Four Thousand Days by M.J. Trow

Author:M.J. Trow [Trow, M.J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Severn House
Published: 2021-10-03T23:00:00+00:00

NINE

The Senior Common Room had long ago been appropriated by the teaching staff. Originally, it had been built as a bolt-hole for graduates, but few of them ever turned up so the lecturers moved in, lured by the soft leather furniture, the ginger biscuits and the port. All in all, it had the hallmarks of a gentlemen’s club without the exorbitant membership fees and it was the gentlemen’s angle that annoyed Margaret Murray the most. She was usually too busy to go there, but whenever she could, she would make an appearance just because she wore a dress. She would listen to the tuts and sighs from the older dons and wink at the younger ones, most of whom had no problem with her presence at all.

Today, however, she was on a mission and the two birds she would bring down with a single stone sat opposite each other, hogging the fireplace, looking like Tweedledum and Tweedledee – without Mr Tenniel’s caps and tight jackets, of course.

‘Good morning, doctors,’ she trilled, causing both of them to rattle their papers.

Reluctantly, they clambered to their feet. ‘Dr Murray,’ one of them said. He was arguably the more approachable of the two. Henry Sacheverill was an Oxford man, wondering most days how he had ended up so far down the academic pecking order as to be teaching at University College, London.

‘Dear lady,’ smiled the other one. He was Alistair Wishart, a Cambridge alumnus who had long ago learned to lose his native Arbroath accent in favour of the plummier tones of the queen’s English.

‘I hate to bother you,’ Margaret said, plonking herself squarely between them as though she were there for the duration, ‘but I’d like to pick your brains on William Blake.’

The men looked at each other. ‘Why us, pray?’ Wishart asked.

Margaret could gush with the best of them. ‘Because you, gentlemen, represent the finest brains in the English faculty. Where else would I turn?’

Their egos suitably tweaked, the lecturers made burbling noises and Sacheverill rang a little silver bell by his chair. ‘Will you take tea, Dr Murray?’ he asked. ‘Personally, I find Blake too dry for my tastes.’

‘Wasn’t he a great poet?’ Margaret asked. She had been around undergraduates for long enough to know how to play the ingénue.

Sacheverill snorted. ‘He was mad, Margaret,’ he said as a waiter hovered. ‘Teas all round, Weston, and a pile of your best gingers.’

‘Mad is in the eye of the beholder, Sacheverill,’ Wishart said. ‘I see him as a visionary, a pioneer, if you will.’

‘I won’t,’ Sacheverill scowled. ‘Why the interest in Blake, Margaret?’

‘Oh, it’s some random jottings that a student recently made. I’m trying to make sense of them.’

‘Couldn’t you ask him?’ Wishart was ever the champion of the all-too-obvious.

‘I’d love to,’ Margaret said. ‘Sadly, she is dead.’

‘Ah.’

‘I was particularly interested in “Jerusalem”.’

The tea arrived at that moment and there was a great deal of clattering of crockery.

‘Yes.’ Wishart waited until Margaret did what was expected of her and poured for them all.

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