‘Duncan – here’s the full devil of the thing. She won’t tell.’
‘Won’t tell?’
I produced this stupid echo partly out of mere surprise at hearing Uncle Rory mention the devil at all. I had never heard anything like an imprecation on his lips before.
‘Who the fellow is. She won’t say.’
As often with me, I had a moment of clarity before confusion set in. If Anna was going in for a nameless-shame line, then Anna was being even more of a nuisance than need be. In a queer sense I had no sympathy for her, although at the same time I was probably as aghast at what had befallen her as her father was.
‘It will come out by stages,’ I said firmly. ‘Anna must be in a state of terrible shock. Telling us all like that, instead of first going quietly to my aunt, shows that. She just mustn’t be rushed.’
‘I suppose you’re right.’ Uncle Rory appeared grateful for this steadying speech from a male kinsman, and I indulged myself, I hope briefly, in the irrelevant vanity of feeling grown-up. ‘Only,’ Uncle Rory went on, ‘it’s a kind of thing in which there’s no time to lose.’
I saw that this was the theme of the shot-gun marriage. It brought into my head (and the further irrelevance shows how unaware I was of what was really going on inside me) a place in Man and Superman where somebody says something like ‘The scoundrel must be found and forced to marry her’.
‘At least you can give her till tomorrow,’ I said. ‘Perhaps she’ll tell Ruth. Or perhaps Ruth knows.’
‘You don’t know?’
This pulled me up. For a moment I wasn’t even sure what its implication was. But Uncle Rory – at least for the present – immediately cleared up any ambiguity.
‘I don’t mean her necessarily telling you, Duncan. I know she keeps herself to herself – even from someone as close in age to her as you are. But you notice things. Undoubtedly you notice things. Mountjoy says it will get you somewhere one day.’
‘I haven’t noticed anything at all, Uncle Rory.’ This, in a strict sense, was true. I had been told things, rather than noticed them – and by both Mountjoy and Colonel Morrison. I was possibly going to be in a delicate position.
‘There’s that young fellow Petrie over at Garth,’ Uncle Rory said. ‘Back from the war, and said to be a loose fish enough. But he’s in the Blues, you know. Surely he wouldn’t risk it? My daughter isn’t a chorus-girl or a superior tart. They’d turn him out.’
I held my peace, since here was territory on which I had nothing to offer.
‘Or there’s the Macwherry. I’ve never trusted that crowd. Bogus family, if ever there was one. No man for a girl to go out with on a dark night.’
‘But has Anna done that with Mr Macwherry?’
‘No, no—only a thought.’ Uncle Rory shook his head, and I again saw how bewildered he was. He had hit, however, upon what he appeared to regard as a fruitful line of speculation, and he went on for some time with a review of the surrounding male gentry as possible seducers of his daughter. Grooms and gillies didn’t seem to strike him as an alternative field. Remarking this made me think of Mountjoy again. What exactly had Mountjoy said? He had begun with something about a strain of imagination in the family. But that had been only a way of getting round to the insinuation that my cousins might at any time fall into a kind of morbid romancing which a recipient would do well to think twice about. There could be no doubt as to what had been specifically in his mind; it was that one of the girls, presumably Anna, might start romancing about a love-affair with him. And Colonel Morrison, as if by a mysterious infection, had been under the same anxiety – in addition to which he had been afraid that Anna might also get going on me. They were both envisaging, presumably on the basis of at least some personal experience, the unleashing of a thoroughly pathological exhibition at Corry.
This line of thought gave me an idea.
‘Uncle Rory,’ I said, ‘don’t you think it’s possible that Anna is making the whole thing up?’
‘Making it up?’ My uncle was in his turn reduced to idle repetition. ‘Making what up?’
‘That there’s a baby. I’ve been remembering something that I’ve been—’ I broke off, realising that it would be discreet to steer clear of Colonel Morrison and Mountjoy, whose anxieties ought to have been advanced – if to anyone – to my uncle and not to myself. ‘I’ve remembered something I’ve read. Hysterical women sometimes imagine themselves to be pregnant. Quite baselessly. Even virgins do. And produce apparent physical signs of the thing.’ I didn’t pause to be surprised by this freedom in my own speech. ‘Perhaps Anna’s case is like that.’
‘Good God!’ Disconcertingly, Uncle Rory clutched his head and gave a sudden moan of despair. ‘Then she’s mad?’
‘No, no. It’s not madness, exactly – if that is it, I mean. Or only a temporary kind.’ I was unnerved by the effect my brilliant suggestion had created. It seemed for the moment as if the thought of lunacy in the family was more terrible to the Glencorry than would be any number of illegitimate children. Thinking to bring comfort, I had in fact opened up an abyss.
But this extremity braced my uncle. He was rather a meagre man, sandy and wispy, and the old-fashioned Norfolk jacket and knickerbockers he habitually wore for most of the day often seemed to emphasise the fact.
He now drew himself up so sternly that he was wholly impressive.
‘Duncan,’ he demanded, ‘do you believe that? That there’s no baby?’
‘No, sir – I don’t think I do.’ I was abashed and feeble. I somehow knew very well that there was a baby.
‘Then don’t alarm me with such ideas, my dear boy. Nor your aunt. Not that your aunt would be troubled by idle talk of imbecility. She could have no doubt as to Anna’s condition. She tells me that she now recalls having been aware of certain intimate signs. We need not be specific, Duncan. Nor, indeed, know about such things.’
‘No, Uncle Rory.’
My uncle’s portentous reticence can scarcely – it is now clear to me – have referred to anything of the slightest evidential consequence. My aunt, seeing the truth perfectly well, had simply said something to shortcircuit his first bewildered incredulity. But upon myself this vague conjuration of physiology had a different and disproportionate effect. I felt once more a kind of horror before the dark mystery of procreation. And this in turn triggered off a further feeling. Set down before my recently acquired typewriter, I should have converted it into an essay on birth, copulation and death as the brute bases of existence, only to be humanised by rites and ceremonies and fidelities and tremendous vows. As it was, I simply felt a dismayed sense that Anna looked due to be distinctly short-changed in her current transaction with Great Creating Nature. And meanwhile my uncle, whose head was unencumbered by such abstractions, had asked a question.
‘But why, Duncan? Why should she?’
‘It’s a natural urge, I suppose.’ I was at a loss. ‘Everybody feels it – except eunuchs, and people like that.’
‘No, no. I mean, why should she refuse to say?’
‘Oh, I see. But really, Uncle Rory, I don’t know.’
‘Haven’t you any ideas?’
‘Well, yes.’ I suppose I couldn’t bear to be judged barren of ideas, for I rapidly cast round in my mind. ‘It’s possible that Anna has . . . has had the misfortune to . . . well, to fall in love with a married man.’ I found myself surprised at the prim way in which I felt it necessary to express this possibility. ‘And then it has happened – the baby, I mean. And she wants to protect his honour, or not break up his marriage, or something of that sort.’
‘That is a possibility.’ Uncle Rory looked as if he wanted to be impressed by it. ‘Yes. The Macwerry’s a married man. Not young Petrie, though. But Admiral Farquhar is. And Thompson and Lumley and Lavington and D’Arcy-Drelincourt.’ As before, my uncle resourcefully lengthened out his list of postulants, his face progressively brightening the while. Then he stopped abruptly, and was once more in sombre mood. ‘No,�
� he said. ‘It won’t do, Duncan. The wrong tack.’ He shook his head in a manner that rather touchingly suggested a sober realism. ‘Not like Anna, when you come to think about it. If you ask me, it’s simply that she doesn’t know.’
‘Doesn’t know!’ Not unreasonably, I stared at Uncle Rory aghast.
‘That’s it. I remember a fellow in my regiment – a bit of a bounder, who ought never to have got in – used to make a joke about a circular saw.’ My uncle paused for a moment on this obscure reminiscence, and I continued merely to goggle at him. The distresses of the day might have been described as stirring him up a bit (as, indeed, they were stirring up me). After all, he must know more about life than was suggested by the manner of it that he imposed upon Corry Hall. And perhaps he knew more about his daughters than I did. ‘Yes,’ he went on. ‘She can’t name the right man – or not with any certainty. And what may follow after that? Naming the wrong one, if you ask me. And pretty well at random. Like bobbing for apples at Hallowe’en.’ He paused again on this – as he well might, since it was the first simile upon which I had ever heard him venture. ‘And—good God, Duncan! I’ve been badgering the girl. When the fact is, she must be shut up.’
‘Shut up!’
‘Kept quiet. Bundled out of the country. Lord knows what. Don’t you see? She may name anybody at any time. Dear old Jim Morrison, for instance. Or even a wholesome young fellow like Mountjoy. Then the fat would be in the fire! Solemn talk about it in their confounded Kirk Session, or whatever they call it. You can’t do that sort of thing here.’
‘Uncle Rory, I’ll marry her.’
‘You’ll what?’ My uncle, in his turn helplessly gaped.
‘I’ll marry Anna. I’m old enough. And first cousins are allowed to. It will solve the thing.’
There was a silence – during which I saw my uncle putting the simplest of interpretations on my wild and whirling words. The ravisher of his daughter stood, revealed and repentant, before him. But, although dotty, he wasn’t a fool, and in a moment the absurdity of my impulse came to him.
‘Pull yourself together, boy,’ he said gently. ‘Thank you. But pull yourself together.’
The oddity of my behaviour – if such a weird vagary can be called behaviour – has never fully explained itself to me. As I have to keep on repeating, I was in love. Boyishly but deeply, I was just that. I don’t believe that, in any normal social context, the appearance before me of the most beautiful girl in Europe would for a moment have shaken my romantic fidelity to Janet. Yet what I had said I had meant. It is conceivable that the phrase ‘bundled out of the country’ had done it. There hadn’t been much of rite or ceremony about that. The thing is embarrassing to look back on now, almost half a lifetime later. It presents me as a kinsman, a Christian gentleman, a loyal adherent to the Glencorry connection. It presents me as the lord knows what.
At least such heroics are a bubble to be pricked, or a balloon to be gently deflated. My aunt was rather less gentle than my uncle. When my curious proposition was communicated to her (for it didn’t occur to Uncle Rory to keep it to himself) she must have concluded that I had become too deranged to remain as an acceptable guest at Corry Hall. I was inclined to agree with her – in addition to which I had a strong enough motive for wanting to be back in Edinburgh. And the following morning’s post brought a letter from my father. My mother was very much better. She was still singing rather loudly about the house, but there was nothing out of the way in that. I had better come home when I wanted to. I did want to. I wanted to very much. So the abbreviating – or, rather, truncating – of my annual holiday was decorously arranged, and I found myself back in my native town with some weeks in hand before going up to Oxford.
Janet had returned from visiting her uncles and aunts and cousins in Skye: unknown and distant people of whom I was extremely jealous, but of whom I tried to approve both on general egalitarian principles and on the score of having had a crofter grandfather myself. Reunited, however, Janet and I went in for the pleasures of the town as conceived by the more intellectually inclined of the haute bourgeoisie therein – frequenting museums, picture galleries and concert halls, and talking much and rather at random about books. Janet, although falling upon this with an odd avidity, termed it ironically our topping-up with culture. It was, she said enigmatically, one way of life, and we might as well have a stab at it. Janet Finlay was beginning, in fact, to have her elusive moments – like the girl in Barrie’s sentimental play who is going to be called away by the fairies.
It was to be quite a long time before I heard anything at all about what had happened to Anna Glencorry.
III
My uncle spoke of ‘the two universities’ as he might have spoken of ‘the two sexes’. That Oxford and Cambridge played their prescriptive roles with any supporting cast, however dim, would scarcely have occurred to him. He had lived for the greater part of his life in Scotland. Niched somewhere in his head must have been a bare knowledge of the existence of universities at St Andrews, Glasgow, Aberdeen, and Edinburgh. But that the first three of these had been in business since the fifteenth century and that the fourth was a going concern within the lifetime of Shakespeare was probably information with which the particular slant of his antiquarian studies had failed to acquaint him. It was at Oxford that I myself was to become conscious of the astonishing historical blankness which may be entertained by persons themselves of ancient lineage. I might have picked up a hint of it from Uncle Rory, had it ever come to me to reflect on the matter.
I had not been brought up to think or speak in Uncle Rory’s way. More of my schoolfellows went to the University of Edinburgh than to Oxford and Cambridge together. My father, long after his reputation as a painter had become as much continental as native, continued to regard as our family’s main claim to distinction the circumstance that his brother the minister had ‘been through’ college in our native city, and had there ‘sat under’ some particularly eminent professor of divinity. Nevertheless – as I have explained – it was a certain whimsicality on my father’s part that despatched me across the Border.
I can think of two groups of people who may be spoken of as having ‘gone up’ to Oxford not once but twice. It occasionally happens that men who have spent no more than three or four undergraduate years there, and who have subsequently followed paths having little or no connection with academic life, return to the university in later middle age. They may be civil servants or ambassadors or bankers, trading in the tail-end of their professional careers for the dignified leisure that attends upon being head of a college. Or they may be of more modest station, engaged in some activity hitherto not favoured by the learned but now through a shift of fashion declared worthy of scholastic regard, and therefore to be taught or professed by new men recruited for the purpose. This was to be me; after many years during which university people of any sort rarely came my way, I was to go back and try to turn myself into a teacher. The feel of the thing proved to be much that of ‘going up’ again. I was to be conscious, for example, of old bewilderments. Was it drama that I was expected to teach, or was it dramatic history? Nobody appeared to know. Long ago, my tutor Talbert had been vague like this about the examinations for which he was supposed to be preparing me.
The other twice-born people I think of are those forebodingly revealed to me by my abortive acquaintance Stumpe: young men who had come to Oxford straight from school and were now, only a few years later, coming there again straight from war. Their wars had, no doubt, been as diverse as their schools, but broadly speaking they shared a common experience, so it was natural to regard them as a group. In my first undergraduate weeks in college I used to think about them a lot. I felt surprised that they were not more readily identifiable than they were; not to be spotted in the quad simply by a martial bearing or something of the kind. A number of them were married, but it nearly always took time to discover this. Their general unobtrusiveness (so remote from Stumpe’s prediction) was puzzling then, although it i
s comprehensible in retrospect. There is a poem in which Matthew Arnold tells a girl (to an effect of undesigned comedy) that a sea rolls between them: their different pasts. The young men returned from the war were determined to have nothing to do with such a sea; their idea was simply to get back to square one and muck in again.
It can’t have been all that difficult, since Oxford itself goes in for continuities fairly massively. Yet there were at least superficial ways in which the place had changed more during their short absence than it subsequently did during my very much longer one. Merely consider breakfast, lunch, and tea. When, as an undergraduate, I wanted tea I got it for myself or in a common room, and for breakfast and lunch (or, of course, for dinner) I went into hall. But for boys who had entered the college in, say, 1938, the first two of these meals were carried to their rooms, across rainy quads and up stone staircases, by menservants (most of them already elderly) who had also kindled coal fires, emptied slops, and conjured up hot water by the quart or gallon. The lunch might be anything from bread and cheese and beer to an elaborate entertainment designed to gratify their most sophisticated acquaintances. There was a separate and smaller tribe of youths, more or less of their own age, who on demand would appear in the afternoon bearing tea and muffins, and who at other times cleaned their bicycles and mended punctures. It would be tedious to enlarge on this sort of thing.
That all disappeared overnight, it seems, pretty well as the first sirens sounded. As in Shakespeare’s play, with a quaint device, the banquet vanished: only here the magic was that not of Prospero’s wand but of Hitler’s Panzers. Any revival of such dispositions during my undergraduate years always had about it an air of anachronism, indeed of social anomaly; and I was thus of the very first generation to belong wholly to the period of what was to be called the social revolution. When I returned to Oxford in middle age this immediate post-war change had simply established itself a little more distinctly. Pupils – for I was to have pupils – who a generation before would have entertained me with the air of inhabiting a Stately Home now did so in their digs and off their own bat, with much competent scurrying in and out of make-shift kitchens which were probably bathrooms as well. In point of hygiene there may have been something to be desired, but there can be no doubt of the larger wholesomeness of the change.
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