‘Whenever I think of Ranald,’ I said to Janet at a venture, ‘I think of Greek irregular verbs. They positively chinked in his pocket – as if it was pocket-money day every day of the week.’
‘They’re the small change of juvenile erudition.’ McKechnie was perfectly capable of responding to this sort of thing – although his sort of thing it was definitely not. He had a jerky manner of speaking, idiosyncratic and not unpleasant, as if his vocal apparatus was powered by some intricate system of tiny springs. ‘Whenever I think of Duncan, I think of the most thumping and staggering lies.’
‘The Secret Service Boy,’ Janet said. I could see that she was pleased with the way this encounter was going. I was also struck by something else. Long ago I had provided her with an enormous amount of information about myself, but had probably suppressed any mention of the main activity of my tenth year, which had consisted in offering to my form-mates as gospel truth the high adventures perpetually befalling the Secret Service Boy out of school. McKechnie must have told Janet about this. And now a sudden vision of the McKechnies sitting by their fireside and giving a little time to exchanging memories of me was accompanied by a moment of poignant feeling which I should have found it difficult to define as either pleasure or pain.
‘And now,’ Janet was saying, ‘Duncan has produced a new tall story. He claims to have come upon a long-lost cousin, here in Oxford, who is an authority on Anglo-Saxon pots.’
‘A girl called Fiona Petrie,’ I said. ‘A second cousin – or what’s called more precisely a first cousin once removed.’
‘How very interesting!’ McKechnie said politely. ‘I know her name. She gave one of the British Academy’s lectures last year, and I remember somebody commenting on how young she was to receive the invitation. It was partly, I believe, by way of compliment to J. B. Timbermill. One thinks of him as belonging to a past age, and Miss Petrie must have been one of the last of his pupils.’ McKechnie was now on familiar and congenial ground. ‘A sad case,’ he concluded unexpectedly.
‘Timbermill’s, you mean?’
‘Yes, indeed. A notable scholar, it seems. Unchallenged in his field. But he ran off the rails somehow, and produced a long mad book – a kind of apocalyptic romance. Did you know him, Duncan?’
‘I do know him. He lives in Oxford still, and I saw him not long ago. He was one of my tutors – long before he taught Fiona Petrie. I hope she won’t run off the rails.’ Having seen that McKechnie was upset at having seemed to disparage somebody I turned out to approve of, I was casting round for a diversion. ‘Fiona, you see, has formed a dangerous association, and may be corrupted. She’s living with a novelist.’ This sounded comically wrong. ‘She shares a house with another girl, called Margaret Mountain, who has published a novel and is working on another one. Not that I think my cousin will readily be lured away from scholarship. She seems the real thing to me.’
‘I’m afraid I haven’t read Miss Mountain’s book, or even heard of it.’ McKechnie spoke apologetically, as is customary among the learned when this sort of nescience has to be avowed.
‘I haven’t read it either. I don’t even know its title.’
‘I’ve read it,’ Janet said. ‘It’s called The Orrery. I don’t remember why. Perhaps the characters are supposed to revolve round one another in an extremely complicated way, as if governed by clockwork.’
‘Is it highly cerebral?’ My recollection of the severity of Miss Mountain’s manner must have prompted this question.
‘Well, you do feel she’s thought it all out. But it’s full of searing and irregular passions.’
‘Good heavens!’ This description amused me. ‘Such as?’
‘The principal character is a musician or a painter – I’ve forgotten which – who longs to go to bed with his aunt. He’s in a frenzy about it. Nowadays writers of first novels are often amazingly young. Perhaps Margaret Mountain was barely twenty when she started working on the thing. We can all manage a certain amount of absurdity at that age.’
‘Yes,’ I said, and wondered whether this hard saying had been offered to me advisedly. McKechnie may have wondered too, since it was he who somehow gave the impression of being responsible for a moment’s silence. He then grabbed a fresh topic.
‘I feel remiss,’ he said to me, ‘at having been so little in college lately. I do greatly enjoy coming in to dine. But our living so far out, and Janet’s having been away from home, has made it a little difficult to organise just lately.’
I managed some reply to this unconvincing speech. McKechnie’s impulse towards friendliness was released only when some actual social situation had been firmly contrived for him; without that, his reclusive side – the withdrawn scholar syndrome, it might be called – remained on top. He had probably been hauled along to this party now.
But any further awkwardness the conversation might have run into was obviated by Tommy Penwarden’s joining us. In honour of Mrs Gender’s entertainment our librarian had donned somewhat formal attire, and as the garments evidently belonged to an even earlier period of his life than those he wore every day his appearance of being in some unnatural state of distension was more marked than usual; he might have been a small boy painfully inflated through an injudicious orgy of ginger pop. He proved, however, to be in a condition not of physical discomfort but of gloomy indignation.
‘I can hear them coming back,’ he said. ‘The demonstrators, as they call themselves. They seem not to have spent very long in their unmannerly bellowing at the ladies. The whole disruption is becoming totally scandalous, and the university’s handling of it increasingly inept.’
‘One hears different views expressed,’ McKechnie said mildly, ‘and I fear I haven’t given the situation as much thought as it plainly calls for. May I ask, Penwarden, in what you yourself consider the ineptitude to lie?’
‘In this intolerable nonsense of the university’s setting up now one and now another comic opera version of a court of law. You may not know’—Penwarden turned to Janet, apparently as an immigrant likely to be uninformed on the Oxford scene—’you may not know that, historically, the university has the undoubted right to conduct quasi-judicial proceedings. There are all sorts of distorted views of what that means. I once had a pupil who seriously believed that the Vice-Chancellor has the power to hang wrong-doers from Folly Bridge. His persuasion was erroneous, I am sorry to say. But a court there can be, with Queen’s Counsel briefed to appear before it, if anybody has a fancy that way. And such a court is sitting at the moment, amid every circumstance of indignity and absurdity.’ Penwarden paused to take breath, and appeared about to resume. McKechnie, however, raised a nervous but resolute hand, thus indicating that he had an immediate point to make.
‘One moment, please,’ he said, again in his mildest manner. ‘All this must remain very much an open question, so far as I am concerned. I am shockingly ignorant about it, as I said. So do tell me this. Is it your opinion that these unusual disorders in the streets are not such as to be dealt with suitably by any process of law whatever?’
‘Nothing of the kind!’ Penwarden seemed to turn puffier still from some internal pressure as he enunciated this rebuttal; his cheeks were like a trumpeter’s; I suddenly noticed that his spectacles, like his jacket and waistcoat, looked a size too small for him. ‘The city police should do their proper duty, and bring the entire unruly crowd before the beaks. They’d then end up before a judge of the high court, committed for making an affray, or whatever it may be called. They’d learn something, and we’d be rid of a confounded nuisance.’
‘And yet,’ McKechnie said, ‘it would be satisfactory to feel assured that sufficient attention is being paid to the root cause of our difficulties. Who is to blame for them? It can scarcely be in any large measure these malleable young people themselves. External influences are, of course, at play upon them; we live in a period of social instability, and so forth. But ought we not to begin by looking nearer home? I am inclined to think that the people mos
t at fault are the college tutors.’
The majority of the men now in Mrs Gender’s drawing-room were tutors, so a certain boldness attended McKechnie’s speech. Penwarden didn’t care for it.
‘Are you among those,’ he demanded, ‘who lay most of our troubles at the door of what they call those damned boarding- houses?’
‘Most certainly not!’ McKechnie, in his turn, produced an indignant disclaimer. ‘But it is surely undeniable that college tutors, unhappily, are subject nowadays to a great deal of distraction. They carry novel administrative burdens. They are many of them in demand by an enlarged and extramural public through the instrumentality of what people call the media. They often feel obliged, through a supposed professional exigency, to make constant, diffuse, and even supererogatory contributions to the scholarship of their subject.’
McKechnie paused in this civil indictment. I reflected, not for the first time, that the men among whom my lot had suddenly fallen in middle-age owned resources of vocabulary and syntax exposing them to the hazard of talking like books. Yet their command of this was so effortless that some decent effect of the human and colloquial was commonly preserved.
‘And as a consequence,’ Penwarden took the opportunity to interpolate, ‘they neglect their pupils?’
‘Far from it. They are in general a most conscientious body of men. But they have let their syllabuses – the mass of mere information which students are expected to acquire in pursuit of a first degree – proliferate at the expense of any absorbing and satisfying intellectual discipline.’
‘I confess to feeling a little on common ground with you there.’ Penwarden, although managing this measured response, wasn’t placated. Indeed, just as when, long ago in his library, the unspeakable Christopher Cressy had tucked the fateful letter-book under his arm, he was having detectable difficulty with his breathing. ‘But it is generally supposed that such matters are ordered by boards and committees which are by no means exclusively composed of college tutors.’
‘That is true; we are all, of course, at fault. The fact remains that in Oxford, considered as a place of education, the tutor remains the student’s key man. It’s up to the tutor to generate and sustain that intense intellectual excitement which you and I know to be the finer breath of all knowledge.’
I glanced at Janet and caught a gleam of fun in her eye. But her amusement, I could see, was at the expense of our total situation rather than of her husband. When that mild and withdrawn man thus stood up to be counted she undoubtedly found the spectacle invigorating.
‘And a further relevant point occurs to me,’ McKechnie went on. ‘Faculty by faculty, both in this university and others, there is said to be a marked difference in the incidence of obsessive political preoccupations. In the more severe sciences, where people have to keep thinking hard to hold their place at all, this kind of agitating, and marching around, and occupying the offices of busy people and so forth apparently makes comparatively little headway. It’s when you come to the woolly and light-weight subjects that you gain recruits. The mere lores and superstitions and parlour studies: geography and economics and sociology and English literature. Oh! I beg your pardon.’
McKechnie’s sudden dismay was very agreeable, and even Penwarden managed to laugh at it. One of my recent discoveries had been that the wisdom of Oxford University saw Modern European Drama as falling much within the field of English Literature, and this made me an ‘English don’. But I had no disposition to take umbrage at McKechnie’s momentary failure in fact. I did feel, however, that I ought to rally him in some way.
‘But, Ranald,’ I said, ‘isn’t it something rather primitive that you propose? It used simply to be called keeping their nose to the grindstone.’
‘Only so that a few sparks may fly.’
This repartee pleased Janet; she glanced at me quickly, expecting more; it was as if she liked the idea of her husband and myself in some sort of amicable antagonism.
‘Intellectual excitement,’ I said, ‘is undeniably quite splendid, of course. We all wish we could experience it every morning in our bath. Yet there’s something almost servile, it seems to me, in the whole business of driving young people along the hard narrow road of competitive examinations. You can’t really want nothing but that for them – however exciting clever tutors might make it – full time? It’s not a liberal idea at all. Don’t all those chaps of yours – Aristotle and Plato and that crowd – assert that free citizens have not only a right to political activity but also a positive duty to engage in it?’
Rather unexpectedly, McKechnie responded to this by throwing up both hands in a nervous and comical gesture. He was saying, more or less, that there was no serious coping with such harmless nonsense as I was dishing out. And his gesture was familiar. I hadn’t seen it since we were boys together, but it suddenly came back to me with a whole setting out of the past. The worn wooden floor was spotted with ink; initials and rude rhymes were carved on the desks and benches; there was a smell of blackboard chalk in the air; through open windows came the concerted shouts of boys smaller than ourselves marking some triumph in their bat-and-ball game. I was arguing – with McKechnie, who was what we called the Dux of the school, and in the presence of other of my betters – about I don’t know what. And an idle fingering of popular books on the glories of Greece and the grandeurs of Rome had armed me with some such debating point as I had now made – one just short of the frivolous, and baffling to a serious mind.
One makes up a good deal of one’s past. But this, I saw, could scarcely be a false memory, since something had flashed between McKechnie and myself that spoke of his recalling it too. We were both laughing – to the perplexity of Penwarden, who thus saw an almost acrimonious debate dissolve in mirth.
Anthea Gender’s party was breaking up with an unmetropolitan abruptness, since it was the hour of the day at which all Oxford moves to an exigent clock. The colleges dine early – and did so, I believe, even before it was by servants that such matters were ordered. Within the next twenty minutes a substantial proportion of the academic guests would be seated at their high tables – the husbands among them having parted from wives who would return home and there discuss with their children what Mabel Bedworth, that stout feminist, called the family poached egg. I had as yet no means of determining what degree of domestic infelicity this slightly uncouth social custom occasioned. A surprising number of Oxford wives turn out to be recruited from Oxford – or, if not Oxford, Cambridge – daughters; they have been habituated to the arrangement; perhaps they set a tone.
I promised to lunch with the McKechnies at an early date.
The invitation came from Janet, and her husband’s enthusiasm for it extended to his bringing a crumpled envelope from his pocket and attempting a sketch-map of the route to their dwelling. This discovered itself as being in some rural back-of-beyond in darkest Berkshire; the final turnings to it seemed intricate and confusing; McKechnie clarified the problem they presented by a liberal employment of the letters of the Greek alphabet, together with an explanation of these sigla in the margin. I took the point of this performance to be again reminiscent; he was making fun of the puerile mockery I used to direct upon boys more classically accomplished than myself.
On the walk back to college I fell in with Buntingford, who had been among our domestic contingent at Mrs Gender’s party. He remarked to me with satisfaction that Tommy Penwarden had appeared to be ‘in good gloomy form’.
‘Well, yes,’ I said. ‘He was for Draconian measures against our juvenile Jacquerie.’
‘Tommy would be. But they’re not infuriated peasants, you know, although they dress that way. They’re Jacobins, my boy, educated beyond their station or prospects. And that’s much more dangerous.’
‘Perhaps so, Adrian. Incidentally, I wonder whether Tommy knows how stout the Provost is being about those blessed Blunderville Papers? The other day I went on a kind of diplomatic mission with Edward to a place called Otby. I don’t know if y
ou’ve heard of it.’
‘Otby I Isn’t it a house your crony Tony Mumford, now Marchpayne, is due to inherit?’
‘That’s right. It’s rather complicated to explain, but we were on the trail of the missing letter-book. And I can report that Edward is prepared to make enormous efforts – sustain untold indignities, indeed – to secure its return.’
‘You must be joking.’
‘Well, that’s how it appeared.’
‘How more than odd! Wheels within wheels, Duncan. And Tommy ought certainly to be grateful. He’s obsessed with that cobwebby affair. Nothing would please him more than to hear that Christopher Cressy had been caught robbing a bank and clapped in the Scrubs.’
‘Quite so – yet he has insisted to me that Cressy is a man of enchanting address.’
‘Queer convention, isn’t it? Dog-fights galore, but instant solidarity on the nice-chap front.’
‘Yes, I do find it queer, Adrian. But I suppose it’s the civilised thing.’
‘Nothing of the kind. Politicians go in for it like mad, and there’s nothing civilised about them. And I used to meet it, when I was more or less a kid, among Foreign Office types. They’d insist on the total charm of their opposite numbers in other countries who professionally might be industriously endeavouring to deluge the world in blood. And small things with great we may compare, don’t you think?’
‘No, I don’t. It’s the same Inner Ring ethos, I suppose. But academics – I hate to say it – strike me as a thoroughly blameless crowd.’
‘O saneta simplicitas! Just you wait.’
XII
My rooms were now becoming a good deal frequented by two distinct species of junior members of the university. The one lot consisted of those graduate students whose researches into more or less modern drama I was expected to supervise or give advice on. These were a gentle race, living for the most part on exiguous grants, desperately worried over the grim state of the market job-wise, considerately trying to dissimulate these distresses, and most impressively absorbed in their subjects. I had very little notion of how I was getting on with them or what use I was being. As most of them – whatever their degree of ability – had more of the scholar’s temperament than I had, I was frequently reduced by them to a state of humility of an unwholesome and nervy sort. My other species of visitors were younger, rather more care-free, and much more aggressive: undergraduates – again from all over the university – who, like Nick Junkin, judged ceaseless theatrical activity to constitute a sufficient higher education in itself. My relations with this agreeable but exhausting tribe were informal and unofficial – which simply meant that they dispensed with their seniors’ polite notes and anxious telephone calls, and blew in as they pleased. It was all quite fun and undeniably what I’d signed up for. But I did remind myself at times that eight weeks was the limit of full-scale assault. Plot, responsible for the light refreshments it was proper to offer these conferring or inquiring or demanding persons, probably had the same thought.
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