“I became tired of teaching already hyper-privileged chinless twits how to become even more hyper-privileged chinless twits by developing their ‘mental muscles’ so they could be adapted to any other subject on the planet. That was the bizarre notion on which the place still operated.”
“Twits like me?” Jeremy raised an amused eyebrow.
Barry laughed. “Twits like you, my friend. Only worse. Have you any idea how many prime ministers, foreign secretaries, home secretaries, and chancellors of the exchequer were ex-Oxbridge? Twits who’d pumped up their mental muscles studying Classics and then turned their big brains to running a country without the first idea how to do so? Twits who’d have trouble distinguishing an idea from a hole in the road and couldn’t count beyond single numbers without a calculator, but happily pontificated their way through the Westminster parliament to Downing Street on the back of their Oxbridge ‘educations,’ the very same sorts of twits who are currently the laughing stock of Europe over Brexit. And who, apart from them, stands to gain most from such privilege?”
“Oxbridge,” admitted Jeremy who, through his alumni association, had been invited on a regular basis to contribute large sums to the “refurbishment and re-development” of his alma mater.
“Quite. Enough of which I had soon had once I twigged to this unholy arrangement between the ancient universities, the sons and daughters of the already mega-rich, and ill-gotten power. Bally country run by the posturing buffoons whose ‘minds’ I was helping develop? No, thank you very much.”
“So you left.”
“With some aplomb, and indeed ephemeral notoriety in the media, as it happens. You know hacks. How half of them were educated at Oxbridge and the other half weren’t, so both sides make up all manner of defences for their positions. As evinced through my resignation being leaked by a post-doc student of mine and the bastions of the press having a, mercifully short, field day debating whether I was a whingeing wet or a working-class hero. And those were the days well before Facebook and Twitter. Imagine how it would be in these story-ballooning times with all their mindless chatter. Anyway, interest in me died down soon enough to be replaced with some war or another. Excuse me just a sec, old man, I think I need a pee. Bladder not working quite the way it once did. Not the full flush, if you know what I mean, although you probably don’t.”
While Barry was off trying to pee, Jeremy checked out the poetry and fiction shelves in his library and found them to be as representative of top writers as those of the philosophy section. And not just with texts from the Eng. Lit. canon. It also included contributions from the French, the German, the Spanish, the Italian, the Russian… most in translation, but not all.
“Holy shit,” he was muttering to himself as he heard Barry returning.
“More friends?” he said, gesturing at the bookshelves.
“Indeed. Always need the balance of the literary and the logical to feed both sides of the old brain,” Barry replied, struggling with the flies of his khaki gardener’s pants. “Fancy a smoke?” he added, taking a battered Old Holborn tin from his pocket.
Jeremy hadn’t smoked since varsity where it had been de rigueur to smoke, whatever the health Nazis said. Would probably make him dizzy after all these years. But, hey, what was a little dizziness in addition to his other problems? Might even help.
“Sure. That’d be great.”
“A fatty or a thinny?” said Barry, extracting his green Rizla cigarette papers.
“A thinny or my head might blow off.”
“Okey dokey. Now, where were we?”
“You quitting Oxford.”
“Right. And you know why?”
“Because of the chinless twit business.”
“Yes, the chinless twit business. But that was only the surface reason,” said Barry, carefully tamping and rolling Jeremy’s “thinny” before handing it over along with a red plastic lighter. “May I quote my old pal Socrates?”
“Quote away.”
“‘The unexamined life is not worth living,’ a concept which failed to penetrate even the most brilliant minds in academe, all of which appeared to be so concentrated on self advancement no room was left for the question: Why exactly am I doing this?”
Jeremy nodded as the tumblers began to fall.
“It was on this basis I found your questioning of the ‘choosing/chosen’ dyad so interesting,” said Barry, head bent as he concentrated on rolling up his “fatty.”
“Because you had done the same thing yourself.”
“Precisely, old fellow. Took a long hard look at myself and, like you, concluded it was time to put an end to singing from other people’s hymn sheets. To examine very carefully the power games secreted in their subtexts. And when I looked, again like you, what did I see?”
“Lies? Fantasies? Delusions?” Jeremy nodded, puffing on his roll-up.
“Exactly so. Belief systems swallowed whole. As you said, folk chosen by the cars they drove, the smartphones they changed every five minutes, the fashionable clothes they wore. All the while fooling themselves into thinking it was they who were doing the choosing. It was you who also gave the example of ‘speaking’ languages as opposed to being spoken by them, if I remember.”
Jeremy nodded again. Some memory this bloke had.
“But sadly how else are we to communicate, except through our always already infected grammars and lexises?” Barry continued. “What was it George Bernard Shaw said? ‘The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.’ Something of the sort. I now think bees are more capable of sending effective messages than us poor humans. We could learn from bees.”
“And the rest should be silence,” muttered Jeremy, misquoting a line from the only Shakespeare play he’d ever watched, the one at the local church hall in which Sophie played Ophelia badly.
“I wish it were,” said Barry lighting his fatty. “So much better than the gibberish we are given to think of as reason. Once one becomes aware of these things, life changes. It must. Which is why you find me where I now am.”
Jeremy stubbed out his roll-up in the ashtray Barry proffered for the purpose.
“And you’re happier now?”
“Ah, happy. A problematic notion, happiness. You may recall Basil’s line in Fawlty Towers when asked by his wife, Sybil, whether something was the matter because he wasn’t looking very happy. ‘Happy?… happy?… Oh, happy?’ Basil replies delving back into ancient memory.”
Barry chuckled and crushed out his own cigarette.
“So rather than ‘happy,’ let us just say I am at peace with myself and leave it at that, shall we? Now, look, you’ve had a long day, old chap. I’ve been gassing for far too long and there’s still a lot to think about. So why don’t we call it a day and hit the hay?”
“Call it a ‘dawn,’ maybe,” said Jeremy, as slants of light started filtering through the Shepherd’s Hut window and Shirley and Pete began showing signs of life.
“Possibly literally and metaphorically,” said Barry. “In any case, let me show you to your quarters.”
Seven
Nobody made a mockery of Sir Magnus Montague and got away with it, and he was going to make damn sure Jeremy Crawford, the maths genius upon whom the bank’s future depended, wasn’t going to succeed where others had so frequently failed. First the little blighter had gone bonkers and lived in a barn with a pig. Then he refused psychiatric assistance. Then he had the audacity to disappear altogether, leaving Sir Magnus the laughing stock of his very own army of shrinks and thespians. At least he’d had the pleasure of firing them. But what was his next step to be? That was the million-dollar question.