At the Villa of Reduced Circumstances

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 a small part of it would be occupied. 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 on 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 chain 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 catalogued, 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 the Minoans 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! Punktlich 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.