The Gaudy Page 11

  Having come to this conclusion about Ranald McKechnie, and decided that our dim decent impulse to reach out or back to one another wouldn’t come to much, I was relieved to notice him beginning to show signs of interest in a man sitting opposite. The nearer of the brick-faced men being the next thing to a brick wall so far as my schoolfellow was concerned, here was a propitious development. The tables in hall, indeed, although so long that they appear very narrow, are in fact as broad as a marriage-bed (the comparison had been Tony Mumford’s), and I remembered that conversation across them, and against a background of noisy dining, had never been easy. But McKechnie was addressing himself with surprising vigour to overcoming the difficulty, and I caught enough of the exchange to grasp the reason. He had discovered from his dinner-list that the man opposite was qualified to discuss with him some third man’s edition of Martial. Each knows the man his neighbour knows, the poet says disparagingly of scholars. But here at least, on just that basis, was McKechnie comfortably fixed up until speech-time.

  My own attention was drawn across the table by this shift of balance. For a moment I looked blankly at the man facing me. Then I noticed that he was amused, and realised that it was my blankness which was the cause of this.

  ‘Come, come, Duncan!’ this man said. ‘Wake up. Acknowledge the obscure companion of your youth.’

  ‘Robert—well I’m blessed!’ It was odd not to have recognised Robert Damian. The boyish complexion had turned florid, or at least ruddy, and he had put on a little weight. He seemed otherwise unchanged. I told him this at once.

  ‘Duncan, you are changed − changed utterly. A terrible beauty is born. Spruced up, groomed, metropolitanised, admirably smoothed all over. And wearing almost alarmingly well. I give it as my professional opinion that you will live to be a hundred, and end up indistinguishable from Graham Sutherland’s Somerset Maugham. Or will it be his Beaverbrook? I’m not quite sure.’

  ‘Thank you very much, my dear Robert. Have they put you back on the staircase for the night, as they have me?’ Damian had succeeded a man called Kettle directly above my head − above what would now be Nick Junkin’s head.

  ‘Not needed. My humble home’s in Oxford.’

  ‘Oh, Lord! Then I’ve done it again.’ ‘It?’

  ‘Getting people wrong. Cyril Bedworth, for a start. He came into my room this evening, and I asked him in a kindly way if they’d put him back in his little attic for the Gaudy. And it turned out he was a fellow of the college − a status it’s seemly that all old members should revere. And now you too. Fellow and Tutor in Physiology, I suppose. Or is it Regius Professor of Medicine?’

  ‘Nothing of the sort. I’m a simple GP in a respectable North Oxford practice − pretty well a professional embalmer, really, since most of my patients are nonagenarians. But I’m college doctor as well, and attend to the young gentlemen’s injuries − whether sustained on the rugger field or in bed. It makes a nice change.’

  ‘In bed? Do you mean a chap can ….?’ Much to Damian’s amusement, I hesitated to complete this juvenile inquiry.

  ‘Lord, yes. I put it down to the Kama Sutra, and Japanese pillow-books, and so forth. Occidental joints and sinews just don’t seem to be up to it. A pity − but there it is.’

  ‘I see.’ I’d have supposed Damian to be talking outrageous nonsense if I hadn’t remembered, absurdly enough, the manual my near neighbour the Bishop had been distressed to find in his room. ‘Do you attend to the dons too?’ I asked.

  ‘No—it doesn’t seem to be in the contract. But they give me the freedom of the feast. There’s a tacit understanding, as a matter of fact, that I turn up every year as a sort of casualty service. Last year, when it was the dotards, we had to carry out a couple of them on stretchers. Mild CVA’s as the port went round the second time.’

  ‘I hope they made a good recovery.’ It seemed unnecessary to ask Damian to decode his jargon. ‘Have you run into Tony yet?’

  ‘I’ve had a gracious wave and a cheerful smile. Quite up with the nobs, isn’t he?’

  ‘Cabinet rank. Today’s headline news.’

  ‘Well, well!’

  ‘He’s in his old rooms opposite mine. Full of ‘esprit de I’escalier. He says it’s his ancestral stair. But there’s something odd about our Tony. He hasn’t come up just for the claret.’

  ‘Tony has a son.’

  ‘Yes, I know—Ivo. It seems he believes in taking sugar with his brandy and champagne. He hasn’t been injuring himself on the rugger field?’

  ‘Wrong time of year, old boy − and most improbable at any season. Still, there’s a spot of trouble in that direction, it seems. I’ll tell you later ….’ Damian paused on this spark of discretion − an impulse which didn’t, however, survive his now taking a glance at P. P. Killiecrankie, who was again absorbed in grave conversation with the Bishop. ‘Natty ecclesiastical outfitter, P. P. must have.’ Damian had leant forward, and was speaking in a kind of loud murmur. ‘He must have forgotten his old persuasion that there’s more enterprise in walking naked.’

  I remembered suddenly − and there had already been several occasions upon which it might have come back to me − that Yeats had been for a time something between a cult and a joke on the staircase. I also realised that Robert Damian must have been among the privileged few to whom either Tony Mumford or I had confessed our culpable spectatorship of Killiecrankie’s pleasures.

  VI

  The hall butler had rapped on high table, and the Provost was on his feet. The uninstructed majority, which included myself, grabbed their glasses as they stood up, loyally prepared to drink the health of the Queen.

  ‘Benedicto benedicatur.’

  We shoved our glasses furtively aside, and assumed expressions of solemnity. The Provost’s manner of delivering this decorous supplication was notable. Into the Latin words there had been fed the most cultivated modulations of the English tongue, and the pause between each syllable, fractionally longer than might have been expected, seemed to declare a just repose within unchallengeable authority.

  I thought again of those extraordinary prayers at school − prayers in which, as at some Council of State, inordinate demands are preferred in tones suggesting the moderate and level private exchanges of gentlemen. I thought again of my own favourite: that all things may be so ordered and settled by their endeavours, upon the best and surest foundations, that peace and happiness, truth and justice, religion and piety, may be established among us for all generations. These and all other necessaries, for them, for us, and thy whole Church

  It seemed odd that the Provost’s modest request should recall this omnibus prayer to my mind. What united them, perhaps, was an underlying social assumption. God is the most powerful of our connections, and we are entitled to his patronage and regard − provided we hit off with him, as head of the family, the right note of respect without servility.

  Differently phrased, these thoughts might not be incompatible with orthodoxy, and that they came to me satirically slanted told me how much a Scottish presbyterian I remained in bone. I wondered about Ranald McKechnie’s sense of this matter, and might have startled him with an inquiry if the Provost hadn’t now been on his feet again. It really was the Queen this time. A kind of unbuttoning succeeded, and soon the first cigar smoke began to drift about the hall. I sat back and made a more comprehensive survey than I had yet done.

  The hall if stripped to its sombre panelling and dusky raftered roof would still be impressive; as it is, it is dominated by the portraits that stretch in an unbroken line round its walls. As freshmen we had ticked them off as one witness to our having arrived within an ambience of gratifying grandeur. After that we had more or less forgotten about them, and certainly didn’t study them very much. Between ourselves and these notabilities so confidently filling out their frames there had been a gulf alike of years and of circumstances and expectations which worked against any sense of relationship.

  But tonight, as not when it was simply rows of hungry
undergraduates at the tables, there was a connection of sorts between the living and the dead. These diners were in process of closing the gap. Two or three of them would be hanging on the wall when the twenty-first century came round; already many were taking on the weight, the lineaments, the assumption of knowledgeableness and authority, the obligation to be unaffected because eminent, which Reynolds and Gainsborough, Hudson and Knapton and Devis, had recorded of the judges and bishops, the soldiers and scholars and statesmen looking down on a festivity familiar to them in their time. If there was a marked contrast, it was perhaps in flesh tones or complexion. The men sitting around me were ruddy; those on the walls were pale. This was partly because the hour was drawing on and the wine good; partly, too, it was a matter of certain conventions of portraiture long ago, when to be pallid, ashen, or faintly green had been the distinguished thing. Only Raeburn − my father had once remarked − acknowledges that men live on beef and ale.

  At right angles to the dais, three long tables ran in parallel down the hall. At a smaller table immediately behind me I discovered that there were seated the young men who had formed part of the choir. These undergraduates, who must have remained in residence to grace their seniors’ festive occasion by singing for their supper, were presumably surveying an unfamiliar scene. I wondered what they made of such outmoded if innocent ostentation: the florid satisfied faces, the confident commanding voices, the varying degrees of fancy dress, tables unfamiliar beneath their load of silver and silver-gilt − everywhere cups and bowls and goblets of a size suggesting the potations of giants. To this question, as it happened, I was later to receive an answer.

  My glance went back to the portraits, and I decided that most of these silent witnesses, at least, approved what they saw. Only here and there a poet, a lean and tormented philosopher, an old religious man, cast on us what was perhaps an alienated regard: these might have been sniffing in the cigar smoke, in the vinous miasma, in the considered after-dinner eloquence now getting under way, an odour and a resonance foreign and profane. And it was indeed arguable that, as the old members with the decorations glinting under their white ties pursued their nostalgic and sentimental exercise, the deeper life of the place, which was the life of teachers and taught, was in abeyance.

  I looked round for the teachers. Apart from those whom seniority, or an appointed part in the proceedings, placed at high table, the dons were scattered thinly over the hall. Ranald McKechnie apart, the nearest to me was Talbert, and he was a dozen yards away. He was putting a good deal of vigour into smoking a cigar, so that his large white moustache had the appearance of vaporising at its tips and floating away in air. His gaze was into the rafters, and I wondered whether he was listening to what was being said; it was exactly the speculation which had frequently beset me when I was reading him my weekly essay. I used to believe that he had developed some power of total recall over his texts of the moment, and was in a position to collate one with another as a pure act of memory.

  The first speech of the evening was well advanced. A junior fellow of the college had the task of proposing the health of the guests, and the job consisted in the main of taking felicitous notice of each of the principal visitors in turn. He had begun nervously, and a lank lock of black hair falling over his forehead gave the impression of some stiff physical labour being performed. But brief applause was punctuating his speech, since it was the business of the company at large to express admiration tinged with affection for a number of people about whom most of us probably knew very little. The young man gained confidence from this, and as he finally raised his glass he was relaxed and secretly radiant − knowing that he had brought it off and gained some sort of decent alpha mark from his colleagues. His colleagues were on their feet; both those at high table beside him and the scattering of thirty or so around the hall. A further small round of applause followed the toast, mixed with a little coughing; men who had been too diffident to strike matches during the speech did so now; servants moved in to plant replenished decanters in the place of empty ones. It was one more phase of the ritual accomplished.

  ‘A very good speech,’ McKechnie murmured to me − whether conventionally or sincerely, it was impossible to say. ‘Are you fond of this sort of thing, Duncan?’

  ‘It wouldn’t be too civil to turn up and then declare the affair a bore.’ McKechnie’s question had surprised me. ‘And it all doesn’t lack its interest. About a third of these people ring a bell with me − either faintly or middling loud. And that’s quite fun. But I’ve been thinking I’d rather be seeing the college in working clothes, and with the young men around. Do you know, Ranald, I think I’d like to become a don? For a couple of years, say. I believe I could hold my own, after a fashion, for just about that long.’

  ‘And write a play about us?’ McKechnie had given me a glance of a sharpness which seemed unmerited by my wholly fanciful remark. ‘There was a man who did something of the kind at Cambridge. His name escapes me, but he wrote two or three novels about the place. Rather good as stories, holding the interest well.’ McKechnie paused on this; he seemed to have a flair for temperate praise. ‘But not quite getting his academics in their habit as they live.’

  ‘I think I’d myself produce a merely rambling sort of record. No hold on the interest at all. Mere expatiation.’

  ‘I doubt that very much. Are you not a thoroughly Aristotelian man? What I notice about your plays is that you are careful to give them middles as well as beginnings and ends.’

  I was more surprised still at this serious scholar’s being prompted to make fun of me. But it was, of course, agreeable to be called an Aristotelian man. I replied that middles are the great difficulty, and that it is in the middles that the muddles come.

  ‘Have you had any talk with the Provost yet?’

  ‘I haven’t so much as made a bow to him. And he wouldn’t remember me from Adam.’ I was about to add: ‘Or if he did remember me, it would be as my father’s son; they once discussed Dürer together.’ But I refrained from this − I suppose because of the reminiscence it carried in my own mind of the Dreich and Wee Dreichie. The inconsequence of McKechnie’s question had struck me − this and the fact of its somehow echoing a remark of Talbert’s shortly before we entered hall. I might have put some answering question to McKechnie now had the butler not banged on a table again. The aged Swedish physicist was going to reply for the guests.

  This turned out to be a long speech, delivered in fluent although at times erratic English. The savant’s voice was more powerful than his appearance of advanced decrepitude would have led one to expect; every now and then, whether by accident or rhetorical design, he would simultaneously raise its pitch, increase its volume, and thrust his mouth hard up against the microphone standing on the table before him. The effect was of an intermittent divagation into Tamil, Telugu, or Chinese emitted through a loud-hailer. These exercises, moreover, could be judged to perform a cadenza-like function. Acoustically brilliant in themselves, they appeared to serve as bridge-passages between one theme and another in the course of a singularly wide-ranging oration. Into the punctuating uproar would vanish thoughts on molecular physics or the whaling industry; out of it would emerge reflections on contemporary architecture or on Oxford as a perennial battleground between science and religion. This bizarre eloquence was variously received. Talbert, I felt certain, wasn’t listening to a word; he had passed into brooding reverie on the incompetence of the Rev. A. B. Grosart or the ignorance of Sir Edmund Gosse. The Provost, courteously inclined towards the speaker and thus presenting a noble profile to the body of the hall, remained grave except when some relaxation into the mirthful became mandatory. McKechnie was taking in what was intelligible, and would have his appraising word to murmur at the end of the speech. But, broadly, I felt him to fall within the same bracket as Talbert; he would have preferred to be continuing that conversation about the edition of Martial. As for Bedworth, who turned out to be sitting in a position of semi-distinction looking stra
ight up one of the long tables, I wondered whether I was not suddenly glimpsing in him some curious current of hostility to the whole affair. Among the mass of us there were numerous men whose walk of life took them to a dozen functions of the sort every month; these sat impassive and relaxed − with perhaps one occasionally catching the eye of another across the hall. But the great majority of the guests were unaffectedly enjoying themselves. Some were in a state of delighted admiration as they contemplated in the versatile orator standing before them one whose actual dwelling lay presumably amid the farther mysteries of the cosmos.

  The eminent Swede reached his peroration at last. Oxford, and this the most prominent of its colleges, were, most properly, well to the fore. So were Roger Bacon, Robert Boyle, Newman, Shelley, and Matthew Arnold. The distinguished physicist had been doing his homework well. ‘Beautiful city!’ he bellowed, and seized the microphone with both hands. I found myself wondering how he was going to cope with the overtone of irony which Arnold’s celebrated apostrophe carries. ‘Home of lost grouses,’ he suddenly shouted, ‘and unpopular games, and impossible royalties!’ He sat down.

  Had I, as I listened, invented this incursion into the world of Finnegans Wake? Perhaps I had, since nobody seemed startled and nothing except the regulation applause succeeded. Nevertheless, it had been a speech not easy to follow in the batting order. The elderly statesman who next stood up must have been aware of this, and may even have noticed that the decanters were all but empty down the long tables. Practised, apt and witty, he moved rapidly to the business of proposing the toast of the college. Here the formula for success is adequately to modulate from the light and amusing into a final warmth of sentiment in the expression of which words like loyalty, affection, and love are honestly spoken out. They were very well received now. For brief moments the evening touched the sacramental. And then brandy or a liqueur was being served. The more resolute even had opportunity to possess themselves of a second cigar.