Valerie meets her lover’s wife
RECEPTION RANG THROUGH AND said there was a lady waiting to see me in the foyer. I was in the bath. In the better hotels there is always a telephone by the bath—the sense of importance of those who soak in the provided scented foam being thereby increased. ‘Look, I am the sort of person who is always in demand—always! Why, I can’t even take a bath without being pestered for my time and attention. I’ll come to your hotel again, and tell all my friends.’ And I said, ‘Ask her to come up,’ without thinking too much about it. It might have been my colleague Ann—who knew my whereabouts—or even my editor, come to congratulate me on the first pages of Lover at the Gate which I had faxed through from the hotel’s secretariat—or even Sophie, come to apologize, though I hardly imagined she had been promoted from child to lady in the few weeks of my absence.
And I stepped out of the bath and wrapped myself in one of the big white towels in which these places specialize, and, with an innocence born no doubt of the habit of the past, opened the door.
A small indeterminate woman in a lightly belted black raincoat slipped in past me: she had wispy fair hair and I could see at once from whence the twins had inherited what I can only describe, as their nebulousness—a sense of the nebulae or star cluster that is better seen out of the corner of the eye. If you look too hard it disappears altogether into a kind of wistful, disappointed light in the night sky. Yet she managed to be a rather successful financial journalist. Perhaps all the figures permuting in her head had somehow sapped her reality.
‘Can I help?’ I asked, rather wishing I had more clothes on.
‘I am your lover’s wife,’ she said, and then I was glad I had so little on. I felt like flinging aside the towel. Hugo kept telling me my body was glorious and I had come to believe him. Lou never even looked, on Tuesday and Friday nights, any more than he looked at the instrument he played. He knew it too well. Just as he practised the violin every morning between nine thirty and ten thirty, so I always had the sense he practised his lovemaking on me, getting ready for the real thing, only this with me was not it: I was not it. With Hugo, I was quite definitely the performance: Stef, the more I looked at her, obviously a mere rehearsal. I was surprised when she said:
‘Eleanor Darcy I could understand. But you! What goes on here?’
‘I didn’t ask you here and I don’t want to see you and I have nothing to say to you,’ I said, showing her the door but, alas, she seemed to have no intention of going through it, so I capitulated rather too easily and offered her a drink from the mini bar. She said she’d have a sherry, a nebulous drink itself, so I poured her as dark and sweet a one as I could find in the little tight tiny rows of sinister bottles, and while she drank it I put on trousers and sweater.
‘Hugo likes really thin women,’ she said, ‘when he likes women at all. My own opinion, for what it’s worth, is that he’s a closet gay.’ I said I didn’t think her opinion was worth very much: if that was the opinion she had of her husband then naturally he preferred someone who admired, loved, trusted and desired him, and why didn’t she just go away?
‘I’ve been to see your husband,’ she said—I didn’t like that at all—‘and he asked me to tell you that if you don’t return home by the end of the week he is going to join forces with Kirsty Bull: she’s coming to live in and look after your children.’
Kirsty Bull is a friend of mine whose husband left her six months back. I know Lou admires her. She plays double bass, and I reckon Lou is quite stirred by the sight of the hefty instrument so sturdily placed between, let’s face it, equally hefty legs. She tends to wear full denim skirts with lace borders and her hair falls over her face while she plays. Not a style I wish to emulate; I prefer a kind of brisk straight-lined tidiness; but of all the women in the world Kirsty Bull is the one I would prefer not to move in to babysit. It is one thing to move out—not to be able to move back in because one’s place has been usurped is quite another. I didn’t like that one bit.
‘And Hugo will come back to me because he always does,’ she said, ‘when the guilt gets too much. So I’ve just come out of the goodness of my heart to warn you to save yourself while you can: you’ll lose Hugo—where is he, by the way? Not here? No. I can tell you where he is. Chatting up Eleanor Darcy in a flash restaurant. She’s next. Not only will you lose Hugo you will lose your home, husband and children as well.’
She was trying to frighten me off, of course. I didn’t believe a word she was saying. The phone went. It was Hugo. ‘Your wife’s here,’ I said.
‘The bitch,’ he said. ‘Don’t believe a word she says. She said the twins were outside in their buggy and she was lying. By the time I got back inside Eleanor Darcy was gone.’
So I didn’t believe a word Stef said. She went, and I got on with the life of Ellen Parkin, about to emerge from her chrysalis, to spread her wings as Eleanor Darcy.
LOVER AT THE GATE [6]
Bernard’s encounters with Nerina
‘ELLEN,’ SAID BERNARD ONE morning at breakfast, ‘I have made a breakthrough. Nerina is going to stay on to take her degree.’
‘Nerina?’
‘I’ve told you about Nerina. Her family is from Pakistan. But her father’s a lawyer and her mother does part-time filing work in the college office.’
‘What does she look like?’
‘The mother?’
‘No. Nerina.’
‘Stunning.’
‘So she’s not covered up with bits of black in case she turns you on?’
‘Ellen, she wears bits of jeans and bits of T-shirts like the rest of the group. There is more than a touch of racism in your assumption.’
‘Yes, well you’re liberal-racist. Why don’t you say right out “this middle-class westernized Pakistani girl called Nerina”? You can’t bring yourself to do it. It’s the little “but” gives you away. “But” her father is a lawyer.’
They were both trying to give up smoking.
Presently Ellen said:
‘What sort of stunning?’
‘A perfectly oval face: large almond eyes: rather like one of those plaster Madonnas made in India.’
‘Like the one you jumped on?’
‘No. That was Italian.’
‘You’re just saying that. You’ve no idea where it was made. I expect you’d just rather it was Mediterranean because it would feel less racist.’
‘Perhaps you’d better have a cigarette, Ellen.’
‘Yes, I will.’ They both did.
Ellen finally said:
‘Okay, what sort of breakthrough?’
Bernard told Ellen that Nerina had come to him in tears. Her brother had joined the fundamentalists, and was putting pressure on the family to withdraw her from college and marry his friend Sharif.
‘What’s Sharif like?’
‘Ellen, I have no idea. It is hardly the point.’
‘If I was one of your students and you lot were counting up your staff-student contact hours, working to rule and refusing to mark exam papers, I might well prefer to give up the course and marry my brother’s friend Sharif. If he was halfway good-looking.’
Bernard left for college early and said no more about Nerina. Christmas was coming and Ellen took a part-time job in the college office to meet the extra costs of the season, and there met Nerina’s mother, a pleasant woman wearing a serviceable sari and black lace-up shoes.
‘I believe you have a daughter in the college, Mrs Khalid,’ said Ellen. Both women were transferring confidential student records from file cards on to computer. Occasionally, on whim, they would allow a finger to slip and up-grade exam results. ‘I’m just about coming to the Ks.’
‘Her name’s Nerina,’ said Mrs Khalid. ‘N. S. Khalid.’ Nerina’s card showed two years of B pluses and A minuses in communication studies and sociology, and then a term of Cs and Ds, and then back up to straight As.
Ellen turned the Cs and Ds into Bs. The girl might yet come out with a first.
‘She went through a bad patch,’ said Mrs Khalid. ‘She fell in love with her brother’s friend and wanted to leave college but we made her stay on. I think she’s over it now.’
‘Nerina’s always on at me to wear western clothes,’ confided Mrs Khalid, ‘but I like to be comfortable. I feel happier wrapped, and able to eat as many buttered tea cakes as I like. And of course it keeps her brother Fariq quiet. He’s eighteen; he’s turned fundamental at the moment. But I expect it’s no worse than being a punk. He’s at us all the time, but boys of that age do so like to be morally superior, don’t they?’
‘I wouldn’t know,’ said Ellen. ‘I don’t have children, or mean to.’
‘You’re very young,’ said Mrs Khalid comfortingly. ‘You’ll change your mind.’
Mrs Khalid had a soft expression and lively eyes but a never-say-die-ishness that quite reminded Ellen of Rhoda. She wondered whether, if Mrs Khalid were in love with her son’s friend Sharif, would she do as Rhoda had done, try to marry off her daughter to Sharif just to keep him in the family? And thought no, probably not. Sometimes Ellen felt the need for some understanding older woman in whom to confide. Her mother Wendy hovered round the house in too petty and ethereal a form to be much use: the occasional glimmer of light where no light should be, an object in motion which by rights should be still. And Rhoda, dead and buried, stayed firmly silent, finished and underground. Perhaps the reward of the wronged was to have eternal life? Perhaps the punishment of the wrong-doers was just to be finished, kaput, over? Though to think in terms of rewards and punishments was childish. Story book notions. Nothing to do with real life. ‘I might not change my mind,’ said Ellen.
‘A woman without children might as well not be born,’ said Mrs Khalid. ‘It was to have children that Allah put her on this earth. Can you think of any other reason?’
‘No,’ said Ellen. ‘Not really. Unless we lateral think and it wasn’t him put us here.’
‘I wouldn’t want my son to hear a thing like that,’ said Mrs Khalid. ‘Especially not as you’re wife to a member of staff. It might be dangerous.’
‘Tell me more about Nerina,’ said Ellen to Bernard, over breakfast. They had both settled down to non-smoking. He put down a volume of Hume—he no longer read the daily papers, but was working through the world’s philosophers, from Plato onwards, and had now reached the Scottish humanists. ‘What about Nerina?’
‘Why did she go from As and Bs and then down to Cs and Ds and then to steady As.’
‘I’m not having a relationship with her,’ he said, ‘if that’s what you think.’
‘That is not what I thought,’ said Ellen, ‘but it must have crossed your mind or you wouldn’t have brought it up.’
‘It is not possible,’ he said, ‘to move amongst these nubile girls and have no reaction whatsoever.’
‘I absolutely understand,’ said Ellen. ‘Any more than it’s possible for me to work up at the college with all those strapping lads running round in jockey shorts and have no reaction whatsoever.’
‘All brawn and no brain,’ he said. ‘Of no possible interest to you. Even Nerina worries about the sudden jump to straight As. It’s happened since she joined the black magic course. She finds it disconcerting.’
‘Black magic? The poly now teaches’ black magic? It is that desperate for students?’ Under the new educational regulations any increase in students meant a concomitant increase in funding.
‘Of course we don’t teach black magic. Jed is running a course in the psychology of group reaction. Mass hypnosis, mass psychosis, as related to auto-suggestion. That kind of thing. It is the students who refer to it as the black magic course. Please, Ellen, I’m reading.’
‘And they stand around in pentacles trying to raise the Devil?’
‘I really don’t know what they do. Please, Ellen, I’m trying to ascertain the nature of reality.’
‘Bully for you. And all of a sudden she got straight As? Does she have a thing for Jed, or Jed for her? That would be a more likely explanation.’
Bernard put Hume down. He had been paying more attention than she thought. He had shaved off his beard again. She liked the tender line of his lip: she could see now what he was thinking.
‘Jed is a married man,’ said Bernard, ‘of considerable integrity. He does not have affairs with students and if he did it would certainly not affect their grading.’
Windscale the cat jumped off his lap and sat on Ellen’s. It had never properly mastered the art of sitting on humans. It faced outward, not inward, and kept its claws out to keep itself locked on. ‘Ellen,’ as Bernard sometimes observed, ‘puts up with more from cats than she does from humans.’
Bernard, Ellen observed, had become rather thin. He ate as much as usual, but gesticulated more. He waved his hands around a lot. She hoped that when he stopped smoking he would fill out a little and his knees would be less likely to bruise hers in bed, but no. He went to bed late and rose early, and the space in between was lively with frequent, prolonged and energetic sex.
‘Sometimes,’ she said to Brenda, ‘I wish he’d just stop.’
‘I always wish Peter wouldn’t begin,’ said Brenda.
Belinda said, ‘I told you so. Now he’s not a Catholic, now he’s not a Marxist, there’s no control at all. Why do you think he had those belief structures in the first place?’ Liese said, ‘Len and I are totally happy.’
The springs in Ken and Rhoda’s bed twanged apart and jutted sharply through the mattress. Ellen wondered if she should perhaps look for a replacement, but put it off. Money was tight, and the Christmas season approaching. She thought they might have a Christmas tree; for the first non-ideological season for many years.
Nerina called in at the office to see her mother. Mrs Khalid introduced her to Ellen. Nerina was beautiful, in a languid kind of way. Her palely dark skin glowed with the light of youth. She was serene. Perhaps too serene, Ellen thought: there was something static in her expression, as if the skin had been plumped out by a layer of silicone wax beneath, and made her doll-like. Her bottom lip pouted. She moved slowly and gracefully, conscious of a femaleness it would, Ellen could see, be quite natural to want to drape with fabric rather than exhibit. Her bosom was too large, too suddenly plump, to fit neatly inside its T-shirt. Her jeans were very tight, her feet tiny and her heels high.
‘Thank you,’ said Nerina, ‘for what you did with my records. My mum told me.’
‘Don’t mention it,’ said Ellen. ‘In fact don’t ever mention it.’
‘Okay,’ said Nerina, ‘but I guess I owe you a favour, all the same. A lot of us do.’
‘Nerina,’ said Mrs Khalid, ‘supposing your brother saw you wearing that T-shirt.’
‘My brother,’ said Nerina, ‘can go to Saudi Arabia for all I care.’
‘Or Sharif?’ her mother pleaded. ‘You know you like Sharif. What would Sharif say?’
‘He won’t see me to say anything,’ said Nerina, ‘will he? I hope you don’t suppose I’m insane!’
‘Since she started at the poly she’s been very difficult,’ said Mrs Khalid. ‘I’m not sure about education for girls.’
‘My mother’s quite right,’ said Nerina. ‘I used to have a head quite full of interesting things. Now I’m at college there’s only a kind of vacuum. I fill it up with facts and theories, but it’s going to take forever: it’s a deep, deep well.’
‘Nature abhors a vacuum,’ said Ellen. ‘You’d better be careful. All kinds of things can come rushing in to fill it up.’
‘So I’d noticed,’ said Nerina. ‘Well, I’ll be off,’ and she swayed away, leaving a drift of rather heavy scent behind her.
‘You’re in her good books,’ said Mrs Khalid, ‘that’s the main thing. She can be quite tiresome when crossed. I wish she’d wear trainers. Those shoes are so bad for her feet.’
Now that Bernard left industrial action to others, the heart had quite gone out of the staff’s work-to-rule and normal relations were resumed. Neither side won. A draw was declared. But now both the academic board and the management team viewed Bernard with some apprehension, fearing where his energies would next take him. It was with some relief that they assented to his desire to take over outreach work in the local community. It was on his prompting that ethnic drop-out youths were now accepted onto college courses without formal qualifications; it was on his urging that examinations were now being set and marked in Urdu and other minority languages, the faculties shamed at last out of their insistence that English was the only language in the world that counted. Bernard was triumphant. The college was at last loosening up. The Faculty of Art and Design now ran courses on graffiti in conjunction with the Faculty of Social Sciences. ‘The Role of the Magic Mushroom in Primitive Cave and Contemporary Wall Art’ won its author a first. When Bernard went to the canteen there was a stir, a breath of recognition. The young, the bold; the lowly paid and overworked, acknowledged him as their spiritual leader. The few, the old guard, who could see what generations of scholars had endured for, struggled for, thus lightly swept away, were not so happy. Notions of excellence, of the primacy of scholarship, the victory of steady thought over wild opinion, the sense of generation building upon generation, all thus abandoned in the craven desire to please the student, entertain the student, keep the college in funds. The few were shrewd, powerful, influential and dined in high political places; Bernard knew it, and did not care. Indeed, he found it energizing. ‘No one worth their salt,’ he said, ‘but does not have enemies. Once the mind is free from its self-imposed shackles anything is possible. Even changing the world.’
Mrs Parkin came to stay for a week and went after a day. Bernard would not let her set up Jesus, Mary and Joseph on the mantelpiece even though Christmas was coming.
‘Look, Mum,’ he said, ‘I can just about stand Christmas dinner as a family get-together. But I will not have idols in the house.’ Mrs Parkin left, blaming Ellen for having turned her son from a faith that had sustained her family through death, famine, hardship, war, bereavement. Ellen said it was nothing to do with her, but she was lying, and Mrs Parkin knew it. Once she was gone Bernard and Ellen were able to ask Jed and Prune round for Christmas dinner. Prune was pregnant again and wore a murky green long woollen smock. Ellen wore a skin-tight gold dress with black glittery trimmings.
‘Isn’t that dress rather low cut,’ asked Bernard, ‘for a simple Christmas dinner with friends?’
‘I bought it at Oxfam,’ said Ellen, as if that excused everything. But Bernard paid the matter little attention. There was a kind of dance of thought going through his head: he had to keep in step. He couldn’t stop it.
‘The synapses are twanging,’ he complained, on occasion to Ellen. ‘They get out of step. The rules are gone: the safety nets. Everything links, from cosmology to microbiology. When it finally does link up the computer will explode.’
‘I hope you don’t talk like that at college,’ she said.
‘Of course I don’t,’ he said. ‘I’m not mad.’
Sometimes his eyes would glaze over for a second or two as if he were out of their world altogether. Ellen wondered if he had petit mal and looked it up in a medical dictionary—neither of them went to doctors if they could help it—but the entry was not very helpful, and it seemed in any case the kind of symptom it would be better to be vague about, not define, not name, for fear the naming made it worse, less likely to evaporate out of existence. And sometimes Bernard would wake shivering, from a restless sleep, dreaming of punishments.
‘Well,’ he said in the new year, a couple of days after term had started, ‘I’ve certainly been and gone and upset Nerina, of all people. And over such a trivial thing.’
‘Now what have you done?’
‘I told her God didn’t exist and she took offence.’
‘But she must allow you your opinion.’
‘On the contrary. You must remember Nerina’s background. The ideological war is as real to her as any war with guns and tanks. If your idea is contrary to my idea your idea must be eliminated, especially if it starts getting a territorial foothold, and might just possibly catch on.’
‘Excuses, excuses, the girl’s a fool.’
‘Don’t say that, Ellen. Don’t even think it!’ He looked round anxiously, as if for bugging devices. ‘Now listen, Ellen, we’ve unhinged her from her original faith. We shouldn’t have done it. Mention Allah, mention the Prophet, she laughs. It’s dangerous. She worships the Devil, Ellen, and that’s the truth of it. To say aloud that God doesn’t exist is to thereby negate the Devil. What’s more, you see, Jed’s group is on the point of bringing Satan into corporeal existence. She blames me because it’s taking so long. I know she does.’
‘Have you said anything about it to Jed?’
‘I know what he’ll say. He’ll say it’s all part of continual assessment: the whole point of the course is mass hysteria. The control group will be perfectly sane.’
Married to a madman, thought Ellen. If I don’t look at it, it will go away.
‘Perhaps I’d better say something to Jed.’
‘Don’t, don’t. Nerina might find out.’
‘I should just let them get on with it,’ said Ellen lightly, ‘so long as they don’t start sacrificing goats. On the other hand perhaps they should. Then the Animal Rights Activists can campaign against them, and let you off the hook.’
‘You’re not taking this seriously, Ellen.’
‘No.’
He thought a little. He blinked. His mind clicked back into another, less agitated gear. ‘I mentioned to Jed that Nerina had a crush on him, and I’m afraid it got back to her.’
‘You and Jed sit in the senior common room discussing the emotions of students?’
‘Sometimes they are relevant, Ellen. The staff is in loco parentis. Some of our students are very young. We were discussing the probability of Nerina’s essays being all her own work: or whether someone’s fronting her. They really are remarkable. She’s sent them up to a London publisher who is actually going to bring them out—Multiculturalism and Pluralism in the New Europe. Do you think she’s sold her soul to the Devil?’
‘Is Jed’s relationship to Nerina perhaps very close?’
‘It is perfectly proper, Ellen. Of course there is sometimes an erotic element between teacher and pupil. How can there not be? The point is, Nerina apparently took offence.’
‘You mean you told Jed and Jed told Nerina and Nerina told you and blah, blah, blah. Children’s playground stuff.’
‘I suppose in a way a man remains a child until he has his own.’
He wanted a baby. Ellen didn’t.
‘Prune has nearly had lots of babies. It hasn’t grown Jed up, so far as I can see. She has high blood pressure. She’s in hospital. Did he bother to mention it?’
‘No. Perhaps you should visit her? You have lots of time.’
Bernard thought Ellen should take a proper job. Ellen didn’t.
‘What a good idea! Perhaps it’s the black magic group has put her blood pressure up? Perhaps they mean poor Prune to die in labour so Nerina can marry Jed?’
She shouldn’t have said it. He started looking into corners for the bugging device, though he said he was searching for a stray cigarette, left over from the days when he smoked.
‘Ellen, don’t joke. They’ve put a curse on me now, for betraying Nerina. I can feel it.’
‘Oh dear,’ said Ellen. ‘I wish I’d stayed on at college. It seems much more exciting these days than it used to be. Perhaps you should start smoking again? It’s been all trouble since you stopped.’
That night a bird hurled itself against the window pane and woke them both up. After that a bird—the same one or another—fell through the chimney into the grate and then fluttered and banged in terror around the room. Ellen caught it in a towel and put it out and went back to sleep. In the morning Bernard was pale and his hand trembled too much even to lift his coffee cup, let alone butter his toast.
‘You look as you did when you wanted to be a priest,’ said Ellen, irritated. ‘It was only a bird.’
‘Birds don’t fly about at night,’ said Bernard, ‘in the middle of winter.’
‘Owls do,’ said Ellen.
‘How do you know it was an owl?’ he asked.
‘It had big eyes,’ she said, which seemed to satisfy him, though she hadn’t noticed its eyes, merely the trembling flutter of the feathers through the thin towel as she caught it. She hadn’t liked it. Perhaps her towels were too thin? Perhaps she should buy new?
Bernard reversed straight out of the new garage into the road and hit a passing van. Car and van were written off though no one was hurt. But Bernard fainted so she took him into casualty. ‘If I speak to Nerina,’ said Bernard, whose blood pressure was so low there was talk of admitting him for a day or so, ‘she might lift the curse. On the other hand it might make matters worse.’
‘For God’s sake,’ said Ellen, ‘you put your foot on the accelerator not the brake. You were tired. The bird kept you awake.’
Bernard was admitted for tests. Ellen went to find Nerina. She found her sitting on a bench beneath a stark tree in the college grounds, in a snowy landscape. She was alone. She was wrapped in soft brown wool. A snowflake or so glistened in her black hair.
She sat as if on a throne: her dark eyes glowed. Her face remained impassive, but her expression was equable.
‘How nice to see you, Ellen,’ said Nerina. ‘How is your husband?’
‘In hospital.’
‘Well,’ said Nerina, ‘I understand he isn’t really your husband. You did not go through a religious ceremony with him.’
‘Who told you that?’
‘Your husband did.’
‘I see.’
‘So there is no protection for him in you. And now he has betrayed us.’
‘How did he betray you?’
‘I don’t think it’s proper for me to tell you,’ said Nerina. ‘Besides not being a proper wife to Bernard, you are also an adulteress. In some countries in the world you would be stoned to death. But you helped me out with my grades so I’ll overlook that.’
Ellen thought it safer not to go further into these particular matters.
‘Well,’ Ellen said, ‘I am very fond of my husband, in spite of my western ways, and I know he has a great respect for you, Nerina; and is thrilled about your publishing contract, and any betrayal of confidence has been totally inadvertent. I know he’d want me to say that to you.’
‘In my culture,’ said Nerina, ‘we take love seriously. And if you had indeed repented and reformed—which Jed says you have—why did you have Christmas dinner in a revealing dress?’
‘Because it was cheap and I liked it,’ said Ellen. ‘Honestly, that was all.’
‘I suppose that might be true,’ said Nerina. ‘My mother says that though you were always very pleasant and she liked you, you never paid your share of the office coffee. And she was sorry you had so little belief. She thought it would do you good to be taught belief.’
‘I expect I’ll come round to it in good time,’ said Ellen.
‘I daresay you will,’ said Nerina, waving cheerfully to the group of smiling students, brightly wrapped in woolly hats and scarves, who now approached her. ‘We’re going to build a snowman. What fun! You don’t have anything of Bernard’s on you, I suppose?’
‘No,’ said Ellen. ‘I don’t.’
‘Well,’ said Nerina, ‘we can do without. Your husband looms quite large in many of our minds. Some students had to do an extra year because of the staff work-to-rule. Their exam papers weren’t marked. Many suffered because of your husband’s principles.’
Brenda telephoned a couple of hours later to say she was well, considering, and how was Apricot? She hadn’t heard from her for some time.
‘Considering what?’ asked Ellen.
‘Considering I’m eight and a half months pregnant and haven’t heard from you for a couple of weeks. Not even a “how are you?”’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Ellen. ‘Well, I’m fine. I just had a man round here declaring eternal love. I looked out the kitchen window and there he was, standing at the back gate with a bunch of red roses in his hand.’
‘How nice for you,’ said Brenda. ‘How’s Bernard?’
‘In hospital, but nothing serious.’
‘That’s really very convenient then,’ said Brenda.
‘It is, isn’t it.’
‘Who is he?’
‘He is the Vice Chancellor of the University of Bridport,’ said
Ellen.
There was a short silence.
‘Are you sure? It seems a little out of character.’
‘I’m sure. He’s quite plump and I suppose quite elderly, but he has a wonderful mind. Apparently I met him at a conference on the economics of multiculturalism. I was taking the minutes of the meeting. I can’t remember him but he remembers me.’
‘It all sounds most improbable.’
‘It is improbable for those on the ground that an aircraft should crash on to them. In fact the chances are a million to one against it. But there the aircraft is, its fuselage sticking up out of your house. His name is Julian.’