Matricide at St. Martha's (9 page)

‘I’m in your hands, Dr Pusey.’

‘Ah, very well then. What I suggest is that today we do the medieval period, or as much as can be done in only an afternoon – not forgetting our tea of course.’ He tittered again. ‘And then, when it is again clement, we can advance to the Renaissance.’

‘Gosh, that’s terrific. I look forward to this afternoon immensely.’ As he left the room Amiss wondered whether he should be blaming the Bursar or Miss Stamp for his impending doom. He concluded reluctantly that the buck stopped with him.

‘Sorry, I didn’t catch that.’

‘Uncoursed clunch rubble. Can’t you see?’

Amiss gazed dully at a clump of masonry.

‘Pevsner thinks some of these windows are originals from the third quarter of the fourteenth century, but I’m not at all sure, not at all sure. I think he may have been misled by the cusped lights.’ He peered down at his card. ‘I hope you were moved by it, Mr Amiss. As dear, dear Spenser has said:

‘ “My mother, Cambridge, whom, as with a crowne,

He doth adorne, and is adorn’d of it

With many a gentle muse and many a learned wit.” ’

Spenser had clearly struck lucky, thought Amiss lugubriously.

‘Now I think it’s time for tea. We have finished the medieval tour,’ said Pusey. ‘Come along now, we’ll go to the Copper Kettle on King’s Parade. I’m very, very partial to their chocolate cake.’

Amiss did not have a sweet tooth and forcing down rich cake was a torment to him, but it was required by the Pusey code. This Amiss resentfully summarized as: ‘I’m-a-greedy-little -bugger-without-the -courage -of-my-convictions-who-requires -my-companion-to-carry -the-can -for -my -over -indulgence.’

‘Oh, well, I’ll have another slice if you insist, but only if you do,’ Pusey kept wittering.

The main advantage of tea, however, was that it temporarily stopped Pusey from talking any more about medieval architecture and enabled Amiss to recover from that state of catatonic despair into which merciless bores always threw him.

But as he swallowed his last piece of goo, Pusey started to fumble in his pocket for his cards again. Amiss swiftly intervened just in time. ‘Dr Pusey, please could you tell me a little about Cambridge in its wider sense; perhaps we could make a great leap from medieval to contemporary – looking at the people this time rather than the artefacts.’

‘I’d rather have artefacts any day. Give me a nice little Meissen pot or a Doulton vase rather than one of those nasty coarse creatures who abound in this uncouth world. My idea of heaven is to settle down with Bobsy in the middle of all my nice things with a new piece of knitting or a particularly tricky piece of embroidery, a little bit of chamber music, and perhaps — if I’m feeling very wicked – some cocoa and sugared biscuits.’

Amiss doubted if he and Pusey were likely to strike up a close comradeship. ‘I do understand. Peace and quiet are a great joy. But still I must admit to some curiosity about people. Do tell me something about them.’

‘The people. Ah, the people. Well, of course poor Rupert Brooke said it all:

‘ “For Cambridge people rarely smile,

Being urban, squat and packed with guile.” ’

Amiss hoped that he was grinding his teeth silently. ‘I was thinking more about the St Martha’s people, really. I’m not an academic, you know, so I find them rather odd. A man of your discernment must be able to fill in a poor novice like me. It’s meant a lot to me getting this job, and I’m terrified of putting a foot wrong. How about some more tea?’

‘Only if you are.’

‘And this last piece of cake, go on.’

Pusey looked at it longingly, and then patted his stomach. ‘No, no, I’m getting a little tum. Quite spoils the line of my jacket.’ The word ‘jacket’ brought back unhappy memories and he looked reproachfully at Amiss, who pretended not to notice and started wheedling again. ‘I need advice, and from a man.’

‘I doubt if the Bursar would agree that I’m a man. I know very well that she calls me an old woman. Fat lot she’d know about being a woman, nasty old dyke.’

‘Is she? A dyke, I mean.’

‘She must be. My dear, haven’t you noticed? Absolute bulldyke. She doesn’t have an ounce of femininity. Those clothes, those shoes, great horrid clumpy things, and above all, those knickers. When I think of the wispy lingerie I’ve created for proper women in my time, it makes me weep to be confronted by this butch apparel.’

‘You don’t like her, I gather.’

‘Absolute savage,’ said Pusey. ‘Still, I grant you she’s useful. The sort that gets the trains to run on time. I have to admit she’s our only hope for the future.’

Amiss felt very close to the end of his tether. ‘Dr Pusey, will you please, please, tell me what has brought St Martha’s to this pretty pass?’

Pusey looked longingly again at the cakestand.

Amiss set his teeth. ‘Would you like just a little bit more? I’ll halve it with you.’

‘Oh, you are a naughty boy. All right. I give in.’

10

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‘Thank God you were free.’ Amiss was stretched out in a comfortable armchair in the flat of his friend, Detective Sergeant Ellis Pooley. ‘I was going crazy for someone to talk to.’

‘Are you sure you don’t want something to eat?’

‘No, no, please. I’m still crammed to the gills with vast amounts of cake, consumed in the quest for information. A combination of Jack Troutbeck, who communicates in a kind of oral semaphore and Francis Pusey, who has to have information bribed out of him, has left me pretty desperate. Oxford was never like this. I always knew there was something funny about Cambridge – all those gay spies and mad right-wing dons – but I didn’t realize it was this bad.’

Pooley waited patiently for Amiss’s tirade to cease. ‘Why don’t you tell me what you’ve found out, Robert, and then if you want to, we can talk more generally about Cambridge.’

Amiss took another cheering mouthful of his drink, wriggled more comfortably into the corner of his chair, threw his leg over its arm, collected his thoughts and began.

‘The sequence as I understand it is that St Martha’s was established in partial reaction against the academic success of Girton and Newnham. The founder was up to a point a realist. Although he would have preferred to see women staying submissive and attending to their family and philanthropic duties, he realized the writing was on the wall. What he decided to do was to try and contain the revolution and in particular contain his own daughter, who was making his life hell. So he conceived the notion of a college which would meet the criterion of giving women higher education while preventing them from undertaking unduly unwomanly things like maths or the sciences. He adhered to the Victorian view with which he had grown up, that the nervous system of women was liable to give way if exposed to undue strain. Now, do you have a Bible and a collected Rudyard Kipling?’

‘Certainly,’ said Pooley. It took him two or three minutes. ‘Have you got these catalogued?’ Amiss waved his hand at the shelves which lined the room.

‘Yes,’ said Pooley warily. ‘Why?’

‘By author, subject or what?’

‘By author, just so I know what I haven’t got so to speak. It’s very simple when you’ve got a computer.’

‘Francis Pusey’s collection of books on aesthetics and the womanly arts are catalogued by hand under subject, author, years of acquisition, places of acquisition and for all I know, climatic conditions and astrological signs on the day of same.’

‘He sounds like a busy little person.’

‘A potty little person would be more like it. Right. Now you remember the bit in the Bible about Martha?’

‘She did the housework while Mary entertained Jesus. Wasn’t that more or less it?’

‘Let me read it to you: “Now as they went on their way, he entered a village; and a woman named Martha received him into her house. And she had a sister called Mary, who sat at the Lord’s feet and listened to his teaching. But Martha was distracted with much serving.” What a boring, nasty version of the Bible you’ve got – what’s happened to “But Martha was cumbered about much serving”?’

‘Shut up and get on with it.’

‘ “And she went to him and said, ‘Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to serve alone? Tell her then to help me’. But the Lord answered her, ‘Martha, Martha, you are anxious and troubled about many things; one thing is needful. Mary has chosen the good portion, which shall not be taken away from her.’ ” ’ He looked up. ‘I must say I always thought that a bit thick. Bet you anything you like he didn’t refuse on principle to eat his dinner.’

Pooley refused to be side-tracked. ‘I really don’t follow that. If Christ thought that Mary was right and Martha was wrong, calling a college St Martha’s is sending out rather strange signals, isn’t it?’

‘Hah, no. The plot thickens. Just at the moment when the founder was finalizing his plans for the college, buying the property and racking his brains for a suitable role model, Kipling produced a poem called “The Sons of Martha”. Do you know it?’

‘No.’

‘Quite long. It’s jolly good, but I’ll spare you most of it. The opening lines are the nub:

‘ “The Sons of Mary seldom bother, for they have inherited that good part;

But the Sons of Martha favour their Mother of the careful soul and the troubled heart.

And because she lost her temper once, and because she was rude to the Lord her Guest,

Her Sons must wait upon Mary’s Sons, world without end, reprieve, or rest.’

‘It then goes on about the Sons of Mary having a high old time being waited on hand and foot by Martha’s crew who have no such expectations for themselves:

‘ “They do not preach that their God will rouse them a little before the nuts work loose.

They do not teach that His Pity allows them to drop their job when they dam’-well choose.

As in the thronged and the lighted ways, so in the dark and the desert they stand,

Wary and watchful all their days that their brethren’s days may be long in the land.” ’

‘That poem, would you believe, is written into the statutes of the college. It’s a sort of institution of atonement. Didn’t you ever hear of it while you were at Cambridge?’

‘King’s was a very snobby place. We only took a handful of the most important colleges seriously, and because they were mostly mixed, the single-sex women’s colleges were really looked down on even more than before, I’m ashamed to say.’

‘And St Martha’s?’

Pooley rolled his eyes. ‘Too much off the beaten track geographically and academically to matter. I mean, for heaven’s sake, Robert, Girton was two miles away and I never set foot in it in three years. I once heard a don in Caius express sympathy for his opposite numbers in Peterhouse because it was so far out.’

‘But they can’t be more than a few hundred yards apart?’

‘Yes, but Peterhouse
is
the farthest south of the Trumpington Road group of colleges.’

‘Blimey. Funny people, dons. So what did you hear about St Martha’s?’

Pooley knitted his brows. ‘Poor, dotty and inaccessible. I never met anyone who came from there. I think they produced the occasional first in History or English or something, but search me, I don’t really remember.’

‘You’re a fat lot of use.’

‘Get on with the story.’

‘So because of the founder’s thoughtfulness, those in authority at St Martha’s were imbued with the spirit of duty and sacrifice and womanliness.’

‘They don’t sound very womanly to me,’ said Pooley sternly. ‘Not from what you’ve told me so far.’

‘Womanliness was defined in the statutes in terms of accomplishments of an Edwardian nature. Thus the only subjects for study were in the humanities and one could not – and still cannot – become a student there without being able to give evidence of being able to play the piano, sing, tat, crochet, embroider or do one of those things. All students have to take compulsory instruction in a second accomplishment. The Fellows – usually fourteen – between them have to have accomplishments in twenty-eight different areas.’

‘Twenty-eight? How do you achieve such a high number?’

‘Add in lace-making and gardening, cooking, home-management, book-binding, nursing, bee-keeping, hairdressing, painting – that sort of stuff. You get the gist?’

‘Oh, I get the gist. Did you say they had to have twenty-eight accomplishments
between
them?’

‘Well spotted. Yes. I think there must have been a bit of a slip-up in the drafting.’

‘I’m beginning to understand Francis Pusey’s role in all this.’

‘You’ve got it, Ellis. That little creature can produce evidence of eighteen accomplishments, thus taking a heavy burden off the Fellowship and enabling them to have the occasional Fellow like Jack Troutbeck who is everything that featured in the founder’s worst nightmares.’

‘How did they get round Pusey being a man?’

‘It was so unlikely a contingency that it didn’t occur to anybody when they were framing the statutes. Now, apart from these requirements there were other duties laid on Fellows like exercising, Sunday services, regular classes in moral guidance for the young and so on and so on. That means people with options aren’t exactly queuing up for the privilege of joining the Fellowship.’

‘Couldn’t they get the statutes amended?’

‘You don’t know the Mistress. She sees her main role in life as fighting the future, while Bridget Holdness and her pals see their main duty in life as reinventing the past.’

‘How did this Holdness woman get in, for heaven’s sake?’

‘Good academic record, Oxford first in History and then a Ph.D from London where she was a bit of a dark horse. Could even throw in an ability to paint and cook.

‘She was perfectly pleasant when she first arrived. She’s been there a year, managed to get a pliable student representative on to the College Council as well as filling two Fellowship vacancies with Sandra Murphy and Mary Lou Denslow, both of whom are lesbian and ethnically right-on, Sandra being a rabid Irish-American of the kind who thinks the IRA are the oppressed and Mary Lou being a black agitator. Bridget was clearly planning a gradual Dyke takeover as she could reasonably expect a few more Fellows to drop off their perches through retirement or death in the next five years or so. If she’d played her cards right she could have been Mistress pretty quickly, but the Alice Toon bequest scuppered all that.’