‘Are you dining tonight?’ I asked. This was a prescriptive question at the end of these brief encounters.
‘Yes I am, as it happens.’ Damian grinned at me. ‘And I’ll bring along a skull and plant it on the board.’
And Damian walked away. His emblem, the little black bag, went along with him.
V
Timbermill’s hippie phase – as I suppose it might be called – haunted my dreams, and on the following afternoon, I went to talk about it with Fiona. She was out, however, and I found myself landed with her housemate Margaret Mountain instead. I don’t say ‘landed’ as indicating that this severe young novelist and I now got on together other than well. It was merely a matter of my remembering I had been rather to blame about her. More than a week before I had read in The Times that The Orrery had won a much-publicised ‘literary’ award. This was quite something for a first novel; I ought to have written to Margaret at once; I did hasten to offer my congratulations now.
My performance wasn’t a success. Perhaps I overdid my expressions of pleasure at this piece of nonsense, and it hadn’t occurred to me that the authoress herself might feel it to be just that. She made no bones about being thoroughly upset. She hadn’t ‘entered’ or in any way put herself in competition; she hadn’t been sounded or consulted; the thing was little short of an impertinence.
Margaret’s diminutive frame trembled as she came out with this. She had several times talked to me about the juvenile shortcomings of The Orrery, but I hadn’t realised there were aspects of the book she had come actually to hate.
‘But, Margaret,’ I said, ‘we must credit the judges with an objective view, and accord some weight to it.’
‘Must we? Have you ever heard of any of them?’
‘Barely, I suppose.’
‘Scribblers of reviews and popular lady novelists.’
‘What a supercilious and donnish remark. You ought to get out of Oxford, if you ask me. And wouldn’t you like to be a popular lady novelist yourself?’
‘Belt up, Duncan.’ My attempt at humour had not been a success either. ‘Or talk about something else.’
‘Well, no. Why should I? We’re confreres, aren’t we? At least let me point out you could renounce the prize if you feel all that strongly about it.’
‘Or just denounce it. There was a chap did that. Pocketed the loot and then came out with a high-minded speech.’
‘Perhaps he then donated the loot to some cause worthy in his own eyes.’
‘I need the loot. I don’t belong to your precious rentier class.’
These uncivil exchanges made us feel companionable, and Margaret produced Fiona’s whisky. I had already discovered that these Second Elizabethan women had the notions of an Edwardian male society on what is meant by afternoon tea.
‘Well, then,’ I said, ‘keep the money, keep mum, and get on with the new book. And go a bit easy on all that bed- hopping and irregular passion.’
‘Oh, that!’ Margaret was quite unoffended. ‘It has to be given its place in any responsible representative fiction. But they spotlight your use of it so as to make it appear you’ve produced a tissue of depravities. And they love books that are just that, so that they can play at being no end tolerant.’
‘Margaret, my dear, “they” is a notion to keep clear of. It’s paranoid and dangerous.’ Although the tendencies reprehended by Miss Mountain did irrefutably exist, I felt that their significance could readily be overestimated by this rather brooding young woman. Remarks made about The Orrery had got under her skin, ‘And let’s face it,’ I went on. ‘You gave them a run for their money. There are things in that novel that it puzzles me you can ever have heard of.’
‘But, Duncan, one just runs one’s eye over a newspaper or two, and there they all are!’ Miss Mountain appeared to have taken my further joke seriously. ‘And what sort of things, anyway?’
‘Well, there’s the way the tables of consanguinity take a bit of a battering. And I think I’d call incest a fairly recondite theme.
Most people have never had occasion to give a thought to it.’
‘Have you?’
‘Not really, or not ever that I can remember. A Siegmund and Sieglinde would seem rather odd fowl in one of my plays, wouldn’t you say?’
‘I’ve never seen one of your plays.’ Margaret paused on this, and appeared to judge it slightly bleak in effect. ‘Because I never go to the theatre,’ she added. ‘Have some more whisky. Fiona won’t mind.’
‘No thank you.’ I had a sense of my communion with Miss Mountain as having been checked. She was looking at me much as she had done on the occasion of our first meeting, here in this room, less than a year before: as if I were a problem of a certain abstract interest, but one not likely to reward curiosity in more immediate human terms. This was an obscure notion, and I made little of it; perhaps at the moment, she was simply sensible of having shut down on some not very significant talk with a gauche avowal of ignorance of my professional labours. In any case I wouldn’t have been disconcerted, since I was now familiar with her liability to be swayed at times by a ground swell of almost hostile feeling. She was inclined to be jealous, I supposed, of my developing relationship with Fiona – much as Timbermill, in a less controlled way, had proved jealous of the settled relationship between these two young women.
Miss Mountain seemed aware that my mind was moving in this region – or so I conjectured on the strength of her next remark.
‘I suppose,’ she said, ‘you’re hunting up Fiona to discuss that unfortunate old man with her. He seems to bulk large on your agenda.’
‘Timbermill? I don’t know that “unfortunate” is a particularly good word for him. He may in some way be blessed, or in a state that works both ways. Oedipus arrived at Colonus, perhaps.’
‘Well, perhaps.’ My doubtfully educated remark had gone down with Miss Mountain better than it deserved. ‘I can’t say I regard him with holy dread. But he may have come to know a thing or two. It doesn’t alter the fact that his friends have to think about him.’
‘Perfectly true. And here’s Fiona. So we can have a conference.’
I had heard footsteps in the hall of the little house. But when the door of the sitting-room opened it wasn’t Fiona who entered. It was Janet.
Like many impulsive people, Janet inclined to the cool and formal in her common social relationships. Our own relationship, which neither of us would have pretended had had anything common about it, had taken on an even temperature for the most part. It remained true that her appearance – and particularly an unexpected appearance like this one – affected me more than anything else on earth.
The unexpectedness was sharp. I had wondered before at Janet’s having rather rapidly taken up Fiona and her friend, and now she had seemingly arrived on a footing that justified her walking straight into their house. Perhaps she found their mere youth appealing. Reckoning by the simple decades, she was as middle-aged as myself, and like myself might be subject to the charm (to the pathos, if one is feeling sentimental) of persons with so much rough country ahead of them. She might respond to the accomplished and prize-winning Miss Mountain – it now occurred to me – much as I did to Nicholas Junkin of Cokeville, or even to the still younger Peter Lusby of Bethnal Green, whose undergraduate days still lay ahead of him. Yet I might be quite astray in this. We live surrounded by mysteries – particularly if we have formed the hazardous habit of spending much time with creatures of our own invention.
‘I was thinking of a river picnic,’ Janet said. It’s a purely selfish idea. I do so enjoy getting Ranald into a punt. He looks as if he couldn’t tell one from a motor-launch. And in fact he’s as effective a performer as he is with his terrifying garden Juggernauts.’
‘Is there the same sense of imminent peril?’ I asked.
‘Oh, yes. One is swept towards a weir, or perhaps instant decapitation. But there’s a triumph of dexterity at the end. Margaret, would you and Fiona care to have a go?’
‘Duncan must be in the galley. It’s his special thing. He’ll unpack the hamper, like the Fat Boy.’
This was the sort of remark from Janet which – such are love’s intricacies – could make my heart turn over. That she could compare me to Mr Wardle’s lethargic page was as wonderful as the fact that she could be relied upon never to compare me to Mr Augustus Snodgrass or Mr Tracy Tupman. Janet’s indignation could be formidable. But her mockery was of the gentle sort.
‘I’ll work in the galley,’ I said, ‘provided I have the stocking of it. Lobsters, pigeon-pie, and capital cold punch.’
Amid exchanges of this sort, Janet’s occasion got itself fixed up. It was a routine exercise, I decided, in propelling the elusive Ranald into the society of his kind, and she probably arranged theatre-parties and stiff country walks on the same principle. She might even cherish the belief, not uncommon in devoted academic wives, that nervous benefit accrues to absorbed and brooding scholars from the propinquity of young and pretty girls. Hence, it was a new theory, her having taken up the ladies of the Woodstock Road. Both were decidedly young; Fiona was pretty; Margaret, if without obvious good looks, possessed that curious asexual quality – essentially a physical attribute – which owns a paradoxical power at times to stir the blood. As for myself, it looked as if I were being recruited only as a consequence of being around. But I wasn’t confident of this. There were seldom any loose ends in Janet’s designs.
She certainly had hold of me now, and I presently found that I had left a message for Fiona, and that we were walking back to college, where Janet had parked her car. This represented more of her sole society – unthreatened by anything more than a nod from an acquaintance in the street – than had come my way since our rediscovery of each other. It was a thought that silenced me, and she was the first to speak.
‘How are you making do, Dunkie? Are you going to hit it off?’
‘With Oxford? Well, it’s my guess I’m not going to love the place quite as much as I did when a boy.’
‘Which was just a little bit more than you managed to love me.’
Janet made remarks like this very seldom indeed. I had a sense – not altogether grateful – that our new relationship might be described as yet further firming up. I could have wished, somehow, for just a little more uncertainty of stance in Janet. But then that had never been a vulnerability she was noted for.
‘Yes,’ I said humbly.
‘What about the people?’
‘My colleagues? I expect I’m going to come to tolerate them too. Or admire them or something. They’re quite strange to me.’
‘Strange?’
‘I always guess wrong. Say they have to choose between X and Y. I say to myself “Y’s their dead cert”. But it turns out to be X. A unanimous voice. It’s almost uncanny. I must be the archetypal anti-don.’
‘How fabulous, Dunkie, it’s nice that you can still dramatise yourself.’
‘Yes,’ I said, and decided that once was enough for humility. ‘But there’s nothing surprising about my being a bit at sea with those people. A writer or artist will never be more than a guest among scholars, and that’s all that’s to it. But, Janet, think of you and me: how surprisingly little we know of each other.’
‘Know about each other’s later histories, you mean.’
‘Yes, of course. You ought to be a writer. It’s just being short on mere information. Do you know? I haven’t even gathered when you and Ranald were married.’
‘Just under three years ago. You could have found that out from Who’s Who. It has all the professors and people.’
‘Yes.’ To say that I had hesitated before this means of obtaining information would have sounded like a claim to delicate feeling, so I had to let it go. ‘And you didn’t know Oxford at all before then?’
‘I’d toured the colleges once, with a bus-load of Scottish nurses.’
‘Then that’s why people tend to treat you as a newcomer still.’
‘Yes of course. I’ve hardly stopped having to sit next to all those Heads of Houses at their dinner-tables. I’m not sure it’s a tactful convention to enforce, second time round. Not that it had come my way before. When Calum and I married there wasn’t all that ceremony blowing about.’
‘I suppose not.’ This was only the second time that Janet had spoken Calum’s name since the occasion of Mrs Pococke’s fateful luncheon party nearly a year before. ‘Janet, have I told you I saw you once—just once—in that long stretch of years?’
‘Saw me, Dunkie ? But you can’t have.’
‘It was in the National Museum in Athens.’
‘I’ve never been to Greece.’
‘How very odd.’ I was shying away from what I had been about to tell. ‘I’d have thought Ranald would hale you off there at once.’
‘He won’t go, not as long as Greece is shamefully ruled.’ Surprisingly, Janet laughed softly. If I were to say to him “Ranald, you must take me to Greece”, he still wouldn’t do it.’
‘But he’d be terribly upset.’ I managed to speak lightly, although this last small claim of Janet’s had touched off a spark of feeling which I didn’t care to acknowledge. ‘A lot of scholars feel that way.’
‘And have, from time to time, through several centuries. Poets, too. Shelley wouldn’t visit a Greece prostrated beneath tyrants.’
‘And his friend Peacock, I seem to remember.’ I said this quickly, because the image of a Shelleyan McKechnie had almost tripped me into laughter. I saw you in that National Museum, all the same.’
‘In your mind’s eye, Dunkie.’
‘If you like. I admit you’d glimpsed the Gorgon, and you’d lost the tip of your nose. But there you were. There was a fillet round your hair.’
Janet received this with a long glance, grave but carrying no reproof. I’d told her of a long-past experience among those thronging marbles, one so poignant that it had to be told. And the telling had achieved itself, blessedly, without sentimentality or constraint.
‘So that’s one whack of information,’ I said, ‘and enough to be going on with. My feelings haven’t changed, Janet.’
‘I wish I could be sure of that.’
I thought that Janet had never said a stranger thing – and it had come from her with a flash of feeling which seemed entirely of the past. It was as if she had suddenly become the vehement girl from whose hand I had knocked some novel of Lawrence’s – The Plumed Serpent, it had surely been – in the hall of the Edinburgh Public Library long ago. Had she come to a sudden halt and stamped her foot on the unoffending pavement outside Somerville College, it would only have completed this effect. And I was so confounded that I spoke rashly and without thinking.
‘Janet, has this something to do with my long-lost cousin?’
‘Fiona? I’m not being possessive, if that’s what you mean.’
I was about to say ‘But at least you’re being maternal’ when by some mercy from heaven, the words died on my lips. I can only suppose, I can’t really remember, that an image of Janet’s drowned children had risen up before me in time to check the outrage. ‘At least it’s odd,’ I said instead, ‘that you’re arranging for hock and pork pies on the Cherwell for those young women.’
‘Is it? I suppose there’s something to be said for all getting to know each other a bit better.’
From Janet this was a surprisingly vague and unconvincing remark. She was frowning now, aware of having got on territory she hadn’t designed to tread. Were we, so to speak, to turn another corner on it we’d be confronting the awkward feet that Janet, whether instinctively or of knowledge, disapproved of Fiona. I decided we had better scramble off this ground at once.
‘You think I have a rash weakness for kids,’ I said. ‘Fair enough. Let’s go on the river, have a go
od look, think twice, all that. But – do you know? – there are other perils abroad. Are you acquainted with a woman called Hatty Firebrace?’
‘A kind of female metaphysician? I’ve met her.’
‘I’ve met her only once myself. She told me that Penny’s coming to stay with her.’
‘In Oxford? Oh, Dunkie, you are beset.’
‘I don’t think it’s quite like that.’ Janet’s instant clear merriment had been steadying. ‘But it’s an awful bore.’
“That’s the last thing it is. Have you and Penny kept up anything at all?’
‘Nothing. Not even a Christmas card. But Mrs Firebrace finds something of the petit bourgeois order in the fact that, being safely divorced, we don’t sleep with one another from time to time.’
‘She thinks nothing of the sort. The silly woman just thought it a with-it thing to say to a celebrated dramatist.’
‘Well, yes – I did rather incline to that view of it.’
‘I sometimes think, Dunkie, that Oxford tags after rubbishing metropolitan attitudes in a thoroughly demeaning way.’
‘Aren’t you terribly taken with Oxford, Janet?’ I had been startled by this sudden uncompromising judgement from North Britain. ‘Aren’t you making do here?’
‘Not all that. And, of course, Ranald is far from adoring the place either. I don’t know whether that makes it easier or harder.’
‘Good Lord! Ranald’s been here all his days. I’d suppose him steeped in Oxford.’
‘You’d be quite wrong. He doesn’t feel it’s him at all.’
‘How extraordinary!’ This unexpected new theme came to me for a moment with a certain relief.
‘You know how we live in the country, and how he comes in as little as may be.’
‘He could go somewhere else. He could find a Chair anywhere in the world at a term’s notice. In the United States, for example.’
The Madonna of the Astrolabe Page 9