For ever farewell.’
Eric turned swiftly to Roger.
‘He would do it,’ he said furiously. ‘He would manage to beat even that obscure old fool Meredith at his chosen game.’
‘Yes,’ Roger said, ‘he’s pretty impressive, I must admit. How could he have found out that the man who was due to introduce him had a mania for some forgotten poet?’
‘If you’re paranoid,’ Eric answered, ‘you’re willing to go to any lengths to assert your authority. Listen to him now: airing himself on tetrachoric correlation. You know that McKenna’s worked on that for years. This is all intended to prove he’s hopelessly out of date.’
‘Good for the Bosun,’ Roger said.
‘No,’ said Eric. ‘Don’t you see? It all shows how wrong it is that he should be in charge of anything, let alone of the Institute at Leeds.’
‘Well, that’s no longer our affair, thank goodness,’ Roger said.
Eric did not answer.
‘Of course,’ the Bosun declaimed, turning to the other members of the committee, ‘if you’re really stuck for people to make awards to, the remedy is simple: declare whatever you like as being in the field of psychological medicine. After all, you never can tell with the human brain: anything may be relevant. That’s what makes it so fascinating to me. You never quite know what stimulus will produce what result.’
‘No, you don’t do you, Bosun?’
Eric Smith was standing up beside Roger bellowing for all he was worth at the immense fat figure in the dense black gown away on the dais at the other end of the hall.
Roger made a grab but Eric slipped from his grasp and went leaping downwards towards the edge of the gallery. He leant over the rail and shouted again.
‘You never expected the stimulus of your antics today would produce a death blow for the Institute for Human Relations, did you?’ he yelled.
Roger walked quickly down towards Eric. He made no attempt to quieten his steps. Eric was much too absorbed with his hysterical hatred of the balloon man on the platform to notice any noise behind him.
Roger hit him sharply on the back of the neck. The blow put him out like a snuffed candle.
Chapter Three
When nothing had happened after Eric Smith’s outburst at the presentation of the Sir Patrick Dun Medal he and Roger Farrar began to tell each other that no harm had been done. They came to believe it.
It was no use them pretending to each other that the Bosun had not realized that it was Eric who had shouted at him. He had come down from the dais into the theatre and had attempted to get up to the gallery. Luckily the small door leading to it was not easy to find and Roger had succeeded in lugging the inert form of Eric down the stairs while the Bosun was still in the body of the hall looking for a way up and fending off the solicitude of Professor Meredith.
The fresh air of the square had revived Eric and Roger had managed to propel him through the front gate of Trinity and out into College Green. By a stroke of luck a taxi had been putting down a fare just outside the college railings. Roger under the benign gaze of the statues of Goldsmith and Burke had bundled Eric into it.
They had driven away just as the balloon-like figure of the Bosun had hurried through the gate. But there was no doubt that he had seen them both, and that he would have recognized them.
At first Eric had taken it very badly. It was a whole week before Roger could get him to leave his flat at the top of a tall house in Baggot Street at all.
‘What can the Bosun do?’ he said yet again.
‘We hold commissions in the British Army, don’t we?’ said Eric. ‘We’re technically deserters, aren’t we?’
‘Look, you’re just torturing yourself. You’re really simply harping on anything you can find to make yourself feel more miserable. You must have flourished your status as a deserter in my face half a dozen times today already.’
‘Well, it’s true. I am a deserter. If I was caught I’d be liable to a hell of a term in prison, or worse.’
‘Not worse. Not in peacetime. And in any case there are dozens of real deserters from the British Army in Ireland. We’re not going to be arrested and sent back. For God’s sake, that’s the principle we’ve been living on for the last three years.’
‘But that was before the Bosun knew we were here. That was when changing our names and growing a moustache and using hair dye was enough. But the Bosun knows us too well. He knows we’re here now. He’ll get us back.’
‘Now look, stop it. Just sit down there and ask yourself how he’s going to get us back.’
Eric did sit down. On the edge of the big broad battered armchair by the window from which the great gangling brownish Cuchulain was peering out despairingly.
‘The Bosun’s not going to start proceedings,’ Roger said. ‘He daren’t. He doesn’t want the whole purpose of the Institute for Human Relations produced in court. He may want to touch us, but he can’t.’
Eric sat gloomily looking at the toes of his worn black shoes.
After a while he groaned.
‘Why did I have to go to see him in the first place?’ he said.
‘It was quite a reasonable thing to do,’ Roger answered. ‘The Bosun was, quite by chance, actually going to be in Dublin. It was pretty sound psychology to go and look at him from a safe distance and so to speak exorcise him.’
Eric laughed. Sourly.
‘The psychologist’s psychology,’ he said. ‘I must say it worked like a charm, didn’t it?’
‘It did as a matter of fact,’ Roger said. ‘Only it worked for me and not for you. If I hadn’t actually seen the Bosun down on that platform I wouldn’t have been able to cope with this, I can tell you.’
Eric continued to look at the toes of his shoes. But with closer application..
‘I need boot polish,’ he said at last.
‘Okay,’ said Roger, ‘we’ll trot round to the shop on the corner and get some.’
Eric gave him a sneering smile.
‘Quite the little doctor, aren’t we?’ he said. ‘You’ll be getting me to do raffia work next.’
But he jumped quickly out of the broad sagging armchair and went to the door. Roger grabbed Cuchulain’s heavy leather leash, slipped it on to his collar and followed down the long flight of stairs.
A salt-laden north-east wind was blowing off the Irish Sea and although the sun was shining it was distinctly chilly. Roger and Eric stepped out briskly to the poky general store just round the corner off Baggot Street where Eric conducted his limited housekeeping. Cuchulain foraged ahead of them tugging at his leash and rising up every now and again on his haunches to snuffle at the wind.
They turned the corner and there standing outside the little dilapidated shop was a Civic Guard sunning himself like a great purring tomcat.
Eric stopped in his tracks so sharply that the Guard looked across at him. In an instant Eric had turned on his heel and started to run.
Roger managed to check his impulse to hare after him. He tugged Cuchulain across the narrow side street and went over towards the Guard, who was moving his shoulders uneasily, at a loss whether to investigate Eric’s suspicious action or not.
‘I hope you’re always about when my friend forgets he’s left the bath tap running,’ Roger said to the Guard.
‘How’s that?’ said the Guard.
The proper reaction to friendly chatter from a respectable dog-owner was visibly fighting with the lingering suspicions Eric’s flight had aroused.
‘He did it once before and the people below had to call the Guards to break in and stop the flooding,’ Roger said. ‘So you acted as a pretty potent reminder.’
‘Is that so now?’
‘It certainly is. But I must be getting back. I dare say there’s mopping up to be done.’
Roger dived into the little shop, praying that this time Cuchulain’s tail would not cause any havoc. He spotted a tin of polish on the counter, picked it up, found the right money in his pocket, and was out of the shop agai
n in half a minute.
The Guard was grinning broadly. Roger hurriedly lugged Cuchulain back to the flat.
Eric was there. Roger had to persuade him to open the front door but it took him less time than it might have done.
The incident did not turn out to be as much of a setback as Roger had feared. The very next day Eric went out and walked the streets. The day after he began work again.
What had first attracted Roger and Eric to Ireland was the existence of the Dublin School of Further Studies, an organization founded in the thirties to provide for learned refugees from Germany who wanted to work in a neutral country. It had created chairs and lectureships in whatever particular department of learning they were needed. Since its start it had never lacked applicants for employment. Roger and Eric were the first to come from Britain.
Roger had to escort Eric to the school on the day he elected to go back. But once Eric had got into his own little psychology laboratory, in what had once been a scullery in one of the block of houses overlooking a square which had been taken over by the School, he relaxed.
After a while Roger left him eagerly inspecting his cages of rats to see what progress had been made in his absence. Roger went back to the library where he carried out his own research – into Anglo-Irish speech forms.
His quickening steps as he neared the library door. Sanctuary.
His books were spread out on his table as he had left them the last time he had used them. His notebook, the current early nineteenth century novel open at the chapter he had just finished, the pile of similar works waiting to be read.
The unreadable books he had raced through like a schoolboy reading The Three Musketeers. The never extinguished hope of finding the very speech form he needed to confirm a hypothesis or illustrate an argument.
It was two weeks later while he was again in the library sitting alone in front of another novel that someone opened the door and came in with such exaggerated care that it disturbed even his immersed trance.
He looked up.
There stood the solitary member of the audience at the presentation of the Sir Patrick Dun Medal. He was unmistakable. The same shiny blue jacket, the same baggy grey trousers, the same sweep of grey hair above a pair of roundlens horn rim spectacles.
He put his finger to his lips, smiled and nodded to Roger conspiratorially. He pointed to a table near Roger’s and indicated with some heavy pantomime that he was going to work there.
Roger buried his head in his novel again. He noted that he was not upset by this reminder of the Bosun.
After a short interval the man at the next table suddenly said in a breathy whisper:
‘By the way, may I introduce myself? My name is Wyndham. George Wyndham, as a matter of fact.’
‘Oh yes,’ said Roger.
As there was no one else in the library, he did not lower his voice.
George Wyndham evidently took this as an invitation to talk.
He talked. At length. He poured out information. He was English. He had come over to Ireland ‘for the civilization’. He could not think why he had not done so years before. England was horrible now, entirely materialistic. It would have been impossible to have got permission to use a library like this in England.
Roger envisaged the buzzing persistence which had done the trick in Ireland.
Wyndham’s voice was slightly louder than necessary and his gaze was intense and unwavering. As he spoke his Adam’s apple bobbed up and down. Roger watched it.
He tried to get away several times. Without success. Eventually he jumped up, shook Wyndham’s hand hard and said loudly:
‘We must meet again some time.’
He gave him no time to reply, but dodged rapidly out of the room. As soon as he had got the door closed behind him he turned and ran down the stairs leading to Eric’s laboratory.
Eric was alone, carefully mixing a drug into bowls of food for his caged rats.
‘Eric,’ Roger said, ‘there’s something I think I ought to warn you about.’
Eric looked up.
‘You remember the man who sat in the body of the hall at the presentation, the chap with the blue jacket and grey trousers?’
Eric stopped pouring the colourless fluid into the mess of grey porridge.
‘He’s just wandered in here,’ Roger said. ‘I thought it might be a shock for you if you happened to bump into him. Apparently he’s an Englishman who’s recently come over. He’s the most godawful bore –’
‘Why to warn me?’ Eric said. The edgy tone.
Roger looked at him. With concern.
‘I came to warn you because I knew that you were capable of barking at me like that,’ he said.
‘I didn’t bark.’
‘You did, you know. You bark every time anything reminds you of –’
‘Well, your friend had better not go reminding me, had he?’
‘He’s no friend of mine,’ Roger said.
The attempt to infuse the remark with lightness was only partially successful.
Eric turned back to his rats’ bowls.
‘Now I’ve bloody well forgotten where I’d got to,’ he said.
He strode across to the sink and tipped the test tube of colourless fluid into it.
‘Listen,’ Roger said, ‘this chap Wyndham won’t know who you really are. That’s what you’ve got to remember. Nobody but the Bosun knows that.’
Eric turned away and started taking various bottles from a cupboard. He took a fresh test tube, fixed it in a clamp and began sucking up fluid from one of the bottles into a pipette.
Roger watched him for a little.
There seemed to be nothing more he could say.
He turned and left the little laboratory. As he shut the door he heard the tinkle of breaking glass as Eric hurled something into the deep clinical sink.
Without thinking where he was going he went back to the sanctuary of the library.
George Wyndham was still there, standing by his table and looking down at his work.
‘I took the liberty of glancing at it while you were away,’ he said to Roger.
His Adam’s apple bobbed up and down propitiatorily.
Roger sat down without a word.
‘The Banim brothers I see you’re reading,’ Wyndham said. ‘Very interesting. John Banim, wasn’t it, that they called the Scott of Ireland? I went to a very interesting course of lectures on the influence of Scott once. I thought the name Banim was familiar. Are you working in that field? I must see if I can find my notes of those lectures. There might be something there that would be helpful to you.’
‘That’s very kind of you,’ Roger said. ‘But my interest in the O’Hara family is not strictly literary. I’m a philologist.’
‘A philologist,’ said Wyndham with delight. ‘Then you’re a man after my own heart. I’m a member of the South London Philological Society, actually. They get some very good people at their weekly meetings. Of course, I haven’t been to many recently: I belong to so many societies, you know. I suppose I ought to resign now I’ve come to live over here. But you can never tell when membership of any particular body may come in useful.’
‘I suppose not.’
Roger turned to his notebook and began making an entry.
Wyndham was not discouraged.
‘So your interest in the Banim brothers is philological, is it?’ he went on. ‘I suppose you’re working on the difference between English as spoken in Ireland and the native use?’
Roger kept his head down.
‘Interesting, of course, very. As a matter of fact I thought of making a bit of a study of that myself. Did you know that in Ireland the word “rear” is spelt r-e-r-e? But I wouldn’t have thought that someone who’s worked at Leeds would find a historical subject all that interesting. Perhaps I could take over from you? Leave you free for something else?’
This time Roger did look up.
‘Did you say take over from me?’ he asked.
Doin
g nothing to keep the indignation out of his voice.
‘I was saying that, as I’m particularly interested in the Irish use of English, perhaps I could be of help. I could see what work you’ve done and carry on from there, and you would be free to tackle anything else that happened to interest you.’
‘That’s a very friendly suggestion,’ Roger said. ‘Shall I tell you what subject interests me more than anything else at the moment?’
‘Ah, I thought so.’
George Wyndham rubbed his bony hands together.
‘The Irish use of the English language.’
‘Oh.’
Behind the utilitarian hornrims the pale eyes blinked. Once.
‘Well, then, perhaps we could collaborate. I’ve nothing particular on at the present time. I’d be quite willing to drop everything and muck in with you.’
Roger closed the novel by the Banim brothers. He snapped his notebook to beside it. He picked them both up. He walked out.
After that he took care to see as little as possible of George Wyndham. He saw little of anybody. Occasionally as autumn turned to winter he realized with a slight shock that there were newcomers to the staff at the School whom he did not even know by name. But he liked his solitary existence with the bounding Cuchulain as his only companion.
He saw less of Eric now that his reassurances seemed to be no longer needed. From time to time he bumped into him at the School but their paths seldom crossed.
It was only because of Eric’s insistence that loneliness would ‘lead almost directly to hypochondriasis’ that he agreed to go to supper with him one Sunday just after Christmas.
It was a very cold evening with a smell of snow in the air. Roger walked towards Eric’s flat pulled along at the end of Cuchulain’s heavy leash with his head down fighting against a cutting wind. He hurried up the steps of the tall house and pushed open the unlocked front door. To be out of the wind was a positive sensation, like silence after the sudden ending of some continuous noise.
Roger stopped where he was until he was breathing a little more easily. Then he released Cuchulain’s leash and set off up the long flights of sharply mounting stairs with the big dog scampering awkwardly up in front of him. He felt his legs growing more and more leaden. The relief of being out of the wind had ceased to have its warming effect and the dimly lit stairs were mustily chill.
The Dog It Was That Died Page 3