A Family Affair Page 18

  ‘Which is quite something. I suppose it was your boy who told you about our dubious college treasure. Is it he who has thought up this monstrous joke as well?’

  ‘Talk of Bobby’s from time to time may be said to have furnished the materials. I’ve rather done the stringing of them together myself. About this railway-station business, by the way. Has it actually happened in recent times?’

  ‘Recent times? It was essentially a pre-Kaiser’s-War joke, of course. That sort of organized rag has rather gone out.’

  ‘So the Patriarchs were concluding at their last dinner.’

  ‘But it was brought off in a modified form a year or two ago. I don’t recall what college the young man came from, or why he was being sent down. It must have been for some outrageous defiance of authority, or he wouldn’t have been packed off for keeps. On the other hand, it can’t have been for anything decidedly not on, because in that case the other men wouldn’t have played, I imagine. They got hold of a coffin, easily enough. No doubt you can now buy such things in a supermarket, and simply walk out with it. But then they had to make do with somebody’s car, because they couldn’t get hold of a hearse. In the old days, a hearse would have been the prescriptive thing. The tradespeople, of course, were readier to indulge the young gentlemen in their whims.’

  ‘I suppose so. But we must certainly have a hearse, Master. Your influence will be required.’

  ‘Appleby, I am a timid man, and I have misgivings.’

  ‘I don’t believe it. And remember we are going to put a nail in the coffin of outrageous crime.’

  ‘At least you won’t put a nail in our coffin.’ The Master chuckled as he rose from table. ‘It’s solid stone.’

  18

  ‘Have you heard about Paddy Moyle?’ The question was fired by Bobby Appleby at the first person he came across in the Junior Common Room. ‘The Master has sent him down.’

  ‘Good Lord! Rusticated him, do you mean?’

  ‘Nothing of the sort. Poor old Paddy is sacked for keeps.’

  ‘Whatever for?’

  ‘Atrocious immoralities. He was found in the chaplain’s bedroom in the embraces of an enormous Negress. Paddy thought it was a fine and private place for embracing.’

  ‘But that’s monstrous!’ A second young man had joined in, and it might have been possible to suppose that his voice was choked with emotion. This was occasioned, however, merely by his not having paused to finish the mastication of a slab of anchovy toast. ‘What’s wrong with a Negress – even an enormous one? It’s ghastly racial prejudice. The Master must be denounced. There must be demonstrations and things. They have them regularly in all universities that are in the slightest degree with it. The trouble about Oxford is, you know, that it just isn’t committed.’

  ‘But can we be sure’ – a third and serious youth asked – ‘that the Master wouldn’t have acted in the same way if Paddy’s amour had been with an equally enormous blonde Swede? Not that, in either case, it has anything to do with him. What’s he hired for, really? To see the dons do their job. And what are they hired for? To shove us through exams. Not to bleeding well Eric-or-Little-by–Little us.’

  ‘Perfectly true,’ Bobby said, ‘–and I’m glad to see you know your Stalky.’

  ‘There should be a special JCR meeting,’ the first young man said. ‘Bobby – don’t you think?’

  ‘Well, I think we’ve thought of something better, as a matter of fact.’

  ‘Who’s “we”?’

  ‘Just an obscure college society. Called the Patriarchs.’ Bobby spoke tactfully, as to one beyond an indefinable pale. ‘Paddy happened to read a paper to it not long ago. On rags and practical jokes. Paddy’s a great authority on that sort of thing. So we’re going to hold a rag in his honour. A going-down funeral.’

  ‘What on earth is that?’

  ‘It’s the traditional thing when a chap is sent down – only it has fallen a bit into abeyance. You have a hearse and a coffin and mourners, and you do a grand funeral procession to the railway station.’

  ‘I see.’ The serious youth didn’t sound too enthusiastic. ‘Don’t you think that sort of elaborate joke tends to turn out un-funny?’

  ‘It depends on how well it’s mounted.’ Bobby said this with marked firmness, since the objection was one to which, in other circumstances, he might have subscribed himself. ‘I suppose you’ve heard of the Lewis and Short Sarcophagus?’

  ‘I’m quite sure I haven’t. It sounds absolutely idiotic.’

  ‘You oughtn’t to be so ignorant of the history of your own college. Lewis and Short were two dons: one of them here, and one of them next door. They came on this sarcophagus – which is a kind of stone coffin favoured by the ancient peoples – bang between the two colleges, so that there was a tremendous row about its ownership. But we have it now. It’s locked up in that little place behind the chapel, and the SCR tends to keep quiet about it. It’s what’s called a Christianized object. The pagan bas-reliefs on it have been – ’

  ‘Do be relevant,’ the serious youth said impatiently. ‘What’s the point about this thing?’

  ‘I’d have thought that pretty clear to the dimmest,’ Bobby said politely. ‘We’re going to liberate it, and shove Paddy in it, and take him to the station that way.’

  ‘In a hearse?’

  ‘Certainly in a hearse. Hiring it has been a shade tricky. But there was a string we knew how to pull.’

  ‘Is Paddy going to lie in this sarcophagus thing?’

  ‘He must please himself. It’s his funeral. I think he’ll probably sit up.’

  ‘I’m not sure the whole affair won’t offend the religious susceptibilities of the citizens.’

  ‘But that’s bang in the picture, isn’t it?’ With a great effect of demagogic fervour, Bobby glanced round what was now quite a considerable auditory. ‘The proposal is for a rag in the old-fashioned sense. But it’s also a serious demonstration against arbitrary and obscurantist authority.’ He paused long enough to remark that this ingenious double appeal had made a satisfactory impact. ‘Any questions?’

  ‘What happens at the railway station?’ somebody asked. ‘Does this Moyle person simply climb out of his sarcophagus and shamble into a second-class compartment for Paddington? It sounds rather anti-climactic.’

  ‘That’s what used to happen – and it was rather a limp ending, I agree. But we’ve pulled another string. We’re going to have a sombre van.’

  ‘What the deuce is a sombre van?’

  ‘It’s something Oswyn Lyward found out about from an authority on such matters. It seems the railway companies used to do quite a trade in long-distance funerals, and that appropriate rolling stock was available. You run across it, as a matter of fact, in Victorian novels.’

  ‘A Pair of Blue Eyes.’ An obscure youth – presumably reading English – spoke from the back of the crowd. ‘Thomas Hardy. Two chaps are travelling on the same train, and intending to propose marriage to the same girl. They notice “a curious carriage, rich and solemn rather than gloomy in aspect” – ’

  ‘Quote, unquote,’ somebody said disgustedly. ‘It contains the girl’s corpse, I suppose. Lay off. Bobby, go on.’

  ‘It seems British Railways still have a few in running order. And we’ve managed to book one. Paddy – sarcophagus and all – will glide out of Oxford in his own private sombre van. When he gets to Didcot he can please himself. Don’t you call that doing the thing in style?’

  Murmurs of approval and appreciation greeted this appeal. The proposed rag had begun to take on an enticing elegance.

  ‘Are there to be floral tributes?’ somebody asked. ‘Or is it No Flowers by Request?’

  ‘Details later,’ Bobby said. ‘Just stand by for further orders.’

  ‘Do you mean to say,’ Judith Appleby asked her husband, ‘that you have actually made the Master a party to this absurd plot? You’ve persuaded him to go through a form of sending Bobby’s friend Paddy Moyle down?’

&nb
sp; ‘Not exactly.’ Appleby had made a brief return to Dream, but was displaying a reluctance to move out of earshot of the telephone. ‘These boys aren’t going to go and check up with the Master. Bobby simply wanders round murmuring “Paddy’s being sent down, poor bastard”, and everybody takes it for gospel. But, of course, I couldn’t keep the Master in the dark – particularly as the plan involves borrowing valuable college property. So I’ve enlisted him as an ally. Or call it a sleeping partner.’

  ‘Has it occurred to you that your precious sarcophagus–’

  ‘Messrs Lewis and Short’s precious sarcophagus.’

  ‘Very well. That it’s uncommonly like Lord Canadine’s garden ornament?’

  ‘So it is. So what?’

  ‘The criminal may be chary of having rather a similar go twice.’

  ‘I don’t think so. It’s just too tempting – the sarcophagus. Bobby calls it the bleating of the kid that–’

  ‘Yes, I know. John, aren’t you a little uneasy before this concept of light-hearted crime?’

  ‘Uneasy?’ For a moment Appleby considered. ‘I’m not sure that I’m not. Put it that way.’

  ‘All these affairs tend to take their colour in our minds from the first of them – or the first of them that we know about. The episode at Keynes Court was almost witty, and puts one in a kind of good humour with the whole series. But a Duccio is a Duccio – ’

  ‘Certainly it is. Has it occurred to you, Judith, that the Keynes Court business may have been a straight joke; that the perpetrators hadn’t a clue as to the value of the small object they’d made off with; and that when the truth was revealed to them they were carried away by vistas of future affluence?’

  ‘It’s possible, I suppose. It has been the large-scale affair, so far as the brute number of impostors was concerned. A police escort, and Lord knows what. To me, that does suggest fun rather than crime. But it’s a mere conjecture. By the way, have you thought enough about the lady in the case? There seems to be only one.’

  ‘If you mean the august personage, I don’t expect ever to meet her.’

  ‘Nor do I. It’s my guess that she was Sir Thomas Carrington’s late mama. Sir Thomas is a very good suspect as the mastermind. His mother’s talent as a painter set him going. And his Stubbs never was a Stubbs. It’s his supposed loss that is what you call the bogus link – the one the criminal planted on himself by way of averting suspicion.’

  ‘I’d like to believe so ingenious a notion. But the august personage is as likely to have been the capable Mrs Meatyard, or your obsessively gardening friend, Lady Canadine. But when one thinks about it, of course, it’s clear that she must have been a professional actress of approximately the right age. Nobody else could possibly have carried out a successful impersonation of a public figure in that way – not even before such guileless people as the Cockaynes seem to have been. She’s dead by now, more likely than not. And certainly she may have supposed herself to be involved only in an innocent joke. She’d have been told that the exploit was in the interest of a wager, or something like that. Indeed, in all these affairs it seems likely that most of the subsidiary figures could get away with a plea that they’d been ignorant of anything except fun and games as being involved. Which is why it’s important – Ah, there it goes!’

  The telephone had rung in another room, and Appleby hurried out. It was some minutes before he returned, and Judith gave the time to carrying a little further some mild research which she had been carrying on into Roman sarcophagi. What chiefly struck her was that such objects must be enormously heavy. She wondered whether the young men whom John was encouraging to such disorderly courses had very carefully thought out the mere mechanics of their operation. It was certainly likely that the thief – if thief there was going to be – had efficiently thought out his. In none of his known depredations was there any record of a technical hitch.

  ‘It’s on!’ Her husband was in the room again, boyishly triumphant. He might have been Bobby.

  ‘Then, so far, so good.’ Judith didn’t fail to hear a certain lack of spontaneity in her own voice, but she couldn’t quite identify what prompted it. It wasn’t exactly that she hadn’t wanted to play. Her encounter with the Canadines at Netherway had amused her very much; it had pleased her that Bobby had clearly shown resource at Sir Thomas Carrington’s Monks Amble; she hadn’t affected to be other than absorbed by John’s accounts of the Meatyards, and Praxiteles, and her old friend Hildebert Braunkopf. It had all been, so far, very entertainingly a family affair. But she somehow distrusted the final absurdity to which it seemed to be building up. ‘But how do you know?’ she asked. ‘Has something happened?’

  ‘It certainly has. That was the Master on the telephone. The tiger has taken a first nibble – or at least has whisked his tail. The kid hasn’t bleated in vain.’

  ‘An identifiable tiger?’

  ‘Say, an identifiable jackal. In fact, our Cambridge friend.’

  ‘Sansbury? He’s put in another of his appearances on the fringe of the affair? He must be off his head.’

  ‘He doesn’t strike me as that. But you may certainly judge his behaviour odd. After my second meeting with him – the one at Keynes Court – he can’t but have been alerted and alarmed. Yet here he is – taking a couple of steps out of the wings, as it were, and making a little bow.’

  ‘Just what kind of bow?’

  ‘He rang up the Master, announced his name and standing, and said he had a colleague coming over from America some time in the fall. The colleague is interested in sarcophagi, and Sansbury is doing a little preliminary fieldwork for him. He’d heard of Lewis and Short, and wanted to check that it was still in the possession of the college, and that it would be available for inspection by a properly accredited scholar in a few months’ time.’

  ‘It doesn’t make sense.’

  ‘It certainly makes sense – up to a point. He was making sure that, tomorrow afternoon, labour and ingenuity weren’t going to be lavished on the situation to no purpose. The young men might have got their facts all wrong, and be proposing to fool around with what was no more than a stone cattle-trough.’

  ‘I can see that. But why on earth should Professor Sansbury make this inquiry in his own name? He’d have just got the same information from the Master if he’d put on an American accent and called himself Professor Töpperwein or Dr Deutschbein.’

  ‘Perfectly true. And the explanation is obvious. He’s between the devil and the deep blue sea, and no longer his own master.’

  19

  The obsequies of Paddy Moyle were to get a little out of hand in the end, but in their initial stages the organization at work could hardly have been faulted. For one thing, it was an organization that concealed itself, so that a marked effect of spontaneous extravagance was achieved. The Patriarchs, being a modestly exclusive club, had a flair for self-effacement, and it would have been difficult even for a pertinacious reporter from a London newspaper to discover just who had launched the spectacle. And ‘spectacle’ was certainly the appropriate word for these surprising pompes funèbres. The cortège which wound its way down the gentle and dreaming curve of the High was of a gratifying length. It was generally felt, moreover, that the mourners were as respectable as they were numerous; for although few appeared at all far advanced within the vale of years, the assemblage was yet highly representative of the athletic, social, and intellectual life of juvenile Oxford. Elderly and sentimental dons, drawn to a halt on the pavement by Mr Moyle’s passing, murmured happily to themselves (with the poet Wordsworth) of so wide and fair a congregation in its budding-time of health and hope and beauty.

  Nor was the occasion embarrassed by any officious appearance of the representatives of a narrow and restrictive conception of law and order. The Proctors were invisible: doubtless they were somewhere drowsed in burgundy and port. The Chief Constable quite failed to emerge from the Police Station, and his representatives in the streets gazed with an undisturbed equanimity at what
was presumably but one more movie company concerned to create an authentic evocation of Oxford life. The citizenry came happily to the doors of their shops and booths to watch with smiling gratification what was essentially a memorial of better days, when the young scholars of the university were more abundant both in joie de vivre and (what so often conduces to it) ready money.

  Many remarked on the richness, and some on the curiosity, of Mr Moyle’s sepulchral casket. It was stone-coloured – and those who pressed near were able to determine that it was actually made of stone. It was ornamented in a deep relief: on one side, a mêlée of Romans and Orientals had been roughly adapted so as to afford a lively representation of the torments of the damned; on the other, a Last Judgement had been contrived from what might originally have been a scene in a Roman law court. The lid (which had been found not quite to fit, and which must have been carved for purposes quite other than funerary ones) depicted some sort of Bacchic orgy; it lay beside the sarcophagus – in which Mr Moyle, still defiantly dressed in his scholar’s gown, sat as if in an outlandish bath, sweepingly acknowledging with his academic cap alike the plaudits and the jeers of the bystanders.

  Yet most voices were mute, so dumbfounding was the scene. Even the traffic stilled, and it might have been in a solemn silence that the procession wound its farther way but for the fact that Oxford is a bell-swarmed and towery city. It was as the hearse came abreast of the church of St Mary the Virgin, stolidly gazed upon from across the way by the effigy of the late Mr Cecil Rhodes, that a clamorous yet appositely mournful tintinnabulation broke out in every quarter of the sacred town. St Mary’s itself has a big bell; Christ Church has a very big bell; all the little colleges (except perhaps the very newest ones) have little bells. And, in a single instant, all the bells began to toll. It was a memorable instance, long to be talked of in senior common rooms with envy and awe, of the stealth, the cunning, and the disinterested outrageousness of the young.