The Hill Bachelors

Death of a Professor

The roomful of important men expectantly await the one whom another has already dubbed the party’s ghost. In some, anticipation is disguised, in others it is a glint in an eye, a flushed cheek, the flicker of a smile that comes and goes. Within their disciplines it is their jealously possessed importance that keeps those gathered in the room going, but for once, this morning, their disciplines do not matter. Shafts of insult remain unlaunched, old scores can wait as the Master’s Tio Pepe makes the rounds. Gossip is in command today.

‘Oh, just a — a jape, they say?’ little McMoran mutters, excusing cruelty with a word he has to search for. His sister’s school stories of forty years ago were full of japes — The Girls of the Chalet School, Jo Finds a Way, The Terrible Twins. No point in carrying on about it, McMoran mutters also: they’ll never find the instigator now. A bit of fun, still mischievously he adds.

Seeming almost twice McMoran’s size, Linderfoot sniffs into his empty glass, his great pate shiny in bright winter light. Oh, meant as fun, he quite agrees. No joke, of course, if it comes your way. No joke to be called dead before your time.

‘It hasn’t come your way, though,’ McMoran scratchily points out, and wonders what the obituarists have composed already about this overweight, obtuse man, for he has always considered Linderfoot more than a little stupid even though he holds a Chair, which McMoran doesn’t. Obedient, it would seem, to the devilment of some jesting or malicious student, four newspapers this morning have published their obituarists’ tributes to the professor who has not yet arrived for the Master’s midday drinks.

‘Kind on the whole,’ Quicke remarks to a colleague who does not respond, being one of several in the room who likes to keep a private counsel. ‘Oh, kind, of course. No, I would not say less than kind.’

Grinning through bushy sideburns that spread on to his cheeks, Quicke offers variations of his thought, recalling an attack made on the historian Willet-Horsby after his death — disguised, of course, but none the less an attack. ‘1956. Unusual on an obituary page, but there you are.’

Quicke is the untidiest of the men in the room, his pink corduroy suit having gone without the attentions of an iron for many weeks, the jacket shabby, lapels touched here and there with High Table droppings. A virulent red tie — assertion of Quicke’s political allegiance — does not quite hide the undone buttons of his checked lumberjack’s shirt. He is a hairy, heavily made man, his facial features roughly textured, who in his sixties is still the enfant terrible of College junketings and gatherings such as this one.

‘Ormston has taken it in his stride,’ he finishes his observations now, guessing this to be far from so. ‘He is a man of humour.’

‘Ormston’s nothing of the sort.’ The tallest man in the room, skinny as a tadpole, Triller peers down at the Master’s wife to contradict what both have overheard. Triller is courteous but given on occasion to sharpness, tweedily one of the old school, with a pipe that this midday remains unlit in the Master’s drawing-room.

‘It is a most appalling thing,’ the Master’s wife, the only woman in the room, asserts. ‘I doubt that Professor Ormston will turn up.’

‘You’ve had no word?’

‘Not a thing.’

‘Oh, then he’ll come. Unlike him not to.’

‘It’s going too far, don’t you think, this? Why is it that everything must go too far these days?’

‘Your husband, I’m perfectly certain, intends to do what is necessary.’

The Master is lax, Triller’s private view is. Tarred with the Sixties’ brush, the Master long ago let the reins slip away. What better can be expected now? A show of strength is necessary, and Triller adds:

‘Not for an instant do I doubt the Master’s intention to supply it. How odd, though, that the victim should be Ormston.’

‘I didn’t myself realize Professor Ormston was unpopular. No, not at all.’

‘He does not suck up.’ Professor Triller glances briefly at Wirich’s back and is pleased when the Master’s wife acknowledges his allusion with one of her faint smiles. ‘I don’t suppose Ormston has ever worn leathers in his life.’

This elicits laughter, a tinkle in the noise of conversation. Though not attired so now, Wirich is given to leather — jackets and tight leather trousers, studded belts, occasionally a choker. He rides a motorcycle, a big Yamaha.

‘Could this not simply be carelessness?’ the Master’s wife suggests. ‘Newspapers have a way, these days, of being careless.’

‘Not four different obituary departments, I’d have thought. I rather fear it was deliberate.’

Plump, with spectacles dangling, the Master’s wife retorts that no matter how the unpleasantness has come about it is unacceptable in an older university. She’s cross because what clearly excites her guests does not excite her, nor the Master himself. Something has been taken from them, she feels. Today should belong to them.

‘I considered telephoning Ormston,’ the Master reveals to the author of Tribal Organization in the Karakoram Foothills and to a classicist who considers the investigation of foothill tribes a waste of time. ‘But then I rather thought that would simply highlight the thing, so I didn’t.’

Nods greet this. They would have resisted telephoning too, a joint indication is, both men reflecting that the Master’s role is not one they could ever take to, with irritating decisions endlessly to consider.

‘I really am disturbed.’ Given to booming, the Master lowers his voice to indicate the seriousness of his state. ‘I truly am.’

Before his time, by as much as fifteen years, there was the business of Batchett’s extra-mural lecture, and longer ago still the mocking of T. L. Hapgood, which now is in the annals, although no one in the Master’s drawing-room this midday knew T. L. Hapgood in his lifetime or is aware of what he looked like. More recently, one morning, there was the delivery of a pig to Dr Kindly, and that same evening four dozen take-away pizzas. Batchett had presented himself at a famous public school to lecture to the Geographical Society on land lines, only to discover that not only had some sort of mid-term break emptied the school of his anticipated audience but that there was, in fact, no Geographical Society and never had been.

‘The Hapgood riddle was never solved?’ the Karakoram foothills man hazards. ‘I’ve never known.’

‘No, they didn’t get to the bottom of it. Years later, identities often surface after such nuisances, but none did then. Some disaffected bunch.’

The bunch who took against T. L. Hapgood — by general consent because his sarcasm hurt — based their jape on the professor’s disdain for the stream of consciousness in the literature of his time. Other academics were written to in Professor Hapgood’s name, announcing his authorship of a forthcoming study of James Joyce’s life and works. I feel my task will be incomplete and greatly lacking without the inclusion of your views on the great Irishman, and in particular, perhaps, on his subtle and enlightening use of what we have come to call the ‘stream of consciousness’. Anything from a paragraph to thirty or so pages would be welcome from your pen, with prompt reward either in cheque form or our own good claret, whichever is desired. I am most reluctant to go to press without your voice, inimitable in its perception and its sagacity. For eighteen months Professor Hapgood received contributions from Europe, America, Japan and the antipodes. Later, demands for reimbursement became abusive.

‘I didn’t know Ormston in his youth wanted to be a cabinet-maker,’ the classicist remarks. ‘It said that in one of them this morning.’

‘Affectionately, though,’ the Master hurriedly interjects. ‘The point was affectionately made.’

‘Oh yes, affectionately.’

Historians and philosophers and breezy sociologists, promoters of literature and language, of medieval lore and the Internet, they stand about and talk or do not talk. In different ways the diversion draws them from their shells, even those who have decided that comment on any matter can be a giveaway. Some wonder about the absent victim, others about his younger wife — a flibbertigibbet in Triller’s view, the price you pay for beauty. To McMoran it seems like fate’s small revenge that Ormston should be struck down before his time: his own wife has long ago given in to dowdiness and fat.

At twenty-five past twelve there is a lull in the drawing-room conversations, occurring as if for a reason, although there isn’t one. For a moment only Quicke’s rather high voice can be heard, repeating to someone else that Ormston is a man of humour. A snigger is inadequately suppressed.

‘My dear, there are empty glasses,’ the Master’s wife murmurs in her husband’s ear.

As he looks about him, wondering where he left the decanter, the conversational lull seems not to have been adventitious after all, but a portent. The doorbell sounds. Professor Ormston has come at last.

*

Someone once said — the precise source of a much-repeated observation long ago lost — that in her heyday Vanessa Ormston’s beauty recalled Marilyn Monroe’s. Over the years, inevitably has come the riposte that she still possesses the film star’s brain. Photographs show a smiling girl with bright fair hair, slender to the point of slightness, her features lit with the delicate beauty of a child. At forty-eight — younger by sixteen years than her husband — she seems thin rather than slender and has retained her beauty to the same degree that the flowers she presses between the leaves of books have. Ormston’s wife — as she is often designated among her husband’s colleagues — has a passion for flowers. Significance has been found in her preservation of blooms beyond their prime, the venom of envy spilt a little in college cloisters or at High Table.

Very early on the morning of the Master’s sherry do — that racy term racily approved in academe — Vanessa read the obituary of her husband, whom ten minutes ago she had left alive in the twin bed next to hers. Arrested by the grainy photograph — head and shoulders, caught at Commencements five years ago — her instinct was to hurry upstairs to make sure everything was all right, that time had not played tricks on her. Was it somehow another day? Had amnesia kindly erased the facts of tragedy? But then she heard her husband’s footfall and his early-morning cough. Mistily, she read — a revelation — that he was well loved by his students. She read that he was ‘distinguished in his small world’ and knew he would not care for that. None of them recognized that his world was small.

The electric kettle came to the boil while Vanessa read on; and then, alarmed anew, she hurried upstairs. He was propped up on his pillows after his brief absence from the bed, what showed of him almost a replica of the photographed head and shoulders on the fawn Formica surface of the kitchen table. ‘Won’t be a tick,’ she managed to get out and hurried off again to make their seven o’clock tea, the tray prepared the night before, gingersnap biscuits in the round tin with ‘The Hay Wain’ on it. The newspaper should accompany all this, his turn to scan it then.

Vanessa lost her head, as in difficult moments she tended to. She could not possibly hand the paper to him and wait for him to arrive at his recorded death. His companions on the page — no doubt correctly there — were a backing singer of a pop group, a bishop, born in Stockport, and a lieutenant colonel. Professor A. R. Ormston, it said, the space allocated to him less than that of the others, less particularly than the backing singer’s. The bishop’s photograph was small, but generous text made up for that; the lieutenant colonel married Anne Nancy Truster-Ede in 1931 and lost an arm in Cyprus. Gazing at his soldier’s brave old eyes and the bishop’s murky likeness, the raddled babyface of the singer, metal suspended from lobe and nostril, Vanessa again said to herself that she could not possibly commit this cruelty. Being crammed into what space remained was horrible.

The obituaries were on the inside of the last page. There had been a time when the paperboy jammed the paper into the letter-box, tearing that page quite badly. Please leave the newspapers on the window-sill, her husband had instructed on a square of cardboard which he suspended from the brass hall-door handle. He kept the square of cardboard by him, displaying it each time the paperboy changed.

Vanessa tore the bottom of the page and bundled away what she could not bring herself to reveal. She dropped the ball of paper into the waste-bucket beneath the sink, pushing it well down, under potato peelings and a soup tin. Then she carried the tray upstairs.

‘We need to hang out your notice again,’ she said, pouring tea and adding milk. ‘It’s a different boy.’

‘What boy’s that, dear?’

‘The one with the papers.’

What on earth else could I do? she wildly asked herself, dipping a gingersnap into her tea. She had needed time to think, but now that she had it could think of nothing. Her worried features, private behind the cover of the magazine that had been delivered also, were a blankness that filled eventually with a consideration of the consequences of her subterfuge. It did not occur to her that this was anything but an error in a single newspaper. More on her mind was that her protection could not possibly last, that when the moment of truth arrived no explanation could soften the harshness of an obituarist’s mistake. She might have tried to speak, to lead on gently to a confession, but still she could not.

‘Whatever’s a stealth fighter?’ came an enquiry from the other bed, the question answered almost as soon as it was asked. An F117 Stealth Fighter was an aeroplane, she was told, and also told that there was going to be trouble with the postal unions, and then that there was not much news today. ‘Oh, little do you know!’ her own voice cried, though only to herself. She turned the pages of her magazine, seeing nothing of them. Her desperation misled her: friends and colleagues would rally round in humane conspiracy, their instinct to protect, as hers had been. When letters arrived from those who could not know the truth she would reply, explaining. They would, in the nature of things, be addressed to her. That some undergraduate, when the new term began, might say, ‘Sir, surely you are dead?’ did not enter Vanessa’s bewildered thoughts. He was well loved by his students, after all. They, too, would surely respect his dignity.

But minutes later, when Professor Ormston’s wife stood in the bedroom with her dressing-gown and nightdress slipped off, the moment before her underclothes every morning felt cold on her skin, she knew she had again done the wrong thing, as so often she had in her marriage and in her life. And as so often also, she had compounded it by creating an unreal wonderland: they would take pleasure, all of them, in this amusement.

‘What shall today bring?’ the Professor wondered from his bed, words familiar in the bedroom at this time.

She thought to tell him then. She could have gone to him half dressed, and offered consolation with her young wife’s body. ‘I am ridiculous,’ instead her own voice echoed, soundless in the room, ridiculous because she did not have the courage to cause pain.

She boiled his egg and made his toast. She heated milk for their coffee. To come were the leisurely hours of this Saturday morning, while still he would not know. And hopelessly again she wondered why, for once, it should not be different, why at the Master’s sherry do they should not be merciful.

*

‘This matter shall be dealt with,’ is the Master’s greeting. ‘Have no doubt on that score.’

He says no more, only nods through what he takes to be Ormston’s embarrassment but is, in fact, bewilderment. It seems to the Master that Ormston intends to ride the storm, disdaining comment. And in that, of course, he must be honoured. ‘Is this what’s called insouciance?’ McMoran mutters, struck also by Ormston’s calm.

Alone in a corner a medievalist, Kellfittard, regards Ormston with a distaste that reaches into hatred. ‘The Quicke and the dead,’ Kellfittard hears coming from his left when for a moment the man declared to be no longer alive is in the company of the pinkly corduroyed professor. Kellfittard cares for neither of them, but has more reason to dislike the one he imagined until an hour ago had left his wife a widow. Kellfittard’s bachelor status has everything to do with Vanessa Ormston, who is of an age with him and wasted, so he believes, on a dry old man. Dry himself, he is one of the professors who are economical with their utterances, an inclination in him that played against his chances where Vanessa was concerned, allowing his rival to get in first. Hours ago in his cheerless college rooms he gazed in disbelief and wonder, and then in pure delight, at the likeness on the obituary page, went out to buy the three other newspapers he guessed might carry the same happy tidings, and there they were. Fantasies began at once: theatre visits with Vanessa Ormston, quiet dinners at The Osteria, a discreet weekend, and in Salzburg before the autumn term began the honeymoon that should have taken place years ago. It wasn’t until he arrived at the Master’s house that Kellfittard realized some prankster had been at work.

Quicke’s donkey roar reaches him in his corner. It mocks him, as the faces all around him do — McMoran’s wizened, Linderfoot’s a blob of fat, the one that has been to the Karakoram foothills sunburnt, Wirich’s beaky, the Master’s square and heavy, Triller’s long and tidy. Kellfittard himself shares with the man who nineteen years ago snatched beauty from him a pallor without a trace of pink, and rimless spectacles. Both men are grey-haired; both are sparely made. In the course of his morning’s thoughts it seemed rational to Kellfittard that, in marrying again, a wife would choose, the second time, a physical repetition. Though in no other way, those same thoughts adamantly insisted, was there a similarity.

‘Impossible to know how it was done. One of our names taken in vain, I have no doubt.’

It is Linderfoot who makes that pronouncement, approaching Kellfittard in his chummy way. What Linderfoot maintains — idiotically, it seems to Kellfittard — is that some undergraduate has simply acted a part on the telephone, proffering the news of a professor’s death.

‘Your name or mine,’ Linderfoot presses, ‘would seem to have been enough.’

‘No,’ another man joins in to say. ‘That would not have been enough.’

‘Then what?’ Linderfoot purses his big lips as if to whistle, his habit when a conversation palls. The man who has butted in says:

‘This was done from within a news agency. It must have been.’

‘A news agency?’

‘One of Ormston’s old students. Forgiveness does not come cheaply always.’

‘But Ormston —’

‘We all offend.’

‘Ormston appears to be pretending it hasn’t happened.’ Kellfittard breaks his silence with that. He does not say he rejoiced to know the man was dead. He does not believe that he himself in any way offends his students, but he keeps that back also.

‘Extraordinary,’ Linderfoot interjects, pursing his lips again. ‘Extraordinary.’

It is known to the others, but not to Linderfoot — who takes no interest in such matters — that Kellfittard feels he should have married Vanessa Ormston, that he has married no one else because a passion has lingered. It’s understandable, in Linderfoot’s opinion, that Ormston should choose to ignore the embarrassment of what has happened to him. He blunders about the room, seeking other conversations, unaware of the prevailing disappointment that Ormston has not appeared among them a broken man, that there has been this anticlimax.

‘An inside job,’ Quicke remarks eventually, determined to exact something from the let-down. Leaving the house with Ormston, he offers his opinion as they make their way on the Master’s wide garden path. ‘On the media front, an inside job, so they are saying now.’

He touches one nostril and then the other with a red spotted handkerchief, causing Ormston to look away. Quicke’s manner implies particular comradeship between the two, a lowered tone suggests concern. The comradeship does not exist, the concern’s unreal.

‘What are you talking about?’ Ormston asks and in a roundabout way, the information larded with commiseration, he learns of what has occurred.

*

Passing on his left the grey-brown stone of porters’ lodge and deeply recessed library windows, Ormston remembers the torn back page of his morning paper. The face of the pop-group singer, which briefly he glanced at, is as briefly repeated in his recall. What was missing from that page was what was left hanging when the Master said the matter would be dealt with. The Master’s wife was awkward in her greeting, McMoran smug. Triller’s vague air disguised something else; Wirich stared; Linderfoot was excited; Kellfittard looked the other way. Every one of them knows.

As others already have, Ormston knits together an explanation that is similar to theirs except in detail. When he was young himself an unpopular Senior Dean suffered the indignity of being approached by a police constable, following information that confused his identity with a draper’s elderly assistant who hung around public lavatories. A youth called Tottle was sent down for that; and Ibbs and Churchman suffered the same fate less than a term later for stealing the Master’s clothing, confining him miserably when he should have been delivering the Hardiman lecture in the presence of a member of the Royal Family. All one year there’d been a spate of that kind of thing, chamber pots on spires, false charges laid, old Purser’s bicycle dismantled more than a dozen times.

Why should he be a victim now? He is not arrogant that he’s aware of, or aloof among his students; he does not seek to put them in their place. Lacking the ambition of his colleagues, he is a scholar as scholars used to be, learned in an old-fashioned sense. Has all this jarred and irritated without his knowing? Still walking slowly, Professor Ormston shakes his head. He is not a fool, of course he would have sensed unpopularity.

Noticing the green and black hanging sign of the St Boniface public house, he considers entering it and a moment later does so instead of passing by. He has rarely in his life been in a public house, maybe a dozen times in all, he estimates as the swing doors close behind him. Blue plush banquettes along the walls are marked with cigarette burns, as are the low tables arranged in front of them, each with a glass ashtray advertising a brand of beer and small round mats bearing similar insignia. Unwashed glasses have been collected and are still on trays; busy ten minutes ago with Saturday-morning trade, the place is empty now.

‘Sir?’ a man behind the bar greets Professor Ormston, looking up from a plate of minced meat with a topping of potato.

‘Might I have a glass of whisky?’

‘You could of course, sir.’

Warmly steaming, smeared with tomato sauce, the food smells of the grease it has been cooked in. On a radio somewhere a disc jockey is gabbling incomprehensibly.

‘Would I make that a double, sir?’

As if aware that his customer is unused to public-house measures, the barman holds the glass up to display how little whisky there is in it.

‘Yes, please do.’

‘Decent enough bit of weather.’

‘Yes, it is.’

‘There you go, sir.’

‘Thanks.’

He pays and takes the drink to one of the tables by the windows. ‘Kind,’ was how Quicke put it; all four obituarists were kind in Quicke’s opinion. ‘Quite right, of course.’ And he was able to nod, not up to pretending aloud that yes, the notices were kind enough. A dare, Quicke said, young men have dares. They think up these things and the one who is eventually in a position to do so sees something through. A bet it might have been, and probably was. There’d be apologies from all four editors, Quicke was certain about that.

A child appears behind the bar, only the top of her head visible. The man tells her to go away, but then he reaches for a glass and pours a Pepsi Cola into it while continuing to eat. He tells the girl she’ll be the ruin of him.

‘This’ll make me drunk,’ Professor Ormston tells himself, whisky on top of Tio Pepe before lunch. And yet he wants to stay here. The newspaper beside the trays of unwashed glasses on the bar is not the kind that has obituaries. Again the torn page stirs in his recall, only half of the backing singer there, the name of the army colonel not known to him, as the bishop’s wasn’t either. Of course a popular entertainer took precedence. The way things are these days, that stands to reason.

‘I’m sorry,’ he says at the bar after he has sat for a while longer, apologizing because the man hasn’t finished his food. But the man is cheerful, Irish by the sound of him. Professor Ormston has read somewhere that the Irish make good publicans, a touch of the blarney not out of place.

‘Sure, and what am I here for, sir? Wouldn’t I be negligent to eat me dinner with a man going thirsty?’

‘Thank you so much.’

He carries the replenished glass back to where he has been sitting. Survived by his wife, Vanessa. It would have said that, Vanessa mentioned once. No children, acquaintances of long ago would notice. And students who did not know he’d ever married would be surprised, he not being the sort, they might in their day have assumed. When they took her on as secretary in the department there had hardly been enough work to justify it and she was bored at first, until it was suggested she should be shared with McMoran. When she left, three years ago, it was because she didn’t like McMoran.

She has done what she thought best. He knows that in her; and sipping more whisky, he tries to understand. Apart altogether from McMoran’s spikiness, she had never been happy in the department, as later she confessed. ‘You think this girl’s up to it?’ he asked when they first considered her, not even noticing her beauty then. This city, not a human attribute, was what he’d thought of when he thought of beauty, the grey-brown columns and façades, carved figures in their niches, the lamplight coming on in winter. Seven hours have passed, he calculates: she came up with the tea and gingersnaps, prevaricating although prevarication does not come naturally to her.

Another man comes in, who doesn’t have to order what he wants. The barman knows and pours a bottle of Adnams’ beer. ‘Floating Voter,’ the barman says. ‘You’ll get him at nines.’

The others kept it to themselves when she left the department, unable to criticize her because she was his wife. McMoran muttered something, feeling more let down because he had relied on her more, but what he said wasn’t audible. It doesn’t interest any of them that she is happier now, that she has given her life up to her flowers and to her hospital charity work, amusing children while they wait on cystic-fibrosis days, or children undergoing leukaemia treatment, or hole-in-the heart children. ‘I don’t know how she does it,’ he might have said, but never has because they wouldn’t be interested in the charity work of someone’s wife. She wanted children; he could not give her them.

The trawl through his life that she has withheld from him would not, of course, record that. Nor would it touch upon his occasional testiness, his cold appraisal of examination answers, the orderly precision that enhances his work and affects him as a husband, the melancholy that comes from nowhere. Other human-interest decoration might enliven a drab account, with liberties taken for the casual reader. His wife was younger by sixteen years most certainly would not be written. Nor as lovely in her day as Marilyn Monroe.

The whisky has dried his mouth. In the Master’s drawing-room he would have seemed a figure of silliness, not saying anything: those of them who have wives would now be passing that across their lunch tables. They’d be amused to know that he is surreptitiously drinking in a public house.

*

The house is silent. Wintry sunshine dwindles in the kitchen, on the places laid at the oval table, each of the two plates of tongue covered with another plate, for the sun has made the window a haven for the last of autumn’s flies. A salad, the oil and vinegar dressing not yet added, is covered also.

Whoever the perpetrators are, Vanessa feels she belongs with them, that she has added something to their cruelty. ‘I couldn’t think, I didn’t know what I was doing’: all that is ready, and has been for longer than the food she has prepared. ‘Panic,’ she must also say, for that word belongs. ‘I went all blank.’ No need to say a wife should have the courage to bear bad news.

He’ll know because it will, of course, have all come out; and then he’ll see her reddened eyes and know the rest as well. A nest of vipers the Master and his simpering wife gather round them on these occasions. Who has a chance in a nest of vipers?

‘My God!’ Vanessa’s mother exclaimed in open horror when, nineteen years ago almost to the month, she learned of her daughter’s engagement to a fusty academic who was just old enough to be her father. ‘My God!’ she said again after their first encounter, when Vanessa brought him for the weekend to her mother’s flat. ‘Has he money?’ she asked, unable to find some other reason for what she termed an unattractive marriage. ‘Just what he earns,’ Vanessa replied, and two months later married him.

His key turns in the hall-door Yale. While waiting for him, it has occurred to Vanessa that there would be the other newspapers. She has imagined him in a newsagent’s, giving the right money because he likes to if he can, taking the papers to where he can peruse them undisturbed.

The hall door bangs softly; he does not call her name. There’s the pause that means he’s hanging up his overcoat and scarf, the papers placed on the table beneath the picture of a café scene. There are his footsteps then.

‘I have to tell you,’ her husband says, ‘that I believe I’m drunk.’

His voice is quiet, the words not slurred. He does not look drunk; he is the same. He doesn’t smile, but then he often doesn’t when he comes in. ‘A sobersides,’ her mother said. ‘Wizened,’ she added, although that wasn’t true.

‘I looked in at the St Boniface,’ he says. ‘Understandably, I believe.’

‘I’m awfully sorry.’

‘Oh Lord, it’s not your fault.’

‘I —’

‘I know, I know.’

‘I couldn’t think.’

‘I couldn’t when I heard, myself.’

‘They mentioned it?’

‘Quicke couldn’t resist a little mention. It didn’t matter. Sooner or later someone would.’

‘Yes.’

‘The culprits will be exposed, the Master’s view is. Of course he’s wrong.’

‘You don’t seem drunk in the least.’ Relief has slipped through Vanessa during these exchanges. For a reason that is obscure to her, and for the first time since she turned the pages of the newspaper while waiting for the early-morning kettle to boil, she feels that nothing is as terrible as it seemed in those awful moments.

‘To the best of my knowledge I have never in my life been drunk before. The man poured three double whiskies, and that on top of sherry.’

She lifts the plates that cover their cold meat. She stirs the oil and vinegar, shakes the salad about when she has added a few spoonfuls, then pours on the rest. Perhaps they’ll go away, Vanessa’s thought is, perhaps he’ll take an early retirement, as one of them so unexpectedly did last year. She’d pack up at once, she wouldn’t hesitate. Liguria, or Sansepolcro, where his favourite paintings are. Hers, too, they have become. ‘I could live here happily,’ he has said, over coffee in Sansepolcro.

‘I can tell you how this has happened,’ he says. ‘If you would care to know.’

‘Panic,’ she begins to say, and ceases when he shakes his head, grey hair as smooth as a helmet.

‘An act of compassion,’ he corrects.

‘But it was stupid. To try to suppress what cannot be suppressed —’

‘Why cannot an act of compassion be a stupid one? I can tell you,’ he repeats exactly, ‘how this has happened. If you would care to know.’

‘Some horrid, wretched student.’

‘I am not the sort to inspire a grudge. I am too shadowy and grey, too undramatic. I annoy too little, I do not attack.’

She watches the buttering of a piece of baguette, the knife laid down, the meticulous loading of tongue and salad on to a fork, the smear of mustard. She pours his coffee; he likes it with his food at this time of day, with French bread in particular, he has often said. My God, Vanessa thinks, it might be true. He might not be here now.

‘Imagine Kellfittard opening his paper this morning. Imagine his happy hour or two.’

For a moment she is confused, thinking he means Kellfittard is responsible for this. He says, ‘And then the rug pulled out from under him. Generations have suffered from Kellfittard’s wit. It passes for that, you know. So much we fusties say passes for wit.’

‘But you —’

‘They would not mind about me. Whoever they are who got this going would not think twice about reaping me in before I’m due. What’s famous here is Kellfittard’s abiding passion for someone else’s wife.’

The last time Kellfittard stopped to talk to her yesterday’s garlic was on his breath. Stopping to talk to her has always been his ploy, and smiling in a secretive way — as if, by doing so, secrets are created.

‘Fall-guy, do they call it?’ she hears her husband say. ‘I am the fall-guy.’

He has winkled out the truth, sitting in the public house he gave the name of, which she has often passed. The truth doesn’t make much difference, and certainly is no consolation. Yet for her older husband it had to be established, if only because it’s there somewhere. Students who are no longer students have got their own back. He is an incidental figure, and so is she.

‘Well, that is that,’ he says. ‘Four notices in all, Quicke said. Space to spare on a Saturday.’

‘There will be letters.’

‘Oh, and apologies will be printed. So Quicke says too.’

Something in his tone, or in what he has said, causes her to realize that she was wrong when she imagined him buying the newspapers. He has not done so. He asks about the coffee and she says Kenya.

He nods. The coffee’s good, he says. The other matter’s over, he does not add, but Vanessa knows it is. Once Kellfittard gave her a box of chocolates, Bendicks’ Peppermints because he knew she liked them. ‘I bought these by mistake,’ he said, the lie so damaging the gesture that the gesture lost its point. It would have been silly not to accept them.

‘Linderfoot’s put on another stone, I’d say. How fortunate the wives are to be left at home!’

His wisdom was what she loved when first she loved him, when she was still a girl. She called it that, though only to herself. Not brains, they all had brains. Not skill. Not knowing everything, for they knew less than they imagined. His wisdom is almost indefinable, what a roadworker might have, a cinema usher or a clergyman, or a child. Her mother would not understand, and he himself would deny that he is wise. Of course the papers are not on the hall table; of course he hasn’t read a word — the subtle slights wrapped up as worthiness, and qualities he did not possess made his because it is the thing to do, all of valediction’s clichés.

‘No, no, a blunder,’ she hears him say when the telephone rings, the first time it has today, the house of mourning left to itself until this moment. ‘No, most ridiculous,’ he says. ‘I’m sorry if I startled you.’

He laughs, replacing the receiver, and Vanessa does not say she loves him, although she wants to. Absurd, to have thought of hiding away in Italy, packing everything up, leaving for ever his beautiful city just because they have been involved in someone else’s hoax.

He has worn the better of the two, Vanessa reflects. Age in his features was always there; her beauty loses a little every day. ‘I love your wisdom,’ she wants to say, but still is shy to use that word, fearing a display of her naïvety would make her foolish.

‘My dear,’ he murmurs in the calmness they have reached, and holds her as he did the day he first confessed his adoration. It is the wedding of their differences that protects them, steadfast in the debris of the storm.