The Madonna of the Astrolabe

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by J. I. M. Stewart


  ‘Pattullo,’ Wyborn said, and walked on in silence. This absence of immediate further communication may have been justified by the manner in which he had again pronounced my name. For a start, he was reassuring himself as to my identity. He was even reassuring me as to my identity. Furthermore, he was intimating a deliberative mood, together with a hint of appeal and a suggestion that something confidential and delicate was in the air. The vocal instrument with which Wyborn managed these effects wasn’t in itself impressive, being thin, reedy, and troubled by a curious tremor or wobble. This rendered the more notable the weight of implication achieved.

  ‘There is a matter I should like to consult you about,’ Wyborn said. We had now left the University Parks and were walking towards the city.

  ‘Yes, of course, Wyborn.’ I spoke encouragingly, but only a further silence succeeded. I wondered whether I ought to have said ‘Pray do, by all means’, or something of the sort, as carrying a heavier assurance of interest. We passed the Clarendon Laboratory of Experimental Philosophy (which is Oxford’s way of naming a haunt of nuclear physicists) and then the University Museum (which houses the remains of a creature 150 million years old, splendidly called Cetiosaurus oxoniensis). Wyborn was still in no hurry to speak. And as I couldn’t very well either say ‘Out with it, man’ or advance some random topic of my own the situation remained static. This didn’t trouble me. I was far from all agog about what was to come. I had something of my own to chew over. Or I ought to have had. What was perplexing was that I felt no particular impulse that way.

  I didn’t often think about Penny. I thought about her far less often than about Janet McKechnie, crudely to be called an old flame, or about my cousin Fiona Petrie, who was gaining some title to be considered a new one. This hadn’t been striking me as odd. Penny had long ago passed out of my life as definitely as Wyborn and I had just passed out of the Parks. That she was going to pay a visit to Oxford was not a piece of news that I’d have expected to upset me, and I had only been amused by Mrs Firebrace’s scarcely veiled assumption that it must do so. What now struck me as curious was the fact that, from the moment of my making a parting bow to Jacob’s mother, I hadn’t thought of Penny at all. I realised that, had I not met Wyborn and been obliged to pay him some attention, my walk back to college would have produced only reflections on the Bedworth family, the weighty matter of Marlowe’s rumbustious Scythian shepherd, and whatever problems of lecturing and supervising I was involved with at the moment. So what was not in my mind, was a faint sense of apprehension before this anaesthetic, patch in my consciousness. I was a child of the age of the depth psychologies; I had been an inquiring boy at a period before these began to give ground before the slobbering of Pavlov’s dogs. When my contemporary, Martin Fish, had fallen into a depression as the consequence of an unpropitious love affair, and when his friends had discussed the possibility of dropping him through trap-doors and assailing him with loud noises whenever he glimpsed the faithless Martine, this sketching of an aversion therapy had been entirely frivolous. What we had really believed was that Fish had suffered some awful trauma which he would repress, but which would intermittently bob up in him for the rest of his days – failing, that was, the attentions of someone like Sigmund Freud. It was in terms of such distant postulates as these that I was capable now of being bothered by the fact that Penny refused to bother me. Some poet—was it Keats?—had been troubled by ‘the feel of not to feel it’, and something of the kind was assailing me when Wyborn at last got down to business.

  ‘It’s Lempriere,’ Wyborn said. ‘I feel anxious about him. And I know, Pattullo, that you’re a relation of his.’

  I was anxious about Arnold Lempriere myself, and judged that others might be as well, since it was possible to sense a certain amount of therapeutic effort going on here and there. But a disposition actually to confer about Lempriere had not, so far, come my way. In our common room, a man would have to be in considerable disrepair before anything of the sort took place except between intimate friends. And, unless it was Cyril Bedworth’s, I was nobody’s intimate friend as yet. Why Wyborn, whom I scarcely knew, should feel he ought to discuss Lempriere with me was obscure.

  ‘Lempriere and I are in some sort of cousinship,’ I said. ‘And he’s been very kind to me as a result.’

  ‘I understand he had a most disagreeable experience at the end of last year.’

  ‘Yes, he had.’ Wyborn’s ‘understand’ puzzled me for a moment; it seemed to set him at an implausible distance from the episode to which he referred. There could be nobody in college, surely, who didn’t know about it in detail. Yet it was plain to me, even on our slight acquaintance, that Wyborn wasn’t a man to prevaricate. A good deal must really pass him by. ‘It was a quite horrible affair,’ I said.

  ‘But in no sense to his discredit?’

  ‘Of course it wasn’t to his discredit.’ I suppose I snapped this out. ‘Nobody has suggested such a thing.’

  ‘There was something about improper photographs?’

  ‘You do seem to know something about it.’ I glanced at Wyborn, perhaps thinking to detect in him the hint of a prurient attitude to our topic. But he wasn’t that sort of man either. ‘There was nothing particularly improper about the photographs themselves,’ I said. ‘They were simply of Lempriere at a bathing place on the Cherwell. He takes pleasure in swimming, and has kept it up even in old age.’

  ‘That’s most sensible.’ Wyborn displayed unexpected animation. ‘At our settlement – you know that I sometimes work for a university settlement in the East End of London, Pattullo – I have known it recommended to some of our geriatric cases. Please proceed.’

  “What was improper was the motive for taking the photographs. And the manner of their use, in a fugitive rag put out by one of our junior members, was quite disgusting.’

  ‘Does this mean, Pattullo, that there is still a bathing pool on the Cherwell where men go naked?’

  ‘Of course there is.’ I was becoming impatient of this odd conversation. ‘Do you disapprove?’

  It’s a difficult question.’ As if to emphasise an impulse to suspend judgement, Wyborn came to a halt half-way down Parks Road. ‘But, no—I don’t think I do. Certain of the Umbrian painters, I believe, have employed complete nudity to symbolise the New Dispensation, over against the encumbering garments of the Old.’

  ‘It’s a relevant consideration, no doubt.’ I was wondering what Lempriere – whose fondness for unencumbered striplings had been spot-lit so cruelly – would make of this theological point. ‘I think it has been generally supposed,’ I went on, ‘that Lempriere, who, you will agree, is a proud and sensitive man, and a man of honour as well, must have suffered a good deal from the wretched business. It may have given a forward shove to the ageing process that already had a grip on him. I’m certain I’d be most unhappy if I’d been subjected to such an outrage.’

  ‘Unhappiness can be creative, Pattullo. It’s despair that’s deadly. Indeed, one is warranted in calling despair a sin. Can we take means—here is the question—to guard Lempriere from that?’

  I dislike Christian busybodyism very much, the more so because I am seldom wholly free from the sense that my spirit is rebuked by it. I resented Wyborn’s designs upon Lempriere, which presently revealed themselves as being rather naively evangelising. And I certainly didn’t see myself – as was being proposed – persuading my distant kinsman to a resumption of his religious duties and a renewed participation in Holy Communion. All this was embarrassing, and at the same time I was ashamed of being embarrassed by it. I inwardly cursed Wyborn (I am sorry to say) for not knowing one man from another, or what was and what was not conceivable in a society in which he preserved at least some token appearance of mingling. I was squaring myself to the necessity of telling him that I was no good for the purpose he had in mind when our walk came rather suddenly to an end. Wyborn, although I had forgotten it, no longer lived in college, having taken on as a subsidiary duty some chaplain
cy in a working-class district of the city. So outside the Indian Institute, our ways parted, leaving the Lempriere issue unclarified between us.

  I walked on in just such a disturbed state of mind as Mrs Firebrace might have occasioned in me but hadn’t. I was seeing, I told myself, as much of Arnold Lempriere as I had done before the wretched Ivo Mumford had given his abortive magazine to the world and been most justly turfed out of Oxford as a result. But Lempriere had become more of an unknown quantity to me, all the same. I had accepted my colleagues’ almost unanimous profession that what had happened was a nastiness to be ignored even in the most private conversation. As a consequence, Lempriere and I hadn’t exchanged a dozen words about Ivo’s wretched Priapus. I felt that this had been wrong. The proper course would have been to discuss, for example, whether anything could be done for the boy now that he had been sent down.

  Lempriere owned more than enough magnanimity to be capable of that. And even a little talk might have cleared the air.

  The college was now in view – and so was the subject of these reflections. Lempriere had emerged through the main gate and was crossing the thoroughfare that slopes gently downhill past the west side of the Great Quadrangle. It struck me that in his own regard, he was moving briskly ahead. In fact, his stride was so confined that each pace took him forward by no more than half the distance which he probably thought of it as doing. This made perilous his progress through the traffic – a circumstance which he acknowledged at least to the extent of holding one hand shoulder-high as he walked. Dressed, after his common fashion, in shapeless grey tweed, and this to an effect of being hunched or crumpled in person as well as attire, he recalled, particularly as the towering buses and gigantic articulated lorries went by, a hedgehog injudiciously abroad on a very dusty day.

  Lempriere gained the farther pavement in safety, and there for a moment paused. I now saw that he was equipped with a pair of field-glasses, something I had never noticed his carrying about with him before. Old fashioned and probably of the most superior make, the bulky instrument was slung round his neck on a thong and so appeared to bow him down with an emblematical suggestion, as monarchs in old pictures are obliged to lug round outsized orbs and sceptres, and the Great Doctors similarly bear hypertrophied commonplace-books, inkpots and quill pens. As prompted by Arnold Lempriere, a man in whom certain gazing instincts were robustly developed, this was a passing fancy perhaps too obvious to record. His appearance made me now call up, however, something from a distant past; the manner in which Uncle Rory’s friend, Colonel Morrison had never walked the glens without binoculars, and how appalled had been my sense that these might have focused upon certain irregularities of behaviour between my cousin Anna Glencorry and myself. Suddenly recaptured like this, memories which time ought to have rendered merely amusing can for a moment occasion the actual sensation of embarrassment or discomfiture which had accompanied the original situation.

  Lempriere had disappeared. He could be neither advancing towards me nor withdrawing in the other direction. I thought I must have been wool-gathering (as in fact I had been) until I remembered that, directly opposite the college gate, a narrow street runs off at right-angles in the direction of nothing of much consequence. Lempriere must have departed that way. I glanced down this minor avenue when I reached it. Some thirty yards off, my kinsman had planted himself in the middle of the fairway, thus blocking any traffic that might be desiring to pass in either direction. His field-glasses were trained on something high above my head. This could only be the college tower.

  The particular spot Lempriere occupied was one of those from which this splendid architectural achievement may most advantageously be viewed. Another is from a corresponding distance within the college, across the expanse of the Great Quad. Any tall structure shows itself as variously foreshortened according to the particular triangle constituted by its base-line, its apex, and the position occupied by the eye of the observer. The more subtle the design, the greater will be the number of variously pleasing impressions received as the view-point is changed. Most good judges, however, would have concurred in the opinion that Lempriere had chosen the best station of the lot.

  Even so, it didn’t seem to me probable that aesthetic pleasure could be what he was aiming at. Only late at night would he consider it decent to pause and admire this most precious of our possessions. There must be another explanation, and I thought I had found it at once. Some sort of roof-climbing exploit had been going forward. The tower, technically the very Everest among Oxford’s peaks, had been conquered once more. Lempriere was studying some tangible token of the fact.

  In coming so speedily to this conclusion I was again being influenced by memories from some time back. Hazardous scramblings on the leads had been in vogue during those immediate post-war years in which I had been an undergraduate. They were unconnected with any increased interest and expertness in rock-climbing and mountaineering, being rather a test of hardihood on the part of youths conscious of having been just too young to fight. The activity had made headway, too, in public schools. I could remember being told by a fellow freshman how he and two companions had scaled the spire of a near-by parish church – a broach spire, ornamented with crumbling crockets, of a type common in Northamptonshire. The ascent took them the greater part of a night, and they reached the top only because too ignorant to assess the grotesque risk they were running. Coming down was harder; they reached ground-level in full daylight and under the fascinated regard of some 600 boys. Their headmaster stepped forward, congratulated them on their achievement and survival, and led them off to suffer in decent privacy a beating unexampled in the history of the school. He felt obliged, one must suppose, to discourage a practice which might result in his having to send a batch of his pupils home in their coffins.

  As for our tower, it had long been regarded as almost impregnable; and, as there was no record of anybody ever having been killed or injured on it, I imagine that actual attempts had been few. But I could remember the morrow of one night on which success was achieved. From the final glittering vane there flew, triumphant and incredible, a pair of rowing shorts and a pennon-like scarf in the colours of another college.

  Nothing of the sort was on view now, and I had been astray in nourishing any such expectation. Undergraduates didn’t do such things in present-day Oxford; they eschewed heady ambition, an unfriendly observer might have said, and preferred to stump terra firma, waving placards and bawling. Lempriere’s observations, therefore, were in some other interest. I went up to him, waited until he had lowered the field-glasses, and then steered him to the pavement.

  ‘Arnold,’ I asked, ‘what’s this in aid of? Have you taken to bird-watching?’

  ‘Temple-haunting martlets—eh, Dunkie?’ Lempriere gave his throat-clearing chuckle, but his expression was sombre. He had been changing of recent months, both physically and in manner. One thought of the quizzical and sardonic as his note; that, with flashes of generous feeling on the one hand and arrogance on the other, had outlined his personality. His self-assurance, moreover, had appeared to be of the bred-in-the-bone sort that is indestructible – and inoffensive even when irritating. But nowadays he seldom seemed at any far remove from agitation, and could even betray an eye misdoubting the manner in which people were regarding him. Yet at the moment he looked at me gamely enough. ‘Pendent beds and procreant cradles,’ he went on. ‘We may see them niched in the ruins well before we die. Either of us. For have I told you? I feel it in my bones that I’m condemned to a more than saurian longevity. Come, Dunkie, wouldn’t you say I looked like a tortoise?’

  ‘I was thinking of a hedgehog. And I believe they have an ordinary span of life, like the rest of us.’ I didn’t suppose Lempriere’s bones likely to prove particularly good prophets, but at the same time I knew that he must be rallied and joked with – if necessary, to the death. There were octogenarians in our common room and there were youths in their earliest twenties. Within certain limits of discretion we all
played at being contemporaries, a convention which worked well.

  ‘But, Arnold, I still don’t know what you’re talking about. What ruins?’

  ‘See for yourself. Spot the things with your naked eye first, and then take the glass. The top one’s gone already. And it wasn’t expected to. Not in anything like the time.’

  I did now know what Lempriere was concerned about, and I scanned the west face of the tower. Its upper reaches were still bathed in sunlight, and they shone as if built of freshly quarried stone. This was deceptive; it was simply that the superficial masonry had been washed under high pressure less than a year before. It was then that the mischief had been discovered.

  My eye had to take its time, for I hadn’t performed this exercise before. Lempriere stood beside me patiently, holding the binoculars. Very high up, and from the smooth surface of a great cyma reversa expanse, light winked at me, winked too from lower down – and from lower down again. It was as if here and there, small cleft flints had become accidentally bedded in the stone and were glinting down at us.

  ‘Yes, I see,’ I said, and took the binoculars. Focused, they revealed the small squares of glass cemented to the stone over a barely visible crack – a mere hair-line, it seemed – in the massive masonry of the tower. The topmost of these squares of glass was cracked from top to bottom. I handed back the instrument. ‘It does look as if some minor surgery is required.’

  ‘It was damned folly, giving the thing that Turkish bath. It went on for weeks. Washed out good honest compacting dirt.’

  ‘Perhaps, Arnold. But I don’t believe serious damage can be done that way. It’s when foundations subside that you get trouble. Even so, think of the campanile at Pisa. That’s seen no end of saurians come and go. It looks like a drunk leaning on a bar that isn’t there. But it’s a perfectly respectable bell-tower.’

 

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