At times, in fact, Dr Dick seemed more English than an Englishman. He had attended a minor Home Counties public school before progressing to Oxford, where he had helped to found a real ale society. He could recite, in his fruity accent, every member of the English cricket team since time began. (‘What a wanker,’ was Bob’s laconic verdict.)
Maggie Mackenzie and Dr Dick looked as if they were squaring up for a fight. I supposed that would be one way of deciding who should be head of department.
‘Hand-to-hand combat,’ Professor Cousins murmured in my ear. ‘It would save a lot of time, you know.’
Dr Dick backed down and turned his aggression on me. ‘Your essay’s late,’ he said curtly. ‘I want it immediately.’
Dr Dick was a man who revelled in his hypochondria, although he wanted to be head of department so much that it did seem to be making him sick. He forgot about me now, distracted by a sudden need to feel his pulse. ‘I think I’d better sit down for a while,’ he said limply and retreated to his room again.
‘The man’s perfectly idiotic,’ Maggie Mackenzie said and then turned to me and said irascibly, ‘Tomorrow will do for me. I want your George Eliot on my desk by five o’clock,’ she beetled her brows threateningly, ‘or else,’ and stomped off abruptly down the corridor.
‘Such a frightening woman,’ Professor Cousins said when she was out of hearing.
I was surprised that the university women’s liberation group hadn’t co-opted Maggie Mackenzie now that it had entered a new militant phase. Hitherto a peaceful refuge for students who wanted to drink coffee and moan about their boyfriends, the group had been hijacked recently by a girl called Heather, a junior honours politics student with a round face and owlish spectacles who was determined to teach us the finer points of dialectical materialism before she died, which was probably going to be sooner than she expected.
‘Well, well,’ Professor Cousins said, finally meandering to a halt at the door of his room. ‘I think I’ll have a little nap now. How about you?’
I was unsure as to whether he was asking me to join him in a nap or just generally enquiring about my plans; either way, I shook my head sadly and said, ‘I’ve got to go home and do some work.’
‘Give my regards to that boyfriend of yours.’
‘Bob?’
‘If that’s his name.’
Professor Cousins caught sight of Joan, the departmental secretary, a middle-aged, big-breasted woman fond of mohair so that I always had to stifle an instinct to go to sleep on her furry bosom. Professor Cousins made an elaborate pantomime of drinking a cup of tea and with a long-suffering sigh Joan went into the cupboard where she kept her kettle. For times of emergency — such as we were in — she had set up a little camping gas stove as well (which is probably how dreadful accidents happen).
‘Got to keep my strength up,’ Professor Cousins laughed. ‘Someone’s trying to kill me, you know.’
‘I’m sorry?’ I said, thinking I must have mis-heard, but he had shut the door of his room, although I could still hear him chuckling to himself on the other side of the flushed wooden door.
In the basement that served as the Students’ Union all kinds of health and safety laws were being flouted. It was unusually crowded, the air thick with condensation and the flickering candles on the tables giving the place an air of subterranean gloom, especially when they illuminated the Breughel-like paintings which for some reason adorned the walls.
If you can imagine a place somewhere between a stone-age cave and a wartime air-raid shelter then you have imagined the Students’ Union. A new union was currently under construction — all plate glass and open spaces — but I suspected that it wouldn’t be occupied for long before it had acquired the same rank atmosphere, its new carpets marinated in beer and cigarette ash.
The Union was divided into two areas, a kind of self-service café and a bar, in which currently a group of rugby players, almost certainly an unholy alliance of medical and engineering students, were having a noisy lunchtime pint or ten. They were behaving as though it was Friday night rather than Monday lunchtime, downing pints of heavy in one draught and singing simplistic songs about bizarre sexual acts that they had almost certainly never indulged in and probably didn’t even understand.
I found Terri cornered at a table, smoking intensely and trying to ignore Robin, who was breaching the perimeter fence of her personal space. Terri’s personal space occupied an area roughly the size of Mull and therefore required vigorous defences.
Robin looked like Roy Wood from Wizzard with a touch of Rasputin in his last days, if Rasputin had worn burgundy-coloured loons and a rainbow tie-dyed T-shirt. He was ostentatiously reading The Glass Bead Game. Robin had the capacity to be extraordinarily tedious. His creative writing paper for Martha was a one-act play called Life Sentence (‘post-Beckettian’) in which disaffected young men sat around on packing cases and talked in unfinished sentences about how boring everything was and, in my opinion, was too true to life to be art.
Andrea was delicately eating a Golden Delicious — peeling it and cutting it up into careful segments — and frowning with distaste at the sight of Kevin opposite her who was stuffing a huge Forfar bridie into his mouth, greasy flakes of pastry adhering to his puffy lips. He sighed miserably when he finished chewing the last mouthful and said, ‘Two’s never enough, is it?’ Kevin was feeling disgruntled because the cafeteria was only serving cold food.
A big girl called Kara was making a great performance out of sitting down at the table. Kara was laden with a tray of food, a heavy rucksack, a woven Greek shoulder-bag and, finally, a fat, pneumatic baby, strapped to her back with a shawl.
Kara lived with other students — Robin was one of them — in an old farmhouse called Wester Balniddrie out in the wilds of rural Angus. They kept goats and chickens and pretended to be self-sufficient but they were not really the kind of people to hang out with in the aftermath of a disaster; they needed all the accoutrements of civilization to survive. Anything that involved a tool, for example, sent them into a panic. If the inhabitants of Balniddrie had been in charge of man’s technical evolution, people would still be storing things in hammocks slung from trees.
Kara finally managed to get settled and started wolfing a large bridge roll that was fraying at the seams with grated cheese and cress. Kara’s main fashion influence was peasantry. Today she was wearing an Indian cotton skirt, a pair of big workman’s boots, a huge, hairy sweater that looked as if it had been knitted on tent poles and some kind of cloth wrapped round her head, Russian serf-style. Her skin looked as if it had been rubbed with walnut juice.
Kara was from Kent originally although she looked like a tinker, and was planning to do teacher-training after she graduated and be released into the world of primary school infants in the guise of ‘Miss Jones’. The baby, whose paternity was almost as vague as mine, was called Proteus and was lugged around everywhere by Kara, much to the annoyance of the university staff who had discovered, rather late in the day, that there were no rules about not bringing babies into lectures and tutorials.
Robin grew tired of pretending to read The Glass Bead Game and took out a pack of giant Rizlas and started rolling a joint under the table. Robin had recently decided to become a Buddhist, which made him even more boring.
‘What’s it all about? The meaning of Liff,’ Robin said, laughing in a stupid way that made his shoulders shake, like a cartoon dog. For some reason all Dundee students found this hilariously funny.