‘This’ll make me drunk,’ Professor Ormston tells himself, whisky on top of Tio Pepe before lunch. And yet he wants to stay here. The newspaper beside the trays of unwashed glasses on the bar is not the kind that has obituaries. Again the torn page stirs in his recall, only half of the backing singer there, the name of the army colonel not known to him, as the bishop’s wasn’t either. Of course a popular entertainer took precedence. The way things are these days, that stands to reason.
‘I’m sorry,’ he says at the bar after he has sat for a while longer, apologizing because the man hasn’t finished his food. But the man is cheerful, Irish by the sound of him. Professor Ormston has read somewhere that the Irish make good publicans, a touch of the blarney not out of place.
‘Sure, and what am I here for, sir? Wouldn’t I be negligent to eat me dinner with a man going thirsty?’
‘Thank you so much.’
He carries the replenished glass back to where he has been sitting. Survived by his wife, Vanessa. It would have said that, Vanessa mentioned once. No children, acquaintances of long ago would notice. And students who did not know he’d ever married would be surprised, he not being the sort, they might in their day have assumed. When they took her on as secretary in the department there had hardly been enough work to justify it and she was bored at first, until it was suggested she should be shared with McMoran. When she left, three years ago, it was because she didn’t like McMoran.
She has done what she thought best. He knows that in her; and sipping more whisky, he tries to understand. Apart altogether from McMoran’s spikiness, she had never been happy in the department, as later she confessed. ‘You think this girl’s up to it?’ he asked when they first considered her, not even noticing her beauty then. This city, not a human attribute, was what he’d thought of when he thought of beauty, the grey-brown columns and façades, carved figures in their niches, the lamplight coming on in winter. Seven hours have passed, he calculates: she came up with the tea and gingersnaps, prevaricating although prevarication does not come naturally to her.
Another man comes in, who doesn’t have to order what he wants. The barman knows and pours a bottle of Adnams’ beer. ‘Floating Voter,’ the barman says. ‘You’ll get him at nines.’
The others kept it to themselves when she left the department, unable to criticize her because she was his wife. McMoran muttered something, feeling more let down because he had relied on her more, but what he said wasn’t audible. It doesn’t interest any of them that she is happier now, that she has given her life up to her flowers and to her hospital charity work, amusing children while they wait on cystic-fibrosis days, or children undergoing leukaemia treatment, or hole-in-the heart children. ‘I don’t know how she does it,’ he might have said, but never has because they wouldn’t be interested in the charity work of someone’s wife. She wanted children; he could not give her them.
The trawl through his life that she has withheld from him would not, of course, record that. Nor would it touch upon his occasional testiness, his cold appraisal of examination answers, the orderly precision that enhances his work and affects him as a husband, the melancholy that comes from nowhere. Other human-interest decoration might enliven a drab account, with liberties taken for the casual reader. His wife was younger by sixteen years most certainly would not be written. Nor as lovely in her day as Marilyn Monroe.
The whisky has dried his mouth. In the Master’s drawing-room he would have seemed a figure of silliness, not saying anything: those of them who have wives would now be passing that across their lunch tables. They’d be amused to know that he is surreptitiously drinking in a public house.
*
The house is silent. Wintry sunshine dwindles in the kitchen, on the places laid at the oval table, each of the two plates of tongue covered with another plate, for the sun has made the window a haven for the last of autumn’s flies. A salad, the oil and vinegar dressing not yet added, is covered also.
Whoever the perpetrators are, Vanessa feels she belongs with them, that she has added something to their cruelty. ‘I couldn’t think, I didn’t know what I was doing’: all that is ready, and has been for longer than the food she has prepared. ‘Panic,’ she must also say, for that word belongs. ‘I went all blank.’ No need to say a wife should have the courage to bear bad news.
He’ll know because it will, of course, have all come out; and then he’ll see her reddened eyes and know the rest as well. A nest of vipers the Master and his simpering wife gather round them on these occasions. Who has a chance in a nest of vipers?
‘My God!’ Vanessa’s mother exclaimed in open horror when, nineteen years ago almost to the month, she learned of her daughter’s engagement to a fusty academic who was just old enough to be her father. ‘My God!’ she said again after their first encounter, when Vanessa brought him for the weekend to her mother’s flat. ‘Has he money?’ she asked, unable to find some other reason for what she termed an unattractive marriage. ‘Just what he earns,’ Vanessa replied, and two months later married him.
His key turns in the hall-door Yale. While waiting for him, it has occurred to Vanessa that there would be the other newspapers. She has imagined him in a newsagent’s, giving the right money because he likes to if he can, taking the papers to where he can peruse them undisturbed.
The hall door bangs softly; he does not call her name. There’s the pause that means he’s hanging up his overcoat and scarf, the papers placed on the table beneath the picture of a café scene. There are his footsteps then.
‘I have to tell you,’ her husband says, ‘that I believe I’m drunk.’
His voice is quiet, the words not slurred. He does not look drunk; he is the same. He doesn’t smile, but then he often doesn’t when he comes in. ‘A sobersides,’ her mother said. ‘Wizened,’ she added, although that wasn’t true.
‘I looked in at the St Boniface,’ he says. ‘Understandably, I believe.’
‘I’m awfully sorry.’
‘Oh Lord, it’s not your fault.’
‘I —’
‘I know, I know.’
‘I couldn’t think.’
‘I couldn’t when I heard, myself.’
‘They mentioned it?’
‘Quicke couldn’t resist a little mention. It didn’t matter. Sooner or later someone would.’
‘Yes.’
‘The culprits will be exposed, the Master’s view is. Of course he’s wrong.’
‘You don’t seem drunk in the least.’ Relief has slipped through Vanessa during these exchanges. For a reason that is obscure to her, and for the first time since she turned the pages of the newspaper while waiting for the early-morning kettle to boil, she feels that nothing is as terrible as it seemed in those awful moments.
‘To the best of my knowledge I have never in my life been drunk before. The man poured three double whiskies, and that on top of sherry.’
She lifts the plates that cover their cold meat. She stirs the oil and vinegar, shakes the salad about when she has added a few spoonfuls, then pours on the rest. Perhaps they’ll go away, Vanessa’s thought is, perhaps he’ll take an early retirement, as one of them so unexpectedly did last year. She’d pack up at once, she wouldn’t hesitate. Liguria, or Sansepolcro, where his favourite paintings are. Hers, too, they have become. ‘I could live here happily,’ he has said, over coffee in Sansepolcro.
‘I can tell you how this has happened,’ he says. ‘If you would care to know.’
‘Panic,’ she begins to say, and ceases when he shakes his head, grey hair as smooth as a helmet.
‘An act of compassion,’ he corrects.