Parlour Four Page 13

  It was thus that we began to hear of the sinister metropolitan occasions of the Galen Professor of Physike and Chirurgerie.

  Essaying only the sparest of narratives, I here pass over preliminaries: the whisperings at second-hand, the rumours of undetermined provenance. There came a morning upon which I was sitting in my little basement office in Wellington Square, endeavouring to sort out the affairs of a retired Fellow of Oriel College who was proposing to lecture on Restoration Comedy in the lesser universities of Uruguay, when the door opened and my boss stuck his head into the room. (I say ‘my boss’ to emphasise again my humble status in the city of dreaming spires.) It was seldom that he thus ventured half-underground. He was now in an unaccountably agitated condition.

  ‘Burton,’ he said with a tremour in his voice, ‘there’s somebody called to see you. It’s Martell.’

  ‘Martell?’ I said. ‘I don’t know anybody . . .’

  ‘Good God, man! Charles Martell. He’s the P.M.’s p.s.’ Maxton (which was my boss’s name) might have been saying, ‘He sitteth on the right hand of God the Father Almighty’. So I hope I looked impressed. In fact, I confess to being impressed. Nobody from the corridors of power had ever – so to speak – rung my bell before.

  ‘You’d better show him in,’ I said.

  ‘I thought, perhaps, that in the circumstances, my own room . . .’

  ‘Show him in, Maxton,’ I said firmly. It wasn’t, after all, Maxton that this emissary from on high asked for. And I suppose that already I had an inkling of what was cooking.

  ‘Oh, very well.’ Maxton disappeared, and moments later ushered in the great man.

  ‘Mr Burton,’ Maxton said, ‘is a valued colleague. I must apologise for the accommodation, Sir Charles. Our budget, if I may venture to mention it . . .’

  ‘How do you do?’ Martell said to me, and briskly shook hands. ‘Thank you,’ he said to Maxton. So Maxton withdrew, and my visitor surveyed my cubby-hole with some care. ‘Mr Burton,’ he asked, ‘can we by any chance be overheard?’

  ‘Oh, yes – I expect so.’ I said this in a cheerful and carefree way, having a hunch that I’d have to be treading warily, and judging that a little lightness of air might usefully suggest that I wasn’t going to be trodden on. But, of course, the chap knew better than that. His manner was, in fact, extremely courteous. ‘Then, perhaps,’ he said, ‘we might take a turn in the garden. It’s familiar ground to me. A good many years ago, I had digs in Wellington Square.’

  ‘I was in Holywell,’ I said.

  ‘Ah, yes. Convenient for you as a New College man.’

  So Martell had done his homework – or, rather, had it done for him. We left the building. Wellington Square cannot have been any longer much like the place my visitor remembered from his undergraduate days. But he seemed well-pleased to talk as we perambulated in what remained of its secluded centre.

  ‘Let me be clear at once,’ he said. ‘The Prime Minister is very concerned about this extraordinary outbreak in Oxford. He is anxious to be kept informed about it. And particularly about the incubation period.’

  ‘My dear Sir Charles, why on earth should you come to me about that? It isn’t remotely my sort of thing. But I have gathered – merely from reading it up in the last few days – that most authorities would regard talk about an incubation period as nonsense. Dyslexia, when it occurs in maturity, is regarded as the consequence of a small-scale cerebral disaster. If it happens, it happens bang off.’

  ‘Would that be – or would it now continue to be – the opinion of Professor Brand?’

  ‘I’ve no idea.’

  ‘But the Professor is—is he not—among your intimate friends?’

  ‘Nothing of the sort. We were at the same prep school, and now see each other from time to time. May I say that I consider it very extraordinary that you should wish to talk to me about him?’

  ‘It is indeed extraordinary. But we are faced with an extraordinary situation. And not merely in Oxford, Mr Burton. In London as well. Or, to be more precise, in Whitehall, in the Houses of Parliament – and, indeed, in Downing Street. In Number 10, Mr Burton. Yes, positively in Number 10 itself.’

  At least a breath of all this had already come to us in Oxford through the channels I have described. As a consequence, I was able to give some attention to the form, as well as to the substance, of what Sir Charles Martell had said. I judged him to have a nice sense of climax.

  ‘So I appeal to you, Mr Burton. I appeal to you on the instruction of the Prime Minister himself. You say that your acquaintance with Professor Brand is comparatively slight. But at least it stretches far back. Is it in your memory that he nursed’—and Sir Charles paused to choose a phrase—’revolutionary predilections?’

  ‘My dear sir – a boy at his private school!’

  ‘But it is most important. We must uncover everything we can: mere hints though they may be. In your more recent chats with the Professor, has he ever let slip an interest in, even an admiration for, the principles of communism as they inform the governments of Eastern Europe?’

  ‘Never.’ I saw that things were getting serious. ‘But go on,’ I added. ‘If I am to help you Sir Charles, I must be put in the picture.’

  ‘I fear that might take me beyond my instructions.’

  ‘Then, sir, we’d better call it a day.’

  ‘Very well – but I rely upon your absolute discretion. And I ask you to imagine a Cabinet Meeting confronted with papers none of which those present is able to read.’

  ‘It is certainly a remarkable thought.’ I resolved to be a shade perky. ‘But I don’t know that it would matter very much.’

  ‘The chain of command, sir! The flow of intelligence! Consider the convenient questions which back benchers are instructed to get up and put to Ministers. Of course they have to be written down for them. Good fellows, no doubt – but more likely than not to be of mediocre intelligence. One couldn’t possibly trust them to do the job viva voce. And that is only one tiny instance of the mischief threatening us. The entire system of government would grind to a halt. We are, of course, making our contingency plans, but time would be required to bring them into effect. And in that fatal interval an enemy might strike. Lacking directives, our armed forces would be in chaos.’ Martell paused briefly. ‘The Dyslexia Factor,’ he said solemnly, ‘would be decisive. Our defeat would be certain from the start.’

  ‘Dear me!’ I said. I believe I was really alarmed by this sudden vision of paranoia in high places. ‘Just how can poor Martin Brand affect so comprehensive a mischief?’

  ‘By squirting it.’

  ‘I beg your pardon!’

  ‘The things are called aerosols. You kill flies with them. Or, for that matter, obtain the stuff you shave with. In a confined area such as Westminster, and granted the possibility of an imperceptible and odourless vapour . . .’

  ‘I can see, Sir Charles, why you want to know about an incubation period. But—even granted the theory that there is a bug, or virus, or whatever . . .’

  ‘The situation here in Oxford proves that, does it not? What you call cerebral disasters don’t suddenly happen by the hundred.’

  I saw that Martell had a point there, and I paused to consider.

  ‘Even so,’ I then said, ‘have you any evidence whatever that this machination has been in Brand’s head?’

  ‘Conclusive evidence. Not only has he of late been coming constantly up to town, and cunningly insinuating himself into vital places. He has even been observed—and photographed!—gloating over the things.’

  ‘The things, Sir Charles?’

  ‘The canisters containing the deadly stuff. Alone in a first-class railway carriage, and believing himself safe from detection, he opened a haversack and counted over the deadly objects.’

  I find it hard to believe that, at this point, I failed to tumble to the true – and sufficiently shocking – state of the case. But I am uncertain about this, and recall only that I at once asked two f
urther questions.

  ‘Am I to understand from all this, Sir Charles, that Professor Brand has occasioned widespread dismay and panic throughout the government; that every Minister, and innumerable less exalted persons, are waiting apprehensively for dyslexia to descend upon them?’

  ‘I would not express the matter in precisely those terms, Mr Burton. But in substance your conjecture is correct.’

  ‘Then why on earth don’t you arrest the man? He must be clean off his head.’

  ‘Precisely so. We are apprehensive that, upon an unwary approach with the object of putting him under restraint, Brand might take some summary means of making away with himself. Taking with him the secret of the antidote.’

  ‘If there is one.’

  ‘The cure, the treatment – what you will. If the man can propagate the thing, he can certainly put an end to it.’

  ‘It’s an assumption,’ I said – and didn’t add that Martin had named this to me as exactly what he couldn’t do. ‘And I still don’t know, Sir Charles, why you have come from town to tell me all this.’

  ‘Because it is clear from our inquiries, Mr Burton, that you are in Professor Brand’s confidence. We look to you to sound him out. Perhaps, if you judge it to be judicious, to hint to him that he has been unmasked.’

  At this last word, something like melodrama appeared to hover over my colloquy with the Prime Minister’s right-hand man. I felt I’d had enough of him.

  ‘I’ll do what I can,’ I said. ‘Have you come up to Oxford by car?’

  ‘By train.’

  ‘Then we’ll go back to the office, Sir Charles, and I’ll call a taxi to take you to the station.’

  V

  It seemed to me that the situation required a little thinking over. I decided to let a day pass, and then simply tell Martin, in careful detail, about my disconcerting interview with Sir Charles Martell. The sequel would be up to him.

  But this failed to happen, and when I did again see Martin it was under changed circumstances. What took place began with my remembering, just after Martell had left me, that on that evening I happened again to have an invitation to dine in Judas. If Martin chanced to be dining too, I could, with a very little manoeuvring, covertly study him without having to join him and converse. Why I should have taken it into my head that this would be in any degree advantageous, I don’t clearly know. There was a good deal of muddled thinking in Oxford by this time, and probably I had my share of it.

  Standing, as before, while awaiting grace, I quickly saw that Martin wasn’t in evidence. But the Provost was in his place at the head of High Table, as was the senior fellow facing him in the prescriptive fashion. The Provost, of course, knew that grace by heart, so his affliction was neither here nor there so far as the ritual performance went. The precise drill was this: the Provost would give a dignified nod to the head servant who managed things in Hall; the servant would give his bellow; the long rows of chattering undergraduates would fall silent; the Provost and senior fellow would fall to the business of alternately haranguing their deus omnipotens, pater caelestis. But a hitch – indeed, an unexampled impropriety – now manifested itself. At the bottom of the Hall a lounging young man, perched on the end of a table, was reading a newspaper – no doubt with some obscure notion of showing off to those of his companions who could have done nothing of the sort even had they wanted to. And the Provost observed it. He motioned to the butler standing behind him.

  ‘Give that gentleman my compliments,’ I heard him say, ‘and require him to come up here at once, bringing his paper with him.’ This was a sensation – but only a very minor sensation compared with what was to follow. The message was delivered, and the offender, amid a dead silence, walked up the length of the Hall and presented himself before the Provost. The Provost eyed him for a moment before speaking.

  ‘Your name, sir?’

  ‘Kilby, Mr Provost.’

  ‘Mr Kilby, gentlemen do not engage themselves with the public prints when attending upon the common meal.’

  ‘I’m very sorry, Mr Provost.’ Kilby now clearly judged it proper to be oppressively correct.

  ‘Hand me that paper.’

  Kilby did as he was told. The Provost glanced at the thing, and his brow darkened. ‘What is this?’ he said. ‘”Vicar’s Love Nest in Vestry”. And “My Joy Ride with Sex Maniac”. The gutter press! Mr Kilby, consider yourself admonished.’

  ‘Thank you, Mr Provost.’

  At this, Kilby received back his paper, and returned to his place – in a silence that now had stupefaction added to it. There could be no doubt as to what had been demonstrated. The Provost’s word blindness had evaporated.

  And so, within a few days, had that of everybody else who had been visited. This held throughout the town – of scholars and citizens alike. At the railway station the timetables could be consulted; on the streets everybody could see where the buses were going to; the reading-rooms of the Bodleian were crowded again. Quite soon, as with an epidemic of influenza, the thing was forgotten about. But I did have a brief conversation with the Galen Professor of Physike and Chirurgerie.

  ‘Explain,’ I said.

  ‘I’ve told you before,’ Martin said. ‘I know nothing about it. No more than the next man, I said. Don’t you remember?’

  ‘I remember your saying that you could start it, even if you couldn’t stop it.’

  ‘It was a lie,’ Martin said comfortably. ‘I had to cheer myself up, you know. The whole affair is nonsense, so far as anything known about dyslexia goes. And I’m not going to be the man who tries to make sense of it. Plenty of young chaps around to get going on that.’

  ‘But, Martin, you don’t deny that you played the fool with a pack of aerosols and whatever, and put the fear of God into the entire Establishment?’

  ‘If a bunch of morons takes one for a mad scientist, why not give them a run for their money? I think I did pretty well.’

  ‘Aren’t you afraid they’ll lock you up?’

  ‘Not in the least. They’d only expose themselves as having been first-rate chumps, wouldn’t they? No, no – they’ll keep mum about it all. I’m all right, Jack.’

  TWO STRINGS TO HIS BOW

  I

  Geoffrey Simkiss had believed for a good many years that he had come to terms with himself as a harmless little man. This wasn’t a matter of the comfortable frankness that steals upon many in middle age. Simkiss was still quite young when the persuasion of his own near-nullibiety looked to have become a settled thing with him. Even so, it had been a little procrastinated by the fact of his having been appointed a professor at the startlingly early age of twenty-five. Premature promotion had arrived partly because he was intellectually precocious and rather clever as well; and partly because, at the critical moment, there had been nobody else around who had shared with him his interest in the early history of English lexicography. Within five years of his taking up his Chair, he had become the sole authority in the field worth appealing to, but had also arrived at the perception that the subject was of limited interest not merely to the world at large, but to his own learned world as well. So he began to wonder how he could branch out from it.

  Simkiss said ‘branch out’ to himself rather than ‘break loose’ because he was reluctant to contemplate positively quitting the academic profession. Even in slightly paranoid phases, when he believed (wholly inaccurately) that some of his colleagues had formed the habit of actually articulating the phrase ‘harmless little man’ by way of describing him, he still didn’t want to quit university life. It was true that the pupils who gravitated to him were on the dull side, and that at those boards and committee meetings at which his rank should have assured him of a respectable hearing, quite a number of people distinguishably switched off as soon as he opened his mouth. But on more relaxed occasions, most of his colleagues chatted to him cordially enough, and without their glance too often straying to other parts of the room. He liked his midday meals in what was called ‘Staff House
’, where a bustling woman knew to bring him a little carafe of wine along with his corned beef, and at which there was small talk which he could sometimes positively brighten with an apt quotation or a suddenly remembered undergraduate joke. Moreover the pay wasn’t bad, and he had twice got himself brief holidays abroad at the university’s expense by discovering that there was to be a lexicographical conference in Bonn or Uppsala. So at first he thought of a little increasing his stature (which was the real problem) by what might be called cognate studies: adding, for example, early orthoepists (with whom he already had some familiarity) to the early dictionary wallahs, or venturing seriously into the tricky field of Finnish loan-words in Old High German. But these things meant much labour for somewhat exiguous rewards, prestige-wise regarded. He wouldn’t exactly walk tall on the strength of them. It was because there was a streak of genuine ambition in him that he wanted so to walk.

  So what about breaking loose after all – but in some fashion compatible with staying put? There was the comparatively new race of persons called ‘TV dons’ – commonly so named with a disparagement more than a little tinctured with envy. Given the necessary assiduity, might not the higher-class chat shows become open to him? But somehow he didn’t much relish the idea of going home and a few evenings later viewing himself on the box – or even having so to view himself during the recording in a battery of screens ranged round the studio. Always a diffident man, Professor Simkiss was on far from easy terms with the shaving mirror in his bathroom, and still less with the long looking-glass that hung beside his bed. TV wasn’t on.