I wondered if Professor Cousins was as old as he looked. I was a kind of magnet to old people – at bus-stops and in shop queues they flocked around me, desperate to chat about bus timetables and weather. Andrea, who was frightened of old people (in case she became one, one day, I suppose), said that every time she looked at a baby she thought that one day that baby would be an old person. Personally, I prefer to look at an old person and remember they were once someone’s baby. Perhaps there are two personality types (a half-full, half-empty kind of thing), on the one hand the people who can discern traces of the baby in the senescent and, on the other hand, the depressives that look at the fresh baby and see the demented old crone.
~
Wise, Nora amends, wise old crone.
Archie was beginning to get a slightly mad look in his eye. The overheated room and the number of people in it were making him increasingly dishevelled – he had loosened his tie and unbuttoned his collar and the damp patches of sweat were spreading further and further across his chest like two oceans determined on confluence.
‘
. . . or as the transition from one existent to another, from a signifier to a signified . . .
’
‘Excuse me, Archie,’ Professor Cousins was waving his hand around in the air to catch Archie’s eye.
‘Yes?’ Archie said stoically.
‘Could you just go back a bit,’ Professor Cousins said genially. ‘I seem to be losing the thread of all this. I’m afraid –’ he turned to Archie’s students with a conspiratorial smile – ‘I’m afraid I don’t have Dr McCue’s brilliant mind.’
Archie trundled his chair across the carpet, a mode of locomotion that made him resemble a particularly inept Dalek, but then stopped abruptly in front of the Professor and started doing strange breathing exercises, presumably to calm himself down, although he gave the impression of someone who was trying to inflate himself.
‘Realism,’ Martha intervened patiently on Archie’s behalf, speaking very loudly and slowly to Professor Cousins, ‘Dr McCue’s talking about realism.’
‘Ah,’ Professor Cousins smiled at Martha, ‘Trollope!’
Archie retreated back across the brown contract carpeting and snapped, ‘
The mimetic form can no longer convince us of its validity in the post-industrial age, true or false?
Someone? Anyone? Kevin?’
Kevin shook his head miserably at the wall.
‘Effie?’
‘Well, I suppose these days,’ I said, wriggling uncomfortably in my chair, ‘there’s an epistemological shift in fiction-writing, whereby second-order verisimilitude won’t suffice any more when trying to form a transcendentally coherent view of the world.’ I had absolutely no idea what I was talking about, but Archie seemed to.
‘That seems to imply that achieving a transcendentally coherent view of the world might still be a good thing, doesn’t it? Anybody?’ There was another knock on the door.
‘It’s like Waterloo Station in here,’ Professor Cousins said cheerfully. ‘I don’t know when you get any teaching done, Archie.’ Archie gave him a doubtful look. Professor Cousins may be on his way out but he hadn’t gone yet and still had hiring and firing power. The knock on the door was repeated.
‘Come in,’ Archie said querulously. The candle wavered and flickered wildly.
‘Oh, it’s you,’ he said to—
I can hardly sleep because of the unearthly yawling and yowling of the feral cats, like feline banshees. They have startled me awake most nights since I arrived – dropped off by a passing friendly fishing-boat, the owner of which regretted that he could not return for me because the island was full of strange noises that made him ‘feart’. He was not to be persuaded that they were merely Siamese cats gone horribly wrong.
I am convalescing. I have been sick with a virus, a strange influenza that has left me as weak as a kindle of kittens. I have come here to recuperate although, sadly, my atavistic mother’s island does not provide the usual invalid comforts – warm bedrooms, soft blankets, coddled eggs, tinned soup, and so on – but I must make do, for Nora is all I have.
Nora herself washed up here a couple of years ago, in her little boat, the
Sea-Adventure
. She lives like a castaway in the ‘big house’, which is indeed bigger than all the other ruined crofts and roofless cottages that litter the island, themselves slowly eroding into landscape like the ruins of a Minoan palace. Nora says that her great-grandfather had the house built in the last century, imagining that generations of Stuart-Murrays, stretching out to the crack of doom, would wish to vacation here.
The house gives the impression of having been abandoned suddenly, in anticipation of some great disaster. Set up on the hill overlooking the Sound, and beyond that to the wide Atlantic, the winter winds are so fierce here that they cast up pebbles from the beach to rattle and knock against the windows, as if the ghosts of homesick mariners are asking to be let in.
The house is falling down around our ears. A house that was once grand and orderly is now reduced to little more than a stone shell. The roof leaks dreadfully so you cannot move for falling over old galvanized buckets of rainwater. The sandstone of the sills has been worn away by the sea air, the floorboards are rotten and the main staircase so eaten by worm and fly that you must walk at the edge of the stair for fear of falling right through to the mosaic-tiled floor of the hall below.
The house still has its heavy, moth-eaten drapes and cold, fireless grates, the big Belfast sinks, the monstrous Eagle cast-iron range, the Glass Queen washboards and a full set of bells for summoning servants who have long since ceased to respond. The walls are hung with gloomy oil-paintings, so in need of cleaning that you can barely make out the stags and liver-spotted spaniels and heathery vistas that form their subjects. There is even a plant that has survived, a dry old palm with papery brown leaves, struggling on from another era without benefit of water or warmth.
The house is full of the mouldering relics of a more complex, more opulent life – the huge silk umbrellas like marquees that rot in the outsized yellow dragon Chinese vases in the vestibule, the complicated deckchairs with canopies and footrests whose green canvas is worn so pale and thin that they can barely take the weight of a field mouse. In cupboards and trunks and outhouses there lurk decaying galoshes, sou’westers and rubberized macs, ancient shotguns and fishing-rods and nets. On disintegrating dressing-tables the bristles of enamel-backed brushes have caught the hair of people who are all now dead.
The cellar appears to have been used as a storehouse for the whole island and contains cargoes of mysterious objects – lengths of net and twine, old fish boxes and lobster pots, racing-pigeon hampers, shrivelled seed potatoes and, perhaps strangest of all, the figurehead from the prow of an old sailing-ship – a seafaring sailor’s fantasy of a mermaid, with yellow hair and naked torso, she must have once flown beneath the bowsprit of some brave ship, her breasts jutting into the winds and her mad blue eyes looking on the wonders of the world – the Baltic ice and London fog, the tempests of the Capes, the soft yellow sands of the Pacific and the strange savages of Bermuda.
Everything is turning to dust before our eyes. Nothing escapes the hand of time, neither the cities of the Sumerian plain nor the holiday home of our ancestors.
Nora makes a supper of groats and curly kale. She lives like a peasant. But under the skin I suppose we are all peasants.
~ No, no, no, Nora says, striking her breastbone savagely, we are all kings and queens.
~ And now, she says, yawning – in what I consider to be a rather theatrical way – I’m going to go and get some sleep. Carry on without me, why don’t you.
‘Come in, why don’t you,’ Archie said, ‘everyone else has.’
Watson Grant was one of the no-hope challengers for the departmental crown. His speciality was Scottish Studies, a strangely old-fashioned subject which occupied a country somewhere between Brigadoon and the White Heather Club, a landscape of burns and banks and braes where people danced strathspeys and reels while Moira Anderson and Kenneth McKellar sang duets in the background. Martha Sewell would have understood this version of Scotland.
Grant Watson always wore a Harris tweed jacket and came from somewhere remote that either began with ‘Inver’ or ended in ‘ness’ and was strangely asexual, like a mole, although he did have a wife and two children tucked away in Fife somewhere. He was a keen hill-walker, sometimes even turning up to teach in his clumpy leather walking-boots, still caked in Monro mud, as if there was something virtuous about climbing a hill when you didn’t need to.
Professor Cousins contributed to Watson Grant’s usual air of nervousness by shooing him away with a good-natured smile and an absurd attempt at a Scottish accent, ‘Ochhhh,’ he said, as if trying to cough up a gobbet of phlegm, ‘awa’ ye gae, ma guid man.’ Grant Watson hovered uncertainly on the threshold of Archie’s room, not wanting to stay but not wanting to go either – in case Professor Cousins’ presence there signalled an inclination towards bequeathing Archie his regalia. His little jog of indecisiveness was halted abruptly by Archie saying, ‘The toilet’s down the other end of the corridor.’ He was saved from finding a reply by the bell which rang to signal the end of the hour.
Archie ignored the bell and continued talking but everyone stopped listening and started worming their way free of the hard plastic chairs. For a deluded second I thought I saw the flimsy form of The Boy With No Name spiralling like smoke out of his chair. I blinked and there was nothing there but the greasy soot of the guttering candle at the window.
Archie suddenly loomed over me, his bloated Zeppelin figure blocking out what little light there was. I thought for sure he was going to say something about the whereabouts of my dissertation but he just frowned vaguely at the garbled notes I’d been taking and said, ‘Can you babysit for us tonight?’ I agreed in a half-hearted kind of way; the non-existent
Man or Maze
put me in a difficult position
vis-à-vis
Archie. I just hoped he wouldn’t start wanting to barter sexual favours instead of babysitting ones.
I helped Professor Cousins extricate himself from his chair. Everyone was slightly stir-crazy by this time and heading for the door like passengers evacuating an aircraft on fire. I had to reach out and grab at the worn brown corduroy of Professor Cousins’ jacket to prevent him being swept away by the stream of students leaving the room in full spate.
Working his way upstream I spotted Martha’s husband, Jay Sewell. He was a tall man with a big jaw and a shock of silver hair which Martha thought ‘leonine’ but which no lion in its right mind would envy. Jay had the manners and demeanour of a southern plantation owner and did indeed originate in the deep south, a fact that Martha seemed to find both politically challenging and sexually attractive.
Jay Sewell greeted Professor Cousins but ignored the students as if they were a lesser life form. He greeted Martha with a cool kiss on the cheek and said that he had Buddy in the car and that he’d been sick all morning.
‘Oh, poor baby,’ Martha said. I was eager to hear more about Buddy (A dog? A child? A friend? A dead rock and roll legend?), but Jay closed the door and Professor Cousins and I were shut out in the murky corridor.
‘Where now?’ he asked me cheerfully.
‘Well,
I
have to go and write an essay about George Eliot,’ I said, the very idea making me feel as weary as an inhabitant of Hades, ‘but you don’t. You’re not a student,’ I reminded him. ‘You can do what you want.’
Professor Cousins frowned and said, ‘Well, only within certain social, physical and ethical parameters,’ a surprisingly coherent statement, only slightly undermined by a sudden lunatic outbreak of tap dancing from his feet. ‘I dreamt of going on the stage once,’ he said, looking crestfallen.
‘It’s never too late,’ I said vaguely. A lie, of course, as often, unfortunately, it is much too late.
We navigated the Stygian gloom of the corridor arm in arm like a quaint, old-fashioned couple. Professor Cousins was very polite, always scurrying to get on the outside of women on pavements (in case they were knocked flying into the road by a hansom-cab presumably), proffering seats and opening doors and generally treating the female sex as if we were very delicate and made of glass, or something equally fragile and breakable, which, of course, we are, for we are made of bones and flesh.
His gentlemanly presence was rather reassuring especially as the doghairs on the back of my neck were standing to attention. Perhaps it was The Boy With No Name, lurking around his old haunts.
‘Oh, we’re all being watched,’ Professor Cousins said blithely. ‘We just don’t know it.’
Archie, of course, had long held the conviction that Special Branch were watching him, although he never elucidated why that should be so. (‘Perhaps because he’s special,’ Andrea said in one of her less intelligent moments.)
‘Oh yes, but Archie’s mad,’ Professor Cousins said cheerfully. ‘We’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.’
‘How do you know I’m mad?’
‘You must be,’ Professor Cousins said, ‘or you wouldn’t have come here.’
Professor Cousins’ room was at the other end of the English department corridor – always a perilous place fraught with danger but infinitely more so these days as the struggle for succession hotted up. Getting from one end of the corridor to the other was rather like being on a Ghost Train, ducking the spooks and spectres as they jumped out unexpectedly trying to frighten you.
Today, however, they all seemed to be absent. Dr Dick’s door was firmly closed, while Maggie Mackenzie’s was wide open as if to show she had nothing to be ashamed of although she herself was missing. Watson Grant seemed to have left the building. I was held captive by Professor Cousins’ ancient mariner anecdotage as he embarked on a rambling story about his days as a spry young doctoral student at Cambridge and some girl he had seduced at a May Ball long ago, so that we didn’t notice Maggie Mackenzie storming through the Murk, as thrawn as a Fury, until she was almost upon us.
Her shapeless, funebral garments billowed and her kirby grips scattered as she progressed. Maggie Mackenzie’s long iron-grey hair began each day anchored or plaited or rolled in a variety of vaguely Victorian styles but by lunchtime it had begun to work its way free of restraints and encumbrances and by mid-afternoon she had the appearance of someone leading a tribe of ancient Britons into battle, a gnarled warrior queen bearing grudges.
‘Dr Mackenzie, Maggie.’ Professor Cousins nodded pleasantly at her. She glared back at him. Maggie Mackenzie, who taught the nineteenth-century novel (
Why Women Write
) harboured a bitter resentment against the male of the species, resentment precipitated by her ex-husband, also a Dr Mackenzie, for reasons which she never spoke about because ‘some things went beyond language’.
‘I believe you owe me an essay?’ she said to me tersely by way of greeting, and added, ‘Where
is
your George Eliot?’ in a way that suggested there might be several George Eliots wandering the world and that I was the owner of one of them.
‘I left it at home,’ (or perhaps ‘I left her at home’), I said with a helpless shrug at the way life was an entity apparently beyond my control.
Dr Dick opened the door of his room suddenly as if he was trying to catch someone out. He frowned when he saw the three of us and gave the impression that he would have liked to give us lines for loitering near his territory. Dr Dick, whose speciality was the eighteenth century (
1709–1821 – Rhyme or Reason?
), believed he should be made head of department because he was the only person in it who could construct a timetable properly. He was probably right.
Beardless and rather weedy, Dr Dick was a tall, anaemic-looking man who gave the impression of someone who had outgrown his strength. He was a peculiar Anglo-Scots hybrid. His father had apparently come from the same strain as the great veterinary Dicks but his mother was from a less pedigree brand of Kentish haberdashers, and when the marriage failed she returned to the bosom of her family taking young Dr Dick with her, so although Edinburgh born, he was Canterbury bred. This cross-border fertilization had not, however, produced a more robust species.
At times, in fact, Dr Dick seemed more English than an Englishman. He had attended a minor Home Counties public school before progressing to Oxford, where he had helped to found a real ale society. He could recite, in his fruity accent, every member of the English cricket team since time began. (‘What a wanker,’ was Bob’s laconic verdict.)
Maggie Mackenzie and Dr Dick looked as if they were squaring up for a fight. I supposed that would be one way of deciding who should be head of department.
‘Hand-to-hand combat,’ Professor Cousins murmured in my ear. ‘It would save a lot of time, you know.’
Dr Dick backed down and turned his aggression on me. ‘Your essay’s late,’ he said curtly. ‘I want it immediately.’
Dr Dick was a man who revelled in his hypochondria, although he wanted to be head of department so much that it did seem to be making him sick. He forgot about me now, distracted by a sudden need to feel his pulse. ‘I think I’d better sit down for a while,’ he said limply and retreated to his room again.
‘The man’s perfectly idiotic,’ Maggie Mackenzie said and then turned to me and said irascibly, ‘Tomorrow will do for me. I want your George Eliot on my desk by five o’clock,’ she beetled her brows threateningly, ‘or else,’ and stomped off abruptly down the corridor.
‘Such a frightening woman,’ Professor Cousins said when she was out of hearing.
I was surprised that the university women’s liberation group hadn’t co-opted Maggie Mackenzie now that it had entered a new militant phase. Hitherto a peaceful refuge for students who wanted to drink coffee and moan about their boyfriends, the group had been hijacked recently by a girl called Heather, a junior honours politics student with a round face and owlish spectacles who was determined to teach us the finer points of dialectical materialism before she died, which was probably going to be sooner than she expected.
‘Well, well,’ Professor Cousins said, finally meandering to a halt at the door of his room. ‘I think I’ll have a little nap now. How about you?’
I was unsure as to whether he was asking me to join him in a nap or just generally enquiring about my plans; either way, I shook my head sadly and said, ‘I’ve got to go home and do some work.’
‘Give my regards to that boyfriend of yours.’
‘Bob?’
‘If that’s his name.’
Professor Cousins caught sight of Joan, the departmental secretary, a middle-aged, big-breasted woman fond of mohair so that I always had to stifle an instinct to go to sleep on her furry bosom. Professor Cousins made an elaborate pantomime of drinking a cup of tea and with a long-suffering sigh Joan went into the cupboard where she kept her kettle. For times of emergency – such as we were in – she had set up a little camping gas stove as well (which is probably how dreadful accidents happen).
‘Got to keep my strength up,’ Professor Cousins laughed. ‘Someone’s trying to kill me, you know.’
‘I’m sorry?’ I said, thinking I must have mis-heard, but he had shut the door of his room, although I could still hear him chuckling to himself on the other side of the flushed wooden door.