The British Museum is Falling Down

by David Lodge

  It was their attitude, above all, which made the hair on Appleby’s nape prickle as at the brush of a passing ghost—an attitude which suggested prayer rather than conspiracy, and was the more frightening because the more unaccountable. If they were waiting for him, why were their backs turned, why were they poring, with bowed heads and hands clasped behind their backs, upon the bare expanse of his desk? It was as if they were engaged in some hypocritical act of mourning for a crime they had already committed.

  Appleby perceived that the strangers’ presence had not gone unnoticed by the other readers in the vicinity, but it seemed almost as if the latter were trying to pretend otherwise. Without lifting their heads from their books, they were stealing glances, first at the Chinese, and then at himself. An African law student, sitting near him, rolled a white eye and seemed about to speak, but thought the better of it and turned back to his books. If only, Adam felt, he could see the faces of his visitors, he would know what they had come for. He shrank from the encounter, but anything was preferable to the mystery. Or was it . . .? If he were to walk away, go home and think about it, and come back later, tomorrow say, perhaps they would have gone away, and his books would be back on the desk, and he could forget all about it. As he stood wavering at this fork in the road of his moral self-exploration, he was suddenly relieved of the choice by a light tap on his shoulder and a voice which murmured, ‘Mr Appleby?’

  CHAPTER IV

  I believe there are several persons in a state of imbecility who come to read in the British Museum. I have been informed that there are several in that state who are sent there by their friends to pass away their time.

  CARLYLE

  ‘SO IT APPEARED,’ said Adam, biting into a Scotch egg, ‘that these Chinese were some cultural delegation or something from Communist China, and that they’d asked if they could look at Karl Marx’s desk—you know, the one he worked at when he was researching Das Kapital. Did you know that, Camel? That you saved me Karl Marx’s seat?’

  Camel, whose face was buried in a pint tankard, tried to shake his head and spilled a few drops of beer on his trousers.

  ‘I should have thought it would have singed your good Catholic arse,’ said Pond.

  ‘It makes you think, doesn’t it?’ Adam mused. ‘All the famous backsides who have polished those seats: Marx, Ruskin, Carlyle . . .’

  ‘Colin Wilson,’ suggested Pond.

  ‘Who?’ Adam asked.

  ‘Before your time, old boy,’ said Camel. ‘The good old days of the Museum, when everyone was writing books on the Human Condition and publishers were fighting under the desks for the options.’

  ‘You’d think you only had to sit at any of these desks,’ Adam went on, ‘and the wisdom would just seep up through your spinal cord. It just seems to seep out of mine. Look at today, for instance; lunch time and I haven’t done a thing.’

  They were in the Museum Tavern, Adam, Camel and Pond. Pond was a full-time teacher at the School of English where Camel taught a few evening classes. It was run by a crook, and Pond was worked very hard, but Adam and Camel found it difficult to commiserate with him because he earned so very much money. He and his pretty wife, Sally, had a Mini-Minor and a centrally-heated semi in Norwood with a four-poster bed draped in pink satin. Pond usually lunched with Adam and Camel one day a week, among other things in order to rid himself of the xenophobia which, as he explained, was both an occupational state of mind and a professional crime. According to Camel, he was the soul of kindness to his foreign pupils while on the job.

  ‘That’s because Karl Marx was a Jew,’ he now said in reply to Adam’s complaint. ‘All you have to do is change your seat.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Camel, ‘find yourself the seat Chesterton used. Or Belloc.’

  ‘Or Egbert Merrymarsh,’ said Adam.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Before your time,’ said Adam. ‘The good old days of the Museum, when there was a crucifix on every desk. The trouble is,’ he went on, ‘that Merrymarsh probably chose an unpadded seat, just to mortify himself.’

  ‘So what about the Chinese?’ said Camel. ‘What did you say to them?’

  ‘Well, I was just summing up courage to go up to them and say . . . say . . . well, say something, I don’t know, like, this is my seat, or, what have you done with my books, when this superintendent came up and explained. He’d been looking for me, but I was telephoning Barbara.’

  ‘He’s always telephoning his wife,’ explained Camel to Pond.

  ‘Well, that’s all right; I like to phone Sally myself occasionally,’ said Pond.

  ‘Ah, that’s just uxoriousness. Appleby is a neurotic case.’

  ‘I’m not neurotic,’ said Adam. ‘I toyed with the idea this morning, but I decided against it. Though, I must admit, those Chinese had me worried for a minute.’

  ‘Chinks,’ said Pond. ‘Don’t be afraid of good old prejudiced English usage.’

  ‘I must say, whoever it was had a nerve removing your books,’ said Camel.

  ‘Oh, I could see their point. Like tidying up a grave or something.’

  Pond shuddered, as he always did at the mention of death, and swigged some beer.

  ‘What exactly did the Superintendent say to you?’ Camel asked. ‘I want to know exactly what he said. Did he say, “I hope you won’t mind, but three Chinese gentlemen are looking at your desk”?’

  ‘Yes, he did, actually,’ said Adam, surprised. ‘That’s exactly what he did say.’

  ‘And what did you say?’

  ‘I didn’t say anything at first. I tell you, I felt pretty queer.’

  ‘So what happened then?’

  ‘Well, he looked a bit embarrassed, and said, “It was Karl Marx’s desk, you see. We often get visitors wanting to see it.”’

  ‘So what did you say then?’

  ‘Well, that’s what I was going to tell you. I think I said: Mr Marx, he dead!’

  Camel and Pond looked meaningfully at each other. ‘I told you,’ said Camel. ‘Appleby is cracking up.’

  ‘I can see,’ said Pond. ‘He’s going to become one of the Museum eccentrics. Before we know it, he’ll be shuffling around in slippers and muttering into a beard.’

  ‘It’s a special form of scholarly neurosis,’ said Camel. ‘He’s no longer able to distinguish between life and literature.’

  ‘Oh yes I can,’ said Adam. ‘Literature is mostly about having sex and not much about having children. Life is the other way round.’

  Pond came back from the bar carrying three pints.

  ‘That’s funny,’ said Adam. ‘You’re limping.’

  ‘What’s funny about that?’

  ‘Well, I’m limping too.’

  ‘Perhaps its a bug that’s going round,’ said Camel.

  ‘I don’t think, somehow,’ said Pond, ‘that our symptoms have the same cause.’

  ‘I don’t even know the cause of mine,’ said Adam. ‘I just woke up this morning with a pain in my leg.’

  ‘Why are you limping, then?’ Camel asked Pond.

  Pond made a grimace. ‘That damned Kama Sutra,’ he said, in the tone of a man boasting of his hereditary gout. ‘I forget which position it was—the Monkey or the Goose or something. I know I got a terrible cramp. Took Sally an hour’s rubbing with Sloane’s Liniment to straighten me out.’

  ‘I hope it will teach you a lesson,’ said Camel.

  ‘It was worth it,’ replied Pond, winking.

  ‘My God!’ Adam exclaimed. ‘You mean you’re so sated with conventional sex . . . Pardon me while my imagination boggles.’

  ‘It’s that four-poster bed that does it,’ Camel opined. ‘The pink drapes.’

  ‘No, as a matter of fact I think it’s the central heating,’ said Pond. ‘You’ve no idea how central heating extends the possibilities of sex.’

  ‘Be a waste of money for us, then,’ said Adam gloomily.

  ‘Well, drink up,’ urged Pond. ‘Bloody wogs.
’

  ‘Bloody wogs,’ they murmured. Pond insisted on this toast when he drank with them. It was only a matter of time, Adam thought, before someone heard them and insisted on their expulsion from the Tavern.

  ‘You know,’ said Camel to Adam, ‘I think you ought to apostatize. You can’t go on like this.’

  ‘What d’you mean?’

  ‘Well, leave the Church—temporarily I mean. You can go back to it later.’

  ‘Death-bed repentance, you mean?’

  ‘Well, more of a menopause repentance. It’s not such a risk is it? You and Barbara have a good expectation of living past forty or so.’

  ‘It’s no good talking to him like that, Camel,’ said Pond. ‘There’s always the bus.’

  ‘Yes, there’s always the bus,’ Adam agreed.

  ‘Bus? What bus?’ asked Camel in bewilderment.

  ‘The bus that runs you down. The death that comes unexpectedly,’ explained Pond. ‘Catholics are brought up to expect sudden extinction round every corner and to keep their souls highly polished at all times.’

  ‘How do you know all this?’ Adam demanded.

  ‘Sally went to a convent,’ Pond explained. ‘No,’ he went on, ‘it’s no use talking like that to Adam. We’ve got to convince him intellectually that Catholicism is false.’

  ‘I wouldn’t want to do that,’ said Camel. ‘I believe in religion. I don’t have any myself, but I believe in other people having religion.’

  ‘And children,’ Adam interpolated.

  ‘Quite so,’ Camel agreed. ‘I don’t have any affection for children myself, but I recognise the need for them to keep the human show on the road.’

  ‘Selfish bastard,’ said Adam.

  ‘But if you must have religion,’ said Pond, ‘why not Hinduism? Then you can have sex as well.’

  ‘I thought you were against things foreign,’ said Camel.

  ‘Well, I think we could have a kind of Anglicanised Hinduism . . . get rid of the holy cows and so on.’

  ‘No, it won’t do,’ said Camel. ‘I want Christianity kept up, because otherwise half our literary heritage will disappear. We need people like Appleby to tell us what The Cloud of Unknowing is all about.’

  ‘Never heard of it,’ said Adam.

  ‘Or the Ancrene Rewle.’

  ‘That’s what let me down in my Middle English paper,’ said Adam.

  ‘You should read it sometime. There’s some very interesting cloacal imagery in it.’

  ‘But Camel,’ said Pond, ‘for your purposes, it’s quite enough if people have a Christian education. There’s no need for them to practice the darn thing all their lives. We owe it to Adam to free him from the shackles of a superstitious creed.’

  ‘Go ahead, convince me,’ Adam invited.

  Pond, who fancied himself as a logician, shifted his chair nearer the table, and leaned his elbows upon it, pressing the fingers of each hand lightly together.

  ‘Very good,’ applauded Camel. ‘The fingers is very good. First round to Pond.’

  Pond ignored the diversion. ‘Let’s begin with the Trinity,’ he said. ‘The fundamental doctrine, as I understand it, of orthodox Christianity.’

  ‘Doesn’t give me much trouble,’ said Adam, ‘but go ahead.’

  ‘It doesn’t give you much trouble, if you don’t mind my saying so, my dear Adam, because you don’t think about it. In fact you don’t really believe it, because your assent is never tested. Since it costs you nothing to accept the idea of three in one, you have never bothered to inquire why you should accept anything so utterly contrary to logic and experience. Now just remind yourself, for a moment, of the concept of number. See: one’—he placed a salt cellar in the centre of the table—‘two ’—he placed a pepper pot beside it—‘three ’—he reached for the mustard.

  ‘I should have brought my clover leaf with me,’ said Adam. He spooned some mustard on to his plate, and sprinkled it with pepper and salt. ‘Three in one.’

  ‘There!’ cried Camel. ‘It really tastes horrible, but it’s true.’

  ‘I think you’re being highly irresponsible, Camel,’ said Pond testily. ‘Encouraging him like this. Especially as you propose remaining sterile yourself. Do you realise that the birth-rate figures show that England will be a predominantly Catholic country in three or four generations? Do you want that?’

  ‘No,’ said Adam fervently. ‘But it won’t happen because of the lapsation rate.’

  ‘Lapsation?’ Camel inquired.

  ‘Falling off from the Church,’ Adam explained.

  ‘Why do so many fall off?’

  ‘Not because of the doctrine of the Trinity,’ said Adam. ‘Because of birth control is my guess. Which reminds me: I have to attend a Dollinger meeting on that very subject this lunch hour. I must hurry.’

  The Dollinger Society took its name from the celebrated German theologian of the nineteenth century who had been ex-communicated in 1871 for his refusal to accept the doctrine of Papal Infallibility. Originally founded to press for the posthumous reversal of Dollinger’s ex-communication, and eventually his canonisation (in pursuance of which unlikely objectives the founder-members had encouraged themselves by citing the precedent of Joan of Arc) it had since become an informal discussion group of lay Catholics concerned to liberalise the Church’s attitude on more urgent and topical issues, such as religious liberty in Spain, nuclear war, and the Index Librorum Prohibitorum. Its only public activity took the form of writing outspoken letters on such subjects to the Catholic Press. The letters were never published, except in Crypt, a subscription newsletter edited by the Society’s unofficial chaplain, Father Bill Wildfire O.P., who, after a few beers, could be coaxed into questioning the doctrine of the Virgin Mary’s Assumption into heaven. Heretical statements like this, particularly when they had a sacerdotal—or, better still, episcopal—origin, were a source of unholy joy to the Society, circulating among the members much like dirty jokes in secular fraternities. It often seemed to Adam that many Dollingerites declined to follow the example of their patron mainly because the liberal conscience had a more thrilling existence within the Church than outside it.

  Adam attended the Society’s meetings only spasmodically, but today’s had a special interest for him. He wished that he had a clearer head for it. He had consumed more beer than he had been aware of. He staggered slightly, crossing the road between the Tavern and the Museum, and this decided him to walk rather than use his scooter. In any case, the distance was so short that it was scarcely worth the trouble of starting the scooter.

  With characteristic daring, the Dollinger Society held its meetings in Student Christian Hall, an inter-denominational centre located in one of the tall, narrow houses in Gordon Square. It had a small canteen in the basement where homely young women served cottage pie and a peculiarly vivid form of tomato soup to anyone who offered himself as a student or a Christian. On the first floor was a reading room, and on the second a lounge, where the Dollingerites gathered once a month for coffee and discussion.

  The meeting was already in progress when Adam arrived. He tip-toed across the floor and sank into a vacant armchair. About a dozen people were present. Adam could tell which of them had lunched downstairs by their orange moustaches. The secretary of the Society, Francis Maple, who was submanager of a Catholic bookshop, was evidently reading out the draft of a letter to the Catholic Press.

  ‘. . . advances in psychological knowledge and the increasing personalisation of human relations in different aspects of life have also contributed to a new awareness of the positive contribution made by affective and physical elements in the attainment of marital harmony. Ordered human sexuality, within the legitimate framework of married life, undoubtedly contributes to the development of the whole person . . .’

  It was a long letter. As it went on, Adam grew more and more impatient. It was not that these were bad arguments. They were good arguments. He had often used them himself. But their style of high-minded generality
, their elevated concern with the fulfilment of the married vocation, somehow missed the real rub of the problem as it was felt by the individual: the ache of unsatisfied desire, or the pall of anxiety that the Safe Method draped over the marriage bed. . . . Perhaps the new refinements of temperature charts and whatever really did work, but no one who had experienced an unwanted pregnancy could really trust periodic abstinence. Post coitum, omne animal triste est, agreed; but not before coition, or for days afterwards.

  The letter came to an end. After a long silence a flat-chested girl with ginger hair said, as she said on every similar occasion: ‘Can’t we bring the Mystical Body in somewhere?’

  ‘Why?’ Adam demanded. He was surprised by his own belligerence: it must be the beers. The ginger-haired girl cringed; her flat chest became concave. Adam felt sorry for her, but heard himself going on, ‘It seems to me that we’re concerned with the carnal body here.’

  ‘I agree,’ said a young man who had recently left a monastery and got engaged before his tonsure had grown over. ‘We’ll never get anything done until we have compulsory marriage of the clergy. They just don’t understand.’

  ‘Robert and I,’ said his fiancée, ‘think we should adopt Catholic orphans, instead of having children of our own. But with the present teaching on birth control it would be too risky. We might be overrun.’

  There were sympathetic murmurs from the rest of the company. The fiancée looked pleased at the effect she had created.

  ‘I’d like to know,’ said Adam, ‘what it is we want. I mean, do we want to use contraceptives, or the pill, or what? The letter didn’t say.’

  There was a slightly embarrassed silence. Francis Maple cleared his throat, and said:

  ‘I think the letter was just intended to air the concern of Catholic lay people, and draw the clergy’s attention to the subject.’

  ‘Does anyone know,’ said a bald-headed lawyer, the father of five, ‘whether the pill is really allowed or not? I’ve heard there’s a priest in Camden Town who recommends it in the confessional.’