Decency, again, marked the conduct of the Warden upon the solemn occasion. He was altogether benign. Indeed, if the thought hadn’t been irreverent in the circumstances, Quail would have concluded that he was going about his business as one thoroughly pleased with things. It was perhaps this sense of a general decorum and even amenity about the proceedings that prompted Quail, with an expansiveness in which he surprised himself, to approach Mrs Jopling at the close of the service with a polite enquiry as to whether he might transport the Warden and herself to the Bradmore Road.
“Dear Mr Quail, that is most kind of you. Michael Manningtree – who is also, although in a more remote way, an allié of the Fontaneys – had hoped to come, in which case he was to have taken us, of course, to the reception. Unfortunately it is one of his hunting days. So we shall be most grateful. My husband and I must, I suppose, be regarded in a sense as the principal guests. But, dear me!”—and Mrs Jopling, who had maintained one of her statuesque poses during this speech, turned rapidly in preparation for darting movement—”I must send a porter to countermand our taxi. Otherwise they may charge for simply sending it to the Lodge, which would be outrageous. And then I will fetch Charles. I imagine the nouveaux mariés are signing the register now.”
So they drove north. Jopling was genial. It was apparent to Quail that he was determined to go through the day with address – indeed with that effortless command of the role of good loser which is the birthright in England of the race perversely known as public school men. Quail judged the performance impressive. But, of course, right at bottom there might be something like antagonism towards Tandon still at play. Tandon had clearly not required the Warden’s priestly services in any spirit of reconciliation; in fact, his motive hadn’t been at all reputable. And the better Jopling behaved, the more this fact might be impressed upon any mind caring to reflect upon it.
But Quail checked himself here. This was a line of thought ungenerous in itself; and it seemed to him that the right thing was a frank word with Jopling on the situation. “I guess I’m glad,” he ventured, “at some of the ways this has worked out. You know how I was dead keen on Fontaney’s journals – and on everything else, for that matter. And I know you were inclined, Warden, to take some interest yourself. But we can be satisfied that Gavin Tandon will do a very good job.”
“Certainly, certainly.” Jopling gave his leonine nod. “Tandon is a most worthy and estimable person, as I have always maintained. But for some time he has lacked stimulus. The life of a working tutor is monotonous, it can’t be denied. That is why I have tried to stir him up a little, from time to time. If you ask me, it is one of the functions of the head of a house to trouble the waters, so to speak, every now and then. It’s an aquarium world, one might say. Did it ever strike you that our college common room is peculiarly like that? Glimpse it from the garden, my dear Quail. The creatures occasionally drift to the windows and stare through the glass at the world beyond. But in a peculiarly sightless way. Their mouths open and close, but torpidly. Lack of oxygen—eh? Now, I regard myself as a pipe – just a small pipe, injecting the vital gas at convenient intervals. There’s a little flurry, of course. But the process is health-giving in the main.”
“Charles has his odd way of putting things.” Mrs Jopling appeared to think that an explanatory word was necessary. “C’est sa façon de parler. But he does, of course, work very hard for the health of our whole body.”
“I’m sure it’s appreciated.” Quail spoke with a decent absence of all irony. “I wonder whether our friends intend to make a long honeymoon of it?”
“Ah!” Jopling was benevolently amused. “I have no doubt of what is in your mind. The rites of Aphrodite will not long detain our excellent Tandon from the service of Pallas Athena? Very true. No doubt he will do the proper thing, and conduct his bride to some approved spot on the French or Italian riviera. But if a north wind should blow, one imagines him sniffing it—eh? Yes, indeed. He is understandably impatient to be across the Channel again. Well—great discoveries await him. But here we are. What an odd part of the world it is.”
Even the largest houses in the Bradmore Road are scarcely mansions, and the reception was a horrid crush. It would not have been Quail’s wish to linger five minutes beyond the bride and bridegroom, and he felt that if Miss Fontaney really felt it necessary to make him a confidential communication she might have chosen a more convenient – even a more seemly – moment than the tail-end of this jollification. And as that, it still grated on him horribly. No amount of rational consideration, no sage reflection that people may engage in a common enterprise with tolerable accord even when actuated by totally different and mutually incomprehensible motives, could help him to see the occasion other than in a sombre light. But he could at least in all sincerity wish Marianne Tandon happiness, and when he had done this he turned to her husband with words in which there was similarly nothing feigned. He was a little surprised when Tandon, who was not comporting himself with any more ease than might have been expected, at once drew him aside.
“It’s a real relief. I expect you were worried too. Miss Fontaney – Eleanor, that is – has a great deal of good sense. I didn’t like to make a great point of it. Only to drop the merest hint. But it’s clear she acted on it. Yes – a great relief.”
It was a moment before Quail made anything of this. Then he looked about him, and saw what the crush of guests, and perhaps his own preoccupation, had obscured from him so far. Almost all Arthur Fontaney’s treasures had been removed. Even the tall mirror with the Gibbons frame, in which he had once come upon Marianne questioning herself, had vanished from its wall. He could just distinguish, between the heads of two women in picture hats, the less faded patch of Morris wallpaper that had lain behind it. “I suppose,” he said to Tandon, “that the room had pretty well to be cleared, anyway. Particularly since there was to be such a spread.”
It was true that the entertainment being provided by Miss Fontaney was on an unexpectedly prodigal scale; here in the drawing-room a long buffet table had been set up and loaded with confections of considerable elaboration. And the rapidity with which the champagne was being served suggested the employment of caterers with the largest ideas of such occasions. Even Tandon now seemed struck by this. “No queue for the champagne,” he said. “Do you know, that’s something I’ve never seen in Oxford before? But Eleanor is undoubtedly a generous woman – and thoroughly sensible, as I said. These precautions, for instance. I notice they’ve been taken in the other rooms as well. I hope she got reliable people.” His husky voice took on a tinge of anxiety. “A lot of damage can be done to things in store . . . by the way, have you seen old Gosskirk? I particularly want a word with him.”
“I’m afraid I don’t know him.” Quail noticed with surprise that Tandon’s gaze had not its usual fixed focus on infinity. The bridegroom, in fact, was peering anxiously about the room.
“Gosskirk of the University Press.” Tandon was almost impatient. “There’s something I particularly want to discuss with him before I have to leave Oxford. I doubt, you know, whether I’ll get back under three weeks. Ah, there he is! Excuse me.”
Quail watched him go. Even edging his way through this crowd, Tandon managed to get his body at its accustomed forward-thrusting slant. And Quail felt that he knew perfectly well what Tandon was going to put to Gosskirk. It would be the high propriety of issuing at an early date a check-list of the Fontaney manuscripts. There was no harm in that. But meantime, and for the moment, here was Marianne somewhat awkwardly left to face alone the tail-end of the arriving guests. Quail found it impossible not to take this as symbolic of a state of affairs to come; and he didn’t even find much comfort in the circumstance that Tandon did quite soon return to his proper station. Employing an unobtrusive symbolism of his own, Quail let the champagne pass him by.
And by several prescriptive stages the function came to its close. The bride and bridegroom departed, the Warden and Mrs Jopling followed, and such guests
as lingered were made aware that anxiety to replenish their glasses had abruptly ceased. Quail, without freedom to take his own leave, was presently confronted with a room in which the waiters had been joined by a number of inferior and hitherto invisible assistants, and in which the remnants of the feast were being swept into crates and baskets with a hint alike of reproachful haste and unnecessary noise. It was extremely dismal. Nor did the appearance of Miss Fontaney when she eventually made her way towards him do anything to dissipate the feeling.
She was dressed with an elaboration, or at least a richness, matching the feast over which she had been presiding. But this served only to emphasise the emaciation of her person – rather, indeed, as the feast itself had thrown into relief, once one had observed it, the stripped and disgraced condition of the room in which it had taken place. But while the room was no more than forlorn – and presumably was this only as a temporary measure – its owner had about her a sort of grim pathos before which there seemed nothing to say. She had risen – when one came to meditate it she had risen magnificently – to the crisis of her sister’s fate; and no doubt she had been bred long ago to a view of marriage that would regard as decently sanctionable such a union as had just taken place. And whether it was rightly or wrongly that she had come to her notion of where Marianne’s happiness lay, she had acted with what must now be felt as some nobility in the light of it. A daughter of Arthur Fontaney’s, even if confused at accounts and unable to read Tasso, must be allowed to choose her own destiny. A daughter of Arthur Fontaney’s must not be married in hugger-mugger – even if this meant something like the desecrating of a shrine, to say nothing of a mere expenditure of cash which the ladies’ straitened means must have rendered formidable.
She hadn’t arrived at her decision unscathed or indeed unravaged. Her manner was composed, and he didn’t feel that even the most trying circumstances would readily see her break down. But he vividly felt, as she turned with a brief word and led the way from the continuing menial hustle of her drawing-room towards the seclusion of the library, that she was at a strain the extent of which he couldn’t altogether account for. Her physical weakness and the fatigue and emotion of the day ought to account for it; but something told him this wouldn’t quite do. Eleanor Fontaney was a strong-minded woman, and although some of her notions verged on the bizarre, she had a tolerably clear head. It couldn’t be possible that she didn’t know, as everybody else knew, that the end of her life was near. It was almost at her own grave-side, to put it bluntly, that she had turned and dismissed the sister who had been her life’s companion – dismissed her, as it were, back into the breathing world.
There, indeed – Quail saw it with sudden clarity as he followed her rigidly braced body through the hall – was the mechanism. Although marriage to Gavin Tandon didn’t, to the disengaged observer, very immediately suggest the largest liberation, the marital state in itself had been a symbol sufficiently potent with Eleanor. As far as the mere bearing of the torch was concerned, Hymen didn’t pick and choose between marriages; and the light and warmth of that sacred flame, even if not of the strongest, was the last gift that the elder sister could make the younger. Yet these considerations weren’t enlightening upon the point Quail was now troubled by. Miss Fontaney had sacrificed something of her sister’s companionship in the months or few years that remained to her; but there shouldn’t somehow be in that a hint of ultimate dilemmas and desperate remedies. There ought to be more of the triumphant in this sick woman, and less – Quail searched for the right conception – less of the sacrificial.
As if the word as it came into his head had acted as a cue, Miss Fontaney, whose hand had been on the library door, turned round with this unopened. “Mr Quail, I have spoken of an explanation. Let me begin it here.” And, rather strangely, she sat down on a narrow bench that lay disposed against the wall of the corridor in which they had halted.
He stood awkwardly before her. “I must insist that you don’t owe me any explanation at all. It has been a great privilege, Miss Fontaney, simply to—”
“But certainly I do.” Her high-pitched voice interrupted without ceremony. “You are the great authority upon my father’s life and writings. You have been eager to acquire what it is in my power to dispose of. And I know that you would have wished to do so on the most generous terms. I did give, believe me, long and anxious consideration to the possibility. And I greatly regret to have to say that I was unable, in the end, to reconcile myself to the idea of letting my father’s journals and other memorials leave England.”
He bowed. It seemed the right formal thing to do. “I understand that very well – although my hope, of course, was that you might see the matter otherwise.”
“So I have made other dispositions. You will have no difficulty in guessing what they are.”
Quail felt that he decidedly hadn’t. He also found, with some satisfaction, that he had similarly no difficulty in giving a cheerful answer. “I’m sure they’re going into excellent hands – and appropriate hands, too, as matters have turned out.”
“My decision has, moreover, removed a great difficulty of a practical order.”
“I’m very glad to hear it.” He was slightly puzzled, for he didn’t see how this statement fitted in. Then it occurred to him that perhaps the Tandons – as they must now be called – were going to return and make their home in the Bradmore Road, and that Miss Fontaney was disposed to see large if nebulous difficulties resolved by the fact of having a resident scholar, so to speak, on the job.
But this wasn’t a hypothesis in which he was allowed to rest for long. Miss Fontaney had risen to her feet again. “As I believe you know, I felt it necessary at first strongly to oppose the engagement of my sister. It was not, of course, on the score of Mr Tandon’s – or Gavin’s – ineligibility. We need not pretend that he is at all a distinguished person, and his family connections appear to be obscure. However, he has attained to a respectable station in life. As Marianne’s husband, I had no quarrel with him. The ineligibility lay, of course, on Marianne’s part. She was without a portion.”
“Without what?” Quail’s astonishment was beyond his power of civil expression.
“Marianne had no dot.” Miss Fontaney was before the library door again, and this time she opened it. “It is a matter upon which I hold strong views. No woman in our class of society, you will agree, ought to marry without proper settlements. So I was, I say, in a great difficulty . . . shall we go in?”
They entered the library – and the truth seemed to glimmer up at Quail from the threshold. There could have been no proposal to use the place for the wedding reception. But it was now as bare as the drawing-room. Empty shelves stood bleakly round it. Everything – even Arthur Fontaney’s books – was gone. “You mean,” he said, “that you . . . that you . . .?” He didn’t remember ever in his life before being reduced to stammering.
“I could, of course, have applied to you. But I have explained my objection to that. My father’s things must remain in England. So it was fortunate that the Warden has also been keenly interested. He has taken everything – and on what I judge to be very reasonable terms.”
“I see.” For a moment Quail, although he said this automatically, was merely stupid. “So it isn’t just that things have been stored out of harm’s way?”
“Certainly not. Everything is now in the Warden’s Lodge. And the settlement has been so prompt that I have been able to make the proper financial arrangements for Marianne already.” Miss Fontaney looked round the dismantled library – and suddenly her voice, while still rising and falling characteristically within its high register, trembled as well. “It has been a drastic act, Mr Quail. But it will make a great difference to my sister’s future.”
There was a moment’s silence. Miss Fontaney’s last proposition was one to which Quail found it singularly hard to respond. “But Gavin Tandon,” he managed to say at length, “—isn’t he—well, disappointed?”
“He knows nothing o
f the matter. I have judged the time not appropriate for speaking of it. Gavin is not himself a man of means, and he might feel a little awkward about what I have judged it necessary to do. And lately, of course, his mind has been otherwise occupied.”
“Of course.” Quail seemed to glimpse another aspect of the affair in which Eleanor Fontaney’s family pride had operated disastrously. It had often been evident that her sense of her sister Marianne was not romantic; that she regarded her, in fact, as being, for Arthur Fontaney’s daughter, sadly lacking in intellectual distinction. Nevertheless, it had simply not occurred to her that anything other than Marianne herself could be in the mind of a man who proposed to marry her. For some seconds Quail felt that there was absolutely nothing more to say. Then, deciding that he must speak, he spoke cautiously. “But Mr Tandon is a first-rate scholar in the field – and particularly on the more strictly philosophical side. And now, having become by his marriage one of the family, he might expect—”
“That, no doubt, is a possibility.” For the second time Miss Fontaney interrupted. “And, indeed, I gave it careful thought. But I could scarcely have sold things to a man about to become my sister’s husband, even supposing him to have had the means to buy. Nor do I consider him to be quite the right man to have an important say in the matter of my father’s remains. He has not, to my mind, quite the status. With the Warden it is entirely different.”
The Guardians Page 20