The Madonna of the Astrolabe

by J. I. M. Stewart

  We found ourselves hanging back, and then encouraging Seashore to enter the chamber first, since a further glance had revealed that its contents – which were abundant – seemed very much his sort of thing. My eye fell on a stone image of the Virgin and Child, with both the heads knocked off, and behind this was a splintered wooden affair – still perhaps utilisable as firewood – which looked as if it might have been a small triptych from an altar.

  “We seem to be confronted,’ the Provost said with careful want of emotion, ‘with certain evidences of the Reformation in England. Or perhaps of a zealous afternoon’s work in Commonwealth times. Some of these ruined things were probably very beautiful. But they were condemned as what were called objects of false devotion. This is a dark day for us, I sadly fear. Seashore, I wonder whether I am right about those slabs of plaster against which the crucifix is leaning.’

  ‘Yes, indeed. Yes, I fear you are.’ Very gently, Seashore had picked up a fragment of the rubble and examined it. ‘A fresco – or wall-painting of one sort or another – bashed to bits and chucked into this beastly hole. Oh dear, oh dear!’

  ‘Something may be recoverable,’ Burnside said. His voice was shaking. ‘Restoration may not be impossible here and there.’

  ‘We had better make a quick survey,’ the Provost said with authority. Or rather, Seashore, we will leave it entirely to you. Please take this torch.’

  We stood in our huddled group, and Seashore poked around. The air was close but dry, and we were conscious that from somewhere a faint daylight filtered through the place. Only the torch, however, lit anything securely, and as Seashore worked his way to the far end of the chamber he became himself a mere silhouette.

  ‘Interesting,’ he said. ‘Interesting but sad.’ His weary manner was returning to him. ‘Dear me, here at the back are some paintings, I do believe. A small stack of them. Panels mostly, but one or two canvases as well.’ He was silent for some moments, and I shifted ground in an attempt to see what was going on. Seashore was tipping over and examining a number of rectangular shadowy objects one by one – not very enthusiastically, but rather with a kind of polite diffidence, as if here, tilted against a studio wall, were the accumulated labours of some not too successful artist, awaiting purchasers who didn’t come. I glimpsed him reaching the last, and pausing over it fractionally longer than over the others. ‘I fear,’ he said, as he set each of the dim appearances to rest again one upon the other, ‘that we have uncovered stuff of no more than curious interest. And the good Provost Pagden has eluded us to the last. Provost, I think we had best withdraw. Later, an inventory must no doubt be attempted. But there is nothing more to do now.’

  We edged out of the place – subdued, and more than physically uncomfortable. I myself had the fleeting thought – but it was certainly unjustified – that our expedition had been an irresponsible buffoonery occasioned by the Provost’s not particularly abundant wine. From the mouldered cross, the thorn-crowned head regarded us wrong way up. We pushed through the door. Seashore closed it, managed to turn the key and extract it from the lock. He handed it silently to the Provost, who accepted it without a word. We filed back through the farther door and into the lodge. Ullage, clothes-brush in hand, received us as if we had been up to no good.

  We parted in the Great Quadrangle, without saying much, but Seashore accompanied the Provost towards the Lodging. As I made my way to Surrey, I saw them come to a halt by Bernini’s fountain. Perhaps, I thought, Seashore had some appropriate word to say about it, as he had about Pagden’s chunky effigy earlier. But it didn’t look quite like that; there was something intent in the brief conference I was witnessing. Then the Provost made his customary stately bow – it was scarcely to be distinguished from the one he would have made had Seashore been an altar – and the two men parted. I myself walked on, and before reaching my rooms encountered Dr Wyborn. He passed me with no more than his elusive sidelong smile. It occurred to me that he might well have made one at the Provost’s luncheon party, since it had appeared he was accustomed to assist Burnside in his archival labours. Then I recalled that, according to Burnside, Wyborn wasn’t interested in ‘the museum side of the thing’. Moreover he walked by himself. The communal rummaging upon which we had been engaged would not have appealed to him.

  IX

  That evening I was rung up by Tony. Or rather I was rung up by Tony’s secretary and told to hold the line since Lord Marchpayne proposed to speak to me. This uncivil manner of initiating a private conversation used to annoy me precisely, I suppose, as it would have annoyed my Uncle Rory. (Uncle Rory might have taken it from his solicitor or his dentist without much noticing, but from a former cabinet minister would have regarded it as unspeakable insolence.) On this occasion I submitted to the ritual patiently, since I rather expected Tony to use me as a channel of communication with the Provost when any hard news about the Blunderville money came through. This, again, wouldn’t have been Lord Marchpayne’s politest course. But as a politician, he had trained himself in expressing shades of relationship through such devices. And he would never now fail a little to distance Edward Pococke – and this for the bad reason that Edward Pococke was one of those to whom Ivo had behaved with peculiar outrageousness. Politicians are an inveterately unforgiving race: a proclivity only less distressing than the chumminess one may remark in them as they prowl the corridors and haunt the bars of the Palace of Westminster. (The Provost, although – as Tony now acknowledged – something of a professional politician himself, has to be recorded as decently immune from this frailty.)

  ‘Is that you?’ Tony’s voice demanded.

  ‘Yes, it is. My secretary’s on the other line to the Secretary of the Cabinet’s secretary.’

  ‘Don’t be a fool, Dunkie. Can you lunch with me tomorrow at my club?’

  ‘Perhaps I can. Are you going to have anything useful to say?’

  ‘About propping up your tottering pinnacles? Yes, of course. With a bit of luck, that is. Just another part of the Mumford service. Trust your childhood’s friend.’

  ‘Then I’ll come.’ I could tell that Tony was jubilant. He was always at his most insufferable when in high spirits.

  ‘Capital! You know my usual dump. One o’clock. Goodbye.’

  ‘Hold hard, Tony. I want a hint or two now, please. How does the matter stand?’

  ‘Look—I’m fearfully busy. But I’ll tell you this: I’ve got the old maniac where I wanted him. He’s a pro-college man. Just in time. They have their decisive meeting tomorrow morning.’

  ‘He’s backing the college after all?’ I didn’t need telling who the ‘old maniac’ was. ‘I thought you said our best chance was to have him on the other side. Put his fellow- trustees’ backs up.’

  ‘Joke, joke, joke. Not that it isn’t a little complicated. There may be a condition or two.’

  ‘What the devil do you mean?’ There came to me an obscure sense that in this last remark of Tony’s there again lurked joke, joke, joke. ‘Who’s going to make conditions?’

  ‘You’ll see, old boy.’

  ‘Tony, there are limits. One of them is being called “old boy”. I won’t stand for it.’

  ‘Fearfully vulgar, isn’t it? Wouldn’t do in your common room. Comes of my plebeian ancestry and coarse associations. But you’ll see, as I say. All quite harmless. One o’clock.’

  And Tony rang off.

  The Provost proved to be dining, and I wondered whether I ought to tell him what was in the wind. He was, I felt sure, counting the days until the position came clear. There had still been no public disclosure of the state of the tower, and for this reticence he had been responsible. I had little doubt that there was substance in his persuasion that the Blunder ville trustees might be scared off by the notion that their money, if it came to us, would be tumbled straight into stone and mortar – or at least that they might stipulate for its being used in other ways. It was even possible that some leak had occurred, and that Tony’s cryptic talk about condition
s hitched on to this. What seemed to me material was the fact that the college’s keeping mum over any extended period of time about danger to anything so famous as its tower, might become liable to very adverse comment. So I ought not, even for twenty-four hours, to keep mum about anything relevant myself.

  But then I thought of Cedric Mumford, the old maniac. He really was just that. And so consistently was he on record as hostile to the college and all its ways that it seemed extraordinary he should have come round to favouring it. I had no doubt that Tony had played fair, accepting the view that Ivo’s disasters made firm support for the college the only decent family attitude. We had even agreed to call this the Mumfords’ Reply. But I knew little about the degree of influence that Tony might exert over his father. On the occasion of my first encounter with Cedric, Cedric had done as he was told. But so, for that matter, had Tony; both had been knocked over by the circumstances of the moment, which had included the possibility that Ivo was booked for gaol. Since then, I had formed the impression that Cedric Mumford would be a singularly unpersuadable old person. Yet beneath his posturing as a brutal eighteenth-century squire there lay a commonplace Establishment character – a City of London man, more at home with Bulls and Bears than with pheasants and partridges. It was possible that he stood rather in awe of a son who had been an important Minister of the Crown.

  My problem was solved for me when the Provost walked straight out of hall after dinner, which was the custom if a man had some engagement precluding his going into common room for dessert. There, I presently found myself sitting between Bedworth and James Gender, who struck me as suitable people with whom to share my anxieties. But first – and as in honour bound at this convivial hour – I offered them as lively an account as I could manage of the afternoon’s treasure hunt. Since it hadn’t been without its aspects of comedy, this wasn’t difficult.

  ‘But how strange,’ Gender murmured as he pushed a decanter at me, ‘that the place should have been unremarked for so long! One can imagine it’s not being peered into for years on end. But you would seem to have been breaking in upon the solitude of centuries. That really is a most remarkable thing.’

  ‘It can’t have been that,’ Bedworth said. ‘The surveyor’s people can’t have neglected it. Not conceivably, Duncan. It was their business to sound every inch of the old structure.’

  ‘But not to report the presence of a pile or two of old lumber, Cyril.’ Gender had said this after a pause, as if there had here been a legal point which had to be taken (as my brother would have said from his bench) ad avizandum. “But there is the Domus Visitation. There has certainly been a slip up there.’

  ‘What on earth’s that?’ I asked.

  ‘But, Duncan, it’s in the Statutes—the Domus Visitation is.’ Bedworth had answered me, and been unable to suppress a tone of reproach before such culpable ignorance. ‘Stat. XXn, iv, I think. The Governing Body is required to undertake a decennial survey of the whole college. And not by proxy. The Provost and Fellows as a body. They’re directed to peer into everything, including the houses of office, which means the loos.’

  ‘And that makes it not unnatural,’ Gender said, ‘that this aspect of our duties has fallen into desuetude. Do you think, Duncan, that anything of great value has been mouldering away?’

  ‘I wouldn’t know. I didn’t see everything, for one thing. This chap Seashore did most of the poking around. He was suitably distressed, but didn’t seem particularly excited about it all. Burnside was much more agog. I suppose he smelt documents.’

  ‘But didn’t find any?’

  ‘Well, not there and then. Clearly the whole mess must be hunted through.’

  We were silent for a moment, the subject of the debris in the old gate-house having exhausted itself. Gender sipped port, I sipped Sauterne, and Bedworth – abstemious not on principle but from honourable economic considerations connected with school fees to come – munched a walnut. So I turned to my other topic, although I wasn’t confident I ought to do so. Bedworth knew all about the Provost’s hopes of a rich endowment from the trustees of the late Lord Mountclandon, but I was far from clear that Gender did. He was a most senior man, and in an affair likely to have its legal aspects if it came off at all it would be natural to suppose that he had already been consulted. Yet the college was full of strange pockets of secrecy, and the Provost had certainly not been broadcasting his intelligence. But it looked as if there might well be some public announcement on the following day, and I decided to go ahead.

  ‘Jimmy,’ I asked, ‘do you know all about the Mountclandon or Blunderville millions?’

  ‘I know they must exist.’

  ‘Nothing more?’

  ‘Certain suspicions have visited me. Murmurs among Chancery men.’ Gender was himself murmuring in his most diffident fashion. ‘Cyril, you are no doubt well ahead of me?’

  ‘Well, yes—perhaps I am’ Our Senior Tutor was uncomfortable. It so happened—’

  ‘Yes, of course. How convenient that Edward should wear two hats – and both capacious, as befits that massive head. So much can be kept under them. A veritable hive of bees, like the helmet in the poem. A buzz of high policies! Sometimes one imagines one can hear the hum.’

  Bedworth suspended the cracking of a second walnut the better to utter one of his rare laughs. Like many earnest men, he could be delighted by deft nonsense.

  ‘Duncan’s in on this,’ he said, ‘because it’s mixed up with Tony Mumford—and with Tony’s father, that rather difficult old man.’

  ‘Difficult,’ I said, ‘is an uncommonly temperate word.’

  ‘So I’d suppose.’ Gender passed a decanter again. ‘I hope it’s not also mixed up with the young Mumford who had to be sent down?’

  ‘I can’t be quite confident as to that.’ I was surprised to hear myself say this, since it wasn’t an aspect of the matter that had been consciously in my mind. ‘But now Cyril will tell you how a group of gentlemen know as the Blunderville trustees are going to rebuild our tower – or hopefully, at least, as people now say.’

  Thus challenged – and not without a cautious glance round common room – Bedworth explained the situation. He did so with admirable clarity. Gender listened in silence, now and then gently rotating the remaining wine in his glass.

  ‘Fairy gold,’ he murmured, when Bedworth had done.

  ‘You think so?’ I asked, sharply.

  ‘Well, the crock is really there at the end of the rainbow from time to time, I suppose. But all money is pretty scarce these days, wouldn’t you say?’

  This expression might have come from Tony Mumford himself. It spoke of the Gender who went abroad among men of affairs. For those were days in which all such people subscribed to gloom and doom. The Establishment had not been so frightened, I told myself, since the railings went down in Hyde Park and Matthew Arnold, that prince among dons, had gone round crying woe. ‘Tomorrow,’ I said, ‘much may be revealed.’ And I explained about my lunching with Tony.

  ‘We’ll wait most anxiously,’ Bedworth said. And he cracked his second walnut with care.

  Gender and I left the common room together. We walked across the quad and paused by the fountain. The great chub had not yet gone to bed. Against a still luminous night sky – always its best backdrop – the tower stood, austerely beautiful.

  ‘Quite a different thing,’ Gender said, suddenly. ‘It came into my head as I mentioned that young man.’

  ‘Ivo Mumford?’

  “Yes, indeed. It’s about the dead boy’s brother.’

  ‘Peter Lusby?’ I was afraid that, for Gender, Peter Lusby was always going to be ‘the dead boy’s brother’. Paul Lusby’s fate was to continue formidable for him. ‘I hope,’ I added gently, ‘that when Peter comes up it won’t be too much as that that he continues thinking of himself.’

  ‘Duncan, you’re perfectly right. He could too easily be burdened by his sense of mission. I’ll be very careful, I promise you.’

  This was humb
ly said, and I hadn’t the smallest doubt that in Jimmy Gender the younger Lusby was going to be fortunate in his tutor.

  ‘How has Peter cropped up?’ I asked.

  ‘He’s a boy – it was you who discovered it – with a strong religious sense.’

  ‘It’s in the family. His mother is a devout woman.’

  ‘Yes. Well, Peter Lusby has been inquiring about the devotional life of the college. It’s not a common thing. They’re usually anxious to know whether they should bring up sheets and pillow-cases.’

  ‘Mrs Lusby might write in about that.’

  ‘Yes. Well, Peter Lusby has written to Wyborn.’

  ‘How on earth should he know about Wyborn?’

  ‘He may have got hold of a university calendar, seen Wyborn described as our Pastoral Fellow, and decided he was the right man. But I have a notion there may be some other connection.’

  ‘How very odd! I suppose he ought to have written to that young chaplain, who would be pleased, no doubt.’

  ‘Yes, of course. We’re most of us so damned secular, aren’t we? A nest of unbelievers, including myself. You, too, Duncan – if I’m not being impertinent’

  ‘I’m afraid so.’

  ‘It makes me feel uneasy, which I’m sure is wrong. But religious enthusiasm – to put it crudely – can be a hazard in a place like this. Distracting. More so, even, than girl-trouble, or your confounded theatricals.’

  ‘Yes, I know.’ I hope that I, in my turn, spoke with due humility. ‘Was Paul inclined to religious fervour?’