The Gaudy Read online

  There was now much noise in the Great Quadrangle, and I got the impression that an unnatural proportion of the guests − a proportion, that is, in excess of the moiety that balanced conversation would posit − must be talking simultaneously. Hunger, nervousness, exuberance, and perhaps a persuasion that in such a hubbub it is easier to utter than to hear, contributed to this conduct. People were also doing much charging at each other, laughing loudly in one another’s faces, and vigorously shaking hands. As group behaviour this perhaps represented a syndrome of middle-age. Old Mr Mumford’s lot would show more restraint, and the younger generation due to turn up to the Gaudy following this one would not quite have forgotten the casual grace that attends undergraduate social intercourse. I decided that I hated this nel mezzo cammin business and being myself like all these men so inescapably entered upon what another poet has called the stupidity of one’s middle years. Although already aware of a number of people whom it would be mannerless not presently to greet, I elected for the moment a watching role. Some others were doing the same thing. There were men who combined an odd-man-out stance with a composure in which nothing factitious appeared; wine glass in hand, these simply contemplated the scene as one might contemplate a waterfall or the monkey-house in a zoo. Others were uneasy and irresolute − doubtful here of a welcome, and suspecting there the hint of an amused regard. A few behaved in a manner I have observed among practised party-going women awkwardly circumstanced amid strangers or uncongenial persons − moving rapidly here and there, now with a parting glance or gesture over a shoulder, and now with the air of edging their way towards some suddenly glimpsed boon companion in a farther corner of the quad. I was wondering how this particular

  vagary of self-consciousness could be made lucid on the stage when I became aware that the evening’s activities were entering a new phase.

  So far, I hadn’t remarked what, in another context, would be termed the top brass. The Provost, the Chancellor of the University, the Vice-Chancellor, the personages of high distinction − whether academic, political, or even artistic − who had elsewhere been receiving sundry honours earlier that day: these and others of consequence had not been provided with their sherry, as had the majority, en plein air. They had been hobnobbing together in the senior common room, appropriated for the occasion to the uses of a VIP lounge. Now a door of this arcanum giving on the Great Quadrangle had been thrown open, and these important people were emerging in a kind of half-hearted formal procession, and with a diffident dignity at once comical and impressive. The Provost walked beside the Chancellor, a former Prime Minister. The Pro-Provost guided the tottering steps of a Swedish physicist, even more eminent than aged. Similar notabilities followed, and then came a few of the more senior fellows, together with a handful of old members who were to be presumed marginally more distinguished than the main body of their contemporaries − whether in Church or State, Learning, the Law, or the armed forces of the Crown. I was edified to see that Tony − Lord Marchpayne, as I ought now to think of him − had made the top grade. He was far from looking out of place in it.

  The appearance of this company − in multi-coloured shambling state, like a file of richly caparisoned camels emerging from a caravanserai − caused some abatement, although not anything so absurd as an awed silence, in the larger concourse dispersed as with an appropriate symbolism at a slightly lower level around it. The drop in volume was the occasion, as it happened, of a curious effect of orchestration. As when the trumpets and the tubas, breathless, cease to blare, and are succeeded by the melody of the wood-winds calling from a different world, so now there percolated into the Great Quadrangle from some adjacent corner of the college the clear voices and brief laughter of young men enjoying themselves. They may have been outrageously skylarking, or they may have been playing croquet − but they were certainly undergraduates, and probably in one way or another expelling the stale air of the Examination Schools from their lungs. The sound ceased. It was as if it had floated through glades and ridings to touch the ear of a bustling rout or hunting party − this only for a moment, since the alien folk producing it were departing under the hill.

  I was probably alone in thinking of the fairies. General salivation was taking place at the promising signs that dinner was going to happen at last. The procession moved on towards the broad staircase leading up to the hall. Only one incident interrupted its progress, and Tony was responsible for this. He had observed some elderly acquaintance down below: a retired fellow of the college, perhaps, who had modestly taken his station amid the herd. Tony’s gesture was to break ranks, run down two or three steps, shake hands with this person, compress into seconds what had the appearance of a leisurely exchange of talk, and skip back into his place just as the Provost’s party began its climb. It would have been easy − crudely put − to make a muck of this turn; a breath of the over-affable, the slightest forcing of the cordial note, and any observer of the kind congregated here would have judged that the chap thought too much of himself. I saw at once, however, that Tony owned skill in such small performances.

  ‘A pleasant fellow, Marchpayne.’ A clergyman − vaguely known to me, and with whom I had already exchanged a nod − murmured this as we fell into step together. ‘I’m delighted by his signal promotion.’

  ‘I haven’t heard about it.’

  ‘Marchpayne has gained a seat in the Cabinet. The reshuffle came over on the six o’clock news.’

  I said that I was delighted too, and it struck me that Tony must have known about his elevation while we were consuming Plot’s tea and anchovy toast together. But he had kept it under his hat − the bowler hat that had lain on the table between us − and spoken of himself casually as a reliable junior Minister. Perhaps it would have been awkward in him to say anything else − particularly since I had so culpably known hardly a thing about him. He was evidently hard-working, and didn’t readily take time off. That handshake had seemed to me entirely political − as much a reflex action as the patting or kissing of babies. Yet I already possessed evidence that it was not in the interest of his career or his party that Tony, on the present occasion, was pertinaciously engaged.

  I might have got further with this had I not, on the very threshold of hall, at last consulted my vade me cum, and discovered to my surprise that Ranald McKechnie would be seated on my right.

  V

  Retrospection may be among the pleasures of advancing age, but it can prove an unnerving indulgence as well. Memory trundles us at will back to any point on the lengthening corridor − and there waiting for us is not a dead but an unfinished self. We join him on his journey and walk with him for as long as we please, yet our companionship is on unequal terms, since as revenants we command a forward vision which he lacks. The corridor turns, darkens, deceives with whispering ambitions. We, because we have walked this way before, cannot be surprised or disillusioned like our doppelganger, but of the two it is we who are the more aware of the constant play of the contingent upon the small unfolding history. Were we philosophers surveying the macrocosm, we might view unperturbed what tiny accidents, unidentifiable by the most pertinacious historian, have controlled humanity’s dance through recorded time. But as seen in the microcosm of our personal fortunes the unslumbering, pouncing inconsequence alarms.

  This is a portentous way of introducing McKechnie − in whose company I was about to eat (as the vade mecum told me) a number of uncomplicated dishes beginning with smoked trout and ending with strawberry meringue. But the point is that he and I had been at school together, and that his coming to Oxford had been the sole occasion of my coming too. I was to be sitting beside a man who had brought Chance into my life very prominently indeed.

  Our school, a mixed affair of day-boys and boarders after a fashion infrequent in the English scheme of things, had been founded as a device of the haute bourgeoisie of Edinburgh for segregating their sons from less privileged boys and thereby gaining them a firmer grip on the professional hierarchies of the city. Th
at had been when the Modern Athens was enjoying its Indian Summer. Bleak and Doric (as I have said), brutal (until shortly before my generation), Philistine (still): the school was ‘classical’ in the severest way, treating drill in the ancient languages as the sole purpose of education. It dominated the Scottish bench and bar, the university, the consulting-rooms and, to a lesser extent, the established presbyterian Kirk. It was a highly successful monopoly affair, erected on a strong regional basis, and I don’t know why, by my time, it had taken to slanting itself southward as it had. Its Rector was a diminutive Etonian; its masters were nearly all large, expatriate, and slightly bewildered Englishmen, dismayed by the absence of county cricket, murmuring to us of Balliol and New College, Emmanuel and King’s. On Sundays we went − the day-boys − in kilts to St Giles’ or St Cuthbert’s, and along with our parents and aunts hearkened to persons of quasi-Calvinistic persuasion wrestling with the Lord in conceived prayer. But on weekdays the whole school temperately hinted to the same deity that he should fulfil the desires and petitions of his servants as might be most expedient for them, or direct and prosper the High Court of Parliament, under our most religious and gracious King at that time assembled. (These extraordinary Anglican prayers, given a final polish by a flock of divines at the command of a defected Scottish monarch, were among my first glimpses of the urbanity of the English tongue.) Nearly all the alert and clever boys had a notion of going to Oxford. With some of us the pull appeared to be romantic and poetic rather than intellectual. The Scholar Gipsy fled our gaze amid the contours of the Pentland hills. The Last Enchantments blew around us as we played our barbarous games with wooden bats (employed, too, as instruments of correction by prefects) and napless tennis-balls in the pebbly playgrounds we called the ‘yards’.

  My father professed to be an Anglophobe. Next after the French, whom he regarded as our nearest civilised neighbours, he liked the Irish − this even although they had never produced a great painter. He liked seeing Shaw’s plays. He would sometimes pore over Ulysses, although he was a man who didn’t often read a book. Had I, at seventeen, gone to him and announced that the time had come for me to take up residence in Dublin, or even better in Paris, I believe he would at once have consulted his bank manager about what could be done. But the idea of Oxford he didn’t care for at all. If I wanted to write, he said, I had better keep clear of a country that had produced H. G. Wells and John Galsworthy. Such talk on my father’s part was mere random prejudice. But he was an obstinate man.

  Then he received a commission to paint Professor McKechnie. At that time he still undertook occasional oil portraits, as well as more numerous portrait-sketches in crayon or pastel: these last for what he called dentist’s money, although I imagine the proceeds were quite enough to pay my brother’s school fees and my own. He would almost certainly have become a distinguished portrait painter had he not so firmly settled his allegiance elsewhere.

  Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night:

  God said, Let Monet be! and all was light.

  I remember his delight when I thus perverted for him Pope’s couplet.

  The occasions with Professor McKechnie were not a success; nor, I imagined, was the portrait, although I had never set eyes on it. There were both social and temperamental incompatabilities. My father was a man of the people, and an artist; in my mother he had married, by what was virtually a mesalliance, the daughter of a Highland laird. The McKechnies had been scholars and allied to scholars for generations; the present one was a philosopher, a belated representative of a branch of the species known, I believe, as the Scottish Hegelians. He was very shy, but very chilly as well; he must have hated having his likeness taken by an ill-dressed limner smelling of whisky; no spark could be struck out of him − nor the acceptance of anything except a cup of tea and a minimum of polite conversation.

  Even so, the odds would have been on my father’s merely laughing at Professor McKechnie, and perhaps making ludicrous sketches of him for the amusement of fellow artists in congenial hostelries. For some reason, however, he took an active dislike to his sitter, and thereafter referred to him as the Dreich, a Scots word so inherently expressive as to require no gloss. The Dreich appeared to have been a little less than dreich only on one topic, that of his son Ranald, whose accomplishments − my father took it into his head − he exhibited with a tedious particularity as being comprehensively superior to my own. There was certainly plenty of scope for such a comparison. Ranald McKechnie, although nearly a year younger than myself, was already what we called Dux of the school; he had graduated from Virgil and Horace and Herodotus and Euripides to more mysterious writers such as Lucretius and Pindar; he had been the recipient of sundry medals, prizes, and bursaries; and he had lately gained an Open Scholarship to Oxford. Moreover, it appeared that Ranald was a promising performer on the violin. (To this last brag it pleased my father to assert that he had responded with the information − which was totally untrue − that I had lately switched from the bagpipes to the big drum in the JTC band.)

  This episode in my father’s professional life, which I had no difficulty in accepting as gospel at the time, has come with the years to bear a character altogether implausible in my mind. It is impossible that Professor McKechnie should have delivered the sustained comparative discourse attributed to him. My father must have made up at least the greater part of the encounter, a recital of which would keep him happily employed for half an hour on end. But as virtually his own brain-child he was all the fonder of it, so that he rapidly came to believe in its substantial reality. At the same time, there must have been a kernel of truth in the little saga of the boastful Hegelian; otherwise my father would not so dramatically have proceeded from words to action.

  I have recorded that he was in many ways a negligent and even scandalous parent. It would not normally have occurred to him that my progress at school ought to be the subject of encouragement, admonishment, or any sort of notice at all, any more than it would have occurred to him that I needed a bath or a new pair of shoes. He was aware that I had taken to scribbling, but would have supposed this in a normal order of things even had I persisted in the activity twelve hours a day. He occasionally read what I had written, and commented on it not as to the schoolboy I in fact was but as if I were a contemporary of his own. This could be disconcerting, but I was to come to regard five minutes of it as having been a good deal more useful than five hours of Talbert’s tutorials. It was these tutorials that now lay unexpectedly ahead of me.

  Because of his indignation against the Dreich, it occurred to my father to rummage through some drawer of my mother’s until he found a stack of my school reports. I doubt whether he had so much as glanced at them when, twice a term, they arrived by post. Now he read them through, and his main discovery was that over a period of ten years (for it was a school at which one was expected to spend a quite dauntingly high proportion of one’s total life-span) I had been wholly undistinguished in the studies principally approved by the place. But I had always come first in the subject vaguely known as English, and within the previous twelve months had collected in this field prizes open to competition by the entire school. On the basis of these facts my father conjectured − correctly, although he might well have been quite wrong − that I had twice triumphed over Ranald McKechnie (whom he now referred to as Wee Dreichie) as a juvenile authority on Old Mortality, Idylls of the King and, I seem to remember, The Advantages and Disadvantages of Civilisation. What then came to my father was the thought that I could repeat this performance on other territory.

  My father packed a bag, called a taxi, and went off to the Waverley station. We supposed his destination to be London, since he had a number of friends there, for the most part senior to himself. (Sickert and Steer, his early masters, had both died m a great age a few years before, but he kept in touch with some minor men who had remained faithful to the ideas of the Camden Town Group.) He was in fact on his way to Oxford.

  He put up at the Mitre and w
alked around. Tony Mumford would have said that he was casing the joint. I have an idea that it shook him much as Carcassonne or Albi had once done. He walked up to Boars Hill, and from that modest altitude surveyed the city in late-afternoon sunshine. He was sufficiently impressed to make the same expedition five hours later − thereby coming to identify, I don’t doubt, the line of festal light in Christ-Church hall. On the next day he took a fuller view of the several colleges. He was later to admit having expended almost an hour in studying Magdalen Tower from several viewpoints. Why he decided against that particular place of education I don’t know. Conceivably he had once dipped into Gibbon’s Autobiographies, and derived the impression that matters were rather slackly conducted there. He eventually plumped for the Radcliffe Observatory, for he had once seen the real Temple of the Winds and judged that here was a pretty good English imitation: he was distressed upon discovering this particular architectural landmark to be unprovided with residential accommodation. But a further prowl brought him within what was to become known to me as the Great Quadrangle. He traversed it, turned, and was looking at another tower − one under which he had passed on entering. It was only one look, since he owned a practised eye. He walked back to the gate, and asked to be directed to the office of the Principal.