The Madonna of the Astrolabe

by J. I. M. Stewart

  ‘It mightn’t be easy to find them precisely that. And you’re talking very great nonsense, anyway. You know perfectly well what school you’d send them to.’

  By this time the greater part of the Corn was behind us, and at its intersection with Ship Street, Lempriere had come to a halt as if to take the measure of the traffic. It was contrary to his habit; when crossing even the busiest thoroughfare he would simply raise that arm in air much as a policeman on point duty might do. Directly in front of us now was St Michael-at-the-North-Gate, and I supposed that his pause was occasioned by a wish to compare one notable tower with another. The tower of St Michael’s is not in the least architecturally splendid. It is a rectangular structure dwarfed by the surrounding buildings, and is fabricated out of something known to antiquarians as ‘random rubble’. This scarcely suggests anything likely to survive the centuries, but in fact the tower was originally part of the fortifications of Saxon Oxford, and is thus far and away the most venerable building in the city; its stones must already have blackened in the vapours of the Thames valley long before some handful of scholars near-by began to regard themselves as a studium generale or university. The tower of St Michael-at-the-North-Gate is thus a very suitable monument for any latter-day don to take reflective notice of. But this seemed not Lempriere’s intention either. His glance was directed elsewhere.

  To the side of the tower, and raised a few inches above the pavements bounding it, is a small flagged area furnished with three or four wooden benches which stand in the scanty shade of a not very flourishing lime. This exiguous precinct one would somehow have supposed to constitute a haven for the elderly: for old women lugging shopping-baskets and old men in difficulty with their feet. But in fact it is the young who tend to congregate on this very ancient spot. School children line its perimeter from time to time, out-clattering the traffic with rattled tin collecting-boxes for the relief of famine and plague in distant quarters of the globe. The benches tend to be occupied by persons only a little older but of contrastingly contemplative habit: scarcely (as might be appropriate) wandering scholars, but at least Wandervogel with a respectable tradition of their own. A quarter of a century before, these ragged and gentle creatures, long-haired and seemingly infrequently tubbed, would have presented an almost total contrast to Oxford’s indigenous young: to that entire congregation, so various in itself as to include alike the adolescent Tony Mumford and the adolescent Cyril Bedworth. Nowadays only certain forced accents – earrings, for example, and by preference one earring rather than two – at all securely distinguished them from those junior members of the university for whom the drop-out image had its appeal. Wordsworth’s vagrants, Matthew Arnold’s alienated scholar or his gipsy child by the sea-shore, were their kin; their poverty, passivity, and mysterious non-attachment generated a certain awe, I believe, in those more settled of their contemporaries through whose ranks they were straying for a time. Nick Junkin, for instance, who had survived something called the First Public Examination, achieved theatrical eminence, and even acquired a three-piece suit, would stiffen at a word of disparagement directed against these apostles of a different way of life.

  This was the spectacle that Arnold Lempriere had paused to contemplate. It seemed not in a sympathetic spirit. He was of a generation which resents – which even feels threatened by – inexplicable new canons of behaviour in the young. I was expecting him, therefore, to utter some words of severe distaste before this layabout or hippie scene. But then I saw that his expression was not of indignation but of something very like fear – this, and that he wasn’t looking at the scattering of idle young people, but at the only person of a different age sitting among them. This was an old man, alien to the scene, and yet alike in manner and attire curiously assimilated to those around him. He was J. B. Timbermill.

  Since Timbermill was, or had been, the outstanding Anglo-Saxon scholar of his time, the tower of St Michael-at-the-North-Gate was a wholly appropriate background for him. It could literally have been this had any of the several colleges of which he was an honorary fellow or the like thought to commission a portrait of him to hang on the line in hall. But nobody, it seemed, could recall a day upon which Timbermill had entered any college whatever, and the custom must have been judged, as a consequence, inappropriate to his case. Even at this late stage of his career (and how late it was, a single glance now told one) he could have prompted, indeed, a portrait very much in an Oxford academic tradition. The colleges are apt to procrastinate these commemorative activities. They may even, like the nations in Johnson’s poem, to buried merit raise the tardy bust. More frequently, they go into action round about their subject’s eightieth year. And as the venerable alumnus, consulted about a painter of his choice, often recalls some contemporary and crony of his own who is a dab hand at that sort of thing, the combined ages of sitter and painter can run well into the 160s. The image which may thus be conjured up of two aged creatures peering myopically at one another from either side of a canvas has a bizarre quality sometimes matched by the oddity of the artistic effect achieved.

  I wasn’t, of course, fabricating such thoughts as I stood beside Lempriere in the Corn. I was telling myself that Timbermill in his present situation was by no means to be regarded as an object of pathos. He was exceedingly unkempt – like a tramp, it might have been said, who has for some time been letting himself go. He was this to an extent much beyond the bounds of that eccentricity which in the popular mind is admissible in professors and learned persons generally. He also looked rather mad – or at least one would have hesitated to risk money on his sanity without further investigation. Yet, and even although his lips were soundlessly moving, he could be seen to be a man who commanded himself at least to this extent: that he was where he was because he wanted to be. This was, no doubt, partly a matter of the tower – about the history of which he must know as much as any man in England. But chiefly it was the young men and women around him that he had chosen. He sat among them securely, like a man amid his peers.

  If the author of The Magic Quest had thus found and elected his final companions, it looked for a moment as if he had correspondingly lost at least one from earlier on his road. I had seen him gaze at Lempriere quite unregardingly, but Lempriere might well be a man he didn’t know, or at least had no reason to remember. Then he had looked at me, and again no shadow of recognition had appeared to stir in him. This shook me. A week seldom passed without my visiting Timbermill, if only briefly, and although his conversation was not without its strangeness it hadn’t struck me as addressed to somebody whose identity he was prone to forget. His ‘Duncan son of Lachlan’ was as firmly delivered as ever. Yet now I had a sense of having floated out of his regard. And there seemed nothing to be done. Timbermill prowling Oxford bemusedly at midnight could be taken charge of and guided home. But I felt that I had no title or occasion to do anything of the sort now; felt even that, were he in need, it would be most natural for him to appeal to one or another of those young strangers among whom he sat. There was a sense, then, in which Timbermill had simply left us – ‘us’ signifying, really, less this individual and that than the sum of his academic associations through a long and eminent working life.

  I glanced again at Lempriere. He was no longer showing fear. That had been only a brief betrayal, and he was now sardonically grim. He, too, was at the end of a long working life. But he had not achieved – nor, I suspected, ever owned any strong impulse to achieve – eminence as a scholar. Collegiate life as a texture of personal relationships, alike with colleagues and with fleeting generations of young men, had made him what he was, and his only acclaim had been at those particular desks in the Foreign Office, which had discovered in war-time his unexpected skill in lying abroad for the good of his country. As this old joke came back to me I saw how strange a dichotomy that interlude had represented in his life; it belonged with the same unpredictability in things as had been exemplified when Gavin Mogridge, that non-starter as a Pablo Casals, moved by way
of the Mochica disaster to his mysterious career as a secret agent.

  Lempriere had now looked at Timbermill quite long enough: another few seconds of such scrutiny and the effect would have been aggressive and rude. Timbermill mightn’t have noticed, or in the least minded if he did, but I myself didn’t take to the notion at all. I put a hand on Lempriere’s shoulder – which was a temerarious act, even granted our cousinship – and propelled him forward and into Magdalen Street. He accepted this treatment in sombre silence, so that I supposed he was disinclined to offer any comment on the incident. But this wasn’t so.

  ‘Notice that poor old chap, Dunkie?’ he asked, suddenly and in his gruffest voice. ‘Hasn’t kept his form at all. Timberlake, or some such name. Spent his life digging up Anglo- Saxon shit-houses and the like. Done him no good at all.’

  ‘J. B. Timbermill,’ I said. ‘He was my tutor. He got a clear alpha on the job.’ In what tone I said this I don’t know, but I was displeased that Lempriere should dismiss our strange encounter with so stupid a quip. ‘And he wrote a very remarkable book. Not about Angles and Saxons, but about some sort of imaginary heroic age.’

  ‘Pshaw!’ Lempriere had a little quickened his toddle, with his walking-stick pointing cautiously ahead of him. I saw that he was upset. ‘Fellow of Balliol,’ he said, ‘back in Sandy’s time. Brilliant place. Never went near it. Made an honorary fellow of New College, which is where he started out. Ignored it. The same thing at Merton, I’ve been told. Men like that go mad. Shuffle through the streets munching apples and slobbering, so that you’d suppose they’d taken to drink. Or just been let out of gaol.’

  I had no reply to this, and we walked on for some paces without speaking. Then again Lempriere halted, this time by the Martyrs’ Memorial.

  ‘A good tutor?’ he demanded.

  ‘Yes. He never took many pupils. But he was a very good tutor indeed.’

  ‘I didn’t know.’ Lempriere produced these words in a disturbed voice which was unfamiliar to me, the voice of a humble man. And at the same time he looked around him confusedly. ‘Dunkie,’ he asked, ‘which way would you like to go?’

  ‘We’ll go up St Giles’,’ I said, reflecting that he had never put such a question to me before.

  Later that afternoon, as it happened, I witnessed another encounter between contemporaries – quite exact contemporaries, this time. Mark Sheldrake and I had run into each other on several occasions at the foot of our staircase, and had usually got decently further than just passing the time of day. He seemed a friendly youth in a reserved fashion, a little reminding me of a former inhabitant of Surrey Four, Martin Fish. Fish had been an Australian, and Mark Sheldrake was what I could still think of as very English; and whereas Fish had been no more than pleasantly personable, this new neighbour was as he was. Their similarity consisted in their both being what I had long ago naively named miraculous youths – this meaning that they seemed incapable of the slightest awkwardness of adolescence and never got small things wrong. Such a gift of nature can be a liability, and off- putting if the slightest self-consciousness attends it. But those right at the top of this league table are immune even from that. Fish, becoming a close friend as a consequence of what each of us regarded as deep amatory tribulation, had at times irritated me on various accounts – but never, so far as I could remember, on the score of this particular endowment. About Mark Sheldrake I couldn’t as yet be sure, and I should never travel through Italy with him in dogged pursuit of aesthetic instruction. One day, we’d have a glass of madeira together, and he’d tell me such things as the number of his siblings and the region of England in which he happened to live. Meanwhile, we neither of us had any inclination either to sustained conversation or to hurrying shyly by.

  I hadn’t yet glimpsed Matthew Sheldrake. The college is a large place, so large as seldom to seem populous, and one can go here and there in it for weeks on end without running into one or another individual with whom one is perfectly familiar when one does. A peculiar grace of communal living attaches to this. We used to be astonished when ignorant persons from colleges on a different scale remarked commiseratingly that we were much too large.

  But here now, undoubtedly, was Matthew on the east of the Great Quadrangle and Mark on the west; they were advancing upon one another each on some occasion of his own and without any hasty sign of recognition or preparation for greeting. The first thing I noticed was their clothes. One might have said that in this particular they had a common style, but within it were differences of detail, careless in seeming but perhaps not quite thoughtlessly achieved. They did their hair differently – again within a common convention of an unnoticeable sort. They weren’t going to be mistaken for one another if they could help it, but at the same time they weren’t taking any means to this that would suggest their attaching importance to the matter, or signal any sense that being identical twins was a very special sort of thing. But there remained, of course, the stubborn fact of their answeringly identical good looks. These would, after a fashion, remain with them all their days; but they were now of an age at which, in either sex alike, such looks take on a quality the flower-like transience of which seems set apart from sublunary things. The angels in heaven, one supposes, go on looking angelic for ever. But this can only mean that angels miss out on something and are taken for granted as comfortable permanencies in the divine regard. These mortal boys were like a bright exhalation in the evening, poignant in the evanescence of what they possessed.

  Mark Sheldrake and Matthew Sheldrake met. They hadn’t exactly been strolling – for strolling is, if only faintly, implicated with the offering of an effect. But they hadn’t been walking briskly either, and this rendered unobtrusive the manner of their now pausing in front of one another. Hands in pockets, they exchanged what I read as trivial information, the most casual remarks. They weren’t quite immobile as they did so; rather they were in faint movement, like saplings in a breeze. They took leave of each other by way of a slight backward inclination of the body and walked on. Then, with a couple of yards between them, each swung simultaneously and telepathically round, retreating backwards for a few paces so that some exchange of afterthoughts might pass between them. And then they turned again and went their ways.

  Although there was nothing remarkable about this fraternal episode, it was lingering in my mind when I ran into Robert Damian a few minutes later. The black medical bag he carried indicated that he was in college on a professional occasion, but since he stopped to speak, I concluded that this had been discharged.

  ‘I’ve just seen those twins together for the first time,’ I said. ‘It’s taken me weeks to realise they exist, although one of them is now on my staircase. Would you say, Robert, that they interest you from a scientific point of view?’

  ‘The Sheldrakes? Well, not really. They’ve so obviously been nursed upon the self-same hill. Fed the same flock, and so forth. If one of them had been snatched from his cradle by the raggle-taggle gipsies, then we’d have quite something. Bringing identical twins together for guinea-pig purposes after wholly disparate nurtures is a trick-cyclist’s dream. It has been managed, I believe. But I’m not a man of science, thank God. An Empirick—that’s me.’

  ‘No doubt. A rather special condition attaches – wouldn’t you say, Robert? – to those two young men.’

  ‘Yes, indeed. 0 don fatale!, as Verdi’s lady says. What obscure poet talks about the ambush of young days? I never know these things.’

  ‘Shakespeare.’

  ‘Ah, yes. Well, I’d suppose that at school the Sheldrakes ran into the hell of a lot of ambush. But nothing to what they’ll have to put up with once the female of the species is let loose on them.’

  ‘Perhaps so, although there are compensations, no doubt. By the way, I’ve had a dollop of the other end of life this afternoon, and I think you’ve told me that in North Oxford that’s rather your territory. Embalming, you called it.’

  ‘True enough. It’s why I like this college jo
b. I suppose the young are quite as busy just surviving as the old – only it hasn’t occurred to them that the position is merely that.’

  ‘Regardless of their doom, the little victims play.’

  ‘Exactly. How boring, Duncan, that the whole of life can be summed up in half a dozen stupid tags like that out of anthologies.’ Damian prepared to move on, and then checked himself. ‘What were we talking about?’

  ‘Only about my going for a walk with Arnold Lempriere before tea, and having a glimpse of J. B. Timbermill. My cousin Fiona Petrie believes he’s a patient of yours. Is that right?’

  ‘Yes, he is. Only he’s not one for calling in the doctor. You were his pupil, weren’t you?’

  ‘I was farmed out to him for the language stuff in the English School. He made me passionately interested in it.’

  ‘Good God!’

  ‘Yes, he’s a remarkable man. Not that it became a lifetime addiction, I’m afraid. Years and years later, Fiona was his pupil in a far more substantial way. And what’s happened is that we’ve made a pact – —Fiona and I have – not to start tidying him up or away, at least as long as he has the slightest power to answer to his own helm. It may be a muddled idea, and I’m not happy about it. Timbermill doesn’t seem to have a relative in the world. I thought I’d just tell you.’

  Damian received this silently but with a quick nod. I judged it to be a satisfactory signal. When he did speak it was obliquely.

  ‘I’m not Arnold Lempriere’s G.P., praise the Lord. But there’ll be a spot of tidying up there one day.’

  ‘I think Arnold does have relations of a sort. An aged aunt—’

  ‘Hardly that.’

  ‘Well, somebody. Buried in a derelict manor-house I don’t know where.’

  ‘I see. Useful to shove in a front pew at the memorial service.’

  ‘You have a point there.’ As I made this Lempriere-style reply I thought how remarks like this from Robert Damian had an effect of giving him away. He was a compassionate man. One day a perceptive obituarist –the thought came naturally to me as a consequence of the way our minds were running – would describe him as of lively sympathies.