The Gaudy Page 5

  This shallow aphorism, sounding on my inward ear, broke up the reverie. Instead, and as I stared absently at Ishii Genzo over the grate, I reflected that my surroundings of the moment afforded me rational ground to feel the disadvantage to a writer, in particular, of losing contact with younger people. One ought not, clearly, to haunt or badger one’s juniors: the leisure they have for one is limited and often created out of courtesy. Yet they represent the grass roots of mature generations to come, and perhaps one ought to claim among them such grazing-rights as one may. I had returned to the college, I told myself, at the wrong time and for what would probably be a boring occasion. It would have been much more fun to be coming up, say, to talk to a college dramatic society − one doubtless involved, if not with Ubu Roi, then with Ubu Cocu or Ubu Enchaine.

  I was interrupted by the reappearance of Plot. Not that ‘interrupted’ is quite right. This time, Plot entered the room in the character of an Invisible Man, and as an Invisible Man made his way to the bedroom opening off it. I recalled that college scouts put on this turn when their job called them into a don’s room in which a tutorial was going on. I had not myself owned sufficient sophistication to be unperturbed by this; it had appeared to me that when somebody thus presented himself there should be at least a momentary passing of the time of day. Even at this moment I was not quite at ease. Observing, that is, that I was going to be respectfully ignored by Plot, I affected, before the journal still open in front of me, an absorbed regard such as might lend some colour to this lack of communication between us. Plot disappeared soundlessly, shutting the bedroom door behind him. I found myself straining to catch what he was up to.

  He was, of course, laying out my evening clothes. Whether he regularly performed equivalent valeting services for the set’s more permanent proprietor, I didn’t know. I wondered whether he had to do a great deal of simple tidying round. Did youths from unassuming homes, accustomed to fold things more or less neatly or risk a row with Mum, quickly adopt the habits (if they still were the habits) of their more privileged contemporaries, persuading themselves that the right place for a discarded garment was any corner of the floor from which a servant − thus wholesomely redeemed from idleness − could be expected to pick it up? Perhaps this lingering convention (among my astonishments long ago) had passed wholly into desuetude. It is, after all, only in detective stories and in romances of the neo-silver-fork school that nursery-maids, housemaids, footmen and the like abound any longer. (But here and there, of course, there are still fags. I used to believe that some of my companions spent the whole of their freshman year in perplexity over the absence from their new environment of personal assistants of that sort.)

  Plot now returned from the bedroom, announced all to be in order there in the matter of cuff-links and socks, and moved to one of the windows. It was still hours too early, on this mid-June evening, to draw the curtains, so he contented himself with a motion apparently designed to shake them (somewhat meagre and indeed scruffy as they were) into more graceful folds. I took this lingering to be an invitation, or at least permission, to converse.

  ‘Is there anybody else from my time on the staircase again tonight, Plot?’

  ‘A Mr Mogridge in the rooms below these, sir. His old rooms, too, it seems. I can’t say he comes back to me. But he would be the same year as his lordship and yourself, all right. Mr Killiecrankie’s year.’

  ‘Ah, yes.’ Identificatory phrases such as ‘my year’, ‘your year’, ‘our year’ were familiar to me as turning up in encounters with old members of the college. But here was something new. It was quite reasonable, no doubt, that college servants, living out their lives in contact with so many ephemeral generations of youth, should evolve a calendar of the kind thus hinted − one of Oriental suggestion, as one should say ‘the Year of the Monkey’ or ‘the Year of the Dog’. I should myself have thought of P. P. Killiecrankie’s heyday as to be associated with the Goat. ‘Do you know whether Mr Killiecrankie is coming to this Gaudy?’ I asked.

  ‘I think I’ve heard he is, sir. Always interesting to meet, Mr Killiecrankie is. Done very nicely for himself, too, I’d say.’

  ‘I’m delighted to hear it. Not that I ever got to know him, so far as I can remember.’

  ‘Is that so, sir?’ Much more distinguishably than when I had turned out not to be Lord Marchpayne, I had declined in Plot’s estimation. ‘I’d have thought everybody knew Mr Killiecrankie. Quite a name with us, he was.’ Plot paused on this—fleetingly, but long enough to sweep into the picture, as it were, a cloud of below stairs witnesses. ‘I was never his scout, mark you, since you’ll remember it was before I got a staircase. But I used to take a message for him, from time to time. A bicycle-boy could go anywhere in those days. Without, as you might say, being noticed.’

  A longer pause on Plot’s part had preceded this last fragment of communication. I was compelled, and slightly alarmed, by a momentary equivocal glint in his eye. He was a most respectable-looking man, and I didn’t doubt that to this there corresponded a most respectable manner of life. Like myself, he had passed the ambush of young days. He might well, unlike myself, possess grown-up children: even a daughter at Somerville or a son lately become a Fellow by Examination of All Souls − such story book social inversions I knew to be of real occurrence in contemporary Oxford. I much doubted whether, with the nineteen-year-old boys whose shoes he polished, he would permit himself a word or a wink suggestive of any complicity in moral misdemeanour. But with a man of his own age (and especially one who wrote stage plays) it might be different. And for a moment, indeed, Plot’s conversation did continue in a promising vein.

  ‘No older than myself, Mr Killiecrankie was. And, of course, a public school man, as more of the gentlemen were at that time. Not places, from what I’ve heard of them, where a lad has much scope for learning his way about. You know where, that is.’

  ‘But Mr Killiecrankie knew his way about?’ This question I believe I asked quite unblushingly, although it happened to be one which Tony and I had been in a position, long ago, to answer in the most literal sense.

  ‘I won’t deny that I learnt something from him,’ Plot said − all unconscious that he was echoing Lord Marchpayne’s words. ‘Still there’s been a bucket or two of water under Folly Bridge since then − and taking our own follies with it, we must trust, sir.’

  This pious hope was plainly designed as a close down upon P. P. Killiecrankie for the moment. Discretion had returned to Plot, and I wasn’t going to learn whether my deplorable contemporary had actually set up as a tutor in licence to the youth who ran or pedalled on his dubious errands. To avoid the appearance of, as it were, fishing the murky waters under Folly Bridge, I brought up a change of subject, and asked about Mr Junkin, the present tenant of these rooms.

  ‘A very pleasant gentleman, and settling down nicely. Inclined to be a little familiar at first − you’ll understand me, sir − but got his bearings in the end.’

  I supposed I did understand Plot. Junkin, whether out of natural decency or ideological persuasion, had tried to get himself treated by Plot as the social equal (and, at the same time, much younger person) he in fact was. He had persisted in addressing Plot as ‘Mr Plot’ and had said things like ‘My friends call me Nick and I think you should too.’ Had Plot replied: ‘It doesn’t work, sir. I can’t call you Nick if I don’t call Mr Mumford Ivo’? Probably Plot, although a perfectly sensible man, had for some reason of caste refrained from any such lucid statement and merely been inflexible. Whereupon Junkin had been hurt in his feelings, and was now inclined to be slightly bloody minded about college servants.

  I wondered whether I had got this wrong. If I had, it was again because I didn’t know an entire age group. I felt a wish to meet Nicolas Junkin. Ivo Mumford would be not without interest, but Junkin was the real attraction. At the same time, there was an obvious question I could ask about the two together.

  ‘Have these two young men on either side of this landing much in comm
on, Plot?’

  ‘Well now, you may say any two young men will have in common with each other what those like ourselves won’t have with either of them.’

  ‘That’s very true.’ I found encouragement in Plot’s thus asserting the existence of a bond between us. ‘But I dare say you remember more about being that sort of age than I do. You’re in contact with it all the time.’

  ‘And a funny old life I sometimes feel it to be.’ Plot had produced a duster out of air − it was a facility I recalled scouts as having − and was flicking it over the mantelpiece and the frame of Sharaku’s print. The time of day seemed inappropriate to such an operation, and I realised that Plot was automatically justifying to himself or to me this lingering over an agreeable gossip. ‘”Nanny Plot” is what Mr Mumford − Mr Ivo Mumford, that is − sometimes calls me. Very pleasant, of course, since he’s entirely the gentleman. But I know what he means.’

  ‘He’s making fun of you for trying to get some order and decency into his entire gentleman’s ways?’

  ‘I dare say it might be put like that.’ Plot had received with momentary suspicion, but at the same time with the faint gleam of an understanding eye, this subversively slanted question. ‘As for him and Mr Junkin, I’d say they don’t much get along. They’re both the party giving sort, though − and I sometimes wonder how it will be when they both hold a party − “throw a party”, it’s still called − on the same night.’ Plot paused darkly for a moment on this. ‘Different types, of course. Very confident, Mr Mumford is. And gay, you might say, when he hasn’t been crossed in something. It has all come his way easily, I don’t doubt.’

  ‘Mr Junkin isn’t confident?’

  ‘Desperation, he’s sometimes in. He’s said to me that if he didn’t do all that play acting, and pretending he’s not Junkin but Winston Churchill or the Pope of Rome, he’d be clean potty and in the Warneford by this time.’

  ‘I see.’ This modified my sense of the owner of the bottles. It also made me warm towards him. Although I was aware of much substance in the conventional view that one’s student days are the most ‘carefree’ and therefore the happiest of one’s life, I had a very clear memory of the nevertheless unfathomable intermittent melancholy of the undergraduate condition. ‘Do you feel more drawn to one sort of lad than the other, Plot?’

  ‘Well, now.’ Plot hesitated for a moment before so unprofessional a question. ‘I’d say Mr Mumford’s sort is easier to get on with. You know where you are with them, even if you mayn’t always like it. With Mr Junkin’s sort it’s more chancy. Very awkward and unexpected, they can be. Very much so, indeed.’

  ‘But perhaps that makes them more interesting?’

  ‘Yes, that may be. There’s not much variety, you might say, in those from Eton and such places.’

  ‘But Eton is supposed to encourage individualism, Plot, and even to tolerate a good deal of eccentricity. It’s the smaller public schools that are said to iron boys out.’

  ‘I wouldn’t know as to that, I’m sure. But I couldn’t say there’s much variety among such gentlemen − not even generation by generation, there isn’t. Take Mr Ivo and Mr Mumford, and you couldn’t have two more alike.’

  ‘The lad is just a repeat of his father?’

  ‘Well, that too, perhaps. But I don’t mean his lordship as now is. Old Mr Mumford himself, I’m thinking of—Mr Ivo’s grandfather. Before my time or yours, of course, he is; and that by a long way. But he came up for last year’s Gaudy.’

  ‘And he was lodged in his old rooms over the way?’

  ‘Oh, certainly, sir. The big picture over the chimney took his fancy a great deal. It had just been moved in with other of his grandson’s things. The old gentleman would stand chuckling before it for minutes on end.’

  ‘Would he, indeed?’ I found myself trying to visualise Tony’s father − a Tony thirty years on − thus experiencing a trick of the old rage. ‘What is old Mr Mumford like?’

  ‘Very pleasant, indeed. Commanding, of course, as is only natural. Mr Ivo as he’ll be one day, you might say. Anybody could see it’s some time since the first Mumfords bought boots. They’re aristocratic. Not like the old gentry, though. You can always tell them’

  ‘Ah.’ I was impressed by the invoking of this mysterious and superior social group the ability to distinguish which must have been inherited by Plot from a grandfather of his own, who had trudged up and down such a staircase as this with coal-scuttles and hot water cans long ago.

  ‘Mr Sandys, now − that spelt his name with a y and had this very set three years back. Aloof, in a way − and yet as natural as your own brother. What was due and proper passing between you. But never a word less polite than a prince’s from Michaelmas to Trinity. Not like Mr Ivo, that isn’t. You could tell Mr Sandys as old gentry, all right.’

  ‘I’d like to have known him.’ I saw that if Plot himself were to be categorised, it would have to be as a romantic, and I almost asked whether any real princes, abounding in politesse, had come his way. But he was now preparing to go about the staircase’s business, and I found myself turning back to something else. ‘I’m sorry Mr Junkin gets so desperate,’ I said. ‘It spoils my pleasure in being in his rooms. Have you any notion what his trouble is?’ I had no sooner asked this question than I felt it to transgress the bounds of legitimate curiosity − even a writer’s legitimate curiosity − where a total stranger was involved. So I substituted a more general query. ‘What sort of troubles do the young men mostly have?’

  ‘Well, sir, there they are much like you and me. It’s money, as often as not. Particularly with them that are here on government grants. They’re none too generous, the grants, it seems to me. Especially for a raw lad coming up against his betters and their goings-on in a place like this.’

  ‘Like the present Mr Mumford and his brandy and champagne, for example?’

  ‘But then, again, it may be a matter of a lady.’ Plot’s ignoring of my question was a very proper rebuke, and I had no doubt that he practised the same technique with the young men. ‘Demand and supply, sir; that’s where the hitch is. Not nearly enough ladies to go round. Unless, that is, they did go round as quick as among fornicating savages beside a camp fire.’

  ‘And they don’t do that?’ I was struck by the picturesqueness of the image offered me. ‘No brisk promiscuity?’

  ‘Well, now, Mr Pattullo − you and I know what sex has become, if we’re to believe them in the newspapers and on the wireless. Just plain in-out, in-out, and then look round again.’ Plot appeared unperturbed at having produced this yet more robust expression. ‘But I can’t say I see much of that with our young men. It isn’t just cunt, begging your pardon, they’re after, if you ask me. They may chew their sheets half through the night, thinking it is. Yet sensualists − if that’s the word − is just what they are not. Wouldn’t you say?’

  ‘With reservations, Plot. Deplorable exceptions certainly occur.’ (Fleetingly I thought of the early erotic life of P. P. Killiecrankie.) ‘But I’d go with you in a general way.’

  ‘Young Casanovas is how they may see themselves − and they may be raging, fair enough, just to get a finger there. But it isn’t as much their thing as they fancy it. They want a lot going on in the old fashioned heart as well, if you ask me. And that takes time and decency, you’ll agree. It doesn’t go with what you might call a quick turnover. Add the supply problem to that—But you probably see my point, sir.’

  ‘I think I do. You make it seem surprising the whole lot aren’t right round the bend.’

  ‘But Mr Junkin, now, isn’t in that trouble − or not that I know of. And not that bad in the money one either. He has an old aunt, he says, who comes down handsome at need. She gives out she has nothing but a sweet shop, but really owns a whole street of houses as well. He had a Honda from her the day he was seventeen.’

  ‘Ah, I never had an aunt like that.’ I saw that Plot was in an admirable relationship with Nicolas Junkin. ‘And I don’t expect you had
, either.’

  ‘That I had not. And it’s his studies he’s worried about. Very worrying in a general way, the studies seem to be nowadays. Examinations here, and examinations there − and going on long after they ought to be over, if you ask me. Why, there are gentlemen still up now, on one such score or another. More work for the servants, and more vexation for themselves.’

  ‘But that doesn’t apply to Mr Junkin at the moment?’

  ‘No, it doesn’t. But he has a bad time coming, he says, later on.’

  ‘Perhaps he spends too much time being Winston Churchill or the Pope of Rome.’

  ‘That’s what the masters tell plenty of them.’ (‘Masters’, I remembered, was the college servants’ word for fellows, tutors, and senior members generally; they used it precisely as it is used in a boys’ school.) ‘But what they tell Mr Junkin, it seems, is that his headpiece isn’t right.’

  ‘You mean his tutors tell him he’s a bit insane?’ Not unnaturally, I was disconcerted by the notion of such brusque candour.

  ‘Oh, no. What Mr Junkin says is that they think he can’t think. Can’t get the second thing he says or writes hitched on to the first − or the third to the second. And yet I’ve seen Mr Junkin in print. It doesn’t make sense.’

  ‘What Mr Junkin has had in print doesn’t make sense?’

  ‘Well, I don’t know that it does to me.’ Plot had hesitated, as if feeling we were at cross purposes. ‘But there he is − in Isis and the like. Poetry, some of it is − which is harder than anything else, by all accounts. And yet the masters say that of him. You can’t blame him for being worried, having his way to make as Mr Ivo and his like have not. I’m sure I’d be, if it wasn’t just the old brush and Hoover that was my end of the boat.’