‘Readers can’t go in without a ticket, sir.’
‘But I’ve been in hundreds of times!’ George said. He was now aware that he was behaving foolishly, but irrational indignation nevertheless overcame him. Being denied entrance to the Bodleian! Him (or He)! George Naylor M.A.; Clerk in Holy Orders; for some eighteen months (he had just remembered) a junior research fellow (supernumerary and non-stipendiary) of one of the most distinguished colleges in the university! It was wholly monstrous.
‘When would you have been here last, sir?’
This was a type of question which often got George confused. He was no good at dates. So he ducked this issue.
‘I only want . . .’ he began.
‘You can apply at Admissions, sir.’ Sir Thomas Bodley’s Janus spoke a shade impatiently this time. There was a small queue of readers, authenticating tickets in hand, formed up behind George. ‘First doorway beyond the passage to Radcliffe Square, sir.’
So George, not being sure that he had comported himself quite courteously, produced one of his apologies and withdrew into open air. Halting by the little railing that surrounds the statue of Lord Herbert, runner-up as the putative lovely boy of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, he considered his position. In a small way, he had made a fool of himself. He remembered that when as a young man he had worked for a time in the British Museum, and even though the nature of his researches had entitled him to do his reading in the privileged area known as the North Library, he had been issued with a ticket which he had shown up every day on entering, at least until the door-keepers had got to know him. And at Cambridge, he had recently read, they now charged wandering scholars a fee for admission to the University Library. He decided that the man in the lidless box represented a praiseworthy precaution on the part of the Oxford authorities against evilly disposed persons. Most irrationally, he felt rebuffed, all the same.
The remedy against this improper emotion was at once to go through the drill required to regularise his position as a reader in the Bodleian. Somehow he no longer much wanted to inquire into the present state of affairs within that wide sphere of reference constituted by Jacobus Baradaeus of Edessa and his carryings-on 1,300 years ago. But he ought to seek out Admissions, nevertheless.
And, just beyond the tunnel-like approach to Radcliffe Square, there was a bright new board beside a doorway, saying ‘Admissions’ in letters so large that there was no overlooking them. (The doorway also said, in rather bogus-faded hues, Schola Musicae.)
George entered. There was a notice with a pointing arrow. It said, ‘Applicants for admission to the library are earnestly requested to take a seat behind the screen, and there attend upon the ringing of a bell.’ George did as he was bid. He took a seat and attended upon.
Nothing happened. On the other side of the screen there must be a business area with a brisk traffic going forward. But no sound indicative of this came from the arcanum or adytum from which he was now sundered by a full six feet. George began to think of his train, although he knew that its departure was still a couple of hours off. Then he did a very scandalous thing. Unsummoned by any bell, he stood up and peered round the screen. He saw the remainder of the small room in which this important admissions transaction was conducted. An elderly lady in an M.A. gown was seated at a table upon which stood several miniature filing-cabinets. She appeared to be asleep.
George was confounded. He couldn’t possibly disturb this learned person’s repose. Behind her were no doubt several hours of exhausting labour during which she had been struggling with clouds of exigent postulants for readership, any one of whom might have been secreting incendiary devices (backed up by fragmentation bombs) in his or her pockets. George could only stand and wait.
‘Do please sit down,’ the lady said, in tones every phoneme of which suggested Somerville or Lady Margaret Hall. She had presumably merely been resting her eyes even from the crepuscular light which alone penetrated to this Bodleian semi-dungeon. ‘Shall you be in Oxford for long?’
This question, which might perhaps have been better phrased, seemed to admit only of the answer, ‘Until about half-past five’, and this answer George accordingly gave. A certain perplexity not unnaturally resulted on the lady’s part, but she listened with well-bred patience to her visitor’s further explaining himself. Then she fell to work on one of her filing cabinets. Having found what was clearly a relevant card, she glanced at it quickly, and then more at leisure and with perfect courtesy at George himself. ‘Can you tell me, Dr Naylor,’ she asked – but it was clearly information she no longer needed to seek – ‘in what year you were first admitted as a reader?’
For George this was a bad sort of question. Despite the severe scholarship to which he had been for so long habituated he was really, it must be repeated, a poor hand at dates.
‘Would it,’ he asked hopefully, ‘have been about 1940?’
The lady didn’t even elevate her eyebrows at this extraordinary suggestion, which of course implied a quite astounding precocity in her visitor. Indeed, she closed her eyes again – and for so long that George had to suppose that she really had dropped off this time. But she had merely been casting round for some tactful manner in which to proceed.
‘We work under the most vexatious necessities here,’ she presently said. ‘We have occasionally to appear quite absurd. I wonder, Dr Naylor, whether you would deprecate being asked to identify yourself?’
‘Not at all, madam! Of course not!’ George made this reply with inappropriate and disconcerting vehemence, since it was his only means of masking what he knew to be indefensible indignation. The idea of it! It was scarcely to be believed. He rummaged in pockets: several of the wrong pockets before a more hopeful one. ‘Here’s a visiting card,’ he mumbled. ‘Grubby, I’m afraid. One doesn’t much use such things nowadays, and they take on a shop-soiled look. Or one of these affairs?’ Hopefully, he held out a small plastic object. ‘A bank card, I think it’s called. It’s got my name on it. Oh! I see it has my signature too. George Naylor.’
Like the lady in Blackwell’s shop, this lady managed a kindly smile. She had unmistakably decided that she was in the presence of a harmless Fool of God. Then she produced an object of her own. It was like a ping-pong bat, and it had some rigmarole pasted on it. George remembered having seen such things in the several rooms of up-to-date stately homes and picture galleries, telling you what you were looking at on the walls. The lady handed this to George – considerately, handle first.
‘Can you solemnly assure me,’ she asked with sudden sternness, ‘that you clearly remember subscribing to this declaration when first admitted as a reader in the Bodleian?’
George stared at the ping-pong bat in a more or less mesmerised way.
‘Well, yes,’ he said. ‘That is, I rather think so. I don’t know about the clarity. But I do seem dimly to remember that bit about not making fire in the place.’
‘I fear I must ask you to read it aloud to me.’
‘Solemnly?’ George repeated this word by way of attempting to suggest abundant and willing co-operation. Unfortunately it came out with the effect of a frivolous quip. He then managed, however, to read the thing aloud with a decent sobriety. He even got in what might have been called a hint of pulpit eloquence. And it appeared to satisfy the terms of this guardian spirit’s mystery. She produced a little card of her own, wrote on it, had George sign it, passed it through a copying machine, and handed it back to him with a blessed air of accomplishment and finality.
‘Thank you very much,’ George said. ‘Do I have to show it if I go into the Camera too? The Radcliffe Camera, one of Oxford’s scattering of really splendid buildings, is a kind of free-standing annexe of the Bodleian Library.
‘Certainly,’ the lady said. ‘They won’t let you into the Camera without it. It would be a serious breach of security.’ She stood up, shook hands with George, sat down again, and immediately – and surely to a certainty this time – fell asleep. George left her like that, and went o
ut round the screen. There was nobody, he noticed, attending upon the ringing of a bell.
He returned to the Pig Market – more properly the Proscholium – and showed his newly acquired passport. After that, everything was reassuringly familiar. Or at least it was so for a time. Soon, however, he realised that – at least in the common or garden working parts of the Bodleian – almost nothing was quite the same. There were fine displacements virtually wherever he turned, and these progressively confused him. Every day there must be numerous scholars from the ends of the earth who had to find what they wanted through a process of trial and error. Nevertheless, he felt that his own uncertainties must be attracting attention. Nothing was quite where it had been. Suddenly he felt something almost symbolical in this. His life was now going to be like that. Nothing quite where it had been.
‘Over-hardy,’ he heard his own voice saying to himself. ‘Over- hardy.’ He came to a halt before some irrelevant catalogue. Why ever should such words bob up in his mind? For a moment he knew only that his memory was again behaving badly. Then he recalled Mrs Archer and her citation of Milton’s large-limbed Og, and he was so amused that he laughed aloud. This was not at all the thing in the Bodleian. Moreover, since it was the middle of the vacation, there were very few young people around, and the place seemed exclusively frequented by aged and desiccated persons, all deep scholars without a doubt, who looked as if they hadn’t heard a laugh for years; had in fact forgotten about laughter altogether; and were now in some alarm, occasioned by the fallacious impression that George must have been taken ill.
This was unnerving, and George somehow wasn’t helped by the fact that he was quite a deep scholar himself. It was almost certain that nobody in the Bodleian at this moment knew half as much about Jacobus Baradaeus of Edessa as he did. Nor, it soon seemed to him, did anybody anywhere else. Eutychian studies – his rummagings in bibliographies and check-lists soon revealed – were in almost total desuetude. Dom. Potter of Minnesota had switched to Ebionitism. Prebendary Delver had ratted too, and had produced three volumes on Patripassianism, that fond persuasion that the Logos is to be identified with the Father. The man at Gottingen was still at it, but had switched from Marx to Freud as the best illuminant on theological disputation in the sixth century. The Gottingen man was called Gottschalk – which oddly enough had been the name, George recalled, of a particularly desperate heretic in the age of Johannes Scotus Erigena. Various ecclesiastical synods had attempted to wallop his errors out of the original Gottschalk, but rods had no better success than argument, and the wretched man had died still proclaiming whatever his particular nonsense had been. George wondered whether the current Gottschalk would have the guts for that.
Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum. Lucretius’ hackneyed but inexpugnable line, George reminded himself, told only half the story. There was a great deal to be said for religion, and it was a pity that he himself had got in such a mess about it. But he wouldn’t get out of the mess by nostalgic potterings in the driest dust of the thing. Surely among all these millions of books there must be a work that spoke to his condition more effectively than Gottschalk II? As he asked himself this question, something rather absurd came into his head. He had never read Robert Elsmere! Mr Gladstone had – and, following Mr Gladstone, pretty well all England in the year 1888 or thereabout. Mrs Humphry Ward’s Robert Elsmere was a novel said to present with extraordinary skill the plight of an intelligent Anglican clergyman upon being confronted with the dire findings of what was then called the ‘higher criticism’. Elsmere might be just George’s man. He couldn’t, of course, now read the book – and nobody may borrow a book from the Bodleian – but at least he could take a peep at it and estimate whether it might help. He remembered that undergraduates reading English Literature spent a lot of time in the Radcliffe Camera. Mrs Ward’s illuminating masterpiece (for he thus thought of it for the nonce) would probably be over there, and on an open shelf from which he could take it down at once.
Strong in this persuasion, George hurried down the staircase of the Bodleian, intent of gaining the Camera, not a hundred yards away. He hurried so much that he found something bumping against his legs. It was Blackwell’s gratuitous plastic bag, and it was knobbly because it quite plainly contained books. So might he be suspected of theft? Ought he to open the bag and display its contents – Lewis, Rushdie and Storey – to the man in the lidless box? Or would this be behaviour so outré in character that they would lock him up forthwith? The complete irrationality of this last apprehension so alarmed George (who occasionally went in for lurking fears of madness) that at the critical moment he actually took to his heels – bolting past the guardian presence as if the whole Bodleian were in conflagration, and he himself responsible as having ‘made fire’ in it. The guardian presence reacted only with mild curiosity. Eccentric characters abound in Oxford.
Although thus confused, George as he mounted the steps of the Camera didn’t forget to fish his new admission ticket from his pocket. The woman who had bestowed it on him had insisted that it was essential here too. Inside the portal there was another flight of steps, curving down to a gloomy but deceptively non-subterraneous region the nature of which eluded his recollection. Was it a reading-room, or just an enormous book-stack? It was a reading-room, and at its entrance there was a notice saying English and Theology. This bobbing up again of the Queen of the Sciences disconcerted George, but then he reflected that the melange was just right for Mrs Humphry Ward’s fictional dealing with the Higher Criticism. Moreover, there was a thoughtfully provided line of coat-pegs, and on one of these he gratefully hung up Blackwell’s bag. Thus disburdened, he found calm and confidence restored to him. He entered the great rotunda.
It was deserted. It was utterly empty. Such at least was his first impression – although he was equally conscious of its being thronged with books: thousands and thousands of books in a deep vacation slumber. Of course the Camera was predominantly an undergraduates’ reading-room, although learned persons did occasionally frequent it as well. So it was unsurprising that on this fine summer afternoon there seemed to be nobody in evidence. But there must, of course, be a man to whom to show his ticket. No lidless box was on view, but there was a desk near the entrance which suggested itself as being for a member of the library staff rather than for a reader. But nobody sat behind it. Still clutching his ticket, George began anxiously to hunt around. The chap must also have the duty of returning stray books to their shelves: something like that. And the place had so many alcoves, radiating like the spokes of a wheel, that he might well elude notice for a time. Increasingly conscious of the high impropriety of being loose in the Camera without accrediting himself, George scurried from alcove to alcove, unconsciously holding his ticket head-high. And at length he came upon somebody: a somewhat unimpressive somebody, dusty and elderly, who was kneeling on the floor with his nose close to a row of books.
‘Oh, there you are!’ George said with perhaps an involuntary hint of reproach. ‘I’ve got to show you this.’
Thus accosted, the elderly man got to his feet, turned round, and looked at George with detectable surprise.
‘Good afternoon,’ he said politely.
‘My ticket, you know. Here it is. I understand . . .’ George’s voice suddenly trailed away. He had never seen this dusty old man before, but he had several times seen his photograph. Was he the Principal of Brasenose? Was he the Warden of Wadham? It didn’t much matter which. He was a scholar of enormous eminence, and quite certainly at the moment President of the British Academy.
‘Did you say your ticket?’ the Principal (or Warden) asked. If he was perplexed he didn’t show it. His was clearly an effortless alpha so far as academic courtesy was concerned.
‘I’m terribly sorry,’ George said. George wasn’t exactly abashed. They were, after all, simply two scholars in an absurd situation. But he wasn’t quite at ease either. In fact he was still holding out his ticket, so that the Warden (or Principal) was more or less
constrained to take it from him and examine it.
‘A reader’s ticket,’ George said helpfully. ‘To admit one to Bodley. Or to the Camera. Essential security.’
‘How very interesting.’ The President of the British Academy handed George back his ticket. It was evident he had never seen one of the things before – or perhaps been aware that such objects existed. ‘Can I help you in any way?’ it occurred to him to ask.
‘Thank you very much. But, no. I’m just looking for Robert Elsmere.’
This time, George’s dusty but august interlocutor did permit himself to betray perplexity.
‘But I am Robert Elsmere,’ he said. ‘How do you do?’
George recalled at once that this was true. There was some Head of a House – Warden or Principal or Rector or whatever – whose name was Robert Elsmere. It wasn’t in itself all that remarkable. But two Elsmeres coming on top of two Gottschalks was just too much for George. All amenity deserted him.
‘But now I have to catch a train,’ he said. And he bolted from the Radclifle Camera as quickly as he had bolted from the Bodleian itself.
Robert Elsmere must, of course, know about Robert Elsmere. Perhaps his parents – possibly of humble station? – had not been aware of the book. In decent society one doesn’t exploit any humorous potentialities lurking in a man’s name, but from time to time the real Robert Elsmere must encounter a little friendly badinage nevertheless. And the incident in the Radcliffe Camera had been so bizarre that the man would almost certainly add it with enjoyment to his stock of after-dinner anecdotes. So it was only something perfectly harmless that had happened.
George managed to tell himself all this before he reached the High Street. He was in renewed nervous discomfort all the same. He glanced at his watch and saw that if he went straight to the railway station he would still have a fairly long wait for his train. He could get a cup of tea in the refreshment place. He did badly need a cup of tea, but wasn’t sure that he wanted it at the station. And now a bold idea came to him. He was within almost a stone’s throw of his old college. He would go there.
The Naylors Page 5