‘The generation gap?’
I wondered why a cliche, hopefully produced, should put it in my head that what Peter might turn out to be was a poet. He had mentioned Milton in his first words to me. But in the great Olympic pool of language, certainly, he had shown no sign of being more than a breast-stroke performer as yet.
‘Yes,’ I said, accepting the phrase. ‘Whether it really much exists. And if it does, whether it’s a constant, or whether it widens and narrows as succeeding generations trundle along. I’m going to be interested to see whether undergraduates today, for instance, are very different from what they were in my time.’
‘There’s the length of their hair.’
It would have been hard to say whether this remark of Peter’s had been intended seriously or humorously. Certainly he hadn’t smiled. It occurred to me that I hadn’t seen him smile yet.
‘Almost everything I’ve noticed so far,’ I said, ‘seems like straight recognition from the past – with just enough of surface change to keep things lively. I look at a man in the quad, and say to myself “He’s just like so-and-so”. I mean, you know, in everything I can glimpse of his manners and habits and assumptions. That rather than mere physical resemblance.’ I paused on this, and saw that I was puzzling Peter now, rather than interesting or amusing him. Perhaps foolishly, I tried something more arresting. ‘You yourself, for instance. You remind me a good deal of one of the first friends I made here. He’s a fellow of the college now, as a matter of fact.’
As I said this I was thinking, needless to say, of Cyril Bedworth, who had been just such a youth as Peter, with the same hint of the chetif about his person, and a similar liability to social unease. Allowing for certain shifts in the English class structure, a similar family background, too, might have been posited of either. The young Bedworth had been occasionally pompous, as Peter was not. But that had tied in with the flexing, as it were, of his intellectual muscles. He was an intellectual – or at least a scholar – whereas Peter was something else. I didn’t at all know what. Probably not a poet. Only I dimly felt that posterity might just conceivably hear of Peter, but not of Bedworth.
‘Do many undergraduates stay on and become dons?’
This was once more Peter’s sharp questioning note. I somehow knew that he felt he oughtn’t to deploy quite so many demands. But an unexpected opportunity had come to him, and it was on his conscience that he must make the most of it; must discover the lie of a whole unknown terrain while he had the chance. I realised something else; that I’d done what I’d actually made a mental note not to do. I understood singularly little as yet about college entrance in the nineteen-seventies, but I did suspect that a boy like this, unprovided with any special talent of the sort examiners can readily recognise, and unprovided too with anything broadly to be described as ‘connections’ of a useful kind, probably had a long way to go. It wasn’t for me to play the knowledgeable insider, and benevolently hand out facile and groundless encouragement. And I’d unfortunately let Peter pick up a false implication from what I’d carelessly said. He was the same type of person as somebody who’d brought off a successful academic career.
‘No,’ I said. “Not really. Undergraduates are many and dons are few. But then it’s also true, Peter, that careers are many and university teaching is just one of them. It’s a very specialised thing. Quite as specialised as being a poet or a painter, say.’
‘You don’t seem all that specialised to me.’
‘Probably I’m not.’ I had liked this firm retort. ‘And whether I’m going to be any good here is still all to prove. But what about your own career, Peter? What do you want to do?’ I had located my clock – perched crazily on top of half a dozen volumes of the Oxford English Dictionary – and noticed that it was almost time to see my guest out of college. And it wasn’t possible, I felt, to part without asking this obvious question.
‘I think I must come here, sir.’
‘To this college?’
‘Yes. To read law.’
‘You might certainly do worse. There’s a capital tutor in law here.’
‘I know – Mr Gender.’
‘Quite right.’ For a moment I had found myself considerably startled – less by the boy’s possessing this scrap of information than by something in his way of uttering it. ‘And you have my best wishes for bringing it off. But have you thought about any of the other colleges as alternatives?’
‘No, I haven’t. Why?’ Peter’s entire spare frame appeared to have tautened. ‘Is it particularly hard to get a place here?’
‘I’m not sure, but I don’t think so. It’s just that it’s usual to shop around a little. To send in a list of three or four colleges, I believe, in order of your preference. Your school will keep you right about that.’
‘I suppose it has already. I’ve filled in a lot of forms. I didn’t understand them very well. There’s one master who says this college isn’t much good at present. Academically, he means. Is that so?’
I knew very well it was so, but felt a decent reluctance to admit it baldly.
‘Perhaps it doesn’t perform too brilliantly at the moment in what are called the Examination Schools,’ I said. ‘But it’s the college I’d choose, all the same.’
‘Just as you did long ago?’
‘Well, no, Peter. To be honest, no. My father did the choosing for me, as a matter of fact. It was a sudden thing of his. I believe he liked the architecture.’
‘So do I.’ Peter said this to a curious effect of momentary inattention. My mentioning my father had arrested him, but now his thoughts were elsewhere. ‘Anyway, it’s all irrelevant.’ Surprisingly, the boy had got briskly to his feet. ‘I think I’ll have to say good-bye now.’ He hesitated. ‘You see, my parents have thought about it a great deal. And they want me to come. So I’ll have to try.’ Peter frowned. It was as if he felt he might be judged to have said rather a feeble thing, but himself knew that it was nothing of the kind. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘And I see they’re right. There’s nothing else for it. Please don’t bother to come out with me.’
I almost agreed to this, feeling that for some reason Peter wanted to break off our encounter at once. Then I caught his glance, and it seemed to signal something else.
‘Peter,’ I said, ‘that’s not the drill at all. Of course I’ll walk with you to the gate. Are you sure you know the way to the railway station?’
Making certain of this took us from the darkness of Surrey to the darkness of the Great Quadrangle – and that we traversed in silence. A curious conjecture which had been floating in my head had made me of a divided mind. Did the boy really want to say or disclose something more? I decided he did. The great gate was shut, but the little wicket in it stood open. I waited until we were both in the street.
‘I’ll look out,’ I said, ‘for your name in any lists that turn up. Only I don’t know it, Peter. So it’s Peter what?’
‘Peter Lusby, sir.’
‘Thank you. I thought perhaps it was.’
‘Then you know about Paul – even though you’ve only just arrived?’
‘Yes, I know about Paul. I was here – although not as a don – on the night the news came.’
‘Paul was my elder brother. Thank you very much for entertaining me so kindly, sir.’
These last Words – which somehow showed the boy as giving every ounce of himself to the task of making a good impression in this place to which he wanted to come – were almost too much for me, and I was glad of the darkness. Only just in time, I realised that he was accompanying them with a proposal to shake hands.
‘Good-bye, Peter,’ I said, and watched his slight figure dissolve into the dark.
III
In the second week of term Tony Mumford – in his middle years ‘disguised’ (in a favourite phrase of Lempriere’s) as Lord Marchpayne – came to dine with me. Tony hadn’t yet been elected an honorary fellow of the college, although his elevation to Cabinet rank now lay some months back. Simply a
s an M.A., however, he was entitled to turn up occasionally at high table and in common room if he wanted to. If he had adopted this course on the present occasion his entertainment would have been at his own expense instead of mine. But he judged it more politic, he said, that his appearing should be in response to an invitation from myself. I had summoned him to dinner, he explained casually to several men, by way of celebrating my own election to a fellowship of the workaday order.
I thought a shade poorly of this – partly because such an action would never have suggested itself to me, and partly because I judged the subterfuge must be transparent to all who had any interest in Tony and his concerns, or rather in his sole concern with Oxford at that time. Ivo Mumford, who occupied his father’s old rooms in Surrey directly above those which had now become mine, was under threat of banishment as the consequence of being obstinately unaddicted to passing examinations. Tony was here now to discover – from me, if possible – how the situation was developing. He had involved himself in the issue to an extent which I judged wildly injudicious. But I soon saw there had been nothing injudicious in the fiction of his having received that invitation from me. People approved of it in the interest of the convenances. And Tony was a model of good behaviour. He managed to talk to quite a number of men – without exuberance, and even without the charm which was one of his professional assets in simpler company. No breath of domestic concern exhaled from him. He might have been a comfortable bachelor in his favourite club. Nor did he linger over his wine. As soon as two or three departures had taken place he gave me a wink and we went off to my rooms. We settled down with whisky in front of the fire.
‘I remember who had these rooms in our time,’ Tony said. ‘We called him the White Rabbit. An elderly queer.’
‘He was one thing and another, no doubt. A mediaeval historian, for instance. His name was Tindale. I used to see something of him when he had retired to Amalfi and I was up at Ravello.’
‘Men used to climb into college by way of the coal-yard and through these rooms. This Tindale got a kick out of watching them as he lay in bed. Sometimes he’d pretend to wake up and catch one. He’d offer him the choice of being reported to the Dean and gated for the rest of the term, or engaging in some esoteric flagellatory ritual on the spot.’
‘What utter rubbish! It’s the kind of dirty yarn people make up at drunken parties.’
‘So it is – and rather in my poor old father’s style.’ For some moments we smoked and sipped in silence over this accurate but unfilial remark. ‘Damn it, Duncan!’ Tony then said abruptly. ‘The sheer muddle-headedness of it!’
‘Muddle-headedness of what?’
‘Having the boy back for a term, and then turfing him out if he fails to clear their bloody sticks.’
‘I can’t say that I quite see that.’ This confusion of mind in a legislator disturbed me. The college is a place of education, you know. That’s a rock-bottom fact.’
‘The boy’s here under his own steam – or mine.’
‘He’s nothing of the kind. I’ll bet Ivo touches the tax-payer for his little minimum grant. To say nothing of the college endowments.’
‘Ivo’s not a scholar; he’s not on the foundation of the place at all, any more than I was.’ Tony grinned at me. ‘We know that you were, young Pattullo.’
‘It doesn’t make all that difference. Everybody gets tuppence for his penny, more or less. From generations of benefactors concerned to bring up the youth of England in virtuous and gentle discipline. That sort of thing.’
‘I know you don’t think there’s been much that’s virtuous and gentle about Ivo’s ways of late. But he’s my son.’
‘I’m sorry.’ And I really was sorry at having produced so tactless a quote as this from Spenser or Sidney or whoever it was. ‘You must just take it that I’m on Ivo’s side – if it comes to his having a side. That’s because I feel he’s had a raw deal. But it’s a raw deal from blind fortune, not from the authorities of this college.’
‘Dunkie, thank you very much. I know what you mean.’
I was silent for a space, for I didn’t think Tony did know quite all I meant. He was very aware that Ivo, when visiting his grandfather at Otby, had been implicated in a rustic gang-bang hazardously like rape. He was probably unaware that a less censurable folly on his son’s part had through sheer misfortune led indirectly to Paul Lusby’s suicide. He was certainly unaware – since it had blown up only within the last ten days – that a breath of this lesser folly had got around, and that at present, Ivo wasn’t too popular as a result. What to my mind it all added up to was the good sense of Ivo’s clearing out and making a fresh and unacademic start elsewhere. The Mumfords would have denied they were wealthy, but they were by any rational standard unassailably prosperous. Their heir – and Ivo was that – was free to pursue any course of life he pleased. Nevertheless, and although the sum worked out like that, I knew in my heart I’d have to back Tony if I couldn’t deflect him. But at deflecting him I’d have a damned good try.
‘Look here!’ I said. ‘You bloody well surprise me, Tony. You belong to the great world of affairs and high policy. That’s where your abilities have taken you. You might expect to become P.M. if you hadn’t been so thick as to accept your idiotic life peerage. Can you renounce it, by the way?’
‘No, I can’t.’ Tony, who wasn’t above vanity, responded promisingly to this treatment. ‘It seems a chap can’t renounce what he’s himself agreed to be created. That’s built into the Act. Fair enough, I suppose.’
‘There could be another Act.’
‘So there could.’ Tony now looked at me warily. ‘We’re getting off the point.’
‘The point is that you’re overestimating the importance of Oxford for your son in the most astonishingly naive way. The proud suburban papa. It’s quite comical. And it’s not as if Ivo were being absolutely singled out. There are several others in the same boat, or a very similar one. The fact is, the place seems to be trying to pull up a bit on the academic side.’
‘Bugger the academic side. And I know there are others. You told me on the Gaudy night about one. A young lout called Junkin.’
It was with difficulty that I kept my temper. This class stuff of Tony’s, I told myself, was the more insufferable in the light of his public speeches, which I had taken to reading occasionally since the renewal of our intimacy. In Tony’s speeches we were all – gentle and simple, rich and poor – chums together, comrades in some great patriotic task.
‘I thought it uncommonly useful,’ Tony was saying – surprisingly on a note of gratitude. ‘Your giving me the tip-off about that. I wrote to the good Mr Junkin, as a matter of fact.’
‘You wrote to Nicolas Junkin!’ It was in blank astonishment that I stared at Tony.
‘No, no. I wrote to Junkin pere, suggesting that we put on a common front.’
‘I see. Chums together.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. I saw it as rather a good move. Two fathers from widely differing walks of—’
‘How on earth did you run the boy’s father to earth?’
‘That’s just the word for it. Indeed, you might say deep into the ground. Some godforsaken place called Cokeville. And of course it’s perfectly easy to get hold of a bit of information like that.’
‘I’ll bet you got a dusty answer.’
‘A coal-dusty answer. Dad’s a miner. Can’t frame a sentence. Can’t spell.’ Tony grinned at me, perfectly aware of being insufferable. ‘After all those millions spent on the blessings of national education! And he wrote on something that looked like bumf.’
‘Perhaps it was bumf. Nick’s father may have been feeling like that.’
‘You’re dead right. And it was a damned good letter.’ Tony visibly enjoyed this volte-face. ‘The complete brush-off. Nick’s affairs were Nick’s business. And if Oxford didn’t like Nick or Nick didn’t like Oxford, there were a dozen useful jobs waiting for him any day of the week.’
&nb
sp; ‘Just what I keep on trying to tell you about Ivo, Tony.’
‘Ivo isn’t Junkin, Duncan. Ivo’s been elected to the Uffington.’
I knew very well that Tony couldn’t offer a remark like this seriously. He was simply using it as a piece of nonsense with which to bait me. Still, he did really believe that society would cease to make sense if it ceased to allow for very varying degrees of privilege. And he had a contempt for those in any station within it who didn’t play for their own side. I saw that all this had been hardening in him with the years, obliterating – no, not really quite obliterating – his old power of mocking himself as zestfully as he mocked other people.
Recalling the duties of hospitality, I poured Tony more whisky. I remembered an early belief of mine that it simply amused him to pretend that he got drunk rather easily. There had seemed no other way of accounting for the fact that he sometimes appeared to forget that he was drunk. Later, I had been obliged to credit him with the odd power of turning from genuinely tipsy to completely sober at will. Perhaps this outrages toxicology: I don’t know. Certainly – expense apart – tipping a good deal of liquor into him had long ago ceased to worry me.
‘The boy’s uncommonly quiet.’
I was at sea for a moment before this remark, and then I remembered that Ivo was presumably directly above us as we sat. It was as if Tony would have been better pleased if his son had been engaged in wholesome uproar. Conceivably his instinct was sound. And certainly here was the moment for me to advance something new.
‘I’d say he’s been rather unobtrusive since the start of term,’ I began cautiously. ‘And I ought to mention I haven’t yet even made his acquaintance. I’ve felt a father’s friend ought not to rush him.’
‘Quite right.’ Tony nodded approvingly. Approval was always at least his provisional reaction to anything seemingly of a cunning cast. ‘Although I’m sure the boy’s looking forward to meeting you.’
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