Old Hall, New Hall

by Michael Innes

  Sadie had never heard of the Shufflebotham Award. She was sure almost nobody had. It must have been kept more or less dark while Gingrass himself was having the initial enjoyment of it. They fell to random and ill-informed guessing as to the identity of the eminent deceased native next to be celebrated. And then Clout remembered that the Award wasn’t yet, after all, quite in the bag. He had a rival to whom Gingrass might conceivably still treacherously turn. ‘Sadie,’ he asked, ‘do you know one Lumb?’

  ‘Wun Lum – a Chinese?’

  ‘No, no – a chap called Lumb! He’d like the Shufflebotham too.’

  ‘Oh – George Lumb. Can’t you both have the Shufflebotham thing?’

  ‘No – just one of us. And I’m the chap.’

  ‘Oh well, George can’t want it too badly. He’s got a job – cataloguing somebody’s books.’ Sadie was silent for a moment, and Clout discerned with unexpected annoyance that she was sorry to hear of this George Lumb’s missing out on anything. ‘You’d like George,’ she added. ‘He’s terribly keen on Lawrence.’

  Clout wasn’t clear that he’d any longer find this a decided reason for liking anyone. ‘You know him well?’ he asked. ‘Isn’t he–?’ He was going to say: ‘cross-eyed and a stammerer,’ but had the good manners to alter this to: ‘by way of being a writer?’

  ‘Oh, yes. I’m sure he’s going to be a good one. He and I went on an expedition in the vac, looking for cattle.’

  ‘Why ever did you do that?’ Clout finished his soup, reached for his stew, and stared at Sadie.

  ‘Highland cattle. For me to dance to.’ Sadie appeared perfectly serious. ‘We wanted to see.’

  ‘I can’t think what you’re talking about.’

  ‘Colin, you surely haven’t forgotten Gudrun dancing to the cattle in Women in Love?’ Sadie was sincerely reproachful. ‘George and I wanted to see if it would work. I was to do the slow, hypnotizing convulsion of the dance. And feel a terrible shiver of fear and pleasure. I was to dance right up to the cattle, and discover if I felt the electric pulse from their breasts running into my hands.’

  ‘And this Lumb?’

  ‘George was to watch the cattle, and notice if they breathed heavily with helpless fear and fascination.’

  ‘How absolutely revolting. The man must be an imbecile.’

  ‘He’s very nice.’ Sadie was suddenly angry without being in the least offended. ‘And it was fun. But, of course, if you’ve become a prig, Colin Clout, it must sound silly.’

  ‘Perhaps you danced for Lumb like Anna in The Rainbow too?’

  This was an insulting question, and Clout was instantly ashamed of it. He rather feared that Sadie might quietly rise and quit. But she only frowned, as if making the effort to remember that he’d been away four years and probably picked up new ways. ‘We haven’t quite got each other’s wave-length, yet – have we?’ she asked. ‘But never mind. By the way, are you married?’

  This question, although it seemed merely absurd, in fact staggered him. It staggered him as suddenly revealing an unspeakable danger he had escaped. After all, he might already be married. Several of his fellow research students at Oxford had been, although goodness knew what they lived on. He might already be married – in which case what had come to him that morning would have been a hideous mockery. Clout felt sweat on his forehead at the mere thought of it. ‘Of course I’m not married,’ he said. ‘What could put such an idea in your head?’

  For the first time since their reunion, Sadie hesitated. ‘I saw you earlier this morning,’ she said. ‘Before you actually bumped into me.’

  ‘Oh.’ Clout was wary.

  ‘With a girl. And I thought perhaps she was your wife.’

  A warm glow of pleasure suddenly suffused Clout’s being. He recalled that he had always known little Sadie Sackett to have a strong streak of perceptiveness. Now she had been intuitively aware of the deep, deep intimacy which had so magically established itself between himself and the girl right at the first dawning of their acquaintanceship. And she had very naturally taken the tie to be already the marital one. ‘Oh, no,’ he said self-consciously. And he added as carelessly as he could: ‘Just what made you think of such a thing?’

  Sadie considered. ‘Well, you seemed to be showing her round, and explaining the place. And she didn’t really seem to be attending. Not, I mean, to you.’

  ‘What do you mean – not attending to me?’ Although he asked this question stupidly, Clout concluded that he must have entirely misheard what Sadie said. For her words, as he had picked them up, made, of course, no sense.

  ‘She was seeming to attend to you, but really she was busy thinking of other things. And it’s a way one sometimes sees married people – even quite young ones – behaving.’

  For a moment invisible hands, very cold and very clammy, seemed to have felt their way beneath Clout’s clothes, and to be clamping themselves about his body. Then he realized that he was in the presence of an absurdity requiring laughter – rather loud laughter, which, with a mingling of relief and embarrassment, he presently heard sound through the almost deserted refectory. Sadie was probably quite quick at understanding people like herself – or like him, for that matter. But the marvellous girl had a different sort of breeding behind her – not better but just different, Clout magnanimously interpolated to himself – and the outward and visible signs of it had led Sadie entirely astray. That was it. The marvellous girl had a poise, a delicious air of detachment, which Sadie had comically read as sheer inattention and absence of interest. Clout finished his stew with renewed appetite. ‘I think you’re terribly acute,’ he said humorously. ‘But you haven’t got that one at all right. The girl isn’t, as a matter of fact, anybody that I know at all well.’

  There was a moment’s silence. Sadie was looking at him curiously. It was as if she suspected that, one way or another, there had been something disingenuous in his last speech. And, of course, there had been. He was concealing the plain fact that, at that morning’s breakfast, the girl had not yet existed for him. It came to him, with a hint of surprise and remorse, that although he had put in quite a lot of time with Sadie once, he had never been prompted to tell her the ghost of a fib. He stood up, went back to the counter, and fetched two cups of coffee. After all, this renewal of acquaintance was quite an occasion, and he could without ostentation offer Sadie a fourpenny drink. He rather expected her now to ask the girl’s name, since it was one of the wholesome if unrefined conventions of the place that you uttered questions when they came into your head. And this question would certainly call his bluff. But Sadie said nothing. She simply took the coffee – some of which he had managed to slop into the saucer – as if it was a present she valued receiving. The cups were of some plastic substance that went squishy under heat; presumably they had been produced by the genius of a great nation at war, and taken over from a derelict NAAFI when the University started up again.

  Sadie had a packet of cigarettes, and they smoked. ‘As a matter of fact,’ Clout said suddenly, ‘I’d never seen that girl before. She was just peering in, so I took her around. I don’t even know her name.’ He sat back, relieved. That was honest. There was no call on him to go on, and announce his grand passion. He wasn’t a bit less convinced of its existence, but he did have a clearer view of its extravagance. When Shakespeare had to put across a roughly analogous story about Romeo, he abandoned blank verse and slipped in a couple of sonnets. Clout could hardly continue his remarks to Sadie Sackett in elaborately concatenated rhyme. So he resolved on a change of subject. ‘Is this Library job interesting?’ he asked. ‘Are you glad you’ve stayed on?’

  ‘I’d call it not too bad.’ Sadie was philosophical. ‘It was either that, of course, or taking a Dip Ed and turning schoolmarm. I didn’t want to do that – although I suppose it’s not too bad, either.’

  ‘I see.’ Clout was aware of an obscure sense of guilt attending his perception that there was, for the time being at least, something missing from Sadie’s
life. He looked round the refectory almost in the hope of his glance falling on an adequate and biddable young man. But now there wasn’t a soul in the place except themselves. ‘Well,’ he continued, ‘I expect you made a wise choice. Books are no doubt a good deal less annoying than kids.’

  ‘Oh – I don’t know that I’d mind kids.’

  Cloud was disconcerted by this. It sounded ambiguous. ‘They’re lively, of course,’ he said hastily. ‘And a library can’t be that.’

  ‘Not a university library, anyway. Public libraries are better.’ Sadie appeared to be drawing upon stores of professional knowledge. ‘They get eccentrics and drunks and even suicides.’

  ‘Suicides?’

  ‘Yes – we had it in a lecture. Apparently they open appropriate books – Schopenhauer or Sartre or Gissing or Hardy – at particularly suitable passages, and then swallow something. You’re told to look out for anybody writhing or frothing or gushing asunder in the midst.’

  ‘No doubt it makes a change. But you’re not likely, as you say, to get any excitement in a university library.’

  ‘Definitely not. Not anywhere in a university.’

  ‘Exactly. They’re dull places. Think of this Shufflebotham thing.’

  ‘It certainly doesn’t seem to promise much fun, Colin.’ Sadie rose. ‘Well, I’d better be getting back. It’s nice that you’ll be back.’

  ‘It’s nice of you to say so.’

  For a moment they looked at each other in some faint uncertainty. Then they returned their squishy cups punctiliously to the counter – for they were both well-drilled children of the State – and left the refectory. They could have no notion how fallacious would prove the generalization upon which they had so sagely concluded.

  5

  Clout’s attic was up to expectation. Indeed it was beyond that by some fifteen feet, being tucked away high in the gable of a surviving fragment of the original Caroline house which was buried in the Georgian one. In shape the room was a short triangular tunnel, running without fuss from the door at one end to the window at the other. On either side of the window, behind creaking cupboard doors, further triangular tunnels, crammed with lumber, vanished into gloom and distance. Clout had not ventured to explore these beckoning infinities, but it occurred to him that they would at least provide the mind with territory upon which to roam at large, should he later find his actual Lebensraum oppressive. At present he was very well satisfied with his quarters – or rather with having secured them. But when he looked beyond, he was conscious of some anxiety.

  For one thing, his position around the place still appeared to be undefined. Gingrass, it was true, had shoved him in here, and told him of certain tutorial classes he would be expected to hold in a subject called the Higher Literary Form. But Gingrass had said nothing more about the Shufflebotham, upon which the whole financial feasibility of his new existence seemed to depend. And now the first day of Full Term had arrived. Its most obvious manifestation was echoing up the several staircases now; a throb, a soft pulse of menacing sound constituted by the heavy feet and unmodulated voices of the student body taking possession en masse. Presently there would be the ritual of the Pig Market. And Clout supposed that he ought to attend.

  He took his gown from a hook behind the door and eyed it with misgiving. According to Dr Johnson’s well-known poem, this lugubrious black object ought to exercise a strong contagion on any likely youth coming into possession of it, infecting him with the fever of renown. No doubt renown had come into Johnson’s head chiefly because the word rhymed with the garment being celebrated. Still, the general proposition remained. Clout, as he wriggled himself into the enfolding subfusc, ought to be reflecting with excitement that he might go a long way in this. But did he? He doubted whether his publisher (when he had a publisher) would suggest adorning the dust-jacket of his novel in the manner of Kafka (when he had finished his novel in the manner of Kafka) with a photograph demonstrating that its author was indubitably Clout, BA, B Litt. Very probably Gingrass was right, and what applied to the wretched Lumb applied to him, Clout, too. Perhaps he ought to have retreated to Lake Garda, measured himself against Buddenbrooks or À la recherche du temps perdu, and decided about himself one way or the other.

  But if he had done that, he might never have met the girl. Indeed, if ever in the course of his past life he had performed even a single trivial action other than he had in fact done, it was almost certain that from it there would have flowed a chain of consequences which would have resulted in his never meeting her. Clout found that he was meditating upon this almost metaphysical fact a good deal. It was a speculation that took his mind off the question of whether, after all, he was in the least likely ever to meet her again.

  Deciding to take a plunge, Clout ran downstairs. The older-established students were standing about in large mixed groups of men and women, talking loudly. Simultaneously, and chiefly by intuitive processes, they were working out the cliques and couples into which they would presently sort themselves for the duration of the term. Some were confidently taking up again, at the precise point at which they had been broken off, the relationships of four months ago. Some had been planning a reshuffle, an exchange, a fade-out, an infidelity. Some were aware of difficulties ahead, precipitated by rash letter-writing during the boredom of suburban vacations. Cut off from all this of the passions and affections, the new students stood in rows before bewildering notice-boards, anxiously copying lecture-hours into large printed time-tables and then rubbing them out again. These still believed that a university is a home of the intellect.

  It all made – Clout reflected – a wonderful field for the artist’s brooding eye. He wondered if Redbrick realism was the line of his rival Lumb. What Kafka, of course, would ‘do’ – Clout remembered to put the magical word between its inverted commas – was the bewilderment: the ambiguities and the false casts and the culs-de-sac. Nobody would be quite sure whether anybody else was a student or a professor; and there would be intermittent doubt about the place being a university at all, and not, say, a maternity hospital or the municipal abattoir. And, in particular…

  ‘Mr Clout, sir!’

  Clout turned and saw advancing upon him an elderly man dressed in a frock-coat with enormous brass buttons. It was Gedge, the head porter. Gedge would have been no good to Kafka. Nobody could advance the hypothesis that Gedge was perhaps really the Vice-Chancellor or the Reader in Biometrics. Gedge was plainly too important to be either. And now Gedge had spoken. Clout’s position was at last defined.

  Mr Clout sir was decisive. Students, however senior or however affluent, were never other than plain Mr Jones or Miss Brown to Gedge. Mr Jones sir (or Miss Brown miss) at once elevated the person addressed to a position on the Staff. From the large twilight of young persons of indeterminate status – post-graduate students, senior scholars, part-time assistant demonstrators – it was the voice of Gedge that summoned to this clearer day. Clout was so overwhelmed by the voice thus having pronounced so early in his own interest that he was unconscious for a time of a large official-looking envelope which Gedge was now thrusting at him rather as if he were a pillar-box. ‘With the Registrar’s compliments, Mr Clout, sir.’ Gedge reiterated the crucial formula plainly on the benevolent supposition that the young man couldn’t, at present, hear it too often. ‘Better take it in with you,’ he added confidentially. ‘The bell’s just going to go.’

  At that moment the bell went, as it did punctually at every hour throughout the day. It was an electric bell of almost incredible shrillness, guaranteed to dominate any uproar – and even (which was its principal function) to stop the most self-absorbed lecturer dead in the middle of a sentence. On this occasion it was the signal for a stampede. The new students, previously warned, knew that the moment had come at which they must present themselves for the approval of those professors under whom they aspired to study. Many had a muzzy notion that some sort of quota operated, and that they must use their elbows now if they were to be given
the best chance of using their brains later on. And they all – Clout reflected as he received a jab in the chest – had elbows. He was borne along in the rush. But he managed to tear open his envelope and draw out a small sheaf of papers. He squinted at them and distinguished the word ‘Shufflebotham.’ So it was all right. The electric bell was still ringing.

  ‘Abominable!’Another hurrying figure, gowned like himself, and whom he vaguely remembered as a lecturer in French or German, suddenly shouted in his ear. ‘I’ve never got used to it. I’d rather have the bell in Greene’s books – the cracked one.’

  ‘The cracked one?’ Manfully Clout bellowed back. ‘Graham?’

  ‘Yes – I mean no, It’s the bell that’s cracked.’ The gowned figure reeled momentarily under the impact of a charging Amazon in spectacles. ‘Always turning up in Greene. Cracked school-bell. Symbol of childhood’s misery. But this one’s a symbol of the misery of senescence… Aren’t you Clout?’

  ‘Yes – I’m Clout.’

  ‘You’ve come back?’

  ‘Yes – I’ve come back.’

  ‘Good God!’ Rather unwisely, the gowned figure made a theatrical gesture with his arms. At once he was adroitly savaged in his unguarded ribs, and disappeared gasping. There was a moment of maximum chaos as muscular young bodies jammed the double doorway of the great hall. Clout, whose instincts were modest, endeavoured to edge away from heaving bosoms and wriggling buttocks, and succeeded in standing on the toes of old Miss Harlock, the only woman professor. A moment later the mêlée thinned, and he found himself in the comparative security of the interior. The students, who had been jabbering excitedly in the corridor, fell silent here. The Pig Market was going to begin.