The Late Scholar

by Jill Paton Walsh

  Chapter 23

  One of the more conventional duties of the Visitor was the installation of a new Warden. The college took time to deliberate; fully eighteen months. Of the two contenders – Gervase and Ambleside – the college chose Ambleside, to Peter’s quiet satisfaction. So in October of the following year the Wimseys were again in Oxford, to do the honours for Ambleside.

  A blazing and golden autumn had transformed the city. A soft and gauzy autumnal mist drifted from the twin rivers, and tissue-wrapped the streets and buildings until nearly mid-morning. The plane trees on St Giles were butter-yellow and adorned with little brown balls of seed-clusters. Carpets of gold were spread under the avenue of trees on Christ Church Meadow and the trees in the University Parks. Slightly overblown roses and clusters of rose-hips hung on in the Botanic Gardens, and the city was seized with the annual delectable contrast between the end of summer, and the start of a new university year. The autumn would be a time of beginning for ever after for each generation of students who arrived, recurring like the seasons, in that lovely phase of the year.

  The majority of the undergraduates of course were blasé second and third years, but the mood was suffused with the excitement and bewilderment of the freshers, agog at what was now theirs for an inconceivably long prospect of three years. Even four years for the classicists. Every college notice-board was surrounded by anxious young people looking for instructions about what to do now they had unpacked their cases, when and where to meet their tutors. The anxiety dispersed like the morning mist, to be succeeded by excitement. They did not have to attend lectures in their own subjects, and soon they were flocking to hear lecturers in other subjects – J.L. Austin, or J.R.R. Tolkien, or C.M. Bowra, or C.S. Lewis, or whoever they had heard recommended. Professor Wind announced a whole term of lectures on one single painting – Raphael’s The School of Athens – and the lecture had to be moved to the Oxford Playhouse because there was not room enough in the Examination Schools. To attend lectures or tutorials, one had to wear a gown, and the streets were full of the silly sleeveless undergraduate gowns, with tapes hanging from the shoulders. The scholarship winners had more dignified affairs, almost like those of graduates, which blew out behind them like black sails in the wind. In the morning lectures there were always some people falling asleep, exhausted by the marathons of talk that filled the first years’ rooms till the small hours; in the afternoon the lectures competed with the punts on the river, for as long as the sunshine lasted.

  And all day long from every quarter the clocks in college towers struck the time, taking, if you timed it, nearly twenty minutes from the first note to the last note, collectively approximate, however accurate one among them might be. Those bells insinuated themselves into memory, so that the sound of them would unwind generations of Oxford men and women back to their student days, and to their rash and joyful younger selves.

  In those streets you might have seen, that year, an older couple, walking together not hand in hand, but perfectly in step with each other, moving from one fine sight to another, seeming to walk in a dream. In Duke Humfrey’s Library the man said to the woman, softly, ‘And Bredon says no to all this . . .’

  Out in the courtyard again, the woman said to the man, ‘Family tradition is a burden, Peter, which you should know better than most people.’

  ‘Give me time, Harriet. I’ll get used to it,’ he said.

  ‘Oxford feels itself again to me, Peter,’ she said. ‘Does it to you?’

  ‘The sick rose healed, and all invisible worms exterminated?’ he said. ‘Yes; it feels like our Oxford again. And it’s striking eleven. Can we make it to the Wind lecture, do you think?’

  They did.

  The installation of the new Warden – the most grave of Peter’s duties as Visitor in normal times – was to take place that afternoon. It didn’t turn out to be either onerous, or much fun for Peter. It consisted of his waiting with Ambleside in the drawing room of the Warden’s Lodging, while all the action was going on in the college chapel. Harriet was allowed to sit quietly watching from a corner.

  ‘So what exactly are they doing in the chapel?’ Peter asked.

  Ambleside said, ‘They are casting votes.’

  ‘But I thought you were already elected,’ Peter said.

  ‘I am,’ said Ambleside. ‘But once there is a clear majority for someone the tradition dictates that everyone votes again for the winner. A Warden is always elected unanimously.’

  ‘That’s a graceful way of doing it,’ said Peter. ‘It shouldn’t take long then.’

  ‘The votes are collected in a chalice,’ Ambleside said, ‘and then they have to be counted. The last Warden was in office so long it’s pretty well only the Senior Tutor who can remember the last time it was done.’

  ‘That would be Cloudie?’

  ‘Yes. And I believe here he comes.’

  Mr Cloudie entered the room, smiling, and shook hands with everyone.

  ‘I have pleasure, Your Grace, in presenting to you John Ambleside as the duly elected Warden of this college,’ he said.

  ‘I have pleasure in accepting him as such,’ said Peter.

  The college butler entered, carrying a large tray with decanters and glasses.

  ‘Oh, do we drink to that now?’ said Peter. ‘Hurrah.’

  ‘We must sign the great book first,’ said Cloudie, indicating a huge volume lying ready on a side-table. ‘It records the election of every Warden back to the sixteenth century.’

  Peter and Ambleside and Cloudie all signed below a beautifully handwritten declaration. Cloudie handed Ambleside a copy of the Bible, and holding it he read firmly an oath of office, of fidelity to the college at all times and in every way. And presto! Ambleside was the Warden.

  The room began to fill with other fellows, who had walked across from the chapel to offer good wishes, and share the party. Peter and Harriet joined in, aiming, as they would have done at home, to talk to everyone in the room.

  The atmosphere in St Severin’s had changed. It felt hopeful and slightly precarious, like the mood of someone recovering from an illness. Ambleside had in effect been discharging the Warden’s duties for some time, and hardly needed a novitiate. The new fellows had, of course, all heard about the perturbations and trials of the previous year, but they were over – history – of no more immediate interest than the reign of Alfred the Great. The exception to taking that view was, naturally, Jackson, one of three new research fellows.

  In the college chapel the broken wing of a carved angel had been fixed back in place, and the height of the balustrade on the minstrels’ gallery had been raised. A new slab of dark slate was mounted on the wall opposite the door, where it caught the eye. It bore the inscription:

  DAVID OUTLANDER

  1921–1948

  LATE SCHOLAR OF THIS COLLEGE

  DECUS REIPUBLICAE LITTERATORUM

  ‘What does it mean?’ Emily had asked Peter when he told her about it.

  ‘An ornament of the republic of letters,’ Peter had said. ‘An ornament to learning.’

  ‘Good,’ she had said. ‘I like that. I’ll go and have a look at it some time.’

  Looking at it now, Peter said, ‘Quite right and proper.’

  As they left the chapel they saw Jackson, crossing the quad, and hailed him.

  ‘Congratulations on the fellowship,’ Peter said.

  ‘I think I owe you a lot,’ Jackson replied. ‘I think you saved Boethius for the college.’

  ‘Noting saved Boethius for himself,’ Peter replied. ‘Poor chap died a nasty death in the end, in spite of philosophy. That reminds me, Jackson, of something I wanted to ask you. You remember that odd phrase in the manuscript that we all got so excited about, that Bunter photographed?’

  ‘Of course I remember,’ said Jackson. ‘It’s a king-pin of my thesis.’

  ‘I never asked you what it meant,’ said Peter.

  ‘It means: I hope to do good deeds in my lifetime, and to be remembere
d for them after my death,’ said Jackson.

  ‘Nothing about seeing God, or immortality?’ asked Peter.

  ‘Not a word,’ said Jackson. ‘And perhaps that’s odd, now you mention it, because he certainly believed in God.’

  ‘But his hope was just to do good and be remembered. At the same time not much to ask, and a lot to ask. I’d gladly settle for that myself,’ said Peter Wimsey.