He raised his voice slightly and glanced round the room.
‘I am suspended. I haven’t caught leprosy. So I won’t wear a bell. And I shall continue to use this room as of right until I am shown why in law I should not.’
‘And if that happens, you shall be my guest,’ added Henry Saltecombe, his jowls shaking in emphasis.
The historians glanced at each other and raised their eyebrows in wry humour. Miss Scotby nodded as though she had expected nothing else. Which was probably true, thought Arthur Halfdane. Or at least she had the art of always giving the impression that whatever happened was expected.
A pretty young woman with a determined chin, Eleanor Soper of the Social Science department, came across in pursuit of the coffee-pot, apparently unconscious of the tension. Halfdane smiled at her and pulled up another chair beside his own. She sat down.
Miss Scotby nodded again as if this, too, were expected, turned on her heel and, avoiding Miss Disney’s imperious beckonings, walked smoothly out of the room.
‘Nicely timed,’ said Halfdane to Eleanor.
‘Why?’ she said. ‘What’s up with Scotby?’
‘Gone to earth,’ said Henry with a chuckle. ‘Walt’s furious.’
He was the only person in the college who actually addressed Miss Disney as ‘Walt’ to her face.
‘Now, Sam,’ he said, ‘what’s the latest? If it’s not sub judice or something.’
He rubbed his podgy hands in mock-enthusiastic expectation.
How mock is it? wondered Halfdane.
‘There’s nothing new. I’ve agreed to go before the governors to make a statement, but not while the student governors are present. They’re still trying to sort out the legalities.’
‘Well,’ said Henry dubiously. ‘The students are after all legally elected members of the governing body. In any case, I’m surprised that you are bothering, Sam. Points of order and matters constitutional have always bored you to tears in the past.’
A general movement towards the doors prevented any reply from Fallowfield.
‘What’s on?’ asked Halfdane.
‘By Christ!’ said Henry, pushing his fifteen stones breathily out of the chair. ‘They’re going to shift Hippolyta, her of the golden tits, begging your pardon, Miss Soper. This we mustn’t miss!’
‘What?’
‘The statue. Al’s statue. Acres of thigh swinging on high! Coming, Sam?’
‘No, thanks,’ said Fallowfield, shaking his head moodily, his recent liveliness in the face of the enemy now completely evaporated. ‘I don’t think I will.’
‘See you later then.’ He puffed cheerily away, followed by the slight figure of Halfdane. Soon there was only one other person left in the Common Room. She came to a halt by Fallowfield’s chair.
‘Yes, Miss Disney?’ he said without looking up.
‘Mr Fallowfield,’ she said loudly, as though speaking to someone much more distant. ‘Whatever the outcome of this business, I should like you to know I consider your admitted conduct to be absolutely deplorable. You have debauched a charming and delightful young girl. Should you be acquitted …’
‘I’m not on trial,’ observed Fallowfield, but it wasn’t worth the effort.
‘… and stay on at the college, I warn you there are other matters I may have to speak of. Other matters. You follow me, I have no doubt.’
She left in a shudder of flesh and a crash of door.
Fallowfield whistled a couple of bars of ‘The Dead March’.
‘Glass houses to you, Miss Disney,’ he murmured. ‘Bloody great glass houses.’
He finished his coffee and poured himself another cup even though it was cold.
The giant mechanical shovel-cum-crane lumbered through the herbaceous border on to the lawn of the staff garden. Miss Scotby winced visibly and Miss Disney took a step forward as though to lay herself beneath its tracks.
It was as well she didn’t. The ground was baked hard by the summer sun, but still the vehicle’s metal teeth left a deep imprint in the level green turf.
The college gardener, who had tended it and watered it to the last, spoke a word which normally would have caused the Disney bosom to push indignantly against the Disney chin. Now she nodded sadly as though in full accord.
‘What happens now?’ asked Halfdane.
‘I think they’ve drilled most of the base out of the concrete,’ said Henry, pointing with his much-chewed pipe. ‘Now they’ll take the strain with that thing, finish the drilling and haul away. Look. Here comes Simeon.’
The long, wirily energetic figure of Simeon Landor, the college principal, came striding from the mellow, castellated sandstone building known as the Old House which backed on to the garden.
‘Hello, Principal. Come to see the fun?’
Landor shook his head in reproof.
‘No fun, Saltecombe. A sad moment, this. For us all. Very sad.’
He raised his voice slightly. Miss Disney, who was standing some yards away, shot him an indignant glance and turned her back.
Halfdane had come in at the tail-end of this particular saga, but as usual with the help of the inveterate chronicler by his side he was in full possession of the facts.
The college had expanded rapidly since Landor had taken over as principal five years earlier on the death of Miss Girling, whose services to the college were commemorated by this very statue.
When he came, the place had been a teachers’ training college for some two or three hundred girls, though for the first time men were being admitted the following September. Now it covered a much wider range of courses, vocational and academic, some leading to degrees from the new university of East Yorkshire, situated some fifteen miles to the south. Numbers of students, staff and buildings had risen rapidly, and now the Old House, the early nineteenth-century mansion which once housed the entire college, was the centre of a star of concrete and glass. But it was an incomplete star. In one direction lay half an acre of cultivated beauty which had once been a source of pride and joy to Miss Girling and still was to Miss Scotby and Miss Disney and many others. It was like an artifact created for a nurseryman’s catalogue. It had everything, including a fringed pool and a ferned grot, and from the first crocuses in spring till the last dahlia in the autumn it was ablaze with colour. Above all, it had the long, level lawn, the finest Solway turf, five thousand square feet without a blemish. Till now.
For the Landor plan needed the garden. Where the blushing flowers had once risen in such profusion a new growth was going to gladden the eye, or some eyes at least. A biology laboratory.
The principal
