Eva Ibbotson - A Glove Shop In Vienna

Or Blackwater, striding angrily into the staff-room. ‘So the Buddha gave up sex at thirty. So he gave it up . Is that any reason why I shouldn’t inject Hannibal?’

In a way it was Pringle who showed most fight. ‘I don’t care what the new work on plant sensitivity shows,’ he said, sitting with teeth clenched over his tank. ‘This beetroot is not screaming .’

‘Look, Kirstie,’ I said, using her Christian name for the first time and removing from her shoulder the white rat she had personally been unable to chloroform. ‘I understand your feelings very well. But why inflict them on us? You don’t need a diploma in agriculture to go into a convent.’

‘It’s not like that, Dr Marshall, honestly. I just have to get this diploma. Particularly now that this ghastly thing has come up with Vernon —’ She broke off and to my horror, her piebald eyes began to fill with tears. ‘Don’t be cross, please .’

And for some reason I wasn’t. Not until I went to tell Potts that we had run out of formalin and found him lost to the world, reading The Little Flowers of St. Theresa .

As one would expect from the Ministry’s top scientist, Sir Henry’s schedule was worked out to the last detail. He was to arrive at Torcastle Station at nine-fifteen, inspect the Technical College and the Art School in the morning, lunch with the Lord Mayor and reach us at two o’clock.

Ten minutes to two on the great day saw us, accordingly, dark-suited and — we hoped — scientific-looking, assembled on the steps to greet Sir Henry’s motorcade. Two o’clock struck, two-fifteen, two-thirty…

At ten to three the college secretary came running out of her office and whispered something into Peckham’s ear.

‘Oh no!’ I heard him say. ‘Not today of all days. This really is the end!’

‘That was Torcastle police,’ he said, coming over to me. ‘They’ve arrested one of our students for kicking a policeman. Get over there quickly, and for God’s sake, hush it up !’

I was in my car, turning out of the drive, before I realised that I hadn’t even bothered to ask who the student was.

‘That’s marvellous,’ I said, storming into the police station an hour later. ‘You can’t chloroform a worm and you go round kicking innocent policemen.’

‘I didn’t kick him, Dr Marshall, honestly,’ said Kirstie. There was a black smut on her nose and between her green and yellow eyes a purple bruise gleamed fitfully. ‘He was stepping on a pigeon.’

‘Pigeons,’ I said, speaking with care, ‘are birds. They don’t get stepped on. They can fly, remember?’

‘This one couldn’t, he had a bad leg. I was sort of keeping an eye on him. There were a whole lot of us guarding this lime tree by the station, you see, stopping it from being cut down, and then the police started making a cordon and one of them stepped back on to this pigeon and I just gave him a little shove…’

There was a pause while I wondered just where the breaking point of the average Mother Superior might be expected to lie. ‘Well,’ I said at last, ‘I suppose we should try to get you out of here.’

‘Dr Marshall, you’ve been marvellous and I’m terribly grateful, but I don’t feel I should leave here till I find out what’s happened to that dear old man they arrested along with me.’

‘Look, Kirstie, you’re already in trouble enough —’

‘But he helped me. He jumped out of his car when they started carrying me off in this van. We had such a marvellous talk! You’ve no idea how wise he was, and how good . There was nothing he didn’t know about. Albert Schweitzer, Lao Tse, the lot!’ Suddenly her face crumpled. ‘You don’t think they’re beating him up?’

‘For heaven’s sake, Kirstie, will you stop drivelling about this old man? Why don’t you worry about yourself for a change? You don’t seem to realise you’re a case of student violence, the kind that has to be nipped in the bud. I’m horribly afraid they’re going to chuck you out.’

I was right. By the time we got back, delayed by a blocked petrol pump, Sir Henry’s visit was over. Peckham thought it had gone well. Though the unexplained delay at the beginning had made the whole inspection somewhat hurried, he felt that Sir Henry had been pleased. Indeed Sir Henry’s secretary had confided to Peckham that he had never seen the great man look so relaxed and peaceful.

For Kirstie, however, there was no reprieve. Peckham sent for her straight away and the look on her face as she came out of his study made me long to go and knock his smug and disciplinarian head against the wall.

‘All right,’ I said when I found her at last, sitting hunched and wretched under a clump of birch trees beside the ornamental lake. ‘Now explain. Why does it matter so much? What’s with the convent?’

‘I never said I was going into a convent. I said I was going where there weren’t any men.’’

‘And where’s that?’

She sighed. ‘I don’t suppose you’ve ever heard of an island called Braesay?’

But there she was wrong. ‘I have. It’s one of the most beautiful islands in the Hebrides. But you can’t get on to it. It belongs to a crusty old —’

‘My father,’ said Kirstie. ‘He doesn’t like people all that much.’

I was silent, thinking of Braesay with its grey seals, its white-fringed foreshore, its fabled, bird-hung cliffs…

‘My father’s getting old and I’m the only child. I wanted to learn about agriculture so that I could go on running it after he couldn’t. There’s an old shepherd, a couple of crofters on the North Shore… You can’t just sell up and turn people out.’

‘Look,’ I lied, ‘this diploma’s just a load of rubbish. All you have to do is marry some nice, competent man and —’

‘But I’ve tried and tried! You’ve no idea how I’ve carried on. And I almost had Vernon Hartleypool. He didn’t exactly send me, but he was absolutely fantastic about oat smut and rape seed and things. He even knew about digested sludge . And then he turned me down because of his appendix ?

‘His appendix?’

‘Well, on Braesay we have to put up flares for a doctor and his appendix grumbles.’

She sighed and a despairing silence fell. After a while her hand, without exactly creeping into mine, somehow indicated that it was there . I picked it up, turned it over, passed my thumb to and fro along her wrist. It was not as if I didn’t see what that worm had been on about, it was that I didn’t want to.

‘What do you do up there, say, when the seal population builds up and begins to interfere with the fishing?’

Her green and yellow eyes lit up.

‘Well, I put the pups in a boat and the mothers swim after us and we take them away to another island.’

‘I thought it might be something like that,’ I said heavily. ‘I just thought it might.’

Six weeks later at the beginning of the spring term, we received notice that our Charter had come through. Peckham was triumphant, but like all men who have battled through and won, he found that victory brought problems.

There was, for example, the sudden, curious decimation of his staff. Davies, who was twenty-six, said he felt he was getting too old for experimental work and left to join his brother on a hill farm in Wales. Blackwater accepted an offer from a firm of strawberry growers, and it was generally understood that I had been called away to do Nature Conservancy work in the Hebrides.

But in a way it was Sir Henry’s letter that disconcerted Peckham most. Sir Henry found himself compelled to decline the flattering offer to be Torcastle’s first Chancellor. He had, he said, long harboured a great desire to retire from the world and end his days in prayer and meditation, but had forced himself to remain at his post in order to foster those values — respect for life, conservation of the environment and so on — without which mankind was doomed to perish. A recent encounter with one of Peckham’s own students, however, had shown him how completely the youth of today could be trusted to carry on just these ideals. He was accordingly leaving to join the ashram of Shri Ramananda in Jaipur and wished the new university every success.