‘It wasn’t much of a dinner,’ I said.
‘Not fit for the cat. I say, what an awful room.’
‘Yes, isn’t it?’
‘I expect I’ll get rooms in Surrey Quad if they’ll resign themselves to putting up with me at all. My grandfather had rooms there. My father never came up. He says he hadn’t the right sort of brain. Did yours?’ As he asked this question, Stumpe gave me an appraising glance.
‘No. I had an uncle at New College, although I can’t think he had the right sort of brain either. Surrey looks rather splendid.’
‘Yes. It was built by Christopher Wren, just like St Paul’s.’ Stumpe offered this staggeringly erroneous information with complete confidence. ‘But they say, as a matter of fact, that the baths are better over here in Rattenbury.’
‘That’s something.’
I felt our conversation wasn’t going too well, being disjointed to the point of awkwardness. But Stumpe seemed quite contented. He wasn’t a fool – he was, in fact, going to win some sort of exhibition – and I think his thus dropping in on me was respectably motivated by genuine intellectual curiosity. Perhaps his grandfather had told him that at Oxford he should cultivate the advantage of rubbing up against all sorts. His next question lent support to this conjecture.
‘I say – are you at some sort of day-school?’
‘We’re most of us day-boys.’
‘And are there girls?’
‘No – no girls.’ Quite unjustifiably, I took this further demand for information as designedly insolent. ‘I suppose there are girls at your school?’ I asked.
‘Of course there aren’t.’ This time, Stumpe really stared.
‘Funny. I’ve always thought of it as one of those co-educational places.’
I was pleased with this, and expected it to produce indignation. Some loose association of ideas, however, had prompted Stumpe’s mind to move elsewhere – as now transpired in a startling manner.
‘I say,’ he said, ‘have you ever had a woman?’
‘No, I haven’t.’
This brisk admission produced another – and this time interesting – silence. Stumpe had, so to speak, moved into the round. Years afterwards, I would sometimes recall the occasion – this when a character whom I was labouring to create would suddenly behave out of character, and have to be reassessed as a result. At the moment I couldn’t have said at all meaningfully that Stumpe was behaving out of character, since his character was something about which I knew nothing at all. I did have a sense, however, that in so abruptly raising an intimate matter he was at least acting out of type and out of turn. Whether this was indeed so I don’t really know to this day. English schoolboys may be less reticent than Scottish ones. On the whole, I judge that certain stresses of adolescence had endowed Stumpe with an interesting measure of eccentricity, at least in a temporary way.
‘It’s a worry,’ Stumpe said. ‘I mean, when to begin – and how to begin. One might leave it too long, and never get into the way of it at all. It’s awfully risky holding out against nature, wouldn’t you say? There’s some word for what can happen – atropos or something.’
‘I suppose Atropos might take a disabling snip at you with her shears, and altogether spoil your matrimonial chances. But atrophy’s the word you want.’
‘That’s right – atrophy.’ Stumpe was unresentful of my didactic tone. ‘A mental sort of atrophy rather than a physical perhaps. A man can run off the rails, you know. It’s a bit alarming. I can tell you I have some damned odd fantasies when it comes to quiet half-hours with sex. Flage, and all that. Do you?’
Stumpe had produced a word unknown to me, rhyming with ‘badge’. It must have been straight from the mint, but I sufficiently got the idea to be inwardly scandalised. Not in our closest moments could Ninian and I have conducted such a conversation with each other, and I didn’t know that it is characteristically with total strangers that obsessed persons are liable to take such plunges. But I felt I mustn’t put up the shutters on Stumpe, nor indeed did I want to. If not impressive he was at least serious. Most of the sex-talk I heard at school was smut, and to be responded to with sniggers. So I answered Stumpe’s last question and several more. Within a quarter of an hour a curious effect of warmth and intimacy had established itself between us. One part of my head knew that it bore a factitious character. Still, there was no vice in it.
‘I have a cousin who believes that an actress is the thing,’ Stumpe said. ‘Actresses have the temperament. Of course, it would have to be an unimportant one – for a start, I mean.’
‘You might work your way up.’
Stumpe laughed loudly at this – a reaction which, for a moment, surprised me.
‘But I have another cousin,’ he went on, ‘who says that actresses are an Edwardian idea, and that it can be pretty well any girl one meets at a dance. But—do you know?—I somehow don’t fancy that. It doesn’t seem quite the thing. And she might be a virgin, after all – which would be a frightful responsibility.’
‘But mayn’t some actresses – young ones, of course – be virgins too?’
‘That’s perfectly true.’ Stumpe now looked at me admiringly. ‘As a matter of fact, there’s a chap in my house whose father owns several theatres. And he says that quite a lot of actresses are pure.’
Stumpe had uttered this last word awkwardly. It was clearly a sacred one, hazily associated with close female relatives, and it produced a shift in our talk. I found this a relief, since by way of playing fair I had passingly offered a number of confidences a good deal against the grain.
‘Are there any theatres in Scotland?’ Stumpe asked.
As a transitional passage this displayed enviable conversational virtuosity compensating for its revelation of a not too well-stocked mind. The theatre was already in my blood, and it was at some length that I put Stumpe right. He bore it very well. He was willing to learn. This made it odd that he was emerging from a famous school so lavishly furnished with ignorance. But no doubt there were whole regions of discourse, wholly unknown to me, in which he was well clued up.
We returned to the subject of Oxford entrance, and he once more produced his phrase about bloody men back from the war. It almost looked as if there was another obsession here. I didn’t myself know quite what to think about men back from the war. Some of them could be called bloody, I supposed, in the sense in which the term is applicable to the sergeant at the beginning of Macbeth. There would have been times when they staggered to their feet after a shell-burst and found themselves smothered in the stuff. That surely entitled them to be regarded as heroes. Yet I recognised this as a conventional and tribal idea which didn’t, for good or ill, find much of an echo in my heart. We had at school a shocking institution known as a punishment run. It was supposed to be an enlightened and humane substitute for a beating – although in fact it could include quite a whack of that from bigger boys strategically located en route. In any case, you arrived back from it pretty shagged, so that your fellows awkwardly avoided your eye. Ninian when a prefect had once taken a token swipe at me on such an occasion, and for a time it had rankled between us. I now discovered that I saw men back from the war as in a similar whipped and hounded category. They had been given a gruelling time. And what it had done for their dispositions was anybody’s guess.
Stumpe wouldn’t agree about the gruelling time. He saw most repatriated warriors in a light that was to become fashionable in novels about ten years later. They had sat on their arses in offices, intriguing against each other in any way they could, and been intermittently dined and wined by uncles and aunts high enough up to be immune against the rationing and so on imposed upon the vulgar herd. And now they were going to be all round us in the college – supposing, once more, that we got in. They might even be accorded preferential treatment in such vital matters as being given rooms in Surrey.
‘Have you by any chance had a brother up here?’ Stumpe asked. The question, which came abruptly, had brought him oddly
to his feet.
I told him that I hadn’t. Ninian – although I didn’t add this – had achieved the glory of shaping to be in the Royal Marines Commandos, and there was certainly to have been no arse-sitting in that. But the gong had gone. Ninian was already back in Edinburgh, studying law.
‘Have you?’ I asked.
‘Yes. My brother Charles.’
‘Will he be coming up again?’
‘No, he won’t.’ Stumpe had reached the door, and his hand was on the knob. ‘He was killed at Salerno, as a matter of fact. They blew his head off. Do you know? I think I’ll try a bath. Good night.’
I tried a bath myself. If the baths in Rattenbury were really superior to those in Surrey, then the baths in Surrey must be museum pieces of no common sort. But the war had at least accustomed me to a maximum of five inches of hot water, and here the stuff was in unexpectedly abundant supply. The boy who had snapped out ‘Downside’ so disobligingly was having a bath too. Nude and steaming, we stared at each other without acknowledgement through doors that had come off their hinges. If I didn’t myself utter, it was because I had already decided he was an uncivil character I wouldn’t care for.
But first impressions can be fallacious. In the following October, when Stumpe and I had both come into residence, we occasionally addressed a word or two to one another in the quad – perhaps with a shade of embarrassment, although I can recall nothing of the sort. Later we made do with a passing nod. Finally – and with the true undergraduate ability simply to rub out false starts – we ceased to bother even with this. But the boy from Downside was Tony Mumford, who was to become my best friend.
II
During the latter part of that summer I was despatched to Corry Hall on a longer holiday than usual. Unlike my parents and my Edinburgh acquaintance in general, Uncle Rory and Aunt Charlotte saw nothing remarkable in my being booked for Oxford. My uncle merely judged it – on grounds which were for some time obscure to me – anomalous that I should be going to the college of my father’s picturesquely arbitrary choice. A place at New College, he maintained, would have represented the correct ordering of the matter. He appeared to have forgotten – if, indeed, he had ever noticed – that Oxford undergraduates are divided into scholars and commoners, and that a boy who has gained an open award at a particular college is obliged to take up residence in it. His sense of the situation appeared to be that I was still free to choose. Arrived at the railway station, I had only to direct a taxi-driver to take me to whatever college I liked, and so settle the matter. It lay with me to say ‘New College’, be driven down the tortuous lane leading to the obscure portal of that magnificent foundation, and there ask to be shown into the presence of its Warden – whereupon the details of my sojourn would at once be determined.
This vision of current academic life was my first intimation that, since my last visit, Uncle Rory had been going increasingly dotty. But an element of reason always lurks in madness, and presently I worked it out. My uncle (as I had told Stumpe) had himself been at New College. This was because, at the time, his elder brother, the heir of the Glencorrys, was still alive. New College was the proper college for younger sons – and so, by an extension of the hereditary principle, for scions in a general way. My own destined college was for eldest sons.
So what my father had contrived was subversive of the settled order of things, and to be regarded as a legacy of the indiscretion which had prompted my mother to marry a person whose origins were totally obscure.
Thus baldly stated, these facts do my uncle an injustice. So far as I can tell, he had never, since the day he first acknowledged his sister’s marriage, treated my father other than with respect. He would probably have observed the same propriety had my mother married a grocer or a plumber. But there also harboured in him, I believe, a dim sense that something called Art held a licenced place in what I was soon to hear lecturers call the Great Chain of Being, and that it was proper that its practitioners should be accorded moderate notice by their betters. Confronted by the colour-print after Corot in that dismal Rattenbury room, he would have been unable to pronounce with confidence that it was not an original oil-painting by Poussin or Rubens. But had somebody driven Poussin or Rubens up to Corry and introduced him as a well-regarded artist, my uncle would not have hesitated in putting his hand to the decanter with his best sherry.
There could be no doubt that he was turning a little odd. Corry Hall is a largish nineteenth-century mansion by David Bryce. Contrived in the Scottish baronial style, and for some reason smothered in whitewash from basement to roof, it is reputed to hold encapsulated within itself a structure known as Duff’s Tower and dating from the year 1264. Both Ninian and I had put in many hours hunting for this antiquity, and as our skill in trigonometry and solid geometry grew we became increasingly confident that nowhere in the building could there be an area of more than some three square feet which we were unable to account for. Duff’s Tower had thus to be regarded as no longer other than notional – a conclusion we refrained from communicating to our uncle, fearing that he might be considerably upset. For Duff’s Tower – or rather its date – was important to him. Corry Hall is like a miniaturised version of Blair Castle, which is also the work of Bryce. But Cumming’s Tower in that more exalted dwelling is supposed to date only from 1269, and upon this flimsy chronological structure Uncle Rory based the contention that the Glencorrys were of a higher antiquity than the Murrays, and indeed than the antecedent Stewart line of the earls of Atholl themselves.
I don’t think that my uncle would ever have spoken with positive disrespect of a Duke of Atholl, any more than he would of my father, or – for that matter – of the fishwife for insulting whom he had once so famously caned Ninian. But whenever he uttered the name ‘James Atholl’ (which was apparently the correct manner in which to refer to a duke with whom one familiarly passed the time of day) his tone suggested that, whatever the present man might be like, the further back you went among the Murrays the more dubious a crowd did you find yourself rubbing shoulders with.
Pursuing this virtually dynastic contention, Uncle Rory had recently taken up genealogical and historical studies for the pursuit of which neither his abilities nor his acquirements equipped him. He was, it might be crudely said, as uninformed as his wife and even less intelligent. But this is again unfair to my uncle, considered simply as a human being. To my aunt, although I suppose she was a harmless woman, I never kindled; there was nothing about her that could be identified and held on to as hinting either character or personality; my uncle might have rummaged her at random out of a gigantic deep-freeze labelled Upper-class Englishwomen: Standard Model. It is true that Uncle Rory himself might also be viewed as a stereotype, but he was a more sympathetic figure than Aunt Charlotte. The mental stock-in-trade of the one was as limited and frequently absurd as that of the other. Uncle Rory, however, had a beguiling extravagance which was denied his wife.
These are not conclusions that have come to me only in maturity. In their essentials, my earliest holidays at Corry revealed them to me. In particular, I think I was always aware of the touch of sacred strangeness in Uncle Rory. The Glencorrys may be guessed to have a history of mental instability, for the family legends are full of ghosts, of ‘callings’, of the second sight, which are probably mythologised equivalents of intermittent neurotic vagary. The liability emerged in my mother. It was because she was nervously unwell that my present stay at Corry was planned to last throughout September.
Later in that month – my uncle told me shortly after my arrival – the duke would be ‘putting on his show’ at the Highland Gathering at Blair Atholl. The expression, which if not disrespectful was at least sardonic, referred to the duke’s custom of opening this annual athletic occasion by marching on to the field at the head of the Atholl Highlanders. For a reason to which I shall come, we ourselves failed to attend the Gathering, so I don’t know whether this feudal manifestation actually took place. It was certainly a regular occurrence at a
slightly earlier time, and it may still happen today. Chronology was not my uncle’s strong point. He had the utmost difficulty in remembering just what stretch of years is indicated by such a term as ‘the seventeenth century’. It is an uncertainty conceivable in the mind of a cultivated Italian when studying British history, but disabling in a Scottish laird developing antiquarian interests.
I have heard that dukes as a class each individually possess some privilege permitted to no other subject of the crown. According to the Glencorry (which is the style under which Uncle Rory liked to hear himself referred to) James Atholl’s unique distinction was that of being permitted to retain a standing army, and the regiment which followed him on parade beneath the windows of Blair Castle was precisely that. Whether this was indeed the case, I again don’t know. I am writing of long ago; the twentieth century had not yet reached its middle term; even so, it seems probable that no practical significance even then continued to attach to the matter. But it held great significance for my uncle. His researches inclined him to the view that this ducal prerogative stemmed from the circumstance that the Murrays of Tullibardine had at one time been sovereigns of the Isle of Man. But the history of the Menavian islands is of a complexity equalled only by its obscurity, and Uncle Rory had somehow arrived at the conclusion that forebears of his own had been prepotent there round about the time of King Gorse. From this he moved on to the persuasion that King Gorse (or perhaps King Orry – if, indeed, Kings Gorse and Orry were not identical) was a character from whom he was himself lineally descended. At this point I suppose it would have been possible for the uncharitable to declare that my uncle was already far gone in lunacy. He managed to go a little further simply by persuading himself that he was thereby entitled to a standing army too. He was putting in quite a lot of time designing a uniform for it. I have recorded elsewhere that he disapproved of what he called the invention of the kilt; and for this reason his men were to appear in galligaskins. They would have looked rather like a Papal Guard.
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