The Pink and the Grey (24 page)

There being no other AOB business, or at least none to discuss in Amanda’s particular company, the meeting closed and scheduled to reconvene two days later for a further update and for college selection. Dennis and Helen hurried off at their respective paces, perhaps to further whichever tasks the Archivist had given them.

I felt the meeting had passed exceptionally reasonably. It was not a feeling I usually associated with meetings, especially those I chaired, and especially those attended by Amanda. I tried not to strut or preen, as I was well aware of the Master’s ability to leech away any feeling of satisfaction or pride: some called it the
tumble in the jumble
.

But she had been quiet, by her usual decibellic standards. When we were alone, as I gathered my papers, she leaned forward and stared blankly down at the table, her arms stretched out before her, her nails dotting out two purple arcs across the wooden surface. The words came slowly. “Have you reached a verdict upon which you are all agreed upon?”

“I beg your pardon, Amanda?” Upon which
we were all
agreed? Was this a reference to the Archivist and his team? Had she more access to his data than I knew?

“Regarding your proposed vacancy. Am I to recruit, or to not recruit? That is the question.” Her voice was low, soft, almost vulnerable.

Perhaps a mere verbal tic, then: a running away of the mouth, a cascade of word association football. I hoped the Archivist’s systems were sufficiently hardened to prevent unauthorised ingress. Perhaps she was extrapolating: reaching mentally as well as physically. I wondered whether she knew, if not the detail, then that
something
was afoot over which she had no control.

“Master,” I said plainly and quietly, papers in hand. “I have no desire to leave St Paul’s. Despite the hardships and troubles, I believe we work for a common good, for the students, as our founder wished it. I may from time to time inadvertently topple from the wagon into a flowerbed, not necessarily unaccompanied, but these are mere unfortunate lapses.”

“Lapses, Dr Flowers?
Lapses?
I assure you they are geraniums.” Even this had no bite, no spat venom.

She was in a curious mood, one I had never seen. It unsettled me, like the mechanical clanking as you are hauled to a localised maximum of a roller coaster knowing but not knowing what is to follow. Had the fight entirely left her?

Her reign as Master had always been turbulent and, as it were, event-filled. There were protests at her appointment, from a certain subset of the Old Paulines — all gentlemen, naturally — who declared her genetically unsuitable. I had supported her then. I was less in favour when two fellows whose friendship had grown beyond friendship broke up apocalyptically, and she proclaimed that we must thenceforth no longer mix pleasure with business. That struck me as too unnecessarily strict a rule, too black and white, and I said so vigorously. In retrospect it was perhaps not so odd that I soon found myself in the regular company of our then-and-now-69-year-old Praelector, Dennis. Perhaps he had been grooming me.

I stood to leave, and Amanda did so too.

“May we walk?” she asked.

She was silent as we descended the staircase together, her clog-like shoes thumping on the worn stone like a mason’s blunt mallet. Through a tall glass door into the fresh air of Top Court she became invigorated somewhat, more animated. She took my arm, a most unnerving experience: cracked old purple-tipped fingers slithering past my inner elbow, locking me to her. I had, I noted disturbingly, left my pen-knife in my flat and would be unable to slice off my own arm should the situation make that necessary.

“How are
things
?” she asked in attempted friendliness as we began to walk anticlockwise around the court. I could think of no worse — or, indeed, unlikely — question to emerge from her lips. Its openendedness and breadth rendered any answer either uninformatively brief or liable to continue via a mix of subordinate clauses, subparagraphs and weeping until we were both desiccated corpses lying, entwined forever, in the ditch we had carved around the lawn of Top Court with our endlessly circling feet.

“Well, you know,” I said, opting for the former variant of answer.

“Might there be anything with which I can help you with?”

I could think of many things, none of them pleasant.

She continued: “Perhaps in respect of our— friends at the
Bugle
?”

I laughed. “If you could arrange for them to drop this week’s stories, that would be simply magnificent.”

“Is not that, as it were, in hand?”

“We are having a good stab, Master. A thrust here, a slice there, the occasional pirouette.”

A hesitation. More quietly: “We, Dr Flowers?
We
?”

“In the royal sense. I am—”
 

“I have the eyes, Spencer.”

I had slipped, and she knew it.

Perhaps this was the source of her apparent malaise, I thought. She still retained her limited access to the Archivist’s systems to view cameras around college: a simple monitoring, a broad overview, with none of the Archivist’s whistles and bells. She had undoubtedly seen me visiting him. I hoped she had not seen Seb, or at least not connected him to the growing conspiracy.

“The Archivist and his team are assisting in their usual capacity,” I said, saying nothing.

“In regard of which?”

“In regard of… it is perhaps best I say no more. For pl—”

“In regard of which, Dr Flowers?” Her voice hardened. Her grip tightened.

“I should not say. There are aspects—”

“Aspects? Which aspects?” The gentle stroll changed up to a march.

I began to worry. “You know better than I how the Archivist works, Master. Please— would you mind awfully excusing yourself from my limb?”

Her elbow stiffened closer to her body, pinning me. I smiled and wrenched as pleasantly as I could given our location, in full view of chunks of college. An undergraduate dawdled a few paces ahead, another across the court. There would be faces within glancing distance of windows. She parried my wrench with an inverse wriggle and an unladylike jiggle.

“This is requiring of utmost discussion, Dr Flowers.” Her volume rose with her temper. “Please, tell me your actions. This I do here command a response.”

I stopped, whether she wanted to or not. She tried to pull me along. I resisted. “I am not a child, Amanda.”

“Then why so do you act? I ask of you one item.”

“Why?”

“I need to know.”

“Why?”

“I am the Master. Of further ‘why’ there is no need, let me say simply. My request demands an immediacy of response.”

“I refuse to tell you.”

“Why?” It was her turn.

“You do not need to know.”

“Why?”

All my instincts clamoured for me to say
because you are a part of all this
, but I resisted. In that brief moment of thought, I heard something: a quiet, strange, familiar warbling on the air.

Uh-meh-meh-onna-OW-puh-yuh-air-onna-OW
.

What was it? Where was it coming from?

She heard it too, and scrambled in her jacket pocket with her free arm.

OW-um-on-aah-OW
.

“Oh,” she said, confused.

OW-um-on-aah-OW.

“Is that you? It’s coming from— Is that— Is that Lulu?”

“Nothing. No matter. The singer, having sung, moves on.” She fumbled with something, and it went silent.

“Show me that,” I said firmly. “What is it? What are you doing?”

“Inconsequential.”

Proprieties be damned, I thought, and broke free with a most impolite wrench that left her staggering. I grabbed her shoulders and spun her to face me, looking angrily into her eyes. Then I plunged my hand outrageously into her pocket.

I pulled out an ancient recording device with a miniature tape within: a dictating machine from the stone age.

“Were you recording me?” I demanded.

“No, I—”

“Let us see, shall we?” I inspected the device quickly. “Well. Assuming I can make it rewind. Ah.”

I hefted the appropriate buttons. Very shortly I heard the latter part of our conversation, ending at her imperial command to tell me my actions — when I presumed the jolt of my stopping had disrupted its function and inflicted an ancient, younger Lulu upon us.

I thought rapidly. I could only assume she had intended to take whatever I had revealed to the
Bugle
as incriminating evidence. But to what end? To sacrifice me to save the college? The newspaper could not be allowed to hear what I had said, of course. That much was easy to achieve. Less trivial: how to deal with Little Miss Scattershot herself.

I took her arm and contrived a smile. “Come with me,” I said, with a degree of force and two degrees of butch.

The Archivist was waiting for us underground at his outer door. He was mid-shift and his hair showed signs of biscuits — perhaps he had been napping. He told us his elves had quickly alerted him to the unsightly fracas.
 

He took us through hurriedly to the plain room in which Dennis and I had met him a week before: the room with no secrets proudly on display, no plush carpet. A worried elf brought sufficient chairs and met nobody’s gaze before scurrying away.

The Archivist paced to and fro silently, his hair bobbing like a conductor’s arm. I indicated to the Master to sit, and thankfully she acquiesced mutely. I was too enraged to join her, bouncing on my toes and boggling repeatedly at the obsolescent recording device I held before my face.

“We cannot allow—” I began, pushing it towards the Archivist.

He wafted me to silence. “Professor Sauvage will be here shortly,” he said. “Nothing can begin until he is here. And until he is here, neither of us can leave.”

“Deniability,” I said, and he nodded. “But are we not currently monitored, recorded?”

“Yes, of course,” he said, his stride unwavering. “But everything can be falsified given sufficient inclination. One trail of evidence is necessary, but not always sufficient.” He stopped, and glared witheringly at me. “I thought by now you might have learned that lesson, Dr Flowers.”

I looked to the floor, desperate for a hole into which to cast myself.

It was four or five excruciating minutes before Dennis was shown in. He was pale and out of breath, and I fussed him quickly into a chair.

“Dear jeebus, at my age, at my age,” he said, mopping his face with a light blue handkerchief from his left rear trouser pocket.

The elf returned once more with water, pounced upon eagerly by Dennis, and then left us in peace: perhaps to watch whatever was to happen next on the screens in the Hub, or perhaps to wind up the organ of gossip and transmit updates by jungle drum to the far corners.

My stomach began to cartwheel. I felt the fart of history upon me.

The Archivist brought Dennis — and everyone watching — up to speed. There had been a gross and unprecedented betrayal of trust, he said, and glanced at me before looking more fiercely upon the drawn, purple, mouldering face of Amanda. He explained how the college was in the midst of a great crisis, how its very future was in doubt, and that we must all work together to ensure its continuation.
The Pink and the Grey
had lasted two centuries, he cried, and while breath remained in his body he would make it last another two. It was a stirring, passionate political manifesto sprinkled with flashing knives and vaguely homoerotic imagery and had undoubtedly been circulating around his head for the previous several years.

The Archivist was relishing this chance to finally say his piece, and he laid into Amanda with some abandon.

“And so we have no alternative,” he said finally. “We must, for the enduring good of the Holy and Glorious College of St Paul, for all that is right and true, for the pre—”

“Might I mitigate?” said Amanda quietly but firmly, her warble cutting through the Archivist’s waffle.

His ranting red face halted, arm aloft in splendid oratory, spittle frozen mid-arc.

Dennis had recovered sufficiently and regained what remained of his colour. “It would only be fair, Archivist,” he said.

The Archivist’s arm dropped and reluctantly waved her to speak. He retreated to lean against a wall, his hair splaying out behind him.

“I thank. I speak trepidatally in fear of made-up minds. Yet speak I must, and heard be I must.” She rose slowly as to confront the Archivist. “I am aware of my dispopularity, amongst the here and the there. It is impossible so to dispute. I have the screens, as does the Archivist. Yet these screens he may record and database without punity. I may, as it were, not. A simple action of dictaphone and the heft is upon me and all a-blister. How dare I! Betrayal! Such nuclear wording!”

“She rather has a point,” I said. “Well, a fuzzy blob. The Archivist keeps records. Why cannot she?”

“It is my job!” said the Archivist. “Enshrined in our rules: a separation of concerns. I act purely in the future interests of our college.”

“Do I not?” said the Master. “Do I work against such interests?”

“I do not claim that, Master. The fact remains that you have not explained your reason for this recording.”

“Master,” I said, “you wanted information about my dealings with the Archivist. Regarding the
Bugle
business.”

“This did I,” Amanda said, nodding. “Of this am I not entitled? Is it…
secret
from me?”

I looked away.

“I see,” she continued. “Then perhaps I was right to record.” She sat once more, her point I thought well and truly made, and not a biro in the vicinity.

“But to what end!” cried the Archivist. “Why would you think to do so? Is there a third party pressuring you? Have you begun your memoirs?”

“In my future interest, Archivist,” she said with some intensity. “
My future interest
.”

The Archivist could only huff uselessly at that. He went to the Praelector and muttered darkly to him. Dennis nodded and replied, and his face paled again. I could not hear what was said.

“These are pressing times,” the Archivist began finally, “and I hope it is plain that we must all work together to ensure the continuation of St Paul’s. Any conflicts between us work against that goal. The Master has made some valid points, I willingly concede. But now is not the time for this debate. The external forces upon us are too great, too immediate, to allow for the niceties of a constitutional subcommittee. That is for a better time, when the crisis is resolved and we may attend properly and respectfully to all matters arising. For now, under present circumstances, Professor Sauvage and I are agreed that we must declare, in common parlance, a temporary state of emergency.”