The Gaudy

by J. I. M. Stewart

  For there was a company, although not a large one, and I found myself relieved that the luncheon wasn’t going to be of a sheerly working sort. Becoming a Reader in Modern European Drama was something on which I was developing second thoughts. I was half-way through one career, and I couldn’t see the appointment as not involving pretty well a complete switch to another. And I might well make a muck of the new one. Suppose, for example, that a second Paul Lusby somehow came my way. I might make a muck of him. And that, obviously, I wouldn’t like in the least.

  Lusby’s tutor, James Gender, was one of my fellow-guests. He had put on a black tie. His wife was with him; she had the crisp address and rapidly moving eye often to be remarked in those who frequent the society of horses and dogs. There was also an unaccompanied woman, plainly academic in her own right, whom I supposed to have been brought along to balance up with myself. The Provost came forward and performed introductions with a courtliness a little in excess of the needs of the occasion. The effect was dampening. We stood in a constrained circle and sipped sherry. Mrs Gender alone adopted a different stance.

  ‘I always enjoy your plays,’ she said to me decisively. ‘But you oughtn’t to bring a man on the stage brandishing a brace of pheasants in the middle of June.’

  ‘Have I really done that? Perhaps he was a poacher.’

  ‘Poachers don’t brandish pheasants in the libraries of country houses.’

  ‘I suppose not.’ Mrs Gender’s comprehensive statement was incontrovertible. ‘But how do you know it was in the middle of June, anyway?’

  ‘The programme told us so. A Warm Midsummer Day. It said just that.’

  ‘I’m afraid it sounds a fair cop. Please do tell me of any other similar solecisms. Dramatic critics don’t know about such things. But it’s nice not to offend the better informed.’

  ‘Nothing but grouse round about Corry, I suppose.’ Mrs Gender had answered my attempt at humour with an agreeable if mannish laugh. ‘You wouldn’t have fellows brandishing grouse before the twelfth of August, would you?’

  ‘Probably not.’ To have a not very important aspect of my past chucked at me twice within a morning was, I thought, excessive. ‘Has Arnold Lempriere been putting you in the picture about me?’

  ‘Not quite lately. When they began this talk about grabbing you we had a gossip. Arnold enjoys family gossip. He and I are related in some way.’

  ‘I see.’ I wondered whether this unknown woman was going to claim that I too was thereby a kinsman of hers. ‘But I don’t see why they should want to grab me, as you call it. The thing’s mysterious to me.’

  ‘Wives are not expected to admit any knowledge of such matters. But, of course, it was dear old Albert Talbert who found the answer when the problem turned up. He told them at once it must be you.’

  ‘Talbert! He doesn’t know me from Adam for more than ten minutes at a time. There’s no reason he should, since I’ve been so culpably truant from the place. His more settled opinion, as a matter of fact, is that I’m somebody called Dalrymple.’

  ‘It’s at least a Scottish name. Albert − or should one call him Geoffrey? − I never know − must have had the idea of you laid up in heaven. And he brought it down in a big way.’ Mrs Gender seemed to me basically the sort of woman who might have banged a tennis-ball across a net at my Aunt Charlotte, but perhaps she was clever as well. ‘And on the university side,’ she went on, ‘Miss Minton is most enthusiastic.’

  ‘Who the dickens is Miss Minton?’

  ‘My dear man, the Provost introduced you to her five minutes ago. Jimmy’s stuck with her, over there by the window. Jimmy’s always getting stuck with people.’

  There was now another couple in the Day-room, and the company had a little opened up. James Gender was certainly in the situation his wife had described. A polite but not resourceful man, he stood silently beside the academic lady, his head inclined a little to the side, rather as if offering prolonged consideration to some matter of moment. Miss Minton − whether in embarrassment or not, it was impossible to say − was gazing into her glass.

  ‘I seem to have heard of Miss Minton,’ I said. ‘But I didn’t catch her name.’

  ‘You were too busy, Mr Pattullo, being amused by the Provost’s manner. Marking it down for future use, no doubt.’

  ‘Writers really don’t work that way.’ I wasn’t too pleased by Mrs Gender’s rather routine pleasantry, and decided to try signing off banter. ‘I’m very sorry,’ I said, ‘that your husband has had such sad news about a pupil. Did you know the boy?’

  ‘Certainly I knew Paul Lusby.’ Mrs Gender showed neither surprise nor displeasure at this abrupt change of key. ‘I had my eye on him, but I wasn’t quick enough. As for Jimmy, he finds it hard to forgive himself when he thinks he has let anybody down.’ Mrs Gender gave this the timbre of a disparaging remark, so that I concluded her to be in fact another devoted wife. ‘For God’s sake grab the decanter,’ she now said. ‘That butler − he goes by the absurd name of Honey − is a perfect fool.’

  I picked up the sherry obediently, although feeling, much as a nervous undergraduate might, that it was a most improper liberty to take. My discomfort was increased when I became aware of Mrs Pococke bearing down on me. She had the new arrivals with her. I recognised Charles Atlas, the young man whom I had fleetingly registered the night before as disapproving, if not of myself in toto, at least of my premature admission to a college confabulation. He was entirely civil during Mrs Pococke’s introducing us anew. His wife, who was very pretty, was even younger than he was, and had not outgrown semi-acute terror on occasions like the present. I hoped I should be set down beside her at lunch. I’d prefer her, even, to the fascinatingly shamefast Mabel Bedworth. Like other ageing men, I supposed, I was coming to like my women younger and younger, and had no eye for anything else. I’d end up blamelessly offering sweets to little girls in public parks.

  It is seldom prudent to muse upon oneself in this manner. The propensity is self-indulgent, and the spirit of comedy is always on the pounce. That spirit was going to achieve (to my interior sense) a staggering leap in something under the next half-hour.

  Meanwhile, Mrs Pococke made the running − Mrs Gender having moved away on one of those unobtrusive sideways glides which party-going perfects. Mrs Pococke struck me as having changed more than her husband. Since she hadn’t grown a beard she would have been, indeed, the more readily identifiable of the two. But she had aged more. One’s first judgement on Edward Pococke, here and now, would be that he was an extraordinarily handsome man. One’s first judgement on his wife would be that here, surely, had been an extraordinarily handsome woman. I found that I quite vividly remembered her as that. One would suppose it to be a dry stick who would curate staves in the V. & A. The young Mrs Pococke, on the contrary, had been on the opulent side. When her husband stripped her (I could recall Tony libidinously saying) what he had on his hands was a wench ready to step into one of the later Renoir’s bath-tubs. Of course ‘young’ in relation to our first recollections of her meant something like ‘in early middle age’. Not quite so old as her academically precocious husband, she must have taken over at the Lodging more or less in her middle thirties. I am certain that we never really thought of her as with decency beddable; that vision of pink and pearly flesh under the squeezed sponge had been strictly innocent and fanciful: amusing because so distanced by the Oxford grande dame in the making. ‘You wouldn’t call her a flat ornament,’ Tony used to say. ‘Les fesses et les tétons are very much in order, if you ask me.’ And he would wave a familiar salute to the ladies over his mantelpiece, presumably by way of asserting himself as an authority on this matter. It was at least true that we had been aware of Mrs Pococke as a sexual presence, and not merely as another of the odd and rather alarming tribe of Oxford’s learned ladies. She was an old woman now, her ash-blonde hair a perruquier’s blue and her skin beginning to be all well-tended pouches and wrinkles. I wondered whether (as with the ageing poet) her meditat
ions were of time that had transfigured her. More probably she had a wholesome sense of herself as in vigorous middle life still.

  ‘Mr Pattullo,’ Mrs Pococke said to the Atlases indifferently, ‘was among the most satisfactory men of his year. He came to tea if I invited him, and went away afterwards without having to be turned out of the house. As much couldn’t be said of some more socially pretending youths.’

  This speech surprised me. It is said that husbands and wives tend to become increasingly like one another with the years, and I have observed instances in which something of the kind appeared to be true. But in three sentences Mrs Pococke had made evident a contrary development. Formerly, her style had been very much her husband’s; although much too young to be stately, stately she had resolutely been. She had totally lacked anything one could think of as spontaneity, since her comportment had been designed to project an artificial personality which she judged appropriate to her position. Now, she had become a perfectly direct woman. Perhaps, I conjectured, she had begun her married life by dutifully approximating herself to her husband’s style, and been intelligent enough to realise that it wouldn’t do; that a double dose of Edward from, as it were, either end of a dinner table must conduce to covert levity rather than a becoming awe. What Edward’s interest required was a counterpoise, a contrasting accent, operating at least within the sphere of his social relations. And just that she had set herself to create.

  None of these thoughts would have been going through my head had there not plainly been some hitch about Mrs Pococke’s luncheon party. We ought by now to have been at the board. Honey had disappeared, so that I wondered whether his melancholic disposition had finally overcome him, with the result that he was hanging on a pair of braces from a convenient hook in his pantry. More probably he was replenishing the sherry decanter, upon which my unauthorised incursion had made a visible effect.

  It looked as if there must be guests still to turn up. Meantime, I was protractedly talking with Mrs Pococke and the Atlases − although not awkwardly stuck with them as Gender still was with Miss Minton. That impasse was now so pronounced as to have become our hostess’s urgent business. She failed, I noticed, in a telegraphic attempt to direct her husband across the room to the relief of the dumbfounded pair. The Provost, unheeding, discoursed with some particularity to Mrs Gender on an architectural drawing, presumably of a proposed addition to the college, which he had spread out on a table before her, and over which his hands hovered in restrained and graceful gestures. His sense, I thought, of the minutiae of an actual social occasion didn’t quite match his diffused vision of the Lodging as a scene of augustly polite intercourse.

  Mrs Gender, however, was evidently habituated to handling such situations with untaxed ease, and this one she resolved by summoning Miss Minton and her husband across the room in a voice which would have been wholly adequate on a parade ground. Mrs Pococke was thus relieved of her anxiety, and her attention was restored to the Atlases and myself. I made a sudden resolution − and it showed what, in the midst of all this small talk, was most on my mind − to tackle her on the subject of the Mumfords: on Ivo Mumford really, but using his father as a lead-in. Mrs Pococke didn’t run the college. But it was conceivable that Mrs Pococke − the new Mrs Pococke, as I thought of her − did run its Provost.

  ‘Do you remember Tony Mumford at those tea-parties?’ I asked. ‘He was always rather amusing.’

  ‘He was, indeed. Lord Marchpayne, as we have to call him now, was more amusing than you were, Mr Pattullo. Not that I didn’t think of you as the nicer young man. That Scottish seriousness was most attractive.’

  ‘Dull, but meaning only improvingly and well.’

  ‘Nothing of the kind. You were much too clever, and much too well-informed a boy, to be in the least dull. Mr Mumford’s particular charm lay in his disposition to be amused by me. I found it extremely wholesome.’

  I saw Mrs Atlas blink, and then glance at her husband in alarm − much as if our hostess had suddenly revealed a vein of reprehensible eccentricity in thus condoning the impropriety of Lord Marchpayne’s conduct in his nonage.

  ‘Have you seen Tony this time?’ I asked.

  ‘No, I have not. I made an effort to catch him when Edward suddenly arranged this lunch. But it seems that, having honoured us, he has hurried away.’

  ‘People in Tony’s walk of life don’t command their own time.’ I advanced this proposition (which came to me from Plot) with confidence. ‘He left me a note saying he had been called away a little sooner than he intended. Otherwise, he was going to have called on you, of course.’ I celebrated these last two unblushing words by finishing my sherry.

  ‘I don’t recall his doing so on any previous occasion. But now he is worried about his son.’

  This time, it was Atlas who reacted. I observed him to compress his lips. He was so much a purist about college affairs that he disapproved even of the Provost’s wife taking passing cognisance of them.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Ivo’s having difficulty with his examinations troubles Tony a good deal. I think myself that he attaches an exaggerated importance to such things.’

  ‘A college is something more than its examination results,’ Atlas said abruptly, and rather like a man getting to his feet at a meeting. ‘I’d never dispute that. And, of course, this particular college is in a strong position not to care a damn if it hasn’t a mind to. Our men have pretty well been running the country since before Honour Schools and so forth were invented. And even nowadays, as Arnold Lempriere is so fond of telling us, it’s clear that nobody cares twopence for such things as soon as you get high enough up. But Oxford isn’t, and this place isn’t, a glorified public school − building character, and codifying manners, and raising hymns of praise for the gifts of all-roundedness and leadership. It’s one of England’s two traditional major centres of education and research and learning. And you must have at least some sense of intellectual standards running right through such a concern, or it simply begins to lose coherence and identity. Heaven forbid that we should have unremitting egg-head endeavour all round. But a limit has to be set on sheer bloody-minded idleness.’

  I had an impression that this speech (it couldn’t be called an outburst, since Atlas had very adequately invested in codified manners himself) was one which Mrs Pococke had heard before. So, more certainly, had Atlas’s wife, but this didn’t prevent her from now gazing at her husband with a becoming admiration. I didn’t myself find it uninteresting, chiefly because it had bobbed up in connection with Ivo Mumford’s name. I had a suspicion that Ivo’s academic insufficiencies were shaping up as a test case, so that if he escaped being put in gaol for a crime, his follies were still going to land him with plenty of trouble ahead. I saw no reason to suppose that I’d much care for him, but I was nevertheless continuing to see myself in the role that had prompted my conversation with Arnold Lempriere. Under this impulsion, I continued to build on the tenuous hypothesis that Mrs Pococke had owned a greater fondness for Ivo’s father than she realised.

  ‘I expect you’ve made the acquaintance of Tony’s boy,’ I said to her. ‘Does he venture to make fun of you too?’

  ‘Certainly not. And it wouldn’t be at all the same thing.’

  This was a just rebuke. At the same time it perhaps acknowledged, if obscurely, the former existence of a mild flow of feeling between Tony and the Provost’s then decidedly attractive wife which would be inappropriate and displeasing in the case of a second Tony now.

  ‘I like the boy,’ Mrs Pococke suddenly said − surprisingly and firmly. ‘He is a graceless and idle youth, no doubt. But there are plenty of such around.’

  ‘Not all that many.’ Atlas took this up at once. ‘A quite small, but nevertheless occasionally subversive, minority.’

  ‘That may be, Charles. You must know more about the undergraduates than I do.’ Mrs Pococke said this to the young man quite without sarcasm, but it wasn’t a wholly uncoloured remark, all the same. She then turned back
to me with what was clearly to be, for the moment, a valedictory word. ‘Ivo Mumford reminds me of his father − and of his grandfather, for that matter, who turns up from time to time, and whom I can’t say I greatly care for. But Ivo has the misfortune to be not nearly so clever as Lord Marchpayne.’

  ‘Do you really think it a misfortune,’ I asked, ‘not to be clever?’

  ‘Not in the least − provided one’s father and brothers aren’t clever either. What may be called drive is a different matter. Everybody is the better of that. And Ivo lacks it as well.’

  ‘You would say Tony has notable drive?’

  ‘When you enter the Cabinet, Mr Pattullo, I shall credit you with it too. Meanwhile, you do have your designs.’

  I had asked for that, I told myself as Mrs Pococke turned away. She must have been fully aware of what I had been about − which didn’t mean that she mightn’t be an ally, all the same. I was now addressed by Mrs Atlas, who made a little conversation − nervously, and rather as if it was something her husband required of her. She was even prettier than I had at first concluded, so that I wondered at a restlessness which I was beginning to feel. Perhaps it was simply that a sense of something oppressively slow in the passage of time assails one when the production of a meal appears unreasonably delayed. This explanation received some support when James Gender moved across the room to us − no doubt under the direction of Mrs Pococke, who had now taken on Miss Minton.

  ‘It’s the McKechnies,’ Gender murmured to us, after he had exchanged punctilious greetings with me. ‘They haven’t a high reputation for punctuality. It’s because McKechnie has pretty well to be brought along on a lead.’ Gender spoke with such an air of diffidence and whimsical charity that he couldn’t possibly have been taken as advancing a serious social stricture. ‘You positively see the little thong in the hand of his charming wife.’