Death of a Salesperson (19 page)

‘St Pothinus!' said the Master, who had placed himself in the centre of the room. We all toasted the patron saint of the College (dead at ninety, in a dungeon), and then the Master fixed Wittling with an eye, bleary, but designed to threaten and command.

‘Well, Wittling, we're all hoping to hear you've changed your mind.'

‘Changed my mind, Master?' Innocently.

‘About altering the terms of the Fellowship.'

‘Oh,
that
—' (dismissively, as if the matter had passed completely out of his head). ‘No, Master, I fear that my opinions on that subject are very much as they were last week.'

‘I see, I see-e-e. So, to satisfy a foolish whim, to enjoy a bit of wilful trouble-making, you are prepared to jeopardize the best traditions of St Pothinus.'

‘What did Winston Churchill say about the traditions of the Navy? Rum, sodomy and the lash? I suppose you could say that St Pothinus's were port, sodomy and the third-class honours degree. Personally, I believe traditions should be evaluated empirically. The obsolete ones discarded, what?'

‘What you are proposing,' snapped Peddie, ‘is a craven concession to the spirit of modernity.'

‘Concession?' chortled Wittling. ‘Not at all. I propose welcoming it in! A breath of fresh air from the contemporary scene. Apropos of which, I have a
picture
—' he skipped, chuckling and snuffling, over to his briefcase in a corner by the door—‘a snapshot, I think you call it, of the young lady herself, some years ago, taken when she was performing in the Cambridge Footlights Review . . . Ah, here it is.'

He produced from his case an old, slightly brown copy of the
Sun
newspaper, and we clustered round to view a picture of a distinctly handsome black girl, in leopardskin briefs, apparently topless, clutching a microphone in the centre of a stage, swaying her hips and crooning into it.

‘My word!' said Carmody, ‘I suppose that was taken after she lost her faith.'

None of the rest of us could think of anything more adequate to say.

‘There,' said Wittling triumphantly, looking around at us and thrusting the photograph at the Master who was wandering over from the fireplace. ‘Now you can see that Miss Bulewa will certainly provide something different in the College, what? Can't see anyone paying to see us topless, eh? Except perhaps Dr Smythe in some dubious Soho locale.' He pottered back towards the fire. ‘No, this
is
going to be a bit of a change, isn't it? I hope she fits in. Do you feel she will? Don't you sometimes feel you've got into a bit of a rut here, all of you? That life is lacking in zest? Needs a bit of spice. Suddenly our lives are going to acquire a whole new flavour.'

He picked up his glass of port, and drank triumphantly. Suddenly an expression of horror, or rage, crossed his face, which set in a terrible grimace. His hand dropped the glass and went to his throat, a strangled cry escaped him, and he crashed forward on to the hearthrug.

‘Dear me,' said the Master. ‘Mr Wittling appears to be unwell.'

I was down on the hearthrug beside him, pulling open his dinner jacket, feeling his pulse. No one else moved. I didn't need long.

‘He's dead,' I said.

‘How unfortunate,' said the Master, taking a fortifying sip of his brandy. ‘Struck down in his prime. In the midst of life . . . The ways of Providence are strange.'

‘Providence, my foot!' I said brutally. ‘You saw how he died. He's been poisoned.'

‘Mr Borthwick! Mis-ter Borthwick! What an extraordinary suggestion! Most improper. You've been reading too many books by—what's that
thriller
writer?—Mr Wilkie Collins.'

‘Can't you smell it? Almonds. It must have been in the port.'

‘Gad! Founder's Port,' said Hugo Carmody.

‘I can't smell a thing,' said Peddie. ‘Look—I'm drinking port. It's perfectly all right.' And he downed his drink.

‘I'm drinking port too,' I said. ‘It must have been put in his
glass.
He'd already drunk half of it. It must have been put in his glass while we were all looking at his damned newspaper.'

‘Come, come, Mr Borthwick, let us not lose grip of our logic,' said the Master in his unpleasant, silken whine. ‘If we were all looking at his newspaper, none of us could have put anything in his glass.'

‘One of us must have held back,' I said, crinkling my forehead with effort. ‘One of us wasn't there.' I had a vision of the paper being thrust at the Master as he came from the direction of the fireplace. I looked at him, and he stared unwaveringly back.

‘We were all gaping at it, far as I remember,' said Pritchard-Jones. ‘Handsome filly.'

‘Quite,' said the Master. ‘We were all over that side of
the room. Now let us forget this frivolous suggestion, and—'

‘No doctor on earth is going to sign a death certificate, Master,' I said. ‘There'll have to be an autopsy.'

‘I'm sure Dr Pritchard-Jones will have no hesitation in signing the necessary formalities,' said the Master smoothly.

‘Pritchard-Jones? He hasn't practised medicine since before penicillin was invented.'

‘I believe you are eligible to sign the necessary forms?' inquired the Master in his high whinny, turning to Pritchard-Jones.

‘ 'Course I am. Most uncalled-for remark. Offensive.'

‘I believe there
was
some history of heart trouble, wasn't there?'

‘Think there was. Know he went to his doctor last week. I can square it with Smithers. Man's practically senile. Needn't be any question of a post-mortem.'

‘There we are, then. That's all quite clear. There need be no question.'

‘Master, even if you have a certificate,' I explained patiently, ‘no undertaker is going to bury that corpse without getting a police clearance first.'

‘Why on earth not?'

‘Well—look!' I turned over the corpse. The face of Mr Wittling, blue, and twisted into a hideous grimace of torment that seemed to drag his wrinkled skin tight over his aged skull, gazed horrifyingly up at us.

‘Well, he was nobody's idea of a dreamboat at the best of times,' said Auberon Smythe.

‘I've no doubt Lockitt will not make any trouble,' said the Master. ‘We'll get
old
Lockitt. Not the boy, he's a fusser. Old Lockitt is quite as old as any of us, and nearly blind. He's very understanding. He won't want to lose us—we've been one of their most regular customers, over the years.'

‘You are covering up! You are accessories after a murder!'

‘Covering up? Really, Mr Borthwick. You'll be suggesting next that I committed murder myself.'

He looked at me, and I, weakly, looked down at the floor.

‘Well, how do I know that you didn't? How do I know that you're not all in it? Pritchard-Jones, what poison is it that smells like almonds?'

‘Don't know, m'boy. Have to look it up in m'books.'

‘It must have been brought here.' I looked desperately round the room. ‘Look! Here it is.' I picked up from one of the side tables a tiny glass phial. ‘This is how it was brought.'

‘No doubt it contained some medicament that poor Wittling was taking for his heart,' said the Master.

‘He did not have heart trouble,' I said. ‘We'd have heard about it endlessly if he had. Smythe: you can see what's happening, can't you? Can I rely on you to support me?'

‘Fight your own battles,' said Auberon Smythe, making for the door. ‘I've no love for the police, believe me. As far as I'm concerned, I went straight to my rooms after Hall. Haven't been near the SCR all evening. 'Bye, duckies.'

‘What did he say?' roared Carmody, but we ignored him.

‘Right,' I said. ‘If I have to fight my own battles, so be it.' I marched over to the telephone, recently installed in the SCR as a concession to the times. ‘If you won't listen to me, perhaps you'll listen to the police.'

‘The police?' neighed the Master. ‘Really, Mr Borthwick, if we can't settle a little matter like this without calling in outside authorities, what has become of academic freedom?'

I didn't deign to answer, and was just beginning to dial when the Master spoke again, with that authoritative undertone to his whine that always got his point across.

‘Mr Borthwick, you really must be careful, you know. I don't
think
you have quite thought this thing through.'

‘What do you mean?' I demanded.

‘Well, let us say, for argument's sake, that we are all “in it”, as you put it a moment ago. It will be very easy, will it
not, for us, all of us, to inform the police of a most unfortunate altercation, really quite violent, that took place last week between you and poor Wittling—'

‘Altercation? There was no altercation. I hardly spoke to the man if I could help it.'

‘Precisely. Your hostility was well known to us. And in an enclosed community such as our own, it is well known how little things can fester, and become great ones. There was that altercation, as I say. On the subject of—what was it?—Milton's debt to Virgil. Yes, I think that was it. We all heard it, of course. Now, would the police believe your story, of a collusion between a large number of elderly and impeccably respectable academic gentlemen to murder one of their colleagues? Or would they not rather accept our unanimous view that you—your mind unhinged, perhaps, by the notorious infidelities of your wife—had a brainstorm and decided to do away with a colleague with whom you were publicly on the worst of terms?'

‘That's ridiculous.'

‘Or say our splendid British police discovered that this was the work of one man. Say Mr Peddie. Say Mr Carmody. Say, even, myself. Leaving the rest of the SCR intact. You have been so taken up, I fear, with the terms of the Fellowship in Ancient Persian that you have forgotten the terms of your own Fellowship . . .'

‘My own—?'

‘As some of us here remember, when the Jeremy Collier Fellowship in English was established, English was still a comparatively new university subject. Many of us hoped it would go away. So, in their wisdom, the governing fellows made this Fellowship renewable every five years.'

‘But that's just a formali—'

‘It has been hitherto.
Quite. We have been generous, as is our habit. However, the Fellowship comes up for renewal, does it not,
next year.
I think you may find that the SCR will not take kindly to the idea of renewing the Fellowship of
one who has been responsible for arraigning one of their colleagues on a capital charge.'

‘Damned bad form,' said Carmody.

‘Quite,' said Peddie.

‘Quite,' said all of them, sounding like a flock of ducks in St James's Park.

‘You wouldn't dare,' I said, but my voice sounded hollow.

‘I think you would find that to get a job at your time of life is far from easy. A cold academic wind is blowing, is it not, Borthwick? Positions are being abolished, rather than created, I believe. I'm told that even in the Colonies the universities are no longer the refuge for Oxonians that they once were. And though you are a great
reader
, Borthwick, you are hardly a prolific
writer
, are you? Isn't that what they want these days? Acres of little papers on this and that? It doesn't bear thinking about, does it, Borthwick? One of the great army of three million unemployed.'

I took my hand slowly from the telephone. He had me over a bubbling cauldron of boiling oil. When threatened where it hurts most, our jobs and our pockets, we liberal intellectuals do not hesitate. Or rather, we hesitate, because that is in our natures, but in the end . . .

I took a symbolic step away from the telephone.

‘Splendid!' neighed the Master, rubbing his hands. ‘I felt quite sure you'd see you'd been mistaken. Sad that the death of a respected and valued colleague should have been disfigured in this way. Now I fear I must to the Residence, to set in motion the necessary formalities.' He looked around the room carefully. He took up the little phial from the table, and hurled it into the fire. Then he took the copy of the
Sun
and placed it carefully in his briefcase.

‘I shall ring Lockitt's, talk to the old man. I'll tell him to bring along a certificate for you to sign, Pritchard-Jones. Perhaps you would stay here too, Peddie, to see if there's anything else? The rest of us can go, I think. Borthwick, we'll quite understand if you are too upset to attend tomorrow's
meeting: you have taken the death of your friend very hard, we can all see that. I shall propose to change the terms of the Heatherington Fellowship to one in Chinese. I think Wittling would have approved, with his concern for the older languages. And it will show that we in Potty's can, in our small way, adapt ourselves to the new patterns of the modern world.'

And that's how it turned out. We appointed two new Fellows. One was a Chinese scholar of great age and Buddha-like inscrutability, the other an elderly Winchester schoolmaster who was having disciplinary problems. They fitted in very well. Life in college goes on pretty much as before. For a time I did not care to go to High Table. I dined constantly at home, driving my wife to a frenzy of irritation. Even when I started to eat in Hall again, I avoided the port. But Time takes the edge off most things. Now I take my glass of Founder's Port with the rest, with scarcely a thought.

It's amazing what we liberal intellectuals can take in our strides, when we set our minds to it.

I
n any league table of Britain's stately homes, Hardacre Hall would not figure in the top ten. Nor in the second ten, nor yet in the ten after that. Only in a list of the least stately homes open to the public could Hardacre be expected to be given any prominence. People wondered why Lord Woolmington bothered to open it at all, for the receipts could hardly recompense him for his trouble, but the fact is that it gave him and Lady Woolmington an interest, and something to talk about. ‘That chappie with the dentures—insurance salesman, wouldn't y'say?' Woolmington would chuckle at the end of his day's activity of showing the occasional visitors round in ones and twos. ‘And did you notice that frightful woman's hat?'