Staircase in Surrey: The Gaudy Part 13

'I'm going to be a writer.'

I had never said this to anyone, not even Ninian, before. My father must have known it was in my head, but only because of the scribblings I sometimes showed him although his awareness of my ambition had become more or less explicit, indeed, in his dark remarks about Galsworthy and Wells. But that I should myself utter such words, and give them the cast of a stated fact, was a new thing.

'You'll be a great writer, Dunkie,' Janet said with gravity.

I knew for there was much that was clear-headed in me, at least when I was a boy that I wasn't going to be that. Janet Finlay had completed her conquest of me, all the same.

After its whirlwind beginning (or what I thought of as that) our relationship became unexpectedly cautious and hesitant. We met several times in the National Gallery, simply because the place had turned up in our first conversation. We were naturally a good deal less aware of the pictures than of one another. But this consciousness was a self-consciousness as well. Our shyness for we were shy in each other's company, after all must have been in part socially determined: we couldn't pretend to be art students and there didn't seem to be other schoolboy-and-schoolgirl couples around. We did better on Sat.u.r.days and Sundays, out of school clothes and going for walks together. But this attracted the awareness of our parents, and soon we had been to tea in each other's houses and were established as having formed a friendship entirely right and proper for our years. There was a certain depressant effect about this. It acted particularly upon Janet who, although so much younger, was more in need of a sense of enlarged independence than I was.

My mother was a little too enthusiastic about my new a.s.sociation. Ninian's affairs had sometimes bewildered her and taken her out of her depth, and she was determined to see Janet and myself in another light. Ninian had been a hunter abroad, and had never willingly brought a girl home in his life. My mother's notion of an ideal love-affair had generated itself out of her own history; it must be highly romantic while at the same time not disruptive of existing family ties. This led her to insist on making the acquaintance of Janet's mother. It required considerable address. Mrs Finlay was a maternal woman simple, reserved, and domestically competent who shared with her daughter a lack of enthusiasm for the social ambitions of the professor of clinical neurology. She must have been much more distrustful of the disorder of our household than impressed by my mother's being a sister of the Glencorry. Janet, when she discovered this kinship, wasn't impressed either or at least not favourably. When she wanted to do battle with me (and that she sometimes did was perhaps a sign that our relationship, although adolescent, held the seeds of maturity) she would pretend that I was virtually the Glencorry myself, fatuously convinced of the devotion of feudal dependants who, in fact, hated me in their guts. I resented this joke I thought justifiably, since my own views were of a thoroughly egalitarian sort. I wondered how Janet could have come by such stuff.

The holidays arrived, and Janet went off to Skye. We didn't write to each other. The initiative ought to have been mine. What seemed to deter me was a sense that anything I did write would be received by Janet in circ.u.mstances and amid surroundings unknown to me and that these would somehow render shallow, callow, or otherwise unsympathetic anything that a schoolboy thought to scribble. It was an instinctive feeling of the kind that is seldom wholly astray. But now, looking back, I see in this abstention the first intimation of something in myself an unready or unripe condition, it must be called which ill fortune was to render definitive.

The holidays ended, and schoolchildren were back at school. Oxford, however, was still some weeks off, and during these weeks I managed to see a great deal of Janet. While she was away I had formed the superst.i.tious conviction that if I didn't succeed in kissing her before my own imminent departure I should lose her for ever. But how was I to go about it? Did I ask her permission? Or did I firmly announce what I was about to do? Or did I just do it? I had no means of coming to a decision, but in fact I ended by kissing Janet with no more preparation than a swift glance. This action, which turned out triumphantly natural, took place, whether appropriately or not, in front of Yermeer's Christ in the House of Mary and Martha.

Our subsequent kisses, like the first one, were unembarra.s.sed affairs, but unaccompanied by words. They took place, reasonable privacy permitting, on meeting and parting, and I think not much at other times. It was as if shaking hands had become infinitely precious and exciting, but could not without extravagance be indulged in at all hours as a result. I suppose we were happy rather than unhappy in those brief weeks, but at the same time we were both aware that something disturbing and paradoxical had entered our relationship. The paradox had to do with what in another context might have been called growth-rates. Superficially, I had taken a jump ahead of Janet. Emanc.i.p.ation had arrived. I should never again hurtle into a school yard on a bicycle at nine o'clock; never again call anybody 'sir' unless I chose to; never again be under the slightest compulsion to solve trigonometrical problems or memorise the princ.i.p.al exports of Chile. I had acquired a surprising array of new clothes from a good tailor my father having perhaps taken it into his head that Wee Dreichie might be overgone (as he certainly might) in this department also. More significantly, my thoughts were beginning to project themselves with an increasing sense of contact and reality into an adult future.

If Janet thought very coherently about an adult future I didn't hear about it. But she was certainly concerned to get away from where she was, and out of that symbol of subjection which she called 'this b.l.o.o.d.y nunnery stuff' meaning her school uniform and awful school hat. I was rather shocked at hearing Janet say 'b.l.o.o.d.y', although among my male contemporaries I enjoyed using as many improper words as they did. (There were some boys Ra.n.a.ld McKechnie, for instance who were chaste of speech. But we didn't admire them.) But if Janet was increasingly impatient with her schooling it wasn't because she was no good at her books. It was obvious, indeed, that she was much more generally successful at school subjects than I was. She liked languages, and particularly she liked French; my father had been astonished and delighted when he had one day thought to tease her with his own rapid command of it, and she had been suddenly fired to give him back quite as much as she got.

But I had grown older only on the surface and as a matter of changed status; whereas Janet, still in thrall to all the circ.u.mstances of childhood, had grown older deeper down. I had been aware of this almost in the first moments of seeing her on her return from Skye. It was an awareness difficult to get clear or express. There was more of her that was mysterious to me than before; she would sometimes look at me with a brooding reserve which reminded me of her mother; I had an uneasy sense of being left out of something that was going on.

This was the new paradox in our relationship, and she certainly understood it better than I did. The fact emerged in one of her sudden plunges into mockery. These didn't happen frequently. Although she was a prize girl on a much less narrow front than I was a prize boy, she seemed, indeed, to set increasing store on possessing in me a kind of unofficial tutor. I was drawn, in consequence, into an instructive role which I wasn't stupid enough not to distrust. I explained books and pictures to her (matters about which I knew quite a lot) and also music and politics (of which I was almost entirely ignorant). It was as if I represented something to which she had an impulse to cling. I was alert enough to dislike this impersonalising of me, even although I was sure it const.i.tuted only one element in a complex state of feeling. She wasn't regarding me (I can recall specifically telling myself) merely as a walking and talking junior encyclopaedia, as she might regard, for instance, somebody like Ra.n.a.ld McKechnie. This was a random thought. It had never appeared that the Finlays and McKechnies, although both university people, knew each other.

'Off to boarding school at your age!' she suddenly flashed out at me. 'When you might be growing a wee moustache, and even hoping for a wee beard, so that you'd be able to turn into a perfectly respectable gamekeeper and get a job with your grand uncle.' (She may have been reading Lady Chatterley's Lover although this is improbable, that novel being not yet rampant in public libraries. Whether Mellors is bearded or not, I don't recall.) 'What do you mean, boarding school?' Although Janet's words seemed absurd, I made this demand with a sinking heart, having an intuition that there was a sense in which she was saying something true.

'An Oxford college is like that, isn't it? A lot of young men behaving like children kicking footb.a.l.l.s, and rowing up and down a river in daft little boats, and ragging around, and being no end swells and mashers.'

'Certainly not mashers,' I said feebly and indeed wondering where Janet could have raked up so outmoded a word. 'And I suppose I'm going to do quite a lot of work. They'll let me do what I like doing, more or less. Or so I'm told.'

'I'd like you to be a gamekeeper.'

'Don't be silly. You'd like nothing of the sort. And I'd be a d.a.m.ned bad gamekeeper, anyway. I shouldn't even make a decent gillie.'

'I don't agree. You're clever enough to be anything, Dunkie.'

'But gillies don't need to be clever. In fact cleverness is regarded as a disadvantage in humble life.' I had been melted, as I always was, by Janet's using my pet name. 'But of course if you give an order, that's another matter.'

This was a not unamiable wrangle, and it went on for some time. But there was something I distrusted in it. And Janet was aware of this. We kissed with an unusual and incautious ardour at the end of that encounter.

It seems strange to me now that just this perplexed relationship with Janet should have continued unaltered for a considerable span of time. We wrote to each other sufficiently regularly for the mere fact of our so writing to be interpretable as reflecting a love-affair. But our letters were not in the common sense love-letters; they belonged to the same hovering world which we inhabited whenever I was spending in Edinburgh some part of a vacation during which Janet didn't happen to be on holiday in Skye. This simple chronological statement tells a lot. Janet had been right about Oxford at least to the extent that I was absorbed in a new and (as it seemed to me) much larger world. There wasn't only Oxford. There was the continent Hitler's continent during so much of my later boyhood rapidly opening up as well. I had rather a lot of money: this because my father judged it natural to share with Ninian and myself a prosperity which as can happen with artists, even good ones had come tumbling in overnight. But there was something, too, more inward than all this. Janet had been right about the boarding school as well. If intellectually I was looking ahead to adult concerns, socially and even emotionally (like an old gentleman advertising beer at that time) I was growing younger every day. Nearly all my companions, with the exception of a few older ones back from the war, were recent products of a system which r.e.t.a.r.ds s.e.xual development in all but the crudest and most boisterous expression. They looked down on P. P. Killiecrankie's overtly behaving as he did at least within the ring-fence of the college but were to some extent P. P. Killiecrankies at heart. s.e.xual behaviour as something to be interwoven with the other facts of life was still some years ahead of them.

Of course it is silly to shunt on to a new environment in this way the burden of my own pusillanimity. And I'd have done better but for certain events at home. Janet at times seemed to be watching and waiting with amus.e.m.e.nt. She no longer much made fun of me. On the contrary she occasionally betrayed a kind of remorseful tenderness which at once troubled me and went deeply to my heart. And she wasn't puzzled about me. It was I myself who was that.

My mother who had married when so young her lover of the Sistine Chapel thought that Janet and I should at least be engaged. She tried to treat us as engaged, which was a great embarra.s.sment. She tried to exploit in this interest a discovery she believed herself to have made about the health of Janet's mother. It would be a comfort to Mrs Finlay, she maintained, to know that all was going to turn out well.

This solicitude was in part vindicated, since Mrs Finlay did rather suddenly die. The event precipitated changes still so strange and poignant to me that I must simply hurry over them without a.n.a.lysis. Janet's mourning turned within months into a strange desperation not to be penetrated by anything I could write or say. Then she sent me, very briefly, news that went some way to explaining this. She had been there had never been any doubt of it very much her mother's child. And now her father she wrote had married again, and with what she called indecent haste, the daughter of somebody very much grander than Roderick Glencorry. The clinical neurologist's social ambition had fulfilled itself.

I am certain I didn't think about this information, or rather about the tone in which it was conveyed, as clearly as I ought to have done. It is sad to lose a mother, and commonly upsetting to acquire a stepmother; and when I heard of Professor Finlay's precipitancy I very much wished that I had been at home and in a position to support Janet as I might. I was at a maximum of obtuseness which in the event was to be shattered rapidly enough. The letter I wrote to Janet was long and far too full of wisdom. Since I did at least know this the moment I had posted it I wasn't surprised that it received no direct reply. When Janet did again write it was as briefly as before. But I took what she had to say as rea.s.suring to the extent that it seemed to mark a return to practical interests. As soon as I came home for the next vacation I must teach her to drive a car. It was going to be essential that she should be able to do that.

I had only recently pa.s.sed my own driving test. It had been in a sports car owned by Tony of the sort in which the bonnet purports to be held down by enormous leather straps; and as n.o.body employed by a Minister of Transport to test young drivers could possibly remain unprejudiced at the sight of so lethal-seeming an object I felt a reasonable confidence that I must be pretty good. So I looked forward to teaching Janet rapidly and well. I also decided that I wasn't returning to Oxford without having asked her to marry me.

The first part of this plan presented no difficulty. In the Finlays' car the newness of which was more of a rarity than it would have been a year or two later we drove round the environs of Edinburgh, and later through the city itself, for hours on end. On several occasions we did longer runs in the countryside sometimes threading our way through those hills in which I couldn't but remember that Ninian had first made a girl his mistress. But Janet was so tense and withdrawn that I found it astonishing she never did anything wrong. Her concentration on the job she had set herself was absolute. I had a sense of this singleness of purpose as ominous, as somehow alien to our relationship as I believed it to be. But what did Janet believe it to be? I realised I simply didn't know. I had deferred, avoided indeed, for too long those explicit questions and avowals through which it is a grown man's part to further a love relationship. And now to Janet almost, it might be said, to a Janet afforded no token that I really existed in an adult world something had happened. I understood it not in the least, or only as something that took me quite out of my own range of feeling, power to action. In fact, these were the last days of my adolescence. I was soon, at least, to be clear of confusion.

I returned to Oxford with nothing achieved. I was bewildered and in some mysterious way humiliated. A letter came from Janet a few weeks later. It was addressed from Skye.

Dearest Dunkie, I am married to Calum and as I write his name I realise I have never spoken it to you. So I have treated you very badly. Dunkie, I had to get away. But it has been more than that. I have just been driven with no more will than a leaf before a gale. It's hardly even me, or a personal thing in any way. C'est venus toute entiere sa proie attachee. With much love and I am very sorry.

Janet Grant I stared at Racine's line stupidly, and told myself that this was what came of doing French. I remarked that Janet had got her accents right. I then tore the letter into very small pieces, being determined that it wouldn't live on in a drawer to be taken out and brooded over many years ahead. I wrote to Janet at once about her rightness and about the happiness I hoped she would enjoy. I did this strangely without effort, and before any grief or bitterness came to me. There was nothing else to do. I knew that I loved her very much.

We never wrote to each other again, and I was very far from wanting anybody to talk to me about Janet. At home, however, the subject couldn't be simply ignored. My mother expressed astonishment and indignation, and had to be stopped. My father spoke briefly and, I think wisely taking what had happened as very much in the nature of things. Whether he thought I had behaved feebly I don't know; more probably he saw me as having escaped but hurt rather more badly than might have been expected from a commitment beyond my years. I found comfort in his indisposition in the least to censure Janet. That I was a meritorious and accredited lover lightly jilted by a faithless girl was the one vision of the thing I couldn't at all suffer, since nothing would have been less fair. I hadn't, for example, been without knowledge of Calum Grant's name and calling. They had appeared, once and enigmatically, on one of Janet's postcards, a signal which I neglected to read. The inhibited condition which Oxford had caused to linger with me, Oxford was just at this time breaking up. We were no more, perhaps, than liberated schoolboys still, but here and there among my companions what we called girl-trouble was declaring itself, and my own necessities were changing as if in mysterious sympathy with those of my friends. In this new context, narrow but commanding, I equally with Janet had been faithless. On me, too, Venus had been at work. I had been experiencing for another girl a fatal one in the end a sudden and dreadfully simple s.e.xual infatuation.

Before the whole spectacle of his brother in those final growing-pains Ninian was wary and perceptive. He knew very well where my heart really lay. He knew too that the last thing I would want to hear about Janet was that she had landed herself in fiasco or misery, and he probably had a realistic sense that it was not altogether unlikely to turn out that way. His first discovery on my behalf one not difficult to make was of a neutral and unsurprising sort. Calum Grant was a crofter's son, and of a family related to Janet's own. He had himself become a fisherman. And he was likely to be something between poor and very poor. What Janet had taken lessons with me for wasn't the driving of a Rolls Royce. It was trucking in the peat from where it was footed on the moss.

Some years went by before Ninian had more to tell. He had been to Skye on legal affairs. He hadn't tried to glimpse Janet Grant that, his delicacy would have forbidden but he had seen her husband. Calum, he told me firmly, was what any woman would call a lovely man. And there were now two boys.

I formed a picture of these four people. My father, could he have seen inside my head, would have p.r.o.nounced it an early David Wilkie, and I might myself have thought of it as an Israels with most of the sombreness left out. The children were prominent at that fireside, for the thought of Janet's two stalwart sons pleased me. It is curious that the long-limbed, long-haired creatures whom I have reported as sometimes visiting my breakfast-table were so very unlike them: were so very English and public-school. I don't think that Janet Grant was the mother of those dream-children. There are limits to the sentimentality into which a more or less sophisticated mind is willing to deliquesce. And, of course, I had long since ceased to think very constantly about Janet Finlay, who had become Janet Grant.

But now I was sitting at the same table with her in the Provost's Lodging. And Janet McKechnie was her new name.

XV.

Miss Minton as I had remembered just in time was the author of a book on commedia a soggetto, and when I wasn't being talked to by Mrs Poc.o.c.ke I conversed on topics prompted by this learned circ.u.mstance. Both ladies must have judged me distraught; since they knew about the readership they may have concluded me to be much preoccupied by it.

Janet being on the Provost's right, and myself on Mrs Poc.o.c.ke's, we were beyond speaking range, but had a clear view of one another diagonally across the table. I wondered whether Janet had expected to meet me. It seemed to depend on how Mrs Poc.o.c.ke had gathered her party. If it was an impromptu affair, it might have been natural for her to say on the telephone something like 'Edward hopes that Duncan Pattullo may be coming'. If it had been organised some time ago, my own possible presence was the less likely to have been mentioned. On the whole, it was probable that our meeting had been a surprise to Janet. In the few seconds of our confrontation before moving into the dining-room she had said nothing to prompt either one conclusion or the other.

I wondered, too, whether on his return home from the Gaudy dinner Ra.n.a.ld McKechnie had mentioned to his wife having sat beside a schoolfellow. And from this a more curious question sprang. What did McKechnie know about the romance of near-childhood between Janet and me? I had learnt as yet nothing of the circ.u.mstances under which Janet's second marriage had come about. But it must have been entered into in maturity, and it would seem natural that innocent relationships in an almost distant past would be among the confidences exchanged between a husband and wife. Could Ra.n.a.ld McKechnie, knowing about it, regard it as an occasion for constraint between us? Had it even been a factor in that morning's awkwardness in the Cornmarket? The idea seemed absurd, but I saw sufficient possibility of substance in it to be glad I hadn't obeyed an impulse to ask bluntly 'Are you married?' during our encounter the night before. McKechnie was now listening attentively to Mrs Gender, who had settled for gardening as the best table-topic between them. McKechnie still displayed pens and pencils in his breastpocket, and I saw that he also maintained another old habit: that of seizing upon something uncommonly like a shoelace to serve as a tie. Catching myself noting this, I had to conclude that the new situation found me not incapable of jealousy. It was certainly producing early intimations of emotion of one sort or another.

Janet several times looked at me gravely, and once she smiled. She was a beautiful woman in her earliest forties. But the smile took me back a long way. I remembered her occasional air of amused yet tender expectation, so at variance with her habitual vehemence, and it now seemed to me that there had been something maternal in it; that the schoolgirl had once watched me as a woman watches and waits over a growing son.

We rose from table to take coffee in the Day-room. There was no time to lose, since at any moment the Provost might propose withdrawing to his library to discuss the readership. I got close to Janet, and when our cups had been handed us carried her off by a glance to the far end of the big chamber. Rossetti's contribution to its splendours a portrait of Elizabeth Siddal, sultry, fated, magnificent, and as ill-painted as could be thus presided over us as we talked.

'Janet, I just never had word of you. What happened?'

'To Calum and the boys? They were drowned. Twelve years ago.'

I had expected that mortality would be part of the story. It was unlikely that Janet had been divorced. But I had expected nothing like this. I felt my eyes fill with tears.

'He must have taken them out very young.'

'They were to follow him.'

'Yes, of course.' I was entirely off-balance, and judged my comment, since it implied censure of Calum, to be as luckless as anything I had ever said; nothing even in the emotion of the moment could excuse it. But Janet showed no displeasure. Could I now say, 'I wish I'd known'? The words would have been prompted by sympathy and sorrow, but they too might have sounded ill. 'And then?' I asked.

'Naturally, there was no money. I went back to Edinburgh and qualified as a nurse.'

'I see.' Now I was really stumped, for any further question must lead to McKechnie and suggest inquisition. Janet appeared to feel that her account of herself was, for the moment at least, concluded, and that my own history might be inquired into.

'Dunkie,' she asked, so that the name went to my heart like an arrow, 'were you married for long?'

'No, not at all long. Under three years. My wife and I weren't in the least right for each other.'

'I'm very sorry. I read about your marriage, and was glad. But I never heard anything more not until quite recently. Ra.n.a.ld and I always try to see your plays.'

'Do you think they're any good? You had considerable hopes of me, Janet, a long time ago.'

'I don't think the plays you've written are as good as the plays you may still write.'

'That's rather my notion, too.' As I said this our eyes met, and I was conscious that we had both found a moment's amus.e.m.e.nt. I was conscious, too, of happiness, and that it sprang from a sense of how much we could trust one another. There was no possibility of my saying anything wrong again. This ecstatic conviction prompted my next words. 'Does Ra.n.a.ld,' I asked, 'know how much I was in love with you?'

'He certainly ought to. I quite went to town about it.' As Janet said this there was straight mischief in her glance. 'But there are things that don't make much of a mark on Ra.n.a.ld. He's a very learned and abstracted man.' Janet paused, and I told myself, apparently without dissatisfaction, that here was yet another of those loyal and devoted wives. 'But he produced, out of his head, a list of the prizes you'd won at school. He said you'd beaten him hollow for one of them.'

'Yes,' I said, 'so I did. I think it was for an essay on the advantages and disadvantages of civilisation.'

'It's possible to feel both acutely, wouldn't you say? I'd have expected Ra.n.a.ld to produce the more balanced view.' Janet looked across the room. 'Dunkie, the Provost's coming to n.o.bble you. Goodbye.'

Would I be willing to consider the Provost was asking me ten minutes later an appointment for five years in the first instance? The university had not come quite unprompted to the discovery that a Readership in Modern European Drama was one of its first priorities at the moment. But that caution the Provost continued smoothly was not at all to its credit, for wasn't the subject eminently one which ought to be brought more securely within the sphere of serious criticism? Moreover, one had to consider the young people, and anything they showed signs of being prepared to interest themselves in. Anything of the intellectual sort, that was. There were grave persons around into whose heads this consideration never entered. But the Provost himself gave it much thought. That was why noticing, as he had, the disposition of undergraduates to absorb themselves in theatrical activities he had concerned himself with the benefaction from the start. For he must be candid with me a benefaction there had been: from an American source, wholly unsolicited, and (to return to the point in hand) for an a.s.sured period of five years only. What did I think of that?

'Five years,' I repeated, and tried to give a considering tone to the words. But five fours are twenty, I was telling myself, and it was through nearly that span of years that it had not occurred to me to continue acquainting myself with Janet's fortunes. All I had done was to think of her from time to time. Or hardly even that. It had been a matter only of picturing her with Calum the lovely man on the other side of the hearth, and the boys playing around. And this reverie, as thick with sentiment as Burns's The Cotter's Sat.u.r.day Night, I had continued to indulge during the brief period when my marriage seemed a happy one. Now I was shocked at myself. 'Yes,' I said, 'five years seems to me about right.'

'It represents the formal position only.' The n.o.ble features of the Provost signalled encouraging intelligence from some inner circle of the initiated in the university's mysteries. 'There could be no possibility of an actual termination. Indeed, I should imagine that at the end of that period the post would become fully professorial. A chair would be created.'

'So I'd become just like Ra.n.a.ld McKechnie.'

'Just so.' The Provost's voice hinted mild surprise. He was ent.i.tled to feel something of the sort at such a dotty remark. It was probably his conclusion that I had attempted some uncertain stroke of humour. 'But of course you were at school with him!' he exclaimed, as if this explained the matter. 'It's why my wife had the thought of asking the McKechnies to her luncheon party. Had you met Janet McKechnie before? She's a most charming woman.'

'I had. She is.'

'Yes, indeed.' This had been too brisk for the Provost, who had to recollect himself. 'But as we were saying, five years.'

'Five years.'

If this further inane repet.i.tion disconcerted Edward Poc.o.c.ke I didn't trouble myself with noticing the fact. For I was again doing sums in my head. It had been four or five years after Janet's first marriage that Ninian gave me his last news of her. Probably he never had occasion to return to Skye, and she and her family must have pa.s.sed as completely out of his knowledge as out of mine. It was now twelve years, Janet had told me, since she had lost all her menfolk to the sea. And that had been the year I worked it out in which my marriage was dissolved. Janet had heard of the marriage, but not till long afterwards of the divorce.

I stared at these facts, and incidentally at the Provost, since the facts appeared to float like a tenuous but material substance somewhere in the region of his well-trimmed beard. I felt stupidly that some lesson, some precept, was to be learnt from them. They were facts that could be drawn upon, I concluded, for the material of one of those foolish advertis.e.m.e.nts with which the Post Office seeks to revive the declining practice of letter-writing. Somewhere somebody is waiting for a letter from YOU. This, of course, was idiotic. Had Janet Grant in her bereaved condition had a thought of the inhibited youth who had given her driving lessons she could have got news of him readily enough. Just when she had married McKechnie I didn't yet know, since to have put the question to her in the context of our talk might have carried the most impossible implication. But I did want to know. It was when I found myself on the verge of inquiring whether the Provost could enlighten me that I saw I must pull myself together. At least I saw clearly where the true lesson lay. It had been inadequate in me, and uncivilised, not to try to keep Janet Grant as a friend a penfriend at a safe remove, as it would have had to be. Making up that fireside Wilkie and telling myself I reverenced it had been a weak and unwholesome abnegation, a vagary of a writer's imagination soppier even than thinking up those long-limbed boys. And I couldn't plead that my own marriage had been responsible. The years, the brute chronology again, negatived that. I continued to stare at Edward Poc.o.c.ke aware of the insufficiency of Duncan Pattullo as I had never been aware of it before.

'I can see the five-year term only as thoroughly advantageous, Provost.' I heard myself say this in the most level way. 'The notion of a trial run of giving the thing a go is implicit in it. And I think that entirely right.'

'Quite so, my dear Pattullo. It leaves you free. We will regard it like that.' The Provost smiled urbanely, which was the nearest his temperament and training permitted him to go in the way of triumph. For a moment I found myself speculating on the ident.i.ty of the unacceptable candidate or candidates whom he was feeling his expert handling of the situation to have put to rout. It was a vain search. I could think of half a dozen men much better qualified than I was to put Modern European Drama on its feet within the University of Oxford. 'I am most happy about it,' I heard the Provost say. 'After all, you know our ways, my dear fellow.'

I accepted this encomium (as I supposed it to be) becomingly, although I had no reason to judge it particularly true. And the interview was concluded. When we returned to the Day-room it was to find that the party had broken up with an informality which would have been impossible in the early days of the Poc.o.c.kes' tenure of the Lodging. The style of the later Mrs Poc.o.c.ke was evident in the change. I was glad not to have to say a second goodbye to Janet or even, for the moment, to look her husband in the eye. It would have been trying to have to hear an announcement of my probable accession to whatever faculty of the university traded in Modern European Drama. But that would have been unlikely. The appointment, presumably, had yet to be worked although that was a crude expression, of a sort which in future I should doubtless have to eschew.

As I was taking my leave of Mrs Poc.o.c.ke her husband referred to me as Duncan. It was gracefully done, but there was something dreadfully definitive about it.

XVI.

I left the Lodging, bowed out by the sombre Honey, and walked across the Great Quadrangle to the gate, where I consulted the porter about late-afternoon trains to London. Then I returned to Nick Junkin's rooms, packed my suitcase, put a tip on the mantelpiece for Plot, and told myself to relax. In front of me there was only the Talberts' tea party. After that I was free to depart, and to begin thinking about the five years' a.s.signment I had committed myself to.

It was a sun-soaked afternoon. I threw open the windows upon the spectacle of the library in apparent sinuous movement as warm rising air washed over it. Formerly, when the great facade with its ma.s.sive columns was crumbling, flaked and tettered, the effect had been curiously submarine, as if one were peering through gla.s.s at the superannuations of sunk realms, and might at any moment spy finny monsters emerge with clammy quartos or folios in their jaws. But now the ma.s.sive building, re-edified and gleaming, held the same suggestion of mise en scene as had Howard with its litter of rope and canvas the night before rather as if somebody had painted on enormous flats a Veronese-like architectural fantasy which a strong draught from the wings kept faintly stirring.

It was with some satisfaction that I took refuge in this idle word-spinning; I'd had enough of the pressure of immediate life for a while. I sat down and tried it was a similar exercise to recall Nicolas Junkin of c.o.keville clearly. By now he must be thumbing his way efficiently towards the corner of the globe known to him as Turky. He would manage it almost for free which had proved, in an unexpected fashion, to be the manner in which his neighbour Ivo Mumford had reached New York. Paul Lusby, whom Ivo had so lucklessly challenged to harmless folly at the Commem Ball, had departed on a longer journey.

Others untimely dead a lovely man and two Highland boys were closer to me, although them Fate had overtaken twelve years ago. I found myself back with the sums, calculating Janet McKechnie's age. Conceivably it had been after a long widowhood, conceivably it had been no time ago, that she had married an Oxford professor. The Talberts might know. Perhaps Janet might have other children still.

I sat for some time, uselessly brooding. Then I looked at my watch. In half an hour I could have a porter summon me a taxi to take me out to Old Road. But that I suddenly remembered wouldn't do. Hadn't I promised Albert Talbert to walk? He was certain to question me closely on my afternoon's pedestrianism. Acknowledging an ancient compulsion to obey a tutor's behest and being restless, too, under my own company I got up and set out walking now.

The High was uncrowded. A few bicycles had been chucked, negligently and illegally, against the walls of the Examination Schools. Farther east, where the quiet vista closed, somebody had outrageously perched the peeping top of a structure like a silo or a grain elevator. Punts waggled familiarly under Magdalen Bridge. Beyond that were several new buildings, chunky but towering, as if the children of the G.o.ds had been tumbling out their building-blocks on some supernal playground on the banks of the Cherwell. But beyond this again nothing much had changed. I was pa.s.sing through an area not greatly favoured for residential development.

I became aware of the Bedworths Cyril and Mabel walking ahead of me. They might have been making for anywhere within a wide segment of outer Oxford-or, equally, open country beyond. Bedworth, now Talbert's junior colleague, must have been in some degree Talbert's pupil long ago a circ.u.mstance of which I couldn't have been ignorant, although it had entirely faded from my memory. Talbert had no doubt marched him around the countryside quite as much as he had me; and with Bedworth the habit had stuck. So Bedworth and his Mabel were off on such a tramp now.

As I came to this conclusion I lost interest in it, and the detail of my excursions with Talbert (and, often, with Boanerges) flooded into my head instead. The walks always began with an air of purposeful research. We were to find the Scholar Gipsy's Elm, or visit the stripling Thames at Bablockhythe, or trace the line of the roadway constructed by undergraduates under the direction of Ruskin, or peer into that garden at Littlemore in which a spy sent out by Keble or Pusey or some such person had detected John Henry Newman fatally attired in flannel trousers this apparently revealing beyond any possibility of error that the first intellect in Anglican Oxford had perverted to Rome. It had been impossible to tell how serious Talbert was in conducting these instructive peregrinations, since his fathomless gravity was always liable to yield place at crucial moments to equally fathomless mirth. And often the expeditions ended well short of their mark. We would come to a halt at a pub; Talbert would stick his head inside and call out loudly, 'Weak tea for two!' and confidently await the arrival of this beverage on a bench in the garden or by the door. I can recall no pot-house, however unpropitious in seeming, that ventured to refuse what was thus demanded.

I walked for a hundred yards or so in the luxury of these reminiscences, and then it occurred to me that the Bedworths were scarcely dressed as for a rural ramble. Bedworth was in a London suit which again didn't quite fit. Mrs Bedworth's clothes, too, were distinguishably on the formal side. They fitted very well. So the couple were probably making for the same tea party as myself. And like me they had undertaken to arrive on foot.

They were walking briskly, but nevertheless it seemed inc.u.mbent upon me to catch up with them, since it would be an unfriendly thing if I were detected with any appearance of lingering in their rear. There was something, moreover, I wanted to get out of Bedworth if I could. So I quickened my pace, and presently gave a familiar hail. Bedworth turned round, and at once signalled his pleasure in recognising me. His wife turned too, but seemingly with the intention of studying the pavement a yard or so in front of me. The effect was something to which I now felt habituated.

'Are you by any chance going to tea with the Talberts?' I asked.

'Yes, we are.' As he said this, Bedworth took a step away from his wife. The vacancy thus created was plainly designed for me, and we walked on three-abreast. 'Do you remember, Duncan, how we used to go to tea there as undergraduates?'

'Yes, indeed.' This, I am afraid, wasn't true. I couldn't remember ever having visited Old Road in Bedworth's company although equally I couldn't have sworn that I had not. n.o.body more than Bedworth had impressed on me during the past twenty-four hours some of the oddities of memory. When we say that a man has changed or not changed over a period of years we are likely to be making substantially a subjective statement. We may even, in a sense, be saying what it was determined we should say before the renewed encounter took place this since our temperament, our disposition to confront or deny the flow of things, is a factor in what we believe to be a truth of observation. Again, some people and things return to us as from fifty years back, although we know perfectly well that our own fiftieth birthday is still far ahead. In extreme cases the effect can const.i.tute a kind of ontological puzzle, and evoke notions of pre-existence to which I seem to recall that a learned name was given by Plato. I didn't at all suppose that I had known Bedworth or the Provost or P. P. Killiecrankie dimly in another life. But they did tend to flow to and fro in time, and with Bedworth in particular I was now conscious of harbouring patches of amnesia. I suspected that in some way my spirit had been rebuked by his. A serious and responsible youth, capable of a warmth of friendly feeling I had accepted without much bothering to reciprocate: these qualities had conceivably made of Cyril Bedworth a Gunga Din figure I had been ready virtually to forget. A totally different effect had accompanied my renewed acquaintance with Tony Mumford. In point of fact, Tony had obviously changed more than Cyril had; the political man he now was had been, prelusively, only glimpsed by me. Yet Tony had swum back to me at once as from no further away than the length of a bathing pool.

'I hope,' Bedworth was saying, abruptly but cautiously, 'you had a satisfactory talk with the Provost?'

'Yes, I think I had. At least I hope it was that.' Here was an introduction to the point I wanted to get at. 'I was very much flattered, Cyril. I can't think how the idea has come into anybody's head.'

'It gathered force very quickly. Almost everybody is dead set on it.'

'That's more flattering still.' I wondered vaguely what individuals were covered by that qualifying 'almost'. 'I met James Gender's wife, and she said a most unaccountable thing.'

'Anthea Gender goes in for saying unaccountable things.' Mrs Bedworth came out with this decisively.

'She's really a very good sort,' Bedworth said anxiously. 'Of course, her wavelength is a little remote at times. She comes of county people. Like Arnold Lempriere.'