The Campus Trilogy (33 page)

I was also in correspondence with the Vice-Chancellor’s
childhood
friend, Sylvester Mancini. He was very keen on the
proposed
partnership between the Mancini training school in Las Vegas and the new degree programme in Casino Management at St Sebastian’s. I found it hard to pin him down as to the precise existing syllabus of the training school, but I was overwhelmed to receive a very lavish invitation. Emma and I were asked to stay in the family’s fanciest hotel over the New Year. It appeared that this was an especially festive time in Las Vegas. It was to be an all expenses paid trip – first-class flights, limousines to the airport and I was assured we would be the Mancinis’ most honoured guests. Sylvester was sure we would enjoy ourselves.

I had reservations about all this. I thought it was improper because there might be a conflict of interest somehow. However, the Vice-Chancellor gave me no choice. He and Helga had had a similar invitation for the late spring and they were certainly going. Magnus expressed his unadulterated envy.

‘You’ll have a splendid time! It’ll be even grander than my Christmas voyage on the Queen Christina and, believe me, that’s glitzy enough! Of course, it’s even better for you. You don’t have to dance with hoardes of ancient American ladies, Emma’ll
protect
you. But there again, you’ll miss out on all the presents!’ We were sitting in the Senior Common Room when we were having this conversation. Magnus sighed nostalgically and took from his pocket an elegant gold cigarette case which had been a tribute from one of his many admirers. He kept a good supply of mints in it and he offered me one.

‘Still,’ he continued, ‘you’ll have to do some gambling. How are you getting on with Sir William’s infallible system of
blackjack
?’

It was true that for several days after our excursion to the bingo hall, I had struggled with Sir William’s book on card counting. Entitled
How to Win at Blackjack in Ten Easy Lessons
, it was written by one Ernest Ripper, PhD. Although I was fairly
conversant
with the various thories of chance, Dr Ripper’s system
defeated me. After I read the first chapter, I realised that it was a practical course so I bought several decks of cards to try to work out the combinations. It made no difference. The technique seemed to depend on having a photographic memory. You needed to know exactly which cards had been played and which remained. As someone who believed in working things out by logic, I was hopeless at it.

Magnus was no better. He kept the book for a week and ended up pronouncing that the technique was even more difficult than learning ancient Cuneiform. How, we wondered, did Sir William do it? One afternoon, Magnus came for tea and biscuits in my office. I took out the pack of cards and we played several hands. If anything Magnus was worse than I was. I persevered for another two days, but in the end I was frustrated by the whole exercise.

One morning I waylaid Mrs Brush in the corridor.

‘Are you still seeing Mrs Catnip at bingo?’ I asked.

‘Oh yes,’ said our cleaning lady, ‘and a dreadful state she’s in too. She misses her Leeds friends more and more, and that Professor Catnip gives her no peace at home. Nag, nag, nag, she is! She doesn’t say much, but I can read between the lines. It’s wrong, that’s what it is!’

‘Well,’ I tried to soothe Mrs Brush’s indignation, ‘I have a
little
present for her. I understand she’s interested in cards and I thought she might like this book on blackjack.’

Mrs Brush looked doubtful, ‘Oh I don’t think she could ever afford to play blackjack … still, you’re right. I know she’s
interested
. She always wants to go and look at the tables. It’s very kind of you Dr Glass. I’ll make sure she gets it; I’ll be seeing her tonight.’

The next day, Mrs Brush delivered a note to me. Elsa Catnip must have bought the stationery in the bingo hall. It read:

The card had a pretty flower design, the writing was old-
fashioned
copperplate and the spelling was impeccable. There was no doubt that Elsa Catnip was a woman of style. Of course Magnus had been right about Joy Pickles. There had been no
acknowledgment
of my flowers, though the shop assured me that they had been delivered. I had not been forgiven and Joy Pickles had no manners.

During this period I also continued to try to establish contact with my new theology colleagues. As I had feared, however, the scene I had witnessed between the Vice-Chancellor and John Pilkington had not improved our relationship. My departmental chairman now made it clear that not only was I an unbelieving Jew, I was also to be numbered among the loose-livers and gamblers. Whenever I came to sit near him with my lunchtime sandwich, he would look at me as if I were a leper. Then he would make an excuse and leave. My other theological
colleagues
observed his disapproval and were soon following his example.

I also did not improve my standing in the department when I refused to double-mark some Korean essays. Apparently part of the syllabus of the Reverend Kwan Christian College of Seoul was philosophy of religion. Consequently I was told that one of my responsibilities was to moderate the students’ essays in this subject. One day a heap of eighty dissertations in Korean appeared in my pigeonhole. Accompanying them was the usual university mark sheet neatly filled in by the Kwan College
teachers
with some very creditable marks. It was my role to check a sample of the essays to make sure I agreed with the assessments.

Unfortunately a knowledge of Korean is not among my accomplishments. I telephoned Pilkington to ask him what I was supposed to do. He said I must do as everyone else did. I was
mystified
. He told me that until the department managed to find a Korean translator, we had no choice but to confirm the original marks. It was just a matter of putting a tick beside each entry on the mark sheet and signing my name at the bottom. I asked when he expected to appoint an interpreter. There was a long pause. It appeared that the department had many other pressing things on which to spend its money and a Korean interpreter was by no means the first priority at present.

I was appalled. I did not say anything on the telephone. Instead I put all the essays in a very large envelope and sent them back to the departmental secretary, Wendy Morehouse. I included a note pointing out that, due to my linguistic deficiency, I was not
qualifed
to check the asseessments. Formally I heard no more of the matter, but Magnus told me that he had overheard Pilkington describe it to Wendy as ‘typically unhelpful behaviour.’

I was not the only person to be rejected by the Theology department. Our new dean, Patricia Parham, was also not
popular
. Initially I thought this was because she had defeated Pilkington in the Deanship election, but Magnus indicated to me that there was also strong disapproval of Patricia’s personal lifestyle. Same-sex relationships were condemned in the Old Testament in the Book of Leviticus and the St Sebastian’s
theologians
believed that nothing had changed in the three thousand years since the Bible was written.

Patricia did not seem to mind their attitude. Indeed she was rather amused. One lunchtime she joked to me that the
disapproval
of Pilkington was the one thing that she and Father Chantry-Pigg shared in common. It was certainly hard to think of any other quality. Our new chaplain remained pompous, humorless and self-important while Patricia was funny,
straightforward
and pleasant to everyone. The friar was still to be seen round the building with his entourage of obsequious young men. He had even brought a group of them into the Senior Common Room for a meeting. Pilkington had told him very sharply on that occasion that students were not permitted there.
Chantry-Pigg
had not repeated the experiment.

One day Patricia told me that her partner Judith had started spending one evening a week volunteering at the Women’s Refuge. She had heard from the woman in charge that my daughter Imogen was intending to write her undergraduate thesis on battered women and would be working in the Refuge herself over Christmas. I confirmed that this was the case and we agreed that there was no excuse whatsoever for domestic violence. Magnus was rather sceptical when I told him about this conversation. After all, he maintained, he had been battered by Judith, but I said that I thought that that was rather different.

There was one person, however, who seemed to be thriving under the new regime. At the start of term Jenny Sloth, the Registrar’s rejected wife, was very tearful and miserable. She had always been hopeless at her job in the library. She was
responsible
for ordering books, but this was a task that was rarely done. Indeed it used to be said that solely because of Mrs Sloth’s
inadequacy
, the library was the only area in the university that
consistently
underspent its budget. Registrar Sloth’s desertion had not improved her performance.

By November, things had changed. I had ordered new books for my Kant class. As a matter of form, I emailed Jenny a couple of times to remind her, but, just as I was about to formulate the third tactful missive, I had a note from her that they had arrived. I was astonished. I made a point of going over to the library to thank her and I found her looking very smart. Her hair had been freshly dyed and waved. Her clothes were flattering to her figure and looked new. Something had happened.

I remarked that she was looking very well and she smiled, ‘It makes all the difference to be appreciated.’

‘Oh?’ I said.

‘I’ve just been appointed Trustee of the Chapel. Father Chantry-Pigg says he very much approves of my choice of prayers and hymns. Of course, I always try to pick his favourites. He works so hard and he’s such a wonderful man. The chapel has completely changed since he’s been here.’

‘How splendid.’ I tried to enter into her enthusiasm. ‘You must be working with all those nice young men who seem to hang around there. I’m sure you help them a lot.’

‘They’re very nice boys,’ said Jenny defensively. ‘I know people have the wrong idea about them and Father Crispin,’ she blushed a little, ‘but it’s completely untrue. They just don’t know him as I do …’

I was curious about this conversation. It seemed that Jenny Sloth did not share the general belief in Chantry-Pigg’s
homosexuality
. She was certainly besotted by him. On the other hand, the man was almost a caricature of the kind of gay Anglo-Catholic priest portrayed in novels. He had all the qualifications – the sense of superiority, the arrogance, the little in-jokes and the flurry of effeminate disciples. Well, I thought to myself, love is blind.

Consequently I was very surprised one rainy afternoon when I called in to see Magnus. While we were chatting, there was a knock on the door. It turned out to be Mary, my philosophy
student
and she looked as if she had been crying. ‘I hoped I’d find you with Dr Hamilton,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry to bother you, but I do need to talk to someone. Are you busy?’ Rosalind stood behind her in the doorway and both girls looked anxious.

‘Do you want to see me, too?’ I said. ‘Is it private?’

The girls came into the room. I noticed that they were both well brought up and averted their eyes from Magnus’s phallic statue. They sat down together on the sofa. ‘We’re so thankful to find you together,’ Rosalind said. ‘You both teach us and we thought we’d be able to tell you what’s happened.’

Mary blew her nose as Rosalind explained. ‘Mary was in the vestry with Father Chantry-Pigg,’ she said, ‘and he tried to kiss her. He lunged at her from behind.’

‘Oh dear,’ I said.

‘Well, Mary didn’t intend to do anything about it. She doesn’t want to cause trouble. But it just isn’t right. He’s the chaplain. And he’s always going on about chastity and virginity and all that … Anyway, you’re our teachers and we thought you’d know what to do.’

Mary started crying again. ‘It’s all my fault. Normally I’d be careful about being by myself in a closed place with a man. But you don’t expect it from a friar in his habit and anyway he always shows much more interest in the boys than in the girls. I always thought he was …’ She was embarrassed and stopped.

‘You always thought he was gay?’ Magnus asked gently.

Mary nodded. Magnus and I looked at each other. ‘Listen, Mary, Rosalind,’ I said, ‘you were absolutely right to come to see us. But I’m afraid there may be a problem. You see, Father Chantry-Pigg will in all likelihood deny that anything happened. So it would be Mary’s word against his. There was nobody else there, was there?’

‘No,’ Mary sniffed. ‘The other members of the choir had just gone. I had volunteered to collect the music and put it back. I knew he was in the vestry with me, but I didn’t think anything of it. Anyway, just as I had finished, he came behind me and grabbed me. He was quite rough. I thought maybe he was pulling
me away from some falling books or something, but when I turned around, he tried to kiss me. I really had to squirm and push to get away from him.’ She lapsed into tears again. Rosalind patted her shoulder and looked appealingly at us both.

Mary took a deep breath. ‘Anyway I managed to get away and I ran out of the room. I just don’t understand it. He doesn’t like me.’

‘How do you know that?’ asked Magnus.

Mary smiled rather damply. Rosalind took up the story. ‘She corrected him after one of his sermons. He said that the
pre-Socratic
philosopher Parmenides taught that the world was in a state of constant flux. Well we knew from your Introduction to Philosophy course, Dr Glass, that it wasn’t Parmenides, it was Heraclitus. Parmenides said the opposite. We thought he’d want to know. I had to see someone after the service, but Mary went up to him and told him,’ she giggled.