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  First published in 1978

  Copyright: John Stewart Literary Management Ltd. 1978-2012

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  The right of J.I.M. Stewart to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.

  This edition published in 2012 by House of Stratus, an imprint of

  Stratus Books Ltd., Lisandra House, Fore Street, Looe,

  Cornwall, PL13 1AU, UK.

  Typeset by House of Stratus.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library and the Library of Congress.

  EAN ISBN Edition

  075513043X 9780755130436 Print

  075513317X 9780755133178 Kindle

  075513348X 9780755133482 Epub

  This is a fictional work and all characters are drawn from the author’s imagination.

  Any resemblance or similarities to persons either living or dead are entirely coincidental.

  www.houseofstratus.com

  About the Author

  John Innes Mackintosh Stewart (who also wrote as Michael Innes) was born in Edinburgh where his father was Director of Education. He attended Edinburgh Academy before going up to Oriel College, Oxford where he was awarded a first class degree in English and won the Matthew Arnold Memorial Prize and was named a Bishop Frazer scholar. After a short interlude travelling with AJP Taylor in Austria, including studying Freudian psychoanalysis for a year, he embarked on an edition of Florio’s translation of Montaigne’s Essays. This subsequently helped him secure a post teaching English at Leeds University.

  In 1932, Stewart married Margaret Hardwick, who practised medicine, and they subsequently had three sons and two daughters. By 1935, he had been awarded the Jury Chair at the University of Adelaide in Australia as Professor of English and had also completed his first detective novel, ‘Death at the President’s Lodging’, published under the pseudonym ‘Michael Innes’. This was an immediate success and part of a long running series centred on ‘Inspector Appleby’, his primary character when writing as ‘Innes’. There were almost fifty titles completed under the ‘Innes’ banner during his career.

  In 1946, he returned to the UK and spent two years at Queen’s University in Belfast, before being appointed Student (Fellow and Tutor) at Christ Church, Oxford. He was later to hold the post of Reader in English Literature of Oxford University and upon his retirement was made an Emeritus Professor. Whilst never wanting to leave his beloved Oxford permanently, he did manage to fit into his busy schedule a visiting Professorship at the University of Washington and was also honoured by other Universities in the UK.

  Stewart wrote many works under his own name, including twenty-one works of fiction (which contained the highly acclaimed quintet entitled ‘A Staircase in Surrey’, centred primarily in Oxford, but with considerable forays elsewhere, especially Italy), several short story collections, and over nine learned works on the likes of Shakespeare, Kipling and Hardy. He was also a contributor to many academic publications, including a major section on modern writers for the Oxford History of English Literature. He died in 1994, the last published work being an autobiography: ‘Myself and Michael Innes’.

  J.I.M. Stewart’s fiction is greatly admired for its wit, plots and literary quality, whilst the non-fiction is acknowledged as being definitive.

  I

  The college tower was coming down. Already where its upper ranges had been there was only naked scaffolding. The sun dropped through this criss-cross vacancy every evening. If one walked round Long Field at night there was a point from which the moon was to be observed similarly disposed, like a sickly prisoner behind bars.

  Not that we put in much time staring. Building operations of one sort or another were commonplace; during term and vacation alike, they went on now in this quad and now in that; the fabric was extensive and most of it dated from centuries back. Yet we didn’t much like what we were now seeing. Although there was money for a complete restoration, from which there would only be lacking a certain weathering that it would be absurd to attempt to reproduce, we’d still own, we knew, an irrational sense of loss.

  I suppose nobody’s consciousness of this was oppressive. Yet everything taking place during the academic year now beginning, was to occur against a background of dust and rattle as the tower crumbled away; and when tensions built up they were a little exacerbated by that.

  Matthew Arnold thought of his colleagues at Oriel College and elsewhere as men of ‘petty pottering habits’, and a century earlier, the undergraduate Edward Gibbon judged ‘the monks of Magdalen’ to be ‘decent easy men, who supinely enjoyed the gifts of the founder’. Gibbon’s stricture would scarcely have been applicable in the Oxford of Arnold’s time ̶ a place from which the general strenuousness of the Victorians was not absent. Nor could Arnold’s words be used with fairness, a century later again, of the university I knew. For if the interests, say, of Albert Talbert might have to be described as petty and pottering they were at the same time marked by a quite monumental industry, and by and large I was steadily aware of being in the society of intelligently active men and women.

  This predominant tone was so secure a possession of the university, that people were slow to trouble themselves before the spectacle of apparent idleness here and there. In many English public schools, those boys are most admired who achieve intellectual or athletic distinction with the least appearance of effort, and in college we were ourselves prone to applaud able youths who collected university prizes and an impressive First Class in their final examination with no trace of application whatever. It was the same with their seniors. Men would gossip with witty aimlessness in the common room until a late hour, and then return to their college rooms or North Oxford dwelling, there to turn up the lamp on strenuous research through deeper watches of the night.

  Within this area of not quite authentic insouciance, appeared to fall the first formal meeting of the college tutors in each term. It was the duty of my colleagues to answer a proxy roll-call certifying that each of their pupils had returned into residence. Inevitably, by no means all had done so, and the Senior Tutor read out to the meeting such excuses as the absentees had sent in. These were various, but with commonplace ailments and accidents little in evidence. A premium seemed to be set on invention. One man would be awaiting serviceable aircraft in Nepal, and another a snow plough in Scotland. Organising a mother’s garden party or a grandmother’s wedding, attending upon the birth of hound puppies, awaiting ransom after having been kidnapped by Bedouin in the Sahara: these are representative of the exigencies presented to us. Cyril Bedworth passed them on to the meeting with an air of discreet amusement handed down to him by predecessors in his office.

  The absurd letters and telegrams and telephone calls were treated, then, as a traditional beginning-of-term joke. There was rarely the hint of a headache in them. The youths involved very well knew the rules of the game. Saturday’s captive of the Sahara would be around the place on Monday morning, and hound puppies were born regularly on time. And so also in other matters. We scarcely bothered to preserve among ourselves the humorous fiction that undergraduates are childish, impervious to reason, inexpugnably lazy, incipiently alcoholic, and so on. It was the dull fact of the matter that they were a reliable crowd, well able to get smartly off a mark when the pistol barked. A strain of complacency lurked in this persuasion. Hadn’t we hand-picked the a
blest boys in the kingdom? So what would you expect?

  We had also hand-picked ourselves or each other. Nobody in the world could wish a colleague on us. We decided on our needs, advertised, interviewed, deliberated, and finally elected into a fellowship a man whose tenure became at that moment virtually for the remainder of his working life. A small closed society of this self-perpetuating sort might be expected to exhibit a conservative collective mind. But in fact the college was sometimes venturesome and eccentric in its recruitment, as if there were an assumption that the strength of that mind depended upon its incorporating at least a strong dash of heterodox views. This matter of the mind of a collegiate society is a tricky one, which I am very little able to elucidate. I would have described the majority of my colleagues as being, individually, diffident men, who through their intellectual endowment were very sufficiently aware of the perplexingness and treachery and uncontrollability of things in general. But collectively they had a serene confidence in themselves. They reposed this confidence, indeed, not merely in their own conjoined wisdom but also each man in the other individually. Or, if they didn’t do this last, there was a convention that they should profess to do so – a convention barely to be breached even in the conversation of intimate friends. Hence that enviable assurance which I have always tended to associate (perhaps mistakenly) with the notion of a crack regiment.

  But to such time-tempered societies breaking strains can come unsuspectedly, just as they can to the fabric of an ancient tower.

  The roll-call meeting was an after-dinner occasion, rarely lasting more than fifteen minutes. Pipes and cigarettes were in evidence, and prosperous or improvident men lit cigars. At the end of the proceedings, the more sociably disposed usually returned to common room to drink and converse. This had become my own habit. My vacations were tending to be solitary affairs, given over to the writing I had little time for during term. As a consequence, when a new term began I behaved in a clubbable way for some weeks. It was in these circumstances that I had my first encounter with David Graile.

  Graile came up to me in front of the decanters, waited until I had poured a tot of whisky, and then introduced himself. He had been a fellow of the college for fifteen or twenty years, and I hadn’t met him because, during my single year as a member of common room, he had been absent on sabbatical leave. This was an institution stoutly upheld among us. Every seventh year a man might disappear as he pleased, continuing to earn his pay solely in virtue of his private research, and not at all for any continued labours in the way of educating the young. Opinions appeared to differ as to whether a man availing himself of this provision ought to present any formal intimation of what he proposed to be about. One man would turn in a detailed programme and another do little more than bleakly announce his impending disappearance. Those college Statutes by which we were all supposed to live attained a maximum of obfuscation on this point, since they spoke of a fellow as ‘entitled to permission’ thus to vanish. But this dark saying, like many others in this book of wisdom, was of no practical consequence.

  ‘What did you make of that meeting?’ Graile asked.

  I don’t know why I delayed for a moment before answering this casual-seeming question. If there was one thing that my recently acquired colleagues had never suggested to me, it was that of adopting the role of examiner or inquisitor vis-a-vis their neophyte. It was indeed their constant attitude – lightly but unmistakably intimated – that any cadet in their midst was at least by some crucial margin better-informed than they were – and this even in regions so arcane, so shrouded within the particular mysteries of his novel ambience, that only the most pronounced clairvoyant faculty would have made any such knowledgeableness conceivable. I suppose there may still have harboured in my mind the ghost of a juvenile persuasion that all dons – and in particular freshly encountered ones – were disposed to subject one to the rigours of viva-voce assessment. And in Graile’s tone I had perhaps detected some hint of challenge.

  ‘It appears to be a meeting designed for purposes of amusement,’ I said. ‘I don’t feel I came away with any very useful accession of knowledge.’

  ‘One learns who’s not around.’

  ‘That could be put on paper.’

  ‘Well, no, Pattullo. Or not comprehensively. Consider Watershute.’

  ‘But I heard that name, and his tutor answer for its owner. Quite rightly. He’s certainly up. In fact he’s a decent-looking lad who has just moved in on my staircase.’

  ‘Ah, that’s the son. I’m talking about the father. One couldn’t very well have a Senior Tutor being gently ironical over some facetious communication from him. But, for that matter, Watershute – William, that is Watershute père – would never bother his head to turn in any communication at all.’

  ‘I’ve barely heard of William Watershute, and didn’t connect him with the young man.’ I was finding myself a little at sea over these exchanges. ‘He’s actually a fellow of the college?’

  ‘Of course he is. And an extremely able nuclear physicist.’

  ‘He certainly can’t have been much in evidence since I turned up last October. If I set eyes on him, it was without being aware of it.’

  ‘Well, Watershute did have a couple of terms’ leave. But he’s been so seldom on view since then that you might think he had miscounted, and stayed away for three. One would expect a higher degree of numeracy in a scientist.’

  ‘I suppose so.’ Graile’s last observation had been quite in the common line of academic humour. ‘Are you telling me that this roll-call meeting is in aid of spotting who’s not round the table – which of us, in fact, is on French leave?’

  ‘It has inescapably that function, wouldn’t you say? It’s sometimes made a joke of. One wouldn’t dream of taking the suggestion seriously. This is a damned rum place, Pattullo.’

  ‘I sometimes feel it that way, I admit.’ I still felt a little out of my depth, or at least uncertain of the extent to which Graile and I were just being funny together. ‘It does strike me as odd,’ I said, ‘that I’ve hardly heard of my young neighbour’s father. Am I right in thinking that there’s felt to be a situation about which a little reticence is to be observed?’

  ‘Yes, you are.’

  ‘Then why, Graile, do you come at me with it? I’m a very new arrival here, and massively junior according to the rules of the place.’

  ‘Perhaps I have it in mind that, as a fresh observer of our cloistral scene, you may preserve and present a usefully objective point of view.’

  ‘I’ve no point of view whatever – or not on the matter we seem to be talking about. For one thing, I haven’t a notion of what sort of person this William Watershute is, and in the circumstances it doesn’t look as if I’m going to have any large chance of finding out. Or not, at any rate, at first hand. And I don’t know that I have much impulse to go inquiring around.’

  ‘Haven’t you, Pattullo? You disappoint me. Aren’t you a dramatist? I’d suppose it was your thing, rather – discovering how somewhat out-of-the-way people tick.’

  ‘He’s out-of-the-way, is he?’

  ‘Ah, that’s better! And I’d say he is, decidedly.’

  ‘Just as a don? An irresponsible and rather frivolous type?’

  ‘I’d scarcely have said that until recently. But he does seem to have been moving that way. Coming to have the look of a loose fish, if you ask me. Tell by a fellow’s mouth, don’t you think? Kind of saggy effect. Belated playboy, perhaps, kicking out as his youth sinks over the horizon. Question is, could he be yanked out of it by being pulled up sharp.’

  These remarks, unexpected as offered about a colleague in this place, held me dumb. So Graile was able to continue.

  ‘Something freakish about him, too. You could never feel certain – or I couldn’t – what he might be up to next. But the devil of it is you can be certain – at a mere whiff of the man you can be certain – that there’s a purposeful creature there as well. Thorough, too. Never does things by halves.
’

  ‘It’s a useful endowment.’

  ‘He couldn’t have got where he has, without it. But it looks as if that particular Watershute is being squeezed out. Playing fast and loose with his duties in the most startling way.’ Graile was silent for a moment. ‘But I mustn’t plague you with uncongenial gossip,’ he then said, a shade maliciously.

  ‘What you say seems a little beyond that. Are you telling me there’s a real problem looming?’

  ‘Within a month, I’d say. Will you put a bottle of port on it in the wager book? We could fudge it to look quite innocuous.’

  ‘No, thank you. It’s not my kind of bet.’

  ‘Bloody glad to hear it,’ Graile said. ‘We get all sorts here now.’ He put down his glass and walked away.

  When I myself left the common room a few minutes later it was with a displeased sense that there had been an examination after all; that I had been subjected by a totally fresh acquaintance to a process of sizing up. Just how this had been meant to work wasn’t clear to me. But my behaviour in face of the unexpected had certainly been in question. I’d been offered, for instance, the choice of a right or wrong response to that proposal about a wager. It was something I could scarcely be other than resentful about.

  The Great Quadrangle washed this feeling away in an instant. It was a composing place, particularly at night. And this was a frosty mid-October night in which a clear sky was powdered with stars. The most brilliant of them appeared to have congregated together in the west; they might have been suspended from the scaffolding round the tower as lamps on a Christmas tree. The central fountain was still playing, perhaps for the better refreshment of the college chub, and its gentle splash was the only sound to be heard. The Great Quadrangle is given over in the main to senior persons of a sober habit. One would not have expected from it any sharp impression that after summer slumbers the college had filled up again, was murmurous and pulsating like a vast and intricate honeycomb of caverns into which there had once more flowed some codling-crowded sea. Yet the impression did hold, and fairly enough. Of the several hundred young men who had been dining in hall a couple of hours before, the majority were still within bow-shot of me now.