‘I’ll bet she’s in my option,’ I said gloomily.
And of course I was right.
My first-year Zoology practical class is a strictly academic and orthodox affair, the Principal insists on that. Straightforward dissections of the earthworm, the frog, the afferent and efferent systems of the dogfish, that kind of thing. And although the lab assistant, Potts, is a treasure, everyone — another college rule — prepares their own specimens.
Torcastle is low on student unrest. I entered the lab that first morning to find two dozen earnest heads already bent over their pinned-out earthworms, scalpels flashing, scissors snipping…
Except, in the corner of a bench by the window, this kind of anarchic cell, this area of silent nihilism. In short, the tow-coloured duckling girl whose name, it seemed, was Kirstie Hamilton, gazing raptly through the orifices in her nose-length fringe at something held in her cupped hands.
‘You haven’t begun yet?’
She lifted her head and looked at me. Both her eyes were green, but one was also yellow and the whole thing was not what I was accustomed to.
‘Dr Marshall, I’m extremely sorry, but I find myself unable to chloroform this worm.’
At first I didn’t take in what she had said and this was because her voice, with its rolling ‘R-s’ and lilting vowels, let out of the bag my ten-year-old self, the one that had been going to live in a Hebridean croft, befriended by seals, the confidant of shearwaters, world expert on the breeding habits of the cuddy-fish. When I had disposed of him and her words registered, I grew cross.
‘Look, this is a scientific department and there’s absolutely no room in it for whimsy. If you’re one of those antivivisectionists—’
‘Oh, but I’m not, I’m not!’ she cried and the worm, interested, raised up a dozen or so if its anterior segments and laid them across her thumb.
‘Of course people have to do experiments and test drugs and things. Of course they do!’
‘Well, then?’ I was getting impatient. All around me I could see butchered seminal vesicles, lacerated cerebral ganglia…
‘It’s just that I personally can’t kill this worm… I can just feel its bristles on my wrist,’ she said, and she might have been describing a ‘Night of Love’ in Acapulco.
Something in me snapped. ‘Perhaps you would like to go out and look for a worm that’s died of natural causes?’
Clearly, she was not a girl sensitive to sarcasm. ‘Oh, thank you, Dr Marshall. What a marvellous idea! Yes, that’s what I’ll do.’
And with her hand still cupped protectively around her specimen, she left the lab.
The whole thing rattled me. I went to look at my experiment, but what had seemed like a pretty significant breakthrough in endocrine physiology now looked like thirty-eight mice without their ovaries looking less cheerful than thirty-eight mice who still had them. Fortunately the Principal, Dr Peckham, chose that moment to send for me.
‘James,’ he said excitedly as soon as I entered his study, his bald head and his bi-focals all gleaming with joy. ‘I think we’re going to make it!’
‘No! You mean our Charter?’
Dr Peckham nodded. ‘Sir Henry Glissop’s coming with the whole Glissop commission. They wouldn’t send him unless there was a good chance. Just think of it, James! Us and the Tech. and the Art School all united in the new University of Torcastle!’
Raptly, Dr Peckham made for the open window, seeing I knew, not the pleasant flower gardens of Torcastle Agricultural College, its unpretentious animal houses and white-washed farm but a glittering campus, a towering Science Block and he himself, gowned in scarlet, hurrying from Senate Meeting to Congregation and back again…
‘It all depends on the research side of course,’ he went on. ‘How’s Pringle’s beetroot?’
‘Playing up a bit, sir.’
Peckham frowned. ‘And Blackwater? That new technique for storing A.I. samples?’
‘Well, sir, you know how it is with Hannibal,’ I said and Peckham winced, for Hannibal, after fathering some three thousand offspring in all corners of the globe, had suddenly gone cold on the whole thing and lounged about in the North Paddock, a seventeen-hundredweight drop-out from the permissive society, wincing when a heifer even passed his gate.
‘But your work?’ said Peckham hopefully. And then: ‘Good heavens, what on earth is that girl doing crawling about in that flower bed?’
I told him. Peckham didn’t really like it. He didn’t, in fact, like it at all.
Sir Henry’s visit was timed for the last week of term and following Peckham’s instructions, the college threw itself into a frenzy of scientific activity. The pigs were put into metabolism cages, the turkeys reserved for the staffs Christmas dinner vanished from their shed and reappeared in a pen marked ‘Organo-Phosphate Toxicity Trials’. Davies doggedly anaesthetised thirty sheep, stuck tubes into their stomachs and set up an impressive — if statistically dicey — feeding experiment. Blackwater began a systematic attack on Hannibal’s failing libido, tramping nightly over to the North Paddock with house-sized syringes of hormone extract, while Pringle (though his wife had taken to covering herself all over with cold cream) set up five more beetroots respiring in a tank.
All in all, it was a surging, forward-looking scene with nothing to indicate that already there was a canker gnawing at its breast.
The Zoology practical class the following week was a straightforward dissection of the frog. Killing a frog is simple and painless. All the same, it was with a leaden lack of surprise that I walked past the neatly pinned dissections and came, presently, upon this palpably still living frog, its bulging ‘cornered-financier’ eyes glittering moistly, one webbed foot hanging limply from a space between her fingers.
‘Dr Marshall, I’m extremely sorry — ‘
‘Don’t tell me,’ I said bitterly. ‘I know. You personally, just at this minute, find yourself unable to kill this frog.’
She nodded. ‘Those spots are really sort of golden…’
Goodness knows how it would have ended. I walked away and left her and when I came back the black-bearded Welshman who worked next to her had given her his pinned-out specimen and was preparing another for himself. Sex, as they say, is everywhere.
It was certainly at the Agricultural Society’s ball held in the College Hall on the following Saturday. The ratio of men to girls at Torcastle is five to one, so I was accustomed to seeing girls dragged round like pieces of mammoth by men still sweating from the chase. The worm-saving Miss Hamilton, however, was being dragged round by an entire rugger scrum, all of whose members seemed certain that time was not on their side.
‘That’s Kirstie Hamilton, isn’t it?’ said a voice on my left.
The other student, an Afro-haired agricultural engineer, nodded. ‘They say she’s absolutely fantastic. Goes out with anyone, no holds barred.’
‘Funny, she doesn’t look the type.’
‘Apparently she’s going into a convent or something when she’s through here. So she’s getting it all in now.’
She was certainly getting it in. Slightly disgusted for some reason, I steered my own piece of mammoth — a succulent dental nurse called Charline — towards the buffet.
By the time I got back to the ballroom, single ownership of Miss Hamilton had definitely been established. Peering closely at the victor, I saw the sallow face and slicked-down hair of our prize student Vernon Hartleypool, winner of the Mortimer-Ponsonby Prize for the best essay on Silage Utilisation and holder, two years running, of the Potterton Scholarship in Egg Production.
Agriculturally, she couldn’t have done better. But for a last outburst of sensuality before renouncing the world, her choice struck me as odd. Which was not to say that I didn’t by the end of the evening feel extremely sorry for Vernon Hartleypool. For just as the lights grew really dim, the music more and more insistent, I saw Vernon, scowling, leave the ballroom, return with a ladder, climb (among drunken cheers from his classmates) to the top of the thirty-foot window and release, at last, into the ink-black Torcastle night, a passe and not noticeably grateful turnip moth.