Professor Cousins came back at that moment, bearing aloft a cup of Joan-made tea. ‘Good God, man,’ he cried when he saw Grant Watson, ‘what on earth happened to you?’ When Watson Grant explained, Professor Cousins said, ‘Laid low by some anonymous stranger in the dark, eh?’ He proffered a Nuttall’s Minto but Grant Watson declined. ‘Concussion,’ Professor Cousins reminisced dreamily, ‘I was concussed once – during the war, or a war, certainly. Unconscious for the best part of an hour. When I came round I couldn’t remember anything, had no idea who I was. I rather liked it, looking back,’ he sighed regretfully; ‘a tabula rasa , a blank sheet of paper. A fresh start.’
‘And do you know who you are now?’ Watson Grant asked him with a little more asperity than usual. Professor Cousins looked thoughtful. ‘Well, I know who I think I am.’
Me, I am Euphemia Stuart-Murray. I am the last of my line. My mother is not my mother.
It does seem a little harsh of her to tell me this now, after twenty-one years. Although I always suspected there was something not quite right, some skeleton waiting to fall out of a cupboard. If she’s not my mother how did she acquire me?
‘Did you steal me? Did you find me?’
~ It wasn’t quite like that.
‘Well what is it like, for heaven’s sake?’ My mother stares into the empty hearth. Not my actual, factual mother, of course, for she – apparently – is dead. It turns out that I have been wrong all along – I am not a semi-orphan, I am a complete orphan, whole and entire. I belong to no-one.
I made my excuses and left before Grant Watson remembered I owed him an essay. As I was getting into the lift a voice shouted, ‘Wait for me,’ and a breathless Bob rushed in and said, ‘Beam me up, Scottie. And be quick about it.’
‘I’m going down not up, and what are you doing here anyway?’
‘I’ve been to a philosophy tutorial,’ Bob said, the unfamiliar word sitting uncomfortably on his tongue. Bob had no idea how he’d ended up taking five of his eight degree papers in philosophy and presumed it must be due to an administrative error somewhere. And, of course, philosophy attracted exactly the wrong kind of girls for Bob – earnest intellectual ones, for example, who wanted to discuss Foucault and Adorno and other people Bob had tried very hard not to hear of. If Bob could have designed a girl he would have started by getting rid of her vocal cords. In Bob’s ideal world, Bob’s girl would be, not me, but Lieutenant Uhura or Honeybunch Kaminski. Or – better still – Shug.
Bob frowned at a photocopied sheet he must have been given in the tutorial and started catechizing me. ‘Have you ever heard of Secondary Rules of Inference?’
‘No.’
‘The Law of the Excluded Middle?’
‘Sounds like something from Gilbert and Sullivan.’
‘Is that a no?’
‘Yes.’
He looked at me doubtfully. ‘Monadic predicates?’
‘No.’
‘Hypothetical Syllogisms?’
‘Not really.’
‘Not really?’ Bob said. ‘What kind of an answer is that?’
‘OK – no, then.’
‘The Law of Identity?’
‘Well . . .’
‘Yes or no?’
‘No,’ I said irritably, ‘this is boring.’
‘You’re telling me. Reductio ad Absurdum?’
‘Endlessly.’
Bob waved a sheaf of past exam papers in my face and said, ‘This stuff’s unbelievable. Listen.’ (‘Stuff’ was Bob’s all-purpose word for everything.) He proceeded to read a question, in a ponderous tone, from the exam paper –
Symbolize the following propositions in the symbolism of Predicate Logic:
(a) Cupar is north of Edinburgh.
(b) Dundee is north of Edinburgh.
(c) Cupar is not north of Dundee.
(d) Cupar is between Edinburgh and Dundee.
(e) There are places between Edinburgh and Dundee.
(f) If one place is south of a second place, then the second is north of the first.
(g) If one place is between two others, and is north of the first, it is south of the second.
(‘Nxy’ is ‘x is north of y’; ‘sxy’ is ‘x is south of y’; ‘bxyz’ is ‘x is between y and z’; ‘c’ is Cupar’; ‘d’ is ‘Dundee’; ‘e’ is ‘Edinburgh’; universe of discourse: places). Show by formal derivation that (a), (d), (f) and (g) together imply (b). You may need to supply a further premise expressing one of the properties of ‘is north of’ referred to above.)
Bob shook his head in a fish farm sort of way. ‘Wow, who thinks this stuff up? What are they on?’ We had exited the lift by now, of course, as it only takes a sentence to travel the two floors to the ground, and then a longish paragraph to reach the Students’ union where, to a seemingly endless diet of ‘American Pie’ on the jukebox, I plied Bob with (Scotch) pie and beans in an effort to cheer him up. Terri was asleep at a table. She was wearing a long cloak and a pair of high-heeled black boots with a little astrakhan ankle-trim and had a moth-eaten black lace parasol clutched in her nerveless hand. She looked like someone Jack the Ripper would be attracted to. I told Bob to tell her to meet at two o’clock in the Tower and left him playing table football while I went to a women’s liberation meeting.