Can the Gods Cry? Read online

  “You have to do up every last button,” grinned one of them. “When it comes to children you can never be too careful. That’s a fearful cold wind out there!”

  “When I want your advice, I’ll ask for it,” said McBride rather weakly, but then he stiffened, “and don’t think you know how to look after kids; you’re no more than a snivelling little kid yourself.”

  If it was intended to wound, the barb bounced off uselessly. The student, who now appeared more determined to stay on the train than McBride himself, had a taken up a more permanent position leaning against the back of one of the seats with one foot propped up on its toe, like an Edwardian gentleman at his fireplace. “No one understands children, least of all their parents. The child a parent sees is a mere construct in the parent’s addled brain, and has nothing to do with the reality of the child. By the time the parent becomes aware of his or her own idiocy, it’s too late: the child has grown up and is ready to challenge the parent.” At this stage, the student disentangled himself from his Edwardian posture, leant right down until his mouth was close to McBride’s ear and hissed, “And then the fun starts!”

  “Watch yourself,” replied a startled McBride, “watch you behaviour. I’ll have your name.”

  The young man was unmoved and resumed his gentlemanly pose, “Of course, when it comes to understanding children and always admitting that they remain pretty impenetrable for us all, I believe that the closer one is to childhood, the easier it is; having witnessed your performance this morning, I am absolutely convinced that this is the case.”

  At this stage, McBride had had enough; gathering the living proof of his fertility around him with a protective gesture that suggested the student’s words could be construed as offensive to those of tender age, an implication belied by the children’s continued expression of complete bafflement over the entire exchange, he opened the door and took them with him. The stationmaster’s whistle blew as the students piled out, and he began to wave his arms about in a state of extreme agitation. Health-and-safety was being ignored, and the culprit, wearing a highly fashionable long raincoat of the kind used by American sleuths in the thirties, slipped away with his infantile retinue, like the Pied Piper. You have now been introduced to our heroine’s tormentor – not a demonic one, and in the end he turns out to be not all bad. That is the thing about tormentors, they are very rarely all bad, which confuses matters considerably.

  But Maeve was not alone. She had a champion and a very remarkable one at that: the tall, dark-haired and attractive Anne Bartlett, a German historian. She immediately understood that Maeve not only had a fine mind but, also and more importantly, a very good heart. They enjoyed each other’s company, and what little social life she had revolved around her protector. Anne was one of those people whose intelligence never interferes with their profoundly decent instincts. The white charger was always waiting and, when she mounted it, her own self-interest was entirely disregarded. When it came to Maeve, it was an open and shut case. Here was a woman of undoubted talents whose execrable colleagues were pushing her around and worse: their put-downs were articulated with the slightly weary tone of people who are trying their very best to be kind and to show understanding. Maeve, whose mind ran along strictly rationalist lines, was of course utterly outsmarted and unable to understand exactly where she was being wronged. In heroically holding them at bay, Anne did not use the sword of truth and the trusty shield of fair play so beloved of some right-minded politicians; such weapons would have been far too heavy for her, but she was handy with the rapier of sarcastic comment and a virtuoso with the very down-to-earth broomstick of common sense, which can be used for prodding or simply lateral beating around the head – a very humane instrument of warfare as it causes no lasting damage to the adversary.

  Like so many of her kind – her wonderful kind – Anne was less adept at running her own life than at running other people’s. She did everything on impulse and believed her own innate decency to be found amongst most people. She was having an asymmetric love affair with a young Czech called Lech, who was intermittently studying for a degree in German literature. He would occasionally come over to England to get drunk, an experience that differed from getting drunk in Prague only in this respect: in England he could complain incessantly about the poor quality of the beer, which undoubtedly added to his pleasure.

  Unwittingly Lech was to bring about changes in Maeve’s life: such is the fragility of the threads that hold us together. The timing of this momentous event was that season of drunken silliness, that Yuletide whose ebb leaves behind a clutter of empty wineboxes and beer cans. But its place was far more complex, and it requires me to make a little detour.

  A few years earlier, the university had decided that it needed to catch up with the more entrepreneurial times. They appointed a go-getting vice-chancellor to further the successes of our illustrious, liberal and, might I say, candid seat of learning with its dreaming towers and cloisters of poured concrete and ceramic pools of shining water, redolent, I think, of some Mediterranean marvel – Venice perhaps. Why not? Well, perhaps because they had to fill in so many of these pools that tended to catch all the falling leaves that autumn brought and then began to turn all shades of brown before blooming in midwinter into a bright algae green.

  And this genius of business management they hired was none other than the now infamous Lord Brown of Envelope. He was a Tory in those days when Labour life peers were lagging behind in the corruption stakes, and Lord Envelope was leading the pack: not for him the odd night at the Paris Ritz and a few thousand the tax man knew nothing about. No, he was a man of taste and couldn’t possibly restrict his life of luxury to weekends. I will not tire the reader with the details which had three KPMG accountants working full time for two and a half years. For our purposes, I must only mention the wine. The university was the owner not only of large structures in reinforced concrete and endless “villages” of student accommodation, which must have kept the London Brick Company busy for several weeks or possibly months, but also a sixteenth-century hall it rather neglected and had allocated for postgraduate lodgings. No sooner had the building come into Lord Envelope’s vision than he started to dream up the most perfect dinner parties in a refurbished version of the hall. And so it was, much to the anger of the post-graduates turfed out of their eccentric accommodation and those pedants at English Heritage who thought his porch with Doric columns not in keeping with the ancient Tudor build. But as Lord Envelope constantly liked to point out to the university authorities, they needed to pay the “going rate for the job”, if they wanted a well-run institution with an international reputation. He always drove this important point home by telling them that he had turned down a much more lucrative job in America as the Chief Executive of the Coca-Cola Corporation, and had done so solely out of his great love of learning, instilled in him by his mother, a writer of popular whodunnits who had been unjustly neglected in favour of Agatha Christie. The good men and women of the senate committee were very impressed and indeed cowed by his generous sacrifice and kept opening the university’s purse wider and wider.

  But I have promised not to burden the reader with all that dismal minutiae of greed, and restrict myself to the one element that was to affect the fate of our plain but unhealthily virtuous heroine, Maeve King – unhealthily for herself, of course, and not for society, which would be much improved if there were more plain Maeves around.

  An old Elizabethan hall has, of course, a cellar, and a cellar has to be filled. In the case of Lord Envelope, it had to be filled with the best. In all, the accountants sent in after the vice-chancellor’s arrest found 9,738 bottles of the finest claret, mostly Chateau Latour, and the invoice that went with this modest drop of hospitality was considered so scandalous that the senate decided to sell the entire collection of claret (we won’t mention the whites and the other reds here) to an enterprising young French historian called Tom Viticult for 25p a bottle (I will leave you to do the sums and choke wi
th envy).

  Tom did not have a wine cellar, but his terraced house in Brideton, Southdown’s seaside capital, did have an unused coal cellar, which certainly helped out but did not suffice. The surplus was distributed around the house at the bottom of wardrobes, under sinks, in the cupboard under the stairs, beside the cold-water tank in the attic and underneath almost every item of furniture: beds, tables, desks and the TV stand – much to the irritation of his wife, Claire, another scholar of French culture.

  Such a quantity of wine could not be drunk by Bacchus in his eternal lifetime – nor by Tom in spite of his comparable thirst for the red liquid full of dizzying dreams, vivacious conversations, happy palates and the odd sore head. There was nothing for it but to organise the mother of all Christmas bashes, and what better place to hold it than in the Elizabethan hall which was having its newly acquired Doric columns removed, a cost the university was defraying by renting it out to the public. The cleverness with which we manage to keep wealth circulating around our advanced western economies is something we never fully understand or appreciate as we should. Thus a small part of the booty was earmarked for immediate consumption, much to Claire’s approval as she saw an opportunity for re-deploying part of her invaded wardrobes. By now, the reader must be aware of how fate was manipulating persons and the concomitance of events in order to deprive Maeve of her one support.

  So the time was Christmas and the place was the Elizabethan Hall with the partially dismantled Doric columns. Lech was feeling that life was a good adventure. The stifling regime that had run his country since shortly after the war was staggering towards its end. He was abroad again, and visitors like himself were still uncommon enough to attract great interest. He had a beautiful girlfriend, although a touch serious for his liking. A childhood full of rank moralising made her stern principles unendearing to him. Good fortune, he thought, is like a woman, and you will do much better if you take her forcefully – none of that namby-pamby sensitivity for her feelings. Sensitivity is something we leave to women; it is not a male virtue. And women, like good fortune, love youth – vigorous youth that doesn’t think too much – youth with a good hard body that makes them slightly fearful. Lech had steeled himself with a few foul-tasting English pints before thinking these princely thoughts that can be found in any of the back streets of our towns and cities when the nightclubs empty on a Saturday night, but also in the works of our great European philosophers, lovers of knowledge and civilisation. Lech had the feeling of being elected to great deeds and happiness, which he mistakenly believed to be interconnected.

  The entrance to the hall was guarded by the austere head of the Italian Department, Professor Pino Pinguino who must have got up at five in the morning to present the world with such a well-ordered appearance, ranging from polished black shoes to a beautifully coiffured head on which it looked as though each hair had been laboriously placed in position to match a perfect cascade of thatch. There are worse ways to waste one’s life, but few that express so compellingly the inanity of our vanity fair. Lech waited for the tall professor to make eye contact with a guest requiring a double dose of sycophantic effusion, and then boldly ducked under his line of vision. Fate must have arranged that too.

  As Lech got drunker and discovered the English right-thinking classes to be stuffy, puffed-up and, worst of all, unnaturally incurious about Lech himself, he became increasingly obsessed with the idea of reciting the bawdy poems of the infamous satirical poet from Pumpernickel, Otto Pornovsky, considered a degenerate by the Nazis, not least because of the suspicious ethnicity suggested by his surname and not sufficiently redressed by a Christian name harking back to four Holy Roman Emperors no less, and one of them garnished with a “the Great”. What Lech could not possibly have known was that during the eighties feminism had passed from its virtuous radical stage to its tiresome finger-pointing one, in which deviation from the new norm could not be tolerated. Pornovsky is famous for his unremitting depiction of women as mere bodies and objects of male desires, an attitude that was not exclusively Pornovskian and could not be banned by diktat. The cheerless Doctor Joyce Graves, also of the Italian Department, started to bang doors to broadcast that her finest sensitivities had been unpardonably affronted, even though she had been known to eye up the talent amongst the first-year students at the beginning of each year and then report every physical detail to the diaphanous Doctor Cecilia Atrophy from English Literature who looked as though she didn’t have the energy to eat her breakfast, let alone make love to one of the sturdy lads depicted by the good doctor of philosophy and defender of our new morality.

  As the Czech boyfriend could not be summoned before the school committee, it was Anne Bartlett herself who had to respond for his bad behaviour. Anne, of course, could have made short work of that committee, and many a time she had done just that on behalf of other people, but on this occasion she felt that a grand gesture of solidarity with the part-time student and full-time drinker was in order. It was difficult to reconstruct the exact course of the senate proceedings after the event, as reports were conflicting, but the result was that Anne handed in her notice. Lech repaid her loyalty a few months later by marrying Sophie Witleston who, as far as bodies are concerned, was very well endowed with the upholstery required to set the male hormones racing. The content of her cranium was somewhat limited, unlike her bank account which had been overflowing since her father had sold off his razorblade company to an American corporation. And all of this, of course, was fine by Lech who knew a good thing when he saw it. Besides the contents of Anne’s cranium and bank account had been the other way about, and that can be tedious for a man, particularly one who wants a quiet life and freedom to indulge his pleasures.

  But the greatest loser in this tragic end to Anne’s academic career was Maeve, who lost her closest friend – and worse, that rare friendship that stimulates and keeps the mind alive.

  Anne would marry a doctor – a real one who cures patients – and during her happy years of motherhood, something she had never really hankered after, she started to write a satirical novel about a Northdown University and characters not that dissimilar from the ones we have encountered here. After lying some ten years in a drawer, it has now become a huge success. Anne appears on Newsnight Review, and seated on their low and uncomfortable chairs, she can be heard to reel off inanities in clipped tones to the grinning assent of the presenter whose mind is elsewhere of course – on such matters as who should be the next speaker, who would best enliven her programme, how to make the speakers perform and, dear God, the desperate urgings of her producer channelled directly to her ear. Anne, meanwhile, falls prey to belated ambition and resentment. Her treatment by the university, which she had rarely thought about for more than a decade, has become an obsession, and more inexplicably, she feels that she has wasted her enormous talents on an ungrateful family, which in reality is both grateful and admiring of her success. So it is clear: the vanities of our fairground world can corrupt even the best and brightest of our sons and daughters, so what hope for us lesser mortals?

  But what the reader really wants to know is Anne’s opinion now of that Lech for whom she sacrificed her career. But don’t you know? – We, the vainglorious homines sapientes, would lay down our lives for someone whom in all probability we would detest six months later in the happy (or perhaps unhappy) event of our surviving. We are motivated by vanity and impulse, although we dress up our vain and impulsive acts in all sorts of fine clothes. And as for the past, we are forever rewriting it.

  So now we come to the really weepy part of our story. Our heroine has been deprived of her caballera in shining armour (I’m afraid we have no word for a woman knight in our native tongue, which is no less lacunose than any other language, despite chauvinistic beliefs to the contrary), and is now defenceless against ruthless men who do not want their way with her body but are quite capable of stealing her research results and impugning the integrity of her academic work (in no other field of human endeavour
have so many been so dependent on the rumours of so few). I hear you objecting that you hear very little about Maeve; what a predictable lot you are! It is sufficient for a heroine to be virtuous. That is her principal task, but you have to admit that supercilious academics, wayward Czech students and corrupt university vice-chancellors are much more fun to read about.

  As the most junior member of faculty in the department, the now unprotected Maeve was summoned to the offices of both Cameron Murray and Harvey MacBride, descendants of a people who could never distinguish between forename and surname or foreboding and surly moaning. Cameron Murray was to see her first and had her sitting around for three-quarters of an hour while he interviewed students. “So sorry to keep you waiting,” he would say, with that sly, mock solicitousness he had so expertly mastered. But stop, I’m not a military historian and I’m not an academic. I would never tire you with a battle scene, and describe the clashing steel, the parrying shield or the copious bleeding from fatal wounds, so why would I discuss the even more monotonous cut and thrust of an academic single combat with its purring niceties, wicked jokes, subtle sarcasm and brutal demonstrations of the will to power (and power over what)? We know the outcome: Maeve was put upon. Ah! you say, what a middle-class form of oppression; she was hardly breaking up bricks for aggregate on a Bengali roadside. You’re right; but though evils are relative, they are all evils. Leave criticism to the critics and let me introduce you to one last character.