Staircase in Surrey: The Gaudy Part 1

The Gaudy.

Staircase in Surrey.

J. I. M. Stewart.

About the Author.

John Innes Mackintosh Stewart (who also wrote as Michael Innes) was born in Edinburgh where his father was Director of Education. He attended Edinburgh Academy before going up to Oriel College, Oxford where he was awarded a first cla.s.s degree in English and won the Matthew Arnold Memorial Prize and was named a Bishop Frazer scholar. After a short interlude travelling with AJP Taylor in Austria, including studying Freudian psychoa.n.a.lysis for a year, he embarked on an edition of Florio's translation of Montaigne's Essays. This subsequently helped him secure a post teaching English at Leeds University.

In 1932, Stewart married Margaret Hardwick, who practised medicine, and they subsequently had three sons and two daughters. By 1935, he had been awarded the Jury Chair at the University of Adelaide in Australia as Professor of English and had also completed his first detective novel, 'Death at the President's Lodging', published under the pseudonym 'Michael Innes'. This was an immediate success and part of a long running series centred on 'Inspector Appleby', his primary character when writing as 'Innes'. There were almost fifty t.i.tles completed under the 'Innes' banner during his career.

In 1946, he returned to the UK and spent two years at Queen's University in Belfast, before being appointed Student (Fellow and Tutor) at Christ Church, Oxford. He was later to hold the post of Reader in English Literature of Oxford University and upon his retirement was made an Emeritus Professor. Whilst never wanting to leave his beloved Oxford permanently, he did manage to fit into his busy schedule a visiting Professors.h.i.+p at the University of Was.h.i.+ngton and was also honoured by other Universities in the UK.

Stewart wrote many works under his own name, including twenty-one works of fiction (which contained the highly acclaimed quintet ent.i.tled 'A Staircase in Surrey', centred primarily in Oxford, but with considerable forays elsewhere, especially Italy), several short story collections, and over nine learned works on the likes of Shakespeare, Kipling and Hardy. He was also a contributor to many academic publications, including a major section on modern writers for the Oxford History of English Literature. He died in 1994, the last published work being an autobiography: 'Myself and Michael Innes'.

J.I.M. Stewart's fiction is greatly admired for its wit, plots and literary quality, whilst the non-fiction is acknowledged as being definitive.

I.

The staircase had changed in the twenty years and more elapsed since my last view of it. The meniscus curve of the dull grey stone treads was deeper. The walls were in a new colour scheme. I remembered everything to which paint was applicable as tinted and textured to an effect resembling chocolate when it has been disastrously h.o.a.rded through a long sea voyage. Now the pervasive note was pastel pinks and blues, and these had naturally grown grubby quickly. Muddy track suits, sweaty jerseys, wet towels had brushed or lounged against the lower surfaces; quite high up the walls were flecked and spotted in a manner perplexing until one thought of violently shaken-out mackintoshes and umbrellas. This, as much as the hollowed stone, was a matter of honest wear and tear. I noticed that the effect was nowhere enhanced by scribbles. It appeared that graffiti were judged improper at least within one's own preserves. They were for the enlivening of the outer walls of other people's colleges. I had seen many of these minor portents of change as I was driven from the railway station. We'd never have dreamed I told myself of prowling the streets of Oxford with coloured chalks.

The only thing legible here was on a perched-up square of cardboard. Plainly the work of a hara.s.sed scout, it said Please wipe your feet. The last word had been struck out by another hand, and nothing subst.i.tuted. It was this abstention, I believe, that brought home to me how much I was on familiar ground.

For two years the staircase had been my own. The rooms I was briefly to occupy had been my own rooms. I wondered whether this was chance, or whether the domestic bursar, a retired admiral with time on his hands, had amused himself by looking up office records and adding a sentimental grace note to the entertainment to be offered to old members that night. However this may have been, sentiment had its moment now, so much so that I set down my suitcase and stepped back into the quad to take a long breath before the larger scene.

I was making no exhibition of myself. The big lidless Palladian box within which I stood, honey-coloured and sparely ribbed with reticent Ionic pilasters, was deserted. The undergraduates, I supposed, had departed; like migrating birds (but in confidently thumbed cars and camions) had departed for southern climes. If a few lingered it would be in forlorn immurement, on this hot June afternoon, within the Examination Schools. And it looked as if I was the first arrived of the Gaudy guests. I shared Surrey, the second of the larger quadrangles, with the eroded statue of Provost Harbage and a sleeping black cat. It must have been a college cat. The porters would no more admit a strange cat within the walls than they would admit a hawker of oriental rugs or a babe in a perambulator. (At the gate of the college garden a large notice, ancient but preserved in a state of full legibility, recorded the duty of these servitors to exclude persons of improper character or in dirty clothes or more mysteriously 'carrying large burthens'.) There is nothing mediaeval about Surrey except its name, which had belonged to one among a congeries of halls and inns on the site, humble cradles of Oxford learning long ago. Through centuries these had been conjoined, disparted, extinguished or revived, until all were bulldozed out of existence in the interest of the Augustan decorum on view today. One is sometimes told by those concerned with lauding the ancient universities that their material fabric const.i.tutes in itself an education alike of the senses and the spirit; that fine architecture elevates and refines the nascent mind in much the manner claimed by Wordsworth for the permanent and beautiful forms of nature. I dare say there is something in it. By almost anybody planted amid such surroundings a sense of certain graces and amenities must be at least a little sopped up.

Glancing about me now, I knew it had been my own case. A bleak and murky Doric had frowned upon me both at school and dispersedly elsewhere in my native town, so that I must have found in the facades of Surrey quite as much of clean-cut elegance as they in fact possess; at the same time I had picked up at home although it was never urged upon me a certain alertness before the deliverance of art. Had I first arrived at Oxford in the twenties and not the forties, I would have been thinking of myself as an aesthete within a week. I was, I suppose, a lively and receptive but quite unintellectual boy, and I had been whisked into a new social situation. Among the resources I rapidly mobilised was that of being something of an authority on matters artistic and architectural. I was even entirely willing to instruct my father in them and this although I firmly believed him to be (as in fact he was) the best landscape painter in Scotland. How disastrous I remember telling him to the great free-standing library which closes Surrey on the south had been certain tinkerings with the design while the building was going up. All because of a clutter of pictures, I said, given to the college by some distinguished curioso at just that time. s.p.a.ce had to be found in which to display them. So the notion of an open lower storey or piazza, such as Wren had created at Cambridge for Trinity College, was abandoned. The result was the ma.s.sive structure, dominating Surrey like a finer dwarfing a harbour mouth, before which I was inviting my father to adopt a critical stance.

My father didn't comply, perhaps seeing more of Michelangelo in the building than I saw, or affected to see, of Baalbek. He would in any case have considered adverse comment discourteous, since, if only in a formal sense, the library was in part the property of his son lately become a scholar on the foundation of the college largely through, as will later appear, a somewhat eccentric action on his, my father's, own part. Now he simply remarked that he looked forward to viewing these fatal canvases, wherever they chanced in these days to hang.

The door of the library opened, and my solitude was ended. The man who had emerged struck me for a moment as merely roughed in upon the scene, and also as too small to be true; he might have been one of those subtly diminished strollers or standers-by that architects insert in the foreground of a sketch in order to render an enhanced impression of the consequence of a projected building. But here the building had consequence already. The door, that it might appear in some sort of scale with the march of gigantic Corinthian pillars on either hand, was in its mere valvular part ten feet high, so that a Hobbit-like semblance was necessarily taken on by anybody pa.s.sing in or out. But this was no Hobbit. It was Albert Talbert. The realisation came to me as quite a shock. Perhaps I had carelessly supposed him dead.

Although we were separated by the entire length of Surrey it was apparent that, just as I had recognised Talbert, so had Talbert recognised me. His was the more remarkable feat. Talbert had been my tutor, and of one's tutor one is likely to preserve an image adequate for the purpose of identification many years on. I, on the other hand, had simply been Talbert's pupil and of pupils half a dozen to a dozen fresh specimens come within a college tutor's purview every year. Talbert seemed to be considering what to do. He wasn't a man to shout, and as his arms were full of books it would have been impracticable for him to wave. Or would it? Always of a sedentary habit, Talbert now seemed to reveal himself as owning the corpulence of a man who isn't wearing well. I told myself that the resulting paunch, dropped so as to suggest a woman immediately before childbirth, presented an almost shelf-like structure upon which the pile of books might have been let balance of themselves during a moment of at least cautious gesticulation. Talbert, however, remained immobile, and I therefore advanced upon him myself with a show of alacrity which wasn't altogether a matter of civil pretence. I was curious about him. Indeed, but for discovering in myself some revived curiosity as to the college and its present inhabitants in general, I should not, it was to be supposed, have accepted the invitation to the forthcoming feast.

My cordial haste took me straight across the gra.s.s of Surrey, and I found myself wondering whether this might not be a breach of etiquette. Wasn't it only the dons who were let walk on the gra.s.s, and must I not consider myself present more in the character of a perpetual undergraduate than of any sort of authentic senior member? On the other hand the turf was warm and dry underfoot; I wasn't going to injure it, nor it to incommode me; the taking, in these conditions, of a circuitous route to the waiting Talbert would have been absurd, and might even have suggested a discourteously leisured disposition on my part.

Later on, I was to recollect this dubiety to have been meaningless, reflecting merely one of those confusions which steal upon us with the pa.s.sage of time. Only in the Great Quadrangle is the gra.s.s a preserve of the elderly; that in Surrey and elsewhere had in my own day, as now, been freely scamperable upon by the most junior among us. I might have remembered this at once rather than tardily had not another occasion of perplexity presented itself. Was the waiting man Talbert?

From eighty yards off there hadn't been a doubt of it; identification had been immediate and, as I have said, apparently mutual. Now the distance between us having been halved the state of the case was different. The appearance I had distinguished in front of the library door had said 'Talbert' to me at once, and must therefore have corresponded to a picture of my former tutor that I carried about for intermittent consultation in my head. But, as I approached, the visual phenomenon before me drew away from this. Its coincidence with the Talbert image had become disturbingly blurred, rather in the manner of two figures within an imperfectly manipulated stereoscopic toy. I found myself believing that I had fallen into some embarra.s.sing mistake.

Of course Talbert now would be much older than Talbert then; but I somehow knew that it wasn't a factor of this sort that could account for my perplexity. The perplexity increased when I got nearer still, since I now seemed to discern in it a state of mind which I shared with the person who must in another moment become my interlocutor. Was he, too, confronting embarra.s.sment and the need for apology? It did look as if each of us had misidentified the other.

But this supposition survived (at least as to its reciprocal nature) only for a moment. I then saw Talbert as incontrovertibly in front of me and my confusion as something of common enough occurrence. As with sc.r.a.ps of verse, or natural scenes, or episodes of personal drama, the features of people once familiarly known seldom return to the memory untransformed. Each time we call them up imagination a.s.serts its claim to retouch the picture perhaps radically almost from the start, perhaps gradually and as with a stealthy artistic intention. Hence our frequent surprise that a person (like, it may be, a coast or city or painting revisited) is not at all as we remember him. Yet the first and veridical image seems to survive beneath its later variants in some limbo of the mind. On this occasion it had stirred at my first glimpse of the man across the quad, so that Talbert's name had come to me instantly. Then some more recent, and delusive, Talbert image had fought back, to a resultant moment of confusion. Finally here I was my mind having come full-circle acknowledging myself in the presence of the authentic Talbert after all, the Ur-Talbert upon whom through a long period of years my unconscious fancy had been plastically at play.

It was now that I noticed, too, how I had been under a further deception: one which might have interested my father more than it did me. Contrary to my impression of moments before, Talbert had by no means notably deteriorated as to the physical man. His possessing a paunch had been an illusion created by some play of light and shade, perhaps even some quiver of the warm air, within those ma.s.sive Corinthian shafts as in a Mannerist painting, I reflected, the Madonna, although with her Child already in her arms, may appear gravid still only because we fail to read correctly some freak of chiaroscuro which has pleased the artist's fancy. As for Talbert's books, they were few in number, and lightly carried under his left arm; his right hand was free and now confidently extended to me. Yet he was not himself wholly confident. The doubt which I had detected in him had not, as had my own, dissipated itself.

'Ah Dalrymple!' Talbert said. 'We are very pleased that you have been able to come to our dinner.' His voice held all its old unbelievable degree of huskiness and its old effect, too, of a gravitas quite beyond the reach of a common scholar's capacity. He might have been announcing something of the deepest import arrived at that morning in an arcane divan, a hortus conclusus dedicated to the just privacy of the councils of princes, and now by him responsibly divulged to some person of desert and discretion among the outer profane. 'Our trifling foolish banquet,' Talbert added. Amazingly, but in a manner instantly approved by memory, silent yet powerful laughter was convulsing his frame. His eyes lit up with a remote elfin glee wholly unexpected in one so evidently of the sober sort. He brought his hands together this at hazard of letting his little cache of learning tumble to the ground and rubbed them joyously each on each. 'Our trifling foolish banquet,' he repeated as if relis.h.i.+ng a rare stroke of wit. 'Eh, Dalrymple?'

'Thank you very much.' I knew I ought now to come out with something from Shakespeare myself capping, as it were, old Capulet. But (as frequently, long ago) my resources failed me. 'Only,' I said, 'I'm not Dalrymple. My name is Duncan Pattullo, and I was a pupil of yours a sadly unrewarding one, I fear rather a long time ago.'

'Pattullo?' Talbert frowned. No learned man cares to be indicted of inaccuracy, and in particular of a misattribution. I could see that he was tempted to dispute with me the legitimacy of my claim. Instead of which, however, he asked, 'Do you still write plays?'

It was said by Dr Johnson (who had reason to know) that the manners of men of learning are commonly unpolished, and I believe it to have been by the learned that this particular question has most frequently been fired at me. To a refined sensibility it might occur that, if a man does happen still to write plays, he will fondly suppose the fact to be known to all cultivated persons. In the present instance, since a comedy of mine was then running in a London theatre, it might have been my reasonable hope that Talbert, the college's English don, would own some semi-professional awareness of it. Not that I was offended by my old tutor's ignorance. It was true to his form, as was his surprising instant memory that I had ever written plays at all.

'Yes, indeed,' I said. 'I still write them. In fact, I've at last come to make some sort of living that way. So nowadays I do nothing else.'

'There's money in them?' Talbert had returned to gravity but to gravity, this time, of fresh implication. It was now a man-of-the-world to man-of-the-world kind of gravity. 'How right I was to dissuade you from that mad thought of a fellows.h.i.+p! I've been a laborious scholar for forty years, my dear Duncan, and I haven't a penny. Not a penny!' Further to fortify this sudden pa.s.sionate cry, Talbert slapped his right-hand trouser-pocket as being the area, no doubt, in which the scholar's proverbially empty purse might be imagined lightly to repose. It was a gesture of unfortunate effect. The books under his other arm went to the ground, after all. The next few seconds were devoted to our both scrambling for them.

I found myself touched that Talbert had addressed me by my Christian name. In a moment and with a brilliance quite akin to that succeeding upon Marcel's tasting the madeleine there flooded in upon me a whole treasury of memories. These didn't run, it is true, to any conjuring up of the mad thought of a fellows.h.i.+p: that reference had conceivably marked a fleeting return to the Dalrymple-theory of my ident.i.ty. But I did recall how in my last year, when I had frequently gone to tea with the Talberts in the wilds of Headington (there to play with their children instructive games of a lexicographical character) first Mrs Talbert (also a deep scholar) and then occasionally Talbert himself had taken to addressing me in this more familiar fas.h.i.+on. Nowadays Oxford dons, like young people at a party, know both each other and their pupils by their Christian names alone, so that upon formal occasions they are at a loss as to who is being designated Smith or Brown. Talbert's habits had been formed in an earlier era. For several terms he had invariably addressed me as Mr Pattullo, much as if this were his only sure means of continuing to distinguish me, in his unfathomably brooding and often alarmingly absent mind, from one or another of the young women from Somerville or St Hugh's whom the res angusta domi (as he would have phrased it) constrained him to be perpetually tutoring on the side.

The Talberts' house in Old Road (so conveniently disposed, Talbert would explain from amid one of his baffling seizures of subterranean mirth, in relation to the Warneford hospital for nervous cases) was a red brick villa with the proportions and virtually the dimensions of a doll's house. That I felt at home in it from the first was not because of its architecture. In that regard, as it happened, I was more familiarly placed in Surrey, since I had been brought up amid similar although more austere echoes of the Palladian idea in Edinburgh's new town. In Old Road it was the res angusta that I recognised: and that here in a new form was the kind of activity known to me as producing such a state of affairs.

The senior Talberts rather as if resourcefully improvising in the course of domestic charades the roles of necromancers, or ancient philosophers, or professors of the exegesis of holy scripture were apt to be discovered severally poring over leather-bound tomes of jumbo size. Of these they owned a score or more, which were kept in a locked bookcase of answering magnitude and served a little to mitigate what was in general a somewhat culturally disfurnished effect in the rest of their surroundings. The children, it is true, possessed (or held in trust) a number of cardboard boxes containing Lotto, Word Making and Word Taking, Scrabble, and similar diversions. I also recall a gramophone with a horn not a hypertrophied horn such as was modish at that period, but a small horn of the old-fas.h.i.+oned sort before which one felt there ought to be perching an attentive dog. I never heard music from this instrument. The only record I recall (as I well may, having sat on it with disastrous results during the excitement of a session at Lexicon) was one holding out a promise of elementary instruction in the field of articulatory phonetics. It was a subject about which I felt no urge to knowledge, although I did detect myself wondering whether phonetics of a non-articulatory order was an alternative option which the curious student might embrace.

The elder Talberts both held their big books in requisition (it would be inapposite to say 'read' their big books) two at a time and side by side. They were perpetually engaged, in fact, in collating texts. At weekends (which was when I went to tea) they carried out this task with the help simply of their own select resources; at other times they kept long hours in the Bodleian Library. The motions of collation recall those of watching fast tennis. Since two columns of print are to be compared with each other not merely word by word but letter by letter, the eyes (and also, perceptibly, the head) must be flicked from side to side with metronomic regularity. Watching the Talberts thus engaged, I thought at first of a species of toy, at that time readily to be acquired from street traders, in which a clergyman or duckling or hippopotamus or oriental sage has been so constructed with its head balanced and pivoting within a socket that the flick of a finger will keep it becking and bobbing for some time. But this didn't really fit the Talberts, whose muscular efforts had to be on a horizontal plane. I then remembered, in a Christmas fair held in a subterraneous market-building in Edinburgh, certain mannikin figures, derived from vulgar American comic strips or cinematographic cartoons, which unrestingly jerked their hydrocephalic heads from side to side above the entrance to some shooting-gallery or raree-show. This was a comparison mechanical in every sense, and to be deprecated as even having crossed my mind, since nothing could be less vulgar than the spectacle of the Talberts pursuing their priestlike and l.u.s.tratory operations upon the text of Chapman or Dekker or Middleton or whoever the object of this strange devotion may have been. For strange it undeniably was; material consequence seldom attaches to a comma here or semi-colon there; to devote one's life to a single long-drawn-out activity of systematic and conservative scholars.h.i.+p has certainly something heroic about it but also something a shade absurd. And if in the Talberts' efforts I didn't descry the absurdity alone this can scarcely have been because I wasn't callow enough so to do. It was rather because (as I have hinted above) I was conscious of a surprising affinity between the Talberts and the Pattullos. A sort of discordia concors bound them.

It is sometimes said that there is a sharp ant.i.thesis, even a strong potential antagonism, between the intellectual habit and the imaginative; and that, as one instance of this, dons and artist don't often get on. I scarcely know whether Albert Talbert and my father would have got on, but at least neither would have found anything puzzling or antipathetic in the other's wavelength. Each was the head of a household in which everything and particularly any prudent degree of regard for the material means of comfortable living went down before a large impersonal purpose unrelentingly and indeed obsessively pursued. My father was as singly concerned to return from Islay or Coll with, as he would express it, 'the spindrift on the canvas' as was Talbert to banish from the text of his chosen playwright the corrupt readings of foolish and insufficient Victorian editors. Yet neither man was a fanatic, in whose presence one might feel pushed around by violence or self-will. They both took singleness of purpose for granted in a gentle and matter-of-fact way. But all this does not mean that I think of them as particularly like each other. I suppose, for example, that I see Talbert as essentially a comic character, whereas I am unable to view my father in that way, although I am conscious of his having had a comic side: indeed, something of this must soon transpire.

Again, the Talberts, like my parents, were an incongruous pair; and with the Talberts this began at the level of physical appearance. Talbert was a man of unnoticeably medium stature and possessed no features to speak of, so that what one chiefly marked were the superficialities of a large white moustache, a complexion to be described as baby-pink, and gold-rimmed spectacles of somewhat old-fas.h.i.+oned suggestion. Mrs Talbert was very tall, angular, almost scraggy in a distinguished and fine-boned way, and with a commanding arched nose which took off from her face with the boldness of a skier on some Olympic run. The voices of the pair chimed well with these visual contrasts. Talbert's was but for that deep huskiness which distinguished him from all living men, and suggested, indeed, the ghost of Hamlet's father as he might have appeared in Mr Wopsel's production an accent standard in the sense of being unremarkable; I supposed his to be the English of a provincial boy who had moved from a small grammar school to a Cambridge college, and there approximated his speech to that of those around him without ever having been particularly aware of the fact or in the least concerned with its social implications. His wife's voice was wholly different. It swooped up and down just as did her features; it drew out some syllables to almost sentence-length, totally suppressed others, and owned skill in articulating a few and with the greatest precision upon an enormous indrawn breath. The effect, which ought to have suggested the ill-judged attempts at enchantment sometimes ventured upon by cacophonous exotic birds, had on the contrary a claim to be called musical. And n.o.body versed in phonetics, whether articulatory or not, could be unaware that its creatrix had tumbled into Old Road, Headington, from some perch well up the English social ladder.

Mrs Talbert, again, was a good deal younger than her husband. She was supposed to have first come to him from Somerville in a tutorial way, although another theory declared her to be a Balliol man and a noted pioneer of academical transvestism. At least there seemed to be a probability that educational processes, rather than any more general polite intercourse, had been the occasion of their first meeting. Mrs Talbert addressed Talbert as 'Geoffrey', and research in works of reference revealed that this must be a pet name, not an alternative stacked up at the baptismal font for possible future use. Since 'Albert Talbert' is lacking in euphony and even a shade ludicrous, Mrs Talbert's rejection of it whether upon marriage or from the earliest phase of courts.h.i.+p may well have been prompted by aesthetic feeling. But The Oxford Dictionary of Christian Names (which is among a writer's most useful works of reference) records that, on the marriage of Queen Victoria, the name Albert 'soon became very popular, especially among the poorer cla.s.ses with whom it is still common', and I suppose this to be an observation relevant to the case. Be all this as it may, the Talberts were a devoted couple.

It is certain, too, that they were devoted parents after a fas.h.i.+on, although with neither the temperament nor the habits which would have made possible a discriminating sense of their children's varying needs. Charles and Mary (the very names suggest only a relaxed attention to identificatory exigencies) were well-mannered young people, and docile at least to the extent of being resigned to Scrabble as a species of Philology without Tears. But they were distinguishably in Topsy's plight, ent.i.tled to suspect that they had just 'grow'd'. It was this that made me approximate them to the former condition of Ninian and myself. My brother and I, indeed, had been more extreme instances of the state of affairs I describe, since (with two perfectly loving parents alive) we had been children detectably unwashed, hideously clothed or misclothed, and of a defective complexion suggesting a random, unpunctual, and ingeniously innutritious diet. At times we suffered fiendishly from the humiliating consequences of thus coming from what, in Edinburgh, was inevitably thought of as a disreputable Bohemian home; and it is possible that the young Talberts suffered similarly, if in lesser degree, from their upbringing in a household where quartos and folios were regarded as the only objects given by G.o.d to man for any purpose of serious contemplation. But on balance they were lucky, as Ninian and I had been, to have had their upbringing in a household in which scant attention was given to other than disinterested purposes and activities.

'A white tie,' Talbert said abruptly and on a note of admonition. For a moment I was at a loss. Then I remembered how it had been his custom little appreciated by some to a.s.sume in all his pupils indifferently regarded an abysmal ignorance of social forms. It used to be said that he had once instructed some young heir to a peerage on the direction in which it is prescriptive to pa.s.s the decanters at dessert. He had certainly explained to me that I was not to begin a letter to him with the words 'Respected Sir' nor end it with 'Yours faithfully' or any similarly inadmissible locution. Now he was letting me know in what attire I must turn up that evening. And this, incidentally, told me that our present colloquy beneath the library portal was at an end.

I took leave and retraced my steps across Surrey in the direction of the staircase and my abandoned bag. It occurred to me that I had failed to inquire about Mrs Talbert's health. Although already in middle life, I was still at an age inclined to believe that even the no more than moderately elderly are quite likely to be dead, so it had been the fear of a possible faux pas that had held me up. But it is an obvious hazard in any encounter after a long period of years, and had Talbert been skilled in minor social occasions he would have taken the initiative by himself making some reference to his wife. As it was, I should have to ask elsewhere whether the lady was still alive, and hope to have some further brief exchange with Talbert in the course of the evening, when the proper civil expressions could be produced.

I found myself wondering about Dalrymple, and slightly vexed that Talbert should have hailed me under that delusive name. This was unreasonable for had I not myself been uncertain about Talbert's own ident.i.ty? As a young man I had dined out on the Talberts often enough; they were among the earliest of my adult acquaintance to have been transformed into imaginary beings by pa.s.sing through my typewriter. But I must have set more store than I had known by my admission to that Headington villa, and had thus been a little aggrieved that 'Duncan' had come back to Talbert only under pressure. As for Dalrymple, the name rang no bell. Its owner must have gone down before, or come up after, my own time. It would be nice to think that the character with whom Talbert had confounded me had been a reasonably agreeable man.

II.

Nothing stays put. The Heracleitan commonplace, which the venture upon which I had launched myself would in any case have been bound sooner or later to bring to mind, had got off to a brisk start with Albert Talbert's turning up on me. Now, once more alone in Surrey, I found the mere architectural spectacle to be performing another of the tricks of time.

Scenes never revisited since childhood are said to be found smaller than memory has held them to be, and the effect perhaps holds true over other long terms of years. But Surrey had not merely thus contracted; it had proportionately sprung into air. I have called it a lidless Palladian box. The box was now much deeper than I remembered it: an oddity the explanation of which I was to stumble upon only some months later. Among my books was one on architecture in Great Britain since the sixteenth century, and it contained a number of photographs of the college. No doubt I had paused on them with decent affection from time to time. And it so happens that, confronting Surrey, the camera has misbehaved, thrusting one angle of the building far into distance, and producing in general a sprawling and stunted impression, as of hutments or hen-houses round a paddock, totally at variance with any that a living spectator could receive. There is nothing surprising about this; before subjects in which values of perspective are prominent the term 'photographic accuracy' has little meaning, as anyone watching a cricket match on television is aware. What interests me is the fact that this bad photograph, perhaps half a dozen times surveyed, should have superseded in my mind my own first-hand impression of a building in which I had lived for two years, so that for some seconds I was actually indignant with Surrey for being as well-proportioned as Surrey really is. As in my doubts over the ident.i.ty of Talbert, the true culprit was my own mental const.i.tution.

At the time, and lacking the clue of the photograph, I concluded that I was merely experiencing some side-effect of one marked and veritable change in the scene. Formerly the whole place had seemed to be tumbling to bits. The library had literally been tumbling; sizable chunks of it used to fall off from a great height, particularly in frosty weather. Unwary dons had even been getting killed from time to time, or so we affected to believe. It had been a state of affairs occasioned by the march of progress. The builders of mediaeval Oxford brought their stone from a distance, and where not subsequently knocked down by expanders and improvers their work remains intact to the present day. Later on, local quarries were opened up not far from the subsequent site of the brick abode of the Talberts. The enterprise was popular, since it conduced to cut-price jobs. Unfortunately the local stone proved to dislike being dug from its bed; the climate of the Thames valley was ungrateful to it (as to a good many humans); eventually it declared its mortality by turning black and beginning to flake away. From the leprous fabric that remained we had been able to detach with a finger-nail great scales of rotten stone.

The effect of this secular decay was often rather splendid. Of the library in particular the Baalbek aspect was enhanced: or as one surveyed it one could think of Piranesi, wringing from the ruins of Rome scenes which as Horace Walpole said would startle geometry. The entire university, moreover, was in like case; the Roman city of Bath must have owned a similar appearance when so abraded as to suggest to our Saxon forefathers only the ancient work of giants. There was thus presented a problem on a challenging scale. It must already have been so in the period of Thomas Hardy's Jude Fawley, who is recorded as grounding his hope of employment in the city upon his observation of its dilapidated state. But a further half-century had to pa.s.s before a great deal was done. Then and largely, no doubt, beneath the wand of transatlantic munificence a transformation-scene reminiscent of one's childhood's pantomimes was achieved, and all Oxford sheathed and carapaced anew.

I looked now at the refurbished facades and found they gave me no particular pleasure. The library, unflawed and glittering in stone which faithfully reproduced its pristine alternations of milk and cream, had gained in sheer ma.s.s from its renovation, and appeared more than ever a large-limbed Gargantua in the refined cradle of Surrey. Along the strong horizontals of Surrey itself the eye, no longer impeded by the old jumble of pied and peeled masonry, ran with a facility emphasising the slight jolt with which, in each of the building's two angles, it was suddenly held up. This is an odd phenomenon, which I have heard attributed to the amateur inspiration of the design. It is as if no advance warning has been given that each of the three sides is not to be of indefinite extension.

But now the staircase was before me. I grabbed my suitcase, and climbed.

By this time other guests were arriving; and among them numerous men, eminent as I was not, were similarly humping bags up wearisome treads. For the Lord Chief Justice of England himself, I supposed, the laying on of a porter would not have been the thing. Grandees, scribblers, a.s.sistant masters ageing in obscure private schools: we were all old members and nothing more. Such pious conventions induce an 'in' feeling irritating to those without, but surely harmless as manifestations of the gregarious instincts go. Not that the very top grandees were yet around; it was the university's day of high festival as well as the college's; august preliminary junketings elsewhere probably still detained those of the most superior regard. These dignitaries, festooned with medals and orders like so many Christmas trees, would appear at the Gaudy dinner later on.

Undergraduates are exhorted to remove their private property from college rooms during the long vacation chiefly because the college, like every other college in the university, moves into the hotel business at that season of the year. Officials of the National Coal Board, oec.u.menically minded prelates, Byzantinists, a.s.sociations of learned women, the liberated sp.a.w.n of American colleges and high schools: all indifferently throng these guarded courts for the time. A useful revenue is thus raked in. But no young man is prepared to believe that his rooms can really be thus stolen from him, and few do much clearing out. I was not surprised to find my old quarters, as I entered them, present very much a lived-in appearance. Somebody probably not the owner had done a superficial tidying up. Nevertheless a firm individual proprietors.h.i.+p everywhere declared itself, and the sharpness of its accent had the effect, for some moments, of calling up for me more vividly than might otherwise have been the case, the appearance of the room during my own occupancy. Over the mantelpiece hung a reproduction of that most popular of j.a.panese actor prints, Sharaku's Mitsugoro II as the ferocious Is.h.i.+ Genzo drawing his sword. It is a kind of ultimate in bug-eyed monsters, and was in the place once occupied by a preliminary water-colour sketch for my father's celebrated if historically dubious painting, Young Picts watching the arrival of Saint Columba. (The young Picts had been Ninian and myself; we had been required to crouch uncomfortably for hours in the middle of a clump of p.r.i.c.kly whins.) In once corner of the room, in which I had kept an elegant but totally unfunctioning Dutch bracket clock bought in Edinburgh's Gra.s.smarket for eight s.h.i.+llings, lay a tennis-racket, a hockey-stick and a guitar, tumbled together in a manner suggesting an early composition by Braque; and on the walls this motif might be said to be caught up in a number of large but inexpensive reproductions of works of art which had been affixed to the panelling with sc.r.a.ps of sellotape. From these last the eye, upward travelling, came upon a less sophisticated exhibition. The whole room was dominated by bottles which had been ranged side by side, dozens and dozens of them, on a substantial cornice near the ceiling as if convenient to the hand of a barman nine-foot high. They were empty bottles: exhausted wells of champagne, beer, gin, claret, cider, hock, ouzo, tokay and chianti all juxtaposed in a spirit of the finest egalitarianism. It was an innocent ostentation, and attractive to me; in fact I received from it a first hint of how fascinating I might find moving through those middle years as I was a closer view of the mysterious business of growing up.

So once I had unpacked and washed in the little bedroom I settled down comfortably enough amid the possessions of an unknown young man. There were a couple of shelves of books paperbacks for the most part, but interspersed with three or four bound volumes which turned out to be prizes bearing the inscription: Nicolas Junkin History Sixth c.o.keville G.S.

This was one discovery; another was that Mr Junkin possessed two of my early plays. The circ.u.mstance naturally predisposed me in his favour, and I even entertained the thought of purloining an empty brandy-bottle from the forthcoming festivity and leaving it on his writing-table as a species of rent. Meantime, I looked at my watch, and decided that it would have been agreeable if, for early arrivals, there had somewhere been a cup of tea. I filled a pipe instead, found myself without matches, and searched the room for a box in vain. Deciding to seek further, I left Nicolas Junkin's set and went out to the landing. But I don't smoke heavily, and had no urgent need of the matches. What drew me from the room was the staircase itself.

Except in colleges of modern foundation, the corridor is not an Oxford inst.i.tution. One lives on a staircase: commonly one set of rooms on either hand, storey by storey, from ground floor to attics. A hospitable man will give a party for the whole staircase. It is to that extent an ent.i.ty. Indeed, there is a kind of mystique of the staircase; it has, in any one year, its tone this however diverse the temperaments, interests, backgrounds of the persons who pound up and down it, bang its doors, exploit its resonances in the interest of nocturnal disturbance.

Or so it had formerly been. For all I knew, it might be different now. The bond of simple contiguity used to knit together even men who in some instances scarcely acknowledged one another's existence as their shoulders brushed. Perhaps this no longer obtained.

Yet staircases, significantly, are still being built although to dispose young men laterally would be the rational procedure today. Rooms on a corridor can be tidied and swept through by arthritic old women wheeling vacuum cleaners, whereas staircases require the services of a virtually vanished race of menservants, able and prepared to trudge up and down round the clock. Nevertheless I had been told that, when some extension of undergraduate accommodation is proposed in the form of a new quadrangle, it has to be on a staircase plan this lest the sentiment of old members (whose pockets must be touched if the project is to succeed) should be alienated by a more rational design. 'We were on the same staircase in '25,' elderly gentlemen report of one another. It is in the spirit of such reminiscence that the cheque-book is brought out.

At the moment, the staircase feeling certainly commanded me. For example, Tony Mumford had lived in the rooms immediately opposite mine. I wondered what had recently happened to Tony, with whom I hadn't at all kept up. Hadn't he been moving ahead in politics? I didn't really know. But the memory of his rooms came back to me as vividly as that of my own. I wondered what they looked like now.

At least they, too, were being occupied by a Gaudy guest: a fact apparent because (as in my own case) a hand-written card had been attached to the oak by the staircase's scout. I crossed the landing and looked at this. It read Lord Marchpayne. The name obscurely touched my mind, but to no particular illumination. I wondered whether Lord Marchpayne had yet arrived. Still telling myself that my foray was a matter of matches, I banged on the door with a lack of ceremony which testified to the extent of my having recovered the spirit of the place, and walked boldly in.

There was n.o.body around. A first glance told me that here was the term-time abode of an undergraduate distinguishable from the one over the way. There was nothing to correspond to the bottles. There seemed to be no books at all. A few aquatints, ill.u.s.trative of sporting occasions and probably of some value, ornamented the walls; so, with marked aesthetic regardlessness, did a peculiarly hideous Cecil Aldin colour print in which an aggressive clerical thruster, with the hounds almost beneath the hoofs of his mount, was deservedly taking a toss into a ditch. That the proprietor of these objects owned a practical as well as an artistic interest in field-sports was attested by the presence in a corner of the room of a saddle and a pair of hunting boots with s.h.i.+ny tops. The entire spectacle was one to which nothing very out-of-the-way attached. It was my second glance that momentarily astonished me.

Over the mantelpiece hung a large oil painting in a strikingly erotic Late Victorian taste: it might have been by some libidinous follower of Sir Laurence Alma-Tadema. Adequately clothed but suggestively posed on couches and amid marbles evocative of the last decadence of Rome, several languorous ladies awaited appointments the nature of which, in what was so evidently an antique maison de tolerance, it wasn't hard to guess. Tony Mumford had set great store by his heirloom, of comparatively recent accession in the family though it must have been. I could recall numerous jokes, not of the most refined, which had turned upon his supposed recurrent emotional dependence on this private lupanar. It seemed odd that Tony should simply have abandoned the picture to the college on going down a quarter of a century ago.

I was still puzzling over this when a sound made itself heard on the staircase a sound so familiar that I at once turned to the open door behind me in the simplest expectation of what was going to appear. And I was not mistaken. A man of about my own age was framed in the doorway, carrying a tray from which the small rattle of crockery had come.

'Good afternoon, my lord. I thought you might have a fancy for a cup of tea. Plot is the name, my lord. I haven't been on the staircase all that long. But I remember you, if I may say so, very well. Very well indeed, my lord.' Plot (and I remembered, on my part, his not unmemorable name, but not the man himself) advanced towards a table in the centre of this room the just occupancy of which I had so rudely usurped. It was a situation requiring immediate clearing up.

'That's very kind,' I said. 'But I'm not Lord Marchpayne. My name is Pattullo, and I've been put in the rooms opposite. I was only looking for matches.'

'On the bedside table, sir.' Plot touched a reproachful note. 'We keep having those power-cuts. Strikes, go-slows, refusing an honest bit of overtime: quite shocking, it seems to me. As bad as them in the motorworks, who come out if they have to walk through a small puddle to their job. So the matches, you see, are sometimes a convenience to the gentlemen in the night.'

'Yes, of course. It was stupid of me not to look in the bedroom.' The neutrality of Plot's 'the gentlemen' had caught my ear. It would not have been possible to say whether this traditional manner of designating the young men on his staircase existed in a comfortable and uncoloured way in his mind or was there conditioned by ironic reservations. Certainly he was not the man indiscriminately to abnegate the distinctions of cla.s.s. There would be lads in the college kitchens whom he would address as from a just remove. Correspondingly, although his manner had turned a shade less deferential upon his discovery that I was not a peer of the realm, it still held quite enough deference for any reasonable commoner to be going on with. I concluded that there had been Plots around the college for generations, and that with this one it would be possible to establish excellent relations.

'I'll just take the tea into your own rooms.' Plot made to pick up the tray he had set down. 'As you see, I thought I'd make a little anchovy toast, and it oughtn't to be let grow cold. I think I'm right in saying the gentlemen were partial to it in your time.'

'That's perfectly true.' The anchovy toast was something I had already become aware of, its aroma being the more striking since some time happened to have elapsed since this particular delicacy had been offered to me. 'But what about Lord Marchpayne? He may turn up at any moment.'

'Plenty more, sir, where this came from.'

'I'm delighted to hear it,' somebody said from the doorway. 'Another cup and saucer will be just the thing.'

The newcomer was certainly Lord Marchpayne: he had a suitcase by his side. And Lord Marchpayne was certainly Tony Mumford. The voice was a little changed, having become distinguishably a public voice. The figure and even the features had changed too; both were heading towards the ma.s.sive. But I hadn't the slightest doubt about Tony. Nor had he about me.

'Well I'm blessed-Duncan! And Plot, isn't it?' Tony had turned instantly to this ministrant character and shaken hands with him. It was something it hadn't occurred to me to do, and I tried to remember whether it had been our habit with our scouts at the beginning and end of term. Plot appeared not overwhelmed.

'Quite correct, my lord. And pleased to be looking after you. I was telling Mr Pattullo that I hadn't been on this staircase long. I take it you'll hardly object to using this young gentleman's crockery?' Plot, who was opening a cupboard door, asked this with some humorous intention which I was dull enough to fail to elucidate. 'Promotion comes rather slowly, you might say, in my department of college life. All the better when it does, of course.'

'Capital!' Tony had tossed a bowler hat on the table, and I found myself questioning this slightly archaic object as if it might tell me something about its owner. What was eluding me was whether as an undergraduate Tony had been in some sort of succession to a barony or the like, or whether he was now Lord Marchpayne as a consequence of services rendered to the nation. It was not a point of which he would expect a former intimate to be ignorant. 'Capital!' Tony was now repeating. 'Bicycle-boy, wasn't it? Any of them around today?'

'No, my lord and not all that many bicycles, either. Nothing but motor cars. Why, a freshman is let run a motor car, if only he can produce a sc.r.a.p of an excuse for it. Go down to where the piggeries were, and you'll find in term-time, that is a whole car-park of them.'

'Ah, changed days.' Having briskly established relations with Plot, Tony as briskly switched off. And at this Plot, having satisfied himself that our hot-water jug was adequate to the replenis.h.i.+ng of our teapot, and impressed upon us the circ.u.mstance that he would be within call, retired to his pantry. Tony and I were left regarding each other with the ghost of constraint.

'This is quite splendid!' Tony said and added (having paused to pick up a finger of toast), 'I rather thought you never came to these affairs, Duncan? For our generation they happen every three or four years, you know. You must get the invitations?'

'Yes, I do. But I'm afraid I've never been to a Gaudy in my life. I've been living abroad a good deal.'

'Dodging the tax-gatherer eh, Duncan? But hang abroad! Cut out of it, my boy. Live at home and look about you. Your plays will improve no end.'

'That's an amateur fallacy,' I p.r.o.nounced firmly but wondering whether what Tony had said was true. And even although there was something fact.i.tious about his bold reaching out towards our juvenile candour, I rather admired the prompt force with which he had gone after it.

'You're losing your command of modern English idiom, for one thing,' Tony pursued with bland authority. 'Your people even the young ones talk exactly as we talked in this room G.o.d knows how many years ago. And we went in for something rather archaic then, for that matter. It was an affectation of yours, Duncan.'

I felt that this brutality was something at which I, too, must play.

'Were you always going to be Lord Marchpayne?' I demanded. 'It must have been on the strength of being somebody's grandson or nephew, if you were since you were plain Tony Mumford, without a doubt. Or is it a hastily improvised disguise?'

'Oh, quite the latter.' Tony was amused. 'I've been pus.h.i.+ng around perhaps not in departments of activity you keep an eye on. Nothing dramatic, let alone theatrical, about being a reliable junior Minister with the right contacts in the City.' Tony smiled charmingly. 'That's me. Unfulfilled renown, and all that.'

'I write about obscurely private life, you know, and keep my eye on that. My characters are all virtually idiots in the original sense of the word.'

'You always had a smack of the don in you, Duncan.' Tony's thus greeting my inconsequent piece of pedantry was fair enough. But his renewed smile told me he wasn't too pleased at my ignorance of his career. If we were to horse around innocently as in days of yore we should have to watch our steps, at least in the initial stages.

'I suppose,' I asked, 'that these are your son's rooms?' Plot's question about the crockery and my own familiarity with the picture over the mantelpiece had belatedly come together in my mind, and the inference to be drawn was clear. 'When he came up, you arranged for him to have your old rooms here in Surrey?'

'More or less. Ivo that's my boy liked the idea. You see, they were my father's rooms too although I mayn't ever have mentioned the fact. Do you know? Not long ago I met a very nice chap who'd written a book. Blameless bit of literary history of some sort. And he'd talked about undergraduates who might turn over letters written by their great-grandfathers when they were undergraduates. Idea was to show how totally incomprehensible one generation's interests may be to another. Husky lads solemnly concerned over Dr Pusey's latest sermon, or the Eastward Position, or whether it is edifying to visit the good poor. And this chap was rebuked in some public print by an egg-head professor from heaven knows where for being sn.o.bbish or, as they say, divisive. Comical, wouldn't you say? After all, everybody has great-grandfathers I suppose with the sole exception of Jesus Christ.' Tony paused, and I felt he had thrown in this as an appeal to what he thought of as the pervasively sceptical spirit of modern literature as embodied in my person. 'Still, one has to mind one's p's and q's, no doubt. Pointless to get thought of as snooty in such matters. Make your standing clear and then be gracefully modest about it. Think of that convention at Cambridge. I wonder if it still goes on.'

'I don't know any convention at Cambridge.'

'Ah.' Tony paused to finish a cup of tea and pick up a further finger of toast. 'It may only have been at one or two colleges. When boys with handles to their names were due to come into residence, their full style was put up over their door: Visc. This, or just the Hon. That. But when they arrived, it was regarded as the thing for them to direct that the t.i.tle of honour be painted out. A bit wasteful of somebody's time but a graceful gesture, if you care to regard it that way.'

'I can't say that I do. It sounds thoroughly foolish.' I secured the last sliver of toast. 'They've put me in my old rooms opposite, quite without my asking them. Did you ask to be shoved in here?'

'Oh, no although it seems Gaudy guests do make such nostalgic demands. I had a word with the head porter as I came in. He told me that last year, when they had the most senior lot, there was a nonagenarian clergyman who asked for his old rooms four floors up in Howard. And stipulated for a pot.'

'Fair enough.'