Sticks and Stones

STICKS AND STONES

"You're damned lucky we ran into each other today, old boy," said Petherick.

He dropped his morning newspaper next to his plate and himself, heavily, into the chair. It's Petherick's humour to "old boy" me, even though we belong to the same generation; which is to say, the one after the last one to use the phrase seriously as a term of male affection. Petherick seems oblivious to the incongruity. Or perhaps it's a way of signifying his recognition of the fact that we're both English. He's a sloppy man in many ways, Petherick; but his choice of language, though eccentric, is always calculated. Phrases for him have an obscure and sometimes a bizarre personal significance. He uses obsolete and slightly discomfiting slang, often with a touch of arch emphasis, as though he is privately testing his auditor. But how one passes or fails the test, and what the consequences are for doing either, I don't know.

"Yes, you're lucky," he repeated, "because it turns out my wife knows Norman's girl. Apparently we were almost neighbours. Yes, Cecile ran into the poor child in the deli this morning. Curious that even a killer's mistress needs milk for her coffee. She was distraught, of course, but you know Cecile: the human tin-opener of the emotions. She extracted all the details over a litre of Skimmer. C'est une histoire palpitante. Yes it does. It fairly palpitates."

"Really? I'm agog," I said politely.

My coolness was ill-dissimulated. The tables in our staff club are decently far apart, but the snatches of dialogue I'd overheard as we crossed the room confirmed that today there was an eager topic of conversation. Then there was Petherick's newspaper. He had it rolled up like a baton and you couldn't see the grainy photograph high on the front page. But I didn't need to, for I had just left my own copy open on the desk in my office. In my mind's eye I saw again that slight, dishevelled figure caught by the camera emerging awkwardly from the rear of the police car, tugging a leather jacket high over his face. Below, his shirt had pulled loose and had rucked up, pathetically exposing the navel. In short, I was bursting with curiosity.

Once a month, or rather less, Petherick and I would lunch. It was always by chance, never by appointment. I'd stumble across him in the corridor of his wing of the building, or he in mine, and one of us would say, "Lunching today?" and that would be it. Universities, those little worlds, hold within them yet smaller microworlds. They are bubbles of soapy foam which conjoin but do not coalesce. Unless they are made to fuse by one of the powerful solvents of human interaction -- a common hobby, sexual compulsion, mutual indignation over the parking -- your lecturer in biology has about as much social talk for his colleague in art history as two Hottentots from different endogamous tribes.

So there we sat on opposite sides of the table, Petherick and I, on this warm November noon, and took stock of each other.

Petherick is a husky, bull-necked man, and his face is jowly and creased. His cheeks are rosy with that other rosiness which does not signify youth, and his eyes are small and watery. Behind the hoarseness of his voice, the product of those evil little black cigars which he affects, the attuned ear can detect the wreckage of an Oxbridge accent.

He started with a teaser. "The food here never gets better, does it?" he said. "A soup and savoury omelette," he added parenthetically to the waitress, "and with it, perhaps, a flask of your pink?" She registered no surprise. She dealt daily with odder fish than Petherick.

"Still, I've eaten worse." He grimaced. "I went to a Staff Club somewhere in New Zealand once -- where was it, now? It wasn't Auckland; was it Otago? -- and in the self-service section there I encountered a great mound of soggy white sandwiches. And you know what they were filled with? I swear: tinned spaghetti!"

I smiled dutifully. "Much appreciated by the natives I'm sure, Harold. You were saying --"

"And talking of beastly Abroad, the Dodger's off again next week," continued Petherick heartlessly. By this disrespectful cognomen he signified his boss, Roger Simon, the Professor of French. Once I'd even heard him use the label in Simon's hearing, but it hadn't drawn any obvious reaction. Perhaps he took it as a compliment.

"It's Japan this time. The Dodger's the Wandering Jew of the world of letters. Not that he's the worst. By no means. Most of our Department seems to suffer from round bottoms. There's one man who only appears for staff meetings. One might say" -- here he ducked his head and dropped his voice, parody of a conspirator -- "one might say that he's raised the baggage check to the status of a literary genre." He regarded me with a tiny smirk. Evidently the epigram was practised.

What was it about Petherick? My own reaction to him puzzled me. After a decade of austerity in our universities, your flabby gentleman-scholar has at last become a dying breed, and it rankled to see one still flourishing. And yet once again I found myself smiling at him across the table. Of course, I knew what it was, really: it was the siren-call of the frivolous to the puritan. Once Petherick had had the gall to tell me that he had taken up French at grammar school simply because his favourite subject, Technical Drawing, had been oversubscribed. Then, having displayed a preternatural facility for the language, he had taken a frictionless run down the rails -- graduate, doctoral Fellow, academic -- simply through being too idle to get out and switch the points.

Allied to this (it was the part of his cult of the amateur that appalled me most) was Petherick's attitude to his specialism. For he was a Francophobe. He found everything French distasteful: the people, the food, the mores. He was not your whole bigot, not rabid; rather, his attitude was one of amused and cynical contempt. With an unselfconscious relish that made me wince, he habitually referred to that race as 'Frogs'. "What d'you expect?" he would say, if the conversation should turn to Mururoa, the Rainbow Warrior, or the slaughter of Emperor penguins in Antarctica. He delighted in every fresh example of Gallic perfidy. "What d'you expect? That's the Frogs for you!" And delightedly he would tap the ash off his cheroot. One expected him to invoke, any minute, Agincourt, Harfleur and the stout bowmen of Henry the Fifth. He took it seriously, too. Not for him a neat little villa in the Dordogne, industriously occupied in the Southern summer and rented out profitably to visitors in the Northern. Rare visits to the Pacific possessions sufficed him. The fact that he never took trips to metropolitan France passed without remark in Australia. Naturally he took no interest in local expatriate French affairs. The local chapter of the Institut Français knew him not: their most flattering importunities were ignored. He took no French newspapers, as far as I knew; certainly he would rather have been taken in adultery than spotted browsing through Paris-Match in the library.

Did I say he detested all that was French? Not quite all. Petherick loved the language. That was his saving grace. After all, he was a Reader in French Language; he was paid munificently to teach it and research it. In this he was both diligent and competent. His feebler students loved the ingenious word-games with which he enlivened his classes; his Honours students were impressed by the lucidity with which he could explain the use of the past subjunctive. I myself have heard a chic lady from the Sorbonne refer admiringly to "l'érudit et attrayant M. Petherick" and remark on the flawlessness of his accent.

It is not surprising, then, that the only contemporary French institution which Petherick respected was the Académie Française. While discoursing on its labours to protect the virtue of the French tongue from the horrors of miscegenation with alien languages, he would expand with admiration. 'Franglais' had no more energetic opponent than he. I have heard him insist that the correct French for zip is not, cannot be, that useful monosyllable. Certainly not. The French for zip is une fermeture à curseur.

Petherick was no humourless pedant, though. For him, the syntax and vocabulary of French had precisely the charm of a good word game. Like your dedicated crossword puzzler, Petherick loved the thrill of the chase. Sometimes to tease him one of his colleagues would ask innocently, "I say, Harold, what the French for booster pump?" And he would tell the tormentor patiently that it had to be une pompe primaire d'amorçage de carburant. Apart from the oral delight of articulation, Petherick took no pleasure in his insistence. Indeed, it confirmed his prejudices. On his infrequent trips overseas he entrusted his person without a qualm to the safekeeping of Loftleidr or Tarom or carriers even more obscure; yet nothing would get him on to a flight of Air France. "Ever seen a French technical manual next to the English version, old boy?" he would say. "It's twice as thick. The language is most lucid but the cost is prolixity. Stands to reason the mechanics don't read them properly. Slack devils, the Frogs!"

Meanwhile over the soup the bones of the story were emerging. "Of course, you've seen the paper this morning. What was the headline again?" Petherick gestured boldly with his fork. "'Fatal classroom assault: French teacher charged.' A certain resonance there, for sure. But I'm forgetting. You've seen Norman, haven't you? When he was in here last week, lunching with the Dodger? And, come to think of it, weren't you chatting to him afterwards, over coffee?"

"Well, we did gossip a bit," I conceded cautiously. And so we had. I thought about it while we finished our soup and embarked on our omelettes.

Jean Norman I remembered as a study in monochrome. His face had been drawn, almost haggard. His complexion was pallid and pimpled like a teenager's, though he was certainly in his late twenties. His eyes were black as olives, hooded and fierce, and across his pasty brow fell constantly a long comma of oily hair which he kept flicking back irritably with long pale fingers. In his worn leather bomber jacket over a black skivvy, he looked like a stage Marseillais pimp costumed by an inept wardrobe mistress. But appearances deceived. Jean Norman, it turned out, wasn't only solid middle-class; he wasn't even French. His father was an English engineer who had worked for years on the Continent for a defence contractor. He had moved from Stevenage to Toulouse when his son was a toddler and the whole family had become completely assimilated. Jean's English, his mother tongue, was not in the least stilted, but it was careful. When he used idiom -- "Yes, Paul," he had told me, "I am cheesed off at the moment" -- it was with a slight wry flinch, as though he anticipated correction. As we chatted, Jean had tapped out an endless series of Gitanes bout filtré, lighting up each with a nervous scratch. How could he afford them? I recalled wondering.

At last, the final mouthful of rubbery omelette dispatched, Petherick threw down his fork: drained with enthusiasm his glass of the rosé which to me had tasted like a solution of iron filings: took out and ignited one of his mini-cigars: offered me one. "Coffin nail? No?" He sighed and leaned back in his chair in heavy post-prandial mood. To avoid another detour I said quickly: "Jean never made it clear what he was doing in Australia at all."

"Well, what d'you think, old boy? Cherchez la femme." Petherick smacked his lips lasciviously over the cliché's final consonant. "No pert little midinette for him. Instead a rangy Aussie charmer whom he latched on to in Toulouse. Foul place, Toulouse. Full of technocrats making guided weapons. A pleasant enough town it used to be, before the war." Though he knew that I knew he had been in rompers then, Petherick always spoke intimately of this era in the tones of some aging, nostalgic boulevardier. Was I supposed to register respect or pull him up on it? As usual, I did nothing but make a vague assenting noise.

"Anyway, here he is in Oz, enjoying his pre-connubial bliss, and scratching round for a job. Pity, because there's nothing for him up here. The Dodger told me he looked quite good on paper: licencié ès lettres from somewhere OK. But of course he's got no publications. You know how it is in this country; publications only matter when you're looking for a job. No one gives a damn afterwards -- so long as you've got tenure, that is. Not like the States. Remember the joke? Two Roman soldiers looking up at Christ on the cross. One says: 'Well, he's come to a bad end, but say what you like, he was a great teacher.' And the other replies: 'Sure, sure. He was a great teacher. A great teacher. But I ask you (hands spread wide): What did he publish?'

"Yes, Norman was akin to Christ in that respect. Not that it would have made any difference. We haven't had a vacant post for donkey's years. Not even a spot of part-time tutoring. Nothing paid, that is. What the Dodger was trying to do last week, I expect, was to con poor old Jean into doing a few Conversationals for love, dangling the carrot of some cash later on. I'm sure Jean was too cluey to fall for that. Anyway, as we now know, he already had the private school job. And he hated it."

"I'd have thought he'd be pleased to get the work."

"No doubt he was, to start with. But he didn't get on with the only other French teacher. The other man was retirement age. Even in his prime he'd only been barely competent, and his conversational skills had rusted to nothing after years of intercourse with schoolboys. Norman's bilingual intrusion was most unwelcome, and instead of conceding the position he tried to conceal it with bluster. Un brêle, decided Norman, and didn't bother to hide his contempt. Unfortunately the fellow had the headmaster's ear. Norman's tenure was likely to be short."

Petherick paused. "Well, here we approach the central mystery. I only have this tale at several removes. And what do mere words tell us, anyway, of motive and act? Even if we had him here at this table, now, would Norman himself tell us anything more? Could he?

He frowned and moodily swilled the dregs in his wine-glass. "In my childhood, as I recall, there were long, long boredoms. I filled them with reading pap. Half my conscious life was spent in storybooks, and for me it was by far the realler half. In particular, I thought the omniscience of the author was part of nature. 'Jack spoke crossly, because he had wanted to win the prize.' Or: 'Judith envied the pretty Jane and always tried to do her a bad turn.' I grew to be a teenager before I accepted, fully and finally, that people were just as opaque to everyone else as they were to me; that there's no privileged observer in life, only and always the hard slog of deduction. Fiction is the only art which dares to tell us incontrovertibly why people do things. Even now, surrendering that illusion pains me sometimes." He sighed, stagily.

"Come now, Harold." I leaned forward impatiently with my knife and cracked its butt down hard on the laminate top between his plate and glass. "To the point, if you please."

Petherick frowned, flicking at the tip of his cigar with his little finger nail. "The point, old boy? I thought we were at the point, the salient point. We're too honest, aren't we, you and I, to play the fictionalist? Fortunately there is the thespian art."

"Ah," I said. Because I teach drama. The veering beagle of Petherick's narrative was at last straightening its course. Up ahead I thought I saw the hare.

"Yes, you're a man of the theatre, Paul. Here's a one-act playlet; or at least, one act has been played so far. How would you handle the stage business? No, no, no, no" -- here Petherick held up a restraining hand, like a traffic policeman -- "please, don't bother. The question was rhetorical. My visual imagination is excellent. Just fill me in on request." He leaned forward.

"Let's see, now. There's Norman in the classroom, nine o'clock on a Monday morning. He's feeling a bit churlish, no doubt; underemployed, ill-paid, seedy, bored, resentful. Bit of a row with his girl, who knows? They're team-teaching, him and the old fellow. The old man takes the register; the class grinds into life. Up he gets, chalk in hand, to the blackboard. The singsong phrasing. "Quel jour sommes-nous aujourd'hui? En français, s'il vous plaît. Come on, Bloggs. That doesn't take a Rhodes Scholar." A practised pause here for sycophantic laughter. Ah, those schoolmasterly jokes! Fair takes you back, doesn't it? And all the time Norman's gorge, we might say, is rising. But how to show it? A neat bit of stage business is needed here."

"Are we allowed close-ups? Some eye-rolling, perhaps? Or is that a bit crass?" I suggested tentatively.

"Something like that, certainly. Now the crisis approaches. Now we must be very intelligent. What do we have? Well, we know that the crystal around which events precipitated was the date."

"The date?" I echoed, incredulously. "Are you trying to tell me Norman was suffering from premenstrual tension?"

"No, no, old boy. I don't speak of the time of the month. I mean the calendar date. I mean the date inscribed daily in the corner of the blackboard. Having elicited the fact that the day was Monday, the poor old fogy reaches up and starts to write. The bold round script comes rolling out the end of the chalk: Lundi le sept de Novembre. What a solecism! The de, I needn't tell you, Paul, is redundant. Norman stares at the veined hand of his colleague, white against the board. For forty years, it may be, the old codger has been writing the date on the board and every day he's got it wrong. Norman has smiled at the error before and shrugged it off, but now it's a revelation, a horrid epiphany.

“Now here, I fancy, we really can't escape the television camera and some business with heavy breathing and working jaws. We have to see the irritation mounting to a head, frothing over.

"With a loud groan, Norman ups and grabs at the chalk, intent on correction. His colleague resists -- 'Are you mad, man?' A struggle; the lectern goes over. They push and shove about. Of course, all the movements will have to be well-rehearsed. Norman, much younger, wiry, temporarily crazed, seizes the other's shoulders at last and thrusts him sharply back. The old man stumbles, teeters back on his heels, loses his balance; his head meets the sturdy down post of the blackboard with a peculiar and very distinct noise."

Petherick paused and mused. "That noise," he said reflectively. "Yes, I can hear it plainly. It's a sickening noise, for sure, but, really, it’s very hard to reproduce on stage. After all, we are not directing for the antique Roman theatre. We cannot crush a skull in the interests of verisimilitude. So how would you manage it?"

"Goodness, I'm not sure. In the old days, I believe, they made use of a stagehand with good reflexes, hitting a grapefruit with a wooden mallet."

Petherick grunted approvingly. "The very thing, old boy. Of course, that's exactly what it sounded like. The man's head crashes back against the post with just that soft, fruity noise and down he goes. How? In the approved fashion, of course, like a marionette with the strings cut. Legs splaying out at an absurd angle. He slumps slowly to one side, like an unbalanced Glad bag, and comes to rest nose down in the chalk-dust. His head is almost bald, with a wide tonsure, and over the occiput there stands revealed a frightening indentation. Skull like an eggshell, it turns out; it's not uncommon, apparently. Anyway, it's DOA. Dead on arrival."

We were silent. "Well," said Petherick, suddenly sober. "Language is the most serious game we know. Not so long ago, any Breton child caught talking Gaelic instead of French was punished by having a clog tied tight round its neck. Men have killed, and been killed, for less. I can understand it."

I bet you can, I thought.

"Anyway," he added, brightening up and shaking his shoulders to throw off the melancholy. "It wasn't murder. It's bound to be involuntary manslaughter; Norman will only get two or three years, maybe not even that. And what d'you expect anyway? A silly, impulsive act. Quite irrational. Trust the Frogs! Coffee in the common room?"