‘He’ll be enchanted.’ There was a pause. ‘He’ll be rather pleased,’ Tony emended on a changed note. ‘So thanks. How are you?’
‘Fine.’
‘Oh, for God’s sake! What’s this in aid of, Duncan?’
‘It’s about another and even more enormous sum of money. The Blunderville Trust money. Is there anything doing?’
‘Damn-all, so far. I thought I might get myself made an extra trustee, but it wasn’t on. I’d supposed they had power to co-opt, and I reckoned a second Mumford wouldn’t be out of the way. But it seems they can collect a new chum only if one of them dies or resigns. So I can only work through the old boy.’
‘Do you think he can possibly be well-disposed to the college?’
‘You should have somebody look in your head, Duncan. Of course not. My father’s attitude to the whole gang of you is one of settled malignity. I’m working on him.’
‘Is that any good?’
‘You don’t understand. I’m feeding the flame in the hope that his ill will or prejudice or whatever will so plainly appear that the other trustees will feel obliged to write him off.’
‘I see.’ Tony as a political animal was given to oblique courses, but this one sounded like a mere flight of fancy. ‘Listen,’ I went on. ‘There’s something else. If those people did decide the college was to be a major beneficiary, could they put specific strings on the bequest or grant or whatever it is?’
‘I’d suppose so. Yes—I’m pretty sure they could. What are you getting at, Duncan?’
‘Well, it seems for a start that the college could urgently use a five-pound note.’
‘Urgently? Impossible! Do you mean a sudden emergency?’
‘Just that, Tony. It’s supposed to be confidential.’
‘Rubbish! The country at large is going to the dogs, but that’s a long-term menace. The only crisis the college can conceivably face in a sudden way is some large-scale threat to the fabric. So that’s it.’
‘Yes, that’s it.’
‘Would I be right in thinking that the Provost’s treating it in a hush-hush manner?’
‘Yes, he is. I can’t imagine why.’
‘God, Dunkie, you are thick! It can’t be the library, because that’s been coped with no time ago. It’s the hall or the tower. Right?’
It’s the tower.’
‘Very well. Benefactors, on the whole, want something new for their cash. If my father’s confounded cronies remain unalerted they may conceivably hand over that wad of money with no strings at all – simply for the general purposes of the college. But if they get wind it might be used simply to patch up an old building at terrific expense, they may well start thinking they know better. Insist on founding fellowships and scholarships for research into Wheeling and Dealing, or to promote the study of Universal Benevolence. That’s what’s in the head of that crafty old Edward Pococke in keeping the lid on. I give it to him.’
‘What would you say the time factor is, Tony?’
‘Oh, any day now. The lot will fall, the die be cast. I’ll hear at once, and I’ll rush you the fatal issue. I am trying. I took your point about that.’ Tony paused on this, and I realised it wasn’t a note on which he wanted to close. ‘Come to dinner some time,’ he said. ‘Propose yourself, and I’ll see what I can do. Have your secretary get in touch with my secretary, old chap.’
‘Idiot,’ I said. And as I put down the receiver I was wondering whether in old age Lord Marchpayne and I would still be clinging to the convention of these juvenile exchanges.
IV
Ivo Mumford’s Priapus, with its wretched lubricities at the expense of Arnold Lempriere, was now a good many months behind us. It had made little stir. Those prepared to market it had been few in the first place, and of these the majority scrapped their stock hastily upon a timely word given. Thus not many people knew of the scandal other than by hearsay. A good many copies must have made their way into undergraduate possession. But undergraduates although excessively ribald are also choosy, so it was on the whole by a loud silence that the ephemeral publication had been acclaimed. In his design to achieve a stink of sulphur Ivo might thus have been judged as meeting with his customary bad luck. Still, not everybody runs to a grandfather prepared to reward such a performance with enough hard cash for an Aston Martin. And as Ivo had also got clear of Oxford (which he detested) in circumstances of reasonably diffused notoriety he hadn’t done too badly on the whole. It had been Lempriere who was the chief sufferer by the affair.
But Lempriere’s feelings I hadn’t – as I have said – penetrated to. It was, of course, impossible for him not briefly to express a view, or at least intimate an attitude. What we had gathered of his stance was that Priapus had been such a melange of inept and oafish indecencies from cover to cover that no special opprobrium need be attached to Ivo’s photographic contributions. This was a tenable position, and admirable on Lempriere’s part in that it played down the element of unforgivable personal offence in the performance.
But now – and from the opening days of this summer term – I had been aware of a question of considerable curiosity hovering ahead. Would Lempriere resume his customary visits to Parson’s Pleasure? They had formed a settled part of his life at this time of year, it seemed, since that period immediately after the Kaiser’s War when he was no older than any of the other youths for whom the place was primarily intended. There was nothing very singular, indeed, in his having continued to frequent it. One often observed a scattering of nude elderly men upon that innocent sward, conversing among themselves or with the striplings around them upon topics so plainly of the graver sort that it required only a little imagination to feel that here, recreated on the Cherwell’s bank, was some nursery of philosophy as known among the ancient Greeks. And Lempriere, as he moved among the ephebi, was at once sage and gymnasiarch. In this last role, I was told, he had been known to come down heavily upon young men who had fallen to some form of skylarking that offended his sense of decency. It is true that his sense of decency was his own – strict, but with surprising contours here and there.
At the moment, this business of Parson’s Pleasure set me a private problem. Back in Michaelmas Term, and during a muddy walk by the Cherwell when river excursions of any sort seemed very far away, I had rashly volunteered to accompany Lempriere to the bathing place one day when summer came round. And here summer was. The undertaking was not one that Lempriere would have forgotten. Ought I to leave it to him to revive the project if he wanted to? Or would it be better to take an initiative myself, thereby implying an unembarrassed assumption that his routine was unchanged?
Meantime, and with this question unresolved, another piece of routine went forward: my weekly afternoon toddle with Lempriere around the streets of Oxford. Unless in the stillness of the night, no particular charm attaches to such a perambulation in the present age. The pavements are noisy and jostling. There is petrol vapour in the air. The university population is so outnumbered by the industrial and commercial as to be virtually an indetectable presence. There is nothing particularly distressing about this last circumstance – yet it can somehow promote the illusion that the colleges themselves are now untenanted, or have become warehouses for goods which some drift of taste has caused to be little in demand. So I’d myself have been prompted to walk further afield. But for that Lempriere’s days were over, and it was incumbent on me to follow where he led. Nobody else was admitted to walk with him. It was a privilege accorded to me in virtue of the nebulous consanguinity which he had discovered to exist between us. (The only parties which Lempriere would attend were those given by Jimmy Gender’s wife Anthea, and this was also a consequence of some postulated cousinship.).
The quality of Lempriere’s awareness of what lay around him on these occasions became a subject for speculation with me. On our first city walk together, which had been a couple of terms ago, he had contrived to pass through a large-scale undergraduate ‘demo’ without betraying any consciousn
ess of its existence – although, indeed, he had made some reference to it an hour or so later. At times I thought that his manner of moving around as if in an earlier Oxford approximated to actual hallucination, and that he was capable – it was an alarming thought – of seeing an empty street where, in fact, a bus was bearing down on him. At other times I believed what was in question to be, rather, a simple but sustained act of will. He refused to admit the existence of anything he sufficiently disapproved of. If this was so, there were more hazards involved than that represented by an Oxford Corporation bus.
He wasn’t however, abstracted or withdrawn. Our jaunts regularly began and ended with a scrutiny of the tower, and it was evident that he was keeping as sharp an eye on it as anybody. Not that there was anything to see, nor would be until – perhaps in a week, perhaps in a year – the next of the little glass plates cracked like the ominous mirror of the Lady of Shalott. I had one day said to him that the real sign of imminent danger in such a case would be not visual but aural; that whispers, sighs as of weariness, the groans of deep fatigue would make themselves heard. I had no intention of speaking mischievously, and had read somewhere of just such phenomena as I was conjuring up; I must have thought in terms of diffusing my aged companion’s anxieties and rendering them less acute. But Lempriere took this new view of the affair seriously, and put in time trying to catch amid the roar of traffic this fresh intimation of advancing catastrophe. Had he appeared one afternoon for our meeting beneath the tower equipped no longer with his binoculars but with a stethoscope I should not have been surprised.
I thought of him as quintessentially the college man; indeed, on more than one occasion he had explicitly so described himself. Now I was finding that he had a finger in numerous other pies – or at least a brooding regard for how they were cooking. Almost every place he passed put him in mind of some ticklish or unsatisfactory situation within. Some of these problems – and they were all personal problems – concerned near-contemporaries of his own, and I saw that there must have been a time when Lempriere sustained a wide acquaintance throughout the university, among its historians in particular. But the typical present situation appeared to be that of one man’s falling out with another man and a third man’s failing to do what he could about it. To Lempriere, this was a grave sin. He valued friendship even more than he valued those family relationships which he appeared only very tenuously to possess. It was apparent to him that a rift between friends should call forth eirenic effort at once – the more imperatively if the trouble lay within what he regarded as the sacred bounds of collegiate life. So one had the spectacle of this quirky and often quarrelsome old man not merely inflexibly asserting the propriety of decent manners between fellow-members of such a society but also requiring them to exhibit towards one another a positive warmth of affectionate regard.
Lempriere had a further concern. In almost every one of the colleges, it appeared, some former intimate of his now had an undergraduate grandson in residence – and these boys were all in one way or another being mishandled and misunderstood. My first conclusion here was that it couldn’t be quite like that; at least some of the crowd must be getting on well. Then I realised that it was a crowd; I kept a tally as Lempriere talked; and it became undeniable that he was talking nonsense. It wasn’t, I decided, that he was imagining things, but merely that his sense of time was turning unreliable. Perhaps there were indeed a few such unfortunate youths in residence now; Lempriere was simply adding to their sum others who had come and gone long ago. He was holding on to them. That, indeed, was the essence of his position all round. He was firmly not reneguing on the Lempriere I had first encountered only a year before: a Lempriere, among other things, effectively combative when he wanted to be. He still represented himself as that Lempriere almost every night in common room. But now I knew that what was going on there was the grim projecting of an artificial, or at least a former, personality, and that Lempriere had, in fact, moved on further than one might immediately detect. Had some ingenious investigator of human behaviour fitted him up with a line of small squares of glass, these would be splintering in a succession a good deal faster than those on the college tower.
It was a disturbing conclusion to arrive at on the strength of Lempriere’s comportment abroad, and I now saw it as being substantiated by what went on in college. He no longer took much part in formal business, and never seemed to be put on committees. Indeed, the college’s statutes, superficially read, would have inclined one to suppose that his age debarred him from any longer being around the place at all. But such statutes exist in order to provide intellectual exercise for nicely exegetical minds, and niched in ours somebody had somewhere detected some turn of phrase interpretable as an invitation to Lempriere to stay put. Perhaps it was intended that he should do so, essentially as a social presence, and it may have been by way of honouring this implicit condition that he remained for the most part silent during all official deliberations. Yet this abnegation was very partial, since Lempriere now constantly concerned himself with a shifting multiplicity of college affairs. His habit of confidential communication had grown on him. ‘Tell nobody,’ he would murmur, raising that conspiratorial hand to his mouth. And he would embark upon some issue the delicacy of which made it totally insusceptible – he would aver – of ventilation before so vulgar a herd as the Governing Body. Alternatively, he would take up one or another trivial matter – such as not long before he would have laughed at any man’s bothering with – and urge this or that attitude to it upon anybody prepared to listen. It was activity at least showing a certain resilience or power of adaptation in the face of change. Lempriere was again holding on. But it was to something slipping as inexorably from his grasp as Penny had slipped from mine in my dream.
Cornmarket Street is an undistinguished thoroughfare. In those informed guidebooks to Oxford with which dons of literary bent every now and then seek a little to improve their fortunes it is commonly passed over in silence, and occasionally even reprobated – although the more detailed compilations will note ‘a pleasantly restored sixteenth-century shop’, or mention that Shakespeare regularly put up at one of its pubs which was already some four hundred years old at the time of the death of Queen Elizabeth. But in the Corn on the whole, the picturesque traveller has a thin time. It will be his impulse to steer rapidly between the Scylla of Woolworth’s and the Charybdis of Marks and Spencer’s in order to enter the broad calm waters of St Giles’. Lempriere and I, making this perambulation regularly, proceeded at an even pace, conversing the while. It was noticeable that he had abandoned his former convention, which had required a substantial initial period of silence. I have known elderly men of settled taciturn habit who, having suffered some circulatory disaster reducing them for a time to a humiliating aphasia, turned almost embarrassingly loquacious when the power of speech was restored to them. Lempriere’s condition appeared to hold some correspondence with this; he was reassuring himself that things had become normal again. Observing this farther sign, I remembered the anxieties of Dr Wyborn about our colleague, and now felt that his solicitude was not unreasonable.
‘You ought to visit some Scottish schools, Dunkie.’ Lempriere produced this one afternoon immediately we had left the college gate behind us. ‘It’s clearly your job to take them on. No fellow ought to hold himself exempt from such chores, even if he is a professor or reader or what-have-you. It’s only decent to earn your keep.’
This surprising attack – the more disconcerting since I had to think for a moment before understanding what Lempriere was talking about – was at least reassuringly in his old vein of sudden and gratuitous affront. Making and fostering contacts with ‘good’ schools – and particularly with unassuming ones not regularly in the way of sending boys to Oxford – was an activity to which a number of my colleagues apparently gave considerable thought. It seemed an admirable concern, and one which might have astonished persons with a stereotyped notion of the exclusiveness of ancient universities. Under
lying it, no doubt, was that competitive hunt for the country’s really clever children which a collegiate system nourishes. I hadn’t myself much instinct for this – or at least I believed that prizing individuals preponderantly in terms of their sharp wits was something to be chary about, and could even approximate to a kind of occupational disease among the academic classes. But at the talent-scouting involved I’d have been very willing, within bounds, to do as I was told. So I resented Lempriere’s depicting me as a skulker on the fringes of the scrum.
‘Nobody’s put anything of the sort to me,’ I said, and recalled even as I spoke, that Lempriere owned skill in eliciting patently inadequate replies to his remarks. ‘But, of course—’
‘We don’t put things to people. Responsibilities emerge.’
‘Arnold, you’re not being reasonable. Nobody is more inclined than yourself to tick me off as a tiro – and I don’t mind a bit. But the job you’re talking about is for somebody who has got thoroughly hold of the ropes.’
‘You have a point.’ Lempriere’s chuckle, although almost inaudible as we negotiated Carfax, signalled that he wasn’t displeased. ‘But we all have to begin.’
‘Very well. Be good enough to tell Charles Adas I’d have a go if asked – I suppose as Tutor for Admissions it’s his stamping-ground. Do you visit schools yourself?’
‘Now and then.’ Rather to my discomfiture, Lempriere gave me, slant-wise, that glance that I thought of as new to him: the glance of a man who suspects mockery or disparagement. ‘Public schools, for the most part, since I’m regarded as that sort of period piece. Damned useless places, most of them are nowadays. If I had sons, I’d send them to a Board school.’
The Madonna of the Astrolabe Page 7