The Campus Trilogy

by AnonYMous

  ‘How was it religious?’ I asked.

  ‘The ceremony was conducted by someone called Rabbi Rhinestone … that can’t be his real name … It was held under an enormous canopy all draped in white lilies. It would have been ruinous for my hay-fever. And the bride was given away by no less a person than the great Luigi Mancini himself!’

  Emma and I roared with laughter. ‘I don’t believe it,’ I said. ‘Well poor old Robert Sloth certainly couldn’t have provided such magnificence.’

  ‘Anyway,’ continued Magnus, ‘that’s not the end of it. There was a huge article about it in the Las Vegas Standard. Wendy Morehouse had a copy of it in her desk, but she wouldn’t let me borrow it. It was a whole supplement called ‘The Mother of All Weddings’. There were hundreds of photographs and a run-down of all the guests. I’m sorry I couldn’t bring it; you’d have adored it.’

  ‘Perhaps it’s on the internet,’ suggested Emma.

  I brought over my laptop computer and typed in ‘Joy Pickles’ and ‘Wolfie Goldberg’. Immediately the article came up. Magnus had been right. It was indeed a notable occasion. The wedding dress was enormous. There was a picture of Joy standing next to her mother, Mrs Sylvia Pickles. The latter was barely visible round her daughter’s layers of satin and lace. Then the happy couple were shown standing on either side of Luigi Mancini who looked rather more affable than when I had last seen him. The Elvis look-alike had been invited to the second ceremony and seemed most convincing and there was a large picture of the State Governor proposing the health of the newlywed pair.

  The guest list extended over several columns. Apparently over five hundred people were present. The Ziggurat Grand Ballroom was the chosen venue where Rabbi Earl Rhinestone (who looked disconcertingly like me!) pronounced the blessings under the extravagantly beflowered canopy. The out-of-town visitors included four presidential hopefuls, two past state governors and three ex-justices of the Supreme Court. Also listed were the representatives of various Italian-American families – the Ferretos (New York), Montadoris (Florida), Gambinis (Michigan), Calabrinis (Illinois and Pennsylvania), Rapellos (California) and Sopranos (New Jersey). The photographs extended over several pages and everyone who was anyone appeared to have been there. However, although I looked most diligently, there was no sign of Miss Divine de la Rue.

  ‘Golly,’ I sighed.

  ‘Well,’ said Emma, trying to keep a straight face, ‘I hope they’ll be very happy.’

  Magnus had dissolved in giggles again on our sofa. We had to invite him to an early supper to sober him up.

  At the end of the first week of June, Imogen came home from Cambridge. She had had a hugely successful second year. As we had all hoped, her dissertation on domestic violence had been well received and she had done well in all her other courses. In addition she had been invited to a May Ball and had obviously had a splendid time.

  The next day she went over to see her friends in the Women’s Refuge. She came back bringing Judith with her. We had coffee together in the kitchen and they told us all the news. Emma had just baked fruit scones. They were cooling on a wire rack and they smelled irresistible.

  ‘Helga is about to leave the Refuge,’ our daughter informed us.

  ‘She’s a different person now,’ added Judith, ‘and so is Helmut.’

  ‘Who on earth is Helmut?’ asked Emma.

  Judith laughed. ‘He’s the Flanagan dog. You remember Patricia and I went to collect him from Cuckoos’ Roost one day when we knew the Vice-Chancellor was at the university. He was a horrible beast at first. He was barely house-trained and he either cowered in a corner or he snapped at people for no reason at all. At the beginning we were quite frightened for the children.’

  ‘Why was he like that?’ Emma loved dogs and she hated to hear of canine unhappiness.

  ‘Well,’ Judith hesitated, ‘Helga told us that Flanagan only allowed her to keep the dog because he was a present from her father. The Vice-Chancellor hated him and used to tease and torment him with food. Then when he was in a foul temper he would lash out at Helga and the dog indiscriminately. Poor Helmut just didn’t know what to expect.’

  ‘Is he all right now?’ asked Emma anxiously.

  ‘The change is amazing,’ Judith told us. ‘After a couple of weeks of regular living, when Patricia helped Helga train him properly, he was completely transformed. He’s a lovely dog now, playful and fun. He never bites and seems completely trustworthy. The children will miss him dreadfully when he goes.’

  ‘So Helga is definitely leaving?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes. She’s just got a job as an assistant bursar at Marlborough College Cambridge.’

  I was astonished. ‘As an assistant bursar? But you need proper qualifications for a position like that …’

  ‘She has them.’ Judith was triumphant. ‘You remember there was a rumour that Flanagan had tried to get a sinecure for his wife in the Bursary at St Sebastians and everyone dismissed the idea as his way of chiselling more money out of the university?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Well it was all true. She has the best possible qualifications from the University of Berlin. She graduated with the equivalent of a first-class degree in finance and she stayed on for a further year to get the German postgraduate professional accountancy diploma.’

  Emma was embarrassed. ‘And I dismissed her as a sad little woman who was quite a good cook, but not really very interesting otherwise. That husband of hers is a disgrace …’

  ‘He was in the process of destroying her,’ said Judith. ‘In the end his violence was really a blessing in disguise. It enabled her to come to her senses …’

  ‘Anyway,’ interrupted Imogen, ‘she’s leaving for Cambridge the day after tomorrow. It turns out that Flanagan is away at a conference for a couple of nights, so we’re going to the house to collect a few of her things…’

  ‘Who’s we?’ asked Emma.

  ‘Judith, Helga and me. She can’t go alone. She’s still frightened of the Vice-Chancellor even though she hasn’t seen him since he last hit her. You know he never visited her in hospital. Not once!’

  ‘Hasn’t he seen her at all?’ I asked. ‘Doesn’t he want her back?’

  ‘He wrote a pathetic begging letter just before the doctor discharged her. Of course he was terrified he was about to be reported to the police.’ Judith was very scornful. ‘He swore that he loved her and that it would never happen again. But this time Helga wasn’t having any of it. She wasn’t going to hand him over to the authorities, but I think she realised that the whole cycle of violence would never be broken. This time he’d gone too far. For forty-eight hours the doctors thought she had a fractured skull …’

  ‘I’m sorry Imogen,’ Emma was worried, ‘I do understand that Helga needs some moral support, but you’ve got to be careful. I don’t want you to find yourself with a police record for theft or criminal damage. If you go along on this trip, you mustn’t take anything out of the house yourself. And if she’s tempted to destroy anything, please don’t aid and abet her.’

  ‘Don’t worry.’ Judith was amused. ‘We deal with this type of situation at the Refuge all the time. Jan and Liz keep several pairs of rubber gloves for exactly these kinds of visitations; we tie up our hair under a cap and we all wear long sleeves. We know all about not leaving any trace of forensic evidence!’

  It was nine o’clock in the evening before Imogen came home the next day. We were both worried about what had happened, but she was in the highest spirits.

  ‘The three of us arrived at Cuckoos’ Roost at half past two,’ she began. ‘On the way Helga told us that she absolutely hated the house. All that heavy German furniture and those ghastly cuckoo clocks were entirely Flanagan’s idea. In her new flat she intends to have white walls, pale tables and chairs and be completely minimalist.’

  ‘So what happened?’ Emma was anxious about our daughter’s exploits.

  ‘Well there was very little Helga wanted. She took a few basic clothes
and one or two books and bits of silver. She left all her jewellery. She told us that Flanagan had only given it to her to make it up after hitting her. She said that he could present it to his next victim. But then she insisted on going round every single one of those cuckoo clocks and removing all the weights.’

  ‘What was the point of that?’ I asked.

  ‘The clockwork mechanism depends on them. The clocks won’t go and they won’t cuckoo without the weights …’

  ‘What did she do with them all?’ I was bewildered at this mysterious feminine behaviour.

  ‘She put them in a big black dustbin bag. Don’t look so worried – neither Judith nor I helped. The bag was incredibly heavy by the end, but she lugged the whole thing down to the front gate. It’s dustbin collection day tomorrow so the whole lot will have gone by the time the Vice-Chancellor comes home!’ she laughed. ‘Helga thinks he’ll be grief-stricken without his birds!’

  ‘Then,’ she continued, ‘she found the keys to the Mercedes. She was pleased about that. She knew he was going to the conference by train, but she thought that he might have taken the keys with him. But no … they were there in the drawer of the hall table. The car was a present from her father so it really belonged to her. She put the stuff she’d taken into the boot and she drove it round to the Refuge. It’s parked outside at this very moment and she’ll drive herself to Cambridge in it tomorrow.’

  Emma and I looked at each other. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘it was a present from her side of the family, so I suppose …’

  ‘Don’t be a stuffed shirt, Daddy!’ said my daughter.

  ‘You haven’t heard the end,’ she continued. ‘When she left the hospital, Helga took half the money from their joint account. That’s what she’s been living on – happily there was quite a lot there. Anyway, in retaliation Flanagan cancelled their joint credit cards. But yesterday she found another card. It was one they only used for holidays and they’d both forgotten about it. She came across it in the back of the silver cupboard. She wasn’t sure it would work, but she tried it out by filling up the Mercedes with petrol on the way back to the Refuge. It was fine!’

  I was not sure I was going to approve of the end of this story. ‘So what did she do with it?’

  ‘She thought everyone in the Refuge deserved a treat. So she booked a table at the Amalfi Restaurant for six o’clock. There were twenty of us. The two paid helpers Liz and Jan, five resident women, eight children, Patricia and Judith, Danielle Bousset who has been very helpful, me and Helga herself.’

  ‘What about Helmut?’ asked Emma.

  ‘No … he had to stay at home on her bed. Anyway we had a private room. Danielle, who knows about these things, chose the champagne. The children had some form of pasta and salad and ice cream and the rest of us had slap-up dinners. I had mussels followed by veal cooked in a wonderful cream and mushroom sauce. Then I had zabaglione with fresh mangos and a selection of Italian cheeses. It was yummy!’

  ‘How much was it?’ Emma could not decide whether to be amused or horrified. ‘The Amalfi isn’t cheap.’

  ‘The bill was over seven hundred pounds. We had a lovely time!’ Imogen grinned.

  I felt uneasy. ‘Perhaps I should tell the Vice-Chancellor that I’ll pay Imogen’s share …’ I suggested to Emma.

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous, Felix.’ My wife was having none of it. ‘It’s the least that man can do to contribute to the situation.’

  All too soon the novel was finished. I tried to delay the moment of separation by fiddling about and rewriting the odd paragraph. But I couldn’t deceive myself. The book was done. I took a deep breath, put the manuscript into a large envelope and sent it to the publisher. He telephoned back within forty-eight hours, bubbling over with enthusiasm. He was anxious that I should deal with the proofs as soon as possible. Almost before I knew it, press releases were being issued. An advance copy was sent to a prominent politician. To my amazement, he not only read it, but described it as a ‘rattling good read.’

  Several newspapers were intrigued by the idea of an anonymous author. Then we ran into a problem. We needed someone to talk to journalists. Eventually we decided that Emma would do the public relations for the book. She was a professional media person and would know how to cope with the press. She did a wonderful job. As a result of her efforts, there was a double-page article in the Times Higher Educational Supplement conjecturing who had written such a scandalous volume. The piece was illustrated by a montage of a bald-headed white male, a gorilla and a busty blond. The headline was ‘Anon Brings Campus to Book.’

  She also persuaded the education editor of one of the quality newspapers to take it on. In a major article, the correspondent discussed the contemporary relevance of the book. Under the headline ‘In the Footsteps of Lucky Jim’, it emphasised the poor standard of university management, the absurdity of the Research Assessment Exercise and the dangers of dependence on outside funding. There were also several reviews in the literary pages of the other serious newspapers.

  I had never experienced anything like it. Sadly Kant’s Critiques Revisited was still waiting for its first notice in an academic journal. In contrast, everyone seemed eager to voice an opinion about A Campus Conspiracy. The editor of the local paper, the St Sebastian’s Gazette was not to be outdone. He had used Emma frequently on his cookery and leisure pages and he wanted to have an interview with her. He sent along a young reporter and she told him that an option on the book had been sold to a major American film company. The next week, a front page story appeared entitled ‘Unknown Takes Book to Hollywood.’ There was a nice photograph of Emma, but the young journalist had written that she did not know who the author was. We were unhappy about this and I encouraged Emma to write a letter to the editor saying that although the book was anonymous, she did, in fact, know the name of the writer. ‘Oh what a tangled web we weave …’ said Imogen when she heard the story.

  Soon afterwards, my publisher telephoned me again. He was delighted with the publicity and was still exulting about the film option. By this stage it was becoming clear that the book would be a minor bestseller – Waterstone’s had just placed a substantial advance order and other bookshops were following suit. It was felt that we should not let the opportunity pass. What about producing a sequel?

  This idea had not occurred to me. Although A Campus Conspiracy was written in the first person, it was really the story of a colleague whom I had chosen to call Harry Gilbert. I was not sure that I could make up a novel with no basis in fact. My publisher was amused. I had hinted to him on several occasions that my own relationship with the university was not exactly sweetness and light. Why shouldn’t the next book be centred around me? My wife thought this was a splendid idea. It would be cathartic for me to write out my feelings. I was unsure. It is one thing to write a successful novel about someone else. Could I pull off the same trick for myself? I thought about it for a few weekdays. Without any conscious effort, the shape of the new book emerged.

  Like Harry’s adventures, mine would also have to be fictionalised. As in A Campus Conspiracy, the novel’s university would be called St Sebastian’s, but, at the very least, all the characters’ identities would have to be changed. This meant I could not use my real name. After a certain amount of discussion within the family, we settled on the central couple being called Felix and Emma Glass. The perfect title was more elusive, but it came to me in the middle of the night. It would be entitled Degrees ’R’ Us. It would show the lengths the modern university would go to achieve solvency. In the course of time I did write the sequel and, dear reader, this is the very volume that you are now holding in your hand.

  Not suprisingly the university was buzzing with gossip. There were enough people on campus who knew the original story of Harry and Victoria to ensure that St Sebastian’s was recognised. But who could have written the novel? Various suggestions were made. Perhaps it was the old Vice-Chancellor who played such a prominent part in the proceedings. Could it have been the Re
gistrar as a therapeutic exercise after he had found himself in a muddle with his ladies? It was even mooted that the original of Wanda Catnip had turned her energies to fiction during her retirement? Magnus, however, was so excited about the possiblity of becoming a film star that he let Patricia and Judith into the secret. Soon the word spread. As far as St Sebastian’s was concerned, I was the likely culprit.

  By the first week of June several of my colleagues had telephoned asking if the rumour were true. I refused to confirm or deny their conjectures. There was, however, a deathly hush from my Head of Department, who had, after all, taken an important role in Harry’s career. John Pilkington, in defiance of all the rules of good management, had had no contact with me since my accident. There had been no card, no telephone call and no enquiry. I wondered how he would tackle the statutory Back to Work Interview when the time came.

  Then, unexpectedly, I received an email from the Vice-Chancellor summoning me to see him. This sounded ominous, and I was reluctant to go. After all, I was on sick leave. I had no real obligation towards him. In the event, however, he did not want to meet in his office. Instead he invited me for lunch one Saturday at the St Sebastian’s Golf Club. I did not think even Flanagan could dismiss me from my job amid the bourgeois, golf-playing citizenry of the club dining room.

  In any case, I was curious to know what was on his mind. By this stage I had discarded my crutches and was able to drive the car for a short distance. I still used a stick, but it was wonderful to be able to walk on my own two feet. On the appointed day I set off at noon. The club was two miles outside the town so I took the car and I dropped in to the university on my way. I was anxious to keep abreast of my post. I parked the car and slowly mounted the steps of the Old Building. There was a crowd assembled just outside the chapel. Clearly a wedding was about to begin.