Unseen Academicals

  ‘Doesn’t he look sweet lying there?’ said Juliet. ‘All pink.’ She stroked Trev’s greasy hair inexpertly. ‘Just like a little boy!’

  ‘Yes, he’s always been good at that,’ said Glenda. ‘Why don’t you go and get the little boy a cup of tea? And a biscuit. Not one of the chocolate ones. That’ll take some time,’ she said as the girl shimmied away. ‘She tends to get distracted. Her mind wanders and amuses itself elsewhere.’

  ‘Trev tells me that despite your more mature appearance you are the same age as her,’ said Nutt.

  ‘You really don’t talk to many ladies, do you, Mister Nutt?’

  ‘Oh dear, have I made another faux pas?’ said Nutt, suddenly all nerves again, to such an extent that she took pity on him.

  ‘Would this be “faux pas” that looks as if it should be said like “forks pass”?’

  ‘Er, yes.’

  Glenda nodded, satisfied, another literary puzzle solved. ‘Better not use the word “mature” unless you are talking about cheese or wine. Not good to use it for ladies.’

  She stared at him, wondering how to pose the next question. She opted for directness; she wasn’t very good at anything else.

  ‘Trev is sure you sort of died and came alive again.’

  ‘So I understand.’

  ‘Not many people do that.’

  ‘The vast majority do not, I believe.’

  ‘How did you do it?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘This is rather late in the day, I must admit, but you don’t feel any hunger for blood or brains, do you?’

  ‘Not at all. Just pies. I like pies. I am very ashamed about the pies. It will not happen again, Miss Glenda. I fear my body was acting on its own. It needed instant nourishment.’

  ‘Trev says you used to be chained to an anvil?’

  ‘Yes. That was because I was worthless. Then I was taken to see Ladyship and she told me: You are worthless but, I think, not unworthy, and I will give you worth.’

  ‘But you must have had parents!’

  ‘I do not know. There are many things I don’t know. There is a door.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘A door in my head. Some things are behind the door and I don’t know them. But that is all right, Ladyship says.’

  Glenda felt like giving up. Nutt answered questions, yes, but really all you ended up with was more questions. But she persevered. It was like stabbing away at a tin can, hoping to find a way in. ‘Ladyship is a real lady, is she? Castles and servants and whatnot?’

  ‘Oh, yes. Even a whatnot. She is my friend. And she is mature like cheese and wine, because she has lived for a long time and is not old.’

  ‘But she sent you here, yes? Did she teach you . . . whatever it was you used on Trev?’

  Beside Glenda, Trev stirred.

  ‘No,’ said Nutt. ‘I read the works of the masters in the library all by myself. But she did tell me that people, too, were a kind of living book, and I would have to learn to read them.’

  ‘Well, you read Trev well enough. Be told, though: don’t try that stuff on me or you’ll never see another pie!’

  ‘Yes, Miss Glenda. Sorry, Miss Glenda.’

  She sighed. What is it about me? The moment they look downcast I feel sorry for them! She looked up. He was watching her.

  ‘Stop that!’

  ‘Sorry, Miss Glenda.’

  ‘But you got to see the football, at least. Did you enjoy it?’

  Nutt’s face lit up. ‘Yes. It was wonderful. The noise, the crowds, the chanting, oh the chanting! It becomes a second blood! The unison! To not be alone! To be not just one but one and all, of one mind and purpose! . . . excuse me.’ He had seen her face.

  ‘So you quite liked it, then,’ said Glenda. The intensity of Nutt’s outburst had been like opening an oven door. It was a mercy her hair hadn’t frizzled.

  ‘Oh yes! The ambience was wonderful!’

  ‘I didn’t try those,’ Glenda hazarded, ‘but the pease pudding is usually good.’

  The scrape of crockery and the tinkling of a teaspoon heralded the arrival of Juliet, or rather of the cup of tea that she was holding in front of her as if it were a grail, so that she drifted along behind it like a comet’s tail. Glenda was impressed. The tea was in the cup instead of in the saucer and it was the acceptable brown colour that is usually characteristic of tea and was usually the only tea-like characteristic of tea made by Juliet.

  Trev sat up, and Glenda wondered how long he might have been paying attention. All right, he might be good in an emergency, and at least he washed sometimes and owned a toothbrush, but Juliet was special, wasn’t she? All she needed was a prince. Technically that meant Lord Vetinari, but he was far too old. Besides, no one was sure which side of the bed he got out of, or even if he went to bed at all. But one day a prince would come, even if Glenda had to drag him on a chain.

  She turned her head. Nutt was watching her intently again. Well, her book was locked down tightly. No one was going to riffle through her pages. And tomorrow she would find out what the wizards were up to. That was easy. She’d be invisible.

  In the stillness of the night, Nutt sat in his special place, which was yet another room, very close to the vats. Candles burned as he sat at a rescued table, staring at a piece of paper and absent-mindedly cleaning out his ear with the point of his pencil.

  Nutt was technically an expert on love poetry throughout the ages and had discussed it at length with Miss Healstether, the castle librarian. He had also tried to discuss it with Ladyship, but she had laughed and said it was frivolity, although quite helpful as a tutorial on the use of vocabulary, scansion, rhythm and affect as a means to an end, to wit getting a young lady to take all her clothes off. At that particular point, Nutt had not really understood what she meant. It sounded like some sort of conjuring trick.

  He tapped the pencil on the page. The castle library had been full of poetry and he’d read it avidly as he read all books, not knowing why it had been written or what exactly it was supposed to achieve. But generally poems written by men to women followed a very similar format. Now, with a world’s worth of the finest poetry to choose from, he was lost for words.

  Then he nodded to himself. Ah, yes, Robert Scandal’s famous poem, ‘Oi! To his Deaf Mistress’. It surely had the right shape and tempo. Of course, there had to be a muse. Oh, yes, all poetry needed a muse. That might present a difficulty. Juliet, while quite attractive, was also, in his mind, a kind of amiable ghost. Hmm. Ah, of course . . .

  Nutt pulled the pencil out of his ear, hesitated and wrote:

  I sing, but not of love, for love is blind,

  but celebrate instead the muse of kindness . . .

  The fires in the vats cooled, but Nutt’s brain was suddenly ablaze.

  Round about midnight, Glenda decided it was safe enough to leave the boys alone to get up to whatever it was boys got up to when women weren’t around to look after them, and made sure that she and Juliet were on the late cross-town bus. That meant she actually got to sleep in her own bed.

  She looked around the tiny bedroom by candlelight and met the gaze, which was quite difficult, of Mr Wobble, the three-eyed transcendental teddy bear. It would have been nice to have a bit of cosmic explanation at this point, but the universe never gave you explanations, it just gave you more questions.

  She reached down surreptitiously, even though there was only a three-eyed teddy bear watching her, and picked up the latest Iradne Comb-Buttworthy from the cache unsuccessfully hidden below. After ten minutes of reading, which took her some way into the book (Ms Comb-Buttworthy producing volumes that were even slimmer than her heroines), she experienced déjà vu. Moreover, the déjà vu was squared, because she had the feeling of having had the déjà vu before.

  ‘They’re really all the same, aren’t they?’ she said to the three-eyed teddy bear. ‘You know it’s going to be Mary the Maid, or someone like her, and there’s got to be two men and she will end up with the n
ice one, and there has to be misunderstandings, and they never do anything more than kiss and it’s absolutely guaranteed that, for example, an exciting civil war or an invasion by trolls or even a scene with any cooking in it is not going to happen. The best you can expect is a thunderstorm.’ It really had nothing to do with real life at all, which, although short on civil wars and invasions by trolls, at least had the decency to have lots of cooking.

  The book dropped out of her fingers and thirty seconds later she was sound asleep.

  Surprisingly, no neighbour needed her in the night so she got up, dressed and breakfasted in what was an almost unfamiliar world. She opened her door to take breakfast to widow Crowdy and found Juliet on the doorstep.

  The girl took a step back. ‘Are you goin’ out, Glendy? It’s early!’

  ‘Well, you’re up,’ said Glenda. ‘And with a newspaper, I’m pleased to see.’

  ‘Isn’t it exciting?’ said Juliet, and thrust the paper at her.

  Glenda took one look at the picture on the front page, took a second, closer look, and then grabbed Juliet and pulled her inside.

  ‘You can see their tonkers,’ Juliet observed, in a voice that was much too matter-of-fact for Glenda’s liking.

  ‘You shouldn’t know what they look like!’ she said, smacking the paper down on her kitchen table.

  ‘What? I’ve got three brothers, ain’t I? Everyone bathes in a tub in front of the fire, don’t they? It’s not like they’re anything special. Anyway, it’s culture, all right? Remember when you took me to that place full of people in the nuddy. You stayed in there hours.’

  ‘It was the Royal Art Museum,’ said Glenda, thanking her stars that they were indoors. ‘That’s different!’

  She tried to read the story, but it was very difficult with that amazing picture beside it, just where an eye might stray again and again.

  Glenda enjoyed her job. She didn’t have a career; they were for people who could not hold down jobs. She was very good at what she did, so she did it all the time, without paying much attention to the world. But now her eyes were opened. In fact, it was time to blink.

  Under the headline ‘New Light on Ancient Game’ was a picture of a vase or, rather more grandly, an urn, in orange and black. It showed some very tall and skinny men – their masculinity was beyond doubt, but possibly beyond belief. They were apparently struggling for possession of a ball; one of them was lying on the ground, and looked as if he was in some pain. The translation of the name of the urn was, said the caption, THE TACKLE.

  According to the accompanying story, someone at the Royal Art Museum had found the urn in an old storeroom, and it contained scrolls which, it said here, had the original rules of foot-the-ball laid down in the early years of the century of the Summer Weevil, a thousand years ago, when the game was played in honour of the goddess Pedestriana . . .

  Glenda skimmed through the rest of it, because there was a lot of rest to skim. An artist’s impression of the aforesaid goddess adorned page three. She was, of course, beautiful. You seldom saw a goddess portrayed as ugly. This probably had something to do with their ability to strike people down instantly. In Pedestriana’s case, she would probably have gone for the feet.

  Glenda put the paper down, seething with anger, and as a cook she knew how to seethe. This wasn’t football – except that the Guild of Historians said that it was, and could prove it not only with old parchments but also with an urn, and she could see that you were on the wrong end of an argument if you were up against an urn.

  But it was too neat, wasn’t it? Except . . . why? His lordship didn’t like football, but here was an article saying that this game was very old and had its own goddess, and if there were two things this city liked, it was tradition and goddesses, especially if the goddesses were a bit short on the chiffon above the waist. Did his lordship let them put anything in the paper? What was going on? ‘I’ve got business to attend to,’ she said sternly. ‘It’s good that you bought a decent paper, but you don’t want to read this kind of stuff.’

  ‘I didn’t. Who’s interested in that? I got it for the advert. Look.’

  Glenda had never bothered much about the adverts in the paper, because they were put there by people who were after your money. But there it was, right there. Madame Sharn of Bonk gives you . . . micromail.

  ‘You said we could go,’ said Juliet pointedly.

  ‘Yes, well, that was before—’

  ‘You said we could go.’

  ‘Yes. But, well, has anyone from the Sisters ever gone to a fashion show? It’s not our kind of thing, is it?’

  ‘Doesn’t say that in the paper. Says admission free. You said we could go!’

  Two o’clock, thought Glenda. Suppose I could manage it... ‘All right, meet at work at half past one, do you hear? Not a minute later! I’ve got things to do.’

  The University Council meets every day at half past eleven, she thought to herself. Oh, to be a fly on that wall. She grinned . . .

  Trev was sitting in the battered old chair that served as his office in the vats. Work was proceeding at its usual reliable snail’s pace.

  ‘Ah, I see you are in early, Mister Trev,’ said Nutt. ‘I am sorry not to have been here. I had to go and deal with an emergency candelabra upset.’ He leaned closer. ‘I have done what you asked, Mister Trev.’

  Trev snapped out of his daydream of Juliet and said, ‘Huh?’ ‘You asked me to write . . . to improve your poem for Miss Juliet.’

  ‘You’ve done it?’

  ‘Perhaps you would like to have a look, Mister Trev?’ He handed the paper to Trev and stood nervously by the chair as a pupil stands by the teacher.

  After a very short while Trev’s forehead wrinkled. ‘What’s ee-er?’

  ‘That’s “e’er”, sir, as in “where e’er she walks”.’

  ‘You mean, like, she walks on air?’ said Trev.

  ‘No, Mister Trev. I should just put it down to poetry if I were you.’

  Trev struggled on. He had never had much to do with poetry, except the sort that started ‘There was a young lady of Quirm’, but this looked like the real stuff. The page seemed to be crowded and yet full of space as well. Also, the writing was extremely curly and that was a sure sign, wasn’t it? You didn’t get that sort of thing from the lady of Quirm. ‘This is great stuff, Mister Nutt. This is really great stuff. This is poetry, but what really is it sayin’?’

  Nutt cleared his throat. ‘Well, sir, the essence of poetry of this nature is to create a mood that will make the recipient, that is to say, sir, the young lady who you are going to send it to, feel very kindly disposed to the author of the poem, which would be you, sir, in this case. According to Ladyship, everything else is just showing off. I have brought you a pen and an envelope; if you would kindly sign the poem I will ensure that it gets to Miss Juliet.’

  ‘I bet no one’s ever written her a poem before,’ said Trev, skating quickly over the truth that he hadn’t either. ‘I’d love to be there when she reads it.’

  ‘That would not be advised,’ said Nutt quickly. ‘The general consensus is that the lady concerned reads it in the absence of the hopeful swain, that is you, sir, and forms a beneficent mental picture of him. Your actual presence might actually get in the way, especially since I see you haven’t changed your shirt again today. Besides, I am informed that there is a possibility that all her clothes will fall off.’

  Trev, who had been struggling with the concept of ‘swain’, fast-forwarded to this information at speed. ‘Er, say that again?’

  ‘All her clothes might fall off. I am sorry about this, but it appears to be a by-product of the whole business of poetry. But broadly speaking, sir, it carries the message you have asked for, which is to say “I think you’re really fit. I really fancy you. Can we have a date? No hanky panky, I promise.” However, sir, since it is a love poem, I have taken the liberty of altering it slightly to carry the suggestion that if hanky or panky should appear to be welcomed by the yo
ung lady she will not find you wanting in either department.’

  ***

  Archchancellor Ridcully rubbed his hands together. ‘Well, gentlemen, I hope we have all seen the papers this morning, or glanced at them at any rate?’

  ‘I thought that the front page was not the place,’ said the Lecturer in Recent Runes. ‘It quite put me off my breakfast. Metaphorically speaking, of course.’

  ‘Apparently, the urn has been in the museum’s cellars for at least three hundred years, but for some reason it makes its presence felt now,’ said Ridcully. ‘Of course, they have tons of stuff in there that’s never really been looked at properly and the city was going through a prudish period then and didn’t care to know about that sort of thing.’

  ‘What, that men have tonkers?’ said Dr Hix. ‘That sort of news gets out sooner or later.’

  He looked around at the disapproving faces and added, ‘Skull ring, remember? Under college statute the head of the Department of PostMortem Communications is entitled, nay, required to make tasteless, divisive and moderately evil remarks. I’m sorry, but these are your rules.’

  ‘Thank you, Doctor Hix. Your uncalled-for remarks are duly noted and appreciated.’

  ‘You know, it seems very suspicious to me that this wretched urn has turned up at just this time,’ observed the Senior Wrangler, ‘and I hope I am not alone in this?’

  ‘I know what you mean,’ said Hix. ‘If I didn’t know that the Archchancellor had his work cut out to persuade Vetinari to let us play, I would think that this was some sort of plan.’

  ‘Ye-ess,’ said Ridcully thoughtfully.

  ‘The old rules look a lot more interesting, sir,’ said Ponder.

  ‘Ye-ess.’

  ‘Did you read the bit that said players were not allowed to use their hands, sir? And the high priest takes to the field of play to ensure that the rules are honoured?’

  ‘I can’t see that catching on these days,’ said the Lecturer in Recent Runes.