‘I don’t think I’m cut out to be an actress, Joe. It’s too much like hard work.’
Bromhead also expressed some relief at the demise of the project.
‘My heart ceased to be in the production ever since Mossop changed it into a modern satire, I must say. And as for the curse of “Cain and Abel”, it has convinced me to lock the manuscript and the old book in a box well away from prying eyes. As I have no children, I have bequeathed all my books to the boy of my second cousin. Thackeray by name. Young Will is a bit of a ne’er-do-well and I don’t suppose he will amount to much, or even read any of my collection. Though he may pass it on to a library, if he has any sense. Personally, I hope The Play of Adam is never found again, or if it is, that no one tries to revive it. The first murder in history should be the only one associated with this cursed play.’
Epilogue
Surrey, July 1944
He limped into the Senior Common Room and tossed a file of dog-eared lecture notes onto the stained table near the door. This held a kettle simmering on a gas ring, a collection of odd cups and saucers, a battered tin tea-caddy, a large brown china tea pot and a tin of National Dried Milk donated by the assistant librarian, who had small children.
‘Harry’s had another of his brain-storms,’ the newcomer announced glumly, as he poured himself a cup of over-stewed Brooke Bond and stirred it vigorously to break up the lumps of milk powder. ‘He’s decided the college needs a diversion from the Second Front, so we have to put on a medieval play to entertain visitors at the Open Day next month!’
The only other occupant of the SCR groaned.
‘Why the hell can’t Harry stick to The Importance of Being Earnest or Jack and the Beanstalk, like any normal person?’
‘Harry’ was the covert nickname for Dr Hieronymus Drabble, the Reader and Head of the History Department at Waverley College, beloved by none of his small staff. The first man sank into a sagging armchair of worn Rexine and sipped his tea as he stared around the room. The grand title of Senior Common Room, which conjured up visions of a sedate chamber in a venerable Oxford college, seemed misplaced for this seedy place more suited to an inner-city secondary school. But Peter Partridge was not looking at the familiar décor and furnishings, but was casting a critical eye at the windows. In charge of Air-Raid Precautions at the college, he stared at the wide strips of sticky tape that crisscrossed the panes of glass to minimise the possibility of blast injuries and then at the heavy curtains of black cloth that had to blank out the slightest glimmer of light after dark. Obsessive about his responsibilities, he satisfied himself that a broken hook on one rail had been replaced by the college caretaker.
‘What’s brought this on all of a sudden?’ demanded Loftus Maltravers, Senior Lecturer in the History Department. ‘Harry’s not angling for a professorship again, is he?’
‘Only God knows how his mind works!’ growled Partridge. ‘But you might be right. No doubt some of the members of Council will turn up for it. Anyway, he’s called a meeting for three o’clock to discuss it. Every one has to be there, it’s a three-line whip.’
Peter was a big man in his late twenties, with red hair parted in the centre and Brylcreemed down flat on either side. A lecturer with a special interest in the plays of Molière, he had heavy features and an aggressive manner, which made him unpopular with his colleagues, who tried hard to make allowances for his club foot and the consequent three-inch-thick sole on his left boot. Like most of the college staff, either on health grounds or from being overage, he was exempt from military service.
Loftus, who suffered from bouts of severe asthma, was a thin, morose fellow nearing fifty, with black hair and a Clark Gable moustache. He was an expert in the history of stage scenery and pantomime throughout the ages. The two men always seemed ready to snipe at each other, contradicting and arguing over trivialities.
‘So what play do we have to do?’ he demanded. ‘Not another bit of the Townley Cycle, surely? We were stuck with that two years ago. I’m not building another bloody Noah’s Ark for it.’
Partridge sighed and shook his head. ‘No need to get yourself in a lather, Loftus! Harry said he’d found something very interesting in an old journal. He seemed quite excited about it, said we ought to follow it up and maybe get up a paper for one of the Yank publications.’
‘Nice to see that plagiarism is still alive and well,’ observed Loftus, with his habitual cynicism.
They broke off their conversation as the distant ululations of air-raid sirens began broadcasting their warning to a wide area of northern Surrey and South London. The college was a few miles south of Croydon, having been evacuated in 1940 from the main university campus in Lambeth to this shabby Victorian mansion in the supposedly safer Green Belt.
‘Bit early for them, isn’t it?’ asked Loftus, uneasily. With part of the northern coast of France already liberated following D-Day the previous month, the Luftwaffe air raids had almost ceased, but the unmanned V-1 missiles were still coming from launching ramps in the Pas de Calais.
The wailing sound faded and nothing further disturbed the peace of the morning, though until the steady tone of the All Clear sounded forty minutes later, both men had half an ear listening for the throbbing drone of the pulse-jet engine that signalled the approach of a ‘doodlebug’, to use the derisory but fearful term for Hitler’s no-longer secret weapon.
Loftus carried on reading some essays he had set during term time to the few undergraduates that had either escaped the call-up or had been invalided from the Forces. In the armchair, Peter Partridge scanned the four thin pages of the morning newspaper. As a drama historian, he found the news that Stalin had once more attacked Finland and invaded the Baltic States of less immediate interest than reports of the London premiere of Laurence Olivier’s film of Shakespeare’s Henry V.
The door opened again and a very thin elderly woman came in, hugging a briefcase under her arm. She had a severe face devoid of make-up and wore old-fashioned pince-nez on a cord pinned to her mannish grey costume. Dr Agatha Wood-Turner, Senior Lecturer in Religious Art, was inevitably known by the nickname of ‘Lathe’, from both her surname and her body shape.
Scorning the motley collection of crockery on the table, she sat on an upright chair and delved into her case to retrieve a tartan Thermos flask. Unscrewing the Bakelite cover, she poured some murky brown fluid into it and then produced a small bottle of milk, two sugar cubes and a paper bag containing three digestive biscuits. Only when she had organised her ‘elevenses’ did she acknowledge the presence of the two men.
‘I hear that Doctor Drabble is intending to put on a play for Open Day,’ she said, as if she was reading the one o’clock news on the BBC Home Service.
Maltravers nodded. ‘We’re on parade at three o’clock. A hundred lines for any absentees,’ he added sarcastically, but the prim and proper woman ignored his attempt at levity.
The door opened again and a very different sort of female entered. Christina Ullswater was the archetypal fluffy blonde – petite, blue-eyed and shapely. She wore a fussy pink floral dress with ruffles at the neck, a white cardigan thrown artfully over her shoulders and unsuitably high-heeled shoes. At twenty-six, she was a postgraduate working on her doctoral thesis, and in spite of looking like an escapee from a Chelsea tennis club, was in fact a very clever young woman, already making her mark in the rarified world of early medieval poetry.
It was a matter of covert speculation in the college as to why she was not a Waaf or Wren, and opinions varied from having a daddy who was ‘something in the War Office’, to having being the mistress of the Chancellor of the Exchequer. The most popular theory at the moment was that her first war job had been filling shells at a munitions factory, but that she had been asked to leave after a fortnight, due to fears for the safety of the establishment!