The Madonna of The Astrolabe

I

Happy birthday to you,

Squashed bananas and stew!

You look like a monkey,

Go back to the zoo!

Johnnie Bedworth sang this as lustily as any of his guests. There was no impropriety in his joining in, since none of the juveniles present retained much awareness of the originating occasion of the party. It was doubtful whether even Johnnie’s sister, Virginia did. She was crooning the lines broodingly to herself in a corner, and seemed progressively less well-disposed to the festivity as it became more and more of a romp. Indeed, not so much a romp as a rumpus. But this too was in order. The room was called the rumpus room – although a linguistic purist (such as Cyril Bedworth was) might have been prompted to speak of it rather as the rumpus area. For on the ground floor of the Victorian North Oxford house, several walls had been knocked down and compensating girders inserted – this no doubt at the expense of our college, which owned the property – in the interest of open-plan living. The boundaries between sitting-room, rumpus room, and kitchen having thereby become merely notional, Mabel Bedworth could talk to visitors in the first and keep an eye on her children in the second without interrupting her culinary activities in the third. The rest of the house, three more storeys and a basement, had presumably been remodelled on similar principles. Its original design must have equanimously envisaged the doing to death of three or four domestic servants a year.

It struck me that a philosopher (and Mrs Firebrace, who had brought her three sons, was eminent in the university as that) could not fail to find matter for speculation in what was proving the theme-song of the party. Outrage takes on a sharper edge when it travesties or parodies some familiar orthodoxy – as Black Masses and Feasts of Fools witness. Johnnie Bedworth and his friends were on the crest of such an indulgence. The words they chanted were wicked and daring in an extreme, the battle-cry of a heady insurgence. Singly or in couples, these academic infants, all flashing eyes and floating hair, would bear down upon a grown-up, shout their strident and defiant quatrain, and dash away again. I had seen the precise physical manoeuvre on television the evening before: a student at some violent confrontation with authority breaking ranks, darting forward to take a swipe at a policeman’s helmet (or at the muzzle of a mounted policeman’s horse), and darting back again rather more quickly still.

I offered the analogy to Mrs Firebrace, who replied – I felt discouragingly – that it could not be extended through other dimensions of the two affairs. She was a woman with deep-set black eyes operating from behind a tumble of black hair, so that one conversed with her rather as one might have nerved oneself to interrogate a sibyl shrouded in the darkness of a cave. At the moment, I could just see that she was looking at her watch. It wasn’t with any uncivil intent. Two of her boys were among the oldest at the party, and she was reflecting that they must be got home in time to be calmed down and persuaded to do their prep. The children at private schools, it seemed, were already shouldering this burden; those enjoying state education (and they were the majority) would still be free of it for some time ahead.

‘It appears,’ Mrs Firebrace said, ‘that birthdays can be significant from a very tender age indeed.’ She glanced at me sharply (or I thought she did), as if to confirm that I had made an appeal for, and would be gratified by, rational talk amid the surrounding din. ‘In the early days of psychotherapy, William Brown was able to elicit memories of people’s second, or even first birthday.’

‘They say now that they can get at pre-natal memories.’

‘But that isn’t so remarkable.’ Mrs Firebrace was surprised that this should have to be pointed out. ‘A random somatic event or sensation in the womb is one thing; an anniversary occasion is quite another . . . I wish Jacob wouldn’t pick his nose.’

‘Why?’

‘Why?’ Mrs Firebrace, whose train of thought had been interrupted on observing this displeasing action on the part of her eldest son, stared at me blankly. ‘It’s unhygienic.’

‘Then why not stop him?’

‘And how am I to do that?’

‘Leather him whenever the loathsome practice rears its ugly head.’

‘Jacob would bite his nails instead. He’s very resourceful.’

‘Leather him harder.’

‘What good would that do?’

‘His resourcefulness would eventually lead him to find satisfaction in some socially inoffensive gesture. Twiddling his thumbs or smoothing down his hair. But you were saying something about birthdays.’

‘In its radical sense the concept is a simple one – just the day you came out of mummy’s tummy. The tiniest child can understand that.’

‘Of course. It’s the most natural thing in the world. Nothing in the least odd about it.’

‘Mr Pattullo, please do not subject me to banter. It’s the worst type of male chauvinism.’

I’m terribly sorry.’ Mrs Firebrace and I were getting along quite well together. ‘Do continue.’

‘A birthday anniversary is quite a complex idea to get hold of. Far more, even, than the concept of a today or a tomorrow. Where does any first grip on it come from? It must be a matter of the deep structure, wouldn’t you say?’

I thought it wise not to say. The next ugly head to be raised looked like being Professor Chomsky’s, and it was improbable that I’d make much of this savant amid the uproar surrounding me. The threat, however, was obviated by my host. Johnnie Bedworth was making a dash at me, his head lowered like that of a charging bull. Oxford children incline to precocity, and although I understood it to be Johnnie’s fifth birthday that we were saluting, I couldn’t be certain that he was incapable of some full-blown fantasy of the successful goring of a matador in an appropriate Spanish setting. Within inches of me, however, he halted and straightened up. He was struggling for breath, for speech. Or was he bottling up enormous mirth? Impossible to tell. His complexion was turning from pink to purple. He spluttered. His whole person seemed to swell under the pressure of whatever it was that was going on in him. He gulped, and I saw that words were again, if briefly, at his command. I was about to be told that I was of simian appearance and had better return whence I had come.

‘See you later, alligator!’ Johnnie shouted at me. Screaming with laughter, he turned and bolted across the room. He ought, I believe, to have given me a chance to reply ‘In a while, crocodile’. That would have been correct. But Johnnie’s concern had been with frustrating legitimate expectation. It seemed to him enormously funny and utterly devastating that I should not have been told to go back to the zoo. I found myself feeling for Johnnie the respect due to a confrere. He had discovered one of the prime mechanisms of comedy.

Except for myself – drawn in as a kind of honorary uncle in consequence of that cordial regard which Cyril Bedworth so undeservedly bestowed on me – the adults present were all, as was natural, parents. There were almost as many fathers as mothers – this because, until the dinner-hour comes round, Oxford dons are the most domesticated of men. Moreover, although of learned or speculative habit, they are prompt and dutiful in joining at need in the activities of their young. Several were now taking part in ‘Murder’. This was by way of a reprise. ‘Murder’ having proved the main success of the party, the infants were insisting on going through it again before breaking up. Even a simplified version of the game might have been judged unsuitable for those of such tender years. But there was no doubt of its grip, and it was those children who least understood the root idea who most seriously addressed themselves to a proper comportment during the ritual. I knew little about children; only my brother Ninian’s had been much on my horizon, and I had lived abroad too long to see a great deal even of them. The dream children to whom I have occasionally confessed had never, significantly, been proper children at all; they had sprung to life almost within reach of the age of the young people who now occasionally turned up to my lectures. Perhaps this disregard of two of the Seven Ages of Man was partly a matter of professional prejudice. Children are a dead loss on the stage. Shakespeare himself couldn’t manage them, even although he had actual children with theatrical training always to hand. So it was very much from the sidelines that I judged juvenile assemblies.

There had, of course, been Charles and Mary Talbert, the progeny of those deep, and deeply wedded, scholars who had presided over my early assaults on English literature within the university. I didn’t think I had actually been to a birthday party in Old Road; and if such festivities were ever mounted there, it was probable that their highlight had been the production of a new educational game of philological character. There had been, too, the children I used to observe in the course of my pilgrimages through North Oxford to my other, and reclusive, tutor, J. B. Timbermill. These, unlike the young Talberts, had scarcely been inhibited, and a certain social motility had been suggested by their pursuit of street games (involving much unsightly chalking of pavements), which would appear to have percolated from other strata of society. What I chiefly remembered of these, however, was again something in a linguistic area: their uniform command of what Timbermill called Received Standard English – a dialect at that time barely to be comprehended by my alien ear. Here, at least, there was a marked contrast between then and now. Johnnie Bedworth, even when bellowing at the top of his voice, produced cockney with the precision of an accomplished character actor: this because his nursery school had provided him with a boon companion (present at the party), who had lately migrated to Oxford from Mile End. Contrastingly, there were two or three children whose complexions suggested regions farther away, but whose accents, far from being answeringly coffee-coloured, were indistinguishable from those of Heads of Houses or Fellows of Lady Margaret Hall.

The darkly shadowed Mrs Firebrace had left me – composedly, although the occasion of her departure was her youngest son’s having been sick in some inappropriate place. I continued to reflect on social change as evidenced in infancy. In the Edinburgh of my childhood, coloured boys and girls of any variety hadn’t existed, not even, so far as I could remember, as a casual phenomenon in the streets. They belonged solely within the sphere of religious education – being frequently represented in a species of Sunday School iconography as awaiting in distant lands enlightenment on Noah’s Ark and the Twelve Tribes of Israel. But had one of them turned up while we were ourselves receiving such instruction, I doubt whether we should have behaved at all well, so untoward would the irruption have appeared to us. Here at the Bedworths’ party the pinko-greys on the one hand and the contrastingly tinted on the other, seemed to be a wholly integrated group, confirming the view that racial feeling surfaces only at adolescence. It was true that the parents of almost all the children here present would be firmly anti-racist. Yet that might cut two ways. How antipathetic to the unformed mind must be elders of liberal persuasion who forbid the chanting of Ten little Nigger Boys and banish Little Black Sambo from the nursery library!

These thoughts were interrupted by the appearance before me of Virginia Bedworth. She had detached herself from the final game with the air of a conscientious hostess who has adequately discharged a duty and earned an unobtrusive breather for a while.

‘Excuse me,’ Virginia said. ‘Please, may I get my book?’ She edged past me, ran a practised eye along a shelf, and possessed herself of a volume which, although slim, was almost as tall as herself. (Virginia was three.) She then turned and showed it to me politely. It was Babar and Father Christmas. ‘It’s rather noisy here,’ Virginia said. ‘I shall read quietly in my room.’ And with this she withdrew from the party.

Her mother was much involved with the celebration still, but by way of an activity, at least suggesting the end of the tunnel. Each child was to receive a present on leaving, and Mabel Bedworth was checking these over. At the start of the occasion, Johnnie had received a present from each of his guests. There was no doubt an immemorial, a courtly, an oriental sanction for these punctilious exchanges, but I couldn’t confidently remember that it had obtained in my time. At Christmas parties, indeed, everybody had got a parcel from the tree. But hadn’t it been felt there was something excessive about taking presents to birthday parties – and certainly about giving others away at the door? Wouldn’t this have drawn down the same disapprobation as did the hiring, by parents lacking in decent self-reliance, of a conjurer or ventriloquist ‘to make the thing go’? I found myself hazy here, my only clear memory being that I hadn’t greatly cared for birthday parties. And my brother, Ninian, had been at one with me. We may have felt awkward because our manners, as much as our clothes, had not been of an acceptable party-going sort. We were conscious of being held to stand in need of explanation – something sufficiently achieved when it was remembered that our father was an artist, and our mother slightly mad, though ‘well-connected’. The last phrase had come to me when I was young enough to associate it perplexedly with the use of the telephone.

These thoughts were interrupted by the return of Mrs Firebrace, who had coped with the emergency presented to her. There was no reason why she should thus seek me out again; we were but slightly acquainted; it might have been more natural for her to switch her attention to one or another of her fellow parents ‘sitting in’ on the party. I was conjecturing that she perhaps judged me lonesome, and that her action was charitably motivated, when something of a freshly appraising character in her glance prompted me to discard this theory.

‘Penny,’ Mrs Firebrace said, briskly, ‘is coming to stay with me.’

My response to this news – or to the manner of its delivery – fails to return to my mind. It may have been as inappropriate as Laertes’s ‘O, where?’ when told of Ophelia’s death by drowning. My first feeling, certainly, was irrelevant and trivial, since I found myself resenting so baldly phrased a communication from a person scarcely known to me. This was unjust. Encountering me as she had done at Johnnie Bedworth’s party, and equipped with a piece of information I had some title to receive, Mrs Firebrace would have done equally ill either to withhold or to make a business of it. And if Penny had been awkward as suggesting that we were all three of us intimate together it had certainly been the only term at Mrs Firebrace’s command. ‘Penny Pattullo’ – if Penny still called herself that – would scarcely have done, and ‘your former wife’ wouldn’t have done at all.

I heard myself say, on a note of polite interest, that I hadn’t been aware Penny and Mrs Firebrace knew each other.

‘Oh, yes, indeed. We were at school together.’ Mrs Firebrace was displeased by my ignorance. ‘And quite close friends in our last two years there.’

‘Penny must just have happened never to mention it.’ All this information struck me as odd. I knew about Penny’s school, a very fashionable school then, and I’d hardly have thought of it as a likely nursery of young philosophers. Still less should I have imagined Penny disposed to choose as a companion a girl already, it might be presumed, showing a precocious interest in Wittgenstein and Ryle. Not that Penny didn’t possess a flair for surprising preferences from time to time.

‘But later we rather lost touch,’ Mrs Firebrace said.

‘Ah, yes. Well, Penny and I have lost touch, too.’

‘You don’t often see her?’

"We haven’t met since the divorce.’

‘That must be unusual nowadays, don’t you think?’

‘Perhaps so. Uncivilised is probably the word.’

‘I’ve been told it’s thought friendly to celebrate the making absolute of one’s divorce by going to bed together.’

‘Penny and I didn’t do that.’ The mildness with which I said this cost me no effort. I was accustomed to women – mostly at parties, although scarcely parties like Johnnie’s – playing up, as they thought appropriately, to my professional character by saying the sort of things that are said in plays. If Mrs Firebrace’s effort had been contextually none too felicitous, that only suggested that she was more accustomed to seminars and tutorials than to silly chatter. I still didn’t think her a bad sort of woman. ‘Is it long since you last saw Penny yourself?’ I asked.

‘Oh, years and years. But we wrote from time to time. And there’s always been an idea she might come and stay with us in Oxford.’

‘But she never has − not till now?’

"Not till now.’

‘As a girl she used to visit an aged relative in Oxford, a Mrs Triplett. It’s where we first met.’

‘Yes, I’ve heard all about that.’

‘No doubt.’ I was silent for a moment, offended (as I was inclined to be) at the thought of Penny reminiscing about me to persons unknown. ‘And Oxford’s an attractive place to return to. I know that, since it’s only a few months ago that I did it myself. And after years and years of never being near the place.’

‘So Penny is following you up.’

‘Following me up?’

‘Your example, I mean. Coming back to have a look.’

‘Yes, of course. When’s this due to happen, Mrs Firebrace?’

‘Oh, it’s vague at the moment. I’ll let you know.’

‘My dear lady! So that I can skulk in Surrey Quad, and never venture my nose in the street?’

‘No, of course not. But occasionally it’s disconcerting to run into somebody after a long interval and as a complete surprise.’

‘I suppose so. Indeed, I’ve experienced something of the kind at least once, come to think of it.’ I sought to hold Mrs Firebrace’s gaze as I said this, since I was wondering whether she could possibly know what I was talking about. ‘But I think I can promise not in any circumstances to be particularly disconcerted by Penny.’

‘I could discourage the whole thing.’

This seemed to me an extraordinary remark – the more so because Mrs Firebrace hadn’t uttered it with any lightness of air. She seemed, indeed, rather perplexed, as if she were a philosopher not of the metaphysical but of the moral sort, confronting an ethically ticklish situation. My conclusion was that there had been lightness of air, probably in a letter of Penny’s in which her visit to Oxford had been propounded. Mrs Firebrace had some reason – to put it crudely – to suppose her old school-fellow to be harbouring predatory intentions. It wasn’t conceivable that on Penny’s part this could be other than a passing joke, at least so far as I was concerned. Mrs Firebrace might have failed, however, to interpret it that way.

I was the last guest to leave the party. This might, in any case, have been correct behaviour in an honorary uncle, but it was also occasioned by Cyril Bedworth’s feeling that he had some piece of college business to discuss. He commonly did feel thus at the tail-end of social occasions; he was beginning to take the full weight of his new duties as our Senior Tutor; it might have been said of him – as of Milton’s Satan in a similarly tough spot – that on his Front engraven Deliberation sat and public care. His present problem was the resistance being put up by some of our older colleagues to a proposal that the college Dramatic Society should be given permission to use the Fellows’ Garden for a production of the first part of Tamburlaine the Great. One of these curmudgeonly members of the Governing Body had advanced as a conclusive consideration, the certainty that the pampered jades of Asia would cut up the turf in an appalling manner. It was Bedworth’s belief that we could defeat this illiberal opposition if we could only make sure of the support of Albert Talbert. Everybody knew that Talbert was the most distinguished of living Elizabethan scholars, so his supporting the undergraduates’ application would carry weight. Indeed, not to defer to him on such a matter would pretty well be—didn’t I think?—to break one of the unwritten rules of the game.

I replied that my experience of the Governing Body was still limited, but that I thought he was right. So far as my observation went, its proprieties had the edge on its savageries, if only by a fine margin, every time.

Bedworth, although encouraged by this opinion, now produced a further anxiety. Was Talbert, at least to any pronounced degree, an admirer of Christopher Marlowe? Did I remember that lecture on Marlowe which Talbert had given in 1947 or thereabouts, in which he had described the dramatist as being, if not the most talented, at least the noisiest of the contemporaries of Shakespeare? If Talbert came out with something like that to the G.B. it wouldn’t—would it?—advance matters at all.

One part of this questionnaire had its awkwardness for me. I must have attended two or three of Talbert’s formal discourses at the distant time invoked, since it had been held a necessary act of courtesy to show one’s tutor something like that degree of countenance in the lectures he was constrained to deliver for the university. But if, as a consequence of this, I had heard Talbert pronounce on Marlowe, the circumstance had faded from my mind during the ensuing quarter of a century. To admit this would be to perplex Bedworth; it might even impair the state of pleasurable feeling I could detect in him as arising from the success of Johnnie’s birthday party. I concentrated, therefore, on the simple issue of noise. The point was an important one. The majority of our colleagues undoubtedly disliked uproar, the only variety they were at all disposed to tolerate being, oddly enough, that nocturnally produced by high-spirited young drunks. And ever since the college Musical Society, ambitiously attempting Tchaikovsky’s Eighteen-Twelve, had surreptitiously introduced into Long Field a battery of cannon provided by a former member, who happened to command the Royal Regiment of Artillery, there had been an alert feeling abroad that any form of artistic expression indulged in by undergraduates was likely to generate uproar by one ingenious means or another.

It didn’t seem to me that a performance of the first part of Tamburlaine was likely to prove an exception to this rule. It would be a romp before which the one we had just been through would pale. Bedworth and I discussed the problem for some time. I wasn’t a wholly disinterested party. Nicolas Junkin was involved in the project, and had contrived to become my pupil during the present term – for reasons academically obscure, and the more perplexing, since I wasn’t expected to take undergraduate pupils at all. It had to be concluded that he had no other intent than that of ruthlessly exacting my support for the production.

‘Of course,’ Bedworth said, hopefully, ‘noise is never so bad in open air. It ascends mercifully to the heavens. We can point that out.’

‘Very true, Cyril. It’s why bandstands in public parks and places have lids. They keep the racket to ground level.’

‘A few years ago, we had son et lumiere in aid of some building project or other. It was because the college has had to over-extend itself alarmingly of recent years in the way of capital expenditure. The prospect of such an affair outside their windows didn’t much please our immediate neighbours. But actually it turned out fairly harmless. Perhaps this will too.’

‘Perhaps.’ I felt that it would be only honest to afford Bedworth at least a hint of the possible worst. ‘It rather depends on what tapes they hire.’

‘Tapes, Duncan?’

‘Of battles, and cities being sacked, and virgins being raped, and so on. You can take your choice. It’s a well- developed industry. No need to bring in real cannon now. They come through the post in a cassette. You just clip the thing in, and then amplify according to taste. It could be done so that the effect would be detectable in Wantage or Abingdon.’

‘Oh, dear!’ Bedworth was dismayed. ‘Do you think, perhaps—’

‘We mustn’t be faint-hearted, Cyril.’

‘Of course not.’ Bedworth squared his shoulders. ‘I’ll tackle Albert. I still think he’s the key.’

During this conference, Johnnie Bedworth had been hanging around. He ought to have been getting ready for bed, but was contriving an effect of helping his mother to cope with the general debris of the party. When I took my leave, he was quick to accompany me down the garden path. It was, I felt, a very proper if slightly unexpected attention.

‘My daddy says you have a typewriter that works by electricity.’

‘So I have, Johnnie.’ I was about to add, ‘It’s my new toy,’ but decided that this, although true, might sound over- playful. ‘It saves part of the hard work,’ I said.

‘I’m to have an electric train at Christmas.’ Johnnie considered this statement for a moment, and concluded that, as a boast, it wasn’t quite adequate. ‘We have a very big motor car.’ He frowned. ‘Two—three—very big motor cars. We have an aeroplane.’

‘An aeroplane must come in very handy.’ The exhilaration of his party, I saw, was still affecting Johnnie’s vision of things.

‘With bombs.’ As he made this shocking claim, Johnnie craned his neck sideways and went through the action of peering down over his right shoulder. ‘Bang, bang, bang!’ The bombs had hurtled earthwards and exploded. Johnnie, however, didn’t pause to assess the damage. ‘Does it do the spelling?’ he demanded.

‘The electric typewriter? No, I’m afraid not.’

‘I could write a proper book like my daddy with one that does the spelling.’

‘Probably they’ll invent that kind one day. But you can come and see mine, Johnnie. We could spell one or two things together.’

‘That would be very nice.’ Johnnie was polite but un-enthusiastic. ‘We have a dog,’ he said, with a switch to veracity. ‘He’s called Bruno. Virginia says Bruno is only a name for a bear, but I think it’s quite right to call a dog Bruno too. Bruno wasn’t allowed to come to the party because sometimes his behind smells.’

On this note of realism, Johnnie and I parted, and I made my way back to college on foot. In the University Parks – the plurality of which had long ago become as fictitious as that of the Bedworths’ living-quarters – level evening sunshine washed the grass with gold; skimmed it with shadows, as if the gods were bowling inky sneaks on the cricket field at the centre of the scene. The flatness of the prospect was not totally unrelieved. There were benches; there were shrubs reputed to be of superior botanical interest; there was even a small ornamental pond with ducks. The whole area was confined, but art, not of too obtrusive a landscaping sort, had been deployed to suggest further vistas at least to the imaginatively gifted. I was becoming fond of the University Parks, which as an undergraduate I had seldom frequented. I reflected now that they were a paradigm of their circumambient academic repose.

That a trite phrase like ‘academic repose’ could thus remain part of my mental furniture is an index of the force of early impressions and persuasions. This first year of my return to Oxford had not been without incident, and common sense would tell one that cares and passions are no more to be excluded from a college than – as Johnson tells us the poet Pope fondly supposed – from a grotto ‘adorned with fossile bodies’. But this last image would be not a bad one to describe an undergraduate view of dons and their habitations. I don’t doubt that my first encounter with Albert Talbert had held some hint as of the tap of a hammer upon rock: here suddenly revealed was evidence of the existence of a heroic age of scholarship long ago.

From these musings, which had come to me half-way across the Parks, I was withdrawn by the appearance of Dr Wyborn, who was bearing down upon me from the direction of Keble chapel. Wyborn was among the minority of my new colleagues whom I hadn’t, by this time, got to know tolerably well. Even his function was a little obscure to me. He held the title of Pastoral Fellow, whereas the rest of us were plain Fellow and nothing else. It wasn’t just because he was a clergyman; several of our number were that, without being distinguished in this