The British Museum is Falling Down

by David Lodge

  ‘Shuddup,’ the hairy man said.

  ‘I read books in the library there,’ Adam said.

  The man with only one thumb jerked it towards the ceiling. ‘She has a lotta books,’ he said.

  Mrs Rottingdean?’ Adam said. ‘It’s her I wanted to see.’

  ‘She’s out,’ the man with the one thumb said.

  ‘I told him that,’ the hairy man said.

  ‘I’ll come back later,’ Adam said.

  ‘You wait here,’ the hairy man said. He pulled up a chair for Adam. Adam sat down slowly.

  At the other end of the kitchen a door opened and the figure of a young girl appeared. She had a white face and black hair and her dress was black.

  ‘What do you want?’ said the hairy man, without looking round.

  ‘Nothing. Who is that?’ the girl said, looking at Adam.

  ‘He’s from the café,’ the man with the sling said. ‘You got any aspirins?’

  ‘No, you’ve used them all,’ the girl said.

  ‘Then get outta here.’

  The door closed.

  ‘Bad lot,’ the man with the sling said.

  ‘I think I’ll be going,’ Adam said, getting to his feet.

  The hairy man pushed him down with a firm pressure on his shoulder. ‘You wait here,’ he said.

  ‘So you read books?’ the man with the sling said to Adam.

  ‘Yes,’ Adam said.

  ‘What kind of books? Love stories?’

  ‘Some of them are love stories.’

  ‘I like a good movie myself,’ the hairy man said.

  ‘He is in love with Elizabeth Taylor,’ the man with one thumb said.

  The hairy man blushed and twisted one leg round the other. ‘She is a magnificent woman,’ he muttered.

  ‘He has seen “Cleopatra” thirty-four times,’ the man with one thumb said. ‘Do you think that is a record?’

  ‘I’m sure it must be,’ Adam said.

  ‘It is not. The girls who show the seat have seen it more often.’

  The man with his arm in a sling choked on his beer bottle. The beer streamed down his chin and throat and soaked his vest. ‘One day you will kill me, amigo,’ he said.

  ‘One day I will kill Richard Burton,’ the hairy man said.

  ‘Have you any idea when Mrs Rottingdean will be back?’ Adam said.

  ‘Richard Burton would not let you,’ the man with the sling said. ‘I have seen him knock down bigger men than you.’

  ‘He is no bigger than yourself,’ the hairy man said.

  I believe it.’

  ‘I have knocked down many men your size,’ the hairy man said. ‘I would show you but your hand is in a sling.’

  ‘Do you not understand in the movies it is all faked?’ the man with one thumb said. ‘It is not Richard Burton who knocks down or is knocked down. They are like children,’ he said to Adam.

  ‘I still have one good arm,’ the man with the sling said. He thumped his elbow on the table and held his forearm vertically in the air. The hairy man sat down on the other side of the table and did the same, entwining the other’s fingers in his own.

  ‘Have it your own way,’ the man with one thumb said. He opened another bottle of beer.

  The two men struggled to force down each other’s arms on to the table. The sinews on their bare forearms stood out in hard relief. Sweat poured from their foreheads, and formed dark patches under their armpits. The third man encouraged their efforts with a low, guttural crooning.

  Adam got up from his seat and walked quietly to the door.

  ‘Where are you going?’ the man with one thumb said. The two men at the table stopped struggling and looked at him.

  ‘I was looking for the lavatory,’ Adam said.

  ‘Through there.’ The thumb gestured to the door at the other end of the kitchen.

  It was a long walk between the two doors.

  Adam opened and banged shut the door of the lavatory without going in. He did not want to use the lavatory. He did not want to wait for Mrs Rottingdean, supposing she existed. He just wanted to get out of the house and ride away into the fog, while he still had all his fingers. He had seen, in a film somewhere, that trial-of-strength game played with knives on the table.

  A dark staircase led upwards from the basement. Adam felt his way cautiously up the stairs until his groping hands encountered a door. It yielded to a turn of the handle and Adam stepped into a carpeted hall. His first action was to close the door softly behind him. A hand-written notice on the door said, ‘Keep Locked’, and Adam was glad to obey: the key was in the lock. No doubt the girl he had seen in the kitchen had omitted to lock the door when she retreated. He blessed her for her forgetfulness.

  He stood with his back to the door for a few moments, taking stock of his surroundings. The hall was dark and a little dingy. There was a large, heavy coatstand, and a grandfather clock with a ponderous, doleful tick. The walls were hung with large pictures of martyrs in various forms of agony: he identified St Sebastian transfixed with arrows like a pin-cushion, and St Lawrence broiling patiently on a grid-iron. While these morbid icons were consistent with what he knew of Mrs Rottingdean’s religious background, they made him feel uncomfortable. He shrank from them as from something cruel and sinister. This will teach you to go whoring after unpublished manuscripts, he told himself. Don’t you wish you were snug in the British Museum, counting the words in long sentences? Or at home dandling your three lovely children on your knee—knees?

  Apart from the ticking of the clock, the house seemed quite silent and deserted. There was nothing to stop him from walking down the narrow strip of threadbare carpet, opening the front door, and leaping down the steps to his scooter. Nothing except the staircase at his right, to which his back would be exposed as he walked down the hall, and the three doors to his left, anyone of which might open as he passed.

  Then, suddenly, he heard the sound of music—pop music. It was faint, very distant, and he couldn’t be sure whether it was carrying from some remote part of the house, or from outside. But its intimations of cheerful normalcy reassured him, and gave him courage to walk down the hall. He passed the doors to his left, one, two, three, without incident. A glance over his shoulder assured him that the stairs were unoccupied. His fingers reached out eagerly to grasp the latch of the heavy front door, and he pulled it open.

  A large, middle-aged woman stood on the threshold, pointing something at his chest. Adam raised his arms in surrender but checked himself as he saw it was only a Yale key.

  ‘Who are you?’ said the woman.

  ‘Appleby—Adam Appleby,’ he gabbled.

  The woman regarded him through narrowed eyes. ‘That rings a faint bell.’

  ‘You must be Mrs Rottingdean . . .’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I wrote you a letter, and you wrote me one back. About Egbert Merrymarsh.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Mrs Rottingdean. ‘May I come in?’

  Adam stepped aside to let her pass. ‘You must be wondering what I’m doing in your house . . .’

  ‘I suppose my daughter let you in?’

  ‘No, some men downstairs—’

  ‘It’s very bad of her. I’ve told her never to answer the door when I’m out.’

  ‘No, she didn’t, really. These men—’

  ‘Well, you’re here anyway,’ said Mrs Rottingdean, who seemed to be a little deaf. ‘Won’t you have some holy water?’

  ‘I’m not thirsty, thanks.’

  ‘I see you’re not a co-religionist, Mr Appleby,’ said Mrs Rottingdean, dipping her hand into a holy water stoup fixed to the wall, and crossing herself.

  ‘Oh yes, I am,’ said Adam. ‘I just didn’t understand . . .’

  ‘If you’d like to sit down in here,’ said Mrs Rottingdean, throwing open the door of a sitting-room, ‘I’ll make tea.’

  The sitting-room was furnished much like the hall, with heavy, antiquated furniture and sombre religious paintings on the walls.
There was a quantity of religious bric-à-brac on all the surfaces. Adam sat on the edge of a hard upright chair. He thought he heard someone pass the door which Mrs Rottingdean had closed behind him, and a few moments later he heard voices, faintly from the back of the house, but raised in anger. It sounded like Mrs Rottingdean and her daughter.

  He got to his feet and prowled restlessly about the room. A human finger-bone under a glass case on the mantelpiece caused him a momentary twinge of fear: he wondered whether it had been donated by one of the troglodytes below. But a legend on the case read, ‘Blessed Oliver Plunkett, Pray for us.’ He went to the window and drew back the net curtains. It was quite dark outside and the street lamps glowed dully, each in an aureole of fog. The squat shape of his scooter was just visible at the kerb. That was all right, then. He turned back into the room and investigated a glass-fronted bookcase. It was locked, but he made out the titles of several of Merrymarsh’s books, and other Catholic works of yesteryear: Chesterton’s The Napoleon of Notting Hill, Belloc’s The Path to Rome, Henry Harland’s The Cardinal’s Snuff Box, Robert Hugh Benson’s Come Rack! Come Rope!, the Poems of John Gray. They looked like first editions, and he wondered whether they were autographed. A faint quiver of curiosity and excitement revived in him. In particular he was intrigued by a black box-file on the lowest shelf of the bookcase. On the faded label he could just make out the word, ‘E.M.—Unpublished MS’. Perhaps it was a good thing he had come after all. He resolved to make an impression on Mrs Rottingdean.

  It was with a, for him, unwonted alacrity that our friend, hearing the tinkle of china in the hall, sprang gallantly to the door.

  ‘I’ve been admiring your “things”,’ he said, as he assisted her with the tea-trolley.

  ‘They’re mostly my uncle’s,’ she said. ‘But one does one’s best.’ She gestured vaguely to a cabinet where reliquaries statuettes and vials of Lourdes water were ranged on shelves, dim dusty devotional.

  She made tea in the old, leisured way, pouring the water into the pot from a hissing brass urn.

  ‘One lump or . . .?’ she questioned.

  Weighing his reply, he had time to take stock of his new friend. She wore a simple robe of soft dark material, and shoes that, diffident as he was in such matters, he would not have felt altogether out on a limb in describing as ‘sensible’. A plain gold cross at her bosom was her only ornament. Her countenance, innocent of paint, was regular, reposed, righteous—the kind of face he had glimpsed a hundred times in the gloom of cathedral side-chapels, pale above pale hands knotted in beads. She met his apprehension of her like the feel of a fine old missal in the palm: clean but well-thumbed, its cover softened by use but the spine still firm and straight.

  ‘Two,’ he said boldly.

  ‘You have a sweet tooth,’ she passed it off.

  But he kept her to it. ‘You are very perceptive.’

  ‘Uncle Egbert had a sweet tooth,’ she went on. ‘He had a weakness for chocolate éclairs after Benediction on Sundays.’

  ‘You lived with your uncle, then?’

  For some reason the question seemed to disturb her, and she fumbled with the teaspoons.

  ‘That was a long time ago,’ she said.

  The memory of Merrymarsh was evidently a tender one, and it seemed as though the question of manuscripts would have to be delicately broached. He fairly rattled the small change of conversation in his pocket without lighting on a single coin that wouldn’t, in the circumstances, seem too soiled and worn, too vulgarly confident of being ‘hard’ currency.

  ‘Won’t your daughter be joining us?’ he risked at last.

  The shrewd grey eyes took it in. ‘She has a headache. I hope you may have another opportunity of meeting her.’

  ‘I hope so, too,’ his answer was prompt.

  ‘Perhaps you could explain her to me, Mr Appleby. I confess I don’t understand the young people of today.’

  Well, he had pressed a button of sorts, at all events.

  ‘No doubt your own mother said the same of you, once,’ he ventured with a smile.

  Mrs Rottingdean put down her teacup. ‘Between a Catholic mother and her daughter there should be no distrust.’ She seemed to square him up in the vice of this statement before tapping home her next remark: ‘Are you a practising Catholic, Mr Appleby?’

  He was caught off balance, he couldn’t disguise it. She dropped her eyes and murmured, ‘I apologise. One should not ask such questions.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t mind admitting it to you,’ he reassured her, with a rueful laugh.

  ‘You mean . . .?’

  ‘I mean there are occasions when, coward that one is, one prefers to let people think the worst. It is the homage virtue pays to vice.’

  ‘Ah,’ was all she had to say.

  He put down his teacup.

  ‘May I give you another?’

  ‘Please. It is delicious.’

  She poured expertly, from a height. ‘Virginia has had a strict upbringing. Perhaps too strict. But I have old-fashioned ideas about girls’ education.’

  ‘Virginia.’ He tested the ring of it. ‘That is a charming name.’

  Mrs Rottingdean looked him straight in the eyes. ‘She will have two thousand pounds on marriage,’ she said.

  That was it, then. They had touched bottom at last; and like most bottoms it was muddy and a shade disillusioning, littered with the pathetic shapes of old broken things—prams, kettles and bicycle wheels. But he had to admire, as he shot back to the surface with bubbles trailing from his mouth in the form of a gay, ‘Then I envy the bachelors of your acquaintance,’ the brave effort with which, gasping only a little, she quickly rejoined him in the thinner element of polite conversation.

  ‘You are married? And so young?’

  ‘With three young children,’ he rubbed it in. ‘Which makes me all the more anxious, dear lady,’ he went on, ‘to make my fame and fortune with your generous assistance.’

  ‘Oh, I am to be generous, am I?’ she teased him.

  ‘To a fault.’

  ‘Ah, that is what I am afraid of.’

  ‘How could you blame me for thinking so, after your kind letter?’

  ‘Oh, letters!’ Her emphasis was expressive.

  ‘Quite. Letters,’ he echoed, glancing involuntarily at the bookcase. Her eyes followed his, and they communed in silence. It took on quite a character of its own in the end, this silence, shaped by the consciousness they both had of the manifold things they, all understandingly, were not saying to each other.

  ‘And if I hadn’t written . . .?’ she said at last.

  ‘Oh, in that case . . .’ His shrug conveyed, he hoped, the direness of such a hypothesis.

  ‘You would have renounced all hopes of fame and fortune?’

  ‘Well, no,’ he admitted. ‘But one must have materials.’

  Mrs Rottingdean poured herself a second cup of tea and slowly stirred the cream into it. ‘And what do you do with “materials” when you get them?’

  ‘Read them, first. Then, if, as one always hopes, they turn out to be of interest, write about them. Perhaps even publish them.’

  ‘And what are your criteria of “interest”?’

  It was his turn to drop into directness. ‘Well, I can’t for instance imagine that anything that threw light on Egbert Merrymarsh and his circle would lack that quality.’

  He leaned back in his chair and crossed his legs with a casualness that was not altogether unstudied. Mrs Rottingdean scrutinised him for a moment, then rose to her feet. She took a key from the mantelpiece and went to the bookcase. She returned with the black box-file, which she placed on his lap.

  ‘There you are, Mr Appleby,’ she said. ‘That contains all the unpublished writings of my uncle that I possess. You can have them for two hundred and fifty pounds. I won’t take a penny less.’

  Adam sat dejectedly in his chair, a thick manuscript open on his lap. He had long since abandoned reading it. From time to time the sum of money Mrs
Rottingdean had mentioned returned to his mind and forced an incredulous snort of derision from his nostrils.

  The black box-file had proved to contain a single bulky manuscript and a sheaf of letters from publishers explaining, with various degrees of rudeness, that they could not undertake publication. On the bottom of one of these letters, from a respectable Catholic house, was a note in Merrymarsh’s sprawling hand: More evidence of the Jewish-Masonic conspiracy against my work.

  The manuscript itself was a full-length book entitled Lay Sermons and Private Prayers. Adam had got as far as the sermon on Purity.

  ‘WHEN I was a lad at school,’ it began, ‘we were taught religious instruction by a holy old priest called Father Bonaventure. Father Bonaventure wasn’t the greatest theologian in Christendom; but he knew his catechism and he had a great devotion to Our Lady, and that was worth a thousand arguments to our young, unformed minds.

  He based his moral instruction on the Ten Commandments, which he went through one by one. But when he reached the Sixth, “Thou shalt not commit adultery,” he would say, “I’ll deal with that when I come to the Ninth Commandment.” And when he came to the Ninth, “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s wife,” he would say, “I’ll deal with that when I come back to the Sixth Commandment.”

  Some of the boys used to laugh at Father Bonaventure on this account; but it seems to me now, looking back gratefully to my schooldays, that old Father Bonaventure gave us the best instruction on purity that was ever given. For what was his artless evasion of the sixth and ninth commandments but purity in action? And to speak the truth, there were few boys in that class, even among those who laughed at their old teacher, who were not secretly relieved that purity, the shyest and tenderest of virtues, was not dragged roughly out into the arena of public discussion.

  We were, no doubt, a rough and ready set of fellows. Our collars were not always clean, our prep was not always faultless, and we were not over-scrupulous in respecting the rights of private property, particularly where apple orchards were concerned. But on one score we needed no correction; and if a newcomer to the school let a smutty word fall from his lips, or a lewd book from his pocket, he was soundly kicked for his pains, and was all the better for it. Talk about purity, it might be said at the risk of appearing paradoxical, begets impurity. It puts ideas into young heads which they would be better without. And after all, the talk is unnecessary. No one in his right body needs to be told that short skirts and mixed bathing are an offence against purity; not to mention the novels of Mr Lawrence, the plays of Mr Shaw, or the pamphlets of Dr Stopes in which the modern ideal of the Unholy Family is so graphically adumbrated . . .’