Eva Ibbotson - A Glove Shop In Vienna

‘Look, this is a scientific department and there’s absolutely no room in it for whimsy. If you’re one of those antivivisectionists—’

‘Oh, but I’m not, I’m not!’ she cried and the worm, interested, raised up a dozen or so if its anterior segments and laid them across her thumb.

‘Of course people have to do experiments and test drugs and things. Of course they do!’

‘Well, then?’ I was getting impatient. All around me I could see butchered seminal vesicles, lacerated cerebral ganglia…

‘It’s just that I personally can’t kill this worm… I can just feel its bristles on my wrist,’ she said, and she might have been describing a ‘Night of Love’ in Acapulco.

Something in me snapped. ‘Perhaps you would like to go out and look for a worm that’s died of natural causes?’

Clearly, she was not a girl sensitive to sarcasm. ‘Oh, thank you, Dr Marshall. What a marvellous idea! Yes, that’s what I’ll do.’

And with her hand still cupped protectively around her specimen, she left the lab.

The whole thing rattled me. I went to look at my experiment, but what had seemed like a pretty significant breakthrough in endocrine physiology now looked like thirty-eight mice without their ovaries looking less cheerful than thirty-eight mice who still had them. Fortunately the Principal, Dr Peckham, chose that moment to send for me.

‘James,’ he said excitedly as soon as I entered his study, his bald head and his bi-focals all gleaming with joy. ‘I think we’re going to make it!’

‘No! You mean our Charter?’

Dr Peckham nodded. ‘Sir Henry Glissop’s coming with the whole Glissop commission. They wouldn’t send him unless there was a good chance. Just think of it, James! Us and the Tech. and the Art School all united in the new University of Torcastle!’

Raptly, Dr Peckham made for the open window, seeing I knew, not the pleasant flower gardens of Torcastle Agricultural College, its unpretentious animal houses and white-washed farm but a glittering campus, a towering Science Block and he himself, gowned in scarlet, hurrying from Senate Meeting to Congregation and back again…

‘It all depends on the research side of course,’ he went on. ‘How’s Pringle’s beetroot?’

‘Playing up a bit, sir.’

Peckham frowned. ‘And Blackwater? That new technique for storing A.I. samples?’

‘Well, sir, you know how it is with Hannibal,’ I said and Peckham winced, for Hannibal, after fathering some three thousand offspring in all corners of the globe, had suddenly gone cold on the whole thing and lounged about in the North Paddock, a seventeen-hundredweight drop-out from the permissive society, wincing when a heifer even passed his gate.

‘But your work?’ said Peckham hopefully. And then: ‘Good heavens, what on earth is that girl doing crawling about in that flower bed?’

I told him. Peckham didn’t really like it. He didn’t, in fact, like it at all.

Sir Henry’s visit was timed for the last week of term and following Peckham’s instructions, the college threw itself into a frenzy of scientific activity. The pigs were put into metabolism cages, the turkeys reserved for the staffs Christmas dinner vanished from their shed and reappeared in a pen marked ‘Organo-Phosphate Toxicity Trials’. Davies doggedly anaesthetised thirty sheep, stuck tubes into their stomachs and set up an impressive — if statistically dicey — feeding experiment. Blackwater began a systematic attack on Hannibal’s failing libido, tramping nightly over to the North Paddock with house-sized syringes of hormone extract, while Pringle (though his wife had taken to covering herself all over with cold cream) set up five more beetroots respiring in a tank.

All in all, it was a surging, forward-looking scene with nothing to indicate that already there was a canker gnawing at its breast.

The Zoology practical class the following week was a straightforward dissection of the frog. Killing a frog is simple and painless. All the same, it was with a leaden lack of surprise that I walked past the neatly pinned dissections and came, presently, upon this palpably still living frog, its bulging ‘cornered-financier’ eyes glittering moistly, one webbed foot hanging limply from a space between her fingers.

‘Dr Marshall, I’m extremely sorry — ‘

‘Don’t tell me,’ I said bitterly. ‘I know. You personally, just at this minute, find yourself unable to kill this frog.’

She nodded. ‘Those spots are really sort of golden …’

Goodness knows how it would have ended. I walked away and left her and when I came back the black-bearded Welshman who worked next to her had given her his pinned-out specimen and was preparing another for himself. Sex, as they say, is everywhere.

It was certainly at the Agricultural Society’s ball held in the College Hall on the following Saturday. The ratio of men to girls at Torcastle is five to one, so I was accustomed to seeing girls dragged round like pieces of mammoth by men still sweating from the chase. The worm-saving Miss Hamilton, however, was being dragged round by an entire rugger scrum, all of whose members seemed certain that time was not on their side.

‘That’s Kirstie Hamilton, isn’t it?’ said a voice on my left.

The other student, an Afro-haired agricultural engineer, nodded. ‘They say she’s absolutely fantastic. Goes out with anyone, no holds barred.’

‘Funny, she doesn’t look the type.’

‘Apparently she’s going into a convent or something when she’s through here. So she’s getting it all in now.’

She was certainly getting it in. Slightly disgusted for some reason, I steered my own piece of mammoth — a succulent dental nurse called Charline — towards the buffet.

By the time I got back to the ballroom, single ownership of Miss Hamilton had definitely been established. Peering closely at the victor, I saw the sallow face and slicked-down hair of our prize student Vernon Hartleypool, winner of the Mortimer-Ponsonby Prize for the best essay on Silage Utilisation and holder, two years running, of the Potterton Scholarship in Egg Production.

Agriculturally, she couldn’t have done better. But for a last outburst of sensuality before renouncing the world, her choice struck me as odd. Which was not to say that I didn’t by the end of the evening feel extremely sorry for Vernon Hartleypool. For just as the lights grew really dim, the music more and more insistent, I saw Vernon, scowling, leave the ballroom, return with a ladder, climb (among drunken cheers from his classmates) to the top of the thirty-foot window and release, at last, into the ink-black Torcastle night, a passe and not noticeably grateful turnip moth.

As half-term approached and Sir Henry’s visit drew nearer, activity in the college became more and more frenetic. Black-water increased Hannibal’s dosage yet again and it took two men to carry the syringe. Davies added intestinal fistulas to his already gastrically fistulated sheep and Pringle (though his wife had purchased a set of hair-curlers that would have interested the Inquisition) nevertheless added at least two feet of significant glass tubing to his beetroot.

All the same…

‘Staff all right, James, do you reckon?’ asked Peckham, the Principal, putting it into words. ‘Not feeling the strain?’

I said no, the staff were fine. What else could I say? That I had encountered Davies, after he’d taken the First Years for animal nutrition, staring haggardly at his fistulated sheep.

‘James, this is a useful experiment? Worth causing a bit of discomfort for?’

‘Of course it is.’

‘I mean, they’re just sheep. Not happy sheep. Not unhappy sheep. Sheep . St Francis just doesn’t come in to a thing like that.’