“If they’re going to use the knife on you,” said Lufkin creakingly, “you’d better get the best man in London. I always believe in getting the best man in London.”
“He’s always said that,” said the herald, pink-faced, well-tubbed, plump beside his hero’s bones.
“Who is your man, then?” Lufkin said.
I produced the name of Mansel.
“Never heard of him,” said Lufkin, as though that removed Mansel from the plane of all created things.
After a patch of conversational doldrums, he had another thought.
“I have it,” he said. He turned to the herald. “Go and ring up —” Lufkin gave the name of the President of the Royal College of Surgeons — “and find out how this fellow’s thought of.”
The herald trotted off. The curious thing was, as Margaret and I had discovered, that he was a successful solicitor, and not Lufkin’s solicitor at that. He had appointed himself Lufkin’s handyman, not for money or any other sort of benefit (Lufkin’s patronage had gone by now), but just because he loved it.
Lufkin considered that he had done his duty to me, and passed on. His parting shot, as he gazed at some honorary graduands, was: “I never have believed in giving people degrees they haven’t worked for.”
In which case, one would have thought, he ought not to have been present to receive one himself that morning. Most men would have thought so: but not Lufkin.
The academic procession got into line, a mace-bearer led us, caps dipping, hoods glaring, into the university hall. It might have been any one of two thousand academic processions that year in the English-speaking world, all copied, or not so much copied as refabricated, from processions of corporations of clergymen four hundred years before. It wasn’t really a tradition, it was manmade. Manmade, not woman-made, Margaret used to say: women couldn’t have kept their faces straight long enough to devise colleges and clubs, the enclaves and rituals which men took shelter in.
Anyway, with solemnity this particular ritual pattered on. We climbed up the steps on to the platform, we took off our caps to Francis Getliffe, Francis Getliffe took off his cap to us. We sat down. For a moment or two the order of proceedings was interrupted, for some students had become amused by the patch over my eye and started to cheer. Then Francis Getliffe delivered the invocation: more standing up, sitting down, taking off of caps.
At last the public orator was beginning to make his speech in praise of Lufkin. The orator stood towards the edge of the dais, and Lufkin, standing opposite, did not turn his face towards him. Lufkin just remained there, immutable, with an assessing expression — just as he used to sit at his own table, in the days of his industrial power, surrounded by his court of cherubim and seraphim. He listened now, as he used to listen then, to the story of his virtues and achievements, as though he could, if he felt inclined, point out where certain important features were being omitted. About his virtues, Lufkin’s view of his own character was different from any other person’s: about his achievements, the maddening thing was, he was right. He made his claims for himself, and he sounded like, and perhaps sometimes was, a megalomaniac: yet objectively the claims were a little less than the truth.
Lufkin was duly hooded, the citations fluted on, an orientalist was being celebrated: I was only half-listening, with my eye regarding David Rubin, whose turn was still to come. At each academic pun, a smile crossed his clever sad Disraelian face. One might have thought that he enjoyed this kind of jocularity or that he was intoxicated by the occasion, never having been honoured before. If one did think either of those things, one couldn’t have been more wrong. I had known him for a good many years, and I sometimes thought that I now knew him less than at our first meeting: but I did know one thing about him. He felt, underneath his beautiful courtesy, that his time was being wasted unless it was spent in his own family or with one or two colleagues whom he accepted as his equals. He had been adviser to governments, he had had all the honours in his own profession, he was courted by the smart, and he was so unassuming that they believed they were doing him a favour: it must have seemed, people said, a long way from his Yiddish momma in Brooklyn. Not a bit of it. His skin was like parchment, there were panda-like colorations under his eyes, he had never looked satisfied either with existence or himself. But, satisfied or not, Rubin was one of the aristocrats of this world. He walked among us, he was superlatively polite, and (like Margaret’s forebears) he didn’t give a damn.
Another citation; looking out over the hall, I felt, or imagined, that my sound eye was getting tired. I didn’t observe that a note was being passed up to Lufkin: in fact, during that ceremony no one but Lufkin would have had a note passed to him. I was surprised to be tapped on the arm by my neighbour and be given a piece of paper. On it was written, in a great sprawling hand, the simple inscription: Mansel is all right. L.
Rubin, last on the list, had returned to his seat with his scroll; Francis Getliffe gave the valedictory address, and Margaret led me away. I had begged myself off the mass luncheon, and she and I ate sandwiches in an office. I told her, not that she needed telling, that I should be glad when the Court was over. She knew that I couldn’t rely on my energy that afternoon, that I, who had been to so many committees, was nervous before this one.
Because I was nervous, I arrived in the Court room too early, and sat there alone. I read over the agenda: it was a long time since any agenda had looked so meaningless. Item No. 7 read: Constitution of Disciplinary Committee. It would take a couple of hours to get down to it. Previously I had thought that Leonard Getliffe and his friends had been well-advised, the tactics were good: now the words became hazy and I couldn’t concentrate.
The others clattered in noisily from the luncheon, some of them rosy after their wine. Francis Getliffe took the ornamental chair, looking modestly civilian now that his golden robes were taken off. Arnold Shaw, flushed and bobbish, sat on his right hand. Francis was just going to rap on the table when his son came and whispered to me: “I’m very sorry that you had to come.” Civil of him, I thought without gratitude. Did he know that, if you are in any kind of conflict, the first law is — be present in the flesh?
Francis Getliffe cleared his throat and said that, before we began, he would like to say how sorry the entire Court was to hear of my misfortune, and how they all wished me total success in my operation. Several voices broke in with “my lord chairman”, saying how they wished to support that. I duly thanked them. Down below the words I was cursing them. Just as energy had seeped away, so had good nature. The last thing I could take was either commiseration or kind wishes.
As though at a distance from me, the meeting lumbered into its groove. Lumbered, perhaps, a little more quickly than usual, for Francis, though a stately chairman, was surreptitiously an impatient one. Someone by my side crossed, one by one, five items off. The sixth was Extension to Biology Building, and even Francis could not prevent the minutes ticking the afternoon away. The voices round me didn’t sound as though they could have enough of it. The UGC! Architects! Appeals! Claims of other subjects! Master building plan! Emotions were heated, the voices might have been talking about love or the preservation of peace. Of all the academic meetings I had attended, at least half the talking time, and much more than half the expense of spirit, had been consumed in discussions of building. Whatever would they do when all the buildings were put up? The answer, I thought, though not that afternoon, was simple: they would pull some down and start again.