‘In that case,’ said Sir Godfrey, ‘there’s nothing more to be said.’
They all knew at once of course. Biggers must have told them and when I came back from lunch they were waiting for me. Mrs Rahman, her doe-eyes wide with concern; Uncle Laszlo, shaking his head; Matt telling me I was silly, that they had always known they wouldn’t be allowed to stay.
And Flossie, blaming herself. Flossie putting a hand on my arm and remembering, and turning away with a little gulp… Flossie who had lost both her parents in a car crash and to whom the Havelock was home.
The letter refusing the grant came the following week. Vivian was furious with me and I couldn’t blame her. After all, Sir Godfrey was her protege.
‘If you would climb down,’ she said, ‘I’m sure I could get him to change his mind.’
But this I wouldn’t do. ‘Sometimes you have to stand up and be counted,’ I said wearily — and saw her recoil from my priggishness.
Ten days later I came home to find a note on the mantelpiece. Always look for the obvious, they say, in matters of the human heart. But could I have foreseen anything as trite, as banal, as soul-destroying as Vivian and Sir Godfrey? Or that my disgust and bitterness would be so little help in blotting out the pain?
At the Havelock we went on working like lunatics, all of us. You could have eaten your dinner off the floor on the day before we were due to close. That day we had a party. Matt and Brian fixed up a bar between the aardvark and the gnus, Mr Biggers made a speech, Uncle Laszlo and the Brigadier downed the champagne like mother’s milk, and to the sound of roe deer rutting noises Flossie and I solemnly waltzed.
Parties poised over an abyss of leave-taking and calamity are generally the best. None of us noticed how late it was, or that Mrs Rahman had long since slipped away. When we did, Flossie went at once to find her.
She returned as pale as death. ‘Oh, come quickly, please, please! And ring for an ambulance, someone — only I’m afraid it’s much too late!’
Flossie was right. Mrs Rahman, that gentle soul, had not cared to spoil our fun. Now she lay on the trestle bed, glistening with sweat and trying between contractions to apologise.
Heaven knows how we did it, but we did. And when it was over and we gave the radiant, exhausted woman her lusty son to hold, I had to hand it to Leboyer. Because I swear to you, the messy, beat-up little thing quite definitely smiled!
It was November again. Bobbles on the plane trees; mist, wet leaves splayed on the pavement. A year had passed since I had first seen the naked sea slug and the football supporter had tottered out of her door, dropping her shrunken head. My decree had just come through and the sense of failure was bad.
I went in past the bust of Sir William in his pith helmet… past the aardvark, the gnus… Everything was as it had been but a little better, a little more highly polished. A couple of Arab ladies were whispering reverently by the silk moths of the Emperor Wu-Ti. A lot of people came from the Middle East these days: the place was a kind of pilgrimage spot for them. The birth-place of Yusuf Mahomet Abu Rahman, the first healthy male child born to the son of a reigning sheik in the state of Quittah for forty years. Our endowment from the old man, running at one three-hundredth of his annual oil revenue, made the Havelock one of the wealthiest museums in the land.
The door marked ‘Staff Only’ burst open. Her sixth sense unfailing, out she came.
‘Oh, Paul, why did you come in by the front, we’ve been waiting and waiting for you! Uncle Laszlo’s found some new bones which he thinks are—’ She broke off, tilted her tangled head. ‘Are you sad?’
‘Not now.’
She lurched tentatively towards me. I opened my arms and she moved into them. My own personal football supporter. Mine. …
The Adultery of Jenny Craig
Jenny Craig knew that there was no such thing as adultery any more. The women’s movement, the new way of thinking had made the word, the whole concept, obsolete. There weren’t really ‘affairs’ any more either; there were just different people relating to each other, taking and giving love, some inside marriage, some out… That’s what it was like now.
Only, seemingly, not for her. What she was planning to do: to meet a man called Thomas Marsham, to whom she was not married, for a weekend in London, felt like adultery. Furthermore the sleeplessness, the indigestion, the tension headaches she had developed as the result of the lies it had been necessary to tell her husband, felt like guilt.
Jenny had been married to Philip Craig for twelve years and they had been good ones. All the trouble people had with sex hadn’t really come their way. Philip enjoyed it and so did she and when after the first few years they had done all the ordinary things and were perhaps inclined to get a little bit into a rut, they had gone out and bought some books and done slightly less ordinary things. Only, of course, after a while these too got a little bit repetitive, there being only so many things one can expect of the human body; and lately, returning from one of his more exhausting business trips, Philip had been inclined to fall asleep before, rather than after, they had expressed themselves in this particular way.
All of which Jenny understood and didn’t in the least mind. As far as she could see, the sex thing was a ‘heads you win, tails I lose’ situation up to a point, since if you started well you were bound to get caught up in the sheer repetition thing and if you started badly you’d had it anyway. So she was in no way inclined to use this as an alibi for what was about to happen between herself and Thomas Marsham.
She had met Thomas at an adult education class in philosophy run by the local university where he had tried to explain to a group of housewives, retired schoolteachers and weirdos what Wittgenstein had meant by sentences like: ‘The World is all that is the case’.
Jenny had not understood Wittgenstein, as she had hot really understood Kant or Descartes or the doctrines of logical positivism, but over a cup of coffee in the university canteen she found that she understood Dr Marsham.
He was a few years older than she was, with wild hair already turning grey and short-sighted blue eyes behind thick glasses: an untidy, chain-smoking, neglected-looking man with beautiful hands and a formidable intelligence which he concealed with idiotic jokes, self-denigration and buffoonery. He had married, at Cambridge, a Girtonian with a First in Anthropology whose academic career matched, and now seemed likely to surpass, his own. Between expeditions to the He-He in Basutoland (whose adopted tribe member she was), broadcasts and committee meetings, Professor Marjorie Marsham found life a full and absorbing business and though extremely fond of Thomas, was inclined to communicate with him mostly through little notes propped against the tea-pot informing him how and when to empty the dustbins and roughly what day he could expect her back from Basutoland.
It was therefore with a pleasure whose innocence at first entirely misled him that he looked at Jenny Craig with her snub nose, shining curly brown hair and trusting grey eyes, and listened as she apologised for her lack of education, the fact that she had ‘only’ been a shorthand typist before her marriage, and confided in him her longing to avoid the ‘coffee morning’ set-up now that her two children were both at school. With students he was careful, even shy, but this little housewife with her shining cleanliness, her readiness to be impressed by the glory of learning, found him with his defences down.
The first cup of coffee in the canteen after the lecture had been followed by others, as often as not chaperoned by some other member of the class. The way that Jenny looked round the filthy refectory with its plastic cups and garish walls, the wistful look with which she breathed in the ‘academic’ atmosphere, touched him profoundly. Without realising it, he was starved of comfort, comeliness and grace and these old-fashioned qualities he found in this woman who apologised with every second sentence for her lack of brains.