It was all Mafferty’s doing. Mafferty had brought this ceremony, which summed up and epitomized everything the School stood for, into chaos and disrepute. Since the discovery of the essay, Bishop had been thinking about Mafferty a good deal. He had remembered passing Mafferty not far from the Principal’s office. What had he been doing there? And there was his flight from the hall just a short while ago. Everyone else had stayed to help. But not Mafferty, no. Mafferty had fled, no other word for it. Cowardly of course, like all his kind. There was no longer any doubt in Bishop’s mind: Mafferty was the person responsible. Well, he was not going to get away with it. Nemo me impune lacessit, Bishop thought, his breast swelling with indignation. What Mafferty needed was a straight left to the jaw.
Looking out over the hall, he thought of the years in which he had served the Chief, their long association. Through thick and thin, he said to himself, and something inside his throat thickened suddenly. I won’t let you down, Donald. A friend showed his mettle in time of true need. Donald would be needing him at this very moment. But where was Donald?
He began, logically enough, by looking in the Principal’s office, but there was nobody there. Staying only long enough to slip Donald’s little bottle of tranquillizing tablets into his pocket, he went out again into the corridor. Where next? The School lay in silence around him. There were no teachers on the premises now, no students. The thought of Donald wandering unhappily about the building was peculiarly painful to Bishop. He might of course be brooding in his own quarters on the other side of the house. In that case he would have to be left alone. Or perhaps … Bishop raised his head and looked up towards the ceiling. Perhaps the chief had taken refuge from the storm of life on the top floor amid storage cupboards and workrooms. It was worth a try, he thought.
However, as he was making his way back along the corridor he heard a mutter of voices, and emerging on to the wide landing at the end found himself confronted by a number of stocky men in overcoats.
‘Hullo,’ Bishop said. ‘Can I be of any assistance?’
The men advanced in a body, one slightly to the fore. They were all smiling now. When they got near enough they all held out hands to be shaken.
‘How do you do?’ the leader said. ‘How is it going?’
‘Quite well thanks,’ Bishop said. The handshaking took some time and was marked by considerable confusion. After it there was an uncertain pause, during which the smiles of the men dimmed slowly.
‘You have come to enroll, I take it,’ Bishop said.
‘Roll?’
The men looked at one another gravely. There was a brief interchange among them in some foreign tongue. Then the spokesman turned back to Bishop.
‘Mr Roll?’ he said. ‘I am Yanar. This is Tatesh. This one is Oksuz.’
Suddenly Bishop remembered what the chief had said about visiting Turks.
‘He over there is Ajikguz,’ the spokesman said. ‘It means open-eye.’ He smiled broadly and all the others smiled too, as if this last named person was a bit of a joke.
‘You are the Turkish Delegation,’ Bishop said.
‘That is right, sir.’
‘The Principal is not available for the moment,’ Bishop said. ‘He was called away on very urgent business. He asked me to show you round the school.’
‘Good, Mr Roll. Understood perfect.’
‘No, no,’ Bishop said. ‘I am Bishop. I am the Senior Tutor.’
The whole of the Turkish Delegation nodded at this, except the man whose name meant open-eye. He said something in low tones to the spokesman, who looked tolerantly at Bishop and said, ‘Ajikguz English not so good, Mr Roll. It got rusted.’
‘No, no,’ Bishop said again. ‘I’m afraid you’ve got hold of the wrong – ’
‘He is Bishop of this School,’ the spokesman said reprovingly to Open-eye. ‘Mr Roll is Bishop. He is looking after the welfares of the students. That is named pastoral care. All the up-to-date schools and colleges have pastoral care, don’t you know that, Osman? Sometimes called Dean, sometimes called Bishop. You better make a note.’
The Turkish Delegation took notebooks and pens from inside pockets and began to write. Bishop thought of making a further attempt to clarify the situation, but the Turkish Delegation was so obviously pleased to have found at this early stage of the visit something to write about, that he decided to postpone things for the moment, and try later on. Besides, the spokesman, Yanar, was obviously a figure of authority among them and Bishop, with thoughts of Asian self-esteem in his mind, did not want the man to lose prestige.
‘Well,’ he said, when they looked up from their notebooks, ‘shall we go this way?’
He led them from class room to class room, explaining the courses offered at the School, doing his best, too, to set out the educational principles which governed them, as he knew that Donald would have wished him to do this. This tour of inspection took a long time because the patient, thick-fingered Turkish Delegation wrote down almost everything he said, breathing audibly as they wrote.
‘Well, I hope,’ Bishop said, when they were all assembled again on the landing, ‘that this visit will prove of some use to you in the – ’
‘We are all strongly interested,’ Yanar said, ‘in your langauge laboratory, Mr Roll.’
‘That is on the next floor,’ Bishop said, glancing at his watch. It was nearly half-past six. He had been engaged with these people for well over an hour. Thoughts of Donald returned to his mind. ‘That will have to be our last port of call today, I’m afraid,’ he said. He led the way towards the stairs, the bulky Turks falling into single file behind him.
Inside the language laboratory they stood in a group in the middle of the floor, and Bishop was starting to explain the use to which the various equipment was put, when he thought he heard a distant crowing sound of laughter.
‘The whole thing,’ he said, ‘can be monitored by the teacher from this central control panel. But the students in the individual booths – Excuse me.’ He went to the door, opened it and looked up and down the corridor. There was no sign of anyone.
‘They can work independently,’ he said, returning. ‘At their own pace. They can check their own responses, you see, go through the drills as often as they like.’ Again he heard the laughter. It sounded nearer now. ‘They are partitioned off,’ he said loudly, ‘and besides they have earphones plugged in to the receiver so that nobody disturbs anyone else.’
‘Excuse please,’ Yanar said. ‘I heard one man laughing.’
‘No, I don’t think so,’ Bishop said. ‘These are the individual booths, you see.’ He began shepherding the Delegation towards the far side of the room, away from the corridor. Open-eye, however, did not accompany them. He had picked up a pair of earphones from the teacher’s desk and was regarding them intently.
‘But I am sure,’ Yanar said. ‘It came from outside, in the corridor.’
‘Perhaps one of the students,’ Bishop said. ‘They are a high-spirited lot. They come up here sometimes. To play ping-pong, you know.’
‘Ping-pong?’
‘Table-tennis.’ Bishop had broken out in a gentle perspiration. ‘We believe in promoting physical health here,’ he said. ‘In fact that is one of the principles of the School. We offer the students an all-round education. No aspect of personality is neglected.’
‘Write it,’ Yanar said to the rest of the Delegation. He did not have the look of a man whose mind is completely at rest.
‘They can come up here and let off steam,’ Bishop said. ‘No, no,’ he said to Open-eye, who had put on the earphones and was now smiling and moving his head, as if in acknowledgement of sound issuing forth. ‘You won’t hear anything that way. It is not plugged in.’
He took up the end of the flex attached to the earphones. ‘Mens sana in corpore sano,’ he said to Yanar. ‘You know the old tag?’
Holding the flex he moved towards the wall where the sockets were. The flex, however, was not long enough by several feet to be pl
ugged in while Open-eye remained in his present position. ‘Will you move this way a bit?’ Bishop said.
Open-eye, hampered no doubt by the earphones, did not seem to have heard him. He was still nodding and smiling.
‘This way,’ Bishop said. He gave a tug on the flex, bringing Open-eyes head down a little and obliging him to move a step or two forward.
‘Not far enough,’ Bishop said.
At this point there was another burst of laughter from outside, unnervingly loud now, on four notes, the last a sustained crowing one.
‘All work and no play,’ Bishop said, using his free hand to get out a handkerchief and wipe the sides of his neck, ‘makes Jack a dull boy. It is the old idea of the Greek gymnasium.’
‘Jack?’ Yanar said suspiciously. ‘The Greeks we do not like.’
‘A general term,’ Bishop said. He was slowly drawing Open-eye, by means of a series of commanding twitches on the lead, step by step across the room. ‘Another couple of feet and we’re there,’ he said.
‘We do not like educational methods of Greeks,’ Yanar said. ‘That is not the laughter of ping-pong.’ He went suddenly to the door, opened it and looked out. ‘There was a man,’ he said, returning. ‘In a black dress. Long, like a Chorak?’
‘Chorak?’
‘In my country,’ Yanar said, ‘only women wear the chorak. He went very quick round the corner.’
One of the students, having a breather,’ Bishop said.
Yanar went over and removed the earphones from Open-eye’s head. ‘Laughing and dressed womanish,’ he said to Bishop. ‘Is he Greek?’
He said some words sharply in Turkish. The whole Delegation began to regard Bishop with hostility.
‘Thank you, Mr Roll,’ Yanar said stiffly. ‘We are leaving now.’
‘Very well,’ Bishop said.
They went down the stairs together in silence, and said goodbye in the main entrance hall. The Delegation did not offer to shake hands and it was sadly apparent to Bishop that the visit, though attended with so much note-taking and initial good will, had not been an unqualified success, that the Delegation, in fact, were almost certainly leaving under the impression that the School harboured laughing Greek transvestites. There was nothing he could do about it, however, and besides he was very worried about the Chief, so as soon as the Turks were off the premises he made his way back as quickly as possible to the top floor.
The corridor running past the language laboratory was deserted, but when he reached the point at which this was intersected by another, shorter one, he suddenly saw a gowned figure standing stock still some twenty yards away on his left. Bishop was startled by the figure’s absolute stillness, by what seemed some painful distortion of the features, and by the gown–it had not occurred to him that the Chief would still be wearing his gown, and he now understood Yanar’s misapprehension.
He advanced some paces and saw that what he had taken for distortion was in fact caused by a fixed smile. The Chief glanced round as if seeking some means of escape and what made this odd was the fact that the smile did not disappear. There was a strong sense of incongruity in Bishop’s mind, as he began to move quickly forward, between this smile and the hunted manner in which Donald glanced about him.
‘We got everything sorted out, in the end,’ Bishop said. ‘Everything is all right now, Donald.’
His fingers closed over the little box of pills in his pocket.
Lavinia was standing before the mirror in her room, putting the finishing touches to her costume, taking occasional swigs from a large whisky designed to put her in the party mood. She was now, in appearance and in her own conception of herself, the orgiastic Goddess of Love, whose cult was notorious throughout antiquity for the abandoned behaviour of its devotees. Her costume consisted almost entirely of glass beads. Numerous strings of them fell from neck to waist, attached to a loose neckband of smooth glass. The upper part of her body, beneath the beads, was naked. Her beautiful arms could conceal themselves under the cascading glass or ripple out when she raised them, like a swimmer’s limbs emerging from spume. Her large breasts gleamed voluptuously through the bead screen. So that they should tone in better with the pale, opalescent effects of the glass, she had painted her nipples silver. Below the waist she wore silver lamé briefs and a thin snake belt attached, from which strings and strings of glass beads descended to her ankles.
Lavinia surveyed herself in the mirror and was pleased with what she saw. The whole effect was one of shift and glimmer and change. The pale, faintly gleaming droplets of glass glittered and shifted in their own light, and cast light by reflection of the flesh below. This interaction, the glitter from the cut surfaces of glass with the denser, satiny gleam of the skin, made for a glamorous flux of light: when she moved, even slightly, the whole front of her shimmered, glittered. When she walked forwards towards the mirror her smooth heavy thighs bulked nakedly through the beads, with barbaric marmoreal splendour. Her face too, was deeply impressive. She had decided, instead of wearing a mask, to paint a mask on. She had given herself silver lips, cheekbones, eyelids; great black eyebrows going in cruel oriental sweeps to the temple. The face that looked at her now was unrecognizable: magnificent, cruel and strange.
She stood there for some time, delighted with the effect. One of the elements in her pleasure was the fact that Mr Honeyball would be there. Though her feelings towards him had completely changed since the contretemps in the bathroom, she was not averse to reminding him of what he had that day through pusillanimity missed – pusillanimity or some equally inexcusable blundering. She hated a feeble or ineffectual man, and his failure to arrive at her bedroom at the proper time, after she had actually set him on the stairs leading up there, proved him to be one such. Nothing, she felt, could excuse such a failure, nothing but some sort of stroke or seizure experienced by Mr Honeyball in the throes of anticipation and the exertion of climbing the stairs. This had manifestly not happened. Mr Honeyball had simply done a bunk, thus involving her in all that trouble with the plumber.
Such behaviour puts a man Beyond the Pale, Lavinia told her strange, cruel face in the mirror. Its difference from her everyday face renewed her sense of the possibilities of the evening. Mr Honeyball was not the only pebble on the beach after all. She experienced the familiar excitement, unchanged since childhood, of being prepared for a party, for some encounter that might fulminatingly change the course of her whole life. Perhaps tonight was the night. A childlike wonder at her own existence came sweeping over her. Here’s to you, she thought to herself, taking a swallow of the whisky. Her attention was distracted suddenly by the flickering of the television set in the corner. She had switched it on earlier to watch a beauty competition, but then the nine o’clock news had come on, and it had been so gloomy, so fraught with disaster, that Lavinia had become oppressed, feeling her world threatened, and she had turned the sound down, leaving the announcer mouthing, doing his nightly mime of kindly, concerned uncle. Now, however, there were suddenly pictures of emaciated black people, sitting and lying here and there in a sort of compound. Something to do with the famine, she thought vaguely.
The door of her bedroom opened behind her. Through her mirror she saw her husband enter, neatly dressed as a referee.
‘Hello,’ she said, with some constraint. ‘So here you are. I was wondering where you had got to.’ She regarded him with apprehension. Not having seen him since the afternoon, when he had strode away laughing, she had no idea how much he might have discovered since about the injury to the plumber and the events leading up to it. She was half expecting him to upbraid her, but he merely nodded, as if he had been asked to confirm something, then stood in his referee’s outfit. ‘Have some whisky,’ she said.
‘No, thank you.’ Confronted by this shimmering stranger whom he knew to be his wife, Cuthbertson was confused. Bishop had insisted on four pills, afterwards accompanying the chief to the door of his room. Knowing the slowing-down effect the pills had on him, Cuthbertson had made
a point of changing into his costume at once and had then made his way to his office, where he had spent the intervening time sitting at the desk, looking before him. Stray resolutions had come to him during this time, worthy of inclusion in the file, but he had made no move to write them down. Now, though a little too portly for running, he looked every inch the referee, with his dignified gravity, neatly creased navy blue shorts, white stockings and Royal Corps of Signals blazer. On his feet black plimsolls. He looked a man whose whistle and raised forefinger footballers would obey. His eyes, through the lenses of his glasses, surveyed his wife with a drugged steadiness for some time, then transferred themselves to the silent TV screen. Amid wrecked-looking huts and hovels, within some sort of enclosure, bundles of whitish rags were lying here and there, quite still.
‘Is it more bombs?’ Cuthbertson said, enunciating with care, and making a slow gesture towards the screen.
‘No, it is these people dying of starvation,’ Lavinia said. ‘They should not show pictures like that, in my opinion. I was beginning to feel quite worried about you,’ she added, referring again to his long absence.
‘Worried,’ Cuthbertson repeated without particular inflection. He had never said anything to Lavinia about his pills, being unwilling that she should know his weakness. ‘It looks as though there has been an explosion there,’ he said.
‘Are you feeling all right?’ Lavinia said. ‘Have a spot of whisky. I’m having some.’ She did not want to risk any differences of view just then, conscious as she was of being in the wrong rather, of having behaved injudiciously that afternoon. Presumably Donald knew nothing much about it as yet, otherwise he would have made some reference. All the same she was uneasily aware that she had not heard the last of the injured plumber, and wished to postpone all reckonings until the morrow, until after her triumphant apotheosis as Goddess of Love. Moreover, she had noted, though preoccupied with her own troubles, the chaos in the hall that afternoon, and had surmised that something, apart from the ambulance men, must have ocurred to disrupt Donald’s degree ceremony. These things, she felt instinctively, must be avoided as topics of conversation. ‘Put you in the party mood,’ she said, pouring herself another large whisky.
The Big Day Page 16