‘May I take it,’ the Provost said when Quine had concluded, ‘that the subject is now open to debate?’ The Provost seldom addressed the Governing Body other than in interrogative form; it was his way of intimating to his colleagues that he was, as he liked to express it, ‘in their hands’. I found myself wondering whether prime ministers adopted this technique in the Cabinet Room. It was a question I must one day put to Tony Mumford, Lord Marchpayne, who had lately vacated his place in that arcanum as the result of an unfortunate General Election.
There was a pause. When an issue of real weight arose it was the convention that nobody hurried in. It was possible to feel on these occasions that we ought to be on our knees, like a congregation handed over for a time to the activity of private prayer.
Meanwhile, the sun was setting on the college tower. I was among three or four who could enjoy a clear view of this moment in the day through a lofty window at the end of the big room in which we sat. It seemed to me shocking that my nocturnal imagination could have enlisted an object of such tranquil beauty in the bizarre charade of a dream. At this point I moved my head slightly. And the window-glass must have contained a flaw, for the tower appeared to tremble as I looked.
Sanctuary was speaking – now rapidly and nervously, but with much the same command of complex periods as he had exhibited in his previous set piece about Kafiristan. His theme was the imperative need for rapid and decisive action.
‘And before those scoundrels at Westminster,’ Sanctuary concluded, ‘bring in their next Budget, and finally dry up the springs of charity!’ He sat back and glanced round the meeting, pleased that this importing of political animus had cause a stir – conscientiously unfavourable for the most part – among his auditory.
‘Professor Sanctuary,’ the Provost said, evenly, ‘favours the immediate launching of an appeal. Were we to agree on that, its scope would have to be considered – am I right in thinking – with the greatest care. Ought such an appeal to be directed simply to our old members, or ought it to be a national affair? It would be necessary, some of us may feel, to deliberate on that.’
‘Mr Provost,’ Cyril Bedworth said, and paused to collect himself. As Senior Tutor, Bedworth sat on the Provost’s right, and it was his business to act as second in command, something that was not yet coming to him easily. ‘Mr Provost, I need hardly remind members of the Governing Body that our last appeal to the generosity of old members happens to be of very recent date. The response was as magnificent as it was timely. But the fact does make our present situation a tricky one. I confess to being shocked by the magnitude of the sum that looks like proving necessary. Very tentatively, and if there is to be an appeal at all, I think I’d favour launching it at a national level. Were it to fail – a possibility we must take account of in the present economic state of the country – the effect would at least be less damaging to morale than would a similar failure in which the application had been merely to the loyalty of members of our own society.’
‘Mr Provost, I am in agreement with the Senior Tutor.’ It was James Gender who was now speaking. ‘As between the wisdom of one sort of appeal or the other, that is to say. But I think I heard the Senior Tutor advance a proviso in which it struck me there was much wisdom. “If there is to be an appeal at all.” Before we even begin to decide on that, I should much like to hear whether the Estates Bursar sees any other way of meeting the crisis before us.’
‘I suppose, Mr Provost, that Mr Gender is asking whether we can borrow a sum somewhere near the million mark.’ Quine spoke, promptly, and with as near an approach to amusement as the gravity of our debate permitted. ‘Of course the answer is that we certainly can. But if the resulting debt were to be extinguished only over quite a long period of time – say twenty years – the college would still find itself on appreciably short commons throughout. Expenditure on the rest of the fabric would have to be cut. Indeed, we’d balance our accounts at all only by both taking an individual cut all round and retrenching on our teaching and research – in other words, what we’re here for, Mr Provost.’
This speech, tipping in as it did a distinction not to everybody’s taste, produced silence. It was broken by Wyborn. I had the Pastoral Fellow in my head as one of those whom the Governing Body’s proceedings passed by. He was always in his place – attendance at these august deliberations was acknowledged as a high priority by all – but I had never seen him open his mouth, or even contrive any decent appearance of much listening to what was going on. But now he went off like a gun.
‘What we are here for, Provost, is a most relevant point. It is the furtherance of piety and godly learning. I think I am not in error in recalling that it is precisely so expressed in the Statutes given us by our Founder. Well, this tower may be falling down. It is of interest, perhaps, that it is not the spire of our chapel that is in this danger. The spire is by some centuries older than the tower. It belongs to an age of Faith, whereas the tower may be said to belong to an age of Enlightenment. And of elegance. Yes, precisely that! It is undoubtedly an elegant structure, and I do not quarrel with it on that account. There can be much edification in beautiful things – most of all, perhaps, in those directly granted to us by the Divine Wisdom. Consider the lilies of the field.’ As he said this Wyborn looked sternly at the Provost, perhaps as typifying one in particular danger of being insensitive on this front. The Provost (being an ecclesiastical dignitary) could scarcely express impatience before this sudden homily, although it was certainly something to which the Governing Body was unhabituated. So he maintained an air of grave attention. ‘It must be a question,’ Wyborn abruptly concluded, ‘whether we would be justified in pouring out treasure upon an object which does little more than enhance what are already our abundant material amenities. I would, in fact, oppose such an act.’
There was an uneasy silence, which the Provost was in no hurry to break. He looked round the room, ostensibly soliciting further contributions to the debate, but with a certain tautening of the shoulders which signalled to the instructed that he wanted nothing of the kind.
‘The Governing Body will have remarked,’ he said, ‘that the hour is advanced. And a number of items still falls to be considered. Would members agree that this matter be referred to a committee, empowered to consult with the surveyor and other relevant persons, and asked to report, if possible, to the next Governing Body meeting?’
Nobody demurred. Only I heard Lempriere – who nowadays never spoke at G.B. meetings – growl to a neighbour that the confounded thing might tumble around our ears while we yattered. The members of the committee were appointed, a certain number of them being nominated, as was prescriptive, by the Provost. I was surprised to hear myself – the new boy – included among these last, and it was only later that an explanation occurred to me. Apart from Cyril Bedworth, I was very probably the only member of the Governing Body who had been admitted to any knowledge of the Provost’s designs upon the Blunderville Trust.
I had heard nothing of this mysterious negotiation since the night on which the windfall it might bring the college had first been revealed to me. Of the technicalities of the thing there had then been no explanation: it had merely appeared that at some date not far ahead the trustees appointed by a former Lord Mountclandon were required to disperse enormous sums to charities at their own discretion, and themselves pass out of existence thereafter. Since the college was by law a charity, and since the last Marquis of Mountclandon had been one of its most faithful sons, the propriety of our getting our cut was incontestable. The Provost’s sense of this had been sufficiently strong to involve him in parleyings with the senior Mumfords, Cedric and Tony, which couldn’t have been at all to his taste. Looking back on these occasions now, I was surprised that I hadn’t been more struck at the time by the secrecy attending the whole business. Only Bedworth as Senior Tutor and myself as Tony’s oldest college friend, had been admitted to the Provost’s confidence. And that seemed to be the position to this day; none of my other c
olleagues appeared to be aware of the existence of a small fortune conceivably in the offing. Edward Pococke was, I had come to realise, a secretive man, inclined to conceal things, in Lempriere’s phrase, under his hat. He was quite capable of concealing some early confidential intelligence of the really acute danger in which the tower stood were he convinced that such concealment was in the interest of a grand strategy of his own conceiving. And now he had put a brake on his colleagues’ rational disposition to do something immediate and necessarily public about our critical situation. For a fortnight, at least, nothing about it could be bruited abroad. I saw that the Blunderville money must be a factor in all this, but not the necessity for what my friend Nick Junkin would have called a crafty hush. And I was bothered about the tower, as that dream had perhaps obliquely shown. My father’s delight in it had been the sole efficient cause of my ever having entered the college. I resolved to ring up Tony and ask him just what was happening to the Blunderville millions.
III
In hall that night – which was before I put my resolution into effect – I had an irritating conversation with Adrian Buntingford.
‘Well met, Duncan!’ Buntingford said. ‘You can help me. Your views can clarify my mind.’
‘I’d like to think so, Adrian. But what about?’
‘That boring debate on the tower. Was the gloomy and obscurantist Wyborn really right about it? Put it this way. Suppose the college to have a fairy godmother willing to wave a wand and grant us any one wish we chose. Would saving the tower compete for first place?’
‘Possibly not.’
‘Or let’s be sober. Demythologise the fairy godmother. Turn her into a pious old member, who hands us an enormous cheque with absolutely no strings attached. That’s conceivable, isn’t it?’
‘Certainly it is.’ I had glanced suspiciously at Buntingford. But his florid features didn’t readily lend themselves to interpretation, and I had no means of telling whether or not he had got wind of the benefaction possibly ahead of us.
‘So here is money in the bank, Duncan, and over there is our beautiful but tottering tower. You’d say it’s pretty generally agreed to be beautiful?’
‘Pretty generally. But beauty remains in the eye of the beholder.’
‘An excellent reply – and so the problem. Ought we to pay up in hard cash to preserve this chancy aesthetic experience? You will observe at once that a contextual factor comes in. This place isn’t the Louvre or the Uffizi. Even more relevantly, perhaps, it isn’t Palladio’s Vicenza. As we heard from our pastoral friend, it exists for the diffusion of piety and godly learning. So, to what extent should we be justified in pouring unexpected wealth, as if it were so much ready-mixed concrete, into shoring up a mere sense-on-beauty-occasioning object? Consult your own experience before the tower. Would you describe it as intense?’
‘At times, yes.’
‘But momentary?’
‘Aesthetic experience has a fading quality as one of its characteristics. My father taught me about that. You turn away from Piero’s Nativity and take a prowl to Uccello’s fracas at San Romano. Then you go back.’
‘Good. And here, of course, we skirt enormous puzzles. Are you a Christian?’
‘No.’
‘Have you ever been in a battle?’
‘No, I haven’t.’ Rather unwillingly, I was now responding to Buntingford’s tutorial method. He was adept at it.
‘But these blanks in your experience don’t impair your responding to those two masterpieces? I’m told they’re masterpieces.’
‘Essentially, I think not.’
‘Good yet again. So here is what some pundit calls the phantom aesthetic state. A volatile or intermittent experience, and radically indefinable.’ Buntingford’s pudgy hand deftly manipulated a small fork on the dish before him. ‘Rather like swallowing an oyster. That’s what an occasional dekko at the tower is like.’
‘It’s rather an extreme view, Adrian. Do I understand that you would demolish this unsatisfactory tower, and allocate that pious old member’s money to further excavations in Kafiristan?’
‘Not precisely to that. What I have in mind is certain areas of advanced neurological research.’
‘I don’t believe you know any more about that sort of thing than I do.’
‘Probably far less, my dear Duncan. But I glance through popular expositions from time to time. And it’s almost as if the lore of the phrenologists is returning into vogue.’
‘Feeling bumps?’
‘Not exactly. But it seems that chaps are learning to stimulate, or otherwise practise upon, very precise areas of the brain. Fix up your guinea-pig – your human guinea-pig – with the right electrodes or whatever they are in the right place and you can generate not merely a diffused euphoria – which a decent brandy will do – but specific pleasurable sensations, whether coarse or refined. Sexual pleasure, for example, in a very high degree.’
‘What utter balls!’
‘Excellently said, Duncan.’ Buntingford startled our neighbours by a sudden shout of laughter. ‘But aesthetic pleasure too, that phantom state. It will simply be on tap – as freely as the shocking stuff they now call beer. Coin-operated, it could be, like the things you get cigarettes or aspirin from. Where the tower was, we could have an inexpensive little dispensary of such delights, democratically open to senior and junior members alike. And we’d devote our windfall to furthering neurological research in just such interesting areas. Like the tower itself, it would only be moving with the times.’
Around us at High Table, men had been conversing rationally about their cars and television-sets. For this I felt there was much to be said, since I was becoming a little restive before set pieces. Below us in the body of the hall, the three hundred or so undergraduates dining that night were talking about I didn’t know what, although I’d have much liked to. Memory didn’t help. I could recall the occasion upon which Bedworth and I, sitting at that now vanished institution the Scholars’ Table, had discussed the novels of Dostoyevsky at conscientious length. I could recall – but in no sort of useful detail – chatter of a more high-spirited sort: sometimes of a sort, perhaps, to suggest more high-spiritedness than we had actually at command. Many of the young men before me now seemed to judge it quite in order to look serious, or even a little glum. Did they discuss weighty athletic occasions, politics, vacation jobs, the economics of keeping alive on a student’s grant? I didn’t know. Did they discuss their lengthening sexual histories – about which I had gathered little, except that they were not exclusively of an old-fashioned auto-erotic order? At this still early hour, and sitting in rows as they were, such topics were probably as taboo as they would be in a nunnery.
I gave up this speculation – and at the same time any thought of going into common room for dessert. I’d decided to try to get Tony on the telephone at an immediate after- dinner moment, and have it out with him about the present state of the Blunderville negotiation. It was I who had insisted that it was up to him to weigh in – the implication being that he had a spot of family bad behaviour to atone for to the college. Tony had taken this, and it seemed reasonable to suppose he wouldn’t resent a little badgering.
So as soon as the Provost had said grace I walked down the empty hall – the undergraduates’ more meagre repast having been concluded some time before – and into the Great Quadrangle. The tower was at least in its customary position. If it stirred it was only as the Chinese jar stirs in the poem, moving perpetually in its stillness – and this I fancied it did even when thus viewed merely in semi-silhouette against a late-evening sky. Walking on towards Surrey, I reflected with dismay that Buntingford’s nonsense did no more than caricature a philistinism not always absent from the make-up of even the worthiest men. Suppose the tower had to be dismantled, new foundations laid, the whole structure built up again with fresh-hewn stone. The cost would be, in popular language, astronomical; even as much money as we could imagine coming to the college from the Blunderville
Trust would scarcely cover it. Wouldn’t there be others besides the fanatical Wyborn who felt that, in our day and age, here simply wasn’t the way to use money? It was true that we were under a legal as well as a moral obligation to preserve the tower. We happened to own it, just as a landed proprietor may happen to own a notable tithe barn or wool loft; and like him, we must sustain the cost of preventing a scheduled building of historic interest or artistic importance from falling down. But laws of that sort, designed to protect mediaeval things, were of mediaeval character themselves: parliament enacted them, but their enforcement was another matter. Were we to represent ourselves as wretched scholars with an empty purse – or, for that matter, as stiff-necked philistines – it was probable that nothing much could be done about it.
It will be seen that what may be called the tower-theme had lodged itself firmly in my head. Perhaps I’d dream about the tower once more – as it was perfectly proper to do about so phallic an object. Or perhaps it would simply stick in my head through a sleepless night, in which case dawn would find me groping round it as the pivot of a play. This thought amused and alarmed me; I wondered how popular I’d be if I turned out a mini-version of Tbe Master Builder on the basis of my present surroundings. Which of my colleagues would make a colourable Halvard Solness?
Passing under the archway that gives on Surrey, and crossing the grass leading to my own staircase, I tried to banish such idle speculation from my mind. And presently I was assisted in this by running into a sequence of small episodes which, besides delaying my telephone call to Tony, had nothing to do with the sober problem my wits were threatening to play the fool with. Or so I judged. The fullness of time was to prove the supposition fallacious in a curious way.
The Madonna of the Astrolabe Page 5