An Oxford Scandal

by Maxine Barry

  She added a generous splash of gardenia and elderflower Chanel bubble bath to the water, which immediately frothed and foamed and began to smell heavenly. Then she quickly stepped out of her underwear, catching a quick glimpse of her naked self in one of the mirrors as she did so.

  She was used to what she saw.

  At five feet eleven inches tall, she knew most people considered her height both elegant and fashionable. Her slender, even angular curves were also deemed by most to be the height of feminine beauty. But Laurel tended to think of herself as tall and skinny.

  Her long black hair, in her opinion, was just that. Long and black. Others were fascinated by the blue, raven-like quality of her silk-straight locks. Her large ebony eyes were so dark it was almost impossible to make out the round black pupil within them. She’d always believed, ruefully, that they gave her the look of a rather stupid panda.

  Others, men especially, found them utterly fascinating.

  Her face was angular, as the taxi driver had noticed, and she had high, pointed cheekbones, a very firm jaw, and a long, straight nose.

  Not beautiful.

  No. But arresting.

  Intriguing.

  Fascinating.

  Appealing.

  Men had been coming up with different adjectives for her triangular face ever since Laurel had hit fifteen. One man had even come up with ‘sharp as razors’.

  She had almost married him.

  He’d been honest. And funny. And, as her father’s private investigators had found out, very poor. Laurel wouldn’t have cared if he’d been honest about it, but he hadn’t. He leased a Lamborghini, conned the use of richer friends’ boats, houses, clothes, even jewellery.

  All with one aim: catching himself a rich heiress!

  Laurel winced as she stepped into the too-hot water. She ‘ahhed’ and ‘eeked’ her way down into the tub and finally settled back with a weary sigh. She rather naughtily used one of the bathroom’s face flannels to wash off her light make-up, and rinsed it out in the bathwater.

  Her mother would have had a hissy fit. But Laurel seldom wore much make-up in the daytime anyway. Like a lot of raven-haired women, her skin was naturally very pale and she rather liked the white-faced look, and so wore very little by way of foundation and blusher. Her large dark eyes would look ridiculous with lashings of mascara. By far the greatest amount of money she spent on make-up was the purchase of lipstick.

  Laurel had a rather big mouth — both literally and figuratively. Literally, her full lips looked stunning when painted virtually any colour. Figuratively, her tendency to say what she thought had got her in more trouble over the years than her wealth, looks and somewhat lavish sense of humour combined.

  Now she shrugged off her past sins and pushed them firmly behind her.

  After all, she told herself sternly, there was nothing to be gained by dwelling on the past. Her father was gone, and she’d just have to get used to it. She had loved him deeply. He’d been kind and generous, as well as sophisticated and clever. The shock of his sudden loss had been terrific, as had the anger at the waste and stupidity of it.

  But that, too, had now softened from a roaring, raging agony to a dull and deadening ache.

  Her father would have been the first to tell her to stop moping and pull her finger out. His will had made it plain that she was to carry on in his stead. He’d left all his money, his company shares and his power to her.

  Her uncles got to keep everything they had had under Bernard’s benevolent leadership. Their titles, huge salaries and many other benefits. But it had been made well and truly clear to everyone that Laurel was now the head of the family.

  And she was up to it. She had to be.

  Her fiancé and his treachery had all but faded from her memory now. She’d been eighteen, and she’d well and truly had her feathers singed, but they’d all grown back again.

  She was here in Oxford to award the prestigious (and lucrative) Van Gilder chair to its worthy winner and present the chalice to his or her college for the duration, and then to fly the Van Gilder flag at its UK affiliates.

  A nice and easy introduction. Her father could have done it standing on his head.

  Nothing to it. She was fine. Everything was fine.

  Laurel suddenly felt tears running down her face. They took her by surprise, and she sat up with a jerk, raising a hand to her cheeks and then staring at her salt-dampened fingers in astonishment.

  ‘Damn!’ she said angrily. ‘Oh damn!’

  Grimly, she set about washing her hair, then scrubbing her face and body with a lavishly expensive cream soap. Afterwards she towelled herself off, wrapped her long hair in a towel and marched determinedly downstairs.

  The agents had stocked the cupboards well, and she decided to make herself a mug of Horlicks, something she hadn’t drunk in years. Finally, feeling faintly little-girl-ridiculous, she moved into the living room and put on the television, blinked at the absence of hard-sell advertising, realised she was watching the BBC and settled back on her sofa.

  Sometimes, life was hell.

  * * *

  The first thing Laurel did the next morning was explore. She was in a new city and, as usual, there was just too much to see.

  She took a taxi into the centre of town, and by the time she’d alighted at the Martyrs’ Memorial, she had already made a mental note to buy herself a bicycle, for Oxford was riddled with them.

  Students in black subfusc cycled to their colleges to take part in the Matriculation Ceremony and have their first-year photograph taken. Housewives cycled to work. Dons cycled to schools, or clubs, or pubs, or the Ashmolean Museum. Old ladies cycled. Women with babies strapped to their backs cycled.

  And Laurel Van Gilder would cycle too.

  Her first stop was Christ Church. Oxford was the only city she had heard of where its cathedral was in the middle of a college, and she was intrigued by the thought of it.

  She listened to a choir practising for hours, then walked in the meadow and tried to see some deer. They either weren’t around that day (she saw lots of cows, however) or else she had her colleges mixed up, and it was Magdalen College that had the deer. Then she found Broad Street and got lost (quite literally) amid the maze of shelves in the famous Blackwell’s bookshop. She had elevenses at a Christian coffee shop in St Aldates, explored the wonderful arches and narrow lanes around Wadham College, stumbled into a smelly but intriguing ‘covered market’ off Cornmarket Street, and then lunched at Browns.

  Her feet ached, her eyes feasted on ancient British architecture, and her soul began to heal in the September sun.

  That afternoon, she indulged herself with a wonderful stroll through the Botanic Garden, watched the mechanical figures come out as the Carfax clock struck four, and after taking a taxi to the suburb of Botley, she bought herself the promised bicycle.

  It was a pretty and ostentatious shade of cherry pink, lightweight and wonderful to ride. It also had so many gears on it that she wondered if she should have taken lessons before buying it.

  Although the Woodstock Road was a long way from Botley, Laurel bought a street map from the bicycle shop and headed determinedly for home.

  She was wearing her Calvin Klein faded blue jeans, a warm and chunky Arran sweater in lovely tones of beige, orange and chocolate brown, and a heavy gold chain that caught the light of the sun and threw up gold reflections on the underside of her chin and neck. Her long black hair was held back off her face by an impromptu ponytail, but wisps tended to keep coming free and falling in her eyes.

  The bright sunlight was beginning to fade by the time she reached St Giles, and pedalled past St Cross College and the Oriental Institute.

  Her legs were aching pleasantly from the unaccustomed exercise and pigeons fluttered on to the college roofs around her. The worst of the rush-hour traffic was behind her, but she still enjoyed cycling in and out of the queues of traffic stuck at the lights, pitying the drivers trapped in their stuffy cars.

/>   She felt, for some reason she couldn’t quite define, inordinately better. No longer the haunted, lonely, sorry-for-herself girl who’d surprised herself by crying last night. She was suddenly young, wealthy, free, not too ugly, and in a wonderful new city.

  She was also not paying attention to that wonderful new city’s rules of the road!

  Like all Americans newly arrived in Britain, she had her mind set on right-hand drive. In the States, as in most other European countries, traffic drove on the right. In England, however, they drove on the left.

  It had been very strange at first, riding (or, to be more accurate, wobbling) away from the bicycle shop, and she’d had to force herself to concentrate on what she was doing.

  Cars approached her from the right. Come to a T-junction, and you had to look right.

  At first, the very newness of it had kept her alert. All the way from Botley she’d been very conscious of the fact that she was riding along on what felt to her like the wrong side of the road.

  By the time she’d got to the centre of town, however, the novelty had begun to wear off. She’d started to relax and enjoy the new experience of riding a bike along Oxford’s lovely streets.

  She had decided to leave the exploring of St Bede’s until last, but as she approached the college she glanced at her watch. Too late now to really do it justice. Best wait until tomorrow.

  As she diverted her course, she glanced at the pale cream Cotswold stone walls and the ancient mullioned windows.

  She didn’t see the low, green, open-topped Morgan that was cruising along, perfectly legally, in front of her.

  Laurel knew there was a street up ahead where she could turn off to ride up Walton Street. It was a longer route home, but she was in no hurry.

  She glanced automatically to her right.

  Nothing coming, all was clear.

  She turned left. Straight into the side of the Morgan!

  Laurel just had time to give a loud yelp of fright and see a fair head turn to look, startled, in her direction. For a fraction of a second, she caught a flash of amazingly light, electric-blue eyes.

  Then there was the weird sensation of flight as her bike hit the car, catapulting her slight frame into the air and over the bonnet.

  In her ears, the squeal of the Morgan’s brake sounded hideously loud and ominous.

  She had just enough time to imagine the headlines in the papers back home — ‘Van Gilder Heiress Killed in Tragic Oxford Car Crash’ — and more distressingly, how much hitting the pavement was going to hurt. And then she saw the paving stones rushing up at her face. She felt her left shoulder hit the ground, a painful jolting blow, before a sharp pain lanced through her head.

  Blackness rushed up to claim her.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Professor Gideon Welles, a well-respected fellow of St Bede’s and don in Experimental Psychology, rammed on the brakes of his low-slung Morgan.

  His heart shot into his throat and seemed to lodge there.

  He saw the woman cyclist catapult over the bonnet of his car in a sick kind of daze. Everything happened so fast, he couldn’t think in his usual stream of consciousness, just in bare flickers of awareness.

  He had a fleeting impression of long dark hair wrapping itself around a pale oval face.

  He caught a glimpse of colour — the knitted jumper she was wearing.

  He could hear the high-pitched squeal of his brakes as the car obediently snapped to a halt, and felt the pressure of the seatbelt suddenly tighten across his chest.

  And then, a sudden silence.

  The woman had disappeared, but he knew, with the one part of his brain that was still coldly rational, that she had not gone far. Only as far as the pavement, in fact.

  For what felt like years but was really only a second, he sat numbly in the car before leaping into action. He quickly dealt with his seatbelt, finding the release mechanism and snapping it open.

  Just then, a large woman, walking out from the entrance of Little Clarendon Street, stopped in the middle of the road, her mouth falling comically open.

  Gideon realised the engine of his car was still running, and he quickly turned it off. He opened the door of the sports car as the woman bystander dropped her shopping bag and began to waddle anxiously towards the young girl lying sprawled on the pavement.

  Gideon was already getting out of the car. It was always a sight that tickled his students, because the Morgan was so low-slung and Gideon Welles easily topped six feet five inches. Usually he was the picture of unexpected grace. This time, however, he looked a bit like a puppet with one string broken!

  He could feel that his movements were uncoordinated, jerky even, and knew that it was the effects of shock rippling through his system.

  He easily recognised all the signs — the numbness, the sensation of ‘watching it all happen from a distance’, the cold, sick feeling in the pit of his stomach that made him want to heave.

  He walked quickly around the side of the classic green sports car and moved rapidly towards the woman on the pavement.

  Her eyes were closed. Her skin a whiter shade of pale.

  There was no blood on her face though, no outward sign of injury, and his eyes dropped quickly to her chest.

  Below the expensive jersey her chest rose and fell rhythmically, and it was only then that he let out a long, shaken sigh. She was not dead. Thank goodness.

  ‘What happened?’

  The large woman was hovering over the stricken figure of Laurel Van Gilder, moving nervously from one foot to the other, not sure what she ought to be doing.

  Gideon ignored her, and instead folded his very long frame into a crouching position over the unconscious figure. He checked her pulse, and was relieved to find it strong and steady, if a little fast.

  Then he reached into the passenger side of his Morgan for a mobile phone and quickly dialled for an ambulance.

  By now the large woman was not alone in studying the prone, pale and inert figure on the pavement. A postman, delivering his final mail of the day, had pulled up in his van and, ever practical, pulled the mangled cherry-pink bike, which had been lying half under the wheels of the Morgan, on to one side, out of the way of other traffic. A few others — pedestrians who’d been using the same pavement — began to congregate around Laurel, their natural curiosity liberally laced with genuine concern.

  ‘Poor thing,’ some old lady muttered. ‘Crashed her bike, I expect.’

  There was a general murmur. With so many people riding bicycles, people were bound to have accidents.

  Gideon gave the ambulance service their precise location and turned off the phone. His voice was cool, clear, and gave no indication of the true state of his rather frayed nerves.

  He returned to the dark-haired, unconscious woman and shrugged off his heavy suede jacket. He carefully laid it over her, checked that her air passages were clear, and leaned back on his heels.

  Only then, when everything was taken care of, did he look at her properly.

  She was gauntly beautiful, her face structured with sexy, sharp angles — high cheekbones, a long, well-defined nose and a determined jaw. Looking so pale, and lying so still, he’d have thought she was dead if he didn’t know better.

  His heartbeat slowed to a more normal pace as he continued to watch her breathing, and his own face, which had been ashen, began to take on a more normal hue.

  A police car arrived. Someone had thought to phone them, although Gideon himself had thought only of the ambulance. The possible consequences to himself of this accident hadn’t even crossed his mind.

  The two officers were young but very competent. Within moments they’d found witnesses to the accident — one, a woman who’d been driving behind Gideon and had pulled up, shaken, a few yards along the road. She willingly confirmed that the car in front of her hadn’t been speeding, and that the cyclist had simply ridden straight into him.

  Another witness, a student crossing the churchyard opposite the scene, confirm
ed this version of events, and had already given a clear-cut account of the incident when the ambulance arrived.

  The paramedics deftly checked their patient for broken bones, and talked with professional detachment about her ‘head injury’. Gideon watched them transfer her onto the stretcher, relief pouring over him that at last things were being done, and he went to follow them automatically. But one of the policemen, with a very gentle but firm grip of his arm, pulled him back.

  The next few hours passed very quickly, but when he later looked back on them, they seemed like the longest of his life.

  First of all, he was breathalysed on the spot, an oddly humiliating experience even though the purely rational part of his brain told him it was only fair. The police were only doing their job, and there was absolutely nothing personal in it. Nobody had even so much as hinted that he might be drunk or irresponsible. Even so, as he breathed into the plastic tube he felt a surge of resentment.

  By then he’d given his details to the authorities, and nobody was very much surprised when Professor Gideon Welles checked out as having no alcohol in his bloodstream whatsoever.

  In the sometimes-wary world of town versus gown, the civilian population of Oxford had a love-hate relationship with the academics living in their midst. Drunken students could be a pest. Liberal-minded, banner-waving radical dons could be an embarrassment. Generally, though, the police had a cautious respect for the members of Oxford’s many colleges. The university was, after all, one of the best in the world, and it did bestow on the city of Oxford some very real privileges. So, after signing his statement, Gideon was allowed to collect his Morgan from the police car park and leave without any more formalities.

  Gideon barely registered the slight dent on the car’s right-hand fender that was scraped and smeared with a bright, incongruous cherry pink. Normally, the slightest scratch on his prized possession would have been one of the few things that could rouse him to any serious display of anger. Now, he barely gave it a frowning look before folding in his long length behind the wheel.