Twenty-One Stories Page 6

  He was too much for her: he was usually in the end too much for her. Before his first stay at the Scrubs he had held a number of positions as manservant and even butler: the way he raised his eyebrows he had learned from Lord Charles Manville: he wore his clothes like an eccentric peer, and you might say that he had even learned the best way to pilfer from old Lord Bellen who had a penchant for silver spoons.

  ‘And now, my dear, if you’d just let me have my letter?’ He put his hand tentatively forward: he was as daunted by her as she was by him: they sparred endlessly and lost to each other; interminably the battle was never won – they were always afraid. This time it was his victory. She slammed the door. Suddenly, ferociously, when the door had closed, he made a little vulgar noise at the aspidistra. Then he put on his glasses and began to read.

  His son had been accepted for St Ambrose’s, Oxford. The great fact stared up at him above the sprawling decorative signature of the President. Never had he been more thankful for the coincidence of his name. ‘It will be my great pleasure,’ the President wrote, ‘to pay personal attention to your son’s career at St Ambrose’s. In these days it is an honour to welcome a member of a great military family like yours.’ Driver felt an odd mixture of amusement and of genuine pride. He’d put one over on them, but his breast swelled within his waistcoat at the idea that now he had a son at Oxford.

  But there were two snags – minor snags when he considered how far he’d got already. It was apparently an old Oxford custom that fees should be paid in advance, and then there were the examinations. His son couldn’t do them himself: Borstal would not allow it, and he wouldn’t be out for another six months. Besides the whole beauty of the idea was that he should receive the gift of an Oxford degree as a kind of welcome home. Like a chess player who is always several moves ahead he was already seeing his way around these difficulties.

  The fees he felt sure in his case were only a matter of bluff: a peer could always get credit, and if there was any trouble after the degree had been awarded, he could just tell them to sue and be damned. No Oxford college would like to admit that it had been imposed on by an old lag. But the examinations? A funny little knowing smile twitched the corners of his mouth: a memory of the Scrubs five years ago and the man they called Daddy, the Reverend Simon Milan. He was a short time prisoner – they were all short time prisoners at the Scrubs: no sentence of over three years was ever served there. He remembered the tall lean aristocratic parson with his iron-grey hair and his narrow face like a lawyer’s which had gone somehow soft inside with too much love. A prison, when you came to think of it, contained as much knowledge as a University: there were doctors, financiers, clergy. He knew where he could find Mr Milan: he was employed in a boarding-house near Euston Square, and for a few drinks he would do most things – he would certainly make out some fine examination papers. ‘I can just hear him now,’ Driver reminded himself ecstatically, ‘talking Latin to the warders.’

  3

  It was autumn in Oxford: people coughed in the long queues for sweets and cakes, and the mists from the river seeped into the cinemas past the commissionaires on the look-out for people without gas-masks. A few undergraduates picked their way through the evacuated swarm; they always looked in a hurry: so much had to be got through in so little time before the army claimed them. There were lots of pickings for racketeers, Elisabeth Cross thought, but not much of a chance for a girl to find a husband: the oldest Oxford racket had been elbowed out by the black markets in Woodbines, toffees, tomatoes.

  There had been a few days last spring when she had treated St Ambrose’s as a joke, but when she saw the money actually coming in, the whole thing seemed less amusing. Then for some weeks she was acutely unhappy – until she realized that of all the war-time rackets this was the most harmless. They were not reducing supplies like the Ministry of Food, or destroying confidence like the Ministry of Information: her uncle paid income tax, and they even to some extent educated people. The suckers, when they took their diploma-degrees, would know several things they hadn’t known before.

  But that didn’t help a girl to find a husband.

  She came moodily out of the matinée, carrying a bunch of papers she should have been correcting. There was only one ‘student’ who showed any intelligence at all, and that was Lord Driver’s son. The papers were forwarded from ‘somewhere in England’ via London by his father; she had nearly found herself caught out several times on points of history, and her uncle she knew was straining his rusty Latin to the limit.

  When she got home she knew that there was something in the air: Mr Priskett was sitting in his white coat on the edge of a chair and her uncle was finishing a stale bottle of beer. When something went wrong he never opened a new bottle: he believed in happy drinking. They watched her in silence. Mr Priskett’s silence was gloomy, her uncle’s preoccupied. Something had to be got round – it couldn’t be the university authorities: they had stopped bothering him long ago – a lawyer’s letter, an irascible interview, and their attempt to maintain ‘a monopoly of local education’ – as Mr Fennick put it – had ceased.

  ‘Good evening,’ Elisabeth said. Mr Priskett looked at Mr Fennick and Mr Fennick frowned.

  ‘Has Mr Priskett run out of pills?’

  Mr Priskett winced.

  ‘I’ve been thinking,’ Elisabeth said, ‘that as we are now in the third term of the academic year, I should like a rise in salary.’

  Mr Priskett drew in his breath sharply, keeping his eyes on Mr Fennick.

  ‘I should like another three pounds a week.’

  Mr Fennick rose from his table; he glared ferociously into the top of his dark ale, his frown beetled. The chemist scraped his chair a little backward. And then Mr Fennick spoke.

  ‘We are such stuff as dreams are made on,’ he said and hiccupped slightly.

  ‘Kidneys,’ Elisabeth said.

  ‘Rounded by a sleep. And these our cloud-capped towers . . .’

  ‘You are misquoting.’

  ‘Vanished into air, into thin air.’

  ‘You’ve been correcting the English papers.’

  ‘Unless you allow me to think, to think rapidly and deeply, there won’t be any more examination papers,’ Mr Fennick said.

  ‘Trouble?’

  ‘I’ve always been a Republican at heart. I don’t see why we want a hereditary peerage.’

  ‘À la lanterne,’ Elisabeth said.

  ‘This man Lord Driver: why should a mere accident of birth . . .?’

  ‘He refuses to pay?’

  ‘It isn’t that. A man like that expects credit: it’s right that he should have credit. But he’s written to say that he’s coming down tomorrow to see his boy’s college. The old fat-headed sentimental fool,’ Mr Fennick said.

  ‘I knew you’d be in trouble sooner or later.’

  ‘That’s the sort of damn fool comfortless thing a girl would say.’

  ‘It just needs brain.’

  Mr Fennick picked up a brass ash-tray – and then put it down again carefully.

  ‘It’s quite simple as soon as you begin to think.’

  ‘Think?’

  Mr Priskett scraped a chair-leg.

  ‘I’ll meet him at the station with a taxi, and take him to – say Balliol. Lead him straight through into the inner quad, and there you’ll be, just looking as if you’d come out of the Master’s lodging.’

  ‘He’ll know it’s Balliol.’

  ‘He won’t. Anybody who knew Oxford couldn’t be stupid enough to send his son to St Ambrose’s.’

  ‘Of course it’s true. These military families are a bit crass.’

  ‘You’ll be in an enormous hurry. Convocation or something. Whip him round the Hall, the Chapel, the Library, and hand him back to me outside the Master’s. I’ll take him out to lunch and see him into his train. It’s simple.’

  Mr Fennick said broodingly, ‘Sometimes I think you’re a terrible girl, terrible. Is there nothing you wouldn’t think up?’
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  ‘I believe,’ Elisabeth said, ‘that if you’re going to play your own game in a world like this, you’ve got to play it properly. Of course,’ she said, ‘if you are going to play a different game, you go to a nunnery or to the wall and like it. But I’ve only got one game to play.’

  4

  It really went off very smoothly. Driver found Elisabeth at the barrier: she didn’t find him because she was expecting something different. Something about him worried her; it wasn’t his clothes or the monocle he never seemed to use – it was something subtler than that. It was almost as though he were afraid of her, he was so ready to fall in with her plans. ‘I don’t want to be any trouble, my dear, any trouble at all. I know how busy the President must be.’ When she explained that they would be lunching together in town, he even seemed relieved. ‘It’s just the bricks of the dear old place,’ he said. ‘You mustn’t mind my being a sentimentalist, my dear.’

  ‘Were you at Oxford?’

  ‘No, no. The Drivers, I’m afraid, have neglected the things of the mind.’

  ‘Well, I suppose a soldier needs brains?’

  He took a sharp look at her, and then answered in quite a different sort of voice, ‘We believed so in the Lancers.’ Then he strolled beside her to the taxi, twirling his monocle, and all the way up from the station he was silent, taking little quiet sideways peeks at her, appraising, approving.

  ‘So this is St Ambrose’s,’ he said in a hearty voice just before the porter’s lodge and she pushed him quickly by, through the first quad, towards the Master’s house, where on the doorstep with a B.A. gown over his arm stood Mr Fennick permanently posed like a piece of garden statuary. ‘My uncle, the President,’ Elisabeth said.

  ‘A charming girl, your niece,’ Driver said as soon as they were alone together. He had really only meant to make conversation, but as soon as he had spoken the old two crooked minds began to move in harmony.

  ‘She’s very home-loving,’ Mr Fennick said. ‘Our famous elms,’ he went on, waving his hand skywards. ‘St Ambrose’s rooks.’

  ‘Crooks?’ Driver exclaimed.

  ‘Rooks. In the elms. One of our great modern poets wrote about them. “St Ambrose elms, oh St Ambrose elms”, and about “St Ambrose rooks calling in wind and rain”.’

  ‘Pretty. Very pretty.’

  ‘Nicely turned, I think.’

  ‘I meant your niece.’

  ‘Ah, yes. This way to the Hall. Up these steps. So often trodden, you know, by Tom Brown.’

  ‘Who was Tom Brown?’

  ‘The great Tom Brown – one of Rugby’s famous sons.’ He added thoughtfully, ‘She’ll make a fine wife – and mother.’

  ‘Young men are beginning to realize that the flighty ones are not what they want for a lifetime.’

  They stopped by mutual consent on the top step: they nosed towards each other like two old blind sharks who each believes that what stirs the water close to him is tasty meat.

  ‘Whoever wins her,’ Mr Fennick said, ‘can feel proud. She’ll make a fine hostess . . .’

  ‘I and my son,’ Driver said, ‘have talked seriously about marriage. He takes rather an old-fashioned view. He’ll make a good husband . . .’

  They walked into the hall, and Mr Fennick led the way round the portraits. ‘Our founder,’ he said, pointing at a full-bottomed wig. He chose it deliberately: he felt it smacked a little of himself. Before Swinburne’s portrait he hesitated: then pride in St Ambrose’s conquered caution. ‘The great poet Swinburne,’ he said. ‘We sent him down.’

  ‘Expelled him?’

  ‘Yes. Bad morals.’

  ‘I’m glad you are strict about those.’

  ‘Ah, your son is in safe hands at St Amb’s.’

  ‘It makes me very happy,’ Driver said. He began to scrutinize the portrait of a nineteenth-century divine. ‘Fine brushwork,’ he said. ‘Now religion – I believe in religion. Basis of the family.’ He said with a burst of confidence. ‘You know our young people ought to meet.’

  Mr Fennick gleamed happily. ‘I agree.’

  ‘If he passes . . .’

  ‘Oh, he’ll certainly pass,’ Mr Fennick said.

  ‘He’ll be on leave in a week or two. Why shouldn’t he take his degree in person?’

  ‘Well, there’d be difficulties.’

  ‘Isn’t it the custom?’

  ‘Not for postal graduates. The Vice-Chancellor likes to make a small distinction . . . but Lord Driver, in the case of so distinguished an alumnus, I suggest that I should be deputed to present the degree to your son in London.’

  ‘I’d like him to see his college.’

  ‘And so he shall in happier days. So much of the college is shut now. I would like him to visit it for the first time when its glory is restored. Allow me and my niece to call on you.’

  ‘We are living very quietly.’

  ‘Not serious financial trouble, I hope?’

  ‘Oh, no, no.’

  ‘I’m so glad. And now let us rejoin the dear girl.’

  5

  It always seemed to be more convenient to meet at railway stations. The coincidence didn’t strike Mr Fennick who had fortified himself for the journey with a good deal of audit ale, but it struck Elisabeth. The college lately had not been fulfilling expectations, and that was partly due to the laziness of Mr Fennick: from his conversation lately it almost seemed as though he had begun to regard the college as only a step to something else – what she couldn’t quite make out. He was always talking about Lord Driver and his son Frederick and the responsibilities of the peerage. His Republican tendencies had quite lapsed. ‘That dear boy,’ was the way he referred to Frederick, and he marked him 100% for Classics. ‘It’s not often Latin and Greek go with military genius,’ he said. ‘A remarkable boy.’

  ‘He’s not so hot on economics,’ Elisabeth said.

  ‘We mustn’t demand too much book-learning from a soldier.’

  At Paddington Lord Driver waved anxiously to them through the crowd; he wore a very new suit – one shudders to think how many coupons had been gambled away for the occasion. A little behind him was a very young man with a sullen mouth and a scar on his cheek. Mr Fennick bustled forward; he wore a black raincoat over his shoulder like a cape and carrying his hat in his hand he disclosed his white hair venerably among the porters.

  ‘My son – Frederick,’ Lord Driver said. The boy sullenly took off his hat and put it on again quickly: they wore their hair in the army very short.

  ‘St Ambrose’s welcomes her new graduate,’ Mr Fennick said.

  Frederick grunted.

  The presentation of the degree was made in a private room at Mount Royal. Lord Driver explained that his house had been bombed – a time bomb, he added, a rather necessary explanation since there had been no raids recently. Mr Fennick was satisfied if Lord Driver was. He had brought up a B.A. gown, a mortar-board and a Bible in his suitcase, and he made quite an imposing little ceremony between the book-table, the sofa and the radiator, reading out a Latin oration and tapping Frederick lightly on the head with the Bible. The degree-diploma had been expensively printed in two colours by an Anglo-Catholic firm. Elisabeth was the only uneasy person there. Could the world, she wondered, really contain two such suckers? What was this painful feeling growing up in her that perhaps it contained four?

  After a little light lunch with bottled brown beer – ‘almost as good, if I may say so, as our audit ale,’ Mr Fennick beamed – the President and Lord Driver made elaborate moves to drive the two young people together. ‘We’ve got to talk a little business,’ Mr Fennick said, and Lord Driver hinted, ‘You’ve not been to the movies for a year, Frederick.’ They were driven out together into bombed shabby Oxford Street while the old men rang cheerfully down for whisky.

  ‘What’s the idea?’ Elisabeth said.

  He was good-looking; she liked his scar and his sullenness; there was almost too much intelligence and purpose in his eyes. Once he took off his hat and scratch
ed his head: Elisabeth again noticed his short hair. He certainly didn’t look a military type. And his suit, like his father’s, looked new and ready-made. Hadn’t he had any clothes to wear when he came on leave?

  ‘I suppose,’ she said, ‘they are planning a wedding.’

  His eyes lit gleefully up. ‘I wouldn’t mind,’ he said.

  ‘You’d have to get leave from your C.O., wouldn’t you?’

  ‘C.O.?’ he asked in astonishment, flinching a little like a boy who has been caught out, who hasn’t been prepared beforehand with that question. She watched him carefully, remembering all the things that had seemed to her odd since the beginning.

  ‘So you haven’t been to the movies for a year,’ she said.

  ‘I’ve been on service.’

  ‘Not even an Ensa show?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t count those.’

  ‘It must be awfully like being in prison.’

  He grinned weakly, walking faster all the time, so that she might easily have been pursuing him through the Hyde Park gates.

  ‘Come clean,’ she said. ‘Your father’s not Lord Driver.’

  ‘Oh yes, he is.’

  ‘Any more than my uncle’s President of a College.’

  ‘What?’ He began to laugh – it was an agreeable laugh, a laugh you couldn’t trust but a laugh which made you laugh back and agree that in a crazy world like this all sorts of things didn’t matter a hang. ‘I’m just out of Borstal,’ he said. ‘What’s yours?’

  ‘Oh, I haven’t been in prison yet.’

  He said, ‘You’ll never believe me, but all that ceremony – it looked phoney to me. Of course Dad swallowed it.’

  ‘And my uncle swallowed you . . . I couldn’t quite.’

  ‘Well, the wedding’s off. In a way I’m sorry.’

  ‘I’m still free.’

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘we might discuss it,’ and there in the pale Autumn sunlight of the Park they did discuss it – from all sorts of angles. There were bigger frauds all round them: officials of the Ministries passed carrying little portfolios; controllers of this and that purred by in motor-cars, and men with the big blank faces of advertisement hoardings strode purposefully in khaki with scarlet tabs down Park Lane from the Dorchester. Their fraud was a small one by the world’s standard, and a harmless one: the boy from Borstal and the girl from nowhere at all – from the draper’s counter and the semi-detached villa. ‘He’s got a few hundred stowed away, I’m sure of that,’ said Fred. ‘He’d make a settlement if he thought he could get the President’s niece.’