A Question of Upbringing (20 page)

Having seen other guests depart from La Grenadière, I knew that the entire household was accustomed to gather round, saying good-bye, and waiting to watch the taxi slide precipitously down the hill. If the question were to arise, for example, of kissing anyone good-bye, it was clear that there might be imminent risk of having to kiss—if such a hypothetical case as kissing were to be considered at all—the whole of the rest of the party gathered together at the door in the wall. Certainly, it might be safely assumed that nothing of the sort would be expected by anyone
so
anglicised as Monsieur Dubuisson: but I was not at all sure what French etiquette might prescribe in the case of guest and host: though suspecting that anything of the sort was, in general, limited to investitures. It was equally possible that any such comparatively intimate gesture might be regarded as far more compromising in France than in England; and, quite apart from any embarrassing, or unacceptable, situations that might be precipitated if kissing were to become general at my departure from La Grenadière, any hope of making a special impression on Suzette would undoubtedly be lost by collective recourse to this manner of saying good-bye: however pleasant in Suzette’s individual case such a leave-taking might be. Some plan was, therefore, required if a hasty decision was to be avoided.

Accordingly, I finished packing early upon the day I was to return to England, and went downstairs to survey the house and garden. The hot weather had continued throughout my stay, and the sun was already beating down on the lawn, where no one except Dr. Szczepanowski was to be seen. I noticed that Suzette’s big straw sun-bonnet was gone from the hall, where she was accustomed to leave it on the console table. Bum had once found it there, carrying the hat into the garden and gnawing away some of the brim. Dr. Szczepanowski was writing letters, and he smiled in a friendly manner. Jean-Népomucène at one of the tables appeared a moment later, and requested help in mending an electric torch, as Dr. Szczepanowski was skilled in such matters. Both of them retired to the house to find suitable implements to employ in making the repairs. There was just a chance that Suzette might be sitting in the summer-house, where she occasionally spent some of the morning reading.

I crossed the grass quickly, and went under the arch, preparing to withdraw if Monsieur Dubuisson should turn out to be settled there with his pipe. The excitement of seeing Suzette’s straw bonnet was out of all proportion to the undecided nature of my project. She was sitting half-turned from the entrance, and, judging that, if I lost time in talk, I might be manæuvred into a position of formality which could impose insuperable restraint, I muttered that I had come to say good-bye, and took her hand, which, because her arm was stretched along the back of the seat, lay near me. As she turned, I immediately realised that the hand was, in fact, Madame Dubuisson’s, who, as she left the house, must have taken up Suzette’s straw hat to shield her eyes while she crossed the garden.

It was now too late to retreat. I had prepared a few sentences to express my feelings, and I was already half-way
through one of them. Having made the mistake, there was nothing for it but to behave as if it were indeed Madame Dubuisson who had made my visit to La Grenadière seem so romantic. Taking her other hand, I quickly used up the remaining phrases that I had rehearsed so often for Suzette.

The only redeeming feature of the whole business was that Madame Dubuisson herself gave not the smallest sign of being in the least surprised. I cannot remember in what words she answered my halting assurance that her presence at La Grenadière would remain for me by far its sweetest memory; but I know that her reply was entirely adequate: indeed so well rounded that it seemed to have been made use of on a number of earlier occasions when she must have found herself in somewhat similar circumstances. She was small and round and, I decided, really not at all bad-looking. Her contribution to the situation I had induced was, at least from my own point of view, absolutely suitable. She may even have allowed me to kiss her on the cheek, though I could not swear to this. She asked me to send her a picture of Buckingham Palace when I returned to England.

This scene, although taking up only a few minutes, exhausted a good deal of nervous energy. I recognised that there could now be no question of repeating anything of the same sort with Suzette herself, even if opportunity were to present itself in the short time left to me. That particular card had been played, and the curious thing was that its effect had been to provide some genuine form of emotional release. It was almost as if Madame Dubuisson had, indeed, been the focus of my interest while I had been at La Grenadière. I began to feel quite warmly towards her, largely on the strength of the sentiments I had, as it were, automatically expressed. When the time came to say good-bye, hands were shaken all round. Suzette gave mine a
little extra squeeze, after relaxing the first grip. I felt that this small attention was perhaps more than I deserved. The passage with Madame Dubuisson seemed at any rate a slight advance in the right direction when I thought things over in the train. It was nearly Christmas before I found the postcard of Buckingham Palace, which perhaps never reached her, as the Dubuissons must, by then, have moved on from La Grenadière.

P
ROLONGED
, lugubrious stretches of Sunday afternoon in a university town could be mitigated by attending Sillery’s tea-parties, to which anyone might drop in after half-past three. Action of some law of averages always regulated numbers at these gatherings to something between four and eight persons, mostly undergraduates, though an occasional don was not unknown. Towards the middle of my first term I was introduced to them by Short, who was at Sillery’s college, a mild second-year man, with political interests. Short explained that Sillery’s parties had for years played an established role in the life of the university; and that the staleness of the rock-buns, which formed a cardinal element of these at-homes, had become so hackneyed a subject for academical humour that even Sillery himself would sometimes refer to the perennially unpalatable essence of these fossils salvaged from some forgotten cake-world. At such moments Sillery would remind his guests of waggish or whimsical remarks passed on the topic of the rock-buns by an earlier generation of young men who had taken tea with him in bygone days: quoting in especial the galaxy of former undergraduate acquaintances who had risen to some eminence in later life, a class he held in unconcealed esteem.

Loitering about the college in aged sack-like clothes and Turkish slippers, his snow white hair worn longer than that of most of his colleagues, Sillery could lay claim to a venerable appearance: though his ragged, Old Bill
moustache (which, he used laughingly to mention, had once been compared with Nietszche’s) was still dark. He was, indeed, no more than entering into his middle fifties: merely happening to find convenient a facade of comparative senility. At the beginning of the century he had published a book called
City State and State of City
which had achieved some slight success at a time when works popularising political science and economic theory were beginning to sell; but he was not ambitious to make his mark as an author. In fact one or two of his pupils used to complain that they did not receive even adequate tuition to get them through the schools at anything but the lowest level. This was probably an unjust charge, because Sillery was not a man to put himself easily in the wrong. In any case, circumstances had equipped him with such dazzling opportunity for pursuing his preponderant activity of interfering in other people’s business that only those who failed to grasp the extent of his potentiality in his own chosen sphere would expect—or desire—him to concentrate on a pedestrian round of tutorial duties.

Before my first visit, Short described some of this background with care; and he seemed to feel certain qualms of conscience regarding what he termed ‘Sillers’s
snobisme’.
He explained that it was natural enough that Sillery should enjoy emphasising the fact that he numbered among his friends and former pupils a great many successful people; and I fully accepted this plea. Short, however, was unwilling to encounter too ready agreement on this point, and he insisted that ‘all the same’ Sillery would have been ‘a sounder man’—sounder, at any rate, politically—if he had made a greater effort to resist, or at least conceal, this temptation to admire worldly success overmuch. Short himself was devoted to politics, a subject in which I took little or no interest, and his keenest ambition was to become
a Member of Parliament. Like a number of young men of that period, he was a Liberal, though to which of the various brands of Liberalism, then rent by schism, he belonged, I can no longer remember. It was this Liberal enthusiasm which had first linked him with Sillery, who had been on terms with Asquith, and who liked to keep an eye on a political party in which he had perhaps once himself placed hopes of advancement. Short also informed me that Sillery was a keen propagandist for the League of Nations, Czechoslovakia, and Mr. Gandhi, and that he had been somewhat diverted from earlier Gladstonian enthusiasms by the success of the Russian Revolution of 1917.

Short had taken me to Sillery’s two or three times before I found myself—almost against my own inclination—dropping in there on Sunday afternoon. At first I was disposed to look on Sillery merely as a kind of glorified schoolmaster—a more easy going and amenable Le Bas—who took out the boys in turn to explore their individual characteristics to know better how to instruct them. This was a manner of regarding Sillery’s entertaining so crude as to be positively misleading. He certainly wanted to find out what the boys were like: but not because he was a glorified schoolmaster. His understanding of human nature, coarse, though immensely serviceable, and his unusual ingenuity of mind were both employed ceaselessly in discovering undergraduate connexions which might be of use to him; so that from what he liked to call ‘my backwater’—the untidy room, furnished, as he would remark, like a boarding-house parlour—he sometimes found himself able to exercise a respectable modicum of influence in a larger world. That, at least, was how things must have appeared to Sillery himself, and in such activities his spirit was concentrated.

Clay, for example, was the son of a consul in the Levant. Sillery arranged a little affair through Clay which caused
inconvenience, minor but of a most irritating kind, to Brightman, a fellow don unsympathetic to him, at that time engaged in archæological digging on a site in the Near East. Lakin, outwardly a dull, even unattractive young man, was revealed as being related through his mother to an important Trade Union official. Sillery discovered this relative—a find that showed something like genius—and managed to pull unexpected, though probably not greatly important, strings when the General Strike came in 1926. Rajagopalaswami’s uncle, noted for the violence of his anti-British sentiments, was in a position to control the appointment of a tutor to one of the Ruling Princes; Sillery’s nominee got the place. Dwight Wideman’s aunt was a powerful influence in the women’s clubs in America: a successful campaign was inaugurated to ban the American edition of a novel by an author Sillery disliked. Flannigan-Fitzgerald’s brother was a papal chamberlain: the Derwentwater annulment went through without a hitch. These, at least, were the things that people said; and the list of accessories could be prolonged with almost endless instances. All were swept into Sillery’s net, and the undergraduate had to be obscure indeed to find no place there. Young peers and heirs to fortune were not, of course, unwelcome; though such specimens as these—for whose friendship competition was already keen—were usually brought into the circle through the offices of secondary agents rather than by the direct approach of Sillery himself, who was aware that in a society showing signs of transition it was essential to keep an eye on the changing focus of power. All the same, if he was known to incline, on the whole, to the Right socially, politically he veered increasingly to the Left.

In the course of time I found that much difference of opinion existed as to the practical outcome of Sillery’s
scheming, and I have merely presented the picture as first displayed to me through the eyes of Short. To Short, Sillery was a mysterious, politically-minded cardinal of the academical world, ‘never taking his tea without an intrigue’ (that was the phrase Short quoted); forever plotting behind the arras. Others, of course, thought differently, some saying that the Sillery legend was based on a kind of kaleidoscope of muddled information, collected in Sillery’s almost crazed brain, that his boasted powers had no basis whatever in reality: others again said that Sillery certainly knew a great number of people and passed round a lot of gossip, which in itself gave him some claim to consideration as a comparatively influential person, though only a subordinate one. Sillery had his enemies, naturally, always anxious to denigrate his life’s work, and assert that he was nothing more than a figure of fun; and there was probably something to be said at least for the contention that Sillery himself somewhat exaggerated the effectiveness of his own activities. In short, Sillery’s standing remained largely a matter of opinion; though there could be no doubt about his turning out to be an important factor in shaping Stringham’s career at the university.

Stringham had been due to come into residence the same term as myself, but he was thrown from a horse a day or two before his intended return to England, and consequently laid up for several months. As a result of this accident, he did not appear at his college until the summer, when he took against the place at once. He could scarcely be persuaded to visit other undergraduates, except one or two that he had known at school, and he used to spend hours together sitting in his room, reading detective stories, and complaining that he was bored. He had been given a small car by his mother and we would sometimes drive
round the country together, looking at churches or visiting pubs.

On the whole he had enjoyed Kenya. When I told him about Peter Templer and Gwen McReith—an anecdote that seemed to me of outstanding significance—he said: ‘Oh, well, that sort of thing is not as difficult as all that,’ and he proceeded to describe a somewhat similar incident, in which, after a party, he had spent the night with the divorced wife of a coffee planter in Nairobi. In spite of Madame Dubuisson, this story made me feel very inexperienced. I described Suzette to him, but did not mention Jean Templer.

‘There is absolutely nothing in it,’ Stringham said. ‘It is just a question of keeping one’s head.’

He was more interested in what I had to report about Widmerpool, laughing a lot over Widmerpool’s horror on hearing the whole truth of Le Bas’s arrest. The narrative of the Scandinavians’ quarrel struck him only on account of the oddness of the tennis-court on which we had been playing the set. This surprised me, because the incident had seemed of the kind to appeal to him. He had, however, changed a little in the year or more that had passed since I had seen him; and, although the artificial categories of school life were now removed, I felt for the first time that the few months between us made him appreciably older than myself. There was also the question of money—perhaps suggested by Widmerpool’s talk on that subject—that mysterious entity, of which one had heard so much and so often without grasping more than that its ownership was desirable and its lack inconvenient: heard of, certainly, without appreciating that its possession can become as much part of someone as the nose on the face. Even Uncle Giles’s untiring contortions before the altar of the Trust, when considered in this light, now began to
appear less grotesque than formerly; and I realised at last, with great clearness, that a sum like one hundred and eighty pounds a year might indeed be worth the pains of prolonged and acrimonious negotiation. Stringham was, in fact, not substantially richer than most undergraduates of his sort, and, being decidedly free with his money, was usually hard-up, but from the foothills of his background was, now and then, wafted the disturbing, aromatic perfume of gold, the scent which, even at this early stage in our lives, could sometimes be observed to act intoxicatingly on chance acquaintances; whose unexpected perseverance, and determination not to take offence, were a reminder that Stringham’s mother was what Widmerpool had described as ‘immensely wealthy’.

Peter Templer, as I have said, rarely wrote letters, so that we had, to some extent, lost touch with him. Left to himself there could be little doubt that he would, in Stringham’s phrase, ‘relapse into primeval barbarism’. Stringham often spoke of him, and used to talk, almost with regret, of the adventures they had shared at school: already, as it were, beginning to live in the past. Some inward metamorphosis was no doubt the cause of Stringham’s melancholia, because his attacks of gloom, although qualified by fairly frequent outbursts of high spirits, could almost be given that name. There was never a moment when he became reconciled to the life going on round him. ‘The buildings are nice,’ he used to say. ‘But not the undergraduates.’

‘What do you expect undergraduates to be like?’

‘Keep bull-pups and drink brandies-and-soda. They won’t do as they are.’

‘Your sort sound even worse.’

‘Anyway, what can one do here? I am seriously thinking of running away and joining the Foreign Legion or the
North-West Mounted Police—whichever work the shorter hours.’

‘It is the climate.’

‘One feels awful if one drinks, and worse if one’s sober. I knew Buster’s picture of the jolly old varsity was not to be trusted. After all he never tried it himself.’

‘How is he?’

‘Doing his best to persuade my mother to let Glimber to an Armenian,’ said Stringham, and speaking with perhaps slightly more seriousness: ‘You know, Tuffy was very much against my coming up.’

‘What on earth did it have to do with her?’

‘She takes a friendly interest in me,’ said Stringham. laughing. ‘She behaved rather well when I was in Kenya as a matter of fact. Used to send me books, and odds and ends of gossip, and all that sort of thing. One appreciates that in the wide open spaces. She is not a bad old girl. Many worse.’

He was always a trifle on the defensive about Miss Weedon. I had begun to understand that his life at home was subject to exterior forces like Buster’s disapproval, or Miss Weedon’s regard, which brought elements of uncertainty and discord into his family life, not only accepted by him, but almost enjoyed. He went on: ‘There has been talk of my staying here only a couple of years and going into the Foot Guards. You know there is some sort of arrangement now for entering the army through the university. That was really my mother’s idea.’

‘What does Miss Weedon think?’

‘She favours coming to London and having a good time. I am rather with her there. The Household Cavalry has been suggested, too. One is said—for some reason—to “have a good time in The Tins".’

‘And Buster’s view?’

‘He would like me to remain here as long as possible—four years, post-graduate course, research fellowship, anything so long as I stay away—since I shattered his dream that I might settle in Kenya.’

It was after one of these conversations in which he had complained of the uneventfulness of his day that I suggested that we should drop in on Sillery.