The Gaudy Read online

  Up to this moment Mabel Bedworth had preserved, immobile, her dim downcast presence in Junkin’s best chair, and only the picking up of her handbag indicated that it would indeed be necessary for her presently to ‘fly’. This doesn’t mean that she was a negligible presence. Two or three discreet glances had persuaded me that I found her a good deal more interesting than her husband. She was by a number of years the younger of the two; and, of course, it wouldn’t have been difficult for her to be much the better looking. She was, in fact, beautiful in a soft, slightly obliterated way − not colourful but monochromatic: a composition in sepias, and with features which seemed in a perpetual quiver, as if being viewed through a veil of all but imperceptibly stirring gauze. Such was Mrs Bedworth, and by this time I believed I had the shamefastness diagnosed. Either the blood rather easily hammered in Mrs Bedworth’s own temples, or she was the sort of woman who is fated, through no particular volition of her own and upon principles inviolably arcane, herself to set it hammering in a high proportion of any male temples coming her way. She carried round with her, whether she liked it or not, the mysterious power to generate acute sexual awareness.

  This was an interesting discovery, but the extraordinary happening was something other. Hard upon the abortive exchange of views between her husband and myself on the perennial problem of a changing Oxford, Mrs Bedworth had looked up for the first time. It was for the purpose of giving me a momentary glance of intense amusement. And then she was on her feet.

  ‘The little women,’ she said to me − and her voice, low and husky, has to be recorded as doing something to my spine − ‘must be off to their poached eggs.’

  She kissed her husband on the cheek and walked out of the room.

  I was again reduced to rash hypothesis. The Bedworths, I told myself, had for the occasion of the Gaudy joined up with perhaps two or three other old-boy couples (if the expression is admissible), and the women were going to dine together in a restaurant while, in hall, the august and masculine feasting went on. I would have asked Bedworth if this were so, had I not noticed that he was upset. He appeared to judge that his wife’s conduct had been lacking in decorum. I felt no patience with this, and I believe I almost said to myself, as I should certainly have done twenty odd years before: ‘Lord, what a silly little man!’ That I didn’t actually do so was to the credit of a lurking intuition beginning to build up in me about this nervous person’s quality. There was more to him, somehow, than memory suggested.

  ‘Mabel is very fond of Virginia Woolf,’ Bedworth said suddenly.

  This was a piece of knock-out bewilderment. For a moment I even thought that Cyril Bedworth had been drinking; that he was now in a fuddled way confounding me with a more celebrated dramatist; and was announcing that my chef- d’oeuvre was one of his wife’s favourite plays. To such wild misconception there was no reply, and into my confounded silence Bedworth spoke again.

  ‘I must really have a civil word with Lord Marchpayne,’ he said. ‘With Tony,’ he emended quickly. He jumped up and made for the door. ‘I do hope, Duncan, we’ll meet again later in the evening.’ He moved as hastily as he had spoken, so that in a moment he was gone. But his tone, although wholly unassertive, had mysteriously put me in possession of a disconcerting truth. Cyril Bedworth was a fellow of the college − and thus one of my hosts, not another guest. It was my large and confident unawareness of this that had amused his wife. So much was entirely clear. But something in the way he had spoken of Tony was as baffling as had been the remark about Virginia Woolf.

  When I went downstairs a few minutes later I ran into Gavin Mogridge. The hero (for he had been that too) and historian of the ill-fated Mochica Expedition stood surveying Surrey through the doorway much as if the quadrangle were a trackless waste for guidance across which the white man must patiently await the arrival of some trustworthy native. This appearance was enhanced rather than diminished by the circumstance of Mogridge’s being in evening dress; one felt that − this night as every night − the garments had been extricated from a tin trunk and composedly donned by the light of a hurricane lantern round which there flapped unspeakable insects and an occasional vampire bat. Bleached, stringy, dehydrated, Mogridge might have been described as the typical all-weather model of the late-nineteenth century wandering Englishman. Were he to walk across the Sahara, one felt, it would be without troubling to unfurl the sunshade nonchalantly slung on his arm; if he unexpectedly met an old acquaintance in the vicinity of Kampa Dzong or the Rongbuk Glacier he would infallibly join the stroll to the summit of Mount Everest.

  What I tried to recall now was the extent to which these potentialities had already been written upon the ‘cello- walloping Mogridge of my distant recollection. At least here was the mature man, and I had an instant sense that he hadn’t changed a bit. His vagueness, his absence of mind were gigantic; at this moment he was eyeing me so unregardingly that I wondered whether he commonly distinguished between a man and a newel-post.

  ‘Oh, Duncan,’ Mogridge said, ‘do you gather they’re anywhere running to a drink?’

  He had spoken − thus in the instant of glimpsing me for the first time in twenty years − precisely as if we had been in a room together five minutes before. I felt it incumbent upon me to make equally little fuss about this picking up of threads.

  ‘Drinks are in the Great Quad, I believe.’

  ‘The Great Quad?’ Repeating the words on a note of interrogation, Mogridge peered now in one direction and now in another across Surrey, so that I almost persuaded myself I should actually have to take on the role of that faithful black and proceed to hack a path for him through the jungle. ‘Ah, the Great Quad!’ He turned a little, and pointed to the notice concerning itself with the wiping of feet − Plot’s handiwork, as I now understood it to be. For a moment I took it that Mogridge’s myopia was such that he was mistaking this for a ground-plan of the college, courteously provided by the Provost and fellows for the convenience of tourists. ‘I think it’s a joke,’ Mogridge said. ‘Don’t you?’

  ‘It has crossed my mind.’

  ‘Just striking out feet, I mean.’

  ‘I know you do.’

  ‘One of the men on this staircase, I expect.’

  ‘A good guess, almost certainly.’ I had forgotten the pace at which the unkindled Mogridge’s mind moved. ‘We could ask Plot.’

  ‘Plot? Oh, the scout. Yes. Whether there’s a left-handed man.’

  ‘Left-handed?’

  ‘Yes.’ Mogridge was now according Plot’s request all the attention which (had things fallen out as planned) he would once have been able to direct upon some fragment of Mochica masonry. ‘The stroke cancelling that word runs from ten o’clock to four. That’s left-handed. A right-handed person would make his from two o’clock to eight. Don’t you agree?’

  I saw no reason not to. Mogridge hadn’t in the least been showing off a mental affinity with such fictional characters as Hercule Poirot and Lord Peter Wimsey. He must simply own some habit of precise observation which didn’t (as so much of him was celebrated for doing) slumber for years at a time. At the moment, I seized upon the reference to eight o’clock as suggesting that our aperitif must be secured now or not at all. Several other guests were hurrying across Surrey, converging upon the lofty archway that led into the Great Quadrangle. We set out in pursuit of these.

  ‘Do you remember Cyril Bedworth,’ I asked, ‘who used to be on our staircase? He seems to have become a don.’

  ‘Oh, yes − of course. I’ve met him several times at these dinners. Haven’t you?’

  ‘This is the first I’ve been to.’

  ‘Ah, then you wouldn’t have met him.’

  ‘No.’ I realised how, with Mogridge, every stage of a discussion had to reach a full close. ‘But he looked in on me a few minutes ago. He brought his wife.’

  ‘Bedworth is married?’

  ‘That would seem to be the inference.’

  ‘It’s perfectly natural.’ Mogridge sa
id this a shade severely, as if I must be indicted of attempting some pointless levity. ‘And you would have met him again if you’d come to any of these Gaudies over the past twenty years. He has been here pretty well all the time. He stayed up, I think, and took a second degree.’ Mogridge paused; he obviously felt this had been quite something. ‘It was probably a B.Litt. That’s a Bachelor of Letters.’

  ‘So I’ve heard. But I’ve always supposed things of that sort were pursued by a pretty dim crowd. Of course Cyril didn’t exactly sparkle.’

  ‘I suppose not.’ This time, Mogridge’s pause was a brooding one. ‘Do you still write novels, Duncan?’

  ‘Plays. Yes, I do.’

  ‘Of course I remember that you were thinking of taking up literature right from the start. You will probably find that you and Bedworth have a good deal to talk about. Bedworth is literature also. I believe he is your old tutor’s Number Two. Talboys, isn’t it?’

  ‘Talbert.’ I was astonished by the information about my late caller. ‘Do you know what sort of thing Bedworth goes in for?’

  ‘He has published at least one critical study.’ The author of Mochica − that unchallengeable masterpiece in its kind − communicated this further intelligence in a tone of deep respect. ‘I am sure you will have heard of it, Duncan. It is called Proust and Powell. Or perhaps it is Powell and Proust. Two novelists. One English and one French. So I suppose Bedworth must be said to go in for Comparative Literature. It is probably a particularly difficult field.’

  I found myself glancing at Gavin Mogridge askance − which was, of course, the manner in which his own curious trick of vision made him appear to be regarding me. As we passed under the archway (its multitudinous bosses are a blaze of heraldry, with the carved stone brilliantly painted and gilded in the fashionable manner) we must therefore have presented the appearance of a couple of white-chested china dogs, eyeing each other across a fireplace. I tried to remember what kind of a sense of humour Mogridge owned in an earlier time. Nothing came to me, and I had to conclude he had owned none at all. So he hadn’t in any way been pulling my leg. Nor was there anything much odder in his telling me that Proust was a French novelist and Powell an English one than there was (when I came to think of it) in Bedworth’s having taken up these two particular writers for the purpose of critical disquisition.

  Had I been asked in recent years (as I certainly had not) about Cyril Bedworth’s undergraduate studies, I should probably have believed myself able to recall them as concerned with the extreme antiquities of English literature. But this would only have been a consequence of a generally held persuasion that the more reclusive personalities around the college tended to occupy themselves in that field. In fact, Bedworth must have begun by reading Modern Languages, and it was I myself who, inspired by an elderly don called Timbermill, had for a time absorbed myself in the pursuit of mere-dragons, marsh-steppers, eldritch wives, whales, loathly

  worms, and argumentative nightingales and owls. Yet even if Bedworth had been bred among monsters, the preparation would not have been inapposite to encounter with Charlus and Widmerpool, both of whom own that dimension of the grotesque without which, as Proust himself remarks, major art cannot be.

  This rumination took me into the Great Quadrangle, and simultaneously out of the company of Mogridge, who drifted away with as little stir as he had drifted up. His goal, one felt, might have been indifferently a glass of sherry or whatever today is the equivalent of the sources of the Nile. It was part of the mystery of his career that, ever since Mochica, he had doggedly if intermittently projected himself as a traveller and natural-born travel writer without ever attaining striking success again. He seemed not a man who came alive before a mere itinerary, even if it was of a tolerably taxing sort. Mogridge needed − all too plainly, he needed − an occasion, an hour, a crisis of the most absolute order. If he had a second time found such, it had hitherto passed unrecorded. The published episodes of his later wandering life were, if the truth be told, a little dull. I thought − it appeared the idlest of thoughts − that it would be fun to be present when, or if, his moment came again.

  I had a few minutes to look round. It was an animated scene: animated in compressing within the view some three hundred living souls, and literally a scene to the extent that their setting held its hint of the theatrical. The Great Quadrangle was like a child’s fort as such things were when my father was a boy: this chiefly because battlemented within as well as without, as if in a less urbane age rival factions of the learned, although all quartered within the curtilage of the college, had been accustomed to direct cross-bows at one another from behind these lurking places. The inward-facing crenellations had replaced a balustrade during some phase of Gothicising exuberance in the early nineteenth century. Equally suggestive of the nursery was the large flag – exactly square, like the Great Quadrangle itself − which at moments blew so stiffly out on its staff above the leads that it might have been made not of fabric but of tin, like those which astronauts round about that time had taken to planting on the surface of the moon. This one displayed in an improbable-seeming blazon the personal standard of the most magnificent of England’s kings.

  Sunshine slanted into the quadrangle still. It caught the jets flung up by the central fountain. In the surrounding lily pool it glittered on the scales of the great chub and its attendant goldfish, ide, and orfe, so that these became a watery analogue of the land monsters now assembling around them. It fell, too, on the long linen-covered tables (where the drinks were) along the terrace to the east. On one hand it already showed the college’s lovely tower in gentle semi-silhouette; and on the other continued to bathe in a full summer warmth the hidden chapel’s ancient spire.

  If all this made up the toy castle, the guests were the toy soldiers. The majority, whose black tails were for the most part concealed beneath equally black M.A. gowns like my own, presented a predominantly sombre show. But the gleam of their shirts and waistcoats and the glitter of their decorations (for it was remarkable how many of these middle-aged men had picked up something of the kind) provided enough relief to suggest at least those splendidly dark-uniformed but braided and beribboned hussars who formed the aristocracy of the toy-box. One missed, it was true, the horses − to say nothing of the field-guns. But the more learned, or at least senior, academics outshone in splendour the redcoats, the Highland regiments, the whole Household Division. ‘Scarlet’ was no more than a code-word for the doctoral finery; one could rehearse the whole spectrum or palette without exhausting the gorgeousness of their array.

  Quite suddenly, I understood about Mrs Bedworth and Virginia Woolf. Like that spirited feminist, the serious Cyril’s wife found masculine hierarchy, pomp, circumstance and adornment exquisitely absurd. Three Guineas (which contains a satirically presented photograph called ‘A University Procession’) was one of her sacred books − and no doubt A Room of One’s Own was another. Whenever, but it can’t have been often, she raised her eyes to the Oxford spectacle, she found in it perhaps a prompting to indignation, but certainly an enormous joke. She must at this moment be settling down, with other dons’ formally attired wives, to what she had called the little women’s poached egg. I made a note of Mabel Bedworth in my mind as one new acquaintance I wanted to meet again.

  A servant bore down upon me with a tray laden with glasses of sherry; the stuff came in two steeply contrasting shades, so that there should be no mistaking sweet for dry. Another servant, seemingly of greater consequence, handed me a sheet of folded pasteboard which proved to provide a menu, information about a number of wines, a toast list, and a seating plan for the entire company. I was about to consult this vade mecum in order to discover on whom I should presently be dependent for my more immediate entertainment when I found that Albert Talbert was once more confronting me.

  ‘Ah,’ Talbert said at his huskiest, ‘Dalrymple again!’ But upon this, his distant seismic mirth immediately followed, and I realised that what was being registered was the a
bsurdity of his ever having mistaken me for so unlikely a personage. I might, I knew, be Dalrymple to him once more in an hour’s time, but it was nice to be securely Pattullo for the moment. ‘I believe the Provost is bound to have much to discuss with you,’ Talbert went on − mysteriously and with an instant switch to his inexpressible gravity. ‘But there is tomorrow. It would give my wife great pleasure if you could come to tea in Old Road.’

  This was verbatim a formula from twenty years back, and disconcerting for that reason. But it was disconcerting, too, because I had no thought of lingering in Oxford more than an hour beyond breakfast next morning, nor any belief that the college would in the least want to put up with me (or anybody else) for longer than that. But I saw that I must either plead another engagement or return a genuine acceptance at once. It was likely, indeed, that the proposal would vanish from Talbert’s recollection almost on the instant. I couldn’t risk a mere diplomatic murmur, all the same; in addition to which I found even the polite fiction that Mrs Talbert would like to see me unexpectedly pleasing.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said, and just stopped myself from adding a respectful ‘Sir’. ‘I shall look forward to it very much.’ This, too, was formulaic, but more sincerely uttered than sometimes in the past. ‘I think it’s four o’clock? I’ll walk up.’ Talbert had always liked to hear of his pupils as engaging in pedestrianism, which he regarded as the most wholesome employment of periods of leisure.

  ‘Four o’clock.’ Talbert nodded weightily, almost as if some sombre astrological significance attended this hour, and prepared to move away. But he paused for a moment longer, and I saw he was making sure I had put on my white tie. His own tie was white, but so yellowed at the edges that it had the appearance of a rare species of butterfly. I noticed that his shoes, correspondingly, although now decently black, showed signs of having begun life as brown, and I remembered that Dekker and Massinger hadn’t brought him a penny. I was still feeling decently ashamed that half a dozen over-sprightly comedies had put me within reach of a modest competence when he turned and toddled off. ‘Toddled’ is the necessary word. I recalled a stage direction in which, somewhat extravagantly, I had required the actor playing some Talbert-figure of my imagination to progress in the manner of that sort of street toy (for I love such things) constructed thus to move down a gentle inclined plane. It wasn’t a motion that seemed to cohere with Talbert’s rather spare figure; one would think of it as right for a tubby man with short legs. The explanation lay in Boanerges, the Talberts’ dog. Boanerges was an ill- trained dog − having suffered, I suppose, like the Talberts’ children in some respects, through that excessive household addiction to folios and quartos. For years Boanerges, straining (doggedly, one may say) on his lead, had hauled Albert Talbert at a precarious bodily incline all over Oxford and its countryside. I had frequently been privileged to accompany them. Boanerges must long since have passed away. But the inclination remained, and produced the forward-slanted toddle.