The Gaudy

by J. I. M. Stewart

  Of course it is silly to shunt on to a new environment in this way the burden of my own pusillanimity. And I’d have done better but for certain events at home. Janet at times seemed to be watching and waiting with amusement. She no longer much made fun of me. On the contrary she occasionally betrayed a kind of remorseful tenderness which at once troubled me and went deeply to my heart. And she wasn’t puzzled about me. It was I myself who was that.

  My mother − who had married when so young her lover of the Sistine Chapel − thought that Janet and I should at least be engaged. She tried to treat us as engaged, which was a great embarrassment. She tried to exploit in this interest a discovery she believed herself to have made about the health of Janet’s mother. It would be a comfort to Mrs Finlay, she maintained, to know that all was going to turn out well.

  This solicitude was in part vindicated, since Mrs Finlay did rather suddenly die. The event precipitated changes still so strange and poignant to me that I must simply hurry over them without analysis. Janet’s mourning turned within months into a strange desperation not to be penetrated by anything I could write or say. Then she sent me, very briefly, news that went some way to explaining this. She had been − there had never been any doubt of it − very much her mother’s child. And now her father − she wrote − had married again, and with what she called indecent haste, the daughter of somebody very much grander than Roderick Glencorry. The clinical neurologist’s social ambition had fulfilled itself.

  I am certain I didn’t think about this information, or rather about the tone in which it was conveyed, as clearly as I ought to have done. It is sad to lose a mother, and commonly upsetting to acquire a stepmother; and when I heard of Professor Finlay’s precipitancy I very much wished that I had been at home and in a position to support Janet as I might. I was at a maximum of obtuseness which in the event was to be shattered rapidly enough. The letter I wrote to Janet was long and far too full of wisdom. Since I did at least know this the moment I had posted it I wasn’t surprised that it received no direct reply. When Janet did again write it was as briefly as before. But I took what she had to say as reassuring − to the extent that it seemed to mark a return to practical interests. As soon as I came home for the next vacation I must teach her to drive a car. It was going to be essential that she should be able to do that.

  I had only recently passed my own driving test. It had been in a sports car owned by Tony of the sort in which the bonnet purports to be held down by enormous leather straps; and as nobody employed by a Minister of Transport to test young drivers could possibly remain unprejudiced at the sight of so lethal-seeming an object I felt a reasonable confidence that I must be pretty good. So I looked forward to teaching Janet rapidly and well. I also decided that I wasn’t returning to Oxford without having asked her to marry me.

  The first part of this plan presented no difficulty. In the Finlays’ car − the newness of which was more of a rarity than it would have been a year or two later − we drove round the environs of Edinburgh, and later through the city itself, for hours on end. On several occasions we did longer runs in the countryside − sometimes threading our way through those hills in which I couldn’t but remember that Ninian had first made a girl his mistress. But Janet was so tense and withdrawn that I found it astonishing she never did anything wrong. Her concentration on the job she had set herself was absolute. I had a sense of this singleness of purpose as ominous, as somehow alien to our relationship as I believed it to be. But what did Janet believe it to be? I realised I simply didn’t know. I had deferred, avoided indeed, for too long those explicit questions and avowals through which it is a grown man’s part to further a love relationship. And now to Janet − almost, it might be said, to a Janet afforded no token that I really existed in an adult world − something had happened. I understood it not in the least, or only as something that took me quite out of my own range of feeling, power to action. In fact, these were the last days of my adolescence. I was soon, at least, to be clear of confusion.

  I returned to Oxford with nothing achieved. I was bewildered and in some mysterious way humiliated. A letter came from Janet a few weeks later. It was addressed from Skye.

  Dearest Dunkie,

  I am married to Calum − and as I write his name I realise I have never spoken it to you. So I have treated you very badly. Dunkie, I had to get away. But it has been more than that. I have just been driven − with no more will than a leaf before a gale. It’s hardly even me, or a personal thing in any way. C’est vénus toute entière à sa proie attachée. With much love and I am very sorry.

  Janet Grant

  I stared at Racine’s line stupidly, and told myself that this was what came of doing French. I remarked that Janet had got her accents right. I then tore the letter into very small pieces, being determined that it wouldn’t live on in a drawer to be taken out and brooded over many years ahead. I wrote to Janet at once about her rightness and about the happiness I hoped she would enjoy. I did this strangely without effort, and before any grief or bitterness came to me. There was nothing else to do. I knew that I loved her very much.

  We never wrote to each other again, and I was very far from wanting anybody to talk to me about Janet. At home, however, the subject couldn’t be simply ignored. My mother expressed astonishment and indignation, and had to be stopped. My father spoke briefly and, I think wisely − taking what had happened as very much in the nature of things. Whether he thought I had behaved feebly I don’t know; more probably he saw me as having escaped − but hurt rather more badly than might have been expected − from a commitment beyond my years. I found comfort in his indisposition in the least to censure Janet. That I was a meritorious and accredited lover lightly jilted by a faithless girl was the one vision of the thing I couldn’t at all suffer, since nothing would have been less fair. I hadn’t, for example, been without knowledge of Calum Grant’s name and calling. They had appeared, once and enigmatically, on one of Janet’s postcards, a signal which I neglected to read. The inhibited condition which Oxford had caused to linger with me, Oxford was just at this time breaking up. We were no more, perhaps, than liberated schoolboys still, but here and there among my companions what we called girl-trouble was declaring itself, and my own necessities were changing as if in mysterious sympathy with those of my friends. In this new context, narrow but commanding, I equally with Janet had been faithless. On me, too, Venus had been at work. I had been experiencing for another girl − a fatal one in the end − a sudden and dreadfully simple sexual infatuation.

  Before the whole spectacle of his brother in those final growing-pains Ninian was wary and perceptive. He knew very well where my heart really lay. He knew too that the last thing I would want to hear about Janet was that she had landed herself in fiasco or misery, and he probably had a realistic sense that it was not altogether unlikely to turn out that way. His first discovery on my behalf − one not difficult to make − was of a neutral and unsurprising sort. Calum Grant was a crofter’s son, and of a family related to Janet’s own. He had himself become a fisherman. And he was likely to be something between poor and very poor. What Janet had taken lessons with me for wasn’t the driving of a Rolls Royce. It was trucking in the peat from where it was footed on the moss.

  Some years went by before Ninian had more to tell. He had been to Skye on legal affairs. He hadn’t tried to glimpse Janet Grant − that, his delicacy would have forbidden − but he had seen her husband. Calum, he told me firmly, was what any woman would call a lovely man. And there were now two boys.

  I formed a picture of these four people. My father, could he have seen inside my head, would have pronounced it an early David Wilkie, and I might myself have thought of it as an Israels with most of the sombreness left out. The children were prominent at that fireside, for the thought of Janet’s two stalwart sons pleased me. It is curious that the long-limbed, long-haired creatures whom I have reported as sometimes visiting my breakfast-table were so very unlike them: were so very Engl
ish and public-school. I don’t think that Janet Grant was the mother of those dream-children. There are limits to the sentimentality into which a more or less sophisticated mind is willing to deliquesce. And, of course, I had long since ceased to think very constantly about Janet Finlay, who had become Janet Grant.

  But now I was sitting at the same table with her in the Provost’s Lodging. And Janet McKechnie was her new name.

  XV

  Miss Minton − as I had remembered just in time − was the author of a book on commedia a soggetto, and when I wasn’t being talked to by Mrs Pococke I conversed on topics prompted by this learned circumstance. Both ladies must have judged me distraught; since they knew about the readership they may have concluded me to be much preoccupied by it.

  Janet being on the Provost’s right, and myself on Mrs Pococke’s, we were beyond speaking range, but had a clear view of one another diagonally across the table. I wondered whether Janet had expected to meet me. It seemed to depend on how Mrs Pococke had gathered her party. If it was an impromptu affair, it might have been natural for her to say on the telephone something like ‘Edward hopes that Duncan Pattullo may be coming’. If it had been organised some time ago, my own possible presence was the less likely to have been mentioned. On the whole, it was probable that our meeting had been a surprise to Janet. In the few seconds of our confrontation before moving into the dining-room she had said nothing to prompt either one conclusion or the other.

  I wondered, too, whether on his return home from the Gaudy dinner Ranald McKechnie had mentioned to his wife having sat beside a schoolfellow. And from this a more curious question sprang. What did McKechnie know about the romance of near-childhood between Janet and me? I had learnt as yet nothing of the circumstances under which Janet’s second marriage had come about. But it must have been entered into in maturity, and it would seem natural that innocent relationships in an almost distant past would be among the confidences exchanged between a husband and wife. Could Ranald McKechnie, knowing about it, regard it as an occasion for constraint between us? Had it even been a factor in that morning’s awkwardness in the Cornmarket? The idea seemed absurd, but I saw sufficient possibility of substance in it to be glad I hadn’t obeyed an impulse to ask bluntly ‘Are you married?’ during our encounter the night before. McKechnie was now listening attentively to Mrs Gender, who had settled for gardening as the best table-topic between them. McKechnie still displayed pens and pencils in his breastpocket, and I saw that he also maintained another old habit: that of seizing upon something uncommonly like a shoelace to serve as a tie. Catching myself noting this, I had to conclude that the new situation found me not incapable of jealousy. It was certainly producing early intimations of emotion of one sort or another.

  Janet several times looked at me gravely, and once she smiled. She was a beautiful woman in her earliest forties. But the smile took me back a long way. I remembered her occasional air of amused yet tender expectation, so at variance with her habitual vehemence, and it now seemed to me that there had been something maternal in it; that the schoolgirl had once watched me as a woman watches and waits over a growing son.

  We rose from table to take coffee in the Day-room. There was no time to lose, since at any moment the Provost might propose withdrawing to his library to discuss the readership. I got close to Janet, and when our cups had been handed us carried her off by a glance to the far end of the big chamber. Rossetti’s contribution to its splendours − a portrait of Elizabeth Siddal, sultry, fated, magnificent, and as ill-painted as could be − thus presided over us as we talked.

  ‘Janet, I just never had word of you. What happened?’

  ‘To Calum and the boys? They were drowned. Twelve years ago.’

  I had expected that mortality would be part of the story. It was unlikely that Janet had been divorced. But I had expected nothing like this. I felt my eyes fill with tears.

  ‘He must have taken them out very young.’

  ‘They were to follow him.’

  ‘Yes, of course.’ I was entirely off-balance, and judged my comment, since it implied censure of Calum, to be as luckless as anything I had ever said; nothing even in the emotion of the moment could excuse it. But Janet showed no displeasure. Could I now say, ‘I wish I’d known’? The words would have been prompted by sympathy and sorrow, but they too might have sounded ill. ‘And then?’ I asked.

  ‘Naturally, there was no money. I went back to Edinburgh and qualified as a nurse.’

  ‘I see.’ Now I was really stumped, for any further question must lead to McKechnie and suggest inquisition. Janet appeared to feel that her account of herself was, for the moment at least, concluded, and that my own history might be inquired into.

  ‘Dunkie,’ she asked, so that the name went to my heart like an arrow, ‘were you married for long?’

  ‘No, not at all long. Under three years. My wife and I weren’t in the least right for each other.’

  ‘I’m very sorry. I read about your marriage, and was glad. But I never heard anything more − not until quite recently. Ranald and I always try to see your plays.’

  ‘Do you think they’re any good? You had considerable hopes of me, Janet, a long time ago.’

  ‘I don’t think the plays you’ve written are as good as the plays you may still write.’

  ‘That’s rather my notion, too.’ As I said this our eyes met, and I was conscious that we had both found a moment’s amusement. I was conscious, too, of happiness, and that it sprang from a sense of how much we could trust one another. There was no possibility of my saying anything wrong again. This ecstatic conviction prompted my next words. ‘Does Ranald,’ I asked, ‘know how much I was in love with you?’

  ‘He certainly ought to. I quite went to town about it.’ As Janet said this there was straight mischief in her glance. ‘But there are things that don’t make much of a mark on Ranald. He’s a very learned and abstracted man.’ Janet paused, and I told myself, apparently without dissatisfaction, that here was yet another of those loyal and devoted wives. ‘But he produced, out of his head, a list of the prizes you’d won at school. He said you’d beaten him hollow for one of them.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘so I did. I think it was for an essay on the advantages and disadvantages of civilisation.’

  ‘It’s possible to feel both acutely, wouldn’t you say? I’d have expected Ranald to produce the more balanced view.’ Janet looked across the room. ‘Dunkie, the Provost’s coming to nobble you. Goodbye.’

  Would I be willing to consider − the Provost was asking me ten minutes later − an appointment for five years in the first instance? The university had not come quite unprompted to the discovery that a Readership in Modern European Drama was one of its first priorities at the moment. But that caution − the Provost continued smoothly − was not at all to its credit, for wasn’t the subject eminently one which ought to be brought more securely within the sphere of serious criticism? Moreover, one had to consider the young people, and anything they showed signs of being prepared to interest themselves in. Anything of the intellectual sort, that was. There were grave persons around into whose heads this consideration never entered. But the Provost himself gave it much thought. That was why − noticing, as he had, the disposition of undergraduates to absorb themselves in theatrical activities − he had concerned himself with the benefaction from the start. For − he must be candid with me − a benefaction there had been: from an American source, wholly unsolicited, and (to return to the point in hand) for an assured period of five years only. What did I think of that?

  ‘Five years,’ I repeated, and tried to give a considering tone to the words. But five fours are twenty, I was telling myself, and it was through nearly that span of years that it had not occurred to me to continue acquainting myself with Janet’s fortunes. All I had done was to think of her from time to time. Or hardly even that. It had been a matter only of picturing her − with Calum the lovely man on the other side of the hearth, and the boys playing
around. And this reverie, as thick with sentiment as Burns’s The Cotter’s Saturday Night, I had continued to indulge during the brief period when my marriage seemed a happy one. Now I was shocked at myself. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘five years seems to me about right.’

  ‘It represents the formal position only.’ The noble features of the Provost signalled encouraging intelligence from some inner circle of the initiated in the university’s mysteries. ‘There could be no possibility of an actual termination. Indeed, I should imagine that at the end of that period the post would become fully professorial. A chair would be created.’