Full Term, page 15
It was understood that while most of us consulted our own inclination in the matter of placing ourselves at table the Provost ordained his own more immediate company. Exercising this prerogative deftly now, he secured Seashore on his right hand and then – quite firmly – Watershute on his left. Thus, one might have felt, does a courageous commander elect for himself the position of principal hazard on the field. Burnside sat down next to Watershute in what seemed a vague and unrecognising way. I posted myself on Burnside’s other hand. On Surrey Four we were neighbours after a fashion, since he kept his archives in its attic chambers. It would scarcely have surprised me, nevertheless, if he now hadn’t known me from Adam. But this at once proved not to be so.
‘My dear Pattullo,’ he said in his unexpectedly deep voice, ‘I am delighted to have the opportunity for a word with you. I have made another of my little discoveries in those invaluable Allsop papers. And I feel it is bound to interest you. It is a record of a performance in this hall, and in Christmas week 1589, of Richard Puttenham’s Lustie London. As you doubtless are aware, the play is a lost one, and hitherto there has only been Puttenham’s own word that it ever existed. So I am venturing to hope that the discovery may be received as not unimportant from the point of view of theatrical history.’
‘Yes, indeed!’ My response to this information was designed to convey alert enthusiasm. ‘And it must greatly interest Talbert. He’s our prime authority on the lost plays of the Elizabethan period.’
‘No doubt, Pattullo.’ Burnside, the most gentle of men, spoke with a sudden grimness which told me that I had said the wrong thing. ‘We all recognise Talbert as a great scholar. I think I may claim that his reputation has even penetrated to the recesses of the B.M.’ Burnside allowed himself a relaxed chuckle at this joke at the expense of his place of employment. But then the note of asperity returned to his voice. ‘But Talbert, I am sorry to say, entertains the most extraordinary notions about the Allsop papers. He asserts, and most dogmatically, that Theodore Allsop was an unscrupulous forger! Imagine, Pattullo, my indignation when he first propounded to me so monstrous a calumny. He seemed sublimely unconscious that he was slandering one of the most eminent antiquarians of the eighteenth century. I was greatly upset.’
I extricated myself from this unfortunate topic as well as I could, and Burnside’s composure quickly returned to him. He displayed no sense of any threat to the general seemliness of things less remote than the learned pugnacity of Albert Talbert. This, at the moment, distinguished him from almost everybody else at high table. During the earlier part of the meal, indeed, Watershute’s behaviour was subdued to a point at which irritation or tolerant amusement would have been the normal reaction to it on the part of his colleagues. Yet it was impossible that he had actually sobered up. (Tony Mumford was the only person I had ever known to possess the useful power of flicking out of drunkenness at will.) A single glance, moreover, revealed a man not quite adequately in command of his knife, fork, and wine glass. Once or twice he laughed loudly enough – or at least oddly enough – to attract the attention of two or three of the young men sitting nearest to us in the body of the hall. It was this kind of notice that we were all (perhaps rather comically) afraid of. Or we might have been indulging the dreadful vision of Watershute breaking out anew in some picturesque fashion, and of being thus caught for the instruction of the outer world by Boswell Chaffey and his flashlight camera.
That no disaster had happened so far was due to the efforts of the Provost, who had concentrated all his faculties on keeping Watershute reasonably quiet. Policemen are said to be trained to chat up drunks rather than to bundle them into a van, and Edward Pococke owned an analogous command, perhaps quasi-hypnotic in character, of the powers of persuasion rather than compulsion. Or so I reflected. It seemed to me at the same time that what was going on at high table in a general way was a kind of war of nerves. There was a diffused uncomfortable feeling of teetering on some perilous verge.
The Provost, however, was a man as punctilious in the discharge of one duty as of another. The moment came when he must attend to Dr Seashore, the guest on his other hand. This had the consequence of turning Watershute and Burnside into interlocutors, so that I had to direct my own attention elsewhere. I tried to spot where Giles Watershute was sitting in the body of the hall, being a good deal more concerned over the possibility of his suffering a humiliating experience than with any present discomfiture being felt by my colleagues. By the time I had made this search in vain, and exchanged a few desultory remarks with the voraciously hungry young man called Ralph on my other hand, it had become apparent that something was developing between Watershute and Burnside.
Burnside had once spoken of himself in my hearing as having been ‘a rowing man’. Unlike the majority of that fraternity, he was not only a shy person but constitutionally timid as well. Had he not, at our first tete-a-tete amid his dusty archives, charmingly confessed to me that he had turned down a fellowship and plunged into the womb-like security of the British Museum out of a feeling that he was not up to the ‘rough and tumble’ of academic life? It was only too probable that he might fall a ready prey to the freakish impulses possessing William Watershute on this harassing night.
Watershute was now certainly directing upon him the confidential murmuring technique which had perturbed Seashore when suddenly confronted with the myth of the murderous Dr Butcher, that eminent Arabist. I tried to overhear what was going on. Ralph, less absorbed in his platter than might have been supposed, appeared to be attempting the same thing.
I caught from Watershute the words ‘. . . last year it was pubs used by the troops’, and then ‘. . . raising their sights’, and ‘. . . stepping it up’, and ‘. . . class-war element’, and ‘. . . luxury London hotels’.
It was a time at which one would have had to be very much a recluse not to be able to give these fragments an immediate context. But Burnside, as a remote scholar, was sufficiently near that condition to be looking considerably bewildered. And he was looking notably uneasy as well.
‘. . . what they think of as centres of the Establishment’, Watershute said.
‘Jesus, Pattullo! Do you hear that?’ Ralph asked this question in an uncharacteristic because cautiously muted voice. ‘He’s scaring the lights out of the old geezer with a load of crap about urban terrorists. Queer sense of fun.’
‘So he is. I’ll try to stop it.’
But this wasn’t easy. Watershute had already said ‘. . . actually under the Provost’s car’, and was now pointing dramatically to a contraption like a portable oven used to keep plates and dishes warm for us.
‘... only have to open the doors’, Watershute said. ‘ ….or under this very table, for that matter’.
Burnside’s expression was now one of uncontrolled alarm. Even so, there was something unexpected in what immediately succeeded. Burnside jumped to his feet, knocking over a wine glass and uttering a loud cry. It was in his confused head, no doubt, that he was alerting us to imminent and dire danger. And certainly everybody in the hall was aware of some untoward event. This would have been very embarrassing indeed but for the extraordinary presence of mind of the common-room butler. Observing a respected senior member gone thus abruptly out of his mind, he promptly let the tray he was carrying drop on the floor. There was a splendid crash of splintered crockery and glass. The fraction of time elapsing between Burnside’s cry and this admirable diversion it would have been almost impossible for those sitting in the body of the hall to mark. I managed to grasp Burnside’s gown and get him back to his seat.
‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘The man’s talking nonsense. He’s drunk.’
As Burnside stared at me in bewilderment, I became aware that it was now Watershute who was on his feet. He pushed away his chair and began staggering past the backs of his fellow diners. His uncertain progress might have been interpreted as owing to the cramped space in which he moved. Reaching the end of the table, he stopped, and gazed down the hall. It seemed his intention to direct his further progress through it to the screens at the far end – in which case his condition would be immediately apparent to all. Then he turned and disappeared through the nearby door leading directly to the senior common room. I supposed that he had spotted Giles.
XV
If I lost sleep that night it wasn’t over the problem confronting the college in the person of William Watershute, or even because chance had presented me with a view of the matter radically different from any held by my colleagues. Watershute, the Watershute family, hardly came into my head at all. What I was busy with in the small hours was willing Ranald McKechnie not to die.
Scratch a man, however ‘civilised’, and he becomes a primitive being at once. The postulate has been a standard resource of psychological fiction at least since the age of Racine, and in our own time it has become alike one of the lessons of modern history and a dogma of analysts of the mind. In terms of it we are prone to build up pictures of ourselves which may be in large part mythological, and in which our lineaments may appear in some very disadvantageous lights.
It was a kind of myth in my family – and one largely invented by my father – that Ranald McKechnie and I had been rivals as boys, and would remain so. In actual fact our awareness each of the other had been intermittent and almost nugatory. Two boys heading respectively for a professorship in the University of Oxford and the scramble of the London stage have no reason to barge into one another. And it hadn’t been McKechnie who had beaten me for Janet Finlay in a fair fight; it had been a man whom neither of us had ever glimpsed, and who by all accounts was well qualified for victory in any contest there had been. McKechnie’s eventual turning up on me as Janet’s second husband had certainly been a little thunder-clap of sorts. But it had happened only after ages passed, and my relationship with both of them had almost immediately sorted itself out in a wholly amicable way. McKechnie himself, although knowing all our histories, would scarcely have been aware of a problem. And Janet had controlled any difficulty there was. That here and now I was in any sense jealous of McKechnie surely belonged much more to the mythology than to fact. Yet I didn’t know. Here I was, lying in the dark and desperately wishing – or telling myself I was desperately wishing – that McKechnie should live. Perhaps I was clinging to proper feelings in a laudable manner. On the other hand it was possible that there was obscurely at work the sexual funk of which Fiona had indicted me. I went to sleep while engaged in this inglorious self-examination.
The following morning began unpropitiously with one of Plot’s more massive breakfasts. As he had carried it across a couple of rainy quads, and was now busy flapping a duster around me as I ate, there was nothing for it but to display an appetite I didn’t feel. Before the toast and marmalade, however, release came to me in the form of my telephone bell. The caller was the Provost’s wife.
‘Duncan, is that you? This is Camilla Pococke. Can you possibly come over to the Lodging? There are matters to discuss.’
‘Yes, of course. Straight away, Camilla?’ I didn’t doubt that here was a summons prompted by William Watershute’s behaviour the night before. The last straw had been loaded on the Provost’s forbearing back, and the informal committee he had proposed to me on our walk to Iffley was being summoned to meet and deliberate on the matter. I hadn’t wholly shed my reluctance to have anything to do with it. And I felt particularly indisposed to it now.
‘Yes, at once, Duncan.’ (Edward Pococke would have added ‘—if you can possibly be so very kind’. His wife was no waster of words.) ‘There are several things to get clear.’ And Mrs Pococke rang off.
I wondered whether the members of an informal committee wore gowns. Perhaps, being virtually conspirators, they ought to have hats plucked about their ears, like the associates of Cassius in Julius Caesar. I decided against a gown, and took my umbrella instead. The door of the Lodging was opened not by Honey, the melancholic butler, but by Mrs Pococke herself. She took me into a small office-like room in which I imagined she transacted business affairs.
‘Janet,’ Mrs Pococke said, ‘is asleep.’
‘Janet? She’s here in the Lodging?’
‘Certainly she is.’ Mrs Pococke didn’t scruple to indicate, very justly, that my question had been unnecessary. ‘We couldn’t have her dashing to and fro that none too cheerful vicarage. I collected her from the hospital a couple of hours ago. She’d waited there all night, and I hope she’ll sleep for at least a little longer.’ Mrs Pococke paused for a moment. ‘Edward,’ she said, ‘will join us in a few minutes.’
I wondered whether the Provost was still discussing his breakfast, and with a better appetite than I had commanded for mine. It now looked as if the McKechnies, and not Watershute, had been the occasion of Mrs Pococke’s summons. Had it been otherwise the Provost would not have thus deferred his entry on the scene.
‘One gathers, Duncan,’ Mrs Pococke said, ‘that you were there when the accident happened?’
‘Yes, I was. I’d gone out to lunch with the McKechnies.’
‘With two undergraduates?’
‘Yes.’ I was a little surprised by this inquisition. ‘Two boys called Peter Lusby and George Tarpark.’
‘Lusby – the young man who defended the Piero?’
‘Yes, indeed.’
‘That is most reassuring. Edward will be reassured.’ I thought I caught a glint of amusement in Mrs Pococke’s eye. ‘Edward has been in some anxiety, as you may imagine.’
‘My dear Camilla, whatever do you mean? Aren’t we all anxious about poor McKechnie? I’m sure you are.’
‘Yes, of course. But, Duncan, please be quite clear. There was no involvement on the part of those young men? They didn’t contribute to the disaster by any sort of fooling around?’
‘Certainly not.’ I must have been staring at Mrs Pococke in astonishment – and perhaps indignantly as well. ‘As a matter of fact, Tarpark, who is a sensible as well as lively lad, tried to warn McKechnie that he was doing something dangerous. And when the thing had happened, Camilla, both the young men did uncommonly well.’
‘I’m glad to hear it.’ Mrs Pococke left me in no doubt that this was true. ‘And I think I must go and hurry Edward up.’
At this, Mrs Pococke left the room without more ado, and I was delivered for a couple of minutes to my own thoughts. They were characterised by wonderment. Why should the Provost’s wife conduct this odd interrogation – which was clearly on her husband’s behalf? But I had scarcely asked myself this question when the answer to it swam up out of memory. Hadn’t it been I, when an undergraduate and accompanied by two other undergraduates, who had ‘fooled around’ on a golf course to the effect of our almost maiming, if not braining, Edward Pococke himself? The incident had lingered in his mind (as why should it not?), and I was associated there with the general notion of young men thirsting for their seniors’ blood. That the Provost recognised a certain irrationality in this line of thought was demonstrated by his having set his wife to resolve the matter. In doing so, he had acted with his customary sagacity. Had he himself raised with me the possibility that I had let two young men behave in a manner endangering our host’s safety, I’d have been very angry. Nobody was ever angry with Mrs Pococke.
But now the Provost was in the room – relieved that no scandal lurked in the misfortune that had befallen a Regius Professor, and greeting me with a courtesy even a shade more pronounced than usual. During these exchanges I probably betrayed some absence of mind. Mrs Pococke’s questions, I found, had been curiously upsetting. What I had told her about the circumstances of the accident was strictly true, since neither the two boys nor myself had remotely contributed to it. Yet ‘remotely’ wasn’t quite right. I had initiated the luncheon party, and in a sense it had been its very success that had precipitated the disaster. The company of the two boys – and particularly of Tarpark – had been unexpectedly agreeable to McKechnie. Just as he enjoyed general society once he had been dragged there, so – and more pronouncedly – did he enjoy the company of the young when confronted with it: I remembered how, on Janet’s river picnic, he had so unexpectedly applied himself to manufacturing bows and arrows for Johnnie Bedworth. It was because McKechnie had been in high spirits that the accident had happened. And I had been the agent in bringing those high spirits about.
I knew that there was a great deal of nonsense in this. On the very first occasion that I had visited the McKechnies in the country Ranald McKechnie had behaved rashly with his monstrous engines, and it was improbable that this had been other than his habitual way of treating them. Had I been an insurance agent on that day I’d have insisted on a pretty stiff premium if required to estimate the hazard of McKechnie’s electrocuting himself, or chopping off a limb, in the course of trimming a garden hedge. I hadn’t, therefore, the remotest occasion to blame myself for the catastrophe. Yet I knew I was going to continue to feel irrational guilt, all the same. So here was the super-ego at work – and evidence that my id, or whatever it was, had it in for McKechnie, after all. But I saw that this analysis in terms of faded intellectual formulations wasn’t going to cheer me up. Only Janet’s being relieved of hideous anxiety would do that.
‘A terrible misfortune,’ the Provost was saying. ‘But how lucky, Duncan, that you and those two capable boys were at hand! Lusby, of course, one would know one could rely on. And Tarpark, it would seem, is a young man with a great deal of vitality. I recall his tutor describing it in last term’s report as elan. Elan can have its vexatious side. But there is much to be said for it.’
