Rough Cider

SEVENTEEN

Monday morning, ten A.M. Twenty-six first-years looked expectantly towards me. On their syllabus sheets they had a lecture on the Venerable Bede scheduled for this hour. They were in for a disappointment.

Adhering to my belief that honesty is the best policy, I announced, “I’d better confess that I neglected to prepare this lecture. I spent the weekend with a blonde instead of Bede.”

This was met with disbelieving jeers and a shout that I ought to be ashamed of myself.

“Indeed I am,” I told them. “And to save my good name and reputation, I’ve brought in my slides of the great cathedrals and abbeys of Europe. Would you turn out the lights, Miss Hooper?”

Thank God for the great cathedrals and abbeys of Europe. My first reaction on waking at 8:50 A.M. had been to reach for the Alka-Seltzers and my slide projector. Just try ad-libbing for an hour on Bede.

When it was over, I made a phone call from the Senior Common Room. Sally Ashenfelter answered, reciting her number with a crispness that sounded encouragingly sober.

‘This is Theo Sinclair,” I told her. “Visited you yesterday, remember?” I was far from confident that she would.

“Why, yes. The evacuee. I’m afraid my husband isn’t here this morning, Mr. Sinclair.”

“Actually, I wanted to speak to you.”

“Me?”

“We didn’t have much time to talk. There were a couple of things I’m most anxious to ask you about.”

Oh?”

“I’m speaking from the university, Mrs. Ashenfelter. It’s a little public here. Do you think we could meet?” I was about to say “For a drink,” when empty vodka bottles clinked a warning in my head.

“In Bath, do you mean?” asked Sally.

“The Pump Room,” I said on an impulse, “for a coffee.”

She hesitated. “Which day did you have in mind?”

“How about tomorrow?”

“Let’s see… Harry’s going to be out all day, so that’s all right. Someone’s coming in the morning. I can’t put them off.” She thought a moment and suggested casually, “How about a lunchtime drink in the Francis?”

Alcoholics are smart operators. “Difficult,” I said. “Afternoon tea in the Pump Room?”

She laughed. “Cucumber sandwiches, the three-piece orchestra and all? All right. Let’s meet at three, before it gets too crowded.”

“I’ll have reserved a table,” I promised.

I spent the next hour in the history department’s library making up time.

Towards lunch, I scooped my books into a more tidy pile, walked down a staircase, through two sets of swing doors, and into the narrow office where a far-from-narrow secretary called Pippa received visitors to the psychology department. Pippa could pin you to the wall with one deep breath.

“Who’s in today?” I asked. “The prof?” Pippa shook her head, and it wasn’t her head that moved most. “A conference at Liverpool.”

“And Dr. Ott?”

“Just finished a seminar in room nineteen.”

Simon Ott looked up in surprise when I found him rewinding a tape. I asked if he could spare a few minutes. We weren’t well-known to each other, but that, for me, was an encouragement.

“I'm trying to clarify something slightly contentious,” I explained.

“Concerning me?” A guarded expression dropped over his face like a visor. Small, neat, and in his thirties, he went in for dark suits and cream-colored shirts with one-color ties, that color generally being in the brown range.

“Me. I’m after advice.”

“Ah.” He looked marginally more approachable, then said, “I don’t have much time. A meeting at two.”

“Could I join you for lunch, perhaps?”

He glanced at my stick. “I generally take a walk.”

“You think I wouldn’t keep up?”

He hesitated. “If it doesn’t concern me personally…”

“Your special field is the memory and how it functions, isn’t it?”

The face did a double take. The mention of memory triggered an interested response, and the revelation that I’d made some inquiries about him turned him pink. Happily for me, curiosity prevailed. We compromised on a slow stroll across Whiteknights Park.

Without much preamble I told him what I remembered having seen in the small barn at Gifford Farm on Thanksgiving Day, 1943. I told him about Barbara’s suicide, leaving out the murder and the trial. There was no need to go into all that sensational stuff. “The point is that I was required to make a statement,” I said, letting him assume that it was for the inquest. “It’s on record, so I can check my memory against what I said then. It hasn’t altered. I can picture everything as I described it. What I saw was definitely a violent sexual attack. But quite recently someone has claimed that I gave an inaccurate account of what really took place-that in fact it was passionate lovemaking. There’s some secondary evidence to back up this theory. I won’t say it’s shaken my confidence, because it hasn’t.”

“Why come to me, then?” Ott reasonably asked.

I flapped my hand vaguely. “There’s that old saying about memory playing tricks.”

He looked away, following the flight of some starlings to a mown stretch of grass.near the Museum of Rural Life. “Tell me, did you know the people involved?”

“The girl, better than the man. He was virtually a stranger.”

“But you knew her. Would you say that you liked her enough to identify emotionally with her?”

“Yes, I would.”

“So this experience-whatever it was-must have distressed you?”

“Certainly. I was in tears.”

We walked on for some way while he reflected on this. He resumed. “The brain has various defense mechanisms for coping with anxiety. We can, for example, repress certain stressful or disturbing memories by pushing them down into the unconscious.”

I said, “That’s a way of forgetting, isn’t it? In my case we’re talking about remembering something unpleasant.”

“True.”

“I mean, could I have been distorting the memory?”

“That’s possible,” said Ott. “The classic example was cited by Piaget, the Swiss psychologist, who remembered a man trying to kidnap him from his pram in the Champs-Ely-sees. His nurse managed to fight off the kidnapper and was scratched across the face. The man fled when a gendarme with a short cloak and white baton arrived. Piaget retained a sharp visual memory of the scene right into adolescence. When he was fifteen, his father received a letter from the nurse, who had long since left the family. She was joining the Salvation Army, and she wanted to confess something. In particular, she wanted to return the watch she’d been given as a reward for saving the child. The story was untrue. She’d given herself the scratches.”

“So Piaget imagined it?”

“His explanation was that he must have heard the story from his parents and projected it into the past as a memory.”

“What I saw definitely happened.”

Ott didn’t challenge my assertion. With the skill of the analyst he found a way of justifying it while raising serious doubts. “You must have heard accounts from other sources. It’s not impossible that you modified your memory to fit someone else’s version of what happened. Research suggests that memory isn’t totally reliable. It’s influenced by what we subsequently think. So a stressful memory might well be modified in retrospect. Do you often picture this scene of rape?”

We’re getting into Freudian theory, I thought. He thinks I’m a sexual kink. “No. It’s something I prefer not to think about.”

“So you suppress it.”

“Listen,” I said, trying to sound reasonable. “Aren’t you missing the point? The scene I’m unable to visualize is this other nonviolent one, where they are actually lovers.”

“Quite. And there’s evidence to support it?”

“She was two months’ pregnant. The facts point to the same guy who was with her in the barn.”

He brooded silently. We’d turned and were approaching the Faculty of Arts building again. I was beginning to wish I hadn’t bothered him.

Finally, he stopped and said, “There is a possible explanation. You were emotionally attached to the girl. You idolized her to some extent. It may be that the sight of her giving herself in love to a stranger was what really disturbed you. You couldn’t accept it, so you invented a set of circumstances that left her blameless in your eyes. A rape was more acceptable than her complicity in the act of love.” He studied me keenly with his pale eyes. “Is that a feasible interpretation?”

I pondered it. “?ou’re saying I invented the rape to obliterate something that was even more unthinkable?”

“It’s only a hypothesis.”

“Is there any way I could test it?”

“You’d need the help of an analyst, I think. You see, it’s possible that there are other factors at work.”

“Such as?”

“Your feelings of guilt.”

I felt a crawling sensation across my scalp. Had he known all along about the Donovan case?

He explained, “You, presumably, raised the alarm when you found the couple together. The girl subsequently committed suicide. Perhaps you blame yourself.”

I thanked him and said the discussion had been illuminating.

At one-thirty I went out to my car and drove out of White-knights Park and down Redlands Road to the main campus where the red-brick admin block and science labs were situated.

Having parked in the London Road, I unlocked the boot and took out a leather briefcase containing the Colt.45 that had been used to murder Cliff Morton. I carried it through the cloisters and into the physics lab. No one was inside. At the far end were two prep rooms. I was fortunate. The man I wanted, Danny Leftwich, was in there alone.

He put down his coffee. “Hey, what’s this? Off limits, Dr. Sinclair?”

“Just slumming, Danny.” There was a running battle about the antiquated facilities here, compared with our glass-and-concrete palace up at Whiteknights. Personally, I hankered after a return to the London Road site with its high ceilings and better ventilation, but it wasn’t diplomatic to say so.

Danny offered me a coffee. We’d met often at the bridge table. He was the senior lab technician in the physics department, an intelligent man in his thirties, a polymath without the least desire to earn a living lecturing students. He reckoned to polish off the crosswords in The Times and The Telegraph before lunchtime, in between supplying the technical needs of professors, lecturers, and research students. Each of the physics labs was superbly maintained, and Danny still found time to place bets for any of us who followed the horses.

On this occasion I was interested in another of Danny’s enterprises: the university rifle and small-arms club. Through an enterprising and mysterious deal in 1961 with the horticulture department, he’d acquired a stretch of ground at Sonning and sufficient funds from the student union to build one of the best university ranges in the country. I wasn’t a member of the club, but I’d been out there on a Sunday morning to see a match. The facilities and the way Danny managed them were a revelation.

I opened my case and took out Duke’s pistol. “Seen anything like this before?” I asked him.

“The Colt automatic? If you don’t mind, Dr. Sinclair…” He held out his left hand, and I placed the gun on his palm. “Always pick up a gun with the nonshooting hand.” He removed the empty magazine and operated the slide to make a visual check of the breech. “No one’s fired this in years. There’s all kinds of gunge in here. Want me to clean it for you?”

“Please.”

“Didn’t know you were a gun man, Doc.”

“You can see from the state of it, I’m not. It’s a relic, a souvenir. And please don’t ask me if I have a certificate for it.”

“What else have you got in there?” asked Danny as I delved into my case. “God, live ammunition!” He pointed to a sand bucket by the door. “On there, but gently. What is it_World War Two stuff?”

“No good now, I suppose?”

“I wouldn’t care to fire it.”

“Could you dispose of it for me?”

“Of course.”

“Would the gun still be safe to use with some up-to-date ammunition?”

“Should be, after it’s cleaned and oiled. I’ll test-fire it if you like. Most of our pistol shooting is small-bore stuff, but I have a few boxes of.45s. Have you ever fired this thing?”

“Not for a long time. I was still in short trousers. Had to use both hands to control the recoil.” I hesitated. “Could I be there when you test it?”

“If you can stand an early morning.”

“How early?”

“Be at the range on Wednesday at eight A.M.”