Anthony Powell - A Question of Upbringing

As it turned out, Mrs. Foxe did not show the complacence Stringham had expected in agreeing, at once, that he should cease to be a member of the university. On the contrary, she wrote to say that she thought him too young to spend all his time in London; even going so far as to add that she had no desire for him to turn into “something like Bill Truscott:” of whom she had always been supposed to approve. However, this was an obstacle not entirely unforeseen; in spite of Stringham’s earlier hope that his mother might decide on the spur of the moment that a job was the best possible thing for him.

“Of course that’s Buster,” he said, when he spoke of the letter.

I was not sure that he was right. The tone of his mother’s remarks did not at all suggest arguments put forward at second-hand. They sounded much more like her own opinions. Stringham reasserted his case. The end of it was that she decided to come and talk things over.

“Really rather good of her,” said Stringham. “You can imagine how busy she must be at this time of year.”

“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 possibly 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.