by Jane Langton
CHAPTER 31
Alas! a scientific man ought to have no wishes, no affections—a mere heart of stone.
Charles Darwin, letter to T. H. Huxley
It had been a terrible night. But one thing was more dreadful to Helen than all the rest. Not Johnny’s death, although that should have been the worst. Poor Johnny, poor unhappy Johnny! She kept remembering him as he had been at first, the Johnny Farfrae who had sung so sweetly, who had danced with her so gaily, who had one day jumped over a fence to come to her. Last night, kneeling beside his body on the stairs, she had seen him floating above the fence rail, poised in air. If only she could forget everything else!
No, his death was not the worst thing. And to Helen it did not seem terrible that she had wandered around the museum in the pitch dark for hours, feeling her way past the leg bones of the giraffe, sliding a groping hand along the frames of the display cases, while the rain drummed on the glass panes of the roof over her head. Nor had it been painful to climb back to the office and telephone St. Aldate’s, nor to open the museum door when the crowd of policemen came, nor to see them setting up their bright staring lights over Johnny’s broken body, nor even to answer the gently probing questions of Detective Inspector Mukerji in the gray light of dawn.
No, the most terrible thing had been her instantaneous reaction when she guessed that Johnny was dead, the relief that had slipped in ahead of the sorrow.
Mary Kelly went looking for Helen Farfrae.
“Have you seen her?” she asked William Dubchick in the Zoology Office.
He looked at her gravely and shook his head. “She doesn’t answer her telephone. No one seems to know where she is.”
But then Mary found her at once, in the basement ladies’ room. From one of the compartments came a strangled sob.
“Helen, is that you?”
There was a pause, and then Helen emerged and put her arms around Mary. She sobbed once or twice, then stood back and said, “I’m all right, really.”
“Well, I’m not,” said Mary. “I’m starving. Come and have lunch. Do you mind going out? I mean, where people are? There’s a place I want to try.”
It was a pub called the Eagle and Child on St. Giles, not far from the greasy spoon café where they had eaten before. Mary led Helen to a far corner in the farthest of the small crowded rooms.
Helen looked around furtively, but the other people jammed together at the tiny tables looked like students. All were strangers except for Mark Soffit, who was sitting by himself two rooms away, eating his lunch and writing postcards:
I’m writing this from C. S. Lewis’s favorite pub. He’s quite a legend around here, but as you can imagine famous people are a dime a dozen. Heard Dubchick the other day, no big deal. I know his daughter. I’m writing a paper or two, punting on the Cherwell, crewing on the Isis, working in the Bodleian. How are things at Podunk U?
Most of this was lies, but Mark copied it over three times on postcards to other Americans. Staring at his pen, he didn’t see the cynical glances directed at his scarf. It was a brand-new crew scarf, bought at a shop on the Broad, a tourist place specializing in Oxford sweatshirts, Oxford T-shirts and Oxford teddy bears. It had been hard to decide which of the college scarves to choose, because they were all elegantly striped and all expensive, and some were adorned with college crests. The scarf for Christ Church was the one he picked, because the House (that was what people called it) was the most prestigious of the colleges—a far cry from poor old Wolfson. Mark never mentioned Wolfson on his postcards. He used a box number as a return address.
Mary Kelly, carrying two pints of bitter from the front of the pub to the back, caught a glimpse of another familiar face in the Eagle and Child. Stuart Grebe was there, jabbering with the people at the next table, and they were jabbering back. Stuart made friends wherever he went, overcoming the effect of his foolish face with jokes and cheerful enthusiasm. He had not fallen prey to the Oxford scarf shop. Such fripperies were beyond his means. And anyway it turned out that his baggy sweater, his mother’s despair, was right in style.
“Here we are,” said Mary, setting down Helen’s mug with a thump. “Do you know why I like British beer? Because it doesn’t bloat your insides. It doesn’t swell you up and make you belch.” She took a swig and grinned at Helen. “A refined note from across the Atlantic.”
Helen laughed. It was a wholesome laugh, and she felt better for it. And then she began to talk.
Mary sat calmly, eating her thick sandwich, drinking her glass of bitter, and listening. Sometimes she wondered if she physically resembled a tall curtained closet, people seemed so eager to lean toward her and whisper their troubles in her ear. She had always been a target for confessions.
At the end she asked if it would be okay to tell Helen’s story to Homer. “I promise he won’t pass it on to Detective Inspector Mukerji.”
“Yes, of course,” said Helen.
“For years!” said Mary. “All that stuff has been bottled up inside her for years.”
“Well,” said Homer, “that husband of hers must have been the stopper in the bottle. A really rancid character, I gather, John Farfrae. Marriage, my God, the ghastly choices people make, the ways they can go wrong. Some sweet little teenage morsel turns into an alcoholic, or she’s like your friend Marcia and never stops talking, or she’s extravagant and lazy like Minnie, or terminally messy like Joan, or maybe she takes up causes like your friend Louisa and torments her family and friends—”
“Or he doesn’t get up in the night with the baby or clean up after the dog, and maybe he runs after women”—Mary thought of all the rotten marriages she had run into—“or he weighs three hundred pounds, or he’s a hypochondriac, or too nutty to hang on to a job.”
Homer spread Roquefort cheese on his slab of bread. “I’ve always been amazed by what it takes to be just an ordinary everyday wife. You, for instance. What if you couldn’t face it? All those things you have to do, from getting thousands of edible meals and scrubbing the crud out of ten thousand pots and pans—oh, I know I don’t help the way I should—to exterminating plagues of ants and dismembering chickens and sending Christmas cards to all my relatives. Not to mention writing books and teaching legions of college kids. There must be plenty of women who can’t handle it, who just can’t get up in the morning.” He pulled his wife to him, and murmured, “Lucky, I’m so lucky.”
“Oh, Homer, we both are. But next Christmas, you know what? You’re taking over the Christmas cards. I am not writing any more hollow greetings to your Aunt Milly and your cousin Jack.” Mary pulled away and grinned at him. “Make me a sandwich too, heavy on the cheese.”
Homer reached for another loaf of bread. “Tell me, who do you think was meant to fall from that scaffolding in the dark?”
Mary thought about it. “Well, I doubt it was Johnny Farfrae. Helen didn’t know he was coming. Probably nobody else did either.”
“Oh, but after he got there, William Dubchick knew. When he left the office he could have gone straight to the south stairway and removed the barriers. And then he could have gone down the north stairway and turned off the lights.”
“But why?” said Mary. “Oh, well, perhaps he did have a motive. He’d be doing a work of charity, relieving Helen of her frightful spouse. And perhaps”—Mary grinned at Homer—“perhaps he wanted Helen for himself. After all, my darling, you and I know that the fires don’t burn out, just because we’re no longer young.”
“Oh, we do, do we?” Homer put down the loaf of bread and took his wife’s hand. Crowded together into one of the twin beds, they made comfortable old married love.
Afterward Mary said, “Was this a proof of something?”
“Certainly,” said Homer. “We’re proving William Dubchick had cause to kill John Farfrae. Quod erat demonstrandum.”
Mary laughed and got out of bed. “Would it stand up in a court of law?”
“No, because the fact is, it couldn’t have been William who moved thos
e sawhorses and turned off the lights, hoping to lure John Farfrae to his death. When William left the office, he couldn’t guess that Farfrae would leave first, and plunge down that stairwell all by himself. Surely he’d think the man would tyrannize his wife into coming with him.”
“Of course,” Mary thought about it. “So if it wasn’t William, it was someone else who knew Helen often worked late, who thought she’d be there alone. My God, Homer, you know what I think?”
“I think so too. Someone was trying to kill her. But why? Why in hell would anybody want to kill Helen Farfrae?”
“I don’t know why. I do know she mustn’t work late anymore.”
CHAPTER 32
In these still solitudes, Death, instead of Life, seemed the predominant spirit.
Charles Darwin, The Voyage of the Beagle
John Farfrae died on Tuesday night. On Saturday morning Mrs. Dorothy Jarvis found Oliver Clare lying flat on his back on the floor of his rented room with his throat cut.
Mrs. Jarvis’s yellow brick house was one of several on the west side of St. Barnabas Street. All of them backed up to the Oxford Canal. Mrs. Jarvis lived downstairs. The house was also in the neighborhood of the gardens of Worcester College and the golden stone buildings of the Oxford University Press, and not far from a lovely stretch of the Thames and the Rainbow Bridge to Port Meadow and the Holy Well of St. Frideswide. But closer to Oliver’s house were the tracks of British Rail and the public allotment gardens. The Oxford Canal itself was no longer a bustling artery for commercial narrowboats. Behind the church of St. Barnabas, its banks were lined with brushy tangles and a littered parking lot.
Like the rest of the city, the neighborhood was a mixture of the sublime and the tawdry. The short public ways off Walton Street were a kind of downmarket North Oxford. The blocks of modest houses had once been occupied by the servants of North Oxford dons. Now they were rooming houses, bed-and-breakfast places, lodgings for working people and visiting scholars. Babies blossomed on Walton Street. Young mothers heaved strollers over the humps of the pavement, and undergraduates from Somerville College were thick on the street. Graduate students from every college in the university lived in nearby digs. They strode along the narrow sidewalks, dodging the bicycles chained to the railings, heading for the corner where Little Clarendon Street led to the Woodstock and Banbury Roads and the few acres of Oxford where the most ancient of the colleges were huddled together.
Dorothy Jarvis was a sensible and levelheaded woman. On the discovery of the body, she did things in the right order. First she went straight to the loo to be sick, and then she called the St. Aldate’s police station.
Homer Kelly would not have known about Oliver’s death until the evening news on television if Detective Inspector Mukerji had not taken the trouble to track down his phone number at Keble. “I believe this young man was more or less engaged to the daughter of Professor Dubchick. Could there be a connection of some sort with the events in the museum? I suppose not. It is a wild thought. But then I am given to wild thoughts. After all, my Hindu holy books are wilder than your Old Testament. You have a creator in the shape of a man. Ours is a snake.” Mukerji chuckled and hung up, good-humored in the face of calamity.
Homer snatched up his map of Oxford, scribbled a note to Mary, plunged down the stairs, and half-ran, half-walked, in the direction of St. Barnabas Street.
It was straight west for a mile and a half, and Homer was tired when he rounded the massive apse of the church of St. Barnabas. From inside he could hear the plangent voice of the priest blessing the wine. Holy Communion was being celebrated at the moment, although some of the parishioners had forgone the sacrament in order to stand outside and watch what was going on next door.
There was no mistaking the house. Police cars were everywhere, tilted up on the sidewalk, blocking the street. An ambulance was on its way, its siren audible from a distance. Here it came, reeling around the curve of St. Barnabas, the siren winding down.
Now for the first time Homer was overcome by the misery of the young clergyman’s death. The dreariness of the neighborhood made it poignantly real. A bicycle leaning against the front of the house summed it up. Its wheels were crazy ellipses, as though they had been ridden over by some heavy vehicle. Bad luck. Homer suspected it was Oliver’s bicycle, and that misfortune had dogged him all his life.
Some people were born that way, thought Homer sadly. As one of the lucky ones himself, he often grieved at the brutal destiny afflicting some of his friends. Their bread fell butter-side-down, they were dogged by tragedy. Their children were born with cerebral palsy, their wives fell victim to multiple sclerosis, they died young themselves from some torturing kind of cancer. Well, all right, one shouldn’t expect life to be fair, but it shouldn’t be so cruelly unfair either.
Police Constable Gilly guarded the door. “Good morning, sir. My boss said to let you in.” Gilly held open the door and murmured in Homer’s ear, “It’s pretty bad.”
Homer winced, and climbed the stairs. At the top stood a majestic woman, gazing calmly at Detective Constable Ives, who was holding an open notebook. His pencil was poised over a blank page.
“It just seems to me,” said the woman, “that the police are not protecting the citizens of this city.” Her words were petulant, but her manner was transcendent, like God chastising Ives from a burning bush.
The detective constable nodded at Homer, rolled his eyes, put his pencil in his teeth, opened the door of Oliver’s room, stuck his head in, removed the pencil, and murmured, “Dr. Kelly is here.”
“Come in, Homer,” called Gopal Mukerji. “Be careful, there isn’t much room.”
Homer sidled in. At first he couldn’t see the body on the floor, there were so many people in the way. Then someone moved aside, and he had a clear view of the white face and the shirt soaked in blood. The yellow curls were unspotted. Homer tried to appear unmoved, but nausea heaved inside him.
Mukerji drew close and spoke to him softly. “Well, you can see it for yourself, the jackknife in his right hand.”
“Suicide?”
“Or an attempt by someone to make it look that way. I don’t suppose you know whether or not Oliver Clare was right-handed?”
“Sorry, no.”
“And then there’s that.” Mukerji pointed to a strip of paper taped clumsily to the wall above Oliver’s bed. Words were scrawled on it in capital letters. They could be read across the room:
THE ANSWER IS NO.
At once Homer was struck with a fit of shivering. It was all so eerie and terrible—the message on the wall, the bloody body on the floor, the scantily furnished room crowded with too many people, the absence of anything personal to the dead boy except the crucifix over his bed. At this hour not a single ray fell through the window from the October sun that was bathing all outdoors with cheerful light, brightening the roofs and chimneys of the houses on St. Barnabas Street, glittering on the red paint of the narrowboats in the canal, shining on the river as it moved serenely to the sea, its surface scattered with leaves from the trees along Fiddler’s Island and soda cans dropped from the Rainbow Bridge.
Homer nodded at the strip of paper on the wall. “What does it mean, The answer is no? The answer to what question?”
“That’s just it.” Mukerji gave him a look, while a couple of policewomen dismantled the lighting equipment. “To what question would you yourself answer no?”
Homer could think of several. Should there be so many violent deaths in the city of Oxford? Should clergymen die young? Should Homo sapiens have evolved into this dangerous and bloodthirsty subspecies?
But there was one painfully obvious question to which the answer had surely been no: Freddy Dubchick, will you marry me? It was a trite and sentimental solution to Mukerji’s problem, but it was probably correct.
“Might it have been a question put to someone else?” said Homer cautiously. “A woman, for instance? I gather that Oliver’s affair with Professor Dubchick’s daughte
r was on the rocks.”
“Oh, is that so?” Mukerji’s clever face brightened. Homer was reminded of the pictures in Darwin’s book on facial expression—chimpanzees pouting, babies crying, little girls beaming. Mukerji’s face would fit right in.
Homer wanted to get out. The room was too full of people, the air too sickening with the smell of blood, too heavy with a gruesome combination of tragedy and businesslike action. The medical examiner pushed past Homer and joined the detective sergeants, who were stepping cautiously around Oliver’s body as though it were a pit into which they might fail.
Mukerji nodded as Homer gripped his arm and said goodbye. Stepping out into the hall, Homer at once caught sight of a commotion at the foot of the stairs, a woman sobbing, Police Constable Gilly shouting, “No, no, miss.”
It was Freddy Dubchick, making a rush at the stairs. Mrs. Jarvis reached out to stop her. Detective Constable Ives put his body in the way, but she squeezed past both of them. Homer too tried to hold her, but Freddy had become immensely strong. She thrust past him and burst into Oliver’s room.
P.C. Gilly charged up the stairs and followed her in, breathlessly apologizing. “I’m sorry, sir,” he said to Mukerji. “She got away from me. Now, miss, please come downstairs.”
But Freddy moaned, “No, no, I didn’t say that,” and fell to her knees. Homer caught her as she went down.
“Here,” said Mukerji quickly, “put her on the bed.”
Homer lifted her by the shoulders and Gilly took her ankles, still apologizing. “Oh, God, sir, I’m sorry, I’m really sorry.” Together they laid her on the bed.
Again Homer slipped out of the room. At the foot of the stairs he nodded grimly to Detective Constable Ives, who had taken Gilly’s place at the door. On the way home he told himself that he had expected a different sort of university city. People would be civilized and subtle here at Oxford, inhabiting a realm of sophistication in which he would feel like a small child, a raw and clumsy American. But instead—look at them! Brutal husbands tormenting their wives, fainting women, rejected suitors killing themselves for love—it was like a music-hall melodrama from the nineteenth century, not part of the splendid heritage of eight hundred years of learning.