Autumn in Oxford: A Novel

by Alex Rosenberg

  I don’t want to talk about all that again. Liz bit her lip. Well then, say what you’re really thinking. To devil with the niceties! She put down her fork. “No, Trevor’s work’s not the problem. I guess I could live with a failure.” It was like hesitating before a dive into icy water. Just say it. She gulped. “I don’t love him, Tom. If I ever did, I don’t anymore.”

  Clearly taken aback, Tom could only jest. “Marry in haste, repent at leisure?”

  Liz persisted. “Marrying in haste was not my mistake. I did it with malice aforethought. I fell for a Brit accent and a nice foxtrot. We had a secret affair for almost a year. Not easy, especially in Toronto. Then when Olivia was on the way, we married.” It was, she recognized, a revealing admission. What did the Americans call it? A shotgun wedding? One didn’t even tell one’s friends.

  They were, Tom realized, at a juncture: he had to pretend she had never made so frank a disclosure, or match her candour with his own. His decision was easy. “Well, I didn’t exactly marry for money. But I’m afraid I’ve stayed married this long because of it. And what they say is true: anyone who marries for money earns it.”

  “You certainly do,” she said. “Earn it.” She looked up as the steward removed her plate. “The way Barbara snipes at you. Sometimes I can’t bear listening.”

  He didn’t want her to feel sorry for him. And he was not going to censor himself any more than she did herself. A little too loudly, he added, “Well, at least the sex has been good.” Then he realized where they were and looked furtively at their closest dinner companions. The young scientists were still absorbed in chemical bonding. Tom realized that he and Liz might as well have been alone in the vast hall.

  Liz must have thought so too. She now raised the level of intimacy beyond anything polite society allowed. “I haven’t slept with Trev for a year.” Tom wouldn’t ask why—she had already crossed lines people didn’t stray beyond, even among closest friends—but she plunged on as if he had. “No imagination, no interest in his partner. Bad breath, running to fat. And all I can think of when he tries to get on top is that I am sick and tired of supporting him.” She smiled bitterly at her double entendre.

  “Well, you’re certainly not sparing yourself supporting him. I see you leaving mornings at six fifteen, coming back at eight or nine at night, when you get back home at all.”

  She nodded. “I must be spending, what, a hundred nights a year on the road . . . one bloody hotel or another, all round the country. Abbey National have three hundred branches.” Tom noted the plural verb. She had been in England a long time. “The turnover in tellers is endless.”

  “Pass the claret.” The peremptory command boomed down from the senior tutor’s place to the master’s right at the head of the table. The cocoon round Liz and Tom was broken.

  The din gradually subsided as more and more of the undergraduates finished their meals and left the hall. High table conversation became more general until the master stood. Carrying his napkin he led the table down to the fellows’ dining room for dessert. There he commanded Liz to sit with him. College tradition required each fellow to sit with a new partner at dessert, and Tom found himself opposite a student of the seventeenth-century poet John Dryden. All Tom could think of was The Rape of the Lock. His interlocutor reproved him for confusing Dryden with Alexander Pope and thereafter had nothing to say.

  “The master was entertaining,” Liz said when she joined Tom as they reentered the senior common room for coffee, the third act of a guest-night performance. “He was actually interested in how to manage bank tellers.”

  “He’s got people management problems of his own.” Tom looked over his shoulder at the roomful of college fellows.

  Liz lowered herself into one of the old leather chairs, and Tom brought two coffees from the sideboard. They lit cigarettes and contemplated the blue smoke between them, each trying to decide how to pick up the salacious thread they had both been tugging at over dinner. And suddenly Liz and Tom smiled with the mutual realization that both wanted to get back to this forbidden subject. Their grins became conspiratorial. But in the common room, people couldn’t help overhearing. Some would be trying to, for that matter.

  Before the moment evanesced, Tom had to decide. Was the intimacy of Liz’s admissions a signal, an invitation? Did he dare break the unwritten but well-established proprieties? Should he risk a rebuff that would destroy the fantasies a year had stored up? Like Liz, he was poised at the edge of a pool of icy water, screwing up the courage to dive. Then he thought, In a week I’ll be gone, back to the States forever. He dove.

  “Liz, what will become of us?” The presumption in the question made him blush with emotion. Did she notice?

  She replied, “I wish we could spend some time together before you leave.”

  “Don’t see how.”

  “Come to London for a day. I’ll skip work, and we can play tourist.”

  “Yes. Let’s do it.”

  They came down the set of stairs from the senior common room into the large quad. It was now dark but still warm, almost a soft summer night. Their pace was leisurely; both wanted the moment to linger.

  Tom turned to his right. “My college rooms are over in that tower. Care to have a look?”

  Liz shuddered slightly and continued to walk straight ahead.

  Now you’ve done it, Tom thought. An obvious enough attempt. In silence they passed the great oak in the middle of the quad, turned into the smaller front quad, and then went along to the porters’ lodge that opened onto Broad Street. “I suppose that sounded pretty blatant back there.”

  Liz replied, “Yes. Just for a moment I felt like I was in a scene from a film.” She smiled at Tom with slight embarrassment.

  “Which one?” he asked.

  “That Celia Johnson-Trevor Howard one Noël Coward did years ago. After the war, the one with the score from Rachmaninoff. Brief Encounter.”

  “Ah, where the doctor and the married woman fall in love and break it off for the sake of their families . . .”

  “Yes. Remember the scene where he lures her to a friend’s flat, and you want so much for them to consummate the affair . . .”

  “But someone intrudes . . .”

  “And she flees, ashamed. That was me for a minute there.” But suddenly Liz regretted her demur, regretted it profoundly. She couldn’t bring herself to say it out loud, but she put her arm through his and sought his hand. Tom understood.

  Broad Street was quite deserted when they reached the car. Tom gently leaned Liz up against its side. His head came close to hers. “Now I am going to make a pass at you. But slowly enough that you can stop me if you want.”

  “I’d like that very much.” His lips found hers, and then their tongues touched. There was an immediate sensation he had not felt for a decade. As the kiss lengthened, she threw her arms over his shoulders and showed no signs of letting go.

  A bright Thursday morning three days later, they were in a second-class carriage on the down train to London. Liz spoke first.

  “What did you tell Barbara?”

  “Seminar at Kings College London. What did you tell the Abbey National?”

  “Nothing. I’m pretty much my own master. I spend so much time travelling round the country, they don’t really expect me at the home office on a schedule.”

  “What shall we do?” Tom asked in all innocence.

  “Art galleries! The National? The Tate? Let’s start at the National and do them all.”

  “In one day?”

  “It’s all we have.”

  Jostling against each other in an underground carriage, Liz grimaced slightly, wondering, Should I bring this up? “Tom, you’ve never said exactly why you were blacklisted.”

  “I was what they used to call ‘a premature antifascist.’ Joined the Communist Party when it was the only opposition to fascism. I never denied joining.”

  “You’re not still a member?”

  “Not for twenty years now. I quit the Comm
unist Party the day Stalin signed the nonaggression pact with Hitler.”

  “But that was in 1939. You must have been, what . . . nineteen years old?”

  “I was seventeen when I joined the Young Communist League.”

  “Whatever for?”

  “Only one reason really. Racial equality. Only thing I’ve ever really cared about when I was growing up in New York. Still care about it. Anyway, when I joined in the thirties, the Communists were the only people in the US committed to racial equality. There was just no other way to fight Jim Crow back then.” He wouldn’t bore her with an American history lesson. “But when Stalin ordered the party to support his pact with Hitler, I had to quit.”

  “So, why the blacklist?”

  “I wouldn’t name names—refused to tell a congressional investigator who else I knew in the party. But the blacklist was really a pretext to stop me teaching in the States. So here I am.” He moved his hand over hers. He was prepared to tell her more, much more—how he’d been foolish, how the party had betrayed its commitment to Negro equality when it became inconvenient later in the war. But they had reached Trafalgar Square, and she did not pursue the matter.

  Standing before Uccello’s The Battle of San Romano, he kissed her for the first time that day. The room was momentarily empty. The guard had moved into the next gallery shadowing two children. Standing next to Tom, Liz had opened her mouth to speak. Before she could say anything, he had covered it with his. Her tongue found his until the need to breathe overtook them.

  Liz mocked reproof. “Look at the painting, sir.” She went on, “Like all battle pictures, it’s too neat and clean.”

  “I’m afraid if you want real war art, you’ll have to go to the Imperial War Museum.”

  “Spare me the tanks.” She had obviously been there. Liz looked at her watch. “Time for lunch.”

  They were sitting in the dingy snug of a pub on Long Acre just off Charing Cross, finishing the bangers and toying with the mash.

  Liz put down her fork. “Tom, ever wonder why there’s nothing like the blacklist in England?”

  “If being a member of the British Communist Party when you were a kid was a crime, half the Labour Party front bench in Parliament would be in jail.”

  “What is it exactly about Britain that makes it so different from the US when it comes to red-baiting?” Her tone made the question sound rhetorical, but Tom replied.

  “It’s the establishment, Liz. If you are from the right people, went to the right school, finished Oxford or Cambridge with a good degree, speak without a Gordie twang, then you’re really quite alright.” He pronounced the last four words in a mock Mayfair accent. “Even if you were a Communist as a kid, or a Fascist for that matter, so long as your people were ‘sound.’”

  “I think there may be another reason the blacklist doesn’t reach this far.” Liz turned from the window to face him. “Rejecting the blacklist plays to the Brits’ vague sense of superiority to America.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Perhaps your friends are too polite, knowing you’re a Yank. But Brits don’t mind talking down America among themselves. Not hard to do so, of course. McCarthyism is like segregation. Makes them feel a bit smug.”

  “So, my being blacklisted back in the States feeds English condescension? Never quite thought of it that way.” Tom didn’t like the idea.

  They came out of the dank pub squinting into the bright sun pouring down onto the Charing Cross Road. “On to the Tate?” Tom inquired.

  “I have a better idea. Follow me.” She took his arm and led them north up the Tottenham Court Road. Soon they found themselves amidst uniform lines of red-brick, three-storey buildings, interrupted by vacant lots that German bombs had opened in the cityscape nineteen years before.

  “Where are you taking me?”

  “To meet some friends.” She would say no more.

  Deep into Bloomsbury they turned a corner and found themselves in a long, narrow, green space so quiet it could hardly be London. Woburn Square was lined with white mullioned windows staring out of red-brick Georgian mansions. Soon they stood before an imposing building with two signs at the entry, WARBURG INSTITUTE, and below it in smaller letters, SLADE SCHOOL OF FINE ART.

  As they mounted the steps Tom warned, “I’m not going to buy any student pictures.”

  “No worries.” It was all she said as she led them up a wide marble stairway into a gallery. Liz stopped, looked round, and smiled. “These are my friends . . .”

  From where they stood at the entrance to the large room, Tom could recognize a Botticelli, two Fra Angelicos, and across from them the nineteenth-century impressionists. How had he missed this room in half a dozen visits to London since 1944?

  “What is this place, Liz?”

  “It’s the Courtauld Gallery.” Liz was drawing them towards a large canvas next to a window. A fine muslin drape filtered the sunlight falling on the paintings. “My best pal.” She nodded at the large picture, a young woman with blonde bangs. The girl wore a tightly nipped velour jacket. Its scooped neck over a white lace collar revealed a generous bosom above a narrow waist and wide hips. Both her arms rested on the bar, which was littered with bottles. Behind the girl a wall mirror reflected the crowded café in which she was serving drinks. Beneath the large painting was a superfluous label: A Bar at the Folies Bergère (1883) by Edward Manet.

  Liz turned to face Tom. “What will you have?”

  “You.” He leaned down and kissed her. This time she reached out, pulled his hand to her waist, then let it find its way beneath her sweater.

  They heard the museum guard before he could see them. Separating, Liz began to pull Tom along a corridor that led from the large room. Is she trying to get away from the guard? Coming into a smaller gallery, she stopped. “You wouldn’t have wanted to miss this room, I hope.”

  Two paintings faced each other across the room. Like Buridan’s ass, Tom couldn’t decide which was drawing him more strongly. After a moment the Modigliani won out. Was it the frank display of pubic hair? No, the Gauguin nude was just as graphic. But Modigliani’s woman was staring at him, hard. He moved towards it and made an effort to study the painting carefully. Study the painting? Study . . . nothing. He was losing himself in this woman’s body. He looked at Liz. What are you thinking?

  She must have read the unspoken question on his face. “Let’s get out of here before I take off my clothes.” Liz turned and left the room.

  “When do you need to be back in Oxford?” They had left the British Museum and were walking along Great Russell Street back towards Tottenham Court Road.

  “Late. I told Barbara I was being taken to dinner after the seminar at King’s.”

  “Good. We’ll take the last train.”

  “So, dinner . . . or do we call it supper?”

  Liz ignored the question. “I’m hungry.”

  “Well, there is only one decent restaurant in this part of London. Schmitz’s on Charlotte Street.” London was famous for inedible food, even in the best hotels.

  “Never heard of it.”

  “A haven for impoverished academics. Large portions of non-English food, cheap.”

  A half hour later they were seated in a crowded dining room decorated in the kitschy gemütlichkeit of an Alpine Weinstube. Before them large golden-brown cutlets lapped over dining plates. Neither Tom nor Liz were eating, however.

  “We’re going back to the States next week. Flying into Montreal.”

  “Why not New York?”

  “Passport problems. State Department’s been threatening to take away my passport for the past few years. If we fly into Montreal, we can drive to Barbara’s place in Saranac Lake without showing any papers at the US-Canadian border. They won’t even know I’m back, not for a while.”

  “What will you do?”

  “Swim, sail, run the Chris-Crafts”—these were powerful inboard motorboats. “We’ll hike. It’s a big Adirondack lodge, notched logs, huge porch, b
oathouse. Barbara bought it a few years ago to get away from summers in DC.”

  “No, I meant, what are you going to do? Your future?”

  “Barbara’s decided. She says the right lawyer can fix the passport thing.” He said it, but he didn’t believe it. Tom recalled to himself how he had spat the famous names back at his wife: “Chaplin can’t go back to the US even if he wanted to. Paul Robeson hasn’t had his passport for ten years. Linus Pauling couldn’t get to England just to give a scientific talk. Will your lawyers be any better than theirs?”

  “But if you can’t teach,” Liz said, “what will you do?”

  “I can always write . . . for those left-wing mags that don’t pay anything.” That would suit Barbara Wrought. She wanted to return, wanted to cut a swath through Manhattan society with her fashionably blacklisted husband an ornament on her arm. It was true that he was a bit of a celebrity in Cambridge, Hyde Park, Morningside Heights, Berkeley, even Chapel Hill. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad if you went back, he tried to convince himself.

  Liz frowned. “Doesn’t make any sense to me, your staying with her.”

  “No more sense than your staying with Trevor.”

  “I’ve got children to think about.”

  “You’re right. I’m sorry.” He reached for her hand, and she proffered it, smiling. But now she was suddenly asking herself, What are you doing here, in a restaurant in London with a man you’re not married to? Allowing, encouraging him to maul you, almost in public. Then she realized it wasn’t guilt or embarrassment she was feeling. It was deepening regret. The day with Tom couldn’t last much longer. The waiter was approaching. It wouldn’t do. She withdrew her hand from Tom’s.