Part 10 (1/2)

'Can you tell me about being a thingummy?' I understood very well what I was being teased about.

'You want the mortifying truth of the matter? A reader is somebody who won't quite do as a professor I imagine because he is too learned, and at the same time possessed of too little guile. Yes, that is it. Harmlessness has to be his hallmark.'

'I suppose he has definite duties?' The speech just offered me was quite inoffensive in its effect; its tenor was disobliging, but not its tone. 'The chap must do something for his pay. I suppose there is pay?'

'Readers are paid enormous sums, and in return they engage in advanced study and research. You will get a letter instructing you to do that, but permitting you to scratch your own head as to just how. Without particular effort, Lempriere contrived to make all this sound highly ridiculous. 'Come to think of it, you will also have to give a great many lectures. I believe it's thirty-six in a year. As you will deliver them triennially for the rest of your days, it's advisable to have them typed out on durable paper.'

'It sounds as if it might be formidable at first preparing all that eloquence. May I come to you for hints about it?'

'My dear chap, I've never delivered a lecture in my life. Lectures have always appeared to me completely pointless exercises. If I had to choose between lectures and examinations, I believe it would be examinations I'd plump for.'

It was obvious that Lempriere wasn't idly prevaricating, and I concluded that his freedom from what he regarded as a pointless obligation must be a matter of his possessing adequate private means. Such freedoms commonly are. This meant that further inquiry might sound impertinent nor, for that matter, was I as interested in the hierarchy of Oxford learning as, no doubt, I ought to have been. But having been made fun of over the readers.h.i.+p, I decided to try a shaft of my own.

'Not having to lecture,' I said, 'must give you a lot of time for research and writing books.'

What this drew from Lempriere was a swift glance of appreciation or amus.e.m.e.nt. He put a hand lightly on my elbow, and I had a sudden odd knowledge that he seldom touched anybody. It had been to draw me to a halt.

'And here is the river,' he said.

Nothing stays put not even the Isis. The iron railings over which we were peering, indeed, were no more rusty and untidy now than when I had first become acquainted with them. The river steamers moored nearby seemed to speak of aquatic pleasures of the most outmoded sort, but precisely so had they done long ago. Downstream, however, much was changed. The row of college barges along this bank had, with one or two exceptions, vanished, to be replaced in the middle distance by a huddle of boathouses which doubtless gained for commodiousness what they lost for the picturesque. Along the towpath opposite there stretched a long line of cabin-cruisers and motor-launches hired, it was to be supposed, by the week for the recreation of urban populations far away; women were hanging out nappies on them, and men were contentedly peeling potatoes into the sacred stream.

'It used to be the young barbarians all at play,' Lempriere murmured. 'But it's the middle-aged philistines now. Cam and Isis, ancient bays have withered round your brows.'

'Yes,' I said not troubling to sort out this mix-up of the poets. 'But there are nine young barbarians coming upstream at this moment.'

'Our own boat,' Lempriere said at a glance, but without much appearance of interest. 'I believe they go to some regatta or other tomorrow.'

We walked on in silence, listening to the plash of the oars, and to the voice of the c.o.x, obedient to a bellow from a coach on a bicycle, beginning to give his crew ten.

'Awful sport,' Lempriere said. 'I used to do it as a boy a good way further down this river. It's like living. People don't consider it at all the thing to stop off when you want to.' There was another silence, in which I guessed he was thinking of Paul Lusby. 'You probably did it yourself,' he added presently, 'on the Water of Leith.'

'No, I didn't,' I said. 'I played rugger. But the same consideration applied.' It struck me as curious that Lempriere should have acquainted himself with my provenance to this extent. 'You were grabbed by the ankles and pitched violently into the mud. But you had to jump up and chase after the d.a.m.ned ball again. My brother liked it. I didn't.'

'Ninian?' Lempriere asked.

'Yes-Ninian.' This really did pull me up. Lempriere seemed to have been doing research on the Pattullos. And now he had produced his chuckle again. It was like no more than a faint clearing of the throat. I saw that he was nursing some joke.

'Sit down,' he said, on his peremptory note, and pointed to a long wooden seat of the kind provided in public parks. It faced the river and was firmly bedded in concrete no doubt to prevent its being carried off to a bonfire on the last night of Eights. Cut into its back was an inscription: Presented by the Oxford College Servants' Rowing Club to Commemorate the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth the Second. 'Very nice,' Lempriere said, looking at this. It was almost his first remark uncoloured by some hovering irony. He sat down rather carefully, so that one felt his joints to be no longer in the best working order. 'It's at least decently warm. Not that you'll think much of it after Ravello. I like that bit of coast and it's only a short run to Paestum. I'll come and stay with you there one day.'

The college address list, I thought, would give him Ravello. But I was becoming restive. The joke appeared to be that my companion had up his sleeve something that would legitimate his employing my Christian name at a second meeting and announcing that he proposed to be my house-guest in Italy. But I wasn't going fis.h.i.+ng. I'd leave him to play the thing out.

'Paestum is invaluable,' I said, taking my place beside him. 'Greece without the Colonels. One couldn't ask for more.' At that time the misdeeds of those persons weighed heavily on all liberal minds.

'The Niobe of nations! there she stands, Childless and crownless, in her voiceless woe.'

This came from Lempriere with an effect rather different, I thought, from Ra.n.a.ld McKechnie's 'nothing so ill-bred as audible laughter'. He paused on it darkly. 'Or was that Rome?' he asked. 'You read English Literature, and ought to know.'

'Rome, I think. The bits about Greece come earlier on. Not that it wouldn't fit.' I didn't feel I wanted to be shunted off to Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. 'I really ought to say I'd be in two minds about the thingummy proposal, even if anything comes of it. That it should even be thought of pleases me enormously, and I have spasms of feeling there's nothing I'd like more. But you know seriously and apart from all that of fabricating lectures it strikes me as a stiff a.s.signment to come at one out of the blue. It's clearly not what can be called a visiting job.'

'You could make it the next thing to that, if you wanted to. n.o.body would object to your treating the place like a hotel, and dropping in on us for a couple of nights a week. But you mightn't find that particularly satisfactory yourself. We do have a certain corporate life of an amoebic sort. You might be drawn to study it. You were studying it last night, weren't you, when we were discussing that luckless affair in the dark?' Lempriere paused. 'And very much in the dark. Grandfather-figures or not, we have to admit the young as turning more and more baffling on us.'

'I was interested,' I said. 'I wouldn't like to be thought to have been studying anything. I suppose it would be a matter of pulling my weight in a general way. I doubt whether I could turn to at any sort of administration.'

'You wouldn't be asked to do anything of the kind although, of course, you'd be on the Governing Body of the college.'

'Good Lord! What's the Governing Body's line?'

'Governing, one supposes. I'd describe its meetings as festivals of pusillanimity relieved by sporadic dog-fights.'

'I'd be interested in that too.'

'It's most kind of you to say so.'

I was startled by the tone in which Lempriere had murmured these words. It was such as to make them almost as outrageous as old Mr Mumford's incredible remark on long hair and finger-nails. I was being rebuked, in fact, without ever so far as I could see having put a foot wrong. I hadn't been indignant with Tony's father, because I had been instantly aware of his being in some overwrought state. But I was thoroughly indignant with Arnold Lempriere. He had tipped over my head a sudden small bucket of ironic urbanity as unlicensed by anything I'd said as it was incompatible with the whole character of our talk hitherto.

I had indicated my feeling by taking the initiative in standing up before I recalled the abrupt acrimony with which this very senior man had more than once turned upon his colleagues during their nocturnal discussion. There had been differences of view, but at the same time a perfectly evident admission of common concern. And then Lempriere had suddenly flung out this or that. It had been something more, I now saw, than succ.u.mbing to the temptation of quick wit or a tart phrase. It was rather that in some obscure way he wanted the college to himself. He had an impulse to savage not only anybody who infringed his monopoly of criticising it but also (by way of a kind of warning off) anybody who might do so in the future. In fact there was a respectable pa.s.sion for the place at the root of his bad behaviour when he did sporadically behave badly. It was something his colleagues were certainly intelligent enough to understand. There was a high probability that most of them were fond of him.

This was a lot of considering to give to a tiny thing, and within moments we were continuing our walk as amicably as before. My sense of this was strong enough to prompt my next remark.

'You lose no time,' I said, 'in putting the new boys through their notions.'

'That's Winchester.' Lempriere now spoke humorously but I thought he had to conceal a sense that mixing up one school's slang with another's was a serious matter. And I felt I knew something more about him. He was one of those men and long ago I had discovered them to be quite thick on the ground in whom the schoolboy is irruptive still. Tony, I remembered, had been aware of them too. They kept caps and colours and house photographs, he used to say, like French letters under their clean s.h.i.+rts and handkerchiefs, and sometimes they tumbled embarra.s.singly out of the drawer. The more weighted with tradition the school, the higher was the incidence of such r.e.t.a.r.ded characters turned out. And Lempriere's role as champion of the Lusbys over against the Mumfords was a topsy turvy, and perhaps unstable, reflex from this. Believing there was only one real school (as he most certainly believed there was only one real college), he took a poor view (when this perhaps provincial view of things was bobbing up in him) of public schools at large as const.i.tuting any sort of club.

'Would you have been the same year as young Mumford?' Lempriere asked. 'Calls himself Marshmallow, or some such.'

'Marchpayne. Yes, Tony Mumford and I came up together.'

'Ah! That's why he wasn't a pupil of mine. But his father was.'

'Cedric Mumford?' For a moment this entirely astonished me. I had been reflecting, the day before, that Albert Talbert might now be teaching some old pupil's son. If Lempriere was not talking nonsense he was claiming to be at least in a position to teach an old pupil's grandson. But this, in fact, was perfectly possible. It merely meant that I had got the relative ages of these two old gentlemen slightly wrong. In an Oxford college an undergraduate of twenty may find himself with a tutor only two or three years older than himself. 'I think of him as old Mr Mumford,' I said with a shade of malice. 'What sort of a pupil was he?'

'Cedric Mumford? You know him?'

'We've met.' I said this before realising that it blankly contradicted the a.s.sertion I'd made to Killiecrankie. It was inconceivable that the discrepant statements could become of the slightest importance, but I detected myself wondering whether Lempriere's native or acquired skill in telling lies made him a hypersensitive detector of lying in others. I even wondered whether, had he been at my own school long ago, he would have joined McKechnie in holding out against the romancing of the Secret Service Boy. 'I believe Cedric isn't very pleased' I added with incredible rashness 'with the way the college is threatening to treat his grandson Ivo.'

'He wouldn't be. I've never had a pupil who gave himself such airs as Cedric Mumford. Positively intimated that he intended to put you at your ease.' Lempriere's chuckle followed upon this. 'And then, when you told him his essay was b.l.o.o.d.y pitiful, and that in fact you'd heard it from one of his chums the week before, he'd pretty well turn and snarl at you.'

'Yes Cedric still snarls.'

'And who are they, in G.o.d's name, those Mumfords? Catholics, of course but not old Catholics.'

'I suppose there's a big difference but as a Scottish presbyterian, I just wouldn't know.' I managed a little irony of my own this time. The distinction propounded again pleasingly echoed Plot on gentry and old gentry although, indeed, the ambiance wasn't the same. 'Tony Mumford' I added this firmly, and by way of standing up to be counted 'was my closest college friend.'

'Was he, indeed? Well, friendliness seems much his thing. He was scattering it all over the place last night.'

'I suppose he was.' I felt it would be disingenuous to deny this charge. Tony had a little overdone kissing the babies. In some minds, at least, he had as a consequence created the impression against which the sagacious Mogridge had warned him. 'But Tony's a politician,' I went on, 'and seemingly becoming a distinguished one. A slightly too lavish agreeableness has to be excused as part of the tool-kit.'