Doctors Wear Scarlet

by Raven, Simon

  He looked at me quaintly and sadly, and smiled with considerable charm.

  “I didn’t know, you see, so I’m still here, and will be till they throw me out. But Walter will see nothing of the kind happens to Richard… And I’ll tell you one more thing, Anthony Seymour. Walter thinks Richard might suit that daughter of his – poor Penelope – and she, my dear, thinks the same. Look.”

  And so I looked towards where Penelope, still grave and upright, was nevertheless clearly doting with the force of her whole body on the conversation and presence of Richard.

  “He’s not nineteen,” I said.

  “Don’t you worry about that, dear. Walter won’t have any nonsense till everyone’s at least twenty-three – he’s too old a hand for that. It’s just that he’ll contrive to see that there’s some sort of understanding… A nice, vague, but in fact cruelly committing understanding… And then he’ll leave everything nicely on ice until he’s ready to get it out and serve it up.”

  “But… Walter…scarcely knows Richard,” I said. “How can you be so sure of all this?”

  “Walter,” said Marc Honeydew, “picks them on sight, as quick and clever as a cat. And as for me, Anthony Seymour, I’ve got two sharp eyes in an idle head, and I’m a bugger for watching Walter at his larks.”

  I paused for a moment to offer Tyrrel a cigarette and light one for myself.

  “Please go on,” he said gravely; “all this is more interesting – more relevant – than you might think.”

  “It’s also rather exhausting.”

  “You mustn’t stop now, Mr Seymour. Just when some sort of…pattern…is beginning to emerge.”

  He got up and placed an ashtray on the arm of my chair.

  “And so…?” he said.

  It may be that I have taken rather a long time describing one uneventful and very ordinary party. But if it is desirable to look for patterns, then this party reproduces, in a sense, the pattern of all our lives during my three years at Lancaster College. Walter watching over Richard Fountain, planning for him, throwing him together, as much as possible, with Penelope. Penelope quietly doting. Richard accepting this situation, but from time to time making it pointedly plain that he also had ideas and arrangements of his own; seeking my company constantly – often, I thought less for its own sake than for contrast to the uncritical adulation of Penelope, for relief from the paternal and mellifluous coaching of Walter. And then there was always Marc Honeydew some where in the background, thrilling to the latest rumour, vibrating with new hypotheses, a sort of evil fairy who was acting, however, only in the capacity of chorus, taking no real part in events but hoping for the worst. Not but what I was fond of Marc. For all his malice, he was more sympathetic than Walter, who was supposedly working only for Richard’s good. Marc only wanted to be amused: Walter wanted to enslave.

  The day after the party, I went to Richard’s room as he had suggested and we explored Cambridge together. It was one of those fine but melancholy autumn mornings which invite reflection about the past rather than anticipation of the future. We didn’t in fact discuss the past; but Richard was quiet and confidential, falling into the mood of the day, and I was pleased that he responded in the same manner as myself. We lunched together, went to some film in the evening, had dinner, a few drinks… A very ordinary day, you might think, but a very happy one – one of those days one looks back on with pleasure years later when other events, which seemed at the time so full of colour and significance, are more than half forgotten.

  There were to be many such days. But, as I say, I came to feel more and more that they were of value to Richard as release from Walter rather than because of his affection for myself. So as time went on, there was a shadow. As for Walter, he had at first slightly resented my apparent influence over Richard; but it did not take him long to realise that this influence, while genuine, was neither deep nor harmful. So like the diplomat he was, he took to professing a liking for me, and often asked me even to the more exclusive dinners or whatnot that he was giving on Richard’s behalf. That he proposed, in this way, to make an ally of me I had little doubt, for frequently he would take me on one side in great confidence and say, for example, “Don’t you think that such-and-such is an excellent plan for our young friend?” And since an assumption of comradeship, even on the part of someone you dislike, is difficult to confute, I found myself drawn gradually into an unwanted and dishonest understanding with Walter – which, crudely expressed, would have amounted to, “You help me with this boy, and I’ll see you get your share.” Richard realised this, for Walter took care that he should; so that Richard sometimes thought of himself as in a sense deserted, and the shadow between us grew.

  But it never entirely separated us. We spent holidays abroad together, during which Walter was left so far behind that the shadow would disappear altogether. Even in Cambridge itself there were, right up to the end of my last year, many meals and parties, conversations and expeditions, afternoons on the river and evenings in somebody’s rooms. But more and more, when I accepted an invitation of Richard’s, I would find unexpectedly that Walter or Penelope were to be of the party. It was as though Richard were saying, “I know you’re really with Walter in all this, for all the jokes you make about him when we’re alone: so don’t you think we’d better have him here just to make everything quite plain?” And then I would be as hurt as if he had said this aloud to my face, I would remain silent throughout the evening and leave as early as I decently could, wondering where Richard really stood in relation to us all, and what final use he intended to make of my friendship, of Walter’s interest and assistance. What is Richard’s angle, I used to think, as I walked back through the little courts to my room by the river? What does he want of all this? What manner of man can he be?

  But whatever the questions I asked myself in the midnight courts near the river, there was no doubt Richard was achieving great outward success. A very solid first in Part I of the Classical Tripos. Two of the more demanding University awards. An occasional place in the University Cricket XI – though he didn’t, in the end, get a blue. And then there was the matter of his poems…

  For one day, when I went to Walter to have one of my proses corrected, he handed me a thin sheet of paper.

  “Look what our young friend has done,” he said. And there it was –

  Who incense for my pyre,

  Who wine and spice shall bring,

  Who heaps high the fire,

  Makes vain offering.

  While yet I live, be kind;

  No wine on ashes pour:

  For thus only mud is made of him

  That’s dead and drinks no more.

  “There are a lot more,” said Walter. “I’m arranging with Michael” – and here he mentioned the name of a very well known publisher indeed – “to have them done next spring.”

  And appear next spring they did, charming, tinkling, derivative – meaningless in the last resort – and because they reminded some of Fitzgerald and others of the Greek Anthology, they sold very well in a small way and brought Richard a definite reputation: “…young man with a talent, undeniably slight, but gently evocative, wistful, delicate and sad,” said The Times Literary Supplement.

  “Nicely wrapped chocolates,” said Marc Honeydew, “with a nymph and a shepherd in a bower on the box.”

  “Oh?” I said.

  “Yes, my dear. Soap bubbles. Candy floss. You must understand. Walter’s intellectual influence is proving fatal for poor Dickie. Never mind Walter’s plans for his career at the moment – must consider what he’s actually teaching him to think. Academically, I mean.”

  “Well, what?”

  “Perhaps it’s not so much what, but the way he’s teaching him to think. All this business about ‘the pagans were good but only the Christians really knew’. Aristotle and Aquinas. Christ and Socrates. Virgil writing poems about the virgin birth. Having it both ways, Anthony Seymour.”

  “What makes you think Richard accepts
that point of view?”

  “Look at these bloody awful poems, dear. They’re not meant, you see. They’re an exercise. Like some old dear writing elegant Latin elegiacs in praise of cricket or his favourite cat. Listen to this.”

  He took Richard’s book from his table and read out loud –

  “Love in his mother’s lap,

  A child at his morning play,

  Threw his dice at a hazard

  And gambled my life away.

  “Very pretty, Anthony Seymour. But it means nothing because Richard’s plainly not running the slightest risk of anyone gambling his life away for love or anything else. It’s a ‘let’s pretend’ poem. Let’s pretend we’re a young Greek poet who’s unhappy in love. Or let’s pretend we’ve spent the whole night crowned with garlands and swilling down wine and ended up having sex in a mountain grove as the sun rises… When all the time we’re just a cute little English boy with blue eyes, good at cricket, spending a lot of time with a bulging virgin called Penelope Goodrich, and getting ready to cover ourselves with glory in Part II of the Classical Tripos. It is all, my dear, a fake.”

  Now, what Marc said was undeniably true. You could hardly have had a better indication than those poems of how far Richard seemed to have succumbed to Walter’s juicy spiritual compromises, his sly intellectual equivocations. (Leaving alone, as Marc said, the whole question of how far he accepted Walter’s proposals and machinations for his future career.) But I promised you I would try to show how I became aware, at Cambridge, that there might be something odd, something violently twisted even, about Richard; and it is at this stage I can best do it. As I say, I have nothing really concrete; but these poems…it is something Richard told me about them which may show you what I am trying to get at.

  You see, I thought them facile and artificial. Walter praised them – and effected their publication – because he regarded them as charming verses which in no way committed anyone to anything. Marc damned them for the same reason. But Richard… Richard regarded them as the real thing. They had come from the heart. In Richard’s view these poems, so far from being influenced by Walter’s dishonest habits of thought, had been meant to express that side of his life which was in revolt from Walter – from whom, indeed, he had tried to conceal them, but who had been too sharp eyed to miss the fact that something was going on.

  “And when he called while I was out and found one of the poems on my desk,” Richard told me, “I thought he was going to be very angry. It was that one about Bacchus coming to Ariadne after Theseus had left her. It was meant to convey… wildness…lust.”

  In fact, it had conveyed nothing but a familiarity with a poem by Propertius and a painting by Rubens… But it was meant to convey lust…

  “So naturally I was very surprised,” Richard went on, “when he said how charming he thought it was and could he see more? Because what I put in that poem – well, it’s hardly Walter’s thing.”

  That’s all you know, I thought. Then, struck by a sudden idea, I said aloud, “How does this wish of yours to express pagan wildness square with that essay you wrote in your scholarship exam?”

  “Essay?”

  “‘The Dying Gods.’ I’m told you condemned pagan survivals.”

  “In a way I do. We’ve all got lives to live and careers to make. We’ve all got to marry sometime, settle down. And this seemed to me a point of view which might do one good in an exam of this kind.”

  “Really, Richard. You calculating–”

  “Please, Anthony. I wanted that scholarship: I needed it. I’m not rich, you know. And in any case, I believed what I wrote about pagan survivals…being in some way a threat. But then again, sometimes I think that the very things which are most threatening about them are the most deserving of…of respect. The idea of wine or sex being in some way divine, because they lead beyond mere pleasure to ecstasy and so to release. So that revels or routs are not just obscene – they represent the desire to escape oneself and – become part of…the god. This was the kind of thing I was trying to express in some of my poems and what I thought would make Walter angry… But somehow it didn’t.”

  “Did it worry you – the fact that he might be angry?”

  “Yes. But then in a way I wanted to make him angry. Sometimes I hate Walter” – this in an ugly tone I had never heard before – “and that daughter of his, great heavy bosom and cow eyes.” Then he calmed down. “But of course he wasn’t angry and the poems have been published, and I suppose it’s all for the best.”

  He couldn’t realise, you see, that he’d failed to put his message of pagan liberation across. Despite the Times Literary Supplement and its references to “delicacy” and so forth, he just did not see that his supposedly fiery poems had gone down as softly as orangeade at a tennis party. But there’s nothing twisted, here, you will say: just an adolescent outbreak of petty rebellion, so innocuous that it resulted only in a few feeble and tinkling verses. Yes; but what you don’t see, if you think that – what Walter didn’t see and Marc had unaccountably missed – is that he was looking for a weapon to get at Walter and to get at the respectable side of himself. He hadn’t found the weapon. All he had done was to produce some saccharine stanzas about nymphs and satyrs and theoretical priapism. The whole thing just spluttered out. But that didn’t mean he wouldn’t go on looking for a weapon – or that he might not find a dangerous one. Because for all his long sessions with Walter, his polite social attendances upon Penelope, his academic and athletic successes and his thought for the future, there was something of a very different kind waiting to get out; and the fact that it hadn’t yet found a channel, or was most of the time damned up by self-control or hypocrisy, only made the whole business a great deal more perverse.

  But now I will tell you of something which happened during our last summer – and may make what I mean rather plainer. It was still nothing really definite; for the incident, though nasty, was a small thing and perhaps not uncommon in kind. But you may feel, knowing what you now do, that what was or might have been behind it gives valuable matter for thought.

  At the end of our last summer term, we made up a party, at Walter’s suggestion, to go to the college May Ball. It was agreed that Richard should partner Penelope, that Walter should preside in bachelor splendour, and that I should find someone external to give a little novelty to the gathering. So I invited a distant cousin who was then up at Girton, and duly presented the pair of us in Walter’s rooms, where we were to dine before going on to the Ball.

  I anticipated a routine and mildly tiresome evening. But Walter was exerting himself as host, while Penelope was visibly pleased both with her dress and her situation – as partner to the most distinguished undergraduate in the college on the social occasion of the year. Richard was relaxed and happy because he was finished with his exams; and my cousin from Girton was personable and knew how to conduct herself. Under these auspices the evening started and continued well – so well, that towards the end of dinner Walter could no longer resist the temptation to exploit the prevailing good humour in the interest of his latest scheme.

  “So,” he was saying, “here you both are – and about to graduate inside a week. It seems only yesterday you arrived…” And then to me, “What are your plans, Anthony?”

  As a matter of fact he knew very well, for he had asked this question and been answered several times in the last month. But I let him have his cue.

  “I’m going to London,” I said. “I’ve invested some money in a new magazine they’re starting, and I shall act as one of the editors.”

  “What magazine?” said my cousin.

  “Metroland Topics. It will be literary in tone and expensively produced.”

  “And will make no money at all,” said Walter, “but will carry high prestige. I was talking to Stephen and John about it last week. You will be well employed, Anthony. And easily available,” he added, “to come up and see us all here.”

  “I shall come often,” I said.

&n
bsp; “Because you see,” Walter burbled on, “I’m arranging for young Richard to stay on and do some research. A good idea, you think?”

  Since everyone in the room, except my cousin, had known for at least two years that this was Walter’s intention, and since we had also known for a month or more that he had taken very definite steps to implement it, there was a certain superfluity about this speech. I immediately thought – rightly – that it could only be the preparatory process for something more dramatic.

  “And now we’re all here,” said Walter, “the family as you might say, I’m sure Miss – er,” – a swift bow to my cousin – , “will forgive me if I mention a little proposition I have in mind. You see, my dear boy,” he said to Richard, “I have come to be very fond of you, and so has Penelope, and so I thought…” – clearly Walter had bitten off something rather craggy even for him – “…well, let me put it this way. What are you doing about digs?”

  “Digs?”

  “Yes. Research students can’t keep rooms in college, you know. You’ll have to move out of your comfortable T 5 and find somewhere in the town. Had you thought of this?”

  “No,” said Richard crossly.

  It was very plain what was coming now. You bastard, I thought. Bringing this up in front of myself and, what was more, a complete stranger, so that Richard would have to behave politely and might thereby find himself more than half committed before he properly knew what was happening.

  “Well,” said Walter soothingly. Penelope was gazing at Richard with evident anxiety, hope and fear written all over her honest face. “Well,” said Walter, “there is plenty of room at Grantchester. You could have a bedroom and a sitting-room of your own. You could have your meals with us, or, when I’m in Cambridge, with Penelope. And what is more, dear boy,” said Walter with the air of a conjurer who produces a bird of paradise instead of a chicken, “It wouldn’t cost you a penny.”