‘Yes,’ Martha said.
‘Thank goodness for that,’ Professor Cousins said.
‘Let’s turn to your assignments,’ Martha said tetchily.
It was when the bell rang at five to twelve and no-one moved that a horrible realization dawned on me – this was a two-hour seminar. I thought about fainting but that was Andrea’s usual ruse for getting out of sticky situations.
Martha had just singled out a passage in Kara’s novella that she said she found particularly meaningful. The passage was an intimate description of killing a chicken. The poor bird had so far been chased, strangled and plucked and the Kara-like narrator currently had her hand inside the chicken’s egg tube (or whatever the technical term is), rescuing unlaid eggs.
‘Those last little yolks,’ Martha said, nodding sagely, ‘so good for an egg custard.’
The mewing noise that Proteus had been making throughout this critique suddenly escalated into a loud bawling and Kara hauled him out of his basket and slapped him carelessly on a breast. We moved on swiftly to Davina and everyone prepared for extreme boredom. It wasn’t that Davina couldn’t write it was just that she had nothing to say. Andrea wasn’t much better. ‘Anthea’s not been doing much lately,’ Andrea said, looking rather faint.
‘Does she ever?’ Robin said.
‘All right, all right,’ Andrea said and began to read reluctantly. ‘The bees could be heard before they were seen.’
‘Have you started?’ Kara asked.
‘Yes, of course I’ve started,’ Andrea said peevishly. ‘Shall I start again?’ she asked Martha.
‘If you must.’
‘The bees could be heard before they were seen. The girl, leaning out of the window, thinking about what her father had said at breakfast, worried, irrationally, she knew, that the bees would fly into her hair –’
‘The bees?’ Martha checked. ‘As in honey?’ Perhaps like me she had been under the delusion that they were alphabet Bs, imagining them in a monoliteral swarm around Andrea’s head.
‘She preferred not to think about where her fears came from. She was, though she did not know it, on the brink of an unhappy discovery. Would she have cared if she had known? And yet in some way, she already knew everything.’
Martha stifled a yawn.
‘Then she’s omniscient?’ Davina asked. ‘But you have to be a narrator to be omniscient, don’t you? She doesn’t narrate, she’s . . . narrated.’
I am narrated therefore I am. What would that be – a narratee? That can’t be a word. It sounds like a sea-animal. The young narratees leapt and frolicked in the wake of the ship. The narratees swam in playful circles.
‘Effie?’ Martha said. ‘Something you want to share with us?’
‘No, not really.’
‘Your assignment?’
‘It’s at a problematic stage, I need to work on the metastructure some more.’
Martha raised a perfect circumflex of an eyebrow and gave me a pitying look. ‘Try,’ she said.
I sighed and started to read –
‘Penny for them, Madame Astarti,’ a voice boomed behind her.
‘I should be a rich woman, Jack Gannet,’ Madame Astarti said to him, ‘for all the thoughts I’m having today.’
‘Take a stroll along the prom?’ Jack Gannet said, offering her his arm.
‘Always the gentleman, Jack,’ Madame Astarti murmured appreciatively. Indeed ‘Gentleman Jack’ had been his nickname during his days on the Met, on account of his good manners, but Jack Gannet didn’t like that, he thought it made him sound too like a criminal. And Jack Gannet was perhaps one of the straightest coppers on the force. Jack Gannet and Madame Astarti went a long way back, almost as far as Sheffield and that was a very long way indeed. There had been a few occasions during his rise to Chief Inspector when he had been thankful for Madame Astarti’s help, not that he liked to admit it.
‘It’s not the weather for murder,’ Jack Gannet sighed, wiping his brow.
‘Murder?’ Madame Astarti queried sharply.
‘The woman found in the sea, just had the pathologist’s report back on the body. It was decomposing fast, of course, bodies don’t last long in the sea, especially in this weather. Ice-cream?’
Madame Astarti felt confused. The woman was killed by ice-cream?
Jack Gannet stopped suddenly so that Madame Astarti, whose braking distance was quite long, slammed into him.
‘Rigatoni’s,’ Jack said cheerfully, ‘the best scoop in the north.’ They were outside the big Rigatoni ice-cream parlour on the Prom, the flagship one, and he opened the door and gestured Madame Astarti inside and to a table in the window. A buxom waitress appeared and smiled warmly at Jack.