Memorial Service

by J. I. M. Stewart

  I made coffee – a service I had last performed in this room for Peter Lusby. Ivo smoked cigarettes rolled in black paper and tipped (like his father’s swizzle-sticks, a flash of memory told me) with gold. Presumably he wasn’t dead broke now; perhaps a big tip from the squire of Otby had recently come in. He hadn’t asked if he might smoke; on the other hand he hadn’t shoved his cigarette-case at me. His manners, in fact, were an odd mixture of unconsciously good and more or less deliberately bad. I felt that our lunch had been a failure in the sense that I had made no impression on him, or at least none that would lead to his paying attention to anything I said. But at least I knew a little more about him than I had done an hour before, and I told myself I was still indisposed to turn down my thumb on him. I’d continue to read him as a potentially decent lad gone bloody-minded – and the bloody- mindedness was conceivably something transitory and developmental which a change of environment might clear up. I resolved to have one more go on this tack.

  ‘Coming up to Oxford,’ I said, ‘seems to take different people in different ways, don’t you think? I myself fell absolutely in love with it – but then I came from quite far away, and it represented a whole dimension of things I hadn’t dreamed existed. Others—’

  ‘You had the brains for it, I suppose. You must have had – to make all that money in the theatre. And to be able to talk my head off the way you do.’

  This speech, the graceless manner of which was unremarkable in Ivo’s present mood, rather pulled me up. At least it deserved thinking about, and this was why I answered it only obliquely.

  ‘I certainly came here on a scholarship, or I mightn’t have come up at all. But—’

  ‘But you were quite one of the lads, all the same. I agree you can’t have been entirely a gnome, or my father wouldn’t have taken up with you.’

  The insolence of this was something Ivo hadn’t touched before. It was, so to speak, pure Cedric, and at least suggested that I was rather uselessly getting on his nerves. But the conviction was suddenly strong in me that I’d got at a truth. Ivo’s idleness and much else was a desperate disguising of radical intellectual insufficiency. He ought never to have come to the college at all. In other words, the people who were now disposed to turn him out ought never to have admitted him in the first place. Either they hadn’t attended to what was under their noses in entrance papers and available to their eyes and ears on interview – either this, or they’d been rather too ready to accept the next Mumford to come along. And to Cedric and Tony Mumford that ‘too ready’ had no valid existence. They saw the college as faithlessly intending to break a contract never explicitly formulated but valid, generation after generation, as a matter of traditional assumptions. So they were determined Ivo should stay.

  ‘I must stick to my point,’ I said. ‘Some people find themselves dead keen on Oxford. They spend three or four years absolutely lapping it up – some of them working for their Schools like mad, and others, like myself, interested in all that only in a patchy way, and just comfortably getting by. But there are men who fairly quickly find it isn’t them at all. They’re pretty sensible simply to walk out.’

  ‘My father wants me to stay up. He’s dead set on it.’ Ivo looked at me sullenly.

  ‘I know he is. It was in my head a moment ago. But is he right?’

  ‘My grandfather too. He’s determined I mustn’t give in. I believe he’d wreck me if I did. My father wouldn’t do that.’

  ‘Wreck you? Can he wreck you?’

  ‘Oh, yes. There isn’t much in the way of entails and trusts and settlements and things. We’re fairly new people, the Mumfords, you know.’ Ivo made this shameful admission with his chin up in his father’s manner, but glowering at me even more darkly than before. ‘I’d find myself shoved into a shipping office, or something like that.’

  ‘If your grandfather is so determined you must stay, Ivo, why doesn’t he simply bribe you in a big way into paying some attention to your textbooks?’

  ‘Thanks a lot; there’s an idea in that.’ Ivo managed his rare and surprising smile. ‘But you don’t understand. They believe – my father and grandfather do – that all that’s irrelevant. I’ve a right to stay. It’s as simple as that.’

  ‘Yes. And I understand it in your grandfather. He’s pretty well out of the ark in such matters – just like an uncle of mine I could tell you about. But in your father it strikes me as positively eccentric – or sheer aberration.’

  ‘Sir, I don’t know that you should speak to me about my father like that.’

  ‘Don’t be silly. Do you think I’d say to you what I haven’t already said straight to him? And I’m not in the least pledged to plug his line, although you may have imagined I was when you came into this room. I’d just like you to do some thinking for yourself. This right to stay up and do damn-all. Do you believe in it?’

  ‘I don’t know. More or less, I suppose. It’s just that these are rotten times, isn’t it? Plebs running everything.’ Ivo laughed again – with an inanity that made my heart sink. ‘All this is a bit of a bore, if you ask me.’

  ‘Then we must break it up. But one more thing, Ivo. Do you ever think about Nicolas Junkin?’

  ‘Junkin, the man on this staircase? Why ever should I? Not that he hasn’t taken to trying to pass the time of day with me.’

  ‘He’s taken to that this term?’

  ‘Yes. I expect it’s because I’m in the Uffington. There’s no limit to the weird notions proles will take into their heads. Lusby, for instance. Doing all that creating about a rotten exam.’ As Ivo produced this really nauseous nonsense he was staring at me, without at all knowing it, in dim desperation. ‘No point in chaps like that coming here at all.’

  It would have been useless, I saw, to suggest to Ivo that Junkin’s attempts to pass the time of day were prompted by the same impulse that had caused him to deliver that speech at his open window the night before. The notion of being championed or made a friendly sign to wouldn’t go down well. I stuck, however, to my own line on Junkin.

  ‘The point, Ivo, is this. In the business of failed examinations it seems that Junkin is in exactly the same boat as yourself. And it will be the idea of the college that the same rules should apply to the two of you. It mightn’t be a bad idea to think over whether the college is right or wrong. In these concrete terms, I mean. You, and a very decent chap who gives you a nod in troubled times, there on the other side of this staircase. Not your staircase, or mine, or his. Ours. Surrey Four.’

  ‘Damn Surrey Four. And I suppose the answer is that the bloody rule oughtn’t to apply to either of us. They took us on, and they should lump it.’

  I wondered whether, within certain limiting conditions, this last remark was true. It was the first ghost of a plausible debating point that Ivo had risen to. But I was tired of Ivo by this time, and I was glad to see that he was on his feet. He went through the business of thanks and farewells with a switch to decent manners which was somehow depressing in itself. But at the door he paused, as if on something that had been worrying him.

  ‘About that chap who got me away to New York,’ he said. ‘You wouldn’t tell me his name, and I wonder if I know why. You see, he seemed able to give orders to anybody he bloody well chose. A whole jet trundled out for the occasion, as far as I could see – and all as hush-hush as you can imagine. So I think he must be a member of the royal family. Is he?’

  ‘No, he’s not.’

  At that I more or less pushed Ivo out of the room and shut the door. This wasn’t because I felt any prompting to laugh – although the idea of Gavin Mogridge as a prince of the blood was ludicrous enough. It was simply that Ivo had, in the most conclusive way, played a sudden searchlight on his own rating. I recalled his schoolfellow Stumpe, who had once asked me if there were any theatres in Scotland and declared that Surrey Quad had been built by Sir Christopher Wren. But Stumpe couldn’t conceivably have been so at sea about the habits and pursuits of the House of Windsor. One was back w
ith Ivo Mumford’s bad luck. Even by the quite modest intellectual standards of the University of Oxford, he was just that little bit too insufficient to be usefully around the place at all. And his insufficiency was one of the things that had got under his skin.

  V

  It was on the morning following this taxing if instructive encounter between youth and age that I received a letter from my brother Ninian. Ninian was now Lord Pattullo, just as Tony Mumford was Lord Marchpayne. I was to be told by Lempriere (late one night) that Ninian took precedence three steps above Tony’s young nuisance of a son. Senators of the College of Justice came above Viscounts’ younger sons, and they in turn were above the younger sons of Barons, and it was below these that all sons of Life Peers came. Lempriere had taken to occasionally mentioning Ivo as a mild pest about the place, and this was probably why he unloaded on me these useless gobbets of information. I knew very well, incidentally, that such depreciatory remarks about Ivo were disingenuous. Without so much as having met the boy, Lempriere had confirmed himself in the resolution to be on his side. These casual knocking remarks about the heir of the Mumfords were being conceived in a spirit of primitive guile. They made me wonder about that wartime career of Lempriere’s as a top diplomatic liar in America.

  As for Ninian, he had simply become a judge. His career at the bar had been arduous, but had at least not taken him much out of Scotland. Partly because of this, and partly because he was in such matters a more conscientious person than myself, he had kept up with our kinsfolk the Glencorrys, as I had not. Indeed, during the past few years, and more particularly since the death of Aunt Charlotte, he had been in remote control of things at Corry Hall. Uncle Rory still lived there for part of the year, but when he left it the reason lay in the expediency of his withdrawing for a time to a private asylum. His descent from King Gorse, and the virtual obligation thus imposed upon him to maintain a standing army, intermittently got on top of the now aged Glencorry.

  It was about a Glencorry that Ninian wrote to me. Since I had taken it into my head to live in Oxford, he said, I might care to be reminded that our cousin Anna’s daughter, Fiona Petrie, was up at one of the women’s colleges. She couldn’t be panting to meet an elderly relation who had hitherto paid no attention to her, but I might well feel that I ought at least to do something civil now.

  I suppose that somewhere in my mind the existence of Fiona Petrie had dimly registered – although indeed it was the sort of peripheral family circumstance which Lempriere liked to charge me with being neglectful of. Perhaps there was something Freudian about my forgetfulness; what had been operative was the mechanism our minds employ to repress painful or humiliating memories. Yet the inconsiderable history of Anna Glencorry and myself had been as much comical as either of these things; and it was as comedy, surely, that it did occasionally flit through my head. That our phase of tumbling in the heather together was a little shaming even in remote retrospect arose simply from the fact that it had been ineffective and fumbling – or, more exactly, that I had been so, at least in the character of a lusty young male. But much more awkward memories might have been the legacy of any less indefinite achievement crowning these encounters. Again, Anna’s shot-gun marriage to young Petrie of Garth had been preluded by episodes of a certain muted drama, including my own proposal that Anna should be preserved from nameless shame by marrying me (round about my eighteenth birthday, as it would have been). Even Uncle Rory had seen no future in this, and Aunt Charlotte had more or less terminated my Corry holiday on the spot. But this too, although absurd, held nothing to be ashamed of.

  Suddenly I did remember something about Anna’s daughter Fiona. Her having been thus named had offended my uncle. Although ‘Fiona’ sounds eminently Scottish it is in fact scarcely a genuine name at all, having been invented in the eighteen-nineties by a man called William Sharp as part of a pseudonym under which to publish stories and sketches and poems of a Celtic Twilight character. Uncle Rory would have been incapable of estimating the literary quality of ‘Fiona Macleod’, but he did know that no woman of his acquaintance had borne that baptismal name. I doubt whether it was anybody at Garth who was responsible for the solecism, and suspect that ‘Fiona’ was the brain-child of Aunt Charlotte, who subsequently lacked courage to own up.

  But was there a sense in which Fiona Petrie, now of Oxford, was my brain-child too? It was finding myself asking this question that really astonished me. Was she – to amplify – perhaps the child whose growing embryonic presence in the darkness of Anna’s womb had worked on my imagination to produce that precocious proposal of a kind of vicarious fatherhood? It would be curious now to be asking this mysterious process to tea. I began doing sums, and concluded almost at once that the notion must be nonsense. Anna’s child and mine (to put it in that hyperbolical way) would be beyond undergraduate age. This must be a younger daughter.

  Lingering doubt took me to the Oxford University Calendar, in which I discovered to my surprise that Miss Petrie was not an undergraduate but the youngest (or at least most junior) fellow of her college. Further research was required, and from a reference-book I learnt that the marriage of Andrew Petrie and Anna Glencorry had produced a daughter and two sons. So it was the young woman now in residence, after all, who I had proposed should be born a Pattullo.

  There seemed to be no chance of Fiona’s ever having been told of this piece of untoward family history – unless Uncle Rory had communicated it to her in one of his less responsible moments. Even so, I felt it to constitute a situation. How was I to cope with it? But for another memory, I mightn’t have tried; I might have ignored Ninian’s information as something I was too preoccupied to do anything about. What came back to me was a promise I had given to my cousin Ruth, Anna’s younger sister, at the time of my leaving school. I’d invite her to Oxford, I said, and introduce her to lots of eligible young men of her own age back from the war. (If I didn’t say exactly this, I certainly implied it.) The proposal had been unrealistic, so far as my first year in college was concerned. I just didn’t get to know that sort of senior man. I’d given the promise, all the same. This sense of having let Ruth Glencorry down must have lurked in me for years, even if seldom or never coming to conscious focus. I was now reflecting that I mustn’t let another Glencorry girl down. All I knew about Fiona was that her maternal grandmother had recently died and that my uncle, her maternal grandfather, had to be periodically shut up. These mightn’t be circumstances of any deep deprivation. But at least they could be called family troubles calling for some mild manifestation of family feeling.

  It remained to decide what to do. I could invite Fiona to dine with me in college. But this was a very recent possibility so far as high table went, frowned on by the conservatively inclined, and so sparingly resorted to as not yet to have come under my direct observation. I dismissed it as too tricky for the present, particularly as Fiona was a complete unknown. So I decided on starting off by making an unheralded call. There was a presumption that Fiona was unmarried, and if that were so she probably lived in college.

  She turned out to be the owner – or, as it proved, joint- owner – of a minute but agreeable house forming part of a terrace standing back from the Woodstock Road. Because it took time to run the address to earth, I arrived a little later than the tea-time hour I had proposed to myself. I knocked on the door, and was answered by a shouted summons to walk in. The noise of a typewriter guided me into a room on my right. A young woman was operating the machine, and she clattered out the tail-end of a sentence before glancing up at me. There could be no doubt that this was Fiona. She wasn’t in the least like her mother, but she was uncommonly like mine. The resemblance was the more startling because of the points at which it left off. I couldn’t imagine my mother sitting at a big table untidily piled with what were doubtless learned papers; I couldn’t imagine her working a typewriter (or, for that matter, a sewing-machine or a culinary contrivance); I certainly couldn’t imagine her smoking a cigar. Fiona’s cigar was of the
miniaturised and inexpensive sort, the aroma of which doesn’t gratify the sense of anyone casually encountering it; and I had an impression that her jersey and slacks must be impregnated to the same effect. Yet my first response to this belatedly discovered kinswoman was favourable. Her features were indeed my mother’s – but they were my mother’s sharpened by a strong and alert intelligence.

  ‘My name’s Duncan Pattullo,’ I said. ‘It mayn’t convey much, but we’re cousins. I’ve come to work in Oxford, and I thought I’d like to call.’

  ‘I know all about you,’ Fiona said, ‘and I’ve been wondering if you’d show up.’ She gave me a long glance, quite as appraising as I’d have judged the circumstances required. ‘Have some whisky.’

  The whisky didn’t have to be fetched. The bottle – and a glass witnessing to Fiona’s present recourse to it – stood on the table. An austere reply would thus have been inappropriate, and whisky was accordingly poured for me. I had been in the expectation of china tea and a stand-by tin of biscuits.

  ‘But what do you know about me?’ Fiona asked, briskly rather than to any effect of challenge. Yet I somehow felt that it was a factitious briskness, and that Fiona had been intrigued by my tumbling in on her.

  ‘Almost nothing, I’m afraid. Are you a mathematician?’

  ‘Good heavens, no! What should put that in your head?’

  For a moment I wondered myself. Then I realised that this recovered family association had revived my boyhood’s habit of referring everything to the world of Bernard Shaw. Vivie Warren, heroine of Mrs Warren’s Profession, had gone in for whisky and cigars, and it was as a mathematician that she had made her way to Cambridge and economic independence. But as Mrs Warren had managed brothels in a big way I could scarcely explain this chain of ideas to Fiona.

  ‘It was a random sort of question,’ I said. ‘So what do you do?’