Colin Dexter - Death Is Now My Neighbor

“Have you got anything to pray for? Anything that’s worrying you?”

Shelly Cornford smiled sweetly, trusting that such deep dissimulation would mask her growing, now almost desperate, sense of guilt.

“I’m going to pray for you, Denis — for you to become Master of Lonsdale. That’s what I want more than anything else in the world,” her voice very quiet now, “and that’s not for me, my darling — it’s for you.”

“Nothing else to pray for?”

She moved away from him, smoothing the dress over her energetic hips.

“Such as what?”

“Some people pray for forgiveness, that sort of thing, sometimes,” said Denis Cornford softly.

Morse had walked to the Lodge, where he stood in the shadows for a couple of minutes, reading the various notices about the College’s sporting fifteens, and elevens, and eights; and hoping that his presence there was unobserved — when he saw them. An academically accoutred Cornford, accompanied by a woman in black, had emerged from the foot of the Old Staircase, and now turned away from him toward the Chapel in the inner quad.

The bell had stopped ringing.

And Morse walked out into Radcliffe Square; then across into the King’s Arms in Broad Street, where he ordered a pint of bitter, and sat down in the back bar, considering so many things — including a wholly unprecedented sense of gratitude to the Tory Government for its reform of the Sunday licensing laws.

I’d seen myself a don,

Reading old poets in the library,

Attending chapel in an MA gown

And sipping vintage port by candlelight.

In the Hilary Term, in Lonsdale College, on Sunday evenings only, it had become a tradition for the electric lighting to be switched off, and for candles in their sconces to provide the only means of illumination in the Great Hall. Such a procedure was popular with the students, almost all of whom had never experienced the romance of candlelight except during power cuts, and particularly enjoyable for those on the dais whereon the High Table stood, constantly aware as they were of flickering candles reflected in the polished silver of saltcellars and tureens, and the glitter of the cutlery laid out with geometrical precision at every place.

On such evenings, no particular table plan was provided, although it was the regular custom for the visiting preacher (on this occasion a black bishop from Central Africa) to sit on the right side of the Master, with the College Chaplain on the left. The other occupants of High Table (which was usually fully booked on Sunday evenings) were regularly those who had earlier attended the Chapel service, often with their wives or with a guest; and in recent years, one student invited by each of the Fellows in rotation.

That evening the student in question was Antony Plummer, the new organ scholar, who had been invited by Julian Storrs for the very good reason that the two of them had attended the same school, the Services School, Dartmouth, to which establishment some members of the armed forces were wont to send their sons while they themselves were being shunted from one posting to another around the world — in former colonies, protectorates, mandated territories, and the few remaining overseas possessions.

Plummer had never previously been so honored, and from his new perspective, seated between Mr. and Mrs. Storrs, he looked around him lovingly at the gilded, dimly illuminated portraits of the famous alumni — the poets and the politicians, the soldiers and the scientists — who figured so largely in the lineage of Lonsdale. The rafted timbers of the ceiling were lost in darkness, and the shadows were deep on the somber paneling of the walls, as deftly and deferentially the scouts poured wine into the sparkling glasses.

Storrs, just a little late in the proceedings perhaps, decided it was time to play the expansive host.

“Where is your father now, Plummer?”

“Last I heard he was running some NATO exercise in Belgium.”

“Colonel now, isn’t he?”

“Brigadier.”

“My goodness!”

“You were with him in India, I think.”

Storrs nodded: “Only a captain, though! I followed my father into the Royal Artillery there, and spent a couple of years trying to teach the natives how to shoot. Not much good at it, I’m afraid.”

“Who — the natives?”

Storrs laughed good-naturedly. “No — me. Most of ’em could have taught me a few things, and I wasn’t really cut out for service life anyway. So I opted for a gentler life and applied for a Fellowship here.”

Angela Storrs had finished the bisque soup, and now complimented Plummer on the anthem through which he had conducted his largely female choir during the Chapel service.

“You enjoyed it, Mrs. Storrs?”

“Er, yes. But to be quite truthful, I prefer boy sopranos.”

“Can you say why that is?”

“Oh, yes! One just feels it, that’s all. We heard the Fauré Requiem yesterday evening. Absolutely wonderful — especially the ‘In Paradisum,’ wasn’t it, Julian?”

“Very fine, yes.”

“And you see,” continued Angela, “I would have known they were boys, even with my eyes shut. But don’t ask me why. One just feels that sort of thing, as I said. Don’t you agree? One shouldn’t try to rationalize everything.”

Three places lower down the table, one of the other dons whispered into his neighbor’s ear:

“If that woman gets into the Lodge, I’ll go and piss all over her primroses!”

By coincidence, colonialism was a topic at the far end of the table, too, where Denis Cornford, his wife beside him, was listening rather abstractedly to a visiting History Professor from Yale.

“No. Don’t be too hard on yourselves. The Brits didn’t treat the natives all that badly, really. Wouldn’t you agree, Denis?”

“No, I wouldn’t, I’m afraid,” replied Cornford simply. “I haven’t made any particular study of the subject, but my impression is that the British treated most of their colonials quite abominably.”

Shelly slipped her left hand beneath the starched white tablecloth, and gently moved it along his thigh. But she could feel no perceptible response.

At the head of the splendid oak plank that constituted the High Table at Lonsdale, over the roast lamb, served with St. Julien ’93, Sir Clixby had been seeking to mollify the bishop’s bitter condemnation of the English Examination Boards for expecting Rwandan refugees to study the Wars of the Roses. And soon after the profiteroles, the atmosphere seemed markedly improved.

All the conversation which had been crisscrossing the evening — amusing, interesting, pompous, spiteful — ceased abruptly as the Master banged his gavel, and the assembled company rose to its feet.

Benedictus benedicatur.

The words came easily and suavely, from lips that were slightly overred, slightly overfull, in a face so smooth one might assume that it seldom had need of the razor.

Those who wished, and that was most of them, now repaired to the SCR where coffee and port were being served (though wholly informally) and where the Master and Julian Storrs stood side-by-side, buttocks turned toward the remarkably realistic gas fire.

“Bishop on his way back to the railway station then?” queried Storrs.

“On his way back to Africa , I hope!” said the Master with a grin. “Bloody taxi would have to be late tonight, wouldn’t it? And none of you lot with a car here.”

“It’s this drink-driving business, Master. I’m all in favor of it. In fact, I’d vote for random checks myself.”