The Hill Bachelors Read online

  ‘You are prosperous so.’

  ‘Thanks be to God, we are.’

  He was a wandering beggar: they could not tell that what he wore had been a monk’s habit once, or that a tonsure had further marked his calling. They would have considered him blasphemous if he had divulged that he was angry with Our Lady, that he resented the mockery of this reward for his compliance in the past, that on his journey bitterness had spread in him. ‘Am I your plaything?’ he gruffly demanded as he trudged on and, hearing himself, was again ashamed.

  He passed through a forest, so dark at its heart it might have been night. Hour upon hour it took before the trees began to dwindle and the faint light of another evening dappled the gloom. He passed that night on the forest’s edge, covering himself again with undergrowth.

  ‘I will go back,’ he muttered in the morning, but knew immediately that this petulance was an empty threat: he would not find the way if he attempted to return; wild boars and wolves would come at night. Even though the gorse had drawn blood, he knew he was protected while he was obedient, for in the dark of the forest he had not once suffered from a broken branch spiking his head or face, had not once stumbled on a root.

  So, testily, he went on. The hoar-frost that whitened grass and vegetation was lost within an hour each morning to the sun. St Sabas’s day came, St Finnian’s, St Lucy’s, St Ammon’s. In other years they had occurred in all weathers, but on Michael’s journey it still did not rain. He cracked open nuts, searched where there was water for cresses and wild parsley. He remembered, on St Thomas’s day, Luchan telling of Thomas’s finger placed on the wound and of his cry of anguish as his doubt was exposed, and his Saviour’s chiding. ‘It is only that I cannot understand,’ Michael pleaded, again begging for the solace of forgiveness.

  Often he did not rest but walked on when darkness fell, and sometimes he did not eat. The strength to walk remained, but there was a lightness in his head and, going on, he wondered about his life, whether or not he had wasted the time given to him on earth. He begged at the door of a great house and was brought in, to warmth and food. The lady of the house came to the kitchen to pour wine for him and ask if he’d seen badgers and foxes the way he had come. He said he had. Her dark hair and the olive skin of her face put him in mind of Fódla once and that night, when he lay in a bed as comfortable as he had ever known, he thought about his childhood friend: her skin would be rough now, and lined, her hands ingrained from a lifetime’s work. More anger was kindled in him; he was no longer penitent. Why should it have been that Fódla bore the children of another man, that she had come to belong to someone else, that he had been drawn away from her? His melancholy thoughts frightened him, seeming like a madness almost. Since first he had dreamed his holy dreams had there been some folly that controlled him, a silliness in his credulity? Had he been led into what Cathal called confusion’s dance? Cathal would have spoken on that, Diarmaid too, and Ioin. There would have been their arguments and their concern, and the wisdom of Brother Beocca. But alone and lost in nowhere there was only a nagging that did not cease, a mystery that mocked and taunted, that made of him in his fifty-ninth year a bad-tempered child.

  Mass was said in the house in the morning, and the lady of the house came to him when he was given breakfast.

  ‘Do not hasten on,’ she begged, ‘if you do not have to. These days of the year, we would not wish to see you without a roof.’

  Stay, she urged, until St Stephen’s day, offering her hospitality with a smile touched by sorrow. She was a widow, he had heard in the kitchen.

  They would clothe him, although it was not said. They would burn the old habit that was no longer recognizable as to its origin. He had told them nothing about himself; they had not asked.

  ‘You are welcome in my house,’ he heard the invitation repeated. ‘And the weather may turn bitter.’

  It would be pleasant to stay. There was the bed, the kitchen fireside. He had watched the spicing of beef the evening before; he had seen poultry hanging in the cold rooms, and fruits laid out in jars.

  ‘I am not allowed to stay,’ he said, and shook his head and was not pressed.

  It was soon after he left the house, still in the same hour, that his cheerless mood slipped from him. As he walked away in the boots he had been given, he sensed with startling abruptness — not knowing why he did — that he had not failed himself, either as the young man he once had been or the old man he had become; and he knew that this journey was not the way to his death. Faithful to her prediction, the Virgin had not come to him again, but in a different way he saw her as she might have been before she was holy. He saw her taken aback by the angel’s annunciation, and plunged into a confusion such as he had experienced himself. For her, there had been a journey too. For her, there had been tiredness and apprehension, and unkind mystery. And who could say there had not been crossness also?

  Like blood flowing again, trust trickled back and Michael felt as he had when first he was aware he would survive among the rocks of his island. There was atonement in the urgency of his weary travail for three more days; and when the fourth day lightened he knew where he was.

  The abbey was somewhere to the east, the pasture land ahead of him he had once walked. And closer, there was the hill on which so often he had watched over his father’s sheep. There was the stream along which the alders grew, their branches empty of leaves now. No flock grazed the slopes of the hill, nor were there geese in the orchard, nor pigs rooting beneath the beech tree. But the small stone farmhouse was hardly changed.

  There was no sound when he went nearer, and he stood for a moment in the yard, glancing about him at the closed doors of the outside houses, at the well and the empty byre. Grass grew among the roughly hewn stones that cobbled the surface beneath his feet. Ragwort and nettles withered in a corner. A roof had fallen in.

  They answered his knock and did not know him. They gave him bread and water, two decrepit people he would not have recognized had he met them somewhere else. The windows of their kitchen were stuffed with straw to keep the warmth in. The smoke from the hearth made them cough. Their clothes were rags.

  ‘It is Michael,’ suddenly she said.

  His father, blind, reached out his hand, feeling in the air. ‘Michael,’ he said also.

  There was elation in their faces, joy such as Michael had never seen in faces anywhere before. The years fell back from them, their eyes were lit again with vigour in their happiness. A single candle burned in celebration of the day, its grease congealed, holding it to the shelf above the hearth.

  Their land would not again be tilled; he was not here for that. Geese would not cry again in the orchard, nor pigs grub beneath the beech trees. For much less, and yet for more, he had been disturbed in the contentment of his solitude. So often he had considered the butterflies of his rocky fastness his summer angels, but if there were winter angels also they were here now, formless and unseen. No choirs sang, there was no sudden splendour, only limbs racked by toil in a smoky hovel, a hand that blindly searched the air. Yet angels surely held the cobweb of this mercy, the gift of a son given again.

  Death of a Professor

  The roomful of important men expectantly await the one whom another has already dubbed the party’s ghost. In some, anticipation is disguised, in others it is a glint in an eye, a flushed cheek, the flicker of a smile that comes and goes. Within their disciplines it is their jealously possessed importance that keeps those gathered in the room going, but for once, this morning, their disciplines do not matter. Shafts of insult remain unlaunched, old scores can wait as the Master’s Tio Pepe makes the rounds. Gossip is in command today.

  ‘Oh, just a — a jape, they say?’ little McMoran mutters, excusing cruelty with a word he has to search for. His sister’s school stories of forty years ago were full of japes — The Girls of the Chalet School, Jo Finds a Way, The Terrible Twins. No point in carrying on about it, McMoran mutters also: they’ll never find the instigator now. A bit of fu
n, still mischievously he adds.

  Seeming almost twice McMoran’s size, Linderfoot sniffs into his empty glass, his great pate shiny in bright winter light. Oh, meant as fun, he quite agrees. No joke, of course, if it comes your way. No joke to be called dead before your time.

  ‘It hasn’t come your way, though,’ McMoran scratchily points out, and wonders what the obituarists have composed already about this overweight, obtuse man, for he has always considered Linderfoot more than a little stupid even though he holds a Chair, which McMoran doesn’t. Obedient, it would seem, to the devilment of some jesting or malicious student, four newspapers this morning have published their obituarists’ tributes to the professor who has not yet arrived for the Master’s midday drinks.

  ‘Kind on the whole,’ Quicke remarks to a colleague who does not respond, being one of several in the room who likes to keep a private counsel. ‘Oh, kind, of course. No, I would not say less than kind.’

  Grinning through bushy sideburns that spread on to his cheeks, Quicke offers variations of his thought, recalling an attack made on the historian Willet-Horsby after his death — disguised, of course, but none the less an attack. ‘1956. Unusual on an obituary page, but there you are.’

  Quicke is the untidiest of the men in the room, his pink corduroy suit having gone without the attentions of an iron for many weeks, the jacket shabby, lapels touched here and there with High Table droppings. A virulent red tie — assertion of Quicke’s political allegiance — does not quite hide the undone buttons of his checked lumberjack’s shirt. He is a hairy, heavily made man, his facial features roughly textured, who in his sixties is still the enfant terrible of College junketings and gatherings such as this one.

  ‘Ormston has taken it in his stride,’ he finishes his observations now, guessing this to be far from so. ‘He is a man of humour.’

  ‘Ormston’s nothing of the sort.’ The tallest man in the room, skinny as a tadpole, Triller peers down at the Master’s wife to contradict what both have overheard. Triller is courteous but given on occasion to sharpness, tweedily one of the old school, with a pipe that this midday remains unlit in the Master’s drawing-room.

  ‘It is a most appalling thing,’ the Master’s wife, the only woman in the room, asserts. ‘I doubt that Professor Ormston will turn up.’

  ‘You’ve had no word?’

  ‘Not a thing.’

  ‘Oh, then he’ll come. Unlike him not to.’

  ‘It’s going too far, don’t you think, this? Why is it that everything must go too far these days?’

  ‘Your husband, I’m perfectly certain, intends to do what is necessary.’

  The Master is lax, Triller’s private view is. Tarred with the Sixties’ brush, the Master long ago let the reins slip away. What better can be expected now? A show of strength is necessary, and Triller adds:

  ‘Not for an instant do I doubt the Master’s intention to supply it. How odd, though, that the victim should be Ormston.’

  ‘I didn’t myself realize Professor Ormston was unpopular. No, not at all.’

  ‘He does not suck up.’ Professor Triller glances briefly at Wirich’s back and is pleased when the Master’s wife acknowledges his allusion with one of her faint smiles. ‘I don’t suppose Ormston has ever worn leathers in his life.’

  This elicits laughter, a tinkle in the noise of conversation. Though not attired so now, Wirich is given to leather — jackets and tight leather trousers, studded belts, occasionally a choker. He rides a motorcycle, a big Yamaha.

  ‘Could this not simply be carelessness?’ the Master’s wife suggests. ‘Newspapers have a way, these days, of being careless.’

  ‘Not four different obituary departments, I’d have thought. I rather fear it was deliberate.’

  Plump, with spectacles dangling, the Master’s wife retorts that no matter how the unpleasantness has come about it is unacceptable in an older university. She’s cross because what clearly excites her guests does not excite her, nor the Master himself. Something has been taken from them, she feels. Today should belong to them.

  ‘I considered telephoning Ormston,’ the Master reveals to the author of Tribal Organization in the Karakoram Foothills and to a classicist who considers the investigation of foothill tribes a waste of time. ‘But then I rather thought that would simply highlight the thing, so I didn’t.’

  Nods greet this. They would have resisted telephoning too, a joint indication is, both men reflecting that the Master’s role is not one they could ever take to, with irritating decisions endlessly to consider.

  ‘I really am disturbed.’ Given to booming, the Master lowers his voice to indicate the seriousness of his state. ‘I truly am.’

  Before his time, by as much as fifteen years, there was the business of Batchett’s extra-mural lecture, and longer ago still the mocking of T. L. Hapgood, which now is in the annals, although no one in the Master’s drawing-room this midday knew T. L. Hapgood in his lifetime or is aware of what he looked like. More recently, one morning, there was the delivery of a pig to Dr Kindly, and that same evening four dozen take-away pizzas. Batchett had presented himself at a famous public school to lecture to the Geographical Society on land lines, only to discover that not only had some sort of mid-term break emptied the school of his anticipated audience but that there was, in fact, no Geographical Society and never had been.

  ‘The Hapgood riddle was never solved?’ the Karakoram foothills man hazards. ‘I’ve never known.’

  ‘No, they didn’t get to the bottom of it. Years later, identities often surface after such nuisances, but none did then. Some disaffected bunch.’

  The bunch who took against T. L. Hapgood — by general consent because his sarcasm hurt — based their jape on the professor’s disdain for the stream of consciousness in the literature of his time. Other academics were written to in Professor Hapgood’s name, announcing his authorship of a forthcoming study of James Joyce’s life and works. I feel my task will be incomplete and greatly lacking without the inclusion of your views on the great Irishman, and in particular, perhaps, on his subtle and enlightening use of what we have come to call the ‘stream of consciousness’. Anything from a paragraph to thirty or so pages would be welcome from your pen, with prompt reward either in cheque form or our own good claret, whichever is desired. I am most reluctant to go to press without your voice, inimitable in its perception and its sagacity. For eighteen months Professor Hapgood received contributions from Europe, America, Japan and the antipodes. Later, demands for reimbursement became abusive.

  ‘I didn’t know Ormston in his youth wanted to be a cabinet-maker,’ the classicist remarks. ‘It said that in one of them this morning.’

  ‘Affectionately, though,’ the Master hurriedly interjects. ‘The point was affectionately made.’

  ‘Oh yes, affectionately.’

  Historians and philosophers and breezy sociologists, promoters of literature and language, of medieval lore and the Internet, they stand about and talk or do not talk. In different ways the diversion draws them from their shells, even those who have decided that comment on any matter can be a giveaway. Some wonder about the absent victim, others about his younger wife — a flibbertigibbet in Triller’s view, the price you pay for beauty. To McMoran it seems like fate’s small revenge that Ormston should be struck down before his time: his own wife has long ago given in to dowdiness and fat.

  At twenty-five past twelve there is a lull in the drawing-room conversations, occurring as if for a reason, although there isn’t one. For a moment only Quicke’s rather high voice can be heard, repeating to someone else that Ormston is a man of humour. A snigger is inadequately suppressed.

  ‘My dear, there are empty glasses,’ the Master’s wife murmurs in her husband’s ear.

  As he looks about him, wondering where he left the decanter, the conversational lull seems not to have been adventitious after all, but a portent. The doorbell sounds. Professor Ormston has come at last.

  *

&
nbsp; Someone once said — the precise source of a much-repeated observation long ago lost — that in her heyday Vanessa Ormston’s beauty recalled Marilyn Monroe’s. Over the years, inevitably has come the riposte that she still possesses the film star’s brain. Photographs show a smiling girl with bright fair hair, slender to the point of slightness, her features lit with the delicate beauty of a child. At forty-eight — younger by sixteen years than her husband — she seems thin rather than slender and has retained her beauty to the same degree that the flowers she presses between the leaves of books have. Ormston’s wife — as she is often designated among her husband’s colleagues — has a passion for flowers. Significance has been found in her preservation of blooms beyond their prime, the venom of envy spilt a little in college cloisters or at High Table.

  Very early on the morning of the Master’s sherry do — that racy term racily approved in academe — Vanessa read the obituary of her husband, whom ten minutes ago she had left alive in the twin bed next to hers. Arrested by the grainy photograph — head and shoulders, caught at Commencements five years ago — her instinct was to hurry upstairs to make sure everything was all right, that time had not played tricks on her. Was it somehow another day? Had amnesia kindly erased the facts of tragedy? But then she heard her husband’s footfall and his early-morning cough. Mistily, she read — a revelation — that he was well loved by his students. She read that he was ‘distinguished in his small world’ and knew he would not care for that. None of them recognized that his world was small.

  The electric kettle came to the boil while Vanessa read on; and then, alarmed anew, she hurried upstairs. He was propped up on his pillows after his brief absence from the bed, what showed of him almost a replica of the photographed head and shoulders on the fawn Formica surface of the kitchen table. ‘Won’t be a tick,’ she managed to get out and hurried off again to make their seven o’clock tea, the tray prepared the night before, gingersnap biscuits in the round tin with ‘The Hay Wain’ on it. The newspaper should accompany all this, his turn to scan it then.