The Pink and the Grey (11 page)

“Of course.”

“Suffice and in summarisation, Dr Flowers, I say that I am— impressed.” There was that negating pause once more, such a welcome return.

“I am— grateful,” I replied.

“And in full and final settlement my decision is No.”

“I beg your pardon? You just informed us you were going to read it! Did you not?” I was suddenly unsure.

“Read it, indeed shall I. And yet, No, Dr Flowers.
No
.”

Dennis was with us again, in great part. “Goodness, my dear Amanda, such haste, such haste.”

A laser scorch from the Master. “The essence of time is upon us, Praelector, such as of you might be fully aware.”

I fought on. “At least let Helen run the numbers—”

“Helen’s numbers runneth over, as doeseth this meeting.”

“But—”

But
nada
. To be precise: energy expended, lots; agreements achieved, few. When Amanda closed the meeting, allegedly my meeting, and shooed us away like snot-squirting young tykes, I stomped out and down and out into the greying, brooding afternoon of Top Court where I stood breathing heavily, hands on my hips, hunting for a bush to strangle.

Dennis appeared after a minute or so, chuckling, unfazed, and put a hand on my shoulder. “Eight o’clock, lad, eight o’clock. Tea at mine. Frightful woman, isn’t she? Don’t turn up drunk, drunk.”

The temptation to dive immediately into the gin was overwhelming and, I realised, slightly tragic. I had promised Dennis I would arrive promptly and unmunted, and so I dared not tempt myself even with one sniff.
Nunc est
most definitively not
bibendum
. The blessed bottle, pride of place on my desk, remained virgin and unmolested as Monday afternoon dragged its carcass on.

I ate early in the college dining hall, a high-ceilinged echo chamber ringed with portraits of Masters past and cameras present. I chose a bench apart from all others, deliberately so. For company would lead to
just one drink
, which wouldn’t be just one, or indeed just. I reacquainted myself with the unfettered taste of water, drunk this time out of choice and not a desperate necessity. The college food was as it always was: on the bland side of insipid and only identifiably edible given the accompanying crockery and cutlery. I should have asked the morlocks of the kitchen to blend it to a dirty brown mush so I could take it away and spoon it in at my leisure, like a meatshake.

Eight o’clock begrudgingly agreed to arrive. Instinctively I grabbed a bottle of emergency wine as the traditional gift but quickly thought better: tea it had been proclaimed, and tea it was to be.

It took a minute, no more, to cross to the Georgian stone of Bottom Court and climb C staircase to Dennis’s rooms. I had been here frequently, though regrettably and ashamedly not recently. Three knocks and the door breezed open, Dennis ushering me cheerfully through with a twinkle and a cravat.

Unlike me, Dennis lived in college — and college lived in him. He had been here, in these few rooms, longer than anyone could remember. He’d arrived a fresh-faced undergraduate, either in the dawning of the nuclear sixties or the sunset of the warring forties, depending on which birth date you subscribed to. And somehow, he’d never left. Each room was cluttered with the trinkets and thingumabobs and hoojums accumulated over a lifetime at St Paul’s, learning and teaching and serving and goodness knows what else. He was a fixture, a heartbeat.

“The kettle is well on, dear boy,” he said. “Peppermint, I think. Very calming. That’s your chair, sit, sit.” He waved at an old plush velvet armchair he’d evidently discovered moments before under an angry pile of something dusty. His own chair — more worn, more faded, long-dimpled with the memory of his flesh and bone — lay with easy access to books and a remote control, and angled toward a large, new, impossibly thin television wedged into a corner.

“New toy, Dennis?”

He fussed around in the tiny kitchen. “One has to keep up with the news.”

“You could use a computer for that.”

“Ha!” He emerged with two mugs of peppermint tea, one of which I extracted from him quickly before it spilled. He looked over the round lenses of his spectacles. “I fear I like computers about as much as I like A-M-A-N-D-A.” He spelled out her name with a childish glee and tipped his head towards the spy camera mounted high above the television.

“Ah, yes,” I said, sipping and sitting. Peppermint was the tea of my long-gone undergraduate days — now rushing dangerously back as I let my eyes close — when essays were short and without consequence, when the booze lasted forever and the hangovers didn’t, and when a crisis was an unwashed top and an opportunity was an eager bottom.

Dennis eased himself into his chair with that comfy noise those above a certain threshold involuntarily make. “Oh, that dreadful woman. One doesn’t like to tell tales out of school, but —
fucking bitch
, is that what they say?”

I burst into laughter. “Oh Dennis, I knew you’d cheer me up. If I were an undecidable number of years older, or you younger…”

In truth I worried that he was rather too blatant in his treasonous anti-Amanda talk given the camera and the chance we might be overheard: but he was unbothered by it. Perhaps, I thought, he believed himself as untouchable as our founder Drybutter. It was an unsettling theory.

He chuckled. “Nothing ages you more than the calendar, dear boy. Sixty-nine seemed as good a place as any to stop that nonsense. Now I find my contemporaries no longer dwindle, they simply move on and are replenished by ever-bountiful nature. The harvest heralds new growth. And here I still am.” His habit of repeating words withdrew as he relaxed, and that in turn relaxed me.

The conversation was warm and drifted fore and aft, but always reeled gently back towards the present difficulties: Amanda and the college funds. Dennis agreed that my race idea was appealing. He did, though — kindly and carefully — wonder exactly how the college might directly gain, financially. I admitted my hands had rather waved over that in the hope of pixie dust to conjure up a solution. I felt sure, though, that there would be some kind of beneficial effect.

Tomorrow’s first job, he told me, should be to shuffle on my knees across the city and prostrate myself before the gods of St John’s: for without their blessing the entire enterprise was, to use his words,
up the shitter
. I should, he said, proceed merrily on as though Amanda had approved the proposal, despite her earlier words.

The evening drew finally to a close. I set down my mug and made leaving noises, but Dennis had a surprise in store.

“Before you scoot home, my lad, we have a short journey to make,” he said, rising to his feet. The twinkle was back. “To drop in on a colleague. He’s expecting us.”

The Archivist worked out of a suite of rooms in the Admin dungeon. It was no secret that he employed many assistants, undergraduates recruited to his cause and universally known as elves, who rotated in and out on shifts to lighten their fiscal loads. The elves saw much, and knew they were seen much, and it did not affect them much. This current generation at least clutched personal sharing to their very public bosom, although the adage
what happens in archive, stays in archive
was steadfastly and rigorously adhered to. Naturally there were stories, especially of pranks perpetrated during an eager fresher’s first
elving
, as it was called: these usually involved impersonations of celebrities or, shall we say, volume of numbers.

It was said, but never publicly stated, that the Archivist’s empire expanded beyond the college boundary and under St Andrew’s Street and Emmanuel Street, such was the volume of data to retain.

A fog of rumour and legend surrounded the Archivist himself, whose face was well known but whose name was never uttered. The title was enough: should any local politician fly a policy kite in dangerous proximity to college power lines, mere mention of the Archivist might cause the wind to drop.

The current Archivist had held his position for many years and was nearing the compulsory retirement age of sixty. The late nights and constant scanning of video streams, especially in more recent data-rich years, took its toll.

“Professor Sauvage, Dr Flowers.” He gave us a polite and curt welcome at the entrance to his domain. He used the Praelector’s formal academic title, embers of a long-softened Mancunian harshness rekindled by the French pronunciation.

Identity checks efficiently and thoroughly completed, he showed us to what appeared to be a small office. It was stark, bare, minimalist. No pictures on the walls, no photos of family on the smooth, compact desk. No stray papers at which one might sneak a revelatory glimpse. No bank of screens tracking miscreants like myself from court to court.

It was, I realised, an office-cum-interrogation room. I looked in vain for a mirror, behind which might stand a camera and two elves in white coats with clipboards. We were surely observed in any case.

“Do please excuse me, professor, doctor,” he said, careful to refer to us in protocol order. “My shift begins in six minutes and forty-seven seconds and I must prepare. But we may talk briefly.” As was traditional the Archivist took the night shift, nine till nine. He habitually worked through a light exercise regime to limber up for the long evening ahead.

I felt slightly uncomfortable sitting in a plain wooden chair, alongside Dennis, as this short, sinewy man bent and stretched for our entertainment, his mop of white hair billowing as a willow in a strong breeze. We were disrupting his well-rehearsed routine, and a man’s routine is his castle.

“Flowers here wants a favour, Archivist, a favour,” began Dennis unselfconsciously, and patted my arm.

I looked to him, confused. “Favour?”

The Archivist said nothing.

“Our friend Amanda,” the Praelector continued.

Perhaps a glimmer of reaction from the Archivist, or simply a muscle twinge as he pulled and stretched his left foot back and up toward his buttocks.

“Archivist, I shall be blunt with you,” said Dennis. “The snowfall becomes heavier and begins to drift. Do you have anything that might clear a path?”

The Archivist switched feet. “Be very careful, Professor.”

“You see what is happening. It is hardly unexpected.”

“And what would you have me do?” The Archivist froze. “This is not via proper channels.”

“Proper channels be damned!”

“The protocol is well-established. I cannot break it and you know well why this is so.” His dark eyes, shaded and ringed by years of night shifts, years of screens, years of cataloguing and recording, regarded Dennis sternly.

“Not even—”

“Not even.” A second more, and he restarted his exercises.

Dennis turned to me and forced a smile, bleak as midwinter. “Worth a go, worth a go.”

“Forgive me,” I said, “but might someone explain? Channels, protocol? Snowfall?”

The Archivist and the Praelector exchanged a look. The Archivist nodded with, I felt, a slight reluctance.

“The screens,” said Dennis. “She has… some access to the cameras. Perhaps too much, my lad.”

“You might think of it as an addiction,” said the Archivist, grunting as he bent over. “Like pigeons pecking constantly at a button that once delivered seed.”

I could see Amanda pecking away in my mind’s eye. Unpleasant.

“There is such a thing as too much data, Dr Flowers. Within these walls we manage it through shifts and careful monitoring of the elves.”

“Who watches the watchers? You do.”

From his expression, a weary smile, it was not the first time that phrase had been uttered. The phrase
elven safety
also came to mind but I wisely kept it there.

“Indeed,” said the Archivist. “We believe with the Master the influx of data combined with a pathological desire to know
everything
and, of course, her general floundering in the role, triggered a kind of scrambling. Hence her increasing infelicity with language. The snow, falling, drifting.”

“And I suppose,” I said, “it explains her selecting me, of all people, to resolve the funding crisis.”

“Oh, no, my lad,” said Dennis, “that’s entirely personal.”

“Then I confess I don’t have the faintest idea why we are here. Why me, especially.”

The two men looked again at one another, the look of a joke shared.

“Oh! Were we about to attempt to blackmail Amanda?” I said, and they both laughed.

“There is no such thing as blackmail,” said the Archivist tightly, pulling an arm behind his head. “Black implies an absolute. There is no black, there is no white—”

“—All is grey, above, below and beyond,” the two men completed together.

My back shivered with a touch of the freemasons. I must have looked confused. Dennis touched my arm again. “Don’t worry, lad. Old saying. We are all complex creatures, and none of us is perfect, is perfect.”

“I am afraid I cannot help you on this occasion, Dr Flowers.” The Archivist dabbed his face with a branded college towel. “And now it is time for my shift.”

He made a signal to what appeared a bare wall. Evidently not: in a few seconds we were joined in the room by a young man, a student — an elf. I recognised him as the undergraduate I had encountered just after the Master had forced SPAIN upon me. He saw me and gave a shy smile. I was glad he was making himself useful here.

“Please escort these gentlemen out,” said the Archivist.

The elf led us out of the office into the entrance hall. I saw three other doors, leading somewhere unknown: secured, reinforced, with some form of scanning device guarding against unauthorised entry. Retinal scan? Hard to be sure in the gloom.

“A word, please, Mr Geraghty,” said Simon after my first Tuesday morning coffee. What he meant was: a bollocking. It’s never just
a word
, especially if he’s not taking the piss and calling me
ginge
or
mick
or something. The little mini-Kray. Nelson’s bell-end.
Oi oi saveloy
my Irish arse.