The Guardians Page 8

  “That is certainly so,” Quail said – and turned, confessedly excited in his turn, to the gently swaying Tandon. “The house is unquestionably a little museum of Fontaney’s tastes and interests. Everything, you may be certain, is preserved there still – from the blue-and-white china that half the artistically-inclined ladies in Oxford were then collecting to the finest prints of Utamaro and Hokusai – including, you’ll remember, those that Fontaney had from Edmond de Goncourt. It’s a very fragile sort of exquisiteness, and one thinks of it as all disposed on spindly tables and in insecure rosewood cabinets. As a collection, mind you, or whatever one is to call it, it can’t have any very striking monetary value. And one could, I suppose, fake it without a great deal of trouble. But there wouldn’t, to my way of thinking, be much satisfaction in that.”

  “Fake it?” Tandon leaned more than commonly forward on his toes. “I don’t follow you.”

  “I mean that one could fairly readily assemble an almost identical mise en scène – and say: ‘Fontaney lived like this. Notice how it all coheres with his speculations, his intellectual habit.’”

  “I see—I see.” Tandon had again the air of a man grappling with an influx of new and somewhat suspect ideas. “I confess that I hadn’t thought of the Misses Fontaney as—um—presiding over not merely literary remains but also an assemblage of objects not without relevance in a study of their father’s thought. It is a most interesting idea.” He stopped and, for the first time, looked at Quail with what could be termed naked mistrust. “And you yourself are interested in—well, the ladies’ entire environment?”

  “Mr Quail is going to carry it all away, sir.” Warboys, who had been civilly dissimulating boredom during this learned talk, was prompted to speak with perfect gravity. “The house itself is likely to be the main difficulty. It can possibly be put in a large packing-case and taken across the Atlantic as it stands. But it seems more probable that it will have to be moved stone by stone, and brick by brick.”

  Lady Elizabeth, although she could not have made much of Tandon’s expression, appeared to divine that he was disconcerted. “Robin is talking nonsense,” she said. “But there can be no doubt that the house holds much of curious interest, besides Arthur Fontaney’s unpublished journals. There was never, I recall, any kind of sale. It was a decision that seemed very wise at the time to both my husband and myself. We remembered the case of Mr Dodgson of Christ Church, of whom I was speaking earlier this afternoon. The significance of his celebrity was not recognised, and upon his death his personal possessions were at once sold at auction for derisory sums. Moreover, I am not sure that it was not a shade embarrassing. Chest-expanders, you know, and Dr Moffatt’s ammonia-phone – which was something to cure stammering, I suppose – and recondite works on the psychology and physiology of women.” Lady Elizabeth hesitated, almost as if she could hear Tandon uneasily stir. “But my point is that there was nothing of the sort when Mr Fontaney died.”

  “Fontaney probably didn’t have works on the psychology of women,” Warboys said cheerfully. “He had daughters instead. And as they weren’t auctioned, they are available for Mr Quail now. I suppose, sir, you’ll be taking them too?” He turned to Tandon. “You know about Mr Quail’s home town? It’s called, I think, American City.”

  Tandon rocked uncomfortably. He wasn’t too good, Quail thought, at coping with spasms of outrageousness in the young. “American City?” he was saying doubtfully. “Isn’t that something in Henry James?”

  “Yes, sir – but then everything’s in Henry James. The surviving relations, for instance, of the great literary man. Only James’s ladies lived in Italy – Venice, wasn’t it?”

  Quail burst out laughing. This absurd analogy hadn’t occurred to him, and he found it entertaining. “Well,” he said, “North Oxford’s a little Venice, after all. It’s something that kept striking me afresh, this afternoon. So you think of Fontaney as a Jeffrey Aspern?”

  “I was just explaining to Mr Tandon about your plan, as I see it. I’ve no doubt that you propose to present a complete Fontaney Museum to American City – suitably animated. A small residential wing will be added, for properly accredited scholars working on the journals.” Warboys stopped suddenly. He could talk in this way among his seniors consummately without impertinence – and he knew at once when the effect was not entirely a success. And Tandon continued to make little of this fantasy. Or perhaps, Quail thought, he made too much of it. There seemed a high probability that he had a painfully literal mind.

  However this might be, Tandon was now taking his leave – and with very much the same awkwardness he had shown on arriving. Presently he turned to Quail. “It would give me great pleasure—” he began formally, and faltered. Quail supposed that what was to follow must be an invitation to dine in college. “That is to say . . . it occurs to me that perhaps . . . I wonder whether, one afternoon, you would care to take a walk? Shotover is very pleasant.”

  “I should be very glad to.”

  “That will be very nice.” Tandon had flushed, as if aware that he had prompted some different expectation. “I think it is sometimes possible to converse, in that way, with less—less constraint than in common room after dinner, or anything of that sort. But of course I hope also . . . that possibly on some other occasion—”

  Tandon’s husky voice tailed off, and for a moment it was painfully apparent that there were occasions upon which he quite lost self-possession. Yet he retained a sort of dignity, and it was with real cordiality that Quail made haste to strike in. “I shall enjoy a walk extremely. Any afternoon will find me ready for it. And I hope we may have a thoroughly useful talk.”

  CHAPTER VIII

  The fog had become so thick as to be bewildering, and Quail was glad of young Warboys’ company on the route back to his hotel. They had walked in silence and through a muted air to the end of Norham Gardens before Warboys spoke. “I’m terribly sorry about all that playing the giddy goat. I’m afraid booksy talk sometimes gets me that way.”

  “Booksy talk?” Quail was amused by this not entirely felicitous apology. “But my dear young man, you were as booksy as any of us. Who started in, pray, with American City and The Aspern Papers?”

  “Yes, I know. I was quite the young ass. And poor old Tandon, somehow, didn’t like it at all. What’s more, I don’t think you did either.”

  Quail turned up the collar of his overcoat. “You see,” he said, “you were getting us on delicate ground. What you had to say about my museum and so on was—well, roughly in the target area. Not that I at all intend to transport an entire Victorian villa over the Atlantic.”

  “And Mr Tandon is a sort of rival of yours?” The voice of Warboys, although blanketed by fog, took on a new and lively interest.

  “He might be. Have I any reason to suppose that you are a discreet young man?”

  “Oh, yes rather, sir. I mean, no you haven’t—but actually I am.” Warboys was delighted.

  “I think we are going to try to like each other, he and I – and perhaps we shall quite tolerably succeed. But, I’m sorry to say, we shall distrust each other as well.”

  “Stealing a march, and that sort of thing?”

  “I certainly hope nothing like that.” Quail spoke with conviction. “But Tandon won’t feel that I’m quite the right man for those journals of Fontaney’s. He’ll think I’d make what he’d call, I guess, a mere littérateur’s job of them. And who am I to say that he’ll be wrong?”

  “And you think that he—?”

  “I’m sure he’s a first-rate scholar. But – well, I think of Fontaney, you see, as somebody pretty complicated and at the same time amazingly one – amazingly integrated, as it’s fashionable to say nowadays. And I’d be afraid Tandon would just lose a lot of him as he went along. Arthur Fontaney was concerned, you know, to formulate principles of aesthetic criticism. To me, all that is chiefly interesting because of the play of the whole man upon those principles and upon that concern, if you understand me. And
my guess is that Tandon would isolate the pure speculation – which to my mind would be to approach Fontaney on the arid side – or rather with one’s own arid side.” Quail was silent for a moment, surprised that he was saying so much. “But, of course, I may be quite wrong about Tandon. Indeed, it’s absurd—isn’t it?—to pronounce on a man on the strength of a mere hour’s talk in a drawing-room. Now, what sort of a person would you yourself say he is?”

  “I should think he’s all right – I mean as a chap.” Warboys delivered this crucial judgment instantly and without reserve. “But a bit dreary, and all that.” This drastic qualification came with equal decision. “I don’t fancy he’s a terrible success with the other dons. When you see them tottering off to punish the port, you can spot him as a bit of a stranger in the midst. Glaring round, you know, for somebody on whom to unload his latest bit of learning. Which isn’t at all what the old boys want, I imagine, once they get the vine-leaves in their hair. No, I’d say old Tandon’s a celebrated bore, and perhaps a bit of a butt as well.” The voice in the near darkness beside Quail held all the unconsciously pitiless penetration of the young. “But he can teach.”

  “You mean he’s a good tutor?”

  “Terribly good, I’m told. Miles better than Jones.”

  “Jones?”

  “Jones is a young chap who’s my tutor. I’m reading P.P.E. That’s what, long ago, was called Modern Greats.”

  Quail laughed. “So it was,” he said, “very long ago. But what’s wrong with Jones?”

  “What’s wrong with Jones is that he’s absolutely brilliant.” Warboys announced this with manifest pride. “So of course he talks completely over your head, and you don’t understand a word. Everybody says that Jones is far too able to be a don.”

  “Dear me!” For a moment Quail experienced the same dismay as had been occasioned in him by the dilapidated state of the Sheldonian. These seemed to be the most ominous words he had heard in Oxford yet. “Whereas Tandon?”

  “I believe he’s frightfully conscientious and helpful in a shy kind of way. Tells you precisely what you have to do to get a decent class, so that you know exactly where you are. Which is the great thing.”

  “Is it?”

  “Well, no—of course it’s not. Still – jobs, you know, and all that. It isn’t, you see, quite what it was in your day.”

  “I suppose not.” Quail, although depressed by the thought of undergraduates considering it of prime importance to know just how they stood in relation to an examination syllabus, felt suitably reproved. “By the way,” he added, “if you’re ever worried about a job, come along to me.”

  “That’s very kind of you.” The voice in the fog was instantly distant.

  “My dear lad, don’t stand on your dignity. Lady Elizabeth is a very old, and deeply honoured, friend of mine.” He paused and laughed quietly, curiously happy. “You don’t quite like that either – and simply because it’s not precisely an English way of speaking. Still, it’s true. I hold Lady Elizabeth in very great respect, just as I did her husband. And if you’re ever looking for a job I’ll find you one.”

  “I see. Well, thank you very much, indeed.” The voice was mollified. “But I don’t honestly think, sir, I want to go to America.”

  “America? Oh, I see.” Quail’s amusement returned. “I couldn’t promise you, I’m afraid, a fellowship at Balliol, and I have doubts about your Treasury or even your Foreign Service. But within reason, and if you have work in you, I can find the job indifferently in London or New York. Indeed – and to be quite confidential – I rather think I could manage Peking. So think it over.”

  “I certainly will.” Warboys’ voice was now both subdued and puzzled. “But I say, sir,” he presently ventured, “aren’t you a professor or something?”

  “Alas, no. I’m just a plain business man.”

  “Good Lord! Big business?”

  “Yes, indeed. Very big – and very plain.”

  “And all this Fontaney thing is just—just a sort of hobby? I mean”—Warboys appeared to feel that he had used a derogatory expression—”you manage all that on the side?”

  “Very much on the side, worse luck. And you’ve got a wrong impression if you think there’s all that of it. Still, it’s a pretty lively interest with me – every now and then.”

  They had paused before some dubious crossing. The feeble yellow lights of crawling cars seemed to be all around them, and Quail realised that Warboys would have to conduct him through the swathed city to the very door of his hotel. When they were safely across the youth resumed his inquisition. “Isn’t it a funny choice?” he asked.

  “Fontaney?”

  “Well, anything like that.”

  “Anything booksy, as you call it?”

  “Yes.” The young man had become less urbane, more dogged and concerned. “I should have thought that, for instance, fuel would be better worth taking up. I mean,” he hesitated, “hasn’t the time rather gone past for that sort of stuff about chaps who collected Utamaro and Hokusai? This isn’t their age. It’s the age of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And about fuel—well, Jones says it’s quite frightful. If the demand continues to mount, in another thirty years there just mayn’t be any.”

  “Which makes oil derricks more important than ivory towers? There’s something in that. But one can’t, you know, be plugging away at man’s material predicaments all the time. And Arthur Fontaney doesn’t seem to me to be an ivory tower chap in any disabling way. I don’t think he dates as his neighbour Walter Pater does. If I quote Pater at you, and urge you, my dear boy, to burn with a hard gem-like flame, you’ll say, no doubt, that that’s what you’ll do anyway, when the bomb falls and you’re vaporised. But the point about Fontaney is that, although he starts so sensitively from the sensuous world, and particularly, of course, from artistic experience, the direction of his thought is—well, transcendental. You haven’t, perhaps, read any of him?” Quail heard in his own voice a wistfulness which he recognised as comical. “But I don’t think I’ve really explained to you why I continue to cultivate an interest of this sort.”

  “I don’t know why you should. It’s frightful cheek to challenge you about it.”

  Quail laid a hand on the boy’s arm. “Lady Elizabeth,” he said, “gave me some excellent advice this afternoon. It was this: not to spend all my time in Oxford with elderly dons. I don’t suppose, actually, that I’m in great danger of having them bother themselves with me. Still, she was talking sense, and I’d be a fool if I didn’t seek the point of view of people like yourself. And, correspondingly, I’d like you to understand how the mind of an old buffer like myself works in this matter we’re talking about. It wouldn’t quite cover things to say that Fontaney is just my version of packing up, making for camp, and doing some fishing. He pulls more weight with me than that. Not that you haven’t got hold of something, all the same, in reckoning that I’m treating myself to a bit of irresponsibility. Take fuel. As it happens, I have to do as much thinking about fuel as even the brilliant Jones has.”

  “You’re laughing at me.”

  “Say I am, son. It’s good for you. But if I’m to be solemn, I must say that I have to do a great deal more. When I decide something about fuel, it means that thousands of people get rather more beans and bacon, and thousands of people get rather less. And it means that I’m backing my own hunch – my own judgment – about the best way of getting a decent plateful all round, in the fullness of time, for folk who are still on the bottle.”

  “The bottle?”

  “In their baby-carriage. Now, it’s true that selling Fontaney – getting him his place in the syllabus, so to speak – might mean, in a sense, a fuller life for one individual or another. But it’s a matter, you might put it, of intellectual delectation. If I’m to be very grand in this talk, and claim a bit more, I go back to saying that Fontaney’s slant isn’t sublunary. He takes one away – at least he takes me away – from this business of spinning out the coal and the oil on a p
lanet that your Jones is pretty well right in saying has been already squeezed like an orange.”

  “So it is a holiday.”

  “Very well – it’s that. And who are you, Robin Warboys, putting in your eight weeks of term in Oxford before hurrying off to Switzerland, and wasting your own time and other people’s by breaking your legs on a ski-run – who are you, I ask, to grudge a tired business man his vacation?”

  “Oh, I say, sir!”

  “All right, all right. But the grand thing is that, whatever happens about Arthur Fontaney’s prints and pots and papers – whether they fall to me, or Tandon, or the Grand Cham of Tartary – there’s an honest sense in which it doesn’t matter a single cuss. Nobody’s platter is going to be very much affected – and nobody’s substantial destiny is going to be altered at all. It isn’t – and here, for me, is the great thing in what you might call the holiday way – it isn’t going to mean here a ration of happiness, and there a ration of misery . . . why, here we are!”

  The revolving door of the hotel was before them. Quail had been unconscious of the last stage of their murky journey. Now, glancing at Warboys, he was prompted to enquire whether he wouldn’t come in for a meal. But he checked himself – for he was himself a guest, he remembered, in these parts; and with the young people in particular a too ready expansiveness wouldn’t at all do. “Well, thank you very much,” he said. “It’s been good of you to steer me back.”

  “Not a bit.” The young man hesitated. “I say,” he said, “I expect you’re pretty well booked up. But I’d be terribly pleased if you could come in and dine in college one evening. We’ve got a meal for guests that isn’t altogether too shocking, although it isn’t up to the high-table flesh-pots. If you’d at all care to, that is.”

  “I’d like to, very much.”