The Naylors (6 page)

Surely he should retain, although not a devout, at least a scholarly interest in recent contributions to research in the field? He recalled the names of several investigators quite as promising as himself. There had been Dom. Potter of Minnesota; and there had been Prebendary Delver of Durham; there had been a German at Gottingen whose name he forgot, but who had tentatively been putting forth disturbing views on political and economic conditions as having been factors in the Eutychian revival. George couldn’t hope to muck in again. Indeed, he didn’t want to. But he could take a peep at what was going on.

Having formed this resolution, George first visited the nearest Gents (whimsically described as
Schola Linguarum Hebraicae et Graecae)
and then made his way into the Bodleian.

Or rather he tried to do so. The entrance had been changed. It was no longer through the little door (almost as narrow as Blackwell’s) saying
Schola Naturalis Philosophiae.
It was through the wider archway of what used to be called the Pig Market, and the Pig Market itself (which had formerly harboured not pigs but notice-boards) had turned into a shop selling picture postcards and colour slides and do-it-yourself cut-out cardboard models of university buildings. Straight ahead, the Divinity School (in which he had once been required to make a speech in indifferent Latin) was still on public view beneath its incredible roof; and to George’s left, at the south end of the Pig Market, there was a kind of token barrier or horizontal wooden flap – the academic equivalent, one might say, of a turnstile as it exists in the turbulent outer world – and beyond this George could visualise the familiar long but shallow flights of steps to the reading-rooms. So he walked over to the flap, pushed it, and went through.

‘Ticket, please.’

George turned round in astonishment, and saw that he had been addressed by a respectable male person standing in a species of lidless wooden box. He looked as if he had been standing there all day – despite which trying fact he had uttered those two words firmly indeed, but entirely politely.

‘Ticket?’ George repeated in astonishment. ‘But I’m a reader. I’m a reader, I say.’

That this weird linguistic infection should have seized upon George’s speech so confused him that there can be little doubt of his having instantly taken on the appearance of a frustrated arsonist.

‘Readers can’t go in without a ticket, sir.’

‘But I’ve been in hundreds of times!’ George said. He was now aware that he was behaving foolishly, but irrational indignation nevertheless overcame him. Being denied entrance to the Bodleian! Him (or He)! George Naylor M.A.; Clerk in Holy Orders; for some eighteen months (he had just remembered) a junior research fellow (supernumerary and non-stipendiary) of one of the most distinguished colleges in the university! It was wholly monstrous.

‘When would you have been here last, sir?’

This was a type of question which often got George confused. He was no good at dates. So he ducked this issue.

‘I only want . . .’ he began.

‘You can apply at Admissions, sir.’ Sir Thomas Bodley’s Janus spoke a shade impatiently this time. There was a small queue of readers, authenticating tickets in hand, formed up behind George. ‘First doorway beyond the passage to Radcliffe Square, sir.’

So George, not being sure that he had comported himself quite courteously, produced one of his apologies and withdrew into open air. Halting by the little railing that surrounds the statue of Lord Herbert, runner-up as the putative lovely boy of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, he considered his position. In a small way, he had made a fool of himself. He remembered that when as a young man he had worked for a time in the British Museum, and even though the nature of his researches had entitled him to do his reading in the privileged area known as the North Library, he had been issued with a ticket which he had shown up every day on entering, at least until the door-keepers had got to know him. And at Cambridge, he had recently read, they now charged wandering scholars a fee for admission to the University Library. He decided that the man in the lidless box represented a praiseworthy precaution on the part of the Oxford authorities against evilly disposed persons. Most irrationally, he felt rebuffed, all the same.

The remedy against this improper emotion was at once to go through the drill required to regularise his position as a reader in the Bodleian. Somehow he no longer much wanted to inquire into the present state of affairs within that wide sphere of reference constituted by Jacobus Baradaeus of Edessa and his carryings-on 1,300 years ago. But he ought to seek out Admissions, nevertheless.

And, just beyond the tunnel-like approach to Radcliffe Square, there was a bright new board beside a doorway,
saying
‘Admissions’ in letters so large that there was no overlooking them. (The doorway also said, in rather bogus-faded hues,
Schola Musicae.)

George entered. There was a notice with a pointing arrow. It said, ‘Applicants for admission to the library are earnestly requested to take a seat behind the screen, and there attend upon the ringing of a bell.’ George did as he was bid. He took a seat and attended upon.

Nothing happened. On the other side of the screen there must be a business area with a brisk traffic going forward. But no sound indicative of this came from the
arcanum
or
adytum
from which he was now sundered by a full six feet. George began to think of his train, although he knew that its departure was still a couple of hours off. Then he did a very scandalous thing. Unsummoned by any bell, he stood up and peered round the screen. He saw the remainder of the small room in which this important admissions transaction was conducted. An elderly lady in an M.A. gown was seated at a table upon which stood several miniature filing-cabinets. She appeared to be asleep.

George was confounded. He couldn’t possibly disturb this learned person’s repose. Behind her were no doubt several hours of exhausting labour during which she had been struggling with clouds of exigent postulants for readership, any one of whom might have been secreting incendiary devices (backed up by fragmentation bombs) in his or her pockets. George could only stand and wait.

‘Do please sit down,’ the lady said, in tones every phoneme of which suggested Somerville or Lady Margaret Hall. She had presumably merely been resting her eyes even from the crepuscular light which alone penetrated to this Bodleian semi-dungeon. ‘Shall you be in Oxford for long?’

This question, which might perhaps have been better phrased, seemed to admit only of the answer, ‘Until about half-past five’, and this answer George accordingly gave. A certain perplexity not unnaturally resulted on the lady’s part, but she listened with well-bred patience to her visitor’s further explaining himself. Then she fell to work on one of her filing cabinets. Having found what was clearly a relevant card, she glanced at it quickly, and then more at leisure and with perfect courtesy at George himself. ‘Can you tell me, Dr Naylor,’ she asked – but it was clearly information she no longer needed to seek – ‘in what year you were first admitted as a reader?’

For George this was a bad sort of question. Despite the severe scholarship to which he had been for so long habituated he was really, it must be repeated, a poor hand at dates.

‘Would it,’ he asked hopefully, ‘have been about 1940?’

The lady didn’t even elevate her eyebrows at this extraordinary suggestion, which of course implied a quite astounding precocity in her visitor. Indeed, she closed her eyes again – and for so long that George had to suppose that she really had dropped off this time. But she had merely been casting round for some tactful manner in which to proceed.

‘We work under the most vexatious necessities here,’ she presently said. ‘We have occasionally to appear quite absurd. I wonder, Dr Naylor, whether you would deprecate being asked to identify yourself?’

‘Not at all, madam! Of course not!’ George made this reply with inappropriate and disconcerting vehemence, since it was his only means of masking what he knew to be indefensible indignation. The idea of it! It was scarcely to be believed. He rummaged in pockets: several of the wrong pockets before a more hopeful one. ‘Here’s a visiting card,’ he mumbled. ‘Grubby, I’m afraid. One doesn’t much use such things nowadays, and they take on a shop-soiled look. Or one of these affairs?’ Hopefully, he held out a small plastic object. ‘A bank card, I think it’s called. It’s got my name on it. Oh! I see it has my signature too. George Naylor.’

Like the lady in Blackwell’s shop, this lady managed a kindly smile. She had unmistakably decided that she was in the presence of a harmless Fool of God. Then she produced an object of her own. It was like a ping-pong bat, and it had some rigmarole pasted on it. George remembered having seen such things in the several rooms of up-to-date stately homes and picture galleries, telling you what you were looking at on the walls. The lady handed this to George – considerately, handle first.

‘Can you solemnly assure me,’ she asked with sudden sternness, ‘that you clearly remember subscribing to this declaration when first admitted as a reader in the Bodleian?’

George stared at the ping-pong bat in a more or less mesmerised way.

‘Well, yes,’ he said. ‘That is, I rather think so. I don’t know about the clarity. But I do seem dimly to remember that bit about not making fire in the place.’

‘I fear I must ask you to read it aloud to me.’

‘Solemnly?’ George repeated this word by way of attempting to suggest abundant and willing co-operation. Unfortunately it came out with the effect of a frivolous quip. He then managed, however, to read the thing aloud with a decent sobriety. He even got in what might have been called a hint of pulpit eloquence. And it appeared to satisfy the terms of this guardian spirit’s mystery. She produced a little card of her own, wrote on it, had George sign it, passed it through a copying machine, and handed it back to him with a blessed air of accomplishment and finality.

‘Thank you very much,’ George said. ‘Do I have to show it if I go into the Camera too? The Radcliffe Camera, one of Oxford’s scattering of really splendid buildings, is a kind of free-standing annexe of the Bodleian Library.

‘Certainly,’ the lady said. ‘They won’t let you into the Camera without it. It would be a serious breach of security.’ She stood up, shook hands with George, sat down again, and immediately – and surely to a certainty this time – fell asleep. George left her like that, and went out round the screen. There was nobody, he noticed, attending upon the ringing of a bell.

He returned to the Pig Market – more properly the Proscholium – and showed his newly acquired passport. After that, everything was reassuringly familiar. Or at least it was so for a time. Soon, however, he realised that – at least in the common or garden working parts of the Bodleian – almost nothing was
quite
the same. There were fine displacements virtually wherever he turned, and these progressively confused him. Every day there must be numerous scholars from the ends of the earth who had to find what they wanted through a process of trial and error. Nevertheless, he felt that his own uncertainties must be attracting attention. Nothing was quite where it had been. Suddenly he felt something almost symbolical in this. His life was now going to be like that. Nothing quite where it had been.

‘Over
-hardy
,’ he heard his own voice saying to himself. ‘Over-
hardy
.’ He came to a halt before some irrelevant catalogue. Why ever should such words bob up in his mind? For a moment he knew only that his memory was again behaving badly. Then he recalled Mrs Archer and her citation of Milton’s large-limbed Og, and he was so amused that he laughed aloud. This was not at all the thing in the Bodleian. Moreover, since it was the middle of the vacation, there were very few young people around, and the place seemed exclusively frequented by aged and desiccated persons, all deep scholars without a doubt, who looked as if they hadn’t heard a laugh for years; had in fact forgotten about laughter altogether; and were now in some alarm, occasioned by the fallacious impression that George must have been taken ill.

This was unnerving, and George somehow wasn’t helped by the fact that he was quite a deep scholar himself. It was almost certain that nobody in the Bodleian at this moment knew half as much about Jacobus Baradaeus of Edessa as he did. Nor, it soon seemed to him, did anybody anywhere else. Eutychian studies – his rummagings in bibliographies and check-lists soon revealed – were in almost total desuetude. Dom. Potter of Minnesota had switched to Ebionitism. Prebendary Delver had ratted too, and had produced three volumes on Patripassianism, that fond persuasion that the Logos is to be identified with the Father. The man at Gottingen was still at it, but had switched from Marx to Freud as the best illuminant on theological disputation in the sixth century. The Gottingen man was called Gottschalk – which oddly enough had been the name, George recalled, of a particularly desperate heretic in the age of Johannes Scotus Erigena. Various ecclesiastical synods had attempted to wallop his errors out of the original Gottschalk, but rods had no better success than argument, and the wretched man had died still proclaiming whatever his particular nonsense had been. George wondered whether the current Gottschalk would have the guts for that.

Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum.
Lucretius’ hackneyed but inexpugnable line, George reminded himself, told only half the story. There was a great deal to be said for religion, and it was a pity that he himself had got in such a mess about it. But he wouldn’t get out of the mess by nostalgic potterings in the driest dust of the thing. Surely among all these millions of books there must be a work that spoke to his condition more effectively than Gottschalk II? As he asked himself this question, something rather absurd came into his head. He had never read
Robert Elsmere!
Mr Gladstone had – and, following Mr Gladstone, pretty well all England in the year 1888 or thereabout. Mrs Humphry Ward’s
Robert Elsmere
was a novel said to present with extraordinary skill the plight of an intelligent Anglican clergyman upon being confronted with the dire findings of what was then called the ‘higher criticism’. Elsmere might be just George’s man. He couldn’t, of course, now read the book – and nobody may borrow a book from the Bodleian – but at least he could take a peep at it and estimate whether it might help. He remembered that undergraduates reading English Literature spent a lot of time in the Radcliffe Camera. Mrs Ward’s illuminating masterpiece (for he thus thought of it for the nonce) would probably be over there, and on an open shelf from which he could take it down at once.