Death of an Old Goat (4 page)

The University was situated three or four miles out of the city of Drummondale: the city fathers had insisted on this, for they feared contamination. The first one saw of it was a series of blocks and huts at the bottom of a hill, which Professor Wickham pointed out by name as some of the colleges into which the university was divided. Up the hill were toiling strings of students in jeans and odd green gowns, and at the top of the hill there were more blocks and huts, which were apparently the departments, and a large Edwardian gentleman's residence which sprouted and straggled in all directions, and had caused John Betjeman to chortle appreciatively. This was the nucleus of the university, and now housed the administration who not unnaturally kept the best thing for themselves. Professor Wickham flapped his hands at all these objects of interest, and Professor Belville-Smith turned his head in their direction, and practised non-seeing.

When they arrived at the English Department, which was housed in temporary accommodation of a depressing permanence, the first sound that met their ears was that of Alice O'Brien, swapping words along the length of the corridor with a colleague in her most calling-the-cattle-home voice. Professor Wickham assumed his obligatory shudder, and was just wondering whether he could avoid introducing Professor Belville-Smith to the home-grown phenomenon when she emerged to view and hailed their visitor
like a long-lost friend. The voice which affected Wickham like a blatant threat seemed to have no terrors for Belville-Smith, who gravely and courteously shook her hand. Professor Wickham gathered that they had met the previous evening, and wondered apprehensively what the topic of conversation had been. He'd never liked that bitch, and neither had Lucy. Much better to stick to raw Englishmen: they might be incompetent, but at least they had a modicum of style. What a damned shame O'Brien was so competent; no chance of terminating her engagement prematurely on that score. Still, at least her temporary status made her the natural for loading all the unpleasant jobs off on to.

‘Perhaps you would show Professor Belville-Smith around until it's time for his lecture, Miss O'Brien?' he said hurriedly, and bustled into his room to phone Lucy.

Alice looked at the distinguished guest, who still retained some of his early-morning spryness.

‘Do you really want to go and view this collection of old sheds?' she asked.

‘No,' said Professor Belville-Smith.

‘You'll see enough of them in an hour's time,' said Alice; ‘you're lecturing in one.'

She suddenly held up a finger, and they were both silent. From Professor Wickham's room came the plaintive tones peculiar to men with unreasonable wives:

‘I know, dear, I know . . . Yes, I know . . . I
KNOW
 . . . But what can I do? He forced my hand . . . Yes, I know . . . But he won't come at all if we
don't
invite them . . . Yes, he
is
capable of doing that . . . Yes, he is old, but he's tough . . . They'll have to come in the evening . . . We can see they don't get too much.'

Alice turned to Professor Belville-Smith, with a broad smile of congratulation.

‘Good on you,' she said. ‘Why don't we go along to my room?'

Professor Belville-Smith looked curiously round Alice O'Brien's study to see what an Australian academic's room was like. On one shelf of the book-case was Campbell's
Anglo-Saxon Grammar
, a Middle-English dictionary, and an Agatha Christie. Just above these was a large flagon of dry sherry, three-quarters empty, a bottle of whisky, a bottle of gin, a bottle of brandy, a bottle of curaçao, two flagons of cheap red and white wine, and a large collection of tonic water, bitter lemon, ginger ale and a soda siphon.

‘Have a drink,' said Alice.

‘At this time of day?' said Professor Belville-Smith.

‘Religious scruples?' asked Alice.

‘I'll have a whisky.'

Professor Belville-Smith eased himself into the only comfortable chair, and the hour passed rather pleasantly in a swapping of derogatory opinions about a wide range of Australian academics who had been Professor Belville-Smith's hosts over the last few weeks. Professor Belville-Smith had a vein of cattiness which had not been very extensively mined of late, perhaps because his growing detachment from the life around him meant that most of the people he wanted to be catty about were dead, or as good as. Thus, though none of his hosts had been as negligent as Professor Wickham, he found it in him to say something delicately nasty about every one of them, and Alice stored up his remarks to report back to her friends in the various capitals.

The distinguished guest was just beginning to feel warm and rather mellow, floating happily back to the mood of sluggish malice in which he existed at Oxford, when Professor Wickham came to get them, and they all scrambled into their gowns. In the corridor the Department was gathering dutifully to troop up to the lecture-hall. On their faces was an expression of collective long-suffering. Faced with this miserable phalanx, Professor Wickham put his clenched fist to his forehead: sometimes the names of his staff went
clean out of his head, which was not really surprising, as he managed to ignore them for weeks on end. He seized hold of a rather glowering, dark young man, and triumphantly brought him forward.

‘Mervyn Raines, our Australian literature specialist.'

‘Merv,' said the glowering figure. ‘G'day.'

‘Most interesting,' said Professor Belville-Smith. ‘Australian literature. You must tell me about it. I have revealed my ignorance most sadly since I arrived here. I must confess that until I came, I wasn't aware . . .'

‘That we had any,' said Merv. ‘I know. That's what all the bloody pommies who come out here say.'

‘Bill Bascomb,' said Professor Wickham quickly.

‘Good morning, again,' said Professor Belville-Smith. ‘I must thank you once more for your kindness in rescuing me last night.'

‘Oh, you've met,' said Wickham, indulging again in his odd gesture of knocking his forehead with his fist.

‘Yes, thank you,' said Belville-Smith.

My God, thought Wickham, what did he mean by ‘rescuing'? If he spent the night with Bascomb and that bitch O'Brien I can guess what the conversation was about.

Turning frantically around he hastily introduced the guest to Dr Day — ‘our Victorian specialist' — a bleary-eyed figure whose entire skin area seemed to have been treated with nicotine, whose trousers were several sizes too big for him, and whose shirt was stained with a splash of red wine, and torn across the shoulder.

‘What ho,' said Dr Day, as they shook hands: ‘Been getting in a quick one before the lecture, have you? Wish I'd got a sniff of it earlier, I'd have been along.'

‘Dr Porter, Mr . . . er . . . Miss . . . er,' said Professor Wickham vaguely, and began leading him out of the door up the hill. The rest of his staff trooped behind them in a somewhat disconsolate body, the unintroduced staff members at the rear, feeling vaguely insulted as usual. Professor
Belville-Smith, clutching a disorderly mass of yellowing paper which he had extracted from his briefcase in Alice O'Brien's room, dropped them into the dust, and then retrieved them in dubious order. Alice had been right. He was, indeed, to lecture in a shed which looked as if it might smell of sheep-dip. Ranged along the front row of this unimpressive lecture-hall were Mrs Wickham, and some of her friends from the local minor gentry. The men had large stomachs, popping in and out periodically over their bursting belts; the women wore large gauzy hats, which swamped them. Professor Wickham performed the introduction to his wife with enthusiasm. Lucy usually made things right with people when they actually met her, however infuriated they might be with the things she did behind their backs.

‘My wife Lucy,' he said, ‘who's been so much looking forward to meeting you.'

Lucy Wickham was a plump, curvaceous, merry little creature with a heart of steel. She had a mass of black, lustrous, latin hair, and her glittering dark eyes oozed invitation. People assumed she had a mediterranean impulsiveness and generosity, but they soon learned otherwise, for when she wanted something, which was most of the time, she had the doggedness and immovability of a bulldozer. Some said she looked young, which meant that unlike most academic wives she didn't look more than her age. Her hot-toast-and-butter voice, shamelessly pouring forth outrageous compliments that she didn't expect the recipient to think were sincere, always disarmed suspicion, and even Professor Belville-Smith felt a spark of interest course through his elderly body.

This was something not all that far removed from the great hostesses of his young days (he had once been introduced to Lady Ottoline Morrell on a railway station) and he submitted with excellent grace to the introductions she performed, introductions to the local graziers and civic
dignitaries who sat around her. This done, Lucy turned to her husband, whom she treated on all public occasions as a troublesome appendage, and said:

‘Bobby, do get on and introduce Professor Belville-Smith. I can hardly wait to hear what he has to say about Mrs Gaskell.' She turned to the distinguished guest: ‘I
do
hope you are going to say something at least about . . .
Cranford
.'

The suspense before the title was killing to Professor Wickham. He still remembered the public occasion — it was that visiting American who left behind such convincing proof of his virility — when Lucy had revealed that she was under the impression that Ernest Hemingway had written
The Hunchback of Notre Dame.
Professor Belville-Smith reassured her on this point, and Professor Wickham went with his apologetic shuffle up to the lectern, and flammed his way through his usual routine with guest lecturers:

‘. . . distinguished critic . . . sensitive insights . . . how honoured we are by his visit.'

This done, Professor Belville-Smith gathered together his papers, and walked up to the stage. Dimly he perceived, for his eyes were not good, the rows of check shirts and jeans, the well-developed girls in the bright flowered frocks contrasting with the general dullness of the front row. Common to all, though this he did not see, was the glazed expression of the unwilling audience, the uninterested audience, the over-lectured-to audience. Nor could he see that some at the back of the room were writing their weekly letters home.

Clearing his throat, he began with the familiar and well-worn words, which he had penned in his youth.

‘To enter the enchanted world of Mrs Gaskell's novels demands from the reader of today no common effort. To pass from our world of telephones and motor-cars, of dirt and bustle, a world where one may eat breakfast in London and dinner in Paris' (so meaningless had the words become
by now to their author that he would have been surprised if it had been suggested to him that this opening, penned in the twenties, might benefit from a little updating) ‘into the never-failing charm and courtesy of her world of Cranford, with its maiden ladies, or into the hierarchical certainties of the delightful
Wives and Daughters
, is a privilege which only the sensitive and the tolerant can enjoy to the full.'

And so it flowed on. Even the diligent students put down their poised pens and settled into a dim, tranced state. The others sank further and further down into their seats. This was exactly the type of thing they had expected. Professor Wickham wondered if it would be noticed if he closed his eyes. Lucy Wickham leaned forward, apparently with rapt attention, but actually meditating vigorous measures to make apparent her displeasure to the lecturers who would be intruding on her party that night. One of her rural guests began to snore and she nudged him as if involuntarily with her elbow.

Merv Raines screwed up his mouth and whispered to Bill Bascomb: ‘They don't make lectures like that any more.'

‘Life must have been easy for lecturers in those days,' whispered Bill. ‘That sort of muck just writes itself.'

So somnolent did the prevailing atmosphere become that not all Professor Belville-Smith's audience noted a rather remarkable passage in his lecture, which occurred after about twenty minutes. He had torn himself, reluctantly, away from the maiden ladies of Cranford, and was dealing gingerly with the topic of Mrs Gaskell as social critic:

‘Important though the subject of unmarried mothers must have seemed to her when she wrote
Ruth
; and important though the subject of the ills of industrial England undoubtedly was at the time — and indeed, is now — it was not in those subjects that her true genius displayed itself,
and it is not to
Mary Barton
, or
North and South,
or
Ruth
, that the lover of Mrs Gaskell returns with anticipations of rare pleasure. For when the magic of her timeless Cranford world evaporates, she becomes — dare one say it? — a little pedestrian. What we remember her for is not the manufactured excitements of Mary Barton's attempt to save her worthy but dull lover, but the hilarious satire of her portrait of Mrs Bennet. Many have felt Jane Austen's satire of Elizabeth's mother unkind — nay, even cruel. But here I would beg to differ . . .'

At this point a slightly puzzled frown wafted briefly over the face of Professor Belville-Smith. He gazed at his notes. Had something happened? But the familiar words exerted their usual drug-like spell, and he continued for a further half-hour with his well-known attempt to rob Jane Austen of malice, intelligence and common-sense. His audience did not all adapt so easily to the change of subject.

‘Silly old bugger's muddled his notes,' whispered Bill Bascomb to Alice O'Brien.

‘Doesn't make much difference as far as I can see,' she whispered back. ‘It's all a load of garbage.'

‘True,' whispered Bill. ‘But it's supposed to be Jane Austen tomorrow. Will we have to sit through it all again, or do you think he'll manage to switch back to Mrs Gaskell?'