The Music School by John Updike Read Free Book Online Page A

there were rooms and rooms. He would write letters, perform introductions, secure our admission to secret societies. After lunch, at about the hour when on the day before he had introduced us to the paper seller, he shepherded us into the library of the Oxford Union Society and introduced us to the fastidious boy behind the desk. Mr. Robinson’s voice, somehow intensified by whispering, carried to every crusty corner and sacrosanct gallery. The young librarian in his agony did not suppress an ironical smile. When his eyes turned to us, they took on a polite glaze that fell a little short of concealing contempt. But with what a deal of delighted ceremony did Mr. Robinson, who evidently really was a member, superintend the signing of our names in a huge old ledger! In return for our signatures we were given, with a sorcerer’s flourishes, an application form for membership. There was this to be said for Mr. Robinson: he never left you quite empty-handed.
    Returning, frantic and dazed, to our room at the Potts’, we were able to place the application blank and the annotated Arnold beside our first trophy, the Oxfordshire weekly. I lay down on the bed beside my wife and read through the lead article, a militant lament on the deterioration of the Norman church at Iffley. When I had regained some purpose in my legs, I walked over to Keble and found it was much as I had been warned. The patterns of paternalism did not include those students tasteless enough to have taken a wife. Flats were to be had, though, the underling asserted, absurdly scratching away with a dip pen in his tiny nook with its one Gothic window overlooking a quad; his desksuggested the Tenniel illustration of all the cards flying out of the pack.
    I was newly enough married not to expect that my wife, once I was totally drained of hope, would supply some. She had decided in my absence that we must stop being polite to Mr. Robinson. Indeed, this did seem the one way out of the maze. I should have thought of it myself. We dressed up and ate a heartily expensive meal at a pseudo-French restaurant that Mr. Robinson had told us never,
never
to patronize, because they were brigands. Then we went to an American movie to give us brute strength and in the morning came down to breakfast braced. Mr. Robinson was not there.
    This was to be, it turned out, our last breakfast at the Potts’. Already we had become somewhat acclimatized. We no longer, for example, glanced around for Mrs. Pott; we had accepted that she existed, if she existed at all, on a plane invisible to us. The other boarders greeted us by name now. There were two new faces among them—young students’ faces, full of bewilderingly pertinent and respectful questions about the United States. The States, their opinion was, had already gone the way that all countries must eventually go. To be American, we were made to feel, was to be lucky. Mr. Pott told us that Karam had written he would be needing his room by the weekend and pushed across the table a piece of paper containing several addresses. “There’s a three-room basement asking four pounds ten off Banbury Road,” he said, “and if you want to go to five guineas, Mrs. Shipley still has her second floor over toward St. Hilda’s.”
    It took us a moment to realize what this meant; then our startled thanks gushed. “Mr. Robinson,” I blurted in conclusion,groping for some idiom suitable to Mr. Pott and not quite coming up with it, “has been leading us all around the Maypole.”
    “Poor Robbie,” said Mr. Pott. “Daft as a daisy.” He tapped the bony side of his lean dark head.
    My wife asked, “Is he always—like that?”
    “Only as when he finds an innocent or two to sink his choppers in; they find him out soon enough, poor Robbie.”
    “Does he really have a niece in Michigan?”
    “Ah yes, he’s not all fancy. He was a learned man before his trouble, but the university never quite took him on.”
    “ ‘So poetry, which is in