There were other matters to be decided, and it was nearing the time when professors feel the need of a pre-dinner drink, so they said it was agreeable.
2
Professor Raven was not pleased to be asked to join a committee supervising a thesis in the Faculty of Music; she would be the only non-musician, and she knew that the odd man out in such an academic group was expected to be modest and keep out of what didn’t concern him, while lending scope and respectability to everything that was done. This looked like a job involving a great deal of work and very little satisfaction. She thought differently when she had lunched at the Faculty Club with her old friend Simon Darcourt, and had drunk her full share of a bottle of wine.
“I didn’t know you were in on this, Simon,” she said. “That makes a difference, of course.”
“I’m not in it academically, but I’ll have a good deal to say about what goes on,” said Simon. Then he told Penny in extreme confidence—knowing that she was as leaky as a sieve—about the Cornish Foundation, its support for Schnak, and its determination to present Arthur of Britain on the stage. He also told her that any research in which she was involved on the libretto would, of course, be generously rewarded by the Foundation. That made a great deal of difference.
“The problem seems to be that the libretto is very scrappy,” he explained.
“How much have you got?” she asked.
“I’ve taken a quick look, and to be frank there’s virtually nothing,” he said. “What the chances are of digging anything up, I couldn’t even guess. It isn’t going to be easy, Penny.”
“With my flair for research, and the money you’ve got your hands on, much may be achieved,” said Penny, looking owlish. “I’ve taken a look, you know, and it was a quick look, like yours, and there’s really nothing but a few notations in German, written by Hoffmann himself, because he had written quite a lot of music he wanted to use. I assumed that somebody must have some really solid stuff I hadn’t seen. I gather there was some sort of dispute, amounting almost to a row, between Hoffmann and the English librettist.”
“Who was—?”
“None other than the redoubtable James Robinson Planché.”
“Yes, the Dean did mention that name. What was redoubtable about him?”
“Very popular nineteenth-century playwright and librettist. Just about forgotten, now. Though everybody uses a phrase of his: ‘It would have made a cat laugh’, he says in one of his innumerable works. I suppose the opera world knows him, if it knows him at all, as the man who wrote the libretto for the unfortunate Weber’s Oberon, one of the resounding flopperoos of operatic history. Music splendid. Libretto—well, Schnak has a word for it.”
“Shit?”
“Of the most rejectable and excrementitious order.”
“Then why—?”
“I can’t tell you why, and if you didn’t have all that lovely money to throw around I might never find out. But I can, and I will.”
“How?”
“The Cornish Foundation—I see it all now in a vision—is going to pay my expenses to go abroad and find out.”
“Where will you look?”
“Now Simon, you know the research game better than that. Where is for me to know, and for you and Schnak and the Cornish Foundation to find out when and if I get it. But if it’s to be gotten, I’m the girl to get it.”
With that Simon had to be content. He liked Penny. She must have been nearer forty than thirty, but she had charm, and spirit, and in a favourite Rabelaisian phrase of his, she was “a jolly pug and well-mouthed wench”. And beneath all that, she had the steely core of the woman who has scrambled up the academic ladder to a full professorship, so Simon knew that it was useless to press her further.
After lunch, in order to avoid going back to his rooms in Ploughwright, where he would have to face the heap of typescript of his life of the late Francis Cornish—the biography with that disastrous, abysmal gap in the very heart of it—he went to the Club library. He looked with distaste at the table on which were displayed a selection of the less obscure among the innumerable academic quarterlies, dismal publications in which scholars paraded pieces of research that meant all the world to them, but which their colleagues in general found supremely resistible. He ought to look over those that touched on his own subject, he knew, but outside it was spring, and he could not force himself to his scholar’s task. So he strayed to another table, where unscholarly magazines lay, and picked up Vogue. He never read it, but he had hopes, inspired by the wine he had drunk and the cheering companionship of Penny Raven, that it might contain some pictures of women with very few clothes on, or perhaps none at all. He sat down to read.
He did not read. He looked at the advertisements instead. There were young women displayed there, in various stages of undress, but in the fashion of the time they looked so angry, so crazed, so furious, that they gave him little comfort, aroused no pleasing fantasy. Their hair stood on end or was wildly tangled. Their eyes glared or were pinched in squints that hinted at lunacy. But then he came to a picture so sharply contrasted with its neighbours that he looked at it for several minutes, and as he looked something in the back of his mind stirred, moved, was aroused, until he could hardly believe what he saw.
It was not a photograph, but a drawing of the head of a girl, in silver-point, touched here and there with white and red chalk; it was delicately executed but not weak, without any modern flash or challenge. Indeed, it was drawn in the manner, and also in the feeling, of a time at least four centuries before the present. The head was aristocratic, not haughty but modestly confident; the eyes were innocent but not simple-minded; the line of the cheek had neither the pudding-faced nor the lantern-jawed look of the models whose photographs appeared in the other advertisements. It was a face that challenged the viewer, particularly if he were a man, by its self-possession. This is what I am: what are you? it seemed to say. It was by far the most arresting picture in the magazine.
Beneath were a few lines in a clear, beautiful type, but again it was not attenuated or falsely elegant. Darcourt, who knew something about types, recognized it as a modern version of the type-face reputedly based upon the handwriting of a poet, churchman, bibliophile, scholar, humanist, and, in some respects, rascal, Cardinal Pietro Bembo. The message was brief and clear:
Your make-up is not a matter of current fashion. It is the realization of what you are, of that period of history to which your individual style of beauty pertains. What Old Master might have painted you, and seen you truly? We can help you to discover that, and to learn to apply the only cosmetics made to realize the Old Master quality in you. We do not seek the most customers, only the best, and our services and our products are not cheap. That is why they are obtainable only at a few selected shops from our own maquilleuses. What Master are you? We can help you to achieve the distinction that is yours alone.
The advertisement was signed, in an elegant Italic hand, “Amalie”, and below were half a dozen addresses of suppliers.
Glancing around to be sure that nobody saw him doing what was academically unspeakable, Darcourt carefully tore the page out of the magazine and hurried back to his rooms, to write a most important letter.
3
The meeting between the Cornish Foundation and Schnak’s parents took place late in May, in the drawing-room of the penthouse. It had better be done, everyone agreed, though nobody expected anything to come of it. Two months had gone by since the decision to support Schnak in her work to revive and re-flesh and re-clothe Hoffmann’s notes for Arthur of Britain, and the meeting should have taken place earlier, had Arthur not been too much under the weather to do anything. Now, at the end of May, he was mending, but pale and subject to sudden loss of energy.