‘Instructions to a pimple,’ I said to myself as I worked on my upper lip. ‘One. Acquire head as slowly as possible. Exception: if can arrange first appearance after six p.m., reverse this procedure. Prominent head viewed for first time morning after party, etc., valuable aid nullifying in retrospect subject’s subtle seduction moves, gay fund of anecdotes, etc. Two. Select site either where squeezing painful, e.g. round eye, cheek near nose, or where skin too soft for efficient squeezing, e.g. between mouth and chin, at side of neck (if latter, prefer area where shirt-collar will rub). Three. Appear in combination, near existing pustule(s). If none, take as focal point patch of broken veins, mole, birthmark, anything a-bloody-tall, in fact’ —I was talking aloud now, though not loudly— ’which will aid the impression that some major skin disorder is about to break out of its beachhead and overrun every visible square inch up to the hairline, and be sure to pick a day when the poor sod’s meeting his girl,’ I finished not so not loudly, after a small disjunctive voice in my head had asked me whether I knew I had some frightfully funny sort of spot thing on my chin.
Things failed to pick up much in the kitchen, where I stood drinking coffee, eating a piece of toast and listening and looking while the chef told and showed me how badly Ramón had done his cleaning job the previous day. I put David on to that, on to everything else for the next six or eight hours too, and was off, at any rate as far as the office. Here I put a call through to John Duerinckx-Williams in Cambridge. For my present purpose, or indeed for any other I might have there, he was the only possibility among the dozen or so university people I knew otherwise than as guests at my house; I would not have asked any of those I had known as an undergraduate there, back in the mid-1930s, to tell me the time, let alone to help me with what must seem outlandish inquiries.
Despite everything the St Matthew’s porter could do, I finally got hold of Duerinckx-Williams, who said he would see me at eleven o’clock. I was just about to go and find Joyce and tell her something of my plans for the day, when I caught sight of the cheap folio notebook in which I, and she and David too, used to scribble down reminders and messages. The left-hand pages were folded round against the back cover; on the topmost right-hand page there was some stuff about meat in David’s hand, then, in my own, information in overwhelming detail, almost amounting to a curriculum vitae, from a London art dealer who had finally cancelled his booking and rung off abruptly when I told him we had no TV in the bedrooms. But that had been last week, ten days ago. Then I started to read something I thought at first I had never seen before, but soon realized I must have, because I had written it myself, at whatever hour of whichever night and however drunkenly. It ran:
‘Accent like west of England with bit of Irish. Voice wrong, artificial. Something funny about movement, as if behind glass. ?no air displacement. Could not touch. Did not see hand going through, was like hand still in front of h between him and me even tho hand stretched out and he less than foot away. Could not ask Still ‘injaynious’ ? =poss[ess]ed of intelligence. No answer where. Proof. Behind head, body about 3” by 1½, silver, arms out, left hand missing, smiling. Wanted to’
With what I might term shallow alcoholic amnesia, a man can be quite easily reminded of what he has temporarily forgotten. The deeper sort blots out memory beyond recall. This was the case here: I was prepared to believe that I had conversed with Thomas Underhill’s ghost last night, but I would never know what it had been like to do so. I might do better next time; it seemed to me there was going to be a next time. If so, I must try to clear up some obscurities: exactly what, for instance, the ‘proof’ of Underhill’s survival after death was supposed to prove, and also what it might consist of. The idea that he had been carrying or wearing some kind of giant silver brooch ‘behind his head’ was unhelpfully bizarre; I recognized that, like most of those whose midnight selves write notes to their daytime selves, I had thought some vital points too obvious and memorable to be worth the trouble of recording. At a future meeting, too, I might establish whether my account of trying to touch what I had seen and heard was a brilliant attempt to describe the indescribable or a straightforward result of drunken uncertainty about relative distances. Other questions could be cleared up at once, such as why I had written on a past page of the notebook—to conceal my story from others —and why I had nevertheless propped the book open at that place—not to conceal it from myself: a reconstruction almost too plausible to be likely.
I hurried upstairs and met Joyce on the landing. At first, she put on a not-speaking act, presumably by way of showing me how much she wanted me to talk to her, but soon abandoned this.
‘What’s happened?’ she asked, looking me over.
‘Happened? How do you mean?’
‘You’re all sort of excited. Charged up.’
It was true. Ever since receiving my own message, I had been mounting on a spiral of elation and disquiet, a state I was not used to. I suppose I was equally unfamiliar with the prospect of setting off to do something of which the end was unforeseeable. I could not even remember when I had last felt in any way strung up, as now, for a reason—not a very full or clear reason, certainly, but one with a sense of adequacy about it.
I decided to play all this down. ‘Really? I must say I don’t notice it particularly. Standard awful to bloody awful is how it feels from here.’
‘Oh, all right. What are you going to Cambridge for?’
‘To look up some stuff about the house, as I said.’
‘How can that take all day?’
‘It might not, as I said. It depends how soon I find what I’m looking for.’
‘You’re not, you know, meeting anybody there, are you?’
‘I’m going to see Nick’s old supervisor, yes, but not anybody in the sense you mean.’
‘Mm. What’s Nick going to do all the time?’
‘He can please himself. He’s brought some of his university stuff along. Or he could do something with Amy.’
‘Why don’t you take them both with you into Cambridge? There’s a lot more there they could—’
‘I’d have to hang about waiting for them, and I told you I might be coming more or less straight back. Anyway, I’m going on my own.’
‘Oh, all right. You know Lucy’s off this morning?’
‘She’ll be here again tomorrow for the funeral. But say goodbye to her for me if you like.’
‘Do you want me to do the wages and stamps and things?’
‘Would you? I must be off.’
I took a quick and fairly small nip in the still-room and was soon belting up the A595 in the Volkswagen. It was a genuine hot day, with the humidity down for once and the sunshine unfiltered by haze. Vehicles flashed and glistened as they moved, their bare metal seemingly burnished, their paintwork sheened with oil. They hurtled past me in the opposite direction, swung into and out of corners ahead, pulled aside to overtake as if with an extra dash, like actors conscious of appearing against an advantageous background. Even in the deep shadows of the trees lining the road, individual branches and clusters of leaves and patches of soil reflected light with an intensity, and yet with a depth of colour, that I was used to seeing only in Alpes-Maritimes. In the middle distance, refraction-mirages, illusory strips of still water lying across the road, constantly came into view and vanished. Beyond Royston, the confluence of the A10 and the A505 brought heavier traffic, but I kept my average up to forty-five or better. The outskirts of Cambridge rolled by, with the familiar thickening of wayside timber and shrub that suggests the approach to a forest rather than a town. Then this disappeared into the fenland openness of the place itself, never crowded-looking even at mid-morning in term-time, and the landmarks were there: the Leys School, Addenbrookes Hospital, Fitzwilliam Street (where I had had digs when sitting my scholarship in 1933), Peterhouse, Pembroke and finally, more or less side by side with St Catherine’s on the corner of Trumpington Street and Silver Street, the long bitten-off rectangle of St Matthew’s, a flat-fr
onted Tudor structure not too badly restored at the end of the eighteenth century.
I found a parking space only a hundred yards from the main gate. The outer walls bore chalked or whitewashed slogans here and there: COMMUNALIZE COLLEGE ESTATES, NUDE LIE-IN GIRTON 2.30 SAT., EXAMS ARE TOTALITARIAN. First one whiskered youth in an open frugiferous shirt, then another with long hair like oakum, scanned me closely as they passed, each slowing almost to a stop the better to check me for bodily signs of fascism, oppression by free speech, passive racial violence and the like. I survived this, entered and cross the front court (which looked oppressively clean to my eyes), went through a low archway and ascended to the square panelled study-sitting-room that overlooked the long slope of the Fellows’ garden.
Duerinckx-Williams, thin and dry-looking, with a stoop and paraded short sight although well over ten years younger than I, got to his feet and smiled at me fixedly. I had met him perhaps a dozen times on occasions involving Nick.
‘Salut, vieux—entrez done. Comment ça va?’
‘Oh, pas trop mal. Et vous? Vous avez bonne mine.’
‘Faut pas se plaindre.’ Then he turned grave, or graver still. ‘Nick told me of your loss. May I offer my sympathy?’
‘Thank you. He was nearly eighty, you know, and hadn’t been well for some time. It was no great surprise.’
‘Wasn’t it? In my experience’—he made it sound as if this went back to the time of the foundation of the college, give or take a century or so—’these things are never imaginable in advance. But I’m glad to see you’re not unduly bowed down. Now, can I offer you something? Sherry? Beer? Port? Tea? Whisky? Claret?’
It was kind and intelligent of him to pretend, as usual, not to understand about drink, and so allow me to choose what I wanted without embarrassment. I said a little whisky would be very nice. While he got it for me, and made further show of incomprehension in pouring out rather more than half a gill, he came up with some amiabilities about Nick. Then, when we were sitting on either side of the splendid late-Georgian fireplace, he asked what he could do for me. I told him only of my interest in the history of my house and particularly in Underhill, of a reference to his diary in a book I had come across and of my hope that he, Duerinckx-Williams, would telephone the librarian of All Saints’ and assure him of my bona fides.
‘Mm. How urgent is your desire to see this man’s diary?’
‘Not at all, really,’ I lied. ‘It’s just that I so seldom get the chance of a day off like this, and I thought I’d take advantage of it. Of course, if it’s going to be…’
‘No no, I’ll be happy to do all I can. It’s merely that the librarian may not be there at this precise instant. At All Saints’ everybody seems to tend not to be there so much of the time. But I can readily establish that. Would you excuse me a moment?’
He telephoned briefly and rejoined me.
‘We’re in luck, Maurice. He’s not only there but also free of entanglements. Would you care for some more … of that?’ he asked, pretending now to have forgotten what I had been drinking.
‘Uh … no thank you.’
‘In that case we might be on our way. No no, I assure you it’s no trouble. Three minutes’ walk at the most. As you know.’
Four minutes later we had passed through a carved wooden doorway of great age and were walking down the All Saints’ library, a lofty and narrow room in the shape of an immense L, with some good Victorian stained glass in the windows at the angle. There was a characteristic smell, chiefly of dust and ink. The librarian came to meet us with a demeanour that managed to be haughty and deferential at the same time, like that of a West End shopwalker. There were introductions and explanations.
‘Underhill,’ said the librarian, whose name was evidently Ware. ‘Underhill. Yes. Fellow of the college in the 1650s. Yes.’ Then he said with great emphasis, ‘Never heard of him.’
‘Your manuscript collection is pretty extensive, isn’t it?’ asked Duerinckx-Williams.
‘Oh, it’s extensive all right,’ said Ware, a little put out at this irrelevant reminder.
‘Then a Fellow’s personal papers, found here and inspected soon after the beginning of the last century, as I understand the case …?‘
Ware relented a little. ‘It’s possible. There’s an autograph catalogue dating from the 1740s, when the libraries first started taking an interest in manuscripts and older stuff generally. We rather led the way there, it seems. Here it is. Or rather its photocopy. Splendid invention. Underhill. Underwood, Aubrey. Several verses upon occasions, with part of Philoctetes, an heroical poem after the manner of Mr Dryden. How dreadful. That wouldn’t be your man, would it? No. Wrong name, for one thing. Nothing by any Underhill. What a pity. I am sorry.’
‘There’s no other collection it might be in?’ I asked.
‘Not relating to the date you gave me, no.’
‘But my author saw it in the 1810s or thereabouts.’
Duerinckx-Williams peered at the thin regular handwriting. ‘In certain circumstances, such as the loss or detachment of the first leaf or leaves, might not the diary have been entered under some general head referring to anonymous writings?’
‘Oh, I don’t know about that,’ said Ware, momentarily put out again. ‘It’s possible. Let’s see. Yes, under Anonymous, in fact. Anonymous, a tract discovering the vices of Popery, notably its Mariolatrous practice, by a gentleman, never imprinted. Fascinating, but not your quarry, I think. Anonymous, a quantity of sermons, and prayers, and pious thoughts, by the late rector of St Stephen’s, Little Eversden. No. Anonymous, of sundry matters, by a man of learning. Not over-informative, is it? A possibility, I suppose. Anonymous…’
There were no other possibilities. Ware looked at me with gloomy expectancy.
‘Could I have a look at those sundry matters?’ I asked.
‘All these items are kept in the Hobson Room,’ said Ware forcefully, but without indicating whether I was expected to give a cry of pure animal terror at this disclosure, or burst out laughing to find my quest so comically and decisively thwarted, or what. I turned to Duerinckx-Williams.
‘Which, I believe, is not open to non-Fellows without the written permission of the Master,’ he said, ‘but in the case of Mr Allington, who is an M.A. of my college and for whom I am happy to vouch, perhaps this requirement could be waived.’
‘Of course,’ said Ware, impatient now, and with a key already in his hand. Resuming his shopwalker manner, he added, ‘Would you come this way?’
The Hobson Room turned out to occupy a whole floor of a tower at the opposite angle of the court, approached by a winding stone staircase and possessing small windows on three sides. It was cool, the first cool place I had been in for what seemed like weeks. Most of the available wall-space was filled with deep oak shelves of Edwardian pattern, and two working-tables and chairs of the same period completed the furniture. On the shelves stood ranks of grey cloth folders, presumably containing manuscripts. Ware began to examine the top outer corners of these like somebody looking through a collection of gramophone records. I could not watch him; I stood and tried to read a framed quarto page of some book that hung among others on the stone wall, but failed to take in a word.
‘Here we are,’ said Ware. ‘Complete with fly-leaf, I see. Thomas Underhill, D.D., olim Sodalis Collegii Omnium Sanctorum, Universitatis Cantabrigiensis.’
He had to supply the last part from memory, because I had turned and taken the folder from him. It contained all or part of an octavo notebook shorn of its covers—there were traces of glue and stitching—and, apart from a little foxing, in an excellent state of preservation.
‘An odd sort of anonymity, with the man’s name plastered all over the front,’ said Duerinckx-Williams.
‘Thank you,’ I said. I had seldom wanted anything as much as I wanted the two of them to go away and let me read what I held in my hands.
Duerinckx-Williams sensed this at once. ‘We’ll leave you in peace. If you happen to b
e free at one thirty or so, I’d be delighted to give you lunch at Matthew’s. Just the ordinary combination-room stuff, but eatable as a rule. But you mustn’t feel bound by that.’
‘Perhaps you’d lock up when you leave and return the key to me in the library,’ said Ware, handing it to me.
‘Yes,’ I said. I had the notebook open on one of the decks and a reading-light switched on. Thank you.’
There was a short pause while they presumably looked at each other or, for all I cared, went through a complicated mime of impotent fury, and then there was the clank of the iron latch.
Underhill had written a good clear hand, and had not used any private shorthand system: abbreviations were few and immediately understandable. He began, on June 17th, 1685 (he had died in 1691), by boasting to himself about how learned he was and listing and briefly describing the books he had read. Evidently he had had a considerable private library. Most of the works and authors mentioned were unknown to me, but I did recognize references to the Neoplatonist philosophers, who had been contemporaries of his at Cambridge, quite possibly acquaintances: Cudworth’s intellectual System, More’s Divine Dialogues and a couple of others. I remembered from somewhere that More had been part of, or on the edge of, a circle that practised magic, including a sinister-sounding Dutch baron. What had he been called? Never mind—an interesting lead, perhaps, to the scholar, but I am no scholar, and my interest in Underhill was not scholarly.