‘I’ve just glimpsed him on the staircase. He’s a handsome lad – a good deal better-looking than you were, my boy.’
‘But I had a gorgeous figure, Duncan. In a manly upstanding way, of course. Don’t you remember our glowering at each other in the intimite of those baths? I must admit you were pretty smashing yourself in your slender pride. In fact, I couldn’t trust myself to speak. My eyes failed. Oed’ und leer das Meer.’
This was the old Tony – mocking, and showing off literary graces he affected to despise. It was a line of talk, too, with which it had particularly amused him to shock Cyril Bedworth. At the moment, I wasn’t buying it.
‘As a matter of fact,’ I said, ‘I sent Ivo a note inviting him to drop in here tomorrow for lunch. He hasn’t replied. But perhaps he’ll turn up.’
Tony frowned. Unlike his snarling father, he had no natural relish of bad manners.
‘I’m sorry about that,’ he said. ‘Ivo’s still upset, I expect, over that wretched affair at Otby – that, and being hustled off to New York. Not to speak of being persecuted by a pack of pedants over their rotten exam. But it will blow over, sure enough.’
‘I suppose it may. But, as a matter of fact, there’s something else blowing up. And I’d better tell you about it.’ I watched Tony slightly tense himself in his chair; in his inner mind, I believed, he must always be lurkingly apprehensive over the fortunes of his son. It was probably one of the things his son had to contend with. ‘Have you heard of somebody called Lusby?’ I asked.
‘I’m sure I haven’t.’
‘Paul Lusby. He was a contemporary of Ivo’s. An open scholar.’
‘What the devil do you mean – “was”? Ivo’s only been here a year. Has this Lusby been kicked out even quicker than they want to kick out him?’
‘It’s “was” because Lusby is dead, Tony. He mucked his Prelim at the end of last term. He had – well, a different attitude to such things from Ivo’s. He hailed from somewhere in the east end of London – a godforsaken place, you’d probably call it. His people were, I imagine, as simple as they come. Young Lusby’s failure seemed the end of the world to him. It was the end of the world. He went home and killed himself.’
‘By God, there’s something there!’ Tony had sat up, excited and almost triumphant. ‘How splendid of you, Duncan, to get hold of that! It’s no end of a lever in the business of getting the place’s mania for examinations well and truly ditched. What the hell are you staring at me like that for?’
‘It’s that you haven’t heard the whole story.’ No doubt I had looked at Tony with a certain horror, but I was far from wanting to suggest alienated sympathy. I took a moment to consider. ‘Lusby,’ I said, ‘wasn’t all that tough. It wasn’t a point, I suppose, that would enter Ivo’s head. So Ivo’s first piece of bad luck was there.’
‘Ivo? What has this—’
‘Just listen. Ivo dared this boy Lusby to gate-crash the Commem Ball. I think he actually made a bet with him.’
‘I can’t believe a word of it!’ It was almost as if Tony intuitively sensed the shape of what was coming. ‘How could Ivo go out of his way to make a bet with some brat from Shoreditch or wherever? He just wouldn’t know the chap. It doesn’t make sense.’
‘That’s the heart of the trouble, really. I think your son does normally keep within a smallish set of his own. But you’re mistaken, by the way, if you think there’s still a great gulf fixed between one sort of schoolboy and another coming up to this place. It took me no more than a week to notice that. Of course it blows around still – the old way of feeling and acting in such matters. But to the majority it’s not a bit the thing. The feeling’s for a get-together. Perhaps it’s no more than a kind of fraternising in No Man’s Land on Christmas Day: I don’t know. England at large is still, to my mind, the most ghastly class-ridden hole – though one wouldn’t think it from your speeches, Tony. Anyway, just here and now a bit of a thaw’s a fact. Only yesterday a freezing young Wykehamist came to see me about some course or other. Or that’s how he seemed to me. But it turned out he’d spent the long vac wandering through Turkey with our Cokeville Junkin.’
‘Will you just spare me those sociological musings, and get on with it?’ Tony was suddenly savage. ‘Just what is this, for Christ’s sake?’
‘It’s just that Ivo is rather in a rearguard in these things. An Uffington type, no doubt. So he was on record as having gone much out of his way in cultivating Paul Lusby and luring him into a senseless wager.’ I paused on this. ‘It was an awkward aspect of the thing – this element of a sort of wantonness was – when it went wrong to such a ghastly extent. Just how’s soon told. Lusby spent a purgatorial night lurking round the Ball in a borrowed dinner-jacket; when he got to sleep it was unfortunately in the examination room; he slid from panic to panic, bolted home, and made away with himself, as I’ve said.’
‘And that’s all?’
‘That’s all. Except that a certain blame is attaching itself to Ivo in the popular mind. I’m sure he knows that by now. It’s a miserable story. Ivo behaved thoughtlessly, and Lusby with considerable folly. But what chiefly stares at one is hideous bad luck all round.’
‘Thank you for telling me about it.’ Tony looked tired and pale, and I was reaching for the whisky decanter when he suddenly lifted his chin. ‘It makes it clearer than ever—doesn’t it?—that Ivo mustn’t quit. One doesn’t run away from a thing like that.’
‘I don’t see there’s any question of his quitting or running away. It’s only a matter of not fighting against some normal college rule about men who prove uninterested in academic work.’
‘That’s not my view of the matter, Duncan. And we mustn’t overestimate the odds against us. All this will blow over too. I admit Lusby’s story shook me a bit. But it won’t reverberate. Today’s stink blows away tomorrow. That’s a rule in politics, and it’s valid in private life too.’
I remained silent but unsurprised. The spectacle of Tony Mumford regaining confidence was familiar to me from long ago. What he said on such occasions was frequently dead silly. But, with himself, it commonly worked.
‘After all,’ he went on, ‘who are these Lusbys anyway? Good little people, no doubt, when they don’t bite off more than God meant them to chew. I never heard of them before; now there’s been this; I don’t suppose we’ll ever hear their name again.’ Tony struggled from his chair. ‘I think I’ll go up and have a word with the boy,’ he said.
I nodded dumbly. Although accustomed to bursts of arrogance from Tony Mumford which would have done credit to Cedric Mumford himself, I had found these last remarks hard to take. There had been, indeed, a hint of the old self-mockery in them, but the irony had gone harsh or sour. I was glad that, for the moment, Tony was leaving my room. I watched his hand go out to the door-knob.
‘Good God!’ he cried. ‘What’s that?’
There could be no question of what it was. Over the past minute or so there had been a certain amount of noise in the quad, and now something had gone through a window – undoubtedly a window direcdy above our heads. The crash was followed – even as we glanced swiftly at each other, recalling former days – by a rough chorus of voices outside.
‘Lusby!’ the voices shouted. ‘Lusby, Lusby, Lusby!’
There was silence. It was broken by a sound from above – this time, that of a heavy door being closed. Ivo Mumford had sported his oak. I didn’t blame him.
‘They’re drunk,’ Tony said. He turned to stare at me, and I saw that his face was drained of blood.
‘Of course they’re drunk.’
‘I’ll have the skin off them!’ Tony was looking wildly round my room as if for some instrument that might effect this purpose. Then, abandoning so unpromising a quest, he flung open the door. It was as he was about to hurl himself through it that I caught his arm.
‘No, Tony, in heaven’s name! This is Ivo’s thing. If his father broke in on it, it would never be forgotten.’
For a momen
t we actually struggled in the doorway. Then the shouting began again. This time, it was unintelligible: a mere senseless yelling and howling amid which one or another obscenity would make itself momentarily heard. It was rather frightening. To anyone without memories of the more or less harmless coming and going of such savageries in an Oxford college at night it might have been very frightening indeed. But now there came yet another sound from above – that of a window-sash being thrown vigorously upward.
‘Scrub it, you rotten bastards.’ The voice, which was that of Ivo’s nearest neighbour, Nick Junkin, was measured rather than vehement. ‘Piss off, you filthy indecent skunks,’ it went on, ‘and take your dirty pong with you. Go home, you stinking shits, you paltry wet wicks. Do you hear? Or do yourselves a favour. Light a match and take a look at yourselves, you daft boozy prats. You’d be highly surprised.’
Junkin’s vigorous advice continued with undiminished resource for some time, first into a dead or stunned silence, and then amid the unmistakable sounds of shuffling and retreating feet.
‘That’s right,’ Junkin said – more loudly but still on a level note. ‘Have a bit of common, and go to bed. Good-night, sweet buggers all, good-night, good-night.’ He banged down the window on what was clearly an empty quad.
‘Do you think I ought to go up?’ Tony asked. The extent to which he had been shaken was evident in the fact of his consulting me. I don’t even know if Ivo knows I’m here. So would it be the tactful thing?’
I suppose that fathers and sons, equally with persons in any other relationship, have to consider being tactful to each other from time to time. There was something rather forlorn about Tony’s question, all the same. And it wasn’t one I could answer – or at least wasn’t one I ought to answer. I said I lacked any basis of experience for giving advice on the matter.
‘You won’t forgive yourself—will you, Duncan?—for not having kids.’ Coming at me like this was a sign that Tony was rallying with characteristic speed. ‘I don’t suppose your bitch of a wife had much idea of them.’
‘My wife certainly hadn’t much idea of them. I’m not aware I ever told you she was a bitch.’
‘One hears things, Duncan – one hears things.’ Tony offered this cheerful impertinence absently, his mind still on his problem. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I think I won’t go up. The boy may have settled down to work. You remember how we sometimes worked into the small hours, Duncan? Rather fun, really.’
I said I did remember – although in fact my recollection attached the practice more to myself than Tony. As for the likelihood of Ivo’s being at his books now, it would only be some demotic phrase of Junkin’s that could do justice to the absurdity of the idea. But how curious – I told myself – that Tony, so ready to shout at the drop of a handkerchief that young men of spirit need take no thought of study, should in fact in his heart long for a regenerate Ivo singly concerned to take a First in his School. Tony, I had recently decided, was an odd man out among the Mumfords. His father owned a simple and straightforward contempt for all matters intellectual and artistic. His son, I assumed perhaps rashly, belonged to the same uncompromising camp. Much in Tony’s personality was to be accounted for by a youth spent running with the hare and hunting with the hounds.
‘The chap who pitched into them,’ Tony said. ‘Do you know who he was?’
‘Of course. That was Junkin. Didn’t I tell you he was in my old rooms, across the landing from Ivo’s?’
‘Yes, of course.’ Tony laughed robustly; his tension was leaving him. ‘A chip of the old block, your Junkin. It was a damned good speech, like his father’s damned good letter. Well, I must be off. Nice of you to stand me a dinner.’
‘Yes, wasn’t it?’
‘And – look, Duncan – you’ll keep an eye on things?’
‘Yes.’
‘Tell me how the land lies, and the wind blows?’
‘Yes.’
‘There’s something you might have a notion of already.’ We had left my rooms now and were walking through the near-darkness of Surrey; Tony lowered his voice, as if the mouldering walls might have ears. ‘If it came to a show-down, who are the men we could reckon on?’
‘A show-down about Ivo and his exam? I don’t think the thing would work that way: a grand meeting of the Governing Body, or whatever it’s called, to decide the fate of Ivo Mumford. That kind of decision is left to college officers, I imagine, or to some committee of tutors.’
‘Not if it became involved with an issue of policy.’
‘Tony, you’re hopeless. Get back to your Cabinet and run the country.’
‘Not very helpful, old boy.’
‘All right. Fair enough. I’ll try to answer your question. James Gender.’
‘And why James Gender?’
‘He was Lusby’s tutor.’
‘I don’t quite get that. What sort of a chap is this Gender?’
‘Liberal minded in a perfectly sincere way, but thoroughly conservative and traditional at bottom – even, it might be, reactionary.’
‘Sounds admirable.’
‘His pupil’s suicide utterly horrified him, and he’s determined no further ill shall flow from it, or even seem to flow from it. If Ivo were in any sense made an example of on the score of his gross neglect of his work, Gender would see a danger of its being thought that the college was getting rid of the boy largely on quite a different score.’
‘The Lusby thing?’
‘Yes, the Lusby thing. Gender might feel that justice would be done simply by turfing out Ivo for being thoroughly idle. But it mightn’t be seen to be done. The Lusby affair would float vaguely in people’s minds; it would come to be thought that Ivo had been sent down partly at least on account of it; we’d be criticised for that; and, finally, Ivo himself might be suffering a kind of double penalty. That’s why I think Gender would be for keeping your academically undeserving son quietly around.’
‘Anybody else?’
‘Arnold Lempriere.’
‘Good Lord! I’ve been told he’s a renegade old rascal. Lempriere egalite, so to speak, all for sending public-school boys to the scaffold.’
‘He says this and that. But he was your father’s tutor.’
‘Absolute nonsense! He couldn’t possibly have been anything of the sort.’
‘Indeed he was – although they must have been almost of an age.’
‘And the memory of this will constrain him to back Ivo?’
‘Not exactly. He didn’t, I’m afraid, form a high regard for your father.’
‘I’ll bet he didn’t.’ Tony thus concurred without discomposure. ‘So what?’
‘Well, he affects to have your own contempt for the excessive importance ascribed to examinations nowadays. And he’s dead against the idea that there was any real malice in Ivo’s manoeuvring of Lusby. I got these things out of Lempriere the morning after the Gaudy. The old chap grabbed a role really. I think he’d stick to it.’
‘It’s progress – solid progress.’ Tony said this with a seriousness which revealed to me again, rather depressingly, how entirely he’d absorbed himself in this not very significant business of his son’s immediate future. ‘But here’s my bus.’
Tony’s bus was a large official limousine of the kind one sees rolling in and out of Downing Street. Now it was gliding from a discreetly shadowy corner of the Great Quadrangle as if in response to some remote-control mechanism inside Tony’s head. A porter was hauling open the big gates. Tony gave me no more than a casual wave by way of farewell, and climbed into the car. There was somebody in it already besides the chauffeur: a secretary, it might have been, or a detective. As the car began to move forward again, two men on motorcycles also emerged from the shadows. I could see a police car, doing nothing in particular, on the other side of the street.
England had become a country in which bombs were liable to go off, and in matters of security Tony no doubt had to do as he was told. But as the cavalcade disappeared into the darkness I was struc
k by the odd contrast between his going now and Peter Lusby’s going the week before. It occurred to me I hadn’t told Tony that in addition to a Paul Lusby dead, there was a Peter Lusby alive. Peter Lusby wasn’t his problem. But he was certainly due to be somebody’s.
IV
I was awakened next morning by what might have been the crack of a pistol in the middle distance. Plot, the successor to my old scout Jefkins on Surrey Four, had let the bedroom blind up with a snap of its roller. Having achieved this disturbance, he pulled the blind down again by the three or four inches prescriptively approved by well-trained servants. I opened my eyes (in no alarm, since the ritual was familiar from a long time back) in time to observe the latter part of the operation. Plot, turning round, rewarded me with a glance of approbation. At this hour of the day, at least, I had by now shown that I was going to give no trouble.
‘Just coming up half seven, sir – and a very nice morning it looks to be.’ Plot gave both these pieces of information as if an equal sense of pleasure ought to be prompted by each. ‘And your tea will be ready as soon as the boy brings my milk over from the buttery. Here by now, he ought to be. Would it be the honey again for breakfast this morning?’
‘Yes, please.’
‘Mr Mumford will be lunching with you, sir.’
‘I’m delighted to hear it. But do you mean he has simply told you to tell me so?’
“Not that by no means.’ Plot registered displeasure that I should have supposed him willing to be a party to such an incivility. ‘Your invitation is on his mantelpiece – stuck up there with others the like. It’s our way, you’ll remember, to take a look at a mantelpiece. A kind of notice-board it is, in a manner of speaking. And often they like to be reminded of things.’
‘I see. And have you reminded this young man on this particular occasion?’
‘That I have not, sir. Not that easy to speak to at the moment, Mr Mumford.’
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