The Gaudy Page 12

  The Provost came last, and struck me as having the most difficult assignment. His wasn’t the role of a raconteur, or of one fondly recalling golden generations long ago. What was prescriptively expected of him was an account of how, in the past two or three years, the college had been getting along. And this was something in which, curiously enough, the loyal old members showed little more interest than did the miscellaneous distinguished guests who knew nothing about the place. The news was news about dons: how one had died, another had been promoted or translated, and a third had retired. Such matters, and all those problems of university politics and administration which are as life and death to the governing bodies of colleges, were clearly felt as of small significance by men who had for long been breathing the larger air of the world of affairs. Only when the Provost began to talk about the present generation of undergraduates did interest momentarily quicken. But his remarks here were of the considered rather than the informative sort. The college had its problems with the young men − but then when had it not? Present intellectual standards gave perhaps some cause for concern; in the Examination Schools, at least, recent performance could not be called outstanding. But we need not be too downcast. The junior members today were quite as kind to their tutors, quite as active, versatile, well-mannered and charming as their predecessors had been a quarter of a century before.

  The Provost moved smoothly on to other thoughts. He was profoundly sensible of the support which the college received from all its members, present or past. He was deeply grateful to his colleagues for the loyalty he unfailingly received from them. The Senior Tutor, the Dean, the Chaplain, the Bursar: all were paragons. Last, but not least, there were the servants, to whom our debt was so incalculable. We mourned the death of Lickfold, which had taken place shortly after his completing forty years of devoted labour as scout on Howard Six. Gelly, the Head Porter, had retired that day; at a small presentation made to him there had been a very large turn-out. Freeguard, although no longer able to work in the buttery ….

  Freeguard, I conjectured, had succumbed to the professional risk of operating amid kegs of ale. The Provost’s corresponding risk was a Ciceronian copia. But now he was preparing to wind up the formal part of the feast. The night − he urged upon us − was still young, and the college’s resources in the way of modest entertainment were by no means exhausted. In the common rooms − and in the garden, too, so mild was the air − further refreshment awaited us should we care to partake of it.

  We got to our feet. The Provost bowed ceremoniously to the Swede and to the Chancellor, and made a gesture indicative of his intention to escort them from the hall. The other men at high table, taking their tone from this, began also to move out as a body and in a formal fashion. Tony was an exception; he had slipped rapidly along the table, detained in his place the junior fellow who had made the first speech, and had now sat down beside him and begun to talk. It was obvious − as with everything Tony did − that this was quite in order. In the body of the hall most of the guests were strolling out but some lingered − either continuing to gossip with their neighbours or reassorting themselves in casually seated groups. I supposed that Tony was making promptly sure of having an opportunity to congratulate this low-ranking youth on his performance. Lord Marchpayne, I realised again, had trained himself never to miss a trick. It was an art in which he had taken his first distinguishable steps as an undergraduate.

  I spent some time wandering round the hall, talking to people not all of whom I very clearly remembered, or who at all clearly remembered me. Yet another man asked me if I still wrote plays; the implication seemed to be that, like basket-ball or hurdling, it was an activity scarcely to be pursued with any dignity into middle life. If one is to attend reunions at all, I told myself, one ought to attend them regularly. This feeling made disagreeable for the moment the thought of now plunging into some crowded and noisy common room. The garden might be more attractive for the next half hour.

  As I thus made my way, unaccompanied, out of hall, my progress was impeded by a small group of the choral scholars (as I remembered them to be called) who had dined with us after singing grace. They were blocking the wide doorway with a casual regardlessness which, although wholly unaggressive, failed quite to square with the Provost’s assurance about the continued good manners of the young. One of them, a handsome lad who was for some reason wearing a large nosegay by way of buttonhole, was haranguing his fellows excitedly as I edged past.

  ‘I’ve never heard such a load of self-exaggerating crap in all my life!’

  These were the first distinguishable words I had caught from an undergraduate that day. They may have been intended as applicable to the evening’s eloquence as a whole, but I rather suspected that the Provost’s speech was being specifically alluded to. In which case one saw the point. It had been a good speech, but one certainly delivered under the persuasion that it is the business of a Provost to project a praeposital persona. I wondered whether the young man would denounce with equal vehemence a contemporary of his own similarly sustaining an elected role in a discotheque. And I felt momentarily − for it was in a moment that this entire encounter was over − an elderly indignation. I wanted to murmur to the speaker as I went by that even all his life hadn’t been all that long as yet, and perhaps that one doesn’t denounce one’s host with a brio borrowed from his wine. But I also felt, and in the same instant, something quite different: that it would be entertaining to enter into casual talk with these youths, drift away with them to some hospitable haunt of their own, and hear everything subversive or otherwise instructive that they had to say. Unfortunately the second of these impulses would be as inadmissible as the first. I went on out of the hall − aiming for the garden but taking a circuitous route through Rattenbury.

  Rattenbury is a mid-Victorian exercise in Venetian Gothic, and supposed to be very ugly. Perhaps because of this, and despite the comfort of its large solid rooms and a provision of baths and privies dating from the first great age of such amenities in England, it had been regarded in my time, if not as a dump or slum, at least as a species of academic Stellenbosch to which young men of unimpressive personality or inferior social consideration were apt to find themselves, through the operation of some wholly mysterious mechanism, relegated in a second or third year. I had always felt a pleasing quaintness as attending the pile. It is enormous, like an only slightly stunted St Pancras Station, but runs to a variety of decorative features and excrescences executed in the spirit, and on the scale, of a Pugin parsonage. Thus in front of each staircase there protrudes a hutch-like porch entered through a pointed archway so symbolically low that anybody of normal height has to behave like a double-decker bus approaching an arched bridge − carefully centring himself, that is to say, in order to pass through without bumping his shoulder or even his forehead. It was as I passed one of these orifices that I heard, yet again, the voices of young men. They were − as was customary − expertly shouting above the clatter of their own shoes as they came tumbling down a stone staircase. A moment later they had shot through the archway into open air in a huddle so compacted that it was incomprehensible that they hadn’t tripped over one another’s flying feet. There was a lantern above us, and I had an instant’s impression of tossing hair, of alarmed and flashing glances all around me, of a kind of graceful mock-panic and the swift scattering of long-limbed bodies in all directions. A crackling of undergrowth; fawns breaking clear of a dark wood, momentarily at gaze with an alien creature, darting away, startled, vanishing: this, once more, was the effect I fleetingly received. Then the young men had turned a corner, and there came back from them a sudden burst of laughter. They were not laughing at any spectacle I had casually afforded them; however wild their spirits, that wouldn’t come into their heads. Their laughter belonged to an inviolable world of their own, untouched by the irruption among them of tail-coated elders toddling round behind cigars. These were not singers. They must be among the undergraduates who, according to Plo
t, had been obliged to take a plunge into examinations in this midsummer week. It didn’t at all appear that the irksome circumstance had got any of them down.

  VII

  The day had been unremarkable for June, but the night was of that Mediterranean sort which, straying beneath English skies, troubles like a portent. There was no moon, and the stars hung in an electric brilliance suggesting frost − but frost powerless to chill the skin of air through which the earth’s warmth breathed. In the great dimly blottesque garden it was an air heavy from the scented limes; and heavy here and there, too, with tobacco smoke where in twos and threes guests like placid penguins perambulated. Some, still wearing their doctoral robes, were like flower-beds gone adrift in the dark. One large area was garish with coloured lights left over from the Commemoration Ball which I knew the undergraduates to have held, no doubt with prescriptive lavishness, a couple of nights before. Elsewhere it was by starlight that one moved. At a middle distance the cigars and cigarettes danced like fireflies, or glowed and faded like lighthouse signals very far away.

  I looked round for fresh company. One had to get close up to people before it was possible to identify them. But most of the men taking this after-dinner breather had wandered into the garden in groups, and any of these was likely to contain one or two fellow guests known to me at least as well as those with whom I had been talking in hall. I was about to move over to the first such gathering I saw when a hand was laid on my shoulder from behind. I turned round and saw Tony, with Gavin Mogridge beside him. Tony seemed not quite sober.

  ‘Oh, Duncan,’ Mogridge said at once, ‘I’m so sorry.’ He spoke on a note of serious self-reproach. ‘I quite forgot. Many happy returns of the day.’

  It was certainly my birthday. But Tony was the man I’d have thought of as able to recall the fact. He had given me a complete Anatole France on my twenty-firster, and by that time we had exchanged such presents on a smaller scale on a couple of occasions. This memory reinforced my sense of what intimates we had been. It would never have crossed our minds that years might later pass without so much as a meeting. At the present reunion there were probably a number of people being visited by similar reflections.

  ‘Thank you very much,’ I said. Mogridge had not been so close a friend. But his prime characteristic was tenacity, and this extended to a memory surprising in one so much given to absence of mind. ‘I suppose we’re known to our hosts as the middle-aged lot.’

  ‘Tempus fugit,’ Tony said. ‘Tempus fucking fugit.’ He radiated, for the moment, a mild alcoholic gloom.

  ‘At least it brings in its revenges. Do you know who I was sitting next to? Killiecrankie! He’s made the higher clergy as something called a Prebendary. In Ireland, I think.’

  ‘A kind of Venerable?’ My information cheered Tony up to the extent of making him shout with laughter, but then his mood changed again instantly. ‘The Rat Race Dinner,’ he said. ‘That’s what this affair should be called. Hundreds of chaps getting on ever so nicely. Look at the labels round their necks. Some P. M. ought to have found you a K., Duncan. What’s known in literary circles, I’m told, as the poor man’s C. H.’

  ‘I don’t think I’ve ever heard it called that.’ Mogridge said this at his flattest and most serious, and it wasn’t clear to me whether or not he was intending to rebuke Tony’s gibe. ‘They call some car or other the poor man’s Rolls-Royce. And that reminds me of something rather odd I saw as I arrived.’ Mogridge sat down on a garden chair after inspecting it carefully; he might have been suspecting it of harbouring a tarantula or a lethal tropical snake. ‘Somebody I didn’t know drove up in a Rolls. It was an old Rolls − but you may have noticed how, the older they are, the bigger and grander they come. Of course there were half a dozen Rollses, but this was certainly the largest one.’ Mogridge paused, as if feeling that he had been going too fast for us. ‘You may have noticed, too, that Rollses have a little statuette-thing on the radiator. You’d perhaps suppose it was a Winged Victory. But it isn’t. It has a head, you see, and for some reason Winged Victories have all lost their heads. It’s probably conceived as the Spirit of Speed, or something of that sort.’

  ‘Well?’ Tony said humorously. He seemed again amiably disposed.

  ‘The first thing this chap did when he got out of his car was to unscrew this figure and lock it up inside. Then he brought a perfectly plain radiator-cap out of his pocket. It’s probably called a radiator-cap. Anyway, it’s what screws on radiators.’

  ‘And he screwed it on instead?’ Tony asked.

  ‘Yes − just that. And bang in the middle of our own private car park. It was curious behaviour. Do you know what I think?’

  ‘One seldom does,’ Tony said.

  ‘I think it’s possible that people sometimes souvenir such things, and that Rolls owners regularly take that precaution. Only I’ve never noticed it happen before. I must keep a look out.’

  A spell of silence succeeded upon this not very striking anecdote. We were now all three seated within what, in sunlight, would have been the impenetrable shade of a cedar of Lebanon, the grandest tree in a garden not lacking in impressiveness. Above our heads it blotted out half the pierced and powdered sky. Only conspirators, it occurred to me, would seek out so inspissated a gloom. Perhaps we really were going to conspire. The effect was mitigated, however, by a glimmer from those coloured lights which had been left undisturbed after the undergraduates’ Ball. It would have made a good stage set.

  I remembered that I hadn’t yet congratulated Tony on his elevation to the Cabinet, and I did so now. His reply was adequate, and yet there was something edgy about it. Did this promotion only emphasise that his career had got itself out of shape? Why − so early in it as such things go − had he been railroaded into that disabling Upper Chamber? Was he perhaps not, of his sort, quite first class? Was he liable to muff things? He was in college now, I had no longer a doubt, in the pursuance of some design. In such circumstances it couldn’t, surely, be a good idea to get slightly tight? Or could it? There wasn’t the least impropriety, during a feast like the present, in letting liquor temperately show. It was an open question whether there wasn’t an unslumbering cunning in Tony. The situation deserved sounding.

  ‘You’re both dead sober,’ Tony said, much as if he had been reading my thoughts. ‘And so can I be − you’ll be relieved, Duncan, to hear − at the drop of a hat. So what about a drink? There’s a buffet in a marquee at the other end of the garden − another left-over from the youngsters’ Ball, I’d suppose.’

  ‘Not yet,’ I said. ‘Queues for drinks and queues for loos. And all top people. I’m tired of ribbons and gongs.’

  ‘That gong-tormented pee.’

  Tony could scarcely have produced a less witty or more nonsensical remark. But it was the Yeats joke again, and both Mogridge and I responded to it. I wondered how I could have been at sea (or pee) when Tony had declared earlier that day that the staircase was his ancestral stair. And now I saw an opportunity of gaining some information.

  ‘I never went to a Commem Ball,’ I said. ‘I wasn’t able to dance anything except foursome and eightsome reels. Did Ivo go to this one?’

  ‘No need to fish for information about the boy, Duncan.’ Tony put out a hand and touched my arm, apparently to make quick amends for this unreasonable rebuke. ‘It’s all coming out in the next five minutes. Indeed, you’ve guessed the trouble already.’

  ‘They don’t feel he’s making any very good use of his time here?’

  ‘Just that − except that “they” needs defining. They’re not quite all of them dreary pedants, mumbling about their betas and gammas.’

  ‘But some feel he’d do best to go down?’

  ‘Some feel he ought to be sent down, which isn’t quite the same thing.’

  ‘Is Ivo not all that keen on his books?’ In the gloom I could just distinguish the glint of Mogridge’s spectacles directed slantwise upon Tony as he asked this. He spoke as if here were a doubtful point which ou
ght to be determined at once.

  ‘Ivo’s no scholar, if that’s what you mean. But I suppose he may get something out of the life of the place without that.’

  ‘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. Nobody in your sort of set-up is going to give a damn 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 Class in the sole company of the Crown Prince of Waga-Waga.’