Death of a Salesperson

by Robert Barnard

  ‘Really!’ sniggered Carmody. ‘Whatever next?’

  We all sighed.

  ‘There are of course two places to fill, due to the untimely deaths of poor Purvis and Matheson,’ resumed the Master. St Pothinus’s is the only place in the world where death at 76 and 81 could be described as untimely. ‘It has been suggested to me by the Vice-Chancellor that this time we should make an all-out effort—’

  There was a sigh. He had lost his audience already. That phrase had put them all off.

  ‘—to appoint somebody younger. To ensure the future of the college, as he put it.’

  He looked around sardonically. Everyone looked bewildered.

  ‘What frightful balderdash,’ said Peddie, looking from face to face, seemingly quite confident that not only he, but all of us, would be blessed with eternal life on earth.

  ‘We could make another Big Mistake,’ muttered Pritchard-Jones, in the sort of mutter designed to call cattle home on the hills of North Wales.

  ‘Oh God,’ said Auberon Smyth, ‘when will I graduate to being just a Little Mistake?’

  ‘I told the Vice-Chancellor,’ said the Master, satisfied with our reactions, ‘I fear with a touch of asperity, that the cult of the young cut no ice with us, and would not be allowed to destroy the traditional ethos of St Pothinus’s. No, indeed! Nevertheless, there are these elections. We have to have a new Fellow in French. You know my opinion of studying modern languages at a university, but there it is: the Fellowship is vacant. And then, perhaps more difficult, there is the Fellowship in Ancient Persian . . .’

  The Fellowship in Ancient Persian had been held by Harold Purvis, whose death had sent his one pupil screaming into Burton Quad. Since his death his pupil had been as lacking in tuition as he undoubtedly was in savoir faire, since there was only one such Fellowship in the University. Not surprisingly. Many were the years when Purvis managed to attract not one single undergraduate pupil.

  ‘I don’t see the difficulty,’ suddenly chirped up Wittling. There was an edge to his voice that I knew and did not like. It meant mischief. Wanton, senile malice.

  ‘Oh?’ whinnied the Master. ‘You have a candidate?’

  ‘I don’t have a candidate. I know there will be a candidate. There is only one person in Britain qualified for the position, and that person will certainly apply, positions in that field being by no means plenteous.’

  ‘No, indeed: we are nearly, very nearly unique,’ breathed the Master, with immense satisfaction. ‘I hope this is not a young person, Wittling?’

  ‘Thirty-two, I believe, Master.’

  ‘Oh dear. Very young indeed. It seems the decision will be taken out of our hands. You say there is virtually no alternative?’

  ‘No, Master,’ said Wittling, with what was obviously some secret satisfaction. ‘And I’m told that Sandowa Bulewa is brilliant, absolutely brilliant.’

  There was a moment’s silence.

  ‘What was that name?’ bellowed Carmody (who could hear when he wanted to) from the end of the table. ‘Don’t tell me it’s some damned foreigner, for God’s sake.’

  ‘No, no. Born in Britain. Quite the homemade article.’

  ‘But the name,’ insisted the Master. ‘It’s not—’

  ‘Not English, no. Tanganyikan, I believe, or whatever they call the place these days. Mother was Kenyan, I’m told.’

  ‘Then he’s not . . . you’re not telling us—’

  ‘Black. Black as your hat. Yes, Master.’

  ‘Gracious heavens!’ said the Master. ‘Whatever next?’

  ‘It’s a retreat to barbarism,’ said Peddie.

  ‘Something must be done,’ neighed the Master, at his most imperative. ‘I feel the modern world has suddenly rapped most brutally at our door.’

  ‘Personally,’ said Auberon Smythe, ‘I rather fancy the idea.’

  It was all too clear what form the idea took for Smythe. Exclusively sexual. He was imagining a splendid black lover. But I felt I had to back him up.

  ‘If we refused to appoint the man,’ I said, ‘we would certainly be in contravention of the Race Relations Act.’

  ‘Heavens above,’ said Pritchard-Jones. ‘What’s that?’

  I explained at some length, ending up: ‘If we have no adequate grounds for refusing him the Fellowship, he could certainly appeal to the Tribunal.’

  ‘Admirably expounded,’ cut in Wittling as I concluded, and now his voice had a suggestion of real mirth which absolutely made the blood run cold. ‘But I must correct you, pedantically no doubt, on one little detail. You have been referring to Sandowa Bulewa throughout as “he”. However the correct personal pronoun would be the third person feminine: “she”, dear boy, “she”.’ And he chortled that awful laugh that sounded like whooping, Straussian French horns.

  ‘But that’s splendid. She’s not elig . . .’ The Master’s voice faded away. This third shock left him looking as if he had heard the opening of Beethoven’s Fifth played by massed Midlands brass bands and amplified a thousand-fold. He looked at Wittling with outraged reproach.

  For the powers that be at St Pothinus’s had been caught in a trap of their own devising. Some years before, when all the Oxford colleges were changing their statutes, recruiting female dons, even admitting women students, we had, under strong pressure from the university authorities, declared all our senior appointments open to female applicants. We (or rather they) had done this on the clear understanding that nothing whatever was to come of it. I distinctly remembered Wittling at the meeting chuckling his horrible chuckle and saying: ‘We declare them eligible, and we just don’t appoint any. He-he-he!’ It had seemed to most of them an awfully jolly wheeze at the time. I had no doubt that the Master was remembering this now.

  ‘Wittling,’ he said. ‘This is at least in part your doing. I shall rely on you to find some way of getting us out of it.’

  ‘Out of it?’ crowed Wittling. ‘Why should I want to get us out of it? Jolly good idea. Pretty young black thing. Brighten the place up. Spruce us up a bit too. I believe she’s a very lively little thing—modern, and all that. What’s the phrase?—“with it”. He-he-he.’

  ‘Then what on earth is she studying Ancient Persian for?’ demanded Pritchard-Jones.

  ‘I’m told she has a Protestant Mission background from her parents. Went up to Cambridge to study theology. Got into New Testament Greek. Went on from there. Lost her religion, but proved a—he-he-he—whizzkid in ancient languages. Studied Persian at the Sorbonne.’

  ‘Heavens above!’ bellowed Carmody. ‘It doesn’t seem possible. What are gels coming to?’

  ‘I have it! I have it!’ shrieked the Master, a rare and terrifying smile wreathing his aged face. ‘The Fellowship can be changed. Its terms can be altered. We can turn it into a Fellowship in Geography. Or Spanish. Or Comparative Something-or-other. That,’ he concluded triumphantly, ‘is possible under the terms of Edmund Heatherington’s will. The endower of the Fellowship.’

  ‘Quite,’ said Wittling. ‘It is possible. Providing the Fellows are unanimous in desiring the change.’

  ‘Well?’ Magisterially.

  ‘They will not be unanimous. I myself do not desire the change. I must uphold the importance of the dead languages.’ He sniggered. ‘I have no doubt that Mr . . . er, Dr’ (sneer) ‘Smythe, being a modern young man, will not wish the nature of the Fellowship to be changed in order to exclude a member of the female sex.’

  Now Auberon Smythe is one of the few homosexuals who seem genuinely to dislike women. But he too felt himself caught in one of Wittling’s fork-like traps.

  ‘No. No, of course not,’ he muttered.

  ‘And you, Borthwick,’ continued Wittling, turning to me, ‘a liberal young fellow like you would naturally like to see the College open to women.’

  ‘Of course,’ I said, with a touch of priggishness that comes, I think, from my Scottish ancestry. ‘I would certainly be against changing the terms of the Fellowship if that were the motiv
e.’

  ‘Three dissenting!’ said Wittling, in tones of triumph. ‘Not a chance of a unanimous vote, Master. Not a chance!’

  It was death to the Master’s hopes. All his powers of command seemed to have left him. He summoned Jenkyns the porter, who led him from table, back to his Residence. As he staggered off, I saw him removing his dentures, something he only does in public when he is very upset. The rest of us broke up raggedly, and the evening concluded in less of an alcoholic fugg than usual.

  I am not quite sure why Wittling did all this. I’m convinced that when he suggested altering the statutes to admit women he had no such far-sighted project as this in mind. Nor, of course, did he have any particular love of women as such. I’m sure no tingling of lust warmed his aged loins, or had, since about the time of Chu Chin Chow. I think it was just mischief. That’s the trouble when you get older. Either you think you’re immortal, and this gives you a godlike carelessness of consequences, or else you know you’ll soon be dead, and won’t have to put up with the results of your mischief. If the latter was Wittling’s calculation, he was all too soon to be proved right.

  In the week that followed I absented myself from College as much as possible, for squabbling geriatrics are hardly congenial companions. My only insight into how things were going I obtained one evening when, after a late tutorial, I went over to the buttery bar to have a beer before going home for dinner. The door stood open, and I heard the booming voice of Hugo Carmody.

  ‘Well, I don’t know if the Master has any plans, but I’m damned sure something’s got to be done.’ I lingered in the twilight outside the door. ‘If only we could get something on them.’

  ‘Absolutely,’ I heard, in the sharp voice of Peddie.

  ‘Smythe would be easy, what? Threaten to go to the Police about his boyfriends.’

  ‘That wouldn’t do. It’s not illegal any more.’

  ‘What? Not illegal? Good heavens! I must stop slipping Higgins five-pound notes.’

  Higgins was Carmody’s scout. He was reaching retirement age, so he wouldn’t greatly miss his five-pound notes. There was silence for a moment.

  ‘Then there’s Borthwick. Not much to be got on him. A somewhat dim personality, what?’

  ‘His wife is sleeping with the milkman, you know,’ came the thin, malicious voice of Peddie. They chuckled about this like crazy.

  ‘But all the Fellows’ wives sleep with one or other of the roundsmen. I always said that marriage doesn’t do. And really it’s hardly a lever.’

  They subsided into silence, and I made a bustling entrance. I had a quick beer, and resolved to be home more in the mornings.

  Nothing much happened that I knew of until the night before the Senior Common Room meeting. My wife was at an Oxfam gathering, she said, and I was forced to eat in Hall. Dinner was uneventful but unpleasant. No one was talking to Wittling, so he was forced to talk to me and Smythe. Given the choice I preferred Pritchard-Jones, who was at least inoffensive, or even Hugo Carmody, because I was always hoping to get out of him details of a trip he made to Paris with Waugh in 1924. But Wittling it was, and we were forced to put up with his crackling malice, his sly self-satisfaction, his trumpeted chortlings. After dinner we adjourned as usual to the Senior Common Room. I poured myself a second glass of port, and Wittling did the same. Smythe took a hard slug of whisky, and the master took coffee and brandy. Wittling stood by the mantelpiece, and though the rest of us wanted to cluster round the fire, we none of us wanted to be too near him.

  ‘St Pothinus!’ said the Master, who had placed himself in the centre of the room. We all toasted the patron saint of the College (dead at ninety, in a dungeon), and then the Master fixed Wittling with an eye, bleary, but designed to threaten and command.

  ‘Well, Wittling, we’re all hoping to hear you’ve changed your mind.’

  ‘Changed my mind, Master?’ Innocently.

  ‘About altering the terms of the Fellowship.’

  ‘Oh, that—’ (dismissively, as if the matter had passed completely out of his head). ‘No, Master, I fear that my opinions on that subject are very much as they were last week.’

  ‘I see, I see-e-e. So, to satisfy a foolish whim, to enjoy a bit of wilful trouble-making, you are prepared to jeopardize the best traditions of St Pothinus.’

  ‘What did Winston Churchill say about the traditions of the Navy? Rum, sodomy and the lash? I suppose you could say that St Pothinus’s were port, sodomy and the third-class honours degree. Personally, I believe traditions should be evaluated empirically. The obsolete ones discarded, what?’

  ‘What you are proposing,’ snapped Peddie, ‘is a craven concession to the spirit of modernity.’

  ‘Concession?’ chortled Wittling. ‘Not at all. I propose welcoming it in! A breath of fresh air from the contemporary scene. Apropos of which, I have a picture—’ he skipped, chuckling and snuffling, over to his briefcase in a corner by the door—‘a snapshot, I think you call it, of the young lady herself, some years ago, taken when she was performing in the Cambridge Footlights Review . . . Ah, here it is.’

  He produced from his case an old, slightly brown copy of the Sun newspaper, and we clustered round to view a picture of a distinctly handsome black girl, in leopardskin briefs, apparently topless, clutching a microphone in the centre of a stage, swaying her hips and crooning into it.

  ‘My word!’ said Carmody, ‘I suppose that was taken after she lost her faith.’

  None of the rest of us could think of anything more adequate to say.

  ‘There,’ said Wittling triumphantly, looking around at us and thrusting the photograph at the Master who was wandering over from the fireplace. ‘Now you can see that Miss Bulewa will certainly provide something different in the College, what? Can’t see anyone paying to see us topless, eh? Except perhaps Dr Smythe in some dubious Soho locale.’ He pottered back towards the fire. ‘No, this is going to be a bit of a change, isn’t it? I hope she fits in. Do you feel she will? Don’t you sometimes feel you’ve got into a bit of a rut here, all of you? That life is lacking in zest? Needs a bit of spice. Suddenly our lives are going to acquire a whole new flavour.’

  He picked up his glass of port, and drank triumphantly. Suddenly an expression of horror, or rage, crossed his face, which set in a terrible grimace. His hand dropped the glass and went to his throat, a strangled cry escaped him, and he crashed forward on to the hearthrug.

  ‘Dear me,’ said the Master. ‘Mr Wittling appears to be unwell.’

  I was down on the hearthrug beside him, pulling open his dinner jacket, feeling his pulse. No one else moved. I didn’t need long.

  ‘He’s dead,’ I said.

  ‘How unfortunate,’ said the Master, taking a fortifying sip of his brandy. ‘Struck down in his prime. In the midst of life . . . The ways of Providence are strange.’

  ‘Providence, my foot!’ I said brutally. ‘You saw how he died. He’s been poisoned.’

  ‘Mr Borthwick! Mis-ter Borthwick! What an extraordinary suggestion! Most improper. You’ve been reading too many books by—what’s that thriller writer?—Mr Wilkie Collins.’

  ‘Can’t you smell it? Almonds. It must have been in the port.’

  ‘Gad! Founder’s Port,’ said Hugo Carmody.

  ‘I can’t smell a thing,’ said Peddie. ‘Look—I’m drinking port. It’s perfectly all right.’ And he downed his drink.

  ‘I’m drinking port too,’ I said. ‘It must have been put in his glass. He’d already drunk half of it. It must have been put in his glass while we were all looking at his damned newspaper.’

  ‘Come, come, Mr Borthwick, let us not lose grip of our logic,’ said the Master in his unpleasant, silken whine. ‘If we were all looking at his newspaper, none of us could have put anything in his glass.’

  ‘One of us must have held back,’ I said, crinkling my forehead with effort. ‘One of us wasn’t there.’ I had a vision of the paper being thrust at the Master as he came from the direction of the fireplace. I l
ooked at him, and he stared unwaveringly back.

  ‘We were all gaping at it, far as I remember,’ said Pritchard-Jones. ‘Handsome filly.’

  ‘Quite,’ said the Master. ‘We were all over that side of the room. Now let us forget this frivolous suggestion, and—’

  ‘No doctor on earth is going to sign a death certificate, Master,’ I said. ‘There’ll have to be an autopsy.’

  ‘I’m sure Dr Pritchard-Jones will have no hesitation in signing the necessary formalities,’ said the Master smoothly.

  ‘Pritchard-Jones? He hasn’t practised medicine since before penicillin was invented.’

  ‘I believe you are eligible to sign the necessary forms?’ inquired the Master in his high whinny, turning to Pritchard-Jones.

  ‘ ’Course I am. Most uncalled-for remark. Offensive.’

  ‘I believe there was some history of heart trouble, wasn’t there?’

  ‘Think there was. Know he went to his doctor last week. I can square it with Smithers. Man’s practically senile. Needn’t be any question of a post-mortem.’

  ‘There we are, then. That’s all quite clear. There need be no question.’

  ‘Master, even if you have a certificate,’ I explained patiently, ‘no undertaker is going to bury that corpse without getting a police clearance first.’

  ‘Why on earth not?’

  ‘Well—look!’ I turned over the corpse. The face of Mr Wittling, blue, and twisted into a hideous grimace of torment that seemed to drag his wrinkled skin tight over his aged skull, gazed horrifyingly up at us.

  ‘Well, he was nobody’s idea of a dreamboat at the best of times,’ said Auberon Smythe.

  ‘I’ve no doubt Lockitt will not make any trouble,’ said the Master. ‘We’ll get old Lockitt. Not the boy, he’s a fusser. Old Lockitt is quite as old as any of us, and nearly blind. He’s very understanding. He won’t want to lose us—we’ve been one of their most regular customers, over the years.’

  ‘You are covering up! You are accessories after a murder!’

  ‘Covering up? Really, Mr Borthwick. You’ll be suggesting next that I committed murder myself.’