The Reluctant Cannibals

by The Reluctant Cannibals (mobi)

  ‘Patrick, well… why not? I’d be delighted.’

  Eccles duly led on as his tutor followed with gown billowing, a strawberry in one hand and glass of port still in the other. It had been a long time since Augustus had been into the college bar, a small subterranean world with feeble light and, by that time of night, foors tacky from spilt beer. He was soon feeling like he’d never left the place.

  It was almost midnight by the time the barman managed to convince everyone to leave. As a decidedly worse-for-wear Dr Bloom teetered across the quadrangle, Eccles veered off towards the toilets only to collide with Kingsley-Hampton and several of his entourage.

  ‘Eccles, you pisshead. Look what you’ve done!’ said Kingsley-Hampton, inspecting a few damp spots on his shirt while still holding an almost full pint glass in his hand.

  ‘Sorry,’ mumbled Eccles as he tried to avoid eye contact and sidle past the group, only to fnd his path frmly blocked.

  ‘Goodness, it must be past your bedtime Eccles,’ said Kingsley-Hampton. ‘What time is it anyway?’ With that, he lifted his left hand that held his pint glass over Eccles’ head while theatrically rotating his wrist to see the time on his watch.

  After the laughter had eased and the pack had fnished harrowing their dripping prey, their leader spoke again.

  ‘Now, what is the punishment for breaking the curfew, Eccles?’ ‘What curfew?’ he replied, perhaps a little too defantly under the circumstances. ‘The curfew for annoying little pricks like you, Eccles. Let me see, Gentlemen, do

  you think we should educate Eccles in the fner points of croquet?’ With this, a bemused and bedraggled Eccles was manhandled through the alley to-

  wards the college gardens. There, at the foot of the large majestic horse chestnut tree, he was unceremoniously stripped and held down while four croquet hoops, one over each limb, were frmly hammered into the ground with a croquet mallet. Felipe Banzarro gal-lantly offered up the remains of his own beer to allow Eccles to be re-doused from head to toe. There he was left, dripping with beer, spread-eagled, stark naked and face up. Croqueted.

  If you are ever subject to the indignity of such a fate the very best you can hope for is a clear starry night. For apart from awaiting rescue there is very little else to do once croqueted. After the futility of escape has been realised and the pain from the associated grazes on ankles and wrists has waned, a sense of peace often falls on the victim. Only when this stage has been reached can you start to appreciate the true wondrous beauty of a clear starlit night.

  Eccles recognised most of the summer constellations and so could appreciate the al-legorical symbolism of lying beneath the constellation Cygnus – a swan in fight with outstretched arms. Next to Cygnus was the shining pearl of the star Vega in the constel-lation Lyra. Without warning the stars began to take the shape of a human face, a girl’s face. The girl serving in the hall. How had he forgotten her so easily? He didn’t know her name, but he didn’t need to. Whatever earthly name she had been given, she was Vega. The cooling night and alcohol still eking into his bloodstream conspired with his nakedness to produce a mild state of delirium. Like the Duke of Dorset he too could now die with dignity, with the name of the girl he loved on his lips and her image in front of his eyes.

  11 An infamous, but possibly mythical brothel that frequently came up in undergraduate conver-sations, even though no-one seemed to have had any frst-hand experience of the delights sup-posedly on offer.

  Chapter 39

  ‘Come in!’ Augustus shouted over the sound of the boiling kettle. Patrick Eccles duly shuffed in, followed by a miasma of mothball-scented air. He was

  still wearing the old clothes Potts had given him that morning. The porter had discovered Eccles during his predawn circuit of the college grounds. The restorative tea provided in the lodge had been laced with so much whiskey that Eccles was still under the infu-ence as he entered Augustus Bloom’s room for a tutorial. Augustus didn’t notice anything amiss and merely busied himself by pouring hot water into two mugs flled with stringy roots.

  ‘We’ll leave those to stew for a while,’ he said, while placing the cups on the man-telpiece before slumping into his armchair. ‘Now… good God, you look as bad as I felt when I woke up this morning.’

  ‘I feel fne, really I do,’ replied Eccles, the persistence of circulating alcohol giving the words their truth.

  ‘Trust me, hangovers get worse as you get older. Quite a night last night. Mind you, worth the celebration.’ Augustus sniffed the air trying to place the odour that was fghting with the ginseng root aroma, spreading out from the cups on the mantelpiece.

  ‘Now try some of this ginseng tea. Supposedly good for hangovers.’ Eccles smelt the earthy vapour rising off the cup with suspicion before trying a sip.

  Augustus closed his eyes before taking a draft of his own cup. ‘Ham sandwiches on white bread with lots of butter,’ said Eccles. ‘Sorry?’

  ‘My favourite hangover cure. Ham with thick white bread and sweet tea.’ With that, Augustus rose to his feet and opening his desk pulled out a small black book

  to note down his student’s suggestion. Not spectacular from a culinary perspective, but plausibly effective. It had all the right components for a hangover cure, something to ab-sorb residual alcohol together with fat, salt, sugar and fuids.

  ‘Excellent. Now what were we supposed to be talking about today?’ ‘Respiratory refexes.’

  ‘Oh, of course. Off we go then.’

  Augustus settled into his chair with his eyes closed while his student stumbled through his essay on the various respiratory refexes. The occasional sip from his cup and grunt of affrmation reassured his student that he was still awake. Eccles fnished with a fourish on the mythological origins of Ondine’s curse. When he stopped talking, Augustus opened his eyes.

  ‘Excellent. I think you’ve got the hang of that. Now, as I’m not feeling the best and have an important guest arriving this morning, would you mind if we called it a day there?’

  ‘No, not at all.’

  ‘Thanks. We’ll catch up with any questions you might have on Friday. Now do you have any lectures today in the science area?’

  ‘Yes we’ve got a pharmacology practical I think.’ ‘You wouldn’t mind dropping this envelope into the vice-chancellor’s offce, would

  you? Don’t worry, it’s just a dinner invitation.’

  Eccles headed out of the room with invitation in hand and Augustus rose to his feet and emptied the contents of his cup into the sink. He then picked up the phone.

  ‘Gerard, you couldn’t see if the kitchen could rustle up a ham sandwich could you? Plenty of butter, thick white bread and some tea… normal tea will do fne. Oh, and could you bring a little white sugar with that too?’

  *

  Matthew Kingsley-Hampton was fipping through the contents of the ‘K’ pigeonhole when Mr Potts came up behind him.

  ‘There’s a letter here from the Master. Asked me to deliver it in person.’ Kingsley-Hampton looked at Potts and then the letter. He stretched his hand out, fn-

  gers and thumbs poised to grasp the letter. Then with a slight hesitation and supercilious smile he unfolded his hand and waited for Potts to place the letter in his outstretched palm.

  ‘But seeing as you’re ’ere, I’ll just pop it in the pigeon’ole,’ said Potts, relishing this rare victory over Kingsley-Hampton.

  This allegory of the modern tensions in the English class structure was interrupted by the unusual intrusion of an American voice, a female American voice to boot.

  ‘Excuse me, are you Mr Potts, by any chance?’ she said addressing herself to the aforementioned. ‘Augustus, I mean Doctor Bloom, told me to ask for you.’

  Potts turned to look at the disarming smile of Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher, renowned translator of Brillat-Savarin’s magnum opus La Physiologie du Goût or The Physiology of Taste . That was the book’s short title. It also bore the impressive subtitle of Méditations de Gastronomie Transcendante; o
uvrage théorique, historique et à l’ordre du jour, dédié aux Gastronomes parisiens, par un Professeur, membre de plusieurs so-ciétés littéraires et savantes . 12

  ‘I am indeed, Madam. Let me show you to ’is rooms. Can I ’elp you with them bags? They look a bit ’eavy for a lady like yourself.’

  ‘Oh, why thank you. That would be most kind.’ There were times and places where Mary Frances would have resented such an as-

  sumption of female helplessness and struggled with her own bags. This wasn’t one of them.

  ‘You’ve been booked into a guest room in the Master’s lodging, Ma’am, so I’ll drop your bags up later after I’ve shown you up to Dr Bloom.’

  Mary Frances took the few free seconds while Potts pulled the bags into the lodge to drink in the scene. Fresh-faced young men sidled past, oblivious to her presence and to the history around them. In her youth, she wouldn’t have been invisible to men like these or as unimpressed by the scale and history of the honeyed stone walls. She stepped into the quadrangle and felt the gentle warmth of the morning sun. Another group of young men walked past. At the fore, a pimply-faced youth was walking backwards try-ing to break into the conversation. Not one of them paused to notice the scene that was enthralling Mary Frances in the middle of the quadrangle. A duck walked at heel behind the fgure of a man dressed in archaic clerical garb as he strolled across the grass.

  ‘Now, Ma’am, this way.’

  Mary Frances turned to follow. When she glanced back the man and the duck were gone.

  Augustus recognised the tenor of knock on his door and jumped to his feet, only to regret his haste as his brain crashed from one side of his cranium to the other. The tea and ham sandwich had a benefcial effect on the gastric symptoms of his hangover but the contents of his head were still in a delicate state. He pulled open the door.

  ‘Mary Frances, you’ve arrived; how splendid.’

  He offered his hand.

  ‘Oh God, you English,’ said Mary Frances, deftly avoiding his hand to plant a kiss on both cheeks, a habit ingrained from her many years in France but thoroughly alien to Augustus. Then she swept in to explore the room.

  ‘Augustus, white bread and rubber ham? What’s happened to my champion of gastro-nomy?’ she said, picking up the corner of a half-eaten ham sandwich with the deference usually given to soiled undergarments.

  ‘An experiment… Part of my hangover research.’ Mary Frances sniffed the air. Her acute olfactory apparatus picked up ginseng, a

  strong ketotic beer smell and something else entirely unexpected. ‘What is that other smell? A chemical sort of scent.’ ‘Smell?’ asked Augustus, suddenly worried that his Anglo-Saxon approach to hy-

  giene, with a bath on Sunday nights, might be falling short of American standards. ‘Mothballs, that’s it. I must say Augustus, it looks as if I’ve arrived just in time to

  save you. You are looking wretched.’

  This meeting was not going quite as Augustus had planned and certainly radically different to their last meeting in the bar of the Waldorf Astoria in New York. That con-versation, fuelled on a diet of olives and martinis, had, at least in Augustus’ memory, been a firtatious meeting of minds. Augustus had felt he had fnally found a woman who shared his passion for the gastronomic side of life. In the intervening few years his memory had shaved years from her face and inches from her waist. But what were a few decades if you found someone truly special? Now here was that same woman taking on the role of a well-meaning aunt intent on reforming a wayward nephew who was old enough to know better. The combination of a wicked hangover and weeks of sleepless nights had certainly taken its toll on Augustus.

  ‘Sorry, you’ve caught me on the hop. Bit of a big night around here last night, bumps supper. We’re back head of the river.’

  ‘Bumps?’

  ‘A type of rowing race, Mary Frances.’

  ‘Your college won the race last night?’

  ‘Not exactly. Come on, let me show you around and I’ll explain all about it.’ ‘Perfect, Augustus. You can show me Oxford and tell me about your love life at the

  same time. You’re not still pining about that woman from the British Museum, I hope?’ Taking his arm frmly in her own, she led Augustus out of the door.

  *

  ‘I’ll have the Tournedos Rossini. Very rare. Absolutely dripping in fact, or even twitch-ing if possible.’ Matthew Kingsley-Hampton sat in a dark corner of the Elizabeth res-taurant, one of Oxford’s better dining establishments, for a celebratory lunch.

  ‘Make that two,’ said Felipe Banzarro sitting across the table. ‘Mind you Mat, one of these days I’m going to get you over to Buenos Aires for a decent piece of meat.’

  ‘You’re on. Now what to drink? A bottle of Bollinger straight away and decant a bottle of your ’59 Hermitage for later,’ said Kingsley-Hampton, dismissing the waiter with a subliminal fick of the hand.

  ‘So what’s the celebration, Mat?’

  The Honourable Matthew Kingsley-Hampton, one-time scholar of St Jerome’s Col-lege, fshed the letter out of his jacket pocket and offered it to his friend.

  ‘All the weak saps could think of to do to me was take away my scholarship.’ ‘Is that a good thing?’

  ‘Look, academics earn shit and die poor. The way I see it, I’ve just quadrupled my earning capacity by abandoning a scholarship and learning to take the odd risk here or there.’

  Felipe could only smile, shaking his head as he read over the letter again. ‘… reckless abuse of college regulations in evicting a fellow student on a whim… manipulating and hiding behind others in an attempt to smear the good name of the college… ’ It took a profound sense of self-belief to receive such a letter and celebrate. Two champagne futes appeared and the waiter offered Kingsley-Hampton the frst taste. After the cus-tomary nod, the waiter flled the glasses just a little too slowly for Kingsley-Hampton’s liking.

  ‘As the good bard said, better to have scholared and lost than never to have scholared at all.’

  ‘I’ll drink to that,’ said Banzarro, clinking glasses across the table. ‘And I think you came out better than that squealer Eccles. Wouldn’t fancy a night staked to the quad stark-bollock naked even in what you English call summer.’

  ‘Revenge is the sweetest wine, my dear Felipe. Who said that?’ ‘I think you just did.’

  ‘I have my moments. Now grab that bottle Felipe and pour some more of that cham-pagne. That damn waiter seems determined to have me die of thirst.’

  *

  By the evening, Eccles was back in his old clothes with the last vestiges of his delayed hangover fnally lifted. He was sitting with his back to the panelled wall of the Great Hall. He was still surrounded by rowers picking over the bones of last night’s events, but oblivious to their banter as he scanned the faces of the scouts bringing in armfuls of soup plates. He was looking for the girl he had christened Vega during the cool hours of captivity under the stars.

  ‘Enjoy your game of croquet last night, Eccles?’ said Kingsley-Hampton as he sauntered in late as usual and still wearing his long fowing scholar’s gown, as Felipe followed behind in the far less impressive commoner’s gown that barely reached his waist. No reply was expected and Eccles for his part had no intention of delivering one.

  ‘Patrick, what was that ponce on about?’ asked Roger Sinclair. ‘Oh, nothing much. Just the usual Kingsley-Hampton crap. I’m used to it now.’ ‘I heard someone was croqueted last night. That wasn’t you, was it Patrick?’ ‘Oh, it was nothing really. Potts had me out of there in no time.’ ‘Jesus, that guy is dead,’ said Roger as he turned in a whisper to his neighbour. Within

  a minute the whole table had heard the story and were to a man bent on revenge. ‘Ok lads, tonight Kingsley-Hampton’s face down on the Master’s lawn with a daf-

  fodil sticking out of his arse,’ said Gareth Jenkins in his Welsh brogue and customary linguistic fair.

  ‘Appealing image, but wrong season Gareth, a bit late for daffodils.
Mind you, a well-barbed rose might work better,’ said John Metcalfe, surprised to have fnally found a practical application for his studies in Botany. ‘What do you think, Roger?’

  ‘Oh, I have a far better plan,’ said a smiling Roger Sinclair. ‘A little more complic-ated, but perfect. Now we’ll need a few bits and pieces, starting with chloroform. I’ll nick that from the labs today. Anyone got easy access to a nightdress, preferably pink?’ asked Sinclair. From the tone of his voice he might as well have been asking someone to pass the salt.

  *

  It was well past midnight before the plan was put into action. Eccles led the rest of the second VIII up the staircase, pointing out the quietest part of each stair. He opened the door with the key returned to him by Potts and then stood back to let his crew members food into the room, each bearing a torch and fully briefed as to the layout of the room and their respective tasks. Within seconds, both Kingsley-Hampton and Banzarro were rendered incapable of resisting with the aid of Sinclair’s chloroform. Banzarro was tied to his bed and his door screwed shut. Another fate was planned for his roommate. Ec-cles was given the task of ensuring continued anaesthesia while the others lifted every item of furniture down the stairs into the quad outside. Finally Gareth Jenkins, a horse of a man at the tender age of twenty, hoisted the unconscious Kingsley-Hampton over his shoulder.

  In the corner of Old Quad, Patrick Eccles’ former sitting room was reassembled with breathtaking accuracy from the threadbare rug to the dusty aspidistra. Kingsley-Hamp-ton’s bed was placed alongside the rest of the furniture from his bedroom in just the right location, taking into account the fact that the only thing not moved were the walls and doors. An appropriate pink nightdress had been procured with disturbing ease and pulled over the head of Kingsley-Hampton’s unconscious and semi-naked form. Finally, a pair of handcuffs and chain were placed to ensure there would be no easy escape. After a fnal draught of chloroform was delivered through a well-soaked handkerchief, Eccles and his crew vanished into the night with a plan to convene early for breakfast.

  Mr Potts came across the scene just before dawn. He was out collecting the relics left over after summer examinations: empty champagne bottles, discarded mortarboards and white sub-fusc bow ties. As he approached, he quickened his step in mounting fury. Then he saw the body in the bed, already exhausted from futile struggles to escape, and had a change of heart. Recognising the occupant, he stopped and smiled, taking time to relish the scene. He turned back towards the lodge. Only one person would be drink-ing whiskey in their tea that dawn, and it wasn’t going to be The Honourable Matthew Kingsley-Hampton.