Unseen Academicals (Discworld 37)

'Well, you read Trev well enough. Be told, though: don't try that stuff on me or you'll never see another pie!'

'Yes, Miss Glenda. Sorry, Miss Glenda.'

She sighed. What is it about me? The moment they look downcast I feel sorry for them! She looked up. He was watching her.

'Stop that!'

'Sorry, Miss Glenda.'

'But you got to see the football, at least. Did you enjoy it?'

Nutt's face lit up. 'Yes. It was wonderful. The noise, the crowds, the chanting, oh the chanting! It becomes a second blood! The unison! To not be alone! To be not just one but one and all, of one mind and purpose!... excuse me.' He had seen her face.

'So you quite liked it, then,' said Glenda. The intensity of Nutt's outburst had been like opening an oven door. It was a mercy her hair hadn't frizzled.

'Oh yes! The ambience was wonderful!'

'I didn't try those,' Glenda hazarded, 'but the pease pudding is usually good.'

The scrape of crockery and the tinkling of a teaspoon heralded the arrival of Juliet, or rather of the cup of tea that she was holding in front of her as if it were a grail, so that she drifted along behind it like a comet's tail. Glenda was impressed. The tea was in the cup instead of in the saucer and it was the acceptable brown colour that is usually characteristic of tea and was usually the only tea-like characteristic of tea made by Juliet.

Trev sat up, and Glenda wondered how long he might have been paying attention. All right, he might be good in an emergency, and at least he washed sometimes and owned a toothbrush, but Juliet was special, wasn't she? All she needed was a prince. Technically that meant Lord Vetinari, but he was far too old. Besides, no one was sure which side of the bed he got out of, or even if he went to bed at all. But one day a prince would come, even if Glenda had to drag him on a chain.

She turned her head. Nutt was watching her intently again. Well, her book was locked down tightly. No one was going to riffle through her pages. And tomorrow she would find out what the wizards were up to. That was easy. She'd be invisible.

In the stillness of the night, Nutt sat in his special place, which was yet another room, very close to the vats. Candles burned as he sat at a rescued table, staring at a piece of paper and absent-mindedly cleaning out his ear with the point of his pencil.

Nutt was technically an expert on love poetry throughout the ages and had discussed it at length with Miss Healstether, the castle librarian. He had also tried to discuss it with Ladyship, but she had laughed and said it was frivolity, although quite helpful as a tutorial on the use of vocabulary, scansion, rhythm and affect as a means to an end, to wit getting a young lady to take all her clothes off. At that particular point, Nutt had not really understood what she meant. It sounded like some sort of conjuring trick.

He tapped the pencil on the page. The castle library had been full of poetry and he'd read it avidly as he read all books, not knowing why it had been written or what exactly it was supposed to achieve. But generally poems written by men to women followed a very similar format. Now, with a world's worth of the finest poetry to choose from, he was lost for words.

Then he nodded to himself. Ah, yes, Robert Scandal's famous poem, 'Oi! To his Deaf Mistress'. It surely had the right shape and tempo. Of course, there had to be a muse. Oh, yes, all poetry needed a muse. That might present a difficulty. Juliet, while quite attractive, was also, in his mind, a kind of amiable ghost. Hmm. Ah, of course...

Nutt pulled the pencil out of his ear, hesitated and wrote:

I sing, but not of love, for love is blind,

but celebrate instead the muse of kindness...

The fires in the vats cooled, but Nutt's brain was suddenly ablaze.

Round about midnight, Glenda decided it was safe enough to leave the boys alone to get up to whatever it was boys got up to when women weren't around to look after them, and made sure that she and Juliet were on the late cross-town bus. That meant she actually got to sleep in her own bed.

She looked around the tiny bedroom by candlelight and met the gaze, which was quite difficult, of Mr Wobble, the three-eyed transcendental teddy bear. It would have been nice to have a bit of cosmic explanation at this point, but the universe never gave you explanations, it just gave you more questions.

She reached down surreptitiously, even though there was only a three-eyed teddy bear watching her, and picked up the latest Iradne Comb-Buttworthy from the cache unsuccessfully hidden below. After ten minutes of reading, which took her some way into the book (Ms Comb-Buttworthy producing volumes that were even slimmer than her heroines), she experienced d¨¦j¨¤ vu. Moreover, the d¨¦j¨¤ vu was squared, because she had the feeling of having had the d¨¦j¨¤ vu before.

'They're really all the same, aren't they?' she said to the three-eyed teddy bear. 'You know it's going to be Mary the Maid, or someone like her, and there's got to be two men and she will end up with the nice one, and there has to be misunderstandings, and they never do anything more than kiss and it's absolutely guaranteed that, for example, an exciting civil war or an invasion by trolls or even a scene with any cooking in it is not going to happen. The best you can expect is a thunderstorm.' It really had nothing to do with real life at all, which, although short on civil wars and invasions by trolls, at least had the decency to have lots of cooking.

The book dropped out of her fingers and thirty seconds later she was sound asleep.

Surprisingly, no neighbour needed her in the night so she got up, dressed and breakfasted in what was an almost unfamiliar world. She opened her door to take breakfast to widow Crowdy and found Juliet on the doorstep.

The girl took a step back. 'Are you goin' out, Glendy? It's early!'

'Well, you're up,' said Glenda. 'And with a newspaper, I'm pleased to see.'

'Isn't it exciting?' said Juliet, and thrust the paper at her.