The Madonna of the Astrolabe Read online

  ‘Penny,’ Mrs Firebrace said, briskly, ‘is coming to stay with me.’

  My response to this news – or to the manner of its delivery – fails to return to my mind. It may have been as inappropriate as Laertes’s ‘O, where?’ when told of Ophelia’s death by drowning. My first feeling, certainly, was irrelevant and trivial, since I found myself resenting so baldly phrased a communication from a person scarcely known to me. This was unjust. Encountering me as she had done at Johnnie Bedworth’s party, and equipped with a piece of information I had some title to receive, Mrs Firebrace would have done equally ill either to withhold or to make a business of it. And if Penny had been awkward as suggesting that we were all three of us intimate together it had certainly been the only term at Mrs Firebrace’s command. ‘Penny Pattullo’ – if Penny still called herself that – would scarcely have done, and ‘your former wife’ wouldn’t have done at all.

  I heard myself say, on a note of polite interest, that I hadn’t been aware Penny and Mrs Firebrace knew each other.

  ‘Oh, yes, indeed. We were at school together.’ Mrs Firebrace was displeased by my ignorance. ‘And quite close friends in our last two years there.’

  ‘Penny must just have happened never to mention it.’ All this information struck me as odd. I knew about Penny’s school, a very fashionable school then, and I’d hardly have thought of it as a likely nursery of young philosophers. Still less should I have imagined Penny disposed to choose as a companion a girl already, it might be presumed, showing a precocious interest in Wittgenstein and Ryle. Not that Penny didn’t possess a flair for surprising preferences from time to time.

  ‘But later we rather lost touch,’ Mrs Firebrace said.

  ‘Ah, yes. Well, Penny and I have lost touch, too.’

  ‘You don’t often see her?’

  “We haven’t met since the divorce.’

  ‘That must be unusual nowadays, don’t you think?’

  ‘Perhaps so. “Uncivilised” is probably the word.’

  ‘I’ve been told it’s thought friendly to celebrate the making absolute of one’s divorce by going to bed together.’

  ‘Penny and I didn’t do that.’ The mildness with which I said this cost me no effort. I was accustomed to women – mostly at parties, although scarcely parties like Johnnie’s – playing up, as they thought appropriately, to my professional character by saying the sort of things that are said in plays. If Mrs Firebrace’s effort had been contextually none too felicitous, that only suggested that she was more accustomed to seminars and tutorials than to silly chatter. I still didn’t think her a bad sort of woman. ‘Is it long since you last saw Penny yourself?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, years and years. But we wrote from time to time. And there’s always been an idea she might come and stay with us in Oxford.’

  ‘But she never has − not till now?’

  “Not till now.’

  ‘As a girl she used to visit an aged relative in Oxford, a Mrs Triplett. It’s where we first met.’

  ‘Yes, I’ve heard all about that.’

  ‘No doubt.’ I was silent for a moment, offended (as I was inclined to be) at the thought of Penny reminiscing about me to persons unknown. ‘And Oxford’s an attractive place to return to. I know that, since it’s only a few months ago that I did it myself. And after years and years of never being near the place.’

  ‘So Penny is following you up.’

  ‘Following me up?’

  ‘Your example, I mean. Coming back to have a look.’

  ‘Yes, of course. When’s this due to happen, Mrs Firebrace?’

  ‘Oh, it’s vague at the moment. I’ll let you know.’

  ‘My dear lady! So that I can skulk in Surrey Quad, and never venture my nose in the street?’

  ‘No, of course not. But occasionally it’s disconcerting to run into somebody after a long interval and as a complete surprise.’

  ‘I suppose so. Indeed, I’ve experienced something of the kind at least once, come to think of it.’ I sought to hold Mrs Firebrace’s gaze as I said this, since I was wondering whether she could possibly know what I was talking about. ‘But I think I can promise not in any circumstances to be particularly disconcerted by Penny.’

  ‘I could discourage the whole thing.’

  This seemed to me an extraordinary remark – the more so because Mrs Firebrace hadn’t uttered it with any lightness of air. She seemed, indeed, rather perplexed, as if she were a philosopher not of the metaphysical but of the moral sort, confronting an ethically ticklish situation. My conclusion was that there had been lightness of air, probably in a letter of Penny’s in which her visit to Oxford had been propounded. Mrs Firebrace had some reason – to put it crudely – to suppose her old school-fellow to be harbouring predatory intentions. It wasn’t conceivable that on Penny’s part this could be other than a passing joke, at least so far as I was concerned. Mrs Firebrace might have failed, however, to interpret it that way.

  I was the last guest to leave the party. This might, in any case, have been correct behaviour in an honorary uncle, but it was also occasioned by Cyril Bedworth’s feeling that he had some piece of college business to discuss. He commonly did feel thus at the tail-end of social occasions; he was beginning to take the full weight of his new duties as our Senior Tutor; it might have been said of him – as of Milton’s Satan in a similarly tough spot – that on his Front engraven Deliberation sat and public care. His present problem was the resistance being put up by some of our older colleagues to a proposal that the college Dramatic Society should be given permission to use the Fellows’ Garden for a production of the first part of Tamburlaine the Great. One of these curmudgeonly members of the Governing Body had advanced as a conclusive consideration, the certainty that the pampered jades of Asia would cut up the turf in an appalling manner. It was Bedworth’s belief that we could defeat this illiberal opposition if we could only make sure of the support of Albert Talbert. Everybody knew that Talbert was the most distinguished of living Elizabethan scholars, so his supporting the undergraduates’ application would carry weight. Indeed, not to defer to him on such a matter would pretty well be—didn’t I think?—to break one of the unwritten rules of the game.

  I replied that my experience of the Governing Body was still limited, but that I thought he was right. So far as my observation went, its proprieties had the edge on its savageries, if only by a fine margin, every time.

  Bedworth, although encouraged by this opinion, now produced a further anxiety. Was Talbert, at least to any pronounced degree, an admirer of Christopher Marlowe? Did I remember that lecture on Marlowe which Talbert had given in 1947 or thereabouts, in which he had described the dramatist as being, if not the most talented, at least the noisiest of the contemporaries of Shakespeare? If Talbert came out with something like that to the G.B. it wouldn’t—would it?—advance matters at all.

  One part of this questionnaire had its awkwardness for me. I must have attended two or three of Talbert’s formal discourses at the distant time invoked, since it had been held a necessary act of courtesy to show one’s tutor something like that degree of countenance in the lectures he was constrained to deliver for the university. But if, as a consequence of this, I had heard Talbert pronounce on Marlowe, the circumstance had faded from my mind during the ensuing quarter of a century. To admit this would be to perplex Bedworth; it might even impair the state of pleasurable feeling I could detect in him as arising from the success of Johnnie’s birthday party. I concentrated, therefore, on the simple issue of noise. The point was an important one. The majority of our colleagues undoubtedly disliked uproar, the only variety they were at all disposed to tolerate being, oddly enough, that nocturnally produced by high-spirited young drunks. And ever since the college Musical Society, ambitiously attempting Tchaikovsky’s Eighteen-Twelve, had surreptitiously introduced into Long Field a battery of cannon provided by a former member, who happened to command the Royal Regiment of Artillery, there had been an alert feelin
g abroad that any form of artistic expression indulged in by undergraduates was likely to generate uproar by one ingenious means or another.

  It didn’t seem to me that a performance of the first part of Tamburlaine was likely to prove an exception to this rule. It would be a romp before which the one we had just been through would pale. Bedworth and I discussed the problem for some time. I wasn’t a wholly disinterested party. Nicolas Junkin was involved in the project, and had contrived to become my pupil during the present term – for reasons academically obscure, and the more perplexing, since I wasn’t expected to take undergraduate pupils at all. It had to be concluded that he had no other intent than that of ruthlessly exacting my support for the production.

  ‘Of course,’ Bedworth said, hopefully, ‘noise is never so bad in open air. It ascends mercifully to the heavens. We can point that out.’

  ‘Very true, Cyril. It’s why bandstands in public parks and places have lids. They keep the racket to ground level.’

  ‘A few years ago, we had son et lumiere in aid of some building project or other. It was because the college has had to over-extend itself alarmingly of recent years in the way of capital expenditure. The prospect of such an affair outside their windows didn’t much please our immediate neighbours. But actually it turned out fairly harmless. Perhaps this will too.’

  ‘Perhaps.’ I felt that it would be only honest to afford Bedworth at least a hint of the possible worst. ‘It rather depends on what tapes they hire.’

  ‘Tapes, Duncan?’

  ‘Of battles, and cities being sacked, and virgins being raped, and so on. You can take your choice. It’s a well- developed industry. No need to bring in real cannon now. They come through the post in a cassette. You just clip the thing in, and then amplify according to taste. It could be done so that the effect would be detectable in Wantage or Abingdon.’

  ‘Oh, dear!’ Bedworth was dismayed. ‘Do you think, perhaps—’

  ‘We mustn’t be faint-hearted, Cyril.’

  ‘Of course not.’ Bedworth squared his shoulders. ‘I’ll tackle Albert. I still think he’s the key.’

  During this conference, Johnnie Bedworth had been hanging around. He ought to have been getting ready for bed, but was contriving an effect of helping his mother to cope with the general debris of the party. When I took my leave, he was quick to accompany me down the garden path. It was, I felt, a very proper if slightly unexpected attention.

  ‘My daddy says you have a typewriter that works by electricity.’

  ‘So I have, Johnnie.’ I was about to add, ‘It’s my new toy,’ but decided that this, although true, might sound over- playful. ‘It saves part of the hard work,’ I said.

  ‘I’m to have an electric train at Christmas.’ Johnnie considered this statement for a moment, and concluded that, as a boast, it wasn’t quite adequate. ‘We have a very big motor car.’ He frowned. ‘Two—three—very big motor cars. We have an aeroplane.’

  ‘An aeroplane must come in very handy.’ The exhilaration of his party, I saw, was still affecting Johnnie’s vision of things.

  ‘With bombs.’ As he made this shocking claim, Johnnie craned his neck sideways and went through the action of peering down over his right shoulder. ‘Bang, bang, bang!’ The bombs had hurtled earthwards and exploded. Johnnie, however, didn’t pause to assess the damage. ‘Does it do the spelling?’ he demanded.

  ‘The electric typewriter? No, I’m afraid not.’

  ‘I could write a proper book like my daddy with one that does the spelling.’

  ‘Probably they’ll invent that kind one day. But you can come and see mine, Johnnie. We could spell one or two things together.’

  ‘That would be very nice.’ Johnnie was polite but un-enthusiastic. ‘We have a dog,’ he said, with a switch to veracity. ‘He’s called Bruno. Virginia says Bruno is only a name for a bear, but I think it’s quite right to call a dog Bruno too. Bruno wasn’t allowed to come to the party because sometimes his behind smells.’

  On this note of realism, Johnnie and I parted, and I made my way back to college on foot. In the University Parks – the plurality of which had long ago become as fictitious as that of the Bedworths’ living-quarters – level evening sunshine washed the grass with gold; skimmed it with shadows, as if the gods were bowling inky sneaks on the cricket field at the centre of the scene. The flatness of the prospect was not totally unrelieved. There were benches; there were shrubs reputed to be of superior botanical interest; there was even a small ornamental pond with ducks. The whole area was confined, but art, not of too obtrusive a landscaping sort, had been deployed to suggest further vistas at least to the imaginatively gifted. I was becoming fond of the University Parks, which as an undergraduate I had seldom frequented. I reflected now that they were a paradigm of their circumambient academic repose.

  That a trite phrase like ‘academic repose’ could thus remain part of my mental furniture is an index of the force of early impressions and persuasions. This first year of my return to Oxford had not been without incident, and common sense would tell one that cares and passions are no more to be excluded from a college than – as Johnson tells us the poet Pope fondly supposed – from a grotto ‘adorned with fossile bodies’. But this last image would be not a bad one to describe an undergraduate view of dons and their habitations. I don’t doubt that my first encounter with Albert Talbert had held some hint as of the tap of a hammer upon rock: here suddenly revealed was evidence of the existence of a heroic age of scholarship long ago.

  From these musings, which had come to me half-way across the Parks, I was withdrawn by the appearance of Dr Wyborn, who was bearing down upon me from the direction of Keble chapel. Wyborn was among the minority of my new colleagues whom I hadn’t, by this time, got to know tolerably well. Even his function was a little obscure to me. He held the title of Pastoral Fellow, whereas the rest of us were plain Fellow and nothing else. It wasn’t just because he was a clergyman; several of our number were that, without being distinguished in this peculiar way. Nor was it because he performed the duties of college chaplain. These were entrusted to a recent graduate, it being supposed (without, perhaps, any rigorous scientific verification) that a young man best understands young men. Wyborn was middle-aged, and his contact with undergraduates was confined to tutoring in Theology the rare youth disposed to that exacting mistress. Some special provision made by a benefactor long ago must account, I supposed, for his exclusive tide. Oxford is full of such survivals, and no practical significance commonly attaches to them.

  ‘Good afternoon, Pattullo.’

  ‘Good afternoon.’ It was surprising that Wyborn had not only uttered a greeting but also come to a halt before me. He was a shy man whose common habit was to glide past with no more than a murmured word or a faint sideways smile. Yet he wasn’t dim; wasn’t what the young men called ‘grey’; on the contrary, he sometimes gave the impression of being highly charged with something on which he was just failing, as it were, to throw in the switch. At times he reminded me a little of my uncle Norman – also a cleric, although of the presbyterian persuasion – but this was perhaps only a matter of mannerism and physique. My uncle suffered from some curious affliction which gave him the appearance of being frequently in tears, and was thus constrained to be perpetually dabbing at his eyes with a handkerchief: as he was by temperament a lugubrious man the effect could scarcely be heartening. Wyborn dabbed correspondingly at a notably sharp and prominent nose. But this being seemingly un- promoted by any physiological necessity, one might conclude the gesture to be a decorous, if faintly irritating, substitute for the bad habit still practised by Jacob Firebrace. Wyborn was performing it now, and for a moment appeared to have nothing to say. ‘I’ve just come from a birthday party at the Bedworths’,’ I told him. ‘Johnnie Bedworth is five.’

  These simple statements elicited a mixed response. Wyborn was not merely a bachelor; he was celibate in a thoroughgoing sacerdotal way, and the mere sudden mention of a domestic occ
asion confused him. But at the same time, he was taking pleasure in it. Family life represented something beyond the compass of his feeling. Yet there had once been a Holy Family; God, like Johnnie Bedworth, had on a certain day been five years old; it was not improbable that the Mother of God had fixed up a party for Him. That Wyborn’s mind really worked in this way could be no more than a conjecture; and since it was the first conjecture it had ever occurred to me to entertain about this unobtrusive man it was possibly wrong. But as it couldn’t be called an idea that would naturally come into one’s head in the presence of an Anglican clergyman I was inclined to think that some flicker of mental rapport had resulted in my getting it right.

  ‘Are you making your way back to college, Pattullo? If so, let me turn round and accompany you. If I have your permission, that’s to say.’

  ‘Yes, please do.’ The formality of Wyborn’s proposal chimed with his manner of addressing me. ‘Pattullo’ went against college convention. It was months since any of my colleagues there had employed anything but my Christian name. But Wyborn, I remembered, never used that form with anybody – and was, in consequence, himself ‘Wyborn’ and not ‘Gregory’ to all interlocutors. How this had come to pass, or what it told one about our Pastoral Fellow, I didn’t know. It seemed the odder because his surname was so unmistakably in the category of those that carry a muted absurdity along with them. ‘Why, indeed?’ was a witticism so obvious that he must have been greeted with it, or variations on it, often enough as a boy. Perhaps he had clung to his patronymic as a result.