She is a guest – a guest of the university, a guest of her sister's, a guest in the country too. If these people want to take umbrage, that is their right. It is not for her to get involved. Let Blanche fight her own battles.
But not getting involved turns out to be less easy than that. A formal luncheon has been scheduled, and she has been invited. When she takes her seat, she finds herself next to the same tall man, who has in the meantime got rid of his medieval costume. She has no appetite, there is a knot of nausea in her stomach, she would prefer to be back in her hotel room having a lie-down, but she makes an effort. 'Let me introduce myself she says. 'I am Elizabeth Costello. Sister Bridget is my sister. Sister by blood, I mean.'
Elizabeth Costello. She can see that the name means nothing to him. His own name is on the place card before him: Professor Peter Godwin.
'I presume you teach here,' she goes on, making conversation. 'What do you teach?'
'I teach literature, English literature.'
'It must have cut close to the bone, what my sister was saying. Well, don't mind her. She is a bit of a battleaxe, that's all. She likes a good fight.'
Blanche, Sister Bridget, the battleaxe, is sitting at the other end of the table, wrapped up in a conversation of her own. She cannot hear them.
'This is a secular age,' replies Godwin. 'You cannot turn back the clock. You cannot condemn an institution for moving with the times.'
'By an institution you mean the university?'
Yes, universities, but specifically faculties of humanities, which remain the core of any university.'
The humanities the core of the university. She may be an outsider, but if she were asked to name the core of the university today, its core discipline, she would say it was moneymaking. That is how it looks from Melbourne, Victoria; and she would not be surprised if the same were the case in Johannesburg, South Africa.
'But was that really what my sister was saying: that you should turn back the clock? Wasn't she saying something more interesting, more challenging – that there has been something misconceived in the study of the humanities from the start? Something wrong with placing hopes and expectations on the humanities that they could never fulfil? I do not necessarily agree with her; but that was what I understood her to be arguing.'
'The proper study of mankind is man,' says Professor Godwin. 'And the nature of mankind is a fallen nature. Even your sister would agree with that. But that should not prevent us from trying – trying to improve. Your sister wants us to give up on man and go back to God. That is what I mean when I refer to turning back the clock. She wants to go back to before the Renaissance, before the humanist movement she spoke about, before even the relative enlightenment of the twelfth century. She wants us to plunge back into the Christian fatalism of what I would call the Low Middle Ages.'
'I would hesitate to say, knowing my sister, that there is anything fatalist about her. But you should speak to her yourself, put your point.'
Professor Godwin addresses himself to his salad.There is a silence. From across the table the woman in black, whom she takes to be Godwin's wife, gives her a smile. 'Did I hear you say your name is Elizabeth Costello?' she says. 'Not the writer Elizabeth Costello?'
'Yes, that is what I do for a living. I write.'
'And you are Sister Bridget's sister.'
'I am. But Sister Bridget has many sisters. I am merely a sister in blood. The others are truer sisters, sisters in spirit.'
She intends the remark lightly, but it seems to fluster Mrs Godwin. Maybe that is the reason why Blanche raises people's hackles here: she uses words like
Mrs Godwin is speaking to her husband, flashing him looks. 'Elizabeth Costello the writer, dear,' she is saying.
'Oh yes,' says Professor Godwin; but clearly the name rings no bell.
'My husband is in the eighteenth century,' says Mrs Godwin.
'Ah yes. A good place to be. The Age of Reason.'
'I do not believe we see the period in quite so uncomplicated a way nowadays,' says Professor Godwin. He seems to be about to say more, but then does not.
Conversation with the Godwins is clearly flagging. She turns to the person on her right, but he is deeply engaged elsewhere.
