Matricide at St. Martha's (4 page)

‘That’s sexual harassment?’

‘That’s sexual harassment.’

‘And the date rape?’

‘Well, I will not hide from you the fact that I have, er, had it off with the odd inhabitant of St Martha’s. But strictly consentual sex, old boy. However, the sisterhood were keeping a tight eye on me and they nabbed me after a little contretemps with young Pippa.’

Amiss looked enquiring.

‘I grant you young Pippa was a mistake.’ He took a contemplative gulp. ‘I’ve a piece of advice for you m’lad. Never shag a neurotic. But she was a very attractive neurotic and we got on awfully well when we met at a party one Friday night. We came back here and one thing led to another and awfully jolly it was too. Next day she decides I’m the love of her life, wants to have intense discussions about our relationship and explore each other’s psyches; it’s not the sort of exploration I go in for, I can tell you, old lad, so I say, “Look darlin’, that was just a bit of fun. Anytime you want a bit of fun come to me, but I’m not in the market for the lovey-dovey stuff.”

‘So she gets pissed off and goes and cries on Sandra’s shoulder. They have a great whinge session together, Sandra remonstrates with me, I can’t see what she’s driving at so I suppose I get a bit flippant. She goes off to Bridget, Head Bitch, she has Pippa in and cross-examines her.

‘By now they’ve persuaded her that she never wanted to go to bed with me in the first place and an official charge is laid against me for date rape. When I point out that in order to go to bed with me she had to go about half a mile out of her way to accompany me to my room, it’s explained to me that she was operating under the influence of alcohol and emotional duress. Then they throw everything else they can think of at me.’

‘What comes next?’

‘Oh God, there was going to be another one of those endless bloody rows and reference to this committee and that committee and Mistress’s Appeal Court and I just threw in the towel. The Bursar bawled me out for being a lily-livered coward. She said it was typical of the bloody Old Women.’

‘Who are?’

‘Me, a nancy-boy called Francis Pusey and a creepy cleric called Crowley.’

‘Why do you get lumped in with them?’

‘Because the Bursar thinks we lack balls – she says we offend the Trades Description Act.’

‘Doesn’t sound from your adventures as if you do.’

‘She meant metaphorically and she’s right. I don’t stand up to the Dykes. I’m not as tough as the Bursar. I’m like Pusey and Crowley in just wanting a quiet life and some creature comforts.’

He looked pityingly at Amiss. ‘I’m off. Take my advice and don’t lay a finger on any of them. Keep your eyes on the ground and go to bed with your cat.’

He walked over and handed Amiss the whisky bottle. ‘And hang on to this, you’ll be needing it.’

4

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Amiss had just fifteen minutes to unpack, sort out Plutarch’s hygienic and culinary requirements and change for dinner. He cursed the Bursar for her usual failure to brief him on such matters and decided that this time — since presumably it was the Mistress he was trying to impress – more orthodox clobber was to be encouraged.

He arrived in his dark grey suit at the senior common room on the dot of seven and stood there alone for a few minutes trying to become interested in portraits of defunct Mistresses, all of whom combined in their expressions the grimness and austerity required in a university whose men had for sixty years permitted them to take examinations but not to receive degrees. The room itself was not too bad: decent panelling, inoffensive long, dark – if threadbare – velour curtains, a few armchairs that looked as if they might be almost pleasant to sit on and a nice view of the garden – though it would have helped if the garden had been nice to look at. The two flies in the ointment were the absence of heat and the contents of the drinks tray.

Being the product of a male Oxford college, Amiss had assumed pre-dinner drinks on a guest night would be two varieties of sherry. Instead, what the drinks tray seemed to offer was tap water or orange squash, a substance Amiss thought had disappeared – certainly from the adult scene – sometime in the late 1950s. He was gazing morosely at the water jug when the Bursar entered and let out a glass-shattering hoot of laughter. ‘Bet that came as a nasty shock. Don’t you fret, Jack Troutbeck will see you right.’ She reached inside the jacket of her houndstooth suit, fumbled round her extensive chest and finally drew out two miniature bottles of gin, which she swiftly decanted into tumblers. ‘Water, orange squash or neat?’

‘You do offer the most delicious alternatives. Orange squash please.’

‘Well you’ll have to provide your own mixers. I’m not your bloody nanny, you know; my waistcoat isn’t that capacious.’

‘What else have you in there?’ Amiss was about to commence a sartorial investigation when he heard steps coming down the corridor.

‘That’ll be the Mistress,’ said the Bursar.

‘How do you know?’

‘Because it’s exactly ten past seven, of course.’

The door opened and a tall sturdy figure, clad in what closely resembled a dark grey sack, entered, bowed and said, ‘Good evening, Bursar.’

‘Good evening, Mistress. May I introduce our new recruit, Mr Amiss – the chap who’s going to sort us out with Whitehall.’

‘Ah yes, Whitehall. You and the Bursar will no doubt have a lot in common,’ said the Mistress vaguely, reaching for the water jug. ‘I’m afraid I don’t know much about such matters.’

‘Oh, I don’t know, Mistress,’ said the Bursar. ‘You’re pretty clued up on bureaucracies.’

‘I think they’ve rather changed. They didn’t, for instance, have computers in the twelfth century; I’m sure they must make a difference.’ Her sociological reflections were interrupted by the arrival of a clutch of women, including Sandra Murphy and the Senior Tutor, whose hair was now three-quarters out of her hairnet. As she had a habit of swaying to and fro when she talked, long wispy bits of hair waved distractingly about her head. Sandra smiled at Amiss and he moved to her side. ‘I don’t need my stick this evening. It’s one of my good days.’

‘That’s great. And it’s really neat that you’ve got the job. Now, come and meet Bridget. OK?’ She shyly tugged him by the sleeve. Amiss obediently followed her across the room to where a handsome woman with long frizzy black hair was laying down the law to Francis Pusey. She acknowledged Sandra’s introduction, shook hands with Amiss, greeted him curtly and continued to address Pusey about the agenda for the following morning’s meeting. ‘A principle is a principle. This discrimination will have to stop: we’ll have to have our intentions made part of institutional requirements.’

‘For heaven’s sake, Bridget,’ squeaked Pusey, ‘it’s only a part-time tutorship in classics. Surely we don’t have to go through all the paraphernalia of job descriptions.’

Sandra tugged Amiss’s sleeve again and drew him away. ‘Sorry. Bridget’s pretty steamed up. She’s feeling a lot of anger about the way you got the job. It not being properly advertised and all.’

‘Wasn’t it?’ Amiss distinctly remembered being instructed by the Bursar to pretend he’d answered an ad in the
Guardian
.

‘Yeah, well, you see, Bridget feels – and of course she’s right – that as equal opportunities employers we should be advertising in the women’s press and journals representing marginalized people. Like, there’s lots of folks can’t afford to read the
Guardian
. OK?’

Amiss thought of three answers and rejected all of them. He fell back on the weak smile which served him so well. ‘Who’s here tonight in addition to the Fellows?’ he asked.

‘Well, there’s the guest speaker. Though she’s a Fellow too – the new Schoolmistress Fellow. It’s her first day.’

‘Speaker? Do you mean there’s an after-dinner speech?’

‘Yeah, well, it’s more of a lecture really. We do this on the first Thursday of every month – come back in here afterwards with the students and hear a visitor talk.’

‘On what?’ Amiss felt swamped in despair; the thought of having to sit through a lecture was always enough to bring him close to tears.

‘Maybe old architecture or one of those subjects that the Mistress’s friends are interested in. I’m afraid they’re completely irrelevant to our agenda. Bridget’s going to have that stopped. We’ve got someone coming in next time to talk about dictionaries.’

‘Ah. She’s a lexicographer?’

‘Sorry?’

‘Someone who defines words.’

‘Sort of, I guess. She runs a course at St Barbara’s Access College called “Freeing ourselves from Patriarchal Wordwebs.” ’

‘Like what?’

Sandra looked at him in a puzzled fashion. ‘Well, you know, like any of them.
Websters, Oxford
, all those paternalistic ones.’

‘Sorry, Sandra. What’s the alternative?’

‘Why there are lots. Haven’t you got Mary Daly’s
Wickedary
, or even
The Dictionary of Bias-Free Usage
?’

‘I can see I’ve got a lot to learn.’ Amiss wished Jack was to hand with some more gin, but she was out of reach on the other side of the room, booming at a pot-bellied cleric.

‘We’ll help. It’s all very exciting here at the moment. Bridget is so inspirational. She makes you so aware. She’s so brilliant and so principled.’ Sandra looked at her watch. ‘Oh, it’s nearly time. We’ll be going in in half a minute.’

‘You’re very precise.’

‘Well, it’s the Mistress. You can set your watch by her.’

For an academic, thought Amiss, and an advanced feminist one at that, Sandra had a surprisingly pedestrian turn of phrase. He speculated on how someone of her limited ability could tackle a genius like George Eliot and remembered that large numbers of people were paid for a living to write about those who were their intellectual and possibly moral superiors. And, of course, if possible, tear them to shreds.

‘
Ave
!’ said a cheery voice as the crowd began to move out of the common room. The greeting turned out to belong to the pink-cheeked Schoolmistress Fellow, Primrose Partridge.

‘I’m so excited,’ she said, as they set off together, Sandra having scuttled off to attach herself to Bridget’s coat-tails. ‘It’s my first day here. I’ve got a whole three months. I’ve really been looking forward to the intellectual challenge.’

‘Do you know St Martha’s?’

‘Oh yes. I’m an Old Girl. When I was a student here I used to look up at those dons at high table and wonder if I’d ever be among them. I thought how wonderful it would be to have all that challenging conversation. Shake up the old brain cells and all that.’

‘You haven’t been back since?’

‘No. Always meant to. But you know the way it is.
Tempus fugit
and all that.’

‘Where do you teach?’

‘A Yorkshire girls’ comprehensive. Classics. When it was a grammar school we used to have fifty or sixty girls taking classics in the sixth form. Now I’ve got four. Just as well I’m getting close to retirement. In fact, I should have left already, but they couldn’t find anyone to replace me. It’s all a bit sad.’

‘
Nil desperandum
,’ said Amiss encouragingly. ‘Classics will rise again.’ As they turned to enter the dining room, the Bursar burst through the people behind them and dug a vigorous elbow into Amiss’s back, causing him to miss his step and cannon into his neighbour.

‘I beg your pardon,’ he said to Primrose Partridge. ‘Very clumsy of me.’

‘
Ego te absolve
,’ she said lightly.

The Bursar was impatient with these niceties. She caught him by the sleeve and dragged him to one side. ‘You’re getting a bit intimate, Bursar, aren’t you?’

‘Not with you, duckie,’ she said, smiling coarsely. ‘I don’t fancy woofdahs. And you’re safe with most of the other Fellows as well.’ She raised her voice. ‘Dykes don’t go for your sort, do you girls?’ she asked, leering at Bridget and Sandra, who had moved into earshot. Sandra flushed, Bridget compressed her lips and they accelerated into the dining room. The Bursar chortled. ‘Here.’ She jabbed several small bottles into his hand. ‘You’ll be needing these.’

‘Why does everyone keep saying that?’ An awful thought struck him. ‘You don’t mean this meal is dry?’

‘Of course it’s bloody dry. This is a Temperance College. Cf Statute Number thirty-seven.’

‘You took care to keep that hidden from me before you inveigled me into this, you old…’

‘Diplomat?’

‘Swindler would be more accurate. And what’s more, you told me nothing of after-dinner lectures.’

‘Stop making a fuss. It’ll be good for you.’ She headed towards the dining room. ‘It’s Primrose on the subject of Henry VIII and his Yorkshire connections. Should be a gas. Sit at the back and I’ll fortify you if you’re in serious need.’

The maternal instinct took women in interestingly different ways, reflected Amiss, seating himself where directed at the left hand of the Mistress and to the right of the clergyman, who turned to him, bowed and addressed him in tones so unctuous that they might have come straight from a 1950s Ealing comedy.

‘Good evening. How refreshing to see another brother among our little flock.’ Amiss returned the bow.

‘You, I suspect, must be Robert Amiss. I am the Reverend Cyril Crowley, Chaplain Fellow – a man of the cloth with some small pretensions to being also a man of scholarship. Are you by any chance interested in local ecclesiastical history, about which,’ he said, speeding up in the manner of the bore who is terrified that he’ll get a wrong answer to the question, ‘I may claim to have some small expertise, particularly when one comes to the records of the parish of Athelstan to which I have the honour of being also attached. You understand I perform ecclesiastical services for these ladies only on a part-time basis.’

‘I’m surprised they don’t have a woman,’ said Amiss, hoping to head him off from his scholarly pursuits.

‘Couldn’t do the Communion, old boy. Couldn’t do the Communion.’

‘They can now.’

‘Oh, you’re one of these feminist chaps, are you? In favour of priestesses and all that?’