I fell asleep at last, and it seemed almost at once that I had a dream. It was a very simple dream, but I think not one that a psychiatrist would have predicted so soon after such a radically new experience as that day’s. I was in bed with Janet, and we were making love. We had made love; the wet dream was over; I woke up. And as I woke up I heard Ninian’s voice say, ‘That won’t ever happen, Dunkie.’
Of course I had not really come awake − not till seconds after. Ninian and I didn’t even share a room. But his voice often came as an admonishment or a challenge inside my head, and I rose to it now.
‘Yes, it will,’ I said aloud into the darkness. And I went to sleep again.
Whether it would or wouldn’t had no more been a calculation of mine during our balcony tea than, presumably, it had been of Janet’s. The unsensual character of early love (on which Plot was to prove an authority) made all the going. I wanted, above all things, to know about Janet − to know her, indeed, but not in the queer sense of the word that sometimes cropped up in the First Lesson during church on Sundays. I think she had an answering impulse, but got less chance to exercise it. All through our tea I held the initiative, being buoyed up by my astounding achievement in the public library. There was no information at all that I didn’t want to have. I must have asked a score of absurd questions − whether, for example, she preferred cats or dogs − as well as others more pertinent. For I was in the grip of that desire to possess in totality which no doubt represents the predatory side of love. My father, absorbed in some vista of glens and lochs and mountains with a blank canvas or sketch-book before him, was the type of the lover his son was that afternoon.
I questioned Janet about her family. She seemed surprised − but pleased rather than offended − at my not knowing her father to be the university’s professor of clinical neurology. She plunged − rapidly, vehemently, and even with a kind of passion which puzzled me − into family history. Both her parents came from Skye. Both came from humble crofting backgrounds. (‘So does my father,’ I said quickly, since establishing anything in common with Janet was precious to me.) They had been unable to marry young, since her father’s struggle for a medical degree had been hard and long. Her mother had become a schoolteacher on Raasay, and had sent him her pay secretly, since it would have been held an improper thing, if known. I noticed that Janet seemed to regard this as having been to her father’s discredit, a point on which I should have thought it sensible to keep an open mind. We made common ground − although, indeed, most of my friends regularly announced such impatient feelings − about the stuffiness and snobbishness and conventionality of our native city; we had even got hold of the word ‘provincial’ for it, which was not really an accurate term. But Janet had her attitude to this bound up with her attitude to her family in a way I had not. Perhaps I had an advantage here. My ears and neck would have been cleaner sooner if either of my parents had been bürgerlich in the slightest degree, but for the same reason I had largely escaped the exhausting business of being a rebel in the home.
Janet was a rebel − but chiefly, it seemed, against her father rather than her mother. She criticised him as given over to foolish schemes of social aggrandisement. She was reluctant to disclose (even amid all this frankness, which I was certain wasn’t her habit with new acquaintances) that she lived in the very grandest part of the New Town − which she scoffed at as ‘all those draughty parallelograms’. This told me more than that she had read Stevenson as well as Lawrence. And although it seemed in a way to make allies of us, I had an obscure sense of being in the presence of something that might work against me.
‘Well,’ I demanded, ‘what do you like?’
‘A lot of things.’ Justifiably, Janet resented thus being indicated, by implication, of too much discontent. ‘But going home for the holidays, mostly.’
‘Going home?’ I repeated blankly.
‘Home to Skye.’
‘Oh,’ I said ‘You have a house there too.’
‘We haven’t. But my uncles have. They’re crofters there. And fishermen.’
‘I see.’ Perhaps thinking of Uncle Rory and Uncle Norman, I judged the possession of relatives even of that degree of consanguinity an inadequate reason for claiming to have a home in distant places. ‘Janet!’ I said in sudden dismay. ‘You’re not going to Skye in these coming holidays?’ We were already near the end of the summer term.
‘But I must!’ As she said this, Janet looked at me with a divinely uncalled-for remorse which more than made up for what seemed a senseless vehemence. It was as if China tea (a very sophisticated thought, this had been) and currant baps (more native fare) were being acknowledged as having established a bond between us. I was suddenly and most wholesomely overwhelmed by my consciousness of Janet’s beauty. My head swam. ‘Don’t you’ she asked − and it was almost accusingly − ‘ever get away from home?’
‘Yes, of course.’ I was a little stiff at the suggestion of being childishly attached to apron-strings. ‘My brother and I sometimes go to relations at a place called Corry.’ I said this guardedly, having an instinct that it wouldn’t do hastily to claim kinship with members of the Scottish aristocracy, if that was what Glencorry of that Ilk was to be thought of as belonging to. ‘It’s right in the Highlands,’ I added hopefully − thereby no doubt revealing how lowland and urban I was. ‘We’re sent to run wild in the glens,’ I amplified − this with a humorous intention which didn’t seem quite to come off.
‘Hasn’t your father,’ Janet asked at a tangent, ‘got pictures in the National Gallery?’
‘Yes, there are two there. And, of course, you can see him every year at the Academy.’ This was the institution of which my father was so soon to become President. ‘And I’ve got one at home myself, which I want to show you. It’s a watercolour, with Ninian and me in it as young Picts. But we’re lying in whins, so that all you can see is our heels, really, and our bottoms in anachronistic kilts.’ I must simply have babbled this, for the great waters were now sweeping over me.
‘I like the National Gallery,’ Janet said. ‘I like the Millet and the Israels.’
‘They’re very fine,’ I agreed stoutly − although these sombrely sentimental evocations of peasant life in fact held no great appeal for me. ‘Let’s go there now.’ The severe Doric building which is the Scottish National Gallery, perched on the Mound, was on view from where we sat.
‘We’ll go another day. I must go home now. I’ve got a lot of rotten homework. What else do you like, Duncan?’
‘Dunkie.’ I was determined to assert this ultimate intimacy.
‘All right − I’ll always call you Dunkie.’ Janet had taken the point. ‘But what else do you like?’
‘I think I’m going to like going to Oxford. At least I hope so, because otherwise there won’t be much point in it. I’ve won a Scholarship.’
‘A kind of bursary?’ Janet was obviously ignorant of the glory of an Open Scholarship − which got one’s name put up in golden letters in our school hall. ‘Isn’t your father very wealthy?’
‘Of course not.’ I was almost as horrified as amused. ‘We never seem to have a penny.’ I felt that this was an awkward overstatement, since I was standing the tea. ‘Or say a five-pound note. Painters don’t make money, or not for ages and ages.’
‘I didn’t know.’ Janet appeared mollified. ‘Once you go to England, I suppose you’ll stay there. And paint state portraits of the King and Queen.’
‘What a daft idea!’ It hadn’t occurred to me that Janet might take it for granted that in the modern world painting was a hereditary affair. ‘I can’t draw a line.’
‘Then what are you going to do?’
‘I’m going to be a writer.’
I had never said this to anyone, not even Ninian, before. My father must have known it was in my head, but only because of the scribblings I sometimes showed him − although his awareness of my ambition had become more or less explicit, indeed, in his dark remarks about Galsworthy and
Wells. But that I should myself utter such words, and give them the cast of a stated fact, was a new thing.
‘You’ll be a great writer, Dunkie,’ Janet said with gravity.
I knew − for there was much that was clear-headed in me, at least when I was a boy − that I wasn’t going to be that. Janet Finlay had completed her conquest of me, all the same.
After its whirlwind beginning (or what I thought of as that) our relationship became unexpectedly cautious and hesitant. We met several times in the National Gallery, simply because the place had turned up in our first conversation. We were naturally a good deal less aware of the pictures than of one another. But this consciousness was a self-consciousness as well. Our shyness − for we were shy in each other’s company, after all − must have been in part socially determined: we couldn’t pretend to be art students and there didn’t seem to be other schoolboy-and-schoolgirl couples around. We did better on Saturdays and Sundays, out of school clothes and going for walks together. But this attracted the awareness of our parents, and soon we had been to tea in each other’s houses and were established as having formed a friendship entirely right and proper for our years. There was a certain depressant effect about this. It acted particularly upon Janet who, although so much younger, was more in need of a sense of enlarged independence than I was.
My mother was a little too enthusiastic about my new association. Ninian’s affairs had sometimes bewildered her and taken her out of her depth, and she was determined to see Janet and myself in another light. Ninian had been a hunter abroad, and had never willingly brought a girl home in his life. My mother’s notion of an ideal love-affair had generated itself out of her own history; it must be highly romantic while at the same time not disruptive of existing family ties. This led her to insist on making the acquaintance of Janet’s mother. It required considerable address. Mrs Finlay was a maternal woman − simple, reserved, and domestically competent − who shared with her daughter a lack of enthusiasm for the social ambitions of the professor of clinical neurology. She must have been much more distrustful of the disorder of our household than impressed by my mother’s being a sister of the Glencorry. Janet, when she discovered this kinship, wasn’t impressed either − or at least not favourably. When she wanted to do battle with me (and that she sometimes did was perhaps a sign that our relationship, although adolescent, held the seeds of maturity) she would pretend that I was virtually the Glencorry myself, fatuously convinced of the devotion of feudal dependants who, in fact, hated me in their guts. I resented this joke − I thought justifiably, since my own views were of a thoroughly egalitarian sort. I wondered how Janet could have come by such stuff.
The holidays arrived, and Janet went off to Skye. We didn’t write to each other. The initiative ought to have been mine. What seemed to deter me was a sense that anything I did write would be received by Janet in circumstances and amid surroundings unknown to me − and that these would somehow render shallow, callow, or otherwise unsympathetic anything that a schoolboy thought to scribble. It was an instinctive feeling of the kind that is seldom wholly astray. But now, looking back, I see in this abstention the first intimation of something in myself − an unready or unripe condition, it must be called − which ill fortune was to render definitive.
The holidays ended, and schoolchildren were back at school. Oxford, however, was still some weeks off, and during these weeks I managed to see a great deal of Janet. While she was away I had formed the superstitious conviction that if I didn’t succeed in kissing her before my own imminent departure I should lose her for ever. But how was I to go about it? Did I ask her permission? Or did I firmly announce what I was about to do? Or did I just do it? I had no means of coming to a decision, but in fact I ended by kissing Janet with no more preparation than a swift glance. This action, which turned out triumphantly natural, took place, whether appropriately or not, in front of Yermeer’s Christ in the House of Mary and Martha.
Our subsequent kisses, like the first one, were unembarrassed affairs, but unaccompanied by words. They took place, reasonable privacy permitting, on meeting and parting, and I think not much at other times. It was as if shaking hands had become infinitely precious and exciting, but could not without extravagance be indulged in at all hours as a result. I suppose we were happy rather than unhappy in those brief weeks, but at the same time we were both aware that something disturbing and paradoxical had entered our relationship. The paradox had to do with what in another context might have been called growth-rates. Superficially, I had taken a jump ahead of Janet. Emancipation had arrived. I should never again hurtle into a school yard on a bicycle at nine o’clock; never again call anybody ‘sir’ unless I chose to; never again be under the slightest compulsion to solve trigonometrical problems or memorise the principal exports of Chile. I had acquired a surprising array of new clothes from a good tailor − my father having perhaps taken it into his head that Wee Dreichie might be overgone (as he certainly might) in this department also. More significantly, my thoughts were beginning to project themselves with an increasing sense of contact and reality into an adult future.
If Janet thought very coherently about an adult future I didn’t hear about it. But she was certainly concerned to get away from where she was, and out of that symbol of subjection which she called ‘this bloody nunnery stuff’ − meaning her school uniform and awful school hat. I was rather shocked at hearing Janet say ‘bloody’, although among my male contemporaries I enjoyed using as many improper words as they did. (There were some boys − Ranald McKechnie, for instance − who were chaste of speech. But we didn’t admire them.) But if Janet was increasingly impatient with her schooling it wasn’t because she was no good at her books. It was obvious, indeed, that she was much more generally successful at school subjects than I was. She liked languages, and particularly she liked French; my father had been astonished and delighted when he had one day thought to tease her with his own rapid command of it, and she had been suddenly fired to give him back quite as much as she got.
But I had grown older only on the surface and as a matter of changed status; whereas Janet, still in thrall to all the circumstances of childhood, had grown older deeper down. I had been aware of this almost in the first moments of seeing her on her return from Skye. It was an awareness difficult to get clear or express. There was more of her that was mysterious to me than before; she would sometimes look at me with a brooding reserve which reminded me of her mother; I had an uneasy sense of being left out of something that was going on.
This was the new paradox in our relationship, and she certainly understood it better than I did. The fact emerged in one of her sudden plunges into mockery. These didn’t happen frequently. Although she was a prize girl on a much less narrow front than I was a prize boy, she seemed, indeed, to set increasing store on possessing in me a kind of unofficial tutor. I was drawn, in consequence, into an instructive role which I wasn’t stupid enough not to distrust. I explained books and pictures to her (matters about which I knew quite a lot) − and also music and politics (of which I was almost entirely ignorant). It was as if I represented something to which she had an impulse to cling. I was alert enough to dislike this impersonalising of me, even although I was sure it constituted only one element in a complex state of feeling. She wasn’t regarding me (I can recall specifically telling myself) merely as a walking and talking junior encyclopaedia, as she might regard, for instance, somebody like Ranald McKechnie. This was a random thought. It had never appeared that the Finlays and McKechnies, although both university people, knew each other.
‘Off to boarding school at your age!’ she suddenly flashed out at me. ‘When you might be growing a wee moustache, and even hoping for a wee beard, so that you’d be able to turn into a perfectly respectable gamekeeper and get a job with your grand uncle.’ (She may have been reading Lady Chatterley’s Lover − although this is improbable, that novel being not yet rampant in public libraries. Whether Mellors is bearded or not, I don’t recall.
)
‘What do you mean, boarding school?’ Although Janet’s words seemed absurd, I made this demand with a sinking heart, having an intuition that there was a sense in which she was saying something true.
‘An Oxford college is like that, isn’t it? A lot of young men behaving like children − kicking footballs, and rowing up and down a river in daft little boats, and ragging around, and being no end swells and mashers.’
‘Certainly not mashers,’ I said feebly − and indeed wondering where Janet could have raked up so outmoded a word. ‘And I suppose I’m going to do quite a lot of work. They’ll let me do what I like doing, more or less. Or so I’m told.’
‘I’d like you to be a gamekeeper.’
‘Don’t be silly. You’d like nothing of the sort. And I’d be a damned bad gamekeeper, anyway. I shouldn’t even make a decent gillie.’
‘I don’t agree. You’re clever enough to be anything, Dunkie.’
‘But gillies don’t need to be clever. In fact cleverness is regarded as a disadvantage in humble life.’ I had been melted, as I always was, by Janet’s using my pet name. ‘But of course if you give an order, that’s another matter.’
This was a not unamiable wrangle, and it went on for some time. But there was something I distrusted in it. And Janet was aware of this. We kissed with an unusual and incautious ardour at the end of that encounter.
It seems strange to me now that just this perplexed relationship with Janet should have continued unaltered for a considerable span of time. We wrote to each other sufficiently regularly for the mere fact of our so writing to be interpretable as reflecting a love-affair. But our letters were not in the common sense love-letters; they belonged to the same hovering world which we inhabited whenever I was spending in Edinburgh some part of a vacation during which Janet didn’t happen to be on holiday in Skye. This simple chronological statement tells a lot. Janet had been right about Oxford − at least to the extent that I was absorbed in a new and (as it seemed to me) much larger world. There wasn’t only Oxford. There was the continent − Hitler’s continent during so much of my later boyhood − rapidly opening up as well. I had rather a lot of money: this because my father judged it natural to share with Ninian and myself a prosperity which − as can happen with artists, even good ones − had come tumbling in overnight. But there was something, too, more inward than all this. Janet had been right about the boarding school as well. If intellectually I was looking ahead to adult concerns, socially and even emotionally (like an old gentleman advertising beer at that time) I was growing younger every day. Nearly all my companions, with the exception of a few older ones back from the war, were recent products of a system which retards sexual development in all but the crudest and most boisterous expression. They looked down on P. P. Killiecrankie’s overtly behaving as he did − at least within the ring-fence of the college − but were to some extent P. P. Killiecrankies at heart. Sexual behaviour as something to be interwoven with the other facts of life was still some years ahead of them.
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