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.

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 edged 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.

‘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 feeling 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 occasion 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.

‘Pattullo,’ Wyborn said, and walked on in silence. This absence of immediate further communication may have been justified by the manner in which he had again pronounced my name. For a start, he was reassuring himself as to my identity. He was even reassuring me as to my identity. Furthermore, he was intimating a deliberative mood, together with a hint of appeal and a suggestion that something confidential and delicate was in the air. The vocal instrument with which Wyborn managed these effects wasn’t in itself impressive, being thin, reedy, and troubled by a curious tremor or wobble. This rendered the more notable the weight of implication achieved.

‘There is a matter I should like to consult you about,’ Wyborn said. We had now left the University Parks and were walking towards the city.

‘Yes, of course, Wyborn.’ I spoke encouragingly, but only a further silence succeeded. I wondered whether I ought to have said ‘Pray do, by all means’, or something of the sort, as carrying a heavier assurance of interest. We passed the Clarendon Laboratory of Experimental Philosophy (which is Oxford’s way of naming a haunt of nuclear physicists) and then the University Museum (which houses the remains of a creature 150 million years old, splendidly called Cetiosaurus oxoniensis). Wyborn was still in no hurry to speak. And as I couldn’t very well either say ‘Out with it, man’ or advance some random topic of my own the situation remained static. This didn’t trouble me. I was far from all agog about what was to come. I had something of my own to chew over. Or I ought to have had. What was perplexing was that I felt no particular impulse that way.

I didn’t often think about Penny. I thought about her far less often than about Janet McKechnie, crudely to be called an old flame, or about my cousin Fiona Petrie, who was gaining some title to be considered a new one. This hadn’t been striking me as odd. Penny had long ago passed out of my life as definitely as Wyborn and I had just passed out of the Parks. That she was going to pay a visit to Oxford was not a piece of news that I’d have expected to upset me, and I had only been amused by Mrs Firebrace’s scarcely veiled assumption that it must do so. What now struck me as curious was the fact that, from the moment of my making a parting bow to Jacob’s mother, I hadn’t thought of Penny at all. I realised that, had I not met Wyborn and been obliged to pay him some attention, my walk back to college would have produced only reflections on the Bedworth family, the weighty matter of Marlowe’s rumbustious Scythian shepherd, and whatever problems of lecturing and supervising I was involved with at the moment. So what was not in my mind, was a faint sense of apprehension before this anaesthetic, patch in my consciousness. I was a child of the age of the depth psychologies; I had been an inquiring boy at a period before these began to give ground before the slobbering of Pavlov’s dogs. When my contemporary, Martin Fish, had fallen into a depression as the consequence of an unpropitious love affair, and when his friends had discussed the possibility of dropping him through trap-doors and assailing him with loud noises whenever he glimpsed the faithless Martine, this sketching of an aversion therapy had been entirely frivolous. What we had really believed was that Fish had suffered some awful trauma which he would repress, but which would intermittently bob up in him for the rest of his days – failing, that was, the attentions of someone like Sigmund Freud. It was in terms of such distant postulates as these that I was capable now of being bothered by the fact that Penny refused to bother me. Some poet—was it Keats?—had been troubled by ‘the feel of not to feel it’, and something of the kind was assailing me when Wyborn at last got down to business.

‘It’s Lempriere,’ Wyborn said. ‘I feel anxious about him. And I know, Pattullo, that you’re a relation of his.’

I was anxious about Arnold Lempriere myself, and judged that others might be as well, since it was possible to sense a certain amount of therapeutic effort going on here and there. But a disposition actually to confer about Lempriere had not, so far, come my way. In our common room, a man would have to be in considerable disrepair before anything of the sort took place except between intimate friends. And, unless it was Cyril Bedworth’s, I was nobody’s intimate friend as yet. Why Wyborn, whom I scarcely knew, should feel he ought to discuss Lempriere with me was obscure.

‘Lempriere and I are in some sort of cousinship,’ I said. ‘And he’s been very kind to me as a result.’

‘I understand he had a most disagreeable experience at the end of last year.’

‘Yes, he had.’ Wyborn’s ‘understand’ puzzled me for a moment; it seemed to set him at an implausible distance from the episode to which he referred. There could be nobody in college, surely, who didn’t know about it in detail. Yet it was plain to me, even on our slight acquaintance, that Wyborn wasn’t a man to prevaricate. A good deal must really pass him by. ‘It was a quite horrible affair,’ I said.

‘But in no sense to his discredit?’

‘Of course it wasn’t to his discredit.’ I suppose I snapped this out. ‘Nobody has suggested such a thing.’

‘There was something about improper photographs?’

‘You do seem to know something about it.’ I glanced at Wyborn, perhaps thinking to detect in him the hint of a prurient attitude to our topic. But he wasn’t that sort of man either. ‘There was nothing particularly improper about the photographs themselves,’ I said. ‘They were simply of Lempriere at a bathing place on the Cherwell. He takes pleasure in swimming, and has kept it up even in old age.’

‘That’s most sensible.’ Wyborn displayed unexpected animation. ‘At our settlement – you know that I sometimes work for a university settlement in the East End of London, Pattullo – I have known it recommended to some of our geriatric cases. Please proceed.’

“What was improper was the motive for taking the photographs. And the manner of their use, in a fugitive rag put out by one of our junior members, was quite disgusting.’

‘Does this mean, Pattullo, that there is still a bathing pool on the Cherwell where men go naked?’

‘Of course there is.’ I was becoming impatient of this odd conversation. ‘Do you disapprove?’

It’s a difficult question.’ As if to emphasise an impulse to suspend judgement, Wyborn came to a halt half-way down Parks Road. ‘But, no—I don’t think I do. Certain of the Umbrian painters, I believe, have employed complete nudity to symbolise the New Dispensation, over against the encumbering garments of the Old.’

‘It’s a relevant consideration, no doubt.’ I was wondering what Lempriere – whose fondness for unencumbered striplings had been spot-lit so cruelly – would make of this theological point. ‘I think it has been generally supposed,’ I went on, ‘that Lempriere, who, you will agree, is a proud and sensitive man, and a man of honour as well, must have suffered a good deal from the wretched business. It may have given a forward shove to the ageing process that already had a grip on him. I’m certain I’d be most unhappy if I’d been subjected to such an outrage.’

‘Unhappiness can be creative, Pattullo. It’s despair that’s deadly. Indeed, one is warranted in calling despair a sin. Can we take means—here is the question—to guard Lempriere from that?’

I dislike Christian busybodyism very much, the more so because I am seldom wholly free from the sense that my spirit is rebuked by it. I resented Wyborn’s designs upon Lempriere, which presently revealed themselves as being rather naively evangelising. And I certainly didn’t see myself – as was being proposed – persuading my distant kinsman to a resumption of his religious duties and a renewed participation in Holy Communion. All this was embarrassing, and at the same time I was ashamed of being embarrassed by it. I inwardly cursed Wyborn (I am sorry to say) for not knowing one man from another, or what was and what was not conceivable in a society in which he preserved at least some token appearance of mingling. I was squaring myself to the necessity of telling him that I was no good for the purpose he had in mind when our walk came rather suddenly to an end. Wyborn, although I had forgotten it, no longer lived in college, having taken on as a subsidiary duty some chaplaincy in a working-class district of the city. So outside the Indian Institute, our ways parted, leaving the Lempriere issue unclarified between us.

I walked on in just such a disturbed state of mind as Mrs Firebrace might have occasioned in me but hadn’t. I was seeing, I told myself, as much of Arnold Lempriere as I had done before the wretched Ivo Mumford had given his abortive magazine to the world and been most justly turfed out of Oxford as a result. But Lempriere had become more of an unknown quantity to me, all the same. I had accepted my colleagues’ almost unanimous profession that what had happened was a nastiness to be ignored even in the most private conversation. As a consequence, Lempriere and I hadn’t exchanged a dozen words about Ivo’s wretched Priapus. I felt that this had been wrong. The proper course would have been to discuss, for example, whether anything could be done for the boy now that he had been sent down.

Lempriere owned more than enough magnanimity to be capable of that. And even a little talk might have cleared the air.

The college was now in view – and so was the subject of these reflections. Lempriere had emerged through the main gate and was crossing the thoroughfare that slopes gently downhill past the west side of the Great Quadrangle. It struck me that in his own regard, he was moving briskly ahead. In fact, his stride was so confined that each pace took him forward by no more than half the distance which he probably thought of it as doing. This made perilous his progress through the traffic – a circumstance which he acknowledged at least to the extent of holding one hand shoulder-high as he walked. Dressed, after his common fashion, in shapeless grey tweed, and this to an effect of being hunched or crumpled in person as well as attire, he recalled, particularly as the towering buses and gigantic articulated lorries went by, a hedgehog injudiciously abroad on a very dusty day.

Lempriere gained the farther pavement in safety, and there for a moment paused. I now saw that he was equipped with a pair of field-glasses, something I had never noticed his carrying about with him before. Old fashioned and probably of the most superior make, the bulky instrument was slung round his neck on a thong and so appeared to bow him down with an emblematical suggestion, as monarchs in old pictures are obliged to lug round outsized orbs and sceptres, and the Great Doctors similarly bear hypertrophied commonplace-books, inkpots and quill pens. As prompted by Arnold Lempriere, a man in whom certain gazing instincts were robustly developed, this was a passing fancy perhaps too obvious to record. His appearance made me now call up, however, something from a distant past; the manner in which Uncle Rory’s friend, Colonel Morrison had never walked the glens without binoculars, and how appalled had been my sense that these might have focused upon certain irregularities of behaviour between my cousin Anna Glencorry and myself. Suddenly recaptured like this, memories which time ought to have rendered merely amusing can for a moment occasion the actual sensation of embarrassment or discomfiture which had accompanied the original situation.