William Trevor - The Hill Bachelors

‘It hasn’t come your way, though,’ McMoran scratchily points out, and wonders what the obituarists have composed already about this overweight, obtuse man, for he has always considered Linderfoot more than a little stupid even though he holds a Chair, which McMoran doesn’t. Obedient, it would seem, to the devilment of some jesting or malicious student, four newspapers this morning have published their obituarists’ tributes to the professor who has not yet arrived for the Master’s midday drinks.

‘Kind on the whole,’ Quicke remarks to a colleague who does not respond, being one of several in the room who likes to keep a private counsel. ‘Oh, kind, of course. No, I would not say less than kind.’

Grinning through bushy sideburns that spread on to his cheeks, Quicke offers variations of his thought, recalling an attack made on the historian Willet-Horsby after his death — disguised, of course, but none the less an attack. ‘1956. Unusual on an obituary page, but there you are.’

Quicke is the untidiest of the men in the room, his pink corduroy suit having gone without the attentions of an iron for many weeks, the jacket shabby, lapels touched here and there with High Table droppings. A virulent red tie — assertion of Quicke’s political allegiance — does not quite hide the undone buttons of his checked lumberjack’s shirt. He is a hairy, heavily made man, his facial features roughly textured, who in his sixties is still the enfant terrible of College junketings and gatherings such as this one.

‘Ormston has taken it in his stride,’ he finishes his observations now, guessing this to be far from so. ‘He is a man of humour.’

‘Ormston’s nothing of the sort.’ The tallest man in the room, skinny as a tadpole, Triller peers down at the Master’s wife to contradict what both have overheard. Triller is courteous but given on occasion to sharpness, tweedily one of the old school, with a pipe that this midday remains unlit in the Master’s drawing-room.

‘It is a most appalling thing,’ the Master’s wife, the only woman in the room, asserts. ‘I doubt that Professor Ormston will turn up.’

‘You’ve had no word?’

‘Not a thing.’

‘Oh, then he’ll come. Unlike him not to.’

‘It’s going too far, don’t you think, this? Why is it that everything must go too far these days?’

‘Your husband, I’m perfectly certain, intends to do what is necessary.’

The Master is lax, Triller’s private view is. Tarred with the Sixties’ brush, the Master long ago let the reins slip away. What better can be expected now? A show of strength is necessary, and Triller adds:

‘Not for an instant do I doubt the Master’s intention to supply it. How odd, though, that the victim should be Ormston.’

‘I didn’t myself realize Professor Ormston was unpopular. No, not at all.’

‘He does not suck up.’ Professor Triller glances briefly at Wirich’s back and is pleased when the Master’s wife acknowledges his allusion with one of her faint smiles. ‘I don’t suppose Ormston has ever worn leathers in his life.’

This elicits laughter, a tinkle in the noise of conversation. Though not attired so now, Wirich is given to leather — jackets and tight leather trousers, studded belts, occasionally a choker. He rides a motorcycle, a big Yamaha.

‘Could this not simply be carelessness?’ the Master’s wife suggests. ‘Newspapers have a way, these days, of being careless.’

‘Not four different obituary departments, I’d have thought. I rather fear it was deliberate.’

Plump, with spectacles dangling, the Master’s wife retorts that no matter how the unpleasantness has come about it is unacceptable in an older university. She’s cross because what clearly excites her guests does not excite her, nor the Master himself. Something has been taken from them, she feels. Today should belong to them.

‘I considered telephoning Ormston,’ the Master reveals to the author of Tribal Organization in the Karakoram Foothills and to a classicist who considers the investigation of foothill tribes a waste of time. ‘But then I rather thought that would simply highlight the thing, so I didn’t.’

Nods greet this. They would have resisted telephoning too, a joint indication is, both men reflecting that the Master’s role is not one they could ever take to, with irritating decisions endlessly to consider.

‘I really am disturbed.’ Given to booming, the Master lowers his voice to indicate the seriousness of his state. ‘I truly am.’

Before his time, by as much as fifteen years, there was the business of Batchett’s extra-mural lecture, and longer ago still the mocking of T. L. Hapgood, which now is in the annals, although no one in the Master’s drawing-room this midday knew T. L. Hapgood in his lifetime or is aware of what he looked like. More recently, one morning, there was the delivery of a pig to Dr Kindly, and that same evening four dozen take-away pizzas. Batchett had presented himself at a famous public school to lecture to the Geographical Society on land lines, only to discover that not only had some sort of mid-term break emptied the school of his anticipated audience but that there was, in fact, no Geographical Society and never had been.

‘The Hapgood riddle was never solved?’ the Karakoram foothills man hazards. ‘I’ve never known.’

‘No, they didn’t get to the bottom of it. Years later, identities often surface after such nuisances, but none did then. Some disaffected bunch.’

The bunch who took against T. L. Hapgood — by general consent because his sarcasm hurt — based their jape on the professor’s disdain for the stream of consciousness in the literature of his time. Other academics were written to in Professor Hapgood’s name, announcing his authorship of a forthcoming study of James Joyce’s life and works. I feel my task will be incomplete and greatly lacking without the inclusion of your views on the great Irishman, and in particular, perhaps, on his subtle and enlightening use of what we have come to call the ‘stream of consciousness’. Anything from a paragraph to thirty or so pages would be welcome from your pen, with prompt reward either in cheque form or our own good claret, whichever is desired. I am most reluctant to go to press without your voice, inimitable in its perception and its sagacity . For eighteen months Professor Hapgood received contributions from Europe, America, Japan and the antipodes. Later, demands for reimbursement became abusive.

‘I didn’t know Ormston in his youth wanted to be a cabinet-maker,’ the classicist remarks. ‘It said that in one of them this morning.’

‘Affectionately, though,’ the Master hurriedly interjects. ‘The point was affectionately made.’

‘Oh yes, affectionately.’

Historians and philosophers and breezy sociologists, promoters of literature and language, of medieval lore and the Internet, they stand about and talk or do not talk. In different ways the diversion draws them from their shells, even those who have decided that comment on any matter can be a giveaway. Some wonder about the absent victim, others about his younger wife — a flibbertigibbet in Triller’s view, the price you pay for beauty. To McMoran it seems like fate’s small revenge that Ormston should be struck down before his time: his own wife has long ago given in to dowdiness and fat.

At twenty-five past twelve there is a lull in the drawing-room conversations, occurring as if for a reason, although there isn’t one. For a moment only Quicke’s rather high voice can be heard, repeating to someone else that Ormston is a man of humour. A snigger is inadequately suppressed.

‘My dear, there are empty glasses,’ the Master’s wife murmurs in her husband’s ear.