Laura and Dame Beatrice emerged from the car and Laura handed over the keys. The suitcases were taken out and examined and the interior of the car scrutinised before they were allowed to drive on to that part of Bessie’s Quad which had been reserved as a parking-lot for visitors’ cars.
The gate which ordinarily shut off the walled path between Nuns’ Enclosure and the Fellows’ garden was open and so were the gates which ordinarily kept the two gardens private from one another. Dame Beatrice, who had visited the College on many previous occasions, led the way into Nuns’ enclosure where, as she had expected, the High Mistress of the College was circulating among her guests and greeting new arrivals.
The garden was completely walled in, the buildings which were now the principal’s Lodging forming the fourth wall. Below the walls were flower-beds and the centre-piece at the house end of the garden was a well. It had a high stone surround and a fine canopy of wrought-iron work from the top of which depended a bucket and chain, the bucket held below the top of the stone-work so that its utilitarian purpose did not offend the eye. Adjacent to the well were two ancient apple-trees, but they gave little shade and the day was hot.
Laura, whose Highland blood had no sympathy with a temperature in the eighties, noted that over the wall she could see the branches of a magnificent cedar tree; so, leaving her employer (who heeded the heat no more than a lizard on a sunbaked wall) in earnest and apparently entertaining conversation with a group who had come up to renew acquaintance with her, Laura wandered out through the gate, crossed the broad path and entered the Fellows’ garden.
Here there was not only the spreading cedar whose shade she sought, but a bonus in the form of little tables at which tea, cakes, ice-cream and strawberries and cream were being served. The waitresses consisted of one or two maids reinforced by half a dozen women students who were remaining in College for a week or so to take advantage of the facilities offered by the College and the University libraries because they wanted to put in some extra work before going down.
Laura seated herself in a deck-chair, and was soon approached by a student wearing a backless sun-suit, enormous dark-glasses and open-toed sandals.
‘Gracious!’ said Laura. ‘You look more comfortable than I feel!’ She removed her festive and detested hat and, grateful for the shade of the cedar which made the hat unnecessary, she hung the redundant lid on a projection at the back of her deck chair.
‘We agreed to do our waitress act so long as we could dress as we liked,’ said the student. ‘The Bursar thought it was all right so long as we didn’t turn out in bra and panties or in bikinis. The trouble is to keep old Doctor Giddie at bay. Giddie by name and giddy by nature is that old goat. What would you like? It’s all free.’
Laura laughed and opted for iced lemonade. When the girl brought it she was accompanied by another who carried a tray laden with cakes and strawberries.
‘I say,’ said this second girl, who was somewhat more decorously clad than her companion in that her frock, although backless, was almost knee-length, albeit her feet were bare, ‘didn’t I see you come in with Dame Beatrice? Do you know her?’
‘I am her dogsbody. I type, drive the car, chase away unwelcome visitors, answer letters, look up references, bark, balance lumps of sugar on my nose, jump through hoops at the word of command and sometimes join Dame B in pastoral dances by the lee light of the moon,’ Laura replied.
‘Could you ask if I can consult her after Hall tonight?’
‘Consult her? She’s here as a visitor,’ said Laura, becoming serious.
‘Oh, I know, but, you see, I need a psychiatrist and I can’t afford the fare to London as well as paying her fee.’
‘Oh, you plan to be a cash customer? What’s the trouble?’
‘I’ve been seeing the College ghost, a monk dragging a sack. I need help and – well – is it true that she charges according to one’s means?’
‘A foolish practice for which I have often upbraided her. All the same, if you want a psychiatrist, well, she’s no longer in regular practice, you know. Even if you did attend her London clinic, you wouldn’t get her. You’d get one of the three doctors who now run it. She visits every now and again, but that’s all.’
‘I see.’ The two girls left her table, for a stream of visitors suddenly cascaded into the Fellows’ garden, so Laura finished her cake, lemonade and strawberries and relinquished her seat in the shade to a plump, blonde woman who was feeling the effects of the sun. Then she wandered around the grounds. She discovered the cool silence of the cloister and noticed that on the side opposite the church an open archway led into a pleasantly secluded little garden and that this, again, opened on to the main quadrangle and the enclosure formed by the twentieth-century College annexe.
An archway between two blocks led to an acreage of grass which Laura deduced must be part of the College playing fields and she was delighted and surprised to see that one boundary of this area was formed by a backwater of the river. She wandered down to it. As it could be crossed by a wooden bridge which had no gate at either end, she assumed that the land on the other side was also College property.
There was a boathouse on her side of the water. Laura studied the stream, noted that it was clear of weed and, as there were dressing-boxes alongside the boat-house, she realised that she was looking at the College bathing-place.
‘Lucky devils!’ thought Laura. She tried the first of the cubicles. It was open. In two minutes, naked as a mermaid, she was in the water.
Four tables were set for dinner in Hall that evening. Dame Beatrice sat at the high table with the High Mistress and the more distinguished of the guests, two tables below the dais accommodated the remainder of the invited, and at the end of the long room sat an unusually muted gathering at a table to themselves, the students who were staying up.
Laura found herself seated between two of the reverend signiors referred to by the High Mistress in her letter. One of them asked her whether her husband was a member of the University.
‘No, he’s a policeman,’ Laura replied.
‘Ah, yes, I remember. I knew the name meant something to me. Assistant Commissioner Robert Gavin, isn’t it? I think I met him once. Tell me, does he still believe in ghosts?’
‘I don’t know that he ever did.’