Unseen Academicals (23 page)

‘Yes, and then again no, Mister Trev. You will take the remaining five dollars and this rather grubby although genuine receipt for twenty dollars to Mister Stibbons, who thinks you are no good, thus making him doubt his original assumption that you are a thief and a scallywag and assisting your progress in this university.’

‘I’m not a—’ Trev began and stopped, honest enough to acknowledge the knife in his coat. ‘Honestly, Nutt, you’re one of a kind, you are.’

‘Yes,’ said Nutt. ‘I am coming to that conclusion.’

WOTCHER!

The word, in huge type, shouted out from the front page of the
Times
, next to a big picture of Juliet glittering in micromail and smiling right at the reader. Glenda, frozen for the last fifteen seconds in the act of raising a piece of toast to her mouth, finally bit.

Now she blinked and dropped the toast to read:

Glenda stopped reading at this point because the question ‘How much trouble are we going to get into about this?’ was attempting to fill her whole head. And there was no trouble, was there? And there would not be. There couldn’t be. First, who would think that the beauty in the silver beard, like some goddess of the forge, was a cook’s assistant? And, second, there was no trouble to be had, unless someone tried to make it, in which case they would have to go through Glenda and Glenda would go through
them
, in very short order. Because Jools was wonderful. She had to admit it. The girl brought radiant sunshine to the page, and suddenly it was plain: it would be a crime to hide all that grace and beauty in a cellar. So what if she had a vocabulary of fewer than seven hundred words? There were more than enough people who were stuffed tight as an egg with words, and who would want to see any of
them
on the front page?

Anyway, she thought, as she pulled her coat on, it would be a nine-minute wonder in any case and besides, she added to herself, it wasn’t as if anyone would spot it was Juliet. After all, she was wearing a beard and that was amazing, because there was no way that a woman in a beard should look attractive, but it worked. Imagine that catching on! You’d have to spend twice as long at the hairdresser’s. Someone’s going to think about that, she thought.

There was no sound from the Stollops’ house. She wasn’t surprised. Juliet did not have much grasp of the idea of punctuality. Glenda popped next door to see how the widow Crowdy was and then headed,
in the drizzling rain, back to her safe haven of the Night Kitchen. Halfway there an all but forgotten pressure in her bodice reminded her of her duty and she dared go into the Royal Bank of Ankh-Morpork.

Trembling with fear and defiance, she walked up to a clerk at his desk, slapped fifty warm dollars in front of him and said, ‘I want to start a bank account, all right?’ She left five minutes later with a shiny account book and the delightful recollection that a posh-looking man at a posh-looking desk in a posh-looking building had called her madam, and enjoyed the sensation until it ran into the reality that madam had better roll up her sleeves and get to work.

There was a lot to do. She made pies at least a day ahead so that they could mature, and Mister Nutt’s appetite last night had put quite a large dent in her pantry. But at least there wouldn’t be much demand for pies tomorrow night. Even the wizards didn’t call for a pie after a banquet.

Ah, yes, the banquet, she thought, as the rain started to soak into her coat. The banquet. She would have to see about the banquet. Sometimes if you wanted to go to the ball you had to be your own fairy godmother.

There were several obstacles requiring the touch of a magic wand: Mrs Whitlow did indeed operate a certain kind of apartheid between the Night and Day Kitchens, as if one flight of stairs actually changed who you were. The next difficulty was that Glenda did not have, according to the traditions of the university, the right kind of figure to serve at table, at least when there were visitors, and, lastly, Glenda did not have the temperament for serving at table. It wasn’t that she didn’t know how to smile; she was quite capable of smiling, if you gave her enough warning, but she positively hated having to smile at people who actually merited, instead, a flick around the earhole with a napkin. She hated taking away plates of unfinished food. She always had to suppress a tendency to say things like ‘Why did you put it on your plate if you didn’t intend to finish it?’ and ‘Look, you’ve left more than half of it and it cost a dollar a pound,’ and ‘Of course it’s cold, but that’s because you’ve been playing footsie with the young lady opposite and haven’t been concentrating on your dinner,’ and when all else failed
‘There’s little children in Klatch you know…’–it was a phrase of her mother’s, but she’d obviously missed some significant part of it.

She hated waste, she thought to herself as she walked along the stone corridor towards the Night Kitchen. There never needed to be any if you knew your way around a kitchen and if your diners had the decency to take your food seriously. She was rambling to herself. She knew that. Occasionally she would pull the front page of the
Times
out of her bag and take a look at it again. It had all really happened and there was the proof. But, it was a funny thing:
every
day something happened that was important enough to be on the front page of the newspaper. She’d never bought it and seen a little sign that said ‘Not much happened yesterday, sorry about that’. And tomorrow, wonderful though that picture was, it would be wrapping up fish and chips and everyone would have forgotten about it. That would be a load off her mind.

There was a polite cough. She recognized it as belonging to Nutt, who had the politest cough there could possibly be. ‘Yes, Mister Nutt?’

‘Mister Trev has sent me with this letter for Miss Juliet, Miss Glenda,’ said Nutt, who had apparently been waiting by the steps. He held it out as if it were some double-edged sword.

‘She’s not come in yet, I’m afraid,’ said Glenda as Nutt followed her up the steps, ‘but I’ll put it on the shelf over here where she’ll be bound to see it.’ She looked at Nutt and saw his eyes firmly fixed on the pie racks. ‘Oh, and I do seem to have made one apple pie more than called for. I wonder if you could assist me by removing it from the premises?’

He gave her a grateful smile, took the pie and hurried away.

Alone again, Glenda looked at the envelope. It was the cheapest sort, the kind that looked as if it had been made from recycled lavatory paper. And somehow, it seemed to have got a bit bigger.

Inexplicably, she found herself recalling that the gum on those envelopes was so bad that when it came to sealing them it was probably better to just have a very bad cold. Anyone could simply open it up, see what it said, dig out a bit of earwax and no one would be any the wiser.

But that would have been a very bad thing to do.

Glenda thought that same thought fifteen times before Juliet walked
into the Night Kitchen, hung up her coat on the hook and put on her apron. ‘There was a man on the bus readin’ the paper and it had a picture of me on the front,’ she said excitedly.

Glenda nodded and handed over her own paper.

‘Well, I suppose it’s me,’ said Juliet, with her head on one side. ‘What shall we do now?’

‘Open the damn letter!’ shouted Glenda.

‘What?’ said Juliet.

‘Er, oh, Trev sent you a letter,’ said Glenda. She snatched it from the shelf and held it out. ‘Why don’t you read it right
now?
’

‘He’s probably just mucking about.’

‘No! Why don’t you just read it right
now?
I haven’t tried to open it!’

Juliet took the envelope. It opened more or less to a touch. Glenda’s evil side thought, hardly any gum at all! I could have just flicked it open!

‘I can’t read with you standin’ so close,’ said Juliet. After some time moving her lips she went on, ‘I don’t get it. It’s all kinda long words. Lovely curly writing, though. There’s a bit here saying that I look like a summer’s day. What’s that all about, then?’ She pressed it into Glenda’s hand. ‘Can you read it for me, Glendy? You know I’m not good at complicated words.’

‘Well, I’m a bit busy,’ said Glenda, ‘but since you ask.’

‘First time I’ve ever had a letter that’s not all in capitals,’ said Juliet.

Glenda sat down and started to read. A lifetime of what even she would call bad romantic novels suddenly bore fruit. It read as though someone had turned on the poetry tap and then absent-mindedly gone on holiday. But they were wonderful words, nevertheless. There was the word swain, for example, which was a definite marker, and quite a lot about flowers and quite a lot of what looked like pleading, wrapped up in fancy letters, and after a while she took out her handkerchief and fanned the air around her face.

‘So, what’s it all about?’ said Juliet.

Glenda sighed. How to begin? How did you talk to Juliet about similes and metaphors and poetic licence all wrapped up in wonderful curly writing?

She did her best. ‘Weeell, basically he’s saying that he really fancies you, thinks you’re really fit, how about a date, no hanky panky, he promises. And there’s three little x’s underneath.’

Juliet started to cry. ‘That’s loverlee. Fancy ’im sitting down and writing all those words just for me. Real poetry just for me. I’m gonna sleep with it under my pillow.’

‘Yes, I suspect that he had something like that in mind,’ said Glenda and thought, Trev Likely a poet? Not likely at all.

There was a dreadful load on Pepe’s bladder, and he was stuck between a rock and a hard place, if that wasn’t too offensive a description of lying between Madame and a wall. She was still asleep. She snored magnificently, using the traditional multi-part snore, known to those who are fortunate enough to have to listen to it every night as the ‘errgh, errgh, errghh, blorrrt!’ symphony. And she was lying on his leg. And the room was pitch dark. He managed to retrieve his leg, half of which had gone to sleep, and set out on the well-known search for porcelain, which began by him putting his foot down on an empty champagne bottle, which skittered away and left him flat on his back. In the gloom he groped for it, found it, tested it for true emptiness, because you never knew your luck, and, as it were, filled it again, putting it down on what was probably a table, but in his mind and the darkness could just as well have been an armadillo.

There was another sound syncopating with Madame’s virtuoso performance. It must have been that which woke him. By groping, he located his shorts and after only three tries managed to get them the right way up and the right way round. They were a little chilly. That was the problem with micromail; it was, after all, metal. On the other hand, it did not chafe and you never had to wash it. Five minutes on the fire and it was as hygienic as anything. Besides, Pepe’s version of the shorts held a surprise all of their own.

Thus feeling that he could face the world, or at least the part of it that would need to see only the top of him, he shuffled and stubbed his way to the shop’s door, checking every bottle along the way for evidence of
liquid content. Remarkably, a bottle of port had survived with fifty per cent remaining capacity. Any port in a storm, he thought, and drank his breakfast.

The shop’s door was rattling. It had a small sliding aperture by which the staff could determine whether they wanted to let a prospective customer in, because when you are a posh shop like Shatta, you don’t sell things to just anyone. Pairs of eyeballs zigzagged back and forth across his vision as people clustered on the other side of the door and fought for attention. Somebody said, ‘We’re here to see Jewels.’

‘She’s resting,’ said Pepe. That was always a good line and could mean anything.

‘Have you seen the picture in the
Times?
’ said a voice. Then, ‘Look,’ as a vision of Juliet was held up in front of the door.

Blimey, he said to himself. ‘She had a very tiring day,’ he said.

‘The public wants to know all about her,’ said a sterner voice.

And a rather less aggressive female voice said, ‘She seems to be rather amazing.’

‘She is. She is,’ said Pepe, inventing desperately, ‘but a
very
private person and a bit artistic too, if you know what I mean.’

‘Well, I’ve got a big order to place,’ said yet another voice as the owner managed to shuffle for slot space.

‘Oh, well, we don’t have to wake her up for that. Just give me a moment and I’ll be right with you.’ He took another swig of the port. When he turned around, Madame, in a nightshirt that could have accommodated a platoon, at least if they were very friendly, was bearing down on him with a glass in one hand and the champagne bottle in the other.

‘This stuff’s gone horribly flat,’ she said.

‘I’ll go and find some fresh,’ he replied, snatching it from her quickly. ‘We’ve got newspaper people and customers out there and they all want Jools. Can you remember where she lives?’

‘I’m sure she told me,’ said Madame, ‘but it all seems a long time ago. That other one, Glenda I think, works at some big place in the city, as a cook. Anyway, why do they want to see her?’

‘There’s a wonderful picture in the
Times
,’ said Pepe. ‘You know when you said you thought we’d get rich? Well, it looks like you weren’t thinking big enough.’

‘What do you suggest, dear?’

‘Me?’ said Pepe. ‘Take the order, because that’s good business, and tell the others that Jools will see them later.’

‘Do you think they’ll go for that?’

‘They’ll have to, because we don’t know where the hell she is. There’s a million dollars walking around this city on legs.’