Autumn in Oxford: A Novel

by Alex Rosenberg

  Then Alice had seated herself in the drawing room of the rather large house in St. John’s Wood she had inherited when her parents had died two years before. She had poured herself a strong whiskey and soda and set herself to think through her situation. You’ve got decisions to make, and you have to find ways to make them stick. It was the kind of person she’d trained herself to be—analytical, unemotional—ever since she’d set her sights on the law. It had been hard work to train herself to focus on facts, not feelings. But now it would pay off.

  It wasn’t just the pain. She knew she couldn’t deal with the expressions of sympathy and regret that would mask most people’s real responses to fatal illness—secret gladness it was not them. She’d have to trick the world into treating her the way she’d always wanted it to: pleased to see her, but slightly surprised at her cheekiness, her drive, her success. She was going to want to treat herself the same way, right to the end. How?

  She had a little money, about six hundred quid, and she could sell the house in St. John’s Wood if she needed more. But what would she spend it on? Travel? Alone, with no one to share the experience? A fling? More fashionable clothes? A fast car, or a saloon driven by a chauffeur? A box at the opera? Fatuous! Frivolous! None of it would take her mind off her fate for a moment. Only one thing would. She had to keep working, right to the last day if she could. She would need a case that would be more important to her than anything else.

  As for the pain, she’d have to find a compliant physician. And she knew where to look: the now elderly medical man who had treated her since childhood. Dr. Kalb knew her, inside and out . . . Well, perhaps not really my insides, or he’d never have let this happen. Despite the long acquaintance, in his consulting room, he was all business, just what she wanted.

  “So, Alice.” He looked up from the clinical reports. “These people say you’ve got about six months.”

  She searched his stolid face. “But are they right?”

  He looked back at the X-ray and then at the report before him. “I’d say four or five months is optimistic.”

  “Well, I have thought about things and decided. I want to spend what’s left having the most fun I can. Doing what I like doing most.”

  “Which is?” Kalb smiled as though he knew his patient well enough to answer his own question.

  “My work, what I do best, being a solicitor. All I want is a case to sink my teeth into and see to its end.”

  Three days later, Liz Spencer had walked into her office with the very case she needed. By then Alice had filled the prescription for morphine and a brace of syringes that Dr. Kalb had written out.

  Alice pushed her chair back from the desk, kicked off her pumps, and swivelled her chair so that she could put her feet up. She looked at her client. “Let’s begin with everything you know about Tom Wrought.”

  At last warm, Liz stood to take off the tight-fitting bolero jacket she had worn, stretched her arms, and looked at Alice imploringly. “Please, can I smoke another?”

  Alice grimaced but nodded.

  How much does she want to know? Everything, she said. For eight months Liz had been unable to say anything to anyone about the most important thing in her life. And now she’d be able to tell someone everything. Suddenly the muscles in her shoulders loosened, as if she’d finally let down a two-stone rucksack.

  Liz sat down, lit a Gold Leaf, and cleared her throat. “We met eighteen months ago when Tom and his wife, Barbara, moved in next door to us on Park Town crescent in Oxford. But our relationship began only last spring.” Where to start? The night Tom took Liz to high table at Trinity College, and they decided to become lovers. “Alice, did you go to Oxford?” she asked.

  “No, Cambridge.”

  “Still, you know about high table, dining in hall, all that rigmarole?”

  Alice smiled. “I’m afraid so.”

  “Well, it began the second time Tom took me to high table dinner at Trinity College.”

  PART II

  May–August 1958

  Idles in the Wanton Summer Air

  CHAPTER THREE

  A lover may bestride the gossamers

  That idles in the wanton summer air,

  And yet not fall.

  —William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet (Act 2, Scene 6)

  At six thirty in the early evening of a day late the previous May, the sun still had two hours more to shine in an unusually blue sky—unusual for Oxford at any rate that spring.

  It was guest night at Trinity. Tom Wrought finished fiddling with the French cuff and pulled on his suit coat. He couldn’t pretend he wasn’t anxious. Really, there’s no reason to be apprehensive. He tried without success to convince himself.

  The evening would be entirely innocent on the outside. He knew that on the inside it wouldn’t be. His thoughts would be altogether different from what he could dare to say. But later he’d be able to watch high table dinner unroll in his imagination again and again. He would add it to the other memories: chilly mornings on the Thames, Liz pulling at her oars in a double scull; a golden autumn afternoon wandering through the parkland of Blenheim Castle; laughing over an indigestible haggis on a wintry Robbie Burns night; watching her face embrace the warmth of the Cotswold pub after a sodden day’s tramp under scudding clouds. These were the things he’d already stored up, but not before cutting everyone out of the memories but her.

  Tom Wrought had been saving images of Liz Spencer for the better part of a year. Now he was leaving Oxford, and they’d have to last.

  He stepped out onto the crescent, turned left, and knocked at the very next door in the row of somewhat formal but now aging, undetached three-storey houses. Unlike the red-brick villas of North Oxford, the terraces of Park Town were clad in stone, now chipped here and there after a hundred years of English weather. Like some of their London counterparts, they faced a lovely, enclosed garden, private to local residents only. No one had even dared take the iron grillwork that surrounded it for the war. It was all still there, along with the metal fencing protecting each house even as many grander buildings in the town lacked theirs.

  No answer to Tom’s knock. He knocked again. Patience! Someone will answer. Then, the bright-blue door opened, and there was Liz Spencer, her eyes smiling through the wrinkles, the freckles catching the soft sunlight.

  “Sorry, just back from London. I was settling the children down in the garden.” She wore a dark suit jacket over a plain white blouse. The matching skirt was narrow and rather short. The navy blue contrasted with her very blonde hair. Elizabeth Spencer was thirty-five. She looked younger in every way except for those wrinkles around her brown eyes. Five feet five inches in her stocking feet, and thin—just more than nine stone. (What was that in American measure? One hundred twenty-six pounds?) She followed his eyes as they ranged over her. “Alright for high table?” As usual, she had foregone any makeup. Her face was not the kind that needed much; naturally reddish lips and cheekbones were high enough to cast shadows towards her jawline. The eyebrows arched away as though a question were on her mind.

  “Very much so. We’ll match.” Tom was wearing a suit of the same colour and a striped tie. He was also thin, about six feet, with a face that revealed more about him than merely his age, almost forty. Tom Wrought had seen much more than the inside of a historical archive. Furrows across his brow, even in repose, deep-set eyes, skin drawn down a long face. The nose was large, the eyebrows bushy; the hair was dark and in need of cutting. Little about him suggested his Scandinavian origins. Tom’s mouth seemed permanently fixed in a slightly self-deprecating smile, a look that the twinkle in his eye seemed to belie.

  She reached out and touched the tie. “Trinity College?”

  “No, actually, my alma mater in New York.”

  “Will that be a provocation?”

  “They won’t ask. Everyone will pretend they know exactly which Oxford college it is. Meanwhile, they’ll be wondering if I ever spent time in Cambridge.”

  “Sha
ll I drive?” Liz asked. Tom had assiduously avoided driving—on the wrong side—in the year he’d been in England. “I don’t think we want to cycle down dressed for a guest-night dinner.” It was almost a mile along the Banbury Road to Trinity’s Broad Street entry.

  They moved to the curb, where a Humber Super Snipe was parked. It was her company car, a perk, a tax dodge, and a requirement for her work. The American in Tom found the vehicle quaint—no fins, hardly any chrome, one colour, less than twelve feet long, almost five feet high, and a manual choke, of all things.

  Over the rumble of the rough little engine Liz inquired, “You won’t get into trouble, bringing me to high table again?” Women were rare in college.

  “Probably will, but not because you’re coming for the second time. They won’t even remember that it was you back in December.” He paused. “No. I’ll get stick for bringing a woman at all. But if they want me to subsidize their damn guest nights, they’ll have to accept my guests. Besides, last time you charmed them all. Lunch the next day, they were full of you. I expect you’ll do it again.”

  There was little traffic as they passed ranks of red-brick Victorian piles punctuated by the occasional mock Tudor—timber and stucco. All were resolute in their orderliness on either side of the Banbury Road. Each stood gravely behind its low red-brick wall, from which arose rhododendron in bloom. The closer to town, the larger and more opulent were the structures. Under stout elms in May leaf, the wide avenue wore a house pride that had finally recovered from the postwar austerity everyone in Britain could still remember.

  Liz parked in front of Blackwell’s Bookshop. There were few cars and many cycles in the road. Parking was never a problem.

  Walking along Broad Street towards the Trinity gate, Tom noticed how the sun cast a soft gold over the patches of sandstone that remained unstained between the black and grey streaks of coal dusk. It was a glimpse from another time. The war had not damaged Oxford directly, but it had left its marks. Across Broad Street the soot-stained walls round the Bodleian Library still awaited replacement of the ironwork railings that had been taken for weapon-metal in 1940. How, Tom wondered, had Park Town crescent escaped this fate? Must be a matter of class again. Now, in 1958, after almost fifteen years of reconstruction, there still remained open spaces of neatly smooth rubble dotted across London. But for the lost ironwork, Oxford could almost pretend the war had never happened.

  “Hello, Wrought.” A large man in a beard passed them, nodding and smiling.

  “Who was that?”

  “History don at Balliol.”

  “Why was he smiling so broadly?”

  “I expect it was because he knows my wife.” No one could mistake Liz for Barbara Wrought—almost six feet tall, raven haired, with a face that reminded every art student of Rossetti’s sitter, Jane Morris. Liz wore her blonde hair shoulder length, in a French style. It made Tom think of Simone Signoret in that year’s most talked-about film, Room at the Top.

  “Where is Barbara tonight, Tom?”

  “Duplicate bridge tournament. She can’t get enough of it.” They both knew that married fellows were forbidden from bringing wives—even the wife of another college fellow—to college meals.

  The ritual of guest night began with cocktails. No one in the senior common room was drinking sherry. It was a long, narrow space, lined in sandstone, with a built-in sideboard heavy with liquor bottles. The walls were momentarily painted almost peach coloured by the sun slanting through large unmullioned windows open to the warm spring air. A dozen elderly armchairs, polished smooth in places, leather cracked and peeling, were planted round the room. They were evidently too comfortable for the fellows to consider replacement. The day’s broadsheet newspapers were strewn across side tables. Several of the ashtrays had not been emptied.

  Liz saw that she was the lone woman among a dozen males. It unnerved her slightly, but she told herself, This is the only way you’ll ever see the inside of an Oxford college. Besides, she liked Tom’s company . . . really liked it. He was fun and smart, and he was interested in her opinions.

  Tom was on the far side of the room, with a glass in each hand, wending his way through the cigarette smoke already settling on the room. Before he arrived, a hand proffered Liz a packet of Rothmans, while a gold Dunhill lighter hovered conspicuously in the hand’s mate.

  Liz looked at the man’s face. About sixty-five, very calm, she thought, reassuring, a rare don who put you at your ease. Rather rumpled, wearing a three-piece grey suit, prewar from the cut of it.

  “No, thank you.”

  The man took one himself, lit up, drew on the cigarette, and then carefully blew the smoke behind her. “Somerville, Lady Margaret Hall?” He volunteered the names of two nearby women’s colleges. “History don from the States perhaps?”

  “Actually, I’m in trade.” The self-description was intended to provoke. It didn’t.

  Arriving with the drinks, Tom made an introduction. “Liz, may I present the master of the college, Sir David Lindsay Keir. Mrs. Elizabeth Spencer.”

  “Hope I haven’t offended by accusing you of being a historian like Tom. And an American too.”

  “I’m not even an amateur when it comes to history. Not American either. I read maths in Canada, actually.”

  Before he could reply, the master of Trinity was forced to turn and greet another guest.

  Liz looked back to Tom. “Still struggling with Barbara about whether to go back?”

  “Same argument from her for months now: the blacklist is nothing to worry about. McCarthy’s been dead for a year. It can’t last forever. Besides, I won’t need anyone to give me a job. She has all the money we need.”

  “Sounds pretty convincing.”

  Tom did not reply.

  The dinner gong sounded. Fellows in gowns and guests lined up in pairs at the stair that ascended to the hall. Each pair looked at the seating chart as they passed. Tom knew they’d be placed well away from the centre of the table. They hung about till most of the party had filed up the six steps from the senior common room to the great hall. Taking a gown from the hooks, he touched Liz’s forearm, and they went up the stairwell into the brightness. All year, each time he had mounted this stairway, Tom had felt rather like the accused coming up into the dock at the Old Bailey. Thomas Wrought, you are accused of masquerading as an Oxford don. How do you plead?

  Below the timbered ceiling, the vast space was noisy with undergraduates at long tables. Behind them on the dark, wainscoted walls hung five hundred years of portraits—kings, nobles, but mainly former masters of the college—each lit from above by its own picture lamp. On the raised podium, the high table gleamed with sterling plates and fresh-cut flowers. All were reflected in the glass facets of the decanters coloured mauve by the claret that filled them.

  As the fellows entered, the gowned undergraduates rose in a hush. All stood while the master intoned a Latin blessing in monosyllables most could repeat exactly as though it were a mantra. “Bénedic, Dómine, nos et haec tua dona quae de tua largitate sumus sumpturi. Per Christum Dóminum nostrum. Amen.” The last sounds were swallowed by the noise of two hundred chairs scraping across flagstone echoed from the timbered ceiling and followed by the resumed din of competing conversations.

  Liz and Tom sat opposite each other at the table end, flanked on only one side by two young scientists—junior fellows. They smiled when Liz said, “Don’t forget, Tom, fish fork first.” At the previous guest night she’d attended, Tom had been reproved by a sharp elbow when he began spearing the langouste with a meat fork.

  “No worries tonight. These two won’t hold me to the senior tutor’s standard.”

  The younger men nodded and then fell to discussing chemical bonding. That suited Liz. She was eager to get back to Tom’s future. “Surely you could get some teaching back in the States?”

  “Nothing worth accepting. How about you? Ever think about going back to Canada?”

  “Sometimes. Doesn’t matter though; Tre
vor won’t leave.”

  “Can’t blame him. Seems to be doing well enough. I see him coming and going in the Wolseley sedan, grey flannels, regimental tie. Stood me a drink at his club last week—rather posh.” Liz could not suppress a frown. He noticed. “You’re alright financially, aren’t you?”

  Liz bridled slightly. “You mean why am I still working?” Tom began to shake his head, but Liz wouldn’t be interrupted. “Trev’s having a tough time. Hasn’t sold a house this year, only two last, and both in Jericho to family friends who came down from Birkenhead.” Jericho was where college servants and tradesmen lived.

  They both fell silent. Liz put down her fork and looked at Tom for a moment, trying to decide whether to say what she was really thinking. She knew well this wasn’t done. No one said the things she was thinking, not aloud. Tom, I don’t want you to leave. Instead, she began to cover old ground again. “I don’t know how much longer I can hold things together. It feels like we’re in a downward spiral, circling a drain, and Trev just can’t, won’t swim against the tide.”

  They’d talked about her husband before. It was easier when they rowed a double scull along the river together and didn’t have to face each other. Somehow Liz could be candid then. Not facing him, she wouldn’t have to respond to the grimace that crossed his face whenever they touched on the subject of Trevor.

  Trevor Spencer had insisted on moving his young family back to England after a series of setbacks in Canada he’d chalked up to prejudice against Brits. But things had not been any easier in Blighty, and he’d slipped steadily down a slope of sales jobs, for which his persona was totally unsuited. Liz couldn’t even tell Tom that her husband was no longer trying to sell houses. Now he was trying to sell used cars in Cowley, with equally indifferent results.