I paused again by the fountain, but there wasn’t a fin to be seen. There was a light high in the cavernous archway above the main gate. The Great Quadrangle, its crenellations faintly defined by moon and stars, itself lay in the complete darkness which the college porters were for some reason always resolute to achieve at night. In Surrey or Howard or Rattenbury, numerous lighted windows would attest the wakefulness of young men conducting late parties, or discussing Chomsky or Marcuse, or making a belated start on their weekly essay, due on the following morning. But the Great Quadrangle is held in the main too august for the accommodation of undergraduates. It already slumbered in a senior members’ calm.
And yet there was one further gleam of light, a slender perpendicular line that seemed to define the chapel door, slightly ajar. I didn’t know if there was anything unusual about this. The zeal of college chaplains sometimes conduces to minor religious manifestations at unlikely hours. As I glanced across the quad I thought I heard tenuous sounds supporting the conjecture that something of the sort might be in train. Yes – I told myself – it was a muted organ music that floated to me through the October night, faintly swelling and faintly fading, as if a small wind was wandering in distant caverns.
I forgot about going to bed, and walked across the quad – the new boy whose business it was unobtrusively to acquaint himself with what goes on. The door was certainly open and the organ was being played, although in a subdued way. I saw at once that nothing of a devotional order was in question. The chapel, so surprisingly lofty and large by Oxford standards, was dimly lit and deserted. I remembered that music at night was nothing out of the way in college; instruments of one sort or another abounded in people’s rooms; nobody paid much attention to any rules there might be for restricting the hours at which they could be played. It seemed probable that somebody, perhaps one of the organ scholars – of whom there were always, I think, two or three – was treating himself to a little quiet practice while nobody was around. I walked the full length of the aisle until the altar steps were in front of me. It was into a gathering obscurity; the light, such as it was, came only from somewhere near the door by which I had entered. The organ continued to play, but now more softly still.
‘It’s like Milton.’
These words were uttered from behind my shoulder. They had been spoken by a young voice, not of the most cultivated sort, and conveyed an impression of involuntary utterance. I turned round.
‘It’s like Milton.’ The young man – or boy, rather – whom I now faintly distinguished repeated his words apparently out of mere confusion at having spoken at all. ‘Only I can’t remember.’
I could. I wouldn’t have been Albert Talbert’s pupil otherwise. And it was to relieve a certain awkwardness that I now quoted II Penseroso.
‘The high embowed roof,
With antique pillars massy-proof,
And storied windows richly dight,
Casting a dim religious light.
There let the pealing organ blow . . .
That’s it, isn’t it? Even the organ laid on.’
‘Yes, sir. Thank you.’
The boy’s confusion had increased. I tried to disperse it with another question.
‘Does someone often play it late at night?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t belong here at all.’
I had taken it for granted that this was an undergraduate member of the college. It now seemed a little odd that a strange youth should be wandering round the chapel at so late an hour, like a disoriented passenger in a deserted railway terminus. It is improbable, nevertheless, that I was so uncivil as to hint mistrust or surprise. But the boy spoke again, as if to explain himself.
‘I just came for the day. With a party from school. Kids mainly. But I’ve stayed on. I wanted to see a bit more. There’s a train back to London at midnight.’
‘It’s an uncommonly uncomfortable one, I’m afraid.’
‘Oh, I don’t mind that.’ The boy had taken my harmlessly sympathetic remark for a rebuke. ‘And they let me in at the door, the gate. I . . . I gave my name. The gentleman was very nice.’ The boy was suddenly alarmed. ‘They won’t have locked it up for the night? I shall get out?’
I’m pretty sure you will. People seem to come and go at all hours nowadays. In any case, I can let you out myself.’
‘Sir – are you one of the dons?’ The boy’s eyes had widened on me in the gloom.
‘Yes, but I’m quite a new one.’ My eyes were growing accustomed to the half-light, and I could now see my companion less uncertainly. He was slight and very pale. He wore some sort of blazer and an ugly striped tie. I had a sense that his long hair, which seemed raven black, was cleaner than long hair often tends to be. And he was alert and bright-eyed. Once you’d noticed his eyes, I thought, you’d cease to notice his complexion.
The organ had stopped, and the light had dimmed further, fading out the chapel walls like the backdrop on a darkening stage. There was a sound of footsteps, and I saw that a young man was approaching us from the farther end of the nave.
‘Good evening,’ he said, in an accent not like that of my new acquaintance, ‘I hope you didn’t mind my playing that not too well.’
‘Not at all. It completed an effect. I enjoyed it.’
‘I’m afraid the organ isn’t in too good fleece. Our organist says that playing it is like eating stale chocolate. But it’s more than good enough for me, I need hardly say.’ The young man – politely diffident, but very much in charge of the place – was glancing curiously at the boy standing in shadow beside me. ‘I’m terribly sorry,’ he went on, ‘but I’m afraid I’ll have to lock up. Do you mind?’
‘Of course not – not if the recital is over.’
‘Then we can go out together.’ The young man had produced a large key. He stood aside with an air more markedly polite still; there must have come into his head the thought that we might be after the chapel plate. ‘I’m almost sure that you and your son will find the gate open, sir. But I’ll come across with you just in case.’ His eye fell on the gown draped over my shoulder. ‘Oh, I say!’ he said. ‘It looks as if I’ve got this wrong.’
‘Not a bit. But we’ll certainly manage under our own steam.’
We moved towards the door. The young man turned off a final light, and organ and the vague architecture backing it vanished together. Once in the quad, he said good-night in proper form and walked away.
‘It was a bit of luck, that was,’ the boy said. ‘Meeting you, that is. Otherwise, he’d have had me in the nick, if you ask me.’
‘I don’t think it would have been as bad as that.’ I had found the naive remark attractive. ‘Look, it’s not nearly time for your train. Will you come and have some coffee?’
There was a second’s silence. We couldn’t see each other, but I had a sense of the boy as having to brace himself before this sudden invitation into the unknown.
‘Yes, please,’ he said.
Between the Great Quadrangle and Surrey there is a glorified tunnel: an elaborately vaulted affair the numerous bosses of which are embellished with brilliantly gilded and painted armorial bearings of heaven knows whom. Their suggestion is neither ecclesiastical (bishops and their like own only a limited repertory of mitres and crooks and keys) nor academic. Many fellows of the college have doubtless been armigerous in their time, with no need to declare, like Baldock in Marlowe’s play, that they fetched their gentry from Oxford, not from heraldry. Possibly some of these contribute to the display, but I imagine that what is commemorated in the main is one or another connection that the college can claim with persons of altogether more exalted station. However that may be, this tunnel is one of the prime nuisances of the place, since throughout the year herded droves of tourists treat it much as if it were the Sistine Chapel, so that it becomes impossible to move unimpeded from the one quadrangle to the other. But now all this injudicious ostentation was shrouded in night, like a casket closed. The darkness was so entire that I had to
take my chance companion by the arm to guide him through. The action made me realise that there was no single area within the spreading curtilage of the college that I would have failed to traverse confidently even if blindfolded, pinioned and being led to execution. Like the ability to ride a bicycle or sit a horse, it was a skill, it seemed, that one simply didn’t lose.
It was quite a walk; we couldn’t very well accomplish it in silence; at the same time I felt I mustn’t simply fire questions at the invisible boy. His having recalled Milton came back to me, and what I now produced was some allusion, obvious rather than apt, from that literary quarter. It may have been no more than ‘dark, dark to me’ or ‘this dark opprobrious den’ or ‘through utter and through middle darkness borne’ – something like that. Whatever it was, I perhaps expected the boy to cap it in some way. Bandying quotations had been rather the thing with us when I was his age. But I had a feeling that he didn’t catch on to my effort; what came through his grasped elbow was a suggestion of renewed alarm. It was natural enough. He had been snatched up by a total stranger of great age (as he would consider me to be) and was being hurried off he didn’t at all know to what. He might even suspect it as being with some improper intent. This grotesque thought, just slipping through my head, made me realise, as I often did, that the minds of a whole young generation were almost closed to me. It was a poor position for a professional playwright. Some notion of remedying this defect, I knew, had been among the motives prompting me to my present belated entry into the educational sphere. I wasn’t in fact old; I wasn’t a bit old; but I was – if prematurely – coming to feel that the elderly were less interesting than the young.
At least there was a light on the staircase – my old staircase. I had taken over the tutor’s set on the ground floor formerly occupied by Dr Tindale (eminent authority on Pope Zosimus and familiarly called the White Rabbit), whom I had known slightly when I was an undergraduate, and rather more familiarly in Italy later on. Tindale, retired from his fellowship long ago, was now dead. So far as I knew, this wasn’t yet the condition of anybody else who had been on the staircase in my time. I was only beginning, nevertheless, to shake off a feeling of moving among ghosts. Not that there was anything the least eerie about the present moment. On the contrary, there was a great deal of thoroughly mundane noise, and it came from my former rooms on the first floor, now in the occupancy of that Nicolas Junkin whom I had met on the night of the Gaudy. It was evident that Junkin was giving a party. Probably it was a bottle party, and I wondered whether Junkin’s guests would leave their empty bottles behind them – thereby contributing their quota to the impressive array of such exhausted receptacles which I recalled as the principal ornament of his abode.
It suddenly struck me that the boy at my side might be terrified by this uproar ahead of us. Such ebullitions of vinous jollity take a little getting used to. One has to learn, too, to draw conclusions from certain subtleties of timbre not to be distinguished by an unhabituated ear. I recalled that I had myself done this pretty quickly. As a mere matter of self- preservation, the presence or absence of menace is the first discrimination one has to achieve. (When very new, I remembered, one moved about the place nocturnally as alert for small signs as a savage threading a darkness inhabited by alien tribes.) Later on, finer distinctions can be made. There are parties which, on simple auditory evidence, one knows at once that one may join if one wants to; there are others even a distant susurration from which declares that this would be censurable and indiscreet. Nowadays, it occurred to me, the involvement or non-involvement of ladies must constitute a larger factor than heretofore in the manner in which such festivities are comported. I thought I could, in fact, hear girls’ voices from Nick Junkin’s room.
‘These affairs tend to happen at the beginning of term, and then again at the end. It’s a bit quieter in between.’ I said this by way of reassuring my young companion. Perhaps, too, I wanted to vindicate the character of the college as a scene of orderly living and intent study. The boy might be thinking or dreaming of coming up to Oxford himself, and I should have disliked his concluding that this particular bear-garden was not for him. ‘As a matter of fact,’ I continued, ‘the row’s happening in what were my own rooms when I was an undergraduate. But I’m down here now. So come in.’ And I opened my door and turned on the light.
‘Can I give you a hand, sir?’
The boy had asked this after a single glance, and the suggestion was certainly justified by the state of the room. I’d forgotten how much it was still in disarray; it might have been tumbled about by rowdies (by hearties, the generation before my own would have said) expressing their disapproval of some unpopular man. Not much of the furniture had got itself rationally placed; all was higgledy-piggledy, like an overcrowded stage gone hopelessly out of one’s control. Big pictures were stacked against the wall and little ones lay on sofas and chairs; books had emerged in intimidating numbers from crates without yet having got on shelves.
‘Yes, please,’ I said, since so prompt an offer couldn’t be turned down. ‘You get a couple of chairs into reasonably functional shape, and I’ll find the coffee and things. I do at least know where they are. By the way, my name’s Duncan Pattullo. What’s yours?’
‘Peter, sir.’
This was only a semi-communication, but I supposed it probably to follow a convention current with the young. I was about to ask Peter some further question. But he got in his own before me.
‘Have you really only just arrived? Not, I mean, been in another part of the college for a bit first?’
‘I’m brand-new, Peter. This will be only the second night I’ve slept in the college for something like twenty-five years.’
‘Have you been a don somewhere else, then?’
‘No – nowhere else. I’ve never been one before. I’ve made my living by writing plays.’
What this information kindled in Peter seemed to be a renewal of alarm. It certainly wasn’t any spark of recognition, and he was pretending to nothing of the kind. For a moment he was at a loss for a further question. But then he found something.
‘For a theatre, sir?’
‘Yes, for a theatre – when they’ll have one.’ I had been at a loss myself before remembering that most plays are written for the phantasmal world of television. ‘Are you keen on drama?’ I asked.
‘Yes, sir. I’m in the school dramatic society. We did Measure for Measure last term. By Shakespeare.’
It struck me that Peter wasn’t as young as I had taken him to be in the dim light of the chapel. If university entrance was what he was after it couldn’t he far ahead of him. Perhaps one might ascribe to nervousness that last piece of superfluous information. Even so, there seemed a slight presumption that he wasn’t strikingly intelligent. Yet striking in some way I did obscurely feel him to be. He would go off to catch his train, I supposed, without my learning anything very much about him, and we were unlikely ever to meet again. But I’d remember him for some time to come.
I had at least now got him sat down. He perched on the edge of his chair, although it didn’t happen to be one in which such a posture is at all easy. Whenever I got up to fiddle with the coffee percolator or open a tin of biscuits, Peter sprang to his feet too. It wasn’t restful, but to tell him to relax might have been to suggest that he’d got his manners wrong. And if I wasn’t clear that he was at all clever I had no doubt whatever of his being more than commonly sensitive; every now and then the needle quivered on the open dial of his face. We drank coffee and munched biscuits. Peter was in too much anxiety about the crumbs.
‘Is it tremendously exciting?’ he asked suddenly. ‘Being here like this. Coming back.’
‘Do you know, I believe it is?’ The boy had asked something interesting, and I showed it. I hadn’t acknowledged it to myself – not in the least. But, really and truly, it’s exactly as when I came here first, when I wasn’t much older than you are.’ I paused, and saw that this time the boy was alert and on the ball. �
�All easy assurance on top, and an air of modestly dissimulating the fact that I already owned the place. It looked as if I couldn’t be knocked down – like those plastic toys wobbling on lead-filled bottoms – but in reality I was just staving off panic underneath. That was me then, Peter, and I’m not sure it isn’t me now. However, I remember it doesn’t last long. Have some more coffee.’
Peter passed his cup with a slightly shaking hand. He had listened to this small conversational liveliness with his striking eyes rounded on me.
‘I do know,’ he said, ‘it can be rather life or death.’
I found this remark, or the manner in which it was uttered, disturbing. It was as if I was suddenly in the presence of something unknown. So I shifted ground.
‘I don’t think it’s true that our responses to things don’t change. As individuals and with the years, I mean. Life would be pretty boring if they didn’t. Still, odd continuities and recurrences sometimes assert themselves. But there’s another question: how much – in twenty years, or thirty, say – we all change together.’
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