The British Museum is Falling Down
Page 7
‘What’s his name?’ said half-a-dozen voices simultaneously.
‘I don’t know,’ confessed the lawyer.
‘As I understand it,’ said Francis Maple, ‘you can use a pill to regulate the female cycle and make the Safe Period Safer, but you’re not allowed to use it to induce sterility.’
‘I’ve heard the pill can make a woman grow a beard,’ said a post-graduate student from Bedford College. ‘Or make her pregnant when she’s seventy,’ she added, with a shudder.
‘I’d like to know,’ said the ex-monk, ‘what Mr Appleby wants.’
Adam shifted uneasily in his seat, as the eyes of all present turned curiously on him.
‘I don’t know,’ he said at length. ‘I don’t suppose anyone really wants to use contraceptives, even non-Catholics. They’re not things you can work up much affection for, are they? Everybody seems to act a bit furtive about the business. Perhaps the pill will be the solution, but we don’t know enough about it yet. What we want is emergency measures to deal with the present situation, while the theologians and the scientists thrash out the question of the pill. At the moment the situation is that we Catholics expend most of our moral energy on keeping or breaking the Church’s teaching on birth control, when there are a lot of much more important moral issues in life.’
‘Hear, hear!’ said a lady whose pet cause was protesting against the Irish export of horses for slaughter.
‘The trouble with using contraceptives, from the point of view of practical moral theology,’ Adam went on, wondering what conclusion he was going to reach, ‘is that it’s necessarily a premeditated sin. You can biff someone on the head or seduce someone’s wife at a party, and go to confession and say, “Father, I was overcome by my passions,” and be sincerely sorry, and promise not to do it again, and do the same thing a week later without being a hypocrite. But the other thing is something you commit, in the first place, in cold blood in a chemist’s shop; and once you start you have to go on steadily, or there’s no point.’
‘That’s very well put,’ said Maple, as Adam recovered his breath. ‘But what can we do about it?’
‘The only thing I can see is to get contraception classified as a venial sin,’ said Adam, with sudden inspiration. ‘Then we could all feel slightly guilty about it, like cheating on the buses, without forfeiting the sacraments.’
This proposition seemed to take the group by surprise, and a long silence ensued.
‘Well,’ said Francis Maple at length, ‘that’s a novel point of view certainly. I don’t know if there’s any machinery for classifying sins . . . But there’s a general consensus which can be modified, I suppose.’
At this point the door burst open, and Father Wildfire entered.
‘Ah!’ said Maple, with relief. ‘You come at an opportune moment, Father.’
‘Why, somebody dying?’ said the priest, with a boisterous laugh.
‘No, it’s just that we’re getting into rather deep theological waters. Adam, here, thinks that the birth control problem could be solved if contraception were just considered as a venial sin.’
‘Isn’t it?’ said Father Wildfire, with feigned surprise. The group laughed delightedly, but discreetly, as if they were in church. ‘Is there anything to drink?’ asked the priest, unbuttoning his coat. This was a rough serge jacket of the kind worn by building labourers. Underneath it he wore a red woollen shirt and brown corduroy trousers. The Dominicans appeared to have very liberal regulations, of which Father Wildfire took full advantage, concerning the wearing of the habit. Adam often thought that if, as seemed likely, he was eventually de-frocked, no one would ever know it.
A cup of coffee was passed to the priest, who extracted a small flask from his pocket, and poured a generous measure into the cup. ‘Seriously,’ he said, ‘this venial sin—mortal sin business is old hat. Something the scholastics thought up to while away the long winter evenings. All sins are mortal sins. Or, to put it another way, all sins are venial sins. What matters is love. The more love, the less sin. I was preaching at a men’s retreat the other day, and I told them, better sleep with a prostitute with some kind of love than with your wife out of habit. Seems some of them took me at my word, and the bishop is rather cross.’
Adam wanted to ask if it was better to make love to your wife using a contraceptive, or not to make love to her at all; but somehow it did not seem an appropriate question to ask Father Wildfire. He lived at the frontiers of the spiritual life, where dwelt criminals, prostitutes, murderers and saints, a territory steaming with the fumes of human iniquity, from which souls emerged, if they emerged at all, toughened and purified by a heroic struggle with evil. In contrast, Adam’s moral problem seemed trivial and suburban, and to seek Father Wildfire’s advice would be like engaging the services of a big-game hunter to catch a mouse.
The circle of Dollingerites had now broken up into small groups, the most numerous of which was clustered round Father Wildfire, who was expatiating on the problems of Irish girls who came to London to have their illegitimate babies. Thinking of his own healthy and tolerably happy family, Adam was stricken with self-reproach. A favourite remark of his mother’s, ‘There’s always someone worse off than yourself,’ stirred in his memory. He found the maxim no more efficacious in removing anxiety now than it had been in the past. Healthy and happy his family might be, but only so long as it stood at a manageable number. Already the problem of supporting them was formidable. He really must begin to think seriously about jobs for next year.
It was cold and damp on the pavement outside Student Christian Hall. The leafless trees in Gordon Square stood black and gaunt against the façade of Georgian houses. The sky was cold and grey. It looked like snow.
I hunched my shoulders inside my coat and set off briskly in the direction of the English department (Adam Appleby might have written). I had an appointment with Briggs, my supervisor. He was a punctual man, and appreciated punctuality in others. I mean that he liked people to be on time. Men who have sacrificed a lot of big things to their careers often cling fiercely to small habits.
Access to the English Department was through a small courtyard at the rear of the College. There seemed to be a lot of young people about, and I had to linger some moments before I caught the eye of Jones, the Beadle. I always make a point of catching the eye of beadles, porters and similar servants. Jones did not disappoint me: his face lit up.
‘Hallo, sir. Haven’t seen you for some time.’
‘Come to see Mr Briggs, Jones. There seem to be a lot of people about?’
‘Undergraduates, sir,’ he explained.
The English Department wasn’t the most distinguished building in the College, but it had history. The brick façade, stained with soot and streaked with rain water, was thought to be a good example of its type, which was turn-of-the-century warehousing. When, some thirty years ago, the expanding College had bought the freehold, rather than demolish the building they had skilfully converted the interior into classrooms and narrow, cell-like offices by means of matchboard partitions. It wasn’t what you could call a comfortable or elegant building, but it had character. Its small, grimy windows looked on to an identical building twenty feet away, which housed the Department of Civil Engineering. But, schooled by long practice, I turned into the right door and mounted the long stone staircase.
The door of Briggs’ room on the second floor was open, and the sound of conversation floated into the corridor. I tapped on the door and extended my head into the room.
‘Oh, come in, Appleby,’ said Briggs.
He was talking to Bane, who had recently been appointed to a new Chair of Absurdist Drama, endowed by a commercial television company. This, I knew, had been a blow to Briggs, who was the senior man of the two, and who had been looking about for a Chair for some time. His own field was the English Essay. No one was likely to endow a special Chair in the English Essay, and Briggs knew it. His best chance of promotion lay in the retirement of the Head of Department,
old Howells, who was always raising Briggs’ expectations by retreating at the beginning of term to a Swiss sanatorium, only to dash them again by returning refreshed and reinvigorated at the beginning of the vacations.
The posture of the two men seemed to illustrate their relationship. Bane was sprawled in Briggs’s lumpy armchair, his legs stretched out over the brown linoleum. Briggs stood by the window, uneasily fingering the ridges of the radiator. On his desk was an open bottle of British sherry. At my appearance he seemed to straighten up his tired, slack body, and to become his usual efficient, slightly fussy self.
‘Come in, come in,’ he repeated.
‘I don’t want to interrupt you . . .’
‘No, come in. You know Professor Bane, of course?’
Bane nodded casually, but affably enough. ‘How’s the research going?’ he asked.
‘I hope to start writing soon,’ I replied.
‘Will you take a glass of sherry wine?’ said Briggs, who affected such redundancies in his speech.
‘Thank you, but I’ve already lunched,’ I explained.
Briggs glanced at his watch. ‘I suppose it is late. What does your wrist-watch say, Bane?’
‘A quarter to two.’
‘We’ve been talking, and forgot the time,’ said Briggs. If Briggs was losing his habit of punctuality, I thought, he must be seriously affected by the promotion of Bane.
Bane got up and stretched himself nonchalantly. ‘Well, I think we’ve talked it out now,’ he said. ‘Perhaps you’ll think it over, Briggs, and let me know what you decide.’
Briggs bit his lip, at the same time pulling nervously on the lobes of both ears. It was a little nervous habit of his which you didn’t notice at first.
‘I must say,’ he said, ‘it surprises me a little that the Prof hasn’t mentioned this to me at all.’
Bane shrugged. ‘Of course, you realise that it means nothing to me, and the last thing I want to do is to put you to any inconvenience. But it seems that the Prof wants all the people with Chairs ‘—he leaned slightly on the word—’ together on one floor. I think you’ll find my little room on the fourth floor quite snug. At least one doesn’t suffer from interruptions up there. Put it this way: you’ll be able to get on with your book,’ he concluded maliciously. Briggs had been working for twenty years on a history of the English Essay.
As Briggs opened his mouth to reply, he was forestalled by a frenzied crashing in the radiator pipes, emanating from the boilers far below, but filling the room with such a din as to render speech inaudible. While the racket continued, the three of us stood, motionless and silent, lost in our own thoughts. I felt a certain thrill at being witness to one of those classic struggles for power and prestige which characterise the lives of ambitious men and which, in truth, exhaust most of their time and energy. To the casual observer, it might seem that nothing important was at stake here, but it might well be that the future course of English studies in the University hung upon this conversation.
At length the noise in the radiator pipes diminished, and faded away. Briggs said:
‘I’m glad you mentioned my book, Bane. To be honest with you, the thing I have most against a move is my collection here.’ Briggs gestured towards the huge, ugly, worm-eaten bookcase that housed his collection of the English essayists: Addison, Steele, Johnson, Lamb, Hazlitt, Belloc, Chesterton . . . even Egbert Merrymarsh was represented here by a slim, white-buckram volume privately printed by Carthusian monks on hand-made paper. ‘I just don’t see how it will fit into your room,’ explained Briggs.
This was Briggs’ trump-card. His collection was famous, and no one would dare to suggest that he break it up. Bane lost his nonchalant air, and looked cross: a faint flush coloured his pouchy cheeks. ‘I’ll get Jones to take some measurements,’ he said abruptly, and left the room.
Briggs brightened momentarily at Bane’s departure, no doubt consoled by the thought that Jones was in his own pocket. But the hidden pressures of the discussion had taken their toll, and he seemed a tired and defeated man as he sank into his desk-chair.
‘Well,’ he said at length, ‘how’s the research going?’
‘I hope to start writing soon,’ I replied. ‘But I fear I won’t be able to submit in June. I think I’ll have to get an extension to October.’
‘That’s a pity, Appleby, a great pity. I disapprove of theses running on and on. Look at Camel, for instance.’
‘Yes, I know. What worries me is the question of jobs. I really will need a job next academic year.’
‘A job? A university post, is it that you want, Appleby?’
‘Yes, I—’
I was about to allude delicately to the possibility of a vacancy in the Department, caused by Bane’s new Chair, when Briggs went on, with startling emphasis:
‘Then I have only one word of advice to you, Appleby. Publish! Publish or perish! That’s how it is in the academic world these days. There was a time when appointments were made on a more human basis, but not any more.’
‘The snag is, nothing I have is quite ready for publication . . .’
With an effort, Briggs dragged his attention away from his private discontents and brought it to bear on mine. But the energy went out of his voice, and he seemed bored.
‘What about that piece you showed me on Merrymarsh?’ he said vaguely.
‘Do you really think . . . It’s my impression there’s not much interest in Merrymarsh these days.’
‘Interest? Interest doesn’t matter, as long as you get it published. Who do you suppose is interested in Absurdist drama?’
I left Briggs staring moodily into his empty sherry-glass. On my way out of the building I met Bane again, and took the opportunity to ask his advice on a trivial bibliographical problem. He seemed flattered by the enquiry, and took me up to his room to look up the reference.
When I finally made my departure, the trees were still there in Gordon Square, bleak and gaunt against the Georgian façade. I walked back to the Museum under a cold grey sky. I wondered idly which man I disliked most, Briggs or Bane.
CHAPTER V
I spent my days at the British Museum, and must, I think, have been very delicate, for I remember often putting off hour after hour consulting some necessary book because I shrank from lifting the heavy volumes of the catalogue.
W. B. YEATS
AS ADAM APPROACHED the British Museum, lethargy and despair oppressed him. By now, a pile of Lawrence books would be on his desk, but he felt no quickening of his pulse at the prospect. In Great Russell Street he lingered outside the windows of bookshops, stationers and small publishers. The stationers particularly fascinated him. He coveted the files, punches, staplers, erasers, coloured inks, and gadgets whose functions remained a teasing mystery, thinking that if only he could afford to equip himself with all this apparatus his thesis would write itself: he would be automated.
Feeling a faint pang of hunger—the Scotch egg in the Tavern seemed very distant—Adam entered a small shop near the corner of Museum Street, and purchased a bar of chocolate. A headline in the evening paper about the Vatican Council caught his eye, and he bought a copy. He crossed the road and passed through the gates of the Museum, which sat massively before him, its wings like arms extended to sweep him into the yawning, gap-toothed maw of the portico. As he mounted the steps, Adam decided not to be swallowed immediately. He sat down on one of the benches in the colonnade and munched his chocolate, glancing at the newspaper. Cardinal Suenens, he was glad to see, had called for a radical re-examination of the Church’s teaching on birth control. Cardinal Ottaviani had countered by asserting that married Catholics should place their trust in Divine Providence. On no other issue, the paper’s correspondent reported, were the liberal and conservative factions at the Council so clearly defined. A prolonged and bitter debate was in prospect, which was likely to be resolved only by the personal intervention of the Pope, who had not as yet indicated the direction of his own thinking on the matter.
* * * Indeed it was a day of days, Father Francesco Francescini, humble member of the Papal household, wrote in his diary, and I bless the Divine Providence which ordained that I, a humble Franciscan friar, should have been privy to its tremendous doings. Not merely the election of a new Pope—but an English Pope, the first for eight centuries—and not merely an English Pope, but an English Pope who has been married! Little did the Fathers of the Council suspect, I wager, when they approved by so narrow a margin the admission of married men to Holy Orders, that they would soon be acclaiming a Supreme Pontiff with four bambini. Most mirific! Astonishing are the ways of God.
I would give my rosary beads, carved from the shin-bone of holy St. Francis himself, to know what struggles in the Conclave brought about the election of this unknown Padre Appleby, secretary to the English Cardinal and, they say, ordained but lately, to the highest office of Holy Church. Whatever the true history (and the Conclave’s vow of secrecy ensures that it will never be known, not for some days anyway) it is accomplished. We have a Pope! Habemus Papam! With what a sour face old Scarlettofeverini, despot of the Holy Office, enunciated the longed-for words to the cheering multitude in St Peter’s Square, who for days had watched the black smoke of disagreement floating into the sky above the Sistine chapel. Just before the announcement, in the Papal chamber behind the balcony, he had enquired, with a vulpine snarl, what name the new Pope proposed to take.
‘We take the name of Alexander,’ said the Pope with deliberation. The Sacred College reeled back in dismay. There was a flutter of ringed hands, a squeaking and cawing as of startled birds.