Carnage on the Committee (17 page)

'You said she was in Cambridge, Georgie. Jack's in Cambridge.'

Prothero brightened. 'Of course she is. Do you think she'd be prepared to give Wysteria a lift?'

Amiss suddenly felt very happy. 'I'm sure she'll be absolutely delighted.'

12

'So what did you make of Georgie Prothero, Ellis?'

'Amusing but a bit temperamental. No use, really. He didn't tell me anything I didn't already know.'

'Murderer?'

if you can think of a good reason why he should kill someone he's only ever met professionally.'

Amiss smirked. 'Well, he liked you.'

'I don't want to hear,' said Pooley.

'Tell us about Ferriter, Mary Lou,' said Milton. 'Revolting little creep. How can he possibly be a professor?'

'Felix Ferriter is an asshole,' said Mary Lou. 'An alpha asshole and an alpha plus apparatchik.' As she spoke. Amiss observed that Pooley had not lost the habit of looking slightly shocked when his beloved let fly. 'For someone with a second- if not third-rate brain, he's been a staggering success. And all because he's a dedicated follower of academic fashion.' She reached out for a slice of Pizza Continental. 'Poor Jack. She'd sure have a seizure if she could see us now.'

'You haven't confessed your guilty gastronomic secrets to her?'

'No. If she knew I sometimes nip out for a McDonald's she'd not be able to sleep nights.'

'Why didn't she come up with you?'

'Because the poor old thing still has a couple of books she just has to read and she's already overwrought. When I left she had just jumped up and down - literally - on
Uluroo.'

'Uluroo?'
asked Pooley.

'It's a godawful Australian aboriginal novel,' said Mary Lou.

'To be precise,' added Amiss, 'it's a look at Australia through the mind of a sentimental and intellectually-challenged kangaroo, which is presumably why Jack chose to leap on it rather than tear it apart.'

'How bad is it that she was just about to embark on
Closer to the Candle Flame?'

'Bad. Very bad,' said Amiss. 'It's French and about a girl whose phobia about moths leads her periodically to run naked through the streets when she fears her clothes are full of eggs. But being an existentialist, she spends the time in between musing on the moral implications of choosing such behaviour. It's one of Hugo Hurlingham's recommended reads: he can never get enough of existentialists.'

Mary Lou took a happy draught of Pepsi. 'But I guess it's all going to get worse. She also had to sample one you said Ferriter was keen on.'

'Which is?' asked Milton.

'This Hole my Centre.
Sure, I can see you don't believe me, Ellis, but as God is my witness, that's what it's called. It apparently explores the notion of the anus as the cradle and the anus as the grave through the eyes of an Albanian rent boy in Rome.'

'Not just the eyes unfortunately,' said Amiss, as he refilled his glass with the Bordeaux which Mary Lou had spurned.

'You see, as you know, Ferriter's a recent and enthusiastic convert to what he calls QueerStud.'

'I find the whole business completely confusing,' said Milton. 'I thought queer was a banned word years ago.'

'Unless you're gay,' explained Mary Lou. 'It's like I can call another black nigger, but if you do it you'll be in court. Anyway, Ferriter - who is, I should add, quite notorious in our profession - started his career as a straightforward Marxist critic because that's what his professor was.'

'This is completely beyond me,' said Milton. 'What do Marxists think about literature? I thought they concentrated on history and politics.'

'No, no. Marxists take a view on most things and literature's there to provide evidence of the wicked inequalities of society. Ammunition in the great struggle against the imperialistic and capitalistic oppression of the masses et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.'

'It's easy, really,' said Amiss. 'Marxist literary critics are like all Marxist commentators: they're in the business of finding facts to bear out the conclusions they want to reach.'

'Sounds like Geraint Griffiths,' said Milton.

'Geraint is an ex-Marxist who didn't so much move on as do a U-turn,' pointed out Amiss. 'He's an ideologue who's become an enemy of ideologies.'

'In a pretty ideological way,' said Pooley.

'Once a fanatic, always a fanatic,' said Milton. 'Which takes us back to Ferriter.'

Mary Lou frowned. 'Ferriter's a fanatic only about his own career. He takes up these intellectual fashions at the drop of a hat and discards them just as lightly. He's a natural linguist, I guess. But instead of learning real languages, he picks up a new language of criticism in no time at all. Writes like he talks - a mixture of yoof-drivel and incomprehensible and meaningless jargon that pleases whatever constituency he's making eyes at.'

Milton snorted. 'You can say that again. Meaningless is what he does best. That and being so self-centred he's got nothing useful to say about anyone.'

'That figures. Anyway Marxist lit. crit. got him a foot on the Oxbridge ladder. Then he floated into Derridean semiotics.'

'Into what?' asked Milton.

'Don't ask,' said Mary Lou. 'But it was cool at the time and got him a chair in the provinces in his early thirties. There was a brieff dalliance when he thought Edward Said was where it was all at so he claimed some Irish roots and went on about the colonised unconscious, then, bingo, suddenly, to great applause, he converts to feminism -a.k.a. gynocritical discourse - denounces phallocognition and gets a visiting chair at Harvard where they're madly chasing after Yale in their espousal of crackpot ethnic and gender studies and badly need a token male. Then, kiss my butt, you take your eye off him for two seconds and he's in at the birth of Queer Studies.'

Amiss pushed his plate away. 'I should know the answer to this, but I couldn't be bothered finding out. Is it to do with combing through literature looking for overlooked gays? Shakespeare's Dark Lady of the Sonnets was a boy - that sort of thing?'

'That was the primitive stage, Robert. Ferriter and his sort are engaged in "queering" literature on a grand scale. The QueerStud view now is that queer is normal and straight's an aberration.'

'Ferriter's gay, I presume,' said Pooley.

'Certainly dresses like one,' said Milton.

'It's not quite that simple,' said Mary Lou. 'Being the thorough little guy he is, he turned himselff into a practitioner. As a feminist, he'd got in touch with his feminine side but didn't actually change sex. But once a proponent of QueerStud, he turned queer along with the studies.'

'For heaven's sake, you can't just do that,' said Amiss. 'You have to have some inclination in that direction.'

'Ferriter would say that he was always hi, even if his experience was largely hetero.' Mary Lou stopped and helped herself to some more Pepsi. She looked slightly embarrassed, as befitted someone known to everyone present to have once been a lover of Jack Troutbeck. She took a sip. 'So now Felix is in touch with his inner fag: word is he's aiming to shag his way around the entire QueerStud circuit. And being a queer academic has the great bonus that by and large, unlike feminists, gay men don't expect you to sign contracts before you can put a hand on their thigh.'

'I don't follow this,' said Amiss. 'I thought all gays were body fascists these days. Why would they want to shag a weedy little bugger like Ferriter?'

'They're body fascists when it's only about bodies. But when it comes to power, they're just the same as straights and dykes. A Professor of Queer Studies is a very attractive proposition if you have intellectual pretensions and academic ambitions.'

'And he did spruce himself up a bit, didn't he?' observed Milton. 'Body-piercing, leather and all that. Not that I can imagine anyone thinking the effect attractive. But what do I know? I'm just a middle-aged heterosexual cop who thinks the country's going to the dogs.'

Mary Lou stopped talking and tucked into a final slice of pizza. Pooley was looking depressed. 'I like a few illusions, including the one that universities remain seats of learning to which we should aspire to send our children.'

'We will, darling. We will. But you have to be able to distinguish the wheat from the vast amount of chaff. I feel really sorry for these kids who're getting up to their ears in debt studying crap courses at crap universities. You'd think you Brits would have learned from all the mistakes we made in the States, but you've learned jackshit. You're dumbing down like crazy, just like we did. We get bright students at St Martha's, but it's hell to inculcate them with intellectual rigour. And it's hell to try to get through to them that most ffashionable criticism isn't worth wiping your butt with.'

'You're sounding dangerously elitist,' noted Amiss. 'Rosa Karp would have you despatched to the re-education camp.'

'Since I came under the influence of Jack, I've become an unabashed elitist. But it's a hard road and it's beginning to wear me out.'

'That's Eng. Lit.,' said Amiss, smugly. 'Full of pseuds. History's different.'

'Rubbish. It's almost as bad.'

'No, it's not. There are plenty of historians writing perfectly comprehensibly and they're bestsellers.'

'They're the ones that can write, Robert. Plenty that can't are lurking in academia teaching students how to ensure nobody knows what they're talking about.'

'To think,' said Milton, 'that I used to believe that professors were intelligent, peers were people off distinction and writers were dedicated to their art.'

'And policemen were honest,' said Amiss.

'Maybe things don't get worse,' said Pooley. 'Maybe it's always been like that but one just didn't know.'

'AH I know is academia,' said Mary Lou. 'And it's getting much worse now that political correctness has infected staff and students. No one can say what they think any more.'

Into the general gloom, the sound of Mary Lou's phone ringing was a welcome relief. The baroness's voice was audible to everyone. 'That's it,' she bellowed. 'I won't rest until I've strangled that little shirt-lifter with the entrails of the frog-lover.'

* * *

Prothero woke Amiss at seven-fifteen, close to hysteria. 'What
did
your old bag mean by it?'

'What are you talking about?'

'I've just had Rosa Krap on, incandescent.' To Amiss's astonishment, Prothero reported that despite her stated intention of talking to no one, the baroness had told a
Guardian
reporter her approach would not be that of Hermione Babcock since they had radically different views on fiction. 'She said she didn't share
any
of Hermione's tastes, and when the reporter asked how she felt about Virginia
Woolf,
according to Krap she said something really awful about how the only significant thing about Woolf and her circle was their sex-lives and that they all screwed each other since no one else would have them.'

'Can't argue with that,' said Amiss, yawning. 'Didn't Dorothy Parker say the Bloomsbury set were pairs who lived in squares and loved in triangles?'

'Wake up, Robert! You can guarantee that interview will alienate nearly
all
the committee.'

'Maybe, Georgie. But Jack doesn't get trapped by reporters. She'll have done this for a reason. Jack moves in mysterious ways and the thing to do is not to worry and to leave her to it.'

'But they'll
all
be ringing me to complain.'

'Tell them you know nothing and refer them to Jack,' said Amiss firmly. 'Now let me get back to sleep for half-an-hour. I'm a bit tired.'

At Prothero's request. Amiss had arrived early at Warburton House, which was just as well, for Prothero was so jittery that he was annoying the normally imperturbable Birkett. 'I'm sorry, Mr Prothero, but the menu was decided on days ago. What exactly do you want me to do?'

Prothero wrung his hands. 'I don't really know. I'm just

fretting. This new chair, Lady Troutbeck, she's a foodie and things are
so
tense already I don't want a big
fuss
developing about salmon not being wild and all that sort of thing.'

'We are not having salmon today, Mr Prothero,' said Birkett frostily. 'We are having roast saddle of lamb with a vegetarian option. And, yes, it is English spring lamb and no, it has not been frozen. I trust that meets the obvious questions that may come to her ladyship's mind.'

'That admirably addresses all that might concern her, Mr Birkett,' said Amiss firmly. 'Now, Georgie, let's have a word about the press release.'

Prothero looked distractedly at Amiss. 'Oh, all right. Thank you, Birkett. I'm sure it'll all be fine.'

As was customary, Rosa Karp arrived first and sat down with a brieff hello; she did not waste time on people she thought irrelevant. She took from her briefcase a pile of spreadsheets which she proceeded to distribute around the table, before settling down to read her own copy intently. Ferriter was next, closely followed by Den Smith. This morning Ferriter was wearing a T-shirt with a face on it that Amiss could not quite place. 'You've made me curious, Felix. I know that person on your chest but I'm damned if I can remember who he is?'

'Gore Vidal. He's the focus for my QueerStud's strand on twentieth-century martyrs.'

'Where does the martyrdom come in?' asked Amiss politely.

'He suffered for his beliefs, like all non-hetero-affectionals.'

'As he's suffering now like the rest of us who oppose the Bush-Blair axis of capitalist/imperialist evil,' added Den Smith. Rosa looked up and murmured her agreement.

'I read an interview with Gore Vidal the other day,' said Amiss in the most courteous tone he could muster, 'and I thought him a condescending, name-dropping snob who

has made millions through shocking the great American public. He lives in luxury in Italy and Hollywood while being widely venerated by smart society as a sage. I could cope with that amount of suffering.'

Observing Smith going dangerously red, Amiss was relieved at the distraction caused by the simultaneous arrival of Geraint Griffiths and Hugo Hurlingham, who were chitchatting civilly about traffic. Dervla followed a moment later and Amiss, who was still buoyed up by the revelation that she found him fanciable, greeted her warmly, put her sitting beside him and told her how attractive he found her long purple suede boots. They embarked on a conversation about where she liked shopping, which he found he could follow if he concentrated very hard.