‘Your mother?’ Fiona’s confident assertion had somehow brought my aberration back on me.
‘My mother!’ For a moment Fiona stared at me blankly, as was not, I suppose, unreasonable. But she seemed displeased as well. ‘Duncan, I can’t think what you’re talking about. J. B.’s mind had just gone right back. It happens when you’ve decided to die, I believe.’
‘You mean this unknown woman must have been very deep in his past?’
‘There wasn’t any woman, you idiot. What his mind had gone back to was Sutton Hoo, and all the controversy the discoveries there touched off. It was the great archaeological find of the century, so far as Europe is concerned, and J. B. was very passionate about it. Have you forgotten your East Anglian kings, Duncan?’
‘Definitely.’ I was staring at Fiona in my turn.
‘King Anna died in 654. He was strongly Christian, and J. B. was convinced the ship with its treasure buried at Sutton Hoo was a cenotaph which his loyal pagan subjects created to make sure his newfangled religion didn’t count against him in the shades. J. B. must have harangued you about it vehemently enough long ago.’
‘I expect so,’ I said, humbly. ‘Look—let’s drive out somewhere and have a drink.’
And that was the best I could do. I was finding that this odd conclusion to the affair upset me a good deal. It was ridiculous, like the trick-ending to some silly short story, but it was something else as well. I had been eleven in 1939, and could quite clearly remember my father’s delighted interest when the first pictures of the Sutton Hoo treasure appeared. Probably I had told Timbermill of that on some occasion when he had talked to me about the discovery. But King Anna had passed utterly from my mind. Irrationally now, I felt this forgetfulness to have been a kind of treachery to Timbermill. When he had whispered that impassioned ‘Anna!’ to me I ought to have been able to reply to what was perhaps a still receptive ear: ‘654, J. B. And his court must have been the most brilliant in Europe.’
Fiona would have brought off that in her stride. It was a pity she had been lured to Copenhagen by the wretched Steenstrup.
XVIII
Had Nick Junkin not proposed a production of Tamburlaine, there would have been no consultation with Talbert, no calling in of Seashore and no luncheon party for him, no discussion of Hans Eworth’s lost portrait of Provost Pagden, and, therefore, no discovery of Piero’s Madonna del Astrolabio. So much is mere reiteration. Had Junkin’s production when it took place not been marked (as tends to happen on such occasions) by a totally unrehearsed effect, it is probable that the subsequent history of Piero’s picture would have been other than it turned out to be.
Tamburlaine is a tolerable read because the verse, although primitive and monotonous, combines vigour and speed in a way that carries one along. As a stage play, it is pretty hopeless, but offers scope for a romp. Junkin, despite his hankering after leopards and a free hand-out of bows and arrows, was far from intending anything of the sort. He regarded all theatrical enterprises very seriously, and was regularly furious when casual attitudes or unseasonable levity manifested themselves in his cast. Because of this, I expected that he would come round to regarding Albert Talbert as an invaluable ally, even granted that his ideas belonged to the age of Noah. And something of the sort did happen. For most of the time the well-known Talbertian gravitas was prominently on the scene. But so was a great deal of enthusiasm – this on both Talbert’s own part and that of Mrs Talbert – and the spectacle won them considerable good will in the Dramatic Society at large. In the later stages of rehearsal, Talbert actually became something of a romper himself. It was as if that imprisoned gaiety occasionally to be detected in him was breaking surface and taking command. It had to be concluded that in the distant era in which the Talberts had sustained the principal parts in Marlowe’s declamatory drama the gravitas, had not yet established itself. Albert and Emily had been clever and joyous young people with as yet no thought to the textual quiddities of Lust’s Dominion and similar masterpieces of Elizabethan rim ram ruff. I found the thought of these Cambridge lovers and their idyll attractive but rather awesome.
The Sheldrake twins had been enterprisingly cast as Mycetes, King of Persia, and his brother, Cosroe, whose quarrel dominates the opening of the play. In Marlowe’s time these must already have been stock stage characters: the weak monarch and his ambitious kinsman at a bitter enmity. But nobody, I imagine, had ever ventured to present them physically as alike as Tweedledum and Tweedledee (and a Tweedledum and Tweedledee raised, moreover, among the demigods), and I wondered whether it had been to Talbert or to Junkin that this freakish idea had come. As for Mark and Matthew, I thought of them as temperamentally somewhat aloof youths whom it was surprising to find mucking in with the enthusiasts of the Dramatic Society. But I was pleased that they had done so, judging that this absorbing and time-consuming activity might provide a wholesome distraction from Penny. The rehearsals showed them throwing themselves into their parts. They were hating each other like mad.
Amateurs tend to be wary of a professional man of the theatre in their midst, and for this reason I was relieved to be no more than tenuously connected with the production. Timbermill’s death was continuing to affect me, so that I was not in any case much inclined, to be involved in gambols. Nor, for more constitutional reasons, were the majority of my colleagues. During the days immediately preceding the production, they were to be observed hurrying through the Great Quadrangle with averted gaze, muttering to one another that these affairs were getting altogether out of hand. Buntingford, peering into the pool around Bernini’s fountain, was heard to aver that the hullabaloo was very evidently fraying the nervous condition of the great chub.
Not all our senior members, however, reacted with this sort of irritation. Some of the younger among them were even actively involved – the Dramatic Society, like most similar undergraduate concerns, being entirely acceptive of persons distinguishably beginning to decline into the vale of years. A college play, moreover, appeared to rank with major athletic occasions as requiring a decent turn-out of senior-common- room people together with their wives and children. In Eights Week (now behind us) abstracted scholars who scarcely knew one end of a boat from the other would wander amiably down to the Isis, watch the watery proceedings politely, and even offer mild supporting vociferations as the college boat went by. This was an entirely agreeable duty; one needn’t stay long; and one could gossip with one’s colleagues about less incomprehensible matters while waiting for one labouring crew or another to appear from the direction of Iffley Lock. Attendance at dramatic spectacles was more testing, particularly when they were presented in open air. They might begin only after irritating delays; last for hours (and the two parts of Tamburlaine, however mercifully cut by an intelligent scholar reading English, might well establish a record); and draw to a close in steadily worsening climatic conditions more discouraging to the audience than they were to the swarms of stinging insects also in attendance. Everybody brought rugs and the more apprehensive brought umbrellas. Occasionally, one knew, some tremendous thunderstorm would bring the dramatic venture to a dramatic close. But more frequently the gods (as if they were morose anti-theatre puritans), simply arranged for a steadily increasing drizzle to accompany the entire latter part of a play.
Conscientious men like Bedworth and Gender, as also their equally conscientious wives, strong in the conviction that the young should be countenanced in all feasible enterprises, and faced with the natural reluctance of their contemporaries to endure the rigours of the night, were accustomed to do a certain amount of whipping in. Just as when, on the occasion of some eminent foreign savant’s coming to deliver a lecture in Oxford, accompanying cocktail parties are frantically arranged on the unspoken assumption that the guests will feel honourably bound to show up at the conference or discours as well, so now Anthea Gender was mounting a buffet supper in her husband’s rooms in college which was to take place immediately before the first-night performance. It was und
erstood that the more eminent members of the cast had been invited. And they would probably have the civility to turn up.
Giving an eye to the play, I felt that the more elderly in the audience would need any preliminary recruitment they could get. All sorts of violent things happen in Tamburlaine, including an ingenious diversity of incendiarisms which it seemed that Junkin and Talbert had done little to mitigate; that Talbert had alerted the city’s fire brigade to the hazards of the night struck me as an instance of the sagacity that distinguished him. Yet the intermittent violence of the action is as nothing to the sustained violence of the language. Marlowe was limited in the number of soldiers he could set bashing one another, but quite unlimited in the noisy fecundity of his speech. Tamburlaine’s first victory is with words – ‘won with thy words’ somebody takes care to say in the first act; and after that the remorseless logomachy goes on and on. Tamburlaine was eminently the sort of play, I thought resignedly, that it is better fun to take part in than to listen to.
I arrived at Mrs Gender’s party a little late, and there was already quite a crowd. The first people my eye fell on were Mark and Matthew Sheldrake. Not yet made up for their parts, they were standing at either end of the room, each with an admiring little clump of young women around him. And then I saw Penny. She had an admiring clump of young men.
How Anthea Gender, the most socially expert of all the college ladies, had contrived this solecism I was never to learn. It seemed possible that the Sheldrakes had casually brought Penny along, without troubling to inform their hostess of their intention. Yet I couldn’t believe that either was that sort of young man. Anybody would have said at a glance that one accurate word for them was ‘correct’. The stresses of their twinned condition (as real, one imagined, as its satisfactions) would be in part responsible for such a comportment. But however this might be, here Penny was. It was a confused moment. What was alone clear was that we couldn’t with any good sense ignore each other.
It would be foolish, I saw, to regard the situation as particularly difficult vis-a-vis my colleagues and their wives. Few of them could know much or anything about my domestic history. And none of them, if catching Penny’s name and being thus apprised of the bobbing up of a Mrs Pattullo in our midst, would be other than circumspect in anything they thought to say. It was different with the scattering of young men and girls around the room. The Sheldrakes were in the know, and might have made it a talking-point among their fellow-undergraduates – in which case, any of these youths might, in conceivable immediate circumstances, behave in an alarmed and awkward manner. Those around Penny now, for example, might embarrassingly bolt if I approached her. This wasn’t a substantial anxiety, and for that matter it was my guess that the Sheldrakes – being again ‘correct’ – would have kept their piece of commonplace knowledge under their hats. In any case all this was as trivial as coffee-spoons. I walked across the room to Penny. As I did so it occurred to me that, actually and literally, I hadn’t spoken to her since the moment at which I had left the Ithaca with Ulric Anderman to explore the Piccolo Gallo. I found myself wondering whether my instant walk-out, my refusal to utter after that grotesque revelation, had been uncivilised and even unkind.
‘Hullo, Penny,’ I said. ‘I’d heard you were in Oxford. And I had a glimpse of you on the river only the other day. You look flourishing.’ These last words, although notably true in fact, were false in feeling, since I had no honest impulse to commend Penny’s looks. And my retreat upon a foolish conventional utterance amused her.
‘Duncan,’ she said, ‘how nice to be able to talk to you! You were so silent the last time we met.’ She paused on this, and I saw that the young men who had been surrounding her were edging away in much the manner I had been imagining. It may have been that they felt something odd in the air. Or not even that; they may have been doing no more than obey a notion of correct party-going behaviour. ‘I was on the river with Mark and Matthew Sheldrake,’ Penny was saying. ‘Aren’t they sweet? I expect they’re great favourites of yours, Duncan.’
‘They seem very nice lads. But I scarcely know them.’
‘Tut Duncan, how wasteful! Surely you feel they’d be marvellous favourites? Have you changed, darling?’
I was startled by this sally, which confirmed something I’d picked up about Penny’s version of the failure of our marriage. She’d found herself amid a nest of expatriate perverts and been obliged to quit. But the story, if outrageous, had long ago passed as water under the bridge, and I wasn’t going to react to a quip based on it now.
‘You seem to be a favourite too at the moment,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry to have driven all those attractive young men away. And aren’t the Sheldrakes making you their favourite? Look how bored each is with his little bevy of younger and fresher women.’
This was a disgusting thing to say, and I knew as I uttered it that this sad little encounter must be cut short. But it was at least factually true. Admirers still surrounded the twins, and it struck me that their reputation for fabulous good-looks must have spread through the women’s colleges by now, so that even a casual conversation achieved with one or the other would be a point of prestige. It was also true that Mark and Matthew, thus severally besieged, were being no more than adequately polite. One would have said that they had other matters on their mind. And now I saw them exchange a cold glance, which they were tall enough to do over the heads of most of the company. They didn’t like their own celebrity one bit. They didn’t seem to like even each other.
Penny’s only response to my last speech had been that slight movement of the mouth which probably now, as long ago, represented the sharpest barb in her armoury of seduction. Perhaps she had turned it on consciously and ironically. Or perhaps it had degenerated into a kind of habit spasm. I made a movement to part. But Penny detained me.
‘Duncan,’ she said, ‘I’m thinking of getting married. Should you most terribly mind?’
‘Don’t be silly.’—_
‘Aren’t you even interested in who?’
‘Of course I’m not interested in who. Your marriage may be a great success. I hope it will be. Such things happen.’
‘Not even interested if I tell you it’s a colleague?’
‘A colleague?’ No doubt I stared at Penny. This had rather shaken me.
‘So we’ll have lots of dinner-parties together. And delightful witty exciting affairs like this one. It’s dear Mr Penwarden. Surely you know dear Mr Penwarden?’
‘Of course I know Penwarden.’
‘Isn’t he charming? Like whoever it is in Beatrix Potter who’s always bursting his buttons. I only met him half an hour ago. But it’s destiny – a fated thing.’
I had a sudden searing recollection that precisely this sort of rubbish used to enchant me in Penny Triplett. And I turned away, acknowledging a shameful disposition to weep.
Outdoor productions in the Oxford summer term usually start rather late. The idea is that you get interesting effects out of a gathering dusk, and then turn on all sorts of ingenious lighting with expensive equipment hired for the occasion. Undergraduates – it has to be given to them – are extremely versatile. No dramatic society is without its complement of resourceful technicians. This was to be a factor in what was looming ahead of us. The situation was later to strike me as not unlike that in Thomas Hardy’s terrifying poem, ‘The Convergence of the Twain’. In our case the Titanic was represented by a boy called Julian Wright, who was a little prone to getting things wrong. The iceberg was constituted by the laws of electrodynamics.
The production showed itself from the start to be a thoroughly efficient affair. The text was taken at a spanking pace, and the Virgins of Damascus had been haled off to death, and Bajazeth and his consort had vigorously brained themselves, before the artificial lighting was required. Then there was a longish interval, and by the end of it darkness had fallen. At this point Julian Wright got to work. Zenocrate died, and at once the entire south side of the Great Quadrangle burst
most satisfactorily into avenging flames. These faded at a turn of Mr Wright’s rheostat. Minor conflagrations followed: a lady incinerated her husband and son; there was a bonfire of books carried out in a hearty Nazi manner. And now came the big moment when the Governor of Babylon was to be hoisted on the college tower and shot at. The preliminary dispositions for this pleasing spectacle were effected in a sinister near-darkness, but with many nasty noises. What was to follow was to be highly dramatic, for the tower was suddenly to be deluged with blinding light. And this happened. For a moment, we were all dazzled. Then there was a yet more blinding flash, a loud report, a hideous smell of burning rubber. And by the time this last phenomenon was appreciable the audience had, appropriately, only its nose with which to entertain itself. The entire college had been plunged into total darkness. So had a substantial part of the city of Oxford.
XIX
It was during this great darkness that The Madonna of the Astrolabe vanished. The first theory of the picture’s disappearance turned on a hypothetical swift opportunism on the part of the thief or thieves. Professional criminals had been lurking in Oxford, awaiting their opportunity and generally ‘casing’ the college. Julian Wright’s unfortunate error (whatever it had been) had given them their chance. They had gone swiftly to work, seized their spoil, and departed undetected in the murk.
But this theory didn’t stand up for long. It was refuted – or appeared to be refuted – by the story which the night watchman had to tell. This security guard was indeed sadly confused – and very apprehensive (as apparently happens in such cases) of being suspected as an accomplice in the theft. It was more probable that he had simply been not too quick on the draw. Not that he had, of course, anything to draw in the literal sense. Weapons, whether termed offensive or defensive, were forbidden him. What he was equipped with was a powerful whistle and an electric torch. He had, according to his statement, just settled down to his spell of duty in the small common room where the Piero still stood. One of the two doors of the room had opened, and the blackout had followed an instant later. It was clear to him that he faced a crisis. What ought his first reaction to be? He obeyed orders, fumbled for his whistle, and blew it. But he had to contend with a great deal of noise from the quad, where the barbarous hordes of the Scythian Shepherd were howling for the Governor of Babylon’s blood. So he went on blowing like mad. By the time he changed his mind and switched on his torch he was in an empty room and looking at a vacant easel. The Piero had gone.
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