Staircase in Surrey: The Gaudy Part 12

'The gardener's cottage at Otby, you fool. And then that housekeeper of my father's. If she-'

'Listen. Gavin wouldn't have gone ahead without making sure of all that. It would be second nature to him. Your boy's alibi if that's what it's to be called is in the bag.'

'And we shan't be in the jug? Oh, glory! Dunkie waiting has been sheer h.e.l.l. I tried one throw myself, as soon as I got back to town. Not that it would have been any f.u.c.king good. You're sure Gavin says nothing more?'

'Of course I am. I can read, you know.' Fleetingly, I wondered what Tony had been up to. 'You'd better not do anything more. Just sit tight.'

'Yes. I must say he might have been a bit more communicative. Telegrams don't cost all that.'

'Don't be an a.s.s, Tony.' I was astonished by the unreasonableness of this last remark. 'He trusts us to trust him just on the strength of that one word. He was being cautious that's all.'

'Of course, of course. Reliable man. Knows his onions. I say, Duncan! What happens next?'

'I've no idea. Perhaps, with the crisis past, he'll ring you up. Or perhaps you'll just get a quiet family letter from Ivo, full of the sights of New York. And now, unwind. I've got to ring off. I'm lunching with the Poc.o.c.kes.'

'With who?'

'The Poc.o.c.kes, you idiot. And a gaggle of dons and dons' wives. I'll look you up when I get back to town. Goodbye.'

'Dunkie I'm fearfully anxious still.'

'That's inevitable. Go on the bottle a bit. But do nothing. Understood?'

'Yes, Dunkie. And bless you. Bless dear old Gavin. Goodbye.'

I rang off, got out my handkerchief, and dabbed my brow a piece of private theatre excusable in face of such demoralisation. And then I returned to Mrs Poc.o.c.ke's little party.

The McKechnies had arrived and been given drinks, so that lunch was in immediate prospect at last. The awkwardness between Ra.n.a.ld (as I must remember to call him) and myself had entirely gone out of my head. Tony's condition which the bare record of his words on the wire scarcely conveys was affecting me in a curious way. For the time, at least, he was sagging beneath the burden of parenthood to a pitiful degree. It seemed an unenviable situation, and what came strangely to me was that, in a sense, I envied it. Apart from Ninian and perhaps his children, there was n.o.body in the world sudden disaster to whom would mean a great deal to me. I should feel decent distress and regret if misfortune struck here or there among my friends. But if acute misery or apprehensiveness was going to a.s.sail me, it could only be on behalf of my precious self. This insulated state it was not going to be salubrious to grow old in. I have mentioned those long-haired, long-legged boys who on sentimental mornings would sometimes lounge at my breakfast-table. I could have no anxieties about them. They were as immune against cra.s.s casualty as those good folk or elfin people whose voices and laughter had momentarily come to me while waiting for the Gaudy dinner undergraduates in waking fact, fooling around in an adjacent quad. No doubt I had been prudent, obeying or obeying all but once the poet's injunction: Never give all the heart. But neither as artist, statesman, or anything else does the prudent man set any mark upon his time.

These sombre thoughts were occasioned perhaps as much by inanition as by the troubles of Lord Marchpayne; the Gaudy breakfast kippers now lay a long time back. Not to delay the remedy, I said a brisk and cheerful word to Ra.n.a.ld McKechnie, and glanced by way of preparing for brief introduction at his wife.

My heart turned over. I had known Janet McKechnie as a girl. I had expected to marry her.

XIV.

My brother Ninian had been s.e.xually precocious, and since he was so little older than myself this considerably affected my own condition. He had early successes as well as desires, and it is an odd reflection on the patchy way in which manhood arrives that he had slept with a girl some weeks before the celebrated occasion upon which Uncle Rory caned him. The sleeping had been a literal matter, since he had smuggled her out of her parents' house to spend a short summer night in his arms in a fold of the Pentland hills. This exploit was to be the only one he ever communicated to me other than in the most allusive way, despite the fact that we were much in one another's confidence. It had been an initiation too tremendous to bottle up. But he never boasted again. His reticence about succeeding love-affairs, none of which can actually have been much more than clandestine encounters with girls easily won, was a result of their taking colour from his imagination and appearing to involve a gravity of relationship which precluded kissing and telling. He was not by nature a casual amorist (such as the unredeemed P. P. Killiecrankie had been). He was really looking for something quite different.

Ninian's reserve here, a function of rapidly approaching maturity, made life difficult for me. I was tormented by a need to know just what was going on unreasonably, since I knew I couldn't myself manage what Ninian was bringing off. Had it come, with me, to what Victorian novelists call the embrace, I could as soon have jumped off the Forth Bridge as achieved the thing at that time. I was inept with girls, and my romantic imaginings concerned a snub-nosed younger schoolfellow with the awkward name of Tommy Watt. I was faithful to Tommy Watt, clinging to his image for several years.

Ninian, I am sure, never felt such an attachment. Without being in the least the sort of small boy who always plays with the girls, he did naturally turn to them; when still in shorts and jersey he owned a kind of contained gentleness towards the other s.e.x which was thoroughly masculine. Girls noticed that my clothes were sometimes ragged and always scruffy, but they never marked the same qualities in Ninian's. When quite small I naturally hadn't been troubled by this sort of thing. It became different as we grew older. I had grown a great deal older in fact I was seventeen when something traumatic occurred. Tommy Watt was a solicitor's son, but he had an uncle who was a farmer. Tommy used to spend holidays on the farm, and on one occasion sent me a picture-postcard depicting the dreary little lowland village near which it lay. It seemed to me at once to be a magical place and I had, for that matter, to make the most of the card, since it was the only tangible token of regard that Tommy had ever accorded me. Then, helping with a harvest, Tommy (who was very stupid) contrived to feed himself into some mechanical monster and be chewed to bits.

I found myself unable to touch bread, since I believed there might be some of Tommy in it. This extravagant behaviour baffled and alarmed my parents, but like most hysterical performances didn't last long. For a time I groped around for another Tommy. This didn't last long either. My imagination, which had largely created him, simply refused to take on a further job of the kind. Tommy had died on me both in fact and in his representative character, and that sort of adolescent attachment wasn't to be available to me again. Faced up to, the change seemed encouraging, since for some time I had been feeling (very reasonably) that I ought to have advanced beyond picturing life on a desert island with a younger boy whom I would rescue from sharks, boa constrictors, marauding cannibals and similar hazards drawn from Ballantyne or The Swiss Family Robinson.

It is among the discomforts of growing up that mounting emotional muddles can be coincident with rapid intellectual development, and in my later years at school I had been making up for the uninteresting and depressing character of the inst.i.tution's overt s.e.xual mores by reading popular expositions of the discoveries or theories of Freud and Adler and Jung. Poking about in these regions in some alarm but optimistically on the whole, I concluded that I had pa.s.sed through a crisis of development and was now going to be just like Ninian which I desperately wanted to be. So unflawed was my faith in almost immediate transformation that I bought, in a furtive little shop behind Scotland's General Register Office, a packet of what Killiecrankie's friend the bishop would have called s.e.xual engines. I remember thinking that the shop must be just like Mr Verloc's in The Secret Agent a reflection proving my literary education to have run well ahead of that obtainable in the school of life. The fascinating and revolting objects remained unused. I was in fact quite like Ninian, but some marginal difference between us got in the way of my emulating those preliminary and tormenting skirmishes of his with the strength of l.u.s.t and the enigma of love. When Tony Mumford and I were ending our first year together as cronies in Surrey Quad, and were rivalling most of our companions in outrageousness of bawdy invention, I was still a s.e.xually untried youth this despite episodes of a certain laxity between myself and the elder of my Glencorry cousins. So almost, if not quite was Tony. Belonging to a Catholic family, he was sent (as Ivo was not to be) to a Catholic school, and although I was never to detect in him the slightest vestige of religious faith I imagine that certain stiff teachings on the sinfulness of s.e.xuality unsanctified by marriage took time to wear off.

Ninian and I were unaffected here by either parental att.i.tudes or the doctrines of a church. My mother, like many people in Scotland with her background, was an episcopalian which was why my father, to my perplexity as a child, would sometimes refer to her as the wee piskie. Three or four times a year she attended communion in St John's Church at the end of Princes Street on which occasions my father would accompany her to the door, pay a visit to the tomb of Raeburn (who must also have been a piskie) in the adjoining mortuary chapel, and return home for what he called a quick peg before picking her up again. She was, in fact, innocent of any serious religious consideration, and her att.i.tude to s.e.xual conduct was entirely romantic. She had adored young Lachlan Pattullo from that first moment in the Sistine, and although incapable of cooking him a good meal or washing his children's ears she continued so to adore him all her life. He certainly adored her, and this she believed to be in the nature of things rather than some miracle of the heart.

My father was completely faithful to her. Neither Ninian nor I would have called this in question for a moment; indeed, any speculation on the point could never have entered our heads. Later, I was to consider this facet of my father's character in the context of that easy Bohemianism conventionally predicated of the 'artistic' temperament, and in fact going with it often enough which he constantly exhibited. There seemed to mingle in him a feeling for the broad continental culture of which he had seen a good deal and a yet deeper instinct, submerged but miscellaneously eruptive, for the severe rules of conduct to which he had been bred. Certain small Scottish conformities were dear to him. One of these brings me back, after a fashion, to religious matters. It brings me, too, to Janet.

My father had an elder brother, Norman, who like many another dogged Scottish peasant lad had attained to being a minister of the Kirk. His parish lay in a remote region of Aberdeenshire, so that we saw little of him or his family. (As children, Ninian and I had spent a week in the manse, behaving so badly that, to our satisfaction, we were never invited again.) Uncle Norman had a domed head with only a few wisps of hair, a drooping moustache, and some affliction of the eyes which required him to be constantly dabbing at them with a handkerchief. It was often difficult to understand what he said: partly because his accent was as remote from the genteel Edinburgh speech to which we were accustomed as, in a different fashion, was that of Uncle Rory and Aunt Charlotte; but partly, too, because his remarks tended to fade away into a discouraged murmur. A man more different from his brother it would have been hard to conceive. I cannot think that the Dreich himself was as dreich as the Reverend Norman Pattullo.

My father, however, although in general uninterested in his family connections, had a very high regard, as well as deep affection, for Uncle Norman. Years afterwards, I was to learn from family papers that, when himself still extremely poor, he had supported his brother during his theological studies with money earned by anonymous and demeaning labours as a commercial artist. He must have thought his efforts amply rewarded, since he judged it a great thing to become a minister. And although before his death he had pictures hanging in many of the great galleries of the world (and incidentally become, to his considerable amus.e.m.e.nt, Sir Lachlan Pattullo), he never had any doubt about who was the real credit to the family. My own pride in my father (which I hope appears) was to some extent a reflex of his pride in Norman.

It was this distinguished connection that made my father, somewhat surprisingly, a church-goer and one who insisted on church-going children. We weren't, indeed, haled off to worship every week, but our attendance in our parish church was sufficiently regular to have satisfied Uncle Norman himself that we were not 'sitten-up' an expression applicable in Aberdeenshire, if not in Edinburgh, to those who are culpably neglectful of their religious duties. When we stayed away the fact was bound to be remarked, since we rented our own pew, with my father's name on a card set in a little metal frame by way of intimation that none but Pattullos might lawfully worship there. This curiosity of the devotional life lingered longer, I believe, in Scotland than in England.

My mother had no objection to the Established Church of Scotland, and a considerable fondness for showing off her handsome husband and, as she conceived them, handsome sons. So she always came with us, taking satisfaction in the hymns and metrical psalms (which she sang loudly and erratically), and spending the sermon-time, which could be inordinately long, in studying the hats of the well-dressed women who frequented our rather fashionable conventicle.

Whether Ninian ever believed a word that we were told in church I don't know. I certainly did not. It all seemed the greatest nonsense to me: for the most part merely boring, but occasionally as in the lugubrious hymning of Gethsemane and Calvary and the Crucifixion which led up to the Lord's Supper revolting as well. For a time, indeed, the star preachers of the Scottish Kirk did occasionally sweep me away with a torrential and essentially Gaelic eloquence which seemed endlessly at their command. Such a flow of words, and words on top of words, was exhilarating. But when I came to listen more a.n.a.lytically it was revealed to me that no one thing they said hitched intelligibly on to another. The preachers were in an advanced stage of what I was one day to think of as Junkin's Disease.

The girl whom I knew to be called Janet Finlay sat in the pew behind ours. It was, in fact, the Finlay pew, with a card saying Professor Alasdair Finlay at the end of it. Janet sat invariably in the place immediately behind what was equally invariably mine so that Ninian, sitting next to me, was in a marginally better position to catch a glimpse of her than I was. But it wasn't easy for him either. Looking round in church was perfectly permissible. (As our pew was in a species of transept, my mother could thus rake the whole nave with unviolated propriety.) But turning round attempting to rotate one's head through 18o in order to remedy the defect of not having eyes in the back of it was bad manners.

Both Ninian and I must several times have been in the same room as Janet, but I doubt whether either of us had ever spoken to her. Already some way behind us was that phase of development in which children's parties give place to young people's dances, and to dances we didn't much go nor were we much invited to them, since our social contacts, although variously enlarging themselves, were as a matter of family conditions and a.s.sumptions apart from such things. Janet must have been about sixteen before we were really aware of her, and it was Ninian who admitted being aware of her first.

'She's very beautiful,' he told me gravely, dispa.s.sionately, and with what happened to be an unjustified sense that my attention had to be directed to the circ.u.mstance. 'Those Finlays come from Skye, but it's not a Highland beauty at all. Ancient Skyros would be nearer the mark. It was where Achilles hid among the women and I expect he knew what he was about.'

'So you'll be going after her?' I asked at once sarcastically and with a feeling less easily identifiable than the diffused jealousy Ninian could commonly rouse in me. But I knew that the question was an idle one. Ninian clearly felt that Janet was inadmissibly young for him. He had a strict sense of honour about his conquests. But there was something beyond this. He was now, while awaiting call-up, at the university studying law. It was already apparent, to the confounding of our headmaster's predictions, that he was going to sweep the board clear of every prize and honour available to him. Emotionally s.e.xually, rather he had in consequence dropped into a curious period of belated latency; and this was to continue until, a few years later, he startled us by getting married. He was going to be the youngest Senator of the College of Justice that the records of the Scottish bench disclose and that was that.

So it was now I who was alert to who actually trembled at the sight of Janet Finlay, the girl who merited a Homeric hero as her lover. This made it unfair that every Sunday (for I had begun to urge my parents to unremitting piety) it was Ninian who had that slightly superior opportunity to catch her in what was no more than a connoisseur's glance. I was myself pretty well confined to the few moments of arrival and departure. One didn't kneel in our church (it would have been regarded as a papistical action) but at the end of the service one did bury one's nose and pray. One then stood up, and while the congregation was skailing (which would have been Uncle Norman's word) one was free to stare around as one chose. As there was a gallery at the back of our transept, I could always turn round as if to look up at it and identify acquaintances whom I might later join outside. But the timing of this was tricky; I couldn't prolong the stance, and if I embarked on it too soon Janet's prayers might still be continuing when it was necessary to abandon it, so that I'd glimpse nothing but the top of her hat.

All this must seem an absurd prelude to what was to be a serious matter. I was physically clumsy in these manoeuvres in a fashion that must have represented an externalising of interior confusion. I was in love. I was in love with a girl, not a snub-nosed boy and, moreover, with a girl I had never spoken to. I didn't really know this then. But Ninian knew it. He never teased me about Janet Finlay; rather he preserved what might be called a holy silence in face of the whole phenomenon. For a long time I was to draw comfort from this, the severity of my brother's att.i.tude somehow validating what was going on.

It will be evident that what was going on was as yet no sort of spiritual communion. I have had occasion to speak of Charles Atlas's young wife as so pretty that I hoped to be placed beside her at Mrs Poc.o.c.ke's luncheon-table; of Mrs Poc.o.c.ke herself as having been a notably handsome woman in her prime; of Mabel Bedworth as owning a soft motility of feature making for beauty. This does no more than distinguish me as a man who notices such things; and these several instances are of little consequence. Janet Finlay was beauty's self, and my love a.s.suredly began as eye-love of the sheerest sort. It was a long time before it so much as occurred to me that she must have a voice. This may have been because of the circ.u.mstances of our first contiguity; we were two devout (or supposedly devout) young people, comporting ourselves properly at church. But Janet seemed to take this decorum to an extreme. I never detected her as murmuring a word either to her father on her left or to her mother on her right. Nor did she (and it might have struck me that this was odd) either sing the hymns and psalms or audibly repeat the Lord's Prayer.

She stopped coming to church. For a couple of Sundays I was disappointed but not alarmed. Then I began to wonder whether she was ill, or had suffered an accident. I lacked the courage and, indeed, in that rather stiff society, the t.i.tle to make a bold inquiry of her mother. My father treated Professor Finlay as a stranger, and I had no idea whether they had ever met; it was quite probable that they had, but that my father took as poor a view of Janet's father as he did of that other professor of the university, Ra.n.a.ld McKechnie's.

Then a dreadful thought came to me. Totally overestimating any effect I could have made on Janet, and remembering all my clumsy goggling at her, all those gapings up at the gallery with the corner of my eye elsewhere, all those twists and turns so ineffectively dissimulating my fascination: suddenly remembering these things, I decided that I had offended her, and that this was why she was staying away. When our eyes had met, she had dropped hers not before giving me a steady glance, and certainly with nothing of the suggestion which somewhat similar behaviour on Mrs Bedworth's part was to occasion so long afterwards. But at least the action had been quite definite enough to make it clear that she had no disposition to exchange meaningful looks with a strange young man. My agony upon thus imagining that I had driven her away was extreme. I even hinted the possibility to Ninian.

'Jesus, Dunkie! Why should she go to the place?' Ninian's reaction was robust and immediate. 'Why should we? I'm blessed if I know.'

I knew why I went. I also knew one reason, again not wholly edifying, why Ninian went: if he was going to make his way in our native city a good many wise conformities would be required of him. But it was, furthermore, a matter of being dutiful children, or at least of our having for our father an immense respect which made us decently amenable to those Sunday kilts (not that we hadn't by now exchanged them for honest grown-up trousers) and devastated hours. If my father, incidentally, had noticed my behaviour he made no reference to it; and he certainly couldn't have regarded as censurable any impulse to contemplate a beautiful woman or beautiful landscape, which he would have thought of as much the same thing. My mother did notice, and was a little tiresome as a result. She was given to the spinning of facile romance, and would have dearly liked to see me standing up in a ballroom with such a girl as Janet Finlay and treading a measure like young Lochinvar. She was even not above regarding Janet's absence from the Finlay pew as a matter of a maiden's coy retreat from her swain.

And then I ran into Janet in the public library on George IV Bridge.

I literally ran into her, having dashed into the building for some urgent purpose which I now forget. A book she was carrying went to the ground, and I had picked it up and apologised before there dawned on me the apocalyptic thing that had happened. I also recognised the book. It was The Plumed Serpent. Janet appeared to be on her way to return it to the desk.

'Did you like it?' I asked.

This was an eternal moment, for I had done something I couldn't until the words were spoken have believed myself capable of. And it had never occurred to me that Janet Finlay might read books.

'No, I didn't!' Janet replied instantly, and with a vehemence apparently unconnected with any just sense of outrage she might have felt at being addressed by me. 'That woman Kate. She watches her husband murdering people, and their blood being sprinkled on a sacred fire. And it makes her "uneasy". Just that! Not mad with horror, or crazed with some daft religious ecstasy. "Uneasy" and "gloomy" too. I'd be gloomy! But I suppose it's all deeply true.'

'I don't think it's anything of the sort.' Although my admiration for Lawrence at that time was fathomless, I felt it should be made known to Janet that a line has sometimes to be drawn in him. If she thought I was necessarily, because a man, at all like Don Cipriano or Don Ramon, I just didn't see how she could be made to put up with me.

'And all that idiotic inventing of a new religion'

'It's meant to be the reviving of an old one.'

'I suppose so, but it comes to the same thing. One religion is quite enough, it seems to me, without thinking up other ones.'

'Is that why you don't come to church any longer ....?'

'Yes, it is. I've said I won't and I won't. Not if they beat me.'

'But they wouldn't do that!' I cried, horrified although I knew perfectly well that university professors don't tan their daughters.

'No but they can be beastly.' Janet suddenly looked at me round-eyed. It was only now that she recognised me. 'Sorry,' she said. 'I didn't mean to be rude about your belief in Jesus that sort of thing.'

'I haven't any belief in Jesus.' I was now wildly excited, and I had said this so loudly that a couple of women nearby turned and looked at me disapprovingly.

'Then why do you go to church, and listen to all that s.h.i.te about rising again on the third day?'

'I say, have you tried The Man Who Died?' It seemed to me that this was a brilliant diversion. 'It's smashing Lawrence. Jesus gets up and feels very sick about everything, and can't stand the old crowd any more so cuts out.' I was particularly pleased with myself for thus being able to quote verbatim from a letter. 'So he goes-'

'No, I haven't. And you're not answering my question.'

'But I'd like to. Only it will take a little time. Look will you come and have tea somewhere?'

I had again uttered unbelievable words. Had I known Janet well, I might have said, with reasonable Edinburgh propriety, 'Can you come home with me to tea?' But the notion of a schoolboy entertaining a schoolgirl in a teashop was (or so I imagined) an extremely daring one. I was in my last term at school, but I was dressed, except for long trousers, exactly as I had been dressed when seven or eight: in a blazer and cap with bold identifying badges of a spuriously heraldic order although the cap, indeed, I tended to keep in my pocket. Janet, who was of course younger, conformed to the same general pattern except that hers was a straw boater with a hideously striped ribbon, impossible to conceal anywhere. I think I had a weird idea that we might be turned away from a teashop just as we should be from a pub.

'Are you the painter's son?'

'You're not answering my question, Janet Finlay. But, yes, I'm Lachlan Pattullo's son. My name's Duncan. I'm called Dunkie.'

'Dunkie?' It sounded as if Janet was amused. 'Yes, let's have tea.' She frowned, since this left a necessary point unsettled. 'n.o.body has ever invited me out to tea before. What fun!'

She meant, I supposed, that no young man had done so. I felt panic partly because I hadn't stopped to ask myself if I had more than a couple of shillings in the world. I slipped a hand cautiously into a trouser-pocket; there were half a dozen coins, and an exploring thumb-nail revealed them as having milled edges; this meant that I was rich enough for anything. But we were not in very good teashop territory. Those nearby were poky places, and might give, I felt, a clandestine flavour to the occasion. I wasn't going to have that for hadn't I something to display with which I could have walked proudly into the Palace of Holyroodhouse itself? (Moreover, Oxford was ahead of me, where I was to be John Ruskin Scholar and, no doubt, President of the Union, and everything else as well.) 'We'll take the bus down to Princes Street,' I said with decision.

So we sat on a balcony in mild summer sunshine, with the Castle in front of us, and around us prosperous gossiping women eating oatcakes and drop-scones. I recklessly hoped that my headmaster would turn up at the next table, or at least one of my schoolfellows in attendance on his mother. Not that this sort of self-consciousness lasted long. I became absorbed in the girl beside me.

It would have been a reasonable bet on a wise person's part that what we were in for was an hour's constraint and anticlimax. But nothing of the sort happened. The eternal-moment effect went on. I wasn't to know that, on rare visits to Edinburgh years ahead, I should be unable to look up at this balcony without a stab of pain; should be glad, even, when it disappeared as a result of some hideous developing of the site.

That we talked very coherently about religious faith and doubt is improbable. We were too much children of our time for such matters to have real import for us. We were also children suddenly launched upon a strange ocean. The surge and swell of it made me deliriously happy. I didn't only believe that I was in love with Janet Finlay. I also believed that she was going to be in love with me. I wasn't entirely wrong.

But lying awake that night, I gave myself all sorts of cautions, armoured myself in all sorts of second thoughts. For I wasn't only wary of happiness; I was afraid of it. This was not from any adult knowledge that it is the most vulnerable of human conditions, but rather from a feeling which could fitly have been examined by Janet and myself in the course of any theological discussion we did have. It must have been as an inheritance from my Calvinist forebears that what I had often felt, but now felt more strongly than ever before, came to me. That s.e.xual pleasure pursued as an end in itself is sinful was something I was one day going to believe Tony Mumford had been taught at Downside. I think it may be not untrue, and that a wise humanism can say something very like it. But what lurked in me almost as if I had been my uncle Norman's son and not my father's was a sense that all pleasure, that happiness of any sort, speaks of danger, ought to be treated as a warning that one is approaching at least the antechamber of Auld Nick. I couldn't remotely have articulated this evil doctrine, and it would be misleading to suggest that it had more than a dim and ghostly existence in recesses of my mind. So it was much more another kind of magic that prompted some of my thinking before I went to sleep: the kind of magic that says things won't happen if one forces oneself to expect them to happen. I had embarked, I told myself, on a boy-and-girl affair of the kind that comes to nothing, that one lives to laugh at, that is followed by others of the same sort, that is just part of the ignominy of growing up. Ninian had gone through several such episodes. And although he had been without the temperament to treat them lightly or see them as ephemeral, ephemeral they had been in the end. Janet and I were just kids, and we hadn't a chance. And it seemed to me that this necessitated my being very pure of heart in my love for her.

I fell asleep at last, and it seemed almost at once that I had a dream. It was a very simple dream, but I think not one that a psychiatrist would have predicted so soon after such a radically new experience as that day's. I was in bed with Janet, and we were making love. We had made love; the wet dream was over; I woke up. And as I woke up I heard Ninian's voice say, 'That won't ever happen, Dunkie.'

Of course I had not really come awake not till seconds after. Ninian and I didn't even share a room. But his voice often came as an admonishment or a challenge inside my head, and I rose to it now.

'Yes, it will,' I said aloud into the darkness. And I went to sleep again.

Whether it would or wouldn't had no more been a calculation of mine during our balcony tea than, presumably, it had been of Janet's. The unsensual character of early love (on which Plot was to prove an authority) made all the going. I wanted, above all things, to know about Janet to know her, indeed, but not in the queer sense of the word that sometimes cropped up in the First Lesson during church on Sundays. I think she had an answering impulse, but got less chance to exercise it. All through our tea I held the initiative, being buoyed up by my astounding achievement in the public library. There was no information at all that I didn't want to have. I must have asked a score of absurd questions whether, for example, she preferred cats or dogs as well as others more pertinent. For I was in the grip of that desire to possess in totality which no doubt represents the predatory side of love. My father, absorbed in some vista of glens and lochs and mountains with a blank canvas or sketch-book before him, was the type of the lover his son was that afternoon.

I questioned Janet about her family. She seemed surprised but pleased rather than offended at my not knowing her father to be the university's professor of clinical neurology. She plunged rapidly, vehemently, and even with a kind of pa.s.sion which puzzled me into family history. Both her parents came from Skye. Both came from humble crofting backgrounds. ('So does my father,' I said quickly, since establishing anything in common with Janet was precious to me.) They had been unable to marry young, since her father's struggle for a medical degree had been hard and long. Her mother had become a schoolteacher on Raasay, and had sent him her pay secretly, since it would have been held an improper thing, if known. I noticed that Janet seemed to regard this as having been to her father's discredit, a point on which I should have thought it sensible to keep an open mind. We made common ground although, indeed, most of my friends regularly announced such impatient feelings about the stuffiness and sn.o.bbishness and conventionality of our native city; we had even got hold of the word 'provincial' for it, which was not really an accurate term. But Janet had her att.i.tude to this bound up with her att.i.tude to her family in a way I had not. Perhaps I had an advantage here. My ears and neck would have been cleaner sooner if either of my parents had been brgerlich in the slightest degree, but for the same reason I had largely escaped the exhausting business of being a rebel in the home.

Janet was a rebel but chiefly, it seemed, against her father rather than her mother. She criticised him as given over to foolish schemes of social aggrandis.e.m.e.nt. She was reluctant to disclose (even amid all this frankness, which I was certain wasn't her habit with new acquaintances) that she lived in the very grandest part of the New Town which she scoffed at as 'all those draughty parallelograms'. This told me more than that she had read Stevenson as well as Lawrence. And although it seemed in a way to make allies of us, I had an obscure sense of being in the presence of something that might work against me.

'Well,' I demanded, 'what do you like?'

'A lot of things.' Justifiably, Janet resented thus being indicated, by implication, of too much discontent. 'But going home for the holidays, mostly.'

'Going home?' I repeated blankly.

'Home to Skye.'

'Oh,' I said 'You have a house there too.'

'We haven't. But my uncles have. They're crofters there. And fishermen.'

'I see.' Perhaps thinking of Uncle Rory and Uncle Norman, I judged the possession of relatives even of that degree of consanguinity an inadequate reason for claiming to have a home in distant places. 'Janet!' I said in sudden dismay. 'You're not going to Skye in these coming holidays?' We were already near the end of the summer term.

'But I must!' As she said this, Janet looked at me with a divinely uncalled-for remorse which more than made up for what seemed a senseless vehemence. It was as if China tea (a very sophisticated thought, this had been) and currant baps (more native fare) were being acknowledged as having established a bond between us. I was suddenly and most wholesomely overwhelmed by my consciousness of Janet's beauty. My head swam. 'Don't you' she asked and it was almost accusingly 'ever get away from home?'

'Yes, of course.' I was a little stiff at the suggestion of being childishly attached to ap.r.o.n-strings. 'My brother and I sometimes go to relations at a place called Corry.' I said this guardedly, having an instinct that it wouldn't do hastily to claim kinship with members of the Scottish aristocracy, if that was what Glencorry of that Ilk was to be thought of as belonging to. 'It's right in the Highlands,' I added hopefully thereby no doubt revealing how lowland and urban I was. 'We're sent to run wild in the glens,' I amplified this with a humorous intention which didn't seem quite to come off.

'Hasn't your father,' Janet asked at a tangent, 'got pictures in the National Gallery?'

'Yes, there are two there. And, of course, you can see him every year at the Academy.' This was the inst.i.tution of which my father was so soon to become President. 'And I've got one at home myself, which I want to show you. It's a watercolour, with Ninian and me in it as young Picts. But we're lying in whins, so that all you can see is our heels, really, and our bottoms in anachronistic kilts.' I must simply have babbled this, for the great waters were now sweeping over me.

'I like the National Gallery,' Janet said. 'I like the Millet and the Israels.'

'They're very fine,' I agreed stoutly although these sombrely sentimental evocations of peasant life in fact held no great appeal for me. 'Let's go there now.' The severe Doric building which is the Scottish National Gallery, perched on the Mound, was on view from where we sat.

'We'll go another day. I must go home now. I've got a lot of rotten homework. What else do you like, Duncan?'

'Dunkie.' I was determined to a.s.sert this ultimate intimacy.

'All right I'll always call you Dunkie.' Janet had taken the point. 'But what else do you like?'

'I think I'm going to like going to Oxford. At least I hope so, because otherwise there won't be much point in it. I've won a Scholarship.'

'A kind of bursary?' Janet was obviously ignorant of the glory of an Open Scholarship which got one's name put up in golden letters in our school hall. 'Isn't your father very wealthy?'

'Of course not.' I was almost as horrified as amused. 'We never seem to have a penny.' I felt that this was an awkward overstatement, since I was standing the tea. 'Or say a five-pound note. Painters don't make money, or not for ages and ages.'

'I didn't know.' Janet appeared mollified. 'Once you go to England, I suppose you'll stay there. And paint state portraits of the King and Queen.'

'What a daft idea!' It hadn't occurred to me that Janet might take it for granted that in the modern world painting was a hereditary affair. 'I can't draw a line.'

'Then what are you going to do?'