Emotionally Weird(17)

Professor Cousins’ room was at the other end of the English department corridor – always a perilous place fraught with danger but infinitely more so these days as the struggle for succession hotted up. Getting from one end of the corridor to the other was rather like being on a Ghost Train, ducking the spooks and spectres as they jumped out unexpectedly trying to frighten you.

Today, however, they all seemed to be absent. Dr Dick’s door was firmly closed, while Maggie Mackenzie’s was wide open as if to show she had nothing to be ashamed of although she herself was missing. Watson Grant seemed to have left the building. I was held captive by Professor Cousins’ ancient mariner anecdotage as he embarked on a rambling story about his days as a spry young doctoral student at Cambridge and some girl he had seduced at a May Ball long ago, so that we didn’t notice Maggie Mackenzie storming through the Murk, as thrawn as a Fury, until she was almost upon us.

Her shapeless, funebral garments billowed and her kirby grips scattered as she progressed. Maggie Mackenzie’s long iron-grey hair began each day anchored or plaited or rolled in a variety of vaguely Victorian styles but by lunchtime it had begun to work its way free of restraints and encumbrances and by mid-afternoon she had the appearance of someone leading a tribe of ancient Britons into battle, a gnarled warrior queen bearing grudges.

‘Dr Mackenzie, Maggie.’ Professor Cousins nodded pleasantly at her. She glared back at him. Maggie Mackenzie, who taught the nineteenth-century novel ( Why Women Write ) harboured a bitter resentment against the male of the species, resentment precipitated by her ex-husband, also a Dr Mackenzie, for reasons which she never spoke about because ‘some things went beyond language’.

‘I believe you owe me an essay?’ she said to me tersely by way of greeting, and added, ‘Where is your George Eliot?’ in a way that suggested there might be several George Eliots wandering the world and that I was the owner of one of them.

‘I left it at home,’ (or perhaps ‘I left her at home’), I said with a helpless shrug at the way life was an entity apparently beyond my control.

Dr Dick opened the door of his room suddenly as if he was trying to catch someone out. He frowned when he saw the three of us and gave the impression that he would have liked to give us lines for loitering near his territory. Dr Dick, whose speciality was the eighteenth century ( 1709–1821 – Rhyme or Reason? ), believed he should be made head of department because he was the only person in it who could construct a timetable properly. He was probably right.

Beardless and rather weedy, Dr Dick was a tall, anaemic-looking man who gave the impression of someone who had outgrown his strength. He was a peculiar Anglo-Scots hybrid. His father had apparently come from the same strain as the great veterinary Dicks but his mother was from a less pedigree brand of Kentish haberdashers, and when the marriage failed she returned to the bosom of her family taking young Dr Dick with her, so although Edinburgh born, he was Canterbury bred. This cross-border fertilization had not, however, produced a more robust species.

At times, in fact, Dr Dick seemed more English than an Englishman. He had attended a minor Home Counties public school before progressing to Oxford, where he had helped to found a real ale society. He could recite, in his fruity accent, every member of the English cricket team since time began. (‘What a wanker,’ was Bob’s laconic verdict.)

Maggie Mackenzie and Dr Dick looked as if they were squaring up for a fight. I supposed that would be one way of deciding who should be head of department.

‘Hand-to-hand combat,’ Professor Cousins murmured in my ear. ‘It would save a lot of time, you know.’

Dr Dick backed down and turned his aggression on me. ‘Your essay’s late,’ he said curtly. ‘I want it immediately.’

Dr Dick was a man who revelled in his hypochondria, although he wanted to be head of department so much that it did seem to be making him sick. He forgot about me now, distracted by a sudden need to feel his pulse. ‘I think I’d better sit down for a while,’ he said limply and retreated to his room again.

‘The man’s perfectly idiotic,’ Maggie Mackenzie said and then turned to me and said irascibly, ‘Tomorrow will do for me. I want your George Eliot on my desk by five o’clock,’ she beetled her brows threateningly, ‘or else,’ and stomped off abruptly down the corridor.

‘Such a frightening woman,’ Professor Cousins said when she was out of hearing.

I was surprised that the university women’s liberation group hadn’t co-opted Maggie Mackenzie now that it had entered a new militant phase. Hitherto a peaceful refuge for students who wanted to drink coffee and moan about their boyfriends, the group had been hijacked recently by a girl called Heather, a junior honours politics student with a round face and owlish spectacles who was determined to teach us the finer points of dialectical materialism before she died, which was probably going to be sooner than she expected.