The Madonna of the Astrolabe

by J. I. M. Stewart

  The tartness of Lempriere’s reply to this low humour was satisfactory, since it held something of his old fire. I decided that it had been nonsense on Wyborn’s part to suppose that this tough old man would hold any traffic with dejection as the consequence of an insult inflicted by a beardless boy.

  We walked amicably back to college together. I wondered whether it had become a habit with Lempriere to make the reconnaissance upon which I had stumbled. Old people occasionally develop a phobia about this or that falling down. It may be a tree or a building or a lamp-post or a statue, according to some stray association buried in a remote past. Perhaps a picture had once tumbled from the wall in Lempriere’s nursery, or perhaps he’d been secretly terrified by Humpty-Dumpty’s irreparable accident. Something like that.

  ‘If you ask me,’ Lempriere said as we were about to part before his staircase, ‘Edward has been keeping a good deal under his hat. It’s a habit of his.’

  ‘About the tower?’ ‘Edward’ was, of course, a senior man’s way of naming the Provost, whom I’d have had to agree owned an advanced technique of non-communication at times.

  ‘Yes. But he can’t keep it up, you know. There’s a surveyor’s report, and it comes before the Fabric Committee tomorrow. We’ll all have to be given the truth after that.’

  ‘Or what a surveyor supposes to be the truth.’

  ‘Don’t quibble, Dunkie. This is going to be a serious thing.’

  I accepted the rebuke, and walked on into Surrey. Surveying it, I reflected that buildings do disintegrate. A massive structure I was skirting, known as the New Library because dating only from the earlier eighteenth century, had in my own time developed the habit of dropping chunks of itself on the heads of passers-by: sometimes they had come earthwards as abundantly as leaves from a tree. Was it conceivable that the tower, although behaving in no such fashion, was stricken in some yet direr degree deep at the roots? As if Arnold Lempriere’s apprehensions had been catching, I was worried for some time by this thought. As a child, I told myself, I must have been traumatised too. Perhaps in my case it was by the dramatic news that London Bridge was falling down.

  Later that night, and clearly as a sequel to my afternoon’s experience, I ascended the tower. It was the first time I’d done so. Indeed, only since becoming a member of the college’s Governing Body, I supposed, had I been entitled to ask for the key and make the climb. A man called Hardy, whom I only vaguely knew, came with me, and an easy flight of stairs took us to the first chamber, a mysteriously enormous lumber-room. I remembered that some Oxford colleges are celebrated for having accumulated over the centuries an exceptional amount of junk, ironically referred to as treasures, the greater part consisting of gifts from former members of eccentric or ephemeral or tawdry taste: it was presumably such evidences that surrounded Hardy and myself now. For some time we wandered among them, gently amazed. There was a great deal of furniture, nearly all of it elaborately and curiously carved. There were musical instruments, mummies, oil-portraits, pagodas, penny-farthing bicycles, crucifixes, bird-cages, coffee-grinders. One could feel that here, strangely laid away, was everything there had ever been in the world, so that a near-infinity of time would be required for its surveyance. Hardy said ‘Pattullo’ on a rising inflection just short of the interrogative, and then ‘The superannuations of sunk realms’, so that I wondered what had made him think of Keats. Suddenly the oppressive multitudinousness vanished, and I was in open air on the leads of the tower. Then, as if executing with perfect timing a planned surprise, Penny stepped from behind a pinnacle and confronted me.

  I felt no astonishment. I was simply observant. Penny looked no older than when I had last seen her – or, indeed, than when I had first seen her, which had been well before her eighteenth birthday. And she had retained one habit I remembered vividly: a fancy for bizarre pets. She often visited a zoo-like department in Harrods, and came home with some small odd creature on which she would lavish affection for a week or so before forgetting about it. (I had to find means of disposing of half a dozen of these discarded favourites in a year.) What Penny held in her arms now, however, was quite commonplace and humble: a hedgehog curled up tightly in a ball. Thomas Hardy (for he was Thomas) stepped forward and took the hedgehog away from Penny, saying it was his business to see such innocent creatures should come to no harm. This was to prove a wise measure.

  But now Penny and I were alone on the tower – or on some tower, since the structure hitherto around us had unobtrusively gothicised itself and now provided a transformed wise en seine. It was still, however, the city of Oxford that was on view; leaning on a parapet together in a commonplace way, my wife and I surveyed it like tourists. Penny turned her head and glanced at me; I looked at her dispassionately; it did, however, seem to me odd that her mere extreme prettiness drew nothing into my blood. Penny’s lips, which had been closed, parted slightly. It was a tiny sign from the past – and even then it had meant singularly little: not a kiss, not the beginning of simple talk. But in this second, all the same, ungovernable emotion broke into my dream. My head swam; I thought the tower trembled; Penny went wavy before me, as if seen through turbulent water or in some trick-effect on a screen. This appearance faded. Penny’s hand went to her hair, and she glanced round with impatience. I knew at once what was wrong. She couldn’t find a looking-glass. To Penny it appeared to be impossible to do as all other women did, and keep such a thing somehow about her person. She began a familiar petulant prowl, and in a moment was peering over the edge of the tower. It was in this moment that my dream, as it were, took off, soaring into the absurd, leaving waking possibility behind it. But when dreams do this they can become less rather than more dreamlike, at least to the extent that they impress a sharper sense of their reality on the dreamer.

  Penny had found her looking-glass. It was the topmost of several sticking out from the sheer face of the tower and reflecting light at us from a clear sky. If its position was untoward it was, nevertheless, a familiar object: a driving- mirror of the kind more or less standard on motor-cars. Penny judged it would serve her very well; so clear was she about this that she was hanging head-downwards through a battlement-like aperture in the parapet to reach it. I grabbed her by the legs in the instant of its becoming clear that she now had no other support; I hugged them clumsily to my chest; looking past Penny, now vertical and upside-down, I saw not Oxford and its grey quadrangles but, one thousand feet below, the whole vast extent of the Gulf of Salerno from Capri in the east to those tiny specks in the west that I knew to be the temples of Paestum. Penny’s skirt slipped down her thighs, fell like a tent over her head, blotted out all Amalfi immediately beneath. I realised that I couldn’t save Penny; that her legs were sliding through my arms as if she were freeing herself from stockings or tights. She was gone. Craning over the parapet, I saw her plummet like a bomb, shrinking with incredible speed to some vanishing-point still high above the glittering Mediterranean.

  But now I myself was floating free in air, the tower (or was it the solid bastions of Ravello?) having dissolved around me. The sensation of being thus turned into a human balloon – even dirigible, I wasn’t sure – was delightful; I reflected that the levitations of the saints had probably been a treat accorded them in virtue of their good conduct; I thought it possible that this experience of my own was similarly a reward for praiseworthy behaviour in some immediately preceding exigency which I couldn’t now recall. The air was delicate; the sea sparkled far below; I could distinguish on it a little steamer trailing an old-fashioned cloud of white smoke. I did, however, wonder whether there might not be something precarious about my elevated situation, and this made me glad that I now had a companion again. He was a physicist whose name eluded me and with whom I held only a slight acquaintance, but he seemed a suitable person with whom to discuss the scientific aspect of what was, after all, a surprising achievement. I couldn’t actually see this timely authority; he hovered as a disembodied presence; but our conversation was neve
rtheless quite normal. He explained that there had recently been certain changes in what were popularly known as the laws of nature, and that Newton’s sufficiency was no longer quite what it had been. I said that of course I had heard of this, and we talked for some time in a measured and learned way. I was conscious of taking satisfaction in being a cultivated layman, able to follow, and even pertinently to question, any lucid exposition even of recondite matters. The laws of gravity, it seemed, had lately been altered to admit certain principles of latency and periodicity. Just occasionally, to put it very simply, the apple failed to fall, and it so happened that I was behaving like such an apple now. I asked my new companion, not without a natural trepidation, for how long these periods of mysterious stasis usually lasted. He replied that it was never for more than fifteen minutes, after which period gravity invariably resumed its sway. Having made this clear, he left me – if, indeed, he may be said in any philosophical sense to have been with me at all. Now high above Atrani (and drifting, I thought, towards Maiori), I was seized by terror and woke up.

  This dream didn’t yield much to the sort of self-analysis that one practises on such things from time to time. I didn’t, in fact, get much further than accounting for the presence of Thomas Hardy. Hadn’t I been thinking about roof-climbing as a test of hardihood? And hadn’t Hardy written a novel called Two on a Tower? There were other elements in the dream that hitched on to recent waking life, but I found myself without much impulse to work them out. What remained with me hauntingly were Penny’s parted lips. Penny was no longer eighteen – or even twenty-seven. But it wasn’t certain that her mouth would have ceased to admit of that tiny motion – a motion at once overwhelming in its effect and meaning nothing at all.

  II

  There could be no question of the gravity of the surveyor’s report when it was given to the Governing Body a few days later. The document was alarming. The Governing Body, although an assembly the awesomeness of which was such that I hadn’t yet ventured to open my mouth at it, was itself awed by the dimensions of the crisis revealed.

  At least so far as their constitution goes, Oxford colleges are out-of-date concerns. In theory, they are autonomous and self-perpetuating property-owning corporations in quite a big way. Their survival is nobody’s concern but their own, and they made do nicely through many centuries in which their financial operations consisted merely in the gathering in of rents from large estates and applying this income to the furthering of education and learning in whatever manner they judged fit from time to time. In the present age, this independence has become precarious, and maintaining it an activity more complex and exacting than a collection of scholars and scientists is well-adapted for. When they do make do it is partly because they are intelligent men, accustomed to analytical thinking of one sort or another. It is also because they are able to call upon the experience of faithful former members skilled in the mysteries of the financial world.

  I was discovering in these months that I had brought some bad habits back with me to Oxford. There is no vice in seeing the funny side of things; indeed, when the ability comes unforced virtue attaches to it. Pursued in a theatre of entertainment, however, it prompts to frivolity, or at least to an undiscriminating detached amusement as a response to anything that comes along. I fear I reacted in this professional fashion to the Governing Body. Attending the measured deliberations of these fifty-odd persons, intimidated (as I have said) by a decorum and patience which seldom yielded to anything unseemly or indeed lively in any way, I was too much on the look-out for the absurd. At first, at least, I found little that was discussed interesting in itself, so the spectacle ceased to be boring only when it presented, within a narrow spectrum of behaviour, material for what I hoped remained an entirely private grin.

  I imagine that our undergraduates, when they knew of the existence of the Governing Body at all, supposed it to be occupied almost exclusively with the surveillance of their own diverse goings-on. Nothing could have been farther from the truth. A visitor from Mars, I had concluded, could sit in on a good many successive meetings of this assembly without so much as becoming aware that they took place within bowshot of several hundred young men. The problems of these – or these as a problem – were coped with elsewhere. And if any of my colleagues felt a concern (as I am sure many did) over educational issues confronting universities in the contemporary world, they didn’t treat the Governing Body as a forum for their discussion. Never having had to give thought to the priorities enforcing themselves upon administrative assemblies, I had judged this perverse and odd. In particular, I hadn’t thought of the overriding necessity we were under simply to ensure that we had a roof over our heads. It was the first rumblings from the college tower that brought this home to me.

  ‘Number 15,’ the Provost had said, unemotionally. The words, as if they had been a test devised by a social psychologist, divided us at once into two categories. This happened a dozen times at every meeting. Papers of one sort and another had been dropping in on us throughout the preceding fortnight. Some of us had sorted them through, arranging them in an order corresponding to the items of the agenda: these had to do no more than turn to the next page in front of them. Others kept everything higgledy-piggledy, and were constrained to rummage every time. The provident – led by the Provost – invariably waited with apparently effortless patience until the last of the improvident had caught up with them. Sometimes, indeed, a member whose business it was to open a discussion would begin to speak, observe a colleague still leafing through his pile, and break off with an apology for having uttered prematurely. Courtesies like this, barbed in a minuscule way, occasionally provided the more eventful moments of an entire three-hour meeting.

  Number 14 had been the report of the Donations and Subscriptions Committee, and this had included a proposed grant of £1o towards the expenses of an archaeological expedition preparing to set out for Kafiristan. Several men spoke about this. Might not £10 be enough? Would £40 not be a more decent measure of what might be expected of us? Hadn’t there been a similar application a few years ago from the people proposing fresh work at Leptis Magna – and what had we given then? Were any former members of the college known to be involved in this affair? What was the present balance in the Donations and Subscriptions Fund? This went on for some time, during which two or three fellows of really methodical mind, who came to meetings staggering under the weight of filed reports and minutes extending back into their own near-nonage, applied themselves to sifting out from this archival material precedents which they hoped presently to bring to bear in a weighty manner in one interest or another. Then a man called Sanctuary, who knew about Kafiristan but had been holding his fire, delivered himself of what was evidently a prepared speech, tuned up to a high degree of syntactical elegance. What Sanctuary had to say, in effect, was that these incompetent persons should be sent no money at all. But as Sanctuary happened at this time to be President of the most august of England’s learned academies he had to express himself with great circumspection. This he was well able to do, and enjoyed doing. We listened to him for some ten minutes. The Provost, it seemed to me, listened with particular complacence, and when Professor Sanctuary dried up – or came to a euphonious close – he besought Dr Chambers (who was in the same line of business as Sanctuary) to assist the Governing Body with his views. Dr Chambers proved quite willing to do so. He thought we ought to temporise rather than incontinently turn the application down. There were certain technical aspects of the proposed excavations about which one was entitled to have misgivings. At least in an informal way, inquiries might quite properly be made about them. Meanwhile, the matter should be deferred.

  At this point my attention wandered, so I don’t know on what grounds we decided on the £20 after all. I had been glancing back at some of the items already dealt with. Several involved money. We had voted £200 towards the college servants’ annual summer outing. That had taken no time. Nor had deciding to sell a property, once a water-meadow
but now an industrial estate, for a very large sum indeed. But Donations and Subscriptions were seldom rapidly dismissed. So the hour was now late – and here in front of us at last, was the staggering issue of the tottering college tower. It was not, of course, literally to be described that way, but the surveyor had made urgency a prominent note in his report. He may have felt that he was dealing with people not easy to get on their toes.

  I found myself wondering – one often did wonder – if the Provost was up to something. He was presumably responsible – or able to make himself responsible – for the order in which college business appeared before us. And he would not regard the discovery about the tower as other than momentous. So why had it been placed so far down our agenda?

  ‘I shall ask the Estates Bursar,’ the Provost said, ‘if he will be good enough to take us through the surveyor’s report.’

  The Estates Bursar did as he was told. He was a quiet man called Geoffrey Quine, and he had come to us, I understood, some years before from a stratosphere of high finance – the rewards of which he had been able to forgo because he was a person of substantial private fortune. These circumstances lent him prestige among us, so that he was effectively a dictator within his all-important sphere. One could never have guessed this from his manner, which was diffident and gently humorous. In the business of maintaining over our educational labours roofs of a not too hopelessly leaky sort, he had the air of a conjuror who must modestly suggest himself as being harassingly overtasked, although he is in fact well aware of his audience’s conviction that the mirrors will do their job in the end. He now ‘took us through’ the report in considerable detail, although it was a lucid and non-technical document which scarcely stood in need of explication. Later on, the problems would, no doubt, turn complex enough, and appeal to that minority among us who were well-acquainted with the laws of gravity and even the strength of materials. But at the moment the main issue was plain. Perhaps we were being given time to digest it.