Selected Stories

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.