by Sam Bourne
The silver-haired author of half a dozen books and a couple of hundred learned articles eyed him coolly. ‘Yes. Even I might struggle to do my needlepoint with that distraction.’
James realized his mistake. ‘I’m sorry, Mrs Grey. I didn’t mean-’
‘Don’t worry, Dr Zennor. I’ve been condescended to by far greater men than yourself.’ She now placed the teapot at the centre of the table and took a seat. ‘Florence was worried about you. She said you were drinking heavily.’
‘For heaven’s sake, can a man not drink a glass of Scotch in his own home?’
‘At high table the other night, you had Perkins return to the cellar at least twice.’
‘So you think my wife left me because I’m some kind of dipsomaniac?’
‘No one is saying your wife has left you.’
‘She’s not here, is she?’
‘No, she is not. But there is no evidence that she has left you, in the rather melodramatic sense of that word. You don’t know where she is. And you don’t know why she’s gone.’
‘Precisely.’
‘Well, I think you need to begin by putting yourself in her shoes.’
James straightened his back, as if to signal that the discussion was over. ‘Well, thank you, Mrs Grey. I appreciate your efforts. But nothing you have told me will help me get my wife back.’
‘Is that what you want? To get her back?’
‘Of course, that’s what I bloody want!’ His voice cracked at that and, ashamed by the show of weakness, he dipped his head.
‘Well, perhaps I can help you.’
He looked up, the rims of his eyes a bloodshot red.
‘Florence came to see me yesterday.’
James gave a small nod, determined to do nothing that might stop Grey from going on.
‘She seemed agitated. She told me something of the… strains at home.’
‘Yes.’ His mind was whirring, processing what he was hearing at top speed, already working through the possible implications.
‘She said nothing concrete, she made no mention of any plans.’
‘But…’
‘She was clearly in a hurry. She broke off our conversation, saying there was something she had to look up urgently at the Bodleian.’ Grey focused on her fingers, as if she needed to concentrate and choose her words carefully. ‘I thought nothing of it at the time. After all, your wife is a dedicated scholar. But given her departure first thing this morning, I wonder if the two are connected. If there was something she had to check, something she had to find out, before she could leave. It might perhaps give you a-’
But Virginia Grey did not get the chance to complete her sentence. She looked up to see James had simply turned around, grabbed a jacket from the hall and marched out of the front door.
Chapter Five
It was only when he passed the clock outside the Post Office that he discovered the time. It was quarter to six: he had, he realized, spent most of the day in a stupor fuelled by anger and alcohol. But now, at last, he had some action to take. It was not much — after all, his wife was in the Bodleian fairly regularly — but Grey was a shrewd judge of character: if she believed Florence’s visit yesterday might be significant, that his wife had somehow seemed agitated, then that had to be taken seriously.
He had peddled furiously past Keble when a blur from his left suddenly slammed into view. He swerved to avoid it, but it was too late: a fellow cyclist had sprung from South Parks Road without looking, clipping the back of James’s rear wheel.
He landed hard, thankfully on his backside rather than his shoulder. His right hand, which had taken some of the impact, was scratched, the graze revealing itself as a grid of blood spots.
‘So sorry, Zennor. I am so frightfully sorry.’
James looked upward, shading his eyes to see Magnus Hook, research fellow at New College and wearer of the roundest, thickest glasses in Oxford, standing over him. Poor eyesight had kept Hook out of the army, but he was doing his bit for the war effort: he had been seconded by the Ministry of Food, which had taken over large chunks of St John’s to control the national supply of fish and potatoes. ‘I now work at the largest fish and chip shop in the world,’ was his pet conversational gambit; James had heard it at least three times.
Just the glimpse of Hook sapped his energy. For one thing, he embodied the category in which he, Zennor, now belonged. Thanks to his damned shoulder, he too was a D-band reject, just like Hook and the rest of the other half-blind cripples. But combined with this contempt was envy: for Hook had taken his place alongside the hundreds of dons of non-military age who had been drafted as civil servants. That was why Oxford in July, usually empty thanks to the Long Vacation, was teeming: the city had become a displaced Whitehall. Merton housed parts of the Department of Transport, Queen’s had the Ministry of Home Security and Balliol, characteristically for a college which regarded itself as primus inter pares, was host to a good part of the most prestigious of all departments, namely the Foreign Office. Word was that the section in question was intelligence. A further rumour insisted that one unnamed college was being kept empty, ready to house the royal family should the King flee London.
James had watched as this gradual transformation of the university had happened — Brasenose College becoming a hospital, the Ashmolean Museum opening its doors to the Slade School of Art — and wondered when the call would come for him. He had a first-class mind, at least that was what it said on his degree certificate, and he had military experience — experience that had not come cheap. He had even picked up a grounding in intelligence, before… well, before. When James heard that Oriel was taking in the War Office Intelligence Corps, he had stood by, waiting for the call. But it never came.
Instead he was supposed to spend the war in the Department of Experimental Psychology, reading Viennese scholars and drafting learned monographs. A mere five-year-old department in a university that measured its life in centuries, it lacked all status. Located far up the Banbury Road in a converted house, it would have had to be sited in Slough to be any more peripheral. All that had been true before the outbreak of war. Afterwards, its irrelevance increased tenfold.
It was obvious to James that his work there was pointless. Once the requisitioning of college buildings and senior faculty was underway, he had put himself forward, either by means of a discreet chat with colleagues or twice writing formal letters of application. He had heard nothing back. He told himself it was the chaos of war. So he had gone to see Bernard Grey, who knew everyone in Whitehall, and asked him to put in a word. He assumed it would be a formality. But Grey had eventually had to apologize over sherry in the Master’s Lodgings. ‘I’m afraid, Dr Zennor, it seems this is one war you’re going to have to sit out.’
And now here was Hook in his grey flannels, smiling smugly even under his cringing apologies and clumsy, myopic attempts to help James to his feet.
‘Are you sure you’re all right? I feel awful. I thought you could see me, but you were haring along at such a speed, I-’
‘You should have been looking, you damn fool.’
‘That’s just it you see, Zennor. I have the most appalling eyes. Hence these binoculars.’ He gestured at his spectacles which, Zennor guessed, would have enabled a normal man to gaze at the surface of the moon.
James pulled himself up to full height, so that he was now looking down at Hook with the advantage of at least a foot. Maybe it was the imploring, not to say intimidated, look on the poor man’s face; or the recollection that Hook was a staunch anti-fascist — as intolerant as James himself of the appeasers who had had quite a presence in Oxford not so long ago — but James felt a dose of sympathy for Hook, standing there in his bottle glasses. And with the sympathy came shame for his rudeness, and the attendant need to make amends.
‘Apology accepted.’ He extended his hand, which Hook took gratefully. ‘So what you working on then, Hook?’
‘Well, strictly speaking, I shouldn’t say.’
&
nbsp; ‘Good man. “Careless talk” and all that. I’d better be-’
‘Put it this way, though. All this focus on fish and potatoes complements my research very well.’ He looked expectantly at James but, getting no response, went on. ‘Nutrition.’
‘Glad to hear it,’ James said, lifting up his bike.
‘You see, consumption patterns map very precisely onto income and education levels. I’d intuited that before, but now — thanks to the ministry — I have very precise data. They show that in those social categories we would define as weak, potato consumption outstrips fish by a ratio of up to three to one. Among those we might classify as defective, the ratio rises to five to one. In superior groups, the data-’
‘You’re saying the poor eat more chips?’
‘Well, that’s obviously a great simplification. I’d prefer to put-’
‘Yes, of course. Well, I really do have to-’
‘Oh. But I hadn’t explained the link between oily fish in the diet and mental performance. And the benefits of school milk on national strength indices for teeth and bones!’
‘Another time, Magnus.’ James got back on his bicycle, relieved to see that the rear wheel was bent but still functional. He had pedalled a couple of yards when he stopped and looked back over his shoulder. ‘I don’t suppose you’ve seen Florence recently, have you?’
Hook looked down at his feet, his face flushing. James had seen this reaction before: Florence only had to walk into a room to reduce men to stammering wrecks. He had not appreciated that the mere mention of her name could have the same effect. The realization of it brought that deadweight of melancholy back onto his chest.
‘The last time I saw her was on Tuesday. I was on my way into college and she was coming out with her friend, what’s her name?’
‘Rosemary?’ James had only met her a couple of times, but he had found her irritating. And she clung to Florence like a growth.
‘That’s right. Rosemary.’ Hook squinted at James once more. ‘I say, Zennor: is that a rowing shirt under your jacket?’
The last leg of the ride down Parks Road took no time at all, but as he leaned his bike against the low wall outside Wadham College, James had a dread thought. Opening hours at the libraries were shorter now, the New Bodleian included. And it was nearly six o’clock.
He dashed across, heading into a building that still stood out for its novelty. Where almost every other structure in the town was covered in grime, stained with the soot generated by coal fires in every room, the brick of the New Bod was still a pristine beige. Not only was it clean but it was made of straight lines, free of the gargoyles, gnarled brickwork and battlements that made university Oxford resemble a walled city from the Middle Ages. That gloom had only deepened thanks to the strictures of the blackout, demanding that every college cover its windows in blinds or curtains or, when supplies of those had run out, brown paper or even black paint. At first, pride ensured that the curtains were drawn back or the paper removed each morning. But staff were short and so was patience, and so, with the war now in its eleventh month, many of Oxford’s medieval or Tudor windows remained cloaked in darkness all day long.
And to think it had only opened a year ago: James and Florence had gone together, invited as the Greys’ guests. The speeches had looked forward to a bright future, full of dreams for the scholars of the next generation. Even at the time, James remembered, those seemed to owe more to hope than expectation. Only the hopelessly deluded, or those fanatical for appeasement, believed war could be avoided. For some, like James, the war had begun long ago.
Sure enough, the New Bodleian was closing its doors. ‘Have to wait till tomorrow now, sir,’ said the commissionaire, producing a key from his belt in the manner of a gaoler.
‘Of course,’ James replied. ‘I just need to retrieve some notes I’d left in one of the reading rooms.’
‘Opening hours are nine am till-’
‘Yes, yes, I know the opening hours. But-’ He leaned in, his voice dropping to a whisper. ‘This is for the, er, war effort. If you get my meaning.’
The doorman pulled back as if to assess James’s honesty from a distance. All he had to do was feign confidence. That, his instructor back in Spain had told him, was the key. So he held the commissionaire’s gaze, convinced in his own mind that he was engaged in intelligence duties at Balliol or Oriel, until the man eventually stepped out of his way, gesturing him towards the stairs.
He noticed that the landings were full of what he guessed were paintings wrapped in brown paper and string, stacked together against the wall: those must be the artworks he had heard about, brought here for safekeeping. All the colleges were doing it, emptying out their collections, even removing stained glass windows and statuary, using the newly-built Bodleian building as their refuge. And not just the colleges. The House of Lords library had sent some of the nation’s most precious documents here, packed into four tins — among them the death warrant of Charles I. Quite why they thought such treasures would be safer here than anywhere else in Oxford, James was not sure: perhaps they simply put their faith in the modern.
On the first floor, he could see a last remaining librarian, a woman around his age. She had a wireless set on her desk and it was switched on, a sign not only that she was off-duty and packing up for the day but also of how different life had become: you would never have seen a wireless in a library before, but everyone was glued to the device these days, awaiting word of the war. As he approached the desk, he heard the BBC announcer conclude that afternoon’s play, Adolf in Blunderland. Some satirical effort aimed at lifting the nation’s spirits, James guessed.
The woman turned around. She looked nothing like Florence but something in the brightness of her eyes reminded James of his wife and, for a split-second, it seemed to suck the wind out of him. In that instant he was somewhere else entirely, in a pokey little cafe not far from here — The Racket — where, thanks to rationing, he and his wife had had to make do with a supper of baked beans on toast. They had been arguing, he had gone too far and she had calmly got up and walked out, leaving him to face the embarrassed stares of the staff and the other diners. He had run out after her, searching street after street, eventually finding her just a few hundred yards away from their home. They had patched it up, he couldn’t remember how. But for nearly an hour he had feared that he had lost her. And something in this woman’s face brought back that fear now, made him realize he had been fending it off all day.
‘I’m sorry, sir, the library is now closed for the day. We will be open again tomorrow morning.’
James stared back at her, suddenly unsure what to say, where even to begin.
‘Sir?’
She had dipped the volume on the wireless, but he could hear the start of the six o’clock bulletin: something about Vichy France formally breaking off diplomatic relations with Britain. Unplanned, he began to speak. ‘I’m afraid something serious has happened. My wife has gone missing. One of the last places she was seen was here. I’d like to know what she was here for. It may enable us to find her.’
The woman blinked a few times, then glanced over James’s shoulder, as if checking to see if anyone else was around. ‘The rules are quite strict on-’
James looked directly into her eyes. ‘I quite understand that. And that’s how it should be. But this is quite an exceptional situation.’ She said nothing, which he took as a good sign. ‘I’m desperately worried for her, you see.’
‘I’d like to help, but the request forms are not kept here. I’d have to-’ She looked away again, towards a door just behind her. He couldn’t tell if she was worried that someone might come — or hoping that they would. She was a woman alone in a large, empty building with a man who had just described himself as desperate.
’Would you? I really would be extremely grateful.’
Speaking hurriedly, conscious that she was breaking the rules, she handed him a yellow slip and asked him to write on it the name of the lender concerned
. ‘And the date please, Mr…’
‘Zennor. Dr James Zennor.’
She took the piece of paper, turned and went through the door behind her. James looked upward then around, taking in the vast room. He had barely visited here since the opening: he preferred to do his reading in the Radcliffe Camera, where he came across fewer of his colleagues. But Florence had embraced it right away. ‘Just think: I will be one of the very first scholars to have worked in a building that will probably stand for a thousand years.’ She paused, then gave him that smile he could not resist. ‘I like being first.’
He began to pace, looking at the rows of desks, new and barely scratched — lacking the dents, cracks, blemishes and the gluey, human resin accreted through centuries that coated the wood at the ‘Radder’. He looked at the clock. The librarian had been gone more than five minutes, closer to ten. He wondered what could possibly be keeping her.
Where on earth would Florence have gone? Mrs Grey was right: the obvious answer was her parents’ house, but he had ruled that out. He could feel a swell of anger rising inside him. He needed to see what the hell Florence had been looking at here. It could be her regular studies, Darwin and the like, but it could be something else, something more urgent. What was it Grey had said? Something she had to check, something she had to find out, before she could leave.
So what the hell was it? What had Florence had to find out? And where was that damned librarian?
He marched at full speed past the administrative desk, breaking through the invisible barrier that separated clerks from readers, and through the door the librarian had taken nearly quarter of an hour earlier.
Behind it, he found himself on a landing for a service stairwell. Dimly lit by a single sickly bulb, it was painted a functional grey, the floors covered in a thin linoleum. Instinctively he headed downstairs.
Two flights down he came to a pair of double doors. He pushed them open to see what struck him at first as a long corridor. He called out. ‘Hello?’