A Quiver Full of Arrows (25 page)

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 inquired.

“I am to give a series of twelve lectures.”

“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, Old Lone
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 M.C. 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
judgment 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 rr.arried 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 T.L.S. 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 Old for 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 hardboiled 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 O.E.D. on my desk. Need I remind you
that the O.E.D. 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 wished 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 of 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 inquiring 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 opened at The Tunnyng
of Elynour Rummyng, and the word “whym-wham” was underlined.

“... After the Sarasyns gyse,
With a
whym wham
, Knyt with a trym tram, Vpon her brayne pan,..”

Sir William, in his neat hand, had written a
note in the margin: “Forgive me, but I had to let her know.”

“Know what, I wonder?” said the Master
softly to himself as he attempted to remove the book from Sir William’s hand,
but the fingers were already stiff and cold around it.

Legend has it that they were never apart for
more than a few hours.

The
End

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A QUIVER FULL OF ARROWS