Young Pattullo

by J. I. M. Stewart

  ‘Oh, good evening, Pattullo,’ Tindale said. It was the first time he had displayed knowledge of my identity, although this was the third term that we had been on the same staircase. He was a spare middle-aged man, with a florid complexion, a head notably bald and domed, and a fuzz of grey hair over each ear. His eyes had a glitter which a little reminded me of Timbermill – except that they were small, black, bilberry eyes, more suggestive of a plain-clothes detective than of a visionary. For a moment, indeed, his gaze had been bent on me keenly enough for police purposes of the most sinister sort, so that I found myself surprised when his glance suddenly dropped to the neighbourhood of my feet. I’d have been more surprised still had I been able to reflect (as I was to be a long time afterwards) that this was the idiosyncrasy so strikingly exhibited by Cyril Bedworth’s shamefast wife, Mabel Bedworth.

  ‘I’m afraid I don’t know my neighbours very well,’ Tindale said, with a hand on his door-knob. ‘Apart from my own pupils, my undergraduate acquaintance seem to come from here and there around the university. At my age, you see, a good many of one’s old school friends tend to have sons up at one college or another.’ Having offered this explanatory remark, the White Rabbit appeared to feel the way cleared for the next thing. ‘Have you a minute or two?’ he asked. ‘If so, do come in and have a drink.’

  I found this very much in order. Buntingford, the tutor so casually confident about the adequacy of my Latin unseen translation, had made fun of my freshman’s persuasion that Oxford undergraduates lived in a freely mingling society of learned persons, old and young. We had got it, he once declared, out of inferior Edwardian novels of ‘Varsity life. But, in fact, the lack of interest in our young lives exhibited by dons at large wasn’t absolute. If they tended to know only their own pupils tolerably well, they did occasionally cast a social net a little wider than that. And perhaps most of them acknowledged the staircase principle in some degree. I didn’t know whether Tindale had already taken some notice of Bedworth and Mogridge and Tony Mumford. But if he hadn’t, he ought to have; and that went for me too. So I accepted his invitation with what I felt to be becoming ease. It was in my mind, of course, that here might be the right senior person to whom to speak about Fish.

  ‘There’s much to be said for the ground floor,’ Tindale said, ushering me into his sitting-room. ‘One gets a window broken rather more often, of course, than if one is upstairs. But the culprits regularly pay up, after all, and it makes honest work for deserving glaziers. Saves a surprising lot of tramping up and down, too, in the course of the day. Foot-pounds, or ergs, or whatever energy is reckoned in. Brandy?’

  I approved of brandy. After Fish’s coffee, it seemed just right. And it seemed just right, for that matter, after Fish as well. So I accepted quite a tot of the stuff, and looked round the room. There was a typewriter on which it was to be presumed that Tindale’s suspect young lady laboured twice a week in the interest of a clearer view of the diplomacy of Pope Zosimus. Apart from this, the place was sparely, even a shade meanly, furnished; it wasn’t the room of a man who had been bred up in any tradition of taste. Over the mantelpiece, and thus directly beneath Tony’s Roman bagnio, was a large colour-print of the Ansidei Madonna. It was massively framed – much more massively than was appropriate for a thing so thin as a colour-print – but it somehow suggested itself as first cousin to that droopy Corot tree which had adorned the room in Rattenbury in which I had been lodged during my Scholarship Examination. On another wall there hung the sawn-off blade of an oar, painted in the college colours and with the names of some victorious crew or other – all eight of them and a cox – inscribed in small gold lettering. I wasn’t able to make out, without uncivil peering, whether the cox – or perhaps the stroke – had been Tindale. It seemed a faintly anomalous trophy in a don’s room: a kind of attestation of something about a dead self that Tindale didn’t want lost sight of.

  ‘Head of the river, as a matter of fact,’ the White Rabbit said casually, noticing my glance. ‘Do you smoke?’

  I didn’t smoke. It seemed a pity, since I vaguely conjectured that what went with brandy at a donnish level was cigars. There was a pause, as if Tindale was momentarily at a loss.

  ‘Let me see,’ he said, easily enough. ‘What was I saying? Ah, the ground floor. Do you know that I’m a good way in?’

  ‘Sir?’ Rather stupidly, I was at a loss myself. ‘Oh, I see. No – I didn’t know.’

  ‘A closely guarded secret, perhaps. The Tindale route isn’t given away to freshmen, eh?’ My host seemed amused at this. He glanced at me again, and I had an odd impression that what he was looking at was my hair. ‘Quite an income in it, as a matter of fact. A toll-gate effect. Come into my bedroom, and you’ll see. Might be useful to you one night. Who knows?’

  We went into the bedroom. It was pretty bleak. I felt a certain awkwardness in the situation. But Tindale was again quite at ease. He threw open a further door. His set, as I have mentioned, rambled as the other sets on the staircase did not.

  ‘A kind of dressing-room, I suppose. I really haven’t any use for it. But go and take a look out of the window. I expect you can still just see.’

  ‘I expect so.’ I entered the dressing-room and obeyed my entertainer’s instruction. ‘It’s what’s called the coal-yard, isn’t it?’

  ‘Quite right. And that flat roof at the far side is the Dean’s motor-shed. Dead easy to get on that from the street, and then there’s just this window. They have to come in over the upper sash, because the lower one is chocked up. Kind of jack-knife athletic performance, it has to be. Scatters their small change over the carpet, and they’re too scared to stop and pick it up. They bolt through the dining-room, and I collect in the morning. Regular revenue. We’ll call it a fine.’

  ‘I see,’ I said, and registered adequate amusement.

  ‘But the main thing, Pattullo, is that I keep this door communicating with the bedroom open. They all know that to be my tedious habit. Increases the nervous effect.’

  ‘I suppose it does.’

  ‘And sometimes I give a further turn of the screw.’ Tindale led me back to the sitting-room, chuckling softly. ‘Seem to stir in my sleep. Or even call out in a smothered manner, as if from a horrid dream. More brandy? But perhaps we’d better not.’

  ‘No thank you, sir.’ I judged curious the picture of this elderly character lying in his narrow bed and watching the shadowy forms of these young idiots flitting past. ‘Isn’t it pretty silly,’ I asked, ‘keeping up this convention of men having to climb back into college in the small hours? They’re coming all the way from Malaya and goodness knows where, some of them.’ I paused. ‘In a sense,’ I added, feeling that Tindale mightn’t quite be getting there.

  ‘Ah, but you mustn’t deprive me of my Trinkgeld! ‘Tindale indicated comical dismay, although it was clear he wasn’t naturally a humorous type. ‘Not that you’re not quite right,’ he went on, with a transition to gravity. ‘Another five or ten years, and it will all have vanished. But we adjust slowly to changed conditions in a place like this. Don’t you agree? And one has a certain nostalgia for the ancient ways.’

  ‘I don’t think I have.’ I had abandoned the notion of appealing to this particular don in the matter of Fish’s neurosis.

  He seemed, somehow, to be a mixed-up type, and moreover I didn’t much take to his air of connivance in the irregularities of the young. He got his pay for doing the in loco parentis stuff, and he’d do better to play it straight. There was a silence, and I realised he was sensitive to my not being quite on the right beam. ‘Thank you very much for the drink,’ I said. ‘I’ll have to be getting along.’

  ‘Ah, always that essay to write!’ Tindale produced a small friendly gesture. ‘It’s a hard life, Pattullo. Do you know an expression I heard the other day? The rat-race. About nails it, I’d say. Good of you to come in, and I hope you’ll come again. Sometime.’ He moved to the door – entirely the man who could hardly murmur Good-morning or Good-afternoon. �
�Good-night,’ he said, and made the little gesture a second time over.

  I stepped into the quad, wondering whether I had cut this unsatisfactory encounter uncivilly short. If so, it had been partly because, having written off Tindale as a reliable ally, I wanted to resume my plan of seeking out Colin Badgery. It still seemed to me that it was up to us to hand over Fish to the operations of a more adult wisdom than we ourselves presumably possessed. Badgery would know the proper way to go about it.

  Hurrying across Surrey, I met Tony. He looked as if he were returning prematurely to his rooms from some disappointing conviviality.

  ‘Come and see Badgery,’ I said. ‘We must get this Fish business sorted out. It’s bad.’

  ‘Oh silver fish that my two hands have taken,’ Tony murmured, and had to cast around for something to give this particular Yeats joke any appositeness. ‘Do you think the charming Martine chanted that as she grabbed him where she wanted to?’

  ‘I don’t care a damn what she did. Just come over to Howard.’

  Tony made a resigned gesture and fell into step with me. We found Badgery entertaining one of our own contemporaries, Robert Damian. Being affable and instructive to freshmen was one of Badgery’s lines, and he greeted us amiably now.

  ‘Oh, hullo,’ he said, ‘it’s the industrious John Ruskin Junior and his idle hanger-on. There’s some beer under the table. It’s in those horrible little cans. Please make moderately free with it. We’re discussing Behaviourism. It seems it’s susceptible – the good Dr Watson’s nonsense – of practical applications. Robert says they’ll be beneficent. But that’s because he still retains the sanguine and guileless outlook of youth. They sound pretty sinister to me. What do you think?’

  ‘We haven’t come for a tute,’ I said – for Badgery’s questions commonly turned into sustained inquisition, conducted on monotonously Socratic lines. ‘But I do have a problem.’

  ‘How to gouge a single useful word out of Albert Talbert, I expect. No go, Duncan. I tried myself for a whole year, and it was no bloody go. So I can’t help.’

  Badgery was still John Ruskin Senior, but he had ceased to read English. With difficulty, and probably on the strength of much hard work, he had persuaded the college to let him change to another School hazardously far on in his undergraduate career. It must have been judged that he had quite a lot of brains.

  ‘Talbert lets one be,’ I said defensively. ‘He doesn’t produce those Five Main Points at the end of your essay, or make lively faces at you to show he’s being stimulating and God knows. The appreciation of literature is a delicate business. He refrains from irritating the sensibility.’

  ‘And do you respond to that particular maieutic technique, my child? Does the sensibility burgeon week by week?’

  ‘Not too well.’ Badgery’s own technique, which was often one of nonsensical badinage, had the unexpected effect of making one grope after a dim honesty. ‘I don’t do all that for him, as a matter of fact.’

  ‘No matter. Young Pattullo, unlike the frivolous drunkard Mumford, wins golden opinions from his preceptors, tute by tute. Have you heard of the kiss of life?’

  ‘No, I haven’t.’

  ‘It’s a newfangled way of resuscitating the moribund. But it’s my point that reading English is the kiss of death. Or at least getting a First in it is. Have you ever thought of running through the Class Lists since the racket started?’

  ‘Of course not. It would be a waste of time.’

  ‘Nothing of the sort. It’s most illuminating.’ Badgery turned to the others. ‘Or at least for a literary character like young Pattullo it ought to be. Have you ever heard of anybody becoming a star of the Oxford English School and afterwards a poet or novelist or dramatist of the faintest significance?’

  ‘Aldous Huxley,’ Tony said unexpectedly.

  ‘Precisely! He’s the exception that proves the rule. The others all become professors of the stuff. Rank upon rank of them. An army of unalterable aridity. It becomes self- perpetuating.’

  ‘For Christ’s sake,’ Robert Damian said, ‘stop talking such stupid shop. Let’s have Duncan’s problem. I suspect it’s this Fish.’

  ‘Oh silver fish—’ Tony began, and remembered I’d had this one already. ‘Fish it is. Duncan’s obsessed with the man.’

  ‘I’m nothing of the kind. But I do seem to be expected to fix Fish, and I’ve come to wonder whether it can really only be done by doctors and people. So I want to know how to begin. Could I barge in on his tutor – who can’t be too bright if he hasn’t tumbled to the situation already? I rather thought of putting it to Tindale, as a matter of fact.’

  ‘Tindale?’ Tony echoed, and stared at me in surprise. ‘But you don’t know Tindale. Nobody does.’

  ‘Yes, I do. I’ve just been drinking his brandy.’

  ‘Well, I’m blessed!’ Badgery sounded equally astonished. ‘Question: why was young Pattullo born so beautiful? Answer: to delight the gods by constraining the elusive Tindale into breaking his rule.’

  ‘What do you mean – his rule?’ I demanded crossly.

  ‘Not to pick his young associates from inside his own college. A prudent, a decorous rule.’

  ‘Then that’s it!’ Tony said rapidly. He regarded it as a duty to snub or short-circuit this particular joke at my expense – partly because he thought Cyril Bedworth to be the sort of person upon whom it was funniest to direct it. ‘If this obscure don’s tastes lie that way, it releases the typewriter.’

  ‘The typewriter?’ Damian queried.

  ‘A nice girl,’ I said. It was I who had lately discovered that typists had originally been called typewriters – and, indeed, that Joseph Conrad had bewildered his Polish relations by writing home to announce that he had married one. ‘Like the young lady of Barking Creek, she has a date with Tindale twice a week. But Tony’s talking nonsense.’

  ‘Not at all.’ Tony had already succeeded in opening a second can of Badgery’s beer. ‘We waylay the pretty creature as she leaves her dull assignment with the inappropriate Tindale, and tell her we have quite a different proposition two floors up. Swiftly striking a bargain as we ascend—’

  ‘Yes, Tony’s talking nonsense, all right,’ Badgery said, with the air of a mature person suffering the absurdities of the young. ‘But perhaps his general idea is on the right lines. Fish must be found another wench. But the notion of simply hiring one and then saying to him, “Look what we’ve tucked up in your bed” is a shade on the crude side, if you ask me. Duncan, wouldn’t you agree?’

  ‘I wish you’d all stop being idiotic. Of course it’s true that, if Fish doesn’t hang himself or something, time the great healer may weigh in. He’ll go back to Australia and make a suitable marriage and have lots of children. But it’s not going to happen in a day.’

  ‘Of course not. What a penetrating mind Duncan has.’ Badgery paused to drink in a meditative fashion. ‘Taking a scientific view, one sees that one has to work in stages. Is Fish still attached to this girl who has ditched him?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I don’t even know that. But I’d suppose so.’

  ‘Then the first thing to arrange is a sort of deconditioning. Does he still see the girl?’

  ‘Almost certainly not. Martine has vanished.’

  ‘Then she must be tracked down, and it must be fixed so that Fish runs into her in an accidental way quite often. And whenever that happens, there must be somebody ready to produce a very loud noise – perhaps by firing a pistol or something – preferably just behind Fish’s head.’

  ‘You’re dotty,’ Damian said.

  ‘Not at all. It’s just Behaviourism again. But one also wants Fish – about every second time there’s one of these casual sightings of the girl – to experience the sensation of a sudden drop through space. You see, these are the only two things that frighten a baby: being dropped, or being banged at loudly. After that, it’s all conditioned reflexes. So that’s how we work on Fish.’

  ‘It sounds too
easy for words,’ Tony said. ‘Particularly the dropping him through space. And then what?’

  ‘He’s ready to be introduced into new female society. Lots of it, if possible; not just a typewriter delivered at the door. Duncan, what about this old dame you go to tea with in North Oxford?’

  ‘What’s that?’ Tony interrupted. ‘Duncan, you’ve been hiding something from your very oldest friend. Who is she?’

  ‘She’s a Mrs Triplett.’ I was surprised to discover that I had, in fact, kept this recent association to myself. ‘But all that’s totally irrelevant.’

  ‘I’m not at all sure. Everybody has heard of Mrs Triplett. How did you come to achieve the entrée?’

  ‘It began with a cow, if you want to know.’

  ‘Duncan began with a cow.’ Tony was diverted for a moment to routine impropriety. ‘An unassuming, indeed a rustic, taste. And then?’

  ‘She asked me my name and college, rather as if she was the Junior Proctor. Then later it turned out she thought she knew some vague relations of mine, and she started asking me to tea. I don’t see the point of talking about Mrs Triplett.’

  ‘The point,’ Badgery said with extreme patience, ‘is that, at her tea-parties, your Mrs Triplett is said to lay on wenches. Is that right? If it is, the relevance of the fact to the good Fish and his situation ought to be evident.’