Oxford Blood Page 9

  'It's providential. I was so interested in that programme of yours about Asian women and the dramatic conflict between our culture and theirs. You might be surprised to learn how many Asians regard me as a kind of father confessor. They really do want to return to their own culture.' Andrew Iverstone twinkled his little eyes and his fair eyelashes, short but very thick, fluttered. 'I thought we might discuss the matter over a civilized lunch.'

  'How truly kind. Actually my programme was about the assimilation of Asian women, bearing in mind their traditional values. I think you must have another programme in mind. I should hate to have lunch, especially a civilized lunch, under false pretences.'

  It was helpful that throughout this exchange Proffy had not ceased

  philosophizing on the subject of Dives and Lazarus. Jemima turned back to him with relief. Proffy was capable of drinking from an empty glass without noticing; he could also cheerfully eat off an empty plate while talking, as well as dipping his spoon into his neighbour's pudding as he had done at La Lycee. None of this diminished the rapidity of his conversation. Jemima did not notice what happened to the elder Iverstones as the more orgiastic aspects of the evening began to develop. But as she sat herself gracefully down on the river bank alone, Proffy suddenly appeared from nowhere. He picked up the conversation concerning wealth again as though it had never been interrupted.

  'Dives - a very happy and contented man!' he exclaimed several times, pumping the night air with his hand. 'Whereas Lazarus undoubtedly needed the services of a psychiatrist, supposing he could have afforded one. People don't understand that it's most agreeable wearing purple and fine linen, particularly if you have a beggar at your gate to eat up your crumbs. Purple for the rich man: oh yes, indeed. When Saffron succeeds to that Elizabethan gem, perhaps I shall try to persuade him to allow me to come and live at his gate as the token beggar to ensure him happiness, yes, yes - but what about the children?' he paused, then rattled on. 'Not perhaps with all the children. I don't think Eleanor would like it either. Lazarus has no family in the Bible. But I shall be there, with my official sores for his dogs to lick. I wonder what kind of dogs they have at Saffron Ivy? Rather large dogs I daresay. No, on second thoughts, I think I will persuade Eugenia to bring the children, at any rate during the holidays, they're fond of dogs I expect, children are so sentimental about animals, and they can take some of the burden of being licked off me. Take them for walks and that sort of thing!'

  'Didn't the story of Dives and Lazarus end rather badly?' enquired Jemima, 'for Dives, that is. Didn't Dives find himself in Hell, looking up at Lazarus in Abraham's bosom?'

  'My dear girl,' cried Proffy. 'Surely you don't believe everything you read in the Bible. A highly corrupt text. I assure you Dives was immensely happy until the day of his death, when he was promptly received into Abraham's bosom as a reward for his kindness to Lazarus.'

  'Money, like blood, isn't everything—' began Jemima. She was stopped by the sound of a loud splash or perhaps two splashes, coming from the river. There was the sound of wood crashing on wood and some kind of splintering, as it might be two boats colliding. From the noise of it, a fight was taking place.

  There were shouts. Jemima distinctly heard the word 'Pember' and then: 'Look out - Christ, what have you done?'

  Then a girl's hysterical voice cried out: 'It's Saffer. He's covered in blood. I think he's dead.'

  9

  An Envious Society

  The screaming girl was Fanny Iverstone. As she ran out of the shadows, Jemima saw dark patches on her gaudy dress: patches of blood, black in the moonlight. At that point, as if on some ghostly cue, the moon went behind a thick black cloud and for a moment the only light came from the coloured dancing globes of The Punting Heaven, still streaming across the lawn as the noise of the Liebestod, which had succeeded Rheingold (ancient Flagstadt? modern Linda Esther Gray?), bellowed out.

  They've got him, they've got him,' she was crying. 'Proffy, do something.'

  The continuing sense of chaos was made worse by the fact that the grandeur of the music, the glorious voice of Flagstadt (yes), went on soaring above it all. When someone at last saw fit to switch off the homemade Wagnerian tape, special to the occasion, the babble of cries and voices left behind sounded quite puny in the silence.

  Fanny went on sobbing hysterically as Bernardo Valliera - recognizable by his leopard-skin - and another man called something like Luggsby ran towards the river. Proffy, who had stood quite still and for once silent through all this as though in a state of shock, eventually put his arm round her. The emergence of the revellers from the grass and a couple from the most distant punt, both male it appeared, together with a powerful searchlight turned onto the scene from the boats, meant that the evening had lost all its classical Poussinesque magic. A comparison to Stanley Spencer was more appropriate. Several of the girls were shivering. Everyone was suddenly aware that it had become very cold.

  It seemed an extraordinarily long time before the ambulance arrived. Before that, Saffron's motionless blood-stained body was borne out of the bushes at the edge of the bank where he had been found lying by four of his friends, using the door of the boathouse as a kind of bier. As the

  searchlight fell on his face travelled across his body, still partly clad in its gold finery, the Wagnerian comparison to Siegfried was irresistible; would his arm suddenly rise and would he sing of the past before dying?

  Who was his Brunnhilde? Fanny Iverstone? But she hardly looked the part; not romantic enough. Tiggie Jones in a way-out modern version? Or perhaps Muffet Pember who, mask abandoned, was sitting distraught on the grass, quite alone, dishevelled red hair round her shoulders. She looked infinitely pathetic in her leopard-skin bikini; nobody had thought to put a coat round her shoulders. Jemima, who wanted to do something to help and was frustrated by her inability to think of anything practical, went and covered her with her cardigan.

  Muffet looked up. Her first words reminded Jemima that Muffct's correct role in Gotterdämmerung, if she was to pursue the comparison, was that of Gutrune, bride of Siegfried and sister of Siegfried's slayer Gunter.

  'Everyone thinks it's my fault,' she sobbed. 'But I didn't tell Rufus I was coming here. I'm not such a bloody idiot, am I?' Muffet gazed rather angrily at her. It occurred to Jemima that Muffet, apart from her unusual Pre-Raphaelite colouring, was not really all that pretty: her brown eyes were quite small; her neat little nose was quite sharp and snipey. When one looked at her closely Muffet Pember looked more shrewd than naive. Perhaps she was not so pathetic after all. Jemima remembered Saffron's words: 'all venom inside'.

  'Do you mean that it was your brother who attacked Saffron?' asked Jemima sharply. Beyond the fact that Saffron had been assaulted with a boat hook and had a large gash on the back of his head, Jemima had not managed to gather many details of the attack. Despite the great loss of blood - the AB group blood - from the scalp wound he was however very much alive and his pulse was strong.

  'No, of course it wasn't,' said Muffet, sounding even more indignant and less woebegone. 'It was just an awful coincidence. Rufus and Nigel and their friends came up the river in a couple of canoes to - well, I don't know exactly what they came to do' - slightly coy tone - 'and before they could do anything, before they even landed, Fanny found Saffer all covered with blood. I know it sounds rather odd,' Muffet finished lamely. 'But it was just an awful coincidence. I mean, why should Rufus use a boat hook?'

  'Why indeed?' asked Jemima rather grimly. Muffet seemed to imply that other methods of assault - the fight in the restaurant for example -were lawful. At this point they were joined by Fanny Iverstone, hysterics now remarkably vanished and a coat - Proffy's ? No, too smart - flung over her stained dress. Under the circumstances Jemima admired her control, as she had admired her breezily bossy character on the occasion of their first meeting. It took some strength of character to be smoking a cigarette by the river, when you had discovered the blood-stained body of your cousin a very short time be
fore. Even if Fanny's hand was shaking, her conversation made sense. Nor did she seek to blame Rufus Pember.

  'Somebody must have had it in for him,' said Fanny. 'But not necessarily Rufus. He was just lying there. And then I heard the splashes. The trouble is, you know what Saffer's like. People absolutely loathe him. All that money. And then he never tries to hide it, when most people here are so poor. Lots of people hate Saffer who've never even met him. I'd hate him myself, I expect, if I'd never met him.'

  'Well you don't hate him, do you? Not exactly.' Muffet still sounded sulky. Nor was she apparently grateful for Fanny's defence of her brother. Altogether, not a very appealing little character, thought Jemima.

  The next day Jemima related this conversation on the telephone, along with all the other lurid details of the evening, to Cass in London. Considering Cass' doleful prophecies about Jemima's presence at the Chimneysweepers' Dinner, he was remarkably tolerant towards her revelations, showing more interest in the possible identity of Saffron's attacker than in Jemima's own experiences during the evening. The jealous cracks about Saffron were also missing.

  It was not until later, when she was walking with her usual aesthetic satisfaction down the long curve of the High Street on her way to visit that well-known moralist Kerry Barber at St Lucy's, that this absence of jealousy struck Jemima as significant. A sense of fairness in Cass - one of his marked characteristics as curiosity was hers - meant that he generally abandoned any questions concerning her private life when his own would not bear examination. So Jemima, ineluctably, began to wonder who ... All at once the elegance of the curved street, paraded graciously down towards Magdalen Bridge like an Edwardian beauty at the races, failed to move her. Ignoring for once the classical facade of the Queen's College, she felt like Emma during the Box Hill expedition: 'less happy than she had expected'.

  Jemima put her mind resolutely forward to the prospect of her encounter with Kerry Barber at St Lucy's. The bells of evensong were sounding as she passed St Mary's, the University church, and soon other bells began to chime in. Jemima did not imagine that the groups of the young - all undergraduates? at any rate all young - lounging and scurrying along the pavement were on their way to evensong. Nevertheless, for all the evening sunshine now casting its romantic stagey shadows on pillar and alley, there was something uncomfortable at the heart of the idyll. At any rate to Jemima's fancy; another kind of disquiet replaced the vague dissatisfaction about Cass's absent affections.

  An open car, small and red and noisy, passed her: the driver and the male passengers were wearing white. A girl in the front seat, wearing pale blue, waved: it was Fanny Iverstone. Jemima waved back. Fanny at least had perfectly recovered from the events of the previous night, even if Saffron was lying in the Radcliffe Infirmary, eight stitches in his scalp, but otherwise not as badly injured as that glimpse of him white-faced on his bier had seemed to indicate.

  It was this sight of Fanny which jolted Jemima towards the source of her own disquiet: at least about Oxford. It was all very well for Cy Fredericks, as chairman of a commercial television company, to talk enthusiastically about 'a post-Brideshead situation', followed by his famous pronouncement: 'these Golden Kids mean Big Bucks'. But the various attempts on Saffron's life (for so she certainly regarded them) cast rather a different light on the social situation at Oxford University, 'post-Brideshead or otherwise.

  Some person or some people hated Saffron enough to wish him dead, or at best very severely injured. Leaving aside the mysterious business of Bim Marcus' fall, an attack with a boat hook was not to be put in the same category as some form of undergraduate jape on the river. The kind of jape for example that Rufus Pember and Nigel Copley had stoutly sworn they intended to carry out that night, only to be thwarted by some previous more murderous intrusion.

  'Saffer is a shit' had pronounced a huge and dripping Nigel Copley: Saffron's claim to this noun was evidently received wisdom in the Copley/ Pember set. Big Nigel had been hauled with some difficulty out of the river where he had attempted to hide beneath his own overturned canoe, following the discovery of Saffron's body. 'But we wanted to abduct him, you know, not to kill him.'

  'Abduct him ?' Jemima heard one of the dinner guests exclaim, possibly Bernardo Valliera, because he added: 'This is not South America, my friend.'

  'Duck him, he said. Duck him,' Rufus Pember, equally wet but somehow more composed, interrupted. 'Duck him. A good old-fashioned British custom.' He glared at Valliera. In Jemima's view, not every red-haired person justified the reputation of their kind for aggression; Rufus Pember however, for all his physical resemblance to the dying Chatterton, certainly did.

  For the time being Jemima suspended judgement on the involvement of Messrs Pember and Copley in the attack on Saffron. (Although she certainly did not believe a mere ducking had been intended: who would take canoes late at night, travel a mile upstream, merely to administer a ducking ? It made no sense. So to Rufus Pember's aggressive quality, she added a capacity for quick thinking: Copley's admission had been neatly turned.)

  But now as she reached Holywell, and the long secure wall of Magdalen, she considered Fanny's words anew: 'Lots of people loathe Saffer who've never even met him.' Was that uncomfortable thing at the heart of the idyll simple human envy? In an age of grants, declining, and unemployment, rising, it was easy to see how some undergraduates might actively envy Saffron for his advantages. Not only the media found themselves in 'a post-Brideshead situation'. Many students came up to Oxford, envisaging themselves enjoying their own mini-Brideshead existence for a year or two, before setting down to a more serious way of life. Oxford was a place of great expectations. What happened when those expectations were disappointed? Great envy? Even, perhaps, great hatred? For that matter what price the classless society based on merit which many might hope to find at a university if nowhere else in Britain? The cars, parties, dinners of the young and rich ensured them not only a sour spotlight within the university, but the rather more appreciative attention of the media in the world outside. Jemima reflected that Cy Fredericks' enthusiasm for Golden Kids was really quite typical: you could not imagine him mounting a whole programme on the lifestyle of comprehensive-school students once at Oxford, with due respect to the views of Dr Kerry Barber whom she was about to visit.

  Jemima's conversation with Proffy came back to her. Who was to say what Lazarus actually felt about Dives, as he ate up the crumbs from the rich man's table? And maybe being forbidden to give Dives a glass of water afterwards, an instruction from Abraham, was one of the pleasurable experiences of his (after) life.

  As Jemima reached the porter's lodge of St Lucy's College, she was thinking that money - and blood - had a lot to answer for. Blood! That unlucky word again. Better to concentrate on money.

  'Money and where it comes from, money and where it goes to,' Kerry Barber was saying a few minutes later as he lay back in an ugly modern chair which was ill-suited to the large panelled room in St Lucy's famous Pond Quad; he was airing long rather good legs clad in a pair of crumpled white shorts. Dr Barber had evidently just taken part in some active game although it was difficult to make out exactly what, since the single thing his room had in common with Saffer's was the amount of sporting equipment littered about. 'Did you see my piece on the redistribution of Britain's wealth as reflected or rather not reflected in the average income of an undergraduate's parents? "Grants should Get up and Go". Shocking, quite shocking.'

  Kerry Barber jumped up and poured Jemima another large sherry. It was of excellent quality; very dry and if you liked sherry, delicious. Jemima felt it would be ungracious to say that she actually hated sherry, when Barber was such a generous host. Furthermore, he clearly did not drink himself, but took occasional swigs at a china mug bearing a symbol of international goodwill; goodness knew what it contained.

  All in all, he was really a very decent man. It was only under gentle pressure from Jemima - the trained interviewer - that he revealed he had spent the afternoon pl
aying squash with paraplegics; further discreet questioning, centred on the mysterious china mug, elicited the fact that he gave the money he would otherwise have spent on drink to the Third World.

  'It's a decision Mickey - my wife - and I took years ago and you'd be surprised how it mounts up.' He smiled rather sweetly. 'You see we both enjoyed a drink before - and we try not to cheat by pretending to drink less as the years go by. If anything, as Mickey pointed out, we might be drinking more. So many of our friends are drinking more these days. We notice it at our own parties, where of course we try to keep the drink flowing as much as possible. Mickey seriously questions whether the price of three glasses of wine each is enough to put in the box at the end of an evening. Judging from our married friends, at least one of us would be an alcoholic by now - if we drank that is. But which is it to be?' He smiled. 'Statistics suggest Mickey but as she has the lower income that doesn't seem quite fair.'

  Jemima, self-consciously clutching her own second sherry, looked nervously round the room. Was there a box - the box - visible? She thought she saw something which looked like a collecting box near the door and made a mental resolve to donate handsomely to it (the price of a half bottle of champagne at least) on departure. In the meantime, as Kerry Barber was much the most decent person she had met in Oxford, with the possible exception of Jack Iverstone (Proffy with his views on Dives deserved the epithet of engaging rather than decent) Jemima looked forward to his confrontation with the so-called Golden Kids on the programme. What would the Oxford Bloods make of his policy concerning drink and the Third World? Why, their donations if made along the same lines would keep several African states going for months . . .

  She wondered if any of them had crossed Kerry Barber's path. The answer, under the circumstances, was slightly surprising.

  'Lord Saffron, as I suppose we must call him, although the sooner that sort of thing goes the better. Yes. He came to me for economics his first year.' Jemima realized rather guiltily that it had never even occurred to her to enquire what subject Saffron was reading; or was it an indictment of his own deliberately frivolous approach to the University?