Memorial Service Read online

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  A Memorial Service

  First published in 1976

  Copyright: John Stewart Literary Management Ltd. 1976-2012

  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

  0755130413 9780755130412 Print

  0755133277 9780755133277 Kindle

  0755133587 9780755133581 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

  Nos miseri homines et egeni . . .

  For the first time since becoming a fellow of the college, I was listening to grace in hall. It hadn’t changed in twenty-five years; probably it hadn’t changed in four centuries. Or had the pronunciation changed? That first consonant in egeni had come out as in genius, whereas I seemed to remember it as in gamp or golliwog or Ghent. But this might be a false memory, arising from the way I had been taught to enunciate Latin at school. What I was hearing now at least struck me as being close to Italian, which was no doubt proper enough. Possibly the bible clerk summoned thus to prelude the common meal was allowed to consult his own fancy. In such matters it was a liberal place.

  Per Jesum Christum dominum nostrum. As the bible clerk, a bearded youth in a tattered scholar’s gown, came briskly to the end of his task there was a murmured laughter, a ripple of applause, from his companions in the body of the hall. The unexpected sound echoed faintly among the dark rafters of the hammer-beam roof, as if a stripling wave had tumbled audaciously into an enormous cavern and broken there. Some sort of wager may have been involved. The bible clerk had been challenged, say, to get through the grace on one breath, or even to introduce a variant reading, facetious in character, which I hadn’t tumbled to. Nobody at high table took notice of this small happening– – unless, indeed, in the Provost there was to be detected a controlled and temperate disapprobation. But then the Provost was a clergyman, so that was proper enough.

  I had last heard grace here only a few months previously, when, still no more than as a former member, I had attended the annual Gaudy. There had been no undergraduates then, except for half-a-dozen known as academical clerks. They and the choir-boys and the Provost and the chaplain had between them sung and intoned a grace of splendid elaboration judged to be in consonance with the magnificence of the feast. As I sat down now, I was remembering how, when my uncle the minister came to stay with us in Edinburgh in order to attend the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, my father, although not religiously inclined, would insist that we remain standing until his brother had uttered – mournfully and on a far from optimistic note – the simple presbyterian hope that for what we were about to receive the Lord would make us truly thankful. One of my earliest problems of a doctrinal nature had arisen from the thought that the thankfulness, if it were to be any good, ought to be spontaneous, and that it was futile to urge the Lord to go out of his way to make us grateful to him. I wondered what the Provost would rejoin if the new fellow put this theological difficulty to him over the soup.

  Not that at the moment I could have put the question to Edward Pococke without bellowing. He sat at the middle of the high table, with a portrait of the college founder behind him and the long vista of the hall in front. I was four or five places away from him on his left hand, and looking down the hall too. He had greeted me in common room, expressing pleasure that I had come into residence so promptly. Over the Provost’s sense of pleasure, or displeasure, there always hovered a hint of divine sanction – again something very proper in a clergyman, but apt to disconcert when encountered again after an interval. And the phrase ‘come into residence’, although I knew it to be a normal piece of academic vocabulary, struck my unpracticed ear as odd. I made an awkward reply, saying that I didn’t know about residence, but that at least I was here and glad of it. At this the Provost left me, with what I think was designed as a comforting smile. Meanwhile the common-room butler had been hovering, an elderly Ganymede, anxious to explain to me where I must sign on for my sherry. He also mentioned that I got my dinner free but paid for anything I chose to drink at it. This might have been regarded as officious, but I took it to be occasioned by former experience of embarrassing misconception. Fledgling dons, if they unwarily got this small matter wrong, might be confronted with an unexpected bill later.

  Several men had then come up to me, offered casual welcoming remarks, and drifted away. A couple of them shook hands, which was something they would never do again unless they invited me to an extremely f
ormal private dinner. The others, sticking to the custom of the country from the start, refrained from this demonstration. And presently I had moved into hall under my own steam. Nobody was going to do anything so obtrusive as to take me under his wing. Had I been a stranger to the college hitherto it might have been otherwise. But they all knew that I had been an undergraduate here a quarter of a century before. This constituted me – it is another piece of academic jargon – a gremial member. It would be an immediate convention that there was nothing about the place I didn’t know. My return was a matter of coming in and hanging up my hat.

  I had heard that there were still colleges in which the fellows formed up in a solemn order of seniority to enter hall. With us the Provost was allowed to go first and then everybody did as he chose, short of using his elbows. I was to learn that this note of the casual was a central tenet of the society; it overlay, perhaps masked, a formidable subterranean rigidity and conservatism in matters well beyond the sphere of deportment. Such being the order of things, I expected to sit down between total strangers. But, at least on my right hand, it wasn’t so. Cyril Bedworth, my contemporary and a man who had never left these sheltering walls, had been keeping an eye on me, and had all but used an elbow in the interest of establishing himself as my neighbour. (He was a physically awkward man, with no deftness in manoeuvre.) Now he had been standing beside me as we waited for the grace to be uttered. We sat down together.

  ‘Oh, Duncan,’ Bedworth said, ‘how splendid to have you here!’

  It was when I became conscious of Bedworth’s warmth as cheering me up that I realised how much I was misdoubting my new situation.

  ‘Thank you very much, Cyril – and I hope I can bring it off. I’m glad to arrive, and have just told the Provost as much. I’ve a kind of itch to teach that I’d be shy to confess to the generality. But chiefly I’ve come to want stable things around me – not having managed much connectedness in my life so far.’

  If this confessional speech surprised me as I uttered it, I knew I hadn’t gone wrong in addressing it to Bedworth. He received it gravely, although without the solemnity which I recalled as often attending his responses as an undergraduate.

  ‘I think I understand that,’ he said. ‘But Duncan—do you know?—I rather wish you’d married again.’ He paused to pass me a silver salt-cellar almost as big as a soup-tureen. ‘Married and had children.’

  ‘It might have been an idea, yes. But you remember Dr Johnson on second marriages. The triumph of hope over experience.’

  ‘A college is an odd sort of place. And I sometimes think – just looking around me, I sometimes think – that it’s not a terribly good place to grow really old in.’

  ‘I suppose not.’ If Bedworth’s warning note struck me as a shade premature in being addressed to a man in his forties, it was far from deserving to be laughed at. ‘But nobody’s let do that now, surely? Some birthday comes along, and out you go.’

  ‘That’s true, or almost always true. Goodness knows what the final condition of the old-style bachelor life-fellows must have been. And senescence comes to people at varying chronological ages, don’t you think?’ Bedworth glanced down the table and lowered his voice. ‘Look at Arnold, for instance. An ailing and lonely man.’

  I followed the glance and was a good deal startled. Arnold Lempriere had changed perceptibly since I had encountered him only a few months before. Then he hadn’t quite filled out clothes tailored for him a good many years back; he was even more shrunken tonight. His hair and complexion made a single indistinguishable grey, as if he were an image carved out of pietra serena in some shadowy renaissance church.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘He doesn’t look too well.’

  ‘And I think we don’t always allow enough to a man’s years. Our instinct’s good, but perhaps we overdo it. A man’s your equal – you posit in him all his old stamina and flexibility and resilience – right down to the day you attend his memorial service in the college chapel.’

  ‘Most men wouldn’t want it otherwise. The ultimate humiliation, surely, is to be allowed for in a kindly way.’

  ‘Yes. Patronised.’

  ‘Who is Lempriere ages with? Albert Talbert?’ Talbert, once my tutor, was Bedworth’s immediate and senior colleague now.

  ‘No – Arnold is the older by several years. He’s still on the strength, as a matter of fact, only as the result of our bending a rule or two. But there’s another thing. Albert (he’s not dining tonight) is a different type. He’s an absorbed and dedicated scholar, as Arnold is not. And scholarship mummifies, I suppose. It embalms you painlessly as you go along. And Albert has his wife – not to speak of two children who stay put at home. Albert’s not looking for anything he’s less and less likely to get. Perhaps Arnold is.’

  ‘When you say he’s lonely, do you mean he’s alone in the world? When we met last summer he seemed rather keen on family relationships. He said he was related to an aunt of mine – my mother’s brother’s wife – and came down heavily on me for not knowing, or remembering, her maiden name. It was Lempriere.’

  ‘That’s like Arnold – coming down on a chap heavily, I mean.’ Bedworth laughed softly as he said this. It struck me that I couldn’t be certain of ever having heard him laugh before – or, for that matter, call a chap a chap. He had been an anxiously formal, socially uncertain youth. It looked as if the years (and perhaps his position of authority in the college, since he had lately become its Senior Tutor) had loosened him up. ‘As for being alone in the world, I believe Arnold runs to an elderly sister, who looks after his house in the country.’

  ‘So the college isn’t his only home?’

  ‘He owns a small landed property in Northumberland.’ It was the old Bedworth, at least, who said ‘small landed property’. ‘But in effect I’d say the college is his only home. Regarded in emotional terms, that is.’ Bedworth was frowning as he said this; he might have been glimpsing some problem looming ahead. ‘He adores the place. It’s been his whole life. That’s why he snaps your head off if you venture to say a good word for it.’

  Bedworth, although professionally the celebrant of novelists of abundant wit and nuance, was not himself a man from whom one often expected a mot. I marked this one as an arrow going straight to the gold.

  ‘I noticed that,’ I said, ‘on the night of the Gaudy. And he took a monstrously unjustified smack at me when he marched me round Long Field next morning.’

  ‘You’re right about his setting store on distant relationships. There’s somebody’s wife here that he judges it’s important he’s related to. I forget who.’

  ‘A Mrs Gender.’

  ‘That’s right, Anthea Gender.’ Bedworth was surprised at my knowing this. ‘A formidable woman, but extremely nice. Mabel and she get on rather well together.’ Bedworth plainly took pleasure in the fact. ‘Knowing all about your cousins ever so many times removed is an amusing characteristic—wouldn’t you say?—of the aristocracy.’ This time, Bedworth didn’t himself sound amused. Like many men of unassuming origins, he retained a stout if naive sense of hierarchy.

  We were half-way through our dinner, or so a card in front of me seemed to indicate. I glanced down the hall, and saw with surprise that it was nearly empty. It was as if, at the clap of Ariel’s wings, the banqueters and not the banquet had vanished. The undergraduates must have bolted their food in a manner I didn’t recall from my own time. I commented on this to Bedworth, since the subject of Arnold Lempriere had exhausted itself.

  ‘Oh, yes. They maintain they’re hustled through dinner by impatient servants, and that the food’s not fit to sit in front of for more than fifteen minutes, anyway. I’m afraid there’s something in it.’ This was Bedworth’s note of scrupulous fairness. ‘We used sometimes to sit on and on, didn’t we, Duncan? Particularly at the scholars’ table. There’s no scholars’ table now. The undergraduates prefer to be all mixed up, and I suppose it’s better really. I remember how you and I once had a tremendous go at Dostoyevsky. In t
he end they turned the lights out.’

  ‘Yes, Cyril. I remember that too.’ I made this reply quickly, since the reminiscence had been an invoking of ancient friendship. There came back to me all the times I had made fun of Bedworth to frivolous companions of my own. I had the odd thought that it might be to that talk about Dostoyevsky – or to something it represented – that I owed the fact that I was sitting at high table now. I was about to offer some remark about Russian novels at large – picking up, as it were, where we had left off when the lights went out – but Bedworth interrupted me. The man on my other side had for the first time stopped talking to somebody across the table, and Bedworth took the opportunity to effect an introduction.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ he said. ‘Adrian, have you met Duncan Pattullo yet?’

  ‘Good God! Nobody need introduce me to young Pattullo.’ The man addressed as Adrian had uttered his profane exclamation so loudly that the Provost glanced down the table with an air of courteously dissimulated discomfort. ‘I tried to teach him how to translate Tacitus, but had more success in topping him up with madeira.’

  I realised that this middle-aged man, red-faced and full- fleshed, was known to me as Buntingford, who had been one of the minor annoyances of my first two terms in college.

  ‘Absolutely correct,’ I said. ‘And chunks of unseen as well. “Marcellus Offers Reasons for Rejecting the Proposals of Prudendus Clemens.”’

  ‘What on earth’s that?’ Bedworth asked.

  ‘Buntingford explained that there would be an English heading like that to the unseen in the exam. Just to give one a clue. He said that if I simply wrote a short essay in decent English with somebody called Marcellus chatting up somebody called Prudentius, I’d infallibly pass. He judged it unnecessary to instruct me further, and we talked about other things. It was alarming. But he proved to be right.’