The Mortdecai Trilogy (Charlie Mortdecai #1-3)(145)

‘Just so,’ I said. I bade him good night, donned my gown and set sail for the SCR.

Dryden was profuse in his apologies for not having met me at the station.

‘I do hope Margate found you without difficulty?’

‘Margate? No, it was a rum chap called Francis.’

‘Yes, that’s right, Francis Margate. A very nice boy. Brightest Viscount I’ve taught for years.’

‘I hope your, ah, squitters are better, John? Your pupil seemed to be concerned about you.’

‘Oh, goodness, they don’t trouble me, I’ve had them for years, it’s the port here, d’you see, worst port in Oxford, don’t know why I stay. I’ve had splendid offers from all sorts of places, Sussex, Lancaster, Uganda – all sorts of places.’

‘They all sound much the same to me. What, in fact, did prevent you from meeting me?’

‘Oh, I had luncheon at one of those women’s colleges, can’t recall the name, they get you frightfully drunk, you probably know, shocking lot, boozers every one. So I felt a little tired after luncheon and Francis hadn’t his essay ready so I offered to let him meet you instead.’

‘Just so,’ I said. (I find that I say ‘just so’ often in Oxford, I wonder why that is?)

He then gave me a filthy glass of sherry without a word of apology and led me up to the Warden so that I might pay my respects. I paid them.

‘How nice,’ the Warden said with apparent civility, ‘to see an old member.’

To this day I cannot be sure whether it was a gibe or simply an unfortunate turn of phrase.

I strayed around the Common Room until I found a hideous pot-plant which seemed to deserve my sherry. A moment later, we formed the usual sort of procession and shuffled off to Hall, High Table and dinner. High Table was much as it has always been, except for the cut of the dinner-jackets and the absurd youthfulness of the dons, but a glance over my shoulder into the bear-pit of Hall made me shudder. Two hundred shaggy Tom-a-Bedlams with their molls and doxies were scrambling and squabbling around a row of stainless-steel soup-kitchen counters, snapping and snarling like Welsh Nationalists in committee, or Italian press-photographers in pursuit of an adulterous Royal. Every few moments one of them would break out of the mêlée, guarding a plate heaped with nameless things and chips, which he would savage at the table, cursing and belching the while. The long oak tables bore none of the ancient silver of my youth – they have to keep it locked up nowadays – but there were long, proud lines of bottles of Daddie’s Favourite Sauce – and jolly nice it is too, I dare say. But I turned away with a shudder and dipped a reluctant spoon into the Mock Turtle before me. (You can tell how even the memory of it all upsets me if you note that I started the last sentence with a conjunction, a thing I never do.)

You must not think that I am carping when I say that dinner was five courses of poisonous ordure: I expected it and would have been disturbed if it had been good. High Table dinner in Oxford, as perhaps you know, is always in inverse ratio to the brains-content of the College which offers it. Scone is a very brainy College indeed. If you want a good tuck-in in Oxford you have to go to places like Pembroke, Trinity or St Edmund Hall, where they play rugger and hockey and things like that and, if you’re spotted reading a book, someone takes you aside and has a chat with you.

No, what really spoiled my evening was that Scone had gone in for the ultimate gimmick and acquired a she-don. She resembled nothing so much as a badly-tied bundle of old bits of string; her smile was the bitter, clenched rictus of a woman pretending to enjoy natural childbirth and we disliked each other on sight to our mutual satisfaction. She was not wearing a bust-bodice or ‘bra’, that was clear; her blouse was gallantly taking the strain at about the level of her navel.

I couldn’t say anything, could I – as a mere Old Member I was only a guest and she was listening intently – but I met the Warden’s eye and gave him a long, level look. He smiled sheepishly, a sort of qualified apology.

After dinner, in the Common Room, Dryden mischievously introduced us.

‘Gwladys,’ he said with relish. ‘Charlie Mortdecai has been dying to meet you.’

‘Bronwen,’ she said curtly. Clearly, Dryden had used that gambit before.

‘ Enchanted,’ I exclaimed in the gallant voice which I hoped would most enrage her, ‘it’s high time this stuffy old place had a few pretty faces to brighten it up.’

She turned on me that particularly nasty look which your breakfast kipper gives you when you have a hang-over.

‘And what’s your field?’ I asked.

‘Sexual Sociometrics.’

‘I might have guessed,’ I replied archly. She turned away. Never let a day go by without making an enemy, is what I say, even if it’s only a woman.

‘You have made a conquest,’ murmured Dryden in my ear.

‘Have you any whisky in your rooms?’

‘Only Chivas Regal.’

‘Then let us go there.’

His room are the best set in Scone: there are boiseries and a pair of bookcases only rivalled by those in the Pepysian Library in Cambridge and a certain house in Sussex, whose name escapes me. Moreover, he has a bathroom of his own, an unheard-of luxury in Scone, where the corpus sanum – or vile – runs a very bad second to the mens sana. (The story goes that, long ago, when it was first proposed in the College concilium that bathrooms should be provided for undergraduates, an ancient life-fellow protested in piping tones that the lads couldn’t possibly need such things: ‘Why, they’re only here for eight weeks at a time!’ But then came the strange late-Victorian epoch, shot through with obscure guilts, when the English – whom Erasmus had named as the grubbiest race in Europe – found that nothing would do but that they must scrub themselves from head to foot whenever they could spare a moment from smartening up Fuzzy-Wuzzy and other Breeds Without The Law. There are three times as many undergraduates in Scone now, and the bathrooms are just as few, but now no one seems to mind any more.)