Lotte was expecting him, and Lotte was entirely kind. She took him in her arms and comforted him, nursed him; she was sublimely grateful for his simply being there. In the near-darkness she moved the hair back from his damp forehead and gently kissed it. He realised that he could have whipped her and she would have remained just the same. He made love to her instead – himself gently, and compassionately as she was compassionate. He was safe. It was a heavenly night. Neither during it nor over succeeding days did his former vulnerability so much as come into his head. It had gone for good.
Then one more unexpected thing happened. David and Olly received severally from Frau Weber written invitations to fünf-Uhr Tee. There was nothing for it; appalled, they solemnly wrote out formal acceptances. Nothing of the sort had ever happened before. Tim said icily that they were for it. They believed him.
In Frau Weber’s ugly Gesellschaftszimmer a round table had been set out with a tea-run, and little napkins, and plates of repellent-looking sandwiches. On upright chairs placed severely around it quite a company was already present. It didn’t include Lotte and Pfiffi. In addition to Frau Weber herself there were three old women exactly like her. There were also two old men, each balancing his hands on a silver-headed stick, with his bearded chin on his hands. One of them wore a decoration; he was clearly a Geheimrat, or something like that. Neither of them failed to bear a resemblance to their late beloved emperor.
So here was the Family: the Webers, in fact, putting their most terrifying feet forward, and showing that they were by no means humble people like the Mozarts. Introductions were effected, although neither the ladies nor the gentlemen moved other than to offer a frigid bow. Olly, with a desperate flicker of impudence that David judged not too well-bred, clicked his heels and said ‘Servus!’ – which was undoubtedly Viennese but probably not quite right. Tea was dispensed, and sandwiches sparingly consumed. Conversation was sparing too, but did happen. Everybody in turn, that is to say, offered a single polite remark. After that there was silence. David and Olly supposed that this would be followed by the real thing: stern reprobation, probably by the Geheimrat. Or perhaps both gentlemen, although aged, would rise simultaneously and each tweak an English nose – after which the details of the duels would fall to be arranged by seconds summoned for the purpose. But the silence continued. And everybody was looking at David and Olly inquiringly.
It was clearly up to them to say something. And as they were about equally clever it is probable that they arrived at one and the same moment at what it was. They were expected to petition the Family for the hands of Fräulein Lotte and Fräulein Pfiffi respectively. The time had come – had decidedly come – for that.
Faced with this frightful situation, Olly did not too badly. At least he wasn’t again impudent. He simply launched out on approving observations on the musical life of Vienna, and didn’t let up for three or four minutes. David put in this interval imagining himself arriving home with a thirty-year-old Austrian fiancée, or even wife. He was very fond of Lotte, and at present grateful to her beyond measure. But he had a clear head, and he knew there was nothing in it for either of them. And, of course, he had behaved like a cad, etc. When he told his father about it (and this, rather oddly, he knew he’d have to do) he would be informed that it sounded to have been a pretty poor show.
They extricated themselves from the party as best they could, and returned to their own quarters. David felt he wanted to barricade the door. Olly made a half-hearted attempt to denounce Frau Weber who, with that utterly delusive hope of matrimony in mind, had pretty well acted as bawd to her own daughters. David lost his temper, and told him to shut up. Olly obeyed. They decided that the best thing to do was to pack. When Olly went into his bedroom to begin the process, it was to find Tim already doing the same thing. Tim had no doubts about Vienna. Schluss! That was it. As it damn well ought to have been long ago.
There were two horrible partings, and the young men set off for home next day.
VIII
Almost at once they drifted apart. They’d never had a reunion, and there wouldn’t be one now. Even Olly and David, who had been at school together, never met for more than a drink and a quick word until, in the 1970s, they found themselves spending the night in the same hotel. It was in the small market town on the outskirts of which their old school lay. They discovered that they both had grandsons there now: quite small boys in their first term. Being conscientious grandparents, they had both come down on a visit, just to see how things were going along. They agreed that it seemed to be not too badly. The school, Sir Oliver Russell said, had been humanised and liberalised in a most notable way since their time. Professor Read was of the same opinion. Every variety of civilised activity seemed to be encouraged; games, although vigorously pursued, were not the tyranny and fetish they had been; and their grandsons couldn’t be told to tip an arse because they had burnt some great oafs toast.
‘But most of the proper things remain,’ Sir Oliver said. ‘Nice to see everyone in chapel, wouldn’t you say? And all in surplices still. And the candles! Terribly jolly.’
Professor Read agreed that the scene in chapel was terribly jolly. The two old men reminisced together through a long evening, and after a second glass of port and some brandy following dinner each summoned the flickering attention of the other to the recollection of occasions not always particularly civilised or humane. Not unaware of their condition, they joked about being respectively Shallow and Silence. But it was a Shallow and Silence in form-rooms and dormitories and on playing-fields rather than as young blades about a town, pursuing the bona-robas. They took their time, in other words, about approaching Vienna.
‘The fees at the confounded school,’ Sir Oliver suddenly said, ‘are turning outrageous. I’ve had to lend a hand with covenants and so forth. I daresay you have too, David.’
‘Moderately, Olly. The academic life hasn’t been a gold mine exactly.’ While teaching in a university, David had developed quite a profitable side-line in the production of literary biographies, carefully researched, and written in an urbanely formal prose that pleased old-fashioned readers. But he wasn’t at all rich as a result.
‘A gold mine, David? There just aren’t any – not now. I expect you know, by the way, that there are grandchildren of poor Tim Merton’s of school age now? Boys, I believe. A pity they can’t be with ours. Out of the question, I suppose.’
‘No doubt.’ David knew nothing about Tim, except that he had been killed while driving an ambulance around London in 1944. ‘I almost believe,’ he went on, ‘that I never once ran into Tim again – not after our coming back from Vienna all those ages ago.’ David sipped his brandy. ‘In fact he disappeared abruptly. I felt he’d stopped approving of us.’
‘Oh, I don’t think it was that, David. Just then, he had a bad nervous breakdown, and that buggered things up a bit. Nasty thing to come on one, it must be. Never barged into that sort of trouble myself. Did you?’
‘No – or never anything to speak of.’ David gazed into his glass as he gently rotated it. He wondered whether if now, a dotard on the very verge of his confine, he was at last going to tell Olly, also a dotard, the story of that bad time that had climaxed in Spalato. It certainly remained with him vividly enough to be an effective story. But he rejected the idea. Close as Olly and he had once been, such a confidence would be unseemly now. ‘Don’t you seem to remember,’ he asked, ‘that Tim was a good deal under the weather during most of that time in Vienna? That’s how it comes back to me, at least.’
‘True enough – and I know what the trouble was.’ Olly looked round for a waiter; he would have one more brandy before going to bed. ‘I got it out of him not long before they killed him. He’d been married for only two or three years, you know. Sad. You must have got married about the same time, David?’ Olly looked up, for a moment sharply curious.
‘Yes, just about then.’
‘Local girl, eh?’
‘Oh, entirely.’ As impudent as e
ver, David thought. ‘Our vicar’s daughter.’
‘Good, good! Another brandy, please. We none of us went back to Vienna, did we, to collect a bride?’
‘Gott sei dank, Olly. And don’t be frivolous. But tell me what you got out of Tim. I’m curious. I always was. I used to wonder why he was grown up.’
‘Grown up?’ Olly was perplexed. ‘We were all three that, weren’t we? Or more or less.’
‘We shaved, and had our adventures, I suppose. But go on.’
‘Tim had been in love. Thank you – will you put it on my bill please? Tim had been very much in love.’
‘In love?’ There was a note of perplexity in David’s repetition of the phrase – rather as if its reference was to some dubious condition he’d once or twice heard of. It occurred to him that, back in that Tim-and-Olly time, they’d never used it. Making love, yes: it was the upper-class way of saying something denominated otherwise by the vulgar. But in love, no. It just hadn’t cropped up. ‘Do you mean,’ he asked Olly, ‘before our stay in Vienna?’
‘Yes, of course. During Tim’s final year at Oxford. It was what mucked up his Schools.’
‘I remember about that, of course. But I never knew why it had happened.’ David paused, puzzled. ‘Do you mean that, all through that Vienna period, Tim was a heart-broken man because some love affair had gone wrong?’
‘Just that. It happens, you know.’ For a moment, and as he said this, Olly was almost the old Olly again. ‘Yes, it does happen. The real thing.’
‘But he mucked in, didn’t he, in those attempts – and successes – of ours at what our sons would call an easy lay?’
‘Well, yes. He did – in a kind of cynical and half-hearted fashion. But all dust and ashes to him, I think. It would be – wouldn’t it? – after something quite different.’
‘Yes.’ David wondered whether he wanted to hear more. He found he did. ‘How did the crash come?’ he asked. ‘Was it before—’
‘It was before Tim came—with the wench, that is.’ Sir Oliver Russell paused, perhaps discomposed by this resurgence in himself of an ancient routine grossness. ‘But that wasn’t the point. Whether or not he’d possessed her – and he hadn’t – was precisely not the point. For Tim had landed himself with the real thing, as I say. The girl had indeed lain in his arms, he said. Moaning. All that. But at the same time it was beyond sense. And then she was pretty well wrenched away from him.’
‘What sort of a girl was she?’
‘Austrian, as a matter of fact, and aristocratic. Her people and his people saw – or thought they saw – it wouldn’t do.’
‘Good God! Just because—?’
‘No, no. Nothing of that kind. Not class stuff at all. The Mertons were quite in the right drawer themselves, so far as that went. It was some ghastly medical superstition of the time. The same sort of blood disease, or loopiness, or heaven knows what, imagined as running in both families. So a gaggle of bloody leeches blundered in and smashed the thing up. It was a bit morbid, in a way, Tim’s coming to Vienna at all. The girl’s grandfather had been something quite tremendous there, and her father had hung on in the Austrian Embassy in London. That’s how they met. I believe Tim’s father had a crazy idea that Tim might find another, and blamelessly hygienic, wench of the same sort on the banks of the Donau.’ Olly paused on this. Something of his old idiom was returning to him. ‘Perhaps Tim himself had dimly the same useless idea. Do you remember, David, that ghastly old party-giving Baronin?’
‘Gräfin, not Baronin. Baronessen were two a penny. Like the wives of knighted quill-pushers or grocers.’
This was scarcely a tactful pedantry on Professor Read’s part. But Sir Oliver, who nowadays only intermittently listened to what was said to him, ignored it.
‘Remember the girls paraded at those bun-fights, David? I think Tim really was a little cracked at the time, and imagined things as he gaped at them. Certainly when he got home they had to shove him for a time into a shocking bin in Northumberland, or some such discreet back-of-beyond. But, of course, he came round in time. He had a perfectly lovely wife. Astounding kids, too. Too bad that he never saw them scramble out of their perambulators.’
Sir Oliver Russell – he had driven a quill to good effect in some respectable Ministry – fell silent, and Professor Read said nothing. It was time to go to bed in this not very comfortable hotel. They both rose and made their way, a little creakingly, to the staircase. Sir Oliver paused at the foot of it.
‘I say,’ he said, ‘do you remember Sin and Death? My Sin, David, and pretty well your Death, eh?’
Chuckling softly at this aged witticism, Olly – who was inclined to stumble at times – cautiously led the way up to their rooms.
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 enth
ral 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.
Memorial Service
This is the third novel in the Oxford quintet entitled ‘Staircase in Surrey’. Duncan Pattullo returns in middle age to his old college. The Provost is heavily engaged in trying to secure a benefaction from a charitable trust which the old and outrageous Cedric Mumford influences. One significant complication is the presence in college of Ivo Mumford, Cedric’s grandson. He is badly behaved and far from a credit to the college. His magazine, ‘Priapus’ proves to be wholly objectionable. Stewart explores the nature of the complicated relationships between the characters with his usual wit, literary style and intellectual precision and turns what might otherwise be a very common and ordinary situation into something that will grip the reader from cover to cover.
The Madonna of the Astrolabe
In the fourth of J.I.M. Stewart’s acclaimed ‘Staircase in Surrey’ quintet the gravity of a surveyor’s report given to the Governing Body is the initial focus. The document is alarming. The Governing Body, an assembly of which Pattullo was in awe, was equally awed by the dimensions of the crisis revealed. It would seem that the consideration was whether there would literally be a roof over their heads for much longer. The first rumblings from the college tower brings the thought well and truly home to Pattullo. ‘Professor Sanctuary,’ the Provost said evenly, ‘favours the immediate launching of an appeal . . .’ And so it begins . . . In J.I.M. Stewart’s superbly melding of wit, mystery, observation and literary prowess a gripping novel develops that will enthral the reader from cover to cover. This can be read as part of the series, or as a standalone novel.
The Bridge at Arta Page 23