The Gaudy Read online

  ‘I don’t know any convention at Cambridge.’

  ‘Ah.’ Tony paused to finish a cup of tea and pick up a further finger of toast. ‘It may only have been at one or two colleges. When boys with handles to their names were due to come into residence, their full style was put up over their door: Visc. This, or just the Hon. That. But when they arrived, it was regarded as the thing for them to direct that the title of honour be painted out. A bit wasteful of somebody’s time − but a graceful gesture, if you care to regard it that way.’

  ‘I can’t say that I do. It sounds thoroughly foolish.’ I secured the last sliver of toast. ‘They’ve put me in my old rooms opposite, quite without my asking them. Did you ask to be shoved in here?’

  ‘Oh, no − although it seems Gaudy guests do make such nostalgic demands. I had a word with the head porter as I came in. He told me that last year, when they had the most senior lot, there was a nonagenarian clergyman who asked for his old rooms four floors up in Howard. And stipulated for a pot.’

  ‘Fair enough.’

  ‘But I certainly didn’t suggest being put in here.’ Tony glanced casually round the room. ‘It’s one thing for a lad to apply for what were his father’s rooms a generation ago, and quite another to quarter a man in his son’s present rooms like this. That’s a shade obtuse, if you ask me.’

  ‘Oh, do you think so?’ I paused on this − and, indeed, knew I oughtn’t to take it further. ‘Do you mean it gives you a feeling of being a spy?’

  ‘That’s a crude way to put it, Duncan. But something of the sort, yes.’

  ‘Ivo may have skeletons in his cupboards?’ I was now on my feet and prowling myself. There was, as it happened, a cupboard before my nose: it corresponded, on one side of the fireplace, to that on the other side from which Plot had produced the auxiliary cup and saucer. ‘Shall we have a look?’ I said, and pulled open the door.

  It was a graceless small performance, as I knew at the time, and I can only suppose that its occasion was the effort both Tony and I were making to be something like undergraduates together once more. And the cupboard didn’t, of course, reveal anything horrific. It did, however, show that the man over the way wasn’t alone on the staircase in having a taste for bottles. Only Ivo Mumford’s bottles weren’t empty, but full. There were a couple of dozen of champagne, as many of brandy, an array of glasses, and a large bowl containing lump sugar.

  ‘That’s what they drink at the moment,’ Tony said. He had, I believe, been startled, but now showed every appearance of ease. ‘Most damnably expensive, I’m bound to say. But wholesome, as ale goes.’

  ‘I see. When do they drink which?’

  ‘Which? They drink the two mixed fifty-fifty, and on a couple of lumps of sugar.’

  ‘As a midnight carouse?’

  ‘As elevenses, I believe. Carries them on till lunch.’

  Our reunion had gone faintly awkward, and I wondered whether Ivo Mumford was not merely extravagant but in some danger of turning into a drunk as well. There was nothing for it but to try to talk about something else. It was with the thought of contriving this that I strolled to one of the windows.

  ‘It’s from up here,’ I said, ‘that the library looks best. Has it ever struck you as extraordinary that a lot of these buildings were designed by the dons themselves?’

  ‘Were they? I’m afraid I know nothing about it.’ Tony didn’t sound interested. In fact, he was betraying a tendency to brood.

  ‘Lord, yes. Surrey is the work of Provost Harbage. He simply drew the plans, and called in a master mason to get on with the job. And he was something of a pioneer into the bargain. He’d got going on this style of thing a dozen years before William Kent returned from Italy with Palladio in his pocket.’

  ‘Had he, indeed.’

  ‘And his was the general idea for the library, as well. The design was modified later, but by another amateur of the same sort − a fellow, I think, of All Souls.’

  ‘Interesting. Feeble of me never to have read it up.’ Tony was silent for a moment. ‘If you ask me,’ he said abruptly, ‘dons are a great bore.’

  If this sudden judgement on our hosts disconcerted me, it may have been partly because Tony was barely concealing a persuasion that I was becoming a bore myself. I determined to import a livelier note into our exchanges.

  ‘Tony,’ I said, ‘come here. Do you remember how in this window of yours we could have the sensation of being in a kind of stage box?’

  ‘Gaping down at the quad?’

  ‘Not that at all. Diagonally into the corresponding room on the staircase round the corner. It must be just the same in the quad’s other corner. You remember how people didn’t much draw their curtains—’

  ‘Unless they were on the ground floor.’ Tony had joined me now, and appeared vaguely interested. ‘A species of tabu, like not shutting the doors in those awful underground baths. So when the lights were switched on—’

  ‘That was at night. But on summer late afternoons, you got the same effect as now. Look.’

  We both looked, just as we had occasionally done, in luxurious idleness, a long time previously. Sunshine was striking through the two tall windows slantwise presented to us, and in the middle of the room thus revealed a portly and bearded man was holding up some sort of dress-coat on its hanger and disapprovingly shaking his head. Presumably he was deciding that the garment had been badly packed and become unsuitably creased in consequence. He walked out of sight with it. A minute later he appeared again, sat down on a big sofa, put up his feet, and almost instantly gave every sign of having fallen asleep.

  ‘The sofa reminds me,’ Tony said. ‘Do you remember the term when we had a vintage time as young voyeurs? Can you recall the name of the chap who had those rooms then?’

  ‘I don’t think I can.’

  ‘Ah, I can tell you why. It’s because he was a disreputable countryman of yours, Duncan, and with a name as grotesque as your own. Killiecrankie—P. P. Killiecrankie. Wasn’t that it? I don’t believe either of us ever spoke to him.’

  ‘He was a revolting womaniser.’

  ‘Of course he was − but troubled by your Scottish Calvinist sense of sin.’

  ‘I doubt it’s being that. Indeed, I can remember maintaining it was just a morbid delicacy. He couldn’t bring himself to do anything so crude as to invite a girl into his bedroom. So it all had to happen on that sofa.’

  ‘And, by God, it did!’ Turning away from the window, Tony shouted with laughter. ‘Viva Killiecrankie! We learnt something from him, didn’t we? I’d no notion it could be so vigorous an exercise.’

  ‘But all the same − and again as a matter of delicacy − an affair of not much more than disordered dress, as in old-fashioned erotic French engravings.’

  ‘Yes − but then, and as you may say post hoc, he’d get up, strip starkers, and solemnly take a turn up and down the room. Helped him to the second bang.’

  ‘Ornithology. We called it that. Bird-watching, of course. Exquisite undergraduate joke.’

  We were both laughing now; indeed, we had sunk into chairs in what was in part a pretence of helpless mirth. Then we caught one another’s eye and were abashed. We were, after all, no longer bawdy and joyous young cronies, with minds completely open to each other except on a few guarded family matters. We were respectable citizens in our forties, and we hadn’t run across one another in a donkey’s years. Perhaps Tony felt more strongly than I did that we had succumbed to unbecoming behaviour, since junior Ministers of the Crown probably keep more steadily decorous company than writers do. At any rate we now, as by common agreement, sobered up. It was in the resulting calm that I noticed Tony’s glance going to the picture over the mantelpiece. He seemed not too pleased with it. Perhaps he was wondering whether Ivo was any chaster than Killiecrankie had been. But then having the mildly lascivious painting there had been no whim of Ivo’s own. It was seemingly prescriptive with the Mumfords. I determined to inquire into this.

  ‘Tony,
you say your father had these rooms once. Did he bring up those abandoned wenches with him − just as you did, and Ivo seems to have done?’

  ‘Certainly he did − and my grandfather before him. And that, I believe, was in the very year my great-grandfather bought the thing at the Royal Academy’s annual show.’

  ‘So it goes to and fro.’ I cast round for some harmlessly humorous remark. ‘I suppose your great-grandfather had these rooms too?’

  ‘Nothing of the kind. He was a self-made man from the Midlands. But four generations of us have.’

  ‘I’m sure you kept very close about that − although Ivo, come to think of it, was still in the womb of time. But even as many as three generations makes quite a claim.’

  ‘A claim?’ Rather strangely, Tony shot the word back at me. ‘I’m entirely of your opinion there.’

  ‘The staircase ought really to be named after your family, or at least after your broad acres. Where’s Marchpayne, Tony?’

  This mockery failed to catch Tony’s attention. He had again jumped up, and was pacing out the length of the room. He walked over to the cupboard with the brandy and champagne, and closed the door on it gently.

  ‘The staircase?’ he echoed. ‘Well, yes …. in a way.’ He turned back to face me. ‘I declare that this stair,’ he said, ‘is my ancestral stair. So perhaps you’ve hit the nail on its bloody head.’

  There was a silence, since I didn’t know what to make of these words. They came from some poem by Yeats − whom I’d scarcely have supposed to be much resorted to by up-and-coming politicians.

  ‘If you turn up when it says on the card,’ Tony said, ‘you stand around in the quad for half an hour, drinking not the best of sherries. That’s okay, if you want an absolute orgy of the old chums.’

  ‘Then I’ll make it a little later.’ I had stood up, because I felt that this abrupt change of subject indicated that Tony would be quite glad to be rid of me. I was an interloper, after all, in these ancestral Mumford rooms. ‘But I suppose that sort of orgy is more or less what one accepts the invitation for.’

  ‘Oh, there are speeches, you know, by selected big-wigs. Plus one or two sycophantic ones by the more prominent ushers.’

  This once more pulled me up. If Tony really had it in for a harmless lot of dons in this way it was hard to see why he’d presented himself for the annual spree now ahead of us. And I think my expression must have betrayed this perplexity, since he now added something on what appeared to be a sudden impulse.

  ‘As a matter of fact, Duncan, I’ve come up to case the joint. Something has happened that makes me want to see how the land lies. You wouldn’t expect − would you? − that this college would change much. But I’m not at all certain that it ticks quite as of old. And I want to find out.’

  ‘I see.’ I waited a moment for Tony to explain himself further, but this he did not do. ‘Have you decided to send another son to follow in Ivo’s footsteps?’

  ‘I haven’t got another son. But I do have two daughters. They’re still at school.’ Tony had made this transition rapidly, and for a further minute he talked about the girls, while I stood with my hand on the door knob. I realised that he had embarked on some confidence and then thought better of it, at least for the time. Having no wish to give the appearance of hanging around for more, I made a vague remark about the mysteries of female education, and then went back to my own rooms.

  III

  The invitation from the Provost and Fellows said:

  Full Evening Dress with Decorations

  Gowns are worn; Doctors in Scarlet

  I had at least brought the white tie urged upon my recollection by Talbert, but the necessity to wrestle with it was still some time off, and I decided to sit down and read. Nicolas Junkin would hardly resent my taking a book from his shelves, so I had another look at what was on offer. Junkin took an interest in drama − although my own two plays struck me as sufficiently isolated in kind to suggest their having been left behind by a previous tenant of different tastes from his. Beckett led the field, backed by Ionesco, Adamov, and other absurdists. There were Unity Theatre things of one sort and another, including − what must be a prized possession − a cyclostyled text of Harold Muggins is a Martyr. John Arden, in fact, was a favourite, as was anything hitching on to CAST. (At that time those letters stood for Cartoon Archetypical Slogan Theatre, but they may stand for something quite different now − perhaps with Anarcho-Syndicalist in the middle.) There was also a pile of little reviews and fugitive magazines concerned with theatrical affairs. One was produced by university students, and it was this I picked up. I found myself reading an article called The Insignificance of Bernard Shaw.

  Shaw’s insignificance was argued on the basis of a Marxist theory of drama. It was highly relevant that he had begun as a novelist, and he must be regarded as a displaced person, a refugee fleeing to the theatre from the disintegrating territory of realistic prose fiction. He had carried with him all the privatisation of experience that characterises bourgeois life, and as a consequence was impotent before the central problem of dramatic writing, which is that of exhibiting socially significant types in collision, of giving to personal motivation more than a merely individual significance by displaying it as the concrete embodiment of a universal factor in the dynamic of a given class of men of whom the dramatic hero is the exemplar.

  The article ran to twenty pages. But if the writer found Shaw’s plays interesting, there was no sign that he found them entertaining. ‘Comedy’ and ‘comic’ were terms making no appearance. ‘Significant’, ‘relevant’, and ‘objective’ were the key words throughout. In Shaw’s time, I read, ‘the objective conditions of social life imposed a highly compartmentalised subjective existence upon its individuals’.

  There was nothing novel about these ideas. That I finished the essay without impatience was, in an odd way, a function of my interest in Nicolas Junkin of Cokeville Grammar School. It was necessarily a guessing kind of interest, and of a sort familiar to me. An inhabited room, temporarily without its occupier, sets conjecture stirring, and in a quite involuntary way evidences of personality urge themselves into some sort of pattern in my fancy. Junkin had been establishing himself there as a representative young man of a kind that now regularly gains a place at a university. His gown, hanging from a peg in the bedroom, was a commoner’s, not a scholar’s; this suggested, although not at all securely, that he was no cleverer than most of his fellows. The hockey stick (by no means heroically battered), the tennis racket and guitar (each with a broken string), the Japanese print, the op posters and conscientiously paraded bottles: these, and the run of books I had glanced at on the shelves, seemed to speak of a youth having a go now at this and now at that in a wholly unremarkable way.

  The emphasis on drama remained; it had led me to read the article on Shaw, and to wonder whether Junkin approved of it. (There was no Shaw on his shelves.) But a lively interest in theatrical matters by no means took him out of the unassuming main stream in which I was imagining him. In addition to the OUDS, I knew, every college now had its dramatic society, liable at any moment to come up with anything from The Representative to Toad of Toad Hall. Were Toad’s adventures given a Marxist slant, or perhaps subsumed within the Theatre of Cruelty? (Either treatment would be feasible.) Was a distinguishably aesthetic approach to drama at a discount? Somebody had lately assured me that, music aside, the only authentic artistic interest of the young today is in the cinema, but that it is unfortunately much more difficult and expensive to make films than to produce plays: hence Mother Courage and Ubu Roi all over the place. Why, I wondered, were these mimetic arts so vulnerable to engulfment in ideological abstraction − Marxism, Existentialism, or whatever it might be? Was it an accidental consequence of the cropping up, over two or three generations, of a small number of powerful and seminal intelligences: Toller, Brecht, Sartre, and so on?

  Sitting in this nostalgic and, as it were, transitional room (since − as during my own occupanc
y − it was neither a boy’s nor quite one with which a grown up would furnish himself) I considered a number of questions of this sort. Since they were professional questions, more or less, I was inclined to provide prescriptive answers of my own as I went along. It was a profitless activity, or was so until it hinted to me one salient fact. My knowledge of a present student generation was all at second hand, which meant that for sympathy, interest, speculation it was an area of contemporary fife substantially closed to me. My own age group − Tony Mumford, now Lord Marchpayne, for instance − was beginning to have sons and daughters at the universities. It was probable that Talbert had some former pupil’s son among his current pupils now, and that in vacations parent and child would swop anecdotes about tea parties in Headington.

  For a few minutes this train of thought landed me in fantasy. I was at a breakfast table and occupied with a coffee-percolator − from which it might be inferred that I was unprovided with a wife. I did, however, have two sons. Slim, long-limbed, long-haired creatures of perhaps sixteen and nineteen, they had sauntered in, lazily but even at this early hour prepared to gossip. Their Scottish ancestry was not apparent; they were entirely English and very public-school. In fact these agreeable phantoms were miraging up in this spuriously filial relation from my very first weeks in Surrey long ago − before, even, I had made Tony Mumford’s acquaintance, and when I was still merely an observer of young men marvellously known to each other, idly talking, parting and disparting, shouting from windows, banging doors: a society of liberated schoolboys, wholly and astonishingly owning all that antiquity of blackened and flaking stone. How deeply I must have been sold on the place! No wonder I had scarcely ever ventured to come back.

  The fantasy flickered shamelessly on. Learned in the ways of women, I was seeing to it unobtrusively that my boys should here be armed. ‘Believe me,’ I was saying to the elder now, ‘Virgil’s varium et mutabile semper femina gets it dead wrong. It doesn’t square with the implacable female will. Having made up her mind about you − and it happens in the first moment you enter the room − a woman will never alter it. Circumstances may make her swear on the book that she has. But it won’t be true.’