‘I see.’ Bedworth appeared disconcerted by this harmless anecdote, presumably as suggesting irresponsible tutorial behaviour. Then he managed to be amused again. ‘Adrian’s gay confidence was justified. Although I seem to remember giving you a hand myself on more orthodox principles.’
‘So you did, Cyril. And I taught you Greek. I hope you keep it up.’
‘Oh, indeed yes. As well as I can.’ Bedworth took my question entirely seriously. ‘I try to read some Homer and a couple of plays every long vacation. I enjoy it very much.’
‘And now Pattullo and I can again start talking about other things,’ Buntingford said. ‘And do you, Cyril, show some countenance to that harmless youth on your right.’
Bedworth took this injunction seriously too, reproaching himself for having so far neglected a very junior colleague. And Adrian Buntingford looked at me wickedly. ‘The heartening thing I have to tell you,’ he said, ‘is that the first ten years are the worst.’
The majority of dons dining went into common room for dessert. Lempriere proved to be in charge here – perhaps in virtue of being the oldest fellow, or perhaps because he had been elected into some stewardship or the like. Undergraduates never grasp anything about their seniors’ manner of conducting such matters, which put me in the position of now having to learn a lot. I was quite sure that nobody was going to tell me anything, just as nobody had presumed to walk me into hall. If I cared to find out this or that, I’d be free to do so. I might even ask questions. But in this event (I was soon to discover) men who had been members of common room for twenty years would produce answers framed in terms of detached conjecture, as if the whole place were as mysterious to them as on the day they had themselves arrived there.
‘Come and sit down, Dunkie,’ Lempriere barked at me commandingly. He had already disposed of a couple of guests by rapidly reassorting them each with the other’s host, and was pointing at a minute table at one side of a large fireplace. I saw that an effect of modified tete-a-tete was in prospect. There was a shallow arc of tables of varying size facing the fire, and at these the other men were disposing themselves in twos and threes. The gap was closed by a wine-railway down which decanters could be trundled in a more or less controlled way; the effect of this archaic toy was rather that of the primitive sort of contrivance for whizzing chits to a counting- house still to be found in some old-fashioned shops. ‘Did your college friends call you Dunkie?’ Lempriere demanded. And he sat down with a faint creaking of the joints.
‘Tony Mumford did at times. But I didn’t encourage it. As you know, it’s a family thing – my father’s name for me.’
‘Quite right. You’ll be Duncan except to myself.’ Thus allowing for our obscure relationship pleased Lempriere. ‘How is your aunt?’ he asked.
My aunt was dead, and I said so. This reply wasn’t a success. Lempriere, although not upset by the information, was upset that it hadn’t come to him earlier. Perhaps this was reasonable, although Aunt Charlotte’s death had taken place only a couple of months before. I started telling him what little I had myself heard of the unremarkable circumstances of the old lady’s end, but the subject had abruptly ceased to interest him. Instead, he was lecturing me on the two decanters in front of us, which it appeared I ought to have transferred to the next little table, necessarily getting to my feet for the purpose. It hadn’t been a perfectly self-evident social duty, and I might have been irritated had I not realised that this crusty performance had two faces. I was being rebuked in a manner which would have been ill-bred if directed at a near-stranger – and I was to find that Arnold Lempriere, although he could be arrogant and rude, was never that. He was badgering me over this local custom for the same reason that he was going to address me by a family name; I held a position of privilege in his regard, and must expect to receive rough treatment as a consequence. And now he effected another abrupt transition, raising a hand to the side of his mouth as if to indicate to anybody who cared to look that I was being made the recipient of a confidential aside. It was a small but theatrically vulgar gesture which only an entirely self-confident man could have made.
‘Something to say to you,’ he said. Don’t spread it around.’
Although I saw little likelihood of my doing anything of the sort, I responded suitably to this conspiratorial note by leaning towards Lempriere in an answeringly histrionic manner.
‘That old fuss-pot Penwarden,’ he said, ‘has he got at you yet about the Cressy affair?’
This question was mysterious to me. I couldn’t recall even having heard either of these names before. It seemed wise to say so. To be forthright with Lempriere was clearly the appropriate thing.
‘Arnold,’ I said, ‘I simply don’t know what you’re talking about. Who are Penwarden and Cressy? They ring no bell.’
‘You never were too good at remembering names.’ Lempriere said this with a throaty chuckle which I knew indicated a return to good humour. ‘Pull yourself together, Dunkie,’ he went on. ‘You were present on the crucial occasion. I wasn’t here myself in those immediate post-war years – which is why you and I never met until a few months ago. I was still in Washington, God help me, lying away like mad in an effort to shore up the British Empire. But I’ve heard all about it. It has been debated often enough, heaven knows.’
‘Well, then, I do remember.’ I said this in some astonishment, for the phrase ‘immediate post-war years’ had given me the clue. Lempriere was calling up an incident – and now it all came back to me, Penwarden and Cressy included – which had taken place in my first undergraduate summer term. ‘Something about some papers.’
‘The Blunderville Papers. Poor old Blobs Blunderville – he inherited his brother’s title of Mountclandon after he’d been P.M. – of course died donkeys’ years ago.’
‘It would be surprising if he hadn’t. He must have been about eighty then.’
‘Certainly he was. Well, Cressy walked off with the cream of the stuff – the key volume or file or portfolio or whatever it was – bang under everybody’s nose.’
‘So he did. It was the most marvellously impudent thing.’
‘Aha! The target area at last.’ Lempriere was delighted. ‘Penwarden was our librarian – he’s our librarian still, being that sort of man – and the larceny was the supreme shock of his life. Remains so, positively down to this day. And there you were, Dunkie, there you were! A shy but observant youth – and now the sole witness still in the land of the living.’ Lempriere, who during this colloquy had been drinking port with unconventional speed, was in high delight. ‘It’s why he voted for you, if you ask me.’
‘Voted for me?’ I repeated blankly.
‘For your university readership and college fellowship and so on. He now has his witness under his hand. So beware.’
These fantastic remarks dumbfounded me – the more so because their basis lay in fact. My father, already eminent in his profession, had been staying with the Provost; there was a dinner-party which I had been summoned to attend; after it a group of guests, Lord Mountclandon himself included, had been conducted round various college treasures, and had inspected a mass of papers (whether state papers, or family papers, I hadn’t clearly understood) which Mountclandon had lately deposited with the college for learned purposes. And Cressy, then a young don who I gathered had recently moved to another college, had deftly extracted from the aged nobleman a few vaguely courteous words which he then instantly represented as permission to walk off, there and then, with some particularly prized exhibit. That an outraged Penwarden and my uncomprehending self had been the only people within earshot of the crucial exchange I now recalled as true. I could conjure up the scene precisely as it must have been – except that now, by a common yet strange vagary of memory, I was seeing my own figure as part of the composition.
‘Does Cressy have the thing still?’ I asked.
‘Of course he has. That’s the whole point of the matter.’
‘But, Arnold, this is something
that happened more than twenty-five years ago! Isn’t it all water under the bridge?’
To this surely pertinent question I had to wait some moments for a reply. A decanter had come swaying gently down the railway to Lempriere; he seized it with no time wasted and replenished both our glasses; on this occasion I remembered to do my butler-like duty.
‘There’s no such thing.’ Lempriere, having imbibed, produced his throatiest chuckle.
‘No such thing?’
‘As water under the bridge. Not here, Dunkie. Not in a place like this.’
I found it impossible to tell whether or not Lempriere believed himself to have been talking about a matter of any real substance. Perhaps he had only been putting on a turn. On the occasion of the Gaudy I had judged him given to something of the sort, heightening the actual facts of a situation so as to make them vulnerable to his own sardonic commentary. That an act of petty academic larceny perpetrated a quarter of a century before was still a live issue among a body of intelligent men appeared to be a proposition that took some swallowing. But it might be so; I just didn’t know. In such matters I hadn’t yet got the measure of my new environment.
About Lempriere himself, however, there were some observations not difficult to make. This was his hour of the day, and this his place. There were probably few colleges in the university at which the full formalities of dessert were observed, as here, every night of the week. That it was all very much taken for granted; that the inflexible rituals transacted themselves with the most casual ease; that nobody betrayed the slightest sense of being involved in group behaviour that was decidedly odd: these were circumstances which, on a pause to think, only revealed as the more archaic the entire presented scene. It was a survival, and over it Lempriere presided as a survival himself. He had an ultimus Romanorum air – but as the evening wore on suggested less a Cassius (to whom Tacitus attached that celebrated tag) than some tyrant of a later time. He flourished a more-than-imperial toga under our noses, or exhibited (in a plainer figure) the most aggressive territorial behaviour. He commanded people, as if they were his orderlies, about the room; insisted here on silence and there on speech; was charming to obscure guests and startlingly rude to persons of consequence. The decanters circulating the little tables had vanished when empty, but their place had been taken, on a buffet at the end of the room, by others holding brandy, whisky, and the alarming fluids known in their respective countries as grappa and marc. Lempriere’s preference among these was impossible to determine; he grabbed whichever came to hand. Here, I told myself, was what my father had used disapprovingly to call a pale-faced drinker.
I also told myself how unreliable was the old tag about holding one’s liquor like a gentleman. It did seem valid for Lempriere vis-a-vis the young and unassuming; and I was sure that, without ever putting a foot wrong, he could have conducted a tipsy confabulation with a cow-wife until her herd came home. On the other hand he could have become quarrelsome in a moment, insulting on the spot anybody whom he pleased to consider as having some courtesy title to be judged his equal.
I didn’t of course spend the whole evening in dialogue with Lempriere. The little tables had been set close enough together to make general conversation possible. Indeed, the effect was rather cramped and jostling; we might almost have been the habitues of a kerbside continental cafe, manoeuvring newspapers wired to sticks with scant regard to the safety of one another’s noses. The system had been designed for a common room less populous than it had now grown to be; I was to find that on ‘big’ nights (and the present was apparently ‘small’) the minuscule tables vanished, and everybody sat round a very large one which came and went mysteriously as occasion required.
For coffee we went into another room, and mostly wandered around. It was here that I noticed a change in Lempriere. Dining in hall, he had appeared brooding and withdrawn, so that I wondered whether his hearing was now more imperfect than he cared to admit, making conversation difficult for him against a background of considerable hubbub. Seated at dessert, he had been aggressive and touchy. But now, moving confidently if with a physical stiffness from group to group, he was an easier man. It became obvious that as an institution he was liked and his tyranny accepted; people turned to him at once and rallied him or were themselves rallied; if there wasn’t any more colour in his cheeks there was a new sparkle in his eyes. Wine had its part in this. At this hour, he was a happy man.
We hadn’t been on our feet for long before James Gender, the senior of the college’s tutors in law, came up to me. We had met at the Gaudy – in circumstances wholly inappropriate to that festive occasion. I wondered whether he would refer to them now.
‘I’m sorry that this is rather a small night,’ Gender said. He spoke softly and in a tone of apology, as if it would have been more fitting if my wholly unremarkable arrival had been signalised by the entire senior body’s coming on parade. Being unaffectedly no more than a polite fiction, the sentiment passed as not in the least absurd.
‘I find it quite big enough to be going on with,’ I said laughing. ‘What an enormous place this has become.’
‘Yes, indeed,’ Gender had received my words consideringly for a moment, much as if I had offered him a pregnant and instructive remark. ‘But wait for your first meeting of the Governing Body! We burst at the seams. And more and more of us develop a flair for sustained eloquence. It must be put down to the spread of education, I suppose. But the Provost copes with it all quite admirably. He’s miles better than any High Court judge I know.’
‘I’d have guessed as much,’ I said – thus offering a polite fiction of my own. ‘I hope it’s the drill that a new member keeps mum for at least a year.’
‘For a term, perhaps. Isn’t it delightful to see Arnold so recovering his form?’ Gender must have remarked my eye on Lempriere. ‘He terrified me for years, but has a heart of gold.’
‘I’m glad to hear it. It seems I have some claim to be a distant relation of his.’
‘So has my wife. Anthea has never quite worked it out, but accepts it as gospel, all the same. Arnold has his quirks, and they can keep us on the qui vive now and then. But he’s a man of deep feeling. I think you had a glimpse of that after the Gaudy.’
‘Yes.’
‘I was so sorry that on your first return to the college you ran into that sombre affair.’
This time, I didn’t venture even on a monosyllable, for I was uncertain to what extent serious subjects were held appropriate at an advanced post-prandial hour. But Gender had drawn me up a chair in the corner where we were standing, and reached for a second chair for himself. We sat down, therefore, in a confidential manner, and for a moment he was thoughtfully silent.
‘You remember,’ he said, ‘that Arnold spoke to us on a severe note – even an acrid note – on the way we had been arranging things: shunting around the college those boys who had to remain up for examinations.’
‘To accommodate old members at the Gaudy, and because of the Commem Ball as well.’
‘Just that – the wretched Ball. Arnold went to town on it, didn’t he? We must remember that when he was being sharp with us it was before the dimensions of the disaster were known. It was before the news came that Paul Lusby was dead.’
‘Has the disaster left any sort of legacy?’
‘Well, yes. The young men have got hold of the story – the whole story, if in a distorted way – and some of them don’t like it at all.’
‘I can’t blame them.’
‘I agree. But I don’t want to see a beardless boy made into a scapegoat. It would be far from fair.’
This was my own view of the matter we seemed to be approaching. I had an instinct, however, to hold my hand for the moment. As Gender’s colleague, and the colleague of the crowd of strangers now thinning out in common room, I was a tiro. It wasn’t for me to express any attitude to a perplexed affair. This was the clearer to me because the ‘beardless boy’, Ivo Mumford, was the son of my oldest Oxford friend. Gend
er knew it to be so, and he appeared to sense my caution and approve of it. He got to his feet without haste.
‘I have to pick up Anthea,’ he said. ‘She’s been to the Playhouse to see The Good Person of Szechwan. Would you call that an impressive play?’
We exchanged some casual remarks about Bertolt Brecht, and then Gender took his leave. I glanced round the room. There weren’t many men remaining – just enough to form what seemed now a slightly uneasy circle round Lempriere.
I had a notion that Lempriere stayed on to the death every night. I had a notion, too, that on these occasions his behaviour might follow a curve controlled by all that wine. At the start what he drank livened him up, lifted the creeping depression of old age, and made him a companion of considerable charm. Later, perhaps, it dumped him and left him boring and cantankerous. My disinclination to verify this conjecture at a tail-end of the evening was strong. I went up to him and murmured a good-night; remembered to retrieve my gown; and walked out into the Great Quadrangle.
A large pale moon hung low in the western sky behind the college tower. For a moment I stood still, held by the spectacle as I had sometimes been at this hour on returning from a party, a not wholly sober boy – and as my father had been in broad daylight when it had been revealed to him that here must be the scene of my further education. The second memory amused me, just as I had managed to be amused (although I was also infinitely alarmed) when my father came home to Drummond Place with his astounding announcement.
Then I went on, intending to make my way back to the staircase in Surrey where I was again to live.
II
The west door of the college chapel opens on the Great Quadrangle and fronts the main gate; midway between these two portals, islanded in grass, stands the fountain in a big circular basin full of fish. Both grass and fountain are frequently described in guidebooks as ‘ancient’ – but ‘ancient’ is a relative term. Within the college itself the idea of ancientry attaches rather to the great chub. More exotic fish come and go at their allotted span, but this particularly large and lazy creature is believed to live forever. I have always supposed that, in the interest of so pious a persuasion, a deceased great chub is replaced only nocturnally and under the discreet superintendence of the Governing Body’s Gardens Committee. Nocturnally too, human beings are chucked into the basin every now and then, presumably as a sacrifice to Poseidon and his attendant Tritons, piled up like a disordered rugger scrum at its centre. These watery divinities, reputed Bernini’s work, had been the gift of an old member of the college who, pious also, caused them to be filched from Italy at a time when any English nobleman could do that sort of thing at will. The exuberant composition stands in odd contrast to the general massive sobriety of the scene, like a tumble of music-hall contortionists erupting upon a severely classical stage. The stodgy lime-streaked effigy of Provost Harbage, occupying a similar station in Surrey Quad, is really more congruous with the spirit of the place.
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