Murdering Americans Read Free

and a feminist and lived?’
    ‘Robert, Jack thinks Helen is hot. That’s not the way she put it, of course. I think she said pulchritudinous. But the point is she fancied her chances with Helen enough to look favourably at her invitation, which seems to involve plenty of attention, very little work, and shitloads of money. So by the end of the call, she’d agreed in principle, subject to her being able to ensure St. Martha’s doesn’t fall apart in her absence. She’s already been promised dedicated conference-call facilities, an unlimited supply of first-class plane tickets to fly her out for crucial meetings and fly others in, and excellent accommodation for her and any guests she wants at the main hotel where she’ll be pitching camp. Oh, and she’s making a big issue about taking Horace: Provost Pritchardson has been put in charge of investigating the rules about importing parrots.’
    ‘But the mid-West, Mary Lou! What’s she going to do at a provincial university in the mid-West? What’s in Indiana, for heaven’s sake?’
    ‘Nothing, really. It’s what you drive through on the way to or from New York and Chicago. But Jack’s off in fantasy land, Robert. She’s never been anywhere in the States except New York and she’s gone tripping down memory lane to the cowboy movies of her youth and happy days when men were men and John Wayne was in his prime. She’s probably hoping she’ll meet someone just like him at Freeman. Helen told her Cole Porter had been born just up the road so she came off the phone in a romantic haze singing ‘Night and Day’ badly and noisily.’
    Amiss winced in recognition.
    ‘Of course I’ve told her the town will be deadly dull, the faculty full of knee-jerk lefties, the students mostly retards, independent thought and speech will be stiffed by political correctness and, even more seriously for her, the food will be hideous.’
    ‘That should have given her pause.’
    ‘Nope. She brushed it aside along with everything else, told me my trouble was I had rotted my brain reading innumerable crap novels for my course on modern American fiction, that I had forgotten how wonderful my country was and that I must stop exaggerating—and then began speculating lubriciously on what the cheerleaders might look like. I made the mistake of describing today’s cheerleaders as sluts, and she said she liked sluts. And when I begged her at least to read Tom Wolfe’s I Am Charlotte Simmons just to get the flavour of a modern American campus, she reminded me that she didn’t voluntarily read books less than forty years old and that she was certainly in no mood to volunteer to do so now.’
    ‘What’s got into her? You’ve described Jack’s idea of hell and she knows perfectly well that you tend to under- rather than over-state.’
    ‘I guess now I’ve left St. Martha’s and the four of us are embarking on something new, she’s in need of an adventure herself. She hasn’t had one since China. And this fell from the skies.’
    ‘How will Myles feel about being deserted?’
    ‘They don’t have much time together at the best of times, Robert, and nothing fazes Myles. And he knows perfectly well that she has dalliances on the side. As he does, I guess. In any case, he’s part of the problem, since he’s abandoning her too as he’s off for a few months to do something undercover in Iraq with some old SAS pals. And from what I’ve picked up, he did that unexpectedly and without qualms. I’ve a feeling Myles thinks Jack takes him for granted.’
    ‘She takes everyone for granted.’
    ‘As she would say, that’s the way she is. Anyway, since St. Martha’s runs itself these days and nothing is particularly engaging her in the Lords, in the absence of any other challenge, trying to get Provost Pritchardson into bed is about as good as it gets. Anyway, you will hardly have forgotten that once Jack has made up her mind, she’s