The Madonna of the Astrolabe

by J. I. M. Stewart

  In front of Surrey Four, and lit by the lantern above its entrance, there was parked one of those small trucks or hand-trolleys used by the quad-men for their miscellaneous occasions and frequently borrowed by undergraduates for trundling round their baggage. A removal appeared to be going on. The last occasion upon which I had come upon any nocturnal activity of the sort here had been when the disgraced Ivo Mumford had enlisted a number of his acquaintances in a noisy clearing out of his possessions from the rooms above my own. But on that night, the modest vehicle now before me had been represented by his father’s ministerial limousine, impudently commandeered for the purpose. Now, as then, there was a certain amount of racket, although this time of a minor sort. It was represented by sundry bumpings and puffings which seemed to be fading upwards on the staircase.

  I took a turn round the quad before going indoors; I suppose because the library, with its great pillars softly lit through windows witnessing to scholarly endeavours still going on inside, is an attractive object to look at for a while. It isn’t the tower. But it’s quite something, all the same.

  As a result of this delay, I bumped into two young men as I got back to my own door. They had tumbled downstairs with the needless and hazardous expedition characteristic of their kind. One was Junkin, dressed in the bleached jeans and combat-jacket he favoured at that time. The other, like Junkin slim and fair, I recognised as a recent arrival on the staircase: he had taken over Ivo’s rooms. I glanced at him and saw that it was doubtless for socially impeccable reasons that he was wearing a correct London suit. But both youths were smothered in dust.

  ‘Hullo, Duncan,’ Junkin said. He was not above showing off a little with this now reasonably legitimate manner of address. ‘This is Mark.’ Junkin spoke rather as one elderly man, meeting a contemporary in St James’s or thereabouts, might thus casually identify a juvenile nephew whom he is taking out to tea.

  ‘How do you do, sir? I’m Mark Sheldrake.’ Mark spoke promptly and only a shade stiffly. He was a freshman, and clearly held Junkin in high esteem.

  ‘How do you do?’ I said. ‘I hope you’re comfortably settled in above me.’

  ‘Thank you, sir.’

  I took a second glance at this standard public-school boy, with the bizarre consequence that I felt it would be positively impertinent to take a third. Mark Sheldrake was as good-looking as that. He is going to be very hard to evoke or describe, certainly in a word. ‘Handsome’ is useless. ‘Beautiful’ is little better, because carrying too many wrong associations. But the phenomenon lay in that area, and was transcendent of its kind. Even so, I’d scarcely have been telling myself not to stare but for a topographical circumstance attending the encounter. My rooms, outside which we were standing, had been Henry Tindale’s rooms, and it was awkwardly true that I sometimes felt a certain Tindale aura to linger in them. Mark Sheldrake was very much the sort of young man whom Tindale would have enjoyed seeing tumble through his window. Moreover Tindale, whom in my undergraduate time I’d known only slightly, had later (as will transpire) re-entered my life in circumstances leaving me with a lively residual sense of the disastrousness that can be scattered around by men prompted to take a third glance at any Mark Sheldrake. It was only fleetingly that I was conscious of this odd bobbing up of something from the past. But I was conscious, too, of some further and elusive fact about the young man without which nothing of the kind might have come to me. At the moment I had no leisure to hunt after it.

  ‘Duncan’s my tutor,’ Junkin was explaining. ‘For this term, that is. It’s because I’ve become very interested in drama from the historian’s point of view.’

  Mark Sheldrake seemed impressed by this specious statement. It was left to me, however, to make the next remark.

  “But what on earth are you both interested in at the moment, Nick? You look as if you’d taken on a rubbish cart.’

  ‘It is that, more or less. We’ve been giving the Troglodyte a hand shifting some of his junk. He didn’t seem to have anybody to help. It was Mark’s idea. Mark’s absolutely the Boy Scout. He’s been expensively educated, and all that.’

  Mark didn’t seem discomposed by this, but I felt it must be ignored.

  ‘The Troglodyte?’ I asked. ‘Who’s he?’

  ‘He’s an old party called Dr Burnside. But we call him the Troglodyte because of his having these attics.’

  ‘Troglodytes don’t have attics, Nick. They have caves.’

  ‘They’re rather like caves, sir.’ Mark Sheldrake felt startled that I should thus venture briskly to correct the eminent Junkin, and he was moving up in polite but firm support of his friend. ‘I think I’ve heard that Dr Burnside is the college archivist. And he’s been moving everything of that sort to the rooms at the top of our staircase. He doesn’t seem to care to trust the stuff to the porters and people. So he’s been very kindly allowing us to help.’

  ‘I see.’ A certain social sophistication, I felt, was involved in thus describing what appeared to have been the imposition of a species of corvee upon these young men. ‘And I’ve heard about it. Dr Burnside really works in the British Museum. But he has taken a term off in order to get things straight for us.’

  ‘You mean he isn’t even a don?’ Junkin asked. He spoke as if feeling that his labour might have been requisitioned on false pretences.

  ‘No, he isn’t even a don.’

  ‘Then I don’t see how he can be college thingummy.’

  ‘It’s probably an honorary appointment,’ Mark Sheldrake said, suddenly with the confidence of the well-informed. ‘He’s an old member. He was up with my grandfather.’ Having got this clear, the young man appeared to feel that tutor and pupil might now with propriety be left together. ‘I’m going to shake off the dust of battle,’ he said – not without a glance at Junkin’s warlike jacket. ‘I’ve been up to town, and that gets one mucky too. But I’ll shove that trolley away first, Nick.’ And with this, Mark took his leave.

  ‘Well!’ I said. ‘A remarkable acquisition.’

  ‘We all think that.’ Junkin grinned, cheerfully, having picked up a fragment of sub-text in my comment. ‘And then, you see, there’s his brother.’

  ‘Mark has a brother?’

  ‘A twin brother – named Matthew by their resourceful parents. Matthew’s equally dazzling. They came up last term, and were doubled up in Howard. But they felt it might be less confusing for people if they put a quad between them, which is why Mark’s had himself shunted into that pitiful Mumford’s old rooms here. They’re not fraternal twins, you see, Mark and Matthew. They’re monozygotic.’

  ‘Good Lord!’ I didn’t pause to be impressed by Junkin’s unexpected command of this learned word. ‘And you say Matthew’s exactly like Mark?’

  ‘Two peas. They have a problem.’

  ‘I suppose so.’ It seemed a point at which to leave the subject. ‘Is Dr Burnside up there now?’

  ‘Oh, yes. Mucking in like mad.’

  ‘I think I’ll venture to go up and introduce myself, Nick. I’m curious. I used to know that attic.’

  It was apparent from a blank space on the name-board at the foot of Surrey Four that Cyril Bedworth’s first home in the college was no longer regularly tenanted, but it hadn’t occurred to me to find out whether it had been appropriated to any other purpose. Bedworth had done more for my Latin there than Buntingford in his casual tutorials; and the graphs and time-tables and reading schedules with which he had adorned the walls of the place had earned from me more respect than I’d ever cared to acknowledge. So the scene of all that attic-varletry may have constituted a minor focus of nostalgia for me. Some explanation of the sort, at least, was necessary to explain why I was climbing to the top of the staircase now instead of getting on with my telephone call to Tony. I hadn’t met Burnside and had no reason to suppose he had heard of me, or owned any disposition to make my acquaintance if he had. He was reputed a thoroughly eremitical man. Although his duties as archivist brought him occasionally into residen
ce for substantial periods, he hardly ever dined, it seemed, or entered common room. He contrived, in fact, a condition close to invisibility.

  A knock on the door brought a deep-toned command to enter. My first impression was confused. Bedworth’s sitting- room, although low-hutched, had proliferated in various nooks and corners, and was thus, as he liked to say, commodious. But this effect now showed itself much enhanced, since the chamber had been opened up into several others running under the leads. What first confounded me, then, was a sense of having walked into something unexpected but equally familiar and even more nostalgic: the enormous upper room in Linton Road which had been the scene of my instruction in Anglo-Saxon and much else by J. B. Timbermill. Burnside wasn’t in the least like that preternatural scholar. But for a moment it was almost as if it were Timbermill who had risen to receive me.

  There was, however, another and more severe bewilderment. Timbermill’s retreat had been promiscuously cluttered not only with books and papers and journals but also with a congeries of objects of antiquarian regard collected from the kitchen middens of our ancestors. This place was cluttered too, but on an altogether larger scale. Burnside’s conception of ‘archives’ seemed to run to anything sufficiently useless that had ever drifted into the college. I was staggered, for example, to find myself contemplating, perched on a shelf, that befeathered hat, ambassadorial in suggestion, which my father on a notable occasion had politely declined to don at the invitation of ‘Blobs’ Blunderville, Lord Mountclandon, and which I had, in consequence, been obliged to entertain the Provost’s guests by putting on myself. This was sufficiently astonishing. Yet more remarkable was the circumstance that I was back with my dream. Here was the disordered museum which my slumbering mind had sited half-way up the college tower. Or so, let us say, it for some seconds overwhelmingly appeared. Intimations of precognitive experience are commonly evanescent. And now I was obliged to explain myself.

  ‘Dr Burnside?’ I said. ‘My name’s Duncan Pattullo. I’m the college’s junior fellow at the moment, and I thought I’d like to call on you. I hope it isn’t an inconvenient time.’

  ‘How do you do?’ Having first brushed some dust from his fingers, Burnside shook hands with gravity. He was an elderly man whose extreme mildness of manner ought, one felt, to have gone with a light tenor voice rather than with the bassoprofondo I was now hearing. ‘And how very kind! I fear I have been sadly remiss as a social being of late. Only, you see, there is a great deal of work on hand.’

  ‘It seems so,’ I said, glancing round the room. ‘I’ve just been talking to a couple of young men who have been doing some pottering for you.’

  ‘Yes, indeed. I was most grateful to them – and a little struck by the appearance of the younger, as I judged him to be. O formose puer, I was almost prompted to exclaim, nimium ne crede colori,’ Burnside produced a deep but very gentle laugh. ‘Only the warning might have been a little out of turn.’

  ‘I suppose it might.’ Burnside had succeeded in surprising me, although I don’t think it had been in the least his aim.

  “But I really must try to see rather more of my colleagues, as they very kindly regard themselves. I shouldn’t like to fail to convey the great pleasure it is to return to the college from time to time, quite apart from the intense interest of the work. Do you know that I might have stayed on in a fellowship? After taking Greats, that is, which was a long time ago. The examiners were kind to me, and placed me above my deserts.’

  ‘But you preferred the idea of the B.M.?’ Dr Burnside, I found, had drawn me up a chair and seated me in it. Several seconds passed before he judged it courteous to sit down himself. ‘The B.M. must be a wonderful place to work in.’

  ‘Yes—but yes, indeed. Only, perhaps, it wasn’t quite that. I think I judged myself unfit for the rough and tumble of college life.’

  ‘I see.’ This ready communicativeness on my host’s part wasn’t displeasing; he seemed a very crystalline sort of man. ‘And you did find there was less wear and tear in the Museum? I’ve heard it described as a haunt of indescribable animosities.’

  ‘It depends on one’s department, I imagine.’ Burnside wasn’t perturbed by my outrageous remark, which a spirit of experiment had made me concoct on the spot. ‘I believe I enjoy harmonious relationships with everybody in my own part of the place. Of course people come and go. In particular, they go. Tussis attacks them.’ Burnside laughed again and I laughed with him.

  ‘All cough in ink,’ I said. ‘That’s how Yeats expresses it.’

  ‘An amusing poem. But not quite fair. No, not quite fair. How delightful to find that you younger men still know your Yeats!’

  ‘When I was here as an undergraduate we never stopped quoting him.’ It surprised me that Burnside’s information ran to this poet as well as Virgil, my early acquaintance with Albert Talbert having persuaded me that the learned habitually believed literature to have stopped off a long time ago. My after-dinner call was proving a modest success. ‘You seem to be concentrating a vast amount of stuff up here,’ I said. ‘It’s almost a little B.M. in itself.’

  ‘Ah, yes—and the Provost has been teasing me about it, let me say. Of course the archives proper are the important things, and I am glad to think they are now tolerably under control. I have been fortunate in receiving so much assistance from Wyborn, whom you doubtless are acquainted with.’

  ‘It’s an interest of his?’

  ‘Yes, indeed. Wyborn has been going into the early history of the college a good deal. A versatile man, and one with more drive, if I may say so, than might superficially appear. As you will be aware, he has a strongly evangelical side, which is something unusual in a theologian, is it not?’

  ‘I wouldn’t know. Is Wyborn also interested in—well, the museum side of the things?’ As I asked this, I glanced round the vast shadowed chamber, aware that it made me faintly uneasy.

  ‘Not in the least. One wouldn’t expect it in so dedicated a man. And for my own part I can defend it only as a hobby – a foible, indeed. Not that certain significant side-lights are not thrown by it upon the former mores of the college. Take books, for example. Of course they are not my province. But Thomas Penwarden, your excellent librarian, has made some curious investigations there. Until recent times – for all such matters are reformed nowadays, are they not – books, often of considerable value, would disappear from the college library to the enriching of the private collections of the resident fellows. And Penwarden has come upon instances in which these men actually had the effrontery to bequeath such volumes to the college in wills of the most pious and edifying sort. And, as with books, so often with miscellaneous chattels which were in law the property of the society. Fellows would borrow them for the adornment of their chambers, perhaps, and later they would drift around the place, with any certainty as to their true provenance having passed out of mind. What you see around you – college treasures: you will recall the old joke – may include what was private property long ago, although the only practical course is to view it as in corporate possession at the present time. Incidentally, I have been through most of the lumber-rooms around the place by now. One never can tell, after all, what may turn up.’ As he said this, Burnside glanced round him with complacency. Do you know, Mr Pattullo? I have sometimes indulged a thought about my own will. It would beg the college to let my remains be preserved in pickle in this room. The cost of a memorial would thus, at least, be obviated. You will recall the verger’s version of Wren’s epitaph: If you ask for bis Monument, Sir- come-spy-see!’

  I felt that Dr Burnside had probably made this joke before, but if I was less amused by it than he was, the reason lay in my again experiencing as I looked around me more than a hint of the deja vu illusion. As a consequence, the question I now asked came naturally enough.

  ‘What about the college tower – has any of the space up there been used for lumber?’

  ‘God bless my soul!’ As he made use of this extremely violent expression the co
llege archivist sprang to his feet. ‘Would you credit it? I never thought of that! My dear sir, shall we hasten there now?’

  ‘I’ve been told it isn’t very well lit at night.’ This came from me with perhaps excessive promptitude. It was no time since I had paid a ghostly visit to the tower with Thomas Hardy and my former wife, and a further and corporeal ascent with Dr Burnside seemed otiose. Moreover, it was time to conclude my call, which had only been defensible if somewhat formally conceived. So I took my leave, explaining that I lived at the bottom of the staircase, and so had the hope that Dr Burnside might drop in on me one day as he went about his occasions. Burnside found some civil expression which fell short of a positive commitment to any such detour. Like Janet’s husband, Ranald McKechnie, he was capable of enjoying human contact when it came at him, but unprompted to take any initiative that way.

  The miraging-up of the tower during this encounter had at least put me in mind of the night’s final business. There was no difficulty in getting Tony. Being out of ministerial office, he was now more frequently at home.

  ‘Tony? It’s Duncan. How are you?’

  ‘How am I! Are you sure your call is really necessary?’

  ‘Don’t be disagreeable. How are you?’

  ‘Fine. I believe that’s what one says.’

  ‘How is Ivo?’

  ‘Fine. So now you can ring off.’

  ‘Not for just a moment.’ Rather surprisingly, I couldn’t tell whether Tony was in a bad temper or being funny; conceivably he was both. ‘Tell me a bit more.’

  ‘Very well. Ivo’s bought an Aston Martin.’

  ‘Good Lord! On Dad?’

  ‘You must be joking. On his grandfather, of course. The old ruffian gave him an enormous sum of money to celebrate that thoroughly poor show the brat was turned out for.’

  ‘I see.’ Tony habitually (and justly) referred to his father in opprobrious terms, although I believed him to retain some perfectly proper filial feeling also. ‘Well, an Aston Martin’s quite something. Give Ivo my best wishes.’