Nora makes a supper of groats and curly kale. She lives like a peasant. But under the skin I suppose we are all peasants.
∼ No, no, no, Nora says, striking her breastbone savagely, we are all kings and queens.
∼ And now, she says, yawning – in what I consider to be a rather theatrical way – I’m going to go and get some sleep. Carry on without me, why don’t you.
What Nora Missed
—Watson Grant.
‘Ah, Dr Watson, I presume.’ Professor Cousins beamed, as if he had made a great joke.
‘Come in, why don’t you,’ Archie said, ‘everyone else has.’
Watson Grant was one of the no-hope challengers for the departmental crown. His speciality was Scottish Studies, a strangely old-fashioned subject which occupied a country somewhere between Brigadoon and the White Heather Club, a landscape of burns and banks and braes where people danced strathspeys and reels while Moira Anderson and Kenneth McKellar sang duets in the background. Martha Sewell would have understood this version of Scotland.
Grant Watson always wore a Harris tweed jacket and came from somewhere remote that either began with ‘Inver’ or ended in ‘ness’ and was strangely asexual, like a mole, although he did have a wife and two children tucked away in Fife somewhere. He was a keen hill-walker, sometimes even turning up to teach in his clumpy leather walking-boots, still caked in Monro mud, as if there was something virtuous about climbing a hill when you didn’t need to.
Professor Cousins contributed to Watson Grant’s usual air of nervousness by shooing him away with a good-natured smile and an absurd attempt at a Scottish accent, ‘Ochhhh,’ he said, as if trying to cough up a gobbet of phlegm, ‘awa’ ye gae, ma guid man.’ Grant Watson havered uncertainly on the threshold of Archie’s room, not wanting to stay but not wanting to go either – in case Professor Cousins’ presence there signalled an inclination towards bequeathing Archie his regalia. His little jog of indecisiveness was halted abruptly by Archie saying, ‘The toilet’s down the other end of the corridor.’ He was saved from finding a reply by the bell which rang to signal the end of the hour.
Archie ignored the bell and continued talking but everyone stopped listening and started worming their way free of the hard plastic chairs. For a deluded second I thought I saw the flimsy form of The Boy With No Name spiralling like smoke out of his chair. I blinked and there was nothing there but the greasy soot of the guttering candle at the window.
Archie suddenly loomed over me, his bloated Zeppelin figure blocking out what little light there was. I thought for sure he was going to say something about the whereabouts of my dissertation but he just frowned vaguely at the garbled notes I’d been taking and said, ‘Can you babysit for us tonight?’ I agreed in a half-hearted kind of way; the non-existent Man or Maze put me in a difficult position vis-à-vis Archie. I just hoped he wouldn’t start wanting to barter sexual favours instead of babysitting ones.
I helped Professor Cousins extricate himself from his chair. Everyone was slightly stir-crazy by this time and heading for the door like passengers evacuating an aircraft on fire. I had to reach out and grab at the worn brown corduroy of Professor Cousins’ jacket to prevent him being swept away by the stream of students leaving the room in full spate.
Working his way upstream I spotted Martha’s husband, Jay Sewell. He was a tall man with a big jaw and a shock of silver hair which Martha thought ‘leonine’ but which no lion in its right mind would envy. Jay had the manners and demeanour of a southern plantation owner and did indeed originate in the deep south, a fact that Martha seemed to find both politically challenging and sexually attractive.
Jay Sewell greeted Professor Cousins but ignored the students as if they were a lesser life form. He greeted Martha with a cool kiss on the cheek and said that he had Buddy in the car and that he’d been sick all morning.
‘Oh, poor baby,’ Martha said. I was eager to hear more about Buddy (A dog? A child? A friend? A dead rock and roll legend?), but Jay closed the door and Professor Cousins and I were shut out in the murky corridor.
‘Where now?’ he asked me cheerfully.
‘Well, I have to go and write an essay about George Eliot,’ I said, the very idea making me feel as weary as an inhabitant of Hades, ‘but you don’t. You’re not a student,’ I reminded him. ‘You can do what you want.’
Professor Cousins frowned and said, ‘Well, only within certain social, physical and ethical parameters,’ a surprisingly coherent statement, only slightly undermined by a sudden lunatic outbreak of tap dancing from his feet. ‘I dreamt of going on the stage once,’ he said, looking crestfallen.
‘It’s never too late,’ I said vaguely. A lie, of course, as often, unfortunately, it is much too late.
We navigated the Stygian 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 impression of someone who had outgrown his strength. He was a peculiar Anglo-Scots hybrid. His father had apparently come from the same strain as the great veterinary Dicks but his mother was from a less pedigree brand of Kentish haberdashers, and when the marriage failed she returned to the bosom of her family taking young Dr Dick with her, so although Edinburgh born, he was Canterbury bred. This cross-border fertilization had not, however, produced a more robust species.
At times, in fact, Dr Dick seemed more English than an Englishman. He had attended a minor Home Counties public school before progressing to Oxford, where he had helped to found a real ale society. He could recite, in his fruity accent, every member of the English cricket team since time began. (‘What a wanker,’ was Bob’s laconic verdict.)
Maggie Mackenzie and Dr Dick looked as if they were squaring up for a fight. I supposed that would be one way of deciding who should be head of department.
‘Hand-to-hand combat,’ Professor Cousins murmured in my ear. ‘It would save a lot of time, you know.’
Dr Dick backed down and turned his aggression on me. ‘Your essay’s late,’ he said curtly. ‘I want it immediately.’
Dr Dick was a man who revelled in his hypochondria, although he wanted to be head of department so much that it did seem to be making him sick. He forgot about me now, distracted by a sudden need to feel his pulse. ‘I think I’d better sit down for a while,’ he said limply and retreated to his room again.
‘The man’s perfectly idiotic,’ Maggie Mackenzie said and then turned to me and said irascibly, ‘Tomorrow will do for me. I want your George Eliot on my desk by five o’clock,’ she beetled her brows threateningly, ‘or else,’ and stomped off abruptly down the corridor.
‘Such a frightening woman,’ Professor Cousins said when she was out of hearing.
I was surprised that the university women’s liberation group hadn’t co-opted Maggie Mackenzie now that it had entered a new militant phase. Hitherto a peaceful refuge for students who wanted to drink coffee and moan about their boyfriends, the group had been hijacked recently by a girl called Heather, a junior honours politics student with a round face and owlish spectacles who was determined to teach us the finer points of dialectical materialism before she died, which was probably going to be sooner than she expected.
‘Well, well,’ Professor Cousins said, finally meandering to a halt at the door of his room. ‘I think I’ll have a little nap now. How about you?’
I was unsure as to whether he was asking me to join him in a nap or just generally enquiring about my plans; either way, I shook my head sadly and said, ‘I’ve got to go home and do some work.’
‘Give my regards to that boyfriend of yours.’
‘Bob?’
‘If that’s his name.’
Professor Cousins caught sight of Joan, the departmental secretary, a middle-aged, big-breasted woman fond of mohair so that I always had to stifle an instinct to go to sleep on her furry bosom. Professor Cousins made an elaborate pantomime of drinking a cup of tea and with a long-suffering sigh Joan went into the cupboard where she kept her kettle. For times of emergency – such as we were in – she had set up a little camping gas stove as well (which is probably how dreadful accidents happen).
‘Got to keep my strength up,’ Professor Cousins laughed. ‘Someone’s trying to kill me, you know.’
‘I’m sorry?’ I said, thinking I must have mis-heard, but he had shut the door of his room, although I could still hear him chuckling to himself on the other side of the flushed wooden door.
* * *
In the basement that served as the Students’ Union all kinds of health and safety laws were being flouted. It was unusually crowded, the air thick with condensation and the flickering candles on the tables giving the place an air of subterranean gloom, especially when they illuminated the Breughel-like paintings which for some reason adorned the walls.
If you can imagine a place somewhere between a stone-age cave and a wartime air-raid shelter then you have imagined the Students’ Union. A new union was currently under construction – all plate glass and open spaces – but I suspected that it wouldn’t be occupied for long before it had acquired the same rank atmosphere, its new carpets marinated in beer and cigarette ash.
The Union was divided into two areas, a kind of self-service café and a bar, in which currently a group of rugby players, almost certainly an unholy alliance of medical and engineering students, were having a noisy lunchtime pint or ten. They were behaving as though it was Friday night rather than Monday lunchtime, downing pints of heavy in one draught and singing simplistic songs about bizarre sexual acts that they had almost certainly never indulged in and probably didn’t even understand.
I found Terri cornered at a table, smoking intensely and trying to ignore Robin, who was breaching the perimeter fence of her personal space. Terri’s personal space occupied an area roughly the size of Mull and therefore required vigorous defences.
Robin looked like Roy Wood from Wizzard with a touch of Rasputin in his last days, if Rasputin had worn burgundy-coloured loons and a rainbow tie-dyed T-shirt. He was ostentatiously reading The Glass Bead Game. Robin had the capacity to be extraordinarily tedious. His creative writing paper for Martha was a one-act play called Life Sentence (‘post-Beckettian’) in which disaffected young men sat around on packing cases and talked in unfinished sentences about how boring everything was and, in my opinion, was too true to life to be art.
Andrea was delicately eating a Golden Delicious – peeling it and cutting it up into careful segments – and frowning with distaste at the sight of Kevin opposite her who was stuffing a huge Forfar bridie into his mouth, greasy flakes of pastry adhering to his puffy lips. He sighed miserably when he finished chewing the last mouthful and said, ‘Two’s never enough, is it?’ Kevin was feeling disgruntled because the cafeteria was only serving cold food.
A big girl called Kara was making a great performance out of sitting down at the table. Kara was laden with a tray of food, a heavy rucksack, a woven Greek shoulder-bag and, finally, a fat, pneumatic baby, strapped to her back with a shawl.
Kara lived with other students – Robin was one of them – in an old farmhouse called Wester Balniddrie out in the wilds of rural Angus. They kept goats and chickens and pretended to be self-sufficient but they were not really the kind of people to hang out with in the aftermath of a disaster; they needed all the accoutrements of civilization to survive. Anything that involved a tool, for example, sent them into a panic. If the inhabitants of Balniddrie had been in charge of man’s technical evolution, people would still be storing things in hammocks slung from trees.
Kara finally managed to get settled and started wolfing a large bridge roll that was fraying at the seams with grated cheese and cress. Kara’s main fashion influence was peasantry. Today she was wearing an Indian cotton skirt, a pair of big workman’s boots, a huge, hairy sweater that looked as if it had been knitted on tent poles and some kind of cloth wrapped round her head, Russian serf-style. Her skin looked as if it had been rubbed with walnut juice.
Kara was from Kent originally although she looked like a tinker, and was planning to do teacher-training after she graduated and be released into the world of primary school infants in the guise of ‘Miss Jones’. The baby, whose paternity was almost as vague as mine, was called Proteus and was lugged around everywhere by Kara, much to the annoyance of the university staff who had discovered, r
ather late in the day, that there were no rules about not bringing babies into lectures and tutorials.
Robin grew tired of pretending to read The Glass Bead Game and took out a pack of giant Rizlas and started rolling a joint under the table. Robin had recently decided to become a Buddhist, which made him even more boring.
‘What’s it all about? The meaning of Liff,’ Robin said, laughing in a stupid way that made his shoulders shake, like a cartoon dog. For some reason all Dundee students found this hilariously funny.
‘What goes around comes around, eh?’ Shug said, sliding into the seat next to Robin. Andrea smiled, rather pathetically, at him but Shug was more intent on eating his cold, round pie (or ‘peh’ in the Dundee patois). Nora has only ever given me two pieces of advice in my life, both of them on the station platform in Newcastle, when I boarded the train to come to Dundee for the first time:
1. Beware of people with blue eyes.
2. Don’t eat the pies.
I have tried my best to heed this maternal counsel – despite its having been given in a rather unsatisfactory rhyming couplet – as I am unlikely to receive any more.
‘So, I’ve decided to become a vegetarian,’ Robin said staring fascinated at the pale, fatty innards of Shug’s pie.
Proteus started to cry and Kara disentangled him from his makeshift pouch. He was still wound tightly in a grubby white Aircell blanket that made him look like a large maggot. His little fists waved angrily in the air until Kara fumbled inside her shirt for a breast and attached him to it. Kevin blushed in horror and stared fixedly at something fascinating on the ceiling until he noticed Olivia sitting at a neighbouring table and stared at her red boots instead.
Olivia was sitting with a group of social admin people, who were all ignoring her. She was reading Gormenghast, very slowly and deliberately in the way that lone diners in restaurants read. She put her hand to her cheek and revealed a slender wrist circled by a gold bracelet. Several months ago, in an unusual moment of intimacy in the cafeteria queue, Olivia told me that this bracelet had belonged to her mother.
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