‘Yes, indeed,’ Burnside said. ‘Whatever we are bidden to believe about the intercession of the saints, Edward, I have myself frequently found an application to St Anthony of marked psychological efficacy. I suddenly remember where I have vexatiously mislaid something. However, the Piero is another matter. For the moment, it seems, it has departed even as it came. Out of nowhere and back again. It is almost an allegory of human life.’
This view of the matter, although interesting and even edifying, made no present appeal to the Provost, and he now turned to me.
‘Duncan, you are quite right. The Piero, somewhere or other, is in human hands—’
‘Unless,’ I said, ‘St Anthony has sent it miraculously flying through the air and dumped it in Borgo San Sepolcro, like the House of the Virgin at Loreto.’
“No doubt that is one of the improbabilities not to be excluded out of hand. But if we stick to human agency, somebody has possessed himself of it. And, if it isn’t theft, the onus is upon that somebody to prove the fact. Yes, we are entirely at one. Only, circumspection is required, as I have said. Christian, I am sure you agree with us?’
‘Oh, yes—indeed.’ Burnside offered this concurring judgement absently, as if thinking of something else. ‘But perhaps not quite from nowhere,’ he said. It is premature even to be hopeful. But a promising line of investigation has undoubtedly appeared.’
‘On what has happened to the thing?’ The Provost hadn’t quite followed. “Where it’s to be found?’
‘No, no. But, what is equally interesting, where it came from.’
‘That,’ I said, ‘would certainly be very interesting indeed. But, in the present state of the case, not exactly useful.’
‘Unless,’ the Provost emended, ‘there is some relationship between where it came from and where it went. As there is, I believe, in the case of human life, Christian. But let us abandon speculation. Are we to understand that you have something positive to report about the provenance of the Piero?’
‘Far from that. But there is one small clue – for it may be that – to which my attention has been drawn, very kindly, by Gregory Wyborn. As you know, he takes a keen interest in the college archives. But what he has pointed to, in this instance, is simply an interesting provision in our present Statutes.’
I am not sure that, at this juncture, I didn’t feel an impulse, like Dr Johnson on some similar occasion, to remove my mind and think of Tom Thumb. From Bedworth I’d had the college Statutes once already that day.
‘With these as with other matters indifferent it shall be as heretofore.’ Burnside enunciated this declaratory statement with considerable pleasure; it was evident that to him the language of Statutes was entirely agreeable. “The context makes it clear that this includes the disposition of various chattels deemed too inconsiderable to be reiterated in a detailed way.’
‘And among such inconsiderable chattels,’ I said, ‘there might be included a major painting by Piero della Francesca?’
‘Just so, Pattullo, just so. The significance of such things changes with the centuries. And I don’t suppose, you know, that the Piero came to us along with Bernini’s fountain. Indeed, I think it must have been a pre-Reformation acquisition.’
‘And later judged to be an object of false devotion,’ the Provost said, with a detectably sarcastic intonation he didn’t often use. ‘Really, Christian, this seems a tenuous clue – if clue it can be called.’
‘There, alas, I agree with you. Still, it is worth following up. Only, it may take some time. Many of our minor documents, as you know, are still sadly uncalendered. I do my best, but progress is necessarily slow.’
‘My dear fellow, your labours are as of Hercules, and most deeply appreciated.’ The Provost came out very promptly with this, and as he did so got to his feet. ‘And now I have one of those detestable teatime committees. Shall we go back? A longer walk and talk would have been delightful on so pleasant an afternoon.’
We strolled back to college, discussing other matters. I felt that Edward Pococke had admirably masked a certain impatience with the mole-like enthusiasms of our indefatigable archivist.
XX
The seventh and penultimate week of full term had arrived with no news of the missing picture. The police cars had followed the security van into retirement and with the same implication of dubious efficacy in coping with crime. But as the police had not been told of the Piero’s existence until after it had vanished, and thus bore no responsibility at all should it be judged to have been inadequately guarded, they were not disposed to apologise for themselves. The Provost professed to be on excellent terms with the Chief Constable and other of their top brass. Several ‘leads’, it appeared, were still being followed up, and at any time something might ‘surface’ in a useful manner. It was thought that the Provost or some other college authority might soon receive demands for ransom money. Various contingency plans were drawn up to cope with this according to whatever channel of communication the thieves chose to adopt.
The behaviour of my colleagues during this stage of the affair on the whole vindicated my own sense of the matter as I had expressed it to Bedworth. At first, there was a good deal of talk about the enormity of carelessly letting something like half a million pounds (far from an exaggerated figure) depart down the drain, and there may even have been among some a sense that heads ought to roll. Yet a certain unreality attended the whole brief history of the Madonna in our midst. It wasn’t our sort of thing; we could associate it with none of our customary preoccupations; we disliked both the amusement and the commiseration of our friends in other colleges – as also the impertinent intrusions of journalists and similar impossible persons. Moderate regret and underlying unconcern established itself as our public stance, and when we spoke of the financial aspect of the theft, it was with an air of decently dissimulating the fact that it didn’t mean much to us. Quine (who was secretly appalled) was reported as having taken this line when dining in New College, throwing up his hands in a theatrical despair and asserting so vehemently that we should all be finding ourselves on the bread-line, that everybody gained the impression that we had never as a society been so disgustingly affluent throughout the many centuries of our corporate existence. Quine was much commended among us on the strength of this primitive guile. We felt it would have done credit to Arnold Lempriere himself in Washington DC. It almost looked as if, when Michaelmas Term came round, the whole episode would be as forgotten as a last year’s detective story.
Lempriere on the few occasions he spoke about the thing professed to believe that the picture had been an ingenious fake anyway, and that if cleaned, it would reveal itself as having been executed on top of a representation of Queen Victoria presenting a Bible to a black man as the True Secret of England’s Greatness. I found this witticism hard to take – a masterpiece by one of the world’s supreme painters being no fit subject for escapes of donnish fun. When I expressed this opinion to Lempriere rather late one night, he was delighted with me: a response which was a tribute to his sense of our mysterious family relationship. And then one morning, I ran into him under the tower. I had never seen him look so grave, and supposed that he must have fancied himself to hear those fatal sighs and groans from the imperilled structure above our heads.
‘Dunkie,’ he said abruptly, ‘there’s a very serious situation in college, very serious indeed. Say nothing to anybody, but come to luncheon in my rooms tomorrow.’
‘I have an engagement, I’m afraid.’
‘Cancel it. One o’clock.’
‘Can’t you tell me now what the trouble is?’
‘Very well—since it will certainly persuade you to turn up.’ Lempriere looked about him cautiously, and his hand went up to the side of his mouth. ‘Two of our young men have quarrelled—bitterly, it seems. There’s even talk of their fighting a duel.’
‘Arnold, what nonsense!’ I was distressed by this exhibition of my kinsman’s advancing senility.
‘Nothing
of the kind. It does happen, you know, from time to time. On Port Meadow. I was once a second in such an affair myself.’
‘Then it must have been when Queen Victoria was still handing out Bibles to blacks.’
‘Don’t be a fool.’ My joke hadn’t been a success. ‘But it oughtn’t to happen between boys in the same college. That’s bad, very bad indeed.’ It was now clear that Lempriere felt the monstrousness of this supposed situation keenly. ‘Brothers, too. It must be stopped.’
‘Certainly it must. But—’
‘Twins, at that.’
‘Twins ?’ I felt a real chill. ‘In heaven’s name what are you talking about?’
‘Two of our men called Mark and Matthew Sheldrake. Nice lads, they tell me.’
‘And just what have they quarrelled about?’ This was something I didn’t need to ask. I knew.
‘About going with a woman.’ Lempriere named this not unusual activity as if it represented an ultimate in human depravity. I was reminded of my boyhood’s friend Colonel Morrison, whom I have recorded as having, in morbidly anxious moments, employed the identical words in a warning manner.
‘What are you going to do about it?’ I asked. ‘Tell them they mustn’t?’
‘Mustn’t what?’
‘Go with women.’
‘That might be misconstrued.’ Lempriere managed a throaty chuckle, although it was evident that he wasn’t feeling jocular. ‘They mustn’t quarrel over a bit of skirt. My father used to say that was a rule. He was in a damned good regiment, you know.’
‘I’m sure he was.’ This military background of Lempriere’s was news to me. ‘And you’re going to prevent it, Arnold?’
‘Of course I am.’
‘But just how?’ A quick fire of questions was for the moment my only means of going on talking – which was what I had to do while trying to collect myself in face of this fresh complication in my revived life with Penny.
‘I’ve told you. I’ve asked them to lunch with me.’
‘You haven’t told me that, as a matter of fact. And do you know the Sheldrakes?’
‘Never set eyes on them.’ Lempriere chuckled again, and with complete innocence. ‘Or barely.’
I nearly said (prompted, I suppose, by this last word), ‘They must have been a marvellous sight in a school swimming-pool.’ But this facetious grossness was spared me. Instead, I asked another rational question.
‘But you feel it’s all right to summon them?’
‘To invite them, you mean. Of course.’
I knew that this was an article of faith with Lempriere. As the most senior of senior members now in college, he considered such invitations out of the blue as a command, and had thus bewildered and alarmed innumerable young men in his time. He liked young men. He understood them very well through intuitive processes I envied him; and as often as not, I didn’t doubt, he was as useful to them as he was terrifying. If he was at times a little too curious about their privacies, it was reported that he would always shut up if they told him to. But none of this was relevant to the present formidable situation.
‘And you’re inviting me too?’ I asked. ‘Just why?’
‘Dunkie, you know very well just why.’
‘Who told you?’
‘Our kinswoman in common, Anthea Gender. She had it from a woman called Fire-escape, or some such.’
‘Mrs Firebrace. Penny’s staying with her. Making her a base for operations, so to speak. And what good am I going to be? Serve as an awful warning?’
‘You’re an interested party.’
‘I’m nothing of the kind. I’d only serve enormously to embarrass these young men. Enormously embarrass them yet further.’
‘That may be good for them.’
‘I’ve no ambitions as a do-gooder, Arnold. None at all.’
‘Not true, Dunkie. You’d do a lot to get these decent boys away from the lady. So will you come?’
‘Yes, I’ll come.’
‘As I said, one o’clock.’
And Arnold Lempriere walked away. Or tottered away. He was now never without his stick, even within the walls of the college. He did, I felt, have the power of hanging on, and was determined that, if he could help it, no unforgivable thing should happen among us. I didn’t for a moment believe in the threatened duel on Port Meadow. That was a typical piece of undergraduate embroidery upon an observed situation. But it was true that the situation itself appalled me. The essence of Penny’s present ploy was now clear, and it shocked me more than the simple if depraved sexualities I had at times been compulsively visualising. These had been summed up in a word I had heard from Nick Junkin. Tripling. Penny Triplett tripling. But the cardinal point about Penny was that she was more malicious (or mischievous, if one was to be over-charitable) than lecherous. The Frediano episode instanced this. What had taken place on the sun-deck of the Ithaca had been much more for the fun of humiliating Tindale than of fornicating with a personable fisher-lad. That was what I had been unable to think of forgiving and forgetting. Cats mustn’t be judged deliberately cruel to mice. But then cats aren’t human beings. And there were kinds of cruelty which Penny’s imagination found irresistible.
My own imagination didn’t stretch to the Sheldrakes in their present situation. The fact of their having quarrelled I had to admit; it had peeped out through much theatrical nonsense when Cosroe confronted Mycetes. But could it conceivably amount to anything justifying an old gentleman’s shoving in an oar – and an unknown old gentleman at that? I didn’t know. I ought to know about brothers, since I had a brother of my own. I had been jealous of Ninian’s precocious sexual successes, but we had never in any sense been rivals. I had no more tried to steal his mistresses (if they were to be called that) than he had dreamed of casting an eye on Janet. It wasn’t to be doubted that in endless families brothers quarrelled bitterly over girls. But surely, although this was perhaps an irrational thought, twins were a special case? I knew nothing about twins, about the psychology of twins. I had a dim impression that studies of animal behaviour showed that among twins there was always a dominant partner. Did Mark dominate Matthew, or Matthew Mark? If so, it was certainly something that didn’t appear in the comportment of the brothers.
Or did it? I realised that I was judging only on the strength of a most superficial view. In Matthew’s case, it was literally a view, since I’d never so much as spoken to him. And with Mark I’d had no more than those casual chats, standing in a doorway. My sense that they were ‘nice’ lads, agreeably reserved, sexually virginal and fastidious in disposition if not in common schoolboy history: my sense of this – which I called instinctive – was really no more than a function of their extreme good-looks. All that fair is, is bj nature good. Once again it was no more than that. If Matthew had a squint, and Mark a heavy and unsightly jowl, it would never occur to me that I had an insight into the ‘niceness’ of their underlying feelings.
I told myself, on a solitary walk to Godstow that afternoon, that the fact of these boys’ having got tangled with my ex-wife didn’t make them any business of mine, and that equally they were no business of Lempriere’s. But this way of thinking didn’t work. Lempriere mightn’t be in the picture, but I was. My mind went back to the moment when I had discovered Penny to be in communication with Mark Sheldrake. Just because it had been an awkward moment, I had, with a fatuous conventionality, told Mark that he would find my former wife charming and entertaining. I ought to have told him nothing of the kind, and then cultivated his acquaintance so as to be in a position to say something quite different at need. And this must be what Lempriere was designing I should do now. I judged it unlikely that he hadn’t given careful thought to his luncheon party.
‘I’m Matthew Sheldrake.’
Standing in Lempriere’s doorway, Matthew Sheldrake made this announcement with a faint implication that it ought to occasion surprise, produce explanations. When I had asked Ivo to lunch with me (with the fond thought of chatting him up or dressing him dow
n) he had appeared in my doorway and said ‘I’m Ivo Mumford’ more or less in the same fashion. But not quite. Ivo had simply been defiant in a wary way. Matthew was conveying a sense that here was a situation in need of a little elucidating. All that fair is, is by nature thick. This cynical perversion of the Platonic view was another dubious truth. Matthew Sheldrake wasn’t without brains, and this presumably went too for his brother. Junkin was probably right about them.
‘You must take after your mother,’ Lempriere said. ‘How do you do?’
For a moment I found myself supposing Lempriere to have asserted that Matthew’s charms were of an effeminate order; then I realised that he was simply saying he had known Matthew’s father. Lempriere hadn’t mentioned anything of the kind to me. But it was quite probable that the senior Sheldrake had been his pupil, and that the Sheldrake family sent their sons to the college as a matter of course.
Matthew said ‘How do you do, sir?’ and for a moment nothing more. There was no reason to suppose that he cared for comment on his personal appearance as an opening conversational gambit on the part of a more or less unknown old man. But chiefly he was engaged in glancing at me and taking me in. As he did so, he flushed faintly, precisely as his brother had done when first realising that here was Penny’s former husband.
‘I expect you’ve met Mr Pattullo,’ Lempriere said, casually. ‘He’s a kind of freshman too in his way, although they tell me he was around the place long ago.’
‘How do you do, sir?’
Matthew said this instantly, and waited alertly to be shaken hands with. We achieved this formality.
‘I’ve got to know your brother,’ I said, ‘since he came over to Surrey Four.’
‘I’m high up in Howard. There’s a perfectly splendid view.’
‘Of open country, and not of the dreaming spires? That’s most satisfactory.’ I said this while wondering if it was deliberately that Matthew hadn’t responded directly to my mention of Mark. I also wondered when Mark was going to arrive, and why the brothers hadn’t turned up together. To this second question I got an answer at once.
The Madonna of the Astrolabe Page 28
