by Desmond Cory
‘Not in the way you mean.’
‘I meant plays and things.’
‘Plays and things, no sirree. Histrionics generally, yes. What you might call scenes – oh, yes, indeed. Plenty.’
It seemed evident that Arkin hadn’t fancied Dobie’s protégée all that rotten. Well, protégée – she’d hardly been that. But one of his few academic successes, yes. ‘You mean domestic tiffs? Private quarrels? That sort of thing?’
‘The sort of quarrels that should have been kept private but weren’t. I mean, I’m in the house just across the way, as I told you. It must be all of twenty yards distant from here but I could often hear them slanging one another. Shocking language that girl used, too – you’d have been surprised. I know I was, to begin with. Sometimes I walked across and told them both to shut up. Complete waste of time, naturally. Of course they probably enjoyed it but it was damned annoying, all the same, when I had work to get on with. Not to say embarrassing. You can imagine.’
Dobie could, just about. It wasn’t difficult. And after all, when a husband murders his wife one normally assumes a certain unfortunate lack of marital accord. Dobie’s own short married life had fully convinced him that the conjugal state had its ups and downs, but Jenny had never presented him with any problems of that kind. A gentle, quietly spoken girl, Jenny. He’d never quarrelled with her. Not once.
‘I think she’d have upped and left him,’ Arkin said, ‘if he hadn’t … Well. Done what he did. Left him and us. She didn’t intend to stay with us for very much longer, in my opinion.’
‘Where was she planning to go?’
‘The UK, maybe, or the States. Somewhere with better prospects. We awarded her an Assistant Professorship so that gave her a foot in the door. And she was always an ambitious little bitch. Not that you can blame her for that, not altogether.’
Dobie thought of quoting some consolatory lines from a poem about a field mouse, of all things, which he had had to learn at school and with which he was therefore familiar. These were indeed almost the only lines of English verse with which he was familiar and therefore he refrained from citing them, not wishing to give an impression of intellectual omniscience that would be all too inevitably later subject to eventual and total deflation. Anyway they weren’t even written in proper English, now he thought about it, having been composed by some bloody Scotsman or other on his way back from the local boozer. So, ‘Yes, well,’ he said in the end. This was neither a sparkling nor an original contribution to the conversation but had at least the considerable merit of not, as far as he could see, committing him to anything very definite.
‘People come and go,’ Arkin said. That was hardly an original observation, either. ‘You expect that of any university. But of course we’d prefer them not to go feet first, if it can be avoided. The truth of the matter is that this business with Derya has given rise to an awful lot of talk and … I suppose I have to say scandal.’ He stared glumly for a few moments at his toecaps, away over there in the middle distance. ‘We really don’t need that sort of thing. It’s bad for the corporate image, as you’ll appreciate.’
‘What exactly has …’
‘Yes?’
‘What’s happened to him? To Seymour?’
‘He’s in jug, of course.’
‘I suppose I should have asked, what will happen to him? I mean, in Cyprus is there a …?’
‘Death penalty? Yes, there is. In theory.’
‘I see.’
‘But it hasn’t been invoked in years and I don’t suppose for a moment it will be in this case. No, he’ll plead extreme provocation or temporary insanity or something and in point of fact it probably was just that; I mean both those things. What’s more, I’ll bet he was flying higher than a kite when he did it because he often was. Stoned out of his mind.’
‘He drank a lot?’
‘I meant drugs.’
‘Oh. I see,’ Dobie said again.
‘The cops took away about a hundredweight of crack or crunch or whatever you call it and of course that complicates matters a bit. The Rector’s trying to keep that part of it hushed up but I doubt if he’ll manage it. Though he just might. No one wants to give those sods over on the Greek side that kind of a handle because God only knows what a meal they’d make of it, the Turkish mafia flooding Cyprus with boatloads of shit and all our students turned into junkies. They’ve got vivid imaginations, those boys. And very lively newspaper coverage, when they get the bit between their teeth.’
‘But that’s not what’s really happening?’
‘Good God, no.’
‘I’m pleased to hear it.’
‘Oh, now and again a courier gets picked up by the customs but it isn’t any kind of a serious problem. It’s a tiny little island after all; the big dealers just aren’t interested and it is an island which makes things difficult for them in any case. No, they’re not bothered and why should they be? It’s just the small-time guys who try it. Now and again.’
‘And the students? A lot of them come over from Turkey, or so Berry told me.’
‘Yes, they do. About ninety per cent of them, in fact.’
‘Could they be bringing any in? Of course, I don’t know why one automatically thinks of students whenever drugs are mentioned. It’s most unfair.’
‘All the same it’s a good point and don’t think the police haven’t thought of it. Seymour got the stuff from somewhere and nobody knows where, or if they do they’re not saying. It could have been a student. Indeed it’s quite likely that it was. But of course there weren’t any students around at that time, not from Turkey anyway, because it was the middle of the summer vac and they’d all gone home. So that has to be a completely separate issue.’
Shaking his head unamusedly, Arkin rose to his feet and lumbered towards the door, a big shambly man in loose white shirt and linen trousers. ‘Let me know if there’s anything I can do, I mean I’m right next door if there’s … And you’re quite sure you don’t mind staying here? I’ll get you down in the flats tomorrow if this place makes you feel in any way uncomfortable. And either way it should have been tidied up. Of course it’s a terrible thing to have happened but we shouldn’t have let it throw everything out of kilter like this. It’s disgraceful, really.’
‘You said the flats?’
‘What?’
‘What flats?’
‘Oh, the flats, the university flats, yes, you can move in down there any time you like, there have to be quite a few vacancies. Reason why old Berry didn’t take you there first off is because they’re supposed to be for lecturers and others of the lower orders; these villas are for senior staff and Berry Berry tends to be fussy about things like that. In fact he’s a bit too fussy about almost everything. Reflects on the Department of Mathematics, in his opinion, if the Visiting Professor doesn’t rate a villa – this one used to be Derya’s so now it’s yours. He’s not an imaginative feller, either. But you can see his point.’
‘Yes,’ Dobie said. ‘And I’m perfectly happy here, I can assure you. I don’t want to cause any inconvenience. Tell me, who’s my neighbour on the other side?’
‘Ah. Eng Lit chap. Dr Hillyer. Yes, that may well have been another factor, they may have reckoned you’d like to have another Brit next door. I don’t have all that many dealings with him but he’s pleasant enough.’
Dobie pressed the doorbell and nothing happened. A couple of minutes passed. Then, just as he was about to turn away, the porch light came on and faint Mr Badger-like shufflings became audible within. Eventually the door opened and Hillyer peered out, his eyes blinking anxiously from behind his glasses as though in expectation of an immediate and violent assault. In contradistinction to Arkin’s casual mode of attire, he wore an ancient but very well-tailored tweed suit, an MCC eggs-and-bacon tie and, Dobie observed, carpet slippers with holes through which his blue-besocked toes coyly pointed. ‘Yes?’
‘My name’s Dobie. John Dobie. I’ve just arrived. I was wondering if—’<
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‘Of course. Of course. Yes. Come in, why don’t you?’ Muttering the usual polite acknowledgments, Dobie entered, to find himself in a drawing-room that was, except for the incidental accoutrements, an exact replica of the one he had just left. The same somewhat creaky pseudo-modern furniture, the same Formica-topped coffee table, the same plastic striped blinds hanging over the window. Hotel furniture, one would have said, and the twin rows of books in the bookcase, the sports magazines strewn over the sofa and the remnants of an obviously bachelor supper littering the table seemed to accentuate rather than to alleviate this overall lack of individuality. There was, however, a faint scent of something hanging in the air which Dobie’s undiscriminating nose was unable at first to identify. On being waved by his host to an armchair and sitting cautiously down on it, a sudden increase in the effluence caused him to appreciate that someone, probably the aforesaid host, had either emptied or spilt the better part of a bottle of peppermint cordial over the cushions. This didn’t strike him as being in any way odd. He was always doing that sort of thing himself.
‘Fancy my tie?’
Dobie wasn’t disposed to be over-critical. ‘MCC, isn’t it? Very nice.’
‘But perhaps you’d prefer John Collins’?’
Dobie was puzzled. ‘I don’t think I’ve met him.’
‘Or a grasshopper? Or maybe a gin daiquiri? Extremely refreshing, y’know, in this steamy weather.’
Something at once well practised and very familiar in Hillyer’s stance enabled Dobie to leap to the wild surmise that beverages rather than sartorial matters were germane to this present issue. ‘Well, perhaps … one of those grasscutter things …’
‘A wise choice. A very prudent choice. And how was your trip?’
‘Appalling.’
Dobie watched his host slide open the door of the corner cabinet and commence to mix various liquids together with gay abandon, squeezing oodles of sticky fruit juice obscenely out of a tube. Truly appalling, yes, and he was still aware of the after-effects; but a small snifter of something might, he thought, help to settle his stomach. He looked vaguely about Hillyer’s sitting-room, wondering what he was doing there. Obedience to the impulse of the moment wasn’t usually a Dobeian characteristic but he couldn’t convincingly attribute his presence here to anything else.
Hillyer turned and reapproached him, bearing a brimming glass before him like some bespectacled and soberly suited Ganymede. ‘Do you?’
‘Do I what?’
‘No, will this do you?’
‘Oh, yes. Rather. Thank you.’
Having delivered his cargo, Hillyer placed a second similarly brimful tumbler on the side table and placed himself in the other armchair alongside, flinging one bony knee high up into the air before folding it untidily over the other. ‘A beaker,’ he observed, ‘full of the warm south. Welcome to Cyprus.’
‘Thanks very much.’
‘Though I don’t suppose it was any old beaker that he had in mind. Some delicate Etruscan ware, most likely. Conceivably a della Robbia. Something like that.’
In addition to wondering what he was doing here, Dobie had now to wonder what the fuck his host was talking about. ‘I’m afraid I … You see I’ve only just got here and it’s all a bit new to me.’
‘Of course. And you say they’ve put you next door? I’d no idea. Or I’d have made a point of dropping in. But there it is. No one tells me anything. You flew straight out from the UK?’
‘Not exactly straight, no. There was a considerable wobble factor. The adverse climatic conditions—’
‘Pissing down, was it? When you left?’
‘It was humid, certainly.’
‘Well, at least you’ve got away from all that for a while. You can relax in the sun and so forth. We won’t be kicking off with the classes for another three weeks yet, so you’ll have plenty of time to get settled in. I don’t think you’ll find it too difficult once you’ve … What’s your field, by the way?’
‘My field?’
‘Yes, what’s your—’
‘Oh, my field. I’m a mathematician, I do sums and all that kind of thing.’
‘Of course you would be. Silly of me. As you’re little Derya’s replacement.’ Hillyer sampled his own wares and smacked his lips noisily, somehow contriving to make the resultant sound seem thoughtful and even pensive. ‘I take it you’ve heard about …?’
‘Yes, I have. Very sad and … tragic.’
‘And very disturbing, what’s more, when it happens in the next house to yours. Those two didn’t get on, we all knew that. In fact we could hardly help knowing it. The rows and so on. In a close-knit little community like this one. But if we’d had any reason to think … Plenty of married couples have the most awful rows without ending up strangling one another and they were both very young, after all, very young indeed, so it was really a … I take it you’re not a married man yourself?’
‘I’m a widower,’ Dobie said. ‘A recent widower in fact. That’s partly why I’m here.’
‘Ah. Very sorry to hear it. I’m divorced myself. Second time round. I must say I find the single man’s mode of existence a great deal more … But of course one has certain problems, yes, especially in Cyprus. I’ve been here twelve years now, so I should know. However, that’s by the way. Can I offer you another little …?’
Dobie saw with some mild surprise that his glass was indeed already empty. ‘Why, yes. Please. Er … Delicious.’
‘Splendid. Splendid.’ Hillyer ambled back towards the corner cabinet with notable alacrity. His mode of progress was totally dissimilar, Dobie noted, to that of Cem Arkin, not resembling that of a grizzly bear so much as that of a secretary bird stalking a tasty viper with its knees bumping together at irregular intervals; he might well, Dobie thought, have sunk one or two before his guest’s arrival. Or three or four, for that matter. ‘Perhaps,’ Hillyer said, looking back over his shoulder as he spoke and crashing inadvertently into a footstool, ‘perhaps I shouldn’t say this, but in a way … Of course one would wish the circumstances to have been otherwise …’ One would indeed, Dobie thought gloomily. Further obfuscations seemed to be imminent. Odd, though, as Hillyer’s previous question he had found to be readily comprehensible and even delicately phrased. ‘… But all the same I’m on the whole greatly relieved to have you as a neighbour this coming term. Married couples are always … And besides, you’re British. One thing to be said for the British. You know where you are with them.’
‘Seymour,’ Dobie objected, ‘was British.’
‘So he was, so he was. And so was she, technically. Or by birth, anyway. A surprising number of Cypriots manage to get born in the UK, you know … the middle-class ones, anyway.’ Dobie accepted his replenished glass and hastened to test its content. Delicious, as before. ‘But he wasn’t a very likable man, I’m afraid. Seymour wasn’t. Brusque and offhand in his manner. Not very popular. And bad-tempered with it. I don’t say we never chatted together, of course we did. But he wasn’t the sort of fellow you’d ever want to get on first-name terms with. Nobody ever called him Adrian that I can remember, much less Ade or anything like that. He was always so argumentative, it was almost as though he … I remember his making some particularly vitriolic comments about David Gower to which I had to take violent exception and I remain convinced he made those comments with the intention of annoying me. That’s the sort of man he was.’
‘I don’t think I’ve … Is he in the Mathematics Department?’
‘Who?’
‘The chap you mentioned. David—’
‘David Gower is a cricketer and one who in my opinion should be the present England captain.’ Hillyer’s normally mild countenance had turned, Dobie saw with some alarm, to a violent shade of puce, rivalling in intensity that of the content of his upraised glass. ‘Seymour made the utterly preposterous claim that Gower couldn’t bat for toffee. I’d have said that the Test averages alone provided a more than sufficient refutation, but to offer such a
n unwarranted opinion about the most elegant batsman in the England team seemed to me indicative of so profound an ignorance that I preferred simply to ignore the remark. I walked away, more or less. With dignity, I hope. No, there’s no gainsaying the fact that the man was an idiot.’
‘I must admit I’m not too well informed about cricket, either.’
‘So I’d inferred. But that’s another matter. I know absolutely nothing about mathematics and wouldn’t be so ill advised as to offer any kind of an opinion on the subject. Seymour, on the other hand—’
‘Derya didn’t make any effort to enlighten you?’
‘In what respect?’
‘About mathematics, for instance.’
‘Good heavens, no. And I sincerely trust you won’t, either. No, Derya was always enlivening rather than enlightening. Though not in a way that I myself could readily appreciate.’
‘I’m not sure that I … You mean her conversation wasn’t …?’
‘No, I wouldn’t have called her a great conversationalist, not at all, but I didn’t mean that. It was more the way she … I mean, she’d do things like … well, sunbathing on the terrace with nothing on. Where I and just about anyone else could see her. I don’t think of myself as a killjoy and I’m well aware that the tourists in the beach hotels here all do that sort of thing, but in her case it showed to my mind a certain … a certain …’
‘Lack of consideration?’
‘Exactly. Other people could just pass by, I suppose, and regard it as a mildly enjoyable experience, but living next door I had no choice but to …’
‘Regard it.’
‘Just so.’
‘And no doubt it would somewhat exacerbate the rather personal problems you mentioned earlier.’
‘Indeed,’ Hillyer said, emitting a surprisingly high-pitched giggle. ‘This is of course the island of Aphrodite, as Kaya never tires of telling us. He runs the Archaeology Department, by the way, my next-door neighbour on the other side; you’ll meet him pretty soon. Where was I? Ah, yes. Aphrodite. Well, even allowing for the classical associations of the place … there are limits.’