Matricide at St. Martha's by Ruth Dudley Edwards Page B

a week and disappears for the whole evening. Quite often for the night. We’ve never seen him.’ She stopped and thought. ‘Well, we thought it was a him. But maybe it’s a her.’
    Amiss could just about imagine what a female lover of the Bursar’s might look like; the notion of a male was too taxing an idea for him to address. ‘Oh, well, it’ll just have to wait.’
    As he left the dining room, he felt a pull on his arm which proved to be provided by Francis Pusey, low-voiced and conspiratorial and still rather merry from his pre-dinner debauchery.
    ‘I wondered, Robert, if you’d like to see a film. I have quite a selection on video in my room, and if you’d like, we might even have a little port.’
    Amiss wasn’t very keen on port but in his present mood he would have looked kindly on an invitation to partake of turpentine. ‘Why not? What a nice idea.’ And off we went together, as he wrote the next day to Rachel – two chaps getting away from the women by sitting with their Pekinese amidst the chintz and needlework and trinkets of Francis’s dainty little nest.
    Amiss had been rather attracted by the idea of watching the kind of film he expected Francis Pusey to favour – Arsenic and Old Lace or an old Ealing comedy like The Ladykillers . In fact, when Pusey had dispensed port along with much information about origins, suppliers, vintages and so on, and had produced his index to his video collection, his visitor got a nasty shock. Ladykillers there were aplenty but they came from a genre, wrote Amiss to Rachel, that could be described most succinctly as ‘1990s dismembering’.
    He announced in that prissy little voice and with that self-deprecating ‘tee-hee’ that makes my toes curl with the effort of suppressing a scream of irritation, that he and Bobsy liked nothing more than to curl up at night with some choccies and a good film. I was not, he sniggered, to think he was some horrid old sadist because he liked a bit of gore in his films. ‘Just a bit of escapism, Robert. Helps me wind down after a hard day.’
    Hard day my arse. I’ve yet to discover anything he does that a normal person would classify as work, since the young breed of gel is about as interested as I am in learning to tat, knit, sew, dry flowers or turn last year’s skirt into a spring hat. For their accomplishments they mostly these days go to Sandra’s course on ‘Getting in Touch with your Feelings Through Tree-Hugging and Dance Movement Therapy’ or some other similar kind of crap which in these days passes muster as a female accomplishment. (This is not an area in which the Mistress takes much interest. ) So he has a negligible amount of teaching. You know how squeamish I am. So you can imagine how thrilled I was to be faced with making it a choice between films with names like Eviscerate 3 or The Gouger Stalks . So I simpered and said I wasn’t macho enough for the really horrid stuff. That made him – and no doubt Bobsy – feel very tough, but fortunately left him protective enough to expose me only to some drama that involved a muscley chap avenging some insult by rushing round the place waving an AK47 and knocking off thousands. I found if I shut my eyes during the worst bits and thought about tatting I could get through without too much pain.
    The pain came later. Just as the moronic machine-gunner espied someone who had made fun of him in nursery school and decided terminally to assuage his hurt feelings, Miss Stamp knocked on the door perfunctorily and came rushing in squawking. ‘Oh, I’m sorry, I’m sorry to interrupt, but she said I had to come and get you. She won’t let me get a doctor or anything.’
    ‘Who wants whom?’ asked Amiss.
    ‘The Bursar. She’s been injured by the blunderbuss.’ The images that this information set coursing through Amiss’s imagination would have done credit to the most deranged product of Hollywood.
    ‘She’s been shot with the blunderbuss? And survived?’