The Madonna of the Astrolabe

by J. I. M. Stewart

  ‘Do you all swim about together?’ I asked.

  ‘Distinctly not. There’s even, you know, an acknowledgement that anything other than a civil minimum of hospitality is a distraction. That must come hard to the American mind. Its instinct is to be magnificently hospitable.’

  ‘So it is.’ It hadn’t sounded as if McKechnie had been offering a wholly commendatory remark. ‘So just how are you accommodated?’

  ‘We have a villa, a substantially isolated villa. Or say retired. A retired villa, with absolutely everything laid on. And everybody things twice before coming near us.’

  ‘And you think all the time?’ I just saved myself from going on ‘And Janet thinks all the time too?’ The easiness between McKechnie and myself, I had to reflect, was a stream which, like the Cherwell, occasionally threatened sudden snags.

  There were no snags about the picnic; whatever its original inspiration, it went forward blamelessly and agreeably. The presence of the Bedworth children lent it, if delusively, something of the air of a family outing. It was the McKechnies who chiefly occupied themselves with Johnnie and Virginia: Janet in seeing that they were suitably fed, and Ranald in amusing them through a variety of surprising small accomplishments such as making flat stones hop across the river and producing unnerving noises by blowing through blades of grass. These activities, I had to tell myself, represented yet another unsuspected facet of his personality exposing itself.

  ‘Ranald,’ I said to Janet as I went round with the wine, ‘would have been a much more useful man than I was at Johnnie’s birthday party – which I went to some weeks ago. Look what he’s up to now.’ What McKechnie was up to was bringing into being a bow and arrows. The bow was quite a stout affair, and for a bow-string, he had boldly filched from the punt a length of nylon cord designed for mooring it.

  ‘It looks like the real thing,’ Janet said, a shade apprehensively. ‘And what’s he doing with that penknife?’

  ‘He’s making arrows – notching them at one end and getting them distinctly pointed at the other.’

  ‘Oh, dear!’ Janet was as perturbed as if anything that her husband put his hand to were liable to turn distinctly lethal – as, indeed, I knew that mechanical contrivances, at least, were apt to do. But at once she laughed at her own anxiety. ‘Dunkie, I can rely on you to restrain him if he decides to play at William Tell, or something like that. But why aren’t you useful at a birthday party? You like children, don’t you?’

  ‘I’d like to, but it doesn’t always seem to come off. The young appeal to me – I’ve been becoming increasingly aware of that – but my interest seems to stop short of juveniles.’

  ‘I’m glad you like younger people,’ Janet said gravely – and I thought that for the first time her glance went meaningfully to Fiona and paused there for a moment. ‘There are people who seem only to be irritated by their juniors, and jealous of them. That would be a horrid fate.’

  ‘Yes, I agree.’ I wanted to say ‘But nobody appeals to me like you’. Only that was a kind of speech I made sparingly to Janet. So I left the next remark to her.

  ‘Of course one needn’t be undiscriminating,’ she said. ‘One needn’t adore absolutely everybody in an age bracket. Or even like them. When Ranald was a college tutor and his pupils came around, I liked nearly all of them very much. But there were one or two who just wouldn’t do. I definitely had an instinct that way. And there are times when one has to be quite positive – don’t you think, Dunkie? – on the strength of instinct alone.’

  ‘Bang!’

  This had been a shout from Johnnie, and its effect was to disrupt our conversation. We both glanced up, and as we did so, there came a second shout – this time a warning one from McKechnie. McKechnie had fired his first arrow; Johnnie, being a modern child unable to conceive of propulsion without explosion, had offered his familiar bomb-noise; and in the same moment McKechnie had become aware of the unfortunate circumstance that his arrow, although travelling well, was doing so in the direction of somebody who had suddenly appeared on the field path bordering the river. McKechnie’s shout brought this person abruptly to a halt – but not before he had been conscious of the arrow as passing uncomfortably close to his ear.

  The person thus menaced was our Pastoral Fellow, Dr Wyborn. His bobbing up here was not without surprise. But he was very much the man, when one thought of it, to indulge himself in old-fashioned solitary rambles in Oxfordshire. His identity had become plain to McKechnie as soon as to myself, and McKechnie had now dropped his bow and was running forward in a somewhat ungainly fashion and with a very proper apologetic intent. As I watched this, I was comically reminded of a not dissimilar spectacle many years before. But that had been on a golf course, and Cyril Bedworth had actually winged the Provost.

  McKechnie’s shot had fortunately produced only a near miss.

  It wasn’t socially possible for Wyborn, thus happily spared, simply to walk on. He had to pass the time of day with us, and be introduced to Fiona and Miss Mountain; indeed, to have the junior Bedworths presented to him as well. He was an ascetic-looking man – more likely, I supposed, to consent to being comforted with apples than stayed with flagons. I offered him some of our wine, nevertheless. He accepted it, and even consented to sit down on a rug – perhaps judging it indecorous to consume such refreshment standing, as if in an invisible public bar. He was probably more alarmed at suddenly finding himself in predominantly female company than he had been by his equally abrupt encounter with the arrow that flieth by day. But he was a formally courteous person (when not denouncing the darkened state of men’s minds), who felt obliged to stay put until adequate civilities had been exchanged. These were participated in by Miss Mountain to the extent of her advancing upon him and proffering a slice of what had been generally voted an uncommonly good cold pie. She appeared to take an interest in Wyborn – as if he were himself an out-of-the-way pie affording something promising to bite on. Although, as she had once asserted, the untoward situations in her fiction might be gleaned from newspapers, it was to be presumed that her sense of human character came to her in the main unmediated from real life. So she had perhaps discerned something promising in Wyborn. (I had no feeling that she had ever done so in me.)

  Wyborn declined pie; he had, he explained, consumed a sandwich shortly before. As he gave us this information, he surveyed the remains of our picnic with what appeared to be a censorious eye. This was uncomfortable. Partly because I was unused to purveying such things, and partly because I had facetiously borne in mind the standards obtaining at the Fat Boy’s Dingley Dell, my arrangements had been on the lavish side. Wyborn now intimated his consciousness of this clearly enough.

  ‘Had the day not been so enticing,’ he said, ‘it was my intention to attend the Starvation Lunch.’

  ‘What is that, Dr Wyborn?’ Janet asked.

  ‘A misnomer, I fear. It consists of soup and bread – and I am uncertain whether there may not be cheese as well. But the dramatic terminology no doubt appeals to undergraduates, and the root idea is meritorious. They pay so many pence for what they think of as a frugal meal, and give what they might have paid in excess of that for the relief of famine in Bangladesh.’

  ‘One has to hope,’ McKechnie said, ‘that what the money buys gets to those it is intended for. A great deal of corruption thrives, I have been told, on these good intentions.’

  ‘We must not let that daunt us, my dear Professor.’

  ‘No, indeed!’ McKechnie was horrified at being thus charged with introducing a Laodicean note into the discussion. ‘One can barely think of a meaner form of theft.’

  ‘Quite so. And there can seldom have been an age’— Wyborn was now addressing the company at large—’in which the works of corporal mercy were more urgently required of Christians. All seven of them. Feeding the hungry. Giving drink to the thirsty. Clothing the naked. Visiting and ransoming the captives. Harbouring the harbourless. Visiting the sick. Burying the dead. Yes, even that last – and
in more regions of the earth than one.’

  This stiff homily, although perhaps unseasonable, was undeniably impressive. The Bedworth children were round- eyed, and I suppose the rest of us wondered who was going to speak first. Wyborn came to our rescue by continuing to speak himself.

  ‘How to give of our superfluities,’ he said, ‘is a large question, indeed. And I have been minded to speak to you both’—he clearly meant McKechnie and myself—’about what may be an urgent issue of the kind. It is being said – although only, it may be, as rumour – that the college may receive some very large benefaction in the immediate future. Do you know anything of that?’

  McKechnie looked blank, and for the moment I decided to look blank too. News of the Blunderville gold had, after all, got abroad – but belatedly, and when it was already water under the bridge. Seeing that neither of us had anything to say, and disregarding the fact that the ladies were being relegated to the role of a passive auditory, Wyborn pursued his theme.

  ‘If it be indeed so, I see a grave danger that wealth for which some pious and fruitful application might be found will be squandered upon the repair – almost the re-edification, it would seem – of the college tower. To me – and you will recall that I have addressed the Governing Body on this – it is far from self-apparent that a tower, and a merely secular tower at that, should enjoy the sort of priority that some would appear to propose. I most earnestly beg you both to give serious thought to this.’

  ‘It certainly deserves it,’ I said. It seemed to me that Wyborn’s appeal was not of a sort to snub, and that McKechnie would agree with me if he had more than a hazy notion of what was being talked about. ‘But I do know a little, as it happens, about the possible benefaction you mentioned. Unfortunately it’s now entirely off the cards. There isn’t a hope of it. So, as far as I know, the problem of the tower remains exactly where it was.’

  ‘And so does the tower itself,’ Wyborn got to his feet, with the air of a man who has said his say. ‘The whole thing may well be a foolish scare.’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ I said. ‘The danger is real enough – whatever we’re to do about it.’

  ‘It may be so.’ Suddenly Wyborn had produced a handkerchief, and dabbed his nose with it as appeared to be his habit in moments of perturbation. ‘But towers may be opprobrious things, Pattullo. Not infrequently have they been associated with idolatry and overweening pride. Proud towers to swift destruction doomed. A powerful line, which lingers in the mind.’

  With these words, followed by correct but abrupt farewells, Wyborn went on his way. Fiona began pouring coffee from a thermos, and after a minute, it was Janet who spoke.

  ‘Oxford colleges really are rather odd places,’ she said. ‘I didn’t know what to make of that at all. Except that he’s somebody who means what he says. And that he’s not mad.’

  ‘That last bit was north-north-west mad.’ Fiona produced sugar. ‘But I’d agree, not more than that. And Oxford’s full of madmen when the wind’s in that quarter.’

  Milton from Wyborn, I thought, and Shakespeare from Fiona. Oxford was also full of persons whose minds inclined to slip into literary grooves. But it was Virginia Bedworth who, for the moment, had the last word on our untoward visitor.

  ‘Angry man,’ Virginia said.

  I took the punt down-stream without mishap, although it was an exercise demanding care. The afternoon remained sunny, and as we drew nearer to Oxford, it became apparent that this had drawn numerous pleasure seekers to the river. Many of those handling one sort of craft or another were a good deal less expert than I was. With elderly disapproval I marked what appeared to be an increased incidence, as compared with former years, of young people disposed to regard these aquatic exercises as a lark rather than a modest display of athletic prowess. This sentiment made me all the more anxious not to tumble into the Cherwell. I steered – as well as shoved – with care.

  I still contrived some awareness, however, of the natural scene, and even of what, in the muted fashion possible upon so unremarkable a voyage, might be called landmarks. The momentary glimpse of a distant spire, small boat houses and abandoned landing-stages, narrow rills and dubiously navigable backwaters: all these were capable of making a call upon the memory. Was it here that Tony had stripped and dived for what he declared would be pearl oysters – or it might have been dead men’s bones? Was it there that Johnnie’s father had most inadvertently played Leda to a swan? There had been names, facetiously concocted, for unremarkable inlets and sluggish little tributaries. Was it, for example, Fornication Creek that we were now approaching? Did people still call it that? And hadn’t we, more familiarly, said Fornicaggers? Did such weird locutions any longer obtain?

  These questionings may have made me briefly inattentive to my business. From behind a tiny islet, another punt had suddenly appeared, powerfully propelled by a tall and fair youth in its stern. On the minute decked prow (as Oxford, but not Cambridge, regards it) sat just such another youth, idly dabbling a hand in water. These were the Sheldrake brothers, Mark and Matthew. Between them, amply cushioned in the middle of the craft, Penny reclined. She was a striking figure – and not all that more mature, after all, than Cleopatra when she sailed down Cydnus.

  My mind had paused to achieve all these identifications before registering the fact that we were on a collision course. But I knew how to use my pole as a rudder, heaving it in a wide arc through the sluggishly resistant stream. Mark (for it was he who was the handsome Palinurus of the other vessel) did the same, more swiftly and to more saving effect As a result, the two punts glided harmlessly past each other, although with only inches between them. Matthew didn’t know me; Mark had time for a brief and perhaps embarrassed grin; Penny looked at me unsmilingly but with slightly parted lips. And then an impact of sorts did take place, although not of a physical kind. It was a near-hallucination, indeed: a species of false recognition so instantaneous and momentary as to be hard to describe. Mark had glanced backwards to assure himself that all was well, and I had done the same. Our eyes met. It was a point at which the river was overhung by trees in their first abundant leaf, and in the brilliant sunshine, odd touches of chiaroscuro were at play. Now it was as if, in quest of some clever dramatic effect, for a photographic image on a flickering screen there had abruptly been substituted its negative. And dramatic this present effect was – although the drama was entirely confined within my own head. For an instant the fair Mark Sheldrake vanished and in his place stood another young demi-god in the person of a dark-skinned Italian boy. Frediano was his name, and he had been quite as much in Penny’s picture as either or both of the Sheldrakes was ever likely to be. And between Mark’s extreme good looks and Frediano’s there was surely a real resemblance – masked, it might be said, by pigmentation only.

  So now did I know why, at that first encounter with the English youth outside my rooms in Surrey – rooms once tenanted by Henry Tindale, the White Rabbit – I had been visited by an unease I had largely failed to identify? The moment, and this strange question, passed even as I shoved my punt pole once more into the opaque and torpid Cherwell. But it was not before I had seemed to hear an Italian voice.

  ‘Come son’ crudele, le donne!’ Frediano had said, cynically yet sadly, winding up his sense of the affair.

  XII

  Thirty or thereabouts seems to be the age at which most men conclude themselves to have outlived the phase of absolute youth. Women, although they are to cling much longer to the idea of being short of ‘middle age’, already have misgivings at twenty-five. The men start doing exercises even although they still play games, and on the women’s dressing-tables familiar cosmetics designed for the immediate enhancement of beauty are supplemented by others supposed to own some preservative virtue. These are objective signs but the whole business is entirely subjective, no doubt. At eighteen, and during my first year at Oxford, youths senior to me by no more than three or four years seemed to have attained a phase of adulthood entirely remote fro
m my own. I never questioned this. My friend Martin Fish, standing as he did at about that chronological remove from me, appeared grownup as I was not – and this even although his misadventure in love (of which chance had made me so close an observer) was of a kind belonging still with the hazards of immaturity. And in my final year in college, I shared with nearly all my contemporaries a sense that the freshmen were so absurdly childish that it was embarrassing merely to be in the same pub with them. Yet we hadn’t, at that period, developed any uneasy sense that age was creeping up on us: or, if we did, it was only within the narrow context of looming jobs and careers. Milton, indeed, on his twenty-second birthday saw Time as a subtle thief already at work on him. But life was shorter and men more precocious in the early seventeenth century.

  Intellectually, I counted as moderately precocious myself. In a merely public way, that is, and on the strength of delusive early success in the theatre. This persuaded me that I had matured all round, yet I still felt wholly young. I married Penny feeling that way – the persuasion not being at all impaired by a sense that I had achieved this union at a dogged long last. It was a sense supported by the calendar, almost a decade having passed since our first meeting at Mrs Pococke’s dinner-party. Yet the man who married Penny was still the boy whose muddled head had then cast her in the role of life-line for the shipwrecked Fish. The calendar again shows only three years as passing between our marriage and my turning thirty. The period has a much longer feel – being subject to the law that, in retrospections, the decades and the lustres here stretch and there contract in the manner of a telescope or a lazy-tongs. Certainly at the end of it, I was no longer blissfully young. Thirty was to stand out for me as the ‘grim promontory’ that I seem to recall forty as somewhere so named by Henry James.

  Penny owned a liking for places which nobody had ever been to. By this she didn’t mean the remoter stretches of the Sahara or the Gobi or the Tarim Basin – localities familiarly known only to intrepid explorers like my contemporary Gavin Mogridge. The entire Australian continent would have come within the terms of her description as certainly as the Victoria Desert or the Nullarbor Plain. ‘Nobody’ meant ‘nobody one is likely to meet at a party’. For there was an element of what had lately been dubbed one-upmanship in Penny’s notions of travel, and it was what took us to Calabria for our honeymoon. Nobody had ever been to Calabria – except, of course, Norman Douglas. It might be possible, Penny thought, to contact this legendary figure in the guise of pilgrims seeking guidance on the region. Unfortunately he proved recently dead.