The Senior Common Room at St Anselm's: XV. The Table

The Senior Common Room at St Anselm's possessed several tables of varying ages and uncertain provenance. Some had polished surfaces that reflected the afternoon light. Others bore the accumulated scratches of generations of teacups, notebooks and absent-minded academics.

Mr Blottisham set down his coffee with evident satisfaction.

"I've often thought," he announced, "that tables are among civilisation's greatest inventions."

Professor Quillibrace looked up from his book.

"A bold claim."

"They hold everything."

"They hold rather less than the floor."

"The floor is cheating."

"In what respect?"

"It holds absolutely everything."

Quillibrace inclined his head.

"A fair criticism."

Blottisham rested both hands upon the oak table between them.

"But tables improve upon the floor by bringing things to a sensible height."

"So their principal achievement is ergonomic?"

"Precisely."

Miss Elowen Stray smiled into her tea.

"I wonder whether that's why we remember them."

Blottisham frowned.

"Remember the tables?"

"Yes."

"I've never consciously remembered a table."

"Yet I imagine you remember meals."

"Certainly."

"And conversations."

"Several."

"Christmases?"

"Most of them."

She traced a finger lightly across the grain of the wood.

"Were they floating in empty space?"

Blottisham looked down.

"I suppose there was usually a table."

"There almost always is."

Quillibrace closed his book.

"We rarely remember the furniture. We remember what the furniture permitted."

Blottisham nodded thoughtfully.

"So the table disappears behind the occasion."

"Much as grammar disappears behind language."

"Or spectacles behind vision."

"An excellent example."

Miss Stray looked around the room.

"It is curious that removing a table changes a room more than one expects."

"Does it?"

"Imagine six chairs arranged in a circle."

Blottisham did so.

"Perfectly pleasant."

"Now imagine a table placed in the middle."

He paused.

"It does feel different."

"Why?"

"I couldn't say."

Quillibrace answered quietly.

"The room has acquired a centre."

"A centre?"

"One that belongs equally to everyone."

"But to no one in particular," added Miss Stray.

Blottisham considered this.

"So nobody owns the middle."

"Precisely."

"The table creates common territory."

"There is something rather constitutional about that."

Quillibrace smiled faintly.

"Furniture has occasionally anticipated political philosophy."

Blottisham laughed.

"I've never before considered a dining table a constitutional document."

"And yet notice how many human institutions depend upon one."

"Dinners."

"Meetings."

"Lessons."

"Games."

"Negotiations."

"Bridge."

"Bridge seems to occupy an uncertain category between game and diplomacy."

Blottisham chuckled.

"I've witnessed both."

Miss Stray leaned back.

"The remarkable thing is that the table tells us almost nothing about what will happen."

"It merely invites certain kinds of happening," said Quillibrace.

Blottisham looked unconvinced.

"Does it really?"

"When someone says, 'Shall we sit down?'"

"They're offering a chair."

"Are they?"

He stopped.

"I suppose not."

"What are they offering?"

"A conversation."

"Or perhaps," said Miss Stray, "a different kind of conversation."

Blottisham tilted his head.

"There are different kinds?"

Quillibrace gestured gently.

"Standing conversations often expect to end quickly."

"They occur in corridors."

"Exactly."

"But conversations across tables seem oddly unhurried."

"They acquire time."

"Or lose urgency."

Miss Stray nodded.

"The geometry changes."

Blottisham looked around the table.

"No one is above anyone else."

"No one speaks from a platform."

"We are all arranged around something shared."

Quillibrace smiled.

"The table performs social philosophy without publishing a manifesto."

Blottisham laughed.

"It has escaped peer review."

"For centuries."

A comfortable silence settled over them.

Eventually Blottisham spoke again.

"I've always wondered why important agreements are signed at tables."

"Would you prefer staircases?" asked Quillibrace.

"They have a certain grandeur."

"They also encourage people to stand on different levels."

"I hadn't thought of that."

"The table is less theatrical."

Miss Stray added quietly,

"It allows disagreement to remain inside the same arrangement."

Blottisham looked thoughtful.

"So two people may argue without ceasing to share something."

"The table continues to hold them both."

"And the argument."

"And the possibility that the argument might finish."

For a while they watched the afternoon light move slowly across the polished wood.

Then Blottisham spoke almost absent-mindedly.

"My grandmother's table is still in my sister's house."

"Is it?" asked Quillibrace.

"Yes."

"I doubt it's changed very much."

"No."

"But every Christmas still feels as though we're gathering around my grandmother."

Miss Stray smiled.

"Although she is no longer there."

"Exactly."

He looked slightly surprised by his own observation.

"The table somehow remembers."

Quillibrace nodded gently.

"Not in the timber."

"In us."

Another silence followed.

The sort that belongs only to old rooms occupied by people who have no wish to hurry it away.

At length Miss Stray said,

"Perhaps hospitality has never really been about food."

Blottisham looked up.

"What else could it be?"

"An invitation."

"To dinner?"

"To inhabit the same world for a little while."

Blottisham rested his hands once more upon the old oak table.

"I began this conversation thinking tables kept things off the floor."

"And now?" asked Quillibrace.

"I rather suspect they keep people together."

Quillibrace glanced around the room, where conversations rose and fell at half a dozen other tables with the quiet confidence of long practice.

"Which," he said, "is a considerably more demanding form of carpentry."