The Big Day Read online

  What would he come as? she wondered. He would make a good colonial officer, in a solar topee, pale and reduced by fever, in a high state of sexual tension, inflexibly set on doing his duty. With Mr Honeyball and his friend there were twenty-six people coming. Once again she began checking through the guests, experiencing that complex blend of excitement and foreboding. She herself was going as Venus, newly risen from the wave, decked in what she hoped would pass as foam… The urgency of these thoughts made her restless. It was time to be getting out of bed.

  Since early girlhood she had done this in three stages: first throwing the bed-clothes aside and lying until the cooler air imposed the next move; then coming to a sitting position on the edge of the bed and resting there some time; finally standing up and walking. She walked to the full-length oval mirror in its gilt frame, slipped off her nightie and stood for some time appraising herself. She pouted into the mirror and thrust her arms forward, close to her sides, taking the usual satisfaction in her large and exceptionally well-formed breasts. They showed no tendency as yet to sag. She was a tall, solid-boned woman, with substantial shoulders, and the thickness in her upper arms and at the tops of her thighs was firm and rounded. She had a deep complacency about the abundance of her figure which the current quest for fashionable slimness did nothing to dispel. The eyes that looked back at her, in a face still puffy from sleep, were short-lashed, blue and guileless. My fortieth birthday, she thought, and her eyes looked wonderingly at her.

  Beginning to feel slightly chilly, she left the mirror and went over to the door where her negligee was hanging. This was of fluffed nylon and the same colour as her nightie – pale mauve was one of her very favourite colours. She opened the door and slipped along the passage to the bathroom where all had been left in order by Donald.

  Here she followed her customary procedure: first a warm shower to wash away the grosser impurities of the night, then a prolonged and blissful immersion in water much hotter and frothy with jasmine bath salts, her favourite – she had favourites in everything. Today, however, she had first to wrestle with one of the taps, which had been turned off very tightly. It was leaking too, she noticed, quite badly, and she wondered whether Donald knew. Soon, however, she had forgotten all about it, half-sitting, half-lying in the pale-blue bath, sealed and immune in the hot, scented water, listening to a record-request programme on her transistor radio, Mario Lanza singing ‘Santa Lucia’. She lay still, keeping her face carefully out of the water, listening to the powerful voice. Dead now, of course. Sobs built up in the singer’s throat in spasm after spasm, and Lavinia felt a languorous response in every fibre.

  Cuthbertson had seen the leaking tap immediately after emerging from his shower, and had been distressed by it. The water was escaping steadily, not merely dripping from the mouth of the tap, but welling out at the join higher up, as from a sluggish fountain. He tried tightening it but that seemed to make no difference. The washer perhaps. Or some more fundamental flaw. In any case it would most certainly have to be attended to. Gazing fixedly at the delinquent tap, he resolved on immediate application to the Water Company. He was only restrained from telephoning at once by the thought that the Company’s offices would not yet be open. He had a particular hatred for dripping taps, and all leaks, seepages, unauthorized oozings, spilling out from confinement or control.

  He mentioned the tap to Mrs Garwood, his housekeeper, while he was eating the breakfast she had prepared, in the little room adjoining the kitchen, where he and Lavinia had their meals when they were not entertaining. His newspaper showed a picture on the front page of widespread destruction and mangled corpses on a city street. A bomb had been planted and detonated at a time of maximum congestion. Such pictures had become commonplace and, occupied as he was with the offending tap, Cuthbertson did not ascertain what city it was, nor which band of enthusiasts was repsonsible. Mrs Garwood told him that the Water Board was repairing faulty taps free of charge in order to prevent wastage. There was a water shortage, apparently.

  ‘A water shortage?’ Cuthbertson said, seeing an opportunity to make a joke. ‘After all the rain we’ve been having?’

  Mrs Garwood, a grim-faced lady, merely nodded.

  At nine o’clock Cuthbertson mounted to his office on the first floor and the first thing he did was to ring the Water Board and report a leakage. The official to whom he spoke promised to send a representative that afternoon.

  This settled, he turned his attention to the day’s programme. He felt better now, more or less at peace, sitting there at his desk, memo-pad before him, freshly sharpened pencil between his fingers. His early-morning fears, the fiasco with Lavinia, that strange business with the locket, all these things belonged to the messy domestic area; they could not intrude here.

  The dark, polished surface of his desk lay before him, empty of clutter, the familiar items in their familiar places: square before him his blotter, edged with dark green leather; to left and right his wire-mesh trays; occupying pride of place dead centre was his pen-rest in chrome and black perspex; and to the right of this, exactly midway between the pen-rest and the edge of his desk, were first his silver cigarette box and then his chunky glass ashtray, forming a little group suggestive of pleasure … Cuthbertson smoked five cigarettes in the course of a working day, neither more nor less, and at fixed times. The first was due to be consumed in one hour and twenty-one minutes, at ten-thirty, with the morning coffee. The deliberate self-control and self-conquest involved in all this was part of his vision of the School as a well-ordered society with himself both on its periphery and at its heart, gatekeeper, ultimate authority, living example. So long as he shouldered these burdens, kept up these observances, no harm could come from within or without. Over the years the School had become associated, in a peculiarly intimate way, with the exercise of his will; had come to seem dependent on, even hallowed by, a great number of small self-imposed restrictions, irksome perhaps, but necessary for him to endure – a sort of personal protocol, which others might observe, but never fathom.

  Something, however, began to trouble him slightly as he surveyed his desk, a sort of threatening fluidity in the appearance of things. He moved his large, blunt-fingered hands experimentally, up a little, then down. It was the effect of the light, he decided. Strange that he had not consciously registered this before, these vagaries of light across the surface of his desk, tremulous pools that the movements of his hands minutely modified. The chrome and perspex melted, froze again. The numerous facets of the ashtray gleamed in a complex pattern of intensities. The cigarette box was adrift in its own soft puddle. Like pools in some road or track of the past after rain, which change shape and colour as you walk towards them … In that room, above the bay, shapes were constant. The sea light, though benign, not bleak at all, had seemed shadowless; nothing in that room ever varied, except their two bodies in relation to each other. The bay an aimer of white shadowless sea light. Moving, the movements we made, seemed meaningful, not fully our own meaning like those of actors, moving in uniform light. I saw her eyes fill with tears. Before, it was before I actually gave her the flowers. Did she cry then because she saw something I didn’t see? I was trying to remove the string, twine. Stems that the slightest pressure of a finger-nail could wound …

  Cuthbertson braced himself in his seat. There was no time for all that now. He had a number of important things to get straight in his mind. There was a man named Baker, a prospective student, to be seen; there was the interview with Mafferty, due in – he glanced at the clock on the wall – ninety-seven minutes precisely; there were books to be ordered for the literature course; there was the staff meeting, the ‘briefing’ as Cuthbertson and his second-in-command, Bishop, called it. Following upon all these, and dwarfing them in importance, was the main event of the day, one of the highlights of the term: the Presentation Ceremony. Today was Degree Day. Even then he would not be finished, because there was a Turkish Delegation due in the late afternoon.

  All these mat
ters required close attention, and Cuthbertson, a faint glow from his cold shower still persisting, addressed himself to them, in the peace and solitude of his office, with immense determination. But things began to get out of hand almost at once. In spite of all efforts, he could not keep his programme in focus. Events started sliding about. He battled on, mouth dry and chest constricted, not trying now to fix things in sequence, but to shift the creature in the depths of his mind, where it lurked, muddying his thoughts, clouding all attempts at order and logic. Horror grew in him at this monster, and at his own mind, the host, the pasture.

  After sitting at his desk in this travail for twenty-three minutes, Cuthbertson had a dreadful headache. He rang for Bishop, Senior Tutor and Administrative Officer, who had a smaller office adjoining. Bishop always did him good.

  When Bishop arrived, however, great as was Cuthbertson’s need of him, the customary procedure had to be followed. Cuthbertson therefore lowered his aching head to the memo-pad before him and devoted some moments of glazed scrutiny to the words inscribed there. Then he looked up, frowning slightly, his dark luxuriant eyebrows meeting in a line.

  ‘Ah, there you are,’ he said, indicating a seat.

  Mr Bishop was a balding, big, uneasy man with gentle, considerate manners and a habit of sudden loud laughter. He was not very well qualified academically, as Cuthbertson had always conceded – indeed he had no academic qualifications at all, other than the honorary ones the School had bestowed upon him, but he had been to what Cuthbertson always thought of as One of our Great Public Schools, and this had developed in him valuable qualities of character: a spirit of service, a sense of fair play, and an unswerving loyalty to the leader, all of which qualities were now at Cuthbertson’s disposal. He also had a fund of Latin maxims which he was sometimes able to deploy with effect. But it was above all his loyalty, the through-thick-and-thin spirit, which had earned him the position of Administrative Officer, for which he was otherwise not very well-suited, being in a more or less permanent muddle about the detailed running of the School – he relied very heavily on Miss Naylor, the secretary, though he tried to keep this as far as possible concealed from Cuthbertson.

  ‘Not interrupting anything, am I?’ Cuthbertson always adopted a brusque commanding-officer style of address with Bishop; it was what he seemed to respond best to. This morning, Cuthbertson noted with approval, the Senior Tutor was dressed in a navy-blue blazer, tan slacks and suede ankle boots. He looked neat and efficient, completely on the ball, somewhat nautical. Cuthbertson felt his headache lifting just at the sight of him. ‘Everything in order?’ he said.

  ‘Absolutely,’ Bishop said. In his tenure of office he had become quite accustomed to this sort of generally phrased, reassurance-seeking question from the Chief. He always answered in a brisk affirmative, whatever his own private confusions. The one thing never to do was to imply doubt or weakness; nothing irritated the Chief as much as that.

  ‘Good, good,’ Cuthbertson said, then paused, momentarily at a loss. The stillness in the room, and Bishop’s deferential eagerness as he stood there – he seemed not to have noticed the gesture towards the chair – combined for the moment to seem perplexing. At this moment they both heard from below the distant sound of the handbell, rung by Miss Naylor, to signal the beginning of lessons.

  ‘Ah, the bell,’ Cuthbertson said, glancing automatically at the clock.

  Bishop was not a very clever man, but he was sensitive, in his large and hapless way, and particularly so in anything to do with the Principal, whom he revered. Seeing the bafflement on his chief’s brow, he began to supply various administrative details – taking care, however, to refer to matters already known, already discussed; lately he had found the introduction of new matter liable to worry the Chief quite a lot.

  ‘The students have all been informed,’ he said, ‘about registration dates. As you requested, Donald.’ It still gave him pleasure that he was the only one on first-name terms with the chief. ‘They have been posted up,’ he said. ‘And tutors have been asked to remind their groups.’

  Cuthbertson roused himself. He had been allowing the Senior Tutor’s well-modulated tones to lull him. He must make a contribution. ‘What are the dates?’ he asked, leaning forward, speaking in a keen, incisive voice.

  This question was completely unexpected and the Senior Tutor was thrown by it. There was a rather lengthy silence, then he said, ’I don’t remember off-hand, Donald.’ He had broken out into a slight sweat. Quite often before this he had been rebuked for his vagueness in the matter of dates and times. He did not seem able to hold such things in his mind. However, his own confusion and the instinct of self-preservation had combined to help him at such moments: he had found that he could sometimes blur the trail by putting things on to a general basis. This was not a matter of policy or cunning, but of allowing his own private miasma to envelop them both. Lately it had been proving increasingly successful.

  Now, seeing a flush of annoyance rise to the Chief’s face he began to speak quickly, almost at random. ‘No excuse if the blighters don’t know by now,’ he said. ‘Some of these fellows … It is a difficulty of communication, really, don’t you agree, Donald?’

  ‘I don’t get your drift,’ Cuthbertson said, looking intently at his Senior Tutor.

  Bishop paused, trying to order his thoughts, but the Chief’s intent regard made this difficult, and after a moment or two he plunged into speech again. ‘I am very interested,’ he said, ‘always have been as a matter of fact, ever since … this question of language as, well, let’s call it an instrument, for want of a … though tool might do. An adequate tool. And whether, in a way, we aren’t barking up the wrong tree. I would be really glad of your views on the subject, Donald. Sometime, when you have a free moment, I would just like to put the idea forward, roll it forward, and see you play with it…’

  He fell silent, aware that the Chief was regarding him with unabated intensity.

  ‘What idea?’ Cuthbertson said. He spoke sternly, not wanting his subordinate to know how completely he was failing to follow this discourse.

  Bishop paused again, seeking in his personal fog for some form of words that would clinch matters. ‘Which came first?’ he said, with a sense of breakthrough. ‘It is the old hen-and-egg paradox all over again. In more philosophical terms, of course.’

  To his relief he saw the Principal begin to nod mildly.

  ‘Language being your hen,’ Cuthbertson said. ‘Is that what you’re getting at?’

  Or your tool,’ Bishop said. ‘If you take the other alternative.’

  ‘I should have thought that was your egg.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Your tool.’ Cuthbertson frowned. ‘Or is there a third possibility?’ he said.

  ‘You are going too deep for me now, Donald,’ Bishop said.

  Cuthbertson smiled. He did not pursue the topic, however, but reverted to the question of registration, saying, ‘Remind ’em again in a week or so. Need reminding, most of ’em.’

  ‘They certainly do.’

  ‘Need a chili up their bottoms, some of ’em, eh?’

  ‘Ha, ha, yes, they need a touch of the spur.’ Bishop laughed with explosive loudness. Dealing as they did with aliens, most of whom had a very imperfect knowledge of English, or with the naïve and ignorant among their own countrymen, they had developed over the years a joking, belittling habit of speech, the language of dedicated administrators set amidst natives.

  ‘And remember,’ Cuthbertson said, when the other’s laughter had subsided, ‘that fees must accompany applications. I have always regarded that as an axiom. To me, the truly promising student is the one who has paid his fees.’

  ‘Quite so.’ Bishop nodded seriously.

  ‘It makes business sense, and it makes academic sense.’ Cuthbertson said. ‘They concentrate better when they have paid.’

  Bishop nodded again, in full sympathy and understanding, and Cuthbertson, taking in once more the other’s neat
turnout and deferential manner, felt almost if not quite restored.

  ‘All members of staff know about the briefing today, I take it.’

  ‘They have been informed, Donald, yes.’

  ‘There is also the question of Mafferty.’ Cuthbertson raised a slow hand to adjust his glasses, which had slipped down his nose a little. ‘I had my doubts when I offered him a post here,’ he said. ‘Unreliable. No sense of responsibility. That was the judgement I formed at the time. But of course we needed someone. And he does have a Cambridge degree. You have checked up on that, I suppose?’

  ‘Er, yes, Donald.’ Bishop took out a handkerchief and went through the motions of blowing his nose. The matter of Mafferty’s qualifications had been overlooked until quite recently. Miss Naylor had reminded him. They were still waiting for a reply from the university.

  ‘Had it not been for his being a Cambridge man,’ Cuthbertson said, ‘I should not have employed him in the first place. But it now seems that being a Cambridge man is not, in itself, enough. It has to be backed up by character, and that seems to be missing, in Mafferty’s case. Dishevelled. Unpunctual. Smelling of drink. That is the count against him, is it not?’

  ‘Not merely smelling of it, Donald. Actually at times under the influence of. That Persian, I suppose we should call them Iranians now, Taba, his name is, he sometimes passes on bits of information to me, and he told me that he was practically incoherent in the literary appreciation class last week.’

  ‘Taba, eh?’

  ‘Yes, Taba told me that Mafferty – ‘

  ‘Which group is he in?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘This Taba chap.’

  Bishop scratched breifly at his sparse, sand-coloured hair. ‘I’m afraid I don’t remember off-hand, Donald.’