Selected Stories

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.