Matricide at St. Martha's (6 page)

‘Well, what do you suggest I say instead?’

‘Men and women, people, or colleagues. Unless of course there are some non-colleagues in the audience who might feel marginalized.’

The Mistress no longer seemed to be paying attention. Amiss assumed that she had gone off into some erudite day-dream.

‘Very well then,’ said Miss Partridge. ‘Now may I continue?’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Bridget Holdness, ‘but there is a more substantial issue here. What the Mistress said about the classics is deeply offensive to our new Fellow, Ms Denslow’ – she gestured to the black girl beside her, who was staring at the floor – ‘who should not hear Western civilization described as if it were in some way superior to others.’

This was too much for the Bursar. Flushed with gin, wine and port, she leaped to her feet and bellowed. ‘Mary Lou’s a bloody American. What do you think that means if it doesn’t mean Western civilization?’

‘Mary Lou,’ said Bridget, ‘is an Afro-American, which means that she hails from a civilization probably older and greater than anything understood in this ethno-centric institution.’ Mary Lou continued to inspect the rug. ‘And moreover, as women, we are all insulted by the very memory of Henry VIII. I find it extraordinary that a gathering of sisters can be subjected to the insult of being asked to listen to an address on a white serial murderer of women.

‘It is time,’ she said, raising her voice for the benefit of the undergraduates who were clustering round at the back, ‘that this institution examined its own ethno-centricity, neocolonialism and slavish aping of patriarchal attitudes.’

She turned her back on her victims and addressed the audience. ‘Sisters, this college was founded by a paternalistic capitalist whose mission was to contain the female subversion that threatened the male establishment. Have we learnt nothing from the last hundred years? Are we to go on accepting our own inferiority, using the language of the oppressor, enduring the racial insults to our black sisters, addressing ourselves to the cultures of female-hating societies like Greece and Rome when there are the great matriarchal societies and the history of invisible women to explore and celebrate? Are we to bury ourselves in the past? Or will we go forth into a future where empathy replaces scrutiny, independence replaces subservience and above all – universality takes the place of elitism.’

A ragged cheer went up from some of the students. Bridget Holdness smiled, turned round again and said, ‘I’m sorry Ms Partridge, but I cannot remain to experience further affront.’

She had positioned herself neatly at the end of a row so her walk-out was unimpeded. Sandra and Mary Lou trailed in her wake, followed by a couple of dozen students. Miss Partridge put her head in her hands and began to cry.

‘It’s all right, Primrose,’ said the Mistress, awkwardly patting her on the back. ‘If you’d rather, we’ll have the paper another night.’

Miss Partridge lifted her head and gazed round the audience. ‘But I thought I was coming home. Getting away from all those philistines.’

‘I fear,’ said the Mistress, ‘that in higher education these days, philistinism is rapidly becoming a dogma.’ ‘
Tempera mutantur
,’ sobbed Miss Partridge, ‘I should have known not to come back.’

The Mistress looked around the remnants of the audience. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, I think we’ll postpone this lecture to another evening.’

‘I’m going to kill that bitch one of these days,’ said the Bursar to Amiss. ‘Now come along to my room and we’ll talk over how to do it.’

6

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‘I suppose you could try using that elephant gun,’ said Amiss, gaping in awe at the great blunderbuss on the wall of the Bursar’s sitting room.

‘Can’t get the ammunition nowadays. I’m told Rigby’s gave up manufacturing them a few years ago no doubt owing to the shortage of elephants. Drink?’

‘Unwise.’

‘Listen, since Franks got chucked out, I’m surrounded by carrot-juice drinkers, teetotallers and oh-well-I’ll-have-a-small-sherry -seeing-as-it’s-my-birthday types. Don’t go all pi on me.’ She waved the whisky bottle at him.

‘Oh, very well then, but a very small weak one. I have to find my room, deal with my cat and try to behave like a New Man to any virago I meet along the way.’

‘What’s a New Man?’

‘My God, they’re right about you being out of touch with the times.’ Amiss settled back comfortably in the vast armchair. ‘New Men read the
Guardian
, change the nappies, bond with their babies, share their emotions with their partners, recognize the inhibiting aspects of their maleness and explore their own femininity, if you follow me.’

‘Can’t say I do. Are they any good in bed?’

‘Well, they’re certainly very caring. Unfortunately, recent surveys seem to suggest that women are doing the dirty on them by abandoning them in droves for brutish, hairy, selfish, libidinous throwbacks. Sexual politics is a nightmare, Bursar. Just as well for you that it passes you by.’

‘Would that it could,’ said the Bursar sighing. ‘Everything was very happy in this absurd old backwater until the Head Bitch arrived. It was uncomfortable but it was contented; it knew what it was about. What’s wrong with a collection of old biddies spending their lives trying to get their footnotes right and pass on to a new generation some belief in scholarship and truth.’

‘Narrow elitism?’ queried Amiss.

‘Oh yes, the charge of narrowness has substance. And I’m not really entirely impervious to the need occasionally to open up to new ideas. But bugger the business about elitism. If you don’t have that in scholarship, you don’t have scholarship.

‘No, what the Bridget bitch is doing is levelling. If you level the way she’s going about it, you destroy the good and put nothing in its place except half-baked platitudes parroted by morons like Sandra who haven’t got the brains of a hen but apply the few they have to picking the nits out of the work of one of the greatest female geniuses of all time because they have concluded that she was a misguided apologist for a patriarchal society.’ She sat bolt upright and quivering. ‘Now let me test you to see if you’ve any notion how bad it is. Why is George Eliot
persona non grata
?’

‘Well, male ideology and all that stuff, I suppose.’

‘Christ, you have no realization of how simple-minded these cretins are. George Eliot was a woman, right?’

‘Right.’

‘She took on a man’s name.’

‘Yes?’

‘And you and I know why she did that.’ She looked at him expectantly.

‘Because otherwise she wouldn’t have been taken seriously, the 1860s being what it was.’

‘Ah, yes. That’s what you think and that’s what I think, and we think that in adopting
noms de plume
, she and the Brontës were adapting to reality and in a way pulling a fast one on the chaps. Well, it doesn’t seem that way to Sandra, because Sandra has a simple mind, and Sandra knows that when Marian Evans decided to call herself George Eliot she was denying her own sexuality.’

‘You mean selling out to the enemy?’

‘More than that. If I understand it correctly, Marian Evans was a dyke without the courage to acknowledge her dykeness. Therefore, subliminally, she expressed it by adopting a man’s name, living with men whom she was only pretending were sexual partners and using her books to cover herself with a heterosexual patina that would hide her true feelings even from
herself.
’

‘Does the word anachronism mean anything to people like Sandra?’

‘Nothing,’ said the Bursar gloomily. ‘Nor does reason. For Christ’s sake, Sandra persists in talking about “herstory”, although I spelled out for her in words of one syllable the derviation of the word “history” and explained why it had nothing to do with men.’

‘She didn’t understand?’

‘In that little whiney voice of hers she told me that perception was all.’

They fell silent. The Bursar leaned forward and poured some more whisky into Amiss’s glass. ‘What really pisses me off, the older I get,’ she said, ‘is that the world is full of talent and people with brains who get no chance, so serve out their lives using a tenth of their potential, while increasingly the universities seem to be full of quarter-wits educated beyond their intelligence. If I had my way I would swap half our undergraduates and Fellows instantly for an equivalent number of street sweepers, male and female, from Calcutta. Six months remedial teaching and we’d be on a winner.’

‘Well, that’s definitely an unethno-centric statement. Have you put it to Bridget?’

‘The only thing I’m likely to put to Bridget,’ said the Bursar breathing heavily, ‘is the muzzle of my elephant gun. Up her arse.’

‘And what about the mysterious Mary Lou? Is she as dim a hanger-on as Sandra?’

‘Finding that out is one of your jobs. They won’t have anything to do with me for the reasons I’m sure you’ve spotted. I haven’t a clue about Mary Lou; she’s a bit of a dark horse.’ She smote her forehead. ‘ “Dark horse”. Excellent: there’s an expression Bridget would have me blackballed for.’

‘You’re doing pretty well with the politically incorrect terminology, old girl. Does it come naturally or are you doing it on purpose?’

‘You don’t need to do it on purpose. You can offend in this place by blowing your nose.’ She suited the action to the words: the resulting explosion would have done credit to the elephant gun.

‘As I was saying, Mary Lou was unanimously recommended by the Research Fellowship sub-committee which consisted of two Dykes and a Virgin, presumably because the Dykes forgave her having good academic qualifications because she was black and was conducting research on early twentieth-century myths about Sappho.’

‘So far so stereotyped. Now why do you think she didn’t throw herself into the fray this evening?’

‘Maybe she’s still finding her feet. I leave it to you to conduct your researches in whatever way you think fit. Now, would you care to see the agenda for tomorrow morning’s Council meeting. I would particularly like to draw your attention to item 3a), Sandra’s draft equal opportunity policy statement. Listen.’

She declaimed rather than read out:

‘ “St Martha’s awareness that groups or individuals may have been disadvantaged educationally or otherwise in the past, has led to a decision that the balance should be redressed. Positive steps have therefore been taken to ensure that on every shortlist for every appointment in the college a majority of candidates will be from members of groups who have hitherto shared the experience of discrimination. Disadvantaged groups can be identified according to race, colour, creed, ethnic or national origin, disabilities, sex, sexual orientation or marital status.’ ”

‘I don’t believe it.’

She passed it over.

Amiss scanned it. ‘My God, I hope for your sake they recognize fat as a disability.’ The Bursar playfully threw a cushion at him. It knocked over his glass, the contents of which soaked both the equal opportunities paper and his tie.

‘Dries out,’ she said cheerfully, pouring him another. ‘Read on.’

‘ “Often people are perceived to have had insufficient education because of preconceived opinions or judgements about what education is. St Martha’s will endeavour to ensure that through the abolition of pre-set requirements, jobs will be open to the widest possible variety of candidate. Historic disadvantage will, however, be a relevant factor in the decision-making process… ” Do I have to read the rest?’

‘No, that’s the nub.’

‘Do I understand this as meaning that the Dykes want qualifications to be unnecessary to get an academic job in this establishment?’

‘I think that’s about the size of it. And worse. It’s clear that they propose to apologize, through the appointments system, for historic wrongs against particular communities.’

‘So it’s bring on the one-legged black lesbians and only the one-legged black lesbians.’

‘We’re headed there. Mary Lou’s the black dyke, you’re supposed to be the crippled gay…’

‘And you?’

‘Oh, at the moment,’ said the Bursar, ‘I’m making the most of being fat and old and I’m keeping my sexuality even more of a secret than did George Eliot. Now drink up, it’s time you went to bed.’

‘I don’t know how to find my room.’

‘I will escort you and protect your virtue from any lurking sexual predators. I will also meet your cat. Now, I want you up at seven o’clock in the morning, in the garden or the front hall, to participate in the Swedish drill.’

‘Why?’ Even to his own ears, Amiss’s scream was heartfelt.

‘Because you’ve had too much of the Dykes since you’ve arrived and I think it’s time you had a blast of the Virgins. You’re not here, you know, merely to enjoy yourself. There is,’ said the Bursar, smiling evilly, ‘no such thing as a free temporary Research Fellowship.’

7

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Plutarch awakened Amiss by kneading his chest in a particularly brutal fashion. Casting her aside with a loud oath, he established that the alarm was due to go off in two minutes and crawled miserably out of bed to dress for the physical jerks. He was relieved to see that it was raining and that he would be spared the dank dew of an early morning in the Fens.

He arrived clad in jeans and T-shirt and panting in the front hall at 7.09, having been delayed by Plutarch’s demand for food and a contretemps with a can opener. There were a half-dozen or so women already there, dressed in interestingly individual garments. A dreamy-looking beanpole with cropped grey hair – later identified as the theologian, Miss Thackaberry – wore a long striped shirt inside out; the Bursar was simply turned out in knickers and vest; the Senior Tutor sported grey woollen stockings topped with an elongated grey woolly sweater; Miss Stamp, as ever, radiated brightness – this time in a tracksuit in Christmas-fairy pink with appliqued cats. ‘I hoped you’d turn up, Mr Amiss. I wore this in honour of your dear pussycat.’