by Angus Wilson
He rose from the table in bitter mood. Weighed down with doubts, struggling with his depression, he made his way to his study to telephone his wife. As he walked through the hall, he caught sight of his handsome, flushed features, his tall erect figure in the long gilt mirror and was disgusted. 'Good God!' he thought, 'what a bloody, shameful waste!'
Rose Lorimer, struggling with weighed-down shopping baskets, made her immense way among the marble and mosaic of the Corner House, caught a passing view of herself in a mirror and was pleased. She had always affirmed that women scholars were primarily women and should not disregard the demands of feminine fashion. To advertise learning by disregard of dress was to be odd, and Dr Lorimer disliked oddity more than anything. The vast intellectual excitement of her researches since the war had not left her a lot of time for thinking about clothes, but her mother had always said that with a good fur coat, however old, one could not go wrong; and for her own part, she had added a bold dash of colour to cheer our drab English winter - woman's contribution to banish gloom. Twenty years ago, of course, she reflected, straw hats with flowers would have been out of place in December, but the dictates of fashion were so much less strict nowadays, it seemed. And then Dr Lorimer had always loved artificial flowers, especially roses.
There was no want of artificial flowers in the Corner House entrance hall. An enormous cardboard turkey and an enormous cardboard goose, owing their inspiration to somewhat vulgarized memories of Walt Disney, held between them the message MERRY XMAS made entirely of white and pink satin roses. As the tableau revolved, the turkey changed to a Christmas pudding and the goose to a mince-pie, each suitably adorned with a wide grin and two little legs; AND A PROSPEROUS NEW YEAR they announced, this time in real chrysanthemums. Dr Lorimer thought amusedly of Christmas, so rich in pagan symbols; the Real Masters of the Church had taken small pains to disguise their victory there. Muffled voices at the back of her mind pressed her to change her tense - take small pains, it said. In two days' time, she thought, Initiates everywhere - in northern Europe, and farther even than that - will be working their old magical spells of health and renewal over their unsuspecting Christian flocks. In England here, their archbishop - King Fisher - she smiled to think of the significance of the name, would be at the head of them. So old a mystery concealed for so long from so many, but not from her. She shook herself and drove off the voices. Knowledge led one into such strange dreams. It was all over long ago, of course. Nevertheless, the early Christian missionaries bought their pagan converts at high price with the ceremonial adulteration of their Saviour's birthday.
She tucked her giant legs with difficulty beneath one of the small tables and looked at the menu with a certain puritan alarm at its luxurious array of dishes. Choice was made simpler for one, she reflected, at her usual 'ordinary' Lyons or A.B.C. She sighed at the uneasy prospect of sensual choice. Clarissa Crane, however, appeared to be such a distinguished novelist, and novelists, no doubt, were used to living luxuriously. A few years ago she would not have imagined herself introducing a novelist as a guest at the Annual Lecture, but Miss Crane's letter had sounded so very interested; and if the academical world insisted on its narrow limits, then other means of disseminating the truth must be found.
Clarissa Crane, searching the vast marble tea-room with a certain distaste, suddenly recognized her learned hostess and felt deeply embarrassed. In all this drab collection of matinée-goers and pantomime parties, that only could be her. She had expected somebody dowdy, indeed had worn her old green tweed suit in deference to the academic occasion, but she had not been prepared for someone quite so outrageously odd, so completely a 'fright'. Dr Lorimer was mountainous, not only up and down, but round and round as well, and then her clothes were so strange - that old, old fur coat, making almost no pretence of the large safety-pins that held it together, and, above the huge, aimlessly smiling grey face, a small toque composed entirely of artificial pink roses and set askew on a bundle of tumbling black coils and escaping hairpins. Clarissa, with a sensitive novelist's eye, dreaded to think into what strange realm the poor creature's mind had strayed; with a woman of the world's tact, however, she cried, 'Dr Lorimer, this is so awfully kind of you! '
'Not at all, dear, I was only too glad to be of help. It's so seldom that Clio can aid the other muses, isn't it?' Dr Lorimer's voice was strangely small coming out of her massive form, like a little girl's reciting a party piece. Its childish effect was the greater after Clarissa Crane's sophisticated, strangled contralto: 'I do hope I can help you,' Rose said, 'because your novel sounds so very, very interesting.' Her mind strayed away over the novels she had read - The Forsyte Saga, The Last Days of Pompeii, a book called Beau Sabreur, and, of course, a number more when she was a girl. They hadn't been interesting at all, she remembered.
'Thank you,' said Clarissa, 'I'm sure you can. Taking me to this frightfully important lecture in itself, and then, I wanted to know ..
Rose Lorimer interrupted her question, 'We'd better choose something to eat, dear, first,' she said, and looked at Clarissa over the top of the menu with a sort of shy leer. She was not normally given to calling people 'dear' or to leering at them, but she had somehow arrived at this approach as suitable for so unusual a companion as a smart lady novelist. It was a manner that recalled à poor stage performance of a bawd and suggested a subconscious appraisal of her guest that was hardly complimentary. 'Will you have an ice, dear?' she asked, and then, remembering the seasonable cold weather, she added, 'or there seems to be sundries,' and she lingered over the wondrous range of dishes in print before her.
'Oh, no, just some tea,' Clarissa said, and then, fearing to hurt the poor creature's feelings, added, 'and some toast would be nice.'
'Toast,' repeated Rose. 'What with, dear?'
'Oh, just butter.' Clarissa feared being involved with sardines.
'I don't see toast and butter,' said Rose, who had in fact got involved with the sardine section, 'Oh, yes, I do. It's farther down. Buttered toast,' she explained.
'Of course, I've no right at all to consider doing a historical novel,' said Clarissa, her eye trying to avoid the glistening circle of butter-grease that grew ever larger around Dr Lorimer's lips. 'But somehow I feel the past speaks for us so much at this moment.' It was the critics, in fact, who had spoken so determinedly against her knowledge of modern life in her last novel. 'And then those extraordinary dark centuries, the faint twilight that flickers around the departing Romans and the real Arthur, the strange shapes thrown up by the momentary gleams of our knowledge, and, above all, the enormous sense of its relation to ourselves, its nowness, if I can call it that. The brilliant Romano-British world, the gathering shadows, and then the awful darkness pouring in.'
Rose, who, when the muffled voices of her idées fixes were not working in her, was a very down-to-earth scholar, could make nothing of all this darkness and light business. She contented herself with eating as much of the buttered toast as possible; then, taking out a packet of Woodbines, she lit one and blew a cloud of smoke in Clarissa's direction, as though she was smoking out a nest of wasps. 'I'm afraid you won't find much of all that in Pforzheim's lecture, dear,' she said kindly; 'it's about trade.'
'Oh, but that's so fascinating.' Clarissa felt shy and was unable to stop talking. 'The furs and amber from the Baltic, the great Volga route. Yes, even in the darkest times, the persistence of trade. Think of Sutton Hoo! the homage of the barbarians to civilization, that great Byzantine dish!'
'Inferior factory workmanship,' said Rose, and she did not this time add 'dear'.
Clarissa collected her poise around her embarrassed shoulders. 'But what I want from you,' she said, a simple, intelligent seeker once more, 'is the whole story of the clash of the pagan and Christian worlds in England.'
'Oh! that's a very large request, I'm afraid,' said Rose. She had suffered too much for her theories not to be suspicious of such a frontal attack. 'Did you read the articles I sent you?'
'Oh, yes,'
said Clarissa, 'and found them fascinating, absolutely fascinating. But it was the background that I wanted: you see, I'm no scholar. I know nothing really, for example, of comparative religion. Of course, I've read Frazer and Dr Margaret Murray about the witches ..."
She stopped, alarmed at the sudden change in her hostess's expression. A deep pink had spread over Rose's rather grubby cheeks, giving them a curious likeness to the soiled flowers in her hat.
'I'm afraid, dear,' she said, 'if you want to talk about witches, you've come to the wrong person. I'm a very plain scholar. An historian, you know, is not the same thing as an anthropologist.' Her little-girl voice took on quite a hard timbre. Frazer, Margaret Murray indeed! She was always being confronted with this awful confusion. Her theory, her knowledge of the nature of the early medieval Church, was not based on folk-lore and fancy and that sort of thing. She was a factual historian, trained by Tout and Stokesay. And then - what she saw so clearly sometimes nowadays - the conspiracy, the strange age-old conspiracy which she alone had guessed at, was something beside which Dr Murray's Dianic cult and Divine Victims paled into childish insignificance. Clarissa, realizing the magnitude of her blunder, began to extricate herself, but Dr Lorimer was listening now to voices quite other than Clarissa's cultured tones.
Really! thought Clarissa, if collecting historical material is going to be as tiresome as this, I wish I had accepted the offer of writing a travel book on Angola. Seeing Dr Lorimer's blank expression, she raised her voice. Heaven knew how deaf the old thing was!
'Of course, the Melpham excavation seems to me so fascinating,' she shouted, averting her eyes from a nearby party of goggling schoolchildren.
'Yes,' said Dr Lorimer distantly, 'it is very fascinating.' She decided not to tell this stupid woman just how fascinating. She would return the conventional judgement, 'But you must remember that Bishop Eorpwald was a very unusual person. So much we know from Bede alone. We can't judge everything by Melpham.'
'Did you take part in the "dig"?' asked Clarissa in a sporty voice that she somehow felt necessary for the colloquialism.
'Bishop Eorpwald's tomb was excavated in 1912, dear,' said Dr Lorimer sharply. 'I was only a girl.'
Clarissa poured herself out a cup of cold tea and drank it in her confusion. 'I've always been awful about dates,' she explained.
'Well, you must try to get them right in your book, mustn't you?' said Dr Lorimer; then, noticing her guest's embarrassment, she relented, and said, 'There was no reason why you shouldn't think I helped at Melpham. Fifty-five must seem as old as the hills to a girl like you.'
Clarissa reflected that the simple, too, had their charms. She almost regretted her Woman's Hour talks in the 'Middle Age Looks Back' series.
'And anyway,' Rose added, 'I look as old as the hills. As a matter of fact, it was a great compliment to pay to a pupil of Professor Stokesay's. Melpham was the crown of his work, in my opinion. No. Everything he did was wonderful. He taught me all I know. And so vigorous right up to the end, though he rather left his old colleagues behind them. He became a man of affairs, dear,' she ended, as though this was some sort of physical metamorphosis.
'Yes, I remember,' said Clarissa. 'He was one of the men of Munich, wasn't he?' and instantly regretted the contribution. But she need not have been anxious, for Rose smiled vaguely. 'Yes, bless his heart,' she said, 'he'd gone quite beyond my little world.'
'And you really think that the wooden figure ...?' Clarissa tailed away in query.
'Oh, a fertility god, dear,' said Rose. 'No doubt of it at all. Of course, the carving's very crude. Much cruder than the few finds they've made on the Baltic Coast. Due to native workmanship, no doubt with the Continental tradition almost lost. That accounts for the large size of the member, you know.' Clarissa felt that she need not have feared to finish her sentence. 'But it's an Anglo-Saxon deity all right. A true wig. One of the idola Bede was so shocked about. Or pretended to be, shall we say?' she added mysteriously.
The significance of the mystery, however, was lost on Clarissa. 'And is there nobody alive now who was with Stokesay at Melpham?'
'No,' said Rose ruminatively. 'Or wait a bit. I believe Gerald Middleton was there. But he was only a young student, of course, and it's quite outside his period.'
'Oh,' said Clarissa, 'Middleton's World of Canute. Of course, I've read that, or looked at it, perhaps I should say. It's rather heavy, isn't it?'
'Well, we think Gerald Middleton's a great stylist,' said Rose, and added archly, 'but then we're not novelists.'
'Fancy Middleton being alive,' said Clarissa. 'Shades of the schoolroom!'
Rose was nettled. 'Gerald Middleton can't be more than ten years older than me. He only left off lecturing two years ago. He's not much over sixty,' she decided.
'He hasn't written for a long time, I think,' Clarissa sought forgiveness.
'No, I'm afraid not. He doesn't thrive any more than I do in this world of increasing specialization. He'll be there this evening though, I'm sure. All the serious early medievalists will be, you know. You're quite privileged. I'll introduce you to him and then you can ask him about Melpham. Not that he can tell you anything that isn't in Professor Stokesay's articles.'
Clarissa saw a chance for independence. 'As a matter of fact I know someone who was a friend of Professor Middleton, a very great friend at one time,' she added with a coy laugh. 'Dollie Stokesay. But you probably know her too.'
Dr Lorimer, who was not willing to accept from Clarissa the suggestion of old scandal about a colleague, said, 'I saw her, of course, once or twice when she kept house for her father-in-law. But she never helped Professor Stokesay with his work, whatever she may have done in the home.' And then she added, 'I'd no idea she was still alive.'
'Oh, indeed, yes. We're near neighbours,' Clarissa cried, as though this gave Mrs Stokesay a peculiar claim to life. 'Darling Dollie! I simply can't imagine her in the academic world. She's such a marvellous Philistine.' She paused, and added reverently, 'But a wonderfully integral person.'
This was not a concept that claimed Dr Lorimer's attention. 'We must be going, dear,' she said, and she beckoned to the waitress. 'Pforzheim's a brilliant lecturer - the greatest medievalist in Germany today. You're quite privileged, you know. I'm sure you'll find a lot of inspiration in his talk.' She picked up her two shopping-bags. 'But there won't be any witches, I'm afraid,' she added with a chuckle.
Clarissa insisted on taking one of the bags from her and instantly regretted her politeness. It seemed incredible that any shopping-bag could be so heavy. She did not know, and Dr Lorimer did not remember, that at the bottom of this bag were many milk-bottles that should have been returned to the dairy, as well as many empty tins intended for the dustbin. A most peculiar smell disturbed Clarissa as they walked out of Lyons'. Dr Lorimer had also forgotten a tin of dog's meat she had bought for her fox-terrier a month ago.
'Let's go by underground, shall we, dear?' said Dr Lorimer. 'I love the rush-hour tubes; so full of interesting types. Your raw material, I suppose.'
Clarissa's heart sank.
Mrs Clun's heart sank as she recognized her husband's mood. Her thin frame shivered as much with alarm as with the intense cold. She had followed him out on to the porch to ask him about the sherry, and now she had been there Over ten minutes listening to his strictures while the east wind whistled into every open crevice of her afternoon frock. Mrs Clun was extremely thin and not very young; also she had never worn enough underclothes since a time many years ago at the college garden party when her husband had reproved her publicly for looking 'lumpy'. She tried always to tell herself how proud she should be that after so many years he noticed her figure at all.
Professor Clun's dapper, soldierly little body was well padded. 'If, of course, you're going to regard every suggestion I make as a criticism,' he said, and his hard green eyes glared above his toothbrush moustache, 'then I must wash my hands of the whole matter.'
Mrs Clun knew that she must listen care
fully so that she might interpose a softening word at the right moment, but her mind kept travelling to her blue woolly upstairs in the bedroom. She smiled, a vague watery smile. Professor Clun noticed her red, frostbitten nose and resented it.
'I'm sure,' he continued, 'that I've no wish to give my time to these household matters. I have, as you very well know, a great deal of work on my hands. It's bad enough that I have to go to this lecture. I don't relish the idea of spending an hour listening to Pforzheim, able though he is, let alone the prospect of hearing Rose Lorimer air her crazy theories afterwards. If Sir Edgar were a better chairman, or even if Middleton had some modicum of the sense of responsibility which his position ought to give him, we should not waste hours of precious, time on these pointless generalities. The whole concept of these Stokesay Annual Lectures is entirely out of date. If we want to know what Pforzheim or any other Continental authority has to say, we can perfectly well read it in the journals. Any sensible executors with a little more savoir-faire than Sir Edgar or Middleton would have had the terms of Stokesay's will annulled long ago. The money could be most conveniently used for research projects or publications. When I think that I shall have to pay my own fare to the Verona conference next summer ...'
'Yes, Arthur,' said Mrs Clun.