Scholars & Gentlemen

Appointments with Atropos

"Marcus... Marcus...." Sophie's voice was crystal clear and urgent. Marcus woke up with start from a deep and troubled sleep and felt for the bedside light switch. There was no one there. He was alone in the bed for the first time since he had come back to Carston. Caroline had been invited at very short notice to give a paper at an academic conference in York. Sophie was somewhere in the North Sea with her father. Marcus shook his sleepy head and looked wistfully around the room. He had become so used to the two warm and loving bodies lying beside him that their absence left him feeling lonely and uneasy. Everything now revolved round them. Without them he was nothing. He missed them so much. He must have been dreaming about Sophie, dearest Sophie. She would ring soon. He turned over and went back to sleep.

Two days later Marcus made his way on foot from the Hall to the Home Farm for his daily discussion with Dennis Mowbray. There was the faintest glow of warmth in the late March sun which promised something of the spring to come, but the morning was still sharp and brisk. It was good day for a walk in the country. A day to see mad March hares boxing in the fallow fields, bushes enmeshed with delicate filigrees of dew dusted cobwebs, wheeling rooks and sudden startled pigeons, the crowing of an insistent distant cockerel, groups of ponies, their hot breath steaming in the cold morning air, cavalcades of newly milked cows winding purposelessly after an unappointed leader towards their appointed meadow. The whole panoply of nature immersed Marcus in its vitality, from the tiny clouds of evanescent gnats lured out by the nascent sun, to the great lumbering bull which surveyed him across the divide of a gate and bellowed its menacing warning. Marcus had never felt more alive. That dank and miserable place was forgotten, the thesis a trivial irrelevance. Love and life was everything. He hugged himself in disbelief at his undeserved good fortune. This was where he belonged.

On the way down the drive Marcus encountered Fangdale who was expertly trimming the grass verge at the edge of the drive with a half moon cutter. Marcus saluted him and said good morning but received nothing back but the customary grunt and deferential forelock tug. At the Home Farm his meeting with Dennis was over remarkably quickly. Dennis was always very efficient and there was really no need for such quotidian meetings but Marcus liked to talk to him, especially since the girls were away and he felt a little lonely rattling around in the great house on his own, and, anyway, he enjoyed the walk down the drive and the short cut across the fields.

On the way back Marcus noticed that Fangdale was no longer there. The wooden wheel barrow containing his gardening tools, including the ever present hedge lopper, was still parked on the grass. But of Fangdale there was no sign. Fangdale was a law unto himself, but it was unlike him to abandon his tools, especially the hedge lopper. Had he remembered a conversation in the kitchen on Christmas Eve Marcus would have known that Fangdale's wife was pregnant. This morning she had been rushed into the maternity hospital in Northallerton where Fangdale would follow her, once his son had found him in the grounds, and there he would remain until the twin girls were born. For the next twenty four hours the Hall would be without its guardian angel. Marcus smiled to himself and went back into the Hall through the kitchen door. In the comfy womb of the warm kitchen he picked up today's Times and slumped into the old armchair beside the Aga. He missed them so much. It was so quiet without them. The joy, the laughter, the giggles, the teasing, the tears, the cuddles, the wet kisses, the soft warm willing bodies, the wild and the gentle sex, the pure lust for life that radiated from them. Well, Caroline would be back by Sunday. It would be April the first, Palm Sunday. Was it really a year since he had sent off his thesis to Cambridge? It seemed like no time at all, and it seemed like aeons. He opened the Times and began to work his way through it. On an inside page there was short report of the tragic death of one Dr Roger Magot, a promising young academic, who had fallen from the roof of his flat during the course of a party intended to celebrate his election to a full fellowship at St Onans College Oxford. Marcus flipped to the obituary pages but there was nothing. Magot's star had not risen far enough in the academic firmament to warrant an obituary in the Times. Marcus gave a dry laugh. Now that they had both gone he would never know what had really happened to his thesis. He put the newspaper down and went upstairs to his study where he switched on his electric typewriter, inserted a sheet of his recycled thesis into the platen and gathered his thoughts.