The Madonna of the Astrolabe

by J. I. M. Stewart

  ‘It’s nothing of the kind. But never mind that. Go on telling me about Ivo.’

  ‘He must have seen my name on a pay-packet or something. Because one day he asked me if I’d had a brother at Oxford and he named this college.’

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘I said, Yes I had.’ Peter’s chin went up. ‘And that I was coming here too.’

  ‘Good man! And that’s all?’

  ‘Of course not, or I shouldn’t have—’ Peter broke off.

  ‘You see, it’s about this I’ve come to see you, really. I hope that’s all right.’

  ‘Of course it is. Go on.’ If I uttered this injunction confidently I was concealing a sense of the awkwardness of the situation into which Chance, again, had manoeuvred me. It was my impression that the Lusbys – Peter and his parents – had never heard the full story of what had led to Paul Lusby’s suicide. It had remained for them a matter of some perhaps ill-judged behaviour on the boy’s part which had led to his failing an examination and taking the failure disastrously to heart. But the whole college had come to know of the element of responsibility borne by Ivo Mumford, and Gender and I had both worried about the possible effect on Peter were he to learn the facts when he himself came into residence. Ivo’s abrupt departure from our midst had mitigated this anxiety – but the problem had not, so far as I knew, been wholly resolved. It was essentially Gender’s problem. But now I had been pitched in this odd way into the firing-line. I had better learn just what had happened.

  ‘A couple of days ago,’ Peter was saying, ‘this chap Mumford came into the sort of cubby-hole where I make the tea. He must have been looking for a chance to get me alone. There was something very queer about his look. I wondered whether he was drunk.’

  ‘It wouldn’t be an impossibility, I’d say.’

  ‘But he wasn’t. He mumbled something I couldn’t catch. It wasn’t at all his usual way of speaking. And then he suddenly looked straight at me and said, “I’m damned sorry about your brother”.’

  ‘I see.’ For a moment I was more struck by this totally unexpected revelation of Ivo’s state of mind than by how the incident might have affected Peter. ‘And how did you take that?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t think I liked his saying he was damned anything about Paul.’

  ‘Well, I suppose it was a bit crude, Peter. But, you know, it was perfectly proper. He and Paul had been up together, and now he’d heard that you were coming to the college. He couldn’t very well have said nothing.’

  ‘But then, you see, he said something more.’ Peter was looking at me almost sternly, and I felt ashamed of my attempt to ride away from the issue in so pusillanimous a fashion. ‘Mumford went quite pale. He really was terribly upset. And what he said was, “How could I have known the bloody silly bet would end that way?” And then he seemed to lose his nerve—it really was like that—and bolted from the room. I was upset myself. So I want it explained, please –if you can explain it, sir. Can you?’

  For this instant, Peter Lusby had become a skilled interrogator, and I could make only one reply.

  ‘Yes, I can. It’s not at all pleasant, but at least it’s not complicated. Just before Paul’s Prelim Ivo Mumford threw a silly sort of dare or challenge at him: to stay up all night, gate-crashing on the Commem Ball.’

  ‘A Ball! Paul?’ Peter stared at me. ‘Paul would never—’

  ‘Well, that was how it was. Paul was pretty well flat-out already. He’d been over-working, and the sleepless night and general strain of the thing wrecked him in the Examination Schools next morning. That’s the whole story, Peter.’

  Peter was silent – for so long that my thoughts went back to the wretched Ivo. I remembered intolerable things he had said about Paul Lusby long after the tragedy was over. I reflected that his second utterance to Peter had hinted at a shallow self-justification not alien to his habit of mind as I knew it. Still, in a small way the Furies had been at work on Ivo. I could recall hinting to him – although in different words – that it would happen. For the rest of his days he’d have something to live with.

  ‘Do you mean,’ Peter asked, ‘that but for this man Mumford Paul would be alive today?’

  ‘That is the probability. Only, Peter, “but for” thinking doesn’t mend things.’

  ‘Mr Lempriere never told me about this.’

  ‘Mr Lempriere was concerned to see you through the college entrance examination; he wouldn’t want to come out with something that could only distress you.’

  ‘That’s true, I suppose.’ Peter was again silent for a time. He was quite as distressed now as I had feared he would be. ‘I can’t go back to that office,’ he said. ‘I’ll write and tell them so.’ He smiled at me wanly. ‘The tea boy tenders his resignation.’ He stood up as if to take his leave of me – and then said something quite surprising. ‘And to this Ivo Mumford. I’ll write to him too. Thanking him for what he tried to say. Something like that.’

  ‘I think he’ll be grateful. He’s rather a mixed up young man.’

  ‘Only I don’t think I’d want to meet him again. Will he be coming back to the college?’

  ‘Definitely not. He hasn’t just been rusticated or something like that. Ivo’s days here are over.’

  ‘I see.’ Peter moved to the door, and then hesitated, perhaps wondering whether we were due to shake hands. And I myself felt that here was rather too abrupt a parting.

  ‘Look,’ I said on impulse. “There’s something I’d like you to see before you go. It’s a picture the college has just discovered it possesses. I think you’ll like it.’

  ‘A picture?’ The boy was only half attentive, but was instantly polite. ‘Thank you very much, sir.’

  We walked over to the common room. There happened to be nobody there – or nobody except one of the security men. He was imposingly tough, but I caught myself wondering what would have happened if Peter Lusby and I had burst in with guns in our hands.

  ‘Here it is,’ I said.

  Peter looked at The Madonna of the Astrolabe. I thought for a moment that it was almost unregardingly. But I was wrong.

  ‘Oh!’ he said, and after a long pause asked, ‘Sir, could it be by Piero della Francesca?’

  ‘It certainly is. All the authorities say so.’

  ‘It’s terribly beautiful.’ Peter was now round-eyed. ‘Does the college have a lot of things like this?’

  ‘No, indeed.’ I might have been surprised by Peter’s knowledge if I hadn’t remembered what a picture gallery can be to a boy or girl – what, for example, the Scottish National Gallery had been to me. There was no Piero there: only Vermeer’s Christ in the House of Mary and Martha – in front of which, surely rather profanely, I had first kissed Janet.

  ‘The Virgin isn’t like the one in the Nativity,’’ Peter said. ‘Not a bit.’

  In the National Gallery? No, she’s quite different. But they didn’t think it odd—did they?—to keep on painting the Virgin now from one woman and now from another. I suppose it was part of the idea, in a way.’

  ‘Yes, of course.’ Rather comically, and to a slight effect of anti-climax, Peter was betraying surprise that I should prove not without rudimentary religious knowledge. ‘She’s every mother. But glorified. Thank you very much for showing me the picture, sir.’

  We went out into the quad, and I accompanied Peter to the gate, much as I had done upon our first encounter less than a year before.

  ‘Did you call on Dr Wyborn?’ I asked, remembering that Peter had corresponded with our Pastoral Fellow.

  ‘No, I thought I oughtn’t to bother him. You see, I see him occasionally in London now. I don’t mean to talk to. But he has connected himself with our mission at St Ambrose’s – that’s my church – and he sometimes celebrates Holy Communion. Does he do that every day here?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’ This was an awkward question, since my knowledge of what went on in the college chapel was sketchy. ‘We seem to have a good many clergymen aro
und. And there’s a chaplain of course. He’s quite a young man. I hope you’ll like him.’

  ‘Dr Wyborn said in his letter to me that I should always go to the chaplain, and that he is thoroughly sound. Doctrinally, I suppose he meant. Would you agree?’

  ‘I wouldn’t know, Peter. I’m not entitled to an opinion. I’m an old-fashioned agnostic, you see.’

  As I said this, I remembered that Peter, only minutes before, had shown that he already possessed some awareness of the state of my case. And I felt that I might have left ‘old-fashioned’ out, since it suggested a whimsical lightness of air which he didn’t deserve. He now received my explicit confession in silence. I felt, without resentment, that he was probably making a mental note to pray for me. When I had said good-bye and was walking back to Surrey, I was conscious of an increased discomfort about The Madonna of the Astrolabe as a potential article of commerce. I was even prepared to vote for Wyborn’s view of what ought to be done with it. I’d have liked to feel that Peter Lusby, when he came into residence, would be able to do some of his praying in front of it.

  XVII

  An event now took place which drove Piero della Francesca and the unstable condition of the college tower alike clean out of my head. It even banished my altogether more intimate unease before the thought that the Penny Pattullo of the Piccolo Gallo was at large in Oxford. Rather unfairly, perhaps, Penny and sexual depravity had become interchangeable notions for me; the thought of her prompted humiliatingly crude imaginings; I was perpetually seeing her as triumphantly bringing off the tour de force of bedding simultaneously with two young men who were entirely nice and brothers into the bargain. But this (which was to prove not Penny’s idea, after all) sank into some region of my mind that it ought never to have risen from as soon as J. B. Timbermill’s cerebral disaster became known to me. Timbermill was dying.

  It was I who discovered him in his stricken state, and it happened on one of my duty visits in Linton Road. I am ashamed to have to call them that, but it is true that keeping an eye on the Wizard of the North had become something I had to bring myself to face up to. Timbermill had come to expect my presence almost as much as he had come to expect Fiona’s. But, paradoxically, he seemed scarcely aware of us when we did turn up in Heorot, and when he spoke it was querulously and reproachfully. Once or twice we found ourselves visiting him together – although by no pre- arrangement – and I was made aware of how much better Fiona managed what Wyborn would have called a work of corporal mercy than I did. Visiting the sick, the really sick, isn’t easy. One has to repress in oneself that sizeable chunk of one’s unredeemed nature which prompts one simply to get away. And Timbermill was sick in his head, although not yet in the physiological manner soon to overtake him. I don’t know that Fiona felt this evil impulse of rejection at all. I had, in a sense, loved Timbermill when I was a boy; she loved him now, and in his decrepitude. I wondered whether I loved Fiona. If I was drawing nearer to something of the kind it wasn’t least rapidly on these occasions, which revealed a Fiona not commonly on view. Shaw’s Vivie Warren was out; and I’d sometimes have been inclined to say that here were first cousins to Lear and Cordelia, had I not been aware that the comparison was altogether too august to be applicable to these two academic persons, old and young. Unfortunately, the increased warmth I felt for Fiona while in Timbermill’s company during this final phase of his life was not reciprocated. Perhaps Fiona felt that she and I (being January and May) were in a frivolous relationship which rendered inappropriate our simultaneous attendance at Timbermill’s bedside. Or perhaps – I told myself alternatively – she considered that I had been no sort of faithful pupil, and oughtn’t to be pushing in now. These were unsatisfactory conjectures. But Fiona often had me guessing about how she felt we should respond to one another.

  Usually I had been finding Timbermill alone in his vast and shadowy attic. The place had always been untidy and dusty; now it had become dirty as well. Dirt can turn a formidable adversary in old age. I had reasserted my right – first claimed in my final year as his pupil – to wander about the place as I chose; and on one of these visits I let this liberty extend to glancing into the three small rooms tucked beneath the subsidiary gables of the house. They were no improvement on the main chamber. Cobwebs were thick in the bathroom, and thickest of all in the bath, which had become a kind of spiders’ club. Not many months before, it had been within my knowledge that Timbermill had admitted the ministrations of a cleaning-woman once a week. It was clear that this no longer obtained. His becoming a nocturnal wanderer in the streets had been coincident with his embracing a complete domestic seclusion. What he lived on, I didn’t know: tea, perhaps, and bread and butter and boiled eggs. The eggs were more than a conjecture. Sometimes he wore an old sports jacket, sometimes a dressing-gown, and sometimes merely his pyjamas. There was a good deal of egg on all of them.

  These signs betokened an ominously swift decline into dotage, as did his inability or indisposition to enter into any sort of rational talk. Nevertheless it was evident that he still regarded himself as engaged in learned pursuits. Here the main sign of change was a retreat, a thinning out, of the books and papers and journals which had formerly been piled up around him, and their replacement by an advancing chaos of broken pottery, rusted iron and crumbling bronze. It was obvious that Timbermill put in a lot of time handling these multifarious memorials of Anglo-Saxon culture, probably with some thought of reassorting them on their shelves in fresh typological sequence. Of the pottery, at least, a good deal that had been painfully pieced and glued together over the years – by myself, some of it – must have been dropped and broken again during those fumbling efforts; more than once I even thought I detected, littered on the floor, the fragments of some pot or urn, costrel or skillet, which I had actually held intact in my hands many years before.

  This return, as it were, to the midden from which they came of evidences to the study and interpretation of which Timbermill had given much of his life was not inspiriting. Fiona and I had agreed – she on the basis of a much fuller knowledge – that there was nothing to be done about it; there would have been an impossible officiousness in our attempting to organise the interest and interposition of fellow-scholars of Timbermill’s with whom he had long ago lost touch. I did feel that a simple clear-up would be useful, since the spectacle of Timbermill shambling around in carpet slippers among a thick scattering of knife-edged shards was extremely alarming. Going to work in a Draconian spirit with a dust-pan and brush, I quickly found that Timbermill had really lost interest in the pottery; he watched without protest or interest while I did what I pleased about it. But it was otherwise with certain other objects in his collection. The coins were in fair order, but even of them a good many lay scattered around. My attempt to cope with these made Timbermill uneasy at once. And violent agitation followed upon my putting my hand on the Petersfinger scramasax.

  Timbermill, I imagine, would have placed this short sword or long dagger a good way ahead of The Madonna of the Astrolabe, and I had done right in proposing to pick it up from the floor and restore it to its prescriptive place behind glass. Although he possessed a mass of material of great archaeological interest and considerable value, the scramasax was his only major treasure, and must have been worth a very large sum. It was to turn out that he had bequeathed it to the Ashmolean Museum, where it would rank with the Alfred Jewel and the Minster Lovell Jewel.

  Timbermill snatched it from me and fondled it. It had fascinated me in the past, and it did so now. The fascination wasn’t entirely aesthetic, since it partly consisted in a contrast between the exquisite artistry of the pommel and the sinister character of the blade. The pommel displays a gold panel with an interlaced filigree wire ornament superimposed, and it further incorporates some exquisite animal heads which lurk amid bunches of grapes made of tiny granules of gold. (These gold blobs had at one time incongruously reminded me of Tony Mumford’s superior swizzle-sticks, given to him by an indulgent aunt.) So much
for art. The blade was entirely real life – or death; it showed a long groove, believed by some (Timbermill had told me) to have been smeared with poison to effect an enemy’s more certain despatch.

  I have somewhere recorded that Timbermill’s scholarship was at times a little touched by imagination, as one might expect of the author of The Magic Quest. His persuasion that the White Horse of Uffington had been cut in the turf by a non-Belgic tribe called the Dobunni was an orthodox belief at the time of his communicating it to me, although scholars may well have changed their minds about it now. But that the Bunns of Uffington village (butchers, not bakers) were descendants of the Dobunni was a theory difficult to judge persuasive. Timbermill similarly believed, or professed to believe, that his particular scramasax had figured at the assassination of some royal personage whose name I forget – although I remember reflecting that the date of this killing must have been quite close to that at which my father’s young Picts had watched the arrival of Columba from Iona. I was disinclined to believe that the weapon was quite as old as that.

  It could no longer be called lethal, since the blade would probably have shivered had it been used to impale a sparrow. Nevertheless, the sight of Timbermill mindlessly fingering it was disquieting, and on the next occasion of my running into Robert Damian I was prompted again to mention my old tutor’s condition.

  ‘Oh yes, indeed,’ Damian said. ‘I took your hint, Duncan, and went to see the old boy.’

  ‘You managed that?’

  ‘I put on a turn as the old-style family doctor, who called on you regularly, just like the men who wound the clocks and swept the chimneys. And do you remember the tailors’ touts, who used to tap on one’s door in college and murmur a desire to be of service to you?’

  ‘Yes, I do. But tell me about your seeing Timbermill.’

  ‘It wasn’t a striking success. He turned me out of the room. We didn’t have the confidence to do that with the touts, did we? Just ordered a gent’s suiting right away.’