Oxford Blood (7 page)

'So what is the next step, Jemima Shore Investigator?'

'Oh, to forget it all,' responded Jemima. 'What else?'

Jemima Shore, while she was as good as her word for the rest of the evening and night, found herself rapidly reminded of Rochester College at Megalith Television the next morning. This was because she received a letter. The envelope was fairly undistinguished other than that it bore the crest of Rochester College, Oxford; this revealed the foundation to be something vaguely episcopal and not, as Jemima had romantically supposed, connected to the poet Rochester. The quality of the envelope was thin and white. The writing paper within was, on the other hand, nothing if not distinguished.

To begin with, the paper was so thick as to give the momentary illusion of parchment, and its very thickness brought a glow in the tint of the ivory. Then there were great curly black swirls in the address, which was so heavily engraved that the letters positively stood out from the paper. Luckily the address itself could afford to be inscribed in this lavish fashion since it scarcely constituted a space problem. The address read simply:
saffron
ivy
. There was no mention of a neighbouring town, not even a county, let alone anything as common as a postal code (or telephone number).

Jemima read on with interest. That very morning a conference had taken place at Megalith in which she had utterly failed to shift Cy Fredericks from his profound conviction that, as he put it, 'these Golden Kids are Big Bucks, and I don't mean our expenses, I mean our sales. Have you seen the
Brideshead
figures? We can make
Brideshead
look like peanuts. They were just a bunch of actors. We've got the real thing.' So discussions about the
Golden Lads and Girls
programme meandered on; no scheduling as yet, apart from a general feeling that summer was the time to get to grips with that kind of thing. 'Girls in long dresses, nothing punk. And those long boats,' murmured Cy, lowering his voice for once, as if in deference to the scene he was summoning before their eyes. 'Punts,' suggested someone helpfully. 'Nothing punk,' repeated Cy with a wild glare in the direction of the speaker before continuing: 'Long shadows across the July grass. No long shadows across their future, these are Golden Kids - remember, Miss Lewis, make a note of that line -
no long shadows—'

'Long dresses, long boats, long shadows, I mean,
no
long shadows,'
murmured Guthrie Carlyle, Jemima's old friend and potential director of this epic. 'Will it be a long programme to match?'

'What's that, Guthrie?' asked Cy Fredericks sharply. One could never count on Cy's total absorption in his own flow of words, reflected Jemima, especially if there was any hint of disloyalty in the room. Cy had uncanny hearing for disloyal echoes. 'The programme, like all Megalith programmes, will be exactly the right length,' he swept on, 'not a minute more or less. And I mean
artistic length.'
He looked round as if to ask Miss Lewis to inscribe that thought too on her tablets, but by now more exciting matters called, and Miss Lewis had vanished to sort out a flurry of messages from New York.

The main result of the conference was to rechristen the programme
Golden Kids.
This was to avoid the possible charge of sexism implicit in Shakespeare's line, which by placing the word 'Lads' before 'Girls' might be held to suggest that the 'Girls' were mere appendages to the 'Lads'. Guthrie had in fact floated this suggestion as a joke, but finding it enthusiastically endorsed by Cy (who was always desperate to avoid sexism, if only he could put his finger on what it was) Guthrie quickly took the opportunity to atone for his previous levity by proposing
it
in earnest.

'How about
Oxford Bloods’
suggested Jemima at one point, 'or even
Bloody Oxford.'

'Jem,' said Cy reproachfully, 'I had expected better from you. This is not a bloody programme.'

So
Golden Kids
it was. Everyone felt a good deal of progress had been made, and as Cy had to leave for Rome - or as he absent-mindedly described it, New York, until Miss Lewis coughed and corrected him -the meeting broke up.

Jemima was left wondering whether she should have pointed out that the Oxford academic term ended in June. In July, the long shadows in Oxford would be falling on innumerable tourists, while the Golden Kids played elsewhere, departing in long aeroplanes for the long shores of the Mediterranean, the Far East and the United States.

She now gazed at the short note beneath the ornate Saffron Ivy address and thought that under the circumstances a polite invitation from Lord Saffron to lunch in Oxford was not unwelcome.

'Ooh, watch it Jemima,' was Cherry's reaction. 'Supposing he sports that oak thing once you're up there.'

'I shall of course ask him to keep his oak thing to himself,' replied Jemima sweetly. 'In any case I intend to direct operations from a suite at the Martyrs Hotel. Could you be an angel and book it for me? A nice large suite, so that Lord Saffron and others can keep their distance. Megalith owes me a nice large suite for working on
Golden Kids.
And get onto that man, what's his name, that don who went on television the other night calling for more compulsory admissions from comprehensive schools in arts subjects - what
was
his name? Barber or something similar. He's got this campaign called COMPCAMP. I'm not going to let
Golden Kids
get by without a suitable class struggle.'

Jemima was reminded of these bold words a few days later when she found herself sitting with Saffron at lunch in what was in fact a very small and unfashionable restaurant off the Broad.

'For some reason my name is mud in most Oxford restaurants,' explained Saffron plaintively; he also fluttered his eyelashes in a flirtatious way which, whether joking or not, for a moment reminded Jemima of Tiggie Jones. 'And as you know the Martyrs have banned me for my lifetime, or their lifetime, whichever shall be longer. I feel the Lycee won't give me the big hand in future. Luckily when I came here before, I had the wit to book myself in as Colonel Gadaffi and they haven't twigged yet, beyond thinking I'm rather young for a military man. Alas, I can't even set foot in your lovely suite, I fear. I could shin up those pillars, I suppose, and lope in through your balcony. You have
got
a balcony? Looking on the Broad - looking
at
the Martyrs Memorial, oh that's the best one. What a relief. Anyway so far as I am concerned, life at Oxford is just one class struggle.'

Jemima, in spite of herself, had to laugh. But Saffron merely pressed her hand.

'No, I do so understand what Marx meant. The class struggle! When will it ever end? I ask myself. Only the other day Tiggie and I and a few others took ourselves off to the Highgate cemetery to visit the dear fellow's grave. Vodka and Blinis were judged appropriate, though as Poppy Delaware pointed out, who is a Marxist, albeit a Catholic one, something German like beer and bratwurst would really have been more appropriate. Ah, Marx! What a prophet. It's seldom a day I don't think about him, as one tries bravely to keep one's head
above
beer and bratwurst, with due respect to Poppy.'

Saffron, presumably with this admirable objective in view, had ordered champagne on arrival, what he described to an unsurprised waitress in smock and jeans as the Colonel's special. Now he poured it yet again (he was, Jemima noticed, an attentive host; perhaps all the Oxford Bloods were, since they were used to playing the role to each other; or perhaps Saffron had been trained to it since childhood by his parents).

'As if I didn't have enough to contend with, what with the class struggle and beer,' Saffron continued in the same genial voice, 'on top of it all, somebody round here is trying to kill me.'

7

Blood Isn't Everything

'Look, Jemima, I'm going to hire you. That's the point. What are your rates? You're going to find out who's trying to kill me. It would also be quite nice in an off-beat kind of way to know why. Who would want to kill poor little me?' Again Saffron's look of mock innocence reminded Jemima of Tiggie Jones. She did not mention that fact to Cass Brinsley, to whom she related the conversation later that day by telephone. I don't want to inflame him further, thought Jemima sternly. In any case, what Jemima did relate was quite enough for Cass to be getting on with.

'And you let him?' gasped Cass incredulously. 'You let him hire you? As his own personal private investigator. May one enquire the price?'

'You may,' answered Jemima. 'We've struck a bargain. If I discover what's going on, he's going to give a huge donation to the Radical Women's Settlement for Single Drop-Outs. If I fail, he gets to take me to Ascot.'

'Why the Radical Women's Settlement? That's the one you filmed in January, I take it.'

'To be honest, I thought it was the cause he would most dislike,' replied Jemima. 'Originally I considered CND, but unfortunately he actually supports it, although for all the wrong reasons. He told me the noise of the American bombers from the aerodrome near Saffron Ivy disturbs the sweetness of his slumbers. Of course, it's a good thing he supports it,' Jemima added hastily. 'But you see what I mean about it being annoying.'

'Quite,' said Cass who was a multilateralist.

'The real point, darling, is that I am now properly enthusiastic about
Golde
n Kids -
even if
my
reasons are all the wrong ones,' went on Jemima. 'All the reccying I'm doing, interviews with absolutely everyone in Oxford including dons from Professor Mossbanker whom I adore to Kerry Barber 
whom I'm hoping to adore because he's so worthy, it's all now a cover. So naturally I feel much better about it all.'

Although Jemima had worked out for herself that the killer - accidental or otherwise - of Bim Marcus had probably been aiming at Saffron, she was taken aback to find that Saffron himself had made the same calculations and come to the same conclusion. An intelligent and
quick-witted
Saffron was not quite what she had expected to find. Still less had she anticipated finding him sympathetic. Yet away from his friends, the newspapers, away from his
public,
one might almost have said that sympathetic was what Saffron was. The poses were dropped. And the story he unfolded was in itself sufficiently startling and upsetting to deserve some sympathy in its own right.

'Someone's trying to kill me,' he repeated. 'At first I couldn't take it in. The brakes failed on my car. Yes, I know I'm not the world's safest driver, but I do look after the car, and if I don't Wyndham does - he's the old chauffeur at Saffron Ivy. It was Wyndham who finally convinced me that something very odd had been done to the car; he put it down to Oxford undergraduates of course. All the same: "You could have been deceased, my lord" he pronounced with great solemnity, Wyndham having the bearing of a bishop rather than a chauffeur. There were one or two other odd incidents too, but of course I was getting pretty jumpy about everything. Then Bim was killed.'

'When did all this start?' asked Jemima. 'I take it you don't count the fight in the restaurant. The man with the red hair and the appropriate name of Rufus, plus his enormous friend.
That
wasn't an attempt on your life?'

'Rufus Pember and Big Nigel Copley.' Saffron laughed in a brief return to his airy manner. 'Oh yes, they would like to kill me all right. I must write to the Vice-Chancellor about it. Where did it start? A girl, I believe. Muffet Pember, to wit, but this is not sex and violence. This is
serious.'

It all began, Saffron told her, on the terrible day he went to see Nurse Elsie at the Hospice.

'If only Ma hadn't made me go - but as I told you, she made such a point of it. Said Nurse Elsie was asking for me specially - you bet she was - wouldn't die happy unless I went. Then that ghastly place. No, I know it's a wonderful place and all that. But Nurse Elsie, her hand like a claw clutching mine - that was what was ghastly. Like a skeleton from the past. Isn't it odd? I'd always hated it even more when she came to look after me sometimes when Nan was on holiday. And she used to bring Jack and Fanny to stay sometimes. She
looked
at me so oddly, I swear she did. Hugging me when we were alone. Telling me I was her own special little boy. Touching me all the time when we were alone. Nan hugged me of course, but there was something creepy about the way Elsie did it. I knew it was wrong. Children always know things like that, don't they, even if they don't know
why.

'And now here she was, this terrifying skeleton - hanging on to me -and telling me - she was a lunatic - she was telling me - of all things—' Saffron was sounding increasingly incoherent, even hysterical. All the same, Jemima was astonished when he leant forward and without bothering to push aside the glasses or the champagne bottle, now three quarters empty, simply buried his face in his hands. The large green bottle rocked to and fro twice and then fell heavily over. The remains of the drink began to bubble out and flow goldenly across the table.