A Question of Upbringing - Anthony Powell [76]
No one, of course, made any comment after this speech about Quiggin, because there was really no suitable comment to make. The mention of scholarships once more started off Vaalkiipaa on the subject of his difficulties obtaining useful instruction from attendance at lectures while Honthorst, almost equally anxious to discuss educational matters in a serious manner, joined in on the question of gaps in the college library and – as he alleged – out-of-date methods of indexing. Honthorst persisted in addressing Sillery as “sir,” in spite of repeated requests from his host that he should discard this solecism. Sillery was deftly circumventing combined Finnish-American attack, by steering the conversation toward New England gossip by way of hunting in Maine – while at the same time extracting from Vaalkiipaa apparently unpalatable facts about the anti-Swedish movement in Finland – when Quiggin himself arrived: making his presence known by flinging open the door suddenly to its fullest extent, so that it banged against one of the bookcases, knocking over a photograph in a silver frame of three young men in top-hats standing in a row, arm-in-arm.
“Come in,” said Sillery, picking up the picture, and setting it back in its place. “Come in, Quiggin. Don’t be shy. We shan’t eat you. This is Liberty Hall. Let me introduce you to some of my young friends. Here is Mr. Cheston Honthorst, who has travelled all the way from America to be a member of my college: and this is Mr. Jenkins, reading history like yourself: and Mr. Stringham, who has been to East Africa, though his home is that beautiful house, Glimber: and Mr. Vaalkiipaa – rather a difficult name, which we shall soon find that we have all got so used to that we shan’t be able to understand how we ever found it difficult – and Paul, here, you probably know from Brightman’s lectures, which he tells me he loyally attends just as you do; and I nearly forgot Mr. Mark Members, whose name will be familiar to you if you like modern verse – and I am sure you do – so make a place on the sofa, Mark, and Quiggin can sit next to you.”
At first sight, Quiggin seemed to be everything suggested by Sillery’s description. He looked older than the rest of us: older, even, than Vaalkiipaa. Squat, and already going bald, his high forehead gave him the profile of a professor in a comic paper. His neck was encircled with a starched and grubby collar, his trousers kept up by a belt which he constantly adjusted. For the first time since coming up I felt that I was at last getting into touch with the submerged element of the university, which, I had sometimes suspected, might have more to offer than was to be found in conventional undergraduate circles. Mark Members was evidently impressed by a similar – though in his case unsympathetic – sense of something unusual so far as Quiggin was concerned; because he drew away his legs, hitherto stretched the length of the sofa, and brought his knees right up to his chin, clasping his hands round them in the position shown in a picture (that used to hang in the nursery of a furnished house we had once inhabited at Colchester) called The Boyhood of Raleigh; while he regarded Quiggin with misgiving.
“Couldn’t find the way up here for a long time,” said Quiggin.
He sat down on the sofa, and, speaking in a small, hard voice with a North Country inflexion, addressed himself to Members: seeming to be neither embarrassed by the company, nor by Sillery’s sledge-hammer phrases, aimed, supposedly, at putting him at his ease. He went on: “It’s difficult when you’re new to a place. I’ve been suffering a bit here” – indicating his left ear which was stuffed with yellowish