A Family Affair (2 page)

Appleby jerked himself out of this fantasy, since to lose himself in it would be uncivil. Besides, a further stage in the evening’s proceedings had been reached. The President of the Patriarchs was calling upon a certain Paddy Moyle (who had been looking nervous for some time) to “introduce a topic”.

And at this the assembled Patriarchs assumed expressions of severe attention. Appleby, without any difficulty, did the same.

Mr Moyle’s topic proved to be ‘Practical Jokes’. This at least gave promise of more liveliness than ‘Religious Doubt’, even although – as it turned out – Mr Moyle started off from Holy Writ. What, he asked the company, was the first practical joke? He was inclined to give his own vote to the Flood. Flood switched on; Flood switched off; roars of laughter in heaven. This was the very type, the very archetype, of practical joking.

A tall youth sitting next to Bobby (of a privileged class of society, clearly, since he was having no difficulty with his cigar at all) interrupted to disagree. God had contrived a much earlier practical joke than
that
. Think of the first sunset! Adam pottering complacently round his new estate, not much noticing what was going on in the sky. Then the whole thing faded out on him, and in no time he couldn’t see a yard in front of his nose. Think of the shivering despair in which the poor devil passed the night! But morning arrived, and the Prime Orb bobbed up again. Heaven’s laughter must have been very loud indeed. Top practical joke.

‘But hadn’t Eve already been created?’ Bobby asked. ‘She was a pretty stiff joke at the innocent Adam’s expense, wasn’t she? Think of Marvell. “Two paradises ’twere in one, To live in Paradise alone”.’

‘Talking of the Flood,’ somebody said, rather belatedly. ‘There’s a practical joke about it in Chaucer. The first recorded English practical joke. It’s in
The Reeve’s Tale
, isn’t it?’

‘
The Miller’s Tale
, you ignoramus,’ Mr Moyle said. Mr Moyle was becoming a little impatient to get on with his own remarks.

‘That’s right. One chap is persuaded to spend the night in a tub hoisted up to the rafters, because they tell him there’s going to be another Flood. It enables another chap to sleep with his wife. In the end, he’s cut down with a crash. Uproarious, wouldn’t you say?’

‘At least a
practical
joke,’ Bobby pointed out. ‘Joker gets wench. Some point to the thing.’

This remark excited a ribaldry not at all inhibited by the presence of the Patriarchs’ elderly guest. It was against the background of this that Mr Moyle had to assert himself.

‘That’s what I want to go on to,’ he said. ‘Why they’re called practical jokes. I don’t think it has anything to do with the deception paying a dividend, as in Chaucer’s story. Think of the most rudimentary kind, that you can buy in squalid little shops for a shilling. Something you put on the floor or the table, to pretend the ink’s been spilt or the cat’s been sick. There are more ingenious ones that are quite revolting. Their purpose is to disgust or frighten or humiliate. The basis of the ploy is always essentially malicious.’

‘I say – talking of Chaucer.’ It was the man who had harked back to the Flood who now harked back again. ‘There’s a story by Rudyard Kipling called “Dayspring Mishandled”. It’s about somebody spending years and years first forging and then planting a Chaucer manuscript, just in order to fool and discredit another scholar, who is supposed to be frightfully disagreeable. At least, it’s something like that. And I think a practical joke might really be defined as applied satire. The castigation of folly, and all that. Sadism – and malice, as Paddy says – masquerading as moral zeal. But I still don’t understand the word “practical”.’

‘You will if you let me get on to it,’ Mr Moyle said with some warmth. ‘As a matter of fact, it seems to me quite an interesting bit of semantics. And it hasn’t been remarked hitherto, so far as I can discover.’

‘Mr Moyle’s essays,’ someone said in a don’s voice, ‘may be relied upon for an air of making a contribution to their subject.’

‘Machination,’ Mr Moyle said, ignoring this. ‘In the sixteenth century, a “practice” is a stratagem directed at an evil end. And the adjective was used in the same way. So that’s what a practical joke is. A crafty one.’

‘Do we understand,’ Bobby asked, ‘that the expression “practical joke” is known to have been current in a period when “practical” could still mean “crafty”?’

‘Not exactly.’ Mr Moyle appeared slightly at a loss for a moment, but then recovered confidence. ‘However,’ he added, ‘the use may doubtless be inferred.’

‘Don’t the best practical jokes tend to be disinterested?’ Appleby asked. It was plain that the Patriarchs’ guest must utter in the course of the evening.

‘Do you mean without a victim, sir?’ somebody said. ‘I don’t see that that’s possible.’

‘Well, I admit that a practical joke is always, broadly speaking, a hoax; and that in any hoax there has to be somebody to be taken in. But it need scarcely be a specific somebody. Swinburne – at least, I think it was Swinburne – once invented an obscure French poet – I believe it was a poet – and published a substantial essay on him. The victim was something quite vague; say, the literary world at large. Or there were the people who dressed up as navvies and dug an enormous hole in the middle of Bond Street. Or think of some of the most famous impersonations carried off by practical jokers. More often than not, any element of malice was minimal in them.’

‘A joke may be disinterested,’ Mr Moyle said. ‘But it can’t be unmotivated. And that’s what I rather wanted to go on to: what may be called the psychology of the joker. I have come to the conclusion that the typical practical joker labours under a sense of inferiority and insecurity. So he has to prove himself sharper-witted than other people. For example, there was a real man not long ago who forged things rather as that scholar in Kipling’s story does.’

‘T J Wise,’ somebody said.

‘That’s right. He was quite a well-heeled business gent with cultivated interests. He collected books in a big way, with the result that he was much run after by scholars. But he wasn’t himself a scholar. I don’t think he’d even had the kind of education that is the privilege of everybody in this room.’

‘A deprivation painful to think of,’ the Patriarchs’ host of the evening said. He was still going conscientiously round with the port.

‘As a consequence, Wise inclined to feel these learned hangers-on really had a patronizing attitude to him. So he did all his forgeries, and took all these chaps in. Probably they hadn’t really been laughing at him at all. But he felt they had. And now – without their knowing it – he was in a position to laugh at them.’

‘He sounds a bit of a special case to me,’ Bobby said. ‘I don’t believe many people would respond with practical jokes to some embittered sense that they hadn’t themselves made a grade. Wasn’t there a chap who hired the Oxford Town Hall, and gave a very successful lecture in the character of some eminent continental philosopher? I don’t believe for a moment that he was a failed philosopher himself. He was from some quite different walk of life, and just out for a little quiet fun.’

‘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.’

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.’