deep, deep well.’
‘Nature abhors a vacuum,’ said Ellen. ‘You’d better be careful. All kinds of things can come rushing in to fill it up.’
‘So I’d noticed,’ said Nerina. ‘Well, I’ll be off,’ and she swayed away, leaving a drift of rather heavy scent behind her.
‘You’re in her good books,’ said Mrs Khalid, ‘that’s the main thing. She can be quite tiresome when crossed. I wish she’d wear trainers. Those shoes are so bad for her feet.’
Now that Bernard left industrial action to others, the heart had quite gone out of the staff’s work-to-rule and normal relations were resumed. Neither side won. A draw was declared. But now both the academic board and the management team viewed Bernard with some apprehension, fearing where his energies would next take him. It was with some relief that they assented to his desire to take over outreach work in the local community. It was on his prompting that ethnic drop-out youths were now accepted onto college courses without formal qualifications; it was on his urging that examinations were now being set and marked in Urdu and other minority languages, the faculties shamed at last out of their insistence that English was the only language in the world that counted. Bernard was triumphant. The college was at last loosening up. The Faculty of Art and Design now ran courses on graffiti in conjunction with the Faculty of Social Sciences. ‘The Role of the Magic Mushroom in Primitive Cave and Contemporary Wall Art’ won its author a first. When Bernard went to the canteen there was a stir, a breath of recognition. The young, the bold; the lowly paid and overworked, acknowledged him as their spiritual leader. The few, the old guard, who could see what generations of scholars had endured for, struggled for, thus lightly swept away, were not so happy. Notions of excellence, of the primacy of scholarship, the victory of steady thought over wild opinion, the sense of generation building upon generation, all thus abandoned in the craven desire to please the student, entertain the student, keep the college in funds. The few were shrewd, powerful, influential and dined in high political places; Bernard knew it, and did not care. Indeed, he found it energizing. ‘No one worth their salt,’ he said, ‘but does not have enemies. Once the mind is free from its self-imposed shackles anything is possible. Even changing the world.’
Mrs Parkin came to stay for a week and went after a day. Bernard would not let her set up Jesus, Mary and Joseph on the mantelpiece even though Christmas was coming.
‘Look, Mum,’ he said, ‘I can just about stand Christmas dinner as a family get-together. But I will not have idols in the house.’ Mrs Parkin left, blaming Ellen for having turned her son from a faith that had sustained her family through death, famine, hardship, war, bereavement. Ellen said it was nothing to do with her, but she was lying, and Mrs Parkin knew it. Once she was gone Bernard and Ellen were able to ask Jed and Prune round for Christmas dinner. Prune was pregnant again and wore a murky green long woollen smock. Ellen wore a skin-tight gold dress with black glittery trimmings.
‘Isn’t that dress rather low cut,’ asked Bernard, ‘for a simple Christmas dinner with friends?’
‘I bought it at Oxfam,’ said Ellen, as if that excused everything. But Bernard paid the matter little attention. There was a kind of dance of thought going through his head: he had to keep in step. He couldn’t stop it.
‘The synapses are twanging,’ he complained, on occasion to Ellen. ‘They get out of step. The rules are gone: the safety nets. Everything links, from cosmology to microbiology. When it finally does link up the computer will explode.’
‘I hope you don’t talk like that at college,’ she said.
‘Of course I don’t,’ he said. ‘I’m not mad.’
Sometimes his eyes would glaze over for a second or two as if he were out of their world altogether. Ellen wondered if he had petit mal and looked it up in a medical dictionary—neither of them went to doctors if they could help it—but the entry was not very helpful, and it seemed in any case the kind of symptom it would be better to be vague about, not define, not name, for fear the naming made it worse, less likely to evaporate out of existence. And sometimes Bernard would wake shivering, from a restless sleep, dreaming of punishments.
‘Well,’ he said in the new year,