The Rebel Angels

"It is being recorded," said McVarish. "Isn't the University paying Doyle to write its history – given her three years off all other work, a budget, secretaries, assistants, whatever her greedy historian's heart can desire. It'll be three heavy volumes of un-illuminated crap, but who cares? It will be a history."

"No, no it won't; not what I mean at all," said Ellerman. "I mean a vagarious history with all the odd ends and scraps in it that nobody ever thinks of recording but which are the real stuff of life. What people said informally, what they did when they were not on parade, all the gossip and rumour without the necessity to prove everything."

"Something like Aubrey's Brief Lives," said I, not thinking much about it but wanting to be agreeable to Ellerman, who looked so poorly. He responded with a vigour I had not expected. He almost leapt where he stood.

"That's it! That's absolutely it! Somebody like John Aubrey, who listens to everything, wonders about everything, scrawls down notes in a hurry without fussing over style. An academic magpie, a snapper-up of unconsidered trifles. This university needs an Aubrey. Oh, if only I were ten years younger!"

Poor wretch, I thought, he is clinging to the life that is ebbing away, and he thinks he could find it in the brandy of gossip.

"What are you waiting for, Darcourt?" said McVarish. "Ellerman has described you to the life. Academic magpie; no conscience about style. You're the very man. You sit like a raven in your tower, looking down on the whole campus. Ellerman has given you a reason for being."

McVarish always reminds me of the fairy-tale about the girl out of whose mouth a toad leapt whenever she spoke. He could say more nasty things in ordinary conversation than anybody I have ever known, and he could make poor innocents like Ellerman accept them as wit. Ellerman was laughing now.

"There you are, Darcourt! You're a made man! The New Aubrey – that's what you must be."

"You could make a start with the Turd-Skinner," said McVarish. "He must surely be the oddest fish even in this odd sea."

"I don't know who you're talking about."

"Surely you do! Professor Ozias Froats."

"I never heard him called that."

"You will, Darcourt, you will. Because that's what he does, and that's what he gets big grants to do, and now that university money is so closely watched there may be some questions about it. Then – oh, there are dozens to choose from. But you should get on as fast as possible with Francis Cornish. You've heard that he died last night?"

"I'm sorry to hear it," said Ellerman, who was particularly sorry now to hear of any death. "What collections!"

"Accumulations, would perhaps be a better word. Great heaps of stuff and I don't suppose he knew during his last years what he had. But I shall know. I'm his executor."

Ellerman was excited. "Books, pictures, manuscripts," he said, his eyes glowing. "I suppose the University is a great inheritor?"

"I shan't know until I get the will. But it seems likely. And it should be a plum. A plum," said McVarish, making the word sound very ripe and juicy in his mouth.

"You're the executor? Sole executor?" said Ellerman. "I hope I'll be around to see what happens." Poor man, he guessed it was unlikely.

"So far as I know I'm the only one. We were very close. I'm looking forward to it," said McVarish, and they went on their way.

The day seemed less fine than before. Had Cornish made another will? For years I had been under the impression that I was his executor.

2

In the course of a few days I knew better. I was burying Cornish, as one of the three priests in the slap-up funeral we gave him in the handsome chapel of Spook. He had been a distinguished alumnus of the College of St. John and the Holy Ghost; he was not attached to any parish church; Spook expected that he would leave it a bundle. All good reasons for doing the thing in style.

I had liked Cornish. We shared an enthusiasm for ancient music, and I had advised him about some purchases of manuscripts in that area. But it would be foolish for me to pretend that we were intimates. He was an eccentric, and I think his sexual tastes were out of the common. He had some rum friends, one of whom was Urquhart McVarish. I had not been pleased when I got my copy of the will from the lawyers to find out that McVarish was indeed an executor, with myself, and that Clement Hollier was a third. Hollier was an understandable choice: a great medieval scholar with a world reputation as something out of the ordinary called a paleo-psychologist, which seemed to mean that by a lot of grubbing in old books and manuscripts he got close to the way people in the pre-Renaissance world really thought about themselves and the universe they knew. I had known him slightly when we were undergraduates at Spook, and we nodded when we met, but we had gone different ways. Hollier would be a good man to deal with a lot of Cornish's stuff. But McVarish – why him?