The Gaudy Read online

  ‘Yes, indeed,’ I said. ‘I still write them. In fact, I’ve at last come to make some sort of living that way. So nowadays I do nothing else.’

  ‘There’s money in them?’ Talbert had returned to gravity − but to gravity, this time, of fresh implication. It was now a man-of-the-world to man-of-the-world kind of gravity. ‘How right I was to dissuade you from that mad thought of a fellowship! I’ve been a laborious scholar for forty years, my dear Duncan, and I haven’t a penny. Not a penny!’ Further to fortify this sudden passionate cry, Talbert slapped his right-hand trouser-pocket − as being the area, no doubt, in which the scholar’s proverbially empty purse might be imagined lightly to repose. It was a gesture of unfortunate effect. The books under his other arm went to the ground, after all. The next few seconds were devoted to our both scrambling for them.

  I found myself touched that Talbert had addressed me by my Christian name. In a moment − and with a brilliance quite akin to that succeeding upon Marcel’s tasting the madeleine − there flooded in upon me a whole treasury of memories. These didn’t run, it is true, to any conjuring up of the mad thought of a fellowship: that reference had conceivably marked a fleeting return to the Dalrymple-theory of my identity. But I did recall how in my last year, when I had frequently gone to tea with the Talberts in the wilds of Headington (there to play with their children instructive games of a lexicographical character) first Mrs Talbert (also a deep scholar) and then occasionally Talbert himself had taken to addressing me in this more familiar fashion. Nowadays Oxford dons, like young people at a party, know both each other and their pupils by their Christian names alone, so that upon formal occasions they are at a loss as to who is being designated Smith or Brown. Talbert’s habits had been formed in an earlier era. For several terms he had invariably addressed me as Mr Pattullo, much as if this were his only sure means of continuing to distinguish me, in his unfathomably brooding and often alarmingly absent mind, from one or another of the young women from Somerville or St Hugh’s whom the res angusta domi (as he would have phrased it) constrained him to be perpetually tutoring on the side.

  The Talberts’ house in Old Road (so conveniently disposed, Talbert would explain from amid one of his baffling seizures of subterranean mirth, in relation to the Warneford hospital for nervous cases) was a red brick villa with the proportions and virtually the dimensions of a doll’s house. That I felt at home in it from the first was not because of its architecture. In that regard, as it happened, I was more familiarly placed in Surrey, since I had been brought up amid similar although more austere echoes of the Palladian idea in Edinburgh’s new town. In Old Road it was the res angusta that I recognised: and that here in a new form was the kind of activity known to me as producing such a state of affairs.

  The senior Talberts − rather as if resourcefully improvising in the course of domestic charades the roles of necromancers, or ancient philosophers, or professors of the exegesis of holy scripture − were apt to be discovered severally poring over leather-bound tomes of jumbo size. Of these they owned a score or more, which were kept in a locked bookcase of answering magnitude and served a little to mitigate what was in general a somewhat culturally disfurnished effect in the rest of their surroundings. The children, it is true, possessed (or held in trust) a number of cardboard boxes containing Lotto, Word Making and Word Taking, Scrabble, and similar diversions. I also recall a gramophone with a horn − not a hypertrophied horn such as was modish at that period, but a small horn of the old-fashioned sort before which one felt there ought to be perching an attentive dog. I never heard music from this instrument. The only record I recall (as I well may, having sat on it with disastrous results during the excitement of a session at Lexicon) was one holding out a promise of elementary instruction in the field of articulatory phonetics. It was a subject about which I felt no urge to knowledge, although I did detect myself wondering whether phonetics of a non-articulatory order was an alternative option which the curious student might embrace.

  The elder Talberts both held their big books in requisition (it would be inapposite to say ‘read’ their big books) two at a time and side by side. They were perpetually engaged, in fact, in collating texts. At weekends (which was when I went to tea) they carried out this task with the help simply of their own select resources; at other times they kept long hours in the Bodleian Library. The motions of collation recall those of watching fast tennis. Since two columns of print are to be compared with each other not merely word by word but letter by letter, the eyes (and also, perceptibly, the head) must be flicked from side to side with metronomic regularity. Watching the Talberts thus engaged, I thought at first of a species of toy, at that time readily to be acquired from street traders, in which a clergyman or duckling or hippopotamus or oriental sage has been so constructed with its head balanced and pivoting within a socket that the flick of a finger will keep it becking and bobbing for some time. But this didn’t really fit the Talberts, whose muscular efforts had to be on a horizontal plane. I then remembered, in a Christmas fair held in a subterraneous market-building in Edinburgh, certain mannikin figures, derived from vulgar American comic strips or cinematographic cartoons, which unrestingly jerked their hydrocephalic heads from side to side above the entrance to some shooting-gallery or raree-show. This was a comparison mechanical in every sense, and to be deprecated as even having crossed my mind, since nothing could be less vulgar than the spectacle of the Talberts pursuing their priestlike and lustratory operations upon the text of Chapman or Dekker or Middleton or whoever the object of this strange devotion may have been. For strange it undeniably was; material consequence seldom attaches to a comma here or semi-colon there; to devote one’s life to a single long-drawn-out activity of systematic and conservative scholarship has certainly something heroic about it but also something a shade absurd. And if in the Talberts’ efforts I didn’t descry the absurdity alone this can scarcely have been because I wasn’t callow enough so to do. It was rather because (as I have hinted above) I was conscious of a surprising affinity between the Talberts and the Pattullos. A sort of discordia concors bound them.

  It is sometimes said that there is a sharp antithesis, even a strong potential antagonism, between the intellectual habit and the imaginative; and that, as one instance of this, dons and artist don’t often get on. I scarcely know whether Albert Talbert and my father would have got on, but at least neither would have found anything puzzling or antipathetic in the other’s wavelength. Each was the head of a household in which everything − and particularly any prudent degree of regard for the material means of comfortable living − went down before a large impersonal purpose unrelentingly and indeed obsessively pursued. My father was as singly concerned to return from Islay or Coll with, as he would express it, ‘the spindrift on the canvas’ as was Talbert to banish from the text of his chosen playwright the corrupt readings of foolish and insufficient Victorian editors. Yet neither man was a fanatic, in whose presence one might feel pushed around by violence or self-will. They both took singleness of purpose for granted in a gentle and matter-of-fact way. But all this does not mean that I think of them as particularly like each other. I suppose, for example, that I see Talbert as essentially a comic character, whereas I am unable to view my father in that way, although I am conscious of his having had a comic side: indeed, something of this must soon transpire.

  Again, the Talberts, like my parents, were an incongruous pair; and with the Talberts this began at the level of physical appearance. Talbert was a man of unnoticeably medium stature and possessed no features to speak of, so that what one chiefly marked were the superficialities of a large white moustache, a complexion to be described as baby-pink, and gold-rimmed spectacles of somewhat old-fashioned suggestion. Mrs Talbert was very tall, angular, almost scraggy in a distinguished and fine-boned way, and with a commanding arched nose which took off from her face with the boldness of a skier on some Olympic run. The voices of the pair chimed well with these visual contrasts. Talbert’s
was − but for that deep huskiness which distinguished him from all living men, and suggested, indeed, the ghost of Hamlet’s father as he might have appeared in Mr Wopsel’s production − an accent standard in the sense of being unremarkable; I supposed his to be the English of a provincial boy who had moved from a small grammar school to a Cambridge college, and there approximated his speech to that of those around him without ever having been particularly aware of the fact or in the least concerned with its social implications. His wife’s voice was wholly different. It swooped up and down just as did her features; it drew out some syllables to almost sentence-length, totally suppressed others, and owned skill in articulating a few − and with the greatest precision − upon an enormous indrawn breath. The effect, which ought to have suggested the ill-judged attempts at enchantment sometimes ventured upon by cacophonous exotic birds, had on the contrary a claim to be called musical. And nobody versed in phonetics, whether articulatory or not, could be unaware that its creatrix had tumbled into Old Road, Headington, from some perch well up the English social ladder.

  Mrs Talbert, again, was a good deal younger than her husband. She was supposed to have first come to him from Somerville in a tutorial way, although another theory declared her to be a Balliol man and a noted pioneer of academical transvestism. At least there seemed to be a probability that educational processes, rather than any more general polite intercourse, had been the occasion of their first meeting. Mrs Talbert addressed Talbert as ‘Geoffrey’, and research in works of reference revealed that this must be a pet name, not an alternative stacked up at the baptismal font for possible future use. Since ‘Albert Talbert’ is lacking in euphony and even a shade ludicrous, Mrs Talbert’s rejection of it − whether upon marriage or from the earliest phase of courtship − may well have been prompted by aesthetic feeling. But The Oxford Dictionary of Christian Names (which is among a writer’s most useful works of reference) records that, on the marriage of Queen Victoria, the name Albert ‘soon became very popular, especially among the poorer classes with whom it is still common’, and I suppose this to be an observation relevant to the case. Be all this as it may, the Talberts were a devoted couple.

  It is certain, too, that they were devoted parents after a fashion, although with neither the temperament nor the habits which would have made possible a discriminating sense of their children’s varying needs. Charles and Mary (the very names suggest only a relaxed attention to identificatory exigencies) were well-mannered young people, and docile at least to the extent of being resigned to Scrabble as a species of Philology without Tears. But they were distinguishably in Topsy’s plight, entitled to suspect that they had just ‘grow’d’. It was this that made me approximate them to the former condition of Ninian and myself. My brother and I, indeed, had been more extreme instances of the state of affairs I describe, since (with two perfectly loving parents alive) we had been children detectably unwashed, hideously clothed or misclothed, and of a defective complexion suggesting a random, unpunctual, and ingeniously innutritious diet. At times we suffered fiendishly from the humiliating consequences of thus coming from what, in Edinburgh, was inevitably thought of as a disreputable Bohemian home; and it is possible that the young Talberts suffered similarly, if in lesser degree, from their upbringing in a household where quartos and folios were regarded as the only objects given by God to man for any purpose of serious contemplation. But on balance they were lucky, as Ninian and I had been, to have had their upbringing in a household in which scant attention was given to other than disinterested purposes and activities.

  ‘A white tie,’ Talbert said − abruptly and on a note of admonition. For a moment I was at a loss. Then I remembered how it had been his custom − little appreciated by some − to assume in all his pupils indifferently regarded an abysmal ignorance of social forms. It used to be said that he had once instructed some young heir to a peerage on the direction in which it is prescriptive to pass the decanters at dessert. He had certainly explained to me that I was not to begin a letter to him with the words ‘Respected Sir’ nor end it with ‘Yours faithfully’ or any similarly inadmissible locution. Now he was letting me know in what attire I must turn up that evening. And this, incidentally, told me that our present colloquy beneath the library portal was at an end.

  I took leave and retraced my steps across Surrey in the direction of the staircase and my abandoned bag. It occurred to me that I had failed to inquire about Mrs Talbert’s health. Although already in middle life, I was still at an age inclined to believe that even the no more than moderately elderly are quite likely to be dead, so it had been the fear of a possible faux pas that had held me up. But it is an obvious hazard in any encounter after a long period of years, and had Talbert been skilled in minor social occasions he would have taken the initiative by himself making some reference to his wife. As it was, I should have to ask elsewhere whether the lady was still alive, and hope to have some further brief exchange with Talbert in the course of the evening, when the proper civil expressions could be produced.

  I found myself wondering about Dalrymple, and slightly vexed that Talbert should have hailed me under that delusive name. This was unreasonable − for had I not myself been uncertain about Talbert’s own identity? As a young man I had dined out on the Talberts often enough; they were among the earliest of my adult acquaintance to have been transformed into imaginary beings by passing through my typewriter. But I must have set more store than I had known by my admission to that Headington villa, and had thus been a little aggrieved that ‘Duncan’ had come back to Talbert only under pressure. As for Dalrymple, the name rang no bell. Its owner must have gone down before, or come up after, my own time. It would be nice to think that the character with whom Talbert had confounded me had been a reasonably agreeable man.

  II

  Nothing stays put. The Heracleitan commonplace, which the venture upon which I had launched myself would in any case have been bound sooner or later to bring to mind, had got off to a brisk start with Albert Talbert’s turning up on me. Now, once more alone in Surrey, I found the mere architectural spectacle to be performing another of the tricks of time.

  Scenes never revisited since childhood are said to be found smaller than memory has held them to be, and the effect perhaps holds true over other long terms of years. But Surrey had not merely thus contracted; it had proportionately sprung into air. I have called it a lidless Palladian box. The box was now much deeper than I remembered it: an oddity the explanation of which I was to stumble upon only some months later. Among my books was one on architecture in Great Britain since the sixteenth century, and it contained a number of photographs of the college. No doubt I had paused on them with decent affection from time to time. And it so happens that, confronting Surrey, the camera has misbehaved, thrusting one angle of the building far into distance, and producing in general a sprawling and stunted impression, as of hutments or hen-houses round a paddock, totally at variance with any that a living spectator could receive. There is nothing surprising about this; before subjects in which values of perspective are prominent the term ‘photographic accuracy’ has little meaning, as anyone watching a cricket match on television is aware. What interests me is the fact that this bad photograph, perhaps half a dozen times surveyed, should have superseded in my mind my own first-hand impression of a building in which I had lived for two years, so that for some seconds I was actually indignant with Surrey for being as well-proportioned as Surrey really is. As in my doubts over the identity of Talbert, the true culprit was my own mental constitution.

  At the time, and lacking the clue of the photograph, I concluded that I was merely experiencing some side-effect of one marked and veritable change in the scene. Formerly the whole place had seemed to be tumbling to bits. The library had literally been tumbling; sizable chunks of it used to fall off from a great height, particularly in frosty weather. Unwary dons had even been getting killed from time to time, or so we affected to believe. It had been a state of affairs occ
asioned by the march of progress. The builders of mediaeval Oxford brought their stone from a distance, and where not subsequently knocked down by expanders and improvers their work remains intact to the present day. Later on, local quarries were opened up − not far from the subsequent site of the brick abode of the Talberts. The enterprise was popular, since it conduced to cut-price jobs. Unfortunately the local stone proved to dislike being dug from its bed; the climate of the Thames valley was ungrateful to it (as to a good many humans); eventually it declared its mortality by turning black and beginning to flake away. From the leprous fabric that remained we had been able to detach with a finger-nail great scales of rotten stone.

  The effect of this secular decay was often rather splendid. Of the library in particular the Baalbek aspect was enhanced: or as one surveyed it one could think of Piranesi, wringing from the ruins of Rome scenes which − as Horace Walpole said − would startle geometry. The entire university, moreover, was in like case; the Roman city of Bath must have owned a similar appearance when so abraded as to suggest to our Saxon forefathers only the ancient work of giants. There was thus presented a problem on a challenging scale. It must already have been so in the period of Thomas Hardy’s Jude Fawley, who is recorded as grounding his hope of employment in the city upon his observation of its dilapidated state. But a further half-century had to pass before a great deal was done. Then − and largely, no doubt, beneath the wand of transatlantic munificence − a transformation-scene reminiscent of one’s childhood’s pantomimes was achieved, and all Oxford sheathed and carapaced anew.