Young Pattullo

by J. I. M. Stewart

  On the railway platform, and after looking round in a nervous manner not habitual with him, my father handed me a couple of five-pound notes – which at that time were still of the large and milk-white kind. Somewhere or other he must have gathered that something of the sort was customary upon visiting a son at any educational establishment of the ‘boarding’ variety. I might have represented to him that our existing financial arrangement, although random and fluctuating, was on balance very much on the generous side. But it seemed more graceful to accept the present without fuss, and on the strength of it I took a taxi back to college. There I got on my bike and made haste to Linton Road, so that I arrived at the near end of it with ten minutes to spare. I dismounted and went forward, rather slowly, on foot. Anybody might have supposed (I told myself) that the misfortune of a puncture had overtaken me again.

  Linton Road was disappointingly empty. The hop-scotch-playing children (mysterious beings, since they could have only great-grandparents among the adult residents) had departed; the ancient with the Anthony Eden hat might by now (as was statistically probable) have sunk into the grave; not a cow was to be seen in the distance on Mrs Triplett’s drive, let alone Mrs Triplett (or Mrs Triplett’s ward) herself. This shattered a kind of supernatural conviction which I had been entertaining throughout the morning. As I made my way down Linton Road Penny was to appear. I had no good reason to suppose that Mrs Triplett’s celebrated herd ran to a freely-roving bull; indeed, any scanty knowledge I had of such matters inclined me to suppose it wouldn’t. Still, there might be a bull – and if there was it might be chasing Penny rather than Penny it. And in such a situation I could cope with any number of bulls.

  There was nothing particularly strange in the childishness of these imaginings, but it was perhaps odd that they didn’t speak to me of the condition I was in. I still very honestly had the supposed sexual needs of Martin Fish in my head. I dawdled down the void of Linton Road. In addition to being thus unnaturally empty it had telescoped itself in a fashion equally unnatural; its linear perspectives had gone wrong and I’d be at the end of it in no time; the effect was of having walked into a townscape of Chirico’s or something equally surrealistic and eerily dead. I racked my brains in search of some pretext for presenting myself briefly at Mrs Triplett’s door. Nothing emerged. I made my familiar turn into Timbermill’s gate.

  At least I could arrive early on my tutor without rebuke. Timbermill took no more than four or five pupils all told, and he appeared to scatter them over the week. My private hour with him (elderly dons still called tutorials private hours) turned into an hour and three-quarters more often than not. My essay on the Christian element in Beowulf (a subject which Clive Kettle would have handled much better than I could) must already have been read and doodled on; I’d find Timbermill at his accustomed and unflagging pursuit of sticking bits of pot together with seccotine. I climbed his narrow staircase, banged on his door, and went in. Timbermill waved to me – a reasonable gesture, since he was still twenty yards away. I advanced upon him and saw that he had changed his occupation for the time; he was engaged in examining a tray of coins.

  ‘What do you know about Offa?’ Timbermill demanded. This kind of opening gambit was common form with him, so I wasn’t disconcerted.

  ‘He built a dike,’ I said.

  ‘And what, Duncan, is a dike?’

  ‘It’s a wall. Offa, like Balbus, built a wall.’

  ‘Nothing of the kind. He dug a ditch. You’ve been misled by Bosworth-Toller. If I haven’t warned you against Bosworth-Toller I apologise. A dike is a wall in your part of the world – and commonly a dry-stone one. It’s because in Scotland you have more stone lying around than you know what to do with. In England the early existence of this sense of the word is entirely doubtful.’

  ‘I’ll remember,’ I said. In Timbermill’s company this took the place of my ‘Thank you very much’. ‘Did Offa do anything else?’

  ‘That’s the point.’ Timbermill said this as if my question had been singularly acute. ‘There can be no doubt that Offa interested himself in monetary reform. For example, he introduced the mancus. And here it is. A beautiful thing.’

  ‘So it is.’ I had been handed a worn gold coin. ‘Nice to go shopping with.’

  ‘No doubt. The obverse is quite remarkable. But look at the reverse, please. What do you see there?’

  ‘Squiggles.’

  ‘Don’t be frivolous, Duncan, or I shall turn you out. People don’t put squiggles on coins, although I admit it sometimes looks as if they do. Try again.’

  ‘Runes,’ I said hopefully.

  ‘Better – but a wildly unhistorical conjecture, all the same. The answer is Arabic.’

  ‘I don’t see why there should be Arabic on an English coin.’

  ‘Perfectly simple. There was Arabic on the mancus Offa had taken a fancy to. His moneyer faithfully copied it, and it passed into English currency. It can’t have escaped you that there is a great deal of history in coins, although shopping is no doubt what we chiefly prize them for.’

  ‘Yes, of course. May I take it over to the window, please, and look at it there?’

  ‘Certainly. And I’ll fossick out something else. There is an effort by the Dobunni which might interest you.’

  Timbermill’s being, as I have recorded, a somewhat crepuscular room, my request had been reasonable. I moved to the window and studied the mancus again. Timbermill was rummaging, so for some seconds I could safely survey the outer world. It included a corner of Mrs Triplett’s tennis- court, but Penny (who was keen on tennis) wasn’t on view. It included, too, a range of Mrs Triplett’s upper windows, but Penny was at none of these. I continued to stare. The mancus had gone out of my head.

  ‘It isn’t raining, is it?’

  ‘No, sir, it’s not.’ I turned round in confusion. Timbermill had enunciated his question with a certain dryness which alarmed me. ‘I think it’s going to be a lovely afternoon.’

  ‘Then you might do worse than employ it in making an expedition to the White Horse of Uffington. You take a bus to Wantage and walk.’

  ‘I’ve been there, as a matter of fact.’

  ‘Excellent! And what do you know about the White Horse?’

  ‘It’s not awfully like a horse. And it has something to do with King Alfred.’ I saw that this remark was not being favourably received. ‘Because there was a battle at Ashdown,’ I added on my recurrent hopeful note.

  ‘Absolute rubbish, Duncan. I’m ashamed of you.’ Timbermill – who, although a leisure-time tutor, possessed the skills of the craft in a high degree – said this as if I was one of the few young men in Oxford worth talking to. ‘Alfred had too much on his plate to fool around digging White Horses out of unoffending downs. The Dobunni did it.’

  ‘The Dobunni?’ I echoed, blankly and stupidly.

  ‘I did happen to mention them a minute ago. The point is that you wouldn’t expect them to have a coinage, would you?’

  ‘I’d have no expectations about them at all.’ It was necessary at times to rally when Timbermill was like this, and truth had to be one’s watchword. ‘I’ve never heard of them, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Excellent! They were an obscure crowd who came over from Brittany in the first century. Of course they had no business to have a coinage – no business at all. But they had. And here it is.’ I found that I was looking at another coin: this time, it appeared to be a silver one. ‘What does it suggest to you?’

  ‘Squiggles.’

  ‘Capital! You’re absolutely right. But does it suggest anything to you – anything at all?’

  ‘Well – just conceivably – that White Horse.’

  ‘Praise the Lord!’ Timbermill was genuinely and deeply delighted. ‘My dim hope in you is restored. The horse was their emblem or totem or whatever you care to call it, and they dug it out on the down. But they’d ceased knowing they had it on their coins.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘Yes you do �
�� or almost. That coin goes back. You can trace it across Europe, back and back from west to east. Through the centuries a coinage travels as stories do – with the sun. What you would finally get back to here is a very recognisable horse indeed, and it’s on the coins of Philip of Macedon. If you’re an imaginative type – which you are, God help you, Duncan – you can tell yourself that the squiggle on this coin, and the near-squiggle on that Berkshire hillside, is the descendant of the Bucephalus of Alexander the Great. Which makes my point that there’s a certain amount of history in coins. If you think of becoming a scholar – which I don’t recommend – you might do worse than become a numismatist.’

  ‘A numismatist?’ I was utterly blank again. The word might have been unknown to me.

  ‘Duncan Pattullo son of Lachlan, go back to that window and go on with your gaping. And the sooner your Sunday’s tea-party is behind you the better.’

  This time, I did my gaping at the Wizard of the North himself. I was in the Cave of the Magician, and I didn’t like it.

  ‘I don’t quite see,’ I said with weak dignity, ‘what you can know about that.’

  ‘I am intrusive, and I apologise. It comes of having to fetch the milk.’ Timbermill was enjoying himself. ‘Is all now clear?’

  ‘Unclear, I’m afraid.’

  ‘A detestable neologism. Do you know what’s meant by T.T. milk?’

  ‘I haven’t a clue.’

  ‘A capital neologism, that. And T.T. is Tuberculin Tested. The admirable Mrs Triplett is pioneering T.T. milk. Yes, pioneering it. An interesting new transitive use of the verb. And we all have to play. I take my little pitcher every morning before breakfast.’

  ‘And this morning she actually told you—?’

  ‘It shows it’s on her mind. She regards you – and a friend of yours whose name escapes me – as a heaven-sent distraction. So have a care.’

  ‘I really don’t see—’

  ‘You’d better try. And now we’ll have Beowulf. I must tell you in advance that you take inadequate account of Miss Whitelock. An admirable scholar.’ Timbermill was suddenly magistral and implacable. ‘It is not to be supposed that a Christian poet writing for a Christian society would plug the point for the benefit of young men reading his poem in the twentieth century. Not that your essay isn’t written with your customary aplomb. Here it is. Read it, please, and we’ll get to work.’

  I wanted to quarrel with Timbermill. Albert Talbert, I told myself, would never have charged into my life like this. But Timbermill, at least, was interested in me, which Talbert was not. I read my essay without sulking, and did my best to defend it afterwards. By the time Timbermill had taken my ideas to pieces and put them together again it was one o’clock.

  XIII

  Saturday morning brought a note from Mrs Triplett intimating that Fish and I were to turn up on Sunday in a fit state to play tennis. When I passed on this news to Fish he received it with satisfaction. Like Penny (and this seemed a good omen) he was keen on tennis. Since I understood Australians to divide their time between tennis and aquatic pursuits, and since Fish had so strong a disinclination to the latter, I took it for granted that at the former he would perform very potently indeed. Certainly he became better disposed to our expedition upon hearing of the game’s being in prospect. He had received my announcement of Sunday’s outing with reasonable surprise, there being little apparent occasion for my carrying him off to the rigours of a North Oxford tea with total strangers. It was true that, since contracted on the strength of only a slight acquaintance to make the Grand Tour together, we ought to be taking all obvious opportunities of getting to know one another better. But we could most readily have done that by gossiping in each other’s rooms at midnight.

  It did come to me that I knew rather little about Fish. He was much less an identifiable personality to me than was Tony Mumford or Gavin Mogridge or Cyril Bedworth. Yet I had encountered him, as I had encountered none of these, intimately and in a state of vivid sensation. In theory, as it were, Martin Fish’s soul ought to have lain bare to me. But in fact it is amid events levelled with the common surfaces of life that one comes to a feeling, perhaps delusive, of knowing people for what they are. Major emotional stresses and all mental aberrations are insulating and mystery-making, and from an actual mad-house one would clearly come away with the conviction that people make no sense at all. Later, I was sometimes to reflect that in a play I’d get nowhere with Fish; the connective tissue between Fish on one day and Fish on another would elude me.

  He may have felt he knew as little about me. Certainly he had no notion as yet of my amatory – and even, conceivably, marital – designs for him: a fact excusable in the light of the confused and even spurious overtones which had accompanied these designs almost from the word Go. As we walked down Linton Road together in snowy flannels at Mrs Triplett’s appointed hour I was busy being prospectively jealous of Fish, since I was imagining his dazzling performance (as it would be) on the tennis court as carrying everything before it in Penny’s regard. It was increasingly a high old muddle, all in all. Timbermill, indeed – and simply because he didn’t want a promising pupil mucked around – had illuminated it as with a flash of lightning. But lightning-flashes pass, and commonly leave no very clear vision behind them. I was still as bemused as I had been from the first moment of Penny’s appearing before me.

  Prelusively swinging my racket (heavy in its press and swathed in its waterproof cover), I tried to review what I did know about Fish. I was confident that, at least in any normal situation, he would be much my idea of a friend, would answer to it better than would a number of people higher in the league-table which the undergraduates of any generation so swiftly establish among themselves prestige-wise and as objects of emulation. If I felt that this was important it was perhaps because a certain racial hard-headedness enabled me to achieve, if only intermittently, a disenchanted view of the up-and-coming image I was putting a good deal of energy into cultivating. Not that the hard-headed in general would have condemned this legacy from a scruffy childhood which prompted me to showing off. I was to observe later in life that the pecking-order established in the Oxford nursery remained a durable strand in what journalists were going to call the Old-Boy Network. Men were to become (as Tony became) Cabinet Ministers because somebody recalled them as dominant in their nonage: brilliant in dining clubs or debating societies, famous for senseless agitations and amusing outrages and wild weekends in indulgent great houses. This isn’t an observation that I record in order to deplore. On the whole it is qualities like Tony’s that public life, and no doubt the upper regions of industry and commerce, appear to require. And septuagenarians remain prominent in the arts as the result of having been quick off the mark when exhibitionists newly liberated from school.

  But these were not my reflections now. What puzzled and almost offended me about Fish was his resilience. It seemed no time ago that I had witnessed his being carted off in a van – blind as a bat, and a hysterical bat at that. Now here he was, sauntering down Linton Road, composed, radiant with health, and very obviously capable of keeping his eye on the ball; relaxed, unassuming, and with quiet manners which left me standing at the post; the heir of at least as many ages as the antipodes run to. I told myself his riddle wasn’t all that hard to read. Like Conrad’s Kurtz (I was mad on Conrad that term) Fish had simply had bad luck; a bit too much on his plate; a ducking which had been both a trauma laid up for him mysteriously at birth and a humiliation contrived by that awful girl when his will had been concentrated on refusing to see her as awful in the least. All that: I had been over it before. But it seemed to have been the very depth of his vulnerability, it seemed to be the extreme oddness of being prone to transmute distress of mind into an equivalent gross disorder of the senses, that had enabled Fish to bob up again a good deal more rapidly than expectation would have allowed. Nature is never generous, but very occasionally she is just. Fish must live in the uncomfortable consciousness that strange things cou
ld happen to him again at any time. But in compensation there appeared to be this uncanny recuperative virtue built into his disability. That bizarre turn had owned a cathartic operation.

  ‘Duncan, about this girl you won’t stop talking about—’

  ‘What on earth do you mean?’ The enigma of Fish vanished from my mind; I stared at him in bewilderment.

  ‘Well, ever since you met her on Thursday. I don’t want to shove in. But are you sure she’s all right?’

  ‘Of course Penny’s all right, you ass. She’s beautiful and in every way marvellous. You’ll like her quite a lot, Martin. But it’s nonsense that I’ve been jabbering about her.’

  ‘Jabbering wasn’t what I said.’ Fish swung his own racket lazily, but with a final flick of the wrist confirming my view he’d be pretty good. ‘Did you rather invite us?’

  ‘To tea? Well, yes – I did. I think Mrs Triplett quite took to the idea. She probably felt Penny might be finding North Oxford a bit dull.’

  ‘Would you say she much dislikes being a bit dull?’

  ‘Of course she does. Anybody does—or does at our age. I can’t imagine what you’re getting at, Martin.’

  ‘Oh, nothing – not really. I just hope she’s your sort. She sounds a kind of London girl to me.’