by Tim Heald
Elizabeth Burney’s hand was up again.
‘I don’t quite understand,’ she said. ‘In a murder mystery do you have to have a murdered body at the beginning of the book?’
‘In the sort of Golden Age whodunnit we’re discussing in this class, yes you do.’ Tudor felt on firm ground here, but he had to admit that the child was disconcerting. No matter how certain he felt about what he was saying there was something about her which induced uncertainty. She gave the impression of knowing more than he did. Or of knowing something that he didn’t. Something significant. It gave an edge; a superiority. It was disconcerting in one so young.
‘But in real life that’s not necessary?’
‘Not necessarily, not in real life, no. But,’ he smiled wearily, ‘we’re not talking about real life here. This is something quite different.’
‘So the Golden Age whodunnit has nothing to do with real life?’
‘Urn... no, not a lot... that’s why they’ve become unfashionable. Later crime fiction relies heavily on realism. Golden Age stuff is judged largely on the intricacy of the puzzle. The Golden Age authors were playing guessing games with their readers.’
Tudor was aware that the rest of the class were aware of a subtext here although their air of perplexity suggested that they didn’t know exactly what the subtext was.
‘Don’t real-life criminals play guessing games?’ she wanted to know. ‘Like with the police? The murderer against the detective. The murderer has to see how many people he can kill before the police catch up with him. The really clever murderer never gets caught. Just goes on killing for ever and ever and no one can catch him. Wasn’t that what happened with your Jack the Ripper? And he was before your Golden Age, wasn’t he? Wasn’t he supposed to be some Pom king?’
‘The Duke of Clarence actually,’ said Tudor stuffily. He was aware that he was losing control of the situation. He was all for participation, but he was the teacher. The authority was with him. Too much argument and participation led to anarchy. There must be order in the classroom. He represented that order. Law’n’order. The battle cry of the old English Conservative Party as it bayed for hanging and flogging at party conferences from Blackpool to Bournemouth. What was this girl playing at? Just what was her game?
‘So,’ he said, ‘the classic whodunnit begins with a murdered body... now what comes next?’
He looked round the class.
‘Anybody except Elizabeth.’ He laughed but it was no joke. Everywhere else he saw apathy or ignorance. Or maybe they were just shy. In any event it was clear that he was going to get no help from any of the other students. The girl knew that too. He sensed her laughing at him though she kept a stern, tight-lipped poker face. There was laughter in her eyes though it reflected a tormenter’s pleasure.
There was no innocent fun there. Far from it.
Oh well, if he was going to assume the role of old-fashioned schoolteacher, he had better do so properly. He turned to the white board behind him, picked up the black felt-tip pen and scrawled 1) Corpse. 2) Detective.
‘It’s a little like the Marxist dialectic with which you will, of course, be familiar. Thesis... antithesis. And in the crime novel, corpse... detective... leading ultimately to solution, the denouement in the library, Hercule Poirot or Lord Peter Wimsey reveal all. Can anyone name me a famous fictional detective?’
Silence. Quite an aggressive one. What was the Visiting Fellow there for if not to give them the answers to questions such as this? ‘I’ve just given you two names.’
He was becoming irritated. Mistake. It showed.
‘Hercule Poirot and Lord Peter Wimsey are two of the most famous fictional detectives in the history of criminal literature. Poirot is the creation of Dame Agatha Christie and Lord Peter Wimsey is Dorothy L. Sayers’s hero.’
‘Would they have been successful in real life?’
It was her again, of course.
‘Possibly not,’ he said. ‘Fiction is very different from real life.’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘That’s what Professor Carpenter always said. Just because you can deal with murder in books, doesn’t mean you can deal with murder in real life. Or any sort of crime, come to that. Disappearance, kidnap, rape, blackmail.’ She got up and gathered her books and papers. ‘Sorry,’ she said, ‘I have to go to work. There’s a special function at the restaurant. See you later. You should come. It’s a reading sponsored by the Writers Centre and the Yabby Creek Winery. There’s a Les Murray look-alike sound-alike who has to be seen and heard to be believed.’
And then she was gone leaving the Visiting Fellow as stunned as his class.
Chapter Twelve
The Meaning and Murder Class had anticlimaxed after the departure of Elizabeth Burney and he was glad to escape back to the growling Basil and the sanctuary of life behind a locked door. He had, however, made a detour and stopped at the grog shop behind the nearest pub, a pseudo-Irish joint called the Doctor O’Reilly, where he had purchased a box of cheap Jolly Jumbuck Central Australian Shiraz Merlot which he thought sounded just about the right base for Ashley Carpenter’s cinnamon, wattle and royal jelly witches’ brew.
‘What’s your master playing at?’ he asked the dog, after he had poured a glass of Jumbuck and sipped. It wasn’t bad.
He decanted a measure he guessed to be as near as dammit to seventy-five centilitres into a saucepan and lit one of the gas-rings. Then he added Ashley’s various ingredients spoon by spoon. Presently the brew began to steam and a not unpleasant aroma rose nostrilwards. Tudor presumed the unfamiliar slightly musky smell was wattle.
‘Well, Bazza,’ he said, ‘this has the sweet smell of success. I can’t imagine Jazz Trethewey or the Penhaligon axeman producing anything with a better nose.’
The dog regarded him with canine disbelief. Tudor found himself wondering whose side he was on and suddenly realized the implication of the query. ‘Whose side’? What did he mean by ‘two sides’? Did he think that he was on one side and Ashley on the other? He wasn’t supposed to be on a side. He was an honoured guest and if this role had changed it should have turned him into an impartial investigator not somebody who was either on- or off-side. Yet as he pondered all this he realized that he did feel as if almost without realizing it he had been put into an adversarial situation. He had enemies in Tasmania; people who were out to get him. And Ashley Carpenter, wittingly or unwittingly, was part of the plot.
He stirred the pot with a wooden spoon. The smell was an odd amalgam of new and old world.
‘What do you think, Basil?’ he asked, as he took a taste of the spicy mixture. ‘Is someone out to get me?’
The dog looked up at him and gave him a half-hearted grimace as if to say Why ask me, sport? But he also, to Tudor’s clearly fevered imagination, seemed to suggest that he was a dog who knew more than he was letting on.
Tudor sat down heavily in an elderly leather-upholstered armchair. The warm punch puckered his lips. It needed more royal jelly ampoules. Or maybe they hadn’t dissolved properly yet.
Perhaps he should just cut loose and go home. Ashley was the only real reason for his being here and without him he would be better off home at Wessex U. On the other hand, if Ashley had vanished he had an obligation to help find him. Didn’t he? That was what a Golden Age detective would have thought, but the Golden Age was dead and gone even if it had ever been alive. In the modern age of gritty professionalism, Tudor, despite his immaculate academic credentials and qualifications, would have qualified as a rank amateur. A salaried, full-time policeman would regard him as a mere diversion. In the ‘good old days’ people like Tudor would have pulled rank over uniformed coppers or even serious CID officers in belted macs and trilby hats. Not any longer.
‘No place for me here, eh, Basil?’ he enquired of the dog, who cocked an ear but said nothing. Behind him the witches’ brew on the stove was coming to a boil.
He went over and took another sip. Mmmm. The raw, vinegary taste had evaporated, replaced
by something sweeter, pungent and almost palatable. He was contemplating the balance of flavours and the emphases of taste when there was a knocking at the door.
Basil barked.
Tudor opened up.
It was Jazz Trethewey, the Professor of Oenology. She was clutching a bottle of Rockford Sparkling Black Shiraz and looking contrite.
‘I came to say sorry,’ she said. ‘May I come in?’
Tudor hesitated, then decided that graciousness was the better part of suspicion.
‘Of course,’ he said. ‘I can’t think what you have to apologize for, but please come in. Your peace-offering looks exceedingly acceptable. And I’m a sucker for being said sorry to. Doesn’t often happen.’
She laughed a throaty, booze-fuelled laugh and stepped over his threshold.
‘I am sorry,’ she said. ‘I’ve been thinking. We’ve not been exactly welcoming. In fact, we must seem very rude. It’s not intentional and it’s certainly not personal. Do you have glasses?’ Then as he hesitated she went on, ‘I know you have glasses. I know this apartment a lot better than you do. Visiting Fellows come and Visiting Fellows go but I go on for ever. Well, indefinitely.’
She zoned in on the correct cupboard, extracted two large wine glasses, set them down on the dining-table, extracted the cork with a couple of quick twists (the bottle revolving, the cork remaining static in the prescribed manner), poured, took one, gave the other to Tudor, clinked hers against his and said ‘Salud!’, then quaffed and sat down in the other armchair.
‘So,’ she said, ‘I’m sorry. By the way, what have you got on the boil over there? Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble. Makes a change from scribble, scribble, Mr Gibbon. But what is it? Smells quite choice.’
‘Mulled wine,’ said Ashley, discomfited. He did not know what to make of this visit. Was she a Tasmanian bearing gifts, or was this a genuine olive branch? Too soon to tell.
‘I always say if you can’t drink it, don’t mull it. More to the point, if you can drink it, certainly don’t mull it. If wine’s good enough to drink then you should drink it au nature, but if it’s not good enough to drink no amount of sugar and spice is going to make it drinkable. But then I’m something of a purist in these matters. Only to be expected. You can’t be expected to hold a chair in oenology and be anything else. But why, if I may ask, are you mulling?’
Tm entering a brew for the college competition,’ he said.
‘Oh.’ The professor looked thoughtful. ‘I don’t want to, as it were, resume hostilities, or seem anything other than contrite and agreeable, but how did you know about that? The college mulled wine competition? You’ve only been here five minutes.’
‘Ashley and I discussed it,’ he said. ‘And I happen to have a rather special recipe.’
Were these lies or half-truths? He wasn’t sure but he didn’t feel like telling Jazz Trethewey whole truths. Not yet anyway.
‘Well,’ Jazz smiled without much conviction, ‘I don’t believe we’ve ever before had a Visiting Fellow who went in for the competition. I can’t say I’m entirely in favour of it. As you will have inferred I regard it as a form of vinous prostitution. But there you are. You probably think me a terrible prig.’
‘No,’ said Tudor. It was precisely what he had been thinking but he was certainly not going to say it out loud. Not in a moment of truce, however tentative.
‘If you’re so disapproving then what keeps the tradition going? If it is a tradition.’
‘That’s exactly what the Dame would like to think it had become. A tradition. Dame Edith is an extreme traditionalist as you may have gathered. In all things. She thinks mulled wine is the sort of stuff the dons drink in All Souls, Oxford, or at those Cambridge feasts Tom Sharpe writes about. She sees St Petroc’s as a sort of Oxbridge-in-exile. Your friend Ashley is somewhat similar, though more complicated. Most of the Fellows here incline to the Dame’s point of view. They wouldn’t be here otherwise.’
‘But you... you’re different?’
‘Up to a point. The chair in wine is a university appointment, but the way it works is that it carries a St Petroc’s Fellowship with it. Just like Oxford or Cambridge. And Fellows are offered rooms in college. I’m not married; the rooms are comfortable; there’s tolerable company. It suits me. For now anyway.’
She smiled. More warmly this time. Tudor was struck, as before, by an unexpectedly gamine quality. The red bandanna, the deliberately frizzy hair and the aggressively applied make-up seemed even more than at their earlier meeting like a conscious attempt to obliterate softness and femininity in favour of a sort of academic bohemianism which was as passé in its way as all this pseudo-Oxbridge behaviour.
He sipped the fizz. It was good. Also a surprisingly bright blood red. He nodded appreciatively.
‘It’s from Rymills in the Coonawara,’ she said. ‘They call it the Bee’s Knees. Twenty-two per cent 1998 Cabernet Sauvignon, five per cent 1997 Cabernet Sauvignon, twenty-four per cent 1998 Merlot and forty-nine per cent 1998 Cabernet Franc. The earlier version was about a third Cab Franc and two thirds Shiraz.’
‘Ah.’
‘It must be tricky coming into a tight community like ours,’ she said. ‘And being a Pom you’re a double outsider. I’m afraid we haven’t helped. We’ve given off bad vibes, been all prickly like one of Dame Edith’s echidnas.’
‘Oh, I wouldn’t say that. Academics spend a lot of their time being parachuted into other academic communities. I’m no exception.’
‘But we’re not like other academic communities,’ she said. ‘St Petroc’s is a place apart. At least I think it is. It’s sui generis.’
‘All interesting communities think that,’ said Tudor. ‘It’s a symptom of self-respect. What makes this situation awkward is the mystery of Ashley.’
‘But the rest of us don’t see that there is any great mystery,’ said Jazz. ‘He’s just gone walkabout. People do that down here. It’s a national characteristic and a free country. We don’t have to account for our movements every second of our lives. We allow each other space, freedom to do what we want with our lives and time.’
‘This is getting philosophical,’ said Tudor. ‘Surely the point about being part of a community, any community, is that you have obligations to the other members. You can’t manage society if people don’t conform to certain understandings.’
‘But we don’t manage society as you put it. We believe in freedom not regulation.’
Tudor sighed. He was tempted to come clean and tell Professor Trethewey about the e-mails purporting to come from his old friend but a still small voice warned against it. Was he being paranoid? Maybe. But trust, to his way of thinking, had to be earned.
‘I think that’s over-simplistic, I’m as committed to individual freedoms as anyone. I just think people should consider their friends and neighbours. It’s basic politeness really.’
‘But what if your friend Ashley just needs some space and has gone off to find some peace and quiet?’
‘I don’t think he’d do that without telling the rest of us. Especially without telling me. I’m coming halfway round the world at his express invitation and he said he’d meet me at the airport.’
This time Jazz allowed her smile to upgrade into a short snort of laughter. Slightly derisive laughter.
‘Isn’t that a bit childish? Everything has been taken care of. You were met at the airport, escorted to the college, shown to your rooms, given a class to teach. Your friend is going through a mid-life crisis and has gone away to sort himself out, but all you can do is to complain that he isn’t here to nanny you.’ Put like that his behaviour did sound childish. Tudor could see that. He, however, wouldn’t have put it like that. Instead of saying so he put his hands up in mock surrender and said, ‘I thought you were bringing a peace offering.’
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I didn’t mean to seem adversarial.’ She sniffed. ‘It goes against all my prejudices but that concoction of yours is smelling almost appetizing. Is there w
attle in it?’
‘Yes,’ he said.
‘How imaginative!’ She smiled. ‘I wouldn’t have thought a Pom would know about wattles.’ She sipped her sparkling wine and regarded him evenly over the rim of her glass. Nothing was said but it was clear that she believed that he was holding out on her, keeping something back. The silence was a clear invitation for a confidence but Tudor resisted so that eventually she broke it by saying, ‘You’re only just in time though. The contest is tonight. Bob Hawke Room again. Or did you know that?’
He shook his head. ‘No, I didn’t know.’
‘We only decided this morning. There didn’t seem any reason for telling you. We didn’t think you’d be entering. As I say, it’s not usual for Visiting Fellows.’
‘Well, I’m not usual for a Visiting Fellow.’ It was his turn to smile.
‘Touché,’ she said. ‘So tell me about it.’
Chapter Thirteen
Sammy was in charge of arrangements for the mulled wine competition. Not long after Professor Trethewey departed, leaving behind an empty bottle of Rymill’s Sparkling Bee’s Knees and a confused Visiting Fellow, Sammy came knocking in a resplendent scarlet turban and the sort of oriental frock-coat that Tudor associated with the officers’ mess of a superior Indian Army Regiment somewhere like Poona. Sammy carried a capacious thermos flask into which he asked Tudor to pour his blend once it was brewed to his satisfaction. If the Fellow sahib would kindly be bringing his flask with him Sammy would be ensuring that it would be decanted in the manner most appropriate. Actually Sammy did not speak in burlesque Punjabi but perfectly straightforward Australian or Tasmanian English even to the extent of prefacing his remarks with a ritual ‘G’day’ (‘G’day, Professor’ as a matter of fact). However his appearance and demeanour meant that Tudor felt as if he were talking like that. It was a clear case of appearances being deceptive. Because he looked the way he did, Tudor, and nearly everyone else, presumed that he spoke in matching tones. He didn’t. It was the sort of behavioural oddity that Tudor liked to include in his lectures.