The Madonna of the Astrolabe Read online

  Copyright & Information

  The Madonna of the Astrolabe

  First published in 1977

  Copyright: John Stewart Literary Management Ltd. 1977-2012

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  The right of J.I.M. Stewart to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.

  This edition published in 2012 by House of Stratus, an imprint of

  Stratus Books Ltd., Lisandra House, Fore Street, Looe,

  Cornwall, PL13 1AU, UK.

  Typeset by House of Stratus.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library and the Library of Congress.

  EAN ISBN Edition

  0755130421 9780755130429 Print

  0755133234 9780755133239 Kindle

  0755133544 9780755133543 Epub

  This is a fictional work and all characters are drawn from the author’s imagination.

  Any resemblance or similarities to persons either living or dead are entirely coincidental.

  www.houseofstratus.com

  About the Author

  John Innes Mackintosh Stewart (who also wrote as Michael Innes) was born in Edinburgh where his father was Director of Education. He attended Edinburgh Academy before going up to Oriel College, Oxford where he was awarded a first class degree in English and won the Matthew Arnold Memorial Prize and was named a Bishop Frazer scholar. After a short interlude travelling with AJP Taylor in Austria, including studying Freudian psychoanalysis for a year, he embarked on an edition of Florio’s translation of Montaigne’s Essays. This subsequently helped him secure a post teaching English at Leeds University.

  In 1932, Stewart married Margaret Hardwick, who practised medicine, and they subsequently had three sons and two daughters. By 1935, he had been awarded the Jury Chair at the University of Adelaide in Australia as Professor of English and had also completed his first detective novel, ‘Death at the President’s Lodging’, published under the pseudonym ‘Michael Innes’. This was an immediate success and part of a long running series centred on ‘Inspector Appleby’, his primary character when writing as ‘Innes’. There were almost fifty titles completed under the ‘Innes’ banner during his career.

  In 1946, he returned to the UK and spent two years at Queen’s University in Belfast, before being appointed Student (Fellow and Tutor) at Christ Church, Oxford. He was later to hold the post of Reader in English Literature of Oxford University and upon his retirement was made an Emeritus Professor. Whilst never wanting to leave his beloved Oxford permanently, he did manage to fit into his busy schedule a visiting Professorship at the University of Washington and was also honoured by other Universities in the UK.

  Stewart wrote many works under his own name, including twenty-one works of fiction (which contained the highly acclaimed quintet entitled ‘A Staircase in Surrey’, centred primarily in Oxford, but with considerable forays elsewhere, especially Italy), several short story collections, and over nine learned works on the likes of Shakespeare, Kipling and Hardy. He was also a contributor to many academic publications, including a major section on modern writers for the Oxford History of English Literature. He died in 1994, the last published work being an autobiography: ‘Myself and Michael Innes’.

  J.I.M. Stewart’s fiction is greatly admired for its wit, plots and literary quality, whilst the non-fiction is acknowledged as being definitive.

  Introduction

  There could be no question of the gravity of the surveyor’s report when it was given to the Governing Body a few days later. The document was alarming. The Governing Body, although an assembly the awesomeness of which was such that I hadn’t yet ventured to open my mouth at it, was itself awed by the dimensions of the crisis revealed.

  Never having had to give thought to the priorities enforcing themselves upon administrative assemblies, I hadn’t thought of the overriding necessity we were under simply to ensure that we had a roof over our heads. It was the first rumblings from the college tower that brought this home to me.

  ‘Professor Sanctuary,’ the Provost said evenly, ‘favours the immediate launching of an appeal . . .’

  I

  Happy birthday to you,

  Squashed bananas and stew!

  You look like a monkey,

  Go back to the zoo!

  Johnnie Bedworth sang this as lustily as any of his guests. There was no impropriety in his joining in, since none of the juveniles present retained much awareness of the originating occasion of the party. It was doubtful whether even Johnnie’s sister, Virginia did. She was crooning the lines broodingly to herself in a corner, and seemed progressively less well-disposed to the festivity as it became more and more of a romp. Indeed, not so much a romp as a rumpus. But this too was in order. The room was called the rumpus room – although a linguistic purist (such as Cyril Bedworth was) might have been prompted to speak of it rather as the rumpus area. For on the ground floor of the Victorian North Oxford house, several walls had been knocked down and compensating girders inserted – this no doubt at the expense of our college, which owned the property – in the interest of open-plan living. The boundaries between sitting-room, rumpus room, and kitchen having thereby become merely notional, Mabel Bedworth could talk to visitors in the first and keep an eye on her children in the second without interrupting her culinary activities in the third. The rest of the house, three more storeys and a basement, had presumably been remodelled on similar principles. Its original design must have equanimously envisaged the doing to death of three or four domestic servants a year.

  It struck me that a philosopher (and Mrs Firebrace, who had brought her three sons, was eminent in the university as that) could not fail to find matter for speculation in what was proving the theme-song of the party. Outrage takes on a sharper edge when it travesties or parodies some familiar orthodoxy – as Black Masses and Feasts of Fools witness. Johnnie Bedworth and his friends were on the crest of such an indulgence. The words they chanted were wicked and daring in an extreme, the battle-cry of a heady insurgence. Singly or in couples, these academic infants, all flashing eyes and floating hair, would bear down upon a grown-up, shout their strident and defiant quatrain, and dash away again. I had seen the precise physical manoeuvre on television the evening before: a student at some violent confrontation with authority breaking ranks, darting forward to take a swipe at a policeman’s helmet (or at the muzzle of a mounted policeman’s horse), and darting back again rather more quickly still.

  I offered the analogy to Mrs Firebrace, who replied – I felt discouragingly – that it could not be extended through other dimensions of the two affairs. She was a woman with deep-set black eyes operating from behind a tumble of black hair, so that one conversed with her rather as one might have nerved oneself to interrogate a sibyl shrouded in the darkness of a cave. At the moment, I could just see that she was looking at her watch. It wasn’t with any uncivil intent. Two of her boys were among the oldest at the party, and she was reflecting that they must be got home in time to be calmed down and persuaded to do their prep. The children at private schools, it seemed, were already shouldering this burden; those enjoying state education (and they were the majority) would still be free of it for some time ahead.

  ‘It appears,’ Mrs Firebrace said, ‘that birthdays can be significant from a very tender age indeed.’ She glanced at me sharply (or I thought she did), as
if to confirm that I had made an appeal for, and would be gratified by, rational talk amid the surrounding din. ‘In the early days of psychotherapy, William Brown was able to elicit memories of people’s second, or even first birthday.’

  ‘They say now that they can get at pre-natal memories.’

  ‘But that isn’t so remarkable.’ Mrs Firebrace was surprised that this should have to be pointed out. ‘A random somatic event or sensation in the womb is one thing; an anniversary occasion is quite another . . . I wish Jacob wouldn’t pick his nose.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Why?’ Mrs Firebrace, whose train of thought had been interrupted on observing this displeasing action on the part of her eldest son, stared at me blankly. ‘It’s unhygienic.’

  ‘Then why not stop him?’

  ‘And how am I to do that?’

  ‘Leather him whenever the loathsome practice rears its ugly head.’

  ‘Jacob would bite his nails instead. He’s very resourceful.’

  ‘Leather him harder.’

  ‘What good would that do?’

  ‘His resourcefulness would eventually lead him to find satisfaction in some socially inoffensive gesture. Twiddling his thumbs or smoothing down his hair. But you were saying something about birthdays.’

  ‘In its radical sense the concept is a simple one – just the day you came out of mummy’s tummy. The tiniest child can understand that.’

  ‘Of course. It’s the most natural thing in the world. Nothing in the least odd about it.’

  ‘Mr Pattullo, please do not subject me to banter. It’s the worst type of male chauvinism.’

  I’m terribly sorry.’ Mrs Firebrace and I were getting along quite well together. ‘Do continue.’

  ‘A birthday anniversary is quite a complex idea to get hold of. Far more, even, than the concept of a today or a tomorrow. Where does any first grip on it come from? It must be a matter of the deep structure, wouldn’t you say?’

  I thought it wise not to say. The next ugly head to be raised looked like being Professor Chomsky’s, and it was improbable that I’d make much of this savant amid the uproar surrounding me. The threat, however, was obviated by my host. Johnnie Bedworth was making a dash at me, his head lowered like that of a charging bull. Oxford children incline to precocity, and although I understood it to be Johnnie’s fifth birthday that we were saluting, I couldn’t be certain that he was incapable of some full-blown fantasy of the successful goring of a matador in an appropriate Spanish setting. Within inches of me, however, he halted and straightened up. He was struggling for breath, for speech. Or was he bottling up enormous mirth? Impossible to tell. His complexion was turning from pink to purple. He spluttered. His whole person seemed to swell under the pressure of whatever it was that was going on in him. He gulped, and I saw that words were again, if briefly, at his command. I was about to be told that I was of simian appearance and had better return whence I had come.

  ‘See you later, alligator!’ Johnnie shouted at me. Screaming with laughter, he turned and bolted across the room. He ought, I believe, to have given me a chance to reply ‘In a while, crocodile’. That would have been correct. But Johnnie’s concern had been with frustrating legitimate expectation. It seemed to him enormously funny and utterly devastating that I should not have been told to go back to the zoo. I found myself feeling for Johnnie the respect due to a confrere. He had discovered one of the prime mechanisms of comedy.

  Except for myself – drawn in as a kind of honorary uncle in consequence of that cordial regard which Cyril Bedworth so undeservedly bestowed on me – the adults present were all, as was natural, parents. There were almost as many fathers as mothers – this because, until the dinner-hour comes round, Oxford dons are the most domesticated of men. Moreover, although of learned or speculative habit, they are prompt and dutiful in joining at need in the activities of their young. Several were now taking part in ‘Murder’. This was by way of a reprise. ‘Murder’ having proved the main success of the party, the infants were insisting on going through it again before breaking up. Even a simplified version of the game might have been judged unsuitable for those of such tender years. But there was no doubt of its grip, and it was those children who least understood the root idea who most seriously addressed themselves to a proper comportment during the ritual. I knew little about children; only my brother Ninian’s had been much on my horizon, and I had lived abroad too long to see a great deal even of them. The dream children to whom I have occasionally confessed had never, significantly, been proper children at all; they had sprung to life almost within reach of the age of the young people who now occasionally turned up to my lectures. Perhaps this disregard of two of the Seven Ages of Man was partly a matter of professional prejudice. Children are a dead loss on the stage. Shakespeare himself couldn’t manage them, even although he had actual children with theatrical training always to hand. So it was very much from the sidelines that I judged juvenile assemblies.

  There had, of course, been Charles and Mary Talbert, the progeny of those deep, and deeply wedded, scholars who had presided over my early assaults on English literature within the university. I didn’t think I had actually been to a birthday party in Old Road; and if such festivities were ever mounted there, it was probable that their highlight had been the production of a new educational game of philological character. There had been, too, the children I used to observe in the course of my pilgrimages through North Oxford to my other, and reclusive, tutor, J. B. Timbermill. These, unlike the young Talberts, had scarcely been inhibited, and a certain social motility had been suggested by their pursuit of street games (involving much unsightly chalking of pavements), which would appear to have percolated from other strata of society. What I chiefly remembered of these, however, was again something in a linguistic area: their uniform command of what Timbermill called Received Standard English – a dialect at that time barely to be comprehended by my alien ear. Here, at least, there was a marked contrast between then and now. Johnnie Bedworth, even when bellowing at the top of his voice, produced cockney with the precision of an accomplished character actor: this because his nursery school had provided him with a boon companion (present at the party), who had lately migrated to Oxford from Mile End. Contrastingly, there were two or three children whose complexions suggested regions farther away, but whose accents, far from being answeringly coffee-coloured, were indistinguishable from those of Heads of Houses or Fellows of Lady Margaret Hall.

  The darkly shadowed Mrs Firebrace had left me – composedly, although the occasion of her departure was her youngest son’s having been sick in some inappropriate place. I continued to reflect on social change as evidenced in infancy. In the Edinburgh of my childhood, coloured boys and girls of any variety hadn’t existed, not even, so far as I could remember, as a casual phenomenon in the streets. They belonged solely within the sphere of religious education – being frequently represented in a species of Sunday School iconography as awaiting in distant lands enlightenment on Noah’s Ark and the Twelve Tribes of Israel. But had one of them turned up while we were ourselves receiving such instruction, I doubt whether we should have behaved at all well, so untoward would the irruption have appeared to us. Here at the Bedworths’ party the pinko-greys on the one hand and the contrastingly tinted on the other, seemed to be a wholly integrated group, confirming the view that racial feeling surfaces only at adolescence. It was true that the parents of almost all the children here present would be firmly anti-racist. Yet that might cut two ways. How antipathetic to the unformed mind must be elders of liberal persuasion who forbid the chanting of Ten little Nigger Boys and banish Little Black Sambo from the nursery library!

  These thoughts were interrupted by the appearance before me of Virginia Bedworth. She had detached herself from the final game with the air of a conscientious hostess who has adequately discharged a duty and earned an unobtrusive breather for a while.

  ‘Excuse me,’ Virginia said. ‘Please, may I get my book?’ She e
dged past me, ran a practised eye along a shelf, and possessed herself of a volume which, although slim, was almost as tall as herself. (Virginia was three.) She then turned and showed it to me politely. It was Babar and Father Christmas. ‘It’s rather noisy here,’ Virginia said. ‘I shall read quietly in my room.’ And with this she withdrew from the party.

  Her mother was much involved with the celebration still, but by way of an activity, at least suggesting the end of the tunnel. Each child was to receive a present on leaving, and Mabel Bedworth was checking these over. At the start of the occasion, Johnnie had received a present from each of his guests. There was no doubt an immemorial, a courtly, an oriental sanction for these punctilious exchanges, but I couldn’t confidently remember that it had obtained in my time. At Christmas parties, indeed, everybody had got a parcel from the tree. But hadn’t it been felt there was something excessive about taking presents to birthday parties – and certainly about giving others away at the door? Wouldn’t this have drawn down the same disapprobation as did the hiring, by parents lacking in decent self-reliance, of a conjurer or ventriloquist ‘to make the thing go’? I found myself hazy here, my only clear memory being that I hadn’t greatly cared for birthday parties. And my brother, Ninian, had been at one with me. We may have felt awkward because our manners, as much as our clothes, had not been of an acceptable party-going sort. We were conscious of being held to stand in need of explanation – something sufficiently achieved when it was remembered that our father was an artist, and our mother slightly mad, though ‘well-connected’. The last phrase had come to me when I was young enough to associate it perplexedly with the use of the telephone.

  These thoughts were interrupted by the return of Mrs Firebrace, who had coped with the emergency presented to her. There was no reason why she should thus seek me out again; we were but slightly acquainted; it might have been more natural for her to switch her attention to one or another of her fellow parents ‘sitting in’ on the party. I was conjecturing that she perhaps judged me lonesome, and that her action was charitably motivated, when something of a freshly appraising character in her glance prompted me to discard this theory.