‘He’s been out shopping,’ I said. ‘I came on him in the Cornmarket. And I can imagine his being difficult to coax into company.’
‘He hasn’t been with us long, and he doesn’t come in often. We are terribly pleased when he does. McKechnie is a great scholar, and an extremely nice man.’
‘We were at school together,’ I said − perhaps not very adequately in response to these courteous enthusiasms.
‘Of course you were!’ Gender said this as if delighted to have been reminded of a pleasing circumstance widely known among men. ‘And you know Janet McKechnie?’
‘His wife? No − I didn’t even know he was married. I’d rather have supposed he wasn’t.’
‘Yes.’ Gender’s agreement was tentative, and he directed his gaze (rather like Miss Minton) into his empty glass. I supposed that my last remark hadn’t been quite in order, and that civility therefore required that some token support should be accorded it. ‘I believe there are no children. Not by the marriage.’
Ranald McKechnie’s marriage didn’t interest me very much; no more, say, than did his violin. Our encounter, or non-encounter, less than a couple of hours before must cast a slightly ludicrous character over the meeting now about to take place. Ought I to ignore − ought we both to ignore − our singular lapse from adulthood? I knew that he had been as aware of me as I had of him, and perhaps the most civilised thing would be a tacit acknowledgement of our infirmity conveyed in an exchanged glance.
It didn’t look as if there was to be opportunity for further thought about this. Honey had appeared again at the door of the Day-room, and it was reasonable to suppose that the McKechnies were to be ushered in at last. He proved, however, to have nobody in convoy, and was carrying a needlessly large silver salver upon which a small buff envelope reposed. He went up to the Provost, appeared to give him a message, and then turned and with a deliberate pace came over to me.
‘A telegram, Mr Pattullo. The porter has sent it over from the gate.’
I knew at once why time had been behaving irksomely. It was a fateful telegram − so fateful that I was reminded of a telegram that had arrived in Edinburgh long ago and opened on the news that I was to be the John Ruskin Scholar of my year. This one had no bearing on my own affairs, but was far more fateful for another boy. The success or failure of Mogridge’s mission was a grave matter, however fantastic that mission’s trimmings. It was true that an obstinate rational doubt about the Otby episode remained with me. Nevertheless nothing throughout the morning had been more than a passing distraction from it. Mogridge’s promise to communicate with me had scarcely been out of my head, and he was keeping that promise now. I said some word of apology to my companions, picked up the envelope, and tore it open. The message came from New York. It read Satisfactory contract negotiated and was signed − not very inventively − J. Smith.
‘Thank you very much,’ I said to the waiting Honey. ‘There’s no reply.’
A sense of immense relief overcame me − censurably, no doubt, since the news I had received was of the success of a criminal enterprise. I think I may even have given Gender and the Atlases cause to stare, and when I was again capable of attending to my surroundings it was to hear the Provost addressing Miss Minton with a largeness of effect which made his words available to the whole room.
‘Gracious lady,’ the Provost said, ‘happily, I have to implore your patience for only ten minutes more. My butler has had a call from the McKechnies, who are held up by just that further span of time. Our pleasure in their company will be but enhanced when they do arrive.’
Miss Minton showed no sign of being disconcerted by this oratundity; she was presumably habituated to her host’s liability a little to overplay his part. If there had been an inadvertent suggestion that she was ravening for food it was an implausible one, since she was of so ascetic an appearance as to suggest that she habitually lunched off a dry biscuit. As we had, in fact, been introduced at the start of the proceedings, it was time that I displayed some inclination to talk to her. But I saw that I must employ this further pause in an effort to contact Tony and pass on Mogridge’s message; Tony, I was fairly sure, would be in a great state of agitation until he received it. So I made the necessary appeal to Mrs Pococke, and Honey led me to a telephone in the seclusion of the Provost’s library. It was the room in which my father had intimated his intention of entering me at the college.
Tony was instantly available at the first number I dialled − something that one had to suppose uncommon with Cabinet Ministers. He must have been sitting beside the instrument.
‘It’s Duncan,’ I said − and added absurdly (for I had entered the Mogridge world again), ‘Is this telephone all right?’
‘Absolutely. I’ve seen to that.’ (Tony was in the Mogridge world too.) ‘For Christ’s sake, Duncan! Is there any news?’
‘A telegram from New York. It says Satisfactory contract negotiated. And it’s signed J. Smith?
‘In God’s name! Mogridge?’
‘Yes, of course.’
‘What the hell does he mean about a contract?’
‘That’s bosh. Don’t you remember?’ I wondered whether Tony’s wits were deserting him. ‘”Satisfactory” is the key word.’
‘I see. Repeat it, please.’
Patiently, I repeated the message.
‘Nothing else?’
‘No, nothing else. But it means he has brought it off. You can rest easy.’’That’s marvellous! Gavin’s a true friend. A bloody hero.’
‘Just that. Think of that Mochica thing. C’est son métier.‘
‘Don’t drivel, for the lord’s sake.’ Tony snapped this out with no reason at all. ‘But I’m eternally grateful to him. And to you too, Dunkie. You brought him in.’
‘So I did.’
‘But think of all those snags! They’re still there. It’s madness. We’re right out on a limb.’
‘Only if we’ve very bad luck.’ I saw that Tony really was distracted to the point of frenzy. ‘And remember he’s a top pro.’
‘So he is. Good old Gavin! I could grovel to him. He’s been a gift from heaven. I say − what about that cottage?’
‘What cottage?’
‘The gardener’s cottage at Otby, you fool. And then that housekeeper of my father’s. If she—’
‘Listen. Gavin wouldn’t have gone ahead without making sure of all that. It would be second nature to him. Your boy’s alibi if that’s what it’s to be called − is in the bag.’
‘And we shan’t be in the jug? Oh, glory! Dunkie − waiting has been sheer hell. I tried one throw myself, as soon as I got back to town. Not that it would have been any fucking good. You’re sure Gavin says nothing more?’
‘Of course I am. I can read, you know.’ Fleetingly, I wondered what Tony had been up to. ‘You’d better not do anything more. Just sit tight.’
‘Yes. I must say he might have been a bit more communicative. Telegrams don’t cost all that.’
‘Don’t be an ass, Tony.’ I was astonished by the unreasonableness of this last remark. ‘He trusts us to trust him − just on the strength of that one word. He was being cautious − that’s all.’
‘Of course, of course. Reliable man. Knows his onions. I say, Duncan! What happens next?’
‘I’ve no idea. Perhaps, with the crisis past, he’ll ring you up. Or perhaps you’ll just get a quiet family letter from Ivo, full of the sights of New York. And now, unwind. I’ve got to ring off. I’m lunching with the Pocockes.’
‘With who?’
‘The Pocockes, you idiot. And a gaggle of dons and dons’ wives. I’ll look you up when I get back to town. Goodbye.’
‘Dunkie − I’m fearfully anxious still.’
‘That’s inevitable. Go on the bottle a bit. But do nothing. Understood?’
‘Yes, Dunkie. And bless you. Bless dear old Gavin. Goodbye.’
I rang off, got out my handkerchief, and dabbed my brow − a piece of private theatre excusable in face
of such demoralisation. And then I returned to Mrs Pococke’s little party.
The McKechnies had arrived and been given drinks, so that lunch was in immediate prospect at last. The awkwardness between Ranald (as I must remember to call him) and myself had entirely gone out of my head. Tony’s condition − which the bare record of his words on the wire scarcely conveys − was affecting me in a curious way. For the time, at least, he was sagging beneath the burden of parenthood to a pitiful degree. It seemed an unenviable situation, and what came strangely to me was that, in a sense, I envied it. Apart from Ninian and perhaps his children, there was nobody in the world sudden disaster to whom would mean a great deal to me. I should feel decent distress and regret if misfortune struck here or there among my friends. But if acute misery or apprehensiveness was going to assail me, it could only be on behalf of my precious self. This insulated state it was not going to be salubrious to grow old in. I have mentioned those long-haired, long-legged boys who on sentimental mornings would sometimes lounge at my breakfast-table. I could have no anxieties about them. They were as immune against crass casualty as those good folk or elfin people whose voices and laughter had momentarily come to me while waiting for the Gaudy dinner − undergraduates in waking fact, fooling around in an adjacent quad. No doubt I had been prudent, obeying − or obeying all but once − the poet’s injunction: Never give all the heart. But neither as artist, statesman, or anything else does the prudent man set any mark upon his time.
These sombre thoughts were occasioned perhaps as much by inanition as by the troubles of Lord Marchpayne; the Gaudy breakfast kippers now lay a long time back. Not to delay the remedy, I said a brisk and cheerful word to Ranald McKechnie, and glanced − by way of preparing for brief introduction − at his wife.
My heart turned over. I had known Janet McKechnie as a girl. I had expected to marry her.
XIV
My brother Ninian had been sexually precocious, and since he was so little older than myself this considerably affected my own condition. He had early successes as well as desires, and it is an odd reflection on the patchy way in which manhood arrives that he had slept with a girl some weeks before the celebrated occasion upon which Uncle Rory caned him. The sleeping had been a literal matter, since he had smuggled her out of her parents’ house to spend a short summer night in his arms in a fold of the Pentland hills. This exploit was to be the only one he ever communicated to me other than in the most allusive way, despite the fact that we were much in one another’s confidence. It had been an initiation too tremendous to bottle up. But he never boasted again. His reticence about succeeding love-affairs, none of which can actually have been much more than clandestine encounters with girls easily won, was a result of their taking colour from his imagination and appearing to involve a gravity of relationship which precluded kissing and telling. He was not by nature a casual amorist (such as the unredeemed P. P. Killiecrankie had been). He was really looking for something quite different.
Ninian’s reserve here, a function of rapidly approaching maturity, made life difficult for me. I was tormented by a need to know just what was going on − unreasonably, since I knew I couldn’t myself manage what Ninian was bringing off. Had it come, with me, to what Victorian novelists call the embrace, I could as soon have jumped off the Forth Bridge as achieved the thing at that time. I was inept with girls, and my romantic imaginings concerned a snub-nosed younger schoolfellow with the awkward name of Tommy Watt. I was faithful to Tommy Watt, clinging to his image for several years.
Ninian, I am sure, never felt such an attachment. Without being in the least the sort of small boy who always plays with the girls, he did naturally turn to them; when still in shorts and jersey he owned a kind of contained gentleness towards the other sex which was thoroughly masculine. Girls noticed that my clothes were sometimes ragged and always scruffy, but they never marked the same qualities in Ninian’s. When quite small I naturally hadn’t been troubled by this sort of thing. It became different as we grew older. I had grown a great deal older − in fact I was seventeen − when something traumatic occurred. Tommy Watt was a solicitor’s son, but he had an uncle who was a farmer. Tommy used to spend holidays on the farm, and on one occasion sent me a picture-postcard depicting the dreary little lowland village near which it lay. It seemed to me at once to be a magical place − and I had, for that matter, to make the most of the card, since it was the only tangible token of regard that Tommy had ever accorded me. Then, helping with a harvest, Tommy (who was very stupid) contrived to feed himself into some mechanical monster and be chewed to bits.
I found myself unable to touch bread, since I believed there might be some of Tommy in it. This extravagant behaviour baffled and alarmed my parents, but like most hysterical performances didn’t last long. For a time I groped around for another Tommy. This didn’t last long either. My imagination, which had largely created him, simply refused to take on a further job of the kind. Tommy had died on me both in fact and in his representative character, and that sort of adolescent attachment wasn’t to be available to me again. Faced up to, the change seemed encouraging, since for some time I had been feeling (very reasonably) that I ought to have advanced beyond picturing life on a desert island with a younger boy whom I would rescue from sharks, boa constrictors, marauding cannibals and similar hazards drawn from Ballantyne or The Swiss Family Robinson.
It is among the discomforts of growing up that mounting emotional muddles can be coincident with rapid intellectual development, and in my later years at school I had been making up for the uninteresting and depressing character of the institution’s overt sexual mores by reading popular expositions of the discoveries or theories of Freud and Adler and Jung. Poking about in these regions in some alarm but optimistically on the whole, I concluded that I had passed through a crisis of development and was now going to be just like Ninian − which I desperately wanted to be. So unflawed was my faith in almost immediate transformation that I bought, in a furtive little shop behind Scotland’s General Register Office, a packet of what Killiecrankie’s friend the bishop would have called sexual engines. I remember thinking that the shop must be just like Mr Verloc’s in The Secret Agent − a reflection proving my literary education to have run well ahead of that obtainable in the school of life. The fascinating and revolting objects remained unused. I was in fact quite like Ninian, but some marginal difference between us got in the way of my emulating those preliminary and tormenting skirmishes of his with the strength of lust and the enigma of love. When Tony Mumford and I were ending our first year together as cronies in Surrey Quad, and were rivalling most of our companions in outrageousness of bawdy invention, I was still a sexually untried youth − this despite episodes of a certain laxity between myself and the elder of my Glencorry cousins. So − almost, if not quite − was Tony. Belonging to a Catholic family, he was sent (as Ivo was not to be) to a Catholic school, and although I was never to detect in him the slightest vestige of religious faith I imagine that certain stiff teachings on the sinfulness of sexuality unsanctified by marriage took time to wear off.
Ninian and I were unaffected here by either parental attitudes or the doctrines of a church. My mother, like many people in Scotland with her background, was an episcopalian − which was why my father, to my perplexity as a child, would sometimes refer to her as the wee piskie. Three or four times a year she attended communion in St John’s Church at the end of Princes Street − on which occasions my father would accompany her to the door, pay a visit to the tomb of Raeburn (who must also have been a piskie) in the adjoining mortuary chapel, and return home for what he called a quick peg before picking her up again. She was, in fact, innocent of any serious religious consideration, and her attitude to sexual conduct was entirely romantic. She had adored young Lachlan Pattullo from that first moment in the Sistine, and although incapable of cooking him a good meal or washing his children’s ears she continued so to adore him all her life. He certainly adored her, and this she believed to be
in the nature of things rather than some miracle of the heart.
My father was completely faithful to her. Neither Ninian nor I would have called this in question for a moment; indeed, any speculation on the point could never have entered our heads. Later, I was to consider this facet of my father’s character in the context of that easy Bohemianism − conventionally predicated of the ‘artistic’ temperament, and in fact going with it often enough − which he constantly exhibited. There seemed to mingle in him a feeling for the broad continental culture of which he had seen a good deal and a yet deeper instinct, submerged but miscellaneously eruptive, for the severe rules of conduct to which he had been bred. Certain small Scottish conformities were dear to him. One of these brings me back, after a fashion, to religious matters. It brings me, too, to Janet.
My father had an elder brother, Norman, who like many another dogged Scottish peasant lad had attained to being a minister of the Kirk. His parish lay in a remote region of Aberdeenshire, so that we saw little of him or his family. (As children, Ninian and I had spent a week in the manse, behaving so badly that, to our satisfaction, we were never invited again.) Uncle Norman had a domed head with only a few wisps of hair, a drooping moustache, and some affliction of the eyes which required him to be constantly dabbing at them with a handkerchief. It was often difficult to understand what he said: partly because his accent was as remote from the genteel Edinburgh speech to which we were accustomed as, in a different fashion, was that of Uncle Rory and Aunt Charlotte; but partly, too, because his remarks tended to fade away into a discouraged murmur. A man more different from his brother it would have been hard to conceive. I cannot think that the Dreich himself was as dreich as the Reverend Norman Pattullo.
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