The Scholar's Tale

By David James

Master scholars have a reputation for often putting their work before their human relationships. This theme is boldly signalled from the outset and runs deep throughout The Scholar’s Tale, a compelling new novel by David James.

Celebrating his sixth major literary release, James invites readers on an exciting and thought-provoking journey that draws many of its elements from the life of a real renowned scholar.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Mar 18, 2014
• ISBN: 9781483549842

David James

David James writes books about stars and kisses and curses. He is the author of the YA novel, LIGHT OF THE MOON, the first book in the Legend of the Dreamer duet, as well as the companion novellas, THE WITCH'S CURSE and THE WARRIOR’S CODE. A Legend of the Dreamer anthology, SHADES OF THE STARS, was released July 2013, and includes the exclusive novella, THE ENCHANTER'S FIRE. The final book in the duet, SHADOW OF THE SUN, will be released in 2015. BETWEEN THE STARS AND SKY is his first contemporary novel for young adults. Living in Michigan, he is addicted to coffee, gummy things, and sarcastic comments. David enjoys bad movies, goofy moments, and shivery nights. Be sure to visit David’s blog at djamesauthor.blogspot.com and facebook at facebook.com/djamesauthor to learn more about his various addictions and novels.

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CHRISTMASTIDE

Sunday

Truth is Silly Putty. Back in Iowa City I would sit on the john, trousers around ankles, pondering the content of this text, the nature of the medium and the character of its anonymous messenger. The adage could be useful; it might provoke discussion in my linguistics seminar. Real texts are as gold dust. This one, scrawled in dark brown crayon or possibly human excrement, was one to treasure, rather more fertile than the adjacent cubicle’s ‘Derrida Sucks’ or ‘Balls to Bloomfield.’ A metaphor or an axiom, I wondered. Or just a damned lie like Tolstoy’s opening sentence in Anna Karenina, or a waggish statement of general truth, such as that much touted first line of Pride and Prejudice?

I imagine Bloomfield must be all geared up for the New York Conference. I had hoped to have got him the revised Introduction, but with Christmas looming that looks increasingly unlikely. Trouble is these Elizabethans didn’t treasure texts like we moderns do. Half-a-dozen scribbled versions on scattered sheets throughout London playhouses are nothing to donkeys like George Peele.

Here it is then – once again! The Owlde wifes tale printed in 1595, allegedly by one GP who never wrote a book in his life and died three years later of syphilis and in penury. This fake cover before me, featuring a woodcut of curly-headed sailors attempting to squeeze into a tiny boat, is a thousand times more arresting than these smudgy piles of annotated photostats. But it’s from these squiggles that my ephemeral present existence takes its sustenance.

‘You take it,’ she’s shouting from the bedroom. But they’ll call back. They usually do.

Now, where were we? No, not The Old Wives Tale - not yet at any rate; for the moment it’s Jim Barrington’s project, abandoned while he swans off to Tunisia. Could you, Roy? Would you mind? It’s all hands to the pump these days, says the boss. The Battle of Alcazar, then. Now what exactly is the exact relationship between Abdulmeclec - also known as Muly Malocco, King of Morocco - and Sebastian, the King of Portugal? It’s becoming quite irritating, especially as the wretched copy text often misspells both names. Moreover, these photostats from the British Library are rubbish. Now why the hell did I let myself in for helping Bloomers out with Alcazar? Because I’m a born slave, I suppose. At least my name will be immortalised by the eventual publication of Volume Number Six of the first and no doubt the last edition of The Collected Works of George Peele (1556?-1596).

‘Answer it, Roy, please. I’m in the shower,’ comes the wife’s muffled voice. She’s still purifying herself for her evening at the Lucinda Sloane Académie de Dance, no less. Never mind the weather, never mind the rain. And bugger that telephone. Besides, sure as fate, the bloody thing will have stopped before I reach it.

Malocco, Malocco, King of Morocco. So let’s see what this hefty tome has to offer. Christ, I’ve not opened this green and gold bible in years - a glossary of Arabic names, bought for that crazy bitch three years ago in Morocco. Thick pages, all giltedged. Mahamet, Mohommed, Mohammed, Mahmoud and Mamoud. What else? Nice pictures at the front. La Fontaine. JW Goethe. Mythological and Imaginary Beings. Idols etc. Chaps in turbans. Chaps with beards. Oh yes, Great Men of History. Sod you, bloody phone!

She’s out of the shower now, in the kitchen and shouting something. She’s bellowing up the stairs, something about a message from Stanley Earle. She’s astounded, or pretending to be. Have I really not yet called him back? Stan’s obviously forgotten I’m on leave till Tuesday and out of commission on a Sunday night.

‘How’s it look?’ asks Midge, twirling in her black lace-edged dress, tucking her chin into a bare shoulder and batting her mauve and orange eye-lids coloured like some exotic beetle.

‘Delicious, my love. If I wasn’t so damned busy, I’d take up Lucy’s invitation. But you know how it is – bloody Elizabethan stuff. Not as if anyone’ll ever stage the thing.’

‘Go on, you know you love it.’

‘Almost as much as I love you.’ I kiss the top of her head, my lips brushing against a silky flower. She smells of violet, possibly flavoured with cedarwood.

‘Listen, Roycee, if the telephone should ring – ’

‘You’re expecting a call?’

‘- while I’m out, would you be a pet and take a message?’

‘Of course, my dearest love. But why on earth don’t we invest in an extension?’

‘Just answer it, Roy, and take a message.’

‘Someone special?’

‘My dressmaker, if you must know.’

I nod with pursed lips. No reason why I should know anything about her private life, any more than she should have the remotest about The Old Wives Tale. Although a satire gone wrong, it’s head and shoulders above Peele’s other stuff: his translations from Euripedes and bombastic ranting like Iphigenia, or his historicals and the Biblical epics. As for the work in hand, The Battle of Alcazar, for me it’s just one battle too many - to be obliged to read so many versions of the same turgid stuff, note variant readings and elucidate the many textual cruxes. But this fine-tuning - the annotation of Peele’s use of commas or hyphens for example - is precisely what we humble scribes are all about and what the series editor delights in – something to swell the Apparatus at the end of Volume Six, and to provide for the public the ultimate text, the exhaustive and conclusive scholarly text. Moreover, Bob the Nob just loves the melodrama of Alcazar, with all the blood splashed over its yellowing pages. Roy, old man, we really appreciate your offer to stand in. I’m sure you’ll do an excellent job for us.

Then, wouldn’t you just know it, that obnoxious black snake disturbs us while we’re having our tea. I make for the study, but hang about on the stairs, listening. I hear her chirpy little voice: I’m afraid he’s engaged at the moment. Pardon? Can I take a message? Sorry? You’ve what? After a pause I hear the ting of the replaced receiver. Good old Midge! Professor Roy Musgrave is engaged in a vital project, under the combined auspices of The Humanities Research Foundation and the University of Nebraska Press. She doesn’t know it yet, but it could mean an expenses paid trip back to the States next summer to delve back into the Huntingdon archives and sort through the crop of letters in Texas and the New York Public Library. Some of these archivists haven’t a clue what treasure they’re sitting on; much is still not catalogued. It could mean fame and even fortune for the intrepid researcher. Except that it wouldn’t, and the most likely outcome is a microscopic entry in the PMLA annual register of scholarly work.

Once she’s finally called out goodbye, having now changed her dress into the grey silk clingy little number she’d had tailored for Gillian’s graduation last year, given instructions about locking Claws in the kitchen, and scribbled some culinary advice on the pad, I manage to return to the great work. Well to Peele anyway, who, while not exactly Shakespeare, certainly deserves at least a 450-year memorial article on, say, The Harvesting Metaphor in The Old Wives Tale. All these neglected Elizabethans! Call them minor, if you like, but for sheer poetry every one’s a goldmine. Teach these modern drivellers a thing or two!

After an hour or so of textual study I make my way down to the kitchen. On the table lies a scribbled message on how to heat the lasagne and not to wait up for her. She’s left me the usual two kisses. An addendum from yesterday tells me there had been two telephone calls: Mike Beasley and someone called Mme Lamotte. Mike’s would be about tennis tomorrow; the other was probably a cold-caller or a wrong number. I heat the food and consider how best to counter Mike’s wicked first serve. The lasagne is good. She’s a good cook, this Midge, say what you like about her fair, fat and forty figure.

We’d first met at a bus stop a year or so ago. I’d taken her for a kid just out of school, but when she asked me how much longer it would be before the 53 bus came and why was there only one stop over the whole of Blackheath, I realised she was a lady of some style. She’d been here ages, she said, and she had an appointment at the Miller Hospital. What about me? What drew me out on such a naughty night? Her words struck a chord. It recalled Lear and the Fool on the barren heath: tis a naughty night to be abroad, nuncle. She’s no ignoramus, I decided, and I began to open up. I was what? Giving a lecture at Goldsmiths College! And travelling by bus! Don’t they pay expenses, these days? Sadly, no, I explained, and this was no common or garden lecture, but a student symposium I’d been invited to address.

The expected bus never came, and by this time she’d given up on her appointment. She didn’t really care that much about the job anyway. She’d just go for a coffee in Pozzo’s. Had I really never been there? It was nothing special, but homely and warm. We sat at marble-topped tables, eating huge plates of piping hot spaghetti. Pozzo, pronounced, she felt rather appropriately, Pot So! And wasn’t he a character in a Beckett play, waiting around like us at the bus stop for something to turn up? I reminded her that he was one of the tramps in Waiting for Godot. We nattered on about theatre, until through the window I caught a glimpse of a red bus as it slowly pulled away from the distant stop by The Standard pub. I got up hurriedly, fishing for change. No, don’t worry, she said, I could pay next time. We parted and exchanged numbers. A week later, we saw a production of Hamlet in London. Two months after that we signed the register at Greenwich Town Hall. I had agreed to take Millicent Susan Albright as my lawful wedded wife. Sue, as she then was, had prevailed: we were married; me for the second time, she for the third.

Round and fat with sugar on the top, I sing to myself as I mount the stairs to the spare room I like to think of as my study. Not ‘fat’ daddy, it’s ‘flat’! Remember singing that to little Gillian, as I kissed her top knot before putting her to bed, and then, after a bedtime story, retreating softly to go down and check Andy’s homework. Elaine would be out at evening class, not yet having met the guitar teacher who was to change her name for the second time. But that’s all safely tucked away in the past, in the archives of the mind. This is the present, entirely new country. It seems things have turned out nice again. Yet some nasty sneaking suspicion tells me it’s just too sweet to be true. You have to accept the fact that nothing lasts. Except of course fictions. They last for ever and are perpetually being remade, torn down, modified, shattered and rebuilt from the ruins; every word a brick for further use. That’s why we love them. That’s why we love poets and novelists. As well, of course, as playwrights – like Shakespeare and, say, George Peele. Well, why not? He’s as good as or a darned sight better than Thomas Nashe, Thomas the scrivener Kyd, Greene or Udall.

Back to it then, boy! The three most authoritative texts of Alcazar. Find them, or, more likely, find someone who might know where the foul sheets are – in, say, Harvard or Texas. Oxford too, probably. Sandy Purcell would know. After all, she did much of the compilation for the Carcanet Press editions a few years back. Meanwhile, the British Library, as it’s now called. Hamilton-Dunne understands there’s a quarto fragment lying in aspic in Special Collections. Must check out the latest MHRA Bibliography. And here, it is – a whacker too underneath this pile of … whoa, steady the Buffs! Crash! And, Christ, what’s this – a bloody notebook from the past? My writing in radiant blue ink. School or university notes? No, just outpourings that survived the flood. Not all neurotic self-analysis, though. Some decent stuff too, surprisingly; the stuff of thought, you could say. I turn the pages of Jotta One and read:

The Moroccan lecturer wears a suit and pontificates to a passive class; the expat teacher wears jeans, sits tieless and yoga-like on the teacher’s desk. The first has security and everything to lose – he is a tin god, one who has all his pieces of paper signed and stamped. He is a tyrant who has won his position by will and determination. He must exercise this newly-won power over his subjects, each of whom envies him and hates him. The expat has nothing to lose, he can be himself; he has lost the game before he starts.

I feel my heart beating fast and push aside for the moment the photocopied sheets on the desk. Abdelmeclec or Abdulmeclec and Abdulmunen must wait. Something is ringing in my mind: a sense of the past, not the Roman past, nor even that of the dissipated George Peele, but something more insistent, my own.

Monday

Back from a 6-1, 6-2 thrashing on the court. Unable to handle Mike’s top-spin serve, somewhat impetuously I decided to take the initiative by running in after my own. At 4-0 down in set two I wanted to call it a day, and maybe he tried to encourage me by netting a few. I should have stuck to playing Cathy Soames, who’s got no serve at all and enjoys nice long rallies. But Mike likes to play me, or maybe it’s all Midge’s doing, thinking I need the work-out. Midge herself, according to Mike, could be a decent club player, but these days she’s more into badminton, running and dancing the night away.

Back here I find the doormat cluttered with cards and leaflets, under which a much-franked package sealed with very durable red tape - from good old USA. I tear it open and read. It’s from the Big Man, a brief note stapled to a copy of English Studies and it’s not exactly a welcome communication:

Hi there, Roy! Let’s know whadya think! pp 47-53. Some kiddo, eh! Just out of grad school in Kansas but looks the works. Oh, and forget about Alcazar. This guy from Texas is keen to join us. Just the Wives Intro – before Jan, if poss. See you in NYC for the Big Bonanza no doubt. Best to Elaine and the family. R

Relief and a kind of trepidation possess me as I flip through the pages of this bright new journal published in Amsterdam. The whizz-kid’s survey of textual cruxes in Elizabethan plays is an interesting glimpse at the dangers of false emendation. But who is this kiddo? Could he be in any way identified as that same guy from Texas? So he’s taking Alcazar from me now; that’s just fine and dandy, but maybe he’ll get offered The Wives later - unless Professor Musgrave is snappy with his earnest and scholarly Introduction to the definitive edition – occasionally (but erroneously) reissued under the title The Old Wives’ Tale.

The clunk of a car door alerts me. Possibly next door’s home to lunch. No, it’s the travelling nurse herself, the lady and householder, severe and efficient in her blue tunic, taking a break from visiting the old and cold, the lonely and the needy, the deprived and depraved.

‘Hi there!’ I say, but can see there may be trouble ahead. No smile and just a glance at the pile of crockery in the sink.

‘Coffee? Cocoa? Or how about a nice hot cup of tea to warm you up?’

She sits, head in hands, gloved fingers over her eyes. I begin filling the kettle - overfilling it in fact as I glance back to her bowed head and hear her trademark pretend snore.

‘Bloody bitches!’ she says, exhaling a torrent of venom at the wodge of official letters and unopened Christmas cards. ‘Stupid, bloody, incompetent bitches!’

‘Tina, is it, or Benny?’ I pour out two steaming cups of rather weak tea; place them on the table and sit down to console the bereaved or benighted lady of the sorrows.

Initially I had thought it was me, having neglected some essential domestic task, or having ignored Mary Sutcliffe or Fay Osbourne at the tennis club. Not that she’d ever be like that, but Elaine’s legacy will, I fear, never leave me. I’m always preparing to fight my corner, yet nowadays quite needlessly.

She tells me our Christmas party is off. She’s being asked to substitute on night duty. There’s been a crisis. There frequently is a crisis. People are selfish, stupid, inconsiderate, malicious, bone idle, unimaginative, you name it, we know it, don’t we, my love. That’s why I avoid them whenever possible. The only thing reliable is books, and even they are inevitably full of error, errors of fact, errors of grammar, errors of judgement, errors of taste, of transcription and punctuation, of print and pagination, of point and purpose. No book is complete until Error has crept in and affixed his sly Imprimatur.

‘I’m not talking about bloody books,’ she says, her beady blue eyes flashing at me, ‘I’m talking about the sodding National Health Service!’

I nod sympathetically, joining her in her campaign against ineptitude, unfairness and unrighteousness, but somewhat insecure in my newly adopted role as counsellor to the bereaved. After all, although it would be folly to bring it out now, we all have our problems. You got your problems, baby, I got mine. Life consists, I might say, in finding solutions, or at least in reconciling oneself - like, let’s say, Epictetus, Cicero or Seneca. You have to be philosophical, stoical, and not bother about the things you can’t change. That is the pathway to wisdom. But of course she already knows that, none more so, and usually - I say it with joy - she manages to overcome disasters with equanimity. But this low blow seems to have caught her with her defences down.

She sips her tea and winces. Nurse Albright considers. She of course will, as they say in the streets, overcome. She always does. She will never crumple. Overcome? Overcome, though - overcome what, I wonder. That insidious intransitive again. What did the protesters of the Sixties mean exactly? Overcome the government, social injustice, racial prejudice or what? Doesn’t seem to matter. It’s never defined. Like, say, the verb to care. Don’t you care? About what? Don’t you care about anything, Elaine would say to me with scorn. And I’d say, No I bloody well don’t care, not about anything, except possibly honesty or rigour in language, or exactitude in definition. Now of course I could say, with a certain pride, Yes, I care about the accuracy of transcribing texts, always knowing that the perfect text is written in the sky and even the author never got within a mile of it. Finding it is a task doomed to failure, but that’s no reason for not attempting it. Brother Browning and all that … a man’s reach must exceed his grasp! And wasn’t it Valéry who said no creative work is ever finished; it’s only abandoned?

‘So, what do you think?’ she asks, turning to me, her head perky and birdlike.

‘I think we should go to New York for Christmas.’

‘I mean about this cursed extra duty.’

I shrug, wanting to say: Let’s just save ourselves for the New Year. Christmas is over-rated anyway, even as a folk festival. But I know that’s not allowed. We are locked into this thing, willy-nilly. I can see the problem from her point of view. There’s her sister coming over from Ireland, and probably with her two adopted kids, Jimmy from Canada, Cathy from Germany. Not to mention the chance – remote, as it is – of Gillian getting leave from her post in New Zealand.

‘Had a brief communication from Bloomfield,’ I say, pushing English Studies towards her.

She sniffs, raising her shoulders and breathing out heavily, not even glancing at the journal. ‘So, what are we going to do, Roy? I mean, we can’t just cancel the whole thing…well, we can’t, can we? What about all the food? I’ve asked Mary to come in and help. And, Oh Christ, this just shouldn’t happen, not even to a dog – not at this time of year!’

I cover my eyes, staring down at English Studies and thinking about the MLA Annual Conference in New York next week. I’d not given it too much serious thought, but if Christmas is out, there’s just a possibility … and I’d be back well in time for New Year. We could easily reschedule the family bash. She can take them to the Holiday Inn on the Big Day - or the Beasleys, for instance. It’s not the end of the world. Mary won’t mind and you’d be free from all the hassle of cooking and entertaining. I say some of this to her, but she pounds the table, making the cups jump and shouts at me, red in the face, her fists clenched, ready to do battle:

‘You just don’t understand anything, do you!’

I do. I understand she’s upset, for one thing. And that she’s uttered a rhetorical question. And that I’m the sitting duck waiting to be peppered with lead shot. That’s easy to understand. The US suggestion, though flippant at the time, now begins to seem more than a remote possibility.

I offer more tea, but she shakes her head. We stare at the table, she tight-lipped and spoiling for a fight and me backing off and waiting for the flurry of blows - such an unexpected attack from that particular quarter. I attempt a diversion.

‘Bloomfield wants me to go to this conference thing.’ I slide his note towards her.

‘Bloomfield? Who’s he?’

‘Who’s he? Our leader? Ah, let me remind you! Robert J Bloomfield is an Emeritus Professor of English, formerly director of Renaissance Studies at North Carolina, a textual critic of world renown, recently appointed Chairman of English Studies and Dean of Students at the University of Nebraska, now on a travelling fellowship to all parts of the globe.’

‘Bully for him!’

‘It’s an honour to work for him.’

This doesn’t even provoke the flicker of the smile I expect from her. He’s obviously not one to add to our guest list. But I tell her he’s a jovial chap, not only an eminent scholar, but a champion fisherman who owns maybe a thousand acres of farmland. He’s also a good Christian.

‘So you’re thinking of going to this bloody talk shop of tipsy old fuddy-duddies?’

‘Well, it’s an opportunity, isn’t it? If our little shindig doesn’t materialise, that is.’

‘Five star, I suppose. Expenses paid and all that?’

‘Exactly.’

‘Well, you’d better take up the scholar’s burden then, hadn’t you! Whatever happens to us, don’t let our little family obligations stand in the way of scholarship! Heaven forfend!’

‘As I say, it’s just a possibility at the moment.’

‘You’d better give him a call, then, and confirm.’

We both get up and go our separate ways, she to the sink with a loaded tray, me to the telephone on the hall table. Astonishingly, she seems to have recovered her composure, even accepting, somewhat grudgingly but understandably, her husband’s urgent mission.

I’m now consulting directories about international dialling codes, when she sings out to me from the kitchen:

‘Oh, by the way, your inamorata called again last night.’

‘Oh yes?’

‘She’ll call you back tonight.’

‘Good,’ I mutter,’ still searching the long list of dialling codes, and wondering if I’ve ever had Bloomfield in the address section of my pocket diary, and under what heading.

‘She’s French, isn’t she?’

‘Probably.’

‘You mean you don’t know?’

‘What are you on about, Midge?’ I say, coming towards her with a possible number scrawled on a page of jotter. ‘I don’t know anybody, French or otherwise, and don’t want to.’

‘Pity. She sounded rather nice to me – extremely polite, apologetic and so on.’

‘Not Bloomfield’s secretary was it by any chance?’

‘A Miss de Courcy, I believe. She’s called a few times, actually. About Mme Lamotte.’

‘I know nobody of that name.’

‘Oh, well. Maybe it was a wrong number. Who knows?’

‘No message, I suppose?’

‘Well, last night she sounded just a little bit frazzled. She said to call Anny.’

‘Anny? What Anny?’

‘A little friend, perhaps. Maybe you’re all off on this New York jag together. The two professors and their private secretaries – well, do have a happy Christmas!’

‘It’s not until Boxing Day – and only three days, so I’ll be back well before New Year.’

‘Lovely! I’m going to have a bath now, so I’ll leave you to make your arrangements.’

She sounds normal and quite happy now, so I’m almost looking forward to the cattle market, when the young post-grads desperate for first appointments cram the vestibules and corridors of the Hilton, the Sheraton and even the Taft.

I check the phone pad and under the name Lamotte find that she’s scribbled a number of some thirteen digits. But I’ll first try Bloomers and confirm details before booking the flight.

Anny, Anny, Anny. Never heard of her. Ditto the French dolly bird, nice but frazzled.

Tuesday

Difficult to concentrate at the School this morning. I’d got up in the night after two restless hours of tossing and turning. I sat in the cold box room, doodling at my desk while I pondered the ultimate question. Should I do the decent thing, grit my teeth and weather out another family Christmas? I might even, over the holiday, manage to slip up to the study and get in a few hours of collating, pencilling in notes to direct attention to those finer textual cruxes - those Dr Johnson-like restorations of a comma here or a capital letter there, discarding a possible alternative reading inspirationally suggested by Butler a hundred years ago. All valuable work, of course, and not mere pedantry as some blinkered scholars in the field have been known to imply. So yes, by three o’clock I’d virtually decided to support Midge over this trying period. Poor kid, she’s deserved nothing less, after putting up with her husband-lodger for nearly two years now, with barely a murmur.

The light crept into the study and I could hear Midge in the twin bed behind the partition wall breathing deeply, sometimes snorting or moaning in her sleep. I thought of her all wrapped up in her woolly blanket, snugly warm inside her men’s pyjamas, her little roly-poly, tightly-bound body denying access to intruders. A good little lady, a pal for the fun run, a friend in need who keeps her distance, leaves you alone, doesn’t play the radio all day or nag you skinny for breaking porcelain ornaments. Nor would she sulk for a week over a spillage on her polished dining table. Midge respects you for what you are or try to be, and never erodes your self-esteem by comparing you to all the other wonderful chaps at the office, the sports club or a next door paragon who is sociable and fun and probably a DIY freak, and who never fails to buy his wife exciting little presents, rather than a last year’s cook book or a dictionary of synonyms. Yes, Midge deserves a better husband than me. I’d best stay for Christmas. I decided to return to my twin bed, or, even better, possibly squeeze in beside her. Well, you never know, do you?

It was around four or five before I dropped off to sleep. Anyway I heard the first planes going over and thought of the perils of the approaching flight, the Christmas chaos at Heathrow, the fierce pace of New York once past the barricades of customs and immigration at JFK. I could do without all that hassle. Indeed, indeed, indeedy and that’s for sure and all that, I’ve suffered quite enough disequilibrium over the past few weeks for a man of my age and quiet temper.

I must have been in a shallow sleep, perhaps dreaming of fair ladies, when woken by the throbbing of that vile telephone downstairs. I waited for it to stop, which, at last, it did, but only for it to return a minute later to its merciless throbbing. By this time I was in my own bed, waiting for Midge to take the wretched thing, but she tends to sleep with her deaf ear upwards. I crept down and held my hand over the pulsating thing, hoping it would give over. But then I panicked, thinking of an irascible Bloomers at midnight in Nebraska or Iowa, drumming his fingers on a hotel counter. I picked it up and heard a woman’s voice, shrill, excited and possibly angry.

Sitting here now in the empty classroom, the foreign learners having slipped their leads for a quick lunch in the village, or possibly an end of term gathering at the tuck shop under the elms behind the sports field … I find my gorge rising at the memory of this ridiculous early morning telephone encounter. I’d almost begun to forget that such harpies as Anne-Marie de Courcy still existed. But then I’ve been for the past year or more living in an Earthly Paradise with my precios perle wythouten prys, and, as my ex-wife would no doubt remind me, ‘not living in the real world.’ I should have known, should have been prepared, but I wasn’t even properly awake at 6.30 in the morning - 7.30 in Rabat, that North African toy town where Mademoiselle de Courcy currently holds court - except that she’s now seemingly on her winter tour, swanupping in Tunis, then probably flitting to Cyprus.

‘What the Hell’s going on?’ she demanded, ‘Don’t you answer the phone anymore?’

‘Sorry, who is it, please. I’m not sure – ’

‘It’s me, and it’s urgent. I’ve got a class in ten minutes, so don’t hang up on me, OK?’

‘No Anny, I won’t hang up.’

‘I told your maid to make sure you called back. You did get the message, I presume?’

‘Er – I don’t think … there’s been rather a lot of calls lately.’

‘Yeah, most of them mine. But listen carefully. You got pen and paper?’

As ever, my very capable wife has provided a telephone pad with attached pen. I prepared to await instructions, heart in something of a flutter, but obeying the voice’s imperatives like an automaton. I felt for some reason that I should apologise to the voice for my tardiness and inefficiency.

‘Nadia’s in trouble. I stayed in Tunis with her for a few days. She’s at the Hotel Maison Dorée, Numero Trente-et-un, Rue Charles de Gaulle. D’you need me to spell it out?’

‘So, that’s twenty-one –

‘Trente-et-un, mon Dieu! Thirty-one. Three-one.’ Then she added more slowly and as if speaking to the cretin-of-the-month, ‘Telephone 282-377. Maison Dorée.’

‘So, what’s the problem exactly, Anny? Is the girl sick or something?’

‘C’est trop complexe d’expliquer. She needs you; that’s the main thing.’

‘But I’m due in New York next week.’

‘At least phone her. She’ll tell you. Look Roy, got to go now. Call you back, OK?’

I attempted to smooth out the slip of paper I’d inadvertently screwed up while talking, and read the unreal address of an unreal person. Thinking about it now, the whole episode seems to belong in the fantasy land of The Old Wives Tale. It’s the Childe Roland story of the two brothers, the Sleeping Beauty story, and with the ghost of Jack the Giant Killer thrown in.

Of course, as I pulled myself upstairs, still clutching the vital scrap of paper, I knew that I was being called to account for past sins and misdemeanours. This, after all, is what happens in the Storyville that permeates our lives. The past returns in dreams to haunt you and pursue you to the point of madness. We are, willy-nilly, creatures of conscience with - as the great Elizabethans know only too well - our lives fraught with moral choices.

The real woman was already out of bed and peering into the mirror over her dressing table, tugging at her coxcomb ragged locks and grinning with pain as she forced the comb through the tangled bush that was her hair. She said nothing, although she must have known that I’d been staring at her for some time, transfixed as if I’d come back from death’s dark kingdom.

At last she shrugged and without turning to me asked how Bloomfield was. She didn’t know him, of course, and probably didn’t particularly want to. Like George Peele he was just a name, someone outside her sphere and best left alone.

‘It wasn’t Bob,’ I told her, ‘it was Anny.’

Now she turned and brightened, waiting for news, a good story, something to bite on.

‘Oh, her – the pert one with a foreign accent.’

‘Anny doesn’t have a foreign accent, at least not as far as I’m aware. She was born in France, but prefers to hole up, watching for talent while sunbathing in warmer climates.’

‘One of your abandoned popsies from Morocco, I suppose,’ she said, still smiling.

I laughed at the incongruity of Anny as a coy seductress. But now, recalling her almost possessive interest in Nadia, I wonder if there isn’t something in the notion. However, such bizarre thoughts didn’t occur to me in the bedroom early this morning.

‘Anny’s at least as old as your mother, and in any case prefers large dogs or young girls. And she thought you were the housemaid!’

‘So when are you seeing her?’

‘Never again, if I have any say in the matter.’

‘But of course you don’t. It must be something urgent.’

I approached the dressing table and touched my wife on the shoulder, sliding my hand down over her firm upper-arm muscle and squeezing it reassuringly. ‘Not to worry,’ I said, ‘it’s not important – just the possibility of a job in North Africa, that’s all. Lot of bloody nonsense, really.’

‘I’d love to go there. Why not? Now you’ve got back in contact. Marrakesh sounds wonderful. And all the spices in those souqs. And those handsome Arab men, so charming to us ladies.’

This sudden excitement was almost obscene.

‘A lovely idea, but it’ll have to wait for a bit, I’m afraid. Until the great work’s done and dusted.’

I escaped to the bathroom. I looked at myself in the mirror – same long chin, same rubicund complexion, deep grooved lines, hollow cheeks, stubbly chin and sticky-out ears. The boiled rat, the girls called me in Morocco. I never held it against them, never for one moment. I loved the sun, but just couldn’t take too much of it. True, this face didn’t launch too many Moroccan ships or any amoureuses … until May, 1980, that is, when something happened. Eventually I got over it, made a total recovery and began a new life, and rediscovered my metier, the work that had been quietly awaiting me for decades. And then, this morning, while standing in pyjamas on the cold lino, poison was being dripfed into my ear by an alien who, once again, like an avenging angel, seeks to bring me to justice.

But I must get up and go in search of those young lads. Through the glass door I’ve seen one or two heads bobbing up and down during the past half-hour. Occasionally a face appears close to the window, frowning or open-mouthed, just checking whether Sir is still in the vicinity. This new batch seem a rather timid lot, for they’ve all buggered off now – I trust not to the office of our darling principal, Paternoster Stanley, the busiest nobody in South London. Most of them are eager to return to those sleep-inducing listen-and-repeat drills that are the core of language-laboratory learning. But after lunch is the worst time to suffer the tedious drone of a foreign speaker cooing closely into your eardrum. Is the pain worth it? They obviously think so. Or rather their rich parents in Hong Kong or Delhi do. For me, it’s just a bit of pocket money for very little effort. There aren’t even any girls here, and even if there were … well, would I make the effort? It’s all in the genes. I know that. Best keep it in the jeans!

‘Hi there, Indushan, how’s it going?’

He nods and slouches off, hands in pockets. Bright, but lazy. Always a smile, as if he knows it all but can’t be bothered to commit.

‘How’s the Dickens going, Loc?’

‘Ver’ good, sah!’

This one stands to attention before answering. Well-dressed with pristine white shirt and tie with gold pin. Likes to borrow Sir’s books, but only, I suspect, for show. His parents tried to get him into Eton, but maybe he wasn’t up to it or when the chips were down they couldn’t stump up the fees.

They drift off, back towards the classroom. I follow them, kicking the leaves into the ditches in the hands-in-pocket field and wondering about that ridiculous early morning call that’s still clouding the seemingly bright road to freedom, one that yesterday had promised so much. It’s all nonsense of course. It’s another existence altogether, a closed door, never to be reopened. Been there, seen it, done it, finished with it, finished with her, finished long ago. Didn’t I, like Dickens at Gad’s Hill, consign to the flames all that detritus: the photographs, the scraps of paper, tram tickets, Spanish camp-site bills, shop and restaurant receipts and gallery admission stubs, wads of papers, including her exercise books with squared graph paper – copybooks as she called them - scrawled over with French and English and including the trite and pathetic words of an Arabic love song she egged me on to learn by heart? Didn’t I? I sure did do that thing and have never to this day regretted the bonfire of the vanities. Never, never, never! I remember hesitating, though, over a thin wrist watch she’d bought me – or, as I suspected at the time, filched from a jewellers after having charmed her way into the shop assistant’s confidence – yes, that was the one over which one almighty bust-up occurred … in Orleans, if I remember correctly … or it was somewhere in Spain after the Burgos fracas … Orleans, I think … I discovered it under the rubber mat when I was cleaning the Peugeot, some weeks after she’d flitted. I kept it for months in a plastic bag on a top shelf in the wardrobe in Putney. It wasn’t that valuable. It was a lightweight thing, rather like a kid’s toy watch. Perhaps it was. The thing had never worked anyway, and after our dispute of the day, in the car park, neither of us would deign to pick it up after it had slithered to the floor of the car, me driving like a lunatic, just to try and shake some sense into her. The rest of our memorabilia, I recall wrapping up in a sack and while walking Dithy by night along the bank of the River Mole, I chucked the sack in and listened with relief as it hit the water with a resounding smack.

‘This way, Sir. Room Number 7.’

‘Sorry. I must be dreaming. Thanks, Ranjit.’

I’d better go and see Stanley after class and before we all disperse for the vacation on our various supersonic jags to exotic places. I might need an extra day or two at start of term - now that I’ve got clearance for NYC, that is, and a chance to meet the rest of the team under Captain Bloomfield’s benevolence. If, that is, Stan the Man’s still in his office and available to his staff this late on in the afternoon.

Wednesday

Bloomfield is Renaissance Man. Well, at least a modern version of the all-round scholar and man of action. Not exactly like Leonardo, poet, painter, sculptor, botanist, cartographer and inventor, but still an all-rounder, head in the heavens, but feet firmly on the ground. I’m looking forward to New York now, and not feeling too guilty about leaving my wife to host, with Mary’s help, the Christmas festivities on the home front.

They’re all busy down there now, the women, decorating the Christmas tree and transforming the dining room into a maze of lights and tinsel; laughing, shrieking, shouting, and with kids’ voices chiming in now and again. I’ve already chopped the tree down to size so it no longer scratches the ceiling. It was quite a monster, recalling the dollar-a- foot ones we used to pick up and spray in Iowa. Now they’ve spread out dozens of gaily-wrapped presents over the carpet. At least we in England don’t feel the need to trek over icy roads to Value House or load our cars up with Mammoth-mart giant pandas, not only for our own young people but for all the neighbourhood kids; nor do we have to deliver piles of gaudy