I certainly hadn’t responded to Aunt Charlotte’s ideas. For one thing, she was an astonishingly ignorant woman − a fact which my own ignorance somehow didn’t obscure for a moment. She was interested in lawn tennis, a game at which she had herself excelled in youth − which must have been at about the time, I had imagined, when women were first allowed to hit out hard at the ball. The absence of first-class tennis in Scotland was a vexation to her (like the absence of first-class cricket to my schoolmasters), so that she sometimes went to stay with relations in Kent in order to enjoy the satisfaction of watching it. But on the whole she disliked travel, and never left Corry except for this occasional purpose. Correspondingly, and apart from a few friends of her own sort, she didn’t much care for any traffic in the other direction either. In particular she distrusted the importation of periodicals or books, as well as the invention of wireless, all of which she saw as likely channels of what she still called Bolshevism. She also disliked Americans, whom she regarded as pervasively ill-bred, boastful, and given to chewing tobacco and in consequence to the use of spittoons.
Confined within this universe of speculation and discourse, my aunt had, not unnaturally, little to say of relevance to the prospects and problems of penniless boys (as we should be) like Ninian and myself. It was her opinion that if I took Orders something might be done for me, and that Ninian was clever enough to become a barrister. In Scotland one doesn’t take Orders but enters the Ministry, and barristers − for sufficient historical reasons − are called not barristers but advocates. But the only Scots words Aunt Charlotte ever employed were those applicable to various grades of menials − notably grieve, gillie, and caddie. (A caddie is a cadet, and the term is thus one of the traces of French civilisation and influence which so oddly linger in North Britain. And this one has come down in the world. My aunt used it only when − no decent tennis being available − she ventured as far as the nearest horrible holiday resort for the purpose of playing a round of golf.)
I myself wrote off Aunt Charlotte as a Careers Mistress at once. Ninian, being harder-headed, checked up on her, and was told by our headmaster that the Scottish bar was best left to those who had uncles on the bench. I imagine no particular imputation of nepotism was designed to be carried by this; our headmaster must simply have had plenty of opportunity to remark a certain closed quality about the society into which he had come. Ninian, he said, would do better to aim at chartered accountancy. A little later he was to tell me, with a good deal of gravity, that boys who couldn’t make up their minds what to do commonly ended up as chartered accountants. These two speeches, when collated, implied a comparative judgement on Ninian’s abilities and my own which was the more injurious to my brother for being based not at all on our school records. It was an intuitive judgement. Like many such, it was to prove entirely wrong. Ninian was to become an advocate, and his career was meteoric.
Walking down Oxford’s Cornmarket, and preparing to turn into Broad Street with some thought of visiting Black- well’s, I had thus in fact transferred myself to Corry Hall and then to Edinburgh. But I preserved at least half an eye for my actual surroundings, and into that half eye my native city now less insubstantially swam in the person of McKechnie. Carrying a shopping-basket, he was coming towards me on a pavement a little less crowded than I had been traversing hitherto. Unlike Lempriere’s, his attire wasn’t shabby, baggy, or in need of a vigorous brush-up. It was, however, notably drab, as if he felt most at ease moving permanently beneath a protective carapace of what the universities call subfusc. This clerkly habit was emphasised by a little row of pens and pencils clipped into his breast-pocket.
I ought to have been reflecting, during those moments in which we bore down on one another, that on the previous evening we hadn’t done too badly − even to the extent of feeling a certain solidarity vis-a-vis the brick-faced men and contriving a modicum of properly reminiscent talk. And I ought further to have remembered that, having then taken one initiative in addressing my schoolfellow by his Christian name, it was incumbent upon me to take a further initiative now. But McKechnie, amazingly, had fixed his gaze upon the pavement. Equally amazingly − and much more to an effect of revelation − my own gaze had been attracted to the exceedingly unoriginal exhibits in the window of a chemist’s shop. Within a second we had passed one another by.
What was sobering about this weird re-enactment (apart from the acute embarrassment it was going to occasion in both McKechnie and myself when we did next inescapably meet) was the extent to which I had been falsifying the original occasion or occasions. My memory put it, so to speak, all on McKechnie: I was the normally extravert and sociable boy, taking the establishment at least of some sort of friendly relationship for granted, and it was McKechnie alone who did the scurrying past with a gaze in the gutter. I now knew, as certainly as if some miraculous hand had veritably rolled back the years, that our juvenile fiasco had been a totally mutual affair. And if it hadn’t had roots rather deep in our temperaments it wouldn’t have produced this alarming and indecent late-flowering now.
I was so demoralised by what had just happened that I scarcely expected to reach the security of Sir Basil Blackwell’s shop without some further grotesque disaster. Naturally nothing of the sort occurred. In the Balliol lodge two black men in commoner’s gowns and white ties gossiped with two white men similarly attired; all four were relaxed and lounging, as if from the viva voce examination ahead of them they expected singularly little either way. An American gentleman was recording them − but whether by their leave or not wasn’t clear − for exhibition to neighbours in Minneapolis or St Louis in the Fall; the industrious little whirr of his camera was for a moment the only sound in the Broad. Oxford, I thought, is an extravagantly easy place in which to pick up local colour.
Narrow is the entrance (appropriately, where such a temple of learning is in question) to Blackwell’s shop; I jostled in it with a bearded sage who was emerging with every appearance of having bought a fishing-rod; he was a professor of the university, I supposed, pursuing divided interests in this transitional week between term and vacation. Inside, I found just room to edge comfortably around. There were people browsing from table to table or shelf to shelf; there were others who looked as if their nose had been buried in a single book since immediately after breakfast. (A reader can often get a book more quickly in Blackwell’s than in the Bodleian Library opposite.) If one wanted to buy a book there was a means of doing so, although it wasn’t one much obtruded on the casual visitor. I could put in an agreeable hour in the place, after which I’d have to be preparing myself for the Provost’s luncheon party. Not that I knew it was going to be exactly that. Possibly Mrs Pococke (of whom my memory was vivid) would be presiding over a board at which her husband and I confabulated tete-a-tete over the mysteries of readerships.
I had a look at a table stacked with new novels; they presented, somehow, a suggestion of being less morally insalubrious than those one reads reviews of in newspapers and journals. But this may have been illusory, and a consequence of the highly respectable company they enjoyed in this enormous repository of the Word. The shelves of modern drama rendered a similar effect − but then, again, they were being kept an eye on from the opposite wall by works with titles like A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage and Caterpillars of the Commonwealth and Playes Confuted in Fiue Actions. Undeterred by these minatory presences, I turned over a number of plays − literally turned them over, since my interest was for the moment so idle that I looked chiefly at their back covers. John Arden (Junkin’s favourite) was a decidedly photogenic young man, and Harold Pinter was a very serious-looking young man. But if both these were young men then I was myself not more than a couple of years past being quite a young man too. Heartened by this delusive discovery, I glanced up and saw that standing beside me was a lady more responsibly involved with the drama. She was my new acquaintance − and the only female (not counting Tin Pin) with whom I had as yet exchang
ed a word during this Oxford episode − Cyril Bedworth’s wife.
‘Good morning,’ I said. ‘I hope you had a pleasant dinner party? The Gaudy was everything I expected. It was even a little more.’
Mabel Bedworth’s gaze went from her book to my shoes − which fortunately had been handsomely polished by Plot.
‘Oh, good morning!’ Mrs Bedworth uttered this response as a nervous exclamation and in a very low voice; it was the identical voice, nevertheless, that had a little shaken me the evening before. She still didn’t raise her eyes. She might have been said, I thought, to be doing a McKechnie on me. Two such evasive performances within fifteen minutes seemed a bit much. I had to conclude Mrs Bedworth to be feeling that, given the slightest opportunity, I would insult her with a lascivious leer. (Neither McKechnie nor I, in our disgraceful joint behaviour, could quite have feared that.)
‘Do you go much to the theatre?’ I asked. We had begun − or at least I had − a conversation rather than merely exchanged a greeting, and somehow or other it had to be carried on.
‘Cyril and I really did see The Accomplices’ As she thus named my own current play, Mrs Bedworth at last swiftly glanced at me. The effect was to lend to her features as a whole that appearance of floating behind a curtain of gossamer which might have returned to me in my dreams of the previous night had not coarser intervening experiences got in the way. My head swims comparatively seldom in the presence of women, but it did a little swim now. One had to admit that Mabel Bedworth, as the chaste wife (as she certainly was) of a dim scholar, had a good deal to contend with.
But I wasn’t sure that she coped with her liability by simply shunning the duel of sex. She had just packed a good deal of mischief into three words. The assurance in ‘really did see’ carried all the mockery of authorial vanity that might have been achieved by a Meredithian heroine. Having planted her shaft, moreover, she now turned aside gracefully enough.
‘But Cyril and I,’ she said, ‘don’t very often get to town together. It means baby-sitting for too long. So we miss things we’d like to see. That’s why I’m in Blackwell’s. I haven’t seen Hartley’s House, and I want to read it. But it doesn’t seem to be here. What did you think, Mr Pattullo, of Hartley’s House?’
‘It probably isn’t published yet − but, of course, you could have them order it for you.’ I made this point first because I hadn’t myself seen Hartley’s House, and for the moment could remember nothing about it. In the theatres of London a great many plays come and go. ‘I haven’t seen it either,’ I then said briefly. Mrs Bedworth didn’t pursue the topic. It was almost as if she felt it to have been rashly embarked on, and I had to think of something else. ‘Does the vacation,’ I asked, ‘make a great difference to you when it comes along?’
‘Oh, yes − a lot!’ Mrs Bedworth paused on this, and then added swiftly, ‘For Cyril, I mean. He can get on with his own work. Term is terribly heavy, particularly since he has had to be Acting Senior Tutor. And I’m afraid they’ll make him Senior Tutor permanently next year.’
‘But you mustn’t be afraid of it, Mrs Bedworth. Cyril will be a very good Senior Tutor indeed.’ I said this with conviction, feeling it pleasant to return to Bedworth, as it were, a little of the admiration he had once so mistakenly harboured for Tony Mumford and myself. And my words certainly gave pleasure, since Mrs Bedworth had faintly flushed. She was unmistakably a devoted wife.
‘I must go upstairs,’ she said suddenly. ‘To the Spanish. We’re trying to pick up some Spanish before going to Spain.’ And she hurried away.
I had crossed Broad Street and was walking down the Turl before I remembered what I had read about Hartley’s House. It sounded not a particularly distinguished play. The setting was a public school, and Hartley was a house-master. Several of the senior boys − eighteen-year-olds − believed themselves to be in love with his wife. One of them, the house-captain, really was. I could imagine this play, with its big scene dangling like a carrot before the playwright from a long way back. It wasn’t hard to see why Mabel Bedworth, surrounded as she must at least intermittently be by her husband’s pupils, should take an interest in its theme.
XIII
The Provost’s Lodging, like the Provost’s occupation, was quasi-ecclesiastical in character. What one first became aware of was the pictures − this not because they were outstandingly good or oppressively numerous, but simply because of the uniform nature of the exhibition. With very few exceptions that I was ever able to discern, they were life-size portraits of bishops: bearded, for the most part, in the nineteenth century; clean-shaven and bewigged before it; clean-shaven and sleek-haired thereafter. The parade had nothing to do with any dream of episcopal preferement indulged in by the Provost. Everybody recognised that Edward Pococke was modestly content with being widely acknowledged as an eminent theologian.
Had he been an agricultural labourer, his dwelling would have been described as a tied cottage. It went with the job − and so, in his case, did almost everything it contained, the pictures included. Provosts came and Provosts went—moving in or out (as Arnold Lempriere was once to say to me) little more than a toothbrush and a tobacco-jar. This probably bore less hard on the Provosts than on their ladies. Frieda Lawrence, wandering from one impermanent perch to another in the wake of genius, would unpack an Indian shawl and throw it over a sofa. It was not apparent that, over a quarter of a century, Mrs Pococke had done so much. But the reason didn’t lie in any weakness of character or infirmity of purpose. She simply owned a strong historical sense. The Lodging was full of stuff that had silted up in it for centuries, but the process of slow accretion appeared to have ground to a halt something under a hundred years ago, presumably when nothing more could comfortably be got into the building. As the only taste reflected, period by period, was that of one or another committee of academic persons instructed by their colleagues to provide the reigning Provost with miscellaneous chattels expensive enough to reflect the consequence of the college, the general effect, if not gaudy, was rich in rather a heavy way. The only exception to this undistinguished solidity was an enormous chamber known for some reason as the Provost’s Day-room. Upon this principal apartment − and presumably in the later 1860’s − Messrs Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. had operated with all the terrifying energy commanded by the founder of that firm. Wallpapers and hangings, carpets, chintzes, carvings, stained glass, tapestries, tiles, metal-work, settles and similar uncomfortable accommodations believed to be in a mediaeval taste: all were poured profusely in − and the result, perhaps surprisingly, turned out to be extremely harmonious. It was certainly approved by the professional artists of the company, since Rossetti, Burne Jones and Madox Brown crowned the venture by all contributing pictures. The money came from a Provost’s wife whose father had made a fortune in sugar − but the ensemble became college property, all the same. What distinguished Mrs Pococke was her being no more proud of this celebrated museum piece than of the general curiosity of the Lodging as a whole. She had a curator’s mind, and had in fact been professionally just that. The young Edward Pococke was averred to have picked her up not in the National Gallery (a notorious locale for low assignations at that remote time) but in the more austere setting of the Victoria and Albert Museum, where she had been in charge of a notable collection of pastoral staves. (There was a copy of her monograph on these in the college library.) At constrained tea-parties, and when the Pocockes were new to the Lodging their entertainments commonly bore that character, it was helpful to remark to Mrs Pococke that one understood her also to have developed a substantial subsidiary interest in flat ornament. None of us had much idea what flat ornament was (no monograph appeared to have been devoted to it), but this bare remark was always well received.
A visit to the Pocockes in the Lodging − I recalled as I rang the bell at one o’clock − had been even less conducive to relaxed entertainment than had a visit to the Talberts in Old Road. I used quite to yearn for the excitements of Scrabble as, agonisingl
y balancing a tomato sandwich on the rim of a small saucer, I tried to think of something to say to the Provost’s wife. She was by no means unqualified to lead a conversation, but believed that the proper way to ‘bring forward’ the undergraduates (a phrase she was alleged incautiously to have used on some public occasion) was to require of them a strictly equal exchange in matters of this sort. Tony Mumford, if among the invited, was a stay − positively a stave, indeed − at these tea parties in the Lodging. He owned considerable resource in being frivolous without being indictably impudent. I suspected Mrs Pococke of having a weakness for Tony, and used to build this up with much scandalous invention in the course of our post-mortems on these social encounters.
I hadn’t quite lost myself in such reminiscences when the door was opened, just as it had been long ago, by the Provost’s butler. Now, as then, he was a man instantly revealing himself as of depressive temperament, so that at the sight of him my heart sank with a comical familiarity. I murmured Mrs Pococke’s name on a muted interrogative note. It was received with an affirmative inclination of the head; I was conducted into the interior of the Lodging; at the threshold of the dayroom there was a pause while my own name was communicated; and then I advanced upon the company.
The Gaudy Page 24