Old Hall, New Hall

by Michael Innes

  They climbed by worn shallow stone steps up the broad terrace. Long rows of empty bicycle racks stretched on either side of them. Irregularly along the balustrade mildewed and eroded statues presided. Close by Clout one classical lady, her breasts and belly etched with lichen while her still immaculate buttocks glinted from the recent rain, held mutilated arms oddly and stiffly out before her, like a policewoman directing invisible traffic. Next to her an obese Hercules supported himself against the stump of a tree in an attitude suggesting a car-park attendant, badly out of condition, taking his ease against a lamp-post on a slack afternoon. Here and there the marbled divinities were pleasantly diversified with gigantic dogs and boars. In places the balustrade itself had vanished, and been replaced, for safety’s sake, with a line of concrete posts linked together by a painted cable. The whole vista proclaimed its own departed grandeur with an obviousness that elicited irritation rather than melancholy.

  ‘I’m not quite sure how you feel.’ The girl had stopped before the central portico of the transformed mansion and was looking seriously at Clout. ‘Do you regard it as a pity – or what?’

  ‘You mean the social revolution, or whatever it’s to be called, that puts places to changed uses like this?’ Clout too was serious. ‘When I first came here I used to think about that quite a lot. And I found that, although they weren’t at all my sort, I was prepared to regret the passing of the kind of folk that used to live here. But since they’ve gone – or their ability to go on living here is gone – I think it’s right to turn the place over to positive activities – even rather drab educational ones.’

  The girl nodded. ‘Of course it’s happened everywhere. Stowe and Bryantson are public schools. And other places like that are mental hospitals and old folks’ home and prisons without bars.’

  ‘I think that’s all right. It’s sad, and the places are very literally disgraced. But the thing’s not futile, like turning your house into a museum and living on the proceeds in the old servants’ wing.’

  ‘Yes, I agree. But here, I don’t suppose the owners had the choice. It isn’t grand enough for a show-place; it’s not a great nobleman’s seat. Just squirearchy at its most expansive.’

  ‘And already a bit bogus. I don’t expect a pile like this was built on the income from its own estate. Nabob money, probably. Or run up by a mahogany-coloured old gentleman who had done famously in Jamaica.’

  ‘Probably.’ She seemed amused – and rather in a fashion suggesting that she had seen a joke where he hadn’t. But now she was moving forward. ‘Take me in,’ she said. ‘And, if you’ve time, show me all of it.’

  The enchanted progress continued, and so did their rational exchange of views upon impersonal topics. He felt certain that in all major matters they were divinely in accord, while at the same time in a thousand trivia of opinion and feeling they differed enough to provide a whole lifetime of stimulating discussion. It was true that every now and then the girl seemed a little absent, looking about her in terms of some train of thought which he couldn’t quite elicit. But she listened to everything he had to say – he spoke sometimes caustically, but always with a decent loyalty nevertheless – about how the place was run. They looked at the Library, which consisted of the old dining-room and main drawing-room knocked together, and admired the way in which a large lecture-theatre, artificially lit, had been constructed in what must have been a gloomy and useless central court. Then they climbed to the English Department. He showed her the lending library of modern poetry that he had founded in his third year, and took her into the little seminar-room where he had mugged up for his finals things like Piers Plowman and the Miracle plays. There were group photographs on the wall, and she moved over to study them silently. He was there himself, standing perched on a bench beside an impudent looking girl with a mass of dark hair tumbling about her shoulders. He glanced cautiously at this, wondering if she would spot him, and was horrified to notice that he and the impudent girl were holding hands. He remembered the moment perfectly; they had done it out of bravado as the camera on its pivot had swung round towards them. But if this girl noticed it she didn’t, of course, say anything, but moved on to another group. ‘More women born than men,’ she murmured.

  Here was a further enchantment; she was a student of Yeats. ‘There are always more women than men reading English,’ he explained. ‘Elsewhere, as well as here.’

  ‘Ordinary girls like it, and ordinary boys think it a bit soft?’

  ‘Just that.’ What marvellous penetration she had!

  ‘I wonder whether I know any of these people.’

  These were the first words she had spoken that hinted at any sort of local connexion, and he waited for her to say something more. But she had spoken quite casually, and now she moved away. ‘Come to the window,’ he suggested, ‘and look at the view.’

  It was a good view, and he remembered it as having afforded considerable relief during his endeavours to conjure up Piers Plowman’s beastly mist on Malvern hills. But she wasn’t quite satisfied. ‘Can’t we get out on the roof?’ she asked.

  Clout hesitated, because this would be a misdemeanour and he was by nature extremely law-abiding. But he was, after all, an Old Boy, and he mustn’t be abjectly pupillary. ‘Yes, of course,’ he said. ‘I know how to do it. Come on.’

  It meant going up a ladder and through a trapdoor. But she wasn’t, he knew, the sort of girl to be deterred by that. And presently they were on the windy leads. She walked straight to the low stone coping and sat down on it. The flat surface was as broad as a park bench, but he felt a little nervous. ‘I’d be careful,’ he said. ‘Everything’s crumbling.’

  ‘Things fall apart. The centre cannot hold.’ For the first time, she looked at him in open cheerful mockery, and he realized that these scraps of verse, unlike his own Shakespearian maunderings, were ironically delivered. In fact she was making some sort of oblique fun of his self-satisfaction in the collection of Pound, Eliot, and what-not down below. But he wasn’t at all resentful. He just continued to adore.

  They were above the main front of the Hall. In front of them the straight avenue crossed the park at its narrowest extent, and just beyond were the outermost suburbs of the city that stretched, all smudge and smoke and watery glitter, to a horizon of chimney-stacks and miscellaneous industrial contrivances. But elsewhere the park faded imperceptibly into a sort of no-man’s-land between country and town: fields creeping round abandoned manufacturies, fresh manufacturies devouring abandoned fields, hills in places immemorially wooded and in places scraped and scarred by mines and quarries.

  ‘I suppose it’s Satanic,’ he said. ‘But I like it.’

  ‘I like it too.’

  ‘Frightfully Wadsworth.’

  For a moment she was puzzled. ‘Oh, I see. I’d say Wadsworth is frightfully it.’

  This rather prosaic correction was again something that didn’t offend him. She had that fatal booksy-arty response better under control than he had. It would be no good sitting down at the typewriter to evoke this scene and simply tapping out the names of appropriate painters. One had to do something quite different. Pretend, for example, that it was a submarine landscape and work out all the congruous images. For a moment Clout was actually seduced from the girl by the impulse to get to work on this. But almost at once he gave over – it was a damned bad idea anyway – and sat down beside her. ‘You see, it’s as I said,’ he began. ‘The new buildings quite remarkably sink away, and the place looks almost undisturbed. When the old squire pottered up here fifty years ago, his park looked very much as it does now.’

  ‘The old squire?’ She was puzzled.

  ‘A generic old squire. I don’t know anything about individuals. I did once read it up. But I’ve clean forgotten.’

  ‘Probably most people have.’ She picked up a crumb of mortar and dropped it over the verge, leaning forward in an attempt to watch it fall. The action made Clout dizzy, but he felt it was up to him to do the same thing. For a m
oment they peered down together at the flagged terrace. Clout resumed his hunting for marine similes. If the grass beyond the terrace was like a gently heaving green sea, then the terrace itself became like the deck of an aircraft carrier, and the statues were personnel with the hazardous job of flagging planes on and off. Rotten again. ‘Isn’t there a barrow?’ the girl asked.

  He stared – and then saw that she was again looking out over the park. ‘You mean the archaeological sort? I believe there is.’

  ‘And a mausoleum?’

  ‘There’s certainly that.’

  ‘And an ice-house?’

  Clout was puzzled. ‘I think an ice-house has been pointed out to me. They’d be grand enough to want to store ice through the summer, no doubt.’

  ‘It’s a big park. Bigger than I realized.’ The girl spoke with a sudden odd gloom.

  ‘Yes, it’s pretty big. Rugger grounds and cricket fields and tennis courts are tucked away in it so that you just wouldn’t notice. It’s supposed to be one of the things in which we score over other provincial universities. The smart set even goes riding in it.’

  ‘What do you mean by the smart set?’

  ‘Does it sound so funny? There are some students, you see, who are the children of very prosperous local business people. They send their hopeful young here out of a strong sense of regional piety – but give them three times as much money as anyone else. It’s highly democratic. And that’s the smart set.’

  ‘I see. Are you the smart set?’

  ‘Of course not. If I was, I’d be in Dad’s works or office by this time, and not scrouging round for a job in the University.’

  The girl was silent for a moment. Then she stood up. ‘I must be going,’ she said. ‘Steer me down and into the open, please. I might meet the smart set and feel shy.’

  He led her down to the ground floor and out to the terrace. It didn’t look like more rain, but nevertheless he supposed he would be allowed to escort her back to her bicycle. On the steps, however, she stopped with the plain intention of saying good-bye. He tried to speak calmly. ‘We don’t need the umbrella,’ he said. ‘But I’ll just walk up the drive with you.’

  She shook her head. ‘I have an idea you’ve an appointment – about that job. And that perhaps I’ve made you late for it.’ This was unfortunately true, so that for a fraction of a second he hesitated. ‘I hope,’ she went on, ‘you get what you want. If you do, it will be possible to find you up there – among the modern poetry and the photographs?’

  ‘Yes, of course. I’m…that is, I haven’t told you–’

  It was a moment of incoherence – for the suggestion that she might seek him out was at once astounding and something that he took as written in the stars. And when a moment later, still without any exchange of names, she shook hands and walked away, Clout found himself looking after her yearningly indeed but without dismay. And this was strange. In his twenty-five years, of course, he had built up several reassuring Clouts. First there had been Clout, BA (Ist Class Hons. English). Then there had been Clout, 2/Lt Army Education Corps. And now there was Clout, B Litt. (‘The Influence of Thomas Carlyle on the Thought and Expression of John Ruskin’). Yet the combined armour of these had not made plain Clout invulnerable to the slings and arrows of a disabling diffidence. He could never, during the introspective scrutinies he sometimes conducted in the watches of the night, have charged himself with an undue self-confidence. But now it was different. He had – he repeated it – a star. And he was certainly not going to have its orbit interfered with by Gingrass. He would get precisely what he required – what he now absolutely required – out of him.

  Clout turned back into Old Hall and with quiet, unforced resolution climbed upstairs again.

  3

  Gingrass still had his uneasy setting. Most of the professors inhabited quarters having the appearance of lumber-rooms hastily three-parts cleared for them on their arrival. They sat on, wrote at, prowled amid, and balanced their books against junk that must have been mouldering in situ, little troubled by broom or duster, since the close of the Victorian age. It had been remarked that there was always dust on the seat of their pants, and that those who were over five foot eight commonly had cobwebs in their hair. In general all this became them very well. They were most of them genuine, if low-grade scholars, their persons distinguished by marmalade stains, missing buttons, improvised shoe-laces, and their minds directed upon distant and impalpable things. But Gingrass, who had married a lady with means and a shadowy past in interior decorating, owned a room designed to proclaim other affiliations. One of the walls was a deep violet. Against this Gingrass, now a pallid, flaccid fifty, showed like one of those reclusive fish that haunt the farthest ooze. Another wall was papered in thin grey stripes on a black ground. Viewed against this, Gingrass became a creature of nocturnal habit, prowling his cage in some darkened menagerie. A third wall exhibited, more deliberately, the man of learning, being clothed in massive calf-bound books – all impressively anonymous, since their spines were innocent of the slightest trace of lettering. Some maintained that these were a sham, and that pressure upon a concealed spring would cause them to slide away, revealing row upon row of lubricious romances. But this was undoubtedly a libel. So perhaps was the assertion that the litter of large dimly patterned pots, upon the originating Dynasties of which Gingrass would make obscure remarks when hard up for something to say, were in fact commercial ginger-jars obtained from a wholesale grocer’s. Clout had always rather liked the pots. Indeed, he now found that he had a kind of affection for the room as a whole. Perhaps this was simply because his upbringing had been among objects that were sometimes hideous but always conventional, and this had been the first queer room he had ever entered.

  He was late – the girl had made him undeniably late – but Gingrass didn’t, as four years ago he would have done, look reproachfully at his watch. Instead, he put on one of his smiles – the one conveying his sense that your mere continued existence was part of the high comedy of things – and advanced with outstretched hand. ‘Well, well,’ he said jovially, ‘so Colin Clout’s Come Home Again.’

  Clout tried a smile of his own. It was true that his Christian name was Colin, although it had been chosen for him by parents who had never heard of the poet Spenser. And it was natural that Gingrass should deliver himself of this crashing joke. No doubt Clout’s proper course was to dredge up, from what memories he had of the poem thus wittily invoked, an appropriately gamesome reply. But Clout was determined to get ruthlessly to the point and stick there. If you took Gingrass that way, you probably had him. Or at least this was a theory worth gambling on. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘As I wrote to you, I’m looking for a job.’

  ‘Quite so.’ Gingrass, who had retreated against his violet wall, contrived a sideways drifting movement, rather as if a deep submarine current had caught him broadside on. ‘Well, sit you down – sit you down.’

  Clout sat down. ‘Of course,’ he said, ‘I mean an academic job.’

  ‘Oh dear! Oh dear!’ As one vastly dismayed, Gingrass sank into a chair and produced from a pocket of his negligent but high-class gent’s suiting a tobacco-pouch and a straight-grain briar. ‘There’s no money in it, my dear chap. Get that into your head at once.’ He opened the pouch, and the scent of tobacco thus released was like the purr of a Rolls-Royce. ‘I’ve been in it for thirty years, my dear Clout, and I haven’t a penny. Not a penny!’

  This was a known turn. Clout hadn’t had it before, but he had heard of it. ‘I don’t feel’, he replied with careful idiocy, ‘that money’s everything, sir.’

  ‘To a studious young man it means very little, I agree. But, my dear boy, your circumstances will change. Unlikely as it seems to you now, you will meet a young woman.’ For a moment Gingrass’ gloom gave way to a roguish but kindly twinkle. ‘And then, you know – marriage, insurance policies, shoe-leather. And your children, as dear Hilary used to say, will howl for pearls and caviar.’

  Hilary was Hilai
re Belloc. The extensiveness of Gingrass’ acquaintance with the great – particularly those more or less recently deceased – was, Clout remembered, a circumstance altogether remarkable. But it wouldn’t do to argue about this money-business. It must be ignored. ‘And what I want, Professor’ – Clout recalled that this was the proper way to address Gingrass from time to time – ‘is something, even if it’s not much in itself, that starts straight away.’

  ‘I see, I see.’ Gingrass did his sideways dither, this time, on his chair. ‘But it’s rather late, you know, for the coming term. Only a few days to go.’

  ‘I wrote to you early in August.’

  ‘Quite so, quite so. Unfortunately, last year’s tutors are all staying on. So I’m afraid there isn’t likely to be anything much here. But I do happen to know that at Leeds–’

  ‘It’s here, sir, that I’d particularly like to start.’

  ‘I’m glad to hear it – delighted to hear it, of course.’ Gingrass accompanied this assurance with a visible tautening of his unimpressive muscles, rather as a man might do who has achieved a provisional diagnosis of being closeted with a maniac.