Like blood flowing again, trust trickled back and Michael felt as he had when first he was aware he would survive among the rocks of his island. There was atonement in the urgency of his weary travail for three more days; and when the fourth day lightened he knew where he was.
The abbey was somewhere to the east, the pasture land ahead of him he had once walked. And closer, there was the hill on which so often he had watched over his father’s sheep. There was the stream along which the alders grew, their branches empty of leaves now. No flock grazed the slopes of the hill, nor were there geese in the orchard, nor pigs rooting beneath the beech tree. But the small stone farmhouse was hardly changed.
There was no sound when he went nearer, and he stood for a moment in the yard, glancing about him at the closed doors of the outside houses, at the well and the empty byre. Grass grew among the roughly hewn stones that cobbled the surface beneath his feet. Ragwort and nettles withered in a corner. A roof had fallen in.
They answered his knock and did not know him. They gave him bread and water, two decrepit people he would not have recognized had he met them somewhere else. The windows of their kitchen were stuffed with straw to keep the warmth in. The smoke from the hearth made them cough. Their clothes were rags.
‘It is Michael,’ suddenly she said.
His father, blind, reached out his hand, feeling in the air. ‘Michael,’ he said also.
There was elation in their faces, joy such as Michael had never seen in faces anywhere before. The years fell back from them, their eyes were lit again with vigour in their happiness. A single candle burned in celebration of the day, its grease congealed, holding it to the shelf above the hearth.
Their land would not again be tilled; he was not here for that. Geese would not cry again in the orchard, nor pigs grub beneath the beech trees. For much less, and yet for more, he had been disturbed in the contentment of his solitude. So often he had considered the butterflies of his rocky fastness his summer angels, but if there were winter angels also they were here now, formless and unseen. No choirs sang, there was no sudden splendour, only limbs racked by toil in a smoky hovel, a hand that blindly searched the air. Yet angels surely held the cobweb of this mercy, the gift of a son given again.
Death of a Professor
The roomful of important men expectantly await the one whom another has already dubbed the party’s ghost. In some, anticipation is disguised, in others it is a glint in an eye, a flushed cheek, the flicker of a smile that comes and goes. Within their disciplines it is their jealously possessed importance that keeps those gathered in the room going, but for once, this morning, their disciplines do not matter. Shafts of insult remain unlaunched, old scores can wait as the Master’s Tio Pepe makes the rounds. Gossip is in command today.
‘Oh, justa – a jape, they say?’ little McMoran mutters, excusing cruelty with a word he has to search for. His sister’s school stories of forty years ago were full of japes – The Girls of the Chalet School, Jo Finds a Way, The Terrible Twins. No point in carrying on about it, McMoran mutters also: they’ll never find the instigator now. A bit of fun, still mischievously he adds.
Seeming almost twice McMoran’s size, Linderfoot sniffs into his empty glass, his great pate shiny in bright winter light. Oh, meant as fun, he quite agrees. No joke, of course, if it comes your way. No joke to be called dead before your time.
‘It hasn’t come your way, though,’ McMoran scratchily points out, and wonders what the obituarists have composed already about this overweight, obtuse man, for he has always considered Linderfoot more than a little stupid even though he holds a Chair, which McMoran doesn’t. Obedient, it would seem, to the devilment of some jesting or malicious student, four newspapers this morning have published their obituarists’ tributes to the professor who has not yet arrived for the Master’s midday drinks.
‘Kind on the whole,’ Quicke remarks to a colleague who does not respond, being one of several in the room who likes to keep a private counsel. ‘Oh, kind, of course. No, I would not say less than kind.’
Grinning through bushy sideburns that spread on to his cheeks, Quicke offers variations of his thought, recalling an attack made on the historian Willet-Horsby after his death – disguised, of course, but none the less an attack. ‘1956. Unusual on an obituary page, but there you are.’
Quicke is the untidiest of the men in the room, his pink corduroy suit having gone without the attentions of an iron for many weeks, the jacket shabby, lapels touched here and there with High Table droppings. A virulent red tie – assertion of Quicke’s political allegiance – does not quite hide the undone buttons of his checked lumberjack’s shirt. He is a hairy, heavily made man, his facial features roughly textured, who in his sixties is still the enfant terrible of College junketings and gatherings such as this one.
‘Ormston has taken it in his stride,’ he finishes his observations now, guessing this to be far from so. ‘He is a man of humour.’
‘Ormston’s nothing of the sort.’ The tallest man in the room, skinny as a tadpole, Triller peers down at the Master’s wife to contradict what both have overheard. Triller is courteous but given on occasion to sharpness, tweedily one of the old school, with a pipe that this midday remains unlit in the Master’s drawing-room.
‘It is a most appalling thing,’ the Master’s wife, the only woman in the room, asserts. ‘I doubt that Professor Ormston will turn up.’
‘You’ve had no word?’
‘Not a thing.’
‘Oh, then he’ll come. Unlike him not to.’
‘It’s going too far, don’t you think, this? Why is it that everything must go too far these days?’
‘Your husband, I’m perfectly certain, intends to do what is necessary.’
The Master is lax, Triller’s private view is. Tarred with the Sixties’ brush, the Master long ago let the reins slip away. What better can be expected now? A show of strength is necessary, and Triller adds:
‘Not for an instant do I doubt the Master’s intention to supply it. How odd, though, that the victim should be Ormston.’
‘I didn’t myself realize Professor Ormston was unpopular. No, not at all.’
‘He does not suck up.’ Professor Triller glances briefly at Wirich’s back and is pleased when the Master’s wife acknowledges his allusion with one of her faint smiles. ‘I don’t suppose Ormston has ever worn leathers in his life.’
This elicits laughter, a tinkle in the noise of conversation. Though not attired so now, Wirich is given to leather – jackets and tight leather trousers, studded belts, occasionally a choker. He rides a motorcycle, a big Yamaha.
‘Could this not simply be carelessness?’ the Master’s wife suggests. ‘Newspapers have a way, these days, of being careless.’
‘Not four different obituary departments, I’d have thought. I rather fear it was deliberate.’
Plump, with spectacles dangling, the Master’s wife retorts that no matter how the unpleasantness has come about it is unacceptable in an older university. She’s cross because what clearly excites her guests does not excite her, nor the Master himself. Something has been taken from them, she feels. Today should belong to them.
‘I considered telephoning Ormston,’ the Master reveals to the author of Tribal Organization in the Karakoram Foothills and to a classicist who considers the investigation of foothill tribes a waste of time. ‘But then I rather thought that would simply highlight the thing, so I didn’t.’
Nods greet this. They would have resisted telephoning too, a joint indication is, both men reflecting that the Master’s role is not one they could ever take to, with irritating decisions endlessly to consider.
‘I really am disturbed.’ Given to booming, the Master lowers his voice to indicate the seriousness of his state. ‘I truly am.’
Before his time, by as much as fifteen years, there was the business of Batchett’s extra-mural lecture, and longer ago still the mocking of T. L. Hapgood, which now is in the annals, although no o
ne in the Master’s drawing-room this midday knew T. L. Hapgood in his lifetime or is aware of what he looked like. More recently, one morning, there was the delivery of a pig to Dr Kindly, and that same evening four dozen take-away pizzas. Batchett had presented himself at a famous public school to lecture to the Geographical Society on land lines, only to discover that not only had some sort of mid-term break emptied the school of his anticipated audience but that there was, in fact, no Geographical Society and never had been.
‘The Hapgood riddle was never solved?’ the Karakoram foothills man hazards. ‘I’ve never known.’
‘No, they didn’t get to the bottom of it. Years later, identities often surface after such nuisances, but none did then. Some disaffected bunch.’
The bunch who took against T. L. Hapgood – by general consent because his sarcasm hurt – based their jape on the professor’s disdain for the stream of consciousness in the literature of his time. Other academics were written to in Professor Hapgood’s name, announcing his authorship of a forthcoming study of James Joyce’s life and works. I feel my task will be incomplete and greatly lacking without the inclusion of your views on the great Irishman, and in particular, perhaps, on his subtle and enlightening use of what we have come to call the ‘stream of consciousness’. Anything from a paragraph to thirty or so pages would be welcome from your pen, with prompt reward either in cheque form or our own good claret, whichever is desired. I am most reluctant to go to press without your voice, inimitable in its perception and its sagacity. For eighteen months Professor Hapgood received contributions from Europe, America, Japan and the antipodes. Later, demands for reimbursement became abusive.
‘I didn’t know Ormston in his youth wanted to be a cabinet-maker,’ the classicist remarks. ‘It said that in one of them this morning.’
‘Affectionately, though,’ the Master hurriedly interjects. ‘The point was affectionately made.’
‘Oh yes, affectionately.’
Historians and philosophers and breezy sociologists, promoters of literature and language, of medieval lore and the Internet, they stand about and talk or do not talk. In different ways the diversion draws them from their shells, even those who have decided that comment on any matter can be a giveaway. Some wonder about the absent victim, others about his younger wife – a flibbertigibbet in Triller’s view, the price you pay for beauty. To McMoran it seems like fate’s small revenge that Ormston should be struck down before his time: his own wife has long ago given in to dowdiness and fat.
At twenty-five past twelve there is a lull in the drawing-room conversations, occurring as if for a reason, although there isn’t one. For a moment only Quicke’s rather high voice can be heard, repeating to someone else that Ormston is a man of humour. A snigger is inadequately suppressed.
‘My dear, there are empty glasses,’ the Master’s wife murmurs in her husband’s ear.
As he looks about him, wondering where he left the decanter, the conversational lull seems not to have been adventitious after all, but a portent. The doorbell sounds. Professor Ormston has come at last.
Someone once said – the precise source of a much-repeated observation long ago lost – that in her heyday Vanessa Ormston’s beauty recalled Marilyn Monroe’s. Over the years, inevitably has come the riposte that she still possesses the film star’s brain. Photographs show a smiling girl with bright fair hair, slender to the point of slightness, her features lit with the delicate beauty of a child. At forty-eight – younger by sixteen years than her husband – she seems thin rather than slender and has retained her beauty to the same degree that the flowers she presses between the leaves of books have. Ormston’s wife – as she is often designated among her husband’s colleagues – has a passion for flowers. Significance has been found in her preservation of blooms beyond their prime, the venom of envy spilt a little in college cloisters or at High Table.
Very early on the morning of the Master’s sherry do – that racy term racily approved in academe – Vanessa read the obituary of her husband, whom ten minutes ago she had left alive in the twin bed next to hers. Arrested by the grainy photograph – head and shoulders, caught at Commencements five years ago – her instinct was to hurry upstairs to make sure everything was all right, that time had not played tricks on her. Was it somehow another day? Had amnesia kindly erased the facts of tragedy? But then she heard her husband’s footfall and his early-morning cough. Mistily, she read – a revelation – that he was well loved by his students. She read that he was ‘distinguished in his small world’ and knew he would not care for that. None of them recognized that his world was small.
The electric kettle came to the boil while Vanessa read on; and then, alarmed anew, she hurried upstairs. He was propped up on his pillows after his brief absence from the bed, what showed of him almost a replica of the photographed head and shoulders on the fawn Formica surface of the kitchen table. ‘Won’t be a tick,’ she managed to get out and hurried off again to make their seven o’clock tea, the tray prepared the night before, gingersnap biscuits in the round tin with ‘The Hay Wain’ on it. The newspaper should accompany all this, his turn to scan it then.
Vanessa lost her head, as in difficult moments she tended to. She could not possibly hand the paper to him and wait for him to arrive at his recorded death. His companions on the page – no doubt correctly there – were a backing singer of a pop group, a bishop, born in Stockport, and a lieutenant colonel. Professor A. R. Ormston, it said, the space allocated to him less than that of the others, less particularly than the backing singer’s. The bishop’s photograph was small, but generous text made up for that; the lieutenant colonel married Anne Nancy Truster-Ede in 1931 and lost an arm in Cyprus. Gazing at his soldier’s brave old eyes and the bishop’s murky likeness, the raddled babyface of the singer, metal suspended from lobe and nostril, Vanessa again said to herself that she could not possibly commit this cruelty. Being crammed into what space remained was horrible.
The obituaries were on the inside of the last page. There had been a time when the paperboy jammed the paper into the letter-box, tearing that page quite badly. Please leave the newspapers on the window-sill, her husband had instructed on a square of cardboard which he suspended from the brass hall-door handle. He kept the square of cardboard by him, displaying it each time the paperboy changed.
Vanessa tore the bottom of the page and bundled away what she could not bring herself to reveal. She dropped the ball of paper into the waste-bucket beneath the sink, pushing it well down, under potato peelings and a soup tin. Then she carried the tray upstairs.
‘We need to hang out your notice again,’ she said, pouring tea and adding milk. ‘It’s a different boy.’
‘What boy’s that, dear?’
‘The one with the papers.’
What on earth else could I do? she wildly asked herself, dipping a gingersnap into her tea. She had needed time to think, but now that she had it could think of nothing. Her worried features, private behind the cover of the magazine that had been delivered also, were a blankness that filled eventually with a consideration of the consequences of her subterfuge. It did not occur to her that this was anything but an error in a single newspaper. More on her mind was that her protection could not possibly last, that when the moment of truth arrived no explanation could soften the harshness of an obituarist’s mistake. She might have tried to speak, to lead on gently to a confession, but still she could not.
‘Whatever’s a stealth fighter?’ came an enquiry from the other bed, the question answered almost as soon as it was asked. An F117 Stealth Fighter was an aeroplane, she was told, and also told that there was going to be trouble with the postal unions, and then that there was not much news today. ‘Oh, little do you know!’ her own voice cried, though only to herself. She turned the pages of her magazine, seeing nothing of them. Her desperation misled her: friends and colleagues would rally round in humane conspiracy, their instinct to protect, as hers had been. When letters arrived from those who cou
ld not know the truth she would reply, explaining. They would, in the nature of things, be addressed to her. That some undergraduate, when the new term began, might say, ‘Sir, surely you are dead?’ did not enter Vanessa’s bewildered thoughts. He was well loved by his students, after all. They, too, would surely respect his dignity.
But minutes later, when Professor Ormston’s wife stood in the bedroom with her dressing-gown and nightdress slipped off, the moment before her underclothes every morning felt cold on her skin, she knew she had again done the wrong thing, as so often she had in her marriage and in her life. And as so often also, she had compounded it by creating an unreal wonderland: they would take pleasure, all of them, in this amusement.
‘What shall today bring?’ the Professor wondered from his bed, words familiar in the bedroom at this time.
She thought to tell him then. She could have gone to him half dressed, and offered consolation with her young wife’s body. ‘I am ridiculous,’ instead her own voice echoed, soundless in the room, ridiculous because she did not have the courage to cause pain.
She boiled his egg and made his toast. She heated milk for their coffee. To come were the leisurely hours of this Saturday morning, while still he would not know. And hopelessly again she wondered why, for once, it should not be different, why at the Master’s sherry do they should not be merciful.
Selected Stories Page 34
