It wasn’t exactly true that all this seemly conduct on my colleagues’ part had been actively concealed from me. But at least nobody had mentioned it – not even Jimmy Gender when he knew that I was setting off for the Lusby home. And what this formidable standard of reticence had veiled from me didn’t make the present situation any easier – a fact borne out by Mrs Lusby’s next remarks.
‘All that kindness, Mr Pattullo, from learned gentlemen with so much on their minds. And from young people too, where thoughtlessness is common enough. It makes us feel we have a connection with the college. For that service – I forgot to tell you this – there was a printed sheet with the college arms, and “Paul Lusby Scholar of the College” underneath them.’
Again making what reply I could, I thought of the Mumfords, and of their arrogant assumption that an intermittent tenancy over four generations of certain rooms in Surrey Quad constituted a ‘connection’ carrying very large privileges indeed. But that was an irrelevance. Everything said by Peter Lusby’s mother so far simply made it the more incumbent on me to get the boy’s situation sorted out.
‘And it has been a great thing that Peter should have his own chance,’ Mrs Lusby said. ‘We’re sure it’s right he should try – feeling as he does that he owes it to Paul. It goes very deep with him, and I wouldn’t say my husband and I have any full understanding of it. But we respect it as being something on the spiritual side of life. Or we hope it’s that. It might be pride – which is something religion warns us against.’
I avoided, I trust not disrespectfully, any invitation to theological discussion this apprehensiveness may have carried. What I wanted first to get clear was the degree of the Lusby’s understanding of the implications of Peter’s recent interview.
‘I’m sure Peter is working very hard for the entrance examination,’ I said. ‘Did the college interview he had the other day encourage him?’
‘He hasn’t said much.’ Mrs Lusby’s voice had suddenly sharpened in anxiety. ‘But then he’s often rather a silent boy.’
‘How do these things happen, Mrs Lusby? I’m rather new to the system.’
‘I think it’s so that some boys can know early about there being a vacancy for them – I suppose the ones the college feels sure about – and then they can go on with the right work for when they start there. Peter was very excited when his headmaster told him there was a letter saying he must go to be interviewed. He said it was a great thing, and was quite keyed up about it. But he was very quiet when he came back – and very quiet he has remained.’ For the first time, Mrs Lusby hesitated. ‘Mr Pattullo, I’m afraid it didn’t go well. And he’s working so hard still! Long hours away from us, and comes home dead-beat. This morning his father told him it was early days to be hearing anything. But he said no – his headmaster had told him that if you get a place this way word of it comes to the school at once.’
‘Mrs Lusby, something did go a little wrong, and I very much want to clear it up with Peter, if I can. I think you’ve guessed it’s something like that I’ve come about.’
‘Yes – and you’re Peter’s friend.’
‘I’m certainly that. Only you must understand that I have no share at all in this whole matter of admissions. I can only try to get some facts sorted out, and brought to the notice of my colleagues who are charged with the work.’
Mrs Lusby responded to this with no more than a nod, and I realised that she had been listening intently for something else.
‘It’s Peter,’ she said. ‘He’s putting his bicycle away in the shed.’
While talking to Peter’s mother I ought to have been thinking ahead. But if I had failed to do so, and had no plan at all for coping with the boy, it was at least partly because there wasn’t the slightest telling how he would cope with me. If he really felt his private life to have been violated by some innocent badgering on the part of Charles Atlas, he might turn out uncommonly touchy at the sight of me. I had a moment of panic in which I felt my whole venture to have been misconceived. And then Peter was in the room – in this tiny room in which three people could scarcely stand beyond arm’s reach of one another.
‘Here is Mr Pattullo from Oxford, Peter.’
Mrs Lusby spoke, I think, from a feeling that her son, immobile in the doorway, was remaining improperly silent. Her words suggested, rather wildly, that without them my presence might have escaped his observation.
‘Good afternoon, sir.’ Having said so much, Peter waited. He was even paler than I remembered him, and there were dark smudges under his eyes: this and the black tangle of his hair lent an incongruously theatrical suggestion to his appearance, so that I found myself wondering what part he had sustained in Measure for Measure by Shakespeare. But he was only a tired and strained schoolboy, his confidence shaken – and not likely to be restored by my untoward turning up in Bethnal Green. Or not initially. The ultimate issue of the encounter was up to me. But in fact I somehow didn’t feel discouraged. He was up against it, and there was something about his bearing in that condition that I liked the look of. I told myself that he was tougher than his dead brother seemed to have been, even if not nearly so clever.
‘Hullo, Peter,’ I said. ‘I haven’t come just to pay a polite call, but because I think there’s something on the record we must get straight. Would you say that’s so?’
‘Perhaps.’ Peter waited again. He was looking at me with a level and stony glance. And his mother again seemed to feel there was a silence that must be filled.
‘Did you get a good afternoon’s work done in the public library, dear? I was telling Mr Pattullo about that.’
‘I got some work done, I suppose.’ Peter hesitated. ‘It’s quite a good library for my sort of thing.’ He frowned suddenly, so that his dark eyebrows came together with a narrow furrow between them. He was dissatisfied with himself, dissatisfied with what he had just said. An odd fellow-feeling came to me. I remembered how I’d said to his mother, ‘I felt I’d like to call and ask him how he’s getting on’. Peter Lusby didn’t relish being driven into disingenuous speech. He’d brought together two remarks each true in itself, but constituting a prevarication when juxtaposed. He’d been in no public library that afternoon.
It isn’t possible that at this point I had even a glimmer of what was going on. And the situation didn’t look encouraging. Even so, I had a faint sense of light at the end of the tunnel.
‘Peter,’ I said, I’ve walked you through the college, haven’t I? We’ll be quits if you’ll walk me round your park now. Will you?’
‘Yes, of course – if you want to. But, please, I don’t want just to be chatted up.’
If these words perturbed me it was because I had last heard them – or words very like them – from Ivo Mumford. I could only hope that this encounter was going to go better than that one had done.
‘Then come on,’ I said, and turned to thank Mrs Lusby for my tea and bid her good-bye. I wanted to make it clear that I wasn’t settling in on the family for the evening. Poor Mrs Lusby’s anxiety was now at a pitch constituting an unfavourable element in the affair. And Peter himself, I felt, breathed a little more freely when we were out in the street. As we entered the park I had a shot at catching on to this slight relaxation. ‘When I was a boy,’ I said, ‘there used to be an advertisement in the papers for correspondence courses of some sort. It always carried a photograph of a very benevolent-looking elderly man. He was smiling out at you in an encouraging way. And there was a caption saying, “Let me be your father”. We used to repeat that to each other as a kind of joke. But it’s a tricky role.’
Whether it was judicious or not, this entirely authentic anecdote at least acted as a trigger. Peter stopped, faced me, and threw at me words suddenly filled with passion.
‘What business was it of his?’ he cried. ‘What business at all? I’m not a kid! Can’t I have something to myself? I didn’t expect it. I hadn’t thought. It caught me out. I made a bloody, bloody fool of myself. And after it had all s
eemed to go so decently. Oh, damn, damn!’
‘Peter, I know what you’re talking about. And I know that somehow it isn’t just a storm in a teacup, although it sounds a bit like that. Listen. I was asked about my miscellaneous doings at my own interview long ago. It’s a regular thing, and supposed to show friendly interest. Perhaps dons keep it up ineptly when there’s a new sort of relationship between old and young. It can have an irritating smack of “Let me be your father”, I suppose.’
‘What were they thinking of? What were they suspecting me of? They weren’t just peering into my class, and all that. They knew all about that long ago. And they were such a decent crowd when—when we had death in the family.’
‘Yes. And they weren’t suspecting you of anything. But you shut up on them in a puzzling way, and it worries them. Dons are rather nervous people, I sometimes think.’
‘I’m nervous. I went as if I’d robbed a bank. And I just refused to answer one question. I didn’t have the sense even just to keep mum. I said something about not being allowed to talk about it. Could anything sound sillier? Not sinister, it seems to me – although that’s what they seem to have made of it. Just silly.’ Peter paused for a moment, and then walked on. ‘Only, you see, it was true.’
‘There doesn’t seem to be much doubt about that.’ I ventured to give Peter a sideways glance that wasn’t all gravity and despair. ‘Isn’t this something we can get in perspective? Can’t you tell me? I belong to the college. But I’m not one of those tutors and examiners. I’m kind of detached. So out with it, Peter.’
‘No.’
Peter said this so quietly that I felt the issue was settled. We’d reached a point at which I seemed to be trying to force not merely his confidence but his conscience as well. So there was no further road that way. We continued our circuit of the park in silence. It wasn’t a big place. We’d be back at our starting point within five minutes. And then, rather unexpectedly, Peter spoke again.
‘What worries me most,’ he said, ‘is that perhaps it was a promise I oughtn’t to have given. But somebody was being so kind and generous that I felt I had to. And he was quite, quite specific. “Say absolutely nothing to anyone,” he said. Well, I haven’t.’
Yeats’s Happy Shepherd says that words alone are certain good. It’s a shockingly extravagant claim. But at least working with words as one’s job a little sharpens the ear. After a moment’s sheer astonishment I realised that with one swift shove I’d be through.
‘Peter Lusby!’ I cried. ‘Do you mean to say all this connects up with an old gentleman called Lempriere?’
‘But I haven’t said anything!’ Peter’s dismay was tragicomical. ‘I can’t think how—’
‘Never mind. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter a bit. And I could work it all out now, just sitting in a dark room. But listen. Anything you tell me about it in confidence I promise shall remain our secret and Mr Lempriere’s.’
There was a moment’s silence. I had leisure to reflect that this sort of undertaking appeared to be becoming rather my thing. Here was very much what I’d felt constrained to say to Ivo, in somewhat different circumstances, no time ago.
‘I saw it as a secret,’ Peter said slowly. ‘But I didn’t see it as involving lies. Of course it has. Even to my parents. All that about the public library. It’s quite disgusting. But Mr Lempriere said it was entirely honourable and proper in itself.’
‘Then so it was. He’s that kind of man. But what has he been up to, Peter? Sending you to a crack coach?’
‘A crack—oh, I see. Yes – a very, very good tutor in the West End. The best in England, Mr Lempriere said.’ Peter reported this estimate with considerable solemnity. ‘He’s certainly being pretty marvellous. Only he laughs at Mr Lempriere – at Mr Lempriere’s idea, I mean, that examiners are brutes you can be taught tricks about. I think he’s probably right.’
‘I think he probably is.’ Peter, I was thinking, possessed an encouraging amount of good sense; rather more of it, perhaps, than his benefactor. And the barrier was pierced. Peter was eager to talk. He’d been bottling up rather a lot.
‘I don’t think Mr Lempriere was at the service for Paul, sir. But then, you see, he turned up at school, and saw the head, and took me out to lunch. He said he wanted me to have this coaching, quite privately, and wanted to pay for it. He said he happened to be quite well off, but I’d see that was just an agreeable irrelevance. I had to work that one out. He said he knew nothing about me, and that it was because of Paul. He said he’d liked Paul very much.’
‘I see.’ I was, in fact, seeing a good deal. The top liar in Washington, for one thing, had taken on a sudden reality. I judged it not improbable that Lempriere hadn’t so much as known Paul Lusby’s name until the day the boy died. But there was nothing spurious about his sense of what the college owed Peter, and he’d found his own distinctly wayward method of lending a hand.
‘Sir – what happens now?’
‘Nothing at all dramatic, Peter.’ This direct question had been a matter of good sense again. ‘You go on being taught by this thoroughly efficient chap, and then you sit the entrance examination. Everybody has to do that, you know, whether they’ve been promised a commoner’s place or not. If they have, it’s a matter of trying for a scholarship.’
‘I couldn’t remotely—’
‘It doesn’t matter a bit. Only do as well as you can.’
‘I will. But about my parents—’
‘What you tell your parents is your own affair.’ There were limits to this business of digging Peter Lusby out of the difficulties Lempriere had not very judiciously created for him. ‘But it’s my guess you needn’t now worry too much. And you’d better be off to your tea.’
I rang up the Genders from my club. Jimmy had just got home.
‘Jimmy,’ I said, ‘this is Duncan. About young Lusby. I’ve seen him. He’s in the clear.’
‘He is?’ Gender’s voice was eager and reassuringly well- pleased. ‘Just what—?’
‘It’s something I don’t feel at liberty to talk about.’
‘Good heavens, Duncan! Isn’t that something I’ve heard before?’
‘Yes, it is. And that’s it.’
‘Good.’ Gender didn’t hesitate for a second. ‘We’ll act.’
‘The next post, Jimmy. If you can oblige me so far.’
‘Right. It’s for the Senior Tutor to send the letter. I’ll ring up Cyril now. Shall you be dining?’
‘No. I think I’ll go to a theatre.’
‘Enjoy it, Duncan. This has been most terribly good of you. We’re most grateful.’
‘Good-bye.’ I rang off, and went into the club dining-room to get an early meal. I felt – childishly, I suppose – an enhanced regard for our Tutor in Law. He had accepted my verdict as if at the drop of his London hat.
XIII
In the evening following this London venture I was the guest of a man called Alexander Pentecost at a dining club of the traditional Oxford sort that meets now in one college and now in another according to who is host for the occasion. Pentecost was a physicist, and as he had won a Nobel prize more or less in childhood it was to be presumed that he was one of the most distinguished scientists in the university. But he also owned a consuming interest in the theatre. He was active in producing plays for the OUDS and for college societies, and the highlight of his life appeared not to be the occasion on which he was summoned to Sweden to be handed a cheque or scroll or whatever by the king of that country, but one on which he had successfully stormed the West End stage. It had been a matter, I think, of propitious acquaintance with certain top stars powerful in that area. But as the play had been the Prometheus of Aeschylus, and as Prometheus may be regarded as the archetypal atom-buster, a certain eclat no doubt attended its superintendence by so highly nuclear a character. Pentecost was interesting to me because he presented the odd spectacle of a supremely intelligent man (as he must certainly have been) in whom there lurked a Nicolas Junkin
who had never grown up.
We had met several times without my having felt that he had any designs on me in my professional character, but now this proved not to be so. At least he had something to discuss, and he got going on it over the champagne before we sat down at table. There was still prejudice, he was maintaining, blowing around against the Junkins in general. It was often asserted in senior common rooms that no human activity – not even playing cricket for the university – was more disastrously time-consuming than play-acting. As soon as a college began to do damned badly in the Examination Schools it started a witch-hunt in this regard. And it couldn’t be said—could it?—that my own college was exactly at the head of the academic league-table. So was this sort of persecution going on there? He only wanted to know.
I said that on the general situation I didn’t yet feel competent to pronounce, but that so far as the narrower issue went I was unaware of ducking-stools, let alone faggots, being prepared around me. On the contrary, the college subsidised juvenile dramatic aspirations with ready cash to a tune unimaginable in my own undergraduate days. We even allowed ourselves – and it was a much harder thing – to be bundled out of our hall for nights on end in the interest of staging in it theatrical ventures which sometimes proved extremely bizarre. Pentecost wasn’t to mistake me. I was all for this more liberal and accommodating attitude. As for what militated against the success of the academic studies of the young – and again I was all for modest success being there achieved – I was perpetually being treated to all sorts of theories, the kind of distraction we were discussing being only one of them.
Pentecost said he was glad to hear it. But he didn’t let up. Instead, he went into what I sensed as a routine about aristocratic education in the Elizabethan age. The great schoolmasters of that golden time had regularly encouraged skill in the actor’s craft as a proper part of their curriculum; the same attitude had obtained in the great houses of England as well; there were recorded instances of former wards having instituted actions against their guardians – men puritanically inclined, perhaps – for having denied them, in this as in other particulars, the due education of a gentleman.
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