Sidney Chambers and the Perils of the Night (6 page)

Despite the horrors of a ‘freezing train and a frightful journey’, Amanda was on feisty form on her arrival, regaling Sidney with news of his sister Jennifer and a New Year house party that was full of ‘handsome men who had never bothered to learn how to be interesting’. It was a relief to get back to her work at the National Gallery, she said, and she was glad to be helping her old tutor Anthony Blunt with some research into the later paintings of Nicolas Poussin.

Sidney unfolded his napkin. ‘It is strange you should mention Blunt. He dined at the college a few nights ago.’

‘He’s not a Corpus man, is he?’

‘I think he was a guest of the Master.’

‘You didn’t talk to him? You know he’s the son of a vicar?’

‘I was a little distracted, Amanda.’

‘By anything in particular?’

‘Nothing too alarming.’

Amanda paused while the waitress finished pouring out her glass of wine. ‘I’m afraid I don’t believe you, Sidney. I have seen that look of yours before and it troubles me.’

‘One of our junior fellows has died. It’s been a sad business.’

‘By “junior” do you mean that he was young?’

‘It was an accident,’ Sidney answered.

‘I assume, by your tone, that it was nothing of the kind.’

‘It’s quite complicated,’ Sidney replied as their food arrived.

Amanda raised a glass of wine to her lips and made steady eye contact. ‘Are you getting into trouble again?’

‘I can’t seem to help it.’

‘Anything I can do?’

‘Yes,’ said Sidney, poking at a rather unsatisfactory poached egg soufflé. ‘You can take my mind off it. Tell me about London. What have you been up to?’

‘Nothing too exciting. I’ve told you about all the parties. Your sister is still seeing Johnny Johnson . . .’

‘And what about you?’

‘There’s one chap who’s being particularly attentive, but it’s too early to tell if he’s decent or not. I’m far more careful after the Guy debacle.’

It was only a year since Amanda’s future fiancé had disgraced himself with a hot-tempered display at a London dinner party and it had taken her months to recover from the embarrassment. ‘I think I’ve given up on men for the time being. There’s far too much work to do at the gallery. In any case,’ she continued, ‘it’s not my admirers we need to be discussing; it’s yours. I am talking about the famous widow, lest we are in any doubt.’

Sidney put his starter to one side. ‘I was afraid we’d come on to that.’

‘So you admit that Hildegard is an admirer?’ Amanda smiled. ‘I think I’ll have a little more wine.’

‘We are very good friends. That is all.’

Amanda remained silent, forcing Sidney to continue.

‘I had a marvellous time.’

‘Is that it?’

Sidney remembered strolling through the Tiergarten to the Badewanne jazz club where they had listened to the Johannes Rediske Quintet play with cool control. It was a relief that Hildegard ‘got’ jazz and understood why he liked its spontaneity and freedom. Afterwards, they had walked back on the Kurfürstendamm, past the bombed-out Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtnis-Kirche. It began to rain, and Hildegard had their only umbrella. When she put her arm through his, so that they could share it, and she squeezed up against him, it had felt the most natural thing in the world.

‘Well?’ Amanda asked. ‘Are you going to tell me anything?’

‘There’s nothing much to tell.’

‘I don’t believe that for a moment. It’s simply that you don’t want to talk about it. I seem to remember that she is musical.’

‘She teaches the piano. She plays Bach every day.’

‘She must be very serious.’

‘Not all the time. She is also a great fan of Jimmy Cagney.’

‘You have been to the cinema together?’

‘She has taken me. We went to see
13 Rue Madeleine
.’

‘Intriguing.’

‘It was rather fun.’

‘And is she beautiful?’

Sidney was not going to be drawn into any comparisons. ‘I think so.’

‘Not classically then, I imagine.’ Amanda looked at Sidney but it was clear that he was not going to say anything more and she had sufficient tact not to press the matter. ‘Will I ever meet her?’ she asked.

‘In due course.’

‘You mean that she is coming back to Cambridge?’

‘I have invited her.’

‘When?’

‘Later this year, I hope.’

‘That seems rather vague.’

‘I don’t want to rush things.’

‘Are you in love with her?’

‘That’s a very direct question.’

‘Are you prepared to answer it? Or shall I take your silence as assent?’ The waitress cleared away their plates. ‘You can think about your answer over your coq au vin. I’m sorry you found the starter so disappointing. You should have had the onion soup.’

‘Really, Amanda, it’s very hard to know what I think; and yet, at the same time, I quite like not knowing. It’s a pleasant confusion.’

‘That means you are, I would have thought.’

‘In love? I don’t know, Amanda. But I think I feel most like myself when I am with her.’

‘I thought you got that with me.’

‘You are, if I may say so, more of a challenge.’

‘That’s what most of my admirers say. Do you think it puts them off?’

‘I do think that many men find intelligent women difficult; particularly if they are cleverer than them.’

‘None of them are as intelligent as you, of course.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that.’

Amanda smiled. ‘You’re not sorry at all. You are extremely pleased.’

‘Well I do like to be top in some regard. Would you like another glass of wine?’

‘That would be kind; although I myself seem to have been displaced from the top spot.’

‘Not at all. You are very different women.’

The waitress arrived with two plates in her hand. ‘Who’s having the daube?’ she asked.

‘I am. I’m still cold,’ Amanda replied, before asking, ‘Do you think you’ll marry her?’

Sidney hesitated.

Ever since his ordination to the priesthood, he had resigned himself to the idea of celibacy. He could no more imagine a life shared with a German widow than he could with his dazzling friend opposite. Even if he were to marry he was sure that he would make an unsatisfactory husband. He was incapable of concentrating on the traditionally masculine areas of everyday life. He may have been able to translate Herodotus from the Greek but he was not able to drive a car. He could listen to the darkest fears of his parishioners and comfort them in their hours of anxiety, but he was not sure that he could change a fuse. He was hopeless with money, finding that he always had more pressing things to do than go to the bank or pay his bills. No, Sidney had always said to himself in the past; marriage was not for him. He would take as many wedding services as his parishioners required, and marry hundreds of couples in the course of his ministry, but he was destined to remain a bachelor.

‘Hildegard is a widow, you will remember. I don’t think she’s ready for marriage.’

‘Does that mean that you are?’

Sidney imagined himself sitting in his study with Hildegard playing the piano in a room across the corridor. He could even picture a small child, a daughter perhaps, standing in the doorway, asking him if he’d help mend her kite.

‘Are you going to answer my question?’ Amanda asked.

Snow lay heavy on the tiled roofs, turrets and parapets of Corpus; outlining the cinquefoil lights and gabled dormers of Old Court, that most ancient of all the enclosed areas of Cambridge, as Sidney returned from seeing Amanda on to her train.

He remembered how the astronomer and mathematician Johannes Kepler had been intrigued by snow crystals, writing a small treatise entitled
On the Six-Cornered Snowflake
. In 1611 he asked the fundamental question: ‘There must be some definite cause why, whenever snow begins to fall, its initial formation invariably displays the shape of a six-cornered starlet. For if it happens by chance, why do they not fall just as well with five corners or seven?’

In his treatise, Kepler compared their symmetry with that of honeycombs and Sidney had once heard a sermon that used the miracle of the snowflake as an example of both the simplicity and the complexity of God’s creation. It might be worth reviving that idea, he thought, particularly in this weather. Instead of seeing the mass of snow, the congregation could be persuaded to look into the smallest details of it in order to find God.

‘STOP!’

Sidney did so.

‘STAY THERE!’

A large weight of stone fell from the roof of New Court and landed in front of him.

‘Good God, sir,’ cried the porter. ‘You could have been killed.’

Sidney felt the fear run through him.

‘That was close. We’ve had such trouble with the snow, sir. The college is falling apart. Some of the older buildings can’t stand it. It’s the water, you see. It gets into the stone and then freezes and thaws, expands and contracts . . .’

‘Yes,’ Sidney cut him off. ‘I understand the process.’

‘I’ll get one of the men to clear up. You must have someone watching out for you.’

‘I suppose I do.’

‘Of course, as a priest, you probably have extra protection. I imagine the angels don’t want to lose one of their own. That was a near miss.’

‘I wouldn’t call myself an angel, Bill.’

‘Better than being a devil, though, isn’t it?’ the porter winked.

Sidney was irritated. He didn’t like people winking, he had to talk to the Master, and he worried that someone was trying to kill him. In a moment of madness he wondered if it was Kit Bartlett. What the hell was going on?

Sidney was determined to have it out with the Master, but when he finally got to see him he found the man was incapable of concentrating on their conversation. He appeared to have lost something and kept rearranging the papers on his desk, looking under the stacks of books that lay on the tables, chairs and piled on the floor. Even the library ladder was so filled with academic paraphernalia that it could no longer fulfil its function in enabling the reader to reach the higher shelves in the study.

‘Have you mislaid something, Master?’

‘It’s a curious thing. It’s only notes.’

Sidney was bemused. ‘I’m sure they will turn up.’

‘I am a little worried because I have been rather acerbic and I would prefer it if they didn’t get into the wrong hands. I have looked everywhere.’

‘Perhaps your secretary has taken them away?’

‘Miss Madge knows that she must touch nothing in this room,’ the Master replied. ‘I have her well trained.’

Sidney wondered how he had achieved this. His own housekeeper, Mrs Maguire, moved everything willy-nilly and her vacuum cleaner took precedence to everything. The result was that after one of her ‘proper cleans’ Sidney could never find anything at all.

‘It’s very troubling,’ the Master continued. ‘It is not just that Lyall is so tragically dead and Bartlett has disappeared. It’s the air of uncertainty I can’t stand.’

‘I suppose we all like a semblance of order.’

‘A semblance? There’s no illusion in order. It is what we are supposed to offer in this college. History. Continuity. Academic excellence.’

‘And you think that the event on the roof of the chapel will adversely affect our reputation?’

‘It will if we don’t explain the nature of the accident clearly. Lyall was one of our better-known fellows and, even in his lifetime, he attracted a few stories. Now, of course, there are more.’

‘Insinuations, accusations of a sexual nature?’

‘You know the kind of thing. It doesn’t take much. I wish I could find these notes.’

‘Perhaps they have been stolen?’

‘I doubt that. Although it
is
irritating.’

‘Theft is a crime, Master. You could always call in the police.’

The Master stopped tidying his papers and asked, ‘How do you think your man is getting on?’

‘Inspector Keating?’

‘You’ve nothing to report yourself? Nothing out of the ordinary has occurred to you recently?’

Sidney was alarmed. Why would the Master ask such a question if he didn’t suspect that something had happened or that Sidney had become suspicious? He must
know
that Sidney was being followed. He
knew
that there had been attempts to scare him off the case.

‘I don’t think so,’ Sidney replied.

‘Are you sure?’

Sidney hesitated. ‘I am quite sure.’ He wasn’t going to give the Master the advantage in a situation where he wasn’t sure whom he could trust.

‘You are aware that Rory Montague has returned home?’

‘In the middle of term?’ Sidney thought that this, too, was unusual. ‘Why?’