The first of several checks and frustrations experienced by Baines on this day was caused by the fact that there was no theatrical costumier in the town. He had to apply to the local repertory theatre, where, after a good deal of discussion, they agreed to let him hire a costume. There were no masks, but he was able to obtain dark glasses and a false moustache.
He returned to his room with a costume, left it there, and retrieved the brown carrier bag from its hiding place under his bed. When he left again he was carrying this. He was early for his appointment and since it was a warm sunny morning he decided to walk. In the High Street he was stopped by a girl rattling a famine-relief tin. She stuck a little blue flag in his lapel and gave him a pamphlet, with a picture of a naked, starving African woman on the cover. Baines thrust this into his pocket. He was beginning to feel anxious, now that the meeting with the man he knew of as Kirby was imminent.
The meeting-place was in the area of waste ground known locally as The Tips, which lay on the other side of town, beyond the railway station and the canal, a desolate hummocky area of considerable extent, full of hollows, sudden steep declivities and pits, combed with narrow clay paths that led nowhere except to intersections with other paths, or into tangled slopes of bramble and willowherb. The area owed its name to the fact that years previously many tons of earth and rubble had been dumped here and left. Now the mounds and slopes had settled, softened with vegetation, and the whole area had taken on an identity quite distinct and separate from any other part of the town. It was a refuge for vagrants and drinkers, who made little shelters for themselves in the remoter hollows, and a place of resort for all those who had no work to do, and for alienated or outcast people.
It was to this place, the ridge that ran along the upper part of it, where the clay was covered with rank glass, that Baines made his way, carrying his little brown bag, whistling between his teeth. Here the man named Kirby should be waiting for him just below the ridge where it levelled, where one could stand against the bankside, more or less screened from view. He did not know Kirby by sight but he would be wearing a white flower in his buttonhole – sufficiently unusual, it had been thought at Headquarters, to provide identification, given the coincidence of time and place. On a level area just before the ridge began, a thin, red-haired man was standing on a box addressing a small knot of listeners. ‘Oh my dear friends,’ Baines heard him say, ‘Jesus died on the cross for you.’
Baines went past with averted face. After some minutes he saw from above a man sitting against the bankside below the ridge. He made his way down the narrow path towards this person. When he drew near, the man turned his head and Baines found himself regarding a youngish, plump man with a white face and a soft-looking, unpleasantly vivid mouth. Some limp daises looked out of the top pocket of his stained and shabby blue suit. Could this be regarded as a button-hole? Baines wondered. He stood there for some moments in something of a quandary. Then he decided to try the first line of dialogue that had been pre-arranged up at Headquarters.
‘It is a good day today,’ he said.
The other man smiled a gap-toothed smile and began fumbling in the pockets of his jacket. After a moment he took out a piece of paper which Baines recognized as one of the pamphlets the girl in the High Street had been handing out.
‘Looka them tits,’ the man said, holding out the paper invitingly towards Baines. ‘Looka them tits.’
After a moment Baines realized that he was referring to the drooping breasts of the emaciated African woman on the front of the pamphlet. This could not be Kirby.
‘Clear off,’ Baines said, in a voice thick with loathing. ‘Get away from here.’ He took a step towards the other man, raising a fist.
The man got up quickly, went at a rapid shambling walk diagonally away up the hillside. This obedient promptness made it seem as if he had expected to be ordered away. Baines found himself trembling slightly: he had always felt a horrified repugnance for sick or abnormal people; he was daunted too by the coincidence of finding someone in just this place, wearing what might have been taken as a buttonhole. He was still staring up the hillside, though the man had disappeared now, when he heard a voice behind him, saying, ‘It is a good day.’
Baines turned, and found himself facing a man of about his own age, short and thickset, with a white carnation in his buttonhole. ‘I’m supposed to say that,’ he said. ‘Not you.’
‘Better ones coming,’ the other man said promptly. He had very pale, quick-glancing eyes.
‘Better for all of us,’ Baines said. He held out his hand and the other man shook it. ‘You should have waited for me to speak,’ Baines said. ‘Here it is.’ He handed over the brown bag. ‘It is set for eleven-fifteen tonight,’ he said. ‘You can plant it whenever you like. All you have to do is press – ’
‘I know what to do.’
‘You have had your instructions, I suppose,’ Baines said. ‘Do you know the town well?’
‘Well enough. I know where the Municipal Art Gallery is. That is all I need to know.’
‘Municipal Art Gallery? But it is the Conservative Committee Rooms you are supposed to blow up.’
‘My instructions are to cause maximum damage to the Municipal Art Gallery.’
‘I don’t understand,’ Baines said. ‘I made personal representations at Headquarters. This is the first I have heard of the Municipal Gallery as a target. From whom did you get your instructions?’
‘I am not at liberty to say.’
‘But surely,’ Baines said, ‘the question should be – ’
‘Looka them tits,’ a soft sibilant voice said behind them.
Turning sharply, Baines saw the white-faced, shambling character whom he had driven off before, now standing only a few feet away from them, holding out the crumpled pamphlet. He had approached quietly, over the grass.
‘Looka them tits,’ he said again, not venturing closer, but leaning forward, holding out the picture of the dying African woman, his soft, too-red lips curving in a gentle smile.
‘You filthy – ’ Baines said. He stared at the smiling man, his mouth dry with rage and loathing.
‘Shall I stretch him?’ Kirby said, with immediate savagery. ‘I’ll knock your teeth in,’ he said. ‘You bloody pervert.’
‘Don’t touch him,’ Baines said. ‘We don’t want to attract attention to ourselves. Get away from here,’ he said to the man, taking a step forward.
With the same curious promptness as before, the man began to back away. He backed for some yards, then turned and made off, at the same rapid, shambling pace.
Baines turned to face Kirby again. He felt shaken by this reappearance. ‘We’d better go our separate ways,’ he said. He looked closely at the other’s face for a moment or two, at the narrow forehead, pale unsteady eyes. Kirby did not look a very intelligent type of man.
‘I still don’t understand this confusion over the target,’ Baines said. ‘But you must follow your instructions, I suppose.’
‘There were them that wanted the Conservative Committee Rooms,’ Kirby said, ‘and them that wanted the Municipal Art Gallery. And a third school of thought that felt it didn’t make no difference.’
‘They know what they are doing, up at Headquarters,’ Baines said loyally. ‘There are some very shrewd people up there.’
‘I daresay we shall manage,’ Kirby said, gripping the bag, turning away.
‘Odd,’ Baines said. ‘If it is the Art Gallery, I shall be at a party in the next road.’
‘Well, Mr Baker,’ Cuthbertson said. ‘Perhaps you could give me some indication of your requirements?’
He looked steadily through his glasses at the person seated opposite, across the desk. He liked the sober suiting and deferential posture of this person. The letter before him was illiterate in phrasing. On the basis of the letter he had formed certain prognostications. It was deeply reassuring, when there was so much lately to frighten and confuse him, to find that these had been entirely correct: this was a person who had worked hard, accumulated capital in some lowly calling, and now wished to better himself.
Cuthbertson had realized at a very early stage that all applicants could be divided into two main categories: self-improvers and careerists. The former, naively vain and self-deceiving, were able to regard the degrees awarded by the School as both worthless and worth having; the latter had no such illusions, intending to use the degrees in areas of the world where their true nature might be kept indefinitely concealed. This great perception, though the basis of the School’s prosperity, Cuthbertson had of late years largely ceased to acknowledge, even to himself, as it conflicted with his sense of the School as a force for good. None the less it was useful on occasions like the present, when a student might slip off the hook if clumsily handled.
‘We make it our endeavour,’ he said, ‘to, ah, tailor the needs of the … to, ah, tailor the instruction to the needs of the individual student.’
Gentle brown eyes returned his regard. The man had a weatherbeaten face, thinning hair. He leaned forward, keeping his knees unpresumptuously together. Cuthbertson smiled, aware of the power at his disposal, power as it were diffused through all the appurtenances of his office, particles of power rebounding from the quiet walls and gleaming surfaces; all emanating from himself, the generating and controlling force. An urge rose in him to keep absolutely still, keep this generative power at its optimum, sit there for ever, no fear or doubt admitted, in absolute immobile mastery, dominating Mr Baker throughout eternity. His hands rested heavy on the desk before him. Something, however, some alien element in the room, only vaguely sensed before, now began more definitely to trouble and disturb him. His hands moved, and he glanced momentarily aside.
‘You spoke of history in your letter,’ he said.
‘Yes,’ Mr Baker said. ‘Yes, I’ve always been interested in history, right from my school days. That is going back a bit.’
‘You will find a number here of your generation,’ Cuthbertson said, smiling, moving his hands restlessly on the desk.
‘Of course we wasn’t well taught,’ Mr Baker said.
‘Some of the teaching in our schools leaves much to be desired,’ Cuthbertson said. ‘We often find ourselves having to do a certain amount of remedial work before the true process of education can begin. Which of our history courses are you interested in? You’ve seen the prospectus, I take it?’
‘I’m more interested in the modern, really. It helps you to understand your own society more, doesn’t it?’
‘That is an interesting point of view,’ Cuthbertson said. ‘Mr Mafferty does Modern History. A very keen, incisive mind. He is a Cambridge man.’
Thinking of Mafferty caused him to glance at the clock. It was a quarter to eleven. He was again troubled by a returning sense of something different about the room, something not quite right. He glanced around uneasily. Nothing seemed out of place …
‘I didn’t want just a correspondence course, you know,’ Mr Baker said.
‘Oh, no, no, no.’ Cuthbertson bestirred himself, looked back with something of an effort at his prospective student’s face. ‘The student-teacher relationship is of the essence of our system here, of the absolute essence,’ he said.
Mr Baker leaned forward suddenly. Great earnestness marked his demeanour. ‘I would like to obtain a degree,’ he said.
‘That would be the twelve-week course to the first degree, the Bachelor of Arts, or Science.’
‘Would that entitle me to put B.A. after my name?’
‘Certainly, certainly. And to a certificate which you would be at liberty to frame and display, if you so wished.’
‘The terms for that…’ Mr Baker said.
‘For the twelve-week course,’ Cuthbertson said, knowing the other knew already, ‘the inclusive fee – ’
At this point, however, he fell silent, again glancing round the room. Stray peppering thoughts began to bombard him, sensations rather, that he could not isolate or meet squarely. He looked at the immaculate expanse of dark-blue carpeting, the fawn armchairs, the two low tables, the cushioned window seat. Everything was in exact position, as it always was …
Mr Baker coughed, and Cuthbertson thought he saw an expression of embarrassment or uncertainty on the other’s face. ‘Of the absolute essence,’ he said, as if there had been no intermission. ‘Or such, at least, is our belief.’
Suddenly, he realized what the matter was: it was scent, not sight, that was being offended. There was a faint alien sweetness in the air, disturbing the usual plushy, neutral odours of his office. Some perfume, perhaps, that Mr Baker … He did not look that kind of man. The scent, once recognized, seemed stronger now, it pervaded the room like a leak of something dangerous. Cuthbertson shifted his bulk in the chair and opened his mouth, with a sudden audible intake of breath.
‘Are you feeling all right?’
‘I beg your pardon?’ Cuthbertson blinked several times. Mr Baker’s long-jawed weatherbeaten face resettled into focus. ‘Excuse me,’ Cuthbertson said. ‘I have a lot on my mind today. Today is Degree Day, you know. It is also my wife’s birthday. And there is a delegation from Turkey coming to be shown round. We were discussing …’
‘Fees,’ Mr Baker said.
‘For the twelve-week course,’ Cuthbertson said, reverting smoothly to the point at issue, ‘the inclusive fee for tuition and degree is seven hundred and fifty pounds. Payable in advance. That is the honours course. The general degree comes to one hundred and fifty less.’
‘I think I’d be more interested in the honours.’
‘Quite right,’ Cuthbertson said. One must aim high. You are the sort of student we want here, Mr Baker. There is one condition, however, which is also mentioned in the prospectus.’
‘Condition?’
The smell seemed to be getting stronger. A voice at once his own and another’s urged Cuthbertson to his feet, to seek out and destroy this subversive sweetness. He sat there some moments longer, looked fixedly at Mr Baker. Then he stood up abruptly, moved out from behind his desk, turned his head this way and that. Aware that this behaviour, however necessary, might seem eccentric to Mr Baker, he went on talking in a manner as equable as possible. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘the course must be completed satisfactorily on your part. If not, you would be charged for tuition only, part of the fee would be refunded, and the degree would not be awarded.’
‘How do you mean, satisfactorily?’
Cuthbertson looked round. Mr Baker had turned in his chair and was watching him alertly.
‘I mean as to conduct,’ he said beginning to walk slowly forward near to the wall. We cannot permit, the voice said. Oh dear me, no. The voice was bland, remorseless, and often omitted verbs. A certain give and take, yes, but not this. ‘Conduct, attendance, that sort of thing,’ he said. ‘And style of dress. We like to see students wearing ties, for example. Navy blue is a colour we favour. We find that uniformity of appearance encourages the sense of community we are aiming at. Yes.’
Reaching a point about half-way along the wall, Cuthbertson stopped and turned inwards. This enabled him to see that Mr Baker had also risen and was standing with his hands on the back of his chair, watching him intently.
‘I thought you meant failing the exam,’ Mr Baker said, laughing falsely.
Cuthbertson looked gravely for some moments at this laughing face of Mr Baker. ‘There is no examination,’ he said. ‘The matter rests with the tutor’s report.’
After a moment he resumed his soft, circumspect padding, moving this time across the room, towards the opposite wall. Coming to one of his fawn armchairs he edged and felt his way cautiously round it. The scent was strong now, and Cuthbertson was beginning to feel personally endangered, as if a scented pad were being moved slowly and inexorably towards his mouth. He felt it to be vitally necessary to go on talking, to preserve the structure of the interview and keep his own fears at bay. ‘Each student,’ he said, ‘is taught individually, with particular reference to his abilities and general attainment. Progress is necessarily relative, depending as it does on the level of the student at the beginning of the proceedings. Degrees are awarded in accordance with this relative assessment.’
He thought he heard Mr Baker say something somewhere behind him. ‘Quite so,’ he said, without looking round. He could get no clue as to where the smell might be coming from, and Mr Baker’s presence inhibited him from making a thorough-going search. He raised his face towards the ceiling and sniffed delicately twice. Hearing a movement behind him he turned sharply but Mr Baker was in the same position. More strongly than before he had the sense of a scented, suffocating pad being moved slowly towards him. He opened his mouth to get more air. With an instinct of survival he sought to stopper the scent with some memory, find in the past a container for this muffling pad that threatened to cut off all senses with his breath … A certain give and take, yes, the voice said, very clearly and distinctly. But this, this cannot be permitted. Daffodils, the white light. No, daffodils are scentless … With a heaving of the mind he had it, just in time, honeysuckle. August honeysuckle, the smell of it in the hedges and on our hands.
‘Honeysuckle’, Cuthbertson said. He stood in the middle of the room, stilled by the memory. The pad receded. Remembering Mr Baker, he said, ‘Relative assessment and capacity credit marking. None of the older foundations have been prepared to adopt it. Hidebound, you know. Of course, as I point out in my … in the Prospectus, our degrees are not everywhere recognized, our graduates sometimes meet with prejudice.’
He was moving now along the top end of the room, towards the book case. ‘That is settled then,’ he said. ‘The School Secretary, the invaluable Miss Naylor will give you any further details you require as to… I look forward to having you in the student body, on the Modern History Course, Mr Baker, and it only remains for me to say … Subject to the payment of fees, of course …’ Honeysuckle, that was it. Afterwards we lay down on the bankside, still with the honeysuckle, and she said, be careful, take care, you will crush the honeysuckle. She meant something else. What did she mean?
‘You will find your fellow students a very cosmopolitan and variegated community,’ Cuthbertson said, feeling about among the books, speaking faster and faster. ‘We have persons of every sort and condition here, united of course by a common desire for self-improvement and interest in the things of the mind, drawn, they are drawn from all quarters of the compass, your real traditional type of wandering school, you will find every race and creed here and a considerable variety in pigmentation and texture of hair that is part of our purpose part of our philosophy to submerge ah immerse the student in this cultural pool … Aha!’
He had seen them, on a narrow cabinet in the recess beyond the bookshelf. Hyacinths they were, not honeysuckle, a little bunch of white and blue hyacinths, in a Wedgwood vase, behind the petroleum company calendar. Odd, secretive place for them to be. They must have been put there sometime during the morning. A word to the secretary would not come amiss. Somehow, though, he did not think it was Miss Naylor’s doing … He advanced slowly and cautiously on the flowers. ‘Former students,’ he said, ‘we like to feel, who have gone their several ways, still continue to have this sense of having been, so to speak, dipped … “Excuse me,” one of them might say to another, meeting by chance in some … “Excuse me, but isn’t that a Regional College of Further Studies tie you are wearing?” ’
Reaching forward with a sort of stealth, Cuthbertson seized the flowers and drew them out of the vase. He looked over his shoulder smilingly. ‘There is a little counter in the secretary’s office,’ he said, ‘where ties, scarves – ’
Suddenly he realized that his office no longer contained Mr Baker. Without word or sound of any kind, Mr Baker had gone. Odd behaviour, Cuthbertson thought. Unmannerly.
Standing there alone, however, in the silence of the room, holding the dripping bunch in his hands, he was unable for long to resist the suspicion that he had somehow mismanaged the interview with Mr Baker. He was aware, with alarm, of having acted under some kind of duress. A certain give and take, yes. Distracting odours, evocations of past faces and events – not in a well-run institution. You will crush the honeysuckle, she said. Her face closer than it had ever been. Her mouth smiled and then stopped smiling. Afterwards.…
He was standing thus when a light knock came at the door. Unthinkingly he called, ‘Come in.’ The door opened and a smarter than usual Mafferty came into the room, smiling sociably. Only then did Cuthbertson remember his appointment with this lax fellow, and become aware at the same time of the strangeness, for somebody else, of finding the Principal, standing in the middle of the room, holding dripping flowers.
‘I am just disposing of a few flowers,’ he said.
‘Good idea,’ Mafferty said briskly, determined to agree with everything.
Cuthbertson went back to his desk, tore off a few pages from his memo pad and wrapped the flowers up in a wet ball. This he dropped into the waste paper basket. Taking a large white handkerchief from his top pocket, he made a thorough job of wiping his hands, looking steadily at Mafferty while he did so.
Meanwhile, in the adjoining office, Bishop was in the midst of his interview with Said, the Somali student.
‘Now I daresay,’ he was saying, ‘that in your part of the world they do things differently. I am an old stager; I am quite prepared to admit that standards vary throughout the world, I wouldn’t want you to go away thinking that your Senior Tutor is unaware of the relative nature of customs and practices, but when in Rome, you know, you must do as the Romans.’
Said, a handsome, slender negro with a reserved manner and very discoloured whites to his eyes, kept his gaze on the wall before him.
‘Is it proverb?’ he said.
‘Never mind that now. Miss Tynsely has complained. She has turned over to me those notes you wrote to various of the student typists. In this country it just isn’t done to write notes of that kind to girls you do not know. It is infra dig. I have them here before me, and I must say … Take this one for example.’
He picked up a mauve sheet of paper from his desk. Adopting a deliberately dry and unimpassioned tone, he read, ‘ “And I will deposit you with golds and for the blisses there will be more golds and maybe bracelets of my people.” ’
There was a short silence during which Said did not acknowledge by any flicker of expression the authorship of these words.
‘I mean to say,’ Bishop said, ‘wrap it up how you will, that definitely amounts to an offer of money for favours received. Here’s another one: “At home I am prince and I am used by my religion to contain everything by mind over matter inside me going into traces and so you can have multiple funs – ” That is from the note to Miss Barrett,’ Bishop said. ‘Perhaps you didn’t know it, but her father is a militant type of man … Apart from anything else, there is the quality of your English. People do not have funs.’
Said glanced quickly towards him. ‘They have funs and games,’ he said.
‘They may have games,’ Bishop said, ‘but they do not have funs.’
Said took from an inside pocket a small notebook and a pencil. ‘Games but not funs,’ he said. ‘Excuse me.’ He wrote something in the notebook. After a moment he looked up with a slight, dignified smile, and said, ‘Englishmen are good in games but not in funs, isn’t it?’
‘Good at,’ Bishop said. ‘No, it isn’t. I mean no, they aren’t. Anyway they are. Just as good as any one else, that is. You are missing the whole point which is that the word has no plural. Never mind that now. Look what you say in your note to Miss Birdwood.’ Picking up yet another sheet, he read, ‘ “I want to put diamonds exactly in the centre of your both teats very much.” ’
Bishop laid down the paper and looked sternly at Said. ‘Now I am the first to understand an ardent temperament,’ he said, ‘but that note is definitely suggestive. I mean you are actually offering … The word is “nipples”, by the way. We don’t speak of the centres of teats. It has an odd ring in English. Now the fact that several of the girls have received similar missives – ’
‘How you spell that?’ Said said. ‘With two bs, aren’t they?’ His pencil was poised over the notebook.
‘Missives? No, double – ’
‘No, instead of centres of teats.’
‘Double p, man. Otherwise it would be “nibbles”.’ Bishop laughed with sudden explosive loudness. ‘That means to take little bites,’ he said.
He continued to laugh at this idea for some moments.
Said looked at him with a flickering, distrustful expression, then transferred his gaze to the wall. With a dignified gesture of finality he returned notebook and pencil to his pocket.
‘Ex Africa semper aliquid novi,’ Bishop said, reverting to seriousness. ‘Now as I was saying, the fact that several of the girls have been the objects of your attention seems to suggest, to our Western way of thought, that this is not a case of romantic attachment. It is not so much the personality and appearance of some particular girl that has attracted you, but a sort of generalized desire for bodies, Said. There is an unpleasing plurality about it. I haven’t actually sounded the girls concerned, but I’m willing to bet my bottom dollar they felt, ah, belittled.’
Said’s eyes flickered at the idiom, but he made no move towards his notebook.
‘Besides,’ Bishop said, ‘what is all this about being a prince? I understood you to be a trainee controller at Mogadishu airport. That is false pretences, old boy.’
Bishop paused, regarding the other closely, in an effort to see if his words were having any effect. Said’s forehead glistened. His lips were pale lilac in colour. They were full, and set in a slight pout, which gave his mouth the appearance of a crumpled rose.
‘Now I consider myself,’ Bishop said, ‘since you are so far from home, in loco parentis, so to speak, and if there is anything at any time that I can do for you, if the pressure gets too great to bear alone, and believe me, I know something of pressures of that kind, we are all human, Said, more so than you might think … I am always available here at my office or at home if you prefer it, always ready to lend a sympathetic … so if ever you feel like a chat, feel like getting something off your chest, I am always … But you must stop soliciting the student typists, otherwise you will be imperilling your degree. You could find yourself returning to Mogadishu without a certificate of any kind, and that might well have a blasting effect on your future career at the airport.’
There was a light knock at the door and Miss Naylor, the secretary, came in with Bishop’s share of the second mail. She put it on the desk, smiled at Bishop, gave Said a neutral look, and said, ‘What have you been doing to Mr Baker?’
‘Who? I don’t believe – ’
‘The new student. He came and asked for his registration fee back. Said he’d changed his mind about the course. I told him that the registration fee is not refunded under any circumstances.’
‘The Principal interviewed him, I believe.’
‘Probably one of these unbalanced types,’ Miss Naylor said. ‘There are a lot of them about these days.’
Miss Naylor had a beautiful figure, shown off to good advantage by the tight blouse and short skirt she was wearing. Said watched her progress to the door and the petals of his lips moved, as if he were interiorly phrasing fresh blandishments.
‘Well, I hope you will keep it in mind,’ Bishop said, without much conviction. His interview with Said had taken longer than he had expected; he had a lesson now, and so it was not for another hour that he was at leisure to look through his mail, and to discover that it included the answer to his queries about Mafferty.
‘Now I must tell you, Mr Mafferty,’ Cuthbertson said, seating himself behind his desk, ‘that there have been, ah, complaints regarding your teaching.’
‘Complaints?’ Mafferty attempted to infuse the word with mingled disbelief and amused indulgence, but succeeded only in sounding weakly remonstrant.
‘As to your time-keeping, and also, not to put too fine a point on it, your sobriety.’
Cuthbertson placed his blunt finger-tips together. This seemed to complete a sort of circuit, for his voice at once took on the steady hum of power. ‘Now you are a young fellow,’ he said, ‘just starting out on your career. The world is your oyster, Mafferty, but let me tell you this, success has to be earned. You have to put your shoulder to the wheel right from the very word go. I am thinking of the School, primarily, I won’t deny that, of this corporate enterprise we have built up, I like to think together, one for all and all for one, but I am thinking of you too, sitting here today on the threshold. It is not in your interest that unpunctuality and smelling of drink should go unnoticed and unreproved …’
Soothed by his own rhetoric, and with the threat of the flowers removed, Cuthbertson felt for the moment quite in command of the situation. One of the things he enjoyed most was speaking at length without fear of contradiction.
Mafferty, for his part, seeing that the Principal’s focus was on the far wall, and that his voice had settled at cruising speed, felt safe to relax the respectfulness of his posture somewhat, and allow his attention to wander. How strange the old boy had looked, clutching the flowers. Wild somehow, and at the same time, what was the word … obedient, like someone sleepwalking. He seemed normal enough now, though, going on about his bloody corporate enterprise. Corporate enterprise to line his own pockets. Who did the old fraud think he was taking in? The only place, the only kind of business, that appealed to mugs and crooks equally. One gigantic con. He is conning me now, or trying to. He is making a fortune through conning the students, half of whom are content to be conned and the other half preparing to con somebody else. An absolute winner. You can’t go wrong. He thought again of the meeting with his friend Weekes, arranged for that evening. There was something in the wind, Weekes had said. Within a month they could be running their own business …
He looked with a sort of awe at Cuthbertson, who was still talking to the far wall in long fluent bursts marked by very brief pauses as if he were expertly gathering the next collocation before proceeding – an effect of scrupulosity reinforced by the almost startling punctilio of his clothing, immaculate dark suit, high stiff white collar, College of Further Studies tie, knotted exactly, perfectly symmetrical. Exactly symmetrical too was his position at the desk. He sat straight in his black leather chair, both thick shoulders at a level, pressed back against the back of the chair, head dead straight between them, elbows equidistant, hands – large, white hands, immaculate as to nails and half-moons – quite motionless on either side. Any slight movement he made seemed accompanied by a sort of caution, as if, Mafferty thought, he were balancing something on his head.
‘I well remember,’ he was saying now, ‘my early days. My struggles, Mafferty.’
Becoming aware that he was once again being directly looked at, Mafferty sat forward and assumed an expression of alertness.
‘I built this place up with my own hands,’ Cuthbertson said.
‘Did you really, sir?’
This simple question, which Mafferty had uttered merely because he felt some response was required, moved Cuthbertson, released that charge of emotion which was always near the surface when the School was under discussion.
‘Yes,’ he said, in suddenly vibrant tones, ‘yes Mafferty, with my own hands. I believe in Free Enterprise, Mafferty. That is my personal creed. It was the creed of Hawkins and of Drake. I don’t usually speak of it, but when I see a young fellow like yourself, in danger of going off the rails… This house, the whole place, was a ruin when I first saw it. To say that the garden was overrun would be an understatement. Flowers and weeds inextricably, ah, mingled. Shrubs growing everywhere unchecked. Windows warped and half the glass out. Door handles off.’
‘Like a pioneer,’ Mafferty said. He saw Cuthbertson’s chestnut-coloured eyes through the glasses, big with the wonder of these recollections.
‘Tramps had got in,’ Cuthbertson said, ‘and used the premises for their own insalubrious purposes. I won’t enlarge on that. The house adjoins open country at the rear, as you probably know, and this open country was taking over. One of the first things I saw, on my initial tour of inspection, was a rat, a great brown fellow; it sat up and looked at me, Mafferty. The whole place was reverting to the wilds. It had become an embarrassment to the estate agents. But I saw the possibilities. I rose to the challenge. I believe in Free Enterprise, Mafferty, and that is how I see this School, as a monument to Free Enterprise in an age of gradually encroaching state control. It is a dramatic conception, and one that should unite and inspire us all, this course we are steering between nature in the raw and the ah, deadly uniformity of the State …’
With habitual envious fascination Mafferty embarked on the old familiar speculation. The fees varied of course, according to requirements; higher degrees came more expensive, but say seven hundred and fifty pounds, on average, for the twelve-week course, and say at any given time there were fifty or so students, that was in the region of thirty-eight thousand pounds, and multiply that by four …
‘Like a pioneer,’ he repeated, again meeting Cuthbertson’s eyes.
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘A pioneer, sir.’ Mafferty paused. Then, with a sense of brilliant improvization, he added, ‘You know, opening up new frontiers.’
Cuthbertson was silent for some moments. Then he said, ‘Yes, I accept that. But pioneers have to do more than achieve the conquest of nature, Mafferty, they have also to maintain standards. And that has been my great problem, to be frank with you, since we are having this confidential chat, and let me take this opportunity of saying how much I welcome these opportunities of getting to know my staff better, you must come and have supper with us one of these evenings so that we may have the opportunity …’
He fell silent again. One of his hands moved sideways along the desk, then back again. ‘Where was I?’ he said.
‘Your great problem,’ Mafferty said, thankful that he had been listening.
‘Ah, yes, yes. My great problem, right from the start, has been how to reconcile the profit motive – I believe in the profit motive, Hawkins and Drake believed in the profit motive – with standards. To give, in short, value for money. That has been my slogan, right from the start. Value for Money. No one gets a degree here who has not fulfilled all our requirements.’
‘I know that, sir, from my own brief experience here,’ Mafferty said.
‘We are not out of danger yet,’ Cuthbertson said, raising his head. Light reflected from the large lenses of his glasses. ‘I have had disquieting news lately, from reliable sources in the Ministry, and I won’t disguise from you …’
Suddenly, in the midst of speech, he was attacked by discouragement and fatigue. He became aware of himself and Mafferty in the quiet office, two casual lumps of matter set in accidental proximity amid vacant wastes of air.
‘If this attitude persists,’ he said, ‘we shall have to terminate what has been and could continue to be a fruitful relationship. Do you take my meaning?’
Startled by this change of tone, Mafferty sat forward. ‘I think so, yes,’ he said.
‘We have no contract, as you know. And you have only been with me a matter of two months. I would not be required, in law, to give you much in the way of notice.’
‘I realize that,’ Mafferty said.
Cuthbertson’s hand moved again, sideways and back. He felt blankness descending on him. The surfaces of his desk had shifting lights in them, like pools, shallow pools … He looked down at his memo-pad and saw the word ‘Order’. That was it. With a great effort he began to speak again.
‘I believe in order, Mr Mafferty. Order. By which I mean not so much discipline; that comes into it of course, but smooth running. Smooth running. Things working well, everyone pulling together, like a well-oiled machine, but with, ah, sentient cogs. Everyone seeing his way with absolute clarity, just as I see mine. That will be all, then, I think, for the moment.’
Exhausted, he watched Mafferty get up and walk away. It was eleven-thirty-two by the clock on the wall.
Baines was just entering the hospital. He had been dreading the visit, was only doing it from a stern sense of duty, to one of our brave boys, as he would have put it, wounded in action. Immediately on entering he felt oppressed, endangered. The smells and whiteness and long corridors and tubular equipment glimpsed here and there were like the concomitants of an ugly dream, and Baines was already in considerable perturbation of spirit before he got to Kenneth’s ward. This was increased by the fact that the nurse on duty had to point Kenneth out to him – the lad was unrecognizable, bemonstered by bandages.
‘Hello, old boy,’ Baines said, with assumed heartiness, advancing towards Kenneth’s bed, past a bed in which a very old man with a grey, bald, head sat staring straight before him, then another which was just a heap of bed-clothes, nothing human discernible.
‘So here you are,’ Baines said. Very little of the surface area of Kenneth’s face was visible. The bandage supporting his jaw passed beneath his chin and was bound round the top of his head. Had that been all, it would have given Kenneth the look of a medieval knight in a white helmet; but, in addition to this, the left side of his face, which had sustained the damage, had a large dressing on it, extending from the corner of the mouth, almost where the helmet bandage ended, right up to the left temple, with a thick auxiliary strap completely covering the bridge of the nose. His eyes looked out from this stiff white mask as if they had crept to the surface in order to signal.
‘Well, you’re not looking too bad,’ Baines said. Conquering his aversion he looked steadily at Kenneth’s bemonstered head. ‘We shall have you up and out of here in no time … What did you say?’
Sounds had come from Kenneth, but curiously guttural and indistinct.
‘I beg your pardon, old boy?’ Baines said. ‘I didn’t quite catch that.’
Kenneth couldn’t talk properly, he suddenly realized, because the bone structure of his face was rigidly strapped up and immovable; there was no play whatever in his lower jaw.
‘Arree – shit arree mush,’ Kenneth said. ‘Tak allsh trull.’
‘I didn’t quite catch that,’ Baines said again. Kenneth was being obliged to talk without moving his jaws at all, and this was producing a slurred monotone, very disturbing and disagreeable to Baines, for whom the effort of distinguishing a meaning in these guttural sounds now became part of the general horror of the place, the gleaming surfaces, and the smells, the all-pervasive smells of sickness and healing, the same smell to Baines, and a peculiarly repellent one. Sickness and unseemliness were intimately related in his mind, and he found it very difficult not to hold Kenneth accountable, morally, for his less than A.I condition.
‘What was that again?’ he said, leaning forward and looking into Kenneth’s dark, active eyes.
‘Arree shit arree mush.’
‘That’s all right,’ Baines said, nodding, bluffing, thinking how oddly dark and cavernous Kenneth’s mouth looked against the white of the bandage.
‘I’ll tell you what,’ he said. ‘I’m going to see you have a citation for this; you are going to get the Order of Gallantry for it, old boy.’
Kenneth nodded slowly.
‘I consider it a damn good show,’ Baines said.
‘Hankh – hoogh – arreghmush,’ Kenneth said.
It must have been a hell of a whack, Baines thought. In half-darkness and a limited space, in the midst of brawling and stumbling and a confusion of bodies, someone had laid a loaded stick across Kenneth’s face with what seemed absolute precision. For a moment or two his mind was occupied with a sense of this contrast, the precise, shattering blow amid that chaos, the instant tracery of fracture …
‘Have you any idea – ’ he was beginning, when there was an unearthly screech from one of the beds opposite. An emaciated person sat up suddenly and uttered a burst of high-pitched laughter towards the ceiling.
‘Who’s that?’ Baines said. ‘What – ?’
‘Ersh sherraghich whurrd,’ Kenneth said.
‘What did you say?’ Baines leaned forward again. It was warm in the ward and he felt himself beginning to sweat slightly. ‘This is a ghastly place,’ he said.
‘Oh dear, oh dear,’ a quavering querulous voice said, a few beds further down. ‘Oh dear, oh my leg!’
‘Sherraghuk whurrd,’ Kenneth said again.
‘Is there something wrong with his leg?’ Baines started wildly in the direction of the voice. ‘Do you mean geriatric? What, you mean they have put you in with the old people?’
He looked with horror at his lieutenant. ‘But that is disgraceful,’ he said. ‘I’ll see if I can get you moved.’
The white head moved from side to side, very slowly. ‘Ishn’t whurrsh ugh trull,’ it said.
‘You mean you don’t mind?’ Baines stared at Kenneth. He felt acutely uncomfortable. The sweat was running down his left side, inside his shirt.
‘Oh dear, oh dear,’ came again from the bed farther down, followed almost immediately by another screech of laughter from over the way.
‘It’s a madhouse,’ Baines said. The smell of aged bodies and medicaments rose to his nostrils in suffocating waves. All his life he had hated age and deformity and people who were crazy or helpless or disabled. Such people made him feel sick.
‘They should be put out of their misery,’ he whispered vehemently, bringing his head closer to Kenneth’s white helmet. ‘As soon as people get too old and ah, I mean, reach a certain stage of infirmity, they should be put out of their misery.’
The heap in the bed next to Kenneth’s moved suddenly.
‘Deformed people, too,’ Baines said, keeping his eyes on this heap. ‘Why should we – ?’
‘Hargh kark,’ Kenneth said, moving his head cautiously up and down.
‘What do you do with excrescences?’
An arm like a mildewed stick came groping out from the heap of clothes. Pyjama hung from it like the remnants of bark. It clawed briefly at the edge of a sheet.
Baines took out a large white handkerchief and wiped his sweating forehead and cheeks. ‘You slice them off,’ he said, close to Kenneth’s white mask. ‘You slice them, you slice their ballocks off, you … Metaphysically … A healthy society – ’
‘Arghee chorrcet-lurgh.’
‘Functioning perfectly. Beautiful, vigorous bodies, disciplined minds. Like a beautiful machine with all its parts in perfect order. The day is coming and it is nearer than some of these anarchist shits think …’
‘Ghaarloogh.’