‘I’ll turn mine down, if you will,’ she screamed at the jigging head.
Mrs Mercer gave no sign. She had not heard. Suddenly a furious knocking began on the right hand wall, as if someone were striking against it with a heavy object. Mrs Oakley from next door. She would be coming in next. No interference, Mrs Greenepad thought dazedly. We’ll fight this out for ourselves. Her eyes and the whole top part of her head were throbbing painfully. She got up, went to the door, resisted the temptation to open it and escape, bolted it, returned to her booming set.
Mrs Mercer saw nothing of this action. She had not heard the knocking either, or if she had, had assumed it to be some activity of the drums. Romeo was on the point of putting paid to Tybalt. She was shudderingly attached to her set now, by some terrible current which would not release her. Her mouth was open, her eyes were glazed, the jigging of her head had become quite involuntary.
The man, thought to be an Indian, took a – Bakshish? Backseat? He told the driver – Taxi … Indian youth told the driver … burial crowd, ground … thought the man … funeral. Carrying a suit chased? case … driver what appeared to be the body of a child … white darling. Darling? Towelling … Wrapped up in white towelling …
‘Turn your set down,’ screamed Mrs Greenepad. Mrs Mercer did not hear her. There was a violent knocking at the door. Mrs Greenepad’s set emitted a fizzing sound, then a loud pop, and fell silent. An acrid smell of burning filled the room. Mrs Mercer, aware of the sudden cessation of sound behind her, made a great effort and with trembling hands, too dazed to feel triumph, turned her set off.
The Briefing Session was held in a long, narrow room with a highly polished rectangular table going down the middle. This room was known as the Committee Room, and used by Cuthbertson for all gatherings of staff. He was sitting in his customary position now, at the head of the table with Bishop on his right. On the wall behind him was a full-length portrait of a man in mortar-board and gown, standing in a pose of affable dignity, holding in his hands a scroll. This was a portrait of Cuthbertson in his capacity as Founder.
Now, about to set things in motion, he looked with a certain wariness at the little group of waiting faces. My staff. He felt for the moment no power to utter words that might be to the purpose. The water carafes and glasses gleamed along the table, well polished, he noticed, and properly set out. Bishop’s doing … The glasses were reflected in little pools along the surface of the table.
‘Is everybody present?’ Cuthbertson said.
‘I believe so, yes, Mr Cuthbertson,’ Bishop said deferentially. He never used his first-name privilege when there were others present.
‘Ah,’ Cuthbertson said, then paused, his attention again helplessly trapped among the reflections from the glasses, gleaming yet firm-edged, a series of precisely delimited pools of light. The bay below possessed precisely this quality of pallid radiance. But the room itself was blanched, shadowless. The throats of the daffodils deep yellow, clamorous … Somebody down the table spoke in a low voice. Feet shifted. Bishop shuffled papers, glancing about. The phone on Cuthbertson’s right rang suddenly, starling everyone. Cuthbertson picked up the receiver, inclined his head to it – he had a curiously suppliant way of speaking into the telephone.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes?’ For some moments he could not understand what the call was about, then he realized that it was his secretary, speaking about a plumber who had just arrived. Cuthbertson’s mind cleared. He remembered the insidious, the impermissible dripping of the bathroom tap. A man had come to repair it. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Show him straight up to the bathroom, will you, Miss Naylor?’
He replaced the phone, cleared his throat, and raised his face in a blind but dominating manner. ‘There are one or two things,’ he said slowly, ‘that I wish to bring to your attention, particularly as regards the ceremony this afternoon. By the way, I’d like a word with you, Mr Mafferty, when this Briefing Session is over.’
‘Right you are,’ Mafferty said.
‘It is the ceremony later this afternoon,’ Cuthbertson said, transferring his gaze from Mafferty with something of an effort, ‘that I want to talk to you all about. I am particularly anxious that everything should go smoothly. Last time there were not enough chairs provided.’ He looked at Bishop, who nodded and wrote something down.
‘That’s the kind of thing that gets us into a bad odour,’ Cuthbertson said. He looked down at the paper before him. ‘There are twenty-five students receiving the B.A., fifteen receiving the B.Sc., three M.A’s, two Ph.D’s and one Professor Emeritus – that is Mr Austin, who in my opinion has a brilliant future before him.’
‘Hear, hear,’ Bishop said. ‘A first-class brain.’
‘All these students are paid-up, all have attended regularly and applied themselves. I should like the ceremony to be conducted with dignity and decorum. I should like all the staff to wear their gowns. You have gowns, I issued you with gowns, so there is no excuse for not wearing them. Last time a member of staff appeared in a polo-neck sweater. Many of our students are from the emergent nations, I hardly need to remind you of that, and I should like them to carry away with them a proper sense of our older established civilization, the way we do things here, in the old country.’
‘The old firm,’ Bishop said.
Cuthbertson paused, looking at his second-in-command. ‘I don’t want anything to miscarry this time,’ he said.
‘Quite so,’ Bishop said, continuing to make notes.
‘It is their crowning moment, remember that,’ Cuthbertson said. ‘Walking up to the platform, the Union Jack draped over the table, shaking hands with me, the Principal, receiving their hard-earned qualifications amidst the plaudits of their fellows …’
He looked from face to face, launched at last, his eyes humid behind the glasses. None of the teachers quite met his gaze.
Lavinia went over to the large oval mirror on the wall, and surveyed herself, holding her face at various angles to the glass so that the light would fall on it in different ways, and she could check that her make-up was evenly applied, no tell-tale smears or blobs, no inexplicable suffusions, no hint of the hectic.
She saw nothing amiss. Her eyes were bright, her face had the composure of recently made-up faces. Her dress too she thought suitable to the occasion, white linen, very thin, indeed partially diaphanous, square at the neck in peasant style, and cut very low. She was wearing a bra of daring design, which drew her breasts together while actually containing only the lower halves of them.
She spent some time practising in front of the mirror, rehearsing poses that might be employed while entertaining Mr Honeyball. She thrust her shoulders back and raised her head mirthfully, thus forcing her breasts forward and causing the naked nipples delectably to press and prick against the thin material of her dress. That might be an appropriate response to any little witticism Mr Honeyball might utter. Alternatively, by leaning forward, as one might in offering a sandwich, she exposed her cleavage, a deep, smooth, creamy-white cleft. She had always, from a girl, had this creamy, satiny skin, absolutely flawless, all over her body.
She was heartened and encouraged by these exercises. When she could think of nothing else to do she dabbed a little more scent on her bosom and throat. She waited. She thought for a while about being forty, and about the people who were coming to her fancy-dress party that evening. Then she thought about Walter, their former gardener. He was a tall young man with reddish hair and pale blue eyes and a habit of whistling to himself as he went about his work, but his distinguishing feature, and one she had been quick to discern, was an imbalance in his trouser front, indicative of permanent semi-erection. How Donald, with his passion for symmetry, could have engaged a gardener with a permanent bulge on the left side of his trouser front had always been something of a mystery.
One day, in early spring, tulip-time, we had been married five years that March … pleasurably Lavinia embarked upon the familiar narrative. By dint of going over the incident in her m
ind she had shaped it into a gossipy sort of anecdote. I was telling him, telling Walter, my plans for the herbaceous borders. I had this idea of lupins, all different coloured lupins, massed together down the centres, lovely flowers, so English, and pansies at the edges. With pansies and lupins you couldn’t want for colour, could you? Maybe some of those French marigolds mixed in. I like a show, I like a good show of colour. I was explaining this to Walter when he suddenly put a hand on the small of my back. Some force outside myself made me go right on talking. If I had allowed a silence to develop, I don’t think he would have had the strength of character to proceed. I went right on talking. I was telling him to bank up the earth in the middle, to get a nice sloping effect, when he started pushing me along towards the tool-shed. He kept saying ‘Yes, ma’am,’ just as if nothing was happening, and I went right on talking about the herbaceous borders. All the time we were walking to the toolshed, a distance of some fifteen yards I was going on telling Walter that I wanted the flowers in ranks, I wanted a tiered effect, so it was important to … ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘Yes ma’am.’ He put me up against the back of the toolshed. Don’t forget, I said, I want lupins, don’t you go putting gladioli in. The buckle of his belt hurt my stomach, and that was the only thing of a personal nature I said to him then or ever, you’ll have to remove your belt, I said, and he did so. He had me standing up against the toolshed. I was fully clothed except for my knickers; those he took off. I was still going on about the lupins, though by this time finding it difficult to control my breathing. I couldn’t stop, I thought it might break the spell, as if somehow it was all the talk of herbaceous borders that had inflamed Walter in the first place and was now adding fuel to his libido. I was still trying to tell him about the lupins while he was actually … I’ve never been able to view lupins since in quite the same way. It was lovely.
Lavinia pressed hands against hot cheeks. She did not want to look red. Mr Honeyball would be here soon.
*
The plumber’s name was Adams. He was a stoutish, thick-necked, censorious man in early middle age, with a high colour and a more or less permanent look of indignation. This deepened as he was shown up to the bathroom by Miss Naylor whose miniskirt, preceding him up the stairs, revealed practically all there was of her shapely, silk-clad legs. The lubricity aroused in Mr Adams by this sight was at once, by some chemical change, converted into disapproval, he being a man whose impulses and passions had over the years got hopelessly mixed up with the habit of denigration; so much so that a sort of instantaneous transference was effected whenever, as now, he was vouchsafed more than his usual visual ration of the female form. He followed the secretary’s legs up the stairs, lusting and disapproving in equal measure.
His sense of Miss Naylor’s brazenness was reinforced by the luxurious softness of the carpeting under his heavy shoes, and by the obvious expensiveness of all the fittings and furnishings that met his view. He hoisted his bag of tools, looking grimly upwards at the backs of Miss Naylor’s thighs. He noted red-shaded wall lamps on the landing. Call this place a school? Not on your nelly. He was a reader of the Sunday Press, he knew about dens of vice. This was a high-class bordello. Plenty of money about. Not short of a bob or two. Probably cost you a week’s wages just for a quick bash. The thought envenomed his already strong feelings of disapprobation. When the revolution comes, he thought, the real revolution, we’ll clean up places like this, vicious smears on our civilization, and make sure we get fair shares for all …
He followed the secretary along a passage, past a picture of wild horses tossing their manes, past a number of closed doors. A tall pale man passed them silently, with a sidelong glance from prominent, yellowish eyes.
‘Who was that, then?’ Mr Adams said, drawing alongside the secretary. ‘One of your clients, was it?’
‘A student,’ Miss Naylor said. ‘From the Middle East.’
Pull the other one, Mr Adams thought. That man had a sated look. Bloody foreigners, coming here, taking advantage of the fall in the pound.
‘Oh, yes?’ he said, in a tone that conveyed disbelief.
‘Here we are,’ Miss Naylor said, opening a door. She preceded him into the pink and black bathroom. ‘It is the hot-water tap on the bath,’ she said.
Mr Adams had been further offended by the colour-scheme. He looked at the tap, which dripped steadily and obviously into the bath. The sight of it confirmed his unfavourable opinion of the place. People who admitted openly to faults in their water-systems he regarded with suspicion anyway. Any man not hopelessly corrupt would have rolled his sleeves up and had a go at this himself. ‘I would not of known that,’ he said.
‘What?
‘That it was the tap. I might of spent the whole afternoon searching out the trouble.’
His sarcasm effected no change in Miss Naylor’s features. ‘You’ll be all right, then, will you?’ she said, lingering at the door, touching her hair with silver-tipped fingers.
‘All right?’ Mr Adams said, looking at her with his habitual indignation. ‘Yes, I should think I’ll be all right here. I can always have a wash and brush-up, if I come to the end of my resources, like.’
Miss Naylor turned indifferently away and disappeared through the door. Mr Adams’ face relaxed with sour satisfaction. That had put her in her place a bit, he thought. Showing off her arse like that. Probably one of the call-girls, if the truth was known. He turned and regarded the offending tap.
‘Leave it to me,’ Bishop said, busily writing. ‘Leave it to me. Have no fears about the seating arrangements.’
‘If there is nowhere to sit,’ Cuthbertson said, ‘they might move about, start congregating in groups. You see the dangers?’
‘Discipline, they lack discipline,’ Bishop said. ‘That is what they are deficient in. You can’t blame them. They haven’t had the benefit of our institutions. That sort of discipline and self-control – why, it takes generations to produce that.’
‘We can impart something of it,’ Cuthbertson said. ‘We can sow the seed. I am just an old-fashioned patriot, really. People say this country’s voice no longer carries the same weight, that we are no longer pre-eminent in the councils of the world. And this may be true in a temporary sense. But one thing we have got, something that can’t be taken away from us, something that doesn’t depend on overseas possessions or military power, and that is moral influence. Moral influence. The influence of our great past, our civilized standards. These graduates of ours go forth to the four corners of the earth, bearing our standards, to make a play on words …’
‘Ha, ha,’ Mafferty said, anxious to get into the Principal’s good books again.
Cuthbertson regarded him without expression.
‘It is a great thought,’ Bishop said, also looking at Mafferty.
‘To take one example,’ Cuthbertson said, ‘among many. There is a delegation from Turkey due to arrive later this afternoon. These are people interested in, ah, founding private universities in their own country. They come to us for guidance. I shall be showing them round. They will form certain impressions. That is what I mean by moral influence. It is a great trust.’
His eyes as he spoke were on Mafferty, who did not feel comfortable under this regard but tried to gain ground by nodding earnestly and repeatedly.
‘Well,’ Cuthbertson said, and once again it was something of an effort to look away from Mafferty’s nodding face, ‘before we break up … You have no further business, Mr Bishop?’
Bishop shook his head, pushing out his lips in the judicious pouting expression he used to denote complete mastery of a situation.
‘There are one or two things I should like to say,’ Cuthbertson said. He cleared his throat and reared up his head until his neck was at its fullest stretch. ‘If I could revert,’ he said, ‘briefly, to the presentation ceremony due later this afternoon …’ He paused. There was nothing, really, to say. Everything had been gone into, every detail planned. The ceremony would follow the usual procedure. But he
wanted the reassurance of feeling that his staff was behind him, on this important occasion.
‘We are only as strong,’ he said, ‘as our weakest member. I would like you to remember that. I want to feel that you are behind me, to a man. “United we fall, divided we stand.” No, wait a minute, I’ve got it wrong.’
The slip routed him completely. He looked from face to face, attempting laughter. ‘It’s the other way round,’ he said. ‘Divided we fall.’ The blood beat in his temples. The faces of his staff began to caricature themselves before his eyes. All their expressions seemed slowly to intensify, as if in this wilful manner they were hinting at hidden, more profound divisions. Bishop’s face furrowed deeper in the travail of pointless, unproductive cerebration; Beazely’s sagged with bland self-complacence; Binks’ grew sharper-nosed, more acquisitive. All, all of them grew momently more hideously themselves.
The sense of danger, dreadful danger, returned to Cuthbertson; the certainty that these people, like all groups, were a threat to peace and order, unless they could be controlled, dominated, organized. He closed his eyes for a moment. Into his dazed and almost paralysed mind there came the vision of Bishop as he had stood that morning awaiting orders: jacket; white collar and plain tie; fawn trousers; suede footgear. He opened his eyes again. It struck him suddenly, with immense force, what a motley crew his staff was, all so differently attired.
‘Well,’ Bishop said, regarding the chief anxiously, ‘if there is no further business, we could perhaps – ’
‘One moment,’ Cuthbertson said loudly. ‘Just one moment.’ There was deep silence in the room. The surface of the table continued to deploy its tricky pools of light. ‘What I must insist on is standards,’ Cuthbertson said. Dimly, beyond the barriers of the present he glimpsed a possible state of being for himself, longed for and dreaded, destructive freedom, violent peace, paradoxes that his mind sheered away from.
‘Standards,’ he said. ‘All around us, on every side, there are the foes to civilization, those who would undermine our standards, there are people and ideas whose very existence is a threat to the social fabric. And I am using that term in the very widest possible sense …’ It seemed to him as he spoke that his words were forming the only track in a wilderness of silence. So long as he went on talking there was a way to follow. At the outer edges of his words vast deserts of silence began. This slender track of speech was threatened at every smallest pause by thick drifts of silence. In the effort to prevent this obliteration he found himself talking faster and faster … ‘Academic standards, the highest possible critical standards, such as I like to think we enforce here, in this, ah, enclave, but there are other standards too, standards of dress, I often feel besieged as I go about my work here, yes, it is the only word, besieged by these forces militating against standards, you did not know that while you are teaching I am constantly patrolling, did you, no, you didn’t know that, yes, I maintain an unremitting vigilance, yes, it is the only word, I often feel that the smallest relaxation on my part would result in engulfment, and that is what I want of you that you continue to give me your support, help with the sandbags, of course, I speak metaphorically …’
The Big Day Page 12
