Celestial Chess

by Thomas Bontly

  Old Professor Haverhill roused himself from some glum colloquy with his soup, glared at Archie and tore several layers of mucus from around his vocal cords. “Professor Trevor-Finch,” he said, “is a fine man, a brilliant mathematician and a credit to the College. You should consider yourself honored, Fairchild, to have received an invitation to his ancestral manor.”

  “He is rather an eccentric, though,” said young Brian McMann, who was some sort of engineer. “I heard he had a difficult time of it during the war. The government had him doing weapons research and they sent him behind enemy lines to look at some German missile plans. He was taken prisoner and the Krauts quite put it to him.”

  “The war,” intoned decrepit Professor Grimshaw, who was known to sport a glass eye and a permanent steel plate in his skull, “ruined all our lives.”

  Archie pulled a long face, but his blue eyes retained their leprechaun’s twinkle. “I daresay you’ll get your fill of quaint Anglo-Saxon attitudes at Abbotswold, as Finchie’s ‘ancestral manor’ is called. But what are you doing tonight? I’m sure to be beastly company, with my own exile staring me in the face, but we might be able to get up a bit of fun.”

  “What did you have in mind?” I asked.

  “Let’s see . . . No licentious foreign movies on this weekend, so the cinema’s out. No parties to crash, either. The town’s a bit of a bore during the vac. Oh, I say! Have you ever been to the dance hall?”

  McMann dropped his fork. A bit of Yorkshire pudding sprang from his mouth as he released a burst of laughter. “Cavendish! Good Lord, you don’t still go there, do you?”

  Archie shrugged and grinned, redness rising to his temples. “Come, McMann—you were glad enough to tag along with me a few years ago, before we started dining at High Table. I don’t see that it’s so demeaning to fraternize with the townies. Besides, when a man’s as depressed as I am, he’ll stoop to anything.”

  “What,” I asked, “is the dance hall, and what’s so dreadful about it?”

  “It’s where you’ll find all the working birds and their teddy boys,” McMann said, “the farmers from the fens with manure on their shoes, all the wretched shopkeepers and their dreary, dismal ‘intendeds.’ You two will get your heads bashed in before the evening’s over.”

  “Nonsense,” Archie said. “It’s a perfectly respectable establishment. A bit working class, I grant you, but one never knows what one might run into. What do you say, Fairchild—shall we give it a try?”

  We set out for the dance hall as soon as Hall broke up. It turned out to be quite a walk, which took us far beyond the cluster of colleges to grim streets of row houses, factories, fish-and-chips shops and shabby pubs with motorcycles parked out in front. I had never seen this part of Cambridge before.

  “Archie,” I said as we walked along the narrow sidewalk, “what do you know about Sir Percy Wickham George?”

  “A former owner of Bromley House, I believe.”

  “Yes, and one of the founders of the Society for Psychical Research. Was he a Duke’s man?”

  “I don’t think so. He may have taken some interest in the College, since we rather had the corner on uneasy spirits in those days.”

  “That’s what I was wondering. Dean Singer told me that Sir Percy conducted a number of experiments. Were there any in the College proper, do you recall?’’

  “There may have been. Do you think some ghost bumped off Dr. Greggs and buggered your plan to become the world’s leading medievalist?”

  “Not exactly. But what would you say if I told you—’’

  “Hold up, lad. We mustn’t let scholarship interfere with lechery, and there’s the dance hall dead ahead. You be a good chap now and forget about your medieval poems, hum? Later on we can stop by my room for a nightcap. I have a book which might interest you.”

  We paid our shilling, entered the barnlike building and climbed a flight of broad carpeted stairs. I could hear music; there was an immense quantity of potted foliage in the outer lobby and a columned archway which gave upon a large, dark, high-ceilinged room where a revolving globe cast splotches of color upon the crowded dance floor and upon the rows of chairs along either wall, where maidens sat waiting for an invitation to dance. The bar was at the back, and on a stage hung with glistening curtains a dozen tuxedoed musicians produced a wistful imitation of American jazz.

  I was amused and touched by the small-town hokum of it all: pale young ladies with empty eyes; nervous swains uncertain whether to approach or to gather in groups of their own sex to talk about football; balding, pudgy Don Giovannis slyly nuzzling their buxom, stout-legged Donna Annas . . . I found the dance hall’s desperate parody of gentility so crushingly reminiscent of the proms and sock hops of my youth that I couldn’t help wondering if I had stumbled upon the common denominator of the Anglo-American soul. What snares of self-knowledge had Archie led me into?

  “First things first,” Archie said. “We must catch hold of the festive mood. To the bar, Fairchild!”

  We each got a gin and tonic and took our place on the rim of the dance floor, where I observed that Englishmen seem to feel dancing ought to have some purpose beyond the public embracing of women who might not accept an embrace in private. His partner held at arms’ length, the British male moves steadfastly around the dance floor’s outer boundaries, as if determined to accomplish a certain number of laps before the music stops.

  Archie stood very stiff and straight, a frightened light in his eyes as he surveyed the prospects. “Looks like rather slim pickings this evening. You can never tell about this place—sometimes a feast and sometimes a famine. Now, there’s a rather nice . . . oh, she’s with her steady, I see. What about . . . no; much too old, now that I get a good look at her. They ought to make some of these women show their birth certificates at the door. Is there anything here worth our while? Or should we shove off?”

  “Archie,” I said, “you didn’t drag me here just to look at the girls and run away. They’re not all repulsive. I’ll ask one of them to dance if you’re afraid. Pick one you like. I’ll dance her around the race track a few times and turn her over to you.”

  Archie put a hand on my shoulder. “Would you, really? That would be damned decent of you. I always have a bit of trouble getting started at these things. Let’s see—suppose you take a crack at that smashing little redhead over there for starters. I’d like to know if she’s game.”

  “Archie, for God’s sake, they’re all game! That’s why they’re here.”

  “Yes, but they don’t all like College men. They rather shy away from us. You’d better do what you can to disguise your American accent, too. There’s been a good deal of anti-American feeling in Cambridge since that new air base went in.”

  “Just relax, Archie. I’ll deliver the redhead to you in time for the next number.”

  I dodged fox-trotting couples as I crossed the dance floor, then presented myself to the little girl with red hair, pert nose and sharply defined breasts within a clinging satin blouse.

  “Good evening, miss. May I have the pleasure?”

  The redhead glanced around and, seeing nothing better, gave me an apprehensive smile and got to her feet. Soon we were making tracks around the dance floor with the best of them, for it was either move along or get run over.

  ‘‘You’re a Yank, aren’t you?” she asked.

  “Oh, no—Canadian,” I told her. “We don’t like the bloody Yanks any more than you do.”

  “At one of the Colleges, maybe?”

  “No, I’m with an accounting firm down in London. Just up for the weekend because I heard what a swell place this was. You dance very nicely.”

  “Thank you,” she said, and let me hold her a bit closer. Our thighs touched ever so lightly as we negotiated the turn before the bandstand. On the sidelines, Archie watched us with envious eyes. Was this what a first-class British education did to a man? But then, how did one explain Colin Douglas?

  “I brought a chum up with me,” I told
the girl. “Do you have a friend here, by any chance?”

  “Just my boyfriend,” she said, and looked over my shoulder as if he might be sneaking up on us. “Well, he’s sort of a boyfriend. I see him here a lot. He works in a garage and he thinks he’s stuck on me.”

  “Can’t say I blame him. My friend’s sort of stuck on you too.”

  “Oh, yeah? Well, I can dance with whoever I like,” she assured me. “Is that your friend over there, gawking at us?”

  The band had entered its final chorus and we were nearing Archie’s station. “Let me introduce you,” I said. “He’s very shy, but I know he’s dying to dance with you. Then maybe you and I can have another dance later.”

  “All right,” the girl said. “My name’s Brenda.”

  The music stopped; I gave Brenda to Archie with a few words of introduction, and said I’d be at the bar. Archie gave me a desperate look over Brenda’s amber locks, but I took no pity on him and quickly made my way to the bar. There had to be another girl or two like Brenda in the crowd. I was a little sorry I hadn’t heard about this dance hall earlier.

  The bartender still hadn’t taken my order when a row broke out on the dance floor. Somehow I knew Archie was in trouble and made my way toward a congested knot of dancers. There I found a giggling Brenda, a florid, flustered Archie and a hulking young brute in a silver-studded black leather jacket.

  “Now see here,” Archie was stammering. “There’s obviously been some sort of misunderstanding—’’

  “You said it, mate,” the brute replied, “and I’ll misunderstand you into next week if you don’t take your hands off me bird.”

  “I’m not your bird, Charlie Marrow,” Brenda said, and looked at me to save her from Charlie’s clutches.

  “What’s the problem, Archie?” I said, calmly coming between him and his antagonist.

  “Your friend doesn’t know how to dance,” Brenda said. “He keeps stepping on my toes!”

  “Yeah; well, I’ll flatten his nose,’’ Charlie Marrow said.

  “Easy, Junior,” I said, hoping the boy had seen enough American gangster movies to recognize my menacing tone. It had worked with quarrelsome young Britons in the past, since the English believe all Americans are gangsters, anyway. Not this boy, however. He gave my shoulder a vicious shove.

  “Don’t ‘junior’ me, you fucking Yank bastard!”

  I was stuck riding my bluff. “All right, punk—back off! Any more lip out of you and we can meet outside.”

  “You’re fucking right we will,” Charlie said, and swung away from us, dragging Brenda along by the arm and apparently off to seek support from his mates—of whom I suddenly noticed several, gazing stolidly at us from the sidelines. All in black leather jackets and motorcycle boots.

  “Gorblimey, Fairchild—now you’ve done it,” Archie said. “I was managing quite adequately before you tried to bully him.”

  I found it hard to believe that anything too unpleasant could happen to us in Cambridge, but Archie insisted it was time to be off. “You don’t know how they hate us on this side of town. It’s been going on for years. Come along; I’ll do my best to save our hides.”

  “All right, but it’s been a damned disappointment, this dance hall of yours.”

  “It nearly always is,’’ Archie said sadly, and led me down the stairs.

  There was no Charlie waiting for us outside, and Archie set a quick pace back toward town center and the protective embrace of the College walls. We were nearly out of the neighborhood when a squadron of motorcycles rounded the corner and came snarling down on us.

  “Run for it!” Archie said.

  I didn’t see how we could outrun a company of motorcycles, but perhaps Archie had been through this before. He set off up a narrow lane between two factories and I pounded along at his heels. Back on the street, the motorcycles squealed to a stop, sputtered angrily, then came up the lane after us.

  Archie went over a fence, across some railroad tracks, through a coalyard. The motorcycles couldn’t follow, but we heard them growling somewhere in the darkness, seeking a way to outmaneuver us. I might have been frightened, had I not found the whole adventure so incredible. Motorcycle gangs in Cambridge?

  We were still a long way from home and crossing an open marketplace, its booths boarded up for the winter, when the cycles—four of them—caught up with us. Archie and I ducked in among the booths and darted from lane to lane, but the cyclists outflanked us, skidding to a stop both fore and aft so that we were trapped in a narrow passageway.

  “This is it,” Archie said. “We might as well make the best of it. You take the big bloke and I’ll handle the other three. If they have knives or chains, you’d better use your jacket as a shield.”

  Knives? Chains? I suppose the sight of refined, genteel Archie suddenly puffing himself up for combat helped me keep my nerve. A warrior’s glint had entered his eyes. His head lowered itself into his large chest and shoulders, and his doubled fists were huge. I should have known that all those years on the playing fields of Eton and Cambridge had given Archie a taste for blood.

  They came at us from both directions. I had trouble singling out my man in the onslaught of bodies. We grappled en masse in the narrow passageway. Leather was in my face, studs scraped my cheek. I took a blow behind the ear and fell to my knees. A good deal of grunting, punching and groaning was going on over my head and I was sure that Archie was taking a terrible beating. When a boot came down on my hand I grabbed a denim calf, heaved and twisted, came off the cobblestones to put my head into a leather gut, then into somebody’s chin. Something brief and ugly happened just to my left. I turned around and discovered that Archie and I were standing alone over a crumpled mass of leather jackets, one of which emitted a groan.

  “Now then,” Archie said, and gave one of the jackets a knee as it tried to rise. “That wasn’t so bad, was it?”

  He was bleeding from a cut lip and his cheeks were flaming red, but I could see he’d been enjoying himself. We left the marketplace and were soon in a part of town where, Archie assured me, we had nothing to fear from battered teddy boys. “I expect we taught that lot a lesson, anyway,” Archie said proudly. “I should have told them we were from Duke’s. They keep score, you know. Each College has to hold its own, or the townies won’t let a University man walk the streets.”

  We stopped at a pub near the College, where Archie quickly consumed three pints of bitter, for it was near closing time. With his cut lip, bruised cheek and fired-up eyes, he looked like Oscar Wilde just emerged from a free-for-all of demented poets.

  “I say, I’m glad now we went to the dance. Did you enjoy it?”

  “You were marvelous, Archie. I never dreamed you were such a killer.”

  “I’ve been repressing that part of my character far too long, it seems. Scarcely proper for us older chaps to mix it up with the young ones, though perhaps I shall find some use for my hidden talents when I become a schoolmaster in Yorkshire. God, how I dread it! I’ve been at Cambridge for ten years. Do you think I can function in a place like Yorkshire?”

  “Surely it won’t be that bad,” I said.

  “You don’t know Yorkshire. Though I daresay that after Cambridge, anyplace would seem like purgatory. No one leaves this town willingly.”

  I understood that, and could have given Archie some lines from Wordsworth or Tennyson to put a pedigree on his plight.

  When the pub closed, we adjourned to Archie’s room. He lit the gas fire, gave me a glass of Scotch and a small book he’d found in his cluttered bookcase. “You asked about Sir Percy Wickham George. This is a pamphlet the College put out when it purchased Bromley House from his heirs. Take it as a memento of our friendship. I intend to get rid of everything that reminds me of this place before I go. Amnesia, they say, is the only analgesic for exile.”

  “Before you forget everything,” I said, “I wanted to ask you about Professor Trevor-Finch.”

  “I don’t have any literature on him. Our
fields are rather far apart, and Finchie was never much impressed with my work. Never even gave me one of his offprints, the bloody snob. Theoretical physicists are like that”

  ‘‘Why does everyone—or at least all the younger dons—snicker at the mention of his name?”

  “He’s an odd duck,” Archie said. “Him and his musicales and his political clubs and his ancient Norfolk family! To hear him go on about it, you’d think he was the last of the Norman conquerors, the silly faggot.”

  “Faggot? Is Trevor-Finch queer?”

  “I shouldn’t be telling you these things. After all, you’ll be his houseguest soon. It’s all just bloody gossip, anyway. They say he had a wife once, and that she ran off on him while he was in that German prison camp. Made quite a misogynist of him, though I understand he’s devoted to his mother—and to his daughter too.”

  “I didn’t know he had a daughter.”

  “Oh, yes. About our age; still single. Has a career of sorts in London. I’ve never met her, since I haven’t been honored by an invitation to the ‘ancestral manor.’ But Trevor-Finch makes a practice of inviting young men down to Abbotswold. Usually has no use for them afterward, as if they’ve disappointed him somehow. Some people say he’s trying to line up a husband for his daughter, or a lover for himself. Tossup which would be the more abominable, I daresay!”

  “How long has Trevor-Finch been at Duke’s?”

  “Let’s see. He would’ve come about 1953, just after he won an international prize for his work on the quantum theory. All the Colleges were after him, and we thought ourselves damned lucky to get him.”

  “Why do you suppose he chose Duke’s over the others?”

  “We are rather an elegant bunch of swells. You’d be surprised, seeing the old fuddy-duddies at High Table, how many of them have enormous reputations in their fields. And they’re likely to make Finchie the new Master when Sir Henry retires; that’s been in the cards all along.”