by Eva Ibbotson
‘But your work?’ said Peckham hopefully. And then: ‘Good heavens, what on earth is that girl doing crawling about in that flower bed?’
I told him. Peckham didn’t really like it. He didn’t, in fact, like it at all.
Sir Henry’s visit was timed for the last week of term and following Peckham’s instructions, the college threw itself into a frenzy of scientific activity. The pigs were put into metabolism cages, the turkeys reserved for the staffs Christmas dinner vanished from their shed and reappeared in a pen marked ‘ Organo-Phosphate Toxicity Trials’. Davies doggedly anaesthetised thirty sheep, stuck tubes into their stomachs and set up an impressive – if statistically dicey – feeding experiment. Blackwater began a systematic attack on Hannibal’s failing libido, tramping nightly over to the North Paddock with house-sized syringes of hormone extract, while Pringle (though his wife had taken to covering herself all over with cold cream) set up five more beetroots respiring in a tank.
All in all, it was a surging, forward-looking scene with nothing to indicate that already there was a canker gnawing at its breast.
The Zoology practical class the following week was a straight-forward dissection of the frog. Killing a frog is simple and painless. All the same, it was with a leaden lack of surprise that I walked past the neatly pinned dissections and came, presently, upon this palpably still living frog, its bulging ‘cornered-financier’ eyes glittering moistly, one webbed foot hanging limply from a space between her fingers.
‘Dr Marshall, I’m extremely sorry—’
‘Don’t tell me,’ I said bitterly. ‘I know. You personally, just at this minute, find yourself unable to kill this frog.’
She nodded. ‘ Those spots are really sort of golden. . .’
Goodness knows how it would have ended. I walked away and left her and when I came back the black-bearded Welshman who worked next to her had given her his pinned-out specimen and was preparing another for himself. Sex, as they say, is everywhere.
It was certainly at the Agricultural Society’s ball held in the College Hall on the following Saturday. The ratio of men to girls at Torcastle is five to one, so I was accustomed to seeing girls dragged round like pieces of mammoth by men still sweating from the chase. The worm-saving Miss Hamilton, however, was being dragged round by an entire rugger scrum, all of whose members seemed certain that time was not on their side.
‘That’s Kirstie Hamilton, isn’t it?’ said a voice on my left.
The other student, an Afro-haired agricultural engineer, nodded. ‘They say she’s absolutely fantastic. Goes out with anyone, no holds barred.’
‘Funny, she doesn’t look the type.’
‘Apparently she’s going into a convent or something when she’s through here. So she’s getting it all in now.’
She was certainly getting it in. Slightly disgusted for some reason, I steered my own piece of mammoth – a succulent dental nurse called Charline – towards the buffet.
By the time I got back to the ballroom, single ownership of Miss Hamilton had definitely been established. Peering closely at the victor, I saw the sallow face and slicked-down hair of our prize student Vernon Hartleypool, winner of the Mortimer-Ponsonby Prize for the best essay on Silage Utilisation and holder, two years running, of the Potterton Scholarship in Egg Production.
Agriculturally, she couldn’t have done better. But for a last outburst of sensuality before renouncing the world, her choice struck me as odd. Which was not to say that I didn’t by the end of the evening feel extremely sorry for Vernon Hartleypool. For just as the lights grew really dim, the music more and more insistent, I saw Vernon, scowling, leave the ballroom, return with a ladder, climb (among drunken cheers from his classmates) to the top of the thirty-foot window and release, at last, into the ink-black Torcastle night, a passé and not noticeably grateful turnip moth.
As half-term approached and Sir Henry’s visit drew nearer, activity in the college became more and more frenetic. Black-water increased Hannibal’s dosage yet again and it took two men to carry the syringe. Davies added intestinal fistulas to his already gastrically fistulated sheep and Pringle (though his wife had purchased a set of hair-curlers that would have interested the Inquisition) nevertheless added at least two feet of significant glass tubing to his beetroot.
All the same …
‘Staff all right, James, do you reckon?’ asked Peckham, the Principal, putting it into words. ‘Not feeling the strain?’
I said no, the staff were fine. What else could I say? That I had encountered Davies, after he’d taken the First Years for animal nutrition, staring haggardly at his fistulated sheep.
‘James, this is a useful experiment? Worth causing a bit of discomfort for?’
‘Of course it is.’
‘I mean, they’re just sheep. Not happy sheep. Not unhappy sheep. Sheep. St Francis just doesn’t come in to a thing like that.’
Or Blackwater, striding angrily into the staff-room. ‘ So the Buddha gave up sex at thirty. So he gave it up. Is that any reason why I shouldn’t inject Hannibal?’
In a way it was Pringle who showed most fight. ‘I don’t care what the new work on plant sensitivity shows,’ he said, sitting with teeth clenched over his tank. ‘This beetroot is not screaming.’
‘Look, Kirstie,’ I said, using her Christian name for the first time and removing from her shoulder the white rat she had personally been unable to chloroform. ‘I understand your feelings very well. But why inflict them on us? You don’t need a diploma in agriculture to go into a convent.’
‘It’s not like that, Dr Marshall, honestly. I just have to get this diploma. Particularly now that this ghastly thing has come up with Vernon—’ She broke off and to my horror, her piebald eyes began to fill with tears. ‘Don’t be cross, please.’
And for some reason I wasn’t. Not until I went to tell Potts that we had run out of formalin and found him lost to the world, reading The Little Flowers of St. Theresa.
As one would expect from the Ministry’s top scientist, Sir Henry’s schedule was worked out to the last detail. He was to arrive at Torcastle Station at nine-fifteen, inspect the Technical College and the Art School in the morning, lunch with the Lord Mayor and reach us at two o’clock.
Ten minutes to two on the great day saw us, accordingly, dark-suited and – we hoped – scientific-looking, assembled on the steps to greet Sir Henry’s motorcade. Two o’clock struck, two-fifteen, two-thirty …
At ten to three the college secretary came running out of her office and whispered something into Peckham’s ear.
‘Oh no!’ I heard him say. ‘Not today of all days. This really is the end!’
‘That was Torcastle police,’ he said, coming over to me. ‘They’ve arrested one of our students for kicking a policeman. Get over there quickly, and for God’s sake, hush it up!’
I was in my car, turning out of the drive, before I realised that I hadn’t even bothered to ask who the student was.
‘That’s marvellous,’ I said, storming into the police station an hour later. ‘You can’t chloroform a worm and you go round kicking innocent policemen.’
‘I didn’t kick him, Dr Marshall, honestly,’ said Kirstie. There was a black smut on her nose and between her green and yellow eyes a purple bruise gleamed fitfully. ‘ He was stepping on a pigeon.’
‘Pigeons,’ I said, speaking with care, ‘ are birds. They don’t get stepped on. They can fly, remember?’
‘This one couldn’t, he had a bad leg. I was sort of keeping an eye on him. There were a whole lot of us guarding this lime tree by the station, you see, stopping it from being cut down, and then the police started making a cordon and one of them stepped back on to this pigeon and I just gave him a little shove…’
There was a pause while I wondered just where the breaking point of the average Mother Superior might be expected to lie. ‘Well,’ I said at last, ‘I suppose we should try to get you out of here.’
‘Dr Marshall, you’ve been m
arvellous and I’m terribly grateful, but I don’t feel I should leave here till I find out what’s happened to that dear old man they arrested along with me.’
‘Look, Kirstie, you’re already in trouble enough—’
‘But he helped me. He jumped out of his car when they started carrying me off in this van. We had such a marvellous talk! You’ve no idea how wise he was, and how good. There was nothing he didn’t know about. Albert Schweitzer, Lao Tse the lot!’ Suddenly her face crumpled. ‘You don’t think they’re beating him up?’
‘For heaven’s sake, Kirstie, will you stop drivelling about this old man? Why don’t you worry about yourself for a change? You don’t seem to realise you’re a case of student violence, the kind that has to be nipped in the bud. I’m horribly afraid they’re going to chuck you out.’
I was right. By the time we got back, delayed by a blocked petrol pump, Sir Henry’s visit was over. Peckham thought it had gone well. Though the unexplained delay at the beginning had made the whole inspection somewhat hurried, he felt that Sir Henry had been pleased. Indeed Sir Henry’s secretary had confided to Peckham that he had never seen the great man look so relaxed and peaceful.
For Kirstie, however, there was no reprieve. Peckham sent for her straight away and the look on her face as she came out of his study made me long to go and knock his smug and disciplinarian head against the wall.
‘All right,’ I said when I found her at last, sitting hunched and wretched under a clump of birch trees beside the ornamental lake. ‘Now explain. Why does it matter so much? What’s with the convent?’
‘I never said I was going into a convent. I said I was going where there weren’t any men.’
‘And where’s that?’
She sighed. ‘ I don’t suppose you’ve ever heard of an island called Braesay?’
But there she was wrong. ‘I have. It’s one of the most beautiful islands in the Hebrides. But you can’t get on to it. It belongs to a crusty old—’
‘My father,’ said Kirstie. ‘He doesn’t like people all that much.’
I was silent, thinking of Braesay with its grey seals, its white-fringed foreshore, its fabled, bird-hung cliffs …
‘My father’s getting old and I’m the only child. I wanted to learn about agriculture so that I could go on running it after he couldn’t. There’s an old shepherd, a couple of crofters on the North Shore … You can’t just sell up and turn people out.’
‘Look,’ I lied, ‘this diploma’s just a load of rubbish. All you have to do is marry some nice, competent man and—’
‘But I’ve tried and tried! You’ve no idea how I’ve carried on. And I almost had Vernon Hartleypool. He didn’t exactly send me, but he was absolutely fantastic about oat smut and rape seed and things. He even knew about digested sludge. And then he turned me down because of his appendix!’
‘His appendix?’
‘Well, on Braesay we have to put up flares for a doctor and his appendix grumbles.’
She sighed and a despairing silence fell. After a while her hand, without exactly creeping into mine, somehow indicated that it was there. I picked it up, turned it over, passed my thumb to and fro along her wrist. It was not as if I didn’t see what that worm had been on about, it was that I didn’t want to.
‘What do you do up there, say, when the seal population builds up and begins to interfere with the fishing?’
Her green and yellow eyes lit up.
‘Well, I put the pups in a boat and the mothers swim after us and we take them away to another island.’
‘I thought it might be something like that,’ I said heavily. ‘I just thought it might.’
Six weeks later at the beginning of the spring term, we received notice that our Charter had come through. Peckham was triumphant, but like all men who have battled through and won, he found that victory brought problems.
There was, for example, the sudden, curious decimation of his staff. Davies, who was twenty-six, said he felt he was getting too old for experimental work and left to join his brother on a hill farm in Wales. Blackwater accepted an offer from a firm of strawberry growers, and it was generally understood that I had been called away to do Nature Conservancy work in the Hebrides.
But in a way it was Sir Henry’s letter that disconcerted Peckham most. Sir Henry found himself compelled to decline the flattering offer to be Torcastle’s first Chancellor. He had, he said, long harboured a great desire to retire from the world and end his days in prayer and meditation, but had forced himself to remain at his post in order to foster those values – respect for life, conservation of the environment and so on – without which mankind was doomed to perish. A recent encounter with one of Peckham’s own students, however, had shown him how completely the youth of today could be trusted to carry on just these ideals. He was accordingly leaving to join the ashram of Shri Ramananda in Jaipur and wished the new university every success.
‘Must have been Vernon Hartleypool, I suppose‚’ said Peckham, puzzled. ‘He had quite a long chat with him, I know.’
But it is of Pringle that I think, always, when I remember my last days at Torcastle. Pringle the survivor, crouched over his tank, shielding something with his hand.
‘I want you to understand, James‚’ he is saying, ‘ that this is a happy beetroot. A very happy beetroot indeed!’
A ROSE IN AMAZONIA
SHE HAD not expected it to be so beautiful.
In Vienna, in her luxurious villa in Schönbrunn, she had read about the ‘Green Hell’ of the Amazon. Now, standing by the rails of the steamer on the last day of her thousand-mile voyage up the ‘River Sea’, she was in a shimmering world in which trees grew from the dusky water only to find themselves in turn embraced by ferns and frònds and brilliantly coloured orchids. An alligator slid from a gleaming sandbar into the leaf-stained shallows; the grey skeleton of a deodar, its roots asphyxiated by the water, was aflame with scarlet ibis.
She was bound for a city which even in the few decades of its existence had become a legend: fabled Manaus with its rococo mansions, its mosaic sidewalks and exquisite shops … A city of unbelievable luxury and sophistication thrown up by the wealthy rubber barons in the mazed and watery jungle to rival the capitals of Europe which they had left behind. And in particular – since she was a singer – for the prime jewel in the exotic city’s heart: the Opera House, the Teatro Amazonas, the loveliest, they said, in all the Americas.
Only a few years ago her journey would have been a fitting one. Lured by unimaginable fees, Sarah Bernhardt had acted there and Caruso sung before an audience whose jewels would have put Paris and London to shame. But now, in the autumn of 1912, the good times were over. Faced by competition from the East, the ‘ black gold’ that was rubber had crashed as spectacularly as before it had risen. Fortunes were lost overnight; the spoiled and pampered women who had lived like princesses in their riverside fazendas returned to the countries from which they came; the men, according to temperament, shot themselves or prepared to begin again. And to the Opera House there came now only second-rate companies – people who were glad to get an engagement anywhere.
Yet the woman who stood by the rails, her blonde head under the lacy parasol bent in attention to the river, was not – and never could be – second-rate. Nina Berg was an opera singer of distinction and quality who in her native Vienna had been accorded the homage which the Russians reserve for their dancers, the British for their sportsmen and the Austrians for those who sing. ‘Is she beautiful?’ an eager student had once asked Sternhardt, the famous régisseur who directed her. ‘At second sight,’ the great man had answered, paying tribute to her stillness and the gentle reflection in her blue eyes.
From this hard-working and intelligent woman, youth had stealthily crept away. At first she did not heed its passing: venerable divas abound in the opera houses of the world. But now, far too soon, hastened by an unexpected illness and an operation that had gone awry, her voice was going too. And with her voice would g
o all the rest: the villa, the money, the adulation and protection of men … She would become a singing teacher in a little dark courtyard somewhere, one of the tens of thousands of musicians who had never achieved their goal, or passed it, and now watched young girls scrape fiddles or sing arpeggios.
Well, so be it! But why, having accepted her fate, had she decided to come on this trip? Why, when she had been warned of the danger if she sang again, had she decided to appear in this doomed wraith of an opera house? And why, oh why, had Kindinsky chosen Carmen – one of the few operas she did not like – for her farewell?
Jacob Kindinsky, sitting sad-eyed and perspiring in a deck-chair, watching her, could have told her why: because Carmen was a part that suited neither her temperament nor her voice and he did not choose to be dismembered by seeing her bring to her last Violetta or Mimi her unique quality of bewilderment at the loss, the inexplicable passing of happiness. It was bad enough, thought Jacob, to have to come to this unspeakable place – seemingly full of boa constrictors and electric eels, not to mention a fish that he dared not even contemplate which entered one’s orifices when one was bathing and became, by means of backward-pointing spines, impossible to dislodge … Bad enough to be broiled alive and in the end, in all probability, not even paid, without having to submit to Nina’s devastating empathy with those doomed and great-hearted girls. Whereas in the role of Carmen, singing opposite that Milanese bullock, Padrocci, who was now snoring under the fan in his cabin; keeping abreast of the ludicrious tempi which that clown Feuerbach would imagine to be ‘ South American’, she would be compelled into the routine, heel-tapping, fan-clicking performance – and Feuerbach’s imbecile crescendos would drown those heartrending breaks in her top notes.