Parlour Four Page 11

  Howe was our gardener: a jobbing gardener, who was the Brands’ gardener too. He came to each of us for a day a week. The Brands lived in north Oxford in what used to be called a college house. It owned a trim sort of garden, which was fairly spacious as gardens in prosperous suburbs go. We lived rather further out, in a rambling old house which was at least my father’s property, not far from Water Eaton. There was a large and straggling garden, which on three sides merged in a formless and unplanned fashion into some five acres of untidy woodland. We called this the copse, and seldom did anything about it, so that at periods of rank growth our situation became something like Macbeth’s in Dunsinane when Birnam Wood appeared to bestir itself against him. One of Howe’s duties was to defend some sort of perimeter against this assault: a task which he performed with great vigour. I can still recall his triumphant shout of ‘We’re winning!’ as he drove one of his machines through a final thirty feet of nettle and briar and bramble. There was an occasion upon which, knowing himself to be faced with a particularly hard day’s work, he arrived accompanied by three grown-up sons, all of them in the army, who instantly stripped themselves to the waist in the garden-shed and fell to well-co-ordinated labour. I think I am right in saying that these emergency reinforcements came free of charge.

  A certain sense of the mysterious attached to Howe. Occasionally he would ring us up from what seemed not to be a call-box in order to propose one altered arrangement or another. But if he had a telephone of his own he never offered us its number. How he had come to us in the first place I have forgotten or perhaps never knew; and I have an impression that we didn’t even have a note of his address. From time to time, and always without explanation, he would fail to turn up for a fortnight or even three weeks on end. When this happened I would annoy my parents by maintaining that Howe was on the bottle again, or even briefly in gaol. It was then that my father would insist on Howe’s notable intelligence – apparently believing that intelligence, sobriety and law-abidingness go habitually together. There was certainly no doubt about what we would then have called his I.Q. He thought clearly and quickly, and had a capacious memory for horticultural detail, as well as a great deal of useful lore in the field. Moreover, he appeared to have what may be termed a studious streak. In sunny weather he would eat his midday sandwiches while sitting on a chair outside his shed, with a newspaper, not of the most popular sort, spread out on a box before him. He once told me – and I think I recall the phrase accurately – that he was a ‘perusing’ man. Occasionally I noticed that the newspaper was considerably out-of-date. I assumed that he was catching up.

  I ought to have mentioned that Martin Brand and I were not much interested in ‘organised’ games. To be laboriously ‘coached’ in the nets, and told to keep on watching the ball from the instant it left the bowler’s hand and act accordingly, struck us as a stupid way of spending time. And since our school was not exigent in this regard, we spent a good deal of leisure loitering in our garden or his – sometimes, indeed, casually playing French cricket, and sometimes – perhaps a shade shame-facedly – resorting to Cowboys and Indians. We were so employed one day in my own garden when my father called me to his study window. He was about to hurry off in his car to a faculty meeting, and had taken it into his head to scribble down on the back of an envelope some instructions which he told me to hand to Howe. He seldom gave Howe any instructions at all, but now for some reason had decided that one task was to be performed before another, and both of these before a third. Probably my mother, who gave more thought to the garden than he did, had prompted him to the unusual action. This would account for the fact that he thought it proper to be emphatic about the thing. ‘And just make sure he understands,’ my father said, and turned away to stuff some papers into a briefcase. So Martin and I went off together in search of Howe. We found him whetting a scythe. Scything, already a dying art, was one of Howe’s accomplishments.

  ‘Please, Mr Howe,’ I said – for I had been taught all about courtesy to servants and retainers, ‘my father has asked me to give you this.’ I handed over the envelope. ‘He was in a hurry, but I hope it’s fairly clear.’

  That Howe hesitated for a moment was Martin’s impression, not mine. I was simply aware of his taking the envelope and glancing at it.

  ‘Very good, Master Leonard,’ he said. ‘I’ll see to it.’ And he took up his whetstone again.

  ‘What has Mr Burton asked you to do first, Mr Howe?’ It was Martin who asked this, and, although he did so with a great air of simply seeking something to chat about, I found it distinctly odd – and odd, too, was something suddenly intent in Martin’s glance from one to the other of us. As for Howe himself, he was, as the cliché has it, momentarily disconcerted. There could be no doubt about that. It is my clearest recollection of the incident.

  ‘That’s as may be,’ Howe then said sharply, and gave the blade of the scythe a long flowing stroke. ‘Any chance, there’s plenty to do. So you’d better both be off.’

  This was unceremonious, but not much out of order, particularly to myself. Howe and I were on familiar terms; he allowed me to ride the impressive motor-mower which I probably regarded as the Burtons’ most prestige-conferring possession; in return I would fetch him cheese or tobacco or cigarette-papers from the village shop. Moreover, being both learned and clever, he was capable of instructing me on various aspects of the natural world which schoolmasters know nothing about. So I was displeased with Martin as we walked away.

  ‘What did you ask him that for?’ I demanded. ‘It wasn’t any business of yours what my father wrote to him.’

  ‘Wrote to him,’ Martin said. ‘Exactly! You silly drip – didn’t you see? Howe can’t read. It’s a discovery.’

  ‘Can’t read? Do you mean he needs spectacles? I’ve never seen him with any.’

  ‘Spectacles my aunt.’ Our vocabulary at that time was much influenced by the archaic pages of the Magnet and the Gem. ‘The man’s illiterate – and probably has all sorts of cunning wheezes to conceal the fact.’

  ‘That must be nonsense. Everybody nowadays goes to one snot school or another and learns the three Rs. And Howe is highly intelligent: my father says so. Howe couldn’t have missed out on learning to read. Nobody can, unless they’re what’s called ESN.’

  ‘Howe’s illiterate, Burton my child. Just as you are innumerate, and likely to remain so.’

  ‘What do you mean – innumerate?’ I asked indignantly. The term was new to me, and I suspected that what was being called into question was my dawning sexual maturity.

  ‘Statistics, for one thing. I don’t suppose you’ve as much as heard of them.’ Martin, I imagine, already saw himself as booked to become a high-powered scientist. ‘They’d tell you that quite a large number of people leave school unable to read well – or even to read at all. Of course, a large number of people can be quite a small percentage of everybody. But it seems there’s a puzzle, all the same.’

  ‘A puzzle, Martin?’

  ‘Yes, a puzzle.’ Martin Brand was suddenly dismissive; he was always wary of getting out of his depth. ‘I’ll look into it one day. Is your mother going to give me tea?’

  ‘I suppose so,’ I said ungraciously. I was conscious that something had much disturbed me in this small episode. Just what it had been, or at what precise point it had occurred, I couldn’t at all clearly see. But I carried away an odd and inconsequent picture of a malicious child who had suddenly seen how he can push you into the swimming-pool or tumble you off your bike. Something like that: a trivial thing – but potent, all the same.

  II

  Hull paid off, so far as my father was concerned. Comfortably ensconced there, ‘teaching’ something that nobody within a hundred miles of the place much wanted to hear about, he became within a mere decade its prime authority in England, so that we were back in Oxford in what was, in fact, my own final year as an undergraduate. After that, I had a longish spell in London, working for a crammer and doing a number of small t
hings in a literary way. During this period my father died (something Oxford professors very seldom seem to do) and my mother went to live in Budleigh Salterton, so that I ceased to have any connection with the place. But then, and again after an interval, I found myself what may be called a niche there. It wasn’t a university job, being merely something to do with the British Council. But by that time I had also established myself as a minor literateur at large in the Sunday newspapers. And the dons of my old college, finding themselves one afternoon in a conclave with nothing much to occupy them, took it into their heads that I was deserving of an occasional square meal, and elected me to membership of their senior common room. It turned out that I had to pay for the square meals when I ate them, but it was an agreeable privilege, all the same. Moreover, having picked up in childhood some notion of the kind of chit-chat favoured on such occasions, I came to move freely if in a modest way in donnish circles generally, and it was thus that I revived my memory of, and casual acquaintance with, the companion of my youth.

  Martin Brand was rather grand – or so a rhyme that went the rounds not unreasonably declared. He had become, in his vigorous prime, Galen Professor of Physike and Chirurgerie. In other words, he was bang up to date as Oxford’s top medical man. But although this made him vastly eminent, he was known to be decently unassuming about it. He delivered an occasional lecture to the medical students, and this always ended with the injunction: ‘Les malades, toujours les malades!’ – a favourite precept, it seemed, of a colleague equally eminent in France, insisting that no medical luminary, whatever his wattage, should fail to spend time at the bedside of the afflicted. This strictly clinical zeal took Martin himself to the bedside of a good many profitable private patients. There was a story, several times repeated to me, that thus summoned to the extreme north of Scotland at several guineas a mile, he had given as his professional opinion on a ducal sufferer that his Grace might get better, or might get worse, or might remain the same. It is not, on the whole, about unpopular characters that dons fabricate such stories or air such chestnuts. Martin was, I judged, very generally liked as a man in whom there was a good deal more than transpired over a glass of port. Dons are commonly thought of as rather a tame lot. If it be so, the fact may account for their being drawn to individuals in whom some aggressive or aberrant impulse is felt to lurk. And that was certainly the case with Martin. Something that I had sensed in him as a boy was still there. It had, as it were, sunk deeper inside, and thereby become more difficult to put a name to. But perhaps it had strengthened as well.

  One night I chanced to dine as a guest of someone who was a fellow of the college to which Martin’s Chair was attached in the odd Oxford fashion, and I found myself sitting next to my old schoolfellow at High Table. Or, rather, standing next to him, as we hadn’t yet sat down. Grace had to be said before we could do that, and the grace was rather an elaborate affair. A servant would bellow for silence, whereupon the Provost, at one end of the table, would say a number of things in Latin. The senior fellow present, having taken his place at the other end, would interject a number of remarks in reply – also, of course, in the learned tongue. The performance, vaguely akin to a kind of badminton or pat-ball tennis, would continue for a minute or so, and then everybody (including some two hundred young men in the body of the hall) would sit down and fall to. But on this occasion there was a hitch. The Provost hadn’t turned up, so the Pro-Provost had taken his place. And the Pro-Provost didn’t know his stuff. This oughtn’t to have mattered at all, since the entire pious rigmarole was printed on a thing like a ping-pong bat in front of him. He was in difficulty, nevertheless, and fell to mumbling. At this an undergraduate shouted, ‘Louder!’ (and was instantly, no doubt, identified by the bawling servant, and consequently fined a pound next day). A second undergraduate then shouted, ‘—and funnier!’ (a hoary old joke likely to cost him the same sum). The situation might have got out of hand had not the senior fellow, with much presence of mind, firmly articulated, ‘In saeculo saeculorum, Amen!’ and sat down.

  Everybody at High Table took care to be discreetly amused by this small contretemps. Or everybody except Professor Brand. He, having given me a brisk nod of recognition, produced a gesture of dismay.

  ‘By God, Leonard! he said. ‘It looks as if the Pro-Pro has got it as well. A bit too much, that is. And I thought I was in luck.’

  ‘My dear Martin, whatever are you talking about?’

  ‘Something confidential. I’ll tell you – but don’t breathe a word.’ It might have been expected that this injunction would have been delivered in a lowered voice, but it wasn’t my impression that Martin had taken any such prudent course. He was excited, and apparently much perturbed. ‘The Provost’s in the Acland,’ he said, ‘and under my care.’ The Acland was a nursing home. ‘But he doesn’t want it known.’

  ‘Good heavens, Martin! Has the man been stricken by a retributive disease?’

  This was a tasteless joke, of which I was immediately ashamed. But Martin took it in his stride.

  ‘A reasonable guess,’ he said. ‘But I doubt whether the old boy would much distinguish himself in the stews. But he does feel that, in a scholar, it’s a particularly awkward thing.’

  ‘Then just what is “it”?’ I asked.

  ‘Something right up my street. That’s why I thought I was in luck when he came shambling in on me. But now the Pro-Provost too! What if the bloody condition spreads, and I can do damn-all about it? I’ll be a laughing-stock.’ And Martin glowered round the High Table almost as if he thought that this might already be the state of affairs.

  ‘Les malades, toujours les malades,’ I said. ‘You will be able to hop from one bedside to the other. But explain.’

  ‘You remember Howe?’

  ‘Howe?’ I echoed. For the moment the name conveyed nothing to me.

  ‘You must remember Howe. The dyslectic gardener.’

  ‘Dyslectic?’ Again I was at sea. Had Martin found occasion to employ a word like ‘dyslogistic’ I’d have understood him at once. I am, as I have explained, a literary man.

  ‘For pity’s sake! “Word blindness”, if you like. Howe couldn’t read, and the disability had almost certainly been with him from the cradle. He had grown quite cunning about it.’

  ‘I do remember now. But are you telling me that your Provost is dyslectic too? It must be quite unusual surely, for a man to become head of an Oxford college without ever having mastered his ABC.’

  ‘Don’t be an even greater ass than God made you, Leonard. We suppose dyslexia to be a functional disorder. Its presence is commonly detected in children – often very intelligent children – as soon as they’re presented with their horn-book. That’s known as the “developmental” form. We know now not to panic or fuss, and the condition can usually be persuaded to fade out. And it has always interested me. Thirty years back, if I remember, I told you I was going to look into it.’

  ‘So you did. I do now recollect that too.’

  ‘But there’s also, you see, a much rarer form of the trouble. We call it “acquired”, and I’m always on the look-out for it.’

  ‘It attacks adults?’

  ‘Just so. And here, suddenly, it walked in on me in the person of the boss of this dump we’re gorging ourselves at the expense of this evening. And what could be handier – downright nicer – than that? But now here’s his underling almost certainly attacked as well. It’s damned awkward. Suppose it spreads like billy-o.’

  ‘Like mumps, you mean, or some such harmless thing?’

  ‘If mumps comes at you, Leonard, you mayn’t find it harmless. Celibate, aren’t you? It may remind you of what you carry round with you, all the same.’

  This was distinctly coarse even for Martin Brand, and for a moment it silenced me. And my host of the evening became aware as a consequence that he owed me a little chat. So I got nothing further out of Martin until we rose from High Table and went into common room for dessert. But I did have a quick murmur from him a
t the end of the evening, when we were collecting our discarded gowns preparatory to going our several ways.

  ‘Of course, there are possibilities,’ he said. ‘Distinctly there are possibilities. It’s occasionally a small bonus one gets when landed in a fix. Meanwhile, what’s the betting that that praeposital understudy is in my consulting-room tomorrow morning? I’ll put a quid on it. Or a bottle of claret. The dump allows that in its wager book.’

  ‘Not on,’ I said, and departed into the night.

  Living, as I have explained, merely on the periphery of academic Oxford, I was far from surprised that for nearly a week I heard nothing more about the misfortune that had befallen the Provost of Judas, but I did on several occasions find myself reflecting on its extreme oddity. That a mature and distinguished scholar (as the man must surely be) should suddenly find himself, although retaining all his faculties in their full vigour, bereft of the earliest and most humble of his acquirements – to wit, the ability to read – was as bizarre as it must be profoundly disconcerting. I could well understand his retreating into unexplained seclusion until the disability should either pass or have to be admitted as dictating a total change in his manner of life. I even found myself wondering – and the wonderment was itself bizarre – whether he chanced to possess an informed knowledge of flowers and plants, and would thus be able to retreat upon such useful but decidedly unassuming toil as had marked the daily round of the now doubtless long-since deceased Howe. And the recovered image of Howe prompted another train of thought. Howe’s manner of life had been mysterious in various small ways, and the need prudently to dissimulate his disability had inclined him to other concealments than the vital one. The Provost, if his affliction chose to settle in on him, might well decline upon a course of irrational obfuscations.