The Late Scholar

by Jill Paton Walsh

  He nearly missed Longwall Street, and an aggrieved motorist hooted at him when he braked suddenly to make the turn. Peter waved his apology. From Longwall Street to Holywell Street, and at the spectacular corner by the King’s Arms, with the glories of Broad Street ahead of him, and the few further yards to Balliol tugging at him, he turned right into Parks Road, past Wadham College, and reached the elaborate frontage of St Severin’s.

  The moment he stepped under the arch and could see into the front quad, Peter realised he had never before entered St Severin’s. As an undergraduate he had not happened to have a friend there, and on all the revisits to Oxford that he made since youthful days he had gravitated back to Balliol. People do, he reminded himself: Oxford people return to base. Only the most diligent tourist walks in and out of all or most of the colleges to inspect the architecture. And the architecture of St Severin’s would have to wait, while he inveigled himself within its ancient walls, and discovered where Bunter could park the Daimler.

  Meanwhile the college porter was looking at him with an expression redolent of one who has seen it all, and is prepared to see off boarders. ‘Can I help you, sir?’ the man asked.

  ‘I am the Visitor,’ said Peter. ‘Would you let the Vice-Warden know that I am here?’

  ‘The college is closed to visitors at the moment,’ said the porter, ‘sir.’

  ‘I am not a visitor, I am the Visitor,’ said Peter.

  ‘Indeed, sir. I have not been instructed to expect you.’

  ‘Nevertheless I am here,’ said Peter.

  ‘May I ask who invited you, sir?’

  Peter adjusted his monocle and treated the porter to a steady stare. ‘Expected, or unexpected, invited or uninvited, I am here by right,’ he said. ‘Please inform the most senior person now in the college of my presence.’

  The porter held his gaze only for a second or so before picking up the phone. ‘Someone will be with you shortly,’ he said in a minute or so, ‘if you would care to wait.’

  Peter did care to wait. He stood in the doorway arch of the college for several minutes, while undergraduates came and went, picking up their post from a rack of pigeon-holes, and chatting to each other. Peter attracted much less attention than his car, parked outside with Bunter standing guard beside it.

  ‘Who’s got that spiffing car?’ someone asked.

  ‘Must be something to do with Dawlish,’ Peter overheard.

  Then a middle-aged man wearing a gown appeared. ‘I am Ambleside,’ he said. ‘The Vice-Warden.’

  ‘I am Denver, at your service,’ said Peter, extending a hand, ‘come to make the requested formal visitation to the college. ‘Can you make arrangements that allow me to do that?’

  Ambleside did not exactly look pleased – alarmed, rather. ‘Of course I am glad to see you,’ he said. ‘I had expected it would take you some days to be at liberty to come.’ But he was a courteous man, and he escorted Peter to his own room to sit in comfort while he made arrangements.

  It took him nearly an hour, during which time Peter inspected the bookshelves, bearing nearly the complete Loeb classics, and a formidable collection of historians, commentators and critics of classical Greek and Roman literature. Peter felt an unfamiliar pang; his own degree was in history. Given another life he might have liked to be a classicist. But his Latin was good enough to dabble. He picked up the volume of Catullus, and settled quietly to read.

  In a while Ambleside reappeared, and announced that he thought the best place for Peter was the guest set in the Warden’s Lodgings. The housekeeper was making up the bed, and airing the rooms right now. If perhaps the Duke would like to linger for long enough to take a glass of sherry, he could settle in very shortly.

  ‘Is there accommodation for my valet?’ Peter asked.

  ‘I believe so. I think Mr Bunter is helping the housekeeper right now,’ said Ambleside.

  ‘And there would be room for the Duchess, should she wish to join me?’

  ‘Oh, yes. But . . . are you intending to stay with us long?’ asked Ambleside.

  ‘I am intending to stay for as long as it takes to resolve the college’s difficulties,’ said Peter. ‘You may be a better judge than I am as to how long that is likely to be.’

  Ambleside offered dry or sweet sherry, or white port. Peter chose the port.

  ‘I am afraid I have no idea how long matters will take to resolve,’ he said. ‘If indeed they can be resolved.’

  ‘I understand I am expected to resolve them by fiat. Do you wish to give me your own opinion on the sale of the manuscript?’ asked Peter.

  Ambleside was silent. Then he said, ‘I think perhaps it would not be proper for me to advance my own opinion privately, and first.’

  ‘Not all your colleagues take that view,’ said Peter. ‘Several approaches have been made to me already.’

  ‘Troutbeck, I suppose,’ said Ambleside, frowning.

  ‘And another. But perhaps you would prefer to assist me with a different matter – I am stuck on a line of Catullus in your edition. Would you help me construe it?’

  Ambleside brightened visibly and, drawing up a chair beside Peter, said almost eagerly, ‘Which is the passage that is causing difficulty?’

  They read together tranquilly until the housekeeper’s knock summoned Peter to his rooms.

  The Warden’s guest suite was suitably grand and austere, with a splendid stucco ceiling in the ample drawing room, a bedroom with a four-poster bed large enough for an orgy, a tiny cupboard with sink and kettle, and a bathroom of a Victorian degree of discomfort through a connecting door into the Warden’s Lodgings. Peter liked it at once.

  ‘Where have they put you, Bunter?’ was his first question.

  ‘There is a servant’s room in the Lodgings themselves,’ said Bunter. ‘Just through the connecting door. Quite close, Your Grace, and perfectly comfortable.’

  ‘Excellent. And the Warden’s housekeeper is friendly?’

  ‘Rather glad of the incursion, I would say, Your Grace. It is lonely to be managing a house with nobody in it. And she is not exactly on all fours with the other college servants; or she does not feel herself so.’

  ‘What does she have to say about the disappearing Warden?’

  ‘She is worried about him. It isn’t like him at all. And he did not take his razor or his toothbrush, or a change of clothes.’

  ‘Didn’t he indeed? Hmm.’

  ‘I understand when he returns she will offer her resignation immediately. She is his personal servant; he brought her with him to the college, and she is outraged not to have been taken into his confidence.’

  ‘Well done, Bunter,’ said Peter. ‘We must instantly take Harriet’s advice.’

  At that moment a burst of laughter came through the open window. Peter walked across to it.

  The guest drawing room was on the first floor, over the archway between one quad and another. The archway served as a kind of hall’s passage, with the dining room on one side, and the buttery on the other. A group of undergraduates was standing round the buttery door, eating what looked from above like lardy cake. Their voices floated upwards.

  ‘I found out about that car,’ one said. ‘Not something belonging to a posh undergraduate, you will be pleased to know.’

  ‘So whose . . .?’

  ‘It’s a visitation from our ineffable Visitor.’

  ‘The Duke of Whatsit, you mean?’

  ‘Well, it’s high time somebody called them to order,’ said a rather high-pitched voice. ‘It’s not fair to us.’

  ‘How do you mean, not fair, Jackson?’

  ‘Well, I don’t know how it is with the sex-life of plankton or whatever it is you biologists study,’ said Jackson, ‘but we could do with some help in revising and some moral support. All they can think about is this eternal bickering about money and a manuscript; they have only half a brain to spare for us. And they can go on and on bickering for an eternity, but this is our finals year. We get just one shot at a first,
and if we miss it it’s gone for ever. They ought to be thinking about us and the college position in the annual league table . . .’

  ‘My tutor is okay,’ someone else put in.

  ‘Oh, the maths people are so far in the air they are above all this, I suppose.’

  ‘Bunter,’ said Peter quietly, ‘slip down there purporting to buy me some of that disgusting lardy cake, and find out if you can what Jackson is studying, and who his tutor is.’

  Somehow Peter did not feel very tempted by the prospect of dinner in Hall at St Severin’s that evening. He resorted instead to dinner at Balliol, where he secured an invitation simply by telephoning his old friend, George Mason. He persuaded himself that he was not actually shirking; finding out if the trouble at St Severin’s was known to all Oxford, or still had the status of a private grief could conceivably influence the direction his investigation would take.

  Those avatars of Jude the Obscure who yearn for the intellectual glories of Oxford and Cambridge colleges can fondly imagine that the conversations at High Tables are pitched at the highest storeys of ivory towers. But in the real world – and it is only a chimera, an aura shed by ancient architecture, that makes them seem unreal – colleges are conducted by a group of men, or in a few cases a group of women, who know each other very well, dine together often, have long ago exhausted their interest in each other’s subjects, are as capable of hating as of liking each other, and who keep the peace by talking of domestic trivia, the day’s headlines, the endless stream of gossip, while avoiding incendiary, that is to say interesting, subjects. A comforting and bland conversation accompanied dinner that night; only when the company rose and adjourned to the Senior Common Room for dessert did someone liven things up by asking a medievalist if he had heard a rumour that St Severin’s might sell their Boethius.

  For the benefit of another guest – a rather bewildered-looking captain of industry – the Master explained that the book was a work of ancient philosophy written by Manlius Severinus Boethius, which had therefore been given to St Severin’s.

  ‘Is it worth a lot?’ the industrialist asked.

  ‘Perhaps half a million pounds,’ said the Master.

  ‘Good God!’ said the industrialist. ‘For a book?’

  The Balliol dons exchanged glances. The medievalist explained courteously that the book was very ancient. It was written in Latin, of course, but the copy in question had been annotated in Anglo-Saxon, giving rise to the possibility that it was the copy that had belonged to King Alfred.

  ‘Weren’t those Dark Ages people illiterate?’ asked the industrialist.

  ‘It is a matter of record that King Alfred could read,’ said the medievalist. ‘And in Latin as well as English.’ Then, rising from his chair, he said it was getting late, and he bade the company goodnight.

  His departure dislodged the others round the table, leaving Peter with his friend George Mason sitting alone, the fruit and nuts and the port and claret before them. The college silver gleamed gently in the candlelight.

  ‘You are very quiet tonight, Peter,’ said George. ‘What’s got your tongue?’

  ‘I am capable of listening and learning,’ said Peter plaintively.

  ‘You were interested in that manuscript, I take it,’ said George. ‘The person to ask about that is a woman scholar – Mary Fowey at Shrewsbury College. She’s your girl for all things late Latin. Where are you staying? At the Mitre? I dare say we could find you a room if you need one.’

  ‘Thank you, George,’ said Peter, ‘but I am comfortably lodged in St Severin’s.’

  ‘The devil you are! Whatever connection do you have there?’

  ‘I am the Visitor,’ said Peter, grimacing.

  George stared at him. ‘I keep forgetting you are a duke,’ he said at last. ‘It seems ridiculous, somehow, when I think how we used to romp around.’

  ‘It cannot seem more ridiculous to you than it does to me,’ said Peter. ‘I’m not surprised you forget it. But what I would like forgotten at present is the connection between a duke and Peter Wimsey the detective.’

  ‘Surely everybody knows . . .’

  ‘There isn’t anything that everybody knows,’ said Peter. ‘Which leaves us the fun of finding out.’

  ‘Change your mind,’ said George. ‘Let me find you a room in Balliol. It’s only a step away from St Severin’s.’

  ‘A room in St Severin’s is right on the spot, though. Why do you want to move me, George?’

  ‘St Severs isn’t a healthy place,’ said George. ‘Must be something in the water. People dream strange dreams, and have improbable accidents there. Fatal accidents, even.’

  ‘Whereas Balliol possesses a fount of immortality?’

  ‘We are both of us immortal so far,’ said George.

  It was nearly eleven before Peter got back to his rooms in St Severin’s. Bunter was waiting up for him.

  ‘Is there a phone any nearer than the porters’ lodge?’ Peter asked him.

  ‘There is a phone in the Warden’s study, Your Grace,’ said Bunter.

  ‘None of that, Bunter,’ said Peter. ‘We are detecting now, and I am my lord, or even Peter when we are in private.’

  ‘As you wish, my lord,’ said Bunter.

  ‘Show me the way to the Warden’s study,’ said Peter. ‘Like an impecunious undergraduate I need to phone home.’

  Harriet picked up the phone saying, ‘Peter?’

  ‘Oh dear life, when shall it be, That my eyes thine eyes shall see . . .’ he began.

  ‘Lonely in Oxford?’ said Harriet. ‘Don’t be silly, Peter.’

  ‘It really is like the old days when you rebuke me for expressions of longing,’ Peter said.

  ‘I thought you would be having fun,’ she said. ‘I am a bit lonely here without you.’

  ‘Isn’t my mother good company? How is she?’

  ‘As you left her – very lively in spells, and very sleepy in others.’

  ‘How is that speech on Le Fanu coming along?’

  ‘Fine. How is the peace-making going?’

  ‘Starts in earnest tomorrow.’

  ‘Good luck with it then. Goodnight, sweet prince.’

  ‘I have enough titles,’ said Peter darkly, ‘without that one.’

  The Warden’s housekeeper was a stout lady of uncertain age, a Miss Manciple, who proved to be in a useful state of anxiety – the kind that provokes logorrhoea. Peter tackled her first thing after breakfast.

  ‘Oh, sir,’ was her opening shot, ‘thank the Lord you’ve come, thank the Lord! Perhaps now something will be done about it. I’ve been worried out of my mind about him, I really have. I lie awake all night wondering what has become of him, and I didn’t should have to worry by myself, should I? Wouldn’t you think one of his precious college people should be trying to find him? After all he’s done for them!’

  Peter, who was eating breakfast – warmed-up lardy cake was proving its worth – said, ‘Sit down, Miss Manciple, and have a cup of coffee. Or tea if you prefer. Bunter makes an excellent cuppa.’

  ‘Oh, I couldn’t sit down, sir . . .’ she said.

  ‘Yes, you could,’ said Peter. ‘Do me the honour of sitting down with me while we try to get to the bottom of this.’

  Miss Manciple sat down. She sat opposite Peter, very straight-backed, with her hands in her lap.

  ‘I take it you genuinely don’t know where the Warden – Dr Ludgven, isn’t he? – may be?’

  ‘No, I don’t, sir, and that’s God’s truth!’

  ‘And I understand you told Bunter yesterday that it isn’t at all like him to disappear?’

  ‘No, it isn’t,’ she said. ‘I’ve worked for him for nearly thirty years, sir, and I’ve never before not known where he is. He goes abroad a lot, but I’ve always known his forwarding address. Always. And another thing, sir, he’s a very particular gentleman with regard to his person, if you know what I mean and he didn’t take his sponge bag, nor his pyjamas nor nothing. Just walked out.’
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  ‘What time of day did he just walk out?’ asked Peter.

  ‘I don’t know that, sir. I am off duty once he goes into Hall for dinner. I turned down his bed for him, like usual, and went to my own little room, and in the morning his bed hadn’t been slept in, and he wasn’t anywhere to be found.’

  ‘Bunter,’ said Peter, ‘would you slip across to the lodge for me and ask if any of the porters saw the Warden leave, and if so exactly when?’

  ‘Now, try to remember for me,’ said Peter, addressing Miss Manciple, ‘if anything out of the ordinary happened that evening before Hall? Anything at all that you can think of?’

  ‘There was a meeting in his lodging, sir, at five o’clock. And voices raised. Not that that was unusual, sir. It’s been happening a lot this year.’

  ‘You don’t know what it was about?’

  Miss Manciple’s lip curled. ‘No, I don’t, sir. I keep away from all that rubbish. Such clever people we are supposed to think, and they carry on like a load of nasty children. And none of it matters to ordinary people, sir.’

  ‘The other servants don’t tell you about it?’

  ‘They would if I would let them,’ she said. ‘What can you do to find him, sir?’

  ‘Drink up while I think about it,’ said Peter.

  He didn’t have long to think. Bunter returned. ‘A nil result, I’m afraid, my lord,’ said Bunter. ‘There are three porters – they take turns. But they are all very sure that none of them saw the Warden leaving college that night.’