All this was as harmless as the ploys of another uncle, famous in Tristram Shandy. And with the Glencorry the hobbyhorse was ridden more intermittently than by Uncle Toby. The obsession merely came on him from time to time. What Aunt Charlotte made of it I don’t know. She had been brought up in a stockbroker belt in the Home Counties, and had not subsequently armed herself with much knowledge of Scottish history. The only field in which she might have been declared possessed of any historiographical expertness was that of the Wimbledon championships; what she didn’t know about Suzanne Lenglen and similar monarchs of the tennis-court wasn’t worth knowing. She would have been inclined, I feel, to judge her husband by what she could pick up of his neighbours’ opinion of him. But Corry Hall scarcely enjoyed a neighbourhood in the English sense, whether of a town or county order. And the people who did come around, if not precisely like Uncle Rory, were at least more like Uncle Rory than like Aunt Charlotte. It is probable that they kept to themselves any unfavourable impression of the Glencorry’s developing interests. They were nearly all kinsmen of his, in one degree or another.
My aunt’s isolated situation, together with conservative persuasions less imaginative than my uncle’s, had exerted a considerable influence on the upbringing of my two cousins, Anna and Ruth. Had Aunt Charlotte lived in South Kensington she might have tumbled to the fact that at least some trafficking with the spirit of the time was requisite in a mother concerned that her daughters should be adequately ‘in the swim’ – launched, that is, on a current likely to land a girl expeditiously on the shores of reputable matrimony. ‘Nobody could be more broad-minded than I am,’ she was fond of saying. ‘I am entirely in favour of occasional tournaments in which we could actually play against the professionals. The cricketers do so, as everybody knows, and no harm has come of it. Only I will not tolerate modern ideas at Corry. It is fortunate that your uncle entirely agrees with me.’ At this Uncle Rory would nod composedly, no doubt thinking that the kilt or the generating of electrical energy was being referred to. Actually, ‘modern ideas’ was a potent and comprehensive, if unexamined, concept. It included much dogma in the field of education, with the consequence that the virgin character of my cousins’ minds was perpetually fascinating to me. The daughters of the surgeons and advocates, architects and accountants and professors, with whom Ninian and I were acquainted in Edinburgh, were commonly able to give us points on such matters as the aorist and the optative; and Janet Finlay, seldom for long out of my thoughts at that time, commanded more correct if less fluent French than my father. Anna and Ruth, who had been sent to some exclusive boarding-school in England, were innocent even of such ‘accomplishments’ as the Misses Pinkerton may be supposed to have laid on for Amelia Sedley and Becky Sharp in their academy on Chiswick Mall. They could neither sketch picturesque ruins nor play the piano. They certainly didn’t understand the use of the globes.
These deficiencies need not have been crippling in themselves. My cousins had their natural place in a society not given to intellectual or artistic pursuits. But they were both senior to me by several years, and had been entitled to regard themselves as grown-up while the war was still going on. They could have driven staff cars, or learnt to shove model fighters and bombers about a table, or made themselves useful in any one among a number of auxiliary capacities. They would have gained a good deal of independence as a result, but there would have been involved assumptions about the company young women may properly keep – with whom they can go where, and when – acceptance of which would have meant that modern ideas were creeping in. What they did do my wartime holidays never revealed. What they did now was to lead a narrow and baffled life at home, cut off even from others of their own sort who were returning to not very different courses. They walked dogs, visited old women in the surrounding clachans, occasionally trailed out after men on a shoot, and discontentedly assisted in counting the number of creatures shot.
‘Have the girls been out and around yet?’ was a question which Uncle Rory never failed to ask at least once in the course of the day. It seemed to represent the full range of his curiosity about them, and he seldom showed any consciousness that their needs might exceed, or differ from, those to be postulated of a couple of well-bred spaniels. (Ninian said that Anna and Ruth had been inoculated in their youth against distemper, and that their discipline had been humanely achieved by means of taps on the nose with a rolled newspaper.) My aunt would reply, ‘Anna is helping the minister to distribute Life and Work’ or ‘Ruth said she might walk to the head of the glen’, and that would dismiss the matter. In fact, my cousins on the whole disliked outdoor activities, and spent much time in their rooms, or in obscure and chilly corners of the house, idly turning over The Field and Scottish Country Life, or engaged in the desultory reading of illicitly procured and mildly libidinous romances.
In my earlier times at Corry I had barely distinguished between them. Both were handsome rather heavy girls, who seldom had anything noteworthy to say; and if I didn’t pay much attention to them they hardly ever paid any to me. I was too young to be of much interest – a fact which continued to hold true now that they were grown-up and I was nearly so. Perhaps because I had no sisters, I was inclined to extend over these girl cousins a species of sexual taboo, and this for long precluded what might otherwise have been a feasible fooling around. We seldom even romped together. Or at least I never romped with Ruth, who was the nearer to me in age. She was a solid sort of girl who never became, even to the most accidental touch of my hands, a sexual object at all. It turned out a little differently with Anna.
Most of my wanderings around Corry were solitary; its moors remain in my mind as the terrain of those thinking or dreaming walks in the course of which, I imagine, many more talented young men than myself have portentously brooded over their destiny. But through several summers I used to go, or be taken, on occasional tramps in my elder cousin’s company. I would have a rucksack, heavy because of the enormous bottle of repellent mineral water with which Mountjoy, my uncle’s factotum, insisted on providing us. Anna would have a shooting-stick. We might, or might not, be accompanied by suitable dogs. To my uncle or aunt we presented a wholesome and socially acceptable spectacle as we marched off from the house.
We had nothing to say to each other, and a casual spectator might have concluded that my only utility to the young lady lay in carrying the expedition’s supplies. This would have been an error. Our engagement – Anna’s and my own – usually took place either just before or just after our picnic. It was a crudely ritualised affair, and very uninventive. Commonly, we would affect a dispute over some casual object – an interesting chunk of granite or a bird’s feather. This would lead into an episode of flight, pursuit, tackle, tumble, and full-scale wrestling-match. Anna – although, to her mother’s sorrow, not athletically inclined – was a well-developed and powerful wench; I myself was not yet full-grown; commonly I had my work cut out to subdue her. It was stiff muscular effort and undeniably exciting. I can recall at this moment the strangeness of the mingled smell of my cousin and the heather. The contest ended when Anna’s body – prone or supine – and all her limbs were firmly pinioned beneath my own. She would then say sharply, as to a troublesome child, ‘Duncan, that’s enough!’ and I would release her and roll away, panting.
This phase in our relationship eventually petered out. I had learnt something about sensuality – and particularly that female sensuality had in my cousin Anna a notable exponent; in relation to her, in fact, I had an intuition of trouble ahead. If it was I who eventually called off these expeditions (which I take to be the possibly shameful truth) it was not from any primitive fear of incest: the taboo-element was not all that strong. Nor was it, I am afraid, the issue of moral feeling; rather it was controlled by quite shallow social awareness. Observation – the result of other walks taken elsewhere – had persuaded me that behaviour of this particular sort was a characteristically plebeian, as well as adolescent, method of securing sexual enjoymen
t. But what really browned me off was that conclusion to the affair whereby I was abruptly demoted from masterful youth to reproved small boy. So it was at about the time that the down on my cheek was yielding to stubble that this cock-teasing on my cousin’s part came to an end. It left me not much affected – but, if anything, resentful rather than beholden. When at length at Corry an incredible event occurred I suffered the proper feelings in a more than proper degree. I was, in fact, shattered. At the same time I cannot be certain that I was left without an unamiable flicker of a thought to the effect that Anna had got what she was booked for.
These sexual episodes had been the more unedifying as belonging to a period when I had no honest use for feminine society. I was still much taken up with a romantic attachment to a snub-nosed younger boy called Tommy Watt. Indeed, my passion for Tommy – round whose shoulders I never so much as put an arm – outlasted my tumblings with Anna, and came to an end only with his accidental death. The succeeding year or eighteen months, which brought me to the verge of going up to the university, must have been, developmentally, the most crowded of my life. In this last pre-Oxford holiday at Corry I was a different youth from what I had been hitherto. The fact was important only to myself. Nobody noticed it.
I was surprised that Anna didn’t; that she seemed unaware of that subtler chemical change which turns boy into man not merely under a bathing-slip (I used to swim in a pool in the Corry, something which would have been regarded as indecorous in my cousins) but under his hat as well. (I had again brought my school cap, now finally to be abandoned, to Corry; something was still needed to doff to the tenants’ and labourers’ wives, and I should have felt a fool in a deerstalker borrowed from my uncle.) Anna appeared hardly aware of my presence at all. It would be misleading to describe her as withdrawn, since the term implies a cogitative habit behind a mask of passivity. But she would glance at me almost without recognition, and the conversation upon which her parents insisted at table seemed particularly a burden to her. It struck me that she too might be undergoing some process of maturation. What my father – whose French tended to the demotic at times – might have called her nichons were gaining in prominence.
That Ruth had known about her sister’s employment of me in earlier years remains conjectural. If she had, she must have felt some prompting to challenge her own power of exciting me in the same way. She would have liked to know that she had at least the trick of it, to be exercised at will. But she never – it secretly annoyed me that she never – showed the slightest awareness of me as a physical presence. On the other hand, Ruth did now talk to me quite a lot, both during the dull family meals and occasionally in tête-á-tête. She was more intelligent than Anna, even if equally uninformed, and she had seen that although I was too young, ineligible, and consanguineous for the purposes of matrimony, there was at least something to be said for me as a window on the outer world. Perhaps she was conscious of ignominy in being constrained to use a schoolboy in this way, and was compensating for such a feeling whenever, as frequently happened, her address to me took on a jeering tone. But this was commonly in private. To anything of the kind my uncle, however smothered in galligaskins, was remarkably sensitive. Whereas Aunt Charlotte would talk a good deal about persons being well-bred or ill-bred, Uncle Rory regarded such remarks as in themselves a token of dubious breeding, and would never himself utter them. But he was alert to actual bad manners. There was an occasion upon which he dismissed his grown-up younger daughter from table because she had mimicked the flat vowels that I would import into phrases like ‘a vast castle’. It would have been the vowels that Aunt Charlotte frowned on.
Ruth’s interest stepped up sharply when I mentioned (on the strength of Stumpe’s conversation) that in college I was to be surrounded by young men a good deal older than myself. The notion of a large undergraduate milieu of returned warriors of her own age struck her imagination at once. So much was this so that she produced a box of chocolates – they were still hard to come by – and seemed to propose extended talk on the strength of them.
‘Shall you become friends with them, Dunkie,’ she asked, ‘or will they be stand-offish and treat you as a kid?’ Everybody at Corry knew my family name, but only Ruth employed it – no doubt because it was a diminutive to which it was easy to lend a mocking inflexion.
‘As you treat me? Probably I’ll be a kid. Almost a fag. Or a batman. They’ll most of them have had batmen, I expect.’
‘But at Oxford there are men called scouts who do that sort of thing.’ Ruth had taken my suggestion seriously. ‘Why are they called scouts?’
‘Origin unknown. I’ve researched. The dictionary says so. I met one when I was taking the scholarship examination. He was on the fatherly side.’
‘The fatherly side.’ Ruth repeated this as if it were a remark the fatuousness of which could be brought out by satirical echo. It was a habit the more insufferable for being completely random. ‘Have another chocolate,’ she added, recollecting that she was chatting me up. ‘The square ones are good.’ Ruth had an eye on the round ones for herself. She liked soft centres.
‘No, thank you,’ I said with formality. ‘I ought to be getting in training. I think I’m going to row.’
‘To row?’ She looked at me momentarily round-eyed. ‘In the Varsity Boat Race?’
‘Of course not. Just row.’
‘I know – in Eights. Daddy has told me about Eights Week. It’s one of the few times when there are any girls around. It must be a bit dull, living in a university where there are no women.’
‘There are quite a lot of women. Five colleges full of them, as a matter of fact.’
‘I don’t think so.’ Ruth spoke with imbecile assurance. ‘Mummy says there are just some people called Oxford Home Students. Eccentric girls with long teeth, who live in the houses of the dons.’
‘I believe it was like that at one time.’ The foggy time-lag which pervaded Corry Hall quite frequently inspissated itself like this.
‘At one time,’ Ruth mimicked, as if scoring a very strong point. ‘So what happens – Daddy says – is that men bring up their sisters and so on for Eights Week, and for Commem Balls and things, and introduce them to their own set.’
‘To their own set,’ I echoed. This attempt to take a leaf out of Ruth’s book made no impact, and I ought not to have been prompted to mockery of my cousin, since a strain of pathos surely attended the wistful vision she was conjuring up. ‘Perhaps you’ll come some time,’ I said awkwardly. ‘If there really is any sort of fun going on.’
‘That’s jolly decent of you, Dunkie. I don’t suppose Daddy and Mummy would mind. Daddy says you have become a very reliable young man.’
‘Does he really?’ It seemed impossible to produce a response any less feeble than this to such information. Ruth’s shift from silly condescension to an equally silly notion that I was now somebody to be courted disconcerted me a good deal. And I disliked the Daddy and Mummy business; it didn’t befit my cousin’s – as I felt them to be – advanced years, and it had a bogus feel to it into the bargain. Daddy and Mummy were the jaws of an impasse she hadn’t a notion of how to get out of – although she would have been ready to scream if that would have been any good. I saw no solution for her myself. Not even in coming up to Oxford and meeting some bloody men back from the war.
Nevertheless I had entered into a commitment of honour to entertain at Oxford a female relative of inconvenient age. I had no idea how one did this, or whether one did it at all, and I was unsustained by any feeling of honest attachment to my cousin. The situation was depressing, and as a consequence I went in search of Mountjoy, who had become a resource of mine when I was feeling glum at Corry.
Mountjoy welcomed my visits to his quarters, although it was in an undemonstrative and even slightly wary way. His scrutiny was sharp but rather the reverse of lingering – a characteristic that puzzled me until I contrived to see in it a proper instinct of respect for my more elevated social station. Certainly I f
elt that he was keenly aware of me, so that I was puzzled again by what seemed his reluctance to acknowledge that my years now rendered implausible any fondness whatever for a fizzy drink called Kola. He had been at Corry ever since I could remember, perhaps as little more than a garden-boy at first. Although his present employment was unambiguous, he was a man of some mystery both in my own and (I gradually gathered) the general view. It was known that he had been born in Paris, and believed that his illegitimacy – which was taken for a fact – had been of a romantic, or indeed exalted, order. He was handsome in a manner scarcely suggesting ascetic courses; one would have said at once that he was a man of ability; and I myself, studying his nose and mouth, was of the opinion that, appropriately bewigged, he would have been indistinguishable from the second Charles. (I felt I owned a certain authority here, my father’s stand-by employment as a portrait painter having at one time induced me to make a study of regal iconography.) It seemed to me quite on the cards that Mountjoy was the offspring of some more or less legitimate pretender to the throne of the United Kingdom. Speculation of this kind had been encouraged in me, I remember, by a reading of The Adventures of Harry Richmond.
Socially regarded, the personable young Mountjoy was elusive. He wasn’t half-gentry, and he wasn’t a fallen gentleman – or any of the other anomalies of which one is accustomed to read in fiction. The most surprising thing about him was that he should be at Corry at all, since it would surely be quite against my uncle’s instinct to harbour there anybody with this sort of equivocal aura hanging about him. Reflecting on this, I had come to wonder whether Mountjoy might not be a by-blow (another term out of novels) of the Glencorrys themselves, and one a sense of duty to whom Uncle Rory had elected to discharge by maintaining on the estate at a superior level of menial employment. I was insufficiently experienced to appreciate the unlikelihood of this conjecture.
Young Pattullo Page 3