The Short, the Long and the Tall

by Jeffrey Archer

  ‘For Christ’s sake,’ said William, exasperated by the tinny sound, ‘you won’t deduce their religious convictions from their key signatures.’

  ‘More informative than ifs and ands, my dear,’ she said, imperturbably, ‘and at night so much more relaxing than pots and pans.’

  Three years later, with well-received D. Phils, they moved on, inexorably in tandem, to college teaching fellowships. As the long shadow of fascism fell across Europe, they read, wrote, criticized and coached by quiet firesides in unchanging quadrangles.

  ‘A rather dull Schools year for me,’ said William, ‘but I still managed five firsts from a field of eleven.’

  ‘An even duller one for me,’ said Philippa, ‘but somehow I squeezed three firsts out of six, and you won’t have to invoke the binomial theorem, William, to work out that it’s an arithmetical victory for me.’

  ‘The chairman of the examiners tells me,’ said William, ‘that a greater part of what your pupils say is no more than a recitation from memory.’

  ‘He told me,’ she retorted, ‘that yours have to make it up as they go along.’

  When they dined together in college the guest list was always quickly filled, and as soon as grace had been said, the sharpness of their dialogue would flash across the candelabra.

  ‘I hear a rumour, Philippa, that the college doesn’t feel able to renew your fellowship at the end of the year.’

  ‘I fear you speak the truth, William,’ she replied. ‘They decided they couldn’t renew mine at the same time as offering me yours.’

  ‘Do you think they will ever make you a Fellow of the British Academy, William?’

  ‘I must say, with some considerable disappointment, never.’

  ‘I am sorry to hear that; why not?’

  ‘Because when they did invite me, I informed the President that I would prefer to wait to be elected at the same time as my wife.’

  Some non-university guests sitting in high table for the first time took their verbal battles seriously; others could only be envious of such love.

  One Fellow uncharitably suggested they rehearsed their lines before coming to dinner for fear it might be thought they were getting on well together. During their early years as young dons, they became acknowledged as the leaders in their respective fields. Like magnets, they attracted the brightest undergraduates while apparently remaining poles apart themselves.

  ‘Dr Hatchard will be delivering half these lectures,’ Philippa announced at the start of the Michaelmas Term of their joint lecture course on Arthurian legend. ‘But I can assure you it will not be the better half. You would be wise always to check which Dr Hatchard is lecturing.’

  When Philippa was invited to give a series of lectures at Yale, William took a sabbatical so that he could be with her.

  On the ship crossing the Atlantic, Philippa said, ‘Let’s at least be thankful the journey is by sea, my dear, so we can’t run out of petrol.’

  ‘Rather let us thank God,’ replied William, ‘that the ship has an engine because you would even take the wind out of Cunard’s sails.’

  The only sadness in their lives was that Philippa could bear William no children, but if anything it drew the two closer together. Philippa lavished quasi-maternal affection on her tutorial pupils and allowed herself only the wry comment that she was spared the probability of producing a child with William’s looks and William’s brains.

  At the outbreak of war William’s expertise with handling words made a move into cipher-breaking inevitable. He was recruited by an anonymous gentleman who visited them at home with a briefcase chained to his wrist. Philippa listened shamelessly at the keyhole while they discussed the problems they had come up against and burst into the room and demanded to be recruited as well.

  ‘Do you realize that I can complete The Times crossword puzzle in half the time my husband can?’

  The anonymous man was only thankful that he wasn’t chained to Philippa. He drafted them both to the Admiralty section to deal with enciphered wireless messages to and from German submarines.

  The German signal manual was a four-letter code book and each message was reciphered, the substitution table changing daily. William taught Philippa how to evaluate letter frequencies and she applied her new knowledge to modern German texts, coming up with a frequency analysis that was soon used by every code-breaking department in the Commonwealth.

  Even so, breaking the ciphers and building up the master signal book was a colossal task which took them the best part of two years.

  ‘I never knew your ifs and ands could be so informative,’ she said admiringly of her own work.

  When the allies invaded Europe husband and wife could together often break ciphers with no more than half a dozen lines of encoded text to go on.

  ‘They’re an illiterate lot,’ grumbled William. ‘They don’t encipher their umlauts. They deserve to be misunderstood.’

  ‘How can you give an opinion when you never dot your i’s, William?’

  ‘Because I consider the dot is redundant and I hope to be responsible for removing it from the English language.’

  ‘Is that to be your major contribution to scholarship, William? If so, I am bound to ask how anyone reading the work of most of our undergraduates’ essays would be able to tell the difference between an 1 and an i.’

  ‘A feeble argument, my dear, that if it had any conviction would demand that you put a dot on top of an n so as to be sure it wasn’t mistaken for an h.’

  ‘Keep working away at your theories, William, because I intend to spend my energy removing more than the dot and the 1 from Hitler.’

  In May 1945 they dined privately with the Prime Minister and Mrs Churchill at Number Ten Downing Street.

  ‘What did the Prime Minister mean when he said to me he could never understand what you were up to?’ asked Philippa in the taxi to Paddington Station.

  ‘The same as when he said to me he knew exactly what you were capable of, I suppose,’ said William.

  When the Merton Professor of English retired in the early nineteen-fifties the whole university waited to see which Doctor Hatchard would be appointed to the chair.

  ‘If Council invite you to take the chair,’ said William, putting his hand through his greying hair, ‘it will be because they are going to make me Vice-Chancellor.’

  ‘The only way you could ever be invited to hold a position so far beyond your ability would be nepotism, which would mean I was already Vice-Chancellor.’

  The General Board, after several hours’ discussion of the problem, offered two chairs and appointed William and Philippa full professors on the same day.

  When the Vice-Chancellor was asked why precedent had been broken he replied: ‘Simple; if I hadn’t given them both a chair, one of them would have been after my job.’

  That night, after a celebration dinner when they were walking home together along the banks of the Isis across Christ Church Meadows, in the midst of a particularly heated argument about the quality of the last volume of Proust’s monumental works, a policeman, noticing the affray, ran over to them and asked:

  ‘Is everything all right, madam?’

  ‘No, it is not,’ William interjected, ‘this woman has been attacking me for over thirty years and to date the police have done deplorably little to protect me.’

  In the late fifties Harold Macmillan invited Philippa to join the board of the IBA.

  ‘I suppose you’ll become what’s known as a telly don,’ said William, ‘and as the average mental age of those who watch the box is seven you should feel quite at home.’

  ‘Agreed,’ said Philippa. ‘Twenty years of living with you has made me fully qualified to deal with infants.’

  The chairman of the BBC wrote to William a few weeks later inviting him to join the Board of Governors.

  ‘Are you to replace “Hancock’s Half Hour” or “Dick Barton, Special Agent”?’ Philippa enquired.

  ‘I am to give a series of twelve lec
tures.’

  ‘On what subject, pray?’

  ‘Genius.’

  Philippa flicked through the Radio Times. ‘I see that Genius is to be viewed at two o’clock on a Sunday morning, which is understandable, as it’s when you are at your most brilliant.’

  When William was awarded an honorary doctorate at Princeton, Philippa attended the ceremony and sat proudly in the front row.

  ‘I tried to secure a place at the back,’ she explained, ‘but it was filled with sleeping students who had obviously never heard of you.’

  ‘If that’s the case, Philippa, I am only surprised you didn’t mistake them for one of your tutorial lectures.’

  As the years passed, many anecdotes, only some of which were apocryphal, passed into the Oxford fabric. Everyone in the English school knew the stories about the ‘fighting Hatchards’. How they spent their first night together. How they jointly won the Charles Oldham. How Phil would complete The Times crossword before Bill had finished shaving. How they were both appointed to professorial chairs on the same day, and worked longer hours than any of their contemporaries as if they still had something to prove, if only to each other. It seemed almost required by the laws of symmetry that they should always be judged equals. Until it was announced in the New Year’s Honours that Philippa had been made a Dame of the British Empire.

  ‘At least our dear Queen has worked out which one of us is truly worthy of recognition,’ she said over the college dessert.

  ‘Our dear Queen,’ said William, selecting the Madeira, ‘knows only too well how little competition there is in the women’s colleges: sometimes one must encourage weaker candidates in the hope that it might inspire some real talent lower down.’

  After that, whenever they attended a public function together, Philippa would have the MC announce them as Professor William and Dame Philippa Hatchard. She looked forward to many happy years of starting every official occasion one up on her husband, but her triumph lasted for only six months as William received a knighthood in the Queen’s Birthday Honours. Philippa feigned surprise at the dear Queen’s uncharacteristic lapse of judgement and forthwith insisted on their being introduced in public as Sir William and Dame Philippa Hatchard.

  ‘Understandable,’ said William. ‘The Queen had to make you a Dame first in order that no one should mistake you for a lady. When I married you, Philippa, you were a young fellow, and now I find I’m living with an old Dame.’

  ‘It’s no wonder,’ said Philippa, ‘that your poor pupils can’t make up their minds whether you’re homosexual or you simply have a mother fixation. Be thankful that I did not accept Girton’s invitation: then you would have been married to a mistress.’

  ‘I always have been, you silly woman.’

  As the years passed, they never let up their pretended belief in the other’s mental feebleness. Philippa’s books, ‘works of considerable distinction’, she insisted, were published by Oxford University Press while William’s ‘works of monumental significance’ he declared were printed at the presses of Cambridge University.

  The tally of newly appointed professors of English they had taught as undergraduates soon reached double figures.

  ‘If you will count polytechnics, I shall have to throw in Maguire’s readership in Kenya,’ said William.

  ‘You did not teach the Professor of English at Nairobi,’ said Philippa. ‘I did. You taught the Head of State, which may well account for why the university is so highly thought of while the country is in such disarray.’

  In the early sixties they conducted a battle of letters in the TLS on the works of Philip Sidney without ever discussing the subject in each other’s presence. In the end the editor said the correspondence must stop and adjudicated a draw.

  They both declared him an idiot.

  If there was one act that annoyed William in old age about Philippa, it was her continued determination each morning to complete The Times crossword before he arrived at the breakfast table. For a time, William ordered two copies of the paper until Philippa filled them both in while explaining to him it was a waste of money.

  One particular morning in June at the end of their final academic year before retirement, William came down to breakfast to find only one space in the crossword left for him to complete. He studied the clue: ‘Skelton reported that this landed in the soup.’ He immediately filled in the eight little boxes.

  Philippa looked over his shoulder. ‘There’s no such word, you arrogant man,’ she said firmly. ‘You made it up to annoy me.’ She placed in front of him a very hard-boiled egg.

  ‘Of course there is, you silly woman; look whym-wham up in the dictionary.’

  Philippa checked in the Oxford Shorter among the cookery books in the kitchen, and trumpeted her delight that it was nowhere to be found.

  ‘My dear Dame Philippa,’ said William, as if he were addressing a particularly stupid pupil, ‘you surely cannot imagine because you are old and your hair has become very white that you are a sage. You must understand that the Shorter Oxford Dictionary was cobbled together for simpletons whose command of the English language stretches to no more than one hundred thousand words. When I go to college this morning I shall confirm the existence of the word in the OED on my desk. Need I remind you that the OED is a serious work which, with over five hundred thousand words, was designed for scholars like myself?’

  ‘Rubbish,’ said Philippa. ‘When I am proved right, you will repeat this story word for word, including your offensive non-word, at Somerville’s Gaudy Feast.’

  ‘And you, my dear, will read the Collected Works of John Skelton and eat humble pie as your first course.’

  ‘We’ll ask old Onions along to adjudicate.’

  ‘Agreed.’

  ‘Agreed.’

  With that, Sir William picked up his paper, kissed his wife on the cheek and said with an exaggerated sigh, ‘It’s at times like this that I wish I’d lost the Charles Oldham.’

  ‘You did, my dear. It was in the days when it wasn’t fashionable to admit a woman had won anything.’

  ‘You won me.’

  ‘Yes, you arrogant man, but I was led to believe you were one of those prizes one could return at the end of the year. And now I find I shall have to keep you, even in retirement.’

  ‘Let us leave it to the Oxford English Dictionary, my dear, to decide the issue the Charles Oldham examiners were unable to determine,’ and with that he departed for his college.

  ‘There’s no such word,’ Philippa muttered as he closed the front door.

  Heart attacks are known to be rarer among women than men. When Dame Philippa suffered hers in the kitchen that morning she collapsed on the floor calling hoarsely for William, but he was already out of earshot. It was the cleaning woman who found Dame Philippa on the kitchen floor and ran to fetch someone in authority. The Bursar’s first reaction was that she was probably pretending that Sir William had hit her with a frying pan but nevertheless she hurried over to the Hatchards’ house in Little Jericho just in case. The Bursar checked Dame Philippa’s pulse and called for the college doctor and then the Principal. Both arrived within minutes.

  The Principal and the Bursar stood waiting by the side of their illustrious academic colleague but they already knew what the doctor was going to say.

  ‘She’s dead,’ he confirmed. ‘It must have been very sudden and with the minimum of pain.’ He checked his watch; the time was nine forty-seven. He covered his patient with a blanket and called for an ambulance. He had taken care of Dame Philippa for over thirty years and he had told her so often to slow down that he might as well have made a gramophone record of it for all the notice she took.

  ‘Who will tell Sir William?’ asked the Principal. The three of them looked at each other.

  ‘I will,’ said the doctor.

  It’s a short walk from Little Jericho to Radcliffe Square. It was a long walk from Little Jericho to Radcliffe Square for the doctor that day. He never relished telling anyone o
f the death of a spouse but this one was going to be the unhappiest of his career.

  When he knocked on the professor’s door, Sir William bade him enter. The great man was sitting at his desk poring over the Oxford Dictionary, humming to himself.

  ‘I told her, but she wouldn’t listen, the silly woman,’ he was saying to himself and then he turned and saw the doctor standing silently in the doorway. ‘Doctor, you must be my guest at Somerville’s Gaudy next Thursday week where Dame Philippa will be eating humble pie. It will be nothing less than game, set, match and championship for me. A vindication of thirty years’ scholarship.’

  The doctor did not smile, nor did he stir. Sir William walked over to him and gazed at his old friend intently. No words were necessary. The doctor said only, ‘I’m more sorry than I am able to express,’ and he left Sir William to his private grief.

  Sir William’s colleagues all knew within the hour. College lunch that day was spent in a silence broken only by the Senior Tutor enquiring of the Master if some food should be taken up to the Merton professor.

  ‘I think not,’ said the Master. Nothing more was said.

  Professors, Fellows and students alike crossed the front quadrangle in silence and when they gathered for dinner that evening still no one felt like conversation. At the end of the meal the Senior Tutor suggested once again that something should be taken up to Sir William. This time the Master nodded his agreement and a light meal was prepared by the college chef. The Master and the Senior Tutor climbed the worn stone steps to Sir William’s room and while one held the tray the other gently knocked on the door. There was no reply, so the Master, used to William’s ways, pushed the door ajar and looked in.

  The old man lay motionless on the wooden floor in a pool of blood, a small pistol by his side. The two men walked in and stared down. In his right hand, William was holding the Collected Works of John Skelton. The book was open at ‘The Tunnyng of Elynour Rummyng’, and the word ‘whym wham’ was underlined.