he was a bulkier man than now. My first impression of a stout figure, gained in the dark, had been an error similarly induced. Physically, Lempriere was of much the same type as old Mr Mumford. It occurred to me that these two must be close contemporaries.
‘We’ll do a Long Field,’ Lempriere said. He spoke as peremptorily as if I had been a pupil he judged badly in need of exercising.
‘I’ll be delighted to.’ This seemed to me a suitable reply, although it wasn’t exactly an invitation that I had received. ‘It’s very much a morning for it.’
Lempriere gave a sombre grunt. I clearly hadn’t done too well in introducing climatic considerations after this fashion. There were those who ‘did’ a Long Field at some period of the day, wet or shine, throughout the year, and Lempriere was probably one of them. Perhaps I was fortunate in not being required to do the mile-and-a-bit involved at the double. It wasn’t only athletically inclined undergraduates who kept in form that way. Elderly men did it − often modestly after dusk. And possibly some old members did it too, as part of the general nostalgic exercise upon which they were engaged.
‘At least you’re not going to be a tutor,’ Lempriere said as we set out. He advanced this surprising remark in what he seemed to design as a comforting tone. ‘Unless, I suppose, you positively ask for it.’
‘I’m not positively asking for anything.’ I made this reply with a slight asperity, having grown tired of these odd obliquities. ‘And I have nothing but hints and nudges to tell me what you’re talking about.’
‘But hasn’t Talbert put it to you?’
‘Talbert hasn’t put anything to me. I’m going to tea with the Talberts this afternoon.’
‘Then he’s deferred it till then. Or perhaps it has just gone out of his head. For years he has put on a turn as the absent-minded scholar, and now the real thing is catching up on the old chap. It’s a professional risk with poseurs, I know.’
‘I suppose he must be getting on.’ The ‘old chap’ couldn’t, I thought, be as old as Lempriere himself. ‘After all, he was my tutor ages ago.’
‘Of course he was. That’s why he was the appropriate man to broach the thing. He was absolutely instructed to do that.’
‘But I think the Provost has the job in hand at lunch-time.’
‘No doubt. But you were to be softened up first.’ Lempriere chuckled softly. (I have always regarded this verb as one to be avoided as a tired word for a not particularly pleasing activity. But Lempriere certainly chuckled: it was the faintest of noises in his throat, and I rather liked it.)
‘You think I’d be no good as a tutorial fellow?’ I asked.
‘You’d be the wrong age, Pattullo. You’d be the wrong age even to hold down the job, let alone start in on it. It’s a young man’s job − as it was until the university turned silly in the middle of the nineteenth century. Of course an old man can do it, after a fashion. I can do it myself, although I no longer know anything about my subject worth speaking of. On the whole, the young men don’t care for father-figures. They make what that college doctor of ours calls a negative transference, as often as not. But they’ll accept a grandfather-figure. In addition to which, as one turns senile, one comes very much to like the young. And they like being liked − much more than they like being understood. Any intelligent middle-aged man can understand them like mad. But they find that unnerving. They much prefer mute communion and a decent glass of madeira.’
‘I’m not sure that you aren’t busying around proposing to understand me.’
‘Understanding people is one of the minor satisfactions of life.’ Lempriere chuckled again over this indirect reply. ‘But it’s best to go about it without letting on. And I don’t expect other than a negative transference from you. What do your intimates call you?’
‘Duncan. Or Dunkie.’
‘So you can go away if you want to, Duncan.’ Lempriere’s choice between the alternatives offered him seemed to indicate his estimate of the degree of intimacy proper at the moment. It was surprising in itself, and I dimly felt there must be some reason for it. ‘You and I, come to think of it, are at that disabling father-and-son remove.’
‘I’m having a very enjoyable walk, thank you. And similarly, coming to think of it, you might have been a grandfather-figure to me if you’d been around when I came up. And surely you ought to have been. Why weren’t you?’
‘You’re muddled. You probably drank too much last night. I warn you that it’s another professional risk. You’re thinking of me as being then the amiable dotard I am now.’
‘So I am. But you’re not a dotard, and I still require evidence of your being amiable. But I repeat: why weren’t you around?’
‘Because they kept me on in Washington for three years after the war was over. I’d proved a superb liar in high places, and they had a conviction that more lies were essential if the Empire was to survive. They were quite right. So I went on telling lies for all I was worth. It turned me most damnably truthful for the rest of my days. That’s my liability in this place now.’
I laughed at this, not very sure that it was a justifiable claim. I had meant what I said in asserting that I still required evidence of this formidable old gentleman’s amiability. And he seemed to me not quite impartial as between one sort of truth and another. The impression I had gained at our midnight conference was of his liking the uncomfortable kind best, and I suspected that a proposition sometimes appealed to him less because he thought it valid and consistent with whatever were his genuine convictions than because he spotted it as a useful
peg on which to hang a pungent rhetoric.
‘Were you an ambassador?’ I asked. ‘They’ve been said to be honest men sent to lie abroad for the good of their country.’
‘That was certainly the object of the exercise. But my position was a modest one among the indispensable obscure. It remains just that − barring the indispensability.’
Silence was the only civil response to this. I had never heard of Arnold Lempriere as a scholar − which didn’t, of course, mean that he mightn’t be a most distinguished one in a recondite way. I wondered about the effect of Hitler’s war on dons of his generation. They had been young enough to fight, and many of them had fought. But many more had become back-room boys whose abilities had eventually brought them close to the great centres of power and responsibility. And this sounded like Lempriere’s story. I was curious to know whether his ambitions had been touched by that vaster theatre, and whether he regretted his return to quiet academic courses.
‘But apart from that break,’ I said, ‘you’ve been here all your days?’ If a man asks what you are called by your intimates, you are presumably entitled to fire direct questions at him.
‘Yes, indeed. Another of those early points of no return. The fatal day came when I failed to go out of residence.’
‘You mean you accepted a fellowship?’
‘My dear Duncan, it is customary to speak of gaining one. But the terminology is unimportant. That was it, and here I am. They haven’t even made me a thingummy.’
‘Can you tell me about being a thingummy?’ I understood very well what I was being teased about.
‘You want the mortifying truth of the matter? A reader is somebody who won’t quite do as a professor − I imagine because he is too learned, and at the same time possessed of too little guile. Yes, that is it. Harmlessness has to be his hallmark.’
‘I suppose he has definite duties?’ The speech just offered me was quite inoffensive in its effect; its tenor was disobliging, but not its tone. ‘The chap must do something for his pay. I suppose there is pay?’
‘Readers are paid enormous sums, and in return they engage in advanced study and research. You will get a letter instructing you to do that, but permitting you to scratch your own head as to just how. Without particular effort, Lempriere contrived to make all this sound highly ridiculous. ‘Come to think of it, you will also have to give a great many lectures. I believe it’s thirty-six in a year. As you will deliver them triennially for the rest of your days, it’s advisable to have them typed out on durable paper.’
‘It sounds as if it might be formidable at first − preparing all that eloquence. May I come to you for hints about it?’
‘My dear chap, I’ve never delivered a lecture in my life. Lectures have always appeared to me completely pointless exercises. If I had to choose between lectures and examinations, I believe it would be examinations I’d plump for.’
It was obvious that Lempriere wasn’t idly prevaricating, and I concluded that his freedom from what he regarded as a pointless obligation must be a matter of his possessing adequate private means. Such freedoms commonly are. This meant that further inquiry might sound impertinent − nor, for that matter, was I as interested in the hierarchy of Oxford learning as, no doubt, I ought to have been. But having been made fun of over the readership, I decided to try a shaft of my own.
‘Not having to lecture,’ I said, ‘must give you a lot of time for research and writing books.’
What this drew from Lempriere was a swift glance of appreciation or amusement. He put a hand lightly on my elbow, and I had a sudden odd knowledge that he seldom touched anybody. It had been to draw me to a halt.
‘And here is the river,’ he said.
Nothing stays put − not even the Isis. The iron railings over which we were peering, indeed, were no more rusty and untidy now than when I had first become acquainted with them. The river steamers moored nearby seemed to speak of aquatic pleasures of the most outmoded sort, but precisely so had they done long ago. Downstream, however, much was changed. The row of college barges along this bank had, with one or two exceptions, vanished, to be replaced in the middle distance by a huddle of boathouses which doubtless gained for commodiousness what they lost for the picturesque. Along the towpath opposite there stretched a long line of cabin-cruisers and motor-launches hired, it was to be supposed, by the week for the recreation of urban populations far away; women were hanging out nappies on them, and men were contentedly peeling potatoes into the sacred stream.
‘It used to be the young barbarians all at play,’ Lempriere murmured. ‘But it’s the middle-aged philistines now. Cam and Isis, ancient bays have withered round your brows.’
‘Yes,’ I said − not troubling to sort out this mix-up of the poets. ‘But there are nine young barbarians coming upstream at this moment.’
‘Our own boat,’ Lempriere said at a glance, but without much appearance of interest. ‘I believe they go to some regatta or other tomorrow.’
We walked on in silence, listening to the plash of the oars, and to the voice of the cox, obedient to a bellow from a coach on a bicycle, beginning to give his crew ten.
‘Awful sport,’ Lempriere said. ‘I used to do it as a boy − a good way further down this river. It’s like living. People don’t consider it at all the thing to stop off when you want to.’ There was another silence, in which I guessed he was thinking of Paul Lusby. ‘You probably did it yourself,’ he added presently, ‘on the Water of Leith.’
‘No, I didn’t,’ I said. ‘I played rugger. But the same consideration applied.’ It struck me as curious that Lempriere should have acquainted himself with my provenance to this extent. ‘You were grabbed by the ankles and pitched violently into the mud. But you had to jump up and chase after the damned ball again. My brother liked it. I didn’t.’
‘Ninian?’ Lempriere asked.
‘Yes—Ninian.’ This really did pull me up. Lempriere seemed to have been doing research on the Pattullos. And now he had produced his chuckle again. It was like no more than a faint clearing of the throat. I saw that he was nursing some joke.
‘Sit down,’ he said, on his peremptory note, and pointed to a long wooden seat of the kind provided in public parks. It faced the river and was firmly bedded in concrete − no doubt to prevent its being carried off to a bonfire on the last night of Eights. Cut into its back was an inscription: Presented by the Oxford College Servants’ Rowing Club to Commemorate the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth the Second. ‘Very nice,’ Lempriere said, looking at this. It was almost his first remark uncoloured by some hovering irony. He sat down − rather carefully, so that one felt his joints to be no longer in the best working order. ‘It’s at least decently warm. Not that you’ll think much of it after Ravello. I like that bit of coast − and it’s only a short run to Paestum. I’ll come and stay with you there one day.’
The college address list, I thought, would give him Ravello. But I was becoming restive. The joke appeared to be that my companion had up his sleeve something that would legitimate his employing my Christian name at a second meeting and announcing that he proposed to be my house-guest in Italy. But I wasn’t going fishing. I’d leave him to play the thing out.
‘Paestum is invaluable,’ I said, taking my place beside him. ‘Greece without the Colonels. One couldn’t ask for more.’ At that time the misdeeds of those persons weighed heavily on all liberal minds.
‘The Niobe of nations! there she stands,
Childless and crownless, in her voiceless woe.’
This came from Lempriere with an effect rather different, I thought, from Ranald McKechnie’s ‘nothing so ill-bred as audible laughter’. He paused on it darkly. ‘Or was that Rome?’ he asked. ‘You read English Literature, and ought to know.’
‘Rome, I think. The bits about Greece come earlier on. Not that it wouldn’t fit.’ I didn’t feel I wanted to be shunted off to Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. ‘I really ought to say I’d be in two minds about the thingummy pro
posal, even if anything comes of it. That it should even be thought of pleases me enormously, and I have spasms of feeling there’s nothing I’d like more. But you know − seriously and apart from all that of fabricating lectures − it strikes me as a stiff assignment to come at one out of the blue. It’s clearly not what can be called a visiting job.’
‘You could make it the next thing to that, if you wanted to. Nobody would object to your treating the place like a hotel, and dropping in on us for a couple of nights a week. But you mightn’t find that particularly satisfactory yourself. We do have a certain corporate life of an amoebic sort. You might be drawn to study it. You were studying it last night, weren’t you, when we were discussing that luckless affair in the dark?’ Lempriere paused. ‘And very much in the dark. Grandfather-figures or not, we have to admit the young as turning more and more baffling on us.’
‘I was interested,’ I said. ‘I wouldn’t like to be thought to have been studying anything. I suppose it would be a matter of pulling my weight in a general way. I doubt whether I could turn to at any sort of administration.’
‘You wouldn’t be asked to do anything of the kind − although, of course, you’d be on the Governing Body of the college.’
‘Good Lord! What’s the Governing Body’s line?’
‘Governing, one supposes. I’d describe its meetings as festivals of pusillanimity relieved by sporadic dog-fights.’
‘I’d be interested in that too.’
‘It’s most kind of you to say so.’
I was startled by the tone in which Lempriere had murmured these words. It was such as to make them almost as outrageous as old Mr Mumford’s incredible remark on long hair and finger-nails. I was being rebuked, in fact, without ever − so far as I could see − having put a foot wrong. I hadn’t been indignant with Tony’s father, because I had been instantly aware of his being in some overwrought state. But I was thoroughly indignant with Arnold Lempriere. He had tipped over my head a sudden small bucket of ironic urbanity as unlicensed by anything I’d said as it was incompatible with the whole character of our talk hitherto.
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