The British Museum is Falling Down

by David Lodge

  He would have to concede that he had heard Mrs Green’s parting words, and return ignominiously. With luck, she would already have retreated to the kitchen which, appropriately enough, always reeked with the smell of cooking cabbage. Adam fumbled in his pocket for his keys, only to discover that he had left them in the flat. He agitated the door-knocker gently and apologetically. There was no sound from within. He knocked harder. Stooping, he pushed open the flap of the letter-box, and called coaxingly, ‘Mrs Green!’ To his surprise an envelope flew out of the aperture and lodged itself between his teeth.

  ‘Thank you, Mrs Green,’ he called, spitting out the missive, and glaring at a small boy who was sniggering on the pavement.

  The appearance of the letter was as odd as the manner of its delivery. The envelope was a specimen of old-fashioned mourning stationery, with a thick black band round the edges. It appeared to have been formerly used in correspondence with a restaurateur, but wrongly addressed, so that it bore much evidence of the patient efforts of the G.P.O. to deliver it correctly. The envelope was sealed with Elastoplast, and Adam’s name and address trailed between the other cancelled addresses in heavy green biro. Exerting all his paleographic skills, Adam made out at the primary level of the palimpsest the name, ‘Mrs Amy Rottingdean’, who, he deduced, was the probable source of the letter addressed to himself. He was unable to attach the name to anyone he knew. Scrutinising the envelope, Adam quivered slightly with expectancy and curiosity. He found the sensation pleasant, and to prolong it thrust the letter into his pocket. Then he braced himself to confront his scooter.

  Adam kept his scooter under a filthy tarpaulin in Mrs Green’s small front garden. He pulled off the tarpaulin, kicked it under the hedge, and regarded the machine with loathing. He had been given the scooter by its former owner, his father-in-law, when the latter’s firm had provided him with a small car. At the time, he had regarded the gift as one of astounding generosity, but he was now convinced that it had been an act of the purest malice, designed either to maim him or ruin him, or both. He had accepted the gift on the assumption that the running costs would be more than compensated for by the savings on fares, a prediction that still wrung from him a bitter laugh whenever he recalled it, which was usually when he was paying for repairs. Paying for repairs was, however, one of Adam’s smaller worries. Getting the damned thing repaired was infinitely more difficult.

  Of all the industries in the country, Adam had decided, scooter-maintenance exhibited the most sensational excess of demand over supply. In theory, a fortune awaited the man who set out to meet this demand; but at the bottom of his heart Adam doubted whether scooters were repairable in the ordinary sense of the term: they were the butterflies of the road, fragile organisms which took a long time to make and a short time to die. By now, Adam had located every workship within a five-mile radius of his flat, and without exception they were crammed to the ceiling with crippled scooters waiting for repair. In a small clearing in the middle of the floor, a few oily youths would be tinkering doubtfully with a dismantled machine or two, while their owners, and the owners of other machines in dock, loitered anxiously outside trying to catch the eyes of the mechanics to bribe them with cigarettes or money. Adam, an innocent in the world of machinery at the best of times, had experienced the most humiliating and desperate moments of his life in scooter-repair workshops.

  Adam strapped his heavy bags to the luggage rack, and pushed the scooter into the road. He gave the starting pedal a ritual kick, and was so astonished when the engine fired that he was too slow in twisting the throttle. The engine died, and a dozen further kicks produced not the faintest symptom of internal combustion. Adam resigned himself to adopting his normal procedure for starting the motor. Grasping the handlebars firmly, he selected second gear, disengaged the clutch, and pushed the scooter along the road with increasing momentum. When he had attained the speed of a brisk trot, he abruptly let out the clutch. A juddering shock was transmitted from the engine, via the handlebars, to his arms and shoulders. The engine wheezed and coughed, inexorably reducing Adam’s speed. Just as he had abandoned hope, the engine fired and the scooter leapt forward at full throttle, dragging Adam with it. With feet flying and duffle-coat flapping, Adam careered past interested housewives and cheering children for some fifty yards before he recovered sufficient balance to scramble on to the seat. His pulled muscle throbbed painfully from the exertion. Reducing speed, he chugged off in the direction of the Albert Bridge.

  A notice at the approach to this bridge undermined confidence in its structure by requesting soldiers to break step while marching over it. Adam foresaw the time when he would be the innocent victim of military vanity.

  —The men seem in good spirit this morning, Ponsonby.

  —Yes, sir.

  —Keeping step very well.

  —Yes, sir. Sir, we’re approaching the Albert Bridge.

  —Are we, Ponsonby? Remind me to compliment Sar’nt Major on the men’s marching, will you?

  —Yes, sir. About the Albert Bridge, sir—shall I give the order, to break step?

  —Break step, Ponsonby? What are you talking about?

  —Well, there’s a notice, sir, which requests soldiers to break step while marching over the bridge. I suppose it sets up vibrations . . .

  —Vibrations, Ponsonby? Never let it be said that the 41st was afraid of vibrations.

  —Sir, if I might—

  —No, Ponsonby. I’m afraid this is a blatant example of the civil power’s encroachment on military territory.

  —But sir, we’re already on the bridge—

  —Ponsonby!

  —Safety of other people, sir!

  —There’s only some long-haired layabout on one of those silly scooter things. March on, Ponsonby, march on!

  And so the column of soldiers would march proudly on over the bridge, feet drumming on the tarmac. The bridge would quiver and shake, wires twang, girders snap, the road subside, and the soldiers step nonchalantly over the brink, as he himself was hurled into the cold Thames, with only a faint plume of steam to mark the spot where he and his scooter had disappeared beneath the surface.

  Lost in this reverie, Adam drifted towards a huge limousine halted at traffic lights, and pulled up just in time. The advertising copy for this model, he recalled, drew particular attention to the fact that the blades of the fan which cooled the radiator were irregularly set to reduce noise. It had been news to Adam that the fan caused noise: certainly it was not detectable on his own machine beneath the din of the exhaust and the rattling of various insecurely attached parts of the bodywork.

  Inside the limousine, a fat man was smoking a fat cigar and dictating into a portable dictaphone. Adam turned in his saddle to face a melancholy line of people queueing for a bus.

  ‘O tempora, O mores!’ he declaimed, his voice rendered safely inaudible by the noise of his machine.

  A man stepped forward from the queue and approached Adam, evidently under the impression that he had been personally addressed. Adam recognised him as Father Finbar Flannegan, a curate of his own parish, whom he and Barbara, in a private opinion poll, had voted Priest Most Likely to Prevent the Conversion of England.

  ‘It’s very kind of you to offer me a lift, Mr Appleby,’ said Father Finbar, climbing on to the pillion. ‘Could you drop me off near Westminster Cathedral?’

  ‘Have you ever been a pillion passenger before, Father?’ asked Adam, doubtfully.

  ‘I have not, Mr Appleby,’ replied the priest. ‘But I’m sure you’re a very capable driver. Besides, I’m late for my conference.’

  ‘What conference is that, Father?’ inquired Adam, moving off with the limousine, as the lights changed.

  ‘Oh, it’s some Monsignor or other who’s giving a lecture on the Council to the priests of the diocese. One priest was invited from each parish, so we tossed up for it, and I lost.’

  Adam heeled over the scooter to turn right, and his passenger tried to compensate by leaning in the o
pposite direction, yachtsman-style. The machine wobbled perilously, and Adam found himself clasped in a painful embrace by the alarmed priest who, he observed in the wing-mirror, had pulled his black Homburg down over his ears to leave his hands free.

  ‘It’s easier if you lean over with me,’ observed Adam.

  ‘Don’t you worry, Mr Appleby. I have my Saint Christopher medal with me, thanks be to God.’

  These, and subsequent remarks, had to be shouted to be audible above the din of the scooter and the background traffic noise.

  It did not surprise Adam that Father Finbar lacked enthusiasm for the Second Vatican Council, on which he and Barbara and most of their Catholic friends pinned their hopes for a humane and liberal life in the Church. Father Finbar’s ideas about the Catholic Faith were very much formed by his upbringing in Tipperary, and he seemed to regard the London parish in which he worked as a piece of the Old Country which had broken off in a storm and floated across the sea until it lodged itself in the Thames Basin. The parish was indeed at least half-populated by Irish, but this was not, in Adam and Barbara’s eyes, an adequate excuse for nostalgic allusions to ‘Back Home’ in sermons, or the sanctioning of collections in the church porch for the dependants of I.R.A. prisoners. As to the liturgical reform and the education of the laity, Father Finbar’s rosary beads rattled indignantly in his pocket at the very mention of such schemes, and he would, Adam suspected, chain up all the missals in the parish at the drop of a biretta.

  Indignation rising in his breast at these thoughts, Adam coaxed his scooter above the statutory speed limit, and embarked upon some stylish traffic-weaving. He even managed to overtake the limousine, in which the fat man with the fat cigar was now using a radio telephone. In his right ear, he heard the Litany of Our Lady being recited in a tone of increasing panic.

  The wind whistled through the rents in his windshield, and made Adam’s eyes water. But he always enjoyed his morning sprint along the embankment. The Thames lay folded in fog; but away from the river the fog cleared, and the orange disc of the sun was clearly visible. A turn in the road brought into view the campanile of Westminster Cathedral, the most blatantly phallic shape on the London skyline.

  The spectacle and the association deflected Adam’s thoughts into a familiar channel, and he waxed melancholy at the recollection of Barbara’s symptoms that morning. He grew convinced that they had had intercourse while sleeping off the effect of Camel’s Spanish wine, and he tried unsuccessfully to work out the position of that evening in Barbara’s current cycle. He released his grip on the handlebars to count with his fingers, but his passenger, abandoning prayer, shrieked a protest into his ear.

  ‘For the love of God, Mr Appleby, will you take a little care!’

  ‘Sorry, Father,’ said Adam. Then, on a sudden impulse, he yelled back over his shoulder, ‘Do you think the Council will change the Church’s attitude on Birth Control?’

  ‘What was that, Mr Appleby?’

  Adam repeated his question at louder volume, and the scooter lurched as his passenger registered its import.

  ‘The Church’s teaching never changes, Mr Appleby,’ came the stiff reply. ‘On that or any other matter.’

  A traffic jam blocked the road ahead, and Adam went down through the gears to save his ailing brakes. Father Finbar’s teeth chattered under the stress of vibration.

  ‘Well, all right—let’s say “develop”,’ Adam went on. ‘Newman’s theory of doctrinal development—’

  ‘Newman?’ interjected the priest sharply. ‘Wasn’t he a Protestant?’

  ‘Circumstances have changed, new methods are available—isn’t it time we revised our thinking about these matters?’

  ‘Mr Appleby, I don’t have to explain to a man of your education the meaning of the Natural Law . . .’

  ‘Oh, but excuse me Father, that’s just what you do have to explain. Modern Continental theologians are questioning the whole—’

  ‘Don’t talk to me about thim German and French!’ exclaimed Father Finbar furiously. ‘They’re worse than the Protestants thimselves. They’re deshtroying the Church, leading the Faithful astray. Why, half the parish is straining at the leash already. One hint from the Pope and they’d be off on a wild debauch.’

  ‘You mean, fulfilling the true purpose of marriage!’ protested Adam.

  ‘The true purpose of marriage is to procreate children and bring them up in the fear and love of God!’ asserted Father Finbar.

  Adam, his scooter locked in traffic, twisted in his saddle. ‘Look, Father, the average woman marries at twenty-three and is fertile till forty. Is it her duty to procreate seventeen children?’

  ‘I was the youngest of eighteen children!’ cried the priest triumphantly.

  ‘How many survived infancy?’ demanded Adam.

  ‘Seven,’ the priest admitted. ‘God rest the souls of the others.’ He crossed himself.

  ‘You see? With modern medical care they might all survive. But how could you house and feed even seven in London today? What are we supposed to do?’

  ‘Practice self-restraint,’ retorted the priest. ‘I do.’

  ‘That’s different—’

  ‘Pray, go to daily communion, say the rosary together . . .’

  ‘We can’t. We’re too busy—’

  He was going to say: ‘changing bloody nappies’; but became aware that a strange silence had fallen upon the traffic, and that his dialogue with Father Finbar was being listened to with interested attention by the bystanders and drivers leaning out of their cars.

  ‘We must talk about it again, Father,’ he said wearily. In a curious way, the discussion had made Father Finbar more human, and Adam felt he would not be able to invoke him so easily in future as a symbol of blind ecclesiastical reaction.

  The strange silence was explained by the fact that most of the drivers around him, evidently resigned to a long wait, had switched off their engines. Adam now followed suit.

  ‘What’s going on?’ he wondered aloud.

  ‘I think a policeman is holding up the traffic,’ said Father Finbar, dismounting. ‘If you don’t mind, Mr Appleby, I think I’ll walk from here. Perhaps the Queen is driving through.’

  ‘O.K., Father. You’ll get there quicker on foot.’

  ‘Thank you for the lift, Mr Appleby. And for the discussion. You should join the Legion of Mary.’

  His black Homburg hat still pulled down over his ears, Father Finbar threaded his way through the stationary vehicles, and pushed through the bystanders lining the pavement.

  An expectant hush had fallen on the scene. From nearby Westminster, Mrs Dalloway’s clock boomed out the half hour. It partook, he thought, shifting his weight in the saddle, of metempsychosis, the way his humble life fell into moulds prepared by literature. Or was it, he wondered, picking his nose, the result of closely studying the sentence structure of the English novelists? One had resigned oneself to having no private language any more, but one had clung wistfully to the illusion of a personal property of events. A fond and fruitless illusion, it seemed, for here, inevitably, came the limousine, with its Very Important Personage, or Personages, dimly visible in the interior. The policeman saluted, and the crowd pressed forward, murmuring, ‘Philip’, ‘Tony and Margaret’, ‘Prince Andrew’.

  Then a huge plosive shout of ‘The Beatles!’ went up, and the crowd suddenly became very young and disorderly. Engines revved, horns blared, drivers cursed, and the wedge of traffic inched its way forward through the herds of screaming, weeping teenagers who spilled out into the road and pursued the vanishing car. A familiar figure in black darted in front of Adam, and he braked sharply.

  ‘Did you see them, Mr Appleby? It’s the Beatles!’ cried Father Finbar, red with excitement. ‘One of them’s a Catholic, you know.’ He lumbered off after the other fans.

  Only one figure kept a still repose in the ebb and flow of vehicles and people. At the edge of the pavement an old, old lady, white-haired and wrinkled, dressed in sober bl
ack and elastic-sided boots, stood nobly erect, as if she thought someone really important had passed. In her right hand she held a speaking trumpet, which she raised to her ear. Adam, drawing level with her as the traffic surged slowly forward, murmured ‘Clarissa!’ and the old lady looked at him sharply. Suddenly frightened, Adam accelerated and drove off recklessly in the direction of Bloomsbury. Bloomsbury. Bloomsbury!

  CHAPTER III

  I have seen all sorts of domes of Peters and Pauls, Sophia, Pantheon—what not?—and have been struck by none of them as much as by that catholic dome in Bloomsbury, under which our million volumes are housed. What peace, what love, what truth, what happiness for all, what generous kindness for you and for me are here spread out! It seems to me one cannot sit down in that place without a heart full of grateful reverence. I own to have said my grace at the table, and to have thanked Heaven for this my English birthright, freely to partake of these bountiful books and speak the truth I find there.

  THACKERAY

  ADAM DROVE NOISILY down Great Russell Street and, bouncing in the saddle, swerved through the gates of the British Museum. He took some minutes finding a space into which he could squeeze his scooter: many businessmen had discovered that by leaving their cars in the South forecourt, walking through the Museum and sneaking out through the North Door, they could enjoy free parking all day in the centre of London.

  He limped slowly towards the colossal portico, balancing the weight of his two holdalls. The Museum wore an autumnal aspect, as if built of petrified fog. The gilt statuary reclining above the bulging pillars provided the only gleam of colour. Pigeons stalked grumpily about, ruffling their feathers as if they felt the cold. Tourists were sparse. The British Museum was returning to its winter role—refuge for scholars, post-graduates and other bums and layabouts in search of a warm seat. In particular, Adam regretted the departure of the pretty girls who sat on the steps in summer, eating sandwiches and writing postcards, their carelessly disposed legs providing an alluring spectacle for men approaching on ground level.