Selected Stories

The abbey was somewhere to the east, the pasture land ahead of him he had once walked. And closer, there was the hill on which so often he had watched over his father’s sheep. There was the stream along which the alders grew, their branches empty of leaves now. No flock grazed the slopes of the hill, nor were there geese in the orchard, nor pigs rooting beneath the beech tree. But the small stone farmhouse was hardly changed.

There was no sound when he went nearer, and he stood for a moment in the yard, glancing about him at the closed doors of the outside houses, at the well and the empty byre. Grass grew among the roughly hewn stones that cobbled the surface beneath his feet. Ragwort and nettles withered in a corner. A roof had fallen in.

They answered his knock and did not know him. They gave him bread and water, two decrepit people he would not have recognized had he met them somewhere else. The windows of their kitchen were stuffed with straw to keep the warmth in. The smoke from the hearth made them cough. Their clothes were rags.

‘It is Michael,’ suddenly she said.

His father, blind, reached out his hand, feeling in the air. ‘Michael,’ he said also.

There was elation in their faces, joy such as Michael had never seen in faces anywhere before. The years fell back from them, their eyes were lit again with vigour in their happiness. A single candle burned in celebration of the day, its grease congealed, holding it to the shelf above the hearth.

Their land would not again be tilled; he was not here for that. Geese would not cry again in the orchard, nor pigs grub beneath the beech trees. For much less, and yet for more, he had been disturbed in the contentment of his solitude. So often he had considered the butterflies of his rocky fastness his summer angels, but if there were winter angels also they were here now, formless and unseen. No choirs sang, there was no sudden splendour, only limbs racked by toil in a smoky hovel, a hand that blindly searched the air. Yet angels surely held the cobweb of this mercy, the gift of a son given again.

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, justa – 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.’