Matricide at St. Martha's (10 page)

‘I don’t quite see why.’

‘These are straitened times, Ellis, in the academic world, particularly for postgraduate students in the godforsaken subjects the Mistress has in mind to throw money at. So decent bursaries in obscure subjects will certainly attract good candidates. Theologians and paleographers of the first water will flock to St Martha’s, swamping the Holdness crew.

‘So from what I can gather she has decided on a high-risk strategy. She started making trouble about six months ago, and over the past few weeks she been escalating the dispute to the point it’s now reached. Now that she’s got a lot of students backing her, she’s essentially trying a form of psychological terrorism.’

‘It all sounds very like the late sixties – students on the rampage and all that.’

‘Indeed. But while Dame Maud Theodosia Buckbarrow is a throwback, she’s a throwback to a tougher age than the late sixties. Nothing spineless or trendy about her. She won’t cave in like all those terrified dons who threw in the towel at the sight of a demo of stoned sociologists. Dame Maud knows what’s right for scholarship and her gels and no threats are going to move her.’

‘Mmm,’ said Pooley, ‘you’ve got all the ingredients for a…’

‘Murder?’

‘It does seem like that.’

‘However, Ellis, 1 do not have your fanciful streak. I do not see the armies of the politically correct or of the land records of old Athelstan as putative murderers. I’m just going to try to enjoy the experience and make peace where I can. The Bursar is convinced the Dykes can’t win. She quoted some Chinese general who pointed out that one could never successfully attack a walled city.’

‘What exactly is her role in all this?’

‘Preparing the vats of boiling oil to pour out the windows on the enemies’ heads I should think. I rang her to say I was popping up to town and she instructed me to be back at 9.30 sharp tomorrow morning for what she termed “the counter-offensive”.’

‘You’d better wear your steel helmet.’

‘Steel underpants would be more like it. Some of those demonstrators have a nasty glint in their eyes. Now enough of all that. Fill me in on the latest upheavals in the Met.’

11

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The Bursar was declaiming Kipling:

‘ “I’m the prophet of the Utterly Absurd,

Of the Patently Impossible and Vain –

And when the Thing that Couldn’t has occurred

Give me time to change my leg and go again.” ’

‘What’s that about?’

‘My new stratagem: I think I’m word perfect.’

‘In what?’

‘Never you mind. You’ll see.’ She finished pinning to her ample chest a badge which she had taken from the top drawer: in large red letters it bore the legend ‘DYKE POWER’.

‘Bursar,’ said Amiss faintly. ‘What is that?’

‘I couldn’t get a T-shirt in my size. Can’t think why, mind you. The butch dykes must have made a run on them. So this’ll have to do for the moment.’

‘But why are you wearing it?’

She looked surprised. ‘Because I’m coming out, of course. Now come on, come on.’ And she catapulted from the room with Amiss in pursuit.

The demonstrators were in good voice when they were joined by the Bursar, who planted herself in front of them and pointed at her badge: the chanting stopped abruptly. She paused, bowed to the left, bowed to the right. ‘Thank you, sisters. I need your support. It has taken me until now to have the courage to declare myself – she paused for effect and then raised her voice another decibel – ’a lover of women, spelled “w-i-m-m-i-n”.

‘For too long,’ she said, warming to her theme, ‘I have been a victim of my herstory, pandering to patriarchal stereotyping and intimidated by the collaborators into denying my wimmin-bonding.’

Amiss felt that she had used that last phrase a touch uncertainly.

Her voice dropped; the spellbound mob waited anxiously.

‘Will any sisters here help me to share my pain and hurts, to grow, and to be part of wimminess?’

Two Doc Marten-shod figures rushed forward and enveloped her in a loving embrace and by the time Bridget Holdness and her Praetorian Guard arrived on the scene, the Bursar was the centre of a sobbing, cheering mob. Banners had been cast aside, all anger had fled. She broke free with some difficulty, clearly on this occasion feeling inhibited from using her usual strong-arm techniques.

‘Forgive me, my sisters.’ There was a trace of a sob in her voice. ‘I am overwhelmed by your love. Yet I am now empowered to advance our cause.’ Her voice gained in strength. ‘I go into the battlefield now secure and confident that this new vision will prevail.’ And with the air of a particularly self-satisfied Christian going forth to meet the Roman lions, she marched towards the Council Chamber.

Amiss was skulking quietly after her when a strapping young woman, who looked as if she had a long background in public-school sporting activities, suddenly shouted, ‘Come on sisters,’ and led them in a chorus of ‘For she’s a jolly good sister, for she’s a jolly good sister, for she’s a jolly good sister, and so say all of us.’

He sat across the table from the Bursar, trying and failing to catch her eye. She had adopted a pious expression and was seemingly lost in spiritual contemplation.

‘What’s all that about?’ whispered Francis Pusey in his ear. ‘What’s she up to now?’

‘She’s come out,’ whispered Amiss. ‘Can’t you see her badge?’

Pusey gazed, opened and closed his mouth, gazed again and then shrugged. ‘Well, I did tell you.’

‘Indeed you did. But I hadn’t expected quite such dramatic corroboration.’

Bridget and her crew had not yet followed them in. There appeared to be quite a spirited conversation going on outside. Amiss doubted if Bridget was likely to be as easily persuaded of the Bursar’s
bona fides
as had been the impressionable young, but he did not have long to tease out the problem. Two minutes later, at precisely 9.40, the Mistress entered, followed by a mixed group of Dykes and Virgins. The Council was two up on the previous morning. Not only had Miss Thackaberry turned up, but she was accompanied by a twenty-something with tangled brown curls who looked as vague as she did and whom Amiss identified as Anglo-Saxon Annie.

The Mistress sat down and looked round the table. ‘Good morning, colleagues. I trust this morning will be more profitable than yesterday. May we take item one on the agenda? Admissions policy. The issue here, as you will remember, is that Dr Murphy has made a proposal that examination results should be ignored as a criterion for assessing a candidate’s worth.’

‘Well what are we going to do instead?’ asked the Senior Tutor. ‘Standards have gone to pot already. Do you know that yesterday I met a student who’d never heard of Milton and she had passed some exams? I have come across a Fellow who does not know the difference between “imply” and “infer”. What happens next? Do we start accepting girls who can’t even read or write?’ Her voice rose to a squeal. She quivered across the table at the Dykes. ‘You’re trying to fill this college full of illiterate morons. I can’t take any more of this.’

‘Chair,’ said the Bursar. The Mistress looked at her, shocked.

‘Forgive me, I know you dislike that terminology, but I do not wish to give offence to my younger sisters by using words which they find insensitive. Bear with me, I beg of you, I wish to propose a peace plan.

‘We are a band of wimmin – well, that is, apart from a few exceptions here – but we needn’t pay any attention to them. We must stand together in our femaleness and solve our problems by seeking truly to understand each other’s psyches and analyse each other’s experiences.’

The Mistress’s eyes had caught and read the Bursar’s badge; she looked dazed.

‘And sisters, we can’t go on bickering and squabbling like this while society demands of us that we work together to help those who for so long have lived in the shadow. We must bring them forward, we must heal them, we must make them whole.’

‘Bursar,’ said the Mistress testily, ‘moving though your rhetoric might be, it seems of little relevance to the item under discussion.’

‘On the contrary, Mistress… ’ The Bursar clapped her hand over her mouth. ‘Sisters, I deeply apologize. Chair, what I’m trying to say is that I have had a change of heart. I had a long wrestle with my soul and I decided to cease to deny my identity and my sexuality.’

It must, thought Amiss, be a first for the Council Chamber to hear a discussion on sexuality at a Fellows’ meeting. He observed that she had drawn even Anglo-Saxon Annie and Miss Thackaberry out of their reveries: they were gazing at the Bursar in perplexity.

‘Really, Bursar, I don’t think this is the place…’

‘You misunderstand me, Chair. It is just that I feel I now have something to offer. Having been for so long a part of the old St Martha’s ethos and having just come to realize the glory that is the new, I feel I can act between both groups as an envoy. I wish therefore to propose that we continue with all non-controversial business this morning and that all contentious matters be referred to a sub-committee which will try to find a way through. We will look at sexism, racism, disabledism, ageism and so on in language, appointments, curricula and until we come up with a proper report all of us should make a self-denying ordinance to wage no such battles here. That would enable us to get on with such mundane matters as finalizing the budget, deciding on urgent maintenance priorities, making tutorial arrangements and the rest of it.’

Nobody said anything for a moment and then the Mistress rallied. ‘Bursar, I have, as you may imagine, been taken a little by surprise, but I see some way forward in your proposal. Does anyone object?’

‘What will be the composition of the sub-committee?’ asked Bridget Holdness.

‘I think it would be churlish, in view of the Bursar’s really exceptional gesture, to have anyone other than her in the chair. But I would of course expect that you, Dr Holdness, and the Senior Tutor, be the other members.’

There was a squeak from the other end of the table from Francis Pusey. ‘Do you mean that on a sub-committee addressing itself to discrimination there is to be no male representation? There is no minority in this college as much under threat as men.’

‘If Dr Holdness… sorry, Ms Holdness… has no objection,’ said the Bursar smoothly, ‘I think we should take note of that minority representation and ask Mr Amiss to act as our secretary. Someone after all has to take the minutes and make the tea.’

‘Any objections, Mr Amiss?’ asked the Mistress crisply.

‘I’m here to try to perform a useful function.’ He hoped he had put enough hurt into his voice to make the Dykes feel good.

‘Very well then,’ said the Mistress with deep relief. ‘If the Senior Tutor does not mind, she will be replaced by Mr Amiss. Now may we please address ourselves to the matter of maintenance priorities.’

What had amazed Amiss during the first half hour of the sub-committee meeting that afternoon was Jack Troutbeck’s quite extraordinary patience. There were moments when he thought that the old girl really might have flipped and become a Born Again Dyke.

‘Very well then,’ she said. ‘I think we’ve got the headings sorted out, Mr Amiss. Would you care to take us through them if you’ve got them in order?’

Amiss adopted his best impartial civil service manner. Just as he was about to address the Bursar as ‘Madam Chairman’, he reminded himself on which side the Dykes supposed him to be. With some difficulty, he began, ‘Certainly, Chair. I think the issues at present come under four main headings. The first is, for want of a better word, to be described as in Ms Holdness’s words — “Invasions of Personal Space”, with specific reference to smoking and perfume.’

‘Very well,’ said the Bursar. ‘I suppose, Dr Holdness,’ she said wistfully, ‘that you would like smoking banned from public rooms in the college?’

‘Oh no, Chair. I insist it be banned from the entire college.’

‘You’re kidding. Are you suggesting I shouldn’t be able to smoke my own pipe in my own room?’

‘I most certainly am. It is bad for the health of those who visit you.’

‘But they do that, do they not, at their own peril?’

‘Sometimes people have to visit your office, Bursar, and I have to say it’s a most unpleasant experience.’

‘But no one is required to visit me in my bedroom. You can’t seriously suggest that it should be banned in private quarters.’

‘The smell clings to your clothes and exacerbates allergies, even more than does perfume.’

‘Would you say the same to somebody who suffered from BO?’ asked the Bursar. ‘Like at least three students I can think of.’

‘An unacceptable comparison,’ said Holdness. ‘Tobacco and perfume are products developed by capitalism in the pursuit of profit without any consideration of the damage done to the individual and her environment.’

‘So is soap,’ said the Bursar, forgetting to be meek, ‘which is presumably why you don’t approve of recommending it to our naturally smelly sisters.’

‘Item two,’ said Amiss, taking the risk of being ticked off for interrupting, ‘is language. Ms Holdness has proposed a priority exercise to make the language of all documentation free of ethnic and gender bias. Item three is the introduction of training courses to sensitize the Fellowship, staff and students and item four is her proposal to democratize the college through the abolition of titles of all kinds – and indeed, the power that goes with them.’

‘That’s pretty comprehensive,’ said the Bursar. ‘Since these are so far-reaching, we should set up democratic working groups to examine each of these matters in turn.’

‘No,’ said Bridget. ‘That’s a delaying device, the academic equivalent of setting up a royal commission. I insist on prompt action now.’

‘And what does that mean? We couldn’t abolish titles tomorrow if we wanted to without changing the college statutes, which is a slow process.’

‘You procrastinate. We do not have to be trammelled by male law. The Council can simply agree to the
de facto
abolition of the elitist structure of this college; it can be accomplished formally in due course. Otherwise, I shall have to call on the students to apply pressure.