Dying Fall

drink. She started off by railing against Guy, saying that I shouldn’t trust him etc. etc. I’d heard all this before but said (quietly) that Guy was one of my best friends and that I’d trust him with my life. She laughed rather wildly and asked me what I thought my life was worth. I said I didn’t want to have this sort of discussion with her and got up to leave. She grabbed me then and started crying. She said she still loved me but she was afraid. ‘What are you afraid of?’ I asked. ‘Not what, who,’ she said. She was in a really terrible state. I did try to get her to drink water or coffee but she swore at me and ordered another bottle of wine. I half hoped they wouldn’t serve her but they did. I escaped to the loo and rang Guy. He came immediately, thank God. By this time she was so drunk that she was hardly able to stand, but she went with Guy quite calmly. He is so good to her. I don’t know how he puts up with her behaviour. I don’t know if they are lovers or not (Sam says not) and I don’t want to know. All I know is that he has been a wonderful friend to her. And to me.
    27 May 2010
    Horrible day. I heard two of my students talking about the Neo-Nazis. They were saying that there were going to be ‘reprisals’. I reported this to Clayton and he admitted that he’d had a letter saying that the department was going to be destroyed by fire and ice. I laughed out loud. What utter Wagnerian nonsense! Clayton was rather hurt and saidthat I would be scared, in his shoes. Looking at them, I think it’s safe to say that I’ll never be in his shoes.
    When I got home though something happened that made me feel a little different. I had a letter – the usual rubbish about Jewish upstarts ‘dishonouring the memory of the White King’ – but at the end there were the names and addresses of Miriam and Mum and Dad. Just that. Ms M. Golding. Dr and Mrs I. Golding. But the threat was plain. They didn’t need to spell it out. I rang Clayton and once again said that we should call the police. He refused. He’s shielding someone. But whom?
    That is the last entry.
    *
    Ruth sits in the dark room and thinks about her friend Dan. In some ways it feels wrong to read his diary, which was obviously only ever meant for himself, but in other ways it means that Dan is more real to her than he has ever been. Her remembered Dan has almost vanished, to be replaced with a real person – passionate, witty (she loves the comment about Clayton’s shoes) and just a little pompous. She now knows Dan as she never really knew him when he was a cool undergraduate and she was a shy working-class girl from Eltham. To think if she’d played her cards right she might even have slept with him …
    Do the diaries shed any light on who killed Dan? The references to the White Hand are frustrating because, like Clayton and Sam, Dan seems to treat the group with casual contempt. He writes as if they are an unfortunatebut inevitable part of university life, like drug-taking in the union bar or cheating in assignments. But these people knew where he lived – they wrote him letters and put dead birds on his doorstep. They knew where his parents lived. Why didn’t anyone do anything about it? Dan thought that Clayton was shielding someone but didn’t know who it was. Or whom. Ruth loves it that even in his private diary, Dan remembered to write ‘whom’.
    The tangled love lives in the history department are interesting too. Elaine still loves Dan but doesn’t trust Guy. Dan, on the other hand, both trusts and admires Guy. Dan obviously has some sort of past with Elaine and probably Pippa Henry too. Sam thinks that Guy and Elaine aren’t lovers, but how would Sam know? Ruth remembers Elaine’s behaviour towards Sam at the barbeque, how she’d been first antagonistic, then almost loving, sobbing in his arms. What is the nature of
their
relationship?
    Dan’s attitude to Clayton seems to be one of affectionate contempt, which, considering he is (or was) sleeping with his wife, seems a little rich. Clayton ‘panicked as usual’, Clayton fusses about getting the excavation done on time, he ‘admits’ that he’s heard from the White Hand but doesn’t do anything about it. Ruth thinks of her experiences of the head of department – the genial host with the beautiful wife, the historian, the enthusiast striding over the fields in his pointed shoes, the scared man in the paper overalls. Did he know all along that the