Collected Short Stories Page 4

  “They’re an illiterate lot,” grumbled William. “They don’t encipher their umlauts. They deserve to be misunderstood.”

  “How can you give an opinion when you never dot your i’s, William?”

  “Because I consider the dot is redundant, and I hope to be responsible for removing it from the English language.”

  “Is that to be your major contribution to scholarship, William? If so I am bound to ask how anyone reading the essays of most of our undergraduates would be able to tell the difference between an I and an i.”

  “A feeble argument, my dear, which, if it had any conviction, would demand that you put a dot on top of an n so as to be sure it wasn’t mistaken for an h.”

  “Keep working away at your theories, William, because I intend to spend my energy removing more than the dot and the I from Hitler.”

  In May 1945 they dined privately with Prime Minister and Mrs. Churchill at 10 Downing Street.

  “What did the prime minister mean when he said to me that he could never understand what you were up to?” asked Philippa in the taxi to Paddington Station.

  “The same as when he said to me that he knew exactly what you were capable of, I suppose,” said William.

  When the Merton professor of English retired in the early 1950s the whole university waited to see which Doctor Hatchard would be appointed to the chair.

  “If the council invites you to take the chair,” said William, putting his hand through his graying hair, “it will be because they are going to make me vice-chancellor.”

  “The only way you could ever be invited to hold a position so far beyond your ability would be nepotism, which would mean I was already vice-chancellor.”

  The general board, after several hours’ discussion of the problem, offered two chairs and appointed William and Philippa full professors on the same day.

  When the vice-chancellor was asked why precedent had been broken, he replied: “Simple. If I hadn’t given them both a chair, one of them would have been after my job.”

  That night, after a celebration dinner, when they were walking home together along the banks of the Isis across Christ Church Meadows, in the midst of a particularly heated argument about the quality of the last volume of Proust’s monumental work, a policeman, noticing the affray, ran over to them and asked:

  “Is everything all right, madam?”

  “No, it is not,” William interjected. “This woman has been attacking me for over thirty years, and to date the police have done deplorably little to protect me.”

  In the late fifties Harold Macmillan invited Philippa to join the board of the Independent Broadcasting Authority.

  “I suppose you’ll become what’s known as a telly don,” said William. “And as the average mental age of those who watch the box is seven you should feel quite at home.”

  “Agreed,” said Philippa. “Twenty years of living with you has made me fully qualified to deal with infants.”

  The chairman of the BBC wrote to William a few weeks later inviting him to join its board of governors.

  “Are you to replace Hancock’s Half Hour or Dick Barton, Special Agent?” Philippa inquired.

  “I am to give a series of twelve lectures.”

  “On what subject, pray?”

  “Genius.”

  Philippa flicked through the Radio Times. “I see that Genius is to be broadcast at two o’clock on a Sunday morning, which is understandable, as that’s when you are at your most brilliant.”

  When William was awarded an honorary doctorate at Princeton, Philippa attended the ceremony and sat proudly in the front row.

  “I tried to secure a place in the back,” she explained, “but it was filled with sleeping students who had obviously never heard of you.”

  “If that’s the case, Philippa, I am only surprised you didn’t mistake them for one of your tutorial lectures.”

  As the years went on, many anecdotes, only some of which were apocryphal, passed into the Oxford fabric. Everyone in the English school knew the stories about the “fighting Hatchards”: how they spent their first night together, how they jointly won the Charles Oldham, how Phil would complete the Times crossword before Bill had finished shaving, how each had both been appointed to a professorial chair on the same day, and how they both worked longer hours than any of their contemporaries, as if they still had something to prove, if only to each other. It seemed almost required by the laws of symmetry that they should always be judged equals—until it was announced in the New Year’s Honours that Philippa had been made a Dame of the British Empire.

  “At least our dear queen has worked out which one of us is truly worthy of recognition,” she said over the college dessert.

  “Our dear queen,” said William, selecting the Madeira, “knows only too well how little competition there is in the women’s colleges: Sometimes one must encourage weaker candidates in the hope that it might inspire some real talent lower down.”

  After that, whenever they attended a public function together, Philippa would have the MC announce them as “Professor William and Dame Philippa Hatchard.” She looked forward to many happy years of starting every official occasion one up on her husband, but her triumph lasted for only six months: William received a knighthood in the Queen’s Birthday Honours. Philippa feigned surprise at the dear queen’s uncharacteristic lapse of judgment and forthwith insisted on their being introduced in public as Sir William and Dame Philippa Hatchard.

  “Understandable,” said William. “The queen had to make you a dame first in order that no one should mistake you for a lady. When I married you, Philippa, you were a young fellow, and now I find I’m living with an old dame.”

  “It’s no wonder,” said Philippa, “that your poor pupils can’t make up their minds whether you’re homosexual or you simply have a mother fixation. Be thankful that I did not accept Girton’s invitation: Then you would have been married to a mistress.”

  “I always have been, you silly woman.”

  As the years passed, they never let up their pretended belief in the other’s mental feebleness. Philippa’s books, “works of considerable distinction,” she insisted, were published by Oxford University Press, while William’s, “works of monumental significance,” he declared, were printed at the presses of Cambridge University.

  The tally of newly appointed professors of English they had taught as undergraduates soon reached double digits.

  “If you count polytechnics, I shall have to throw in Maguire’s readership in Kenya,” said William.

  “You did not teach the professor of English at Nairobi,” said Philippa. “I did. You taught the head of state, which may well account for why the university is so highly thought of while the country is in such disarray.”

  In the early sixties they conducted a battle of letters in the TLS on the works of Philip Sidney without ever discussing the subject in each other’s presence. In the end the editor said the correspondence must stop and adjudicated a draw.

  They both declared him an idiot.

  If there was one act that annoyed William in old age about Philippa, it was her continued determination each morning to complete the Times crossword before he arrived at the breakfast table. For a time, William ordered two copies of the paper until Philippa filled them both in while explaining to him it was a waste of money.

  One particular morning in June at the end of their final academic year before retirement, William came down to breakfast to find only one space in the crossword left for him to complete. He studied the clue: “Skelton reported that this landed in the soup.” He immediately filled in the eight little boxes.

  Philippa looked over his shoulder. “There’s no such word, you arrogant man,” she said firmly. “You made it up to annoy me.” She placed in front of him a very hard-boiled egg.

  “Of course there is, you silly woman; look ‘whymwham’ up in the dictionary.”

  Philippa checked in the Shorter Oxford among the cookbooks in the kitche
n, and trumpeted her delight that it was nowhere to be found.

  “My dear Dame Philippa,” said William, as if he were addressing a particularly stupid pupil, “you surely cannot imagine because you are old and your hair has become very white that you are a sage. You must understand that the Shorter Oxford Dictionary was cobbled together for simpletons whose command of the English language stretches to no more than one hundred thousand words. When I go to college this morning I shall confirm the existence of the word in the OED on my desk. Need I remind you that the OED is a serious work which, with over five hundred thousand words, was designed for scholars like myself?”

  “Rubbish,” said Philippa. “When I am proved right, you will repeat this story word for word, including your offensive non-word, at Somerville’s Gaudy Feast.”

  “And you, my dear, will read the Collected Works of John Skelton and eat humble pie as your first course.”

  “We’ll ask old Onions along to adjudicate.”

  “Agreed.”

  “Agreed.”

  With that, Sir William picked up his paper, kissed his wife on the cheek, and said with an exaggerated sigh, “It’s at times like this that I wish I’d lost the Charles Oldham.”

  “You did, my dear. It was in the days when it wasn’t fashionable to admit a woman had won anything.”

  “You won me.”

  “Yes, you arrogant man, but I was led to believe you were one of those prizes one could return at the end of the year. And now I find I shall have to keep you, even in retirement.”

  “Let us leave it to the Oxford English Dictionary, my dear, to decide the issue the Charles Oldham examiners were unable to determine,” and with that he departed for his college.

  “There’s no such word,” Philippa muttered as he closed the front door.

  Heart attacks are known to be rarer among women than men. When Dame Philippa suffered hers in the kitchen that morning she collapsed on the floor calling hoarsely for William, but he was already out of earshot. It was the cleaning woman who found Dame Philippa on the kitchen floor and ran to fetch. someone in authority. The bursar’s first reaction was that she was probably pretending that Sir William had hit her with a frying pan, but nevertheless she hurried over to the Hatchards’ house in Little Jericho just in case. The bursar checked Dame Philippa’s pulse and called for the college doctor and then the principal. Both arrived within minutes.

  The principal and the bursar stood waiting by the side of their illustrious academic colleague, but they already knew what the doctor was going to say.

  “She’s dead,” he confirmed. “It must have been very sudden and with the minimum of pain.” He checked his watch; the time was 9:47. He covered his patient with a blanket and called for an ambulance. He had taken care of Dame Philippa for over thirty years and he had told her so often to slow down that he might as well have made a record of it for all the notice she took.

  “Who will tell Sir William?” asked the principal. The three of them looked at one another.

  “I will,” said the doctor.

  It’s a short walk from Little Jericho to Radcliffe Square. It was a long walk from Little Jericho to Radcliffe Square for the doctor that day. He never relished telling anyone off the death of a spouse, but this one was going to be the unhappiest of his career.

  When he knocked on the professor’s door, Sir William bade him enter. The great man was sitting at his. desk poring over the Oxford Dictionary, humming to himself.

  “I told her, but she wouldn’t listen, the silly woman,” he was saying to himself, and then he turned and saw the doctor standing silently in the doorway. “Doctor, you must be my guest at Somerville’s Gaudy next Thursday week, where Dame Philippa will be eating humble pie. It will be nothing less than game, set, match and championship for me. A vindication of thirty years’ scholarship.”

  The doctor did not smile, nor did he stir. Sir William walked over to him and gazed at his old friend intently. No words were necessary. The doctor said only, “I’m more sorry than I am able to express,” and he left Sir William to his private grief.

  Sir William’s colleagues all knew within the hour. College lunch that day was spent in a silence broken only by the senior tutor inquiring of the warden if some food should be taken up to the Merton professor.

  “I think not,” said the warden. Nothing more was said.

  Professors, fellows, and students alike crossed the front quadrangle in silence, and when they gathered for dinner that evening still no one felt like conversation. At the end of the meal the senior tutor suggested once again that something should be taken up to Sir William. This time the warden nodded his agreement, and a light meal was prepared by the college chef. The warden and the senior tutor climbed the worn stone steps to Sir William’s room, and while one held the tray the other gently knocked on the door. There was no reply, so the warden, used to William’s ways, pushed the door ajar and looked in.

  The old man lay motionless on the wooden floor in a pool of blood, a small pistol by his side. The two men walked in and stared down. In his right hand, William was holding The Collected Works of John Skelton. The book was opened at “The Tunnyng of Elynour Rummyng,” and the word whymwham was underlined.

  After the Sarasyns gyse,

  Woth a whymwham,

  Knyt with a trym tram,

  Upon her brayne pan.

  Sir William, in his neat hand, had written a note in the margin: “Forgive me, but I had to let her know.”

  “Know what, I wonder?” said the warden softly to himself as he attempted to remove the book from Sir William’s hand, but the fingers were already stiff and cold around it.

  Legend has it that they were never apart for more than a few hours.

  SHOESHINE BOY

  Ted Barker was one of those members of Parliament who never sought high office. He’d had what was described by his fellow officers as a “good war”—in which he was awarded the Military Cross and reached the rank of major. After being demobilized in November 1945, he was happy to return to his wife, Hazel, and their home in Suffolk.

  The family engineering business had also had a good war, under the diligent management of Ted’s older brother, Ken. As soon as he arrived home, Ted was offered his old place on the board, which he happily accepted. But as the weeks passed by, the distinguished warrior became first bored and then disenchanted. There was no job for him at the factory that even remotely resembled active service.

  It was around this time that he was approached by Ethel Thompson, the shop steward and—more important for the advancement of this tale—chairman of the Wedmore branch of the North Suffolk Conservative Association. The incumbent MP, Sir Dingle Lightfoot, known in the constituency as “Tiptoe,” had made it clear that once the war was over they must look for someone to replace him.

  “We don’t want some clever clogs from London coming up here and telling us how to run this division,” pronounced Mrs. Thompson. “We need someone who knows the district and understands the problems of the local people.” Ted, she suggested, might be just right.

  Ted confessed that he had never given such an idea a moment’s thought, but promised Mrs. Thompson that he would take her proposal seriously, only asking for a week in which to consider his decision. He discussed the suggestion with his wife, and, having received her enthusiastic support, he paid a visit to Mrs. Thompson at her home the following Sunday afternoon. She was delighted to hear that Mr. Barker would be pleased to allow his name to go forward for consideration as the prospective parliamentary candidate for the division of North Suffolk.

  The final shortlist included two “clever clogs” from London—one of whom later served in a Macmillan cabinet—and the local boy, Ted Barker. When the chairman announced the committee’s decision to the local press, he said that it would be improper to reveal the number of votes each candidate had polled. In fact, Ted had comfortably outscored his two rivals put together.

  Six months later the prime minister called a gener
al election, and after a lively three-week campaign, Ted was elected as the member of Parliament for North Suffolk with a majority of more than seven thousand. He quickly became respected and popular with colleagues on both sides of the House, though he never pretended to be anything other than, in his own words, “an amateur politician.”

  As the years passed, Ted’s popularity with his constituents grew, and he increased his majority with each succeeding general election. After fourteen years of diligent service to the party nationally and locally, the prime minister of the day, Harold Macmillan, recommended to the Queen that Ted should receive a knighthood.

  By the end of the 1960s, Sir Ted (he was never known as Sir Edward) felt that the time was fast approaching when the division should start looking for a younger candidate, and he made it clear to the local chairman that he did not intend to run in the next election. He and Hazel quietly prepared for a peaceful retirement in their beloved East Anglia.

  Shortly after the election, Ted was surprised to receive a call from 10 Downing Street: “The prime minister would like to see Sir Ted at 11:30 tomorrow morning.”

  Ted couldn’t imagine why Edward Heath should want to see him. Although he had of course visited Number 10 on several occasions when he was a member of Parliament, those visits had only been for cocktail parties, receptions, and the occasional dinner for a visiting head of state. He admitted to Hazel that he was a little nervous.

  Ted presented himself at the front door of Number 10 at 11:17 the next day. The duty clerk accompanied him down the long corridor on the ground floor and asked him to take a seat in the small waiting area that adjoins the Cabinet Room. By now Ted’s nervousness was turning to apprehension. He felt like an errant schoolboy about to come face to face with his headmaster.