Death Lives Next Door. Gwendoline Butler
clan. The families were: the Leavers, the Boxers and the Hansoms; all equally distinguished and equally clever. Old President Leaver had had the honour, way back in the nineteenth century, of leading his college forward into the world of science; he was not a scientist himself, but he had seen the advisability of electing an eminent scientist to a fellowship at a time when this was not so common in Oxford. He had thus established himself for ever as an advanced man and his family were bound to be advanced and liberal also. It had sometimes been difficult for his descendants to be advanced and liberal enough, they had sought for causes to show their progressive minds, they had advocated votes for women and birth control, they had fought in the Spanish Civil War, and since then they had signed peace pledges, denounced colour bars and marched upon rocket bases. It was difficult for their fellow-citizens to deny that they were very often right in what they proclaimed, but all the same they were irritating people.
The Boxers had brought plain dottiness into the clan; it was a highly intellectual dottiness and, therefore, much prized in Oxford circles. Dr. Boxer was famous as the man who failed to remember the face of his own wife after an exceptionally dull dinner party at his own house and thrust her out into the cold after the departing guests with the remark: “Go home, dear lady!” He did not drink, so it was not to be explained that way. He was also noted for his command of seven different languages and for the polite abuse he could utter in all of them. He had been heard to boast in his high sweet voice when in the seclusion of his college common-room when his colleagues were occupied with port and thick cigars that he knew the verb “to …” (and here he would leave a blank and wag his wicked old white head and titter) in all European languages. His friends believed him and were impressed.
The Hansoms were something different again: they were the heavy-weights, the men you could be sure of. They went into the Foreign Service and had important embassies abroad, they were in the Treasury or the Cabinet Office, and just lately they had taken an interest in Television. But the Hansoms, scattered by their duties as they necessarily were, remembered that above everything they were an Oxford family. If any issue of importance came before Convocation, that vast gathering together of all Oxford Masters of Arts by which Oxford in theory alone rules itself, then you could be sure that the Hansoms would come cycling in from their country livings, or drive down in fast cars from London, or even fly in to prevent some disaster such as women taking degrees or W. H. Auden becoming Professor of Poetry; they were usually unsuccessful.
This ancestry had given Rachel great assurance, not social assurance, she hardly recognised the need for that, but intellectual assurance. With four generations of right thinking behind her, she felt convinced beyond the need even to consider it that the standards, values and judgements of her group and people like her were forever right.
Physically she took after her grandfather Boxer who had been a very beautiful man. In addition she had a sense of humour which may have come from him, too.
The combination of all these qualities, Boxer, Leaver and Hansom, was pretty paralysing and there were many who found Rachel a paralysing problem.
“I’d as soon make love to a man-eating spider,” declared the young man who had complained that Rachel knew everyone.
Rachel had become an anthropologist and this was how she came Marion’s way. She had read and admired the young Marion’s study of the Alpha tribes of Central America and had sought her out. No one knew how Marion felt about being remembered as an anthropologist, Rachel was the first person who had had the courage to speak about it to her face. However, even Rachel found that Marion had her reserves; and yet a steely friendship grew up between the two.
In this friendship Joyo by no means shared, although there was a lot about Rachel that she ruefully admired. Together with a lot she didn’t. She was sharp enough, however, to see that this cut both ways and that equally there was a lot Rachel would not like in her. She was careful as a result, so that while she knew Rachel it would be true to say that Rachel did not know her.
She watched the girl now, and wondered what she was about, standing there in the street. She looked cold, too, poor child. Joyo would have liked to call Rachel into the warm kitchen, but caution restrained her. Let Marion, kind old Marion, do that. Let her be the one to stick her neck out.
Ezra was thinking of Rachel as he stood on the corner of Chancellor Hyde Street. Behind his thoughts about Marion ran the steady stream of his preoccupation with Rachel.
He was horrified to see her suddenly walk forward from the corner and go straight up to the watcher.
“What did you say to him?” he asked.
“I asked him the time,” she looked up. “Go on, ask me why I asked him that?”
“Well, why?”
“I wanted to hear his voice.”
Ezra raised his eyebrows.
“I’m pretty fond of Marion. The fact that I don’t think she’s good for you is another matter. She’s not the only one who noticed him. I went to Stoke with her, you know. I saw him before Marion did.”
“So—what about his voice?”
Rachel was impatient. “I wanted to hear what sort of a person he was. Not the sort of person to be remotely connected with Marion at all.”
Ezra nodded. “But you make Marion sound a snob. She’s known a pretty wide range of people in her day. She knew …”
“Yes, but they were clever people, or interesting people, or out-of-the-way people. This man is ordinary.”
Ordinary, thought Ezra, remembering the kitten. Is he so ordinary?
“You’re pretty much of a prig yourself, Rachel,” was all he said, mildly. He looked up at Marion’s window and saw that she had gone back to work at her table by the window. He could see her intent profile as she bent over a book. No good going back there now. Marion was miles away.
He turned his attention to his love.
“Why do you have to go round looking like the retreat from Moscow?” he asked her irritably. “You’d be quite a good-looking girl if you didn’t get yourself up like that.”
“It’s so cold.” The huge aquamarine eyes stared at him over the edge of a scarf. “Freezing. I’ve just come back from the Sudan, don’t forget.”
“Yes, I always forget you’re the little anthropologist.”
“Not a very good one.” Rachel sighed. “Trouble with me is,” she said wryly, “that I like the people I go to live and work among. And I want them to like me. Won’t do. To be a good anthropologist you’ve got to be quite detached. I minded that those last people, the Berboa, didn’t like me.”
“Seems a reasonably human sort of thing to mind,” said Ezra.
“It does, doesn’t it? But that’s it. Anthropologists are not human. Or only remotely, men-in-a-machine human.”
“You must have picked up that style of dress from he Berboa,” said Ezra, observing her affectionately.
Rachel ignored this. “Anyway who cares? To hell with intellectuals.” This was the Hansom strain coming out—hotted up by the Boxer.
“Do you think I’m an intellectual?”
“Oh, so so,” said Rachel absently from the security of her own intellectual eminence.
“You’re honest, anyway,” exclaimed Ezra, more than a little hurt.
“Let’s look at it this way,” said Rachel, coming back to earth with a start. “You’re more of an intellectual than me, for I sometimes think that I simply inherit my way of life and that left on my own …”
“I think so, too,” interrupted Ezra with satisfaction. So Rachel did sometimes see herself.
“But you’re less of an intellectual than my Uncle Bertie,” went on Rachel. Uncle Bertie was a professional philosopher, and although many philosophers are very practical