“Dear me—I wouldn’t put it as strongly as that.” Tandon shook his head. “He was rather silly, I agree. And his wife, although not a bad sort of woman, wouldn’t be up to giving him much help. But one must make allowances. No family, you know. Just an ageing childless couple, making do with that disagreeable young Manningtree, and so on.” With a queer effect of large tolerance, Tandon shook his head. “Jopling might have been a different man, if he’d only had—” Tandon had been glancing at his watch as he spoke, and now he suddenly broke off. “Good heavens!” His husky voice was now agitated. “I’m late. Will you excuse me for a few minutes? I’ll send Marianne. In fact, I think I hear her coming now.”
He had gone; there was a quick exchange of voices in the little hall; and a moment later Marianne Tandon was in the room. Quail’s mind must have been in some confusion, since at first it admitted no more than a vague impression that she was, somehow, changed. And then he saw that she was pregnant.
CHAPTER V
It’s been such a long time!” She shook hands with him smiling. Then she walked straight across to the window and looked out, just as her husband had done a few minutes earlier. “You must forgive Gavin for dashing away. He believes, you see, that punctuality is most important . . . yes—he’s brought them in.”
“He’s brought—?” Quail was quite at sea.
“Arthur and Gavin John.” She had turned back and was looking at him with amusement.
“Not”—he had an odd feeling as of reaching out and laying a firm hand on the truth—”not the twins?”
Marianne nodded, and her amused expression gave way to distress. “And I never let you know! But there were so many ways in which I was remiss, I’m afraid. It’s rather exacting, it seems – childbearing at my age. Particularly two at once. I wasn’t always very well, and it got on top of me at times. Especially because we started off in so small a flat. But then Lady Elizabeth let us have this one, which is much better.”
For a minute or two Quail simply had to hope that he wasn’t looking too astounded, and that the right expressions – if only conventional ones – were coming from him. “Did you expect twins?” he presently heard himself rather inanely say. He was thinking that Marianne looked far more in possession of a full physical vitality than ever before, but that at the same time she decidedly didn’t look any younger.
“Not until the doctor found out. But it’s something quite likely to happen, it seems, in middle age. However, it’s not twins this time.” She made a candid, strangely beautiful gesture. “And this must be the last, they say.”
“Then I hope it’s a girl.”
“Oh, no!” The reply came as swiftly as if he had said something of ill omen. And then she laughed. “Gavin, I think, would be disappointed. He would like another son. And it’s up to me, isn’t it?” She was suddenly serious again – so that he felt, rather delightfully, his old sensation of not quite knowing where he was with her. “For you might say, mightn’t you, that that’s what it was all about?”
“You mean—?” Quail was resolved on caution.
“It’s why a man of Gavin’s temperament and in Gavin’s circumstances marries, don’t you think?” She was appealing to him earnestly. “Giving so much of his life to young men – but always in a rather impermanent relationship.” Marianne paused, as if her old incoherence were threatening her. “One would sometimes want . . . well, say just to have been in on it all from an earlier stage.”
“You feel your husband married because he wanted sons?”
“I feel it’s a very good reason for a man’s marrying!” She flashed this back at him in a way that made him feel he had asked a shockingly bald question. “But I don’t mean that it was”—she hesitated, and he could see that she was struggling on the farthest verge of her powers of expression—”I don’t at all mean that it was . . . a fully conscious preoccupation. So many things can be going on in a mind. And one thing, fortunately, doesn’t exclude another.” She caught his glance and for a moment held it in a sort of grave confidence. “Not a bit.”
“No—of course not.”
“Gavin didn’t, that’s to say, positively not want a wife. He wouldn’t entirely have preferred to get Arthur and Gavin John from a shop. And he wasn’t slow.”
“Not slow?” Quail found himself disturbed before the strange security that could produce this remote gaiety in Marianne.
“In discovering the conveniences of having a fianceé, and then a wife. His people, for instance – he is deeply devoted to them. But it would never occur to him to confide in one of his college friends in matters of that sort.”
“I suppose not.” It wasn’t within Quail’s recollection that Tandon possessed what could be called college friends at all. But in this impression he was possibly wrong. He had certainly been wrong about a good deal. And what enforced itself upon him now was the conviction that he had better withdraw as speedily as he could unobtrusively manage. What he had come upon in Norham Gardens was an equilibrium that was humdrum enough and entirely matter of everyday. But its ordinariness was grounded in a mystery – and one which it had never befallen him to be directly concerned with. Moreover, it was almost conceivable that he had blundered in with something dangerously disruptive on his tongue if not positively in his pocket. Yes – he had better be moving on.
“But Gavin said something odd.” Marianne was looking at Quail with an expression that had changed to curiosity. “Just now, I mean, when I passed him in the hall. He said that you had come to see us with something rather awkward.”
“Awkward?” Quail was dismayed.
“But, of course, when Gavin says that somebody is being awkward, it’s ten to one that he has been behaving with absurd awkwardness himself.” She was smiling, and she had spoken with an undisturbed serenity. Nevertheless, he wasn’t at all surprised by the straight determination with which her next words were uttered. “What was it?”
“Your father’s journals and papers.” Seeing that there was no help for it, Quail came out with this roundly. “I’ve acquired them. And I came to offer them to—to your husband and yourself.”
She was startled. He could hear her take a quick breath – and then she allowed herself to sit down on the room’s single chair. “The Warden – he has parted with everything?” she asked.
“Yes. And it has been my feeling that it is your husband who should edit the journals.” Quail hesitated. “He was so greatly interested in them, at one time.”
“Of course. And what does he say?”
“He won’t consider it.”
She sat quite still, making no immediate reply. Then she looked up at him with her large full gravity. “But why shouldn’t he?” she asked. “Why shouldn’t he . . . now?”
Quail was silent in his turn, for in her last word he thought he had heard sound the first prelusive note, as it were, in the coda of the whole affair. Then he forced himself to reply. “He feels that the task should go to a younger man, or at least to one who has not so many other responsibilities. I think, you know, I must have made a great mistake about him.”
“About Gavin?”
“Yes. It was my impression that he set very great store indeed on the prospect of—of working on the journals. At one time, I’d have put it almost at obsession. But I must have been quite wrong.”
Marianne shook her head. “You weren’t wrong. Dear Mr Quail—you know you weren’t wrong.”
He saw that they were in for some final frankness. “It was more in his head even than—well, sons?”
“Dear me, yes. It was something that didn’t belong to . . . any unknown side of life, something he wasn’t afraid of. Gavin had been editing books and writing papers for learned journals all his life. A further project of that kind was something he could . . . advance on.”
“I see.” And Quail, in fact, did see – and the consequence was a sort of relief which enabled him, almost spontaneously, to reach a slightly lighter note. “It must have been difficult, at times.�
��
“Oh, yes—oh, yes indeed! But it had to be faced, you know.”
“When you discovered, after your marriage, that your sister had sold the papers to Jopling: I guess it must have been a bit of a crisis?”
“A crisis? Yes, it was that . . . of course.”
“The surprise of it must have been a tremendous shock to your husband – and to yourself as well.”
“To Gavin, yes.” Marianne had risen to her feet again – and again she was looking at him with the direct gaze that contrasted so strangely with what he first remembered of her. “But not to me. What Eleanor did was on my own suggestion.”
“You suggested the sale!” He looked at her in stupefaction, and with a feeling which for seconds he couldn’t identify. Then he recognised it as something that had come to him very rarely: an unstinted admiration for some colleague, some rival who had brought off the really large, the hair-raisingly hazardous thing.
“Of course I’d have liked Gavin to have the journals, and everything else. But you can see, can’t you, that it would never have done? All his days, he’d have had such a guilty conviction that he’d married them – which is what he largely thought he was doing – that he’d never, never have discovered that he’d married anything else as well. But as it was, you see, everything was straightened out by the time our honeymoon was over.” She paused on this, and for a moment it all seemed to lie lucidly between them. “But I don’t see,” she added, “why he shouldn’t have them to—to work with now, since you’re so kind.”
Quail smiled – and felt that it would have greatly pleased him to laugh aloud. In a few years Marianne would be speaking with just the same mild wistfulness of a rocking-horse or an electric train. “I don’t see why not, either,” he said. “But he won’t. Not even if you tell him to, I verily believe.”
She took this seriously. “I wouldn’t do that.”
“He did a little have to cast round for reasons – reasons, I mean, for declining my offer. But I know he won’t change. Not that there isn’t a part of him that would like to, still. When the journals are edited and published, he’ll come out, I reckon, with a pretty stiff review. But that’s all. He knows in his heart that you got him round a tremendous corner, and he’s not going back.”
For the first time, Marianne Tandon faintly flushed in the old way. “The journals, and everything else,” she asked, “—you’ll take them to America?”
He nodded. “Most of them – if I may just have your blessing in doing so.”
“I often did wish you and my father’s journals at the other side of the Atlantic.” She was laughing again. “I was impatient for it.”
“Do you know”—the thought had oddly come to him, and he gave expression to it—”that I believe you would do wonderfully in business, Marianne? You can time things.”
“Time things?” She looked at her watch. “You’ll stay to tea?”
It was Tandon who eventually conducted Quail to the garden gate. The Senior Tutor still had something to say about the large insufficiencies of an existentialist aesthetic. But when Norham Gardens was before them and the moment come to say good-bye, he abruptly changed the talk. “About those journals,” he said, and paused. “Arthur Fontaney’s journals, I mean. We were speaking about them, you remember.”
“So we were.”
“I gained a nodding acquaintance with them, you’ll recall, some years ago. Through your kindness, indeed.”
“I wish we could have done more together.”
“Ah, yes – but I commonly have such a great deal of work on hand.” Tandon spoke hurriedly and at his huskiest. “All I was going to say is this: that I formed a strong impression that Fontaney had left what was virtually a system.” The huskiness had turned perceptibly wistful. “The system’s lurking there in the manuscripts, ready to educe, one might say. I find the thought . . . intensely interesting.”
Quail hesitated. “You’re sure you wouldn’t—”
But, even as he spoke, from the distant city there floated a sound of bells. And at once Tandon interrupted him. “Dear me,” he said. “I hadn’t realised it was so late. Bath-time, in fact. Good-bye.” He shook hands, turned, and vanished.
And Quail walked slowly back to his hotel. It was perhaps only to his fancy that, within the space of this single day, the face of Oxford had changed. There were fewer young people about – so perhaps the last of the balls and the last of the examinations were over. Certainly blinds were down in many of the colleges, and the busier streets seemed more preponderantly than ever simply those of a large industrial town. For a time he thought he was going to be depressed. Then he remembered that on the morrow he must come back this way and call on Lady Elizabeth Warboys. It was likely to be his last glimpse of her. Yet this didn’t now darken his picture. He realised that to think of Lady Elizabeth, even in a context not of the cheerfullest, was to contrive a certain enlargement of view. He mustn’t assert with rashness that what he had come upon in Norham Gardens held easily assessable proportions of life’s poetry and life’s prose. The twins, and the child yet to be born, were Arthur Fontaney’s grandchildren; and they would grow up within a stone’s throw of their grandfather’s dwelling. There was a substantial statistical probability that they would be clever. With a slice of luck, they might inherit something from their mother as well. It was true that they could scarcely be called children of passion, and very conceivably they might go a little short of flashing eyes and floating hair. But they represented – their coming into being represented – the place dealing with its own queer local conditions, one might say, adequately enough. And they would have the business of carrying it into another century.
He reached his hotel and climbed to his room. Jopling had been as good as his word, and a large brown-paper parcel was dumped unceremoniously on the bed. He eyed it with feelings not to be analysed on the final page of his chronicle. And then he glanced about the room. His former sojourn in it had been of considerable duration. But then, as now, he had set no mark on it distinguishable from the most casual tourist’s. He sat down at the small table serving as a desk, and took a luggage-label from his writing-case. Quail, he wrote, passenger to La Guardia, New York, N.Y.
Works of J.I.M. Stewart
‘Staircase in Surrey’ Quintet
These titles can be read as a series, or randomly as standalone novels
The Gaudy (1974)
Young Pattullo (1975)
Memorial Service (1976)
The Madonna of the Astrolabe (1977)
Full Term (1978)
Other Works
Published or to be published by House of Stratus
A. Novels
Mark Lambert’s Supper (1954)
The Guardians (1955)
A Use of Riches (1957)
The Man Who Won the Pools (1961)
The Last Tresilians (1963)
An Acre of Grass (1965)
The Aylwins (1966)
Vanderlyn’s Kingdom (1967)
Avery’s Mission (1971)
A Palace of Art (1972)
Mungo’s Dream (1973)
Andrew and Tobias (1980)
A Villa in France (1982)
An Open Prison (1984)
The Naylors (1985)
B. Short Story Collections
The Man Who Wrote Detective Stories (1959)
Cucumber Sandwiches (1969)
Our England Is a Garden (1979)
The Bridge at Arta (1981)
My Aunt Christina (1983)
Parlour Four (1984)
C. Non-fiction
Educating the Emotions (1944)
Character and Motive in Shakespeare (1949)
James Joyce (1957)
Eight Modern Writers (1963)
Thomas Love Peacock (1963)
Rudyard Kipling (1966)
Joseph Conrad (1968)
Shakespeare’s Lofty Scene (1971)
Thomas Hardy: A Critical Biography (1971)
Plus a further
48 Titles published under the pseudonym ‘Michael Innes’
Select Synopses
Staircase in Surrey
The Gaudy
The first volume in J.I.M. Stewart’s acclaimed ‘A Staircase in Surrey’ quintet, (but the second in time), ‘The Gaudy’ opens in Oxford at the eponymous annual dinner laid on by the Fellows for past members. Distinguished guests, including the Chancellor (a former Prime Minister) are present and Duncan Pattullo, now also qualified to attend, gets to meet some of his friends and enemies from undergraduate days. As the evening wears on, Duncan finds himself embroiled in many of the difficulties and problems faced by some of them, including Lord Marchpayne, now a Cabinet Minister; another Don, Ranald McKenechnie; and Gavin Mogridge who is famous for an account he wrote of his adventures in a South American jungle. But it doesn’t stop there, as Pattullo acquires a few problems of his own and throughout the evening and the next day various odd developments just add to his difficulties, leading him to take stock of both his past and future.
Young Pattullo
This is the second of the ‘A Staircase in Surrey’ quintet, and the first in chronological order. Duncan Pattullo arrives in Oxford, destined to be housed off the quadrangle his father has chosen simply for its architectural and visual appeal. On the staircase in Surrey, Duncan meets those who are to become his new friends and companions, and there occurs all of the usual student antics and digressions, described by Stewart with his characteristic wit, to amuse and enthral the reader. After a punting accident, however, the girl who is in love with Duncan suffers as a result of his self-sacrificing actions. His cousin, Anna, is also involved in an affair, but she withholds the name of her lover, despite being pregnant. This particular twist reaches an ironical conclusion towards the end of the novel, in another of Stewart’s favourite locations; Italy. Indeed, Young Pattullo covers all of the writer’s favourite subjects and places; the arts, learning, mystery and intrigue, whilst ranging from his much loved Oxford, through Scotland and the inevitable Italian venue. This second volume of the acclaimed series can be read in order, or as a standalone novel.
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