‘This matter shall be dealt with,’ is the Master’s greeting. ‘Have no doubt on that score.’
He says no more, only nods through what he takes to be Ormston’s embarrassment but is, in fact, bewilderment. It seems to the Master that Ormston intends to ride the storm, disdaining comment. And in that, of course, he must be honoured. ‘Is this what’s called insouciance?’ McMoran mutters, struck also by Ormston’s calm.
Alone in a corner a medievalist, Kellfittard, regards Ormston with a distaste that reaches into hatred. ‘The Quicke and the dead,’ Kellfittard hears coming from his left when for a moment the man declared to be no longer alive is in the company of the pinkly corduroyed professor. Kellfittard cares for neither of them, but has more reason to dislike the one he imagined until an hour ago had left his wife a widow. Kellfittard’s bachelor status has everything to do with Vanessa Ormston, who is of an age with him and wasted, so he believes, on a dry old man. Dry himself, he is one of the professors who are economical with their utterances, an inclination in him that played against his chances where Vanessa was concerned, allowing his rival to get in first. Hours ago in his cheerless college rooms he gazed in disbelief and wonder, and then in pure delight, at the likeness on the obituary page, went out to buy the three other newspapers he guessed might carry the same happy tidings, and there they were. Fantasies began at once: theatre visits with Vanessa Ormston, quiet dinners at The Osteria, a discreet weekend, and in Salzburg before the autumn term began the honeymoon that should have taken place years ago. It wasn’t until he arrived at the Master’s house that Kellfittard realized some prankster had been at work.
Quicke’s donkey roar reaches him in his corner. It mocks him, as the faces all around him do – McMoran’s wizened, Linderfoot’s a blob of fat, the one that has been to the Karakoram foothills sunburnt, Wirich’s beaky, the Master’s square and heavy, Triller’s long and tidy. Kellfittard himself shares with the man who nineteen years ago snatched beauty from him a pallor without a trace of pink, and rimless spectacles. Both men are grey-haired; both are sparely made. In the course of his morning’s thoughts it seemed rational to Kellfittard that, in marrying again, a wife would choose, the second time, a physical repetition. Though in no other way, those same thoughts adamantly insisted, was there a similarity.
‘Impossible to know how it was done. One of our names taken in vain, I have no doubt.’
It is Linderfoot who makes that pronouncement, approaching Kellfittard in his chummy way. What Linderfoot maintains – idiotically, it seems to Kellfittard – is that some undergraduate has simply acted a part on the telephone, proffering the news of a professor’s death.
‘Your name or mine,’ Linderfoot presses, ‘would seem to have been enough.’
‘No,’ another man joins in to say. ‘That would not have been enough.’
‘Then what?’ Linderfoot purses his big lips as if to whistle, his habit when a conversation palls. The man who has butted in says:
‘This was done from within a news agency. It must have been.’
‘A news agency?’
‘One of Ormston’s old students. Forgiveness does not come cheaply always.’
‘But Ormston -’
‘We all offend.’
‘Ormston appears to be pretending it hasn’t happened.’ Kellfittard breaks his silence with that. He does not say he rejoiced to know the man was dead. He does not believe that he himself in any way offends his students, but he keeps that back also.
‘Extraordinary,’ Linderfoot interjects, pursing his lips again. ‘Extraordinary. ’
It is known to the others, but not to Linderfoot – who takes no interest in such matters – that Kellfittard feels he should have married Vanessa Ormston, that he has married no one else because a passion has lingered. It’s understandable, in Linderfoot’s opinion, that Ormston should choose to ignore the embarrassment of what has happened to him. He blunders about the room, seeking other conversations, unaware of the prevailing disappointment that Ormston has not appeared among them a broken man, that there has been this anticlimax.
‘An inside job,’ Quicke remarks eventually, determined to exact something from the let-down. Leaving the house with Ormston, he offers his opinion as they make their way on the Master’s wide garden path. ‘On the media front, an inside job, so they are saying now.’
He touches one nostril and then the other with a red spotted handkerchief, causing Ormston to look away. Quicke’s manner implies particular comradeship between the two, a lowered tone suggests concern. The comradeship does not exist, the concern’s unreal.
‘What are you talking about?’ Ormston asks and in a roundabout way, the information larded with commiseration, he learns of what has occurred.
Passing on his left the grey-brown stone of porters’ lodge and deeply recessed library windows, Ormston remembers the torn back page of his morning paper. The face of the pop-group singer, which briefly he glanced at, is as briefly repeated in his recall. What was missing from that page was what was left hanging when the Master said the matter would be dealt with. The Master’s wife was awkward in her greeting, McMoran smug. Triller’s vague air disguised something else; Wirich stared; Linderfoot was excited; Kellfittard looked the other way. Every one of them knows.
As others already have, Ormston knits together an explanation that is similar to theirs except in detail. When he was young himself an unpopular Senior Dean suffered the indignity of being approached by a police constable, following information that confused his identity with a draper’s elderly assistant who hung around public lavatories. A youth called Tottle was sent down for that; and Ibbs and Churchman suffered the same fate less than a term later for stealing the Master’s clothing, confining him miserably when he should have been delivering the Hardiman lecture in the presence of a member of the Royal Family. All one year there’d been a spate of that kind of thing, chamber pots on spires, false charges laid, old Purser’s bicycle dismantled more than a dozen times.
Why should he be a victim now? He is not arrogant that he’s aware of, or aloof among his students; he does not seek to put them in their place. Lacking the ambition of his colleagues, he is a scholar as scholars used to be, learned in an old-fashioned sense. Has all this jarred and irritated without his knowing? Still walking slowly, Professor Ormston shakes his head. He is not a fool, of course he would have sensed unpopularity.
Noticing the green and black hanging sign of the St Boniface public house, he considers entering it and a moment later does so instead of passing by. He has rarely in his life been in a public house, maybe a dozen times in all, he estimates as the swing doors close behind him. Blue plush banquettes along the walls are marked with cigarette burns, as are the low tables arranged in front of them, each with a glass ashtray advertising a brand of beer and small round mats bearing similar insignia. Unwashed glasses have been collected and are still on trays; busy ten minutes ago with Saturday-morning trade, the place is empty now.
‘Sir?’ a man behind the bar greets Professor Ormston, looking up from a plate of minced meat with a topping of potato.
‘Might I have a glass of whisky?’
‘You could of course, sir.’
Warmly steaming, smeared with tomato sauce, the food smells of the grease it has been cooked in. On a radio somewhere a disc jockey is gabbling incomprehensibly.
‘Would I make that a double, sir?’
As if aware that his customer is unused to public-house measures, the barman holds the glass up to display how little whisky there is in it.
‘Yes, please do.’
‘Decent enough bit of weather.’
‘Yes, it is.’
‘There you go, sir.’
‘Thanks.’
He pays and takes the drink to one of the tables by the windows. ‘Kind,’ was how Quicke put it; all four obituarists were kind in Quicke’s opinion. ‘Quite right, of course.’ And he was able to nod, not up to pretending aloud that yes, the notices were kind enough.
A dare, Quicke said, young men have dares. They think up these things and the one who is eventually in a position to do so sees something through. A bet it might have been, and probably was. There’d be apologies from all four editors, Quicke was certain about that.
A child appears behind the bar, only the top of her head visible. The man tells her to go away, but then he reaches for a glass and pours a Pepsi Cola into it while continuing to eat. He tells the girl she’ll be the ruin of him.
‘This’ll make me drunk,’ Professor Ormston tells himself, whisky on top of Tio Pepe before lunch. And yet he wants to stay here. The newspaper beside the trays of unwashed glasses on the bar is not the kind that has obituaries. Again the torn page stirs in his recall, only half of the backing singer there, the name of the army colonel not known to him, as the bishop’s wasn’t either. Of course a popular entertainer took precedence. The way things are these days, that stands to reason.
‘I’m sorry,’ he says at the bar after he has sat for a while longer, apologizing because the man hasn’t finished his food. But the man is cheerful, Irish by the sound of him. Professor Ormston has read somewhere that the Irish make good publicans, a touch of the blarney not out of place.
‘Sure, and what am I here for, sir? Wouldn’t I be negligent to eat me dinner with a man going thirsty?’
‘Thank you so much.’
He carries the replenished glass back to where he has been sitting. Survived by his wife, Vanessa. It would have said that, Vanessa mentioned once. No children, acquaintances of long ago would notice. And students who did not know he’d ever married would be surprised, he not being the sort, they might in their day have assumed. When they took her on as secretary in the department there had hardly been enough work to justify it and she was bored at first, until it was suggested she should be shared with McMoran. When she left, three years ago, it was because she didn’t like McMoran.
She has done what she thought best. He knows that in her; and sipping more whisky, he tries to understand. Apart altogether from McMoran’s spikiness, she had never been happy in the department, as later she confessed. ‘You think this girl’s up to it?’ he asked when they first considered her, not even noticing her beauty then. This city, not a human attribute, was what he’d thought of when he thought of beauty, the grey-brown columns and façades, carved figures in their niches, the lamplight coming on in winter. Seven hours have passed, he calculates: she came up with the tea and gingersnaps, prevaricating although prevarication does not come naturally to her.
Another man comes in, who doesn’t have to order what he wants. The barman knows and pours a bottle of Adnams’ beer. ‘Floating Voter,’ the barman says. ‘You’ll get him at nines.’
The others kept it to themselves when she left the department, unable to criticize her because she was his wife. McMoran muttered something, feeling more let down because he had relied on her more, but what he said wasn’t audible. It doesn’t interest any of them that she is happier now, that she has given her life up to her flowers and to her hospital charity work, amusing children while they wait on cysticfibrosis days, or children undergoing leukaemia treatment, or hole-in-the heart children. ‘I don’t know how she does it,’ he might have said, but never has because they wouldn’t be interested in the charity work of someone’s wife. She wanted children; he could not give her them.
The trawl through his life that she has withheld from him would not, of course, record that. Nor would it touch upon his occasional testiness, his cold appraisal of examination answers, the orderly precision that enhances his work and affects him as a husband, the melancholy that comes from nowhere. Other human-interest decoration might enliven a drab account, with liberties taken for the casual reader. His wife was younger by sixteen years most certainly would not be written. Nor as lovely in her day as Marilyn Monroe.
The whisky has dried his mouth. In the Master’s drawing-room he would have seemed a figure of silliness, not saying anything: those of them who have wives would now be passing that across their lunch tables. They’d be amused to know that he is surreptitiously drinking in a public house.
The house is silent. Wintry sunshine dwindles in the kitchen, on the places laid at the oval table, each of the two plates of tongue covered with another plate, for the sun has made the window a haven for the last of autumn’s flies. A salad, the oil and vinegar dressing not yet added, is covered also.
Whoever the perpetrators are, Vanessa feels she belongs with them, that she has added something to their cruelty. ‘I couldn’t think, I didn’t know what I was doing’: all that is ready, and has been for longer than the food she has prepared. ‘Panic,’ she must also say, for that word belongs. ‘I went all blank.’ No need to say a wife should have the courage to bear bad news.
He’ll know because it will, of course, have all come out; and then he’ll see her reddened eyes and know the rest as well. A nest of vipers the Master and his simpering wife gather round them on these occasions. Who has a chance in a nest of vipers?
‘My God!’ Vanessa’s mother exclaimed in open horror when, nineteen years ago almost to the month, she learned of her daughter’s engagement to a fusty academic who was just old enough to be her father. ‘My God!’ she said again after their first encounter, when Vanessa brought him for the weekend to her mother’s flat. ‘Has he money?’ she asked, unable to find some other reason for what she termed an unattractive marriage. ‘Just what he earns,’ Vanessa replied, and two months later married him.
His key turns in the hall-door Yale. While waiting for him, it has occurred to Vanessa that there would be the other newspapers. She has imagined him in a newsagent’s, giving the right money because he likes to if he can, taking the papers to where he can peruse them undisturbed.
The hall door bangs softly; he does not call her name. There’s the pause that means he’s hanging up his overcoat and scarf, the papers placed on the table beneath the picture of a café scene. There are his footsteps then.
‘I have to tell you,’ her husband says, ‘that I believe I’m drunk.’
His voice is quiet, the words not slurred. He does not look drunk; he is the same. He doesn’t smile, but then he often doesn’t when he comes in. ‘A sobersides,’ her mother said. ‘Wizened,’ she added, although that wasn’t true.
‘I looked in at the St Boniface,’ he says. ‘Understandably, I believe.’
‘I’m awfully sorry.’
‘Oh Lord, it’s not your fault.’
‘I -’
‘I know, I know.’
‘I couldn’t think.’
‘I couldn’t when I heard, myself.’
‘They mentioned it?’
‘Quicke couldn’t resist a little mention. It didn’t matter. Sooner or later someone would.’
‘Yes.’
‘The culprits will be exposed, the Master’s view is. Of course he’s wrong.’
‘You don’t seem drunk in the least.’ Relief has slipped through Vanessa during these exchanges. For a reason that is obscure to her, and for the first time since she turned the pages of the newspaper while waiting for the early-morning kettle to boil, she feels that nothing is as terrible as it seemed in those awful moments.
‘To the best of my knowledge I have never in my life been drunk before. The man poured three double whiskies, and that on top of sherry.’
She lifts the plates that cover their cold meat. She stirs the oil and vinegar, shakes the salad about when she has added a few spoonfuls, then pours on the rest. Perhaps they’ll go away, Vanessa’s thought is, perhaps he’ll take an early retirement, as one of them so unexpectedly did last year. She’d pack up at once, she wouldn’t hesitate. Liguria, or Sansepolcro, where his favourite paintings are. Hers, too, they have become. ‘I could live here happily,’ he has said, over coffee in Sansepolcro.
‘I can tell you how this has happened,’ he says. ‘If you would care to know.’
‘Panic,’ she begins to say, and ceases when he shakes his head, grey hair as
smooth as a helmet.
‘An act of compassion,’ he corrects.
‘But it was stupid. To try to suppress what cannot be suppressed -’
‘Why cannot an act of compassion be a stupid one? I can tell you,’ he repeats exactly, ‘how this has happened. If you would care to know.’
‘Some horrid, wretched student.’
‘I am not the sort to inspire a grudge. I am too shadowy and grey, too undramatic. I annoy too little, I do not attack.’
She watches the buttering of a piece of baguette, the knife laid down, the meticulous loading of tongue and salad on to a fork, the smear of mustard. She pours his coffee; he likes it with his food at this time of day, with French bread in particular, he has often said. My God, Vanessa thinks, it might be true. He might not be here now.
‘Imagine Kellfittard opening his paper this morning. Imagine his happy hour or two.’
For a moment she is confused, thinking he means Kellfittard is responsible for this. He says, ‘And then the rug pulled out from under him. Generations have suffered from Kellfittard’s wit. It passes for that, you know. So much we fusties say passes for wit.’
‘But you -’
‘They would not mind about me. Whoever they are who got this going would not think twice about reaping me in before I’m due. What’s famous here is Kellfittard’s abiding passion for someone else’s wife.’
The last time Kellfittard stopped to talk to her yesterday’s garlic was on his breath. Stopping to talk to her has always been his ploy, and smiling in a secretive way – as if, by doing so, secrets are created.
‘Fall-guy, do they call it?’ she hears her husband say. ‘I am the fall-guy. ’
He has winkled out the truth, sitting in the public house he gave the name of, which she has often passed. The truth doesn’t make much difference, and certainly is no consolation. Yet for her older husband it had to be established, if only because it’s there somewhere. Students who are no longer students have got their own back. He is an incidental figure, and so is she.
Selected Stories Page 35
