The brusque, almost callous, tone of the note indicated that it had been penned by someone other than Professor Cousins, who, even if he remembered omissions and absences, never cared enough to reprimand people for them.
I decided that, rather than speak to him, I would leave him a letter, beseeching leniency, and plead a dying grandmother in mitigation. Is my grandmother dead? Or grandmothers in the plural, for surely there must have been two of them unless autogenesis runs in the family?
— Dead, Nora says.
‘And your grandmothers, what about them?’
— Very dead, and I only had one.
But you can’t have only one grandmother, that’s illogical. Everyone has two. Don’t they?
Reductio ad Absurdum
I HADN’T ACTUALLY EXPECTED TO FIND PROFESSOR COUSINS IN his room as he was supposed to be giving a lecture on revenge tragedy at that time of day. Instead he was rifling through the drawers of his filing-cabinet. He seemed to be even more skittish than usual, laughing away to himself as he pulled out, and then discarded on the floor, an endless cache of photocopied timetables and study guides. I reminded him that he was supposed to be giving a lecture and he looked at me in astonishment and said, ‘Really?’ as if he’d never given one before in his life.
I offered to help him find whatever it was he was looking for but this seemed to cause him even more amusement. ‘I can’t remember what I’m looking for,’ he said, ‘but, don’t worry, I will when I find it.’ He gave me a curious glance. ‘Can I help you with something, did you want to see me?’
I told Professor Cousins that I’d come to write a note to him and he gestured wildly in the direction of his desk and said, ‘On you go, my dear, on you go then.’ It seemed the easiest thing to do somehow, so I slipped behind his desk and got out a pad of paper and started writing.
Professor Cousins’ desk was very untidy, scattered with little bits of paper on which he had scrawled messages to himself in his spiky italic hand — ‘Buy fish!’ ‘Find glove!’ ‘Send letter!’
‘’Tis Pity She’s a Whore,’ he exclaimed suddenly, just as Martha Sewell passed his open door. She gave him an unreadable look. Professor Cousins waved to her. ‘That’s what I’m supposed to be teaching, isn’t it?’ he said to me.
‘Yes.’
He sighed, looking very downcast.
‘I’m not in the lecture theatre either,’ I said in a feeble effort to comfort him. He made a helpless gesture and returned to the filing-cabinet, muttering something to himself on the lines of ‘Mummery flummery, mimsy whimsy, blah, blah, blah,’ before wandering out into the corridor, bleating Joan’s name in the ridiculous helpless tone he adopted in the belief that it endeared him to Joan, when in fact it drove her up the wall. When he’d gone I propped up my note for him between ‘Go to Draffens!’ and ‘Joan’s birthday!’ and discreetly pocketed the one that said ‘Mark Honours essays!’
Seeing Martha had been a blow as I had been hoping to avoid her two o’clock creative writing tutorial, but now that she’d seen me I supposed I was going to have to put in an appearance in her class. I looked up and was startled to see Watson Grant lowering in the doorway.
‘Goodness, what happened to you?’ I said to him, for his head was bandaged up and he was sporting a black eye that made him look more manly than he really was.
‘Mugged,’ he said miserably. ‘I was concussed, I’m lucky I’m not dead.’
Professor Cousins came back at that moment, bearing aloft a cup of Joan-made tea. ‘Good God, man,’ he cried when he saw Grant Watson, ‘what on earth happened to you?’ When Watson Grant explained, Professor Cousins said, ‘Laid low by some anonymous stranger in the dark, eh?’ He proffered a Nuttall’s Minto but Grant Watson declined. ‘Concussion,’ Professor Cousins reminisced dreamily, ‘I was concussed once — during the war, or a war, certainly. Unconscious for the best part of an hour. When I came round I couldn’t remember anything, had no idea who I was. I rather liked it, looking back,’ he sighed regretfully; ‘a tabula rasa, a blank sheet of paper. A fresh start.’
‘And do you know who you are now?’ Watson Grant asked him with a little more asperity than usual. Professor Cousins looked thoughtful. ‘Well, I know who I think I am.’
Me, I am Euphemia Stuart-Murray. I am the last of my line. My mother is not my mother.
It does seem a little harsh of her to tell me this now, after twenty-one years. Although I always suspected there was something not quite right, some skeleton waiting to fall out of a cupboard. If she’s not my mother how did she acquire me?
‘Did you steal me? Did you find me?’
— It wasn’t quite like that.
‘Well what is it like, for heaven’s sake?’ My mother stares into the empty hearth. Not my actual, factual mother, of course, for she — apparently — is dead. It turns out that I have been wrong all along — I am not a semi-orphan, I am a complete orphan, whole and entire. I belong to no-one.
I made my excuses and left before Grant Watson remembered I owed him an essay. As I was getting into the lift a voice shouted, ‘Wait for me,’ and a breathless Bob rushed in and said, ‘Beam me up, Scottie. And be quick about it.’
‘I’m going down not up, and what are you doing here anyway?’
‘I’ve been to a philosophy tutorial,’ Bob said, the unfamiliar word sitting uncomfortably on his tongue. Bob had no idea how he’d ended up taking five of his eight degree papers in philosophy and presumed it must be due to an administrative error somewhere. And, of course, philosophy attracted exactly the wrong kind of girls for Bob — earnest intellectual ones, for example, who wanted to discuss Foucault and Adorno and other people Bob had tried very hard not to hear of. If Bob could have designed a girl he would have started by getting rid of her vocal cords. In Bob’s ideal world, Bob’s girl would be, not me, but Lieutenant Uhura or Honeybunch Kaminski. Or — better still — Shug.
Bob frowned at a photocopied sheet he must have been given in the tutorial and started catechizing me. ‘Have you ever heard of Secondary Rules of Inference?’
‘No.’
‘The Law of the Excluded Middle?’
‘Sounds like something from Gilbert and Sullivan.’
‘Is that a no?’
‘Yes.’
He looked at me doubtfully. ‘Monadic predicates?’
‘No.’
‘Hypothetical Syllogisms?’
‘Not really.’
‘Not really?’ Bob said. ‘What kind of an answer is that?’
‘OK — no, then.’
‘The Law of Identity?’
‘Well . . .’
‘Yes or no?’
‘No,’ I said irritably, ‘this is boring.’
‘You’re telling me. Reductio ad Absurdum?’
‘Endlessly.’
Bob waved a sheaf of past exam papers in my face and said, ‘This stuff’s unbelievable. Listen.’ (‘Stuff’ was Bob’s all-purpose word for everything.) He proceeded to read a question, in a ponderous tone, from the exam paper —
Symbolize the following propositions in the symbolism of Predicate Logic:
(a) Cupar is north of Edinburgh.
(b) Dundee is north of Edinburgh.
(c) Cupar is not north of Dundee.
(d) Cupar is between Edinburgh and Dundee.
(e) There are places between Edinburgh and Dundee.
(f) If one place is south of a second place, then the second is north of the first.