A Family Affair Read Free Page A

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.’

 
     
2
     
    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