The Big Day Page 8

  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, t
hey 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.