The Guardians Page 6

  “But certainly you must. Otherwise you will simply dine at high tables, and drowse in common rooms, and leave us with no more stimulus than if you had made a round of dreary London clubs.” As she delivered herself of this extravagance, Lady Elizabeth smiled. It was startling – as if one of Rembrandt’s sad old women should suddenly light up with joy – and Quail felt his heart leap, like a child who sees a rocket soar over some impassable space. With Lady Elizabeth in her seventies, it came to him, he had been a little in love. And now she had made him sit down. “Have you seen anybody yet?”

  “I haven’t yet met the President of the Union, or the captain of rugger, or the stroke of the varsity boat.” He looked at her swiftly to see if she understood this teasing, and concluded that she very well did. “But on the train yesterday I ran into old Dr Stringfellow.”

  “Old Dr Stringfellow?” For the first time, Lady Elizabeth appeared bewildered, indeed almost distressed. “But surely not. Surely—”

  “No – it’s a fact.” Quail was puzzled. “He had what I’m sure you must remember: his paper bag.”

  “Why—you mean Tommy Stringfellow!” Lady Elizabeth’s delight was unfeigned. “I thought you said old Dr Stringfellow. And I was quite certain that Tommy’s father died years ago. Indeed, I clearly remember reading his obituary in the Oxford Magazine.”

  “I see. I didn’t know that Dr Stringfellow, so to speak, had a father.”

  “We were not so clear as we ought to have been, I am afraid, that Professor Stringfellow had a son. Tommy was such a quiet child, and quite commonplace. Whereas the professor, of course, was one of the Oxford figures of his time – a notable eccentric, as well as an eminent Assyriologist.”

  “But isn’t it the son who is the Assyriologist?” Quail put this question with proper circumspection. “He has certainly published books on the subject.”

  “Oh, very possibly. He picked up a little from his father, no doubt. But one’s chief memory of Tommy is of the small boy with the perpetual paper bag. The sweets appeared to be made mainly of liquorice.”

  “The bag contains biscuits now.”

  “Ah—but so it did then!” Lady Elizabeth’s memory pounced on this. “There were biscuits as well. Tommy’s sole distinction was to have secured the acquaintance of Oriel Bill – a thing very rarely achieved except by Oriel men. And it was the biscuits that did it. Robin”—Lady Elizabeth glanced at Warboys, who had returned from attending to the kettle—”have you ever heard of Oriel Bill?”

  “Oh, yes, Lady Liz. He’s their waterman, isn’t he?”

  “Impossible boy! Oriel Bill was Mr Wootten-Wootten’s delightful bull-dog. You must add Mr Phelps’s memoir to that reading-list, cousin.”

  “Very well, Lady Liz.” Warboys clearly took this injunction as mandatory. “A memoir by someone called Phelps of this Wootten-Wootten type?”

  “Certainly not. Nobody ever thought of writing a memoir of Mr Wootten-Wootten. The memoir is of the dog.” Lady Elizabeth turned to Quail. “Do you recall Bill? But I don’t know that you would. He became too much addicted to the pleasures of the table, and died in the same year, I remember, as Mr Gladstone.”

  “1898? It was before my time.”

  “But I think I have a photograph.” Lady Elizabeth moved across the room. “And poor Mr Dodgson of Christ Church, who wrote those odd books for children, died in that year too. So did Mallarme.”

  “Is that so?” Quail now vividly remembered the alarming quality of Lady Elizabeth’s information. There were, no doubt, a score of ancient persons in Oxford who could assert that Gladstone and Lewis Carroll died in the same year. But Mallarme, if not Oriel Bill, would be beyond their range.

  “I think this is it.” Lady Elizabeth had picked up one of the silver photograph frames from the top of a grand piano and was looking at it with her dark clear eyes. “I think this is certainly Bill.” She handed the photograph to Quail. “Is it?”

  He hesitated. “Well—no. This is somebody in glasses.”

  “But Bill was several times photographed in spectacles – and in football dress, and in cap and gown.”

  He was rather awkwardly silent, for he had realised that she must be nearly blind.

  “No doubt you are right. My husband used to say that Bill, unlike Mr Pater, was almost human. He always took a hansom, I remember, on returning from football matches. Bill, that is to say – not Mr Pater, who was uninterested in sport. I must find Bill’s photograph another time. Robin, make the tea.” As if she had divined Quail’s embarrassment, Lady Elizabeth talked easily as she moved back across the room. “I hear people coming. But it won’t be Miss Fontaney quite yet, I think. I asked her for a little later.”

  Quail had his teacup in his hand before he took courage to express his alarm. “You’ve asked Miss Fontaney to tea?”

  “But most certainly. I know you must have corresponded, and I know you’ve never met.” Lady Elizabeth paused to call out to Warboys concise instructions on opening a tin of biscuits. The visitors, so far, were all contemporaries of the young man. They had come tumbling in as freely as if into a schoolroom, and for the moment formed a gossiping group where their formidable hostess had disposed them across the room. “You must, after all, meet at least one of Arthur Fontaney’s daughters sooner or later. I have no doubt that your business interests set you a brisk pace. But your negotiation with Eleanor Fontaney will at least require a meeting. Or so I should suppose.”

  “It’s shocking you should have to guess that I propose business with Miss Fontaney. I’m ashamed that I didn’t put it in my letter to you. But it was only with some idea that I ought to consult you—sound you—before deciding whether I ought to think of anything that could be called business at all.” Quail made this explanation not very happily. His full reason for having said nothing in his letter had turned upon the melancholy conjecture that Lady Elizabeth might be past making anything of his project, or at least past pronouncing any reliable judgment on it. Now this was proving a long way from the truth. It was even uncomfortably possible that she was capable of guessing the entire movement of his mind.

  “It needn’t quite be called a guess,” Lady Elizabeth was saying to him with a touch of asperity. “I keep, you see, an eye on the calendar – on the years and even on the months. I do that because I am interested in whether or not I shall live to be a hundred.”

  “I’m sure you will.”

  “My dear man, I don’t seek encouragement. By interested I don’t mean concerned. That would be foolish.” As Lady Elizabeth said this, Quail received, more pronouncedly than before, the impression of being one who undergoes instruction in the nursery. “Think of Dr Hercus. He was very undistinguished, I’ve been told, and totally without ambition until he entered his nineties. He then began to entertain the resolve to dine in college on his hundredth birthday – something which there is no record of any fellow of a college ever having achieved. His temperament had always been equitable, but now, year by year, he agitated himself more and more about this. Eventually he couldn’t keep still, and fell down and broke something and died when no more than ninety-seven. So one sees that it is foolish to make a point of the thing.” Lady Elizabeth fell silent, and Quail noticed a fine tremor in the hand holding her cup. She had tired herself, he supposed, in the effort to entertain him; and her remarks, although owning their own cogency, had drifted away from the subject originally prompting them.

  At this point more visitors arrived: two elderly ladies who subsequently remained effectively anonymous, and a bearded old gentleman who turned out to be the grandson of a Victorian novelist. It was only after yet further mature persons had joined these that Lady Elizabeth was free to return to her first guest. It immediately became clear that she remembered just where they had broken off. “I keep my eye on the calendar, as I’ve said. And I didn’t take it for a coincidence that you proposed to turn up in Oxford just before the date mentioned in Arthur Fontaney’s will.”

  Quail was increasingly aware th
at Lady Elizabeth’s voice was monotonous as it had not used to be. But for the easy authority it unconsciously carried, the cadence of it would merely have lulled the ear, like the prattle of a crone in a chimney-corner. As it was, this only made more impressive the alert mind behind it. “Certainly there’s no coincidence,” he said. “And I don’t feel too good, I guess, appearing in Oxford like this, all ready to pounce.” He hesitated, and then with some naivety added: “Do you think, Lady Elizabeth, that there’s anybody got ahead of me?”

  Lady Elizabeth received this obliquely. “It might a little depend,” she said. “You haven’t tried to get ahead of yourself? You haven’t written to Miss Fontaney with any preliminary suggestions?”

  “Certainly not.”

  “Then I think you’ll be ahead of anybody who has. I understand there was an expression in the will that the daughters – or at least Eleanor, who is the one who counts – have wished to interpret very strictly.”

  Quail nodded. “’Entertained’ was Fontaney’s word in the instructions he left to his executors. No proposal was to be entertained until this date that is coming along – actually next week. And clearly one ought not to advance a proposition on people who are enjoined not to start considering it. I repeat, I don’t feel all that happy, getting set and ready on the mark like this. But when the date does come, it wouldn’t be sense to let others get ahead – if there are others.”

  “There won’t be others with your command of money, or anything like it.”

  “I suppose not.” It was like Lady Elizabeth, Quail thought, to arrive immediately at this forthright appreciation of his position. “But do you think that Miss Fontaney—?”

  He was interrupted by the grandson of the Victorian novelist, who came toddling up to his hostess with a teacup balanced at the level of his meticulously trimmed white beard. “Mr Quail and I,” Lady Elizabeth said at once, “are talking about money.”

  It was an old trick of hers, Quail thought, thus to push a stiff conversational fence under the advancing nose of a guest; and to be true to form she ought to have slipped away and left the two men confronted. But on this occasion – perhaps only because she was less mobile than formerly – she remained seated between them. And the old gentleman appeared amused. “Money?” he said. “It’s much more important than the weather. But I’m no authority – no authority in the world. I could never come by it, somehow, except in a very small way, and none of my children appears able to come by it at all. Fortunately my grandfather came by quite a lot. He caught the ear of the public, you know, he caught the ear of the public.” The old gentleman laughed rumblingly in his beard, as if here again were something extremely diverting. “Thackeray once said to him, ‘How, my dear fellow, you do catch the ear of the public.’”

  The old gentleman laughed once more, but this time it was absently, and Quail saw that he had himself been caught – but less by the ear than the eye. The youngest generation of Lady Elizabeth’s acquaintance, when not employed in handing tea, continued to have a centre of their own at the other side of the room. Among them, leaning over what appeared, rather surprisingly, to be a shove-halfpenny board, was one girl with fair hair and a particularly striking figure. The old gentleman studied her for a moment, and then advanced his beard confidentially into Quail’s face. “Remember,” he murmured, “those stunners Shakespeare described on Cleopatra’s barge? They made their bends adornings. And there it is. Wonderful poet, eh?” He turned to toddle off in the direction of this new attraction. Then, seeming to feel that this was rather abrupt, he paused for a moment. “I was going to tell you,” he said, “of a remark Thackeray made to my grandfather. But another time.”

  Quail watched him go. “He doesn’t think much of money,” he said to Lady Elizabeth. “But then, probably, he has never had to consider it. And I was going to ask you if you think Miss Fontaney—”

  “Badly off, without a doubt.” Lady Elizabeth was incisive. “But I don’t know whether it’s a matter of the coal-cellar and the larder. With a good many people, certainly, it is just that nowadays. I blame Mr Lloyd George.” Lady Elizabeth paused, leaving Quail in doubt whether here was a flicker in her sense of time or a back- ward-reaching historical hypothesis. “But how any consideration of the sort will affect Eleanor and Marianne Fontaney, I can’t say. My acquaintance with them is far from intimate. And they may be very unaccountable young people, for all I know.”

  “Young people?” Quail’s glance was on the novelist’s grandson, who had now comfortably established himself beside the attractive girl in Robin Warboys’ circle.

  “As I think of young people, must I say?” Lady Elizabeth was amused. “Of course Marianne is the younger by many years. She is possibly your own junior. And Eleanor can be little more than sixty. As yet, she may by no means bear a very settled disposition.”

  If Miss Fontaney was flighty at sixty, Quail supposed, it was scarcely likely that a further span of years would bring her the philosophic mind. But to Lady Elizabeth he said: “I wish I just knew her disposition to me. There was no difficulty when I first brought out my book on Fontaney’s early life. Permission to use various things was given me readily enough, and Miss Fontaney was always civil in her letters. Her final letter – after, I mean, the thing came out – wasn’t expansive; but I had no reason to suppose my picture of her father had offended her.” Quail caught in his own voice as he spoke a note that told him he was seeking to reassure himself. “And, of course, what’s in question now isn’t primarily biography. There is still something of a story untold, you know. But it will come to an end – whatever it is – well before Fontaney’s marriage. It’s clear that what the later journals record, in the main, is just the progress – I guess it should be called the astonishing evolution – of a mind.” Quail hesitated again. He was aware that, as this tea-time hour wore on, his eye was going rather anxiously to the door of Lady Elizabeth’s attic drawing-room. “So I don’t see that Miss Fontaney could have any motive—”

  “The underlying attitude of children to distinguished parents is often very surprising.”

  “I know that. And then, of course, there’s what one might call the national consideration. Miss Fontaney, in spite of her American mother, may feel that everything should remain here in Oxford, and that it should be British scholars who get to work on it. I should have to respect a feeling like that.”

  “Should you?” Lady Elizabeth appeared to think little of this. “The woman’s not, so far as I know, a fool – except that she doesn’t seem able to keep an eye on the clock.” ‘

  “I think there’s somebody coming now.” This was true. In a moment a fresh visitor had appeared. But it was not a lady. It was the man whom Quail, only an hour before, had remarked lingering opposite Miss Fontaney’s house in the Bradmore Road. And at once Quail was confirmed – if by no more than a bizarre intuition – in his former notion of a significance which that encounter had held. Here was somebody else who was “after” Arthur Fontaney’s remains. Quail’s project, his mild little learned adventure, had entered its first phase of complication.

  CHAPTER VII

  You could tell at once, Quail thought, that the stranger would be an uneasy guest in any drawing-room. It remained clear that he was a scholar, the awkwardness seeming to consist in the fact that he was uncompromisingly nothing else. He advanced upon Lady Elizabeth with a bleak impersonality, as if she were less a human being than a catalogue; and the hand which he held out might have been felt to carry the suggestion not of salutation but of a proposal to pull from the old lady’s person some little drawer packed with ingeniously skewered index-cards. Since it is only in surrealist paintings that the vertebrate creation is ever equipped in this way, the effect was not pleasing. But if Lady Elizabeth was for a moment at a loss – as Quail judged her to be – it could not have been because any such impression had come to her. A true explanation appeared when Robin Warboys spoke hastily from across the room, addressing the new arrival by name and promising to brin
g him a cup of tea on the instant. The interposition was designed, Quail discerned, to enlighten Lady Elizabeth, who was thus revealed as relying upon her young cousin’s vigilance for identifying or bringing to her notice visitors whose voices were unfamiliar to her. But Quail himself – and to a rather more startling effect – was enlightened as well. The newcomer was Gavin Tandon.

  Here then was the Senior Tutor whom Mrs Jopling, with her high command of the niceties of the French language, would doubtless call her bête noire. Here was the wrecker, whether by mere inept inadvertence or of malice, of the ladies’ luncheon. And here – more pertinently – was the man who, being a well-accredited authority in Quail’s own particular field of interest, had been found lurking, in what could only be called a sort of learned hunger, opposite Miss Fontaney’s unremarkable front gate.

  But Quail himself had been doing much the same thing, that gate having by no means lain on his necessary route this afternoon. There had, surely, been something like a mutual discovery of predatory intention. It was highly absurd; and now, it appeared to Quail, one burglar was deliberately engaged in keeping an eye on the other. For there was something not casual about Tandon’s arrival at this tea-party. Being a fellow of the college over which Dr Warboys had presided, he unchallengeably possessed, indeed, the right to call; and he was being received with proper cordiality by his venerable hostess now. But it was apparently a privilege that he exercised sparely – tea- parties being not, so to speak, his cup of tea. The inference – mildly shocking if it wasn’t laughable – seemed plain. Tandon had dogged Quail to Lady Elizabeth’s; had then taken a dubitative walk round North Oxford; and had finally decided to present himself as he was now doing. What further followed from this was certainly his knowing something about Quail already. And behind this, if it were so, there appeared to lie some little mystery. It looked as if it hadn’t been Lady Elizabeth alone who had tumbled to Quail’s intentions.