Hull paid off, so far as my father was concerned. Comfortably ensconced there, ‘teaching’ something that nobody within a hundred miles of the place much wanted to hear about, he became within a mere decade its prime authority in England, so that we were back in Oxford in what was, in fact, my own final year as an undergraduate. After that, I had a longish spell in London, working for a crammer and doing a number of small things in a literary way. During this period my father died (something Oxford professors very seldom seem to do) and my mother went to live in Budleigh Salterton, so that I ceased to have any connection with the place. But then, and again after an interval, I found myself what may be called a niche there. It wasn’t a university job, being merely something to do with the British Council. But by that time I had also established myself as a minor literateur at large in the Sunday newspapers. And the dons of my old college, finding themselves one afternoon in a conclave with nothing much to occupy them, took it into their heads that I was deserving of an occasional square meal, and elected me to membership of their senior common room. It turned out that I had to pay for the square meals when I ate them, but it was an agreeable privilege, all the same. Moreover, having picked up in childhood some notion of the kind of chit-chat favoured on such occasions, I came to move freely if in a modest way in donnish circles generally, and it was thus that I revived my memory of, and casual acquaintance with, the companion of my youth.
Martin Brand was rather grand – or so a rhyme that went the rounds not unreasonably declared. He had become, in his vigorous prime, Galen Professor of Physike and Chirurgerie. In other words, he was bang up to date as Oxford’s top medical man. But although this made him vastly eminent, he was known to be decently unassuming about it. He delivered an occasional lecture to the medical students, and this always ended with the injunction: ‘Les malades, toujours les malades!’ – a favourite precept, it seemed, of a colleague equally eminent in France, insisting that no medical luminary, whatever his wattage, should fail to spend time at the bedside of the afflicted. This strictly clinical zeal took Martin himself to the bedside of a good many profitable private patients. There was a story, several times repeated to me, that thus summoned to the extreme north of Scotland at several guineas a mile, he had given as his professional opinion on a ducal sufferer that his Grace might get better, or might get worse, or might remain the same. It is not, on the whole, about unpopular characters that dons fabricate such stories or air such chestnuts. Martin was, I judged, very generally liked as a man in whom there was a good deal more than transpired over a glass of port. Dons are commonly thought of as rather a tame lot. If it be so, the fact may account for their being drawn to individuals in whom some aggressive or aberrant impulse is felt to lurk. And that was certainly the case with Martin. Something that I had sensed in him as a boy was still there. It had, as it were, sunk deeper inside, and thereby become more difficult to put a name to. But perhaps it had strengthened as well.
One night I chanced to dine as a guest of someone who was a fellow of the college to which Martin’s Chair was attached in the odd Oxford fashion, and I found myself sitting next to my old schoolfellow at High Table. Or, rather, standing next to him, as we hadn’t yet sat down. Grace had to be said before we could do that, and the grace was rather an elaborate affair. A servant would bellow for silence, whereupon the Provost, at one end of the table, would say a number of things in Latin. The senior fellow present, having taken his place at the other end, would interject a number of remarks in reply – also, of course, in the learned tongue. The performance, vaguely akin to a kind of badminton or pat-ball tennis, would continue for a minute or so, and then everybody (including some two hundred young men in the body of the hall) would sit down and fall to. But on this occasion there was a hitch. The Provost hadn’t turned up, so the Pro-Provost had taken his place. And the Pro-Provost didn’t know his stuff. This oughtn’t to have mattered at all, since the entire pious rigmarole was printed on a thing like a ping-pong bat in front of him. He was in difficulty, nevertheless, and fell to mumbling. At this an undergraduate shouted, ‘Louder!’ (and was instantly, no doubt, identified by the bawling servant, and consequently fined a pound next day). A second undergraduate then shouted, ‘—and funnier!’ (a hoary old joke likely to cost him the same sum). The situation might have got out of hand had not the senior fellow, with much presence of mind, firmly articulated, ‘In saeculo saeculorum, Amen!’ and sat down.
Everybody at High Table took care to be discreetly amused by this small contretemps. Or everybody except Professor Brand. He, having given me a brisk nod of recognition, produced a gesture of dismay.
‘By God, Leonard! he said. ‘It looks as if the Pro-Pro has got it as well. A bit too much, that is. And I thought I was in luck.’
‘My dear Martin, whatever are you talking about?’
‘Something confidential. I’ll tell you – but don’t breathe a word.’ It might have been expected that this injunction would have been delivered in a lowered voice, but it wasn’t my impression that Martin had taken any such prudent course. He was excited, and apparently much perturbed. ‘The Provost’s in the Acland,’ he said, ‘and under my care.’ The Acland was a nursing home. ‘But he doesn’t want it known.’
‘Good heavens, Martin! Has the man been stricken by a retributive disease?’
This was a tasteless joke, of which I was immediately ashamed. But Martin took it in his stride.
‘A reasonable guess,’ he said. ‘But I doubt whether the old boy would much distinguish himself in the stews. But he does feel that, in a scholar, it’s a particularly awkward thing.’
‘Then just what is “it”?’ I asked.
‘Something right up my street. That’s why I thought I was in luck when he came shambling in on me. But now the Pro-Provost too! What if the bloody condition spreads, and I can do damn-all about it? I’ll be a laughing-stock.’ And Martin glowered round the High Table almost as if he thought that this might already be the state of affairs.
‘Les malades, toujours les malades,’ I said. ‘You will be able to hop from one bedside to the other. But explain.’
‘You remember Howe?’
‘Howe?’ I echoed. For the moment the name conveyed nothing to me.
‘You must remember Howe. The dyslectic gardener.’
‘Dyslectic?’ Again I was at sea. Had Martin found occasion to employ a word like ‘dyslogistic’ I’d have understood him at once. I am, as I have explained, a literary man.
‘For pity’s sake! “Word blindness”, if you like. Howe couldn’t read, and the disability had almost certainly been with him from the cradle. He had grown quite cunning about it.’
‘I do remember now. But are you telling me that your Provost is dyslectic too? It must be quite unusual surely, for a man to become head of an Oxford college without ever having mastered his ABC.’
‘Don’t be an even greater ass than God made you, Leonard. We suppose dyslexia to be a functional disorder. Its presence is commonly detected in children – often very intelligent children – as soon as they’re presented with their horn-book. That’s known as the “developmental” form. We know now not to panic or fuss, and the condition can usually be persuaded to fade out. And it has always interested me. Thirty years back, if I remember, I told you I was going to look into it.’
‘So you did. I do now recollect that too.’
‘But there’s also, you see, a much rarer form of the trouble. We call it “acquired”, and I’m always on the look-out for it.’
‘It attacks adults?’
‘Just so. And here, suddenly, it walked in on me in the person of the boss of this dump we’re gorging ourselves at the expense of this evening. And what could be handier – downright nicer – than that? But now here’s his underling almost certainly attacked as well. It’s damned awkward. Suppose it spreads like billy-o.’
‘Like mumps, you mean, or some such harmless thing?’
‘If mumps comes at you, Leonard, you mayn’t find it harmless. Celibate, aren’t you? It may remind you of what you carry round with you, all the same.’
This was distinctly coarse even for Martin Brand, and for a moment it silenced me. And my host of the evening became aware as a consequence that he owed me a little chat. So I got nothing further out of Martin until we rose from High Table and went into common room for dessert. But I did have a quick murmur from him at the end of the evening, when we were collecting our discarded gowns preparatory to going our several ways.
‘Of course, there are possibilities,’ he said. ‘Distinctly there are possibilities. It’s occasionally a small bonus one gets when landed in a fix. Meanwhile, what’s the betting that that praeposital understudy is in my consulting-room tomorrow morning? I’ll put a quid on it. Or a bottle of claret. The dump allows that in its wager book.’
‘Not on,’ I said, and departed into the night.
Living, as I have explained, merely on the periphery of academic Oxford, I was far from surprised that for nearly a week I heard nothing more about the misfortune that had befallen the Provost of Judas, but I did on several occasions find myself reflecting on its extreme oddity. That a mature and distinguished scholar (as the man must surely be) should suddenly find himself, although retaining all his faculties in their full vigour, bereft of the earliest and most humble of his acquirements – to wit, the ability to read – was as bizarre as it must be profoundly disconcerting. I could well understand his retreating into unexplained seclusion until the disability should either pass or have to be admitted as dictating a total change in his manner of life. I even found myself wondering – and the wonderment was itself bizarre – whether he chanced to possess an informed knowledge of flowers and plants, and would thus be able to retreat upon such useful but decidedly unassuming toil as had marked the daily round of the now doubtless long-since deceased Howe. And the recovered image of Howe prompted another train of thought. Howe’s manner of life had been mysterious in various small ways, and the need prudently to dissimulate his disability had inclined him to other concealments than the vital one. The Provost, if his affliction chose to settle in on him, might well decline upon a course of irrational obfuscations.
From this my speculations moved to Martin. Why had Martin been so promptly upset by the mere possibility that the Pro-Provost had, so to speak, climbed into the Provost’s boat? When at length I did begin to hear the first stirring of general gossip about what had occurred, I noted that its tone of amusement about what had befallen the two men proceeded from the fact of its childishness; its suggestion of one kid catching the mumps or whatever from the kid at the next desk. And at this thought a fuller light came to me. It seemed that Martin Brand had made himself something of an authority on dyslexia, or at least was known to have been long interested in it. Did his prompt dismay as the Pro-Provost seemed unable to read what was on his ping-pong bat proceed from a sudden apprehension that the disability was catching, that there was, to put it crudely, a bug involved – whereas all his own theorising hitherto had been in a different direction? Other hazy perceptions about Martin followed upon this one. As well as perturbation, I felt I had detected in him something like glee. What had he meant by saying that the situation held ‘possibilities’? It came to me that the Galen Professor of Physike and Chirurgerie, for all his air of large self-confidence and heartiness of address, and perhaps in accord with that strong hint of hidden streaks or strains in him, had to be judged as essentially an unstable personality. I think I can honestly say that I recoiled from this notion almost as soon as it came to me. The man was generally liked; I had myself as a boy positively been fond of him; I had a genuine hope that he would wholly distinguish himself in his treatment of his new patient, the Provost of Judas.
It was not to be. The Provost did not return to that High Table. The Pro-Provost, too, was an absentee. A non-anti-phonal, but equally elaborate grace was now being pronounced by an undergraduate.
But that was not all. Quite quickly, that was far from being all. It was a time of year at which the reading-rooms of the Bodleian Library ought to have been crowded with young men and women – with young persons, perhaps I ought to say – belatedly preparing themselves for the mild horrors of the Examination Schools. But those reading-rooms were now almost forsaken. Row upon row of untenanted desks testified to there being something badly wrong. Eventually, so sparse was the attendance that it took even a drastically depleted staff scarcely a couple of hours to fetch a required volume from the labyrinthine bowels of the institution. It was as if, after six hundred years, the Black Death was abroad once more in England.
But nobody, of course, died. And, at least among the young, few went into seclusion. Already at an ungodly morning hour – eleven o’clock say, or even ten – the semi-affluent and the affluent, scions of nobility and loitering heirs of city-directors, crowded the streets in their sports cars as they went off to fish, to shoot whatever the month allowed, to sport with the tangles of Neaera’s hair in little temples, major follies, unfrequented recesses in stately homes and mere country seats. In the afternoons the river was more than commonly gay with punts, canoes, juvenile tuck-boxes, portable radios and record-players. Of an evening the poky restaurants were crowded, and money flowed the more freely because nobody could read the menu, or the prices against one bogus speciality or another. The student body – so wide and fair a congregation in its budding-time of health and hope and beauty – concluded without effort that books are a dull and endless strife, and that there was only blessing in the fact that all such – folios and quartos and duodecimos – had become a closed book to them. Only here or there a pale scholar or exhibitioner, sequacious of the ultimate glory constituted by a fellowship at All Souls, wandered, a lost soul, amid the throng of his liberated and unalphabetic contemporaries.
Inevitably, the thing rapidly became a national sensation. Nothing remotely to be thought of as an outbreak or epidemic of dyslexia had ever been heard of before. It was as unheard of as an outbreak or epidemic of two-headed calves. That it had occurred, of all places, in Oxford, a community relying for its livelihood and existence on reading and copying from books even more than on manufacturing motor cars, added a piquancy – indeed, a weirdness – to the affair. And it was, at least for the present, an entirely localised phenomenon. Nowhere else in England, in all Great Britain, in the entire Western World was any change in the incidence of dyslexia reported. In Oxford itself, and with surprising speed, a whole new commercial activity sprang up. Working in respirators, and segregated as far as possible from the community at large, competent and unafflicted teams of hastily recruited persons toiled with tape-recorders to render audible what had been only legible hitherto: Stubbs’s Charters, for instance, and Liddell and Scott’s Greek-English Lexicon. An acute shortage of magnetic tape was made good by supplies flown in from Hong Kong; there was a hastily smothered scandal about a boom in what were called video nasties.
Amid all this, Martin Brand’s position was peculiar and – after quite a short time – increasingly disagreeable. His connection with dyslexia, which was in fact clearly substantial, was much hyped by the press. He was described as the world’s prime authority on a horrible and newfangled scourge, and it was felt and declared that Oxford was fortunate in possessing on the spot the right man at the right time. But soon the attitude changed. Was it not at least a strange coincidence, it was asked, that the right man had been on the very spot on the world’s surface upon which the hitherto unexampled calamity had occurred? Might there have been carelessness, criminal carelessness in some laboratory in which a quite minor and infrequent medical ‘condition’ was being studied? Had there been – it was a deadly word – a leak? The modern equivalent of Pandora’s fatal box is a test-tube, and it is widely believed among the vulgar that a fractured test-tube may unloose unimagined pestilence over the planet. And whereas at the bottom of Pandora’s box of evils Hope was found to linger, nothing of the kind has ever been discovered in a broken test-tube.