The silent world of Nicholas Quinn (4 page)

and a little befuzzled. In fact, he couldn't quite remember whether it was

Richard III on the First Crusade or Richard I on the Third Crusade. Or, for

that matter, whether either Richard had been on either Crusade. Life was

suddenly very good again. He thought of Monica. Perhaps he would call in

—just for a second—before they started the business of the afternoon.

Monica . . . It must have been the wine.

They finally arrived back at the Syndicate building at twenty minutes to

three; and whilst the others were making their leisurely way back to 1the

Revision Room upstairs, Quinn himself walked quickly along the corridor

and gently knocked on the furthest door on the right, whereon the name

plate read. MISS M. M. HEIGHT. He tentatively opened the door and

looked in. No one. But he saw a note prominently displayed beneath a

paperweight on the neatly cleared desk, and he stepped inside to read it.

'Gone to Paolo's. Back at three.' It was typical of their office life together.

Bartlett never minded his staff coming and going just when and how they

liked, so long as their work was adequately done. What he did insist upon,

however (almost pathologically), was that everyone should keep him

informed about exactly where they could be found. So. Monica had gone to

have her comely hair coiffured. Never mind. He didn't know what he would

have said, anyway. Yes, it was just as well: he would see her in the

morning.

He walked up to the Revision Room, where Cedric Voss was leaning back

in his chair, his eyes half-closed, an inane grin upon his flabby, somnolent

features. 'Well, gentlemen. Can we please try to turn our attention to the

Hanoverians?'

BY THE MIDDLE of the nineteenth century radical reforms were afoot in Oxford; and by

its end a series of Commissions, Statutes, and Parliamentary Bills had inaugurated

changes which were to transform the life of both Town and Gown. The University

syllabuses were extended to include the study of the emergent sciences, and of

modern history; the high academic standards set by Benjamin Jowett's Balliol

gradually spread to other colleges; the establishment of professorial chairs

increasingly attracted to Oxford scholars of international renown; the secularization of

the college fellowships began to undermine the traditionally religious framework of

university discipline and administration; and young men of Romanist, Judaic, and

other strange persuasions were now admitted as undergraduates, no longer willy-nilly

to be weaned on Cicero and Chrysostom. But, above all, university teaching was no

longer concentrated in the hands of the celibate and cloistered clergymen, some of

whom, as in Gibbon's day, well remembered that they had a salary to receive, and

only forgot that they had a duty to perform; and many of the newly-appointed fellows,

and some of the old, forswore the attractions of bachelor rooms in the college, got

themselves married, and bought houses for themselves, their wives, their offspring,

and their servants, immediately outside the old spiritual centre of Holywell and the

High, the Broad and St. Giles'; especially did they venture north of the great width of

tree-lined St. Giles', where the Woodstock and the Banbury Roads branched off into

the fields of North Oxford, towards the village of Summertown.

A traveller who visits Oxford today, and who walks northward from St. Giles', is struck

immediately by the large, imposing houses, mostly dating from the latter half of the

nineteenth century, that line the Woodstock and the Banbury Roads and the streets

that cross their ways between them. Apart from the blocks of weathered yellow stone

round the white-painted window frames, these three-storeyed houses are built of

attractive reddish brick, and are roofed with small rectangular tiles, more of an orange-

red, which slope down from the clustered chimney stacks aslant the gabled windows.

Today few of the houses are occupied by single families. They are too large, too cold,

and too expensive to maintain; the rates are too high and salaries (it is said) are too

low, and the fast-disappearing race of domestic servan1ts demands a colour telly in

the sitting-room. So it is that most of the houses have been let into flats, converted into hotels, taken over by doctors, by dentists, by English Language schools for foreign

students, by University faculties, by hospital departments—and, in the case of one

large and well-appointed property in Chaucer Road, by the Foreign Examinations

Syndicate.

The Syndicate building stands some twenty yards back from the comparatively quiet

road which links the busy Banbury and Woodstock thoroughfares, and is modestly

sheltered from inquisitive eyes behind a row of tall horse-chestnut trees. It is

approached from the front (there is no back entrance) by a curving gravelled drive,

allowing space sufficient for the parking of a dozen or so cars. But the Syndicate staff

has grown so much of late that this space is now inadequate, and the drive has been

extended along the left-hand side of the building, leading to a small concreted yard at

the rear, where it has become the custom of the graduates themselves to park their

cars.

There are five graduates on the permanent staff of the Syndicate, four men and one

woman, severally superintending the fields of study corresponding, in the main, to the

disciplines which they had pursued for their university degrees, and to the subjects

taught in their subsequent careers. For it is an invariable rule that no graduate may

apply for a post with the Syndicate unless he (or she) has spent a minimum of five

years teaching in the schools. The names of the five graduates are printed in bold blue

letters at the top of the Syndicate's official notepaper; and on such notepaper, in a

large converted bedroom on the first floor, on Friday, 31st October (the day after

Quinn's deliberations with the History Committee), four of the five young shorthand

typists are tapping out letters to the headmasters and headmistresses of those

overseas schools (a select, but growing band) who are happy to entrust the public

examination of their O- and A-level candidates to the Syndicate's benevolence and

expertise. The four girls pick at their typewriters with varying degrees of competence;

frequently one of them leans forward to delete a mis-spelling or a careless

transposition of letters; occasionally a sheet is torn from a typewriter carriage, the

carbon salvaged, but the top sheet and the under-copies savagely consigned to the

wastepaper basket. The fifth girl has been reading
Woman's Weekly
, but now puts it aside and opens her dictation book. She'd better get started. Automatically she

reaches for her ruler and neatly crosses through the third name on the headed

notepaper. Dr Bartlett has insisted that until the new stocks are ready the girls shall

manually correct each single sheet—and Margaret Freeman usually does as she is

told:

T. G. Bartlett, PhD, MA Secretary

P. Ogleby, MA Deputy Secretary

G. Bland, MA

Miss M. M Height, MA

D. J. Martin, BA

Beneath the last name she types 'N. Quinn, MA'—her new boss.

After Margaret Freeman had left him, Quinn opened one of his filing cabinets, took out

the drafts of the History question papers, deciding that a further couple of hours should see them ready for press. All in all, he felt quite pleased with life. His dictation (for him, a completely new skill) had gone well, and at last he was beginning to get the knack of

expressing his thoughts directly into words, instead of first having to write them down

on paper. He was his own boss, too; for Bartlett knew 1how to delegate, and unless

something went sadly askew he allowed his staff to work entirely on their own. Yes,

Quinn was enjoying his new job. It was only the phones that caused him trouble and

(he admitted it) considerable embarrassment. There were two of them in each office: a

white one for internal extensions, and a grey one for outside calls. And there they sat,

squat and menacing, on the right-hand side of Quinn's desk as he sat writing; and he

prayed they wouldn't ring, for he was still unable to quell the panic which welled up

within him whenever their muted, distant clacking compelled him to lift up one or other

(he never knew which). But neither rang that morning, and with quiet concentration

Quinn carried through the agreed string of amendments to the History questions. By a

quarter to one he had finished four of the question papers, and was pleasantly

surprised to find how quickly the morning had flown by. He locked the papers away

(Bartlett was a martinet on all aspects of security) and allowed himself to wonder

whether Monica would be going for a drink and a sandwich at the Horse and Trumpet

—a pub he had originally misheard as the 'Whoreson Strumpet'. Monica's office was

immediately opposite his own, and he knocked lightly and opened the door. She was

gone.

In the lounge bar of the Horse and Trumpet a tall, lank-haired man pushed his way

gingerly past the crowded tables and made for the furthest corner. He held a plate of

sandwiches in his left hand, and a glass of gin and a jug of bitter in his right He took

his seat beside a woman in her mid-thirties who sat smoking a cigarette. She was very

attractive and the appraising glances of the men who sat around had already swept

her more than once.

'Cheers!' He lifted his glass and buried bis nose in the froth.

'Cheers!' She sipped the gin and stubbed out her cigarette.

'Have you been thinking about me?' he asked.

'I've been too busy to think about anybody.' It wasn't very encouraging.

'I've been thinking about
you
.'

'Have you?'

They lapsed into silence.

'It's got to finish—you know that, don't you?' For the first time she looked him directly in the face, and saw the hurt in his eyes.

'You said you enjoyed it yesterday.' His voice was very low.

'Of course I bloody well enjoyed it. That's not the point, is it?' Her voice betrayed

exasperation, and she had spoken rather too loudly.

'Shh! We don't want everybody to hear us, do we?'

'Well—you're so silly! We just can't go on like this! If people don't suspect something

by now, they must be blind. It's got to stop! You've got a
wife
. It doesn't matter so much about me, but—'

'Couldn't we just—?'

'Look, Donald, the answer's "no". I've thought about it a lot—and, well, we've just got to stop, that's all. I'm sorry, but—' It
was
risky, and above all she worried about Bartlett finding out. With his Victorian attitudes . . .

They walked back to the office without speaking, but Donald Martin was not quite so

heart-broken as he appeared to be. The same sort of conversation had taken place

several times before, and always, when he picked his moment right, she was only too

eager again. So long as she had no other outlet for her sexual frustratio1ns, he was

always going to be in with a chance. And once they were in her bungalow together,

with the door locked and the curtains drawn—God! What a hot-pants she could be. He

knew that Quinn had taken her out for a drink once; but he didn't worry about that. Or

did he? As they walked into the Syndicate building at ten minutes to two, he suddenly

wondered, for the first time, whether he
ought
perhaps to be a fraction worried about the innocent-looking Quinn, with his hearing aid, and his wide and guileless eyes.

Philip Ogleby heard Monica go into her office and gave her no second thought today.

He occupied the first room on the right-hand side of the corridor, with the Secretary's

immediately next door, and Monica's next to that—at the far end. He drained his

second cup of coffee, screwed up his thermos flask, and closed an old copy of
Pravda
.

Ogleby had been with the Syndicate for fourteen years, and remained as much a

mystery to his present colleagues as he had done to his former ones. He was fifty-

three now, a bachelor, with a lean ascetic face, and a perpetually mournful, weary look

upon his features. What was left of his hair was grey, and what was left of his life

seemed greyer still. In his younger days his enthusiasms had been as numerous as

they were curious: Morris dancing, Victorian lamp-posts, irises, steam-locomotives