The 2 12 Pillars of Wisdom (30 page)

‘I meant no offence,’ said von Igelfeld. ‘I had no idea that you were so loyal to Vienna.’

The Master gave a start. ‘Vienna? I know nothing about Vienna.’

‘I was speaking metaphorically,’ said von Igelfeld hastily. ‘Vienna. Rome. These are places that stand for something beyond the place itself.’

‘You are referring to Wittgenstein, I take it,’ said the Master. ‘There used to be some of the older dons who remembered him. A most unusual figure, you know. He used to like going to the cinemas in Cambridge, where he would eat buttered toast. Very strange behaviour, but acceptable in a man of that ability.’

Von Igelfeld smiled. ‘I have never eaten toast in a cinema,’ he said.

‘Nor I,’ said the Master, somewhat wistfully. ‘There is so much in this life that I haven’t done. So much. And when I think of the years, and how they slip past.
Eheu! Eheu, fugaces!
’

The Master looked up at von Igelfeld, at this tall visitor, and, extracting a handkerchief from his trouser pocket, he suddenly began to cry.

‘Please excuse me,’ he said, between sobs. ‘It’s not easy being the Master of a Cambridge college. People think it is, but it really isn’t. It’s hard, damnably hard! And I get no thanks for it, none at all. All I get is criticism and opposition, and moans and complaints from the College Fellows. Their rooms are too cold. The college wine cellars are not what they used to be. Somebody has removed the latest
Times Literary Supplement
and so on. All day. Every day. Oh, I don’t know. Please excuse me. I know it doesn’t help to cry, but I just can’t help it. If you knew what it was like, you’d cry too. They say such beastly things to me. Beastly. Behind my back and sometimes to my face. Right to my face. I bet they didn’t do that to Wittgenstein when he was here. I bet they didn’t. They just pick on me. That’s all they do.’

Von Igelfeld leaned forward and put an arm round the Master’s shoulders. Just like Müller, he reflected.

Von Igelfeld was shown to his rooms by the Porter, a gaunt man who walked in a curious, halting gait up the winding stone stairway that led to von Igelfeld’s door.

‘A very good set of rooms, this is,’ said the Porter. ‘We reserve these rooms for the Master’s personal guests and for distinguished visitors, like yourself, Sir. You get a very fine view of the Court – probably the best view there is – and a passable view of the College Meadows.’

He unlocked a stout oak door on which von Igelfeld noticed that a painted nameplate bearing his name had already been fixed. This was a pleasant touch, and he made a mental note to make sure that they made a similar gesture in future to visitors to the Institute. Or at least they would do it for some of their visitors; some they wished to discourage – some of Unterholzer’s guests, for example – and it would be unwise to affix their names to anything.

The Porter showed von Igelfeld round the rooms. ‘You have a small kitchen here, Sir, but I expect that you’ll want to eat in Hall with the other Fellows. The College keeps a good table, you know, and the Fellows like to take advantage of that. That’s why we have so many fat academic gentlemen around the place, if you’ll forgive the observation. Take Dr Hall out there, just for an example. You see him crossing the Court? He likes his food, does our Dr Hall. Always first in for lunch and always last out. Second helpings every time, the Steward tells me.’

Von Igelfeld moved to the window and peered out over the Court. A corpulent man with slicked down dark hair, parted in the middle, was walking slowly along a path.

‘That is Dr Hall?’ he asked.

‘The very same,’ said the Porter. ‘He’s a mathematician, and I believe that he is a very famous one. Cambridge is well known for its mathematicians. Professor Hawking, for example, who wrote that book, you know the one that everybody says they’ve read but haven’t, he’s a Fellow of that college over there, with the spire. You can just see it. There’s him and there are plenty more like him.’

Von Igelfeld stared out of the window. He knew
A Brief History of Time
, although he had certainly not read it. It had brought great fame to its author, there was no doubt about that, but did it really deserve it?
Portuguese Irregular Verbs
was probably of equal importance, but very few people had read it; that is, very few people outside the circles of Romance philology and there were only about . . . He thought for a moment. There were only about two hundred people throughout the world who were interested in Romance philology, and that meant that
Portuguese Irregular Verbs
was known to no more than that. His reflection went further: one could place all the readers of
Portuguese Irregular Verbs
in the Court below and still only occupy a small part of it. Whereas if one were to try to assemble in one place all the purchasers of Professor Hawking’s book it would be like those great crowds in Mecca or the banks of the Ganges during a religious festival. This was unquestionably unjust, and merely demonstrated, in his view, that the modern world was seriously lacking in important respects.

‘I’m afraid these rooms lack a bathroom,’ said the Porter, moving away from the window. ‘That’s the problem with these old buildings. They were built in the days before modern plumbing and it has been very difficult, indeed impossible, to make the necessary changes.’

Von Igelfeld was aghast. ‘But if there is no bathroom, where am I to wash in the morning?’

‘Oh, there is a bathroom,’ said the Porter quickly. ‘There’s a shared bathroom on the landing. You share with Professor Waterfield. His rooms are on the other side of the landing from yours. There’s a bathroom in the middle for both of you to use.’

Von Igelfeld frowned. ‘But what if Professor Waterfield is in the bathroom when I need to use it? What then?’

‘Well,’ said the Porter, ‘that can happen. I suppose you’ll have to wait until he’s finished. Then you can use it when he goes out. That’s the way these things are normally done . . .’ adding, almost under his breath, ‘in this country at least.’

Von Igelfeld pursed his lips. He was not accustomed to discussing such matters with porters. In Germany the whole issue of bathrooms would be handled by somebody with responsibilities for such matters; it would never have been appropriate for a professor, and especially one in a full chair, to have to talk about an issue of this sort. The situation was clearly intolerable, and the only thing to do would be to arrange with this Professor Waterfield, whoever he was, that he should refrain from using the bathroom during those hours that von Igelfeld might need it. He could use it to his heart’s content at other times, but the bathroom would otherwise be exclusively available to von Igelfeld. That, he thought, was the best solution, and he would make the suggestion to this Professor Waterfield when they met.

The Porter in the meantime had extracted a key from his keychain and handed this to von Igelfeld. ‘I hope that you have a happy stay,’ he said brightly. ‘We are an unusual college, by and large, and it helps to have visitors.’

Von Igelfeld stared at the Porter. This was a very irregular remark, which would never have been made by a German porter. German porters acted as porters. They opened things and closed them. That was what they did. It seemed that in England things were rather different, and it was not surprising, then, that it was such a confused society. And here he was at the intellectual heart of this strange country, where porters commented on the girth of scholars, where bathrooms were shared by perfect strangers, and where masters of colleges, after making opaque remarks about Freud and Wittgenstein suddenly burst into tears. It would clearly require all one’s wits to deal with such a society, and von Igelfeld was glad that he was a man of the world. It would be hopeless for somebody like Unterholzer, who would frankly lack the subtlety to cope with such circumstances; at least there was that to be thankful for – that it was he, and not Unterholzer, who had come here as Visiting Professor of Romance Philology.

That evening the Master invited von Igelfeld to join him and several of the Fellows for a glass of sherry before dinner. The invitation had come in a note pushed under von Igelfeld’s door and was waiting for him on his return from a brief visit to the College Library. He had not spent much time in the Library, but he was able to establish even on the basis of the hour or so that he was there that there was an extensive collection of early Renaissance Spanish and Portuguese manuscripts in something called the Hughes-Davitt Bequest, and that these, as far as he could ascertain, had hardly been cata-logued, let alone subjected to full scholarly analysis. The discovery had excited him, and already he was imagining the paper which would appear in the
Zeitschrift: Lusocripta Nova: an Untapped Collection of Renaissance Manuscripts in the Hughes-Davitt Bequest at Cambridge
. Readers would wonder– and well they might – why it had taken a German visiting scholar to discover what had been sitting under the noses of Cambridge philologists for so long, but that was an issue which von Igelfeld would tactfully refrain from discussing. People were used to the Germans discovering all sorts of things; most of Mycenaean civilisation had been unearthed by Schliemann and other German scholars in the nineteenth century, and the only reason why the British discovered Minoa was because they more or less tripped up and fell into a hole, which happened to be filled with elaborate grave goods. There was not much credit in that, at least in von Igelfeld’s view. The same could be said of Egyptology, although in that case one had to admit that there had been a minor British contribution, bumbling and amateurish though it was. Those eccentric English archaeologists who had stumbled into Egyptian tombs had more or less got what they deserved, in von Igelfeld’s view, when they were struck down by mysterious curses (probably no more than long dormant microbes sealed into the pyramids). That would never have happened had it been German archaeology that made the discovery; the German professors would undoubtedly have sent their assistants in first, and it would have been they, not the professors themselves, who would have fallen victim. But it was no use thinking about English amateurism here in Cambridge, the very seat of the problem. If he did that, then everything would seem unsatisfactory, and that would be a profitless way of spending the next four months. So von Igelfeld decided to make no conscious comparisons with Germany, knowing what the inevitable conclusions would be.

He made his way to the Senior Common Room in good time, but when he arrived it seemed that everybody was already there, huddled around the Master, who was making a point with an animated gesture of his right hand.

‘Ah, Professor von Igelfeld!’ he said, detaching himself from his colleagues and striding across the room to meet his guest. ‘So punctual!
Pünktlich
even. You’ll find that we’re a bit lax here. We allow ten minutes or so, sometimes fifteen.’

Von Igelfeld flushed. It was obvious that he had committed a solecism by arriving at the appointed time, but then, if they wanted him to arrive at six fifteen, why did they not ask him to do so?

‘But I see that everybody else is here,’ he said defensively, looking towards the group of Fellows. ‘They must have arrived before six.’

The Master smiled. ‘True, true,’ he said. ‘But of course most of them have little better to do. Anyway, please come and meet them. They are all so pleased that you took up the Visiting Professorship. The atmosphere is quite, how shall I put it?
electric
with anticipation.’

The Master took hold of von Igelfeld’s elbow and steered him deftly across the room. There then followed introductions. Dr Marcus Poynton, Pure Mathematics; Dr Margaret Hodges, French Literature; Professor Hector MacQueen, Legal History (and history of cricket too), Mr Max Wilkinson, Applied Mathematics; and Dr C. A. D. Wood, Theoretical Physics.

‘These are just a few of the Fellowship,’ said the Master. ‘You’ll meet others over dinner. I thought I should invite a cross-section, so to speak.’

Von Igelfeld shook hands solemnly, and bowed slightly as each introduction was made. The Fellows smiled, and seemed welcoming, and while the Master went off to fetch a glass of sherry, von Igelfeld fell into easy conversation with the woman who had been introduced to him as Dr C. A. D. Wood.

‘So you are a physicist,’ said von Igelfeld. ‘You are always up to something, you physicists. Looking for something or other. But once you find it, you just go off looking for something more microscopic. Your world is always getting smaller, is it not?’

She laughed. ‘That’s one way of putting it. In my case, I’m looking for Higgs’s boson, a very elusive little particle that Professor Higgs says exists but which nobody has actually seen yet.’

‘And will you find it?’

‘If the mathematics are correct, it should be there,’ she said.

‘But can you not tell whether the mathematics are correct?’ asked von Igelfeld. ‘Can they not be checked for errors?’

Dr C. A. D. Wood took a sip of her sherry. ‘It is not always that simple. There are disagreements in mathematics. There is not always one self-evident truth. Even here, in this college, there are mathematicians who . . . who . . .’ She paused. The Master had now returned with a glass of sherry for von Igelfeld.

‘This is our own sherry, Professor von Igelfeld,’ he said, handing him the glass. ‘The Senior Tutor goes out to Jerez every couple of years and replenishes our stocks. He has a very fine palate.’ He turned to Dr C. A. D. Wood. ‘You have become acquainted with our guest, I see, Wood. You will see what I mean when I say that he is a very fine choice for the Visiting Professorship. Very fine.’

‘Absolutely,’ said Dr C. A. D. Wood.

‘You were saying something about disagreements amongst mathematicians,’ said von Igelfeld pleasantly. ‘Please explain.’

At this remark, the Master turned sharply to Dr C. A. D. Wood and glared at her. ‘I cannot imagine that Professor von Igelfeld is interested in such matters,’ he hissed at her. ‘For heaven’s sake! He only arrived today, poor man!’

‘I am most interested,’ said von Igelfeld. ‘You see, there are disagreements amongst philologists. Different views are taken. It seems that this is the case in all disciplines, even something as hard and fast as mathematics.’