gloom of the corridor arm in arm like a quaint, old-fashioned couple. Professor Cousins was very polite, always scurrying to get on the outside of women on pavements (in case they were knocked flying into the road by a hansom-cab presumably), proffering seats and opening doors and generally treating the female sex as if we were very delicate and made of glass, or something equally fragile and breakable, which, of course, we are, for we are made of bones and flesh.
His gentlemanly presence was rather reassuring especially as the doghairs on the back of my neck were standing to attention. Perhaps it was The Boy With No Name, lurking around his old haunts.
‘Oh, we’re all being watched,’ Professor Cousins said blithely. ‘We just don’t know it.’
Archie, of course, had long held the conviction that Special Branch were watching him, although he never elucidated why that should be so. (‘Perhaps because he’s special,’ Andrea said in one of her less intelligent moments.)
‘Oh yes, but Archie’s mad,’ Professor Cousins said cheerfully. ‘We’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.’
‘How do you know I’m mad?’
‘You must be,’ Professor Cousins said, ‘or you wouldn’t have come here.’
Professor Cousins’ room was at the other end of the English department corridor – always a perilous place fraught with danger but infinitely more so these days as the struggle for succession hotted up. Getting from one end of the corridor to the other was rather like being on a Ghost Train, ducking the spooks and spectres as they jumped out unexpectedly trying to frighten you.
Today, however, they all seemed to be absent. Dr Dick’s door was firmly closed, while Maggie Mackenzie’s was wide open as if to show she had nothing to be ashamed of although she herself was missing. Watson Grant seemed to have left the building. I was held captive by Professor Cousins’ ancient mariner anecdotage as he embarked on a rambling story about his days as a spry young doctoral student at Cambridge and some girl he had seduced at a May Ball long ago, so that we didn’t notice Maggie Mackenzie storming through the Murk, as thrawn as a Fury, until she was almost upon us.
Her shapeless, funebral garments billowed and her kirby grips scattered as she progressed. Maggie Mackenzie’s long iron-grey hair began each day anchored or plaited or rolled in a variety of vaguely Victorian styles but by lunchtime it had begun to work its way free of restraints and encumbrances and by mid-afternoon she had the appearance of someone leading a tribe of ancient Britons into battle, a gnarled warrior queen bearing grudges.
‘Dr Mackenzie, Maggie.’ Professor Cousins nodded pleasantly at her. She glared back at him. Maggie Mackenzie, who taught the nineteenth-century novel ( Why Women Write ) harboured a bitter resentment against the male of the species, resentment precipitated by her ex-husband, also a Dr Mackenzie, for reasons which she never spoke about because ‘some things went beyond language’.
‘I believe you owe me an essay?’ she said to me tersely by way of greeting, and added, ‘Where is your George Eliot?’ in a way that suggested there might be several George Eliots wandering the world and that I was the owner of one of them.
‘I left it at home,’ (or perhaps ‘I left her at home’), I said with a helpless shrug at the way life was an entity apparently beyond my control.
Dr Dick opened the door of his room suddenly as if he was trying to catch someone out. He frowned when he saw the three of us and gave the impression that he would have liked to give us lines for loitering near his territory. Dr Dick, whose speciality was the eighteenth century ( 1709–1821 – Rhyme or Reason? ), believed he should be made head of department because he was the only person in it who could construct a timetable properly. He was probably right.
Beardless and rather weedy, Dr Dick was a tall, anaemic-looking man who gave the
His gentlemanly presence was rather reassuring especially as the doghairs on the back of my neck were standing to attention. Perhaps it was The Boy With No Name, lurking around his old haunts.
‘Oh, we’re all being watched,’ Professor Cousins said blithely. ‘We just don’t know it.’
Archie, of course, had long held the conviction that Special Branch were watching him, although he never elucidated why that should be so. (‘Perhaps because he’s special,’ Andrea said in one of her less intelligent moments.)
‘Oh yes, but Archie’s mad,’ Professor Cousins said cheerfully. ‘We’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.’
‘How do you know I’m mad?’
‘You must be,’ Professor Cousins said, ‘or you wouldn’t have come here.’
Professor Cousins’ room was at the other end of the English department corridor – always a perilous place fraught with danger but infinitely more so these days as the struggle for succession hotted up. Getting from one end of the corridor to the other was rather like being on a Ghost Train, ducking the spooks and spectres as they jumped out unexpectedly trying to frighten you.
Today, however, they all seemed to be absent. Dr Dick’s door was firmly closed, while Maggie Mackenzie’s was wide open as if to show she had nothing to be ashamed of although she herself was missing. Watson Grant seemed to have left the building. I was held captive by Professor Cousins’ ancient mariner anecdotage as he embarked on a rambling story about his days as a spry young doctoral student at Cambridge and some girl he had seduced at a May Ball long ago, so that we didn’t notice Maggie Mackenzie storming through the Murk, as thrawn as a Fury, until she was almost upon us.
Her shapeless, funebral garments billowed and her kirby grips scattered as she progressed. Maggie Mackenzie’s long iron-grey hair began each day anchored or plaited or rolled in a variety of vaguely Victorian styles but by lunchtime it had begun to work its way free of restraints and encumbrances and by mid-afternoon she had the appearance of someone leading a tribe of ancient Britons into battle, a gnarled warrior queen bearing grudges.
‘Dr Mackenzie, Maggie.’ Professor Cousins nodded pleasantly at her. She glared back at him. Maggie Mackenzie, who taught the nineteenth-century novel ( Why Women Write ) harboured a bitter resentment against the male of the species, resentment precipitated by her ex-husband, also a Dr Mackenzie, for reasons which she never spoke about because ‘some things went beyond language’.
‘I believe you owe me an essay?’ she said to me tersely by way of greeting, and added, ‘Where is your George Eliot?’ in a way that suggested there might be several George Eliots wandering the world and that I was the owner of one of them.
‘I left it at home,’ (or perhaps ‘I left her at home’), I said with a helpless shrug at the way life was an entity apparently beyond my control.
Dr Dick opened the door of his room suddenly as if he was trying to catch someone out. He frowned when he saw the three of us and gave the impression that he would have liked to give us lines for loitering near his territory. Dr Dick, whose speciality was the eighteenth century ( 1709–1821 – Rhyme or Reason? ), believed he should be made head of department because he was the only person in it who could construct a timetable properly. He was probably right.
Beardless and rather weedy, Dr Dick was a tall, anaemic-looking man who gave the
Similar Books
