The Case of the Missing Bronte (6 page)

The tone of her voice was not calculated to make the salivary glands run in anticipation. I could see I was in for a difficult morning. But then, I hadn't been looking forward to it anyway. I must go a bit carefully here. There's nothing irritates me more than people who condemn whole professions: the police are pigs, all soldiers are fascists — that kind of thing. I call it jobism, and it's quite as bad as racism. Still, I have to say that I
have not greatly liked the academics I have come in contact with in the course of my life. Of course, you could say I don't as a rule see them at their best: mostly when I've met them it has been in connection with some kind of offence or other — thieving from bookshops, mostly, or sexual offences of a slightly ludicrous nature. But I have to admit that they have seemed the most snivelling, self-important scraps of humanity you can imagine, and as windy and whiney a bunch as ever demanded special privileges without doing anything to deserve them. Of course they might be quite charming in their natural environment. Anyway, it was with this sort of foreboding that I set off for Milltown.

The University of Milltown, it is said and widely believed, came into being as a result of a hold-up on British Rail. One day back in the 'sixties or early 'seventies the train containing the then Prime Minister, Mr Wilson or Mr Heath (folk memory is uncertain which, and in retrospect they do seem increasingly indistinguishable), came to a full stop just outside Milltown, and the Great Man — whichever — on the way from a party conference here to a bye-election rally there sat for twenty minutes looking out at the long rows of grime-encrusted houses, built in long monotonous terraces, and at the gimcrack office blocks and the tightly-packed skyscrapers containing council flats (built, we now learn, due to some failure of socio-architectural theory). And the Great Man, forcibly becalmed into contemplation, turned to his wife, or the underling who was with him, and he said: ‘This is a town with absolutely nothing.' And after another ten minutes of hold-up and painfully enforced thought the Great Man had pronounced: ‘What it needs is a university.' And so that is what it got.

Like so many ideas of our modern Great Men, this one could have done with a bit of thinking through. For the
University of Milltown had not exactly prospered. Student enrolment was precarious. Even as a staging-post on the road from school to unemployment it was not popular. Why, after all, fritter away three years in such an environment as Milltown when gayer, livelier, more beautiful surroundings are equally available to you for frittering in? The North Country young called it the University of Last Resort. Other new universities had made their mark: you went to one because you were bright, to another because you were revolutionary, to a third because you were over-sexed. You went to Milltown because it was there. There were whispers of closure, but the fact is that it's confoundedly difficult to make academics unemployed. Even the architects had shown signs of faint-heart and lack of conviction. At least the other new universities have a certain bold awfulness — a brave Scandinavian fist thrust in the face of comfort, convenience and pleasurable living. The University of Milltown looked like the rest of Milltown. Two or three blocks that could be council offices, or the business premises of some shaky concern or other; several large hangar-like constructions that could be chain-store cash-and-carry warehouses; some builder's sheds that no one had bothered to demolish. It hadn't led to a lively environment. Even in the early 'seventies the students hadn't been militant. They explained at NUS conferences that they were too depressed. Everybody understood.

I had been enjoying the drive up to then, through marvellous countryside, and I'd been singing bits of Verdi. I stopped when I got to the campus.

At any rate you could say it was well signposted. Fingerposts everywhere telling me where to go, as if it were some much-visited stately home. I left my car in the car park, which was miles from anywhere, and I walked past rugby fields, football pitches and finally tennis courts. A couple of chaps were hitting a ball around
dispiritedly. A placard on the gate announced ‘North of England Championships, Leeds, June 15th-20th.' It didn't look as if they'd make the grade. I finally found ‘English Department' on one of those signposts (like those on the South Bank in London) that tell you where absolutely everything is, but somehow leave you more confused than ever about how to get there. I went wrong twice, but finally located the English Department on the third and fourth floors of one of the blocks that looked like local council offices. There was no lift, and as I started up the stairs I was nearly crushed into the ground by a sudden rush of students from a lecture-room, all of them apparently desperate for air. I tell you, I didn't like this place long before I got to the English Department.

Which, when I did get there, proved to be a large central square, windowless, lit with neon tubes one of which was flickering aggravatingly. Off it were corridors leading to offices. There was one notice-board for official notices, another for student activities. There were no student activities. The official one had a list of names and rooms of staff members, little bits of paper advertising cancelled lectures, and various broadsheets suggesting to students a variety of activities and attractions. Some of them were relevant to their studies: contemporary literature courses here, there and everywhere, all of them addressed by Malcolm Bradbury and Ian McEwan. Some of them were rather odd, such as another advertisement for the tennis championships, and another suggesting an overland safari to Australia as a suitable way of spending the summer vacation. Could the staff be wanting to get rid of them?

By the notice board was an office, and as I stood reading I heard a high voice shrieking: ‘I am Professor of English and head of this department, and I insist . . .' I looked at the name on the door. It was Gumbold. I was grateful to the secretary for warning me off. I strayed
down the corridor in search of Timothy Scott-Windlesham. The notice-board had said he was in Room 423, but the numbering system, nominally consecutive, seemed to have been applied on a plan that could only have been the work of a lunatic or a mathematician. There was hardly a soul about. When finally I found Room 423 there was talk going on inside. I knocked tentatively. There was sudden silence, and then the door opened a fraction and a pale face peered out. It said in a high voice: ‘Ten minutes. I'm busy. No, twenty.' Then it popped in again.

I walked away. I wondered how one filled in twenty minutes in an English Department. At the end of the corridor the architect, in a burst of generosity, had allowed a window. By it was an open door, with voices coming through. The label on the door said, in small letters, ‘staff room'. The staff of the English Department, presumably. I went towards it, and poked my head around the door. There were four people in the room, lounging around with cups in their hands. A stocky woman with ugly dark hair and a light moustache glared at me.

‘Are you a student?'

‘No.'

‘Oh — sorry.' She looked genuinely contrite, as if she'd called me a rude name. ‘You never know these days. We get a lot of older people under these retraining schemes.'

Now she really had insulted me. ‘I am not an older person,' I said. ‘As a matter of fact, my wife has just finished her degree at Newcastle.'

‘Really?' She looked around at the others. ‘I say, do you remember when Newcastle was absolutely the end of the road, academically? Since this place was built it's practically Oxbridge.' She looked back at me. ‘Like a cup of coffee?'

‘Love one.'

‘It's instant,' said a burly, bearded, aggressive type, who seemed to flourish the word like a banner and dare me to say that I only drank percolated.

‘That's what I like,' I said. ‘Just as I prefer my tea in bags and my orange juice from tins with additives. Do I pass?'

‘Oh God, a funny one,' said a languid someone in the corner. ‘Thank God you're not a student. The funny ones are the ones I can't stand the most.'

At this point a thin, silent, middle-aged man with a stoop and an unhealthy skin got up and walked out without a word. I looked at him suspiciously, and suddenly realized it was someone I'd arrested long ago in my beat-walking days for exposing himself in the Charing Cross Road.

‘What,' asked the young woman with the faint moustache, ‘are you actually wanting?'

‘What I was actually wanting was a talk with Mr Scott-Windlesham.'

‘Lucky old you. Here's your coffee.'

‘Thank you. Oh — real milk. A luxury.'

‘Oh God,' said Languid. ‘An ironist. You'll get on well with Timothy. He's rather fond of the old irony himself.'

‘Flat-irony, mostly,' said Moustache. ‘Well, your treat is all ahead of you. What can we do for you the while? Recite Shakespeare sonnets?'

‘It's actually a question about Victorian literature I'm seeing him about,' I said. ‘I spoke to your secretary, and she said Professor Gumbold was . . . that he had . . .'

‘Cracked up,' said Beard. ‘Fallen over the intellectual precipice.'

‘Enrolled as a life student of the Higher Lunacy,' said Languid.

‘It's an awful thing,' said Moustache contemplatively, ‘when a perfectly average, plodding, third-rate academic goes bang off his head. The collapse of a brilliant mind
has something grand, something King Leary about it. The spectacle of Gumbold mad is just dreary and ludicrous.'

‘It's we who suffer,' said Languid. ‘His lectures used to be competent and dull as ditchwater, and the students didn't listen. Now they're totally gaga and the students don't go. Not a ha'porth of difference for them. But it's we who have to put up with his tantrums and lunacies. And he's still supposed to be in charge of the department.'

‘His psychiatrist,' said Beard, ‘suggested his mind needed something restful and soothing in the academic line, to calm it down after all that Carlyle. He's always been a hypochondriac, and we suggested a project on asthmatics in literature. It's not working out too well as yet.'

‘There are no asthmatics in literature,' said Moustache. ‘It's an intrinsically unliterary illness, without the romance of tuberculosis. Well — that's our life's burden. I suppose you were told,
faute de
Gumbold, to go along to Timothy?'

‘That's right. Is he your other Victorian man?'

‘Person,' said Moustache.

‘I
suppose
you could say so,' said Beard grudgingly. ‘What do you want to ask him about?'

‘The Brontës.'

Moustache hooted with laughter. ‘You won't get much change out of Timothy on the Brontës. Timothy is a Meredith man. And why is Timothy a Meredith man?'

‘Because,' said Languid, ‘if you study a minor aspect of a great writer — say Fielding's plays, or something — there's always the danger someone will read one of them and want to discuss it with you. Whereas Meredith is a respectable name, with acres of novels that nobody has read.'

‘And if,' said Moustache, ‘by some remote chance
somebody comes along who
has
read
Harry Richmond
or
The Egoist,
you say: “Oh, that's the
popular
Meredith. I can't think I'll be spending too much time on
that.”
That's the principle Timothy works on. Because he's a secretive little squirt, and whether he's actually done any work on Meredith or not I don't know, but he certainly has no wish to talk about it with any of us. And he absolutely loathes the Brontës.'

‘I don't know,' said Beard. ‘I saw him buying a copy of
Wuthering Heights
in the bookshop the other day.'

‘What kind of lecturer in Victorian literature is it who doesn't own a copy of
Wuthering Heights
?' demanded Moustache, with a good deal of reason. ‘He loathes them. When he took over Gumbold's novel course he struck them right off, first thing he did. They're too popular for our Timmy. And too local. He calls them Yorkshire Home Industries Limited. Our Timothy is a great cosmopolitan. So if you're bringing him a problem on the Brontës, you're barking up the wrong tree.'

‘The right metaphor would be leaning on a broken reed,' said Beard, ‘Timothy bearing such an uncanny resemblance to a broken reed. You'd do much better to go to someone in Leeds or Sheffield.'

‘Tell me,' I said, ‘Mr Scott-Windlesham — or is it Doctor — ?'

‘Mr,' said Moustache firmly.

‘Mr Scott-Windlesham hasn't mentioned, has he, a visit from a lady last week — a lady with a manuscript?'

‘No. But then, he probably wouldn't. He fraternizes, but he never confides, our Timmy. What sort of manuscript was it?'

‘Well, that I can't say exactly, but it's quite long, and it's in very small handwriting — '

‘Ho-ho,' said Beard. ‘Now I see where we've been going. Brontë juvenilia, by any chance?'

‘Possibly,' I said diplomatically. ‘As far as I know,
nobody with any expertise has looked at it.'

‘Bound to be a fake,' said Moustache, ‘otherwise someone would have been on to it years ago. Even twenty years ago people used to give their right hand for those little books. Today there's just nothing on the market.'

‘Bound to be a fake,' agreed Beard. ‘Or one of those American collectors would have had it years ago. Or perhaps old Tetterfield in Bradford.'

They all tittered.

‘Who's that?' I asked.

‘An absolutely manic librarian. Head of the West Riding Regional Library. Has a mania for collecting everything about Yorkshire writers. J.B. Priestley's tobacconist's bills, John Braine's underwear. He's just mad to get together a collection of Brontë stuff of his own, naturally, but he's come on to the market too late, and there's practically nothing around. He's got a bit of a private income to back him up, but it's not big enough to get him any of the really high-price stuff. He's as gaga as old Gumbold, as a matter of fact, but it doesn't notice so much in a librarian.'