I certainly saw it all as insignificant, and within a couple of minutes it had gone from my head. For our homage to the Blunderville Papers was over, and we were leaving the library.
It was high time to return to the Lodging, where some of the guests must already be wondering whether they could civilly take their leave of Mrs Pococke while she was still unsupported by her wandering husband. But the Provost was not a man readily to be deflected from his purpose, and we hadn’t gained the near-darkness of Surrey before he was explaining to Professor Babcock the curious interest of what next lay before us. He had a genuine knowledge of painting – even of contemporary painting – and since first interviewing my father not much more than a year before had gained an actual acquaintance with his work. During the previous winter, and at my father’s first retrospective exhibition in London, he had seen Young Picts watching the arrival of Saint Columba, and it was a matter of interest to him that an esquisse for this now celebrated work hung in the rooms of the artist’s son. Having conversed on the matter with Professor Babcock (and not failed to do so with the pagoda lady, who was a woman guest of lesser account), he advanced upon me and laid a fatherly hand on my elbow.
‘And now, my dear Pattullo,’ he said, ‘we shall be most deeply grateful.’
I didn’t then know that the Provost was as lavishly given to this assurance as I was to ‘Thank you very much’, and its disproportion to our present small occasion unnerved me. Moreover at that time – although I didn’t realise the fact – I was possessed by a plurality of loves; my rooms in Surrey were among them; I resented the notion of all these people crowding in uninvited (as it essentially was). So I had to tell myself that it was my own fault; that in the vanity of my heart I had divulged my proprietorship of Young Picts to the Provost; and that the present dicey situation was only what I deserved.
But at least we were quit of Cressy; he had faded unobtrusively into the night – returning to the Lodging, I suppose, to take due leave of his hostess before making off in triumph with his booty. This relieved me a good deal. Had he remained for this odd private view, and then treated Young Picts to that icy stare, I might well have felt obliged to turn him out of the room – when I imagine that the Provost’s deep gratitude to me would have faded sharply. As things were, it was probable that all would go well. I realised that only a certain confusion of mind could have blinded me to the fact that my father wasn’t going to behave other than impeccably when once more a guest in his son’s quarters.
At this hour the only light in Surrey came from a few uncurtained windows, since the college porters had displayed their usual zeal in rendering nocturnal perambulation hazardous by switching off anything they could put a hand to. When we reached the foot of the staircase it occurred to me that I ought from this point to constitute myself Professor Babcock’s escort, and I got some satisfaction out of abandoning the Provost in the interest of this further piece of correct behaviour. I don’t know whether Professor Babcock was gratified by my punctilio. But she was certainly amused, and as I was now feeling confident and in good humour I thought the better of her for it. Since Tony had departed immediately after my luncheon party, for the supposed obsequies of an aunt, and had declared his intention of making the funeral baked meats spin out over a long week-end, there was no risk of ribald observation from that quarter. We climbed the worn treads at a pace proper to our post-prandial condition. I opened my door, switched on the light, and ushered Professor Babcock within. I then decided (the same anxious considerations still being uppermost in my young mind) that I should let the rest of the company precede me too, and I stood back for this purpose. So when I myself entered everybody was already at gaze with the picture over the chimney-piece. But the picture wasn’t Young Picts watching the arrival of Saint Columba. It was Tony’s atrocious Roman bawdy-house.
Through long seconds nobody uttered a word. I looked wildly round. It seemed only possible to suppose that I was very far from sober after all, and that on the landing I had bemusedly turned right when I ought to have turned left. But this, at least, wasn’t true. The room was my own room. My own darling room – as the poet Tennyson somewhere says.
‘I don’t recall conceiving the subject quite in that way.’ My father gave us this information mildly and with complete composure.
‘One would decidedly suppose not.’ The Provost (because he was not yet the nobly bearded man he was to become) could have been observed as having turned pale around the mouth. ‘Our proposed pleasure must be deferred,’ he said. His voice wasn’t quite steady, and as he was a man to whom a fiasco of this sort must appear an outrage I supposed the tremolo effect to be a consequence of blind fury. He turned and looked at me fixedly, and I didn’t imagine for a moment that he wasn’t judging me to be the perpetrator of this extravagant episode. I told myself my Oxford days were over. Not even Bedworth when he had contrived that luckless swipe with his brassy could have been more confounded. ‘My dear Pattullo,’ the Provost said quietly, ‘we must conclude that you number some lively minds among your acquaintance. Perhaps we might all return to the Lodging?’
We did so – to the accompaniment of what composing remarks by the other members of the expedition I don’t remotely recall. Although relieved (and impressed) by the Provost’s swift perception of the facts of the case, I was still sufficiently upset to be asking myself whether I had a reasonable chance of worsting Robert Damian in a stand-up fight, and rather concluding I had not.
‘Dunkie,’ my father asked cautiously, ‘your picture will be all right? They’ll gie it back to ye the morn?’
‘Yes, of course, Daddy. It’s as safe as houses.’ I knew this to be true. ‘Morie-morning, back it will come.’
‘Then that’s fine.’ My father laughed softly. ‘Gin ye ever produce the laddie did it, we’ll hae a bottle of champagne between the three of us.’
‘All right,’ I said. ‘If I haven’t murdered him first.’ But I no longer wanted to murder Damian, for I felt entirely happy. I ought to have known (I told myself) that my father would judge the scandalous joke entirely to its inventor’s credit.
‘Or we might ask your Provost too’—this came reflectively from my father a moment or two later—’and make it a magnum.’
‘All right, a magnum. But don’t suggest it to him quite yet – not for two or three years in fact. I’m coming to see you on your train in the morning. And I’ll breathe more freely after that, Lachlan Pattullo.’
There were still half a dozen cars in front of the Lodging, and the only one with a chauffeur I recognised as Mrs Triplett’s. Young Picts vanished from my mind. I was certainly going to have that chance to say good-night to Penny. I might even be able to tell her what an unusually nice person Martin Fish was.
The party in the Day-room remained a large one. Indeed, it had been augmented in an after-dinner way by guests who were either of inferior consideration or in the enjoyment, contrastingly, of crowded engagement books. The departure and return of the Provost’s small expeditionary force was as a result not much remarked. But one or two people must have been keeping a look-out for their host with the thought of going off to bed in their minds, and this impulse now disseminated itself through the room. I saw that Mrs Triplett was proposing to act upon it with particular briskness – no doubt as having been brought up not to keep the coachman and his horses waiting beyond an appointed hour. The lamentable consequence was that I had only some thirty seconds with Penny. She said goodnight with no appearance of judging the allowance inadequate – or not, at least, until what might be termed the final tick of the watch, which she devoted to the ghost of a suggestion of a lingering glance. And at this accomplished performance (as it was) my head swam wildly. Mrs Pococke, who developed one of those long Oxford memories, was to assure me at a future date that I had taken my leave of her in decent form. But I myself can remember nothing more until I was out in the quad.
I walked back to Surrey with Penny Triplett’s face hovering in the darkness befor
e me; it faded only when I reached my staircase, the foot of which happened to be illuminated through Gavin Mogridge’s open door. I noticed that there was something waiting for me in my letter-rack: only a sliver of coloured pasteboard was visible, and I must have failed to remark it earlier in the day. I picked it up automatically and without glancing at it, and went upstairs to my room. The first thing to do was to cope with Tony’s picture. I got it down from the chimney-piece – it was uncommonly heavy – and perched it back to front against the wall. Then I looked at what I had brought up with me and tossed on a table.
It was one of Janet’s picture-postcards. It came, as now so often, from Skye. As usual, it depicted an uninspiring scene: a little harbour crowded with the hulls and jumbled masts of fishing vessels. I turned it over, and found the customary uncoloured account of reading achieved. Janet had read, among other things, a book about Emily Bronte and a novel, just published, called The Moonlight. Added apparently as an afterthought, however, was a fragment of information on a personal level. I’ve marked with a cross—Janet had written—my cousin Calum’s boat.
I’d never heard of this particular cousin of Janet’s – or indeed by name of any other of her relations in Skye, although it was obvious they commanded her affections and imagination a great deal. I turned the card over again and looked at Calum’s boat. It struck me as rather a frail craft to go tumbling around the Western Islands in. I looked at it for quite a long time, and it may well have been with a sombre intuition that Janet was dropping out of my life. But this, if so formulated, would have been a facile phrase; it would have been truer to say that she could only withdraw into the depths of it.
I perched the card above the fireplace where Young Picts ought to have been, and went to bed.
XII
People commonly wake up, I suppose, in a more or less neutral state of mind. What is happening is nothing if not customary. Here one is again. One performs such initial actions – making tea, raising a blind – as habit dictates, while vaguely rehearsing yesterday’s undramatic events now stacked up by sleep in the shadowy filing-cabinet of memory, or hazily anticipating equally undramatic hours briefly to be called today. Occasionally, however, one awakens to the consciousness of a strong feeling-tone at first possessing no identity. Is it of sorrow or joy, pleasurable anticipation or dread? A fraction of time may pass before one knows even this, and a further fraction before the impalpable answer takes on the body of a specific occasion.
On this particular morning, Friday morning, my mind on surfacing questioned itself and decided that the new medium of its operation was a genial one. The snail was on the thorn, the lark on the wing, the morning at seven, and the hill-side dew- pearled. These Pippa-like impressions appeared to proceed from the fact that Friday was the day of my tute with Timbermill, and a moment or two passed before it struck me that there was anything odd about this. I enjoyed going to Timbermill. Unlike Talbert, he was a conscientious tutor, and I have recorded that he got quite a lot of work out of me. This held all the charm of novelty, since I had hitherto got along on nothing worthier than a disposition to much desultory reading when I wasn’t idly chattering. Timbermill took it for granted that I possessed that sort of intellectual maturity (McKechnie’s, I thought of it as being) which rejoices in mastering arid disciplines for their own sake; and by a force of will which I didn’t understand (for he never exactly bullied me) he had created in me for the time something tolerably like the real thing; after cheerful rubbishing days with Tony and others I would turn up the lamp as resolutely as Cyril Bedworth himself and plunge into the rudiments of Germanic philology. It was natural that I should respect the man who could make me do this; but Timbermill had, in fact, his place among my love-objects as well.
Of course he had his other dimension: that hint of the preternatural I had sensed in him from the start, and which made me refer to him (partly as a matter of mere Oxford topography) as the Wizard of the North. It was during this first Summer Term that evidence of odd matters stirring in him began to appear on paper. I was required to send in my essays in advance – which is not a common Oxford requirement – and when Timbermill handed them back to me for reading aloud they had not been annotated (since that would have been, in a manner, to anticipate my own better thoughts in discussion) but they had been quite extensively doodled on. I soon taught myself to leave wide margins as I typed out the fair-copies to be posted to him, with the result that what I carried back to college with me week by week presented the appearance of leaves abstracted from the Lindisfarne Gospels or the Book of Kells. Long afterwards I was to chance to display some of these keimelia (as Talbert would have learnedly termed them) to a wandering American professor, and to receive within days a cable from his university offering to buy them for a large sum of money. It is a curious thought that the moderately successful scribbling of drawing-room comedies had put me in a position to decline the offer. But curious, too, in those May and June days, were the forms, the creatures, beginning to peer out from amid all that intricacy of foliage and arabesque in the margins of my essays on The Battle of Maldon or The Dream of the Rood. I was witnessing the birth, or the first dim movement in the night of their forebeing, of the presences one day to haunt The Magic Quest.
Nothing of all this explains the fact that I was excited by the knowledge of having to be in Linton Road by eleven o’clock. But before that I had to take my father to the railway station, and I saw that I had better tumble out of bed. I was shaving (and wondering, as I frequently did, whether it would be both physiologically possible and socially acceptable to grow a moustache) when I heard a knock on my outer door. I gave a shout, went belathered into the sitting-room, and found I was being visited by Clive Kettle. He was holding Young Picts very carefully in both hands.
‘Good morning, Pattullo,’ he said. ‘Will it be all right if I give you back your picture now?’
‘It certainly will.’ I glared indignantly at Kettle – but also in some surprise. I wouldn’t have expected so serious and pious a man to have been involved in the previous night’s idiotic joke. ‘And what the bloody hell have you been doing with it, anyway?’
‘Oh, I’m extremely sorry!’ Kettle’s principles didn’t permit him to be offended at this rude challenge. ‘It was Robert Damian, you see.’
‘I know it was – the God-forsaken young bastard.’
‘Oh, I don’t think one ought to say that, Pattullo. In fact, I’ve seen Damian in chapel once or twice this term already. I believe his mind may be beginning to open.’
‘All right – just the young bastard. Why did he unload my picture on you?’
‘He was concerned to help. He’d heard of some foolish men, he said, who were talking about raiding your rooms and carrying off this picture as a joke or a rag or simply to make themselves unpleasant. It’s sad to think of such darkness of mind.’
‘So it is. But go on.’
‘Damian didn’t want simply to sport your oak, in case you hadn’t your key and it turned out awkward for you. And he didn’t think he ought to carry the picture across the quads to his own rooms. There were some drunks around, he said. As there too often are.’
‘Too bloody often by a long way.’
‘Well, yes.’ It was hesitantly that Kettle accepted this intensified view of the matter. ‘So he asked me to look after it for you and bring it back this morning. So I agreed to. I knew it would be quite safe, because I didn’t mean to leave my rooms.’
‘Then thank you very much.’ I was again furious with Damian for gratuitously involving this blameless Christian in his imbecile exploit, and equally cross with myself for being causelessly uncivil. ‘Damian was having you on, as a matter of fact. But it’s too long a story to bother about.’ Explaining matters, it had occurred to me, would involve introducing Kettle to Tony’s picture too – which he had probably never seen and would certainly regard as opprobrious. ‘I wouldn’t have liked my picture to be mucked about,’ I added. ‘It’s by my father, as a matter of f
act.’
‘How very interesting!’ Kettle held Young Picts out at arm’s length the better to admire it. ‘It must be a very jolly hobby to have – and healthy, too, taking one so much out of doors. I do think your father’s pretty skilful. He must go in for it quite a lot.’
‘He is. He does.’
‘How funny he hasn’t noticed there’s something wrong with the smaller boy’s kilt. Who are they supposed to be?’
‘Young Picts.’
‘Oh, I see. Stone Age people.’ Kettle appeared to feel that this went some way to excuse the impropriety of my attire in the picture. ‘Are they rabbiting?’
‘They’re watching the arrival of Saint Columba. He’s coming to the mainland of Scotland from Iona. If you look carefully, you can see his boat.’
‘So I can. Oh, Pattullo, what a splendid subject!’ Kettle’s voice had taken on a solemnity which I tried, and failed, to think of as comical. ‘One ought to have a picture with some sort of religious significance in one’s room. I’m so glad you have. It’s a kind of witness, wouldn’t you say? I’ve got an etching by Rembrandt. It’s Our Lord breaking the bread at Emmaus. Nothing but a copy, of course. But I find it very moving. I’d so like you to see it some time.’
‘I’d like to very much.’ I oughtn’t to have said this as awkwardly as I did, since with Kettle I was now, in a sense, forewarned. He subscribed to what I and most of my contemporaries judged to be a tissue of absurdities: Christ risen from the Dead, and things of that sort. There was no reason why he shouldn’t. He shared these beliefs, after all, with plenty of people much cleverer than I was, including the Provost and (presumably) the Archbishop of Canterbury. But, unlike these more experienced wayfarers in an infidel world, he was simply unable to accept the fact that anybody he knew could be without some vital spark of faith deep in his soul. The idea was too terrible to contemplate. This was either imbecility or a passionate purity of heart, according as to how one cared to look at it. Rather liking Kettle, all I could do was to shuffle – which was entirely wrong. When he left me now, I was a young man indicting himself of enslavement to ephemeral concerns: my father’s acceptability at a dinner party, my own gratifying success in Isis or as a rising college personality, even Penny Triplett’s face. I returned to my bedroom to finish shaving, and cut myself rather badly on an entirely hairless area below my left ear.
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