A Long Way to Shiloh (2 page)

By ten, having managed to dilute and recharge the mixture, the hair of the dog had done its restorative work and the
per
sona
was genial, modest or informative as the situation required; all as normal this bewildering month. This was not by any means the expected crew. With rare consideration, the Birketts had actually invited people I liked or might want to meet, who seemed at the same time to like or to want to meet me; a conjunction not so common. A reputation as a
whizz-kid
carries its own hazards. This lot seemed rather a jolly lot. None of them was being unduly objectionable. The air was pleasantly charged with commendation. I turned and took stock of the situation; and found a creamy young blonde, properly proportioned, taking stock of me.

‘Well, Professor Laing, and how are we?’

‘Well, Lady Liz, very well. I’m not professing anything just at the moment.’ A pang of something, chagrin, ancient lust, had gone through me.

‘Still on your feet, anyway, I’m glad to see. I heard they got you pissed last night.’

She had a knack, something to do with a late labial, more specifically a fricative, convulsion, of throwing her voice as far as your ear and no farther.

‘They tried to.’

‘Nobody invited me.’

‘Nobody invited anybody. They were just a few people who’d worked under me at one time or another.’

She noted that one with a faint lengthening of the eyelid. Nothing in the qualifications as stated had disbarred her.

She said, ‘I expect you’re too proud for me now.’ This had been a private word, too, as her eyelid again indicated.

I said, ‘You could always find out.’

‘I’d have to transfer to Bedford, wouldn’t I?’

‘Very bucolic.’

‘Very crowded, I hear.’

‘I expect we could squeeze in a willing body.’

‘I expect I’d have to compete.’

We’d had relations, this randy young noblewoman and I, enjoyable ones, until an observant dog-faced girl-friend of hers had pointed out the impropriety, as between instructor and instructed. She had promptly switched courses – as I’d believed to enable us to continue. This was a couple of terms ago and I hadn’t seen her since. Something in her last words made me wonder if the reason might not lie with her dog-faced friend; if this unpleasant friend might not have been keeping an eye on me.

I said, ‘What are you doing here?’

‘I’m one of Birkett’s students.’

‘Working hard, I hope.’

‘Leading a balanced life.’

‘I thought you might be.’

‘I’d heard you were, too.’

Almost certainly Dog-face had told her. Chagrin filtered out, leaving only honest lust.

I said, ‘Are you busy on Sunday?’

‘Yes.’

‘Very busy?’

‘Pretty busy.’

‘That sounds relative.’

‘We must always try and relate the relative, Professor.’

‘Might you be in if I rang about four?’

‘I might.’

‘Caspar!’

I spun round. It happens to be my given name. Only one person can make it sound like an oriental bazaar; a person quite capable of making an urbane threesome of what was rapidly becoming a fairly ripe twosome.

I said, ‘Hello, Uri,’ without enthusiasm.

‘Hello, love.’

He’d slipped in late, but had managed to get himself a glass on the way. He had it in his tight shiny glove and his
melancholic
smile was irradiating slightly, facial scar becomingly
prominent
.

‘Here on business?’

‘Just to pay my respects.’

‘Who to?’ He hadn’t taken his eye off the girl.

‘To you. Naturally.’ He was very dark brown in the voice, and his features had the assured immobility of the tragic clown; a very international, very well-tailored tragic clown, hair
en-
brosse
, faintly lotioned. ‘I’m an old student of Birkett’s. He knows how I respect you.’

‘Yes, love. Elizabeth, this is Uri Namir, warrior, bibliophile and bore.’

‘Charming,’ Uri said, impartially.

‘Uri is a hero. Of the War of Independence. The Israeli War of Independence. He is an Israeli.’

‘Hello.’

‘And this is Elizabeth Longrigg.’

‘Wonderful!’

‘
Lady
Elizabeth Longrigg.’

‘Marvellous!’ His interest, if possible, notched up a fraction. ‘Are you really? A Lady?’

‘Always,’ Elizabeth said. She was looking, with frank interest, at his glove. This girl began to overstimulate me all over again. I recalled her way of looking with frank interest at anything that happened to frankly interest her.

I said, briskly, ‘Well, Uri, we must have a word before you go.’

‘You know,’ Uri said, ‘you’re the first Lady I ever met – the first Lady with a capital L. Extraordinary, isn’t it? After all, I’ve been here now some years. People abroad think England is populated entirely by lords and ladies. I try to tell them you never meet any. And now I have.’

‘What do you do in London, Mr Namir?’

‘I am attached to the Embassy.’

I said, ‘He touts for books for another well-known warrior, bibliophile and bore.’

‘Oh, that. It was only on one occasion. Don’t listen to him, Lady Longlegs.’ He’d have got her name accurately first time; he had this knack, the bastard, of shoving the conversation on two frequencies at once to indicate a certain interest in
something
that wasn’t the ostensible subject of it.

‘What occasion was that?’ She was smiling at him.

‘Oh, I was given once the task of rounding up some books for our then prime minister, Mr Ben-Gurion, a great
book-collector
. He was here on a flying visit.’

I said, ‘Isn’t that what you’re supposed to be doing now?’

He’d been going to say something else and he paused
fractionally
and said instead, ‘Yes. That’s right. Which reminds me, Caspar. I want to talk to you.’

‘Okay, I’ve got to pop off just now,’ Elizabeth said.

I said, ‘Look, don’t go –’

‘I have to. Just for a minute.’

‘I want to see you.’

‘Right.’

I watched her wend off.

‘She’s crazy for you,’ Uri said.

‘You know, you are getting to be an abnormally ubiquitous bastard.’

‘She’s crazy for something,’ Uri said.

Elizabeth was just going out of the door and being rather animated with a philosophy don who’d draped himself round it.

‘I envy you up here,’ Uri said. ‘It’s a wonderful relationship. As a professor, my God – you’ll have whole herds of the young creatures at your disposal. When do you go?’

I told him.

‘And what’s your schedule?’

I told him that, too.

‘You don’t have anybody looking out the stuff for you?’

‘I’ve written off to tell them what I’m looking for. If staff is available, I suppose they’ll help.’

‘I mean professionally.’

‘The funds won’t stretch to that.’

‘What exactly is it you want?’

He had a fair working knowledge of the literature, so I told him. I must have drunk a bit over the past few days. I heard my own voice echoing.

‘And which libraries do you expect to do best at?’

It occurred to me as I talked that it wasn’t my voice echoing. It was just that I’d told him it all before. I’d told him it – when? – on Monday. Today was Thursday. I’d told him it at another gathering. He’d told
me
that he was sniffing out more books for Ben-Gurion. It was the reason I’d asked him tonight if he was here on business. He was looking at me gravely, the large
en-
brossed
head clocking it up; all as before. He observed, exactly when it happened, my moment of recall.

I said, ‘Uri, haven’t we been here before?’

‘I have something very interesting for you, Caspar.’

‘Books?’

‘I would like very much if you could keep Sunday free. This Sunday.’

‘I’m afraid I’m busy.’

‘Do you have to be, Caspar?’

‘I simply am.’

‘Free enough to make dates with Lady Lulu?’

The extraordinary bastard had been listening.

He said, ‘Caspar,
don’t
make any arrangements for Sunday. Please leave it free. I’ll call you. I’ll call you some time during the day.’

‘You do that,’ I said, and looked round.

‘She went,’ Uri said.

‘What?’

‘She went a few minutes ago. She waved. She saw you were busy.’

He went himself a few minutes later; and within half an hour most of the others had gone, too.

I stayed on, hooked by Birkett, and talked, of Greek and Hebrew hells.

The following morning, early, found me regarding a couple of Alka-Seltzers fizzing in a glass. I regarded them from a seated position. I felt unwell. This followed. I had drunk too much. I had drunk too much too many nights. I had drunk more than anyone, both last night and other nights. There was a reason for this, I thought, watching the tablets spit and bob and writhe.

The unseemly behemoth had not been wrong last night. There were indeed two types in my discipline. The whizz-kids had to watch out. The thing comes and goes, in flashes. It had flashed first at Jericho, with Kathleen Kenyon, which had started the notoriety; again at Megiddo. It isn’t a matter of learning, although you need that, too, a prodigious amount of it, libraries full of it, enormous atom-smashing assemblies of it, to open the withered shell and in the withered fruit to see the living orchard. More, much more; and at the same time
ridiculously
less: the sudden moment of
rapport
, across the
millennia
, between you and
him
, who had written the thing that had been found; the flickering in the imagination, the metaphysical twilight in which, without formal process of thought, a relation is made between the found object that had been lost, and its lost user now, in this revelatory moment, found.

Something to do with the boutons, of course, those nodes of association in the brain; and there was no telling about them. Either they lit up or they didn’t; erratic wiring. When it
happened
, as the cow had rightly said, it happened early. It
behoved
one to try and keep it happening. How?

Fortunate Michael Ventris, who had deciphered Linear B at twenty-eight, and died at thirty. At thirty, I was taking up a university chair.

A ragged spume-like precipitate had gathered at the top of the glass. I shook it to make it settle and drew my dressing gown more closely. I was seated on the toilet in the arctic chill of the bathroom.

Further clouds of disaffection had come to trouble my pillow in the night and they gathered round the toilet this morning. Was I or was I not in tune with this education kick at all? It was a question, a big and untimely one. To be a good
educationist
one had to have, presumably, an urge of some kind. One had to want to tell somebody something; preferably everybody everything. I had no urge of this kind. My urge was of quite another kind. If I learned something, my reaction was to keep quiet about it. If I uncovered something, my reaction was to put it back, exactly as it was.

It was an initial reaction, of course, and was followed by others. Perhaps, in some obscure quest for grace, I even
over-compensated
; thus calling into being what the female minotaur had described as my ‘racy and amusing exposition’. But the initial urge was there. It was not an educational one.

Not that, I thought, moving numbly and with a sense of
disturbance
on the plastic seat, I was a
bad
educationist. They’d offered me, after all, a
chair
. This undoubtedly was something. My lectures always drew an appreciative hand, the classes were well attended. Too well attended. Since the frigging young Arab had failed to keep his frigging fingers off the Isaiah scroll at Qumran, everyone wanted to get in the act. I had incipient priests, advertising agents, debutantes; budding social pests of all kinds. What had the obliquities of Talmud, Mishnah,
Targum
and Zohar to do with them? Why should they want to know about the way of life illustrated by the Damascene and Alexandrian texts? In what possible ways could the ancient anguish, business and religious, of the peoples who had used the Akkadian, Syriac, Ugaritic, Hebrew and Aramaic tongues, enrich them? And if it did, should it be allowed to? The thing was an affront, and could become a public mischief. Already a literature of upwards of two thousand volumes had been called into being by the grotesque flowering of interest in scrollery. There was even a Home University Teach Yourself the Dead Sea Scrolls!

Far too much knowledge was going here, and undoubtedly it would get worse. The summons to the University of
Bedfordshire
was only a further indication of it. Develop an expert
interest
in any specialized branch of the academic syllabus and inevitably you found yourself in some pedagogic posture,
instructing
others. The thing proliferated. It was an absurdity. What did they
want
with all this information? What did they plan to do with it? It was a vanity, and I was being put in the position of pandering to it, pillaging old privacies, touting old attractions. They would all of them be much better off learning to serve the more fundamental needs of their own society; a thought that led, by a process of easy ratiocination, to some fundamental needs of my own, of the old adam.

Why had the frigging girl gone without seeing me last night?

She’d said she’d come back and see me. Hadn’t she said that? She’d waved at least, so Uri had said; a gesture intended
presumably
for me rather than him. What could this gesture imply?

The tablets were dissolved, the precipitate settled. I drank, pondering.

It might, or might not, imply a wish to start associating with me again out of the public gaze. But she was tricky; you couldn’t tell. She hadn’t, for instance, said she would be
available
at four on Sunday; only that she might be. Was I here being offered a fair crack of the whip or simply an explosive cigar? The old adam, torpid now but a tyrant in his hour, would force me to find out. The prospect held no comfort. Nothing today held any comfort.

I finished my transactions and rose, unsteadily. Too much old cobblers of this gloomy kind had been afflicting the
professor
of late. It was no use brooding over what might be. You had to play it by ear. Four o’clock Sunday, heh? Four o’clock Sunday, then.