The Collected Short Stories - Jeffrey Archer [14]
“Are you to replace Hancock’s Half Hour or Dick Barton, Special Agent?” Philippa inquired.
“I am to give a series of twelve lectures.”
“On what subject, pray?”
“Genius.”
Philippa flicked through the Radio Times. “I see that Genius is to be broadcast at two o’clock on a Sunday morning, which is understandable, as that’s when you are at your most brilliant.”
When William was awarded an honorary doctorate at Princeton, Philippa attended the ceremony and sat proudly in the front row.
“I tried to secure a place in the back,” she explained, “but it was filled with sleeping students who had obviously never heard of you.”
“If that’s the case, Philippa, I am only surprised you didn’t mistake them for one of your tutorial lectures.”
As the years went on, many anecdotes, only some of which were apocryphal, passed into the Oxford fabric. Everyone in the English school knew the stories about the “fighting Hatchards”: how they spent their first night together, how they jointly won the Charles Oldham, how Phil would complete the Times crossword before Bill had finished shaving, how each had both been appointed to a professorial chair on the same day, and how they both worked longer hours than any of their contemporaries, as if they still had something to prove, if only to each other. It seemed almost required by the laws of symmetry that they should always be judged equals—until it was announced in the New Year’s Honours that Philippa had been made a Dame of the British Empire.
“At least our dear queen has worked out which one of us is truly worthy of recognition,” she said over the college dessert.
“Our dear queen,” said William, selecting the Madeira, “knows only too well how little competition there is in the women’s colleges: Sometimes one must encourage weaker candidates in the hope that it might inspire some real talent lower down.”
After that, whenever they attended a public function together, Philippa would have the MC announce them as “Professor William and Dame Philippa Hatchard.” She looked forward to many happy years of starting every official occasion one up on her husband, but her triumph lasted for only six months: William received a knighthood in the Queen’s Birthday Honours. Philippa feigned surprise at the dear queen’s uncharacteristic lapse of judgment and forthwith insisted on their being introduced in public as Sir William and Dame Philippa Hatchard.
“Understandable,” said William. “The queen had to make you a dame first in order that no one should mistake you for a lady. When I married you, Philippa, you were a young fellow, and now I find I’m living with an old dame.”
“It’s no wonder,” said Philippa, “that your poor pupils can’t make up their minds whether you’re homosexual or you simply have a mother fixation. Be thankful that I did not accept Girton’s invitation: Then you would have been married to a mistress.”
“I always have been, you silly woman.”
As the years passed, they never let up their pretended belief in the other’s mental feebleness. Philippa’s books, “works of considerable distinction,” she insisted, were published by Oxford University Press, while William’s, “works of monumental significance,” he declared, were printed at the presses of Cambridge University.
The tally of newly appointed professors of English they had taught as undergraduates soon reached double digits.
“If you count polytechnics, I shall have to throw in Maguire’s readership in Kenya,” said William.
“You did not teach the professor of English at Nairobi,” said Philippa. “I did. You taught the head of state, which may well account for why the university is so highly thought of while the country is in such disarray.”
In the early sixties they conducted a battle of letters in the TLS on the works of Philip Sidney without ever discussing the subject in each other’s presence. In the end the editor said the correspondence must stop and adjudicated a draw.
They both declared him an idiot.
If there was one act that annoyed