Death's Jest-Book (11 page)

He expanded on this for a little
while, almost addressing me directly. It was as if now that he'd won
our little contest he wanted to put the memory of the arm-twisting
and near-bribery behind us and demonstrate that he was a serious
Beddoes scholar.

The others listened happily too,
sitting on the deep leather armchairs and sofa which the spacious
room afforded, drinking from their brandy balloons and puffing on
their genuine Havanas till the aromatic smoke almost hid the
decorated ceiling. I sometimes think that it will not be the least of
the twentieth century's philistinisms that it has destroyed the art
of enjoying tobacco. Like the poet said, a fuck is only a fuck, but a
good cigar is a smoke.

Long before he
bored his audience (the great talkers are also masters of timing)
Albacore stopped talking about Beddoes and invited us all to admire
the copy of the
Vita S. Godrid
which he mentioned to me
earlier and which he'd brought from the secure room of the college
library for our delectation. Merely to handle something of such
beauty and antiquity was enough for most of us, but Dwight with that
lack of embarrassment about money which is the mark of a civilized
American, cut to the chase and said, 'How much would it fetch on the
open market?'

Albacore smiled and said, 'Why,
this is a pearl worth more than all your tribe, Dwight. Think what
you have here. A contemporary copy of the contemporary life written
by a man who actually visited Godric in his hut at Finchale, Reginald
of Durham, a man himself of such piety and erudition that these
qualities are said by tradition to be accorded to all subsequent
clerks who bear that name and title. In other words you are touching
the book that touched the hand of a man who touched the hand of the
saint himself. Who could put a price on something like this?'

'Well,' said Dwight, unputdown,
'I know a dealer called Trick Fachmann in St Poll who'd take a shot
at it.'

Even Albacore laughed, and now
the conversation became general, running like quicksilver from tongue
to tongue, good thing following good thing, wisdom and wit doled out
in a prodigality of plenty, and I felt tears prick my eyes at the
sense of privilege and pleasure in being part of this company in this
place at this time.

If it were now to die, 'twere now
to be most happy. . .

I could have stayed there
forever, but all things have their natural foreordained ends, and
finally we dispersed, some to their student staircases, Dwight and I
making our unsteady way back to the Q's Lodging, arm in arm for
mutual support.

I undressed
and climbed into bed, but I could not go to sleep. At first it was
because of my excitement at the world of profit and delight which
seemed to be opening up before me. But then a sudden and complete
reversal took place .. .
from the migh t/ Of joy in minds that can
no further go, / As high as we have mounted in delight / In our
dejection do we sink as low.
Which is why, dear Mr Pascoe, my old
leech-gatherer, I am sitting here propped up against my pillow,
penning these words to you. Have I done the right thing in giving in
to Albacore? In my last letter I was sure I had your approval. Now I
am equally certain that you with your strong principles and
unmoveable moral convictions will despise me for my venality. It's so
very important for me to get you to see my side of things. I am an
innocent abroad here, a pygmy jousting with giants. It is not always
given to us to choose the instruments of our elevation. You must have
felt this sometimes in your relationship with the egregious Dalziel.
You may well have wished on occasion that the glittering prizes of
your career were not in the gift of such a one. And by indignities
men come to dignities. And it is sometimes base.

So if I seem to be asking for
your blessing, it is beca...

Another
interruption!

What soaps my letters are turning
out to be, every instalment ending in a cliffhanger!

And this time
what a climactic interruption, fit to rank with those end-of-series
episodes of shows like
Casualty
and
ER
designed to whet
your what-happens-next appetite to such an edge that you will return
as hungry as ever after the summer break.

But I mustn't be frivolous. What
we have here isn't soap, it's reality. And it's tragic.

It was the fearful clamour of a
bell which distracted me.

I leapt out of bed and rushed to
the open window. Since my time in the Syke, I always sleep with my
window open whatever the season. Looking out into the quad I could
see nothing, but I could hear away to the right a growing hubbub of
noise and, when I thrust my head out into the night air and looked
towards it, it seemed to me that the dark outline of the building
forming that side of the quad was already being etched against the
sky by the rosy wash of dawn.

Except it was far too early for
dawn and anyway I was looking north.

Pausing only to thrust my feet
into my shoes and drag a raincoat round my shoulders, I rushed out
into the night.

Oh God, the sight I saw when I
passed from the Q's quad to the D's quad!

It was the Dean's Lodging, no
longer a thing of beauty but now crouched there, squat and ugly as a
marauding monster, with a great tongue of flame coiling out of a
downstairs window and greedily licking its facade.

I hurried forward, eager to help
but not knowing how I could. Firemen bearing hoses from the engine,
which seemed to have got wedged under a Gothic arch that gave the
only vehicular approach to this part of the college, some wearing
breathing apparatus, moved around me with that instancy of purpose
which marks the assured professional.

'What's happening for God's
sake?' I cried to one who paused beside me to cast an assessing eye
over the scene.

'Old building,' he said
laconically. 'Lots of wood. Three centuries to dry out. These places
are bonfires waiting to be lit. Who're you?'

I'm a . . .' What was I? Suddenly
I didn't know. I'm at a conference here.'

'Oh,' he said, losing interest.
'Need someone who knows who's likely to be in there.'

'I do know,' I said quickly.

He turned out to be the Assistant
Chief Fire Officer, a good-looking young man in a clean-cut kind of
way.

I told him that, as far as I
knew, Sir Justinian and Lady Albacore were the only inmates of the
Lodging and tried to indicate from my memory of our tour where they
were likely to be found. All of this he repeated into his
walkie-talkie. Behind him as we talked, I could see that the fire had
reached the upper storeys. My heart began to misgive me that we were
witnessing a truly terrible tragedy. Then his radio crackled with the
good news that Amaryllis was safe and well. But my joy at hearing
this was immediately diluted by the lack of any news about Justin.

It began to rain quite heavily at
this point, which was good news for the firefighters. I could see no
point in catching my death of cold watching a fire, so I returned to
my room and letter. Might as well go on writing as I doubt if I shall
be able to fall asleep.

Wrong
again!

I was woken in my chair by Dwight
shaking my shoulder.

As I struggled out of sleep I
could see from his face the news was not good.

Indeed it was the worst.

They'd found Justinian Albacore's
body on the ground floor where the fire had been at its fiercest.

I was devastated. I had little
cause to love the man but perhaps something in his mockingly subtle
character appealed to me and I'd found last night that I had no
problem with the prospect of spending much time in his company.

Dwight wanted to talk but all I
wanted was to be left to myself.

I got dressed and went outside.
The shell of the Dean's Lodging, gently steaming in a Fennish
drizzle, stood as a dreadful illustration of the power of flames. As
I stood and contemplated it I was joined by my handsome young Fire
Officer who gave me the fullest picture they could piece together of
last night's events.

It seems that Amaryllis had been
woken by Justin getting out of bed in the early hours. Drowsily she
asked him what was up, to which he replied he thought he'd heard
something downstairs but it was probably nothing so why didn't she go
back to sleep, which she did. She woke again some time later to find
the room full of smoke. On the landing outside her bedroom she found
things even worse with flames plainly visible at the foot of the
stairs. She retreated into her room and rang the fire brigade. Then,
pausing only to put on slacks, T-shirt, several warm pullovers and a
little make-up, she opened the bedroom window which overlooked the
roof of an architecturally incongruous conservatory, built by an
orchidomaniac Victorian dean before there were such things as
conservation orders, on to which she descended with the help of a
drainpipe and from which she slid into the arms of the first fireman
on the scene.

As for Justin, all that is
possible at the moment is speculation.

It seems
likely that when he descended the stairs he found his study already
well ablaze. His awareness that lying within was the college's
greatest treasure, Reginald of Durham's
Vita S. Godrid,
which
he had personally and recklessly removed from the college library,
must have blinded his judgment. Instead of raising the alarm, he
probably rushed inside to rescue the precious manuscript but found
himself driven back by the heat to the threshold where, overcome by
fumes, he collapsed and died.

From what I
can see for myself and from what my new friend told me, it's pretty
clear that not only has the
Vita
been reduced to ashes, but
not a page of Albacore's Beddoes manuscript or a single card from his
card-index system can have survived the inferno.

It is still early days to reach
conclusions about causes, but when I told the Fire Officer that we
had all been sitting around the study last night drinking brandy and
smoking cigars, his large blue eyes sparkled and he made a note in
his note-pad.

The conference has naturally been
cancelled and, after a morning spent answering questions and making
statements, I am sitting here once more writing to you, dear Mr
Pascoe, in the hope of clearing my thoughts.

I know you will think me selfish,
but deep down beneath all my real sorrow over Justinian's death is a
tiny nugget of self-pity. All my hopes have died too, all the
glorious dreams of a Cambridge future I was having only last night.

Poor old me, eh?

One
more interruption, this one, I hope, definitely the last!

As I wrote my last self-pitying
sentence, Dwight came into the room and said with that American
directness, 'So what are your plans now, Franny, boy?'

'Plans?' I said bitterly. 'Plans
need a future and I don't seem to have one’

He laughed and said, 'Jesus,
Fran, don't go soft on me. It's an ill wind .. . Seems to me you've
got a great future. From what I've picked up over the last couple of
days, you've inherited a half-written book about Beddoes which looks
like it's got the field clear after what happened last night. Tell
me, you got any deal going with a Brit publisher?'

'Well, no,' I said and explained
the situation.

'And there's no way these guys
can come back at you now and say they've got a claim to anything that
Dr Johnson did while he was taking their money?'

'No. In fact I've got a written
disclaimer. It seemed a good thing to ask for . . .'

'I'll say!' he said approvingly.
'So now you can go ahead and finish the book any which way you want
and make your name, right?'

I thought about it. This was an
aspect of the tragedy that hadn't occurred to me before. Truly, God
works in a mysterious way!

He said, 'Ever think about
getting it published in the States? Lot of interest in Beddoes over
there, you know. Lot of money available too, if you know where to
look.'

I said, 'Really? I wish I knew
where to look then!'

'I do,' he said. 'My own
university publishers have been stirring themselves recently. They're
just waking to the truth I've been telling them for years, either you
grow or you die. Tell you what, I'm going to pack now, then I'm being
driven up to London

'Down,' I said.

'Sorry?'

'I think from Cambridge you
always go down to London. Or anywhere.'

He came close to me and said,
'Listen Fran, that's the kind of thinking you want to get out of your
head. OK, Cambridge was once the place to be, but that was costume
drama time. Nothing stays still. Either you go away from it or it
goes away from you. Hell, I was in Uzbekistan recently and being an
old Romantic I wanted to take a look at the Aral Sea. Well, I got to
where my battered Baedeker said it ought to be and you know what I
found? Nothing. Desert. The Russkis have been siphoning off so much
water for so long that it's shrunk to half its size. I talked to this
old guy still living in the house he was born in and he pointed to
the cracked stony ground outside his front door and said that when he
was a kid he used to run out of the house naked on a summer morning
and dive straight into the waves. Now he'd have to run two hundred
fucking miles! Same thing with Cambridge. It's all dried up. Look
real close at it and what do you see? It's an old movie set where
they once did a few good things, but now the cameras and the lights
and the action have moved on. Nothing as sad as an old movie set
that's been left to rot in the rain. Think about it, Fran. I'll be
moving out in an hour. Hope you'll be with me.'

Well, after that I needed a walk
to clear my head. Once more I strolled along the Backs. Only this
time I looked at all those ancient buildings with a very different
eye.