by Desmond Cory
Hillyer obviously wasn’t a logician or he would at once have seen the flaw in the demonstration. Wasn’t and couldn’t have been are quite different concepts. But Dobie wasn’t disposed to press the point, especially since the girl on the beach had now been joined by two other spectacularly topless young ladies and all three were giggling loudly and talking to each other in what sounded like German, and most probably was. Dobie made what sounded like a soft whinnying noise through his teeth and turned away to summon the waiter. Further supplies of brandy were now needed as a matter of urgency.
‘Very stimulating,’ Hillyer said. (Dobie nodded weakly.) ‘On a purely intellectual level, all this speculation … But I can’t see any need to interpret this stuff of Seymour’s on a factual level. I mean, how can you? He’s clearly giving the freest possible rein to his imagination … That’s perfectly obvious.’
‘But there are facts there as well.’
‘What facts?’
‘Well, he did burn his papers that evening. The dustbin was full of ashes. And all that about Derya and the play they did in Cardiff: I know that’s true because I saw the play myself. Although I grant you I don’t remember very much about it.’
‘Yes, but it all drifts away into unreality.’ Hillyer tapped the sheaf of paper on the table impatiently, almost aggressively, Dobie thought. ‘Into that ostentatious style of his, all those allusions and echoes … Tom O’Bedlam and Othello and DHL, it’s all so affected and dated in a way.’
‘Othello?’
‘Oh, yes. He quotes Othello. At least twice.’
‘That’s interesting.’
‘I see what you mean but it’s the way in which he uses his quotations—’
‘And who’s Tom O’Bedlam?’
‘It’s a poem supposedly written by a lunatic. Yes, yes, but don’t you see, my point is—’
‘And DH what? The other one you said?’
‘Yes, Lawrence, “Bavarian Gentians”, that’s one of the later poems in which he … But look, Dobie, if you want a proper literary analysis of the thing you’ll have to give me a little more time. And I have to say that I doubt very much if it’ll be a very profitable undertaking.’
‘He seems to have been quite keen on that chap Lawrence.’
‘He was. But that again, you see, isn’t the point.’
‘No,’ Dobie said sadly. ‘I’m sure it isn’t.’
Dobie wasn’t a man of letters but he wasn’t an idiot, either. He could also be on occasion a tenacious sort of a beggar. The volume of Collected Poems was there on Seymour’s bookshelf and, while ‘Bavarian Gentians’ seemed to be almost as impenetrable as Seymour’s demented outpourings, Dobie found what Hillyer had called the allusion without much difficulty: the poem had at least the merit of being short. Although when he’d finished reading it and had read through it once again and still had no very clear idea of what the bloody thing was all about, he had none the less formed a general impression that accorded well enough with what he knew of Seymour’s concerns and preoccupations. (And Kaya’s, for that matter.) There was no mention of Zeus in the poem but the flowers, the gentians – whatever they were – seemed to be obscurely connected with other strange gods and pagan deities, Pluto, Persephone, et al. being specifically mentioned. Apart from this and a generalised feeling that DHL (as Hillyer called him) was unlikely to have been a little ray of sunshine about the house, Dobie, overall, remained unenlightened. The naiads he had observed at play earlier that afternoon might have had some connection with Bavaria, where to the best of Dobie’s knowledge they spoke German, but Persephone and the others – again to the best of his knowledge – certainly didn’t, and other aspects of the effusion he found equally puzzling. He regretfully decided that Hillyer had been right.
Not a profitable undertaking at all.
Returning the volume to the shelf a little over-exasperatedly, he dislodged from its position its rather flimsy neighbour, which slid sideways and then down to the floor, not with a bang but a flutter. He stooped wearily to pick it up, glancing at the cover as he did so. Cyprus: the Divided Island, it was called. Political stuff, unquestionably. The fall unfortunately seemed to have detached two or more of the inside pages, and these Dobie guiltily endeavoured at once to return to their former pristine condition. But it seemed they weren’t part of the book at all, but something else that had been pushed inside – possibly to act as a marker. It looked like a theatre programme.
The Cardiff University Players
Present
AMPHITRYON
by John Dryden
produced by Adrian Seymour
… It was a theatre programme.
Dobie opened it. Inside, the usual advertisement panels; the cast list; the programme notes. Similarly from this unlikely material does Dryden, in the footsteps of Molière, fashion a brilliantly amusing satirical comedy, not without profound political implications … There you are. There it was. Another fact. Another point on which Seymour could be proved to have been accurate. The theatre programme that he’d referred to really existed. OK, a fact; but again, not a fact that would help anyone very much. Any more than the photograph on the sitting-room wall did, or any more than the photograph that Dobie had discovered seemed to have done.
Political implications, though. That was curious. Still, almost anything might be given a political implication if you searched for it hard enough. Slipping the programme back into its place, Dobie saw that the page it might have been used to mark had indeed been marginated in pencil; or one of the paragraphs on that page, anyway. There were several paragraphs on the page, as most of them were very short.
… Also on the same tragic morning, a group of EOKA-B men entered the village of Tokhni and rounded up sixty-nine men between the ages of thirteen and seventy-four. On 15 August the intruders brought in fifteen more Turkish Cypriot men they had picked up in Mari and Zyyi. They then bussed fifty of their captives to a spot in the vicinity of Limassol, where a ditch had already been dug, and shot them. The remaining thirty-four men were never seen again, and are presumed dead.
In Paphos, the National Guard killed five men and a three-year-old boy. According to a United Nations observer, thirty to forty bullet holes were found in the child’s body.
In the village of Ayios Ioannis, the National Guard and elements of EOKA-B killed five more men on 15 August.
In Alanici, near Famagusta, the entire population of the hamlet – twenty-six men, women and children – were forced on to trucks by the ZEUS guerrilla group; the trucks were then driven away towards the city. The villagers were never seen again, and are presumed dead …
It was this last paragraph that had been marked in pencil. Dobie read it again, rubbing his chin thoughtfully.
‘Zeynep?’
The pummelling noises in the next room stopped and Zeynep, poking her head in through the door, came up with her usual catch-phrase. ‘Ullo Derby.’
‘Zeynep, what’s the name of that village down the road? Where the army base is?’
‘Scawl Alanici.’
‘That’s what I thought,’ Dobie said.
He took the book over to the desk, sat down and read a few more paragraphs. The author, who appeared to be a Frenchman, expressed himself with far more clarity than D.H. Lawrence or than Seymour himself, and his subject matter was even more depressing. The whole chapter made out a seemingly interminable list of atrocities committed by Cypriot Greeks against Cypriot Turks in the summer months of 1974; the next chapter, which Dobie couldn’t bring himself to read, catalogued the atrocities committed, over the same period, by Cypriot Turks against Cypriot Greeks. The only conclusion Dobie could draw was that, compared to this, Seymour’s behaviour constituted the quintessence of sanity. He had been well enough aware that the year 1974 had marked a particularly troubled period in the island’s history, but the depths of the lunacy – and infamy – hadn’t as yet been really brought home to him. He had to suppose that they still hadn’t. He was, after all, only reading words
on a page. The reality would have been something else.
A nightmare. Far, far worse than anything of Seymour’s imagining.
His car was in the garage. He got it out.
Alanici.
Most of the villages in Cyprus bore neat new blue and white plaques at their outskirts announcing their names. This one didn’t. It didn’t really exist. Not any more.
It couldn’t ever have amounted to much of a village anyway. Eight or ten single-storey buildings clustered to the right of the road behind the barbed-wire fencing. Blank windows, closed doors, splintered shutters, a few withered vine stalks obstinately clinging to collapsed pergolas. There was a sign at the village entrance but it was red-painted and said: DIKKAT ASKERI ARAC DUR.
Dobie didn’t know what it meant but its purport was made sufficiently clear by the white-helmeted Turkish soldier who stood, feet apart, beside it, clutching an AK47 and regarding Dobie incuriously. Dobie got out of the car and surveyed the scenery, a little self-consciously under the sentry’s stare; he didn’t want to be taken for some kind of a spy, although there didn’t seem to be much to spy upon round here. Nothing. Absolutely nothing.
The flat bare fields of the Mesaoria, stretching out to the west and south. The backcloth of the Karpaz mountains behind, obscured by the afternoon heat haze. Blue sky and dry brown land; a hot, windless day. Total quietude. No movement anywhere. Dobie walked up the road a few paces, his hands in his pockets, his shoes scuffing up little puffs of dust from the powdery soil. This was yet another place embalmed in the stillness of past time. Another Salamis, broken not by earthquakes but by another kind of upheaval; death had come here and then had gone away again, frustrated perhaps by the calm indifference of the hills, the hot red earth, the overhanging sky. Life didn’t think too much of the place, either.
Only ten minutes away, the Aramis Hotel: the cooling drinks, the beach umbrellas, the screams and splashes, all that enticing acreage of bare brown female flesh. But this was Alanici. A dead-end, Dobie thought, if ever there was one. Three or four lorries had come, had loaded up, had turned and gone back the way they’d come. No other choice. The road ended here. Maybe everything had been like that, in ’74.
Maybe everything was still like that. Cyprus: smashed buildings, barbed wire and a motionless soldier, inactive as the headless statues of Salamis. The tourists and the bikinis, somewhere else. The university, on another planet. Intellectual recognition? Cultural dynamism? Well, old Arkin was certainly trying hard, but you had to have a touch of fanaticism, surely, to believe it. And to put it over to so ultimately unreceptive an audience. Hillyer had put his finger on the spot. Academics … intelligent and cultured – oh, yes, extremely. Hard-working – yes, that too. Up to a point, Lord Boot. But fanatical? No way. It’s true, Dobie thought, we don’t have the guts. We couldn’t kill anybody. Much less bring about an intellectual revolution in a place like this. If Tolga Arkin thinks that, he’s expecting too much of us. We don’t have the imagination. We don’t have …
We don’t have whatever it is that Seymour’s got, when you think about it. That sharp little cutting edge of lunacy. Of course he’d killed Derya. Everyone was convinced of it.
A dead-end. Kaya, Ozzie, Cem Arkin, Berry Berry and (of course) Hillyer himself: a hopeless list of possible alternative suspects. Dobie looked at his wrist-watch; he’d be meeting most of them again soon: Mrs Berry Berry was having a barbecue. In the back garden, no doubt, in the shade of the trees, with blue smoke curling upwards from the grill and with neighbours strolling over to join in the conversation, then strolling as casually away again. The church clock standing at ten to three. The British way of life of sixty years back, effortlessly and thoroughly assimilated. Murder at the vicarage. Quite so.
He looked again at the empty buildings, at the long low army huts behind them, at the set of football posts sticking forlornly up out of nowhere. Then he clambered back into his car, executed a wobbly U-turn and drove away. Going straight back the way he’d come. He had to.
There was nowhere else to go.
Mrs Berry Berry showed every sign of being instantly bewitched by Professor Dobie. Not, it must be said, because of his impressive physique or charm of manner but (he guessed) because as a recent arrival he bore the aura of a visitant from another and more exotic world … ET, perhaps, rather than Robert Redford. Mrs Berry Berry herself certainly carried no such aura, being blonde and fluffy and apple-dumplingish and rather too Kensington High Street. ‘So here you are at last, Professor Dobie. I can’t think why Berry didn’t bring you round before. You really mustn’t think us unfriendly or inhospitable, it’s just that strictly between you and me the poor darling’s getting a little absent-minded. Though I don’t know why I say that. He always was. You know how it is.’
Than Dobie, none better. ‘Well, Mrs Berry—’
‘No, no. Doreen.’
‘Well, Doreen, I’m afraid I’m inclined to be somewhat distrait myself. Or so I’m told. Although—’
‘He was delighted when he learned you were coming to join us, I can tell you that.’ She patted the plastic cushions spread out across the rustic wooden garden bench, relentlessly redolent of Derry and Toms, upon which she sat, and Dobie cautiously planted his bottom alongside. It occupied, he noted, perhaps one-third of the space that hers did. ‘And so was I. It’s so nice to know that from now on he’ll have someone British, I mean, you know, someone really experienced and competent helping him out. Someone who knows his stuff.’ Dobie nodded wisely. He knew his stuff all right when he saw it, which wasn’t often. ‘Because he’s been taking far too much upon himself these past few years and I don’t in the least mind saying so.’
Dobie didn’t mind her saying so, either. ‘Yes, I hope I can be of some use around the place, but of course it’s a temporary appointment. I expect before long they’ll find someone younger as a long-term prospect—’
‘But that’s what I’m saying,’ Mrs Berry Berry wailed. ‘It’s people with experience we need here. People with experience and balance. Energy is fine when it’s expended in the right direction but with young people it hardly ever is. Don’t you agree? It’s guidance this university needs. Not just enthusiasm.’
Dobie nodded, having by now caught and recognised the general tenor of Mrs Berry Berry’s argument and identified the tone in which it was being conducted. Not so much that of the Colonel’s lady in British India; rather that of the Colonel of the Regiment himself. Mrs Berry didn’t look the part but she played it extremely well, no doubt because she believed in it implicitly. ‘I’m sure you’re right, Doreen, we’d hardly be professors otherwise. I know that Ozzie’s been brought in from a business background, but in his field that’s not unusual. In fact —’
‘It’s not the Heads of Department I mean. It’s the junior staff. And Berry’s junior staff in particular. Do you know what the average age of the mathematics instructors was last year? Twenty-five. Berry’s had no one to support him on faculty level since Ben Masefield left. Did you know Ben Masefield?’
‘Er, no.’
‘An American,’ Mrs Berry Berry explained, with some distaste.
‘Ah. But what about Derya?’
‘What about Derya?’
‘She was an Assistant Professor, wasn’t she? Or did you feel that she was too young?’
‘Of course she was. And a nasty little bitch. A real troublemaker, I knew that from the start.’
Diplomacy was needed here. ‘Yes, I suppose her manner might have sometimes be considered a shade provocative—’
‘Provocative? Derya? She’d fuck anything that moved and wore trousers. I know she’s dead but that doesn’t alter facts.’
It is, Dobie remembered, the prerogative of the Colonel of the Regiment to call a spade a spade without exciting reproof, much less reprisal. Mrs Berry Berry, however, had gone slightly pink in the face, as if aware that she might have expressed herself over-forcibly. ‘Perhaps,’ he suggested tentatively, ‘it’s a form of reaction to the
rigours of a severe intellectual discipline. There was a young lady in Lampeter …’
This suggestion, however promising as the opening line of a salacious limerick, was immediately and vigorously rejected by the Colonel. ‘Intellectual discipline my arse. Jumping from bed to bed was what she was good at. All right – I know it isn’t always politic to go round blurting out the truth but I don’t see any point in beating about the bush. People have to take me as they find me. I don’t care.’
‘Well, you’re expressing a personal viewpoint. And we’ve all got the right to do that.’
‘I don’t know that I am. Personally, I didn’t give a shit what the little cow got up to. Promiscuity is none of my business, it was something for her and her husband to … Anyway I was never concerned about that. It was her professional conduct that I objected to. I considered it downright disgraceful.’
‘In what way?’
‘In the way she was always belittling my husband behind his back. Telling everyone he was past it. Just because he isn’t fully acquainted with the latest developments in those computer things and information technology. Things that have got nothing to do with mathematics as I understand it. And spending all her time working at her own research instead of pulling her weight with the teaching and all the administrative chores. I don’t know why Berry put up with it for so long, I really don’t.’
‘But why should she have behaved like that?’
‘Because she was after the job for herself, of course. Why else?’
‘You mean she wanted to head the department?’
‘Of course. She’d have got the job, too, if Berry had retired as he was thinking of doing. And as he will do in a couple of years’ time, if I have my way. That’s why the bloody gal annoyed me so much. Getting up to all those dirty tricks when she’d have got what she wanted anyway, in no time at all.’