Benjamin Wood - The Ecliptic

We had sat together quietly, listening to the noise — all those tiny impacts accreting — until Ender had appeared in the doorway to inform the provost about the phone call. ‘ Telefon ’ was the only word that I had been able to interpret from their exchange. The provost had sighed, placed his cup on the table, and stood up. He had told Nazar to stay and guard me. ‘Watch out for this one, she bites,’ he had said.

Now, the breakfast bell was clanging in the mess hall and even the old dog was getting restless, eyeing the doorway every time she heard a footstep.

And still the provost kept us waiting.

He presided over the refuge the way an auditor haunts an office building, removed from us yet always in our midst. We knew very little about him, in fact, and relied solely on what we had gleaned from our sponsors’ explications. They said he was the son of a Turkish envoy, though Quickman claimed he had been told ‘ambassador to France’, and MacKinney insisted it was ‘political attaché’. They said that he had held a number of accountancy positions within firms across Europe (this much was consistent with all our sponsors’ stories) and that the role as provost had been bestowed upon him after the death of his wife to a lengthy illness (accounts diverged as to which disease she had suffered from: sickle-cell anaemia or leukaemia). They said that he was schooled in Switzerland, England, and America, and that his grasp of many languages would be clear to us when we arrived (it was). They said he dabbled in essay writing: some papers on English and Turkish literature had been published in journals (this was reasonable, given his tendency towards the poetic). They said he composed accounting textbooks and received significant royalties from them periodically (we had seen no evidence of these texts, but there was no reason to doubt they existed, and he did seem particularly pleased each time Ender retrieved the mail from the post office box in town).

According to our sponsors, the provostship was determined by a board of trustees. The board comprised one retired provost and five former residents, and there was a strict recruitment process, tailored to find a certain type of candidate: childless, unmarried, comfortable with isolation, passionate about the arts, respectful of artists but not creative in his own right. The provost’s role demanded resoluteness, fairness, and stoicism. It was his job to maintain regular contact with the trustee board and to uphold responsibility for admissions, departures, budgeting, bookkeeping, as well as the daily oversight of Portmantle’s operations and its limited staff. In return for all this, he was afforded the most resplendent view of Heybeliada from his penthouse window, three good meals a day, the company of so-called brilliant minds, and a permanent escape from the demands of mainland living. We were not told how many provosts had gone before him, but Pettifer judged the mansion to be late nineteenth century, and so, by extrapolation, we assumed no more than ten.

And still he kept me waiting.

Pale smoke was spuming now from all the studio flues, clotting the rain. A couple of residents began to appear at their doorways in pyjamas. Another came strolling up the path towards the mansion in a bright yellow poncho. I believed he was a Frenchman, though he may have been a French-speaking Belgian or a Swiss, and his name was either Anderson or Sanderson or neither. He was handsome but incredibly short. (One afternoon last spring, he had forced us all to watch a preview of ‘a little work in progress’, which had involved him sitting on the lawn, topless, tying blades of grass to his stomach hair to form a kind of umbilical cord, which he then wrapped around his throat. Immediately afterwards, he had distributed pamphlets with three pages of typewritten text explaining the meaning behind the performance and its title: L’enfance des autres. Quickman had skimmed through it and remarked, ‘I think this is one of those works that is better viewed posthumously.’)

As the poncho neared the front steps, Nazar began to spasm; she reared her head and bayed. The poncho halted. The rain slapped its big yellow hood. Nazar got on all fours, yapping, yapping, yapping, and the poncho waved its arms and called to me: ‘Hey, why don’t you do something about this dog, uh? Crazy animal!’ I was about to get up, but then the provost strode into the portico, clattering his cane on the floorboards, and he took the dog by her collar, hauling her back. ‘Calm down, Nazar, you’ll give yourself a stroke, carrying on like that.’ She quietened. ‘There’s a good girl. Save your energy.’

The poncho hurried up the steps and into the house, thanking the provost on his way past: ‘ Merci, Monsieur. Je ne sais pas pourquoi votre chien me déteste autant. Mais je suis content que vous soyez de retour. ’

‘ Le jaune la rend de mauvaise humeur, ’ said the provost. He resumed his position on the swing-seat. ‘Sorry to keep you. It never fails to astound me how much work piles up at this place in my absence. So many things to attend to.’ Dredging his coffee in one gulp, he turned the cup over on the saucer and watched the dark grounds oozing out. ‘You were asking about MacKinney?’

‘No, sir, I was still talking about the boy.’

‘Then I recommend you move on swiftly.’ He prodded the upturned cup with his finger. ‘Don’t test me on this.’

I paused, heeding his tone. ‘Did you manage to resolve anything with Mac’s situation?’

‘No, things are rather bleak on that front, I’m sad to report. I can’t discuss specifics — don’t ask me to get into details, because I’m already well outside my remit — but I’ve had several meetings regarding MacKinney in the past few days. The upshot is that she will be leaving us.’

I had been prepared for this outcome, of course, but I had not expected the numbness I would feel when I heard it confirmed. ‘When?’

‘First thing tomorrow.’

‘You know she isn’t anywhere near finished. If you make her leave now, her whole stay has been for nothing. You do see that, don’t you?’

‘Yes, I understand. And it’s regrettable.’ He lifted the cup, leaving a knoll of coffee grounds on the saucer. For a good few moments, he studied the streaky remnants on the inside rim. ‘I argued her case strongly with the trustee board. A bit too strongly — they weren’t pleased with me at all. The trouble is, there have been precedents. Not in my time as provost — I had to look them up in the archives — but they’re precedents nonetheless, and everyone must be treated the same. I don’t like to enforce protocol, as MacKinney well knows, but I have no option in her case.’ He thrust the cup in my direction. ‘What does that look like to you, some kind of battleship?’ His finger was pointed at a few dark rivulets on the porcelain, but I could see no shapes, no auguries in them at all, just the trickledown mess of spilled coffee. ‘Don’t worry. I’ll ask Gülcan.’

‘There’s really nothing you can do?’ I said.

‘I’ve done everything in my power as provost. It’s a great shame to force her out, but my duty is to Portmantle. This place will still be here — God willing — long after MacKinney or the two of us are in the ground. That’s what I have to consider.’

‘But it won’t be the same,’ I said.

‘She’ll be missed, of course. But you’ll get used to it.’

‘No, sir, I mean this whole place is going to change. For everyone.’

‘I don’t follow.’

‘You’re putting a cap on how long we can be here. If our sponsors die, that’s it, time’s up. Doesn’t matter if we’re finished or not, doesn’t matter if we’re still struggling. It’s going to change the way we work. You might as well start putting clocks up on the walls.’