The Gaudy Read online

  ‘He oughtn’t to make too heavy weather of it.’ I uttered this with conviction, having known a certain number of talented people (as well as numerous worthy ones) quite notably deficient in the elusive art of concatenating ideas logically together. ‘He has time and the great world ahead of him.’

  ‘That’s what I tell the lad.’ It was increasingly evident that Junkin (after his shaky start) had come to enjoy a certain warmth of regard on his scout’s part. ‘”Wait until you get out in the world,” I say to him. “You’ll be heading the lot of them when it comes to going after the jobs.” I tell Mr Junkin that.’

  ‘We must hope it will turn out that way.’ I couldn’t tell whether there was a secure objective basis for Plot’s prediction, but approved his instinct to play down the significance of examinations. ‘Is Junkin facing some affair in the Schools soon?’

  ‘Ah, there he’s in the same boat as Mr Ivo Mumford, all right. Both failed the same exam twice, they have − with less than a canvas between them, it seems, so far as the marks went.’ Like most scouts, Plot was fond of a metaphor drawn from the river. ‘So they have to sit it again, at the end of next term. A last chance, Mr Junkin thinks it will be.’

  ‘And Mr Mumford?’

  ‘Well, it isn’t book-learning of any sort that Mr Mumford’s mind dwells on, by a long chalk. He takes a very high line about such things. Quite in the old college style that you and I remember, his lordship’s son is. As it should be, no doubt − him having a title coming to him now. But I see you’d better be getting changed, sir.’

  I realised that this was true, and said goodnight to Plot, who departed with the assurance that he would bring me a cup of tea at eight o’clock next morning, or earlier if I cared to open the door and give a shout. He must be wrong, I knew, about Ivo Mumford’s having a title ahead of him, since Tony’s elevation had certainly been to a life peerage. It seemed to have come his way at a comparatively early stage in his career, and his having accepted it must imply that he was not ambitious of the highest political office. I got out of my day clothes, and did honour to the coming occasion by a careful evening shave.

  Screwing small pearl headed studs into small gold sockets, I thought about careers. They were going to be all around me in an hour’s time. Careers, so to speak, in mid career. Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita: I had gathered that this Gaudy was to be so structured that Dante’s celebrated line would fit it perfectly. It wasn’t for the senators and patriarchs of the college. Old Mr Mumford’s Gaudy of the previous year had been that. It wasn’t for those comparative youngsters who had gone down from five to fifteen years ago; it would be in the following year that these would get their invitation. This Gaudy was for the intermediate group. Tony and myself, P. P. Killiecrankie (if he had indeed come up) and Gavin Mogridge (at this moment, according to Plot, in his old rooms downstairs): these would constitute one of its more junior echelons.

  With leisure to recall Mogridge now, I was conscious of a genuine start of curiosity which exposed as a shade factitious the incipient interest I had been parading to myself (and Plot) in unknown boys barely out of school. Mogridge’s career − and he had decidedly enjoyed one − abundantly invited to philosophical speculation on the role of Crass Casualty and the like in individual human destinies.

  I remembered him clearly: a large vague youth, fair and gangling, never viewed except wearing perfectly circular steel rimmed spectacles. About these I had used to suppose that there must be something ophthalmically defective, since they by no means obviated the necessity of their owner’s surveying the world perpetually slant-wise − rather in the manner of some bust of Alexander the Great faithfully portraying the torticollis afflicting that emperor. Nobody would have supposed it likely that Mogridge would ever himself be reduced to seeking desperately round for fresh worlds to conquer. Yet something of the kind had happened to him.

  His only ambition − and we understood it to be a consuming one—was to play the ‘cello at a virtuoso’s level. He saw himself as the Casals of his generation. Unfortunately his command of the instrument never rose to playing it quite certainly in tune. As a consequence, towards the close of his undergraduate days his family was under the necessity of viewing him primarily as a vocational problem. But his father had prudently kindled in him some small spark of interest in archaeology; and being a professor of some sort at Cambridge had succeeded in attaching his son, although wholly unqualified scientifically, to an expedition proposing extensive excavations in a remote region of the South American continent.

  In just what capacity − although doubtless humble − Mogridge was programmed to perform never, as it happened, appeared. The plane carrying the entire personnel of the venture, together with various other people to a total of some fifty souls, having risen punctually from the airfield at Lima and vanished at its predicted point over the horizon, was never seen again. Aerial reconnaissance turned up no trace of it, and when days had passed into weeks all hope of the existence of survivors was abandoned. The catastrophe was one of the dozen or so more sensational horrors of its year.

  Yet no immediate fatality had occurred. The plane, while through some technical fault out of radio contact, had cracked up, lost all power, and then simply floated down to a belly-flop in what was fortunately a cushioning but not instantly engulfing swamp. As the last man scrambled out (only the last man, as Mogridge’s narrative makes clear, was a woman), the plane burst into flame, and was presently wholly consumed. The final thing to vanish (Mogridge chronicles) was a golden phoenix emblazoned on the fuselage, the emblem of the airline which had imposed this signal degree of inconvenience upon its clients. From the ashes of the bird nothing arose. The stranded passengers can scarcely have regarded the symbol as felicitously chosen.

  I had more than once called up the curious scene before my inward eye, and I did so again now. Many writers have exploited a situation of the kind: notably Shaw (of whom I had lately been thinking) in the third act of Man and Superman. But the suddenly transformed condition of Mogridge and his companions (who, minutes before, had been reading scientific journals and drinking martinis) proved far more disconcerting than that of Jack Tanner and his talkative friends, who confronted merely ‘one of the mountain amphitheatres of the Sierra Nevada’ − although that, indeed, proved to be ‘a strange country for dreams’. The swamp, into which the metallic remains of the perished plane were sinking with a sinister ease even as they gazed, appeared initially to extend in illimitable vastness on every side. Curiously enough, it was the purblind Mogridge himself who first discerned (through spectacles which happily had remained unharmed on his nose) certain dim serrations at one point on the horizon. By some this was taken to be a city − but only because a city was what they very much wanted to see. Others declared confidently that, even if mere vegetation, here was an infallible sign of a comfortably navigable river. Mogridge said it was more probably a jungle into the middle of which this whole swamp could be dropped with the effect of a penny tumbled on a billiard table. Mogridge was to prove to be right.

  It was, as it happened, his twenty-second birthday; with the exception of a junior cabin steward, he was the youngest person on the plane. He had passed, all decent mediocrity and with that single inept musical ambition, through an unnoticing school and college. One would have conjectured that, if rescued, he would for certain months conscientiously measure and record the dimensions of such chunks of temple masonry and the like as were indicated to him for the purpose, and then return home to equally honourable obscurity in a shipping office or a bank. Instead of which he was to produce Mochica.

  That Mogridge was able to do this − not, I mean, that he so mysteriously had it in him, but that it was physically, mechanically possible − confronts us with one of those artistries of Chance. His digestion was upset, and it so happened that, when the emergency declared itself, he was privately ensconced in a small compartment at the tail of the plane. To his hand was something from which it was clear to him that he mus
t not, in his uncomfortable condition, be separated. It thus came about that, when he presently found himself knee-deep in mud, his sole possession was a roll of lavatory paper. From various fellow passengers he was able to requisition pencils. As the grand virtue of Mochica consists in its being so unchallengeably (in television parlance) ‘live’, and in catching, moment by moment through terrible weeks, the fleeting minutiae of an extraordinary situation, it is evident that Mogridge’s career might be described with almost literal accuracy as based on bumf.

  For some time, indeed, in the literary circles into which he had been rocketed, Mogridge was known as ‘Bumfy’ Mogridge. But the joke, or jeer, didn’t stick. Mochica itself, after all, was emphatically not bumf; it was one of those rare books which, while enjoying riproarious popular success, at the same time owns sufficient intrinsic merit to achieve among the critical a kind of classic status straight away. Mogridge himself had become a celebrity, and one with a large sum of money in the bank, before his father and uncles and other concerned persons had ceased wondering where and how to find him £12 a week.

  Mogridge’s moment had been born out of sudden and unpredictable hazard; and in the sequel something like that confronted him all over again. Even the money might be as swamping as that Peruvian mud, if he failed warily to consider the interest the Inland Revenue was going to take in it a twelvemonth after its arrival. What did, in fact, happen to him thereafter was sufficiently enigmatical to make me regret that I had never once run across him since we both went down. I was going on now to reflect on what hearsay had brought me when there came an interruption in the shape of a knock on Junkin’s outer door.

  I emerged from the bedroom and gave a shout to come in − not at all deterred by the fact that my movement was of the shambling character enforced upon a man who is only half into his trousers. I thought this might well be Gavin Mogridge himself; it would be a reasonable thing that, having heard from Plot of my presence, he should come upstairs to renew our acquaintance. It was certainly not in my head that I was in other than an exclusively male society. So I was casually buttoning my flies with one hand and feeling for my braces with the other when the door opened at my call and a young woman walked in.

  IV

  Duncan, I very much want you to meet Mabel.’ The words came to me − but only just, since the voice was not a strong one − from somewhere behind the lady in the doorway. It was not immediately apparent that the lady, on her part, wanted to meet me. Her demeanour was shamefast − an archaic word to be excused as carrying a useful ambiguity. It was only modest in the girl − thus suddenly confronting a man fumbling with his buttons − to cast her gaze fixedly upon the shabby college carpet, but her bearing also hinted a shyness in excess of this situation − one approaching the awkward or even mildly pathological. Awkwardness, however, might be something merely reflected upon her by her escort, who had made such gauche haste to introduce her without for a moment pausing to identify himself. But he did now advance, edging clumsily round his bashful companion to reveal a slight, almost chetif figure of about my own age. He was dressed in tails which failed to fit him very well, and over which he already wore his M.A. gown. ‘Cyril Bedworth,’ this person went on, seeing me at a loss. ‘Duncan, congratulations on a splendid new play!’

  Bedworth was somebody else I hadn’t seen for many years, but there was nevertheless something peculiarly unfortunate about my moment’s blankness before him. He carried around with him the effect of being a forgettable sort of man, and was to be presumed sensitively aware of the fact. And here he was, saying a generous thing with obvious sincerity − whereas he might perfectly well have produced that familiar ‘Do you still write plays?’

  But if I was embarrassed it was only partly because I hadn’t been quick enough. Cyril Bedworth’s tone had recalled to my memory a salient feature of his character long ago. This had been, quite simply, his artless admiration for myself, for Tony Mumford, and for what an old fashioned writer might call our set. It couldn’t have been a rational admiration, since we were singularly without qualities meriting solid regard. He had simply been in love with us collectively − rather as Helen Schlegel had been in love with the Wilcoxes. But at least no ill consequence, such as Forster’s novel records, had resulted in Bedworth’s case. And now, as if all loyalty to that fallacious estimate of my worth, he was eager to reveal the wonderful achievement of having acquired a wife.

  So I paid my respects to Mrs Bedworth in form, and invited her to sit down on the less broken-springed of Junkin’s two armchairs. She did so still without venturing to raise her eyes, and also with what seemed unnecessary care in the matter of disposing her skirt round her ankles. I reflected that I myself was still in my shirt-sleeves. Then it struck me that Mabel Bedworth, whose note was so decidedly quiet, was nevertheless almost as much as her husband dressed for a formal evening occasion. Why, I asked myself in sudden panic, was she here at all − only some minutes before the Gaudy guests would be beginning to assemble? Had Bedworth, whose early circumstances had not permitted the acquiring of much social expertness, fallen into a stark misconception, in some bizarre fashion persuading himself that wives, too, were bidden to the college board? It would be an error too monstrous for contemplation. Ought I to contrive an oblique remark that would alert them to the truth, and enable them to withdraw without confusion and rearrange their evening? Fortunately this imagination of chaos at once proved unfounded.

  ‘Mabel has to fly,’ Bedworth said. ‘But she did so very much want to meet you. She has heard a great deal about you, Duncan, from time to time. And she does greatly admire your plays.’

  Mrs Bedworth corroborated none of these statements. She just sat perfectly still. There was nothing hostile about her, nor any suggestion of being bored. Indeed, I had a sense that she felt something more electrical to be in the air than was objectively there at all. I might have solved this small enigma at once if it hadn’t become necessary for me to put up some conversation myself.

  ‘I wonder how many of us have been lodged in our old rooms.’ I said. ‘Here am I. And Tony − you remember Tony Mumford, Cyril? − is over the way.’

  ‘Yes, Tony—of course.’ Bedworth had jerked oddly in his chair, so that a spring twanged alarmingly. It was almost as if, unaccountably, he was troubled by this unremarkable information ‘I mustn’t miss having a word with him. It would be a mistake.’

  ‘He’ll be looking forward to it.’ Bedworth’s last remark had puzzled me. ‘And it seems that Gavin Mogridge is down there on the ground floor. The celebrity among us, he must be called. But it’s only Tony that the scout on the staircase pretends to remember. When you and I become lords, Cyril, he’ll pretend to remember us too. Are you in that very attractive attic?’

  ‘No, no—in Howard.’ Bedworth produced this with an enhanced and almost startled lack of ease which made me suppose I had been tactlessly patronising about the attractiveness of the attic. Already in my time, although there were plenty of wealthy men in the college, there can have been few who were exceptionally poor − whose poverty, that is, was much deeper than that of a substantial number of their companions. One would have had to go back to between the wars − to the generation, that would be, of Ivo Mumford’s grandfather − to find poor scholars who were struggling at Oxford on pretty well nothing at all. But Cyril Bedworth through some unknown special circumstance was notably poor, and it seemed reasonable to suppose that he felt touchy about it, and about the unimpressive character of his accommodation beneath the leads. His poverty in itself would have limited the freedom of his association with many of us; in addition to which I am afraid we were sometimes inclined to mix up being poor with being poor-spirited. Not that we lacked delicacy (something of which young men have a surprising command) in any direct dealings with narrow budgets. If Bedworth became covertly a figure of fun with us it was on no such account. Physically he had been notably unattractive. He was, for example, still in serious adolescent trouble with his complexion. So in one no
nsense-saga of our contriving he became the reigning college catamite of his year, and we affected to feel the blood hammering in our temples when we passed him in the quad. It is possible, I suppose, that his mere name provoked whimsy of this sort.

  I saw now that his spots had cleared up, and also that something, not immediately definable, had happened to his features which must be connected with processes going on behind them. But he was still what we had called a grey man. Ivo’s grandfather, I believe, would have said a sub man, and Ivo’s contemporaries no doubt had a term of their own. (Vocabularies change; intolerance does not.) As for his capacity for admiring others − a trait not unamiable in itself − it seemed only too likely that worldly experience had attenuated any disposition of the sort. Perhaps he had transferred the balance of it to his wife, of whom he was obviously immensely proud, and to the children who might be conjectured to have blessed their union.

  ‘Do you think Oxford has changed much?’ I asked Bedworth. It seemed a banal question in the uttering, and in fact I had substituted it for another that had been forming on my tongue. What did Cyril Bedworth do? It is reasonable to ask a former acquaintance, after an interval of many years, about his walk in life. But Bedworth knew that I wrote plays, and had handsomely referred to the fact, so there seemed something uncivil in an inquiry which ipso facto relegated him to the anonymous crowd. The question upon which I had fallen back seemed to afford him difficulty, and at the same time to strike him as of substantial import.

  ‘I find it hard to decide,’ he said seriously. ‘I should like to hear what you think yourself. Yours ought to be the sharper impression, really.’

  I didn’t know quite how to take this. It appeared to be a recrudescence of the admiration theme, a tribute to the superior acuity of mind which a writer must necessarily bear over persons in some such unassuming employment as Bedworth’s own. (By this time I had decided, I believe, that he was respectably ensconced with an old-established firm of chartered accountants.) Before I could take the matter further an extraordinary thing had happened.