The Madonna of the Astrolabe

by J. I. M. Stewart

  Back in college, I rang up the Lodging at once, to be told by Mrs Pococke that the Provost, too, had been in London, and was expected to return only by a late train. I might have run into him, his wife added briskly, had I visited the National Gallery. This information was unsurprising, Edward Pococke’s artistic interests being what they were. Was it not true that I might never have entered the college had he not once discussed Dürer with a Scottish painter wandering Oxford in quest of a place of education for his son? I told Mrs Pococke that I’d hope to catch the Provost immediately after breakfast, and rang off.

  For a bearer of bad news, I found the following morning, I was very complacently received. Whether it would have been so had I embarked on the story of the Ivo Mumford Memorial Scholarship, I don’t know. It was something I judged might keep for another occasion, and I confined myself to stating where the Blunderville money was now definitively to go. The Provost offered no comment on the merits of the two institutions involved, but it was clear that he didn’t regard them with any ill-will. Remembering how he had gone out of his way to cultivate the atrocious Cedric, and how irritating it must be to see him now exposed as a broken reed, I judged that Edward Pococke was comporting himself pretty well. At one point, indeed, I had a sense of his exhibiting an almost exaggerated unconcern. He was not a man who could ever conceivably betray that his attention was wandering from you. But as I got up to leave I did have the impression conveyed to me that we both had other matters to attend to, more significant than the Blunderville fairy gold.

  XI

  It was as I left the Lodging that I saw Penny. There she was, my sometime wife, crossing the Great Quadrangle in the direction of the entrance to Surrey. So definitely I had a matter to attend to remote from the lost Blunderville benefaction. If I was more startled than I need have been, it was perhaps owing to a sense that the philosophic Mrs Firebrace had failed me. I had come to think of her rather as if she were one of those enormous globular devices, to be glimpsed here and there around our coast-line, which are understood to provide early warning of the approach of missiles of a particularly undesirable kind. I can scarcely have thought of Penny, even in the most fancifully metaphorical way, as an atomic bomb; in any image of the sort she would have come to me as a menace long since defused and buried in the sand. Nevertheless, I had been relying upon Mrs Firebrace.

  Then I realised that I was perhaps being unjust to Mrs Firebrace. A few days earlier, I had become aware of her across the breadth of the High Street as about to enter a provision shop near Carfax. Her circumstances could be discerned at once as harassing. She was accompanied by Jacob Firebrace and by both of Jacob’s younger brothers. Each child carried a basket and each child appeared to be in a bad temper – so that I was reminded, inconsequently, of Mrs Pardiggle in Bleak House, impelling her five recalcitrant infants forward on the hard road of charitable endeavour. Jacob Firebrace, indeed, appeared quite furious, perhaps because, in addition to the basket, he was charged with the haulage of a large golden retriever, and was in consequence without a free finger to minister to his nose.

  Mrs Firebrace, thus employed and companioned, had spied me in the same moment that I spied her. She had nodded to me, hesitated, nodded much more vigorously, and disappeared into the shop. I now conjectured that what I had been offered was not a reiterated salutation but a salutation followed by a piece of news. Yes, indeed – Mrs Firebrace had been signalling – Penny had arrived.

  And here she was. I quickened my pace in order to overtake her, being certain there was nobody she could be seeking in the college other than myself. What I made of the situation, I can’t be certain: not even whether I wanted, or didn’t want, some casual renewal of contact. But if Penny wanted it I mustn’t automatically conclude that it was in a frivolous or idle spirit. We had stood before an altar—an object which the most hardened agnostic cannot quite equate with a cocktail bar or a kitchen table – and taken extravagant vows. That had proved an error. Yet vows they were. Obscurely at the end of this train of thought was the persuasion that it wouldn’t do to dodge, duck, or defer Penny when she had decided to look for me.

  The persuasion didn’t last – and for the most trivial of reasons. Penny was moving rapidly, and I was too far behind to arrest her by anything less than a shout. And ‘Penny!’ bawled across the Great Quadrangle would have been some way from quite right. So I simply continued to follow. Then, entering Surrey, Penny paused for a moment, felt in a hand-bag, and brought out an envelope. Holding this, she glanced round as if to distinguish between the staircases, and made her way towards Surrey Four.

  I found that I had halted in the shadow of the library. I hardly knew why. The probability was that Penny had provided herself with a note to leave for me if I proved to be out: a precaution which people take commonly enough. But now I thought of another explanation. Penny wasn’t proposing to contact me in person; she wanted – perhaps as a preliminary feeler, or perhaps because she had only some impersonal matter in mind – merely to make me a written communication. That envelope was simply to be left in my letter rack. There would be an element of the intrusive, therefore, in my catching up with Penny.

  So sophistical an argument scarcely requires analysis. I was skulking from Penny precisely as I had laughed at Mrs Firebrace for hinting I might be prompted to do. It is true that this craven behaviour didn’t last long, and that within the space of a minute I was moving forward again. The delay was crucial, all the same. For Penny, having reached Surrey Four, disappeared only for seconds within its portal. Emerging, she turned away without observing me, vanished for a moment behind the statue of Provost Harbage, and left the college by Surrey gate. I might still have hurried after her. But it seemed evident that she had made no attempt at a call; had simply left the note and gone away. So I walked on to my rooms instead.

  My section of the staircase’s letter-rack was empty. The college messenger (a tortoise-like old creature who took all morning on his round) not having arrived with the day’s mail, there seemed nothing waiting for anybody. Perplexed, I went into my room. Penny might have had time to knock, listen, and then slip in and leave her letter on a table. But when I looked round, there was no letter in evidence. I went outside again, and had another look at the rack. There was one envelope just visible, after all. It was in the section of the rack immediately above my own: Ivo’s once, now Mark Sheldrake’s. Although it wasn’t a proper thing to do, I picked out the envelope and looked at it, thinking that Penny had dropped it into the wrong space. But it was addressed to Mark Sheldrake Esq. And the writing was Penny’s.

  I was extremely surprised – and conscious, too, of another emotion which I hadn’t leisure to identify. There had been a step on the stair, and Mark Sheldrake was beside me. It was a moment the awkwardness of which was all of my making. The lie of things was such that the young man could not have been conscious of my misbehaviour; I had only to slip the letter back in Sheldrake’s space as if I had just found it erroneously delivered in my own. What inhibited me from such a small and prudent deceit was – I soberly believe – Mark Sheldrake’s edifyingly god-like appearance. Purged of any power to deceive, I had to go ahead as I might.

  ‘I’m so sorry, Sheldrake,’ I said, and handed him the letter. ‘I had a notion this had been put in your part of the thing by mistake.’

  ‘Thank you very much.’ Sheldrake took the envelope, glanced at it unconcernedly, and at once faintly blushed. There were two inescapable conclusions: he knew Penny’s handwriting, and he knew what our relationship had been. The letter he was holding, if it wasn’t signed simply ‘Penny’, was signed ‘Penny Pattullo’. Perhaps at our first meeting in Junkin’s company, Sheldrake had realised that here was the former husband of a lady known to him. There was nothing embarrassing, or even remarkable, in these facts in themselves; what did hold an awkwardness was my being found intercepting –for it looked like that – a letter which was no concern of mine. Or rather which was just that, in a dreamlike or nightmarish way.
I might have been an injured husband – something of that kind.

  ‘What happened was,’ I said, ‘that I saw Penny coming in here with a letter, and rather rushed to the conclusion it was meant for me. I do apologise.’

  ‘Not a bit, sir.’ Sheldrake was now self-possessed again, and he didn’t faintly obtrude a forgiving note. ‘My brother and I don’t know Mrs Pattullo well. But we met her at a party, and she said she’d try to look us up if she came to Oxford.’

  ‘Ah, yes,’ I said. ‘You’ll find her charming, and very entertaining.’ It struck me that if Sheldrake’s account of the matter represented the whole truth, he would have been unlikely to know Penny’s hand. But he was entitled to a little reserve, and it was now my business to retreat in as good order as I could manage. The young man, however, appeared to feel that it would be tactful to leave me in possession of the field of my disarray; murmuring something about a lecture, he departed into the quad.

  Back in my room, I didn’t find it difficult to sort out Penny. If leopardesses have spots – as I suppose they have – they don’t change them any more readily than leopards do. I wondered whether Penny had amused herself by hinting to her friend Mrs Firebrace of predatory intentions relating to myself, when she had quite other prey in view. Robert Damian had remarked to me that the Sheldrake brothers would have a stiff time when the female of the species was let loose on them. It was my bet that this was about to happen now.

  I found myself disliking the idea. Mark Sheldrake impressed me – as Matthew Sheldrake would probably do – as having the bearing of a distinctly chaste youth. My conviction was strong that these were not a kind of young men whom Penny might at all harmlessly initiate or advance in her particular sexual lores. This was very right-thinking in me, and as a feeling I believe it was genuine enough. But I had to ask myself – when at length I came to confront it – whether the obscure stirring of which I had been conscious as I looked at Mark Sheldrake’s name on an envelope where I had expected my own hadn’t bobbed up from some jealous hiding-place many years deep. I had often enough been aware of Penny as in more or less clandestine correspondence with admirers.

  Meanwhile, I was conscious of the curious fact that I hadn’t really seen Penny. I had recognised her at once. Although feminine fashions, and, therefore, silhouettes, must have changed over the preceding dozen or so years, the mere back view of her had said ‘Penny’ instantly. Then, when she had turned to leave the college, her profile had been presented to me at only a moderate remove, so in a sense I must have seen her clearly enough. Perhaps, had she greatly changed, I would have become sharply aware of the fact. But in middle life most people don’t, in a decade, change much: least of all a woman who is giving thought to not doing so. The page being unarresting, I had succumbed to an impulse not to read what I saw. And thus, the Penny most vivid to me in the hours succeeding this near-miss in Surrey was again the Penny of our dream encounter on the college tower. That Penny in turn had been the Penny of our first encounter of all, when – at a dinner-party in my freshman year – the Provost’s butler had announced ‘Mrs Triplett and Miss Triplett’ and thereby opened up a new stretch of my unremarkable destiny.

  I now regretted that I hadn’t spoken to Penny. Had I done so, it is true, it would almost certainly have been to reveal my persuasion that she was looking for me – in which case it might, or might not, have amused her to make the error clear. It was uncertain whether she knew that my rooms were on Surrey Four. I doubted whether Mrs Firebrace did, although the quad itself I had happened to mention to her. Penny might have noticed my name in the moment of dropping her note into the letter rack. That would have amused her – as a small and unexpected echo from the past as she engaged in her habitual pursuit of picking up very young men: ‘baby snatching’ as I had more than once denounced it to her during my earlier and unhabituated encounters with the predilection.

  So Penny was now in my head, and showing some reluctance to clear out of it. This was a state of affairs contrasting with that which had obtained hard upon Mrs Firebrace’s announcing the likelihood of her arrival in Oxford: then, I had almost been troubled by my indisposition to think about the matter at all.

  Thus caught up as by a distant sensual music, I found myself forgetful of other matters – for example, what was going to happen about the college tower now that the Blunderville gold had sunk below the horizon. Janet’s water picnic was looming ahead in an opposing quarter, the more compellingly because of the hint of the enigmatical in its purpose. Janet wanted to have something more clearly under her regard, and this was going to be achieved within the confined theatre of a punt. I wasn’t sure that I liked the Cherwell. That muddy and makeshift Arcadian stream was associated in my mind with some not very pleasing occasions: my first glimpse of my friend Martin Fish’s involvement with the deplorable girl called Martine, and Arnold Lempriere’s nostalgic fixation upon the juvenile splashings of Parson’s Pleasure. At this time of year the Cherwell would be populous, and floating over it would be plenty of music more or less sensual – much more of it than in Fish’s time, which was before a transistor radio was humped around by every amorous swain.

  The day came, and brought a minor change of plan. In my own college, were a tutor sick, he would simply pin a notice to his door intimating that he was unable to meet pupils that day. Women are more conscientious – as a consequence of which Fiona had to stand in for a senior colleague during a couple of morning hours. So it was arranged that I should pick her up when she was free, and drive her to a rendezvous some way up the river. I was pleased by this arrangement.

  ‘One thing about you’—Fiona spoke as she settled into my car, and as if taking up a familiar theme—’is that you insist on being even older than your years. Or perhaps it isn’t a matter of insisting. Perhaps it’s constitutional and comes naturally. It’s evident in your plays. Margaret, who hasn’t seen any of them, says it appears in your speech.’

  ‘The devil she does? Confound Margaret!’

  ‘There it is. “The devil she does” and “Confound Margaret”. It’s positively Edwardian.’

  ‘So it is.’ One has to respect the penetrations of the young, particularly the very clever young, who publish novels or gain college fellowships when their perambulators are not far behind them. “But perhaps it’s only a mannerism. Perhaps I’m young at heart.’

  ‘Nothing of the kind.’

  ‘Then what about yourself?’ I was annoyed by Fiona’s pragmatical note. ‘I say nothing about the movement of your mind, or of your idiom either. But you have a very dry way with you, Fiona my dear. Perhaps it’s all those cigars. One might be listening to an emeritus professor.’

  ‘You see me as assimilated already to my faded academic sisterhood?’

  ‘Don’t be silly.’ I felt that, having elected collegiate life, Fiona ought not to offer that sort of gibe about her colleagues. But it would be equally silly to assume the privilege of my years and set about correcting my cousin’s manners. ‘Let’s talk of something else.’

  ‘Very well. I’ve met your wife.’

  ‘She isn’t my wife. She resigned.’

  ‘Did she resign, or did you resign?’

  ‘I see no reason to go into the details. But I’m very willing to hear what you think of her in a general way. There was a time when I thought I knew all about Penny. But now, when I look back, I see or imagine areas of perplexity.’

  ‘Do you do a lot of looking back, Duncan?’

  ‘No, I don’t. But perhaps I shall when I’m really as old as you think I am. How did you come to meet Penny?’

  ‘Oh, it was just at a party the other day. I caught her name when we were introduced, and the penny dropped.’

  ‘What an idiotic pun!’

  ‘So it is. I hadn’t intended it. We were both taught, weren’t we, that it’s ill-bred to make jokes about people’s names. Some Scottish names are distinctly rum. Yours is.’

  ‘Yes. And Colkitto and Galasp would make Quintilian st
are and gasp. One of the poets says so.’

  ‘You’re quite as pedantic as I shall ever be. But about your wife – or Mrs Pattullo, rather.’

  ‘Call her Penny, for heaven’s sake!’

  ‘Very well. Of course she didn’t know about our peculiar relationship, Duncan, so you weren’t referred to.’

  ‘What do you mean, our peculiar relationship?’

  ‘Don’t you feel it to be funny?’ Fiona seemed mildly amused. ‘Have you met her yet, by the way?’

  ‘Only glimpsed her. I don’t know that we’ll meet. She certainly hasn’t come to Oxford for the purpose. What did you think of her?’

  ‘She struck me as an old hand at her sort of thing.’

  ‘Yes.’ I considered Fiona’s brisk appraisal in silence for a moment. ‘Yes, I suppose she would.’

  ‘I talked to her for quite a time. She wasn’t remotely interested in me, of course. But not a flicker betrayed the fact.’

  ‘No, it wouldn’t.’

  ‘Naturally I was interested in her. I managed to hover while she was talking to some other people.’

  ‘Did you, indeed.’

  ‘And I came away with a question to ask. Only I don’t know which way round to put it. It’s either why did you marry her or why did she marry you.’

  ‘More simply, why did we marry each other. It’s a question that has been asked about many faithful couples, and about many faithless ones as well.’