by AnonYMous
Emma looked grave. ‘That means you’re going to be the only philosopher in the department. I’m sure they want your money, but it doesn’t look as if they’re wildly keen on a massive philosophical input into their God-centred debates.’
‘Well I’m not going to worry about it,’ I said resolutely. ‘We must wait and see how it turns out.’
On the day the first meeting of the department of Theology was to take place, Emma had a radio programme to organise, so she was up by seven to catch the early train to London. I had a more leisurely breakfast and set off for the university just after nine. I turned down our lane which came out onto the High Street. Like every other town in England, this had been pedestrianised; rents were enormous and all the small, privately-owned interesting shops had been displaced by the standard national chains. The pathway was an ugly shade of pink and the rubbish bins, crammed with fast food cartons, had not yet been emptied from the night before.
Things changed when I went through the Monks’ Gate into the cathedral precincts. I wandered round the large green court (only the cathedral clergy and distinguished visitors were privileged to walk on the grass) and I passed in front of the gracious seventeenth-century Provost’s House. This has been described as one of the most beautiful houses in England. It was a square Queen Anne building of old red brick, perfectly symmetrical with white-painted small-paned sash windows. It had been inhabited by the various provosts of the cathedral without a break since the middle of the eighteenth century. I knew the present incumbent. As well as running the cathedral, he was the Visitor of the University and took a spasmodic interest in what was going on. However, he was not a particularly effective person. He had previously been the archdeacon of a big urban diocese where the Church was undergoing sharp decline. The rumour was that he had been moved to St Sebastian’s because it was felt that he could do less damage there. Victoria Gilbert, Harry’s wife, used to do a hilarious imitation of his ingratiating manner and his constant references to ‘the dear Archbishop.’
Then, in front of me loomed the great, golden-grey stone mass of the cathedral. Tourists were already gathering in little groups. They were either wandering uncertainly around or were being chivvied by determined-looking ladies with umbrellas. There was the constant click of cameras and a general atmosphere of disorganised reverence. Then suddenly a group of unruly foreign school children swarmed past me, chewing gum and shrieking to each other. The bells struck the quarter hour and I passed under the archway into the cool of the cloisters. Here was order and quiet. Then, as I came out the other side, I walked passed a couple of canons’ residences, both on a less grand scale than the Provost’s House. I was always amused that an institution which taught that it was the meek who would inherit the earth should have such a clear sense of hierarchy in its housing policy. Finally I passed the cathedral souvenir shop which was already open for business. When I walked out of the precincts through the Trinity Gate, the buildings of St Sebastian’s University were directly in front of me.
Established in the reign of Queen Victoria as a training-school for missionaries, the original college was influenced by Oxford-style architecture. Following the ideas of John Ruskin, it was built of local sandstone and decorated with pointed Gothic towers. My office, sadly, was in another building, in a hideous nineteen-sixties construction known as the Arts Block further along the street. Off the entrance hall was a small anteroom which housed the pigeonholes for the academics. My slot was crammed with the letters and periodicals which had collected while I was away, and I hurried to dispose of them in my office.
I unlocked my door and spread the post on my desk. There did not seem to be anything sinister so I abandoned it and searched wildly for the agenda of the coming meeting. Then I set off for the seminar room where the gathering was scheduled to begin at 9:30. I was early and, as I arrived, the departmental secretary, Wendy Morehouse, was just wheeling in a trolley of cups and saucers, coffee pots and a couple of plates of rather sad-looking biscuits. I was not the first. A number of my new colleagues had already arrived.
At the back, tucked in beside the window, sat Magnus Hamilton. He was already dunking a chocolate-chip cookie into his cup. Seven or eight years older than I, he was tall, bespectacled and balding. He had been one of the longest-serving members of the department and had been appointed to St Sebastian’s soon after he had finished his doctorate at Oxford. Harry Gilbert had told me something about his background. Apparently both his parents had been killed in a car accident when he was in prep school, and he had been brought up by his aunt who had sent him to Winchester. He had come to the university with superlative references and had been described as possibly the most brilliant Old Testament scholar of his generation. He was also a first-rate linguist. Yet in his years at St Sebastian’s, he had published very little and had never been promoted.
However, he was a cult figure among the students. They imitated his mannerisms, told stories of his eccentricities and queued up to take his courses. Undoubtedly he was a first-rate teacher and his classes had always been popular. Several of his ex-students had become distinguished academics on their own accounts and some had even dedicated their scholarly monographs to him with fulsome inscriptions. Then a year ago, to everyone’s surprise, he had accepted an offer of early retirement with an enhanced pension. People conjectured as to how he could afford it – particularly after it was known that his first action on leaving the university was to book himself onto an expensive liner for a round-the-world cruise. The rumour went around that he had inherited a vast sum of money from his aunt. Even before I heard about Magnus’s triumph with the premium bonds, I knew that that could not be the case. He frequently spoke of the old lady and it was clear that she was still very much alive.
I had always liked him and felt safer sitting near him in this strange company. I made my way around the table to the empty chair directly beside him. Magnus was wearing a rumpled blue blazar and a purple and gold silk tie. He looked slightly heavier than when I last saw him, which was no doubt the result of a great deal of eating aboard ship. Unlike the rest of us, he was deeply tanned. ‘Nice to see you, Magnus,’ I said as I sat down.
‘Bloody Hell,’ he glowered, ‘I must have been crazy to have let myself be bamboozled into returning to this lot! Just look at them all! Have you ever seen such a miserable-looking crew?’
I muttered something about being in no position to judge. I was just a new boy around here.
Magnus was not to be deterred. ‘Look at this agenda,’ he muttered, ‘A lot of boring nonsense and then the new Vice-Chancellor is coming to waste our time. It’s bad enough listening to the Humourless Pilk.’ I did not myself feel that our Head of Department, John Pilkington, would like that description of himself, but I had heard that Magnus was unsparing in his criticisms of his colleagues.
‘Have you met him yet?’ I asked.
‘Who? Oh, the Vice-Chancellor! I just saw him getting out of his car. He’s as broad as he’s long! He reminded me of a fat dung-beetle!’
I laughed. ‘I’ve seen him too. He isn’t very prepossessing, is he? Perhaps he makes up for the shortcomings of his appearance with an abundance of charm, though I didn’t see much evidence of it when I met him.’
‘Oh then you’ve spotted him too. Well I wasn’t impressed,’ pronounced Magnus. ‘He spoke to me on the telephone about a month ago, asking me to teach the beginners’ Hebrew course. Patricia Parham, our new Dean, put him up to it.’
I smiled. ‘I heard from Harry in Sweetpea how you were hit in the eye by her garage-mechanic friend.’
‘Damn women!’ said Magnus. ‘I was only trying to give her a treat after she fixed my flat tyre. It was months before the bruises went away!’
‘Anyway,’ I wanted to bring Magnus back on track, ‘tell me about the phone call from Flanagan. What did he sound like?’
‘Exactly what he is. A Liverpool boy made good in Australia. A great deal of fake bonhomie and Down-Under baloney. He didn’t quite su
ggest I was a bonzo cobber to be doing what he wanted, but it wasn’t far off. Then once he got down to the real substance of the conversation, he drifted into ghastly phrases like “achieving targets” and “state of the art”. He even had the nerve to talk about “financial prudence” and “economic stringency”.’
‘I don’t think that’s completely unreasonable, Magnus.’ I tried to make a case for our new boss. ‘Vice-Chancellors do have to work within very tight budgets.’
‘Well they’re certainly paying me practically nothing for this Hebrew course, but I’ve heard on the grapevine that when he negotiated his own salary, it was a very different story.’
‘Really?’ I knew Emma would be fascinated by this. She always said that if you understood a person’s financial situation and their attitude to money, then you knew all there was to know about their character.
Magnus settled in his chair. ‘I heard that he demanded a fifty per cent larger salary than his predecessor was getting and drove a very hard bargain. Then, when it was all settled, he had the impertinence to demand a job for his wife on top of it all.’
‘His wife?’ I was puzzled. ‘What was she supposed to do?’
‘I don’t think she can do anything. Everyone says she’s just a little German mouse with no education, but he claimed that she had accountancy qualifications and he wanted a new position created for her in the Bursary.’
‘No!’
‘Well even our pathetic Council managed to stand up to him over that. But then he argued that if the family were going to lose her income, he must obviously be recompensed. He browbeat them so much and they were so desperate to have him that they gave him an extra twenty thousand pounds on top of what he had already negotiated!’
‘No!’ I said again.
‘I had it on the highest authority,’ declared Magnus primly. ‘Now I want to hear about Harry and Victoria. I got an email from him saying you went to see them both at Sweetpea. What did you think of the set-up?’
‘Well it’s all rather amazing. Harry has a fantastic red Rolls-Royce. He picked me up in Washington and drove me over to their house. It was very delightful. The furniture, which I understand came with the house, is stunning and there’s an extraordinary new portrait of Victoria on the drawing room wall. She’s in a white dress and is literally festooned with diamonds.’
Magnus laughed. ‘Yes I’ve been there and seen all that. The picture was painted by their millionaire benefactor’s young boyfriend. The diamonds come from her family. You know she’s the daughter of a baronet?’
‘Yes, I actually met Sir William. He had dinner with us. He’d just come back from a trip to Las Vegas and was very aggrieved. Apparently he’d been thrown out of Cleopatra’s Palace casino for winning too much money!’
It was Magnus’s turn to be astonished. ‘No! How could they do that? He’s just an old man. They can’t evict their punters just because they’re onto a winning streak.’
‘I don’t think it was exactly a winning streak. Apparently he was card counting. I don’t know quite what that means, but he learnt about it from a book Harry gave him for his birthday. It’s all based on mathematics and, if you can do it, it’s an unbeatable system. But anyway it’s strictly against the rules. They were watching him on the close-circuit television. He was summoned for a sticky interview with the casino owner and then a couple of heavies threw him out.’
‘Well I knew he was an absolute card-shark. I lost nearly a hundred pounds playing blackjack with him when I went to visit Harry and Victoria last year. In fact Harry reimbursed me afterwards and I heard later that Victoria introduced a new system so she provides the chips for him to play with when they have visitors.’
I laughed. ‘I had the same treatment. He insisted on playing and I was worried about it, but Victoria gave me a stack of dimes which Sir William systematically won off me. He was so successful I half wondered if the deck was stacked, but Victoria assured me it wasn’t.’
‘Well I can see he would be a nightmare to a casino owner.’ Magnus paused for a moment. ‘I wonder if he would teach me his system …’
At this point our conversation was interrupted. Pilkington called us all to order and reminded us that the Vice-Chancellor would be arriving at ten o’clock. He then very briefly in a few colourless words introduced me as a new member of the team. His lack of enthusiasm was all too obvious. I tried to think positively, but I could not help but feel he was being less than generous. After all I was bringing to his department a dowry of more than sixty thousand pounds per annum.
Then his voice became much warmer. ‘Now everyone,’ he said, ‘I want to introduce you all to a new member of the university. We are very privileged indeed to have as part of the department our chaplain, Crispin Chantry-Pigg. In the time he has to spare from organising and, we hope, revitalising the worship of the university chapel, Brother Chantry-Pigg will be teaching a course on Church vestments.’
With great ceremony, Crispin Chantry-Pigg, who was sitting next to Wendy Morehouse, rose to his feet. He was tall and extremely thin with sparce reddish hair and a long pointed nose. His hands were yellow and bony and he was dressed in a long brown habit. He cleared his throat, bowed to Pilkington and said in a high, clerical voice, ‘If I may, Mr Chairman …’
Pilkington nodded and Chantry-Pigg began. ‘In the first place, I must indicate my great pleasure, my very great pleasure, in being amongst you as part of such a scholarly company. However, if I may, I must take the liberty in correcting your distinguished chairman in just one particular.’
Magnus snorted beside me. Perhaps the friar did not hear, since he proceeded without a pause.
‘He is, of course, quite accurate in referring to me as “Brother Chantry-Pigg”. That is the accepted mode of address for a member of my order. However I am, of course, an ordained priest of our beloved Church of England and, since my role in the university is to lead, guide and support the religious life of this venerable institution, I think it would be not unsuitable for me to be spoken of in this context as “Father Chantry-Pigg”. Many of you no doubt will have heard of my distinguished uncle, the Reverend the Honourable Canon Hugh Chantry-Pigg. He was the personal priest of the well-known lady-novelist Rose Macaulay and was famous in his own right as an intrepid traveller in the Middle East. I remember so well, as a tiny child, sitting on his knee, playing with his pectoral cross and calling him “Father Uncle”. He was always my personal guide and inspiration and I would be honoured to share the same mode of address with him.’
‘Well, I’m certainly not going to call him Uncle,’ muttered Magnus. I stifled a laugh, but again Chantry-Pigg ignored us.
‘Now,’ he said, ‘I’m sure we would like our Heavenly Father to guide our endeavours. Let me begin our little meeting with a prayer.’
Everyone looked bemused, but we obediently bowed our heads. I glanced sideways at Magnus. ‘Is this the usual custom in your department?’ I whispered.
Magnus grinned. ‘Not in my time,’ he said.
Crispin Chantry-Pigg’s prayer was in Latin and largely inaudible. It was not short. Magnus did not pretend to participate. He gazed around at his colleagues and continued to dunk his biscuit and drink his coffee. How, I wondered, could I, as a secular philosopher who specialised in the thought of the great Immanuel Kant, possibly fit in amongst such Christian piety?
Eventually the chaplain appeared to have come to an end and everyone muttered ‘Amen.’
‘Shocking bad Latin!’ remarked Magnus loudly as the friar showed signs of sitting down. However, Chantry-Pigg had not finished. He took his chair magisterially and then asked for Pilkington’s permission to speak briefly about the chapel. Our chairman had no chance to respond. Slowly and ponderously the friar explained that it was his intention to adopt a more traditional approach to worship than had been the custom in the past. There would be a greater emphasis on the sacramental life and the chapel services would from now on be following the medieval monastic offices.’ He continu
ed in a similar vein for another ten minutes while Magnus and I looked at each other.
‘The man’s a religious lunatic,’ Magnus opined.
Even Pilkington began to get restive, and when Chantry-Pigg paused for breath, he cut in apologetically. ‘I am so sorry, Father,’ he said, ‘but the Vice-Chancellor will be here any minute and I have one or two important notices.’
‘Of course, of course,’ said Father Chantry-Pigg. ‘The work must go on. “In the midst of life we are in death” …’
Pilkington began to outline the arrangments for the term. There was to be a meeting for the new undergraduates on Saturday afternoon when they would be introduced to members of the department. He hoped that we would all attend. Wendy Morehouse would be baking biscuits and cakes for the occasion. Then we were treated to a little lecture on the importance of recruiting new postgraduate students since the economic health of the department depended on it. Finally, on no account were we to forget the importance of research in the financing of the university.
‘It has to be said that the departmental result in the government Research Assessment Exercise was a disappointment …’ said Pilkington.
Magnus chuckled. ‘That’s because they left out Harry! Serves them right!’
Pilkington was about to embark on the new arrangements for staff appraisal when he was interrupted. With an incredible amount of noise, our new Vice-Chancellor, Professor Alfred Flanagan, entered the room. Magnus had not been wrong about his bulk – his grey flannel suit barely met around his middle. Round his neck, buried in the folds of flesh, he was sporting the St Sebastian’s tie and there was a gold silk handkerchief flowing out of his breast pocket. Magnus looked at the ceiling and groaned. ‘This is the fifth Vice-Chancellor I’ve known here and he’s quite the ugliest!’
Everyone except Magnus stood up and was told to sit down again. Pilkington embarked on an effusive introduction, but very quickly Flanagan took control of the room. ‘Ladies and Gentlemen,’ he began, ‘it is a great pleasure for me to come to you as your new Vice-Chancellor. Together I hope we will see many changes and improvements in the university. We need to become cutting-edge and quickly. I may be the Vice-Chancellor, but I am well aware that we must all work as a team. My wife Helga and I have now moved into our new house, and, as soon as we have settled in, we are planning to invite all of you over during the course of the year.’
