5 - Murder on Campus

by Hazel Holt

  ‘As long as she doesn’t expect me to go jogging with her,’ I said. ‘Does she have many friends at Wilmot?’

  Anna paused as if considering the question.

  ‘Yes, in a way. A lot of friends, sure, but none of them close. You know how she is.’

  It was true. I had known Linda for over fifteen years. We had first met when she was in England doing research for her doctorate on Mrs Gaskell and had written to ask if we could meet to discuss a paper I’d published on North and South. We’d immediately taken to each other and she always spent a little time with us in the West Country whenever she was in England and was a great favourite with us all. Peter used to say that her enthusiasm and good humour always made him feel young again and she certainly came into that rare category of life-enhancers.

  And yet for all the warmth of her personality we’ve none of us got really close to Linda; there’s always, in the final analysis, a barrier, something that says so far and no further. She hasn’t married, though I know she lived for a while with an Englishman, David Hamble, a don at Wolfson, when she was in Oxford for a year. But she’d gone back to America when her research grant ran out and, as far as I knew, had never seen him again.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I know how she is.’

  We drove on along Route 78 and I marvelled as I always do at all the trees—1 do believe that three-quarters of America is covered by forest and woodland, but nobody ever tells you this and it certainly comes as a delightful surprise.

  ‘I just hope,’ I said, ‘that I won’t add to Linda’s burden—I shall have to rely on her to tell me how to go on. After all, she talked me into coming and I must say I’m beginning to get cold feet about the whole thing!’

  ‘You’ll be great,’ Anna said as she nimbly overtook a vast truck with what seemed to be half a steam engine attached to its side. ‘They’ll love you. Anyway, it won’t matter what you say, the accent will get them.’

  This doubtful compliment did little to reassure me and, as we left New Jersey and drove on into Pennsylvania, I turned my attention to the billboards proclaiming the virtues of petrol, cola and cars, and advertisements for motels.

  ‘Could you get me a tissue from my purse?’ Anna asked. ‘It’s on the back seat.’

  Anna’s handbag was an enormous leather affair with a lot of compartments, all jammed full so that the clasp wouldn’t shut.

  ‘Goodness,’ I said, ‘I thought my bag was full!’

  ‘Well,’ she said defensively, ‘you know how you always seem to get a lot of junk you just have to have with you!’

  I scrabbled about in the bag and finally found a small packet of tissues and extracted one.

  ‘There you are.’ I tried to fasten the bag with little success. ‘Does it close?’ I asked.

  ‘Not really.’ Anna laughed. ‘I guess one of these days I’ll lose something really vital. Well now, if you look to the left you can see the college among the trees down there, by the river. What do you think? Are you going to like it?’

  I looked at what I could see of the large buildings surrounded by trees with the glint of the river behind them—there appeared to be an awful lot of Wilmot College. It seemed pretty impressive and I liked the look of it. What Wilmot thought of me I would doubtless find out quite soon.

  Chapter Two

  Anna drew up in front of a white clapboard house with a handsome porch at the front.

  ‘Here we are,’ she said. ‘Your home for the next three months—though I hope you’ll spend the occasional weekend in New York. The ballet season starts soon.’

  She got out and started to unload the car. Wanting to help I tried to lift a large bag but I couldn’t even move it. ‘What on earth is this?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, that,’ said Anna. ‘That’s Linda’s computer—I had it repaired for her in New York.’

  She lifted it out with apparent ease and I said enviously, ‘Goodness! I wish I was that fit!’

  Anna laughed. ‘Come jogging, then!’

  The door opened and Linda came out to greet us.

  ‘Sheila! Isn’t this great—you’re here at last!’

  We hugged each other and I felt that coming all this way was worth while just to see Linda again. She always has this effect on people—as I said, a real life-enhancer.

  The two sisters embraced and I thought how alike they were, both tall (though Linda was slimmer and more finely boned), both dark with clear grey eyes, and both lively and absolutely bursting with energy. I smiled at them fondly, basking in the warmth of their affection for each other, some of which spilled over on to me.

  As we sat with our drinks (‘Are you sure you wouldn’t rather have tea?’) an enormous marmalade cat suddenly appeared, greeted Linda with a brief chirrup, ignored Anna and me and leapt up on top of the television set where he sat with his back to us and his tail hanging down in front of the screen.

  ‘Oh, that’s Tiger.’ Linda said. ‘I must apologize for his manners.’

  ‘Does he sit like that when the set is on?’ I asked.

  ‘He surely does,’ she replied, laughing. ‘You sort of get used to watching a bisected picture after a while!’

  Linda pushed a couple of dishes with nuts and olives in them and wooden board with slices of cheese (I had forgotten that Americans eat cheese before a meal) towards me and said, ‘Before I forget, we’re required to go for cocktails with Rob and Martha Huron tomorrow—I think most of the people in the department will be there. That’s throwing you in at the deep end!’

  ‘Rob Huron,’ I said, ‘he’s the Head—I mean Chair—of the department, isn’t he? Has he been here long?’

  ‘About three years,’ Linda replied. ‘He came to us from Florida. He’s a pleasant enough person, but—’

  ‘He should never have been made Chair,’ Anna broke in. ‘He has absolutely no control over Loring and O’Brien! What those two get away with!’

  ‘Carl Loring,’ Linda explained, ‘our so-called drama specialist, and Nora O’Brien, who teaches American literature.’

  ‘What do they get away with?’ I asked curiously.

  ‘Well, Loring,’ Linda said, ‘is a really awful man—lazy, sneaky and generally mean. He tries to undermine the rest of us, is always whining to Rob about someone or something, eggs on his students to complain about teachers he doesn’t like, wriggles out of anything that looks like work, never does anything extra for his students, and then there’s the question of freshman comp ....’

  ‘What’s that?’ I asked.

  ‘Freshman composition—the most hated course in any college,’ Linda said. ‘We all loathe it but it has to be done, by everyone except Loring, who has somehow persuaded Rob that his talents would be better used in administration, if you please, on a great plan to reorganize the complete major and minor programmes of the department. Thank God Loring is totally idle and obviously has no intention of ever completing the project or we’d all be working eight days a week and in a state of total chaos.’

  Anna spat out an olive stone.

  ‘The man is vile,’ she said. ‘Look at the way he got that research funding Dave should have had last year. Off he went to Ontario for three months, with not a single thing to show at the end of it! As far as I can see all he did was go up for the Shakespeare season because his boyfriend was acting there!’

  ‘We don’t know that!’ Linda protested. ‘He’s supposed to be giving a paper on the Ontario Theater at the Cambridge conference next spring.’

  ‘Like he did last year, I suppose,’ Anna said scornfully. ‘Yes, well, that was pretty peculiar.’ Linda turned to me. ‘It lasted just ten minutes, would you believe, and was the most disgusting nonsense you’ve ever heard, but, being Loring, he got away with it.’

  ‘He sounds uniquely horrible,’ I said.

  ‘As a matter of fact he isn’t,’ Anna said.

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Unique, that is,’ Anna replied. ‘He has a brother, Max, who’s almost as unbearable as he is.’

 
; ‘Goodness! And is his brother at Wilmot too?’ I asked.

  ‘Thank God, no,’ Anna said. ‘But he’s still too near for comfort. He’s Head of Research at the Whittier Collection—early Italian expert, so I come across him a lot.’

  ‘What form does his horribleness take?’ I asked. ‘Is he lazy too?’

  ‘No,’ she replied, ‘even his worst enemy (and there must be quite a competition for that particular title) couldn’t call him lazy. No, he’s a smug, supercilious bastard, knows everything—in his own field and everyone else’s. Like his nasty little brother he’s picky too; he can’t wait to find fault with things. If you had the most exquisite oriental vase ever created he wouldn’t admire its beauty, he’d be too busy looking for a flaw in the glaze!’

  ‘Do the brothers get on?’ I asked.

  Linda laughed. ‘Do jackals in the same pack get on?’ she said. ‘They loathe each other, but gang up on the rest of society.’

  ‘I think,’ I said, ‘I will try to avoid them both as much as possible.’ I took another slice of cheese to fortify myself and went on, ‘So what about the O’Brien female?’

  ‘Oh, her,’ Linda said. ‘A bad case of power madness. Has to have a finger in every pie. Rob, of course, is only too glad to have someone who’ll do things, but she’s very selective—only wants to do things that’ll advance her own prospects.’

  ‘Or those of her nasty little protégé,’ Anna broke in. ‘The unspeakable Rick!’

  ‘Who is he?’ I asked.

  ‘Her cousin Rick Johnson,’ Linda said. ‘He’s in the department, too—she got him the job, of course. There’s no way anyone would employ him without some sort of pull being used!’

  ‘What does he do?’ I enquired.

  ‘Teaches film,’ Linda said.

  ‘Film!’ I exclaimed. ‘He teaches film! How extra-ordinary!’

  They both looked mildly surprised at my amazement. ‘Yes,’ Linda said. ‘Here, let me freshen your drink.’

  She poured a large amount of gin into my glass and added a very small amount of tonic. I didn’t protest because I felt I needed all the help I could get in this strange land where the movies were considered a subject suitable for a university syllabus.

  ‘Goodness,’ I said, ‘didn’t my generation miss out—there we were slogging away at Beowulf and Milton and all the time we could have been writing essays on the comedic timing of Mae West or a comparison of the eye-contact techniques of Bette Davis, Joan Crawford and Barbara Stanwyck! So is this Rick person no good?’

  ‘Dumb,’ Linda said vehemently, ‘and then some. But perfectly sure that he’s God’s gift to academe. A real slimeball!’

  ‘Hey!’ Anna broke in. ‘Give Sheila a break. She’ll think all of Wilmot’s vile and be off on the next plane!’

  Linda’s face softened and she said, ‘Oh no, most of the people in the department are really nice—my friend Sara Heisek, for example. She’s a mediaevalist—Chaucer mostly—and Dave Hunter, he’s eighteenth-century studies. And then there’s Ted Stern, who’s a darling. He’s retired, really, but still teaches a few courses on modem literature and his wife Susan is one of the nicest people I know. You’ll love her.’

  I began to feel quite dizzy with all this information. Dizzy and rather apprehensive. I have never held a formal academic post or been part of an organization; I really didn’t know how far everything they had described was normal departmental infighting, or if Wilmot was particularly cursed with tiresome and difficult people. I rather suspected the former, especially since both Linda and her sister appeared to bring equal zest and enthusiasm to their condemnation as to their praise. What I mostly felt, though, was a sort of despair at ever sorting out who was who among the staff, let alone the students. ‘What about the students?’ I asked Linda apprehensively. ‘The two who are writing master’s theses; they’ll be the ones I’ll have most to do with, I suppose. What are they like?’

  Linda’s face lit up.

  ‘Oh, you’ll really love them,’ she said. ‘Well, Sam, at any rate, and Gina is sweet, rather shy but very bright.’

  ‘Sam?’ I asked. ‘I thought they were both females.’

  ‘Samantha Broderick,’ Linda said, ‘always known as Sam, is a mature student. She’s working on Dickens’ treatment of women.’

  ‘Is she a very fierce feminist?’ I asked nervously. I never know what to say to declared feminists, since I often feel I have more in common with my mother’s generation than with the brave new world of today, and (reprehensibly perhaps) dislike any sort of confrontation. ‘I suppose we’re just born doormats,’ my friend Rosemary says resignedly, and I fear she may be right.

  ‘I don’t think you need to be nervous of Sam,’ Linda laughed. ‘She’s an original, you’ll love her. She’s been married and is now divorced and living with a man who owns quite a large farm a few miles into Bucks County. The attraction is not so much the man himself as the fact that he owns all these lovely acres where Sam’s two horses can roam free, not to mention her two dogs, her cat and her Nubian goat.’

  ‘No!’ I exclaimed. ‘How marvellous!’

  ‘I told you,’ Linda said. ‘Twin souls.’

  ‘And what about the other one?’ I asked.

  ‘Gina. Gina Monticello. She’s doing her thesis on Fanny Trollope’s American journeys. So you see they’re neither of them working exactly in your field, but what I want is for you to expand their perception of the period—background stuff, society, class—especially class. Americans are hopelessly ignorant of the nuances of the English class system and it’s so important in nineteenth-century English literature!’

  ‘Well, I dare say I could do that,’ I said.

  ‘And another thing I want you to do,’ Linda went on, ‘is to read aloud to my class—Dickens, George Eliot, the Brontës—just so that they can get a feeling of how the novels sound with an English accent.’

  ‘Oh dear,’ I exclaimed, ‘I haven’t read aloud since Michael was a small child.’

  ‘Well, there you are, then,’ Linda said.

  ‘Yes, well,’ I replied doubtfully, ‘but that was Winnie the Pooh and books on dinosaurs.’

  After supper Anna disappeared to her room to go over some notes for a class she had the next day, while Linda and I washed up.

  ‘I guess I’m the only person I know who doesn’t have a dishwasher,’ Linda said, ‘but somehow I’ve never really got the hang of them.’

  ‘Anyway,’ I said, looking round her kitchen, ‘it wouldn’t seem right to have one here.’

  The kitchen had wood-panelled walls and the worktops were also wood with tiles let into them. The wide window sills were crowded with pot plants and dishes of ripening tomatoes and peppers. There was a large wooden table and chairs and colourful rug on the tiled floor.

  ‘It really is gorgeous,’ I said, running my hand over one of the surfaces.

  ‘Wood’s cheap here,’ Linda said. ‘There’s a lot of it all around.’

  ‘I suppose that’s why everyone has those beautiful polished wood floors and staircases, though I do find those rather dangerous—no staircarpet.’

  ‘Wait till you see Sara’s house,’ Linda said. ‘It’s an old mill and her husband (he’s an architect) has done a wonderful job of remodelling it. He’s done most of the work himself.’

  I wiped a large pasta dish carefully with a tea towel Linda must have brought back from England since it depicted Salisbury Cathedral.

  ‘I know it sounds silly,’ I said, ‘but I really am rather nervous about all this. I’ve led such a narrow life since Peter died—you know, just living quietly in Taviscombe or making little forays to Oxford for research or London for the occasional theatre. The thought of meeting all these new people does rather terrify me.’

  ‘You’ll be fine,’ Linda said. ‘People like you, because you’re interested in them.’

  ‘Nosy, friends would say,’ I laughed. ‘How about these awful people in your department? Will they hate me?’

 
; ‘Oh, no,’ she replied. ‘You’re not a threat to them, you see. No, as a visiting expert ...’

  ‘Ha!’

  ‘Well, you are from England and you have published quite a bit in your field, certainly a lot more than most of them have, so they’ll want to impress you. Just wait and see.’

  Anna had already left for New York when I got up the next morning and Linda was nowhere to be seen so I assumed she was out somewhere jogging.

  The kitchen was flooded with early morning sun as I sat at the table drinking coffee and trying to get myself into the right frame of mind to face what would undoubtedly be a testing sort of day.

  Linda burst into the room glowing with health and that sort of righteousness that comes from having just undergone demanding physical exercise while others are a-bed.

  ‘I haven’t got a class until eleven,’ she said, ‘so, just as soon as I’m showered and changed, I’m going to take you to breakfast at the Blue Moon Diner.’

  We drove through streets lined with those timeless American houses that don’t seem to have changed in style for over a hundred years: white clapboard, front porch, back porch. Only the size and the occasional architectural flourish differentiated them. We passed several white churches, handsome and classical in design and a cemetery, unfenced, with gravestones right down to the pavement—the sidewalk.

  Downtown Allenbrook looked strangely familiar and I couldn’t think why until I realized that it was typical small-town America and I’d seen it—or rather, towns like it—many, many times in films or on television. The shops were small and mostly gathered in one main street.

  ‘Here we are,’ Linda said, drawing up in front of a café. I followed her inside and we sat in a booth at a plastic-topped table with ketchup bottles and the waitress came and said, ‘How’d ya want your eggs,’ and Linda said, ‘Sunnyside up,’ just like an old John Garfield movie.

  ‘A few members of the faculty have breakfast here,’ Linda said. ‘Men, mostly; the women are all on diets or health kicks. Actually, that’s Dave Hunter in the corner there. I’ll introduce you when we’ve finished.’