Staircase in Surrey: The Gaudy Part 2

'Would he, indeed?' I found myself trying to visualise Tony's father a Tony thirty years on thus experiencing a trick of the old rage. 'What is old Mr Mumford like?'

'Very pleasant, indeed. Commanding, of course, as is only natural. Mr Ivo as he'll be one day, you might say. Anybody could see it's some time since the first Mumfords bought boots. They're aristocratic. Not like the old gentry, though. You can always tell them'

'Ah.' I was impressed by the invoking of this mysterious and superior social group the ability to distinguish which must have been inherited by Plot from a grandfather of his own, who had trudged up and down such a staircase as this with coal-scuttles and hot water cans long ago.

'Mr Sandys, now that spelt his name with a y and had this very set three years back. Aloof, in a way and yet as natural as your own brother. What was due and proper pa.s.sing between you. But never a word less polite than a prince's from Michaelmas to Trinity. Not like Mr Ivo, that isn't. You could tell Mr Sandys as old gentry, all right.'

'I'd like to have known him.' I saw that if Plot himself were to be categorised, it would have to be as a romantic, and I almost asked whether any real princes, abounding in politesse, had come his way. But he was now preparing to go about the staircase's business, and I found myself turning back to something else. 'I'm sorry Mr Junkin gets so desperate,' I said. 'It spoils my pleasure in being in his rooms. Have you any notion what his trouble is?' I had no sooner asked this question than I felt it to transgress the bounds of legitimate curiosity even a writer's legitimate curiosity where a total stranger was involved. So I subst.i.tuted a more general query. 'What sort of troubles do the young men mostly have?'

'Well, sir, there they are much like you and me. It's money, as often as not. Particularly with them that are here on government grants. They're none too generous, the grants, it seems to me. Especially for a raw lad coming up against his betters and their goings-on in a place like this.'

'Like the present Mr Mumford and his brandy and champagne, for example?'

'But then, again, it may be a matter of a lady.' Plot's ignoring of my question was a very proper rebuke, and I had no doubt that he practised the same technique with the young men. 'Demand and supply, sir; that's where the hitch is. Not nearly enough ladies to go round. Unless, that is, they did go round as quick as among fornicating savages beside a camp fire.'

'And they don't do that?' I was struck by the picturesqueness of the image offered me. 'No brisk promiscuity?'

'Well, now, Mr Pattullo you and I know what s.e.x has become, if we're to believe them in the newspapers and on the wireless. Just plain in-out, in-out, and then look round again.' Plot appeared unperturbed at having produced this yet more robust expression. 'But I can't say I see much of that with our young men. It isn't just c.u.n.t, begging your pardon, they're after, if you ask me. They may chew their sheets half through the night, thinking it is. Yet sensualists if that's the word is just what they are not. Wouldn't you say?'

'With reservations, Plot. Deplorable exceptions certainly occur.' (Fleetingly I thought of the early erotic life of P. P. Killiecrankie.) 'But I'd go with you in a general way.'

'Young Casanovas is how they may see themselves and they may be raging, fair enough, just to get a finger there. But it isn't as much their thing as they fancy it. They want a lot going on in the old fashioned heart as well, if you ask me. And that takes time and decency, you'll agree. It doesn't go with what you might call a quick turnover. Add the supply problem to that-But you probably see my point, sir.'

'I think I do. You make it seem surprising the whole lot aren't right round the bend.'

'But Mr Junkin, now, isn't in that trouble or not that I know of. And not that bad in the money one either. He has an old aunt, he says, who comes down handsome at need. She gives out she has nothing but a sweet shop, but really owns a whole street of houses as well. He had a Honda from her the day he was seventeen.'

'Ah, I never had an aunt like that.' I saw that Plot was in an admirable relationship with Nicolas Junkin. 'And I don't expect you had, either.'

'That I had not. And it's his studies he's worried about. Very worrying in a general way, the studies seem to be nowadays. Examinations here, and examinations there and going on long after they ought to be over, if you ask me. Why, there are gentlemen still up now, on one such score or another. More work for the servants, and more vexation for themselves.'

'But that doesn't apply to Mr Junkin at the moment?'

'No, it doesn't. But he has a bad time coming, he says, later on.'

'Perhaps he spends too much time being Winston Churchill or the Pope of Rome.'

'That's what the masters tell plenty of them.' ('Masters', I remembered, was the college servants' word for fellows, tutors, and senior members generally; they used it precisely as it is used in a boys' school.) 'But what they tell Mr Junkin, it seems, is that his headpiece isn't right.'

'You mean his tutors tell him he's a bit insane?' Not unnaturally, I was disconcerted by the notion of such brusque candour.

'Oh, no. What Mr Junkin says is that they think he can't think. Can't get the second thing he says or writes. .h.i.tched on to the first or the third to the second. And yet I've seen Mr Junkin in print. It doesn't make sense.'

'What Mr Junkin has had in print doesn't make sense?'

'Well, I don't know that it does to me.' Plot had hesitated, as if feeling we were at cross purposes. 'But there he is in Isis and the like. Poetry, some of it is which is harder than anything else, by all accounts. And yet the masters say that of him. You can't blame him for being worried, having his way to make as Mr Ivo and his like have not. I'm sure I'd be, if it wasn't just the old brush and Hoover that was my end of the boat.'

'He oughtn't to make too heavy weather of it.' I uttered this with conviction, having known a certain number of talented people (as well as numerous worthy ones) quite notably deficient in the elusive art of concatenating ideas logically together. 'He has time and the great world ahead of him.'

'That's what I tell the lad.' It was increasingly evident that Junkin (after his shaky start) had come to enjoy a certain warmth of regard on his scout's part. '"Wait until you get out in the world," I say to him. "You'll be heading the lot of them when it comes to going after the jobs." I tell Mr Junkin that.'

'We must hope it will turn out that way.' I couldn't tell whether there was a secure objective basis for Plot's prediction, but approved his instinct to play down the significance of examinations. 'Is Junkin facing some affair in the Schools soon?'

'Ah, there he's in the same boat as Mr Ivo Mumford, all right. Both failed the same exam twice, they have with less than a canvas between them, it seems, so far as the marks went.' Like most scouts, Plot was fond of a metaphor drawn from the river. 'So they have to sit it again, at the end of next term. A last chance, Mr Junkin thinks it will be.'

'And Mr Mumford?'

'Well, it isn't book-learning of any sort that Mr Mumford's mind dwells on, by a long chalk. He takes a very high line about such things. Quite in the old college style that you and I remember, his lordship's son is. As it should be, no doubt him having a t.i.tle coming to him now. But I see you'd better be getting changed, sir.'

I realised that this was true, and said goodnight to Plot, who departed with the a.s.surance that he would bring me a cup of tea at eight o'clock next morning, or earlier if I cared to open the door and give a shout. He must be wrong, I knew, about Ivo Mumford's having a t.i.tle ahead of him, since Tony's elevation had certainly been to a life peerage. It seemed to have come his way at a comparatively early stage in his career, and his having accepted it must imply that he was not ambitious of the highest political office. I got out of my day clothes, and did honour to the coming occasion by a careful evening shave.

s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g small pearl headed studs into small gold sockets, I thought about careers. They were going to be all around me in an hour's time. Careers, so to speak, in mid career. Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita: I had gathered that this Gaudy was to be so structured that Dante's celebrated line would fit it perfectly. It wasn't for the senators and patriarchs of the college. Old Mr Mumford's Gaudy of the previous year had been that. It wasn't for those comparative youngsters who had gone down from five to fifteen years ago; it would be in the following year that these would get their invitation. This Gaudy was for the intermediate group. Tony and myself, P. P. Killiecrankie (if he had indeed come up) and Gavin Mogridge (at this moment, according to Plot, in his old rooms downstairs): these would const.i.tute one of its more junior echelons.

With leisure to recall Mogridge now, I was conscious of a genuine start of curiosity which exposed as a shade fact.i.tious the incipient interest I had been parading to myself (and Plot) in unknown boys barely out of school. Mogridge's career and he had decidedly enjoyed one abundantly invited to philosophical speculation on the role of Cra.s.s Casualty and the like in individual human destinies.

I remembered him clearly: a large vague youth, fair and gangling, never viewed except wearing perfectly circular steel rimmed spectacles. About these I had used to suppose that there must be something ophthalmically defective, since they by no means obviated the necessity of their owner's surveying the world perpetually slant-wise rather in the manner of some bust of Alexander the Great faithfully portraying the torticollis afflicting that emperor. n.o.body would have supposed it likely that Mogridge would ever himself be reduced to seeking desperately round for fresh worlds to conquer. Yet something of the kind had happened to him.

His only ambition and we understood it to be a consuming one-was to play the 'cello at a virtuoso's level. He saw himself as the Casals of his generation. Unfortunately his command of the instrument never rose to playing it quite certainly in tune. As a consequence, towards the close of his undergraduate days his family was under the necessity of viewing him primarily as a vocational problem. But his father had prudently kindled in him some small spark of interest in archaeology; and being a professor of some sort at Cambridge had succeeded in attaching his son, although wholly unqualified scientifically, to an expedition proposing extensive excavations in a remote region of the South American continent.

In just what capacity although doubtless humble Mogridge was programmed to perform never, as it happened, appeared. The plane carrying the entire personnel of the venture, together with various other people to a total of some fifty souls, having risen punctually from the airfield at Lima and vanished at its predicted point over the horizon, was never seen again. Aerial reconnaissance turned up no trace of it, and when days had pa.s.sed into weeks all hope of the existence of survivors was abandoned. The catastrophe was one of the dozen or so more sensational horrors of its year.

Yet no immediate fatality had occurred. The plane, while through some technical fault out of radio contact, had cracked up, lost all power, and then simply floated down to a belly-flop in what was fortunately a cushioning but not instantly engulfing swamp. As the last man scrambled out (only the last man, as Mogridge's narrative makes clear, was a woman), the plane burst into flame, and was presently wholly consumed. The final thing to vanish (Mogridge chronicles) was a golden phoenix emblazoned on the fuselage, the emblem of the airline which had imposed this signal degree of inconvenience upon its clients. From the ashes of the bird nothing arose. The stranded pa.s.sengers can scarcely have regarded the symbol as felicitously chosen.

I had more than once called up the curious scene before my inward eye, and I did so again now. Many writers have exploited a situation of the kind: notably Shaw (of whom I had lately been thinking) in the third act of Man and Superman. But the suddenly transformed condition of Mogridge and his companions (who, minutes before, had been reading scientific journals and drinking martinis) proved far more disconcerting than that of Jack Tanner and his talkative friends, who confronted merely 'one of the mountain amphitheatres of the Sierra Nevada' although that, indeed, proved to be 'a strange country for dreams'. The swamp, into which the metallic remains of the perished plane were sinking with a sinister ease even as they gazed, appeared initially to extend in illimitable vastness on every side. Curiously enough, it was the purblind Mogridge himself who first discerned (through spectacles which happily had remained unharmed on his nose) certain dim serrations at one point on the horizon. By some this was taken to be a city but only because a city was what they very much wanted to see. Others declared confidently that, even if mere vegetation, here was an infallible sign of a comfortably navigable river. Mogridge said it was more probably a jungle into the middle of which this whole swamp could be dropped with the effect of a penny tumbled on a billiard table. Mogridge was to prove to be right.

It was, as it happened, his twenty-second birthday; with the exception of a junior cabin steward, he was the youngest person on the plane. He had pa.s.sed, all decent mediocrity and with that single inept musical ambition, through an unnoticing school and college. One would have conjectured that, if rescued, he would for certain months conscientiously measure and record the dimensions of such chunks of temple masonry and the like as were indicated to him for the purpose, and then return home to equally honourable obscurity in a shipping office or a bank. Instead of which he was to produce Mochica.

That Mogridge was able to do this not, I mean, that he so mysteriously had it in him, but that it was physically, mechanically possible confronts us with one of those artistries of Chance. His digestion was upset, and it so happened that, when the emergency declared itself, he was privately ensconced in a small compartment at the tail of the plane. To his hand was something from which it was clear to him that he must not, in his uncomfortable condition, be separated. It thus came about that, when he presently found himself knee-deep in mud, his sole possession was a roll of lavatory paper. From various fellow pa.s.sengers he was able to requisition pencils. As the grand virtue of Mochica consists in its being so unchallengeably (in television parlance) 'live', and in catching, moment by moment through terrible weeks, the fleeting minutiae of an extraordinary situation, it is evident that Mogridge's career might be described with almost literal accuracy as based on b.u.mf.

For some time, indeed, in the literary circles into which he had been rocketed, Mogridge was known as 'b.u.mfy' Mogridge. But the joke, or jeer, didn't stick. Mochica itself, after all, was emphatically not b.u.mf; it was one of those rare books which, while enjoying riproarious popular success, at the same time owns sufficient intrinsic merit to achieve among the critical a kind of cla.s.sic status straight away. Mogridge himself had become a celebrity, and one with a large sum of money in the bank, before his father and uncles and other concerned persons had ceased wondering where and how to find him 12 a week.

Mogridge's moment had been born out of sudden and unpredictable hazard; and in the sequel something like that confronted him all over again. Even the money might be as swamping as that Peruvian mud, if he failed warily to consider the interest the Inland Revenue was going to take in it a twelvemonth after its arrival. What did, in fact, happen to him thereafter was sufficiently enigmatical to make me regret that I had never once run across him since we both went down. I was going on now to reflect on what hearsay had brought me when there came an interruption in the shape of a knock on Junkin's outer door.

I emerged from the bedroom and gave a shout to come in not at all deterred by the fact that my movement was of the shambling character enforced upon a man who is only half into his trousers. I thought this might well be Gavin Mogridge himself; it would be a reasonable thing that, having heard from Plot of my presence, he should come upstairs to renew our acquaintance. It was certainly not in my head that I was in other than an exclusively male society. So I was casually b.u.t.toning my flies with one hand and feeling for my braces with the other when the door opened at my call and a young woman walked in.

IV.

Duncan, I very much want you to meet Mabel.' The words came to me but only just, since the voice was not a strong one from somewhere behind the lady in the doorway. It was not immediately apparent that the lady, on her part, wanted to meet me. Her demeanour was shamefast an archaic word to be excused as carrying a useful ambiguity. It was only modest in the girl thus suddenly confronting a man fumbling with his b.u.t.tons to cast her gaze fixedly upon the shabby college carpet, but her bearing also hinted a shyness in excess of this situation one approaching the awkward or even mildly pathological. Awkwardness, however, might be something merely reflected upon her by her escort, who had made such gauche haste to introduce her without for a moment pausing to identify himself. But he did now advance, edging clumsily round his bashful companion to reveal a slight, almost chetif figure of about my own age. He was dressed in tails which failed to fit him very well, and over which he already wore his M.A. gown. 'Cyril Bedworth,' this person went on, seeing me at a loss. 'Duncan, congratulations on a splendid new play!'

Bedworth was somebody else I hadn't seen for many years, but there was nevertheless something peculiarly unfortunate about my moment's blankness before him. He carried around with him the effect of being a forgettable sort of man, and was to be presumed sensitively aware of the fact. And here he was, saying a generous thing with obvious sincerity whereas he might perfectly well have produced that familiar 'Do you still write plays?'

But if I was embarra.s.sed it was only partly because I hadn't been quick enough. Cyril Bedworth's tone had recalled to my memory a salient feature of his character long ago. This had been, quite simply, his artless admiration for myself, for Tony Mumford, and for what an old fashioned writer might call our set. It couldn't have been a rational admiration, since we were singularly without qualities meriting solid regard. He had simply been in love with us collectively rather as Helen Schlegel had been in love with the Wilc.o.xes. But at least no ill consequence, such as Forster's novel records, had resulted in Bedworth's case. And now, as if all loyalty to that fallacious estimate of my worth, he was eager to reveal the wonderful achievement of having acquired a wife.

So I paid my respects to Mrs Bedworth in form, and invited her to sit down on the less broken-springed of Junkin's two armchairs. She did so still without venturing to raise her eyes, and also with what seemed unnecessary care in the matter of disposing her skirt round her ankles. I reflected that I myself was still in my shirt-sleeves. Then it struck me that Mabel Bedworth, whose note was so decidedly quiet, was nevertheless almost as much as her husband dressed for a formal evening occasion. Why, I asked myself in sudden panic, was she here at all only some minutes before the Gaudy guests would be beginning to a.s.semble? Had Bedworth, whose early circ.u.mstances had not permitted the acquiring of much social expertness, fallen into a stark misconception, in some bizarre fashion persuading himself that wives, too, were bidden to the college board? It would be an error too monstrous for contemplation. Ought I to contrive an oblique remark that would alert them to the truth, and enable them to withdraw without confusion and rearrange their evening? Fortunately this imagination of chaos at once proved unfounded.

'Mabel has to fly,' Bedworth said. 'But she did so very much want to meet you. She has heard a great deal about you, Duncan, from time to time. And she does greatly admire your plays.'

Mrs Bedworth corroborated none of these statements. She just sat perfectly still. There was nothing hostile about her, nor any suggestion of being bored. Indeed, I had a sense that she felt something more electrical to be in the air than was objectively there at all. I might have solved this small enigma at once if it hadn't become necessary for me to put up some conversation myself.

'I wonder how many of us have been lodged in our old rooms.' I said. 'Here am I. And Tony you remember Tony Mumford, Cyril? is over the way.'

'Yes, Tony-of course.' Bedworth had jerked oddly in his chair, so that a spring tw.a.n.ged alarmingly. It was almost as if, unaccountably, he was troubled by this unremarkable information 'I mustn't miss having a word with him. It would be a mistake.'

'He'll be looking forward to it.' Bedworth's last remark had puzzled me. 'And it seems that Gavin Mogridge is down there on the ground floor. The celebrity among us, he must be called. But it's only Tony that the scout on the staircase pretends to remember. When you and I become lords, Cyril, he'll pretend to remember us too. Are you in that very attractive attic?'

'No, no-in Howard.' Bedworth produced this with an enhanced and almost startled lack of ease which made me suppose I had been tactlessly patronising about the attractiveness of the attic. Already in my time, although there were plenty of wealthy men in the college, there can have been few who were exceptionally poor whose poverty, that is, was much deeper than that of a substantial number of their companions. One would have had to go back to between the wars to the generation, that would be, of Ivo Mumford's grandfather to find poor scholars who were struggling at Oxford on pretty well nothing at all. But Cyril Bedworth through some unknown special circ.u.mstance was notably poor, and it seemed reasonable to suppose that he felt touchy about it, and about the unimpressive character of his accommodation beneath the leads. His poverty in itself would have limited the freedom of his a.s.sociation with many of us; in addition to which I am afraid we were sometimes inclined to mix up being poor with being poor-spirited. Not that we lacked delicacy (something of which young men have a surprising command) in any direct dealings with narrow budgets. If Bedworth became covertly a figure of fun with us it was on no such account. Physically he had been notably unattractive. He was, for example, still in serious adolescent trouble with his complexion. So in one nonsense-saga of our contriving he became the reigning college catamite of his year, and we affected to feel the blood hammering in our temples when we pa.s.sed him in the quad. It is possible, I suppose, that his mere name provoked whimsy of this sort.

I saw now that his spots had cleared up, and also that something, not immediately definable, had happened to his features which must be connected with processes going on behind them. But he was still what we had called a grey man. Ivo's grandfather, I believe, would have said a sub man, and Ivo's contemporaries no doubt had a term of their own. (Vocabularies change; intolerance does not.) As for his capacity for admiring others a trait not unamiable in itself it seemed only too likely that worldly experience had attenuated any disposition of the sort. Perhaps he had transferred the balance of it to his wife, of whom he was obviously immensely proud, and to the children who might be conjectured to have blessed their union.

'Do you think Oxford has changed much?' I asked Bedworth. It seemed a ba.n.a.l question in the uttering, and in fact I had subst.i.tuted it for another that had been forming on my tongue. What did Cyril Bedworth do? It is reasonable to ask a former acquaintance, after an interval of many years, about his walk in life. But Bedworth knew that I wrote plays, and had handsomely referred to the fact, so there seemed something uncivil in an inquiry which ipso facto relegated him to the anonymous crowd. The question upon which I had fallen back seemed to afford him difficulty, and at the same time to strike him as of substantial import.

'I find it hard to decide,' he said seriously. 'I should like to hear what you think yourself. Yours ought to be the sharper impression, really.'

I didn't know quite how to take this. It appeared to be a recrudescence of the admiration theme, a tribute to the superior acuity of mind which a writer must necessarily bear over persons in some such una.s.suming employment as Bedworth's own. (By this time I had decided, I believe, that he was respectably ensconced with an old-established firm of chartered accountants.) Before I could take the matter further an extraordinary thing had happened.

Up to this moment Mabel Bedworth had preserved, immobile, her dim downcast presence in Junkin's best chair, and only the picking up of her handbag indicated that it would indeed be necessary for her presently to 'fly'. This doesn't mean that she was a negligible presence. Two or three discreet glances had persuaded me that I found her a good deal more interesting than her husband. She was by a number of years the younger of the two; and, of course, it wouldn't have been difficult for her to be much the better looking. She was, in fact, beautiful in a soft, slightly obliterated way not colourful but monochromatic: a composition in sepias, and with features which seemed in a perpetual quiver, as if being viewed through a veil of all but imperceptibly stirring gauze. Such was Mrs Bedworth, and by this time I believed I had the shamefastness diagnosed. Either the blood rather easily hammered in Mrs Bedworth's own temples, or she was the sort of woman who is fated, through no particular volition of her own and upon principles inviolably arcane, herself to set it hammering in a high proportion of any male temples coming her way. She carried round with her, whether she liked it or not, the mysterious power to generate acute s.e.xual awareness.

This was an interesting discovery, but the extraordinary happening was something other. Hard upon the abortive exchange of views between her husband and myself on the perennial problem of a changing Oxford, Mrs Bedworth had looked up for the first time. It was for the purpose of giving me a momentary glance of intense amus.e.m.e.nt. And then she was on her feet.

'The little women,' she said to me and her voice, low and husky, has to be recorded as doing something to my spine 'must be off to their poached eggs.'

She kissed her husband on the cheek and walked out of the room.

I was again reduced to rash hypothesis. The Bedworths, I told myself, had for the occasion of the Gaudy joined up with perhaps two or three other old-boy couples (if the expression is admissible), and the women were going to dine together in a restaurant while, in hall, the august and masculine feasting went on. I would have asked Bedworth if this were so, had I not noticed that he was upset. He appeared to judge that his wife's conduct had been lacking in decorum. I felt no patience with this, and I believe I almost said to myself, as I should certainly have done twenty odd years before: 'Lord, what a silly little man!' That I didn't actually do so was to the credit of a lurking intuition beginning to build up in me about this nervous person's quality. There was more to him, somehow, than memory suggested.

'Mabel is very fond of Virginia Woolf,' Bedworth said suddenly.

This was a piece of knock-out bewilderment. For a moment I even thought that Cyril Bedworth had been drinking; that he was now in a fuddled way confounding me with a more celebrated dramatist; and was announcing that my chef- d'oeuvre was one of his wife's favourite plays. To such wild misconception there was no reply, and into my confounded silence Bedworth spoke again.

'I must really have a civil word with Lord Marchpayne,' he said. 'With Tony,' he emended quickly. He jumped up and made for the door. 'I do hope, Duncan, we'll meet again later in the evening.' He moved as hastily as he had spoken, so that in a moment he was gone. But his tone, although wholly una.s.sertive, had mysteriously put me in possession of a disconcerting truth. Cyril Bedworth was a fellow of the college and thus one of my hosts, not another guest. It was my large and confident unawareness of this that had amused his wife. So much was entirely clear. But something in the way he had spoken of Tony was as baffling as had been the remark about Virginia Woolf.

When I went downstairs a few minutes later I ran into Gavin Mogridge. The hero (for he had been that too) and historian of the ill-fated Mochica Expedition stood surveying Surrey through the doorway much as if the quadrangle were a trackless waste for guidance across which the white man must patiently await the arrival of some trustworthy native. This appearance was enhanced rather than diminished by the circ.u.mstance of Mogridge's being in evening dress; one felt that this night as every night the garments had been extricated from a tin trunk and composedly donned by the light of a hurricane lantern round which there flapped unspeakable insects and an occasional vampire bat. Bleached, stringy, dehydrated, Mogridge might have been described as the typical all-weather model of the late-nineteenth century wandering Englishman. Were he to walk across the Sahara, one felt, it would be without troubling to unfurl the sunshade nonchalantly slung on his arm; if he unexpectedly met an old acquaintance in the vicinity of Kampa Dzong or the Rongbuk Glacier he would infallibly join the stroll to the summit of Mount Everest.

What I tried to recall now was the extent to which these potentialities had already been written upon the 'cello- walloping Mogridge of my distant recollection. At least here was the mature man, and I had an instant sense that he hadn't changed a bit. His vagueness, his absence of mind were gigantic; at this moment he was eyeing me so unregardingly that I wondered whether he commonly distinguished between a man and a newel-post.

'Oh, Duncan,' Mogridge said, 'do you gather they're anywhere running to a drink?'

He had spoken thus in the instant of glimpsing me for the first time in twenty years precisely as if we had been in a room together five minutes before. I felt it inc.u.mbent upon me to make equally little fuss about this picking up of threads.

'Drinks are in the Great Quad, I believe.'

'The Great Quad?' Repeating the words on a note of interrogation, Mogridge peered now in one direction and now in another across Surrey, so that I almost persuaded myself I should actually have to take on the role of that faithful black and proceed to hack a path for him through the jungle. 'Ah, the Great Quad!' He turned a little, and pointed to the notice concerning itself with the wiping of feet Plot's handiwork, as I now understood it to be. For a moment I took it that Mogridge's myopia was such that he was mistaking this for a ground-plan of the college, courteously provided by the Provost and fellows for the convenience of tourists. 'I think it's a joke,' Mogridge said. 'Don't you?'

'It has crossed my mind.'

'Just striking out feet, I mean.'

'I know you do.'

'One of the men on this staircase, I expect.'

'A good guess, almost certainly.' I had forgotten the pace at which the unkindled Mogridge's mind moved. 'We could ask Plot.'

'Plot? Oh, the scout. Yes. Whether there's a left-handed man.'

'Left-handed?'

'Yes.' Mogridge was now according Plot's request all the attention which (had things fallen out as planned) he would once have been able to direct upon some fragment of Mochica masonry. 'The stroke cancelling that word runs from ten o'clock to four. That's left-handed. A right-handed person would make his from two o'clock to eight. Don't you agree?'

I saw no reason not to. Mogridge hadn't in the least been showing off a mental affinity with such fictional characters as Hercule Poirot and Lord Peter Wimsey. He must simply own some habit of precise observation which didn't (as so much of him was celebrated for doing) slumber for years at a time. At the moment, I seized upon the reference to eight o'clock as suggesting that our aperitif must be secured now or not at all. Several other guests were hurrying across Surrey, converging upon the lofty archway that led into the Great Quadrangle. We set out in pursuit of these.

'Do you remember Cyril Bedworth,' I asked, 'who used to be on our staircase? He seems to have become a don.'

'Oh, yes of course. I've met him several times at these dinners. Haven't you?'

'This is the first I've been to.'

'Ah, then you wouldn't have met him.'

'No.' I realised how, with Mogridge, every stage of a discussion had to reach a full close. 'But he looked in on me a few minutes ago. He brought his wife.'

'Bedworth is married?'

'That would seem to be the inference.'

'It's perfectly natural.' Mogridge said this a shade severely, as if I must be indicted of attempting some pointless levity. 'And you would have met him again if you'd come to any of these Gaudies over the past twenty years. He has been here pretty well all the time. He stayed up, I think, and took a second degree.' Mogridge paused; he obviously felt this had been quite something. 'It was probably a B.Litt. That's a Bachelor of Letters.'

'So I've heard. But I've always supposed things of that sort were pursued by a pretty dim crowd. Of course Cyril didn't exactly sparkle.'

'I suppose not.' This time, Mogridge's pause was a brooding one. 'Do you still write novels, Duncan?'

'Plays. Yes, I do.'

'Of course I remember that you were thinking of taking up literature right from the start. You will probably find that you and Bedworth have a good deal to talk about. Bedworth is literature also. I believe he is your old tutor's Number Two. Talboys, isn't it?'

'Talbert.' I was astonished by the information about my late caller. 'Do you know what sort of thing Bedworth goes in for?'

'He has published at least one critical study.' The author of Mochica that unchallengeable masterpiece in its kind communicated this further intelligence in a tone of deep respect. 'I am sure you will have heard of it, Duncan. It is called Proust and Powell. Or perhaps it is Powell and Proust. Two novelists. One English and one French. So I suppose Bedworth must be said to go in for Comparative Literature. It is probably a particularly difficult field.'

I found myself glancing at Gavin Mogridge askance which was, of course, the manner in which his own curious trick of vision made him appear to be regarding me. As we pa.s.sed under the archway (its mult.i.tudinous bosses are a blaze of heraldry, with the carved stone brilliantly painted and gilded in the fashionable manner) we must therefore have presented the appearance of a couple of white-chested china dogs, eyeing each other across a fireplace. I tried to remember what kind of a sense of humour Mogridge owned in an earlier time. Nothing came to me, and I had to conclude he had owned none at all. So he hadn't in any way been pulling my leg. Nor was there anything much odder in his telling me that Proust was a French novelist and Powell an English one than there was (when I came to think of it) in Bedworth's having taken up these two particular writers for the purpose of critical disquisition.