‘I suppose you were already capable of that sort of sage remark, but it’s not an endowment that would make you exactly glamorous.’ Fiona glanced at me, wickedly. ‘However, you were probably very good-looking in those days – and in an intriguingly boyish way. Young Pattullo, wasn’t it?’
‘Yes, it was.’ I didn’t know how Fiona could have come by this forgotten manner of naming me. ‘But I was twenty- eight, as a matter of fact, at the time of my marriage.’
‘The virgin bloom remained, Duncan. You were very rapable still, and that must have fetched her. What else was there – on that side of the bargain, I mean?’
‘I’d just had my first and only big success.’
‘The Bear-Garden ?’
‘Yes.’
‘The Bear-Garden isn’t a patch on The Accomplices. Your plays get steadily better. Not spectacularly. But consistently.’
‘I’m very pleased indeed you think so.’ This was true, but I was also amused by the complete confidence of Fiona’s verdict. It was something I had come to remark as characteristic of the academic mind when prompted to assess literary or artistic productions. ‘As a matter of fact, I believe that The Bear-Garden enjoyed the run it did simply because people wanted to see a dazzlingly pretty young actress called June Trevivian. On such adventitious aids do dramatists depend. Anyway, there I was, fancying myself no end, and actually quite a figure in the metropolitan scene. It may have counted with Penny, I suppose.’
‘And you were also – behind that pink and white boyish disguise – a swift and ruthless lover, weren’t you? You must have been.’
‘I was nothing of the kind!’ Taking my eyes from the road for a moment, I stared at Fiona in surprise and – I believe – indignation. It is natural for a man to be gratified at being credited with violent sexual propensities, but not by a girl cousin who is making fun of him. And for a moment, Fiona had the decency to appear embarrassed; it had been only uncertainly that her glance met mine. ‘Look,’ I said. ‘If you’ll be serious I’ll tell you why I married Penny. As clearly as I can, that is. These things tend to retain a certain mystery.’
‘I’d like to know,’ Fiona said, with unusual simplicity.
We were now on the Northern by-pass and near our destination on the riverside. There would be no time for a tedious exposition of my marital history – which, I suppose, was why I chose to embark on it now. I was coming to feel that Fiona was entitled to hear it if she wanted to, although I had no reason to think she devoted to me the ration of serious thought that I devoted to her. It wouldn’t be that sort of tumbling out of oneself to another that commonly – although not, I imagine, always – happens between two people avowedly in love. It wouldn’t be like that at all. But between Fiona and myself some sort of intimacy, not clearly defined, had established itself. It was reasonable that we should a little advance in reciprocal communicativeness from time to time.
‘You see,’ I said, ‘with Penny I began by missing out, when I was still little more than the boy you keep on talking about. And missing out was something I’d done already with another girl – and when really a boy. In fact a schoolboy still.’
‘So that was in Scotland?’
‘Yes, it was.’ Fiona’s comment had been weighted with some meaning, and this was natural enough. She knew, at least in its bare outline, that Janet McKechnie – now to be our hostess in some ten minutes’ time – had been my first declared love. ‘It’s not to be spoken of too grandly,’ I went on. ‘I was a kid and I muffed it: call it that. But it left its mark.’
‘And your first fancy for Penny was one of those rebound affairs?’
‘It wasn’t quite so simple. Penny burst into the situation a little too early for it to be called that. So there was an element of infidelity to it.’
‘But infidelity was rather in the air?’
‘Not on the other girl’s part. Definitely not. We weren’t engaged or anything. And suddenly she was in waters much too deep for me. It’s difficult to be lucid about.’
‘Apparently so.’
‘The relevant point is that the Penny thing – the first Penny thing – was equally sudden with me. It was when I was an undergraduate. I used to go to tea in North Oxford with an old lady called Mrs Triplett. Penny came to stay with her – was sent to stay with her, in fact, to keep her out of mischief elsewhere. Her relationship to Mrs Triplett seems to have been quite nebulous – more so, say, than mine or yours to Arnold Lempriere – but the old lady had a masterful way with her, and had Penny more or less under control. She turfed out one undesirable admirer in the most expert and ruthless manner bang under my own nose at a tennis party. But that’s another story. What’s relevant is that I was overwhelmed by Penny in what I suppose was the most absurd fashion. And then, equally absurdly, as a feasible proposition it was all over and blown sky-high within a matter of days. And I got it mixed up, incidentally, with another man’s misfortunes in the same line. That very much added to the muddle. Then this man and I – he was an Australian called Fish – made the best of things. We wandered about Italy for the better part of a long vac, licking our wounds. Eventually we voted them licked. But it wasn’t quite so – or not with me. And that’s the end of Act One.’
‘Is this a three-act drama?’
‘It’s at least that – only I’m not going beyond Act Two now. And between them, as the programmes say, eight years elapse. Wholly uneventful, the years between Acts One and Two.’
‘Sexually uneventful?’
‘Say non-significant.’
‘Then I needn’t hear about them.’ Fiona was clear on this. ‘Our turn’s the next on the left.’
‘I know it is. Well, The Bear-Garden has been produced – and there I am, convinced that all London is ringing with the young genius’s triumph. I go to a party. And there is Penny.
‘Quite unchanged.’
‘In eight years? She can’t have been – nor I myself, either.
‘But that was the effect. The identical qualities that had bowled me over once did so again.’
‘Are they mentionable with decency, Duncan?’
‘Penny was a very attractive young woman whom I immediately and clamantly wanted to possess. And I wasn’t going to muff it again. I went for her! There’s nothing unmentionable about that. But the sheer force of the impulse takes some explaining. Everything about her was small and delicate and, you might say, manipulable in a fashion enormously appealing to the tactile imagination. But I’m not going to offer you an inventory of her charms.’
‘No need to. We’ll just say that Penny’s attractiveness didn’t consist primarily in the possession of a well-stocked mind.’
‘Of course it didn’t. She had plenty of culture-patter and some brains as well. But she was without an idea in her head.’
‘Did you realise that, Duncan, even while the first enamourment was upon you?’
‘I rather think I must have done. Still, the thing wasn’t – my side of the thing wasn’t – a simply sensual affair. What I called Penny’s qualities included facts of personality and disposition. I found them bowling me over. Yet, to this day I can’t get their appeal quite clear in my head. It sounds idiotic.’
‘There’s our boat house, straight ahead. And of course, what drew you to Penny wasn’t the way her arms and legs were stuck on. That’s all nonsense.’ Fiona was as confident about this as she had been about the relative merits of The Bear-Garden and The Accomplices. It was the way she ticked. You instinctively knew that her character made her just your cup of tea.’
‘Absolute nonsense! Penny’s character turned out—’
‘Yes, I can guess. Perverse and promiscuous. You see, Duncan, it was a matter of how you were brought up.’
‘And how do you know about how I was brought up?’
‘By using my brains – and by reflecting on your behaviour and inclinations in middle age.’ Fiona offered this strange remark with a curious flash of fire. ‘Take your childhood. Lachlan Pattullo was a great painter – and
had a Bohemian slant to him, no doubt. But on that side of your family you had a background in a sort of peasant Calvinism. The sinfulness of this and the wickedness of that. I’m quite sure you hated that whole bag of tricks. But its stock-in-trade – damnation and reprobation and heaven knows what – had its fascination. If mere naughtiness was mortally dangerous, then mere naughtiness was additionally fun. Penny’s pull, certainly that second time round, came from your sensing that she might be very naughty indeed.’
‘Rubbish, Fiona!’ Having said this rather heatedly, I had in honesty to add: ‘Not that she didn’t turn out rather that way’.
‘So there is Duncan Pattullo for you – subject to that insistent little prompting to sup with the Devil. And being careful always to carry a sufficiently long spoon in his pocket.’
‘Fiona, of all the—’
‘They’ve arrived before us,’ Fiona said. ‘We can get moving. And I’m quite hungry. Your company, Duncan, gives me an appetite.’
‘I’m glad to hear it – that’s fine.’
‘For strange viands.’ Fiona looked at me, mockingly. ‘Unknown to my days of innocence.’
Fiona’s anatomy of Duncan Pattullo had failed to enchant me, but I didn’t feel this was because it had come uncomfortably near the bone. She had got me wrong, and perhaps it was the very fact of our kinship that prevented her getting me right. It is notorious that our wives and husbands, our children, our most intimate friends all exist to the end behind veils of our own devising. Mere acquaintances are the people we see most clearly, undistorted by solicitudes and desires. This paradox must not be pushed too far: in the interest, for instance, of gloomy fictions asserting that the closer we try to come the lonelier do we find ourselves to be. I didn’t want to be a gloomy fiction in Fiona’s regard. Thinking of myself (as most healthy people think of themselves) as a fairly decent fellow, I was only anxious – perhaps naively – that she should arrive at a perfectly accurate view of me. This gratifying state of affairs didn’t seem to be coming about.
Penny had become a liability. Fiona’s absurdly attributing to me a kind of milk-and-water Satanism seemed to arise from the notion that there must be something positively kinky about a man who could fall for a little bitch like that. Long ago, I might myself have come to such a conclusion about Fish in relation to his awful Martine. But I hadn’t. There are some ways in which women are undeniably more tiresome than men. As we walked the last few yards to the river-bank, I thanked the Lord that Penny need at least be no longer in the picture that day.
We found that our party had been augmented in an unexpected fashion. In addition to the McKechnies and Miss Mountain, the Bedworth children were awaiting us. Mabel Bedworth had been called away to cope with some brief exigency in her parents’ home; Cyril Bedworth was up to his manful shoulders in college business not to be put by; Janet, having happened on this situation, had taken charge of Johnnie and Virginia. This made rather a crowd for a single punt, but I saw, at once, that the occasion had been a Success so far. Johnnie was provided with the sort of diminutive butterfly net in which tadpoles – even minnows with luck – may be ensnared, and Virginia had brought something like Albert Talbert’s succinct library in her father’s rucksack. It was true that the children now inspected Fiona and myself with some hostility; our late arrival made us intruders upon the established order of the day, and it became our business suitably to ingratiate ourselves in that quarter.
It seemed to me, however, that it was my own first business to take over the punt pole, which was something I could do without unreasonable misgiving. But my offer was brushed aside by McKechnie with unusual robustness. He was dressed for the part in a sports-shirt – wontedly subfusc, indeed, and with a small armoury of writing implements clipped in the breast pocket – and in trousers dating from an era in which the term “flannel trousers’ accurately described such garments. It became apparent at once, that he had a powerful if erratic command of our craft, which he treated (as Janet had forecast) much as if it were one of the alarming mechanical monsters with which he controlled the extensive grounds of his Victorian vicarage. Johnnie had formed a high regard for his performance. In fact, these two – the other male members of our party – were getting on notably well. And it was to McKechnie that Virginia, clambering the length of the punt for the purpose, appealed for the elucidation of the occasional hard word encountered in the course of her studious pursuits. That one of years so tender could read at all was sufficiently phenomenal. But she was clearly her father’s child – and had announced, hard upon our getting under way again, that she would read ‘until the scenery became more interesting’.
The scenery was unlikely to become particularly that. But it was agreeable enough, and on this upper reach of the river not much animated by pleasure craft. The Cherwell is on the whole the possession of the young, and the spectacle of a boat-load of mature persons is faintly anomalous on its waters. But here it was possible to feel that the presence of the Bedworth progeny redressed a balance, or struck an average of a saving order.
I didn’t know how Janet regarded children, and I discovered in myself a certain reluctance to attempt observations in the matter. Death by water must be unusual on the Cherwell (although it had nearly befallen Fish and Martine) but was something that happened around the Western Isles, which was where Janet’s own children had perished. I found myself rather crudely trying to assess Ranald McKechnie – now viewed in so physically vigorous an aspect – as a potentially procreative person. The years – his wife’s years – were running out. It was up to him to get on with it.
Almost as if these were indecent reflections (which they were not), I switched my attention to the ladies from the Woodstock Road. It wasn’t easy to associate Fiona with children: somehow the whisky and the little cigars and the emeritus professor’s articulation got in the way. Yet these were surely the flimsy props of a hastily run-up persona, almost a hangover from what Robert Damian would call an identity crisis of adolescence. I had ceased to attach much weight to them, and it didn’t surprise me that Fiona had an observing eye for Johnnie and Virginia. Miss Mountain, on the other hand, quite excluded them from her brooding regard. Novelists can cope with children a little better than playwrights can – but not all that well, all the same. Jane Austen didn’t try, and even George Eliot had an uncertain touch; Dickens, although miles better, got bogged down now in sentimentality and now in the grotesque; in English fiction, at least, the best children are the achievement of writers of the second rank.
We gained the proposed picnic place quite soon, and pitched camp at a point on the river bank where it was flanked by meadowland cheerfully sprinkled with flowers appropriate to the May. It was May, for we were in the fourth week of the summer term, and the weather was of the unusual English sort that makes al fresco feasting entirely rational. I remarked on this to Miss Mountain, reminding her that Miss Austen’s Mr Knightly (for Miss Austen had been in my head) had judged ‘the nature and simplicity of gentlemen and ladies’ – as I remembered the phrase – to be ‘best observed by meals within doors’. But Miss Mountain was not in a conversable mood, or was at least not disposed to converse with me. She and Janet exchanged remarks now and then. These were entirely commonplace. But I listened as one lately become irrationally wary before women in general.
The picnic being in the main of my providing, I did the unpacking of it. McKechnie proposed to help, but as his exertions had already been so considerable, I began by opening a bottle of wine, pouring him a glass, and ordering him to sit down and recruit himself. He obeyed at once. We were now entirely unconstrained in each other’s company. Those occasions, the last of them less than a year old, on which we had scurried unacknowledgingly by in the street had become memories (with both of us, I imagine) no longer embarrassing but merely comical. Now he sat in silence for a short time, eyeing me with the mildly interested and favourable regard which he might have cast upon a ponderable but not exactly exciting quiddity in the text of Aeschylu
s.
‘I suppose,’ he asked, presently, ‘that Janet has told you we go off to America in about a fortnight’s time?’ It was now McKechnie’s habit to assume that I saw much more of Janet than I did of him, and that she was thus a constant channel for the transmission of such McKechnie family intelligence as there was. This wasn’t so, but as the misapprehension appeared to afford him pleasure there was no particular reason to correct it. It might have been maintained that the persuasion cast him in something like the role of a complacent husband. But that would have been nonsense. In any company, I believe, Ranald McKechnie’s would have been regarded as a commanding or at least incisive intellect. As a result he inevitably carried a certain severity around with him, together with an emphasis on getting the measure of things exactly right. These qualities got in the way of one’s describing him as notably diffident. But he was undeniably modest and unassuming – and in consequence quite capable of deciding that I was a person of livelier conversational resource than he commanded, with whom it was thus agreeable to think of his wife as recreating herself. This was far from meaning that McKechnie thought all that of me. Rather, he remembered me from our schooldays as a harmless entertainer, and had himself in maturity come to a judicious view of the legitimate if minor place of such persons in the scheme of things. And this state of the case, curiously enough, didn’t seem to have militated against our becoming rather fond of each other.
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I’ve heard about your going to America, but I didn’t know it was to be quite so soon. Shall you be lecturing?’
‘I hardly think so. There is no such obligation, certainly. And the semester will, of course, be over. So, no—it’s a straight think-tank arrangement.’
This expression (which McKechnie uttered with a slightly awesome whimsicality, presumably elicited by the American language) had by now come to enjoy English currency; I had first heard it, however, on a visit to Princeton, and an image which had then come into my head now recurred to me.
The Madonna of the Astrolabe Page 16