A Question of Upbringing (25 page)

‘Do you think you will persuade her?’

‘I’m going to rope in Sillery.’

‘Take her to see him?’

‘Have him to lunch. Will you come and play for my side?’

‘I can’t play for your side, if I don’t want you to go down.’

‘Well, just keep the ring then.’

This was about the stage when I began to become dimly conscious of what Short was trying to convey when he spoke of Sillery’s influence, and his intrigues; although, as far as it went, a parent’s discussion of her son’s future with a don still seemed natural enough. Sillery, I thought, was like Tiresias: for, although predominantly male, for example, in outward appearance, he seemed to have the seer’s power of assuming female character if required. With Truscott, for instance, he would behave like an affectionate aunt; while his perennial quarrel with Brightman—to take another instance of his activities—was often conducted with a mixture of bluntness and self-control that certainly could not be thought at all like a woman’s row with a man: or even with another woman; though, at the same time, it was a dispute that admittedly transcended somehow a difference of opinion between two men. Certainly Sillery had no dislike for the company of women in the way of ordinary
social life, provided they made no personal demands on him. I was anxious to see how he would deal with Mrs. Foxe.

Meanwhile, I continued occasionally to see something of Quiggin, although I came no nearer to deciding which of the various views held about him were true. He was like Widmerpool, as I have said, in his complete absorption in his own activities, and also in his ambition. Unlike Widmerpool, he made no parade of his aspirations, on the contrary, keeping as secret as possible his appetite for getting on in life, so that even when I became aware of the purposeful way in which he set about obtaining what he wanted, I could never be sure where precisely his desires lay. He used to complain of the standard of tutoring, or how few useful lectures were available, and at times he liked to discuss his work in great detail. In fact I thought, at first, that he worked far harder than most of the men I knew. Later I came to doubt this, finding that Quiggin’s work was something to be discussed rather than tackled, and that what he really enjoyed was drinking cups of coffee at odd times of day. He had another characteristic with which I became in due course familiar: he was keen on meeting people he considered important, and surprisingly successful in impressing persons—as he seemed to have impressed Truscott—who might have been reasonably expected to take amiss his manner and appearance.

The subject of Quiggin came up at one of those luncheons that Short, who had a comfortable allowance, gave periodically. Mark Members, in spite of his behaviour on the earlier occasion, was again of the party (because Short regarded him as intellectually ‘sound’); though Brightman was the guest of honour this time. Two undergraduates, called respectively Smethwyck and Humble, were there, and perhaps others. Short was inclined to become sentimental after he had eaten and drunk a fairly large amount in the middle of the day,
and he had remarked: ‘Quiggin must find it hard to make two ends meet up here. He told me his father used to work on the railway line outside some Midland town.’

‘Not a word of truth,’ said Brightman, who was the only don present. ‘Quiggin is in my college. I went into the whole question of his financial position when he came up. He has certainly no less money than the average—probably more with his scholarships.’

‘What
does
his father do then, Harold?’ asked Short, who was quite used to being contradicted by Brightman; and, indeed, by almost everyone else in the university.

‘Deceased.’

‘But what did he do?’

‘A builder—keen on municipal politics. So keen, he nearly landed in jail. He got off on appeal.’

Brightman could not help smiling to himself at the ease with which he could dispose of Short.

‘But he may have worked on the railway line all the same.’

‘The only work Quiggin the Elder ever did on the railway line,’ said Brightman, becoming more assertive at encountering argument, ‘was probably to travel without a ticket.’

‘But that doesn’t prove that his son has got any money,’ said Humble, who did not care for Brightman.

‘He was left a competence,’ Brightman said. ‘Quiggin lives with his mother, who is a town councillor. Isn’t that true, Mark?’

A more vindictive man than Short might have been suspected of having raised the subject of Quiggin primarily to punish Members for his former attack on the strawberries; but Short was far too good-natured ever to have thought of such a revenge. Besides, he would never have considered baiting anyone whom he admired on intellectual grounds.
Brightman, on the other hand, had no such scruples, and he went on to say: ‘Come on, Mark. Let’s hear your account of Quiggin. You are neighbours, according to Sillers.’

Members must have seen that there was no way of avoiding the subject. Shaking his hair out of his eyes, he said: ‘There is a disused railway-siding that was turned into allotments. He probably worked there. It adjoins one of the residential suburbs.’

There was a general laugh at this answer, which was certainly a neat way of settling the questions of both Quiggin and Brightman himself, so far as Members was concerned. Smethwyck began to talk of a play he had seen in London, and conversation took a new course. However, the feelings of self-reproach that contact with Quiggin, or discussions about him, commonly aroused in me were not entirely set at rest by this description of his circumstances. Brightman’s information was notoriously unreliable: and Members’s words had clearly been actuated by personal dislike. The work on the railway line might certainly have been of a comparatively recreational nature: that had to be admitted in the light of Mark Members’s knowledge of the locality; but, even were this delineation of the background true, that would not prevent Quiggin from finding in his life some element chronically painful to him. Even though he might exaggerate to himself, and to others, his lack of means in relation to the financial circumstances of his contemporaries, this in itself pointed to a need for other—and deeply felt—discontents. It was possible that, in the eyes of Quiggin, money represented some element in which he knew himself deficient: rather in the same way that Widmerpool, when he wanted to criticise Stringham, said that he had too much money: no doubt in truth envying the possession of assets that were, in fact, not material ones. It was some similar course of speculation that seemed to give
shape to Quiggin’s character and outward behaviour.

Short’s luncheon took place the day before I was to meet Mrs. Foxe again, and I thought over the question of Quiggin on my way to Stringham’s rooms.

‘This may be rather a ghastly meal,’ Stringham said, while we waited for his mother, and Sillery, to arrive.

Sillery appeared first. He had cleaned himself up a little for the occasion, trimmed his moustache at the corners, and exchanged his usual blue bow for a black silk tie with white spots. Stringham offered him sherry, which was refused. Like many persons more interested in power than sensual enjoyment, Sillery touched no strong drink. Prowling about the room for a minute or two, he glanced at the invitations on the mantelpiece: a London dance or two, and some undergraduate parties. He found nothing there that appeared to interest him, because he turned, and, stepping between Stringham and myself, took each of us by an arm, resting his weight slightly.

‘I hear you have been seeing something of Brother Quiggin,’ he said to me.

‘We met at one of Brightman’s lectures, Sillers.’

‘You both go to Brightman’s lectures, do you?’ said Sillery. ‘I hope they are being decently attended.’

‘Moderate.’

‘Mostly women, I fear.’

‘A sprinkling of men.’

‘I heard they were getting quite painfully empty. It’s a pity, because Brightman is such an able fellow. He won golden opinions as a young man,’ said Sillery. ‘But tell me, how do you find Brother Quiggin?’

I hardly knew what to say. However, Sillery seemed to require no answer. He said: ‘Brother Quiggin is an able young man, too. We must not forget that.’

Stringham did not seem much in the mood for Sillery.
He moved away towards the window. A gramophone was playing in the rooms above. Outside, the weather was hot and rather stuffy.

‘I hope my mother is not going to be really desperately late,’ he said.

We waited. Sillery began to describe a walking tour he had once taken in Sicily with two friends, one of whom had risen to be Postmaster-General: the other, dead in his twenties, having shown promise of even higher things. He was in the middle of an anecdote about an amusing experience they had had with a German professor in a church at Syracuse, when there was a step on the stairs outside. Stringham went to the door, and out on to the landing. I heard him say: ‘Why, hullo, Tuffy. Only you?’

Miss Weedon’s reply was not audible within the room. She came in a moment later, looking much the same as when I had seen her in London. Stringham followed. ‘My mother is awfully sorry, Sillers, but she could not get away at the last moment,’ he said. ‘Miss Weedon very sweetly motored all the way here, in order that we should not have a vacant place at the table.’

Sillery did not take this news at all well. There could be no doubt that he was deeply disappointed at Mrs. Foxe’s defection; and that he did not feel Miss Weedon to be, in any way, an adequate substitute for Stringham’s mother. We settled down to a meal that showed no outward prospect of being particularly enjoyable. Stringham himself did not appear in the least surprised at this miscarriage of plans. He was evidently pleased to see Miss Weedon, who, of the two of them, seemed the more worried that a discussion regarding Stringham’s future would have to be postponed. Sillery decided that the first step was to establish his own position in Miss Weedon’s eyes before, as he no doubt intended, exploring her own possibilities for exploitation.

‘Salmon,’ he remarked. ‘Always makes me think of Mr. Gladstone.’

‘Have some, all the same,’ said Stringham. ‘I hope it’s fresh.’

‘Did you arrange all this lunch yourself?’ asked Miss Weedon, before Sillery could proceed further with his story. ‘How wonderful of you. You know your mother was really distressed that she couldn’t come.’

‘The boys were at choir-practice when I passed this way,’ said Sillery, determined that he should enter the conversation on his own terms. ‘They were trying over that bit from
The Messiah’
—he hummed distantly, and beat time with his fork—’you know, those children’s voices made me mighty sad.’

‘Charles used to have a nice voice, didn’t you?’ said Miss Weedon: plainly more as a tribute to Stringham’s completeness of personality, rather than because the matter could be thought to be of any great musical interest.

‘I really might have earned my living that way, if it hadn’t broken,’ said Stringham. ‘I should especially have enjoyed singing in the street. Perhaps I shall come to it yet.’

‘There’s been a terrible to-do about the way you earn your living,’ said Miss Weedon. ‘Buster doesn’t at all like the idea of your living in London.’

Sillery showed interest in this remark, in spite of his evident dissatisfaction at the manner in which Miss Weedon treated him. He seemed unable to decide upon her precise status in the household: which was, indeed, one not easy to assess. It was equally hard to guess what she knew, or thought, of Sillery; whether she appreciated the extent of his experience in such situations as that which had arisen in regard to Stringham. Sitting opposite him, she seemed to have become firmer and more masculine; while Sillery himself, more than ever, took the shape of a wizard or shaman,
equipped to resist either man or woman from a bisexual vantage.

This ineffective situation might have continued throughout Miss Weedon’s visit, if Moffet—about whom a word should be said—had not handed Stringham a telegram, when he brought the next course. Moffet, a tall, gloomy man, on account of his general demeanour, which was certainly oppressive enough, had in some degree contributed to Stringham’s dislike for university life. Stringham used to call Moffet ‘the murderer’, not on account of anything outwardly disreputable in his appearance, which might have been that of some ecclesiastical dignitary, but because of what Stringham named ‘the cold cruelty of Moffet’s eye’. If Moffet decided, for one reason or another, that an undergraduate on his staircase was worth cultivating, there was something sacerdotal about the precision with which he never left him free from attentions; as if the victim must be converted, come what may, to Moffet’s doctrines. Moffet had at first sight made up his mind that Stringham was one to be brought under his sway.

One of Moffet’s tenets was in connexion with the manner in which Stringham arranged several ivory elephants along the top of his mantelpiece. Stringham liked the elephants to follow each other in column: Moffet preferred them to face the room in line. I had been present, on one occasion, when Moffet, having just finished ‘doing the room’, had disappeared from it. Stringham walked over to the fire-place, where the elephants stood with their trunks in line, and turned them sideways. As he completed this rearrangement, Moffet came in once more through the door. Stringham had the last elephant in his hand. Moffet stared across at him forbiddingly.

‘I am afraid I do not arrange ornaments very well, sir,’ said Moffet.

‘Just a whim of mine regarding elephants.’

‘I will try to remember, sir,’ said Moffet. ‘They take a powerful lot of dusting.’

He retired again, adding: ‘Thank you, sir,’ as he closed the door. The incident disturbed Stringham. ‘Now I shall have to go down,’ he said.

However, Moffet was in an excellent mood at having an opportunity to wait on Sillery, of whom, for some reason, he approved more than of most dons. He brought in the telegram with a flourish. The message was from Stringham’s mother: she would be arriving, after all: Buster was driving her down. At this, Sillery cheered up at once; and Miss Weedon, too, saw hope that negotiations might now take place. Stringham himself seemed as indifferent as before.