The Naylors (7 page)

Strong in this persuasion, George hurried down the staircase of the Bodleian, intent of gaining the Camera, not a hundred yards away. He hurried so much that he found something bumping against his legs. It was Blackwell’s gratuitous plastic bag, and it was knobbly because it quite plainly contained books. So might he be suspected of theft? Ought he to open the bag and display its contents – Lewis, Rushdie and Storey – to the man in the lidless box? Or would this be behaviour so
outré
in character that they would lock him up forthwith? The complete irrationality of this last apprehension so alarmed George (who occasionally went in for lurking fears of madness) that at the critical moment he actually took to his heels – bolting past the guardian presence as if the whole Bodleian were in conflagration, and he himself responsible as having ‘made fire’ in it. The guardian presence reacted only with mild curiosity. Eccentric characters abound in Oxford.

Although thus confused, George as he mounted the steps of the Camera didn’t forget to fish his new admission ticket from his pocket. The woman who had bestowed it on him had insisted that it was essential here too. Inside the portal there was another flight of steps, curving down to a gloomy but deceptively non-subterraneous region the nature of which eluded his recollection. Was it a reading-room, or just an enormous book-stack? It was a reading-room, and at its entrance there was a notice saying
English and Theology.
This bobbing up again of the Queen of the Sciences disconcerted George, but then he reflected that the
melange
was just right for Mrs Humphry Ward’s fictional dealing with the Higher Criticism. Moreover, there was a thoughtfully provided line of coat-pegs, and on one of these he gratefully hung up Blackwell’s bag. Thus disburdened, he found calm and confidence restored to him. He entered the great rotunda.

It was deserted. It was utterly empty. Such at least was his first impression – although he was equally conscious of its being thronged with books: thousands and thousands of books in a deep vacation slumber. Of course the Camera was predominantly an undergraduates’ reading-room, although learned persons did occasionally frequent it as well. So it was unsurprising that on this fine summer afternoon there seemed to be nobody in evidence. But there must, of course, be a man to whom to show his ticket. No lidless box was on view, but there was a desk near the entrance which suggested itself as being for a member of the library staff rather than for a reader. But nobody sat behind it. Still clutching his ticket, George began anxiously to hunt around. The chap must also have the duty of returning stray books to their shelves: something like that. And the place had so many alcoves, radiating like the spokes of a wheel, that he might well elude notice for a time. Increasingly conscious of the high impropriety of being loose in the Camera without accrediting himself, George scurried from alcove to alcove, unconsciously holding his ticket head-high. And at length he came upon somebody: a somewhat unimpressive somebody, dusty and elderly, who was kneeling on the floor with his nose close to a row of books.

‘Oh, there you are!’ George said with perhaps an involuntary hint of reproach. ‘I’ve got to show you this.’

Thus accosted, the elderly man got to his feet, turned round, and looked at George with detectable surprise.

‘Good afternoon,’ he said politely.

‘My ticket, you know. Here it is. I understand . . .’ George’s voice suddenly trailed away. He had never seen this dusty old man before, but he had several times seen his photograph. Was he the Principal of Brasenose? Was he the Warden of Wadham? It didn’t much matter which. He was a scholar of enormous eminence, and quite certainly at the moment President of the British Academy.

‘Did you say your ticket?’ the Principal (or Warden) asked. If he was perplexed he didn’t show it. His was clearly an effortless alpha so far as academic courtesy was concerned.

‘I’m terribly sorry,’ George said. George wasn’t exactly abashed. They were, after all, simply two scholars in an absurd situation. But he wasn’t quite at ease either. In fact he was still holding out his ticket, so that the Warden (or Principal) was more or less constrained to take it from him and examine it.

‘A reader’s ticket,’ George said helpfully. ‘To admit one to Bodley. Or to the Camera. Essential security.’

‘How very interesting.’ The President of the British Academy handed George back his ticket. It was evident he had never seen one of the things before – or perhaps been aware that such objects existed. ‘Can I help you in any way?’ it occurred to him to ask.

‘Thank you very much. But, no. I’m just looking for
Robert Elsmere
.’

This time, George’s dusty but august interlocutor did permit himself to betray perplexity.

‘But I
am
Robert Elsmere,’ he said. ‘How do you do?’

George recalled at once that this was
true.
There was some Head of a House – Warden or Principal or Rector or whatever – whose name was Robert Elsmere. It wasn’t in itself all that remarkable. But two Elsmeres coming on top of two Gottschalks was just too much for George. All amenity deserted him.

‘But now I have to catch a train,’ he said. And he bolted from the Radclifle Camera as quickly as he had bolted from the Bodleian itself.

Robert Elsmere must, of course, know about
Robert Elsmere.
Perhaps his parents – possibly of humble station? – had not been aware of the book. In decent society one doesn’t exploit any humorous potentialities lurking in a man’s name, but from time to time the real Robert Elsmere must encounter a little friendly badinage nevertheless. And the incident in the Radcliffe Camera had been so bizarre that the man would almost certainly add it with enjoyment to his stock of after-dinner anecdotes. So it was only something perfectly harmless that had happened.

George managed to tell himself all this before he reached the High Street. He was in renewed nervous discomfort all the same. He glanced at his watch and saw that if he went straight to the railway station he would still have a fairly long wait for his train. He could get a cup of tea in the refreshment place. He did badly need a cup of tea, but wasn’t sure that he wanted it at the station. And now a bold idea came to him. He was within almost a stone’s throw of his old college. He would go
there.

George enjoyed certain rights at the college. Having as a young graduate hung on at Oxford for a time and tutored the college’s handful of theology students, he had been made an honorary member of its senior common room: an exiguous distinction, but one tacitly understood to be for life. He knew just what he could do – having once done it some ten years before. He would simply walk into the common room and push a bell. The common-room butler and under-butler would not be in attendance: they were probably touring the vineyards of Burgundy in pursuit of professional knowledge. But there would be some respectable elderly woman on duty; she would bring him tea (and even muffins); he would scribble his signature on a scrap of paper, and a term or two later receive a bill through the post. It was an alluringly arcane privilege – a tenuous but precious link, indeed, with an almost forgotten paradise.

So George Naylor walked hopefully up to the wide portal of his Alma Mater. It was flanked, as not in the past, with notices recording in some detail the terms upon which visitors were welcome to enter. ‘Visitors’, clearly, was the dons’ civil near-synonym for ‘tourists’. And planted in the middle of the carriage-way was an elderly but muscular man wearing a bowler hat. George saw at once that in a non-academic context this person would be called a bouncer – or, in a slightly older terminology, a chucker-out. He was thus – if with an additional hint of aggressive proclivities – first-cousin to Sir Thomas Bodley’s man in the lidless box. But George stood his ground, or rather continued to cover it. And this intrepidity was at once rewarded. The bouncer raised the bowler hat and held it almost at arm’s length above his head.

‘Mr Naylor—sir!’ the bouncer said in a military (or perhaps naval) manner. ‘A long time since we’ve seen you, sir. But we had Mr Trelawny only last week—and Lord Tunsted and Mr Purnell (the younger one, that is: him they called Poodle) not long before that. All in your own year, Mr Naylor.’

‘That’s capital,’ George said, and if the words were chosen at random they came from a joyous heart. He hadn’t recognised Smithers, the college Head Porter. But Smithers had recognised him! Smithers, already a man of much consequence 20 years ago, was now not above taking on this bouncing job in place of a lesser servant now and then. ‘Visitors’ arriving by the coachload he would firmly and with perfect aplomb direct to some more appropriate entrance. And he knew about a proper welcome and didn’t let it linger on in gossip. The bowler was in place again. George entered the Great Quadrangle.

There it all-majestically was: the uncertain proportions, the misguided crenellations, the cloisters that had never been built, Bernini’s fountain with its Neptune and Triton and dolphins stolen from he’d forgotten where. Nothing in the world could move George more, unless it was modest Plumley (acquired by his great-grandfather) screened by its grove of oaks. He skirted two sides of the quad (only the dons were allowed to walk on the grass, so of course they never did) and gained the typical Oxford tunnel in which the door of the senior common room stood.

Only it didn’t. The tunnel harboured a permanent half-darkness, since there were a couple of obtuse angles to it as if it had been designed to promote optical experiment; it also possessed, presumably built in for fun, three or four stone steps, slant-wise set, which had for some centuries taken their toll of fractured limbs as bibulous Fellows toddled from their port-decanters to bed. So one moved cautiously. George had done so, and found no door. There seemed to be nothing but a blank wall. But this impression proved to be delusive, after all. There was a door of sorts, but it wasn’t the old and familiar door. It was a newfangled and unobtrusive door such as one notices on well-designed delivery vans – not swinging on a hinge but gliding on a rail beneath itself. And it was locked. All it presented to the world was a sunken handle and an aperture for a Yale key set in a metal disk about the size of a tenpenny piece.

The common room was locked up! It took George’s breath away. The thing was beyond his experience. He could remember how, in his final and most Elysian year in the college, he had gone into the room at three o’clock in the morning to hunt up an envelope big enough to take his major contribution to the
New
Theological Quarterly.
The place hadn’t been locked up
then.
It was outrageous that it should be locked up
now.
Or at least it was disheartening. For wasn’t he a
member
of common room, and thus being excluded in an arbitrary way?

Suddenly there was somebody standing beside him. His eyes had got used to the gloom, and he saw that it was a young man, casually dressed. Somehow he knew about this young man instantly and exactly. He wasn’t an undergraduate, but he was the next thing to it. He was a young man so extremely clever – his features and his glance told George this at once – that he had been snapped up as a Junior Fellow within days of qualifying for a degree. To do that he had written nine three-hour papers, had a pleasant ten- or fifteen-minute chat called a
viva
with persons as clever as himself – and now here, if he cared to be, he was established for life. George’s indignation vanished. He found himself rejoicing in this youth’s good fortune just as he had rejoiced in the benediction of Smithers’ bowler hat. And the youth hesitated only for an appraising instant before deciding to speak.

‘Of course it’s the most awful nonsense,’ he said. ‘We’re security-mad. Burglars and so forth. Utterly bonkers! It’s true there’s the Tompion grandfather clock. But who could walk off with that?’

‘Or the scagliola table,’ George said. ‘Hideous affair.’ George hadn’t felt so at ease for weeks. ‘And the strap-work bookcase thought up by William Morris. You’d need a truck for it.’

‘Exactly.’ This time, it wasn’t even for a moment that the young man hesitated. ‘I say! Can I let you in?’ Already he had a key in his hand.

‘You’re very kind.’ A first twinge of misgiving beset George. It now seemed doubtful, somehow, that beyond this bleak barrier there would still be that respectable elderly woman prepared to produce tea – let alone muffins. Muffins didn’t go with Yale locks.
Tempora mutantur, nos el mutamur in illis.
But already the innovatory door was gliding past George’s nose.

The two men (forty-three and possibly twenty-two) entered the common room together.

It hadn’t changed. It wasn’t shabby with the shabbiness some of the minor colleges had to affect. In fact it was very splendid. From three of the walls there looked down on it with approval the portraits not of obscurely distinguished scholars but of prime ministers and persons of that sort. And George suddenly knew it wouldn’t do. To cross the room and punch a bell wouldn’t really do. Whatever his formal status, it would be a presuming and unbecoming action. Besides which, if the elderly woman really was there, this delightful young man would by now probably be saying, ‘What about a cup of tea?’

‘I’ll just take down an address or two from
Members in
Residence,
’ George said – thus avoiding a positive fib. ‘It’s over on that table.’

‘Yes, of course.’ Now for the first time the young man did fractionally hesitate. ‘I have to write a note or two,’ he said. And he sat down at the escritoire that was said to have belonged to Marie-Antoinette.

So the truth came to George. The young man wasn’t
quite
sure. He had a duty as a host to a stranger who was almost certainly an old member. But he had a duty to the college as well, and must respect its regulations, bonkers though they might be. He proposed to remain in the common room until George was prepared to leave it. It was as simple, it was as sensible, as that.