A Family Affair Read online

  ‘Isn’t this whole topic one of merely antiquarian interest?’ A fresh voice asked this from the back of the room. It belonged to a young man who was reclining in an armchair with a great air of elderly ease. ‘Think of rags, for instance. You mayn’t even know what I mean. Not what the Welfare State compels undergraduates to dress in, but how they used to behave when feeling a bit bored. Just doesn’t happen nowadays. Has any of you ever seen a rag taking place?’

  ‘Perhaps not here,’ the man with the decanter said. ‘But the Redbrick places have rags. They’re usually on a day appointed in advance by a Vice-Chancellor or somebody. Rather pitiful. Running about in fancy dress, kidnapping gratified leading citizens in aid of charity.’

  ‘But that isn’t a real rag,’ somebody protested. ‘And I don’t know that even real rags have much to do with practical jokes. Dictionary, please.’ A fat volume was promptly pitched across the room, and the speaker fielded it neatly. He flicked through its pages. ‘Here you are. The OED gives, as you might expect, very much a don’s definition. “Rag: an extensive display of noisy disorderly conduct, carried on in defiance of authority or discipline.” Distinctly hostile, wouldn’t you say? And the same with the verb. “To rag: to annoy, tease, torment; specially in University slang, to assail in a rough or noisy fashion.” No element of wit allowed in a rag. So the rag and the practical joke are distinct species, as I said.’

  ‘I don’t think that’s quite true.’ Mr Moyle, who had plainly done his prep and had a good deal more learning to unload, was again impatient. ‘Practical jokes requiring a lot of teamwork tend to have the character of rags. And Oswyn over there is mistaken in thinking that such things no longer happen in Oxford. Only a few years ago, just before our time, some obscure college or other – I forget which – woke up to find its hall transformed in the night. It had been tuned all over, planted with shrubs and flowers, provided with a sparkling little stream from a fire hydrant, and generously populated with feathered songsters of the grove. And everything had been brought in over the roof, so the organization must have been first-class. I’d say the scale of the thing made it a rag.’

  There was a moment’s silence. The Patriarchs appeared not greatly stimulated by this purely lexicographical aspect of their subject. Moreover the port was running low, and Appleby began to think about his departure. With the beer, he suspected, would come a change of key. The Patriarchs probably ended these symposia with rude balladry and the improvising of improper songs. It turned out, however, that the moment for anything of the sort had not quite come. The tall youth called Oswyn had sunk yet further back in his chair. But from this position he suddenly spoke in a voice that dominated the room.

  ‘I must tell you about something that happened to my father,’ Oswyn said. ‘But in more spacious days. In fact, donkeys’ ages ago.’

  2

  From the attentive silence which had fallen upon the company, it was apparent that the youth whose Christian name (as it presumably was) was Oswyn enjoyed a reputation as a raconteur. And he at once displayed his command of this character by a little deferring expectation. He did this by extricating himself gracefully from his chair, crossing the room with his port glass in his hand, and sitting down beside Appleby. Perhaps he thought Bobby’s father so old that he was probably rather deaf, or perhaps he simply felt that what he had to say should, as a matter of politeness, be given the appearance of being offered to the club’s guest in the first place. And he began by asking Appleby a question.

  ‘Would you say, sir, that what we’re talking about – practical jokes and so on – had a kind of golden age in the Edwardian period?’

  ‘I think that is probably so.’ Appleby wondered whether he ought to disclaim any personal memory of such goings on at the turn of the century. ‘And I’m not sure that there wasn’t a silver age rather later on. Quite sophisticated people sometimes evolved jokes which no doubt seem childish now.’ Appleby looked meditatively at the outsize candle. ‘To appear in any degree pas sérieux seems not at all the thing in your generation. Take Bobby, for example. Unlike Max’s Matthew Arnold, Bobby is invariably wholly serious. And I observe the same characteristic, if I may say so, in the membership of your club as a whole.’

  Appleby found that his glass was being hastily replenished. The Patriarchs had taken this banter rather well. It was what they expected in a guest of great age.

  ‘For instance,’ Oswyn was saying, ‘there were the people who dressed up as the Shah of Persia and his entourage – or as something like that – and managed to inspect a battleship.’

  ‘Yes, indeed,’ Appleby said. ‘And they included one of Leslie Stephen’s girls.’

  ‘My father means Virginia Woolf,’ Bobby said a shade grimly.

  ‘That’s right,’ Oswyn agreed. ‘And it was the kind of thing that happened to my father. He’s an old-fashioned character, by the way. And we’re landed with rather a large house, you know. A useless great place, crammed with every sort of junk. Bobby, isn’t that right? You’ve been and had a look at us.’

  ‘Entirely right,’ Bobby said. ‘Lywards must have been magpies for generations.’

  Appleby noted the name. It rang some sort of bell. A muted Field or Country Life sort of bell. The youth called Oswyn, he conjectured, must be Lord Oswyn Lyward.

  ‘Different sorts of magpie,’ Oswyn said, ‘from generation to generation. Some quite early ones were pretty hot, I’d say. Tended to find themselves possessed of bits and pieces by Cellini–’

  ‘Cellini?’ somebody interrupted with interest. ‘Didn’t he write a dirty book?’

  ‘Very moderately so, Robin. You’re probably thinking of Casanova. Bits and pieces by Cellini, as I was saying, or a few nice little family miniatures by Nicholas Hilliard. But then we’d revert to type – you people must stop me if I get boring in a family way – and accumulate the most frightful things – or at least the just-not-good-enough things. My great-grandfather, for instance, went in for Etty.’

  ‘Etty’s all right,’ somebody protested. ‘I’d like an Etty.’

  ‘My dear Charles, a nude lady by Etty, belly-forward and standing chastely in the middle of a waterfall, is not the same thing as a nude lady by Boucher, splayed bottom-up on a sofa. Sancta simplicitas.’

  ‘Mais tous les deux,’ Bobby murmured, ‘ont senti la chair.’

  ‘Isn’t this rather losing direction?’ Mr Moyle asked.

  ‘Only because Bobby’s showing off,’ Oswyn said. ‘Anyway, the point is that my father, unlike quite a number of my family a bit nearer to Noah’s Ark, is no sort of virtuoso or curioso. He spent a lot of time in India, you know, but his morals were at least wholly uncorrupted by all that shocking sculpture and so on. He went out with a simple taste for shooting, and with a simple taste for shooting he returned.’

  ‘Natives?’ the host of the evening asked with serious interest. ‘I mean, was it one of the periods for that sort of thing?’

  ‘Not in the least. My father was extravagantly liberal-minded and humane. He simply went into jungles and places in a big way, and shot all sorts of lions and tigers. He brought them home – either stuffed or decapitated or flattened out as rugs – and we have them all over the place. Not that they have much to do with what I’m telling you. They just serve to sketch in my father.’

  ‘Is he what is called a backwoods peer?’ somebody asked politely.

  ‘Yes, that’s exactly him. And it’s an important part of the story, as a matter of fact. You see, in spite of India and all that, my father has never much taken up with people. Hardly ever goes to Town, really. Always been very much one for the private life. He did High Sheriff once, and found it awful. Particularly the Assize Judges. Old gentlemen dressed up like Father Christmas, and hanging people right and left. They never did that in India, he says. As for Lord Lieutenant, he turned it down flat, although it created a bit of a stink. Family always has done the job, I suppose. But he just said wandering royalty would be a bit too much. Not what you might c
all a Buck House type, my father. That’s where the story begins, as a matter of fact.’

  ‘We perceive,’ the man who had been interested in Cellini said, ‘that we are to make an incursion into high life.’

  ‘Pretty dubious high life, as you’ll hear in a minute.’ Oswyn turned to Appleby. ‘I don’t know, sir, if you’ve ever taken time off to look at the amateur side of your job – Sherlock Holmes, and all that?’

  ‘I think I know my Holmes pretty well.’ Appleby was amused by this reference to his career. ‘But I’m not so good on his successors.’

  ‘Well, it’s Holmes I’m thinking of. You remember how, every now and then, he’d receive an emissary from an Exalted Personage, who would ask him to save the Empire, or preserve the reputation of a Personage more Exalted still. And finally Watson would ask him where he’d been one day. And he’d produce a pair of diamond cuff links, and murmur modestly that he’d been to Windsor, and received them from the hand of a Very Gracious Lady. That sort of thing.’

  ‘That sort of thing,’ Appleby said. ‘Although I doubt whether your account quite measures up to the scholarship of the subject.’

  ‘I’m sure you’re right. All I’m saying, really, is that it was a Very Gracious Lady who came at my father. Of course she’s dead now, God rest her soul. My father simply had a telephone message that she was coming to tea. At Keynes, that is. Keynes is the name of our house.’

  ‘Quite out of the blue?’ somebody asked.

  ‘Entirely. But there was nothing odd about it. My father and mother were quite proper people to hand the muffins and pour the fragrant Lapsang in such circumstances.’

  ‘Muffins?’ Mr Moyle asked curiously. ‘Would there really be–’

  ‘Well, whatever Very Gracious Ladies do consume. This one had a fancy for going round people’s houses. And she had rather a vexatious habit as well.’

  ‘A notion,’ Appleby said, ‘of what should appropriately mark such an occasion.’

  ‘Just that, sir. She had old-fashioned ideas, just as my father had. It seems that well into the eighteenth century, at least, a visitor whom one desired to distinguish was always given anything he fancied to take away. A volume from your library – that sort of thing. There are shocking gaps, it seems, in some libraries of importance, just because of this habit. My father’s august guest kept this up in quite a big way. It was a kind of joke, it seems, among the sort of people who were likely to suffer from it. Everybody knew about it – or nearly everybody. I’m not sure about my father. He’s a person who lives rather remote from gossip, and so on.

  ‘Well, the circus arrived. All very much in order: police escort, Rolls, equerry, lady-in-waiting – the entire works. I think my mother was quite pleased; she didn’t dislike the notion of her bun fight figuring in the Court Circular next morning. The Very Gracious Lady seemed to have a bad cold, but the occasion went swimmingly, all the same. Only, she didn’t stay very long.’

  ‘Ah!’ Appleby said.

  ‘She was a good deal taken with the Hilliards, but as they are ancestors she couldn’t very well make improper suggestions about them. What she did declare herself enchanted with – what she much envied my father the possession of – was some odd little daub, about twelve inches square, which I expect he was hardly aware of the existence of. But that was that. India, of course, had made him pretty good at taking a hint. He yanked the thing from the wall, rather annoyed my mother by blowing a lot of dust from it, and handed it to the equerry. The chap had the drill pat: two steps forward, receive picture, two steps back. Conclusion of visit.’

  ‘And the next morning,’ Appleby said, ‘there was nothing in the Court Circular?’

  Nothing at all. Nor was there a letter the next day. My father, as a matter of fact, is rather a stickler in such things – India again, I suppose – and he wasn’t pleased. A letter from the Private Secretary, it seems, is de rigueur on such occasions–’

  ‘And a signed photograph?’ somebody asked. ‘Or do they go only to the middle classes?’

  ‘Probably a signed photograph as well.’ Oswyn was not offended. ‘So my father wrote in, expressing the loyal hope that the VGL’s cold was none the worse for her trip. Well, there was a chap down from London in no time, dead keen that the whole hoax should be kept mum.’

  ‘It was a hoax?’ Mr Moyle asked.

  ‘Of course it was a hoax. And one just like the inspecting of that battleship. The type of the purely disinterested practical joke that Sir John was talking about.’

  ‘Only you don’t believe it was disinterested,’ Appleby said. ‘Your narrative has emphasized something it was meant to emphasize. The little daub.’

  ‘That’s perfectly true, sir. Ever since I was told the story, I have rather wondered about the small picture.’

  ‘And your father – hasn’t he wondered?’

  ‘I just don’t know. But I rather think not.’

  ‘I see.’ Appleby looked curiously at the young man who had entertained the Patriarchs to so odd a tale. ‘But simple curiosity would surely prompt one to inquire? There must be a catalogue, an inventory, records from the last occasion upon which death duties were paid–’

  Perfectly politely, Oswyn interrupted this with a low laugh.

  ‘You should come and have a look at us,’ he said. ‘My parents would be delighted. You must have Bobby bring you.’

  ‘That would be very pleasant.’ Appleby was aware of a stir among the Patriarchs, and of the beer crate being tugged from beneath the table. ‘But this is very much a matter of past history?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’ Oswyn was airily vague. ‘Donkeys’ ages ago, as I said. Such things don’t happen nowadays.’

  Appleby said good night to Bobby outside the Master’s Lodging. The quad was filled with a faintly luminous yellow fog, as if some giant hand had ladled into it an unpalatably dilute pea soup. There was a faint smell, deceptively rural, of sodden leaves. A piano was being played in a farther quad, but the notes came without resonance, as if through wet flannel. Somewhere a great bell began to sound, and then many lesser bells. The piano ceased abruptly, suggesting that it must be in the proprietorship of someone of nervously law-abiding disposition. The big bell stopped decisively, and then the little bells rather at random. Appleby opened the door of the Lodging, and went in.

  The Master was reading Plato in his library, with a tall glass and a whisky decanter as his only aids. It must be wonderful, Appleby thought, not to require a Liddell and Scott. The Master pushed the decanter absent-mindedly forward. He had not the air of one politely waiting up for a wandering guest.

  ‘I hope I didn’t stay too long, or leave too early,’ Appleby said.

  ‘You could scarcely have achieved the former, I imagine, so far as the young men were concerned.’ The Master didn’t seem to have given much thought to the evolving of this courtesy; the Parmenides, a teasing affair, takes some emerging from. ‘I forget,’ he said. ‘Was it the Rugger Club?’

  ‘It was the Patriarchs.’

  ‘To be sure. I recall that your son is the Great Amphibian of his year. I was a Patriarch myself once. Conceivably I am still their Senior Member. But, guests apart, there is an age limit on actual attendance.’ The Master closed his Oxford Classical Text a shade reluctantly. ‘Very pleasant lads,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, indeed.’ Appleby saw no reason to dissent from this urbane judgement. At the same time he wondered whether there could ever be any conceivable group of young men of whom the Master would say briskly ‘Scruffy little tykes’ or ‘Idle and insolent parasites’. ‘A boy called Oswyn Lyward,’ Appleby went on, as he poured himself a token whisky, ‘told us an amusing story of a hoax played on his father.’

  ‘Ah, the Very Gracious Lady!’

  ‘You’ve heard of her?’

  ‘Lyward told me the story on, I think, the third occasion of his lunching with me. Just the right stage, wouldn’t you say, for an undergraduate to launch out on quite a stretch of narrative?’

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sp; ‘No doubt.’ Appleby wondered irreverently whether the younger sons of marquises got invited to lunch in the Lodging more frequently than commoner commoners. ‘Do you know his father?’

  ‘Slightly.’ The Master tossed his book on a table and rose to attend hospitably to the fire. ‘The worthy Lord Cockayne is an old member of the college, and turns up at a Gaudy or the like from time to time. He’s getting on. Oswyn is the youngest child.’ The Master turned from the fireplace to glance at his guest in benign amusement. ‘My dear Appleby, I believe you are taking a professional interest in the lad’s story. A trick of the old rage, is it not?’

  ‘Perhaps so.’ Appleby put down his glass. ‘Such as it has been, you see, my career as a copper began in a college just across the High. The affair of poor President Umpleby.’

  ‘To be sure. Peace to his bones.’

  ‘There were rather a lot of bones, as a matter of fact. His study had virtually the character of an ossuary.’

  ‘Is that so? The details escape my memory. But he was my tutor, of course. We once made a trip up the Rhine together. It was the thing to do. But I seem to remember he was to be given an honorary degree at Bonn. Very much at random, often, the distribution of these things. He was no scholar, poor man, although as a tutor he was well enough. What were we talking about?’

  ‘The small painting carried off from Keynes Court. Or at least we were coming round to it. Being stolen property, it has its legitimate interest for me as an ex-policeman.’

  ‘Wasn’t it all rather a long time ago? The young man himself surely has no recollection of it?’

  ‘I don’t think he has. He was rather vague, but it was my impression that he was, as yet, either unborn or still in his well-sprung aristocratic pram.’

  ‘The latter, I’d guess. But we can readily arrive at the terminus ad quem.’ The Master moved over to a bookcase. ‘All we need is the appropriate volume of Who Was Who. And this will be it. We want the year of the VGL’s death. Deplorable that one doesn’t carry in one’s head notable dates of that sort.’ The Maser’s practised fingers turned the pages rapidly. ‘Here we are. The Royal Personage in question died in 1950. The episode certainly occurred before Oswyn had passed from his nanny to his governess.’