The Collected Short Stories Read online

  “They’re an illiterate lot,” grumbled William. “They don’t encipher their umlauts. They deserve to be misunderstood.”

  “How can you give an opinion when you never dot your i’s, William?”

  “Because I consider the dot is redundant, and I hope to be responsible for removing it from the English language.”

  “Is that to be your major contribution to scholarship, William? If so I am bound to ask how anyone reading the essays of most of our undergraduates would be able to tell the difference between an I and an i.”

  “A feeble argument, my dear, which, if it had any conviction, would demand that you put a dot on top of an n so as to be sure it wasn’t mistaken for an h.”

  “Keep working away at your theories, William, because I intend to spend my energy removing more than the dot and the I from Hitler.”

  In May 1945 they dined privately with Prime Minister and Mrs. Churchill at 10 Downing Street.

  “What did the prime minister mean when he said to me that he could never understand what you were up to?” asked Philippa in the taxi to Paddington Station.

  “The same as when he said to me that he knew exactly what you were capable of, I suppose,” said William.

  When the Merton professor of English retired in the early 1950s the whole university waited to see which Doctor Hatchard would be appointed to the chair.

  “If the council invites you to take the chair,” said William, putting his hand through his graying hair, “it will be because they are going to make me vice-chancellor.”

  “The only way you could ever be invited to hold a position so far beyond your ability would be nepotism, which would mean I was already vice-chancellor.”

  The general board, after several hours’ discussion of the problem, offered two chairs and appointed William and Philippa full professors on the same day.

  When the vice-chancellor was asked why precedent had been broken, he replied: “Simple. If I hadn’t given them both a chair, one of them would have been after my job.”

  That night, after a celebration dinner, when they were walking home together along the banks of the Isis across Christ Church Meadows, in the midst of a particularly heated argument about the quality of the last volume of Proust’s monumental work, a policeman, noticing the affray, ran over to them and asked:

  “Is everything all right, madam?”

  “No, it is not,” William interjected. “This woman has been attacking me for over thirty years, and to date the police have done deplorably little to protect me.”

  In the late fifties Harold Macmillan invited Philippa to join the board of the Independent Broadcasting Authority.

  “I suppose you’ll become what’s known as a telly don,” said William. “And as the average mental age of those who watch the box is seven you should feel quite at home.”

  “Agreed,” said Philippa. “Twenty years of living with you has made me fully qualified to deal with infants.”

  The chairman of the BBC wrote to William a few weeks later inviting him to join its board of governors.

  “Are you to replace Hancock’s Half Hour or Dick Barton, Special Agent?” Philippa inquired.

  “I am to give a series of twelve lectures.”

  “On what subject, pray?”

  “Genius.”

  Philippa flicked through the Radio Times. “I see that Genius is to be broadcast at two o’clock on a Sunday morning, which is understandable, as that’s when you are at your most brilliant.”

  When William was awarded an honorary doctorate at Princeton, Philippa attended the ceremony and sat proudly in the front row.

  “I tried to secure a place in the back,” she explained, “but it was filled with sleeping students who had obviously never heard of you.”

  “If that’s the case, Philippa, I am only surprised you didn’t mistake them for one of your tutorial lectures.”

  As the years went on, many anecdotes, only some of which were apocryphal, passed into the Oxford fabric. Everyone in the English school knew the stories about the “fighting Hatchards”: how they spent their first night together, how they jointly won the Charles Oldham, how Phil would complete the Times crossword before Bill had finished shaving, how each had both been appointed to a professorial chair on the same day, and how they both worked longer hours than any of their contemporaries, as if they still had something to prove, if only to each other. It seemed almost required by the laws of symmetry that they should always be judged equals—until it was announced in the New Year’s Honours that Philippa had been made a Dame of the British Empire.

  “At least our dear queen has worked out which one of us is truly worthy of recognition,” she said over the college dessert.

  “Our dear queen,” said William, selecting the Madeira, “knows only too well how little competition there is in the women’s colleges: Sometimes one must encourage weaker candidates in the hope that it might inspire some real talent lower down.”

  After that, whenever they attended a public function together, Philippa would have the MC announce them as “Professor William and Dame Philippa Hatchard.” She looked forward to many happy years of starting every official occasion one up on her husband, but her triumph lasted for only six months: William received a knighthood in the Queen’s Birthday Honours. Philippa feigned surprise at the dear queen’s uncharacteristic lapse of judgment and forthwith insisted on their being introduced in public as Sir William and Dame Philippa Hatchard.

  “Understandable,” said William. “The queen had to make you a dame first in order that no one should mistake you for a lady. When I married you, Philippa, you were a young fellow, and now I find I’m living with an old dame.”

  “It’s no wonder,” said Philippa, “that your poor pupils can’t make up their minds whether you’re homosexual or you simply have a mother fixation. Be thankful that I did not accept Girton’s invitation: Then you would have been married to a mistress.”

  “I always have been, you silly woman.”

  As the years passed, they never let up their pretended belief in the other’s mental feebleness. Philippa’s books, “works of considerable distinction,” she insisted, were published by Oxford University Press, while William’s, “works of monumental significance,” he declared, were printed at the presses of Cambridge University.

  The tally of newly appointed professors of English they had taught as undergraduates soon reached double digits.

  “If you count polytechnics, I shall have to throw in Maguire’s readership in Kenya,” said William.

  “You did not teach the professor of English at Nairobi,” said Philippa. “I did. You taught the head of state, which may well account for why the university is so highly thought of while the country is in such disarray.”

  In the early sixties they conducted a battle of letters in the TLS on the works of Philip Sidney without ever discussing the subject in each other’s presence. In the end the editor said the correspondence must stop and adjudicated a draw.

  They both declared him an idiot.

  If there was one act that annoyed William in old age about Philippa, it was her continued determination each morning to complete the Times crossword before he arrived at the breakfast table. For a time, William ordered two copies of the paper until Philippa filled them both in while explaining to him it was a waste of money.

  One particular morning in June at the end of their final academic year before retirement, William came down to breakfast to find only one space in the crossword left for him to complete. He studied the clue: “Skelton reported that this landed in the soup.” He immediately filled in the eight little boxes.

  Philippa looked over his shoulder. “There’s no such word, you arrogant man,” she said firmly. “You made it up to annoy me.” She placed in front of him a very hard-boiled egg.

  “Of course there is, you silly woman; look ‘whymwham’ up in the dictionary.”

  Philippa checked in the Shorter Oxford among the cookbooks in the kitche