Copyright & Information

A Memorial Service

First published in 1976

Copyright: John Stewart Literary Management Ltd. 1976-2012

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

The right of J.I.M. Stewart to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.

This edition published in 2012 by House of Stratus, an imprint of

Stratus Books Ltd., Lisandra House, Fore Street, Looe,

Cornwall, PL13 1AU, UK.

Typeset by House of Stratus.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library and the Library of Congress.

This is a fictional work and all characters are drawn from the author’s imagination.

Any resemblance or similarities to persons either living or dead are entirely coincidental.

www.houseofstratus.com

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 class 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 psychoanalysis 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 titles 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 Professorship at the University of Washington 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 entitled ‘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

Nos miseri homines et egeni . . .

For the first time since becoming a fellow of the college, I was listening to grace in hall. It hadn’t changed in twenty-five years; probably it hadn’t changed in four centuries. Or had the pronunciation changed? That first consonant in egeni had come out as in genius, whereas I seemed to remember it as in gamp or golliwog or Ghent. But this might be a false memory, arising from the way I had been taught to enunciate Latin at school. What I was hearing now at least struck me as being close to Italian, which was no doubt proper enough. Possibly the bible clerk summoned thus to prelude the common meal was allowed to consult his own fancy. In such matters it was a liberal place.

Per Jesum Christum dominum nostrum. As the bible clerk, a bearded youth in a tattered scholar’s gown, came briskly to the end of his task there was a murmured laughter, a ripple of applause, from his companions in the body of the hall. The unexpected sound echoed faintly among the dark rafters of the hammer-beam roof, as if a stripling wave had tumbled audaciously into an enormous cavern and broken there. Some sort of wager may have been involved. The bible clerk had been challenged, say, to get through the grace on one breath, or even to introduce a variant reading, facetious in character, which I hadn’t tumbled to. Nobody at high table took notice of this small happening– – unless, indeed, in the Provost there was to be detected a controlled and temperate disapprobation. But then the Provost was a clergyman, so that was proper enough.

I had last heard grace here only a few months previously, when, still no more than as a former member, I had attended the annual Gaudy. There had been no undergraduates then, except for half-a-dozen known as academical clerks. They and the choir-boys and the Provost and the chaplain had between them sung and intoned a grace of splendid elaboration judged to be in consonance with the magnificence of the feast. As I sat down now, I was remembering how, when my uncle the minister came to stay with us in Edinburgh in order to attend the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, my father, although not religiously inclined, would insist that we remain standing until his brother had uttered – mournfully and on a far from optimistic note – the simple presbyterian hope that for what we were about to receive the Lord would make us truly thankful. One of my earliest problems of a doctrinal nature had arisen from the thought that the thankfulness, if it were to be any good, ought to be spontaneous, and that it was futile to urge the Lord to go out of his way to make us grateful to him. I wondered what the Provost would rejoin if the new fellow put this theological difficulty to him over the soup.

Not that at the moment I could have put the question to Edward Pococke without bellowing. He sat at the middle of the high table, with a portrait of the college founder behind him and the long vista of the hall in front. I was four or five places away from him on his left hand, and looking down the hall too. He had greeted me in common room, expressing pleasure that I had come into residence so promptly. Over the Provost’s sense of pleasure, or displeasure, there always hovered a hint of divine sanction – again something very proper in a clergyman, but apt to disconcert when encountered again after an interval. And the phrase ‘come into residence’, although I knew it to be a normal piece of academic vocabulary, struck my unpracticed ear as odd. I made an awkward reply, saying that I didn’t know about residence, but that at least I was here and glad of it. At this the Provost left me, with what I think was designed as a comforting smile. Meanwhile the common-room butler had been hovering, an elderly Ganymede, anxious to explain to me where I must sign on for my sherry. He also mentioned that I got my dinner free but paid for anything I chose to drink at it. This might have been regarded as officious, but I took it to be occasioned by former experience of embarrassing misconception. Fledgling dons, if they unwarily got this small matter wrong, might be confronted with an unexpected bill later.

Several men had then come up to me, offered casual welcoming remarks, and drifted away. A couple of them shook hands, which was something they would never do again unless they invited me to an extremely formal private dinner. The others, sticking to the custom of the country from the start, refrained from this demonstration. And presently I had moved into hall under my own steam. Nobody was going to do anything so obtrusive as to take me under his wing. Had I been a stranger to the college hitherto it might have been otherwise. But they all knew that I had been an undergraduate here a quarter of a century before. This constituted me – it is another piece of academic jargon – a gremial member. It would be an immediate convention that there was nothing about the place I didn’t know. My return was a matter of coming in and hanging up my hat.

I had heard that there were still colleges in which the fellows formed up in a solemn order of seniority to enter hall. With us the Provost was allowed to go first and then everybody did as he chose, short of using his elbows. I was to learn that this note of the casual was a central tenet of the society; it overlay, perhaps masked, a formidable subterranean rigidity and conservatism in matters well beyond the sphere of deportment. Such being the order of things, I expected to sit down between total strangers. But, at least on my right hand, it wasn’t so. Cyril Bedworth, my contemporary and a man who had never left these sheltering walls, had been keeping an eye on me, and had all but used an elbow in the interest of establishing himself as my neighbour. (He was a physically awkward man, with no deftness in manoeuvre.) Now he had been standing beside me as we waited for the grace to be uttered. We sat down together.

‘Oh, Duncan,’ Bedworth said, ‘how splendid to have you here!’

It was when I became conscious of Bedworth’s warmth as cheering me up that I realised how much I was misdoubting my new situation.

‘Thank you very much, Cyril – and I hope I can bring it off. I’m glad to arrive, and have just told the Provost as much. I’ve a kind of itch to teach that I’d be shy to confess to the generality. But chiefly I’ve come to want stable things around me – not having managed much connectedness in my life so far.’

If this confessional speech surprised me as I uttered it, I knew I hadn’t gone wrong in addressing it to Bedworth. He received it gravely, although without the solemnity which I recalled as often attending his responses as an undergraduate.

‘I think I understand that,’ he said. ‘But Duncan—do you know?—I rather wish you’d married again.’ He paused to pass me a silver salt-cellar almost as big as a soup-tureen. ‘Married and had children.’

‘It might have been an idea, yes. But you remember Dr Johnson on second marriages. The triumph of hope over experience.’

‘A college is an odd sort of place. And I sometimes think – just looking around me, I sometimes think – that it’s not a terribly good place to grow really old in.’

‘I suppose not.’ If Bedworth’s warning note struck me as a shade premature in being addressed to a man in his forties, it was far from deserving to be laughed at. ‘But nobody’s let do that now, surely? Some birthday comes along, and out you go.’

‘That’s true, or almost always true. Goodness knows what the final condition of the old-style bachelor life-fellows must have been. And senescence comes to people at varying chronological ages, don’t you think?’ Bedworth glanced down the table and lowered his voice. ‘Look at Arnold, for instance. An ailing and lonely man.’

I followed the glance and was a good deal startled. Arnold Lempriere had changed perceptibly since I had encountered him only a few months before. Then he hadn’t quite filled out clothes tailored for him a good many years back; he was even more shrunken tonight. His hair and complexion made a single indistinguishable grey, as if he were an image carved out of pietra serena in some shadowy renaissance church.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘He doesn’t look too well.’

‘And I think we don’t always allow enough to a man’s years. Our instinct’s good, but perhaps we overdo it. A man’s your equal – you posit in him all his old stamina and flexibility and resilience – right down to the day you attend his memorial service in the college chapel.’

‘Most men wouldn’t want it otherwise. The ultimate humiliation, surely, is to be allowed for in a kindly way.’

‘Yes. Patronised.’

‘Who is Lempriere ages with? Albert Talbert?’ Talbert, once my tutor, was Bedworth’s immediate and senior colleague now.

‘No – Arnold is the older by several years. He’s still on the strength, as a matter of fact, only as the result of our bending a rule or two. But there’s another thing. Albert (he’s not dining tonight) is a different type. He’s an absorbed and dedicated scholar, as Arnold is not. And scholarship mummifies, I suppose. It embalms you painlessly as you go along. And Albert has his wife – not to speak of two children who stay put at home. Albert’s not looking for anything he’s less and less likely to get. Perhaps Arnold is.’

‘When you say he’s lonely, do you mean he’s alone in the world? When we met last summer he seemed rather keen on family relationships. He said he was related to an aunt of mine – my mother’s brother’s wife – and came down heavily on me for not knowing, or remembering, her maiden name. It was Lempriere.’

‘That’s like Arnold – coming down on a chap heavily, I mean.’ Bedworth laughed softly as he said this. It struck me that I couldn’t be certain of ever having heard him laugh before – or, for that matter, call a chap a chap. He had been an anxiously formal, socially uncertain youth. It looked as if the years (and perhaps his position of authority in the college, since he had lately become its Senior Tutor) had loosened him up. ‘As for being alone in the world, I believe Arnold runs to an elderly sister, who looks after his house in the country.’

‘So the college isn’t his only home?’

‘He owns a small landed property in Northumberland.’ It was the old Bedworth, at least, who said ‘small landed property’. ‘But in effect I’d say the college is his only home. Regarded in emotional terms, that is.’ Bedworth was frowning as he said this; he might have been glimpsing some problem looming ahead. ‘He adores the place. It’s been his whole life. That’s why he snaps your head off if you venture to say a good word for it.’

Bedworth, although professionally the celebrant of novelists of abundant wit and nuance, was not himself a man from whom one often expected a mot. I marked this one as an arrow going straight to the gold.

‘I noticed that,’ I said, ‘on the night of the Gaudy. And he took a monstrously unjustified smack at me when he marched me round Long Field next morning.’

‘You’re right about his setting store on distant relationships. There’s somebody’s wife here that he judges it’s important he’s related to. I forget who.’

‘A Mrs Gender.’

‘That’s right, Anthea Gender.’ Bedworth was surprised at my knowing this. ‘A formidable woman, but extremely nice. Mabel and she get on rather well together.’ Bedworth plainly took pleasure in the fact. ‘Knowing all about your cousins ever so many times removed is an amusing characteristic—wouldn’t you say?—of the aristocracy.’ This time, Bedworth didn’t himself sound amused. Like many men of unassuming origins, he retained a stout if naive sense of hierarchy.

We were half-way through our dinner, or so a card in front of me seemed to indicate. I glanced down the hall, and saw with surprise that it was nearly empty. It was as if, at the clap of Ariel’s wings, the banqueters and not the banquet had vanished. The undergraduates must have bolted their food in a manner I didn’t recall from my own time. I commented on this to Bedworth, since the subject of Arnold Lempriere had exhausted itself.

‘Oh, yes. They maintain they’re hustled through dinner by impatient servants, and that the food’s not fit to sit in front of for more than fifteen minutes, anyway. I’m afraid there’s something in it.’ This was Bedworth’s note of scrupulous fairness. ‘We used sometimes to sit on and on, didn’t we, Duncan? Particularly at the scholars’ table. There’s no scholars’ table now. The undergraduates prefer to be all mixed up, and I suppose it’s better really. I remember how you and I once had a tremendous go at Dostoyevsky. In the end they turned the lights out.’

‘Yes, Cyril. I remember that too.’ I made this reply quickly, since the reminiscence had been an invoking of ancient friendship. There came back to me all the times I had made fun of Bedworth to frivolous companions of my own. I had the odd thought that it might be to that talk about Dostoyevsky – or to something it represented – that I owed the fact that I was sitting at high table now. I was about to offer some remark about Russian novels at large – picking up, as it were, where we had left off when the lights went out – but Bedworth interrupted me. The man on my other side had for the first time stopped talking to somebody across the table, and Bedworth took the opportunity to effect an introduction.

‘I’m so sorry,’ he said. ‘Adrian, have you met Duncan Pattullo yet?’

‘Good God! Nobody need introduce me to young Pattullo.’ The man addressed as Adrian had uttered his profane exclamation so loudly that the Provost glanced down the table with an air of courteously dissimulated discomfort. ‘I tried to teach him how to translate Tacitus, but had more success in topping him up with madeira.’

I realised that this middle-aged man, red-faced and full- fleshed, was known to me as Buntingford, who had been one of the minor annoyances of my first two terms in college.

‘Absolutely correct,’ I said. ‘And chunks of unseen as well. “Marcellus Offers Reasons for Rejecting the Proposals of Prudendus Clemens.”’

‘What on earth’s that?’ Bedworth asked.

‘Buntingford explained that there would be an English heading like that to the unseen in the exam. Just to give one a clue. He said that if I simply wrote a short essay in decent English with somebody called Marcellus chatting up somebody called Prudentius, I’d infallibly pass. He judged it unnecessary to instruct me further, and we talked about other things. It was alarming. But he proved to be right.’

‘I see.’ Bedworth appeared disconcerted by this harmless anecdote, presumably as suggesting irresponsible tutorial behaviour. Then he managed to be amused again. ‘Adrian’s gay confidence was justified. Although I seem to remember giving you a hand myself on more orthodox principles.’

‘So you did, Cyril. And I taught you Greek. I hope you keep it up.’

‘Oh, indeed yes. As well as I can.’ Bedworth took my question entirely seriously. ‘I try to read some Homer and a couple of plays every long vacation. I enjoy it very much.’

‘And now Pattullo and I can again start talking about other things,’ Buntingford said. ‘And do you, Cyril, show some countenance to that harmless youth on your right.’

Bedworth took this injunction seriously too, reproaching himself for having so far neglected a very junior colleague. And Adrian Buntingford looked at me wickedly. ‘The heartening thing I have to tell you,’ he said, ‘is that the first ten years are the worst.’

The majority of dons dining went into common room for dessert. Lempriere proved to be in charge here – perhaps in virtue of being the oldest fellow, or perhaps because he had been elected into some stewardship or the like. Undergraduates never grasp anything about their seniors’ manner of conducting such matters, which put me in the position of now having to learn a lot. I was quite sure that nobody was going to tell me anything, just as nobody had presumed to walk me into hall. If I cared to find out this or that, I’d be free to do so. I might even ask questions. But in this event (I was soon to discover) men who had been members of common room for twenty years would produce answers framed in terms of detached conjecture, as if the whole place were as mysterious to them as on the day they had themselves arrived there.

‘Come and sit down, Dunkie,’ Lempriere barked at me commandingly. He had already disposed of a couple of guests by rapidly reassorting them each with the other’s host, and was pointing at a minute table at one side of a large fireplace. I saw that an effect of modified tete-a-tete was in prospect. There was a shallow arc of tables of varying size facing the fire, and at these the other men were disposing themselves in twos and threes. The gap was closed by a wine-railway down which decanters could be trundled in a more or less controlled way; the effect of this archaic toy was rather that of the primitive sort of contrivance for whizzing chits to a counting- house still to be found in some old-fashioned shops. ‘Did your college friends call you Dunkie?’ Lempriere demanded. And he sat down with a faint creaking of the joints.

‘Tony Mumford did at times. But I didn’t encourage it. As you know, it’s a family thing – my father’s name for me.’

‘Quite right. You’ll be Duncan except to myself.’ Thus allowing for our obscure relationship pleased Lempriere. ‘How is your aunt?’ he asked.

My aunt was dead, and I said so. This reply wasn’t a success. Lempriere, although not upset by the information, was upset that it hadn’t come to him earlier. Perhaps this was reasonable, although Aunt Charlotte’s death had taken place only a couple of months before. I started telling him what little I had myself heard of the unremarkable circumstances of the old lady’s end, but the subject had abruptly ceased to interest him. Instead, he was lecturing me on the two decanters in front of us, which it appeared I ought to have transferred to the next little table, necessarily getting to my feet for the purpose. It hadn’t been a perfectly self-evident social duty, and I might have been irritated had I not realised that this crusty performance had two faces. I was being rebuked in a manner which would have been ill-bred if directed at a near-stranger – and I was to find that Arnold Lempriere, although he could be arrogant and rude, was never that. He was badgering me over this local custom for the same reason that he was going to address me by a family name; I held a position of privilege in his regard, and must expect to receive rough treatment as a consequence. And now he effected another abrupt transition, raising a hand to the side of his mouth as if to indicate to anybody who cared to look that I was being made the recipient of a confidential aside. It was a small but theatrically vulgar gesture which only an entirely self-confident man could have made.

‘Something to say to you,’ he said. Don’t spread it around.’

Although I saw little likelihood of my doing anything of the sort, I responded suitably to this conspiratorial note by leaning towards Lempriere in an answeringly histrionic manner.

‘That old fuss-pot Penwarden,’ he said, ‘has he got at you yet about the Cressy affair?’

This question was mysterious to me. I couldn’t recall even having heard either of these names before. It seemed wise to say so. To be forthright with Lempriere was clearly the appropriate thing.

‘Arnold,’ I said, ‘I simply don’t know what you’re talking about. Who are Penwarden and Cressy? They ring no bell.’

‘You never were too good at remembering names.’ Lempriere said this with a throaty chuckle which I knew indicated a return to good humour. ‘Pull yourself together, Dunkie,’ he went on. ‘You were present on the crucial occasion. I wasn’t here myself in those immediate post-war years – which is why you and I never met until a few months ago. I was still in Washington, God help me, lying away like mad in an effort to shore up the British Empire. But I’ve heard all about it. It has been debated often enough, heaven knows.’

‘Well, then, I do remember.’ I said this in some astonishment, for the phrase ‘immediate post-war years’ had given me the clue. Lempriere was calling up an incident – and now it all came back to me, Penwarden and Cressy included – which had taken place in my first undergraduate summer term. ‘Something about some papers.’

‘The Blunderville Papers. Poor old Blobs Blunderville – he inherited his brother’s title of Mountclandon after he’d been P.M. – of course died donkeys’ years ago.’

‘It would be surprising if he hadn’t. He must have been about eighty then.’

‘Certainly he was. Well, Cressy walked off with the cream of the stuff – the key volume or file or portfolio or whatever it was – bang under everybody’s nose.’

‘So he did. It was the most marvellously impudent thing.’

‘Aha! The target area at last.’ Lempriere was delighted. ‘Penwarden was our librarian – he’s our librarian still, being that sort of man – and the larceny was the supreme shock of his life. Remains so, positively down to this day. And there you were, Dunkie, there you were! A shy but observant youth – and now the sole witness still in the land of the living.’ Lempriere, who during this colloquy had been drinking port with unconventional speed, was in high delight. ‘It’s why he voted for you, if you ask me.’

‘Voted for me?’ I repeated blankly.

‘For your university readership and college fellowship and so on. He now has his witness under his hand. So beware.’

These fantastic remarks dumbfounded me – the more so because their basis lay in fact. My father, already eminent in his profession, had been staying with the Provost; there was a dinner-party which I had been summoned to attend; after it a group of guests, Lord Mountclandon himself included, had been conducted round various college treasures, and had inspected a mass of papers (whether state papers, or family papers, I hadn’t clearly understood) which Mountclandon had lately deposited with the college for learned purposes. And Cressy, then a young don who I gathered had recently moved to another college, had deftly extracted from the aged nobleman a few vaguely courteous words which he then instantly represented as permission to walk off, there and then, with some particularly prized exhibit. That an outraged Penwarden and my uncomprehending self had been the only people within earshot of the crucial exchange I now recalled as true. I could conjure up the scene precisely as it must have been – except that now, by a common yet strange vagary of memory, I was seeing my own figure as part of the composition.

‘Does Cressy have the thing still?’ I asked.

‘Of course he has. That’s the whole point of the matter.’

‘But, Arnold, this is something that happened more than twenty-five years ago! Isn’t it all water under the bridge?’

To this surely pertinent question I had to wait some moments for a reply. A decanter had come swaying gently down the railway to Lempriere; he seized it with no time wasted and replenished both our glasses; on this occasion I remembered to do my butler-like duty.

‘There’s no such thing.’ Lempriere, having imbibed, produced his throatiest chuckle.

‘No such thing?’

‘As water under the bridge. Not here, Dunkie. Not in a place like this.’

I found it impossible to tell whether or not Lempriere believed himself to have been talking about a matter of any real substance. Perhaps he had only been putting on a turn. On the occasion of the Gaudy I had judged him given to something of the sort, heightening the actual facts of a situation so as to make them vulnerable to his own sardonic commentary. That an act of petty academic larceny perpetrated a quarter of a century before was still a live issue among a body of intelligent men appeared to be a proposition that took some swallowing. But it might be so; I just didn’t know. In such matters I hadn’t yet got the measure of my new environment.

About Lempriere himself, however, there were some observations not difficult to make. This was his hour of the day, and this his place. There were probably few colleges in the university at which the full formalities of dessert were observed, as here, every night of the week. That it was all very much taken for granted; that the inflexible rituals transacted themselves with the most casual ease; that nobody betrayed the slightest sense of being involved in group behaviour that was decidedly odd: these were circumstances which, on a pause to think, only revealed as the more archaic the entire presented scene. It was a survival, and over it Lempriere presided as a survival himself. He had an ultimus Romanorum air – but as the evening wore on suggested less a Cassius (to whom Tacitus attached that celebrated tag) than some tyrant of a later time. He flourished a more-than-imperial toga under our noses, or exhibited (in a plainer figure) the most aggressive territorial behaviour. He commanded people, as if they were his orderlies, about the room; insisted here on silence and there on speech; was charming to obscure guests and startlingly rude to persons of consequence. The decanters circulating the little tables had vanished when empty, but their place had been taken, on a buffet at the end of the room, by others holding brandy, whisky, and the alarming fluids known in their respective countries as grappa and marc. Lempriere’s preference among these was impossible to determine; he grabbed whichever came to hand. Here, I told myself, was what my father had used disapprovingly to call a pale-faced drinker.

I also told myself how unreliable was the old tag about holding one’s liquor like a gentleman. It did seem valid for Lempriere vis-a-vis the young and unassuming; and I was sure that, without ever putting a foot wrong, he could have conducted a tipsy confabulation with a cow-wife until her herd came home. On the other hand he could have become quarrelsome in a moment, insulting on the spot anybody whom he pleased to consider as having some courtesy title to be judged his equal.

I didn’t of course spend the whole evening in dialogue with Lempriere. The little tables had been set close enough together to make general conversation possible. Indeed, the effect was rather cramped and jostling; we might almost have been the habitues of a kerbside continental cafe, manoeuvring newspapers wired to sticks with scant regard to the safety of one another’s noses. The system had been designed for a common room less populous than it had now grown to be; I was to find that on ‘big’ nights (and the present was apparently ‘small’) the minuscule tables vanished, and everybody sat round a very large one which came and went mysteriously as occasion required.

For coffee we went into another room, and mostly wandered around. It was here that I noticed a change in Lempriere. Dining in hall, he had appeared brooding and withdrawn, so that I wondered whether his hearing was now more imperfect than he cared to admit, making conversation difficult for him against a background of considerable hubbub. Seated at dessert, he had been aggressive and touchy. But now, moving confidently if with a physical stiffness from group to group, he was an easier man. It became obvious that as an institution he was liked and his tyranny accepted; people turned to him at once and rallied him or were themselves rallied; if there wasn’t any more colour in his cheeks there was a new sparkle in his eyes. Wine had its part in this. At this hour, he was a happy man.

We hadn’t been on our feet for long before James Gender, the senior of the college’s tutors in law, came up to me. We had met at the Gaudy – in circumstances wholly inappropriate to that festive occasion. I wondered whether he would refer to them now.

‘I’m sorry that this is rather a small night,’ Gender said. He spoke softly and in a tone of apology, as if it would have been more fitting if my wholly unremarkable arrival had been signalised by the entire senior body’s coming on parade. Being unaffectedly no more than a polite fiction, the sentiment passed as not in the least absurd.

‘I find it quite big enough to be going on with,’ I said laughing. ‘What an enormous place this has become.’

‘Yes, indeed,’ Gender had received my words consideringly for a moment, much as if I had offered him a pregnant and instructive remark. ‘But wait for your first meeting of the Governing Body! We burst at the seams. And more and more of us develop a flair for sustained eloquence. It must be put down to the spread of education, I suppose. But the Provost copes with it all quite admirably. He’s miles better than any High Court judge I know.’

‘I’d have guessed as much,’ I said – thus offering a polite fiction of my own. ‘I hope it’s the drill that a new member keeps mum for at least a year.’

‘For a term, perhaps. Isn’t it delightful to see Arnold so recovering his form?’ Gender must have remarked my eye on Lempriere. ‘He terrified me for years, but has a heart of gold.’

‘I’m glad to hear it. It seems I have some claim to be a distant relation of his.’

‘So has my wife. Anthea has never quite worked it out, but accepts it as gospel, all the same. Arnold has his quirks, and they can keep us on the qui vive now and then. But he’s a man of deep feeling. I think you had a glimpse of that after the Gaudy.’

‘Yes.’

‘I was so sorry that on your first return to the college you ran into that sombre affair.’

This time, I didn’t venture even on a monosyllable, for I was uncertain to what extent serious subjects were held appropriate at an advanced post-prandial hour. But Gender had drawn me up a chair in the corner where we were standing, and reached for a second chair for himself. We sat down, therefore, in a confidential manner, and for a moment he was thoughtfully silent.

‘You remember,’ he said, ‘that Arnold spoke to us on a severe note – even an acrid note – on the way we had been arranging things: shunting around the college those boys who had to remain up for examinations.’

‘To accommodate old members at the Gaudy, and because of the Commem Ball as well.’

‘Just that – the wretched Ball. Arnold went to town on it, didn’t he? We must remember that when he was being sharp with us it was before the dimensions of the disaster were known. It was before the news came that Paul Lusby was dead.’

‘Has the disaster left any sort of legacy?’

‘Well, yes. The young men have got hold of the story – the whole story, if in a distorted way – and some of them don’t like it at all.’

‘I can’t blame them.’

‘I agree. But I don’t want to see a beardless boy made into a scapegoat. It would be far from fair.’

This was my own view of the matter we seemed to be approaching. I had an instinct, however, to hold my hand for the moment. As Gender’s colleague, and the colleague of the crowd of strangers now thinning out in common room, I was a tiro. It wasn’t for me to express any attitude to a perplexed affair. This was the clearer to me because the ‘beardless boy’, Ivo Mumford, was the son of my oldest Oxford friend. Gender knew it to be so, and he appeared to sense my caution and approve of it. He got to his feet without haste.

‘I have to pick up Anthea,’ he said. ‘She’s been to the Playhouse to see The Good Person of Szechwan. Would you call that an impressive play?’

We exchanged some casual remarks about Bertolt Brecht, and then Gender took his leave. I glanced round the room. There weren’t many men remaining – just enough to form what seemed now a slightly uneasy circle round Lempriere.

I had a notion that Lempriere stayed on to the death every night. I had a notion, too, that on these occasions his behaviour might follow a curve controlled by all that wine. At the start what he drank livened him up, lifted the creeping depression of old age, and made him a companion of considerable charm. Later, perhaps, it dumped him and left him boring and cantankerous. My disinclination to verify this conjecture at a tail-end of the evening was strong. I went up to him and murmured a good-night; remembered to retrieve my gown; and walked out into the Great Quadrangle.

A large pale moon hung low in the western sky behind the college tower. For a moment I stood still, held by the spectacle as I had sometimes been at this hour on returning from a party, a not wholly sober boy – and as my father had been in broad daylight when it had been revealed to him that here must be the scene of my further education. The second memory amused me, just as I had managed to be amused (although I was also infinitely alarmed) when my father came home to Drummond Place with his astounding announcement.

Then I went on, intending to make my way back to the staircase in Surrey where I was again to live.

II

The west door of the college chapel opens on the Great Quadrangle and fronts the main gate; midway between these two portals, islanded in grass, stands the fountain in a big circular basin full of fish. Both grass and fountain are frequently described in guidebooks as ‘ancient’ – but ‘ancient’ is a relative term. Within the college itself the idea of ancientry attaches rather to the great chub. More exotic fish come and go at their allotted span, but this particularly large and lazy creature is believed to live forever. I have always supposed that, in the interest of so pious a persuasion, a deceased great chub is replaced only nocturnally and under the discreet superintendence of the Governing Body’s Gardens Committee. Nocturnally too, human beings are chucked into the basin every now and then, presumably as a sacrifice to Poseidon and his attendant Tritons, piled up like a disordered rugger scrum at its centre. These watery divinities, reputed Bernini’s work, had been the gift of an old member of the college who, pious also, caused them to be filched from Italy at a time when any English nobleman could do that sort of thing at will. The exuberant composition stands in odd contrast to the general massive sobriety of the scene, like a tumble of music-hall contortionists erupting upon a severely classical stage. The stodgy lime-streaked effigy of Provost Harbage, occupying a similar station in Surrey Quad, is really more congruous with the spirit of the place.

I paused again by the fountain, but there wasn’t a fin to be seen. There was a light high in the cavernous archway above the main gate. The Great Quadrangle, its crenellations faintly defined by moon and stars, itself lay in the complete darkness which the college porters were for some reason always resolute to achieve at night. In Surrey or Howard or Rattenbury, numerous lighted windows would attest the wakefulness of young men conducting late parties, or discussing Chomsky or Marcuse, or making a belated start on their weekly essay, due on the following morning. But the Great Quadrangle is held in the main too august for the accommodation of undergraduates. It already slumbered in a senior members’ calm.

And yet there was one further gleam of light, a slender perpendicular line that seemed to define the chapel door, slightly ajar. I didn’t know if there was anything unusual about this. The zeal of college chaplains sometimes conduces to minor religious manifestations at unlikely hours. As I glanced across the quad I thought I heard tenuous sounds supporting the conjecture that something of the sort might be in train. Yes – I told myself – it was a muted organ music that floated to me through the October night, faintly swelling and faintly fading, as if a small wind was wandering in distant caverns.

I forgot about going to bed, and walked across the quad – the new boy whose business it was unobtrusively to acquaint himself with what goes on. The door was certainly open and the organ was being played, although in a subdued way. I saw at once that nothing of a devotional order was in question. The chapel, so surprisingly lofty and large by Oxford standards, was dimly lit and deserted. I remembered that music at night was nothing out of the way in college; instruments of one sort or another abounded in people’s rooms; nobody paid much attention to any rules there might be for restricting the hours at which they could be played. It seemed probable that somebody, perhaps one of the organ scholars – of whom there were always, I think, two or three – was treating himself to a little quiet practice while nobody was around. I walked the full length of the aisle until the altar steps were in front of me. It was into a gathering obscurity; the light, such as it was, came only from somewhere near the door by which I had entered. The organ continued to play, but now more softly still.

‘It’s like Milton.’

These words were uttered from behind my shoulder. They had been spoken by a young voice, not of the most cultivated sort, and conveyed an impression of involuntary utterance. I turned round.

‘It’s like Milton.’ The young man – or boy, rather – whom I now faintly distinguished repeated his words apparently out of mere confusion at having spoken at all. ‘Only I can’t remember.’

I could. I wouldn’t have been Albert Talbert’s pupil otherwise. And it was to relieve a certain awkwardness that I now quoted II Penseroso.

‘The high embowed roof,

With antique pillars massy-proof,

And storied windows richly dight,

Casting a dim religious light.

There let the pealing organ blow . . .

That’s it, isn’t it? Even the organ laid on.’

‘Yes, sir. Thank you.’

The boy’s confusion had increased. I tried to disperse it with another question.

‘Does someone often play it late at night?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t belong here at all.’

I had taken it for granted that this was an undergraduate member of the college. It now seemed a little odd that a strange youth should be wandering round the chapel at so late an hour, like a disoriented passenger in a deserted railway terminus. It is improbable, nevertheless, that I was so uncivil as to hint mistrust or surprise. But the boy spoke again, as if to explain himself.

‘I just came for the day. With a party from school. Kids mainly. But I’ve stayed on. I wanted to see a bit more. There’s a train back to London at midnight.’

‘It’s an uncommonly uncomfortable one, I’m afraid.’

‘Oh, I don’t mind that.’ The boy had taken my harmlessly sympathetic remark for a rebuke. ‘And they let me in at the door, the gate. I . . . I gave my name. The gentleman was very nice.’ The boy was suddenly alarmed. ‘They won’t have locked it up for the night? I shall get out?’

I’m pretty sure you will. People seem to come and go at all hours nowadays. In any case, I can let you out myself.’

‘Sir – are you one of the dons?’ The boy’s eyes had widened on me in the gloom.

‘Yes, but I’m quite a new one.’ My eyes were growing accustomed to the half-light, and I could now see my companion less uncertainly. He was slight and very pale. He wore some sort of blazer and an ugly striped tie. I had a sense that his long hair, which seemed raven black, was cleaner than long hair often tends to be. And he was alert and bright-eyed. Once you’d noticed his eyes, I thought, you’d cease to notice his complexion.

The organ had stopped, and the light had dimmed further, fading out the chapel walls like the backdrop on a darkening stage. There was a sound of footsteps, and I saw that a young man was approaching us from the farther end of the nave.

‘Good evening,’ he said, in an accent not like that of my new acquaintance, ‘I hope you didn’t mind my playing that not too well.’

‘Not at all. It completed an effect. I enjoyed it.’

‘I’m afraid the organ isn’t in too good fleece. Our organist says that playing it is like eating stale chocolate. But it’s more than good enough for me, I need hardly say.’ The young man – politely diffident, but very much in charge of the place – was glancing curiously at the boy standing in shadow beside me. ‘I’m terribly sorry,’ he went on, ‘but I’m afraid I’ll have to lock up. Do you mind?’

‘Of course not – not if the recital is over.’

‘Then we can go out together.’ The young man had produced a large key. He stood aside with an air more markedly polite still; there must have come into his head the thought that we might be after the chapel plate. ‘I’m almost sure that you and your son will find the gate open, sir. But I’ll come across with you just in case.’ His eye fell on the gown draped over my shoulder. ‘Oh, I say!’ he said. ‘It looks as if I’ve got this wrong.’

‘Not a bit. But we’ll certainly manage under our own steam.’

We moved towards the door. The young man turned off a final light, and organ and the vague architecture backing it vanished together. Once in the quad, he said good-night in proper form and walked away.

‘It was a bit of luck, that was,’ the boy said. ‘Meeting you, that is. Otherwise, he’d have had me in the nick, if you ask me.’

‘I don’t think it would have been as bad as that.’ I had found the naive remark attractive. ‘Look, it’s not nearly time for your train. Will you come and have some coffee?’

There was a second’s silence. We couldn’t see each other, but I had a sense of the boy as having to brace himself before this sudden invitation into the unknown.

‘Yes, please,’ he said.

Between the Great Quadrangle and Surrey there is a glorified tunnel: an elaborately vaulted affair the numerous bosses of which are embellished with brilliantly gilded and painted armorial bearings of heaven knows whom. Their suggestion is neither ecclesiastical (bishops and their like own only a limited repertory of mitres and crooks and keys) nor academic. Many fellows of the college have doubtless been armigerous in their time, with no need to declare, like Baldock in Marlowe’s play, that they fetched their gentry from Oxford, not from heraldry. Possibly some of these contribute to the display, but I imagine that what is commemorated in the main is one or another connection that the college can claim with persons of altogether more exalted station. However that may be, this tunnel is one of the prime nuisances of the place, since throughout the year herded droves of tourists treat it much as if it were the Sistine Chapel, so that it becomes impossible to move unimpeded from the one quadrangle to the other. But now all this injudicious ostentation was shrouded in night, like a casket closed. The darkness was so entire that I had to take my chance companion by the arm to guide him through. The action made me realise that there was no single area within the spreading curtilage of the college that I would have failed to traverse confidently even if blindfolded, pinioned and being led to execution. Like the ability to ride a bicycle or sit a horse, it was a skill, it seemed, that one simply didn’t lose.

It was quite a walk; we couldn’t very well accomplish it in silence; at the same time I felt I mustn’t simply fire questions at the invisible boy. His having recalled Milton came back to me, and what I now produced was some allusion, obvious rather than apt, from that literary quarter. It may have been no more than ‘dark, dark to me’ or ‘this dark opprobrious den’ or ‘through utter and through middle darkness borne’ – something like that. Whatever it was, I perhaps expected the boy to cap it in some way. Bandying quotations had been rather the thing with us when I was his age. But I had a feeling that he didn’t catch on to my effort; what came through his grasped elbow was a suggestion of renewed alarm. It was natural enough. He had been snatched up by a total stranger of great age (as he would consider me to be) and was being hurried off he didn’t at all know to what. He might even suspect it as being with some improper intent. This grotesque thought, just slipping through my head, made me realise, as I often did, that the minds of a whole young generation were almost closed to me. It was a poor position for a professional playwright. Some notion of remedying this defect, I knew, had been among the motives prompting me to my present belated entry into the educational sphere. I wasn’t in fact old; I wasn’t a bit old; but I was – if prematurely – coming to feel that the elderly were less interesting than the young.