‘I suppose I’m vaguely archaeological.’
‘I see.’ Not receiving any further reply, I glanced round Fiona’s room to discover if any more light could be got that way. It had been furnished on the unnoticing method, so that it was tasteless in the neutral sense of displaying neither good taste nor bad. I was a little reminded of the rooms I now occupied in college as they had been during their tenancy long ago by Tindale, the White Rabbit. It certainly didn’t look as if Fiona had brought anything from home. I had never been to Garth, but at a fair guess it would be much like Corry, which housed a jumble of hideous and beautiful objects higgledy-piggledy. Around me now there was nothing characterful at all – except that here and there a few aerial photographs had been pinned at random on the walls, and that on the centre of the mantelpiece there stood a large earthenware pot. This last object obscurely touched my memory. Almost spherical, and reconstituted from fragments of dimly painted clay, its surface suggested an attempted portrayal of the oceans and continents of some alien planet. Perhaps this did come from Corry. It looked ancient enough to have been originally the property of King Gorse himself.
‘Do you think it odd,’ Fiona asked, ‘that here I am?’
‘Perhaps.’ I found myself not quite sure of the sense in which to take this question. ‘I think it odd that here I am. But why should I think there’s anything odd about your being at Oxford?’ As I responded in this way I glanced at Fiona and saw it wouldn’t do. She would give short shrift to polite remarks. ‘But in a way, I suppose, yes. Family-wise and the like, Fiona. I may call you Fiona?’
‘I don’t suppose we’re going to call one another cousin – or coz.’ Fiona laughed at this. Her laugh and her speaking voice went together. They were dry, rather high-pitched, and with a faint suggestion of creak or croak which the cigars may have accounted for. It wasn’t like an old woman’s voice, but it was rather like an old man’s – a cultivated and precise old man’s. In a girl no more than half-way through her twenties the effect ought not to have been particularly engaging. I found myself liking it, all the same. ‘As for oddity,’ she said, ‘there can be no doubt about it. You’re thinking I’m a sport, aren’t you, Duncan? Not a good sport, just a sport. Take the Petries for a start, if you like. They’re scarcely intellectual.’ Fiona paused, as if considering how to develop this family inquisition. ‘Do you know my father? Young Petrie of Garth?’
‘I’ve never met him.’ Fiona’s addendum had startled me as a disconcerting echo from the past.
‘He’s in the army.’
‘Some soldiers are extremely intelligent.’
‘Some – yes. Now take the Glencorrys.’
‘Scarcely intellectual. But your grandfather, you know, was up at New College.’
This time, Fiona’s laughter was silent. She was perfectly right, of course, in saying I’d been thinking of her as a sport, although the actual word hadn’t occurred to me. Her background and heredity alike must have been about as heavily insulated from any current of intellectual energy as could be conceived.
‘I was an unlikely person to come to Oxford myself,’ I said. It had grown clear to me that in conversation with Fiona one could afford to be elliptical.
‘Your father was a man of genius, so you just don’t enter into the argument, Duncan. Or we’ll say you don’t. Come, now! You didn’t have any sort of devil of a time getting to Oxford?’
‘Well, no. I was just sent here, more or less.’
‘I did have the devil of a time,’ Fiona said. ‘It took me all my time.’
‘Just how much time was that? When, I mean, did you get the idea?’
‘The general idea? When I was about five.’ Fiona wasn’t being funny. ‘I began to see that it wouldn’t do – being what they took it for granted I was, that is. Of course I hadn’t a clue on how to proceed. I’d got the hang of having brains: that some do and most don’t. That comes pretty early, don’t you think? What I didn’t stumble on for a long time was that somebody has to come along and train the stuff. However, the penny dropped in the nick of time – just when they were on the point of packing me off to my mother’s and aunt’s old school.’
‘That would have been worse than death,’ I said – and realised that I wasn’t being funny either. ‘Your mother and your Aunt Ruth couldn’t honestly be called highly educated women.’
‘They’re unbelievably ignorant. Well, I used to be sent sometimes to stay with relations in Edinburgh, and it happened one year when I was coming up for thirteen. I managed to get into the city reference library. It was dodgy, because there was a special library for children which they were expected to stick to. But I managed it and got hold of a reference book – a kind of year-book, I suppose – about girls’ schools. It was my first bit of research. I knew I had to stick to posh schools, since nothing else would have come within the comprehension of my parents. Most of them sounded quite awful – all sanitation and games and religious knowledge and that sort of thing – but there were a few that had something to say about getting girls into Oxford and Cambridge colleges, with hard facts about recent successes. I wrote down their names, and when I got home I took the list over to Mrs Mackintosh at Castle Troy. She’s the wife of just one more grouse-slaughtering thickie like my father, but she’d been at Girton before she fell for that sort of manhood, poor soul. I explained the terms of the problem, and Mrs Mackintosh did some research of her own. She found that the headmistress of one of these schools had ancestors going back to King Orry. Duncan, do you know about King Orry?’
‘Of course I do. He may have been the same chap as King Gorse.’
‘That’s right. I see you know your Glencorry stuff. And there were a couple of duke’s daughters at the place, which plainly put it one up on Mum’s old school. So the change of plan was successfully sold to the wee laird of Garth, and to his wife, the daughter of the wee laird of Glencorry.’
‘And you never looked back?’ Faced with her parents, I thought, Fiona was a little given to an unnecessarily satirical note. But we were cousins, after all, with a good deal of experience – as well as the presumption of some attitudes – in common, and to outsiders she would probably be more sparing of mockery.
‘Why should I look back? But that’s enough about me, Duncan.’ Fiona reached for another of her little cigars. ‘Have some more whisky.’
It seemed to me that I could reasonably decline, without thereby aspersing my cousin as a young drunk. She plainly wasn’t. The tone of her invitation or injunction, moreover, had seemed to hint a sudden thought, not very hopefully entertained, that more alcohol might brighten me up. It wouldn’t have been so, and civility scarcely required compliance with a proposal thus carrying a suggestion less of hospitable than of practical intent. If I struck Fiona as a bit elderly-dull, it couldn’t be helped. And I had a feeling we might hit it off quite well without my trying to sparkle.
‘Do you do your teaching here?’ I asked.
‘Oh, no. I have a room provided in college for that. This is for the private life, and getting on with something.’
It was to be presumed that ‘something’ referred to activities of a learned sort, the fruits of which got themselves tapped out on the machine in front of which Fiona continued to sit. I tried to recall what I could of academic women. In my undergraduate days my acquaintance with them hadn’t been extensive, and it certainly didn’t help with Fiona, who clearly belonged to a new age.
‘One can’t get much done in college,’ Fiona said – speaking again because I had fallen silent. ‘Too many kids about.’
‘I suppose they can be tiresome.’ I hadn’t heard undergraduates called kids before.
‘We run a creche, of course. But the infants break out and riot all over the place.’
‘A creche?’ I repeated stupidly.
‘Most of my colleagues are married, and have enormous families. It used just to be cats. Cats are compassable. A nun may have a cat.’
‘So she may.’ This reference to a celebrated Middle E
nglish treatise on the ordering of female devotion revealed to me the field in which Fiona’s studies lay, or at least the field in which they had begun. I might have pursued the point if, at this moment, another young woman hadn’t entered the room.
‘This is a relation of mine,’ Fiona said. ‘A cousin, that is. His name’s Duncan Pattullo. He writes plays. Duncan, this is Margaret Mountain. We live together.’
Mountain is a respectable English surname, borne by any number of distinguished persons. It would have been unremarkable in the present instance, but for the fact that Margaret Mountain was diminutive. Here, so to speak, was a mountain turning out to be a molehill. So silly a joke wouldn’t, I hope, have occurred to me but for the fact that Miss Mountain was really rather mole-like. Not in figure or features, which would be ridiculous, but simply in colouration. Just as Arnold Lempriere was everywhere a senescent grey so was Miss Mountain similarly monochromatic within a narrow range of tones or values darker and faintly lustrous in effect. It was as if the mole were in good fleece, and might in consequence be attractive to the touch. But this last was a remote thought. The young woman was far from proposing herself with any urgency as a sexual presence.
I suppose I said ‘How do you do?’ If so, I received no audible response. Miss Mountain, her lineaments remaining notably in repose, offered, instead, a slight inclination of the head. She then walked across the room, turned, leant her shoulders against the top shelf of a dwarf bookcase, and took up a stance familiar alike in ballet and in Victorian illustrations of gentlemen behaving nonchalantly in their clubs – the weight rested on one foot, the other being crossed in front of it with only the toe touching the ground. Thus poised, Miss Mountain produced and lit a cigarette, steadily and gravely regarding me the while.
What I have to record of this behaviour is its not noticeably striking me as an abnegation of the customary amenities of social intercourse. I might, I suppose, have felt that I was being treated like an accession, whether expected or unexpected, to the furnishing of the room, and so properly to be scrutinised in silence before a verdict was given. But Miss Mountain’s level gaze – our heads were almost on a level, although I was again sitting down after the requisite getting to my feet – Miss Mountain’s gaze was undeniably directed upon a person. Moreover I understood that, if she was offering no communication to me, I was at least being privileged to afford some communication to her. I decided she must be a philosopher; it would only be of another learned individual, after all, that Fiona could say ‘We live together’ – whatever that expression might be taken to imply. She was a philosopher perpending in me the mystery of individuation, reflecting (a trifle sombrely) that whit I did I’d become, and perhaps estimating what was to be learnt from me about the nature of the absurd.
‘Whisky,’ Miss Mountain said absently. Her voice, just like Fiona’s, had a faint husky creak to it.
We all drank whisky – this because I decided that, in these fresh circumstances, I oughtn’t to play odd man out. Miss Mountain showed no inclination to converse, but did appear to feel that conversation should happen; her glance, as it passed between Fiona and myself, was like a conductor’s baton, weaving into dialogue the wood-winds and the fiddles. Both ladies were relaxed; Fiona to the extent of balancing her chair hazardously on its back legs, thrusting her hands into the pockets of her slacks, and talking with a crispness which yet held no hint of a disposition to get back to any other activity; her fellow householder appearing to regard her own stork-like posture as compatible with the comfortable reception of indefinite debate. Fiona inquired into my affairs; their present posture and past history, with an impartiality suggesting that she would have been equally willing to listen to a sketch of the political situation in Bolivia or a stringent critique of Stockhausen’s contribution to aleatory music. I explained myself as well as I could, although Fiona’s questions at times required a more analytical attitude to my writing than came to me at all naturally. But the effect was not in the least the tiresome one, variously familiar to me, of being badgered by women concerned with tagging on to the arts. On the contrary, it was challenging and enjoyable.
This Oxford occasion might have continued indefinitely. It was interrupted by a fresh arrival.
An old man had appeared in the doorway. He was very old indeed, or appeared so: an Ancient Mariner still on his feet decades after his encounter with the wedding guests. More prosaically, one might have taken him for a tramp, except that few tramps would exhibit his sort of eye. The eye was employed in glancing at each of us in turn: at Miss Mountain, who had stiffened and planted both feet on the floor; at myself, also on my feet, as the massive seniority of the visitor seemed to require; at Fiona, herself standing up for the first time, and now advancing towards him. Fiona kissed the old man, and drew him into the room. Something stirred in me, but it wasn’t any clear sense of recognition. I found myself staring at the battered pot on the mantelpiece, and suddenly I did recognise that. I even felt the seccotine sticky on my inexpert fingers. I had glued together these shards, or others like them, myself. The old man was J. B. Timbermill.
‘Duncan, son of Lachlan,’ Timbermill said, ‘welcome home!’
For a moment I could barely manage to advance and shake hands. When I did so, it was to be hugged – a demonstration which increased the disorder of my mind. Timbermill had almost turned me into a scholar for a while, and I had worked hard at what we both knew wasn’t my sort of thing: the remote and demanding field of Germanic philology. Not, of course, that it was remote for him; he knew it as the soil upon which he could raise those strange imaginative proliferations which, gathered and sheaved in The Magic Quest, had brought him a notable fame in his later years. He had liked me for trying, and since he was a private scholar who took few pupils we had been almost master and disciple for a time. Nothing but all the bits and pieces of Anglo-Saxon kitchen- ware I had been allowed to stick together for him any longer witnessed to that. I had admired but not greatly cared for The Magic Quest, not as I’d cared for the strange drawings with which he used to ornament my essays. The book had owned a range and pitch far beyond any scope of mine, all the same.
But nothing of this could have had much to do with my drifting away from my intimacy with Timbermill. He had, of course, been very loosely associated in my mind with Penny – hadn’t it been from his window that I’d scanned old Mr. Triplett’s tennis-court for her in vain? – and might thus be seen as hitching on to a complex of painful feeling. But that hadn’t been it either. It was rather that Timbermill had been a kind of love-object to me in an imaginative way, and that I’d let myself grow away from this without building upon it any succeeding and stable relationship of affectionate regard. And now here was Timbermill, crying out ‘Duncan, son of Lachlanl’ as if my last essay for him had been written only a week ago.
I saw that my old teacher wasn’t wearing too well. His hair, having lost lustre, had turned from silver to grey. It no longer floated about his scalp like an aureole; unkempt and straggling limply down, it lent his head the appearance of some piece of neglected garden statuary on which birds have misbehaved. He didn’t look mad or manic or inspired; he wouldn’t suggest to a young man now, as he had suggested to me in Linton Road, a seer or thaumaturge with perhaps some marvellous thing to say. That was behind him. He had journeyed to and frequented preternatural regions, but what he had sought to bring home – the scrolls and tablets, the bales of figured stuffs and stoppered vials of elixirs and essences – had in part slipped from the labouring back of his imagination during the long return tramp. What remained lay in The Magic Quest. In the man himself the fires had died away. But the ashes were not yet cold, and perhaps a residual glow would remain with him to animate his decline. And I might – at difficult times, if he’d had them – a little have taken him on. If I’d been a better man, I might have done that.
It spoke to me strangely now that this office was being discharged by Fiona Petrie, the unborn child I’d proposed to father at a time whe
n Timbermill was still unknown to me. For it had certainly been with that implication that Fiona had kissed the old man as he entered the room. Kissing within the wide area constituted by close friends and remote relations is of course much the habit of the class of society from which my cousin came. It would be perfectly in order if she kissed me when I presently took my leave. I didn’t, however, think she would, since she struck me as not of the readily kissing sort. Her manner of greeting Timbermill hadn’t been a merely social thing.
Timbermill’s glance moved rapidly over the three of us. It was as if he was binding us together in some theoretical structure I didn’t at all understand. Then he advanced to Fiona’s writing-table, and planted on it an untidy sheaf of manuscript.
‘The second appendix,’ he said – and his voice held something of the vibrant staccato I remembered. ‘You must make what you can of it, my dear. Duncan could help you, eh? Duncan could lend you an amateur hand here and there. He can’t have forgotten everything – no, not everything. People, perhaps – but stuff of this sort sticks. Eh, Duncan?’
‘I could try, sir.’
These words came to me from some distant hiding-place. I had uttered them often enough when leaving Timbermill’s attic room – now in my imagination as vast and dusky as Hrothgar’s gold-hall – after having been given some assignment totally beyond me.
‘Whereas she won’t be any good to you. No good to you at all.’ Timbermill had turned to glare at Miss Mountain as he suddenly came out with this. ‘She’s a mistake, a blunder, a howler – mark my words, Fiona.’ Timbermill was shaking all over, and his face for the moment was at once savage and pitiable. ‘What can you do, in God’s name? Nothing but rub each other up the wrong way.’
This startling and disagreeable speech explained the abrupt tautening of Miss Mountain’s frame when Timbermill came into the room. I wondered what she was going to do now.
She might, I supposed, have indicated indulgence and compassionate regard. Alternatively, she might have given the suddenly phrenetic old man what my other tutor, Talbert, would have called the rough side of her tongue. She did neither of these things, for a moment or two remaining simply impassive and considering. Then, without haste, she walked over to the table and rolled Fiona’s page out of the typewriter.
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