Chapter 8
Finest Old Colonial
Mark stretched his legs and sat back in the armchair in Ed’s party room.
“I’ll tell you one thing, Ed, I’m jolly glad that courses at the Sussex are back in full swing again. It’s a shame that dumb blonde Joséphine left Keith in the lurch, swanning off in mid-term like that, but now Simone is officially Head of French, and doing a lot of the classes that her skeletal compatriot walked out on.”
“Plenty of money coming in, then.”
“Coming in to Simone, there’s plenty. I haven’t got a penny left, myself. Even worse, old bean, I’ve got debts. Up to my eyes. So it’s a really specially jolly good thing that Simone is prepared to support us both.”
“All the same, don’t want to live off your wife if you can help it. Do you?”
“Damned right I don’t. But what’s a fellow to do?”
He furrowed his brow and fixed half-closed eyes on Ed.
“How are you placed, old chap?”
“Me? I need work. Soon. Was thinking of taking up Keith’s long-standing offer.”
“Can’t see you as a teacher, somehow. I think you’d need a bit more patience.”
I’m patient enough with you, aren’t I?
“Well, I enjoyed it when I did it in Wimbledon, and the people I was teaching seemed to learn. It’s more that Keith and I ... well, we’re kind of rivals, as business people. I’d sooner buy him out than work for him.”
Mark laughed. Ed heard a key turn in the lock and rose to embrace his wife as she came through from the hall. Ção’s face was flushed, her eyes shining as she threw her arms around Ed.
“Ed! Mark! I’ve got a job! I really have. I’ve gone and done it. I’ve got a job!”
“Darling, that’s wonderful!”
“Clever girl,” said Mark. “Spill the beans. Tell us all about it.”
“It’s simple. Someone in the Party owns a travel agency, and now that the Revolution is coming into its own, he’s planning to expand. His big idea is to offer affordable holidays to workers who never earned a decent wage before. And since I’m a language girl, and ideologically sound, he wants me in his team. I’m starting next Monday.”
“Fabulous! Let’s have a drink to celebrate. There’s some fizz in the fridge, I think.”
“Oh, I say, let’s go out and celebrate. Simone can pay.”
“Give her a ring for us, will you, Mark? But this evening, this lady is going to pay. I’ve got an advance!”
Ed was proud of Ção for rescuing their finances by venturing into the world of work. However, he was abashed at the prospect of becoming a kept man. His aim was to provide for Ção, not have her provide for him. He thought that with his experience and drive, he was the one who should make things happen.
On Monday morning, Ed accompanied Ção to the travel agency, wished her well and took the underground to the Sussex School to ask for work. Keith was apologetic.
“I’m sorry, what I need right now is another French teacher. I’ve got all the English teachers I need. There might be a few private lessons to fill in the New Year, but nothing full-time.”
“Aren’t you expanding, then?”
“Not at the moment. We will be, though. I’d love to give you a job next autumn, but until then I simply can’t. Not unless one of my teachers gets the heebie-jeebies about the communists coming and decides to run away.”
“Or does a Joséphine.”
“Quite.” Keith gave a wry smile. “Both are possible. Keep in touch.”
Ção made light of her job at the travel agency. There was little actual work to do other than plan for the coming expansion, and that left plenty of time for chatting and sorting out the country’s ideal future political direction. Her co-workers were similar to Ção in outlook and background, though some of them had been to university, including her boss, Fernando, who interpreted “learning from the masses” as listening to his half-dozen employees on all matters regarding his and their work. He attributed the success of his agency to precisely that.
One evening, as rain washed the windows of their flat, Ção took a call from Estrela. They had seen little of each other since the wedding, and their conversation outlasted a chapter of Ed’s Open University textbook. When Ção came back into the room, Joséphine’s former bedroom now cleared and converted into a study, she crept up noisily behind Ed and placed her hands over his eyes.
“Guess who!”
Ed reached behind him, located Ção’s right knee and slid his hand slowly up the inside of her leg.
“Well, judging by the fine texture of the skin on this delectable thigh, I would say it belongs to a certain Mrs. Scripps.”
“Right!” She giggled, moved her legs further apart. Then her voice turned serious. “Ed, do you like studying?”
“Well, I like learning. So if studying means learning, it’s okay. Especially when it gets interrupted by a sexy little beast called Conception!”
Ed swivelled the chair to face her. She brought her thighs together over his hand. Ed rose and thought of lifting Ção to his shoulder to carry her into the bedroom, but he wanted neither to hurt her nor to remove his hand. Instead, he drew her close. Ção lightly bit his neck, then stood on tiptoe and whispered in his ear.
“Just slip a couple of fingers into my vagina and keep them there while you gets us both into the bedroom and naked. If you think you can.”
That was the kind of challenge Ed relished.
Ção still had sperm on her lips when she resumed their earlier conversation.
“What if I were to make these delectable thighs belong to a certain Mrs. Dr. Scripps?”
“Meaning what?”
“That was Estrela on the phone earlier. You remember her, the witness at our lovely secret wedding. She told me the University is going to run evening classes for working people. She’s just enrolled to study law. I think I might do the same.”
“Wow! That’s quite a commitment, you know.”
“Not really. I can ditch it if I can’t cope, or if I get fed up. No problem.”
“You’ll be burning the candle at both ends.”
“What?”
“Working all day and studying all night. Whenever would we make love?”
“Never again! So we’d better make the most of our time together now!”
She turned her attention to restoring Ed’s erection.
Later in the week, Ção got the morning off work and took the bus up to the Old University to enrol. It was not yet too late in the year to do so. She tried to get Ed to stay at home with his textbooks, but he insisted on going with her, to keep her company. At her request, he sat with a textbook in the Department of Literatures café while she dealt with the bureaucracy in the Administration Block.
“My goodness, you shouldn’t read Samuelson in this place, young chap. They think that old Yank leftie is a capitalist lackey around here. Spit in your coffee, I shouldn’t wonder.”
Ed looked up. The speaker was a florid-faced man at least twice Ed’s age. He was chuckling, so maybe he had been joking.
“Are you serious?”
“Not entirely, though you never know. Patrick Harte, by the way.”
“Ed Scripps. Glad to meet you. Care for a – ?”
“Thank you. Already got one.” He held up his glass of amber liquid. “Mind if I join you for a minute, before I rush off to my class? Got the clever kids today. If they show up.”
Ed pulled up a seat for him at the small table.
“What brings you to this august seat of failure to learn?”
“My wife. She’s enrolling for Law.”
“Oh, serious stuff. Preparation for the real world. Here on this side of the campus we only prepare people to be over-educated housewives or underpaid teachers. Goodness, not a student, are you? Or a teacher?”
“Not here. I’m in business. Or I was. But I’m doing an Open University degree so I don’t waste my unexpected free time, and I may have to become a teacher sooner or later.”
“Well, you can have my job if you want it. Been here twenty years, nigh on, but they don’t appreciate me any more, so I’m darn well buzzing off. Sod ’em.”
“What is your job?”
“Teaching English to the rich and privileged. These young things you see flitting around you. I’m yesterday’s man to them, so I’m getting out while I’ve still got a few tomorrows left.”
“Must be hard to get a job like yours.”
“Was. Was indeed. Had to be damned well qualified when I got in. Now they’ll take anyone. Desperate, they are.”
“Why?”
“They’re letting virtually anyone in to study. Haven’t got room for them. Haven’t got teachers. Just apply for a job, and you’ll probably get elected. Native English speaker, aren’t you? Must be, with that dreadful accent. No offence, old boy.”
“It’s the normal way people speak in Stevenage.”
“Yes, sorry. Look, I’ll find someone to propose you, if you want. Can’t do it myself, for the reasons I’ve given. Past my expiry date here. Sorry, got to go and pretend to teach these buggers something. Here’s my card. Give me a ring next week, and I’ll give you the details. You’ll regret it, though.”
“Thank you. That’s very kind of you.”
“You won’t thank me in the end.”
He put down his unfinished drink on the table, got to his feet, nodded to Ed and ambled to the exit, looking around him with detached amusement.
Did he say “elected”?
Ed was pondering how best to grab this unexpected opportunity when Ção arrived. She was miffed because she would have to return the following week to do more paperwork, but she cheered up when Ed recounted what Patrick Harte had told him about the chance of a job.
“He said I had to get elected to the post. That can’t be right, can it?”
“Yes, really, that’s how we do things now. New teachers have to be publicly elected at a meeting of all the teachers and students in the Department. It’s direct democracy in action.”
“Do you think I can get them to elect me?”
“Of course you can, Ed my darling. I’ll use my contacts. With any luck, I can get all the comrades to vote for you.”
“All the Maoists? I’ll have to confess that I’m a businessman.”
“I know, Ed, but you’re our businessman.”
Ten days later, Ed was back on the campus of Lisbon’s Old University, which was adjacent to that of its bitter rival, the Classical University. This time he sat in a very large lecture hall in the Department of Literatures, next to Xavier D’Silva, a scion of an ancient Portuguese family that had helped colonise what became Ceylon, long before the British arrived there. Xavier’s English sounded to Ed even posher than that of Patrick Harte, who, true to his word, had put Ed in touch with Xavier because he was a language instructor at the Department who could plausibly propose Ed as someone worthy of joining them.
The lecture hall was more than half full. On a dais facing the assembled students and teachers sat the luminaries of the Steering Committee that now ran things in place of the formal bodies discredited by their association with the fallen fascist régime.
The meeting was into its second hour, and the matter of potential new teachers had yet to be raised. In the new order, “Any Other Business” came at the start of the agenda, not the end, and it was still in full swing. The student body seemed split three ways: supporters of the Soviet-influenced Communist Party; the Maoists, who referred to the former as “social-fascists”; and the “revolutionary left” followers of the military architect of the April coup, known to all by his exotic first name, Otelo. This group considered both the others to be beyond-the-pale reactionaries. Whenever members of one of these factions took the floor, they were interrupted by their antagonists, who, if they failed to shout them down, took the floor immediately afterwards to rebut what they decided had just been said. Progress towards the agenda was slow, but Ed found the demonstration of academic democracy fascinating.
Xavier sat next to him, doodling on a sketch pad and making occasional ironic comments. Ed leant across to see what he was drawing. It was a series of sketches of the Chair of the Committee, an attractive, dark-haired, olive-skinned woman in her forties, whose energy and beauty leached out of her in each successive, time-numbered sketch. Several of the previously vocal students, though few of the Maoists, left the hall when “Any Other Business” concluded; others arrived shortly afterwards. Ed calculated that dusk had fallen outside when they reached the item that concerned him.
Xavier was called upon to introduce him, which he did in glowing terms, highlighting his commitment to the new Portugal and, at Ed’s prior insistence, his idea of running courses on business English to broaden the employment scope for language graduates. Xavier did this in Portuguese. Then Ed himself was called upon to speak, in both Portuguese and English, to show that he could. He repeated what Xavier had said, making it more factual and less glowing, then said that he would like to teach evening classes so that his students would be working people, to whom business English could make a real, practical difference. This drew a round of applause, even though the majority of those present were daytime students.
“Nice one, Ed,” said Xavier, “it’s in the bag.”
The vote was by a simple show of hands. A visible majority voted “yes”, half a dozen opted for “no”, and a score or so raised their hands to abstain. The meeting moved on to the next item on the agenda.
“Is that it?” Ed asked.
“That’s it. Welcome, O Language Instructor. I’ll fix you an appointment to see Pretty Polly there.” He tilted his head in the direction of the subject of his sketches. “She can give you all the details. She’s a bit full of herself, but she means well.”
“When can I start teaching, do you think?”
“End of January, maybe. After the Christmas holidays, anyway. Don’t worry, there’s never any rush around here.”
Ed, however, was in a rush to get an income flowing. When he met “Pretty Polly”, Deolinda d’Almeida, he was disconcerted at how modest the salary was, and astounded at how few teaching hours he was required to do to earn it: twelve a week. He persuaded Deolinda to let him enrol students before Christmas, launch his classes early in January and start getting paid at the end of that month. She was very complimentary about his willingness to do evening lessons and to teach business English, yet he came away from their meeting with a feeling that she had not told him everything he needed to know.
Christmas was miserable. Ção wanted to spend it with her parents, and they would not invite Ed, so he flew to England to spend the holiday with his own parents. He hated being away from Ção. They phoned each other every day to compare the cold rain of Stevenage with the warm rain of Portugal, though what was important was the warmth in each other’s voices. Ed’s parents were proud of their son’s becoming the first member of their respective families to teach at a university, and Ed used the long hours without his wife to learn what academics considered to be business English and to plan his courses.
Back in Portugal and reunited with his wife, Ed spent days tending to Ção’s sexual and emotional needs, making up for the time he had spent away. He looked forward to being able soon to fulfil her financial needs, too. He also got in touch with his friend Mark.
“Still looking for a job, Mark?”
“Oh dear me, yes. But as much as I look, there is nothing to be seen. I eat thanks to Simone, and I drink and occasionally make merry thanks to a loan from my dear sister, Harriet.”
“Could you see yourself teaching English at the University?”
“I’m one of those who can. I do. I don’t teach.”
“It’s better than living off your women, surely?”
“You do have a point there, old bean, but why would they employ an unemployed businessman?”
“To teach business English. They’ve taken me on to do just that.”
“Well, I’m sure I’m more qualified than you are, with my degree in Modern Languages. ”
“Precisely. Together, we’d make a great team. We could really help the students!”
“OK. Tell me more.”
Mark, too, was less impressed by the salary on offer than by the light workload. Ed gave him the phone numbers of Xavier and of Deolinda, then phoned them to explain that another potential language instructor would be getting in touch with them. He also got Ção to see Simone and talk up the job opportunity that was landing on her husband’s doorstep.
On a warm, wet late afternoon in mid-January, Ed caught a bus up to the edge of the university campus. As he walked up the avenue that led to it from the bus stop, he felt the thrill of anticipation which a new venture brought him. Three pieces of imposing fascist architecture stood at the top of the avenue, as though defying the population to enter. Nevertheless, Ed did climb the steps of the one to his right, push open the heavy glass doors and enter the large atrium. No classrooms were assigned, so he had arranged to meet his students outside the main lecture hall. Before Christmas, he had enrolled two groups of forty each. Xavier had told him not to expect all of them to show up, yet at least forty faces greeted his arrival with expressions ranging from eager to sceptical. Together, they then began what was to become a ritual: searching the building for an empty classroom. Ed explained that the class at this time would be general English and the one starting two hours later, when the proportion of working students would rise, was to focus on business English. Thirty-five of the enrolees had shown up, together with twelve newcomers. Only twenty-eight students showed up for the eight o’clock lesson, of whom seven were newcomers. When Ed said that he would focus on business English, a few of them asked to move to the earlier class.
For the rest of the month, every time Ed arrived to teach a class, new faces added to the mix. Turning people away was against the new ethos of the University, so, when they could not find a large enough classroom, some students would stand behind those who found seats. Ed squared the circle by creating a third group, although this meant that each group would get only four hours’ tuition a week instead of six. His training had not prepared him to teach such large classes with so few resources – he even had to bring his own chalk, in case there was a blackboard – but he saw this as an opportunity to carve out an area of expertise for himself which might one day have monetary value.
In response to popular demand, Ed made two of his classes general English and only one business-focused. He asked Xavier about the higher demand for general English.
“It’s a matter of status, Ed. Business English sounds like vocational training, whereas general English, what I call ENOR, English for No Obvious Reason, is deemed a fit study for high-fallutin’ minds, for the élite.”
The working students he asked, though, told him that they had enough contact with business English during office hours, and preferred a change in the evenings. Ed resolved to find a way to square that particular circle, too.
He phoned Mark to ask for advice. Simone took the call.
“Mark’s not here. He’s out drinking.”
“What, alone?”
“Yes, he said he wanted to drown his sorrows without me around to cheer him up.”
“But he’s about to get a job at the Old University!”
“No, Ed. They had the meeting this morning. The vote went against him.”
“What? But that’s crazy! I can’t believe it!”
Simone sighed. “They said he had no training or experience. And that one English businessman doing capitalist indoctrination was more than enough, even if the students liked him. Especially if the students liked him.”
“That’s awful. It’s so unfair!”
“In the end, it was close. If they don’t get teachers, students graduate later. But the Maoists voted against him as a block. I guess he has the wrong wife.”
Ed thought he heard a sob.
“I’m so sorry, Simone. Of course it’s not your fault! Look, please ask Mark to phone me when he comes in, no matter what time it is.”
“He won’t. He blames you for his humiliation.”
Towards the end of the month, Ed thought that Spring had arrived. A warm wind scattered the clouds above him as he strode, as best he could, up the avenue to the campus. He was on his way to the Administration Block, to sign the chit that meant, as Xavier had told him, that he would get his pay a few days later.
He eventually found the right office, with a clerk whose eagerness to chat he would have welcomed on another occasion. The clerk shuffled through a stack of papers.
“I can’t find a Scripps on the list. What is your full name?”
“Edward Clement Scripps.”
“Let me see. Definitely no Scripps. .... No Edward... Clemente, yes, several: Araújo, da Costa ... Rodrigues, Soares. No Scripps. I’ll double check.”
Ed’s stomach felt as though he had not eaten all day, after an evening’s hard drinking.
“No, I’m sorry, you’re simply not on the payroll. Hang on a minute. I’ll get your file.”
The clerk disappeared into a back office. Ed found a chair and slumped into it. Winter assailed his mind. The clerk returned, looking glum.
“I’m sorry, you don’t have a file. We have no record of you. As far as we know, you are not an employee of this university. Not yet, at any rate.”
Ed pushed himself up and made for the exit.
The clerk noticed Ed’s limp.
“I’ll keep looking, Doctor Scripps. See you tomorrow.”
“Thank you.”
Ed let the warm wind dissipate the winter inside him. After all, worse things had happened.
As he walked unwillingly towards the bus stop, a red Ferrari thundered past him, then hit the brakes. Ed smelt burning rubber as it reversed sharply until the car was level with him. The driver got out, came over to the pavement and embraced Ed. It was Paulo. Ed had not seen or heard from Lourdes’ younger brother for months. Paulo opened the passenger door.
“Ed! Let me give you a lift home. Or wherever you’re going. You don’t look too steady.”
“Home. Thanks, I appreciate it.”
Paulo’s glance was still quizzical. Ed outlined his situation.
“That’s tough,” said Paulo.
“And you?”
“Oh, I’m doing all right. Trading like mad with the ex-colonies, while we’ve still got them. Doing very nicely. You should grab a piece of the action. I can cut you in on a deal or several.”
As music to Ed’s ears, it was even better than Mozart.
If he means it.
Ed changed the subject to Paulo’s new car.
Paulo put it through its paces as well as he could inside the city. Ed was impressed. Paulo halted the Ferrari in Largo do Andaluz. He reached into his jacket and pulled something very small, wrapped in aluminium foil, from an inner pocket. He handed it to Ed.
“Try our product. Then let me know what you think.”
Ed took it and lifted it to his nostrils. The intense aroma reminded him of parties.
“Thanks. I will.”
“Finest old colonial,” said Paulo.