Young Pattullo

by J. I. M. Stewart

  ‘I don’t think I could recommend it just as a book at bedtime. Except, of course, that it is a novel. The Arcadia’s supposed to be an early attempt at a novel. It would take your mind off chemistry. There’s no chemistry in the Arcadia.’ I felt I was beginning to talk like Gavin Mogridge. ‘At least I haven’t come on any so far,’ I added, perhaps in an attempt to enliven matters. There was a pause. One topic was undeniably exhausted. ‘Do you like this room?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s very remarkable.’ Miss Basket looked conscientiously at the room, as if to be quite sure of this. ‘It must hold great interest for your father.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose so.’ I was aware that what held great interest for my father was the spectacle of his son floundering in polite conversation. At this very moment, in fact, he gave me a scandalous wink across the room. I believe it conveyed his condolences that Miss Basket was so plainly not drawing any very exciting secretions into my blood-stream.

  ‘I haven’t spoken to the Provost yet,’ Miss Basket said, a little too much with an effect of inspiration. ‘I think I must go across.’

  I was tempted to say, ‘I haven’t either, so I’ll come too.’ But diffidence or my better nature prevailed, and I stayed put. I offered Miss Basket a little bob as she walked away. It made me feel like a shopwalker. At this self-conscious moment a young man whom I’d have taken for an undergraduate if he hadn’t been wearing a white jacket offered me a glass of sherry on a tray. I needed it badly. The young man gave me a shy, cheeky conspiratorial grin. I was grateful for it. He was the only person of my age in the room.

  The morose butler had almost ceased announcing people. The Day-room couldn’t have been called crowded; it was said to be the largest private chamber in Oxford, and a platoon might have marched and wheeled in it. But there were certainly a great many guests, so that the occasion answered to my preconceived idea of a banquet rather than a dinner-party. They seemed nearly all already known to each other (All know the man their neighbour knows, I would report to Tony), but nevertheless Mrs Pococke was kept fairly busy at brisk introductions – particularly of, or to, my father. With me she didn’t bother further.

  For a young man to be left to his own resources in such a situation can be an awkward thing. I had to check myself from employing my sherry-glass as a kind of vertically operating metronome, and from shifting ridiculously from one foot to the other. It was in vain that I told myself I was a detached spectator much at his ease, enjoying the exercise of the superior penetration that was naturally his. It was miles worse than those rare occasions at Corry when my uncle and aunt entertained the local monarchs of the glens, for at them there was commonly some stringy soldier or weather-beaten lady who would advance and put me through my paces whether they supposed themselves to be acquainted with me or not. Academic life – I told myself with desperate condescension – is bourgeois in tone. At this squalid moment I became aware of the White Rabbit.

  Tindale was at the far end of the room, talking to a dumpy woman who was certainly another don. He was probably giving her the latest news of Pope Zosimus – which was something she looked as if she might well be all agog for. But although Tindale was talking to this scholarly person he was contemplating me. Or rather he had been, for now he was looking at the floor. Of this, however, he seemed instantly to think better, for he raised his eyes, smiled, and gave me an informal wave which I took to have the character of a summons as well. I don’t know that at that time I entirely objected to being contemplated; it was just one of the occasional facts of life. Anyway, any port in a storm. I advanced across the room.

  ‘A young neighbour of mine in Surrey,’ Tindale said. ‘Mr Pattullo. Professor Babcock.’

  I thought ‘young neighbour’ avuncular and impolite, but that cheerfulness was intended. I made my bob at Professor Babcock. I was at least again doing what everybody else in the room was doing: attempting communion with somebody else.

  ‘A large do,’ Professor Babcock said, glancing round. ‘But when you become Vice-Chancellor you no doubt have to step it up. Still, it has a pre-war flavour. Can it last?’

  ‘A pertinent question,’ Tindale said. ‘The Pocockes have entertained most generously from the start. Some feel they have departed splendours in mind. One fears it is against the tide. The butler will transfer his favours to a millionaire in New York. The pantry boys, showing themselves as what is now called delinquent, will depart with the spoons.’

  I resented this on behalf of the pantry boy who had brought me sherry. I even resented it on behalf of Mrs Pococke, who had at least invited me to dine in my father’s company. And I was, of course, unused to the sub-acid as a conversational mode.

  ‘I think,’ I said, ‘it’s pretty stout of the Provost and Mrs Pococke to try to keep things going. I suppose it’s what the whole place is about, in a way.’

  ‘Exactly,’ Tindale replied amiably. ‘The idea of a university, and so on. Out of the mouths of babes and—’

  ‘Dr Tindale, Mrs Rumsey is casting imploring glances at you.’ Professor Babcock made this interruption with splendid brusqueness. I didn’t know who Mrs Rumsey was, and much doubted whether she had been casting glances at all. But the White Rabbit departed obediently. ‘A charming man,’ Professor Babcock said. ‘Undistinguished as a scholar. Extremely witty.’

  I was to come to know this sort of three-tier remark as called the Oxford sandwich. The first and third parts can be chosen at random; it is the middle one that counts. Being at present ignorant of this, I was perplexed and said nothing.

  ‘I know something about you,’ Professor Babcock said briskly. ‘The theme of distinction in scholarship brings it to my mind. You are a schoolfellow of Ranald McKechnie’s.’

  ‘Yes.’ I felt no occasion to go beyond this monosyllable, and was thankful my father was out of earshot. Heaven knew what he would come out with if he thus heard his son being, as it were, trailed in the dusty rear of that supposed rival of mine whom he had dubbed Wee Dreichie.

  ‘Mr McKechnie has become my pupil – just for this term. He is a great joy.’

  ‘Yes,’ I repeated stupidly – and added, more stupidly still, ‘How nice! I expect he reads Tacitus.’

  ‘Reads Tacitus?’ Naturally enough, Professor Babcock was perplexed. ‘He comes to me for Greek verses. I am inclined to judge him the ablest pupil I have taught at Oxford. Do you see much of each other?’

  ‘Well, no.’ I was abased at having to confess my virtual non-association with this paragon. ‘I think McKechnie’s very shy. I mean, we’re both very shy.’

  ‘He is, certainly.’ I saw that Professor Babcock was amused. ‘But I don’t at all know about you, Mr Pattullo. Couldn’t you bring him forward? A favourite expression of our hostess’s, that.’

  ‘Bring McKechnie forward?’ This conception astonished me. ‘I could as soon bring forward the Forth Bridge. McKechnie’s the sort of man who would walk round the block rather than meet his oldest friend face to face. Heaven knows what will happen when he crosses the Bar.’

  This sounded to me, even as I uttered it, a shocking example of a conceited young man putting his best quip forward; it was something becoming a habit with me as a result of having to keep my end up at the scholars’ table and in other gifted circles. But Professor Babcock’s reaction was quite cordial. In fact it was surprising. She leant forward and nudged me. I wasn’t even quite clear with what she nudged me. I had misjudged her in thinking of her as dumpy. ‘Well-developed’ would have been more correct, and it really felt as if what had nudged me was her corsage. She must be one of those female dons who, when stimulated, could be quite astonishing. If she hadn’t been as old as my mother she’d have alarmed me. As it was, I just felt that her gesture (if it was to be called that) acknowledged the fact that McKechnie needn’t be thought of as having it all his own way. I hoped that I’d be taking Professor Babcock in to dinner. But this was negatived at once.

  ‘I do hope,’ Professor Babcock said, ‘that Camilla—Mrs Pococke—h
as a nice girl for you to hand down.’ She glanced round the room. ‘But it doesn’t look like it. Ah! Perhaps it will be our good little Miss Basket.’

  ‘Oh, no!’ Perhaps I said this with uncivil promptitude. ‘A man called Buntingford is booked for that. Mrs Pococke told me.’

  ‘Then, Mr Pattullo, I sadly fear—but stay!’

  The door of the Day-room had opened, and the butler (not yet having absconded to the United States) stood within it.

  ‘Mrs Triplett and Miss Triplett,’ he said. He was announcing the latest arrived of the guests.

  This was to prove an important and indeed fatal moment in my life, but I can remember my first thought as being that Penny Triplett – for this must be Penny – might be just right for Fish. Fish was still very much on my mind. I had little notion of the extent to which the conversion hysterias are, or are not, common phenomena. But at least the dramatic means he had involuntarily taken to break the spell of Martine seemed to belong to a world of demoniacal possession and desperate self-exorcism alarmingly remote from any that one would wish so nice a man to inhabit. He had perfectly provided support for the thesis that being in love – or at least being ‘madly’ in love – is a form of insanity, of irrational concentration upon another person whose supposed objectively-existing attributes may be almost totally the creation of one’s own disordered imagination. Nor had his abruptly redeemed state as revealed earlier that day been reassuring. What he had exhibited could be viewed as a chamber swept and garnished, impressively gleaming in a new-pin and virtually pre-lapsarian fashion, into which goodness knew what might at any moment erupt. What this nice man urgently needed was a congruously nice girl.

  This therapeutic theory had been proposed in a crude way by some of my friends. It had chanced to be thus proposed (and the terrifying sway of chance may already have been noted as prominent in my youthful philosophy) within the context of old Mrs Triplett’s establishment at the end of Linton Road. We had talked rubbish about finding Fish one of Mrs Triplett’s brown girls – allurements by whom my own fancy had been not untouched. Mrs Triplett’s young relative (of whom I had merely heard rumour) was not a brown girl. I was being introduced to her by my hostess now, and she was extremely fair.

  It would be idle to attempt further description of Penny. Her character must later appear, but her person eludes the pen. She shared with the brown girls, at least, the quality of being rather small, and also of that sort of perfection which suggests an exquisite smoothness to the hand and is not readily separable from an answering perfection of turn-out. There wasn’t a hair wrong or a crease where no crease should be. Nothing of all this gave rational occasion for supposing her to be the replacement Fish should be provided with. If I hadn’t happened during the previous week to seek Colin Badgery’s counsel on Fish’s behalf, or if a conversation hadn’t then taken the turn it did, the notion might never have entered my head. I should still have been suddenly and extremely interested in Penny. But no muddled intentions would have been blowing around.

  Going in to dinner involved descending an imposing staircase, and was rather a formal affair. Mrs Pococke, or perhaps it was the Provost, liked it that way. The gentlemen offered and the ladies accepted arms – not quite with the appearance of being habituated to such a ritual, and in some cases rather as if humorously accepting the preliminary dispositions required for a harmless party game. I was still wondering whether I could possibly offer my arm to Penny Triplett when I found that she had composedly taken it, that we were half-way downstairs, and that she was asking me if I played much tennis.

  I said I was fearfully keen on tennis. This first assertion of mine to Penny was, no doubt symbolically, not wholly true. I did no more than quite like tennis, perhaps because Ninian was very much better at it than I was. But I supposed that, as she had raised the subject thus early, tennis was a major interest with her – in which case it would be unenterprising to be tepid about it myself. And Fish must certainly be enthusiastic about tennis. All Australians were.

  I imagine I must have talked during dinner with the woman on my other side. Penny was so correct that she kept an eye on Mrs Pococke at the head of the table, and when Mrs Pococke turned was herself alert to turn at the slightest hint too. But I have no memory of this neighbour, or of almost anything concerning the meal. An impression did come to me of being the object, along with Penny, of occasional glances of benevolent regard now from one and now from another of our fellow-guests. Unless one was to count Buntingford and Miss Basket, we were the only young people in the room, and as we were thoroughly pleased with one another we probably presented a spectacle agreeable and even affecting to elderly persons under the gentle influence of a glass or two of wine.

  Penny was perhaps a little younger than I was – which wouldn’t make her too young for Fish. I learnt that she had just come out, and that the manoeuvres of her first season were being conducted by an aunt, since her parents were at present sustaining some diplomatic role in South America. She had arrived in Oxford on a visit to her elderly kinswoman only the day before, and was going to stay for a fortnight.

  ‘We’ve been hoping it was going to be longer,’ I said.

  ‘Mr Pattullo, don’t be absurd! You can’t ever have heard of me.’

  ‘Oh, but I have. Mrs Triplett has mentioned you. I listened at once. A bevy of beautiful Burmese maidens were dancing on the lawn, but I had only ears.’

  ‘I think you must be a very absurd person.’

  Penny may well have been right. But I don’t think I produced more twaddle like this than was tolerable, and indeed she seemed quite to like it. Perhaps she thought of me as something new and odd. Her own conversation ran on simple lines, and I had the wit to submit my own tone to it for a good part of the time. Not getting much change out of the theme of acquaintances and occasions in common, Penny listed plays seen and books read or heard of. Plays in particular took us some way, although they did seem a little to exist for her for the purpose of being ticked off. She had other conversational resources as well – endless ones, it was possible to feel. She touched lightly on this subject and that, like an exquisite small yacht, all snow-white sails and burnished metal, making a round of the islands in a compendious archipelago. One could say she had been no end ‘finished’. It occurred to me to wonder whether my beautiful mother had been like this when my father first encountered her in the Sistine Chapel.

  Penny knew nothing about Oxford, and exploited her ignorance in the interest of pretty appeals for information. Her mother had been at Somerville – a circumstance to which she could be felt to attach a sense of slight oddity – but she was vague about the possibility that she might come up to the university herself. If she did, could she arrange to be taught only by men? If she delayed her arrival by a few years was it quite certain that she could have me for a tutor? From sallies like this, which I found headier than the Provost’s hock, she would retreat upon more demurely conventional remarks. With deep cunning, I induced her to inquire about my friends. (Muddle was now going strong.) One of my best friends, I said, was a man called Martin Fish, an Australian owning millions of sheep – most of them alive, but one or two dead and painted by Sidney Nolan. Nolan’s was the first name to floor Penny.

  She professed earnest interest. She loved painting. My most urgent after-dinner task must be to introduce her to my father.

  Suddenly I was astounded to see Penny on her feet, and had a mad scramble to contrive any suggestion of having anticipated her. I remembered to sprint for the door, which at least earned me a good mark with Mrs Pococke. The ladies vanished, Penny vanished. I was overwhelmed with the sense of all the vital questions about herself I’d failed to ask. One – only dimly in my head – was why, early in a ‘season’ about which I’d been hearing a good deal, she was putting in a fortnight in a provincial city with an aged female relative.

  The Provost was concentrating his male guests at the foot of the table. He made a gesture – hospitable, but with a sub- suggestion o
f ecclesiastical benediction such as became his cloth – indicating that I should take my place beside him. It was the proper thing (quite certainly, the Provost never did other than the proper thing), but normally I’d have been horrified. As it was, I didn’t care a hoot; I was as confident as a favourite archangel summoned to colloquy with a benign deity. The problem of my father’s comportment had evaporated in my mind. Had he at that moment been proposing to perform a Highland reel on the table I would have been approving but not specially attentive. (He was in fact conversing gravely with the President of Magdalen, who was an eminent art-historian.) I took my place with modest ease, and almost – for I was my father’s son – gave Buntingford a wink as I did so.

  ‘Have you been getting in much golf lately, Pattullo?’ The question, which a little recalled Penny’s opening shot at me, was humorously intended, but this didn’t prevent the Provost from advancing it with his customary air of considered amenity. ‘I have kept an eye out for you—shall I say a wary eye?—on the two or three rounds I have managed myself.’

  ‘I’ve only been out once, sir. Since we met, I mean. With Tony Mumford again.’

  ‘Mumford? Ah, yes – we have a Mumford in residence once more.’ The Provost didn’t seem peculiarly gratified by this thought. ‘And Mumford would have been that one of your two companions gifted with the more confident address?’

  ‘Yes, Provost.’ (I had been told that one might apostrophise the Provost in this way, just as if one were a don or a don’s wife, and I’d thought I’d try it out. The ‘Sir’ business, which all polite youths employed freely, could get very boring.)

  ‘And who was the man who actually scored the hit with which Mumford vaingloriously thought to credit himself?’ The Provost, I was finding, could talk in this ponderous way without marked absurdity except to a cavilling ear, of which there were probably plenty around him. I rather liked it, since I was in a phase of literary development favouring mannered prose. I told myself I must just be careful not to respond with anything mannered myself. It would be insufferably impudent.