Foolscap

by Michael Malone

  It was just as well that when they met, Jonas had bullied him into returning to the town center to buy a blazer and tie at a (horrendously expensive) men’s store, for the Steward’s Enclosure imposed prerequisites more immediately gleaned at a glance than inherited wealth. Male backs had to be encased in jackets, their necks surrounded by ties; female knees had to be covered by skirts. Moreover, officials stood posted at the gate like sartorial Saint Peters to check for interlopers. One inebriated woman attempted to circumvent this tiresome hemline rule by tugging her strapless minidress down below her kneecaps, but (still protesting that she had complied with the code as stated, and was after all planning to pin her jacket shut) she was firmly escorted from the sanctioned enclosure.

  Nor was everyone at the races intoxicated; one assumed most of the racers weren’t, nor the band of the Grenadier Guards pumping out “Salute the Duke” from their gazebo, nor the row of nuns who never left their bleacher on the top tier of the stands—and were at times the only people in the stands. All day the beautiful, slender sculls, rowed by beautiful, slender youths, flew up the flat straight course from start to finish line, but watching them did not seem to be a high (at least not a constant) priority except with the nuns and a little group of Americans holding on to their frontline positions in the canvas lawn chairs that stretched to the Thames.

  Everyone else was promenading about the grounds to see who else was there and to show off their clothes to them. Or they were at the Regatta Shop buying Regatta oven mitts and ice buckets. Or they were floating about the river in motor launches waving at each other. But mostly they were squashed around congested tables to which waiters rushed more and more flutes of champagne and half-pints of Pimm’s Cup. Mostly, they were out in the sun from morn to noon to dusk, drinking as fast and hard as they could. And mostly they were drunk.

  Theo was himself still hung over from the night before in Barnet—when he’d been surprised to wake up with a banging headache not alone in the Nightingale, but in a flat, in bed, beside someone named Stephanie from whom he’d parted at dawn on subdued if friendly terms. (She also had a horrible headache.)

  It was therefore that Theo was particularly struck by the amount of alcohol being consumed here at Henley, apparently without effect on the imbibers.

  “Yes, a remarkable thing,” said Jonas Marsh, in blue blazer, Harvard tie, and straw boater. “The thing to notice, Ryan, is that these people are totally, totally blotto, and yet not a single one has fallen on his or her face. They have tilted.”

  “Remarkable tilts,” agreed Theo, sipping his own Pimm’s. “That man in the maroon stripes—looks like he’s counting the gravel? I’ve been watching five minutes. He’s hanging in there at an amazing angle of list.”

  “Tilted, but not toppled.” Jonas nibbled at his tiny tea sandwich. “They are not sobbing in a maudlin way, or knocking each other down, or even loosening their ties. They’re still speaking in complete sentences, too. And there’s not a vomiter among them. And this when they are so drunk, if they were Americans, by now they’d have their heads in a toilet bowl grunting like apes.”

  “I know the feeling,” Theo said.

  “And that, friend Ryan, is why England produced the greatest empire the West has ever known. Self-respect. Discipline.” The Anglophilic Marsh stretched out his thin arms as if to embrace the entire field of upper-crust sots. “What a relief to think there isn’t a Tupper or a Thorney for miles around! Or any of the other dolts from the backward hills of Cavendish U!”

  “Some of them aren’t so bad,” Theo protested.

  Marsh’s crossed leg shook furiously. “Not so bad? What would be bad? Orangutans? Our president, General Kaney, not only thinks we should have gone to Vietnam, he thinks he’s still there. I don’t know where old Mortimer and Lovell think they are. Our provost is proud, imagine, proud, to be remembered as ‘the Bone-Cruncher’—”

  Theo scooted his chair back from the kicking foot. “Well, come on, at least Tupper okayed your running the London program next year.”

  “Why, Ryan? Ask yourself why?”

  “So what if they did it to get rid of you? At least you’ll be here in England where you like it so much.”

  Marsh’s hands flew around his face after the invisible flies that seemed to pursue him. “There may be a God,” he admitted, and turned back to admire Britain’s finest on their feet.

  And true, though wobbly, the whole privileged class was vertical. They’d been at it all day, but at six o’clock they were still on parade up and down in the mud: the women, in livid hats with matching gloves, kept going while their high heels made little plopping noises as they yanked them out of the sucking sludge. By their sides, and a little to the patriarchal fore, strolled their men in club jackets of broad cartoon-colored stripes with matching beanies and ties that told everybody who they were. Stiffened with drink, they carried on.

  Theo Ryan and Jonas Marsh were on the premises by borrowed privilege. They were not only in through the gate, but in under the pink-and-white awning of the venerable Leander Club, off-limits to all but members and their guests. They themselves were guests of Mr. “Mole” Fontwell Esquire, who had coxed the eights of Brasenose College, Oxford, to victory in the Thames Challenge Cup some thirty years, and pounds, ago. Mr. Fontwell was very short, dark, and nearsighted, and that, rather than christening, was no doubt the source of his being called “Mole.” He was an old friend of Marsh’s, who’d introduced him to Theo as a fellow Renaissance man, though not a professional. A “private” scholar. Since Jonas had led Theo to meet Mr. Fontwell “back at the car,” and the car was a yellow Bentley, Theo translated “private scholar” to mean “rich amateur.” Mr. Fontwell (wearing a yellow-and-black striped blazer with a pink tie) was a generous and convivial man who instantly told Theo how much he’d admired his book on Shakespearean clowns, and added that he’d looked forward to their meeting since learning Marsh and Theo were colleagues. How Marsh and Mole had met was never explained, but apparently they’d known each other for some time; in fact, it had been Mole with whom Jonas had been hiking in the Hebrides, and Mole with whom he’d “motored” to Henley, despite Theo’s assumption that Jonas himself owned a car. Mole’s real first name was not disclosed.

  Alone, Theo might have had trouble locating Fontwell’s particular car, as the entire parking lot (a cow pasture) had been packed with Rolls-Royces clumsily jockeying with Bentleys and Jaguars for space, and trying not to run over the tailgate parties. Here in this pasture had assembled quite a few people apparently not only with no urge to see the Regatta, but in no hurry to get anywhere near the course. Instead, they were doing what the British love to do at the season’s poshest events: get all dressed up in formal clothes and have a picnic. So, just as they had done at Derby Day and Royal Ascot, at Lord’s for the cricket and at Glyndebourne for the opera, here they were at Henley for the races, blinded by sun, besieged by bees, sitting on blankets beside their cars, having tea on the wet ground. Actually, not all of them were on the ground; some had surrounded their enormous cars with tables and chairs, silver services, and portable grills. Not many of them were having tea, either. Champagne corks flew around the pasture as if anarchist snipers were hiding in the trees, trying to massacre as much of the upper class as they could manage.

  It had taken the Americans and their escort a good while to return to the Steward’s Gate, for they were waylaid en route by a gauntlet of boozy M.P.s, K.G.s, O.B.E.s, D.F.C.s, and assorted Esq.s of Mole Fontwell’s acquaintance. Their first stop was a gentleman in a cutaway who sat under a large umbrella and had a matching miniature umbrella shading his magnum of Mumm’s. This man proved to be “one of the chaps” who’d been coxed thirty years ago by “little Mole,” as he called the tiny Fontwell; and they were invited by him to share a bit of the bubbly. Another chap offered them Schloss Vollrad. Another, duck pâté with a decent hock. In fact, little Mole knew so many chaps, and all the chaps
were so hospitable, that Theo and Jonas and Mole had all gotten “tiddly” even before they reached the Leander Club pavilion. It made the more startling the sight of so many grown men in bright pink beanies, pink ties, and pink socks, standing among so many pink balloons, pink flowers, and pink bunting in a pink tent. Pink was the Leander Club color, and they took it seriously. Their emblem, tiny pink hippopotami, was even on the boxers Mole was wearing at that moment (or so he said), and he directed them to the souvenir booth where they might purchase pairs of the same.

  Mole Fontwell either had a remarkable number of friends, or everyone he knew was under that tent, for he certainly was on the most jovial terms with almost all of them. “Boaties, the lot,” he explained. As they stood one another rounds of Pimm’s, interspersed with quick darts out to the riverbank to catch the occasional Double Sculls or Prince Philip Challenge Cup finish, their joviality increased, until at six o’clock precisely, many of them began flirting in a loud-pitched way with anybody they found themselves mashed against in the press.

  At the bar with Fontwell, Theo stood smiling at these sexual rites. From a nearby table, a handsome woman kept winking at him and wriggling her fingers in a minuscule and lascivious variation on the royal handwave. Theo waved cheerfully back.

  “Give it up, Charles!” Mole shouted to a laughing, red-jowled man who’d just had his hand removed from a woman’s buttock by the woman to whom the buttock belonged. This man also wore a yellow-and-black striped blazer, which Theo now knew (from Jonas Marsh, who’d begged him not to display his ignorance by asking anyone but Jonas himself for such information) to be the colors of Brasenose College, Oxford.

  “Charles Blickers,” Mole explained. “Good sport, really; gets a bit over the top at times. Distinguished himself his second year, won a bumper race at the White Horse. Got down twenty-two pints of Hall’s best with a brandy chaser. Woke up in hospital days later. Might have killed a smaller man.”

  “Even a large one.”

  “The brandy was the problem.”

  “Ah.”

  Blickers was now trying to impress another woman by tossing up strawberries, trying to catch them in his mouth, and only occasionally succeeding.

  Theo yelled down at Mole Fontwell’s beanie-topped head. “Do you happen to know the Earl of Newbolt? Wouldn’t he have been up at Oxford about your time?” The large American squeezed quickly into an opening nearer the bar, and hauled Fontwell after him. “Just wonder if he’s here today. I was told he would be.”

  “Couldn’t say. Know Horry Stanlow, do you?”

  “Oh, no. I was at his library yesterday.”

  “A stunner, isn’t it? No, never knew Stanlow. Just a fresher when he took off. Went to Paris and won a dance contest, word was.”

  “Was he expelled?”

  “‘Expelled?’ Ah, yes, ‘expelled’—what you people call sent down. Couldn’t say. He’s certainly putting on an awf’lly good show at Bourne House now’days. No, my round. I insist.”

  This offer was a relief, since a while back, due to Mole’s popularity, when Theo had passed the bartender a twenty-pound note to pay for a round of drinks, he’d been asked for an additional 50 p. The Royal Regatta at Henley was clearly not a cheap way to enjoy oneself.

  Hugging their trays of Pimm’s against the jostle, the two finally shouldered their way back to the table, which they found empty. When they’d left it, Jonas had been deep in conversation with an “antiques man” about current market conditions, and the two had gone off somewhere together. In fact, several of Mole’s intimates seemed to share Jonas Marsh’s interest in antiques, including one who “bought for Sotheby’s,” and another who “sold” for himself. Throughout the afternoon, Marsh and a series of these individuals kept whispering together in what struck Theo as a rather clandestine manner. Hoping for information, he asked Fontwell now, “You and Jonas are both interested in antiques?”

  “Rabidly!” was the only answer he got. Then Fontwell suddenly clicked his glass against Theo’s and proposed a toast to Dame Winifred Throckmorton. “Jonas tells me you’ve just had a visit with the Great Tam, and that you’re an admirer. I too.” He rubbed his beanie. “At least now, through the rosy fog of time, I admire her most awf’lly. Hated her back when. To the Great Learned Tam!” He drank down a third of the potent amber punch. “Does she still wear that hid’jus old thing?”

  “A plaid tam? Yes, but I don’t know if it’s the same one.”

  “I’m sure it is. Same bicycle, too, I suspect. What a dragon she was, absolutely terrified me.”

  “Her bike riding? Ever been in a car with her?” Theo held out his hands and shook them violently.

  “I meant her brain,” Mole said. “I took my D.Phil. with her positively glowering at me like the Medusa.”

  “You did! That’s must have been something.”

  The little man tilted his head up at Theo. “Indeed.”

  “What was it on? Your dissertation.”

  “Oh, horribly boring. Jacobean scribal practices. Professional secretaries. Trial transcripts. That sort of thing. Old hat. Nothing theoretical and deconstructive like you Americans are up to. But I like piddling about, untying little knots. Wouldn’t interest you at all, I’m sure.”

  Theo said, “You’re wrong. I think it would interest me immensely.”

  Although almost literally in his cups, Mole Fontwell was quite cogent, as well as long-winded, as he affably answered all of Theo’s questions about early seventeenth-century “hands”; questions which narrowed to very specific inquiries about paper, ink, and cursive styles. They were eventually interrupted by a roar that shook the tent on the news that the Leander Club had won “easily” in the Queen Mother Challenge Cup with Charles Blickers’s nephew rowing stroke. Shortly thereafter, Blickers himself returned to the tent to stand a celebratory round, at the end of which Mole congratulated him and introduced Theo. When the hefty Britisher learned that Theo taught at Cavendish University, he leaned down (his well-featured face a scarlet blaze of broken blood vessels) and clapped the American on the shoulder. “Astonishin.’ Friend of mine went off there to teach, you know; South Carolina, is it?”

  “North.”

  “Righto. Paid him an astonishin’ ’mount of money. As a salary, I mean. You must know him, Herbie Crawford. Just saw him in the loo, now where the devil did he get to?” Slickers weaved to his considerable height, and began searching the crowd.

  “Herbert Crawford, the historian?” said Theo.

  “Astonishin’ ’mount,” said Blickers. “Wonder what he does with it? Expect he gives it all away. Remember, Moley, when he gave that old Welsh woman that did our shirts fifty quid for Christmas?”

  Theo hoped they were talking about two different people. “Herbert Crawford, the Marxist historian who teaches at Cavendish University? He’s here at Henley?”

  “Somewhere sloshed, Tory-bashing, I expect. Up at school, he was quite the tough; always in that filthy black rollneck pullover, the Cockney bit, man of the people, strewing the quad with leaflets. Remember the marijuana crumpets he passed round at crew table, Moley?”

  “Vividly.”

  “Always off boozing with the town scrubbers,” Blickers said. “Good man, though. We won our blades together at Eights Week. Right, Moley?” He grabbed the little man by the neck and choked him affectionately. “Gave our lovely cox quite a dunking, didn’t we? Remember?”

  “Vividly.”

  “Well, he’s about somewhere. Very-nice-to-have-met-you-Mr.-Ryan.” Off Blickers lurched, disappearing into the swarm, though Theo identified his whereabouts by a woman’s sudden squeal of “Stop that, Charles!”

  “Crawford’s left Oxford, then?” asked Mole. As a private scholar, he obviously didn’t keep up with even the hottest academic gossip.

  “Yes,” Theo hissed. “I suppose he’s back in England for the summer. What’s he doing at the
Royal Regatta? He’s supposed to be a Marxist!”

  Mole laughed. “You Americans are so…” he searched his Pimm’s Cup for a word “…earnest.”

  In a while, Jonas Marsh returned to bring Theo back with him to watch Harvard race against Trinity. So leaving Mole and his friends in the midst of a drunken roundelay of some obscurely scatological ditty, the two hurried outside. There, leaning from their lawn chairs nearly into the Thames, they cheered on the Crimson crew so ardently that bemused eyebrows (rather affectionately bemused eyebrows) were raised by the Britishers seated around them, and one said to his neighbor, “Americans.”

  Theo shouted defiantly louder, “go! go! go!”

  Jonas, with his typical intensity, corkscrewed in his seat and appeared to be stroking along with the rowers. “fight fiercely!” he screamed. Bow to bow with their opponents, the Harvard crew shot past in a flurry of oars, their young faces contorted with strain. “go crimson, go!!”

  “stroke, blokes, strokes!” a voice shouted behind him. “For God, for Country, and for Harvard!”

  This misquotation of Yale’s motto, Theo’s alma mater, turned his head around, causing him to miss Harvard’s half-a-length victory, and to see instead the unwelcome sight of Herbert Crawford approaching across the grass. So Blickers had been right; Theo had been hoping the man was too drunk to have recognized himself in a mirror, much less an old college chum in the loo. With Crawford was someone who looked like, someone who was, Maude Fletcher.

  Behind them walked a sweet-looking stooped elderly couple, both with canes in their outside hands, and their inner arms linked. The old man wore a pink beanie and the woman a hat that looked like a fistful of orange mums. As for Maude Fletcher, she appeared to have shucked her clerical collar along with her virtue, and looked disgustingly happy in a bright silk print dress. And as for Crawford, while sporting the only black leather jacket in sight, he had bent his principles to a white shirt and, of all things, a pink Leander tie.