Oxford Blood (11 page)

An open car, small and red and noisy, passed her: the driver and the male passengers were wearing white. A girl in the front seat, wearing pale blue, waved: it was Fanny Iverstone. Jemima waved back. Fanny at least had perfectly recovered from the events of the previous night, even if Saffron was lying in the Radcliffe Infirmary, eight stitches in his scalp, but otherwise not as badly injured as that glimpse of him white-faced on his bier had seemed to indicate.

It was this sight of Fanny which jolted Jemima towards the source of her own disquiet: at least about Oxford. It was all very well for Cy Fredericks, as chairman of a commercial television company, to talk enthusiastically about 'a
post-Brideshead
situation', followed by his famous pronouncement: 'these Golden Kids mean Big Bucks'. But the various attempts on Saffron's life (for so she certainly regarded them) cast rather a different light on the social situation at Oxford University, 'post-
Brideshead
or otherwise.

Some person or some people hated Saffron enough to wish him dead, or at best very severely injured. Leaving aside the mysterious business of Bim Marcus' fall, an attack with a boat hook was not to be put in the same category as some form of undergraduate jape on the river. The kind of jape for example that Rufus Pember and Nigel Copley had stoutly sworn they intended to carry out that night, only to be thwarted by some previous more murderous intrusion.

'Saffer is a shit' had pronounced a huge and dripping Nigel Copley: Saffron's claim to this noun was evidently received wisdom in the Copley/ Pember set. Big Nigel had been hauled with some difficulty out of the river where he had attempted to hide beneath his own overturned canoe, following the discovery of Saffron's body. 'But we wanted to abduct him, you know, not to kill him.'

'Abduct
him ?' Jemima heard one of the dinner guests exclaim, possibly Bernardo Valliera, because he added: 'This is not South America, my friend.'

'Duck him, he said.
Duck
him,' Rufus Pember, equally wet but somehow more composed, interrupted. 'Duck him. A good old-fashioned British custom.' He glared at Valliera. In Jemima's view, not every red-haired person justified the reputation of their kind for aggression; Rufus Pember however, for all his physical resemblance to the dying Chatterton, certainly did.

For the time being Jemima suspended judgement on the involvement of Messrs Pember and Copley in the attack on Saffron. (Although she certainly did not believe a mere ducking had been intended: who would take canoes late at night, travel a mile upstream, merely to administer a ducking ? It made no sense. So to Rufus Pember's aggressive quality, she added a capacity for quick thinking: Copley's admission had been neatly turned.)

But now as she reached Holywell, and the long secure wall of Magdalen, she considered Fanny's words anew: 'Lots of people loathe Saffer who've never even
met
him.' Was that uncomfortable thing at the heart of the idyll simple human envy? In an age of grants, declining, and unemployment, rising, it was easy to see how some undergraduates might actively envy Saffron for his advantages. Not only the media found themselves in 'a post-
Brideshead
situation'. Many students came up to Oxford, envisaging themselves enjoying their own
mini-Brideshead
existence for a year or two, before setting down to a more serious way of life. Oxford was a place of great expectations. What happened when those expectations were disappointed? Great envy? Even, perhaps, great hatred? For that matter what price the classless society based on merit which many might hope to find at a university if nowhere else in Britain? The cars, parties, dinners of the young and rich ensured them not only a sour spotlight within the university, but the rather more appreciative attention of the media in the world outside. Jemima reflected that Cy Fredericks' enthusiasm for Golden Kids was really quite typical: you could not imagine him mounting a whole programme on the lifestyle of comprehensive-school students once at Oxford, with due respect to the views of Dr Kerry Barber whom she was about to visit.

Jemima's conversation with Proffy came back to her. Who was to say what Lazarus actually
felt
about Dives, as he ate up the crumbs from the rich man's table? And maybe being forbidden to give Dives a glass of water afterwards, an instruction from Abraham, was one of the pleasurable experiences of his (after) life.

As Jemima reached the porter's lodge of St Lucy's College, she was thinking that money - and blood - had a lot to answer for. Blood! That unlucky word again. Better to concentrate on money.

'Money and where it comes from, money and where it goes to,' Kerry Barber was saying a few minutes later as he lay back in an ugly modern chair which was ill-suited to the large panelled room in St Lucy's famous Pond Quad; he was airing long rather good legs clad in a pair of crumpled white shorts. Dr Barber had evidently just taken part in some active game although
it
was difficult to make out exactly what, since the single thing his room had in common with Saffer's was the amount of sporting equipment littered about. 'Did you see my piece on the redistribution of Britain's wealth as reflected or rather
not
reflected in the average income of an undergraduate's parents? "Grants should Get up and Go". Shocking, quite shocking.'

Kerry Barber jumped up and poured Jemima another large sherry. It was of excellent quality; very dry and if you liked sherry, delicious. Jemima felt it would be ungracious to say that she actually hated sherry, when Barber was such a generous host. Furthermore, he clearly did not drink himself, but took occasional swigs at a china mug bearing a symbol of international goodwill; goodness knew what it contained.

All in all, he was really a very decent man. It was only under gentle pressure from Jemima - the trained interviewer - that he revealed he had spent the afternoon playing squash with paraplegics; further discreet questioning, centred on the mysterious china mug, elicited the fact that he gave the money he would otherwise have spent on drink to the Third World.

'It's a decision Mickey - my wife - and I took years ago and you'd be surprised how it mounts up.' He smiled rather sweetly. 'You see we both enjoyed a drink before - and we try not to cheat by pretending to drink less as the years go by. If anything, as Mickey pointed out, we might be drinking
more.
So many of our friends are drinking more these days. We notice it at our own parties, where of course we try to keep the drink flowing as much as possible. Mickey seriously questions whether the price of three glasses of wine each is enough to put in the box at the end of an evening. Judging from our married friends, at least one of us would be an alcoholic by now - if we drank that is. But which is it to be?' He smiled. 'Statistics suggest Mickey but as she has the lower income that doesn't seem quite fair.'

Jemima, self-consciously clutching her own second sherry, looked nervously round the room. Was there a box - the box - visible? She thought she saw something which looked like a collecting box near the door and made a mental resolve to donate handsomely to it (the price of a half bottle of champagne at least) on departure. In the meantime, as Kerry Barber was much the most decent person she had met in Oxford, with the possible exception of Jack Iverstone (Proffy with his views on Dives deserved the epithet of engaging rather than decent) Jemima looked forward to his confrontation with the so-called Golden Kids on the programme. What would the Oxford Bloods make of his policy concerning drink and the Third World? Why, their donations if made along the same lines would keep several African states going for months . . .

She wondered if any of them had crossed Kerry Barber's path. The answer, under the circumstances, was slightly surprising.

'Lord Saffron, as I suppose we must call him, although the sooner that sort of thing goes the better. Yes. He came to me for economics his first year.' Jemima realized rather guiltily that it had never even occurred to her to enquire what subject Saffron was reading; or was it an indictment of his own deliberately frivolous approach to the University?

'He's rather bright, you know,' went on Kerry Barber, still more surprisingly. 'Good mind. Much brighter for example than his cousin Jack of our college. A good man, but almost frighteningly conventional in his thinking. To make up for that dreadful father, I suppose. Hours in libraries and very few minutes of original thought.'

'What's he reading - Jack?' enquired Jemima.

'Oh history of course,' replied Kerry Barber in what for him passed for a malicious remark.

Jemima grappled with the unexpected phenomenon of Saffron being naturally intelligent.

'You don't mean he actually did any work?' she asked incredulously.

'Good heavens, no! And it's perfectly disgraceful that he hasn't been sent down. A prime example of the sort of thing COMPCAMP would put an end to. Coming from a comprehensive school, he would of course—' And Dr Barber launched into his favourite subject. To Jemima's general satisfaction, however - for was he not now saying exactly what she wanted him to say on the
Golden Kids
programme? Provided she could somehow get it past the eagle eye of Cy Fredericks. Cy had a tiresome habit of returning to Megalithic House after weeks of absence in some luxurious haunt, as though by instinct, just as a programme-maker was trying to slip a fast one past him at the editing stage.

All the same, she judged it right to leave after about twenty minutes of elucidation on the aims of COMPCAMP. She did so as gracefully as possible, pausing at the door of the room to deposit a five-pound note in the collecting box.

'For my two delicious sherries.'

'Good heavens, you could have had many more for that!' exclaimed Barber generously. 'Are you sure you don't want to come back? I feel I've only just scratched the surface of our discussion. COMPCAMP is such an important issue.' He sighed as though Jemima was perhaps not the only television interviewer to back away through his door, leaving the depths of his campaign unprobed. 'Ah well, another time. But I must say I envy you having the forum of television for your views.'

'We'll share it,' promised Jemima, generous in her turn, vowing inwardly to defeat Cy even if it meant bribing Miss Lewis to muck up his return flight arrangements for the first time in her life.

Jemima wandered back into Pond Quad still thinking about envy. She gazed rather distractedly into the large round stone-built 'pond' itself, with its statue of St Lucy, Virgin and Martyr, in the centre. As a result of undergraduate binges St Lucy sometimes had to endure further forms of martyrdom. She was currently wearing a large painted notice on her bosom: 'St Lucy votes SDP.' Below someone had written: 'I know. That's why they killed her.' How old were the golden carp in the pond supposed to be? Old enough not to want to go on television programmes, whatever the motive. Old enough not to envy any of the hurrying undergraduates who thronged the quad.

One of the undergraduates stopped and smiled at Jemima.

'Are you going to feature the fish in your programme? They
are
golden.'

It was Jack Iverstone. He was carrying a pile of books, as on their first acquaintance in Saffron's rooms, and Jemima was reminded of Kerry Barber's judgement: 'hours in libraries and very few minutes of original thought'. She decided to put it down to the natural disdain of the economist for the historian.

'I've just been to see Saffer,' he went on. 'I must say he has the strength of ten. Enormous gash in his head and he's asking me to smuggle in some champagne for a celebration.'

'A celebration?' queried Jemima incredulously. 'What on earth can he have to celebrate beyond being holed up in the Radcliffe?'

Jack Iverstone continued to look at her with his easy charming smile. But there was now something quizzical about the smile which she did not quite understand.

'You know Saffer,' he said after a pause. 'He celebrates the oddest things. Why don't you ask him yourself?'

10

Intellectual Advantages

It was Jemima's intention to visit Saffron as soon as she got her interview with Proffy out of the way: she thought it would be good to be able to contrast the Mossbanker way of life with that of the heroically abstinent Barbers, for she somehow doubted whether Proffy and his clever wife Eleanor had a collection box in their North Oxford house - that is, if Proffy's appetite for food and drink at the Lycee restaurant and The Punting Heaven were anything to go by.

She still wondered at the nature of Saffron's celebration and the meaning of Jack lverstone's quizzical glance as she collected her car from the Martyrs car park and drove up St Giles, leaving Rochester College, Saffron's theoretical residence, on her right (and the Radcliffe Infirmary, his actual dwelling on her left). Arrival at the Mossbankers' house, however, drove these thoughts out of her mind. Chillington Road was a pretty tree-lined backwater, part of a network of similar roads off the Banbury Road. Thus the exterior of the Mossbankers' house, despite the ugliness of its late-Victorian architecture, was agreeably tranquil, softened as its facade was by blossom, the door masked by a weeping tree. The interior on the other hand was the reverse of tranquil. In fact Jemima's first reaction was to decide that marriage between consenting Oxford intellectuals should probably be banned for the future (unless sworn to be childless).