Young Pattullo

by J. I. M. Stewart

  The racket astounded me. I couldn’t think where all these young savages had come from. Stumpe was conceivably one of them, but Stumpe hadn’t struck me as likely to be particularly rowdy. Nor had anybody else. I had even reflected that there seemed to be less joie de vivre and élan around than might have been predicated on the evidence of popular romances of university life. People went about in a noticeably subdued and decorous fashion. But that was by day. This was night.

  ‘Do you suppose it’s a regular thing?’ I asked.

  ‘Can’t be. Much too expensive. It’s just a dining club letting off steam. Mayn’t even happen again this term.’

  ‘I suppose that’s why nobody comes out and stops it.’

  ‘Perhaps.’ Tony seemed to find this speculation naive. ‘Would you care to have to try? The Provost himself would be a little hunted hare at the first view-halloo.’

  ‘It certainly sounds like that.’ I realised that it was the suggestion of hot pursuit rather than mere uproar that was so spine-chilling. ‘Are those horns being properly sounded, or are they just blowing away at random?’

  ‘Haven’t a clue. Not one of your fox-hunting men.’

  ‘I don’t feel a fox would content them at all – let alone a hare. I think they’re absolutely yelling for blood. The real thing. Do you think there’s somebody around who’s a bit unpopular?’

  ‘Oh, most unlikely.’ Tony replied casually – but I don’t think he was quite at ease, any more than I was. ‘They may scrag one another now and then. But all in jest. The young barbarians at play.’

  Immediately beneath us, glass crashed, shivered, showered, tinkled in a big way. A wild cheer went up as from a whole army – this, I suppose, because the surrounding quad acted like a sounding-board or echo-chamber. Then there was a momentary lull. It was only because of this that we heard a knock on Tony’s door. I reacted by spilling some champagne on my trousers. I was in a thoroughly jittery condition. But Tony appeared unperturbed by this sinister nocturnal summons, and called to come in.

  ‘Oh, excuse me!’ The head of a young man of our own age had appeared in the doorway. It had appeared rather near the lintel, and somehow conveyed an immediate suggestion of belonging to what my father would have called a ganglin body – loose-limbed and awkward. The young man wore large circular spectacles in a steel frame – the sort of thing, I thought, that at school goes en suite with cage-like dental contrivances designed to corner vagrant teeth. ‘I’m extremely sorry,’ the young man said, and glanced from one to the other of us in a fashion so vaguely oblique as to convey no convincing impression that he distinguished either Tony or myself. He was trying to decide who was the owner of the room. ‘My name’s Mogridge. I’m downstairs. You may have noticed my name above the door. Mogridge.’

  ‘Yes – I have.’ I produced this reply myself, since Tony appeared unprepared to utter. ‘You’re directly under me, as a matter of fact. I’m over the way from Mumford here. I’m Pattullo.’

  ‘Oh, how do you do?’ Mogridge had now come into the room. He was diffident but not embarrassed, and offered us a tentative smile.

  ‘How do you do?’ Tony said belatedly. ‘Do sit down. Have some champagne.’

  ‘Thank you – but I won’t barge in.’ Mogridge was quite clear about the character of the invitation held out to him. ‘I just wanted to say I hoped I haven’t been disturbing you.’

  ‘Disturbing us?’ Tony stared at Mogridge blankly, as he well might. The lull outside was over, and the field in full cry again. ‘Tonight, you mean?’

  ‘Yes – with my ‘cello. I’m afraid I’ve been playing it rather late. That affair with rules they’ve given us says not after eleven. Nothing noisy after eleven. But it’s my cadenzas, you see. I can’t satisfy myself, and it’s awfully tempting to go on till one gets better.’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ Tony said. ‘We all have the instinct to improve. I have it myself. I got a prize for effort, as a matter of fact, at my private school. Sorry to boast.’

  ‘For effort?’ It appeared that the ‘cellist was impervious to sarcasm. ‘I don’t think there were prizes for effort at my prepper. And not at Marlborough, either. But the music was pretty good there. Does either of you have an instrument?’

  ‘We both have,’ Tony said. ‘The same instrument, it turns out to be. Wouldn’t you call that an extraordinary coincidence? And here it is.’ Tony raised his swizzle-stick in air and shook it. A tiny sound – almost, as it happened, to be termed musical – issued from it as the little gold blobbles collided. ‘Do you know it? It’s called the Chinese chinks.’

  ‘There’s something called the Chinese block in a full orchestra. It doesn’t give a definite note, I believe. It’s Temple blocks that do that. Temple blocks give a definite note. Although they’re nothing but chunks of wood with holes bored in them.’ Mogridge offered these instructive remarks at leisure. If he was aware he was being made fun of, he didn’t betray the fact. ‘But I must be off,’ he went on. ‘I promise to put away the ‘cello for the night, so you shan’t be disturbed again. I just felt I must apologise for being thoughtless. Good night.’

  ‘Oh, do stop for a few minutes.’ Tony, although rather going in for bad manners, appeared readily won over by good. ‘And have a glass of this stuff to initiate our acquaintance.’

  ‘Thank you very much.’ Mogridge dropped into a chair without fuss. I saw that he was experimenting with a moustache. But it was not this, or not this alone, that lent him an air of faint anachronism. Something else – and I don’t think it was his clothes either – already rendered that suggestion of throwback to an earlier period (Edwardian or even late Victorian) which was to be so pronounced in him a quarter of a century later. At the moment, I wondered whether this was a subjective impression of my own; whether, for example, Mogridge just happened to correspond in appearance to somebody in an old illustrated edition of Tom Brown’s School Days or perhaps Eric, or Little by Little. I was struck, at the same time, by some peculiarity of his vision. When disposed to hold you in full focus he would move his head to the left and appear to concentrate on a spot a couple of feet wide of your right shoulder. The effect was that of somebody about to attempt a place-kick in a stiff breeze. I was to conclude later that a large part of Gavin Mogridge’s appearance of extreme vagueness was due to this ocular peculiarity. When you did catch his gaze direct you were likely to be aware that it was penetrating beyond the average.

  ‘It’s Saint-Saens’s Concerto,’ Mogridge was saying as he accepted champagne. ‘The solo parts in the first movement. A bit tricky, really.’ He paused. ‘A bit tricky, the first movement of Saint-Saens’s Concerto. Oh, thank you very much.’ He had been offered Tony’s Chinese chinks, now again become a swizzle-stick. ‘Amusing things, these. Rather amusing, swizzle-sticks. I want to get on to Elgar’s Concerto, as a matter of fact. To play the finale of that with full orchestra would be quite something. But I don’t deny I’ve some way to go. I’ve some way to go to Elgar. Have to face it.’

  ‘But not tonight.’ Tony repressed a yawn. I believe he judged himself to have turned on his best behaviour, as became a host, but there was an obstinate glint of mockery in his eye. ‘About those cadenzas, by the way. You haven’t been aware of a certain amount of crescendo going on at the same time? A spot of allegro pomposo, as it were.’ Tony paused on this, apparently pleased with it. It was to be his line to mingle a cheerfully philistine note with random exhibitions of knowledgeableness in one field and another. But Mogridge looked (if Mogridge could be said to look) quite blank. ‘Out in the quad, you know. Listen.’

  ‘Oh, those chaps! Yes, I suppose there is a bit of a din. They’ve been drinking, I’d say. Wouldn’t you say they’d been drinking? That’s it.’

  ‘Doesn’t it terrify you?’ I asked.

  ‘Terrify me?’ There was an entire blankness in Mogridge’s response. ‘Does it terrify you, Pattullo?’

  ‘It absolutely takes the pants off me.’ I felt this frankness was due to myself. ‘And
I’d feel particularly vulnerable, if I was on the ground floor like you.’

  ‘You could sport your oak, I suppose. But sporting your oak is said not to be quite the thing. It’s felt not to be on, sporting your oak.’

  For some minutes the din had been less shattering – the mob, I imagine, having moved into Howard. But now it was coming back again. This was the most alarming effect yet. It was impossible not to believe that a score of rowing hearties and rugger toughs were making a bee-line for us, solely intent upon the destruction of Messrs Mumford, Mogridge and Pattullo – three quiet youths rationally conversing in an upper chamber.

  ‘I expect it’s just some of the men out of the Forces,’ Mogridge said comfortably. ‘They feel they’re due a bit of fun – and quite right too. A lot of them had a pretty dull war. But not everybody. Not everybody had too dull a time. I was talking to a chap last night. When only a subaltern he had to navigate a whole brigade across the Western Desert, just with a compass and by the stars. It must have been quite something, that.’

  ‘Almost,’ Tony said, ‘like playing that Elgar finale against a whole orchestra.’

  ‘Just like that!’ Mysteriously for a moment, our visitor was a man transformed. ‘But I must be off,’ he said, standing up. ‘Yes, I must certainly go to bed.’ He turned to me. ‘I don’t think there’s really the slightest risk of anybody coming up here and mucking around. But if any of them do, just stamp hard on the floor, Pattullo, and I’ll run up and lend a hand. Thanks awfully for the champagne, Mumford. You must have a tiptop wine merchant. Good night.’

  ‘Well, if you must go,’ Tony said, and stood up. ‘Of course, I expect you’re accustomed to this sort of racket – at least in the middle distance. For you live in Cambridge, don’t you? Isn’t it there that your father’s a professor?’

  ‘Yes, it is.’ Mogridge had paused at the door, decidedly surprised. ‘How did you know?’

  ‘I’ve heard of him, naturally.’ Tony produced this quite unblushingly. ‘Good night, old boy. Nice of you to have looked in.’

  We listened to Mogridge’s footsteps fading. Tony shared out the last of the champagne. I stood up and wandered round the room. The big picture over the mantelpiece proved to portray a group of Roman ladies in the languorous enjoyment of gracious living amid a vista of marble halls. Their attire, if obviously sheddable, was decorously unshed; their attitudes, on the other hand, were such that any one of them might have been posing as Leda contentedly awaiting the embrace of the next swan.

  ‘Good God, Tony!’ I said. ‘A thing like that just isn’t good for your health.’

  ‘It’s a Victorian effort, as you can see. Astonishing what that prudish age would take in a pictorial way. Anything to activate the little swizzle-stick, one might say.’ Tony was obviously proud of this dubious artistic possession. ‘You’re welcome to drop in on my wenches at any time.’

  I record this as being the first of innumerable salacious exchanges, all equally imbecile, which Tony’s painting was to prompt. No small circumstance during my first weeks in college surprises me more in the recollection than the facility I discovered in myself for bawdy talk. At school I had been a shade inhibited in such matters. And my father’s fellow-artists, although I believe them to have been highly inventive in the field, commonly refrained from it when Ninian or myself was in their company, a thing which happened frequently enough. Some of the witticisms which the Lord Chamberlain was occasionally to insist on my excising from my plays must have had their origin in this entirely salubrious aspect of my undergraduate years.

  ‘I don’t think Mogridge would approve of it,’ I said of the picture, as I wandered away to inspect Tony’s books. ‘But whether he saw it or not, one just couldn’t tell. Still, you’ve made quite a pal of him, haven’t you? Two new pals in one evening, and both through knowing all about their distinguished fathers on the strength of a reference-book. You’ll go far. Will Mogridge? What did you think of him?’

  ‘One of the last Romantics, if you ask me. Perhaps one of the last great Romantics.’ Tony was lounging back in his chair. ‘I’m a classical man myself.’

  I was discovering that Tony Mumford owned quite a large number of classical texts. I wondered how much he frequented them. That he had made a perceptive if extravagantly couched remark about our late visitor didn’t enter my head. It was something he wasn’t going to make a habit of. Gavin Mogridge fairly quickly came to bore Tony.

  ‘Listen!’ Tony said, and sat up.

  What I had to listen to was sudden near-silence. A moment before, the uproar in Surrey had been unabated. Now it had simply stopped, as if turned off at a tap. One heard instead footsteps, a few opening and closing doors, young and well-modulated voices calling out casual good-nights. These muted and respectable sounds were certainly being produced by the Dionysiac rout still vocal minutes earlier. Oddly, this was the most unnerving part of the show. It was as if the wild beasts that had been let loose about the college had discovered some treacherous magic which enabled them to cloak themselves in human form. I might be passing the time of day with them in the quad next morning, or sitting next to one in a lecture. And if wild beasts can turn human at will, it is evident that humans are liable to turn wild beasts at a drop of the most casual handkerchief.

  ‘Revels ended,’ Tony said sleepily. He was immune from any such thought as I had been entertaining. ‘Better jettison the incriminating evidence, don’t you think?’ He walked over to a window, threw up the sash, and hurled the empty champagne bottle far into the darkness of the quad. I listened, horrified, for the crash of its breaking against stone, or for whatever sound would result from its impact on somebody’s skull. There was only a faint thud. The bottle must have landed on grass at the far side of Surrey. ‘Just another contribution to the quad-men’s haul in the morning,’ Tony said. ‘I expect they flog them to rag-and-bone merchants. The simpler classes of society, you know, favour them for turning into table-lamps.’

  ‘I’m going to bed,’ I said, ‘—like that chap Mogridge.’ Tony’s action had shaken me. I moved to the door, and with my hand on it reflected that it was only on a basis of candour that Tony Mumford and I were likely to have much of a joint future. ‘That was a bloody silly thing to do,’ I added. ‘Good night.’

  ‘Good night, young Pattullo.’ Standing in front of his masterpiece of Victorian volupté, Tony grinned at me – carefree and totally unoffended. ‘I appoint you my wee Scottish guardian angel. Good night, sweet laddie, good night.’ He stretched his arms luxuriously. There was already something slightly heavy about him, and I was to recall him in this pose many years later.

  ‘Oh, I’m so sorry!’

  I had to say this, because I had almost knocked somebody down. The staircase and landing were in near-darkness, since the lighting had been switched nocturnally to the merest glimmer. I didn’t so much see the figure I had bumped against as merely sense him. I put out a hand and found it gripping a trembling arm.

  ‘I say,’ I said, ‘are you all right?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, thank you.’ The voice was trembling as well. ‘Are you Mr Mumford?’

  ‘No. My name’s Pattullo. Mr Mumford’—I managed to reiterate this appellation with a civility which both my father and Uncle Rory would equally have approved—’is through there. Behind me, I mean. I’ve just left him. Are you looking for him?’

  ‘Oh, no—not at all!’ The suggestion appeared further to perturb the agitated person beside me. ‘I’m Mr Bedworth. I’m Bedworth. Cyril Bedworth.’ The young man was concerned to get this right. ‘You won’t have heard of me. I’m at the top. Of the staircase, that is.’

  ‘Yes, I know.’ It was true I hadn’t exactly heard of Bedworth, but I had noticed his name on the letter-rack downstairs. ‘They’re pretty stingy with the lighting, aren’t they? Like the black-out again.’

  ‘Yes, aren’t they?’ Bedworth was finding a certain relief in speech. ‘And in the quads, too. I thought it was all right, you see. They seemed all to
have gone away.’

  ‘Those ghastly rowdies, you mean?’

  ‘Yes—them.’ Bedworth, whose mind seemed to be moving rather slowly, caught the suggestion that we were on the same side of a fence. ‘So I came out—’

  ‘Out?’

  ‘Of a doorway. It was quite dark in it, and I thought I’d be all right. Things went quiet at last – suddenly, in fact – so I thought the coast was clear. Then something seemed to whiz past my head.’

  ‘I expect you imagined that. Natural, when all that rumpus had been going on.’

  ‘I actually felt it in my hair. Or I thought I did. But I suppose you’re right.’

  ‘I’m sure I am.’ The thought that Tony Mumford might have brained this timid person didn’t greatly entertain me. ‘But look,’ I went on, ‘I’m just going back to my rooms.

  ‘Won’t you come in for a minute?’ I was about to add, ‘I’ve got some whisky there’—but felt that, at least if prematurely disclosed, the information might be other than reassuring. ‘We ought to have got to know each other by this time.’

  ‘Yes—we should.’ Although Bedworth jerked this out, it was with conviction. There came to me – dimly, and for a moment – the perception that he had clear views about the place. I didn’t get far with this. I was too occupied with my big-brother turn. Perhaps I had a faint sense that Tony Mumford had been patronising me – or would have been benevolently so doing if I’d let him. I’d have a go at Bedworth now.

  But I am aware, as I write this, that it isn’t really true. My actual impulse towards Bedworth that night must have been more respectable. He was confronted with a new environment stranger to him by several vital degrees than it was to me. At the same time, I felt myself to be much a spectator ab extra, and I was very determined not to underplay the part. (Indeed, what was intellectually mature in me – which wasn’t much – whispered of the advantages to an artist of resisting facile assimilations.) So I felt a tolerably honest wish to support this new acquaintance. Accordingly, I opened the door of my room, flicked on the light, and pretty well shoved Bedworth inside.