Staircase in Surrey: The Gaudy Part 5

'Yes, of course. But one has to understand a college's point of view.' Mogridge, if slow, was firm. 'About education being the main thing.' He was now looking up into the darkness of the cedar, as if searching for some practical approach to the problem in hand. 'Do you think he might be interested in travelling?'

'It's what he'll come to in no time, if they have their way with him.' Tony's good humour was restored by this odd suggestion from the Mogridge world. 'Of the commercial variety. Peddling encyclopaedias from doorstep to doorstep on the strength of his nice Oxford accent and delusive appearance of being prepared to offer gallantry if the lady invites him inside. Seriously, it's simply taking a young man's prospects of a livelihood away from him to treat him in such a fashion.'

'I don't buy that one, Tony.' It struck me as wholesome to do a little being firm myself. 'Staying up and collecting what will probably be a mediocre degree isn't going to enhance your son's prospects in the least. Take him away now and shove him into whatever you'd be shoving him into in two years' time. Banking or broking or insurance or whatever. n.o.body in your sort of set-up is going to give a d.a.m.n for the boy's having fallen foul of the dons. Think of your blessed Cabinet. Full of thoroughly able chaps who either asked for their cards after a year here, or were chucked out because of the excessively contumelious character of their drinking or wenching, or who did remain on the strength and ended up with a Fourth Cla.s.s in the sole company of the Crown Prince of Waga-Waga.'

'Absolute b.a.l.l.s, Duncan. The sort of rubbish one hears talked in outmoded plays.'

It's not rubbish. It's only picturesque exaggeration, for which I apologise. Junkin's father might advance the argument about livelihood with some colour of truth. But not you. You're just creating, my boy, as a matter of family pride. I declare this stair to be my grandpapa's sacred stamping-ground.'

'And who the h.e.l.l is Junkin?' Tony was taking my challenge, or its tone, very well.

'You haven't heard of Junkin? Hasn't Ivo brought him home for a weekend or a square meal? He's Ivo's nearest neighbour on the staircase.'

'And at school with him? How very odd I haven't heard of him.'

'He was at c.o.keville Grammar School, and the pride of its History Sixth. And he's in precisely the same boat as Ivo except that I don't think his father is likely to be at this Gaudy, sizing up the current race of dons.'

'What do you mean in precisely the same boat as Ivo?' Tony's pounce on this had a speed the significance of which didn't at the moment come to me.

'I mean that if Plot is reliable and scouts always know these things your boy and this lad Junkin have failed the same examination second time round and that at the second go there was nothing between them so far as the marks went. Just nothing at all.'

'Which means that Junkin must be in danger of being sent down too.' Mogridge produced this as if it were a piece of advanced logic and then went on, rather unexpectedly, to a further inference. 'And therefore, Tony, if you feel that you must make representations to the college about your son's case, it will probably be right to include a plea for his friend as well.'

'But Junkin isn't his friend and he isn't my son, either.' Tony had spoken impatiently, but now checked himself. 'But, of course, not to-supposing it known that I know about Junkin ....' He broke off. 'Interesting,' he said. 'Interesting and tricky. As Duncan points out, this absurd Junkin's father isn't likely to come around about the thing.'

'And is not a Cabinet Minister,' I said inexorably.

'Yes, yes one has to face all that. It might become a matter of how one works it. It would be totally out of turn for me to breathe the august name of Junkin when discussing the matter at present. But there's no absolute hurry about the situation. I might contact Junkin pere, and fix it that we move in on the affair together. Two parents, differing widely in their circ.u.mstances, come together out of a common concern. It's not a tactic to rush at. But it deserves thought.'

'No.' The monosyllable came from Mogridge, but with a new quality which made both Tony and myself glance round as for another speaker. 'And you don't want, either, Tony, to give the appearance of going round all these people as if you were thinking of forming a caucus. Some of them, at least, must be aware that you have your son's position much in mind. They'd think it very proper that you should be concerned; in fact you probably have a patch of common ground with them in overestimating the importance of the matter. For I rather agree with Duncan, you see. It won't in the least be a tragedy if Ivo has to call it a day. If a chap is no good at a thing, it may be a blessing in disguise if he's booted into something else. I myself had an experience like that long ago, as a matter of fact. But what I was saying was that dons think highly of what they have on offer, and are most of them very conscientious on the whole, and would tend to go along with a troubled parent just as far as they felt they could. But I think they'd very quickly come to resent the application to them of what you might call the techniques of persuasion. You ought just to speak to the Provost, Tony. That's the proper thing.'

This produced silence in myself because I was, quite irrationally, astonished that Gavin Mogridge should be capable of such ma.s.sive common sense. As for Tony, I believe he was a little shaken in his estimate of his own sufficient guile.

'The Provost,' Mogridge resumed, 'is the head of the college.' He paused as if to mark this recovery of his common form. 'And it's always best to go to the head man. That's what a head man's there for to be gone to. I think you should have a talk with the Provost.'

'I'm not having a talk with anybody tonight,' Tony said with recovered ease. 'It wouldn't be the thing. And, as I said, there's plenty of time.'

'For a preliminary softening up?' I asked.

'You can put it that way. As for the Provost, I'm not sure that I like the man. Professionals tend not much to care for amateurs.'

'You mean he's a politician?'

'Of course he is. And there's another thing. I'm not sure of his stuffing. The art of manipulating a corporate body the way you want it is to nose out the true power nexus behind the formal one. Take the Governing Body of this college. It's now, I'm told, between forty and fifty strong. That's including, of course, chaps who are only hangers-on: professorial fellows and so forth, like that dim creature McKechnie. Pretty large, by Oxford standards. Well, some must carry a lot more weight than others, and it's not too difficult to discover what's roughly their pecking order. But there are dark horses as well and n.i.g.g.e.rs in the woodpile, for that matter.' Tony paused to register amus.e.m.e.nt before this jumble of expressions. 'Hidden hands. Even a top hidden hand. And that's the question for the jackpot. Gavin, who would be your bet as the college's lurking strong man?'

'I don't know them all that well. One doesn't get to know people very well if one meets them only once in so many years. You would get a more reliable answer, Tony, from somebody who knew them all intimately.' Thus excelling himself, Mogridge paused. 'Perhaps it would be Cyril?' he said.

'In G.o.d's name who is Cyril?' Tony demanded.

'Cyril Bedworth, of course.'

'Most amusing.' Tony was contemptuous of this absurdity. 'With old Halberd, I suppose, as proxime accessit.'

'Talbert,' I said and remembered how Tony's affecting never to be able to get my tutor's name right had irritated me long ago. 'And now,' I added baldly, 'I'm going to talk to some other chaps.' And I got up and wandered away.

But in fact I avoided chaps again, although not for very long. I think I felt displeased by, and wanted to reflect on, the way in which I had reacted to this not very important Ivo Mumford affair. Here was Tony Mumford, forging ahead in the High Court of Parliament under our most religious and gracious Queen at that time a.s.sembled, but showing every sign of an injudicious obsession with a purely domestic matter. I had thought to detect some sort of pride or arrogance underlying his att.i.tude: an a.s.sumption that at least a measure of special treatment was his due and therefore Ivo's due. And I had reacted too crudely as the old and candid friend. For who was I to judge how strongly a man should feel about the fortunes of his son?

As I walked obliquely across the garden now I tried to project one of those dream children of my own into Ivo's situation, and to estimate how I'd comport myself in relation to it. But dream children however long-haired and long- limbed and charming are much too insubstantial to base such an exercise upon, and I had to reaffirm to myself that I was on territory destined to remain largely unknown to me. I was, indeed, convinced that Tony would do wrong to insert other than the gentlest of oars into his son's academic affairs. Instead of planning a campaign among our present hosts, he ought to be tackling the boy himself. He ought to be saying something like: 'Look, you'd better decide either to have a d.a.m.ned good shot at any further chance your tutors give you, or to cut out and work hard at something more to your fancy and I've a perfectly open mind as to what.'

But how easy to be wise quite genuinely wise on behalf of other people! Distance the Mumfords, father and son, only a very little, and it was crystalline that Ivo, whatever his character and temperament, was likely to take less mischief from having a university career cut short than from a father who patently felt that strings must and could be pulled for him. This was what I ought to have said to Tony and not, perhaps, even in the presence of the loyal and sagacious Mogridge. I ought to have kept if for later and for a wholly private occasion perhaps for the final half-hour which Tony and I were likely to spend together, whether in his son's rooms or in Nick Junkin's, before we went to bed. I had bungled my possible part in the affair. It was a discovery making me feel that I wanted to hear no more of it.

I found that I had strayed out of the garden into Howard. The great square s.p.a.ce was dimly lit from the ancient iron lanterns hanging above the staircase entrances. The Commem Ball, although it had probably, in one way or another, submerged the entire college, appeared to have been centred here. The main marquee must have occupied the whole quad, and its evidences were not yet all cleared away. A dance floor, naked to the sky and seeming faintly to reflect the stars, still covered nearly half the gra.s.s. The rest was littered with huge masts, spars, coils of rope, great rolls of canvas. I might have been surveying in the dim light the stage of some enormous German opera-house, with an impropable Tristan or Der fliegende Hollnder cooking up or perhaps the Lyceum or His Majesty's with Irving's or Tree's carpenters labouring at a sensational decor for the opening of The Tempest. And it was a stage not wholly untenanted. In a corner remote from that by which I had entered I could distinguish a number of dark figures, seemingly closely huddled together. This effect at least was melodramatic. It was as if I had blundered upon a nest of a.s.sa.s.sins or banditti.

They were, of course, nothing but a group of diners who had not discarded their gowns. Quite probably they were all unknown to me, and this made bearing down on them slightly awkward. On the other hand I had a sense that my advent had been remarked, so that to retreat would be graceless. I compromised by drifting in the general direction of the group with an air of thoughtful leisure. And then, as I pa.s.sed under one of the lanterns, I was recognised.

'Oh, Duncan,' Cyril Bedworth's voice said, 'how very nice! Do come and join us.'

There were introductions, from which I gathered that all three of the men with Bedworth were his colleagues. But I picked up only two of the names: James Gender and Charles Atlas. Gender I had a faint memory of as a young man who had turned up in college in my final year as a junior lecturer in law. Atlas seemed just such a young man now. And I could see that the third man was much the oldest of the group.

I supposed that these people had turned into Howard by way of taking a few minutes off the job of acting as conscientious hosts. But this was a little odd, and after the introductions came a pause which put a different idea in my head. It was that Bedworth, in hailing me, had acted with the social infelicity intermittently to be remarked in him. He had noticed me; he did feel for me a certain warmth of regard which didn't the less please me for being a survival from times long past; as a consequence he had given that cordial hail. It was talk of a confidential sort, however, that had been going on, and the pause was a result of a need to change the subject.

'We've been indulging thoughts,' the man called Gender said, pleasantly if not veraciously, 'prompted by these ruins of revelry. They're all over the place. The coal-yard, for instance, is a vast dump of fading flowers and palm-trees in pots. I suppose dances have always required such embellishments. But nowadays, it seems, the young people also demand four distinct bands, a cabaret show, and a complete amus.e.m.e.nt park in Long Field for people who don't want to be bothered with dancing at all.'

'Which is why a double ticket costs fifteen guineas.' This came I fancied with an edge to it from the unidentified elderly man, who was smoking a pipe. 'And you don't cut much of a figure if you can't pay for extra champagne.'

'Oh, rubbish, Arnold,' Gender said. 'The whole affair is a harmless once-in-three-years fling. And you'd find far more emphasis on conspicuous expenditure in a working men's club in the Midlands.'

'I'm afraid I can't feel the fling to have been entirely harmless on the present occasion.' This time, the man with the pipe spoke with an exaggerated gentleness the effect of which was scarcely friendly. 'It doesn't upset me that the place is turned into a brothel-'

'Really, Arnold, that goes a bit far.'

'So it does. I apologise. It doesn't upset me, or in the least astonish me, that some of the young people find themselves probably to their own mild surprise involved in episodes of successful fornication. On such an occasion the whole set-up of an Oxford college invites quite comically to simple indoor games. And the consequences are not likely to be other than trivial. Now and then, perhaps, a shot-gun marriage? Yes but there is little evidence, I imagine, that such marriages are more frequently calamitous than are maturely considered ventures of the same sort. But the casualty we have just heard of is another matter. It startles me, I confess.'

'Do you know what Howard at this moment suggests to me?' This came from the young man, Charles Atlas, and was plainly intended as a diversion. Atlas, indeed, had to pause for a moment to discover what Howard might suggest. 'The d.u.c.h.ess of Richmond's ballroom in Brussels. On the morning after, that is. And with the guns of Waterloo in the distance if there's a thunder-storm coming up, as I think there is.'

'That would seem to make a Waterloo of this Gaudy,' I said, rather at random. It was increasingly evident to me that, here at the moment, something was on the carpet which was no business of mine. But I had at least to offer a remark or two before repairing Bedworth's error by making myself scarce. 'I've been seeing Howard myself,' I added in pursuance of this need, 'as a backdrop for something like Peter Grimes or Billy Budd: 'Ah, yes or the destruction of the Spanish Armada.' The man called Arnold, who was thus merely giving a civil indication that he had taken my point, paused to put a match to his pipe. For a second the spurt of light brought me inexplicably contradictory impressions: I had certainly never seen him before, yet about his features there was a certain haunting familiarity as from a long time back. 'But the Gaudy is no Waterloo,' he went on. 'It's more like a Field of the Cloth of Gold. And in the present instance if we're to pursue the figure Waterloo is simply one of the public examinations of the university. That's where the casualty has occurred.'

'But at least it's not a tragedy,' Atlas said, and then turned to address me directly. 'Something we've had to have a word about,' he said. 'You'd have found it entirely boring.'

Neither the air of apology with which the words were spoken nor the tenses of the verbs employed inclined me to receive this very well. I was without the slightest wish to barge in on whatever academic storm in a teacup was brewing itself up at this unlikely hour, and if these people were so unseasonably involved in confidential talk it had been their business to shelve it for a few minutes more effectively than they had done. So I was about to walk away with a minimum of ado when I was prevented by Bedworth.

'No point in making a stranger of Pattullo,' he said. 'I seem to recall that we happen all to be among those agreed on that.'

'Indeed, yes.' James Gender, who appeared to go in for courteous diffidence, made a kind of murmur of acquiescence out of these perplexing words, and the elderly man gave me a glance which seemed to signal amiable complicity which I didn't in the least understand.

'My name's Lempriere,' the elderly man murmured to me casually. He paused, as if waiting for some recognition that didn't come to me. 'Of course we'll be glad to hear what you think of this business. We're rather close up to it ourselves.'

I believe I felt for a moment an unaccountable alarm. It didn't prevent my being conscious that the junior man, Atlas, still didn't want me in on this confabulation. There seemed nothing personal about this, and I had to put him down as a stickler for the forms. You don't chuck shop and still less rifts in the lute at a dinner-guest.

'As you'll have gathered,' Bedworth said, 'it's this business of the Commem Ball clashing with examinations. It's undoubtedly an awkward thing.' Bedworth was very serious. I had a glimmering sense of him as a dedicated man.

'But didn't it always?' I asked. 'I seem to remember something of the sort happening bang in the middle of when I was taking Schools.'

'Perfectly true.' Lempriere had struck in with an effect of abruptly grim incisiveness. 'But that's different: Finals are for seasoned third or fourth year men most of them living out of college. Nowadays we have another whole rash of Cla.s.sified Honours affairs all that d.a.m.ned rubbish of Firsts and Seconds and Thirds confronting infants with no more than twenty-four weeks of university life behind them. And all brought up in their admirable grammar schools-'

'Forty-six per cent,' Bedworth interrupted sharply.

'And half of them brought up to regard all examinations as life or death affairs. So what do we do? Arrange that on the eve of this spurious but alarming ordeal they have to sleep through or skulk around the fringes of an uncouth imitation of the polished unG.o.dliness of the metropolis. In fact, a Commem Ball.'

'We try,' Bedworth said, 'to move them into the quieter parts of the college.'

'And that is our supreme wisdom, indeed,' Lempriere said. 'Do you know that when an Australian aborigine stole a chicken he used to be trucked half across the continent to what was regarded as the appropriate court for dealing with him? And the mere journey meant an exposure to unspeakable terrors, with alien spirits and a foreign magic all around him. It's just the same with our little brutes. They've grown accustomed to the security of their own familiar rooms. And suddenly you tell them to grab their pyjamas and toothbrush, and you huddle them into Rattenbury. Hitler did the same thing with-'

'Come, come, Arnold.' Atlas spoke quite amiably. 'Don't run away with yourself, my dear chap.'

'Very well. But then there's this notion of Cyril's that they're asked to move in order to have a chance of a quieter night. Complete poppyc.o.c.k. Of course there's no quiet to be had anywhere in college on such an occasion. They're herded over to Rattenbury and they're still there, you know, at this moment because it makes it easier to prevent them gate-crashing that opulent and ostentatious revel. Cyril, that's not to be denied, is it?'

'It was one consideration involved, I agree.' Bedworth spoke slowly. 'It's best not to put temptation to plain dishonesty in people's way.'

'I don't think I'd like to call it that,' Gender said judiciously. 'Gate-crashing is only a lark at least when it's an affair at another college. But attending one's own dance without a ticket isn't perhaps quite the thing.'

'Well, it's what this unfortunate boy Lusby decided to do.' Lempriere had turned to me as if minded to enter upon a narrative. 'We know that he actually made it the subject of a wager. He'd borrow a dinner-jacket for you can attend these things in dinner-jackets nowadays and go right through the ball undetected.'

'Didn't he own a dinner-jacket?' Atlas asked.

'Apparently not and why should he? He's a very simple lad which I see as part of the mischief. Anyway, the hopeful young Lusby succeeded in his design, so that dawn found him still among the revellers. Cyril, that's right?'

'Quite right.'

'Among them, but not of them. That, I imagine, is the nub of the matter. There was n.o.body he could dance with, and he felt in constant danger of being detected and chucked out. For a more privileged lad that would just have been part of the fun, and a matter of losing his bet. But Lusby would view it as a humiliation. He had misjudged the thing, he was strained and miserable, and he never got to bed. He simply changed his clothes, walked to the Examination Schools, sat down at his place, and fell fast asleep. He'd probably been working into the small hours, remember, over the weekend. He'd treat an examination that way.'

'I suppose somebody woke him up?' I asked. As I was plainly to be told Lusby's whole story it seemed polite to show some interest in it.

'n.o.body did. No doubt it's a point the college could make itself unpleasant about, and it reflects small credit on whichever of the examiners were doing the invigilating. I imagine any of them who took a glance at the boy supposed him to have closed his eyes for a few moments in the interest of more powerful cerebration. However that may be, he woke up or more or less woke up at the end of three hours, and found that he had only a blank ma.n.u.script-book to hand in. He did so, and staggered out of the Schools.'

'We don't know that he staggered,' Bedworth said. 'There was still really nothing to alert anybody to the fact that trouble was brewing. If only Lusby had been sitting near any of the other men from the college, they'd probably have tumbled to the situation and yanked him along to his tutor. Or got on to his tutor themselves. Undergraduates are extremely reliable in such situations.'

'Perfectly true,' Lempriere said. 'The young pests can be trusted to rally round in an astonishing way. It's one of the few traits that sharply distinguishes theirs from other criminal societies. If one must get in a sc.r.a.pe, an Oxford college isn't a bad place to choose for it.'

'Yes,' Atlas said. 'They need any alphas they can pick up, the Lord knows. And they do generally raise one on the primitive loyalty paper.'

And James Gender produced his acquiescent murmur again.

It had never occurred to me, when an undergraduate, that our tutors could take any sort of pride in us except, conceivably, on account of some exceptional agility displayed in jumping through the paper hoops of the Examination Schools. But here were these four men, oddly disturbed about poor Lusby and betraying certain signs of being not quite at one on the matter, making each other this pa.s.sing token of accord. They had the good luck to be in a decent regiment. It was something like that: the a.s.sertion, almost in a secret code, of those convictions about the college which, earlier that evening, it had been the Provost's business to express in terms of public eloquence. And the effect of this perception on me was to make me feel a genuine if necessarily tenuous concern for the unknown Lusby myself.

'This examination,' I asked, 'is a full-scale, day-after-day affair?'

'Pretty well,' Lempriere said, and glanced at Gender. 'Jimmy, would it be nine papers?'

'Six, which is almost as bad. Two on Tuesday, the day after the Ball. Two today, Wednesday, and two tomorrow, Thursday.' Gender glanced at his watch. 'And tomorrow will be with us in no time at all, which shows what a successful Gaudy this is turning out to be.'

'Gaudies last till midnight-plus, but Commem b.a.l.l.s carry on into late breakfasts round the town?' I asked.

'One sees you remember the drill,' Lempriere said. 'And now we return to Mr Lusby. He needs help. He has emerged from that non-paper, and is wandering around. Does he get any luncheon? We don't know, but we conjecture not. He will be shy of going into hall and facing all that cheerful gabble about what the paper was like.'

'Bad,' I said. It was evident that the sardonic Lempriere possessed imagination.

'Half-past two arrives, and Lusby is back in the Schools. What he chiefly feels now is that he must not turn in another wholly blank paper. So, every twenty minutes or so, he manages to write down a disconnected sentence. This at least takes him right out of any category of persons whom invigilators need concern themselves about, but it isn't going to help him to pa.s.s his Moderations, whether with credit or otherwise. He is realising now that he ought to have gone straight to Jimmy Gender after the morning's fiasco. Jimmy Gender is his tutor. He quite likes Jimmy. Jimmy, a competent performer, has afforded Mr Lusby certain cautious tokens that he, Jimmy, quite likes him. Jimmy, the situation might be more or less that?'

'We needn't romanticise it,' Gender said. 'When this kind of thing happens, one simply has to acknowledge having fallen down on the job. Of course my pupils knew I'd be on the bridge. It's only simple sense to make that clear to them. But Lusby didn't come along.'

There was a silence in which I made the further discovery that the fact or fantasy of a close personal relationship with the near-children who were their pupils was important to all four of these variously a.s.sorted men. I tried to relate this to my memories of Albert Talbert, who would sometimes take me for one of his undergraduates (which I was) and sometimes for a tenuously identifiable research student from another college (to say nothing of being Dalrymple every now and then). And I saw, with a kind of sudden awe, that there had been nothing in those bizarre intermittencies of memory to prevent Talbert's having been rather fond of me.

'To continue,' Lempriere said. 'The mischief in these affairs is that the point of no return comes so quickly. If those d.a.m.ned examiners had spotted their young Rip Van Winkle straight away, and got on the telephone, all might have been well. Lusby would have had his luncheon sherry, chocolate Bath Olivers, and black coffee, I rather imagine in Jimmy's rooms, and enough of the right chat from Jimmy to take him through some sort of show in the afternoon. By that time we'd have had in Robert Damian, who'd sign on the dotted line and honestly enough that Lusby had been under strain, and so forth. We'd have had a very good chance of selling that successfully to the proctors, who wouldn't be too keen on having negligent invigilation in the examination-room publicised. So Lusby, if he'd performed with any shadow of competence in the rest of the papers, would have been sure of an aegrotat, and might even have got a cla.s.s. As it is, it's no go.'

'And not all that important,' Atlas said, 'except in Lusby's head'.

'Just so.' Lempriere's voice had returned to its sardonic mode. 'But the state of Lusby's head is what we wonder about.'

'Where is Lusby now?' I asked.

'Where, indeed? But let me return to an orderly exposition. At the end of his disastrous day, Lusby slept in college. But, remember, as a displaced person in Rattenbury. The scout on the staircase didn't know him from Adam, or pay any attention to him. Which was a pity. It's well known that a boy's best friend is his scout. And Lusby didn't want to talk to any of his acquaintances those, that is, who were taking the same examination, and remaining in residence during this first week of the vacation for that purpose. They would all just be wondering whether they had done rather better, or rather worse, than they had hoped. Lusby couldn't bear the thought of revealing himself as in a position so remote from that. He was right back with the sort of loneliness of his very first days in college. Only, he'd had his hopes and ambitions to help him then. He didn't have them now.'

'Arnold,' Atlas said, 'stop so obligingly making things vivid for us.'

'Very well, Charles. But we do want to arrive at the young man's state of mind.'

'We want to arrive at his whereabouts, for a start.'

'Then let me tell Pattullo what we know about that. This morning, Lusby didn't turn up at the Schools at all. And that, of course, at last started something. When he hadn't appeared in his place within the prescribed twenty minutes of the first hour the examiners contacted our Senior Tutor. Or rather since he is away ill at the moment our acting Senior Tutor, who is Cyril here. And Cyril set inquiries going. We're still waiting for an answer to them.'

'The scout on that staircase in Rattenbury has a notion Lusby said something about going home.' Bedworth, anxiously precise, had taken up the story. 'Unfortunately he's not at all an intelligent man and moreover, as Arnold has hinted, he hadn't much interest in Lusby. So that piece of evidence is rather unreliable. Lusby has certainly vanished, but he doesn't appear to have taken any of his possessions with him. And perhaps you see, Duncan, that I've had rather a difficult decision to make. The problem does crop up from time to time, but I think it can be dealt with only on an ad hoc basis. In terms, I mean, of one's sense of the particular situation and the particular man.'

'I can imagine that.'

'You know how chary the police are of cla.s.sifying anybody as a missing person. If your husband, or your grown-up daughter, doesn't choose to come home, or walks out of the front door and fails to turn up for tea, it's no good expecting a hunt to be set instantly on foot. Roughly speaking, people are ent.i.tled to take themselves off where they please. And that goes for an undergraduate member of a college. He has come of age, and is free to choose between one lawful course of conduct and another. So you see what I mean. If Lusby has run away, we can only try to catch up with him in some unspectacular way, and reason with him. If it is really home to his parents that he has bolted, that would seem to be simple. But then there's the question of confidence. The theory that college authorities stand in loco parentis with these young adults has worn pretty thin by now. Suppose Lusby has got himself a job on a building site, and is going to receive a pay-packet for the first time in his life. Surprising his parents with that in a week or a fortnight's time may be his notion of rehabilitating himself in his own regard. So am I right in going clucking to them now-and it may be alarming them very much?'

'I see the problems,' I said. It struck me that Bedworth, although now an authority on two writers distinguished for a subtle movement of mind, retained a certain laboured explicitness of his own characteristic note.

'But my dear Cyril,' Lempriere said, 'the art of administration consists largely in ignoring the problems, or at least in not being diverted by them. Lusby's hypothetical pay-packet simply has no business in your mind. What are you going to do?

'Drive to Bethnal Green in the morning.'

'Bethnal Green?' Atlas repeated blankly.

'Certainly.' Bedworth now spoke briskly; his rise to challenge had been immediate. 'It's where the lad's parents live. If there's no news by morning, I'll go and see them. Until I've seen how things lie, they need have no notion such a call is anything out of the way. They're not university people.'

'That's the right thing,' Gender said quietly. 'Only, Cyril, it ought to be me. I'm the boy's tutor. I should have thought of it.'