The Guardians Page 4

  To the best of his ability, Quail talked Moselles and Hocks. The Warden, he supposed, was not minded that his wife should discourse at large on Gavin Tandon. Nevertheless, over coffee, and against a background of what were presumably the ruinously expensive curtains, Mrs Jopling returned to the subject with emphasis. “On the fourth Saturday of Trinity Term there is always the ladies’ luncheon, given by the fellows in common room. It has become quite traditional. Afterwards, there is a little croquet in the garden, and then everybody comes here for a cup of tea. Strawberries, too, if they have come down by then.” Mrs Jopling paused, giving Quail time to reflect that she was, after all, a woman of agreeably simple mind. “I find the tea a convenient way of playing our part, so far as entertaining the fellows and their wives is concerned. Tea is so pleasantly informal – whereas dinners, and more particularly luncheons, so frequently produce constraint.”

  “I can’t believe, ma’am, that constraint ever lasts long in the Lodge.”

  Mrs Jopling flushed. Quail realised, with mingled relief and shame, that it was entirely in gratification. He didn’t dare to look at the Warden. He guessed that the connoisseur’s eye was at play again.

  “The ladies’ luncheon is so well established, Mr Quail, that some formality about reserving the common room has long since ceased to be observed. And last year Mr Tandon took advantage of this in a disgraceful manner. Imposing upon the inexperience of a new servant over there, he reserved all the available accommodation for a luncheon party for some outlandish conference. Things were so thrown out that the ladies’ luncheon never took place at all. And later, Mr Tandon was heard saying to a colleague – it was when they were both going into chapel, which to my mind makes it much worse – that he had dished the tiresome women. You will agree, I am sure, that a remark of that sort is not at all comme il faut.”

  Mrs Jopling had one of her stately immobile moments. Quail realised that comment was expected from him, and that the Warden was not minded to help him out. “I suppose,” he offered largely, “that misogynists are always likely to be found in what were for so long wholly celibate societies.”

  Now the Warden did speak. “Tandon is undoubtedly that – but only in a negative sort of way. He would think it a waste of time, if you ask me, to apply his mind at all consciously to disapproving of women. And I don’t believe he planned that affair as a coup, even if he did fleetingly take credit for it as that afterwards. His mind moves without respite on quite another plane. Tandon is every inch a scholar.” The Warden paused upon this generous note. His finger-tips again softly sought each other. “Unfortunately I am constrained to add that he is every millimetre a bore.”

  Quail felt his eyebrows stir – and in the same moment enjoyed a brief vision of himself as a dim prim person carrying round an almost infinite capacity for disapproving surprise. And yet it hadn’t been altogether for the sake of seeing the wandering American betray disapprobation that the Warden had expressed himself with some lack of propriety about a colleague. Real rancour was involved; and it lay clear that in the Lodge it wasn’t only Mrs Jopling who disliked Gavin Tandon. Quail, because he happened to have some interest in the unknown Senior Tutor, might have reconciled himself to a little fishing in this muddy water, if a glance at the clock – and the Lodge, it struck him, was full of large and rather loudly ticking clocks – hadn’t suggested the superior attractiveness of taking his leave. So he praised his hostess’s flowers – there was a mass of purple cyclamen in the great square grey-mullioned window – and then rose to go. The Warden was not noticeably long in reaching a door. But Mrs Jopling – it struck Quail with some surprise – was disappointed at his departure, and she held him in conversation for a couple of minutes more. Her manner still had its considered grandeur. One might have guessed her to be apprehensive that, if not distinguished as the presiding presence in this stately chamber, she would be inadvertently classified among creatures liable to dart within the chinks of its panelling or the interstices of its outcrops of fretted stone. But the misgivings she now expressed about Oxford’s hotels, and the particularity of her enquiries in the matter of eiderdowns and hot-water bottles, were like the belated appearance of a kind-hearted woman who would have appeared to greater advantage in simpler surroundings.

  Quail followed the Warden down the Jacobean staircase. The good furnishing pictures here consisted of an alternation of florid ecclesiastics with large still-life compositions in the Flemish taste – pyramids and mountains, for the most part, of game and vegetables and fruit glimmering dauntingly out through darkened varnish. Quail glanced at his host. He, too, was florid in a healthy sort of way. None of these Flemish larders would hold any terrors for him, one supposed, were he required to sit down and eat his way through.

  Not that Jopling was a gross man. He carried himself with a buoyant unobtrusive ease that matched his urbane and confident talk. The talk was continuing now. “Poor Tandon’s untimely conference!” he was saying. “I had quite forgotten that odd affair until my wife mentioned it. He didn’t mean it a bit. Nothing wrong with him at all. Unless you hold it against a man that he never had a nursery, if you follow what I mean.”

  Quail, who did follow, said nothing. In his own country, he had to reflect, nurseries do exist. But they are seldom made the subject of just this sort of articulate sentiment.

  “Of course, manners can be acquired subsequently – but not if a fellow takes no interest in them. And as it’s scarcely a field in which to make exciting discoveries, and get in before the next chap in some learned journal, it isn’t to be expected that Tandon should ever have turned his thoughts that way.” The Warden laughed softly, and brought his hands out of the pockets of his jacket. “And it must be admitted that he has a flair for doing the wrong thing even in situations you would guarantee as foolproof. It might be called”—the Warden’s finger-tips came together—”a genius for dropping bricks without straw.”

  Quail, who found himself noticing this witticism rather than responding to it, felt a dismal stealing persuasion that he himself must be a dull and awkward person. The Warden, however, continued charmingly easy; and he paused for some moments in a dark high hall to talk, wholly without animus now, of people still in the college whom Quail might remember. Then he opened a door upon the outer world.

  A light mist was creeping over Oxford, but the autumn sunshine still pierced it and made it faintly luminous. The Warden, as one who would make sure that the air is sufficiently clement for the egress of his guest, stepped over the threshold into the quiet road. As he did so, a large car went past, holding a single young man. The Warden gave him a wave, and then turned to Quail. “The lad who couldn’t come to lunch,” he said in his most casual manner. “Lord Michael Manningtree. No genius – but a very nice boy.” He was shaking hands with Quail, and at the same time looking at him with an effect of quizzical kindliness. “Such fun, seeing you again—such fun. Good-bye . . . good-bye!”

  The Warden stepped back within his doorway, and at the same time raised a hand in farewell. It was a delightful little wave – but not quite of the sort that had been directed at Lord Michael. It seemed to suggest a quayside, a broadening stretch of water and a liner carrying one more American pilgrim home.

  CHAPTER IV

  Quail turned north. Just beyond Hertford he ran into a miniature procession. Two elderly persons, gowned and capped, trudged in single file from New College Lane, each carrying a silver mace. Behind them came the Vice-Chancellor, venerable, active, long-limbed, and impatient of the shuffling dignity to which he must accommodate himself. Quail took off his hat. The Vice-Chancellor responded in solemn form, at the same time avoiding with practised agility a youth pounding past in a track-suit. Traffic lights winked and released a swarm of bicycles; a lorry rumbled round a corner; the procession had vanished – alarmingly, but presumably without actual disaster. Quail walked on. To his right the King’s Arms faded no less indeterminately than of old into Wadham; on his left the garden of Trinity, glimpsed thro
ugh its grille, needed only a blob of scarlet – a Doctor of Divinity, perhaps, getting up an appetite for muffins and éclairs – to echo Corot’s palette in its every tone.

  In the University Parks, young men were playing hockey and lacrosse. Quail stopped to watch and listen. The eyes of the players were bright with concentration and their breath was coming fast, but they chopped or tossed the ball with an appearance of desultoriness and leisure, calling to each other in their clear English voices as if – Quail thought – it was all a game. If Lord Michael Manningtree was a relation of Mrs Jopling’s, were all these lads, he asked himself, second cousins to Jopling himself – the kinship consisting in the smoothly arrogant assertion that everything worth doing can be done with ease? From behind Quail there rose a sudden hubbub, and he turned to discover its cause. In one of the games – perhaps it was no more than what they called a knock-up – something absurd had happened. And the scattered players, jumping and waving where they stood, were sending peal after peal of laughter across the pitch. It was not, Quail noted with an obscure contentment, at all like Jopling’s laughter.

  A whistle had blown and the young men were chopping away again. The clop of stick on ball was faintly muted, for the mist was growing thicker and soon it would be a fog. Looking beyond the players, Quail could see only the bleakly rectangular outlines of large new laboratories. They might have been a massive fortification thrown up by the ancient university with some notion of protecting its northern flank. Quail turned and moved on. Ahead, the mist was thinner. The sun, striking through, cast washes of uncertain gold over the high gables of Norham Gardens.

  He looked at his watch – for his notable day held yet another engagement – and changed the direction of his stroll. As he passed close by a touch-line, a hockey-ball rolled his way, and one of the players, running to save, skidded, lost his balance, and came down with a bump straight in front of Quail’s feet. He sprang up, apologetic and smiling. Quail smiled vaguely back. For the moment a mingled smell of mud and sweat and leather had blotted out all his other sensations. There must, he thought, be something canine in his constitution. The lad who had taken the tumble was running back into the game. There was a trickle of blood down one of his calves. Another of the players was cheerfully jeering at him. Two girls, bespectacled and serious, swung past, earnestly talking. They had been told by their tutor, Quail frivolously conjectured, that in the Thames Valley, intellectual distinction eludes those who fail to take physical exercise. But they were young, and their vigorous progress gave them more pleasure than they knew.

  Although he was himself by no means of a sedentary habit, Quail became aware at this point that his own gait lacked elasticity. No doubt there were other middle-aged persons, both male and female, sedately strolling on the paths around him. Nevertheless, he felt isolated as he had not yet done. If one lives out one’s life in Oxford, he reflected, one is no doubt comfortably convinced, decade by decade, that it is precisely to one’s contemporaries that the place primarily belongs. But if one comes back to it in maturity one sees that its ownership is vested in some seven thousand people whose average age is round about twenty-one.

  With a gesture not habitual to him, Quail shook his head as he walked. He was far from proposing to encourage in himself the attitudes of an ineffectual revenant. He was in Oxford in pursuit of an interest proper to his years – one on the mild antiquarian fringe of the life of passion and imagination. Youth had the privilege of creating, and age the duty to conserve. There was a poem of Yeats’s that treated the relationship devastatingly – and yet it wasn’t altogether true that the old fellows could do nothing more to the purpose than cough in ink. Young men tossing on their beds were often careless with such rhymes as their despair achieved; and indeed all through their lives, the greatly gifted had a trick of being negligent in matters in which posterity might with some show of reason assert itself as having a claim upon them. From which it followed that a useful function . . .

  The apologia faded out of Quail’s mind, doubtless as being too familiar to pursue to its close. It had exerted an effect, however, upon his immediate conduct. His engagement was in Norham Gardens. But he was now walking towards the Bradmore Road.

  He was doing, in fact, what he had rather undertaken with himself not to be so absurd as to do. Presently his contact would have to be made. But he could scarcely, here and now, walk up and ring the bell. And to reconnoitre or prowl appeared to him far from seemly. It would emphasise, somehow, the inescapably appetitive aspect of his adventure.

  Yet here he was. He couldn’t plead that his sense of the topography of the district had grown hazy. It remained distinct in his mind. He had deliberately if not wholly consciously turned this way – and his good sense told him to pocket his scruple and enjoy himself. For there was, at his years, an actual enjoyment in so rare a sensation as that of mounting excitement. He had felt it, very faintly, on the train yesterday. That, in itself, had been novel. It was still his business from time to time to confront large issues at their heightened moment, and at a word to resolve for good or ill some crisis on which many fortunes depended; but it was a long time since he could remember these occasions as having much effect upon the chemical constitution of his blood. Now, in this quiet road with its unremarkable if lurkingly fantastic houses, he felt his heart pounding. Had he looked down and seen in his hands a boy’s first gun, jeans on his legs, and in front of him a hunting-ground bounded only by the distant broad Potomac, he would scarcely have been altogether surprised. But what in fact lay before him was this short curved vista of variously Gothic villas, built in Victoria’s middle time for the first generation of Oxford’s married tutors.

  Sundry eminent persons, he reminded himself, had lived in the Bradmore Road. For instance, there had been that most serious of Matthew Arnold’s nieces, Mrs Humphry Ward. And there had been Walter Pater. For Pater, oddly enough, had for some years lived within a stone’s throw of Fontaney. That had been Pater’s house. And so here—he glanced at a numbered gate-post as he walked straight on. Yes – that was it.

  There was somebody on the other side of the road. But Quail didn’t turn his head. His own footsteps seemed to him unnaturally loud, and he was aware of holding his body with constraint. He might positively have been a burglar, it occurred to him, making off after deciding that the right moment hadn’t come. And he didn’t find the absurdity of this at all funny. Such images don’t start at random to the mind. But now, he saw, he had got to the end of the Bradmore Road. He walked for some yards at random and then paused, irresolute. He looked absently at the house before him. It had all the muted strangeness of the neighbourhood, being like a small blurred Palazzo Pisani, executed in a brick recalling public lavatories and railway stations. He could either proceed by a devious route to his proper destination or turn round and walk back as he had come. It was this second course, he saw, that represented the proper way of taking himself in hand. And he would have a good look, this time, at the house in which Arthur Fontaney had lived and died. He wouldn’t hesitate, even, to draw conclusions from the state of the paint or the curtains. There was certainly something not quite delicate in just this manner of spying out the land. But he wouldn’t, after all, be learning anything that he wouldn’t learn as soon as he did call.

  Armed with this reflection, Quail returned up the Bradmore Road. He was about to do all that he had promised himself – and had got so far as to remark that the place showed no extravagance of disrepair – when his attention was diverted to the other side of the quiet thoroughfare. There was still somebody standing on the foot-path.

  The circumstance ought to have been altogether unremarkable. What was startling was Quail’s instant persuasion that here was another burglar. There was little that could rationally suggest such a notion. A certain meagreness of form, indeed, was the first impression that the stranger gave. One might open an illustrated Dickens – Quail weirdly thought – and come upon him making a grab at a pastry-cook’s window. His clothes, it
was true, didn’t altogether fit in with this picture, for although a policeman might not have cared for them, they would at once have reassured a tailor. This, however, was a subsidiary impression, since the stationary stranger was a good deal more notable than anything he was dressed in. He had been looking intently – there could be no doubt of it – at Fontaney’s former dwelling; and now, just for a second, he was glaring intently at Quail. The intentness might be in part a trick of his features, which were dominated by a thin forward-thrusting nose; and the glare was certainly to some extent the work of pebble-shaped glasses in a glinting frame. He was on the farther fringe of middle age, and – whether or not he was a burglar – he was certainly a don. The species does not, in a mere quarter of a century, at all notably change.

  Even as Quail came to this conclusion, the stranger turned and walked away. He walked rapidly, but with steps that were too short for the length of his legs. His hands were buried in his coat-pockets; his shoulders were thrust far forward and his nose was thrust forward farther still; he had the appearance of cutting his way through some resistant fluid. With this curious movement, and in his respectable but utterly neglected garments, he ought to have been decidedly comical. In point of fact, he carried a certain outré dignity about with him. Following slowly, Quail watched him round a corner. He quite forgot to look at Fontaney’s former dwelling. In the small incident, there had been something he found disturbing.

  CHAPTER V

  The house in Norham Gardens was large and lofty. It rose massively through the gathering fog in a confusion of variegated brickwork and carved stone to a turret the purely mediaeval suggestion of which was impaired by its having been made the terminus of a spiral iron fire-escape. The windows, all of them lurking like small wary eyes beneath pointed arches and between columns crowned with conscientiously diversified capitals, were so numerous and so irregularly disposed that a profusion of exterior plumbing subsequently added to the fabric was obliged to crawl with a tortuous obliqueness over its surface. The whole structure, designed to evoke in cultivated Victorians nostalgic thoughts of Murano or the Grand Canal, in fact achieved a different marine suggestion, that of some vast barnacle-encrusted object in the clutches of an answeringly gigantic octopus.