Death of a Salesperson (18 page)

‘You forget,' neighed the Master, ‘that the Old Boys are not producing many sons. Not
enough.'

‘No. Hardly a philoprogenitive lot,' said Wittling, with his horrid laugh like twenty French horns doing the prelude to
Der Rosenkavalier.

‘We could always give the places to the best applicants,' I said cautiously, for new ideas are not welcome at Potty's.

‘I know what that means!' yelped Peddie, wagging an accusing finger. ‘You want brains!
Brains!
Ha!'

‘Besides,' said Pritchard-Jones seriously, ‘it would mean reading their scholarship papers.'

‘What are you talking about, EH?' bellowed Hugo Carmody from the foot of the table.

‘Admissions,' I shouted back.

‘Well, really!' said Hugo Carmody with a knowing wink. He is quite infuriating. He was a friend of Waugh and Acton and people back in the 'twenties, but if he was a dog then, he certainly has had his day by now. He uses his deafness as a weapon, and when we shout at him he invariably seems to turn what we say in his mind into something indecent, making us feel like smutty schoolboys. To shut him up the Master proposed a toast.

‘Our benefactor, the poet-priest Heatherington,' he neighed.

More priest than poet, more gentleman than priest, more bonviveur and hanger of poachers and discontented peasantry than gentleman. We drank the health of Edmund Heatherington (1711–1779), whose entry in the
Oxford Companion to English Literature
runs to one and a half lines. It was due to the happy accident of his having died immediately after writing the one will (of some thirty) which disinherited both his son and his daughter simultaneously that the college was rolling in money. We repeated his name in hushed tones, and sipped, reverently.

‘Then,' said the Master, ‘there is the question of Elections.'

‘What are you talking about—EH?' yelled Carmody again.

‘About ele . . . about appointing new Fellows,' I shouted back.

‘Really!' sniggered Carmody. ‘Whatever next?'

We all sighed.

‘There are of course two places to fill, due to the untimely deaths of poor Purvis and Matheson,' resumed the Master. St Pothinus's is the only place in the world where death at 76 and 81 could be described as untimely. ‘It has been suggested to me by the Vice-Chancellor that this time we should make an all-out effort—'

There was a sigh. He had lost his audience already. That phrase had put them all off.

‘—to appoint somebody younger. To ensure the future of the college, as he put it.'

He looked around sardonically. Everyone looked bewildered.

‘What frightful balderdash,' said Peddie, looking from face to face, seemingly quite confident that not only he, but all of us, would be blessed with eternal life on earth.

‘We could make another Big Mistake,' muttered Pritchard-Jones, in the sort of mutter designed to call cattle home on the hills of North Wales.

‘Oh God,' said Auberon Smyth, ‘when will I graduate to being just a Little Mistake?'

‘I told the Vice-Chancellor,' said the Master, satisfied with our reactions, ‘I fear with a touch of asperity, that the cult of the young cut no ice with us, and would not be allowed to destroy the traditional ethos of St Pothinus's. No, indeed! Nevertheless, there are these elections. We have to have a new Fellow in French. You know my opinion of studying
mod
ern languages at a uni
ver
sity, but there it is:
the Fellowship is vacant. And then, perhaps more difficult, there is the Fellowship in Ancient Persian . . .'

The Fellowship in Ancient Persian had been held by Harold Purvis, whose death had sent his one pupil screaming into Burton Quad. Since his death his pupil had been as lacking in tuition as he undoubtedly was in
savoir faire
, since there was only one such Fellowship in the University. Not surprisingly. Many were the years when Purvis managed to attract not one single undergraduate pupil.

‘I don't see the difficulty,' suddenly chirped up Wittling. There was an edge to his voice that I knew and did not like. It meant mischief. Wanton, senile malice.

‘Oh?' whinnied the Master. ‘You have a candidate?'

‘
I
don't have a candidate. I know there will
be
a candidate. There is only
one
person in Britain qualified for the position, and that person will certainly apply, positions in that field being by no means plenteous.'

‘No, indeed: we are nearly, very nearly unique,' breathed the Master, with immense satisfaction. ‘I hope this is not a
young
person, Wittling?'

‘Thirty-two, I believe, Master.'

‘Oh dear.
Very
young indeed. It seems the decision will be taken out of our hands. You say there is virtually no alternative?'

‘No, Master,' said Wittling, with what was obviously some secret satisfaction. ‘And I'm told that Sandowa Bulewa is brilliant, absolutely brilliant.'

There was a moment's silence.

‘What was that name?' bellowed Carmody (who could hear when he wanted to) from the end of the table. ‘Don't tell me it's some damned foreigner, for God's sake.'

‘No, no. Born in Britain. Quite the homemade article.'

‘But the name,' insisted the Master. ‘It's not—'

‘Not English, no. Tanganyikan, I believe, or whatever they call the place these days. Mother was Kenyan, I'm told.'

‘Then he's not . . . you're not telling us—'

‘Black. Black as your hat. Yes, Master.'

‘Gracious heavens!' said the Master. ‘Whatever next?'

‘It's a retreat to barbarism,' said Peddie.

‘Something must be done,' neighed the Master, at his most imperative. ‘I feel the modern world has suddenly rapped most brutally at our door.'

‘Personally,' said Auberon Smythe, ‘I rather fancy the idea.'

It was all too clear what form the idea took for Smythe. Exclusively sexual. He was imagining a splendid black lover. But I felt I had to back him up.

‘If we refused to appoint the man,' I said, ‘we would certainly be in contravention of the Race Relations Act.'

‘Heavens above,' said Pritchard-Jones. ‘What's that?'

I explained at some length, ending up: ‘If we have no adequate grounds for refusing him the Fellowship, he could certainly appeal to the Tribunal.'

‘Admirably expounded,' cut in Wittling as I concluded, and now his voice had a suggestion of real mirth which absolutely made the blood run cold. ‘But I must correct you, pedantically no doubt, on one little detail. You have been referring to Sandowa Bulewa throughout as “he”. However the correct personal pronoun would be the third person
feminine
: “she”, dear boy, “she”.' And he chortled that awful laugh that sounded like whooping, Straussian French horns.

‘But that's splendid. She's not elig . . .' The Master's voice faded away. This third shock left him looking as if he had heard the opening of Beethoven's Fifth played by massed Midlands brass bands and amplified a thousand-fold. He looked at Wittling with outraged reproach.

For the powers that be at St Pothinus's had been caught in a trap of their own devising. Some years before, when all the Oxford colleges were changing their statutes, recruiting
female dons, even admitting women students, we had, under strong pressure from the university authorities, declared all our senior appointments open to female applicants. We (or rather
they
) had done this on the clear understanding that nothing whatever was to come of it. I distinctly remembered Wittling at the meeting chuckling his horrible chuckle and saying: ‘We declare them eligible, and we just don't appoint any. He-he-he!' It had seemed to most of them an awfully jolly wheeze at the time. I had no doubt that the Master was remembering this now.

‘Wittling,' he said. ‘This is at least in part your doing. I shall rely on you to find some way of getting us out of it.'

‘Out of it?' crowed Wittling. ‘Why should I want to get us out of it? Jolly good idea. Pretty young black thing. Brighten the place up. Spruce us up a bit too. I believe she's a very lively little thing—modern, and all that. What's the phrase?—“with it”. He-he-he.'

‘Then what on earth is she studying Ancient Persian for?' demanded Pritchard-Jones.

‘I'm told she has a Protestant Mission background from her parents. Went up to Cambridge to study theology. Got into New Testament Greek. Went on from there. Lost her religion, but proved a—he-he-he—whizzkid in ancient languages. Studied Persian at the Sorbonne.'

‘Heavens above!' bellowed Carmody. ‘It doesn't seem possible. What are gels coming to?'

‘I have it! I have it!' shrieked the Master, a rare and terrifying smile wreathing his aged face. ‘The Fellowship can be changed. Its terms can be altered. We can turn it into a Fellowship in Geography. Or Spanish. Or Comparative Something-or-other. That,' he concluded triumphantly, ‘is possible under the terms of Edmund Heatherington's will. The endower of the Fellowship.'

‘Quite,' said Wittling. ‘It is possible.
Providing the Fellows are unanimous in desiring the change
.'

‘Well?' Magisterially.

‘They will not be unanimous. I myself do not desire the change. I must uphold the importance of the dead languages.' He sniggered. ‘I have no doubt that Mr . . . er,
Dr'
(sneer) ‘Smythe, being a
modern
young man, will not wish the nature of the Fellowship to be changed in order to exclude a member of the female sex.'

Now Auberon Smythe is one of the few homosexuals who seem genuinely to dislike women. But he too felt himself caught in one of Wittling's fork-like traps.

‘No. No, of course not,' he muttered.

‘And you, Borthwick,' continued Wittling, turning to me, ‘a liberal young fellow like you would naturally like to see the College open to women.'

‘Of course,' I said, with a touch of priggishness that comes, I think, from my Scottish ancestry. ‘I would certainly be against changing the terms of the Fellowship if that were the motive.'

‘Three dissenting!' said Wittling, in tones of triumph. ‘Not a chance of a unanimous vote, Master. Not a chance!'

It was death to the Master's hopes. All his powers of command seemed to have left him. He summoned Jenkyns the porter, who led him from table, back to his Residence. As he staggered off, I saw him removing his dentures, something he only does in public when he is very upset. The rest of us broke up raggedly, and the evening concluded in less of an alcoholic fugg than usual.

I am not quite sure why Wittling did all this. I'm convinced that when he suggested altering the statutes to admit women he had no such far-sighted project as this in mind. Nor, of course, did he have any particular love of women as such. I'm sure no tingling of lust warmed his aged loins, or had, since about the time of
Chu Chin Chow.
I think it was just mischief. That's the trouble when you get older. Either you think you're immortal, and this gives you a godlike carelessness of consequences, or else you know you'll soon be dead, and won't have to put up with the results of
your mischief. If the latter was Wittling's calculation, he was all too soon to be proved right.

In the week that followed I absented myself from College as much as possible, for squabbling geriatrics are hardly congenial companions. My only insight into how things were going I obtained one evening when, after a late tutorial, I went over to the buttery bar to have a beer before going home for dinner. The door stood open, and I heard the booming voice of Hugo Carmody.

‘Well, I don't know if the Master has any plans, but I'm damned sure
some
thing's got to be done.' I lingered in the twilight outside the door. ‘If only we could
get
something on them.'

‘Absolutely,' I heard, in the sharp voice of Peddie.

‘Smythe would be easy, what? Threaten to go to the Police about his boyfriends.'

‘That wouldn't do. It's not illegal any more.'

‘What? Not illegal? Good heavens! I must stop slipping Higgins five-pound notes.'

Higgins was Carmody's scout. He was reaching retirement age, so he wouldn't greatly miss his five-pound notes. There was silence for a moment.

‘Then there's Borthwick. Not much to be got on him. A somewhat
dim
personality, what?'

‘His wife is sleeping with the milkman, you know,' came the thin, malicious voice of Peddie. They chuckled about this like crazy.

‘But all the Fellows' wives sleep with one or other of the roundsmen. I always said that marriage doesn't
do.
And really it's hardly a
lever.'

They subsided into silence, and I made a bustling entrance. I had a quick beer, and resolved to be home more in the mornings.

Nothing much happened that I knew of until the night before the Senior Common Room meeting. My wife was at an Oxfam gathering, she said, and I was forced to eat in
Hall. Dinner was uneventful but unpleasant. No one was talking to Wittling, so he was forced to talk to me and Smythe. Given the choice I preferred Pritchard-Jones, who was at least inoffensive, or even Hugo Carmody, because I was always hoping to get out of him details of a trip he made to Paris with Waugh in 1924. But Wittling it was, and we were forced to put up with his crackling malice, his sly self-satisfaction, his trumpeted chortlings. After dinner we adjourned as usual to the Senior Common Room. I poured myself a second glass of port, and Wittling did the same. Smythe took a hard slug of whisky, and the master took coffee and brandy. Wittling stood by the mantelpiece, and though the rest of us wanted to cluster round the fire, we none of us wanted to be too near him.