Mungo's Dream Read online

  ‘If you like, we can go to the Senior Tutor or the Bursar or whoever arranges these things, and make him change.’

  ‘Make him?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’ It seemed to surprise Ian Cardower that there could be any doubt on this point. ‘As a matter of fact, my father rather wanted me to have his old rooms in Surrey. But I said I’d prefer just to drift into the place and see what happened. My own modest impulse to push around.’

  ‘Oh.’ This information deflated Mungo. ‘Perhaps we’d better give it a go.’

  ‘I suppose so.’ Cardower stretched himself lazily, as if some small matter had been casually determined. ‘What’s the M. for?’

  ‘The M?’

  ‘In M. G. Lockhart.’

  ‘It’s for Mungo. And the G’s for Guthrie, which was my mother’s maiden name. You’ve told me I’s for Ian. But what about A. V. O?’

  ‘We’ll come to that when there’s an idle half-hour.’ Ian Cardower smiled for the first time – urbanely (Mungo told himself viciously), like a young charge d’affaires who has successfully rounded a difficult diplomatic corner. ‘I’m not sure there aren’t Guthries in my family somewhere.’

  ‘It’s a pretty common Scottish name,’ Mungo said. His new room-mate had spoken as if there could be only one lot of Guthries in the world – or one lot of Smiths or Browns – just as there was doubtless only one lot of Cardowers.

  ‘Did they call you Pongo at school?’

  ‘No, they didn’t, and they’re not going to here.’

  ‘Sorry. I suppose Mungo’s a family name?’

  ‘No, it’s not. It’s just that there’s a Mungo Lockhart in a Scottish poem my father’s said to have been rather fond of.’ It was with some surprise that Mungo heard himself offer this unnecessary confidence.

  ‘Sir Mungo Lockhart of the Lea?’

  ‘Yes.’

  There was a silence in which the lodgers in Howard 4, 4 regarded one another with a fresh access of caution. The line from William Dunbar’s Lament had acted (the imagistically resourceful Mungo told himself) like an exchange of visiting cards, and the information conveyed hinted that they might have some things in common. But clearly nothing of the kind ought to be explored at the moment, and Ian Cardower signalled his grasp of this at once.

  ‘Have you got a trunk over there?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes – and a crate with books and things.’

  ‘So have I. Let’s get them and settle in. They keep little trolleys in the lodge, the kind they have in railway stations. You just borrow one.’

  Mungo wondered how Cardower could have come by this particular piece of local knowledge. Undergraduates could scarcely have trundled around their own luggage, he supposed, in the dear old duke’s time.

  They unpacked their trunks and suitcases each in the privacy of his own bedroom. But of course it was otherwise with the books and miscellaneous minor chattels. These, although really much more private than shoes and ties (or even vests and pants), go prescriptively on display – and indeed it was only in the large panelled apartment that there was provision for them.

  ‘What’s this called?’ Mungo demanded, as he gave the Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats honourable prominence on a shelf. It seemed inevitable that Cardower was going to be in many small things his oracle. ‘Living-room, sitting-room, drawing-room, study – or what?’

  ‘It hasn’t got a name. Six centuries haven’t found it one. Those are our bedrooms. But this is just our room.’

  ‘Do we keep in it?’

  ‘I think that’s Cambridge. We just live in it – or perch. It’s rather like lodgings at the seaside in some novel.’

  This analogy wouldn’t have occurred to Mungo. He rather supposed that Cardower’s home life took place in Long Galleries and Double Cubes (such as he had once viewed at Wilton), surrounded by Van Dycks and Canalettos. In which case nothing even in this splendid college was likely to feel particularly homey to him, with the possible exception of its great hall. But at least he was shelving a wholly unassuming collection of books. They seemed to be history-books mainly, and so not particularly informative – except perhaps to the extent of hinting that Ian Cardower had some tincture of reading man in him too. Mungo kept a look out for anything suggesting what at school had been called extra-curricular interests. One would expect, he told himself expertly (for he was a dogged prowler in public libraries), Surtees, and Peter Beckford’s Thoughts on Hunting, and Siegfried Sassoon, and volumes in something called the Badminton Library telling you how to haul innocent creatures out of the water or shoot them down from the sky. But nothing of the kind appeared. All that did appear was a battered copy of Richard Jefferies’s Bevis. This made Mungo (who was volatile in such matters) suddenly feel that he was going to like Ian Cardower very much. And Cardower, whose own books were the less numerous, was now giving Mungo a friendly, but appraising, hand with his.

  ‘You do cart around a lot of novels,’ he said. ‘French ones, too. Do you reckon you’ll read them all this term?’

  ‘I’ve read a good many of them, as a matter of fact.’ Mungo felt it right to get a shade of apology into his tone. ‘But I thought I might want to rummage in them.’

  ‘Rummage in them? Yes, I see.’ Cardower didn’t appear to be puzzled. ‘Solid rather than trendy,’ he added, running his eye along the shelf. ‘Hullo! Leonard Sedley’s An Autumn in Umbria. Well, well. Quite a milestone, they say.’

  ‘It’s a marvellous book.’ Mungo had become animated. ‘But not exactly in a cosy way. Do you know it?’

  ‘Know him?’ Cardower seemed to have misheard, but corrected himself. ‘Yes, I know it – vaguely. I must have read it a long time ago. Well, that’s about the lot.’ He looked at his watch. ‘My parents,’ he said abruptly, ‘brought me up.’

  ‘Very nicely. Your manners are tiptop.’

  ‘Silly ass! They’ve brought me up to Oxford in the most old-fashioned way, and are staying for the night at the Randolph.’ Cardower’s tone modulated from the casual to the formal. ‘I wonder whether you’d care to come and dine with them? They’d be awfully glad to meet you.’

  Chapter Two

  They walked up St Aldate’s, which Cardower called St Old’s. Mungo didn’t bother to be surprised about the invitation he had received. Everything was so unfamiliar that his head wasn’t totally clear; he forgot his momentary persuasion that he was going to like this unexpected room-mate (just because of Bevis); but he did remember – or spontaneously feel – that he was ready for anything that was going. He wanted at least to know about this chap – and about his parents, if they were on offer. What had happened, he told himself, was simply drill. Cardower had gone into a routine. Suddenly confronted by the simple Scottish boy, he had turned on the noblesse oblige stuff. And Mungo would give it a go. Mungo judged it very important to maintain in all things an enquiring mind.

  It occurred to him that there was one quite prosaic enquiry that he ought to make at once. Who was the Hon. Cardower’s father, and how did one address him? And who was his mother, and how did one address her? But this social curiosity could not have been as lively as it doubtless ought to have been, since in the act of implementing it he was distracted by a shop-window. The shop called itself an Academic Outfitter. The display was in part of blazers, jerseys, scarves, ties, and anything else upon which college crests or colours could plausibly be displayed; and in part of gowns, caps, hoods, surplices and similar adjuncts of the life of learning. Mungo halted to view this useless gear with disfavour.

  ‘Do they still,’ he demanded, ‘make us go swanking around in that stuff?’

  ‘Oh, yes – every now and then. But it’s not swanking. Academic dress is designed as a vesture of humility. Except, of course, if you’re a nobleman.’ Cardower produced this solemnly. ‘Then your square – that’s your cap – has a big gold tassel.’

  ‘Christ! Are you going to have a square with—?’

  ‘I’m talking rot. That was ages ago. And I shouldn’t have one
anyway. I’m not a nobleman.’

  ‘I suppose not.’ Mungo decided to let this nomenclature business be for the moment. ‘I don’t see anybody walking about in gowns.’

  ‘That’s vanished too – but much more recently. You only wear a gown at rather formal times, like dining in hall and going to see your tutor. And squares and white ties and so on are just for examinations.’

  ‘Don’t you still think it’s a lot of rubbish?’ They had walked on, and were waiting to cross Carfax.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. There’s something to be said for special clothes for special occasions. Going to a dance given by some awful woman for some awful girl, for instance: dressing up helps you to bear it.’ Cardower suddenly grabbed Mungo by the arm. ‘Come on!’ he shouted, and they dashed successfully across the nose of a bus. ‘Of course, I suppose I was a bit broken to outré clothes at school.’

  ‘Didn’t anybody rebel?’

  ‘Rebel? Oh, I expect so. All sorts of people had all sorts of ideas, you know. And digging in their heels about this or that was among them.’

  ‘With any result?’ Mungo asked. He was a little baffled by this vague conjuration of strange territory.

  ‘Result? None whatever – except, rather rarely, short sharp agony.’

  ‘Oh, that!’ Thus afforded some sense of a familiar world, after all, Mungo again felt an impulse of companionableness towards Cardower. ‘Are you glad to have left?’

  ‘I’m not sure that I know. Are you?’

  ‘Yes – definitely. There are things at home I almost can’t bear to have come away from. But not school. It hadn’t all that scope. I’d had the place.’

  ‘I see. Do you know? At school I felt like the chap in the Happy Valley – Rasselas. A land of contentment well hidden away – hidden away behind a popular picture of rigours and horrors, for one thing. But, in the main, just easy to be happy in. It becomes a bit of a bore, that.’

  ‘I expect there were a few chaps lucky enough to escape boredom. Bloody miserable, in fact.’ If Mungo said this roughly, it was in reaction to a sharpening sense that he had never talked to a contemporary like Ian Cardower before. He didn’t yet know whether Cardower was in any way remarkable or particularly clever. But he was civilised (a History Sixth character who had read Rasselas!), and from a kid he had been able to listen to people talking as, for Mungo, they had talked only in books. He also seemed not to object to being serious, Mungo acknowledged to himself beginning to feel impressed.

  ‘I say,’ Cardower exclaimed, ‘what awful women this town goes in for! No wonder sodomy is rampant among its young males.’

  ‘Is it?’ Mungo was startled by this sudden frivolity and impropriety in one whom he had just been crediting with higher qualities. ‘I quite see’—he added, recovering himself—’what you mean about the females in this street.’

  ‘But we’ll range the countryside, you and I, in quest of unsullied virginal beauty. We’ll leave Howard 4, 4 every afternoon at two o’clock precisely. There must be many a rose-lipped maiden between here and Bablockhythe.’ Without pausing in what had become a quick march down the farther end of the Cornmarket, Cardower gave Mungo a swift appraising look. ‘Correct?’

  ‘Excellent plan.’ Mungo had a notion that he was being required to vouch for the simplicity of his own sexual constitution. ‘We’ll start tomorrow.’

  ‘And here we are. Lick your hand and smooth your hair, my lad. For in we go for our square meal.’

  ‘Just a moment.’ Mungo wasn’t sure that the rustic admonition had amused him. ‘What do I call your father?’

  ‘Call him? Oh, I see.’ Cardower had probably never been asked this question before. ‘He’s Lord Robert Cardower, but it would be a bit heavy—don’t you think?—to Lord Robert him. Just give him the credit of his years, and call him Sir.’

  ‘What does he—I mean, does he do anything in particular?’

  ‘He’s a diplomat – but not a strikingly successful one. Too honest or something.’

  ‘But I don’t call your mother Madam?’

  ‘She wouldn’t mind in the least – but perhaps not. You’ll probably get away with calling her You. But if it turns out to be positively necessary to distinguish her from the barmaid or somebody, then it has to be Lady Robert. And that’s that.’ But on the threshold of the door Randolph Cardower hesitated. ‘Sticking to names,’ he said, ‘do you mind if we start calling each other Mungo and Ian? Unless we decided to hate one another like poison, we’d be doing it in a few days, anyway.’

  ‘For an Oxford man of six hours’ standing, Ian, you do have a ruddy good grip of the customs of the place. Go ahead.’

  Robert Cardower was as tall as Ian, and even slimmer. The clothes of father and son obviously came from the same tailor. Viewed side by side from behind (Mungo thought – although this experience naturally wasn’t being offered him), they would probably strike you as being twins. Even face to face, Lord Robert was to be distinguished from his son less by physical appearance than by talking twice as fast. He couldn’t have had a clue that Ian, whose invitation had so clearly been a matter of sudden impulse, would be turning up with another chap. But he had grasped the situation straight away, and in no seconds at all slipped through every gear in the box.

  ‘How do you do? It is so nice of you to come. My wife and I have been looking forward with a great deal of curiosity to meeting Ian’s room-mate. I am very glad he is to have a room-mate. In my last year at school I shared quarters with an extremely clever boy who quite talked my head off – and to my great advantage, since I was most shockingly ignorant of virtually everything in the world. Almost my only genuine expertise was in keeping tame owls. And then I was sent up to Oxford – my father thought it would do me good – and put by myself in some rather large rooms in Surrey – the quad next to yours, that is. I felt the lack of stimulus at once. I had acquaintances here and there in the college, but it wasn’t at all the same thing. It seems to me that a single companion, whom one gets to know really well, is so much better than a crowd. But tell me – what do you think?’ Lord Robert accompanied this sudden question with a glance of anxious expectation, rather as if gathering Mungo’s thoughts on the matter in hand was a pleasure he had been anticipating for days. Unfortunately Mungo’s only genuine thought was that any school-friend who had managed to talk Lord Robert Cardower’s head off must have been a prodigy worth knowing. So all Mungo managed now – or thought he managed – was a mumble.

  ‘I couldn’t agree with you more,’ Lord Robert said, instantly and convincedly. ‘I think you are perfectly right. Elizabeth, don’t you agree?’ He had turned to his wife as if she must no longer be excluded from a mature vein of speculation which Mungo had been developing. ‘Ian, come over to the bar, and we’ll fetch some sherry. I’ve booked a table – “reserved” it, as the man says – so there’s no hurry in the world, no hurry at all.’

  Elizabeth Cardower – Lady Robert – although neither so voluble nor so challenging as her husband, alarmed Mungo at first a good deal more. She was perfectly friendly, and she didn’t hint the slightest sense that the youth was to be put at his ease. But her glance was cool and appraising, and you could see she was turning over the questions it might presently be possible to ask. Perhaps – Mungo thought – she did more in the anxious mother way than her husband did father-wise. She was wondering whether Mungo would be a good moral influence on her son. (For many years a similar concern about one boy or another had been a regular preoccupation of Mungo’s aunt.)

  ‘I think it very clever of the college not to team up men reading the same subject,’ Lady Robert said. ‘If you and Ian were both historians it would probably be quite fun for a time, but you would end up by boring each other fearfully. Among professional people there seem to be a lot of marriages of that kind nowadays. Particularly among the dons. If there’s one at Balliol who knows all about Beaumont, he hastens to propose to a lady at Somerville, to whom Fletcher is an open book.’

  ‘Were you at
Oxford – and did you read English?’ It was Mungo’s habit to ask any question that came into his head.

  ‘Yes, I was – and I did. I count myself almost a pioneer. Are you a pioneer – so far as your school is concerned?’

  ‘Not exactly.’ Mungo wondered whether this transition deserved to be called deft. ‘Boys come from time to time, although most go to the university at Aberdeen or Edinburgh. There aren’t any others at Oxford now.’

  The college has been very sensible about you and Ian, I do think. Or did you have any say in it? Did you take an initiative?’

  ‘Oh, no. It was just a shock.’ Mungo felt this was a fair reply. He wondered whether Lady Robert could suppose that he had written in to some Dean or Senior Tutor asking to be doubled up, please, with a good-class Lord or Hon.

  ‘You mustn’t let Ian’s acquaintances be a nuisance to you. In your rooms in Howard, I mean. Just turn them out.’ Lady Robert paused, and suddenly smiled charmingly. ‘You have the inches for it. I do dislike stunted men.’

  ‘So long as we don’t try to turn each other out.’ Mungo wasn’t sure whether he’d liked Ian’s mother making a kind of pass at him, however innocent. But second thoughts inclined him to think he did. ‘It might be bad for the furniture.’

  ‘Yes – it would be the tug of war. But it’s convenient, isn’t it? You needn’t bother whose shirts and jeans are whose. Or shoes, probably. Ian raids his father’s clothes ruthlessly. Incidentally, I wonder why two husky males can be so long in securing four glasses of sherry.’

  Mungo wondered whether this was a signal to him to spring smartly to his feet and say ‘I’ll see’. He decided to stay put. Lord Robert might be seizing the opportunity to utter a few Polonius-like final admonitions to his son.

  ‘But I’m grateful to them for not shoving at the bar,’ Lady Robert was saying. ‘I remember Oxford as a place where it was wonderful occasionally to encounter males just one at a time. They seemed always to hunt in threes and fours. Why are you reading English?’