William Trevor - The Hill Bachelors

Quicke’s donkey roar reaches him in his corner. It mocks him, as the faces all around him do — McMoran’s wizened, Linderfoot’s a blob of fat, the one that has been to the Karakoram foothills sunburnt, Wirich’s beaky, the Master’s square and heavy, Triller’s long and tidy. Kellfittard himself shares with the man who nineteen years ago snatched beauty from him a pallor without a trace of pink, and rimless spectacles. Both men are grey-haired; both are sparely made. In the course of his morning’s thoughts it seemed rational to Kellfittard that, in marrying again, a wife would choose, the second time, a physical repetition. Though in no other way, those same thoughts adamantly insisted, was there a similarity.

‘Impossible to know how it was done. One of our names taken in vain, I have no doubt.’

It is Linderfoot who makes that pronouncement, approaching Kellfittard in his chummy way. What Linderfoot maintains — idiotically, it seems to Kellfittard — is that some undergraduate has simply acted a part on the telephone, proffering the news of a professor’s death.

‘Your name or mine,’ Linderfoot presses, ‘would seem to have been enough.’

‘No,’ another man joins in to say. ‘That would not have been enough.’

‘Then what?’ Linderfoot purses his big lips as if to whistle, his habit when a conversation palls. The man who has butted in says:

‘This was done from within a news agency. It must have been.’

‘A news agency?’

‘One of Ormston’s old students. Forgiveness does not come cheaply always.’

‘But Ormston —’

‘We all offend.’

‘Ormston appears to be pretending it hasn’t happened.’ Kellfittard breaks his silence with that. He does not say he rejoiced to know the man was dead. He does not believe that he himself in any way offends his students, but he keeps that back also.

‘Extraordinary,’ Linderfoot interjects, pursing his lips again. ‘Extraordinary.’

It is known to the others, but not to Linderfoot — who takes no interest in such matters — that Kellfittard feels he should have married Vanessa Ormston, that he has married no one else because a passion has lingered. It’s understandable, in Linderfoot’s opinion, that Ormston should choose to ignore the embarrassment of what has happened to him. He blunders about the room, seeking other conversations, unaware of the prevailing disappointment that Ormston has not appeared among them a broken man, that there has been this anticlimax.

‘An inside job,’ Quicke remarks eventually, determined to exact something from the let-down. Leaving the house with Ormston, he offers his opinion as they make their way on the Master’s wide garden path. ‘On the media front, an inside job, so they are saying now.’

He touches one nostril and then the other with a red spotted handkerchief, causing Ormston to look away. Quicke’s manner implies particular comradeship between the two, a lowered tone suggests concern. The comradeship does not exist, the concern’s unreal.

‘What are you talking about?’ Ormston asks and in a roundabout way, the information larded with commiseration, he learns of what has occurred.

*

Passing on his left the grey-brown stone of porters’ lodge and deeply recessed library windows, Ormston remembers the torn back page of his morning paper. The face of the pop-group singer, which briefly he glanced at, is as briefly repeated in his recall. What was missing from that page was what was left hanging when the Master said the matter would be dealt with. The Master’s wife was awkward in her greeting, McMoran smug. Triller’s vague air disguised something else; Wirich stared; Linderfoot was excited; Kellfittard looked the other way. Every one of them knows.

As others already have, Ormston knits together an explanation that is similar to theirs except in detail. When he was young himself an unpopular Senior Dean suffered the indignity of being approached by a police constable, following information that confused his identity with a draper’s elderly assistant who hung around public lavatories. A youth called Tottle was sent down for that; and Ibbs and Churchman suffered the same fate less than a term later for stealing the Master’s clothing, confining him miserably when he should have been delivering the Hardiman lecture in the presence of a member of the Royal Family. All one year there’d been a spate of that kind of thing, chamber pots on spires, false charges laid, old Purser’s bicycle dismantled more than a dozen times.

Why should he be a victim now? He is not arrogant that he’s aware of, or aloof among his students; he does not seek to put them in their place. Lacking the ambition of his colleagues, he is a scholar as scholars used to be, learned in an old-fashioned sense. Has all this jarred and irritated without his knowing? Still walking slowly, Professor Ormston shakes his head. He is not a fool, of course he would have sensed unpopularity.

Noticing the green and black hanging sign of the St Boniface public house, he considers entering it and a moment later does so instead of passing by. He has rarely in his life been in a public house, maybe a dozen times in all, he estimates as the swing doors close behind him. Blue plush banquettes along the walls are marked with cigarette burns, as are the low tables arranged in front of them, each with a glass ashtray advertising a brand of beer and small round mats bearing similar insignia. Unwashed glasses have been collected and are still on trays; busy ten minutes ago with Saturday-morning trade, the place is empty now.

‘Sir?’ a man behind the bar greets Professor Ormston, looking up from a plate of minced meat with a topping of potato.

‘Might I have a glass of whisky?’

‘You could of course, sir.’

Warmly steaming, smeared with tomato sauce, the food smells of the grease it has been cooked in. On a radio somewhere a disc jockey is gabbling incomprehensibly.

‘Would I make that a double, sir?’

As if aware that his customer is unused to public-house measures, the barman holds the glass up to display how little whisky there is in it.

‘Yes, please do.’

‘Decent enough bit of weather.’

‘Yes, it is.’

‘There you go, sir.’

‘Thanks.’

He pays and takes the drink to one of the tables by the windows. ‘Kind,’ was how Quicke put it; all four obituarists were kind in Quicke’s opinion. ‘Quite right, of course.’ And he was able to nod, not up to pretending aloud that yes, the notices were kind enough. A dare, Quicke said, young men have dares. They think up these things and the one who is eventually in a position to do so sees something through. A bet it might have been, and probably was. There’d be apologies from all four editors, Quicke was certain about that.

A child appears behind the bar, only the top of her head visible. The man tells her to go away, but then he reaches for a glass and pours a Pepsi Cola into it while continuing to eat. He tells the girl she’ll be the ruin of him.

‘This’ll make me drunk,’ Professor Ormston tells himself, whisky on top of Tio Pepe before lunch. And yet he wants to stay here. The newspaper beside the trays of unwashed glasses on the bar is not the kind that has obituaries. Again the torn page stirs in his recall, only half of the backing singer there, the name of the army colonel not known to him, as the bishop’s wasn’t either. Of course a popular entertainer took precedence. The way things are these days, that stands to reason.

‘I’m sorry,’ he says at the bar after he has sat for a while longer, apologizing because the man hasn’t finished his food. But the man is cheerful, Irish by the sound of him. Professor Ormston has read somewhere that the Irish make good publicans, a touch of the blarney not out of place.