Very Old Cambridge Tales 5: ‘Stone’s Story’

‘Will you be going to Russia again?’ I asked Stone as we arrived back at his rooms from the college dinner he had stood me.

‘Not if I can help it!’ he retorted, unlocking the door and walking straight across his sitting-room to a corner cupboard from which he produced a bottle and glasses. ‘I’m fed up with ’em. I’m fed up with Dos-toy-evsky, I’m fed up with Stalin and…and Mandelshtam and Nabokov and Solzhenitsyn! Actually,’ he called from the gyp-room, ‘it’s one of the reasons I’m glad I’ve been made Director of Studies.’

He was thirty, had completed a Ph.D. on Dostoyevsky at twenty-five, was rumoured to know seven or eight modern languages, and had lived in most of the countries of Western and Eastern Europe.

‘Ice?’

‘Water, please.’

He handed me a golden tumbler and we subsided into his low armchairs.

‘Well, you know – it’ll help me to move out of things Russian. Things Rah-shen… I can stop being The Bloke Who Knows All About Russia and become just an English Modern Linguist.’ He smirked: ‘I fancy working on Pirandello, say, and going to Italy a lot.’

From a morbid curiosity, I asked him if it was true that the recent death of someone in my own faculty, P.H. Jones, had occurred in Russia.

‘Quite.’

‘You mean old Jones died there?’

‘I mean he did, I can just imagine it, and it would kill me if I had to go back there.’

‘But it’s the last place you would ever associate with Jones! I can’t imagine him ever going abroad, even. He was notorious in the Faculty for his bon mot “Travel narrows the mind”…’

‘Oh, absolutely.’

Stone finished his glass and swirled the ice around in it at arm’s length. He mused.

‘Actually, Philemon Jones, the Grover Reader in Aesthetics, was agreeably surprised by Moscow – ’

I laughed. It was the tone of one of Stone’s ‘anecdotages’ as he called them, fantastic improvisations that he occasionally perpetrated in company and also attributed to his sojourns in Eastern Europe.

He got up and poured himself another large whisky. His face positively bubbled.

‘No, seriously – you know he was a Fellow of this college, don’t you?’

‘Go on.’

‘Well, he was agreeably surprised by Moscow when he arrived there, because…because the same afternoon, even, he had been sitting by the Philadelphus bush outside his rooms here, reading, occasionally lifting his Pimms from the little flap fitted to his deckchair, and recalling the stories he had been told about Russia at high table. He looked up, oblivious of the tourists ambling by, stared long into the sky above the court, where the black swifts were wheeling, and reflected tensely on the Aeroflot ’planes with rattling wings, the brutal confiscations at Customs, the soap-less hotels… Then, er, there was the political aspect so distasteful to him: the mythopoeia of the Left, the bogus cult of The People…’

I snorted at the unashamed hyperbole of Stone’s technique.

‘ – yet here he was, he reminded himself, and even the journey had been less barbaric than he feared. At two o’clock Eden, the Head Porter, had rung through to say that the taxi was waiting and they had put his bags in the boot. His hand hovered for a moment before drawing a stick from the stand, then, with the Burlington Magazine under his arm, he slipped out of his rooms, across the lawn, and two hours later was at Heathrow. How puzzled some of the Fellows would be to hear him praising the socialist airline, explaining that he was offered chilled lager and there were even seat-belts! His reception at Customs was unexpected, too. As he half-sauntered into the brightly lit hall, he noticed a blonde in grey uniform and white high-heeled shoes chatting to one of the customs men. At that precise moment, she looked up, stopped talking, and came over.

‘“Meester Jonns from the British Academy?”

‘He gave one of his boyish, rather endearing sniggers.

‘“Yes, I – ”

‘“You will come this way pliss.”

‘He sniggered again, but actually something in his mind gave way… Fortunately, though, the girl had been sent as his interpreter and introduced herself as Natasha. He was delighted. The customs inspection was perfunctory, a car was waiting, and he filled with fresh buoyancy at the prospect of his stay. He remembered that he had sensuous, Italian lips – ’

‘Jones?!’ I queried. ‘He was the son of a Welsh miner. Cut himself off from his parents the day he arrived in Cambridge with an Open Schol., and all that. At least, that’s what I’ve always been told. Isn’t your narration becoming un peu exagéré?’

‘No no!’ laughed Stone. ‘I swear that’s what the undergraduates in his dining society said of him! They had got this idea from his features that he had Italian, possibly Florentine blood in him.’

‘All right, all right, perhaps I never looked closely enough. The bit about his snigger was quite good, though. Go on.’

‘He remembered, then, that he had sensuous, Italianate lips and would be all on his own in this foreign country where nobody could possibly know him. However, as he held the front door of the car open for the girl, he was shocked to see long black hairs on the backs of her legs.

‘There followed the most exhilarating experience of his visit so far. The journey from Cambridge had been tedious and fatiguing. Essentially, though, when he stepped from the ’plane he felt as though he had hardly gone anywhere at all. He felt he could blink his eyes and there would be the honey-brown stone of the college court still, the fragrant Philadelphus, and his rooms. But once they were clear of the airport he was plunged into the sensation of real travel. The driver handled the car like a post-chaise, a coach-and-four! A long wall of slender, enamelled tree-trunks zoomed by, then low forms that, as he bounced about on the back seat, he took to be wooden houses; whole dimly lit villages; a jungle of tower-blocks; a single, deserted, gleaming wet street with winking neons; and suddenly they shot out into a vast square with a tractor chugging slowly across it – the centre of Moscow itself…

‘This was too much. He looked out of the back window with a humorous smile, as if to see where they had left the airport, and forgot about England altogether.

‘Of course, it was peeving and ridiculous to have to wait about to be “registered”, disturbing even to have one’s passport taken away, but what were these compared with the view from his hotel room? He gazed through a vast black window at fantastical spires, whorls and cupolas of silver, green and gold, a red flag spotlit high in the night… It was delightful. Magical!’

Stone frowned, and got up from his chair. He fetched a box of long Dutch cigars, offered me one, lit up, and walked up and down for a while, thinking.

‘Next morning P.H. rose rather late. He had a two-hour breakfast in the restaurant. At the end of it, Natasha appeared, and he stood about whilst she made ’phone calls. It seemed that the Tsar Alexander III bookplates he had come to look at did not exist. Then they existed, but could not be found. Curiously, though, he could not…mm…find it in himself to be annoyed at this uncertainty and inefficiency. He sat in the stuffy hotel lounge, wandered through the endless tourist bureaux and shops, and stood for a long time in front of a poster of a church, mysteriously captioned THE PEARL ON THE NERL. He vacantly acquiesced in the pleasantest feeling of suspension, almost as though he were slowly levitating. Then the books with the correct ex libris were found. They would be on a special desk for him, Table 44, around three o’clock. He returned to the restaurant, and by half-past two was ready to set off with Natasha to the Rumyantsev Museum.

‘Of all the unexpected things, it was terribly hot outside. Even under the brims of the Panama hat he had brought with him it was ridiculously hot, and not just hot but torrid, dry; it was a sucking kind of heat. A light haze hankered wherever you looked, and this lent things an oddly different appearance from the night before. An old woman crossing the other end of the immense square loaded down with bags, seemed to crawl along the edge of the world and disappear like a steamer or mirage over the horizon. Were the numbers on that clock-face gold? He could have sworn that last night they were electric blue. As for the red tomb of the Great Cham himself, it hardly bore looking at, it jumped so painfully into and out of the tomato-juice wall behind.

‘This “defocussing” trick, he decided, kept catching you out. That faery castle, now that he saw it in daylight, wasn’t it in fact the bastion of the new imperialism? And the strident vulgarity of the political advertisements everywhere!

‘They were walking through a dark tunnel. Forms passed, staring at his white suit and Panama from the gloom.

‘And yet, he reflected, as they came up the steps towards another huge placard, perhaps the Kulturgeist of the place could be comprehended in terms of a…a poetic of austerity, so to speak, a synthesis of Sparta and the imperial vision, a “reverse-aesthetic” in the neo-Kantian sense… The thought pleased him. After all, there was something aesthetic, in a deeper sense, about the well-pressed khaki tunic of the Communist. In a way, he ventured, his own moral sensibility was essentially Spartan, too; he would almost feel at home here wearing one…

‘However, it was now so sweltering hot that the elastic of his bow-tie was irking him. To make matters worse, strands of thick white fluffy stuff were floating on the air of the street, tickling his nose and somehow conspiring to clog his throat. They entered a dusty, bare-earth courtyard.

‘“Your objective, sair,” announced Natasha, and pointed to a low whitewashed building with a bright green roof. They negotiated a rickety revolving door. He handed over his hat and stick. The girl explained his papers to a policeman and a wizened little creature in a glass case at the barrier, pointed out the direction of the Rare Books Room and cafeteria, ushered him gently through, smiled, and was gone.

‘Philemon Jones, the Grover Reader in Aesthetics, took three steps into the Museum – and turned back. When was she going to meet him again? Where? He made towards the barrier, but the policeman moved in front, smiled, and wagged his finger. Through the revolving door our friend could just see the girl disappearing out of the gates with a young man in a white shirt.

‘A trickle of sweat seeped under his collar. He dabbed his brow, swallowed, and walked in the direction of the cafeteria.

‘There, at the end of a narrow corridor, was a bilious-coloured crypt with tables, chairs, and a muddy, pitted floor where tiles had come out. It was oddly subdued. People carrying buckled aluminium trays stopped and looked at him as though in disbelief. A few more, fainting footsteps towards the opposite doors, through them, and…he halted.

‘Inside a much smaller room than the first, a crowd – it could hardly be called a queue – of about thirty bodies was pressed up against a tiny counter, where figures like washerwomen moved in and out of swathes of steam issuing from a fissured espresso. These…bodies were unimaginably seedy-looking, abominably dressed, and coarsely-featured. They all looked like peasants, or miners. From the way that they stood and the pasty immobility of their faces, it seemed that they were quite used to their outrageous predicament. It was stifling. The deep double-glazed windows were tightly sealed against the winter, condensation streamed down the walls past a bewildered cockroach onto the concrete floor, and each emission from the hissing machine seemed to squeeze a fresh tincture of cabbage from the remaining air. A tree festooned with fluff gazed in the window from the grey courtyard.

‘“Chivovysmotrite?!” bellowed one of the washerwomen at him suddenly.

‘It was not the heat, or the fizzling racket, or the suffocating miasma that overwhelmed him. It was everything at once: the foetid smell of bodies, the steamed cabbage, images of a time long, long ago.

‘His knees were giving beneath him, but he must make it to that chair for dignity’s sake.

‘“Arglwydd arwain,” he heard flooding through his brain, “…stranets…of our own bowels, Phil boy… In Sparta once…”

‘His neck was being bound in fluff, by a snake of cotton wool, tighter and tighter. He desperately tried to unbutton his collar, but something gave a little “pop!” in his chest like a plastic cap coming off, and the last thing he saw as he swooned was a flock of swifts, wheeling slowly and so gracefully far above him.

‘Six weeks later, the body of the Grover Reader arrived back in England. When they took the lid off the zinc container, it was discovered that the corpse’s trousers had been stolen. His legs lay there stiff and white like two new broom-handles. And for years the story was told with great relish at high table, whenever the subject of Russia arose.’

I guffawed.

‘Very good, Mervyn, very good. How well, in fact, did you know Jones?’

‘Not that well at all, really.’ Stone pursed his lips and poured us some more whisky. ‘He said to me during the last election that he thought the National Front were the only genuine non-bourgeois party…’

Note: Chivovysmotrite?! means Wodderyerstaringat?!

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement

‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine

‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian

‘This comprehensive, meticulously researched and highly readable biography, which the author describes as a “story” rather than an academic biography…’ Michael Pursglove, East-West Review

‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

‘The book is written with great assurance and the reader always feels in safe hands. I liked the idea of it being a story and I read it the same way I would read a novel.’ Harvey Pitcher, writer

‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18

A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.