An English writer, himself a graduate of Cambridge, remarked years ago in his autobiography that “every Oxonian has at least one book about Oxford inside him, and generally gets it out.” Nobody who has been to Cambridge, he claimed, feels compelled to write about it. This generally, while untrue, had, like so many generalities, enough truth about it to make it stick. Certainly Kate, standing in front of the Martyrs Memorial, was inclined to credit the assertion. Oxford seemed less her own memories than those of all the famous or merely accomplished people whose accounts of their time here, by themselves or others, she had read. (Not to mention the re-creations in fiction by those who had been unable to forget the dreaming spires.) Kate had, in her day, punted on the Cam, walked along the banks at Cambridge, and indulged, not always religiously, in reverence in Kings College Chapel. Certainly Cambridge’s beauty was great. But for her Oxford was the hub of the scholar’s universe, not least because, an industrial city, it was a place of secrets. Each of the colleges had courts and gardens unfolding, one from the other, known only to the initiated and often open only to the invited. Kate wondered what life in an American university would be like if each group of faculty had a beautiful “fellows” garden in which to converse and behold nature in the form of a carefully tended flower bed and an ancient tree. But if the flowers in the college gardens grew more beautifully than ever, the buildings and traffic beyond prevented any sense that Oxford was in a state of static preservation. Blackwell’s shipping building on Parkend Street, however ancient their store across from the Sheldonian, was all glass and air conditioning and looked as though it had been designed for downtown Detroit. At least, Kate comforted herself, enough sense had prevailed to prevent tall buildings; the spires still dominated the sky, including the atrocious one in Nuffield, built in 1958 to house a library, with no sense of either fitness or discretion.
Kate walked round to retrieve her just-rented bicycle from the rack behind the monument. She had brought her detestation of the motorcar with her into a city likely to be choked by automobiles; she planned to pedal around Oxford in what she hoped was a properly eccentric manner. Kate, bearing to the left, signaled her intention to turn into St. Giles, thence into the Woodstock Road and past the entrance to Somerville, where Cecily and Dorothy Whitmore and Max’s mother were soon to begin their new friendship.
In fact, Kate’s research had extended far enough* for her to know that in 1918 Somervillians were still being housed in the St. Mary Hall Quadrangle of Oriel College, the usual male inhabitants of these sacred precincts having gone to be slaughtered at Ypres and Neuve Chapelle. Somerville College, next to the Radcliffe Infirmary, had been commandeered for conversion into a military hospital, while, at St. Mary Hall, the connecting hall between the men’s living quarters and the women’s had been bricked up. According to Oxford legend, some intrepid souls from either side (or both) had removed the bricks, and until they could be replaced, the Principal of Somerville guarded her side of the gap, the Provost of Oriel his.
Kate passed Somerville, not without a soulful look, which nearly cost her dearly as some truck lurched out from the Radcliffe Infirmary. By the time Somerville was again a college, in 1919, Whitmore and Hutchins were in their second year. Whitmore, who had served two years with the British Army, was the older. Pondering on this, Kate passed the Observatory, neatly missed turning down into Observatory Street—Phyllis had been very explicit about this—passed the small block of stores on the Woodstock Road—Kate ticked them off in her mind: a drugstore (chemists to the residents), a cleaners, a grocery, a shop that sold postcards and the like—and turned left into St. Bernard’s Road. Phyllis’s house was on the left, about a third of the way down, recognizable, Phyllis had said, by having the only uncut grass, front and back, on the street. “One is very frowned upon.” Kate set her bicycle against the railings, and locked it to them with the chain provided by the bicycle people. Had one always needed to lock bicycles in Oxford? She rang the bell.
“What you need,” Phyllis said, “is a drink. Welcome to the shabbiest living room in Oxford, and that’s saying a good deal. No, don’t sit on that couch, you will sink through to the floor and end up in the lotus position. Whenever I look at that couch, I am reminded of that bit from Private Lives where the current wife announces that she is so shocked at Elyot’s running off with Amanda that she feels as though slimy things had been crawling all over her, and Elyot says: ‘Maybe they have, that’s a very old sofa.’ That chair is ugly, commodious, and surprisingly comfortable. Kate, I don’t remember when I’ve been so glad to see anyone. Now I shall stop burbling on and say how are you? How are you? Scotch all right? We have a refrigerator designed to hold one orchid for one social butterfly; there’s room for little else. But in joy at the thought of your arrival, I have managed the production of two ice cubes. After the first drink, you can sip your whisky warm, in the way that built and lost the empire. I’ll be right back. The kitchen, needless to say, is down a flight of steep stairs, which debouch directly into the privy.”
Kate, happily sunk into the ugly and commodious chair, thought that if one could not have been at Oxford in 1920 with Whitmore for a friend, one was fairly lucky to be there over half a century later with Phyllis for a friend. Even in such a room as this. For its shabbiness was indeed of a magnificent degree, as though thousands of Leos had flung themselves against the springs and wiped their feet upon the slipcovers. Filling the fireplace was a gas heater whose efficiency must have been great to compensate for such atrocity of appearance. In the corner stood a television set. On the floor was a rag whose reason for existence must have been warmth; it could not have been aesthetic. Yet, Kate happily thought, it was a marvelous room for conversation, for its only furniture were two overstuffed couches and two overstuffed chairs, and one dim standing lamp in the corner. Since Phyllis was not poor, the house must have been chosen for reasons having nothing to do with its furniture.
Her joy at Kate’s arrival in Oxford had been touching, however expected. Phyllis had once, she had told Kate on the phone, read a book by an American wife of a visiting professor to Oxford entitled These Ruins Are Inhabited, and, she had said, if the title hadn’t been used she would be prepared to write the book herself. Since she shared Kate’s besotted Anglophilia, they were, so to speak, ripe for the exchange of impressions.
“Dieu que la vie est quotidienne,” Phyllis remarked, returning with two stiff drinks, one with ice. “Laforgue would have known what of he spoke if he’d ever been in Oxford in term time while unconnected with any aspect of the university. You can’t imagine. One trots to a series of little stores for one’s food, bread here, meat there, salad in a third place, everyone as pleasant as can be, of course, that’s what makes it possible, the English shopkeepers are so pleasant, not like those in New York, who seem to conclude you’ve entered the store for the express purpose of being insulted. Still, it does wear. Sometimes I go down to the Oxford market and wait on long, serpentine lines at Palme’s for really good cheese and bread, but mostly I go to Marks and Spencer and buy prepared shepherd’s pie. Hugh grumbles a bit, but he’s always being invited out to elegant meals in hall somewhere, and even he admits no one less domestic than a Victorian cook could function in that kitchen. The height of my week is the visit to the laundromat. One goes either at night, when one meets undergraduates, or during the day, when one meets the wives of young dons. The company is better at night. Those wives. I can’t imagine how England ever assimilated Germaine Greer; I’ve never seen a place where women are such slaves. Of course, the American wives who visit are little better; look at me. Well, you, dear Kate, are a marvelous change. You will, I know, be infinitely relieved to learn that I am taking you out to dinner. Now, what is this old history you’re digging up, and why, and how is Reed?”
“Reed is fine. The other questions will take a little longer, and a bit more whisky. Phyllis, how in the world did you manage to acquire this extraordinary house?”
Phyllis chuckled. “I respond like the Vassar girl who was asked how she ended up a prostitute: pure luck. It’s the bathrooms that did it, plus the incredible shortage of housing in Oxford in term time. Hugh, it goes without saying, didn’t make up his mind to spend a year at the Clarendon until we were practically on our way to the airport, and this came up for rent suddenly. Someone must have collapsed at simple contemplation of all the stairs. All knew about it was that it had three Johns and two bathrooms. The other house we might have had had a privy on the bottom floor minus one, so to speak, a bathroom-minus-privy on the third floor, and one slept, fitfully I’m sure, on the top. I’m just American enough to be unable to do without a bathroom to myself, though, as you can see, I do without most other amenities. I think the lady who owns this intended originally to have flats, which is why so many bathrooms. The English, I’ve decided, go in the morning when they get up and never again. You wouldn’t expect it with all that tea, but no doubt their bladders are trained from birth. Also, there’s a fairly good heating system, which is to say a glassful of water will not actually turn to ice if left in here overnight, and there’s plenty of hot water, which is grand, until one discovers that it’s produced by some incredible submersion heater that works with the noise of a jet engine and costs the earth to run. We’ve four floors, two rooms on a floor, which is convenient if one has guests; one can isolate them in layers. Hugh says it’s a vertical ranch house. Since I can’t resist the marvelous English beer in the marvelous pubs, it’s nice to know I take it all off puffing up stairs all day. And that’s why I’m here. Actually, this is a sort of interstitial street: dons began to live here when dons could marry, at the Woodstock end, that is. The working class lives at the Walton end. The new construction is housing for St. John’s, so no doubt St. Bernard’s Road is coming up in the world. Now, your turn. Produce your explanation and pray make it improbable.”
Kate kicked off her shoes and tucked her feet under her on the chair. The absence of tables was partly explained by the ease with which one could balance a glass on the wide arms of the ancient chairs. She had read in a book that Colette, whom Kate enormously admired, had said that friendship, like love, naturally speaks its true language only in a duet. It occurred to her that one of the problems she had begun to encounter in recent years arose from the impossibility of such conversations in the ordinary routine of life. Everyone was either too busy, if they were worth talking to, or too dull, if they were available. She had, to recover herself, chosen occasional solitude in the cabin Reed had given her in lieu, perhaps, of friendship. Or, once past youth, did one find one’s conversations, if any, only with those with overlapping interests or those met by serendipity, in foreign parts, both of you orbiting outside the usual gravitational forces, like Phyllis? She asked the question.
“You,” said Phyllis, “are growing to resemble a psychiatrist or a Jewish comedian, always answering a question with a question. Of course, I know just what you mean. I’ve never been lonelier in my life, and I, unlike you, haven’t newly discovered writers to think about. My major aim in life, I shall confess to you, is to eat in one of those halls in the men’s colleges. Hugh says that that’s still impossible, and even if he got me invited to one of those colleges that admit women exist—because I am a professional, actually head of a school on a year’s leave, though no one ever seems to remember it here, or care—it would all be immensely strained and lonely. The poor dear dons haven’t eaten with women in so long, Hugh says, they would think the food was tainted. Either they’re bachelors and live in college, or they’re married men who leave their poor wives and children home for a supper of corn flakes, and arrive in hall to dine elegantly and with proper service. One of the perks for dons, you know, is a full and elaborate dinner. All that was written into the rules before dons married. I think with what relief they leave the domestic scene and repair to their safe masculine precincts. Which are in danger, I’m glad to report, of being no longer safe. Some colleges, like Exeter, I think, have never had a woman in hall and claim they never will. Not that the dear English are all that welcoming even to male visitors. Some prominent male American professors have been known to die of social chills. Nonetheless, damn it, I still admire the trees and gardens and lawns this side of idolatry. Sometimes I go to look at the deer at Magdalen and think that they brought them there to make the boys from large estates feel at home, and that probably the descendants of those boys think that women ought to be kept in more or less the same attractive and confined way. That world is over, but it had its beauty.”
“What a beauty,” Kate sighed. “Imagine life in the nineteen twenties when there were still rules about mixed parties and, as L. P. Hartley said, hope took for granted what in these days fear takes for granted. Phyllis, if I utter one more word of nostalgia, hit me.”
“I’ll hit you with another Scotch,” Phyllis said. She returned with the bottle, no more ice being, as she had explained, available, and placed the bottle on the floor between them. Kate poured herself another drink. “What I don’t understand,” Phyllis said, “is what you’re doing here, besides rescuing me. Ought I to have heard of Dorothy Whitmore?”
“Not really. We were both too young to see the movie they made of her novel; she was a good friend of Cecily Hutchins. In fact, I’d better make a clean breast of it—where in the world did that expression come from, do you imagine?—and tell you the whole story. Have you met Max Reston?”
“Have I not? He knows Hugh through his brother, Reston’s, I mean, and now and then he turns up at the Cosmopolitan Club, Reston, I mean, not his brother.”
“He turned up there recently with me, as a matter of fact, but that was later. It began in March when I was up at the cottage Reed gave me. But of course, I haven’t told you about that. I’m beginning to sound like my oldest sister-in-law, who is always going so far back to explain all the elements in every story that I begin to wonder if she is dull on purpose; one couldn’t, I sometimes feel, be that boring by accident.”
“You’re not boring me. I’ve only learned to know the meaning of boredom these last months.”
Kate ended up telling the story, in almost sister-in-law detail, as she thought of it. She concluded with an admission of her profound excitement at the thought of reading Whitmore’s letters, which she had already established were in the Somerville library. “Whitmore left her letters to Max’s mother, who left them to Somerville. I long to read them, of course on my way to visit you. How fortunate your situation is for Whitmore research.” This brought her back to Gerry Marston. Kate’s tale was, as tales are with friends who understand conversation, full of digressions that eventually rejoined the main stream neatly, as in medieval literature.
“Are you suggesting,” Phyllis asked, “that Max killed her?”
“No, of course not. At least, I don’t think so. Max might freeze someone to death with disdain, but violence isn’t his style. Even if he had the smallest reason for killing her, which he hasn’t. Max is a true gentleman in that he is never rude unintentionally, but surely not even his withering intentions reach as far as mayhem. But it all does seem odd. And it’s left me with a hunger to know more of Whitmore and Hutchins. Phyllis, do we have to go out? Couldn’t we have a Marks and Spencer shepherd’s pie here and get beautifully sozzled?”
“Why not. I’ve even got some beer, in returnable bottles, bless the English. I’ll go and light the oven now, so that we can eat in three hours. The explosion you are about to hear is part of the scenario, and should not be regarded in the light of a catastrophe.”
When she came back soon, no sound of an explosion having intervened, it was to announce that she had been inspired. “We shan’t eat shepherd’s pie and drink bottled beer, we’ll walk along the river to Binsey and have cheese and pickle sandwiches in the garden of the Perch. Are you still the greatest walker as ever was?”
“Still. I remember the path, and the boats and swans.”
“They’re there yet,” Phyllis assured her, “with the addition of much litter, here as the world over, alas. In England, needless to say, one cannot function without first memorizing opening and closing times—why should the English make life simple and let you drink whenever you feel like it? At least it gives a shape to my day. Ah, I say, I’ll walk to the market and then, on the way back, the Lamb and Flag will have opened and I’ll have a beer. Let’s see; we’ve got time for one more drink and a wash and brush up; I do hope that’s the correct English phrase—I keep trying to use them but always get them wrong, somehow. Hugh will be here when we return, and you can get the male side of life at Oxford from him. Believe me, compared to the lives of females not lucky enough to be attached somewhere, it’s pure heaven, even if Hugh constantly complains that the English love of animals makes the use of even one laboratory mouse a matter of state. Someone in Hugh’s lab got called on the carpet for cruelty to shrimp, if you’ll believe it.”
They set off in a direction not usually recommended to those visitors invited to All Souls. They walked toward what Phyllis called the working-class end of St. Bernard’s Road, past a pub which was apparently the local youth meeting place. Certainly neither the litter nor the noise suggested that English adolescents had anything over their American counterparts in neatness or discretion. “What Leo would like,” Kate said, “is that in England one can, it seems, begin drinking beer before puberty. He’s always asked to prove he’s eighteen in the States, difficult, because he isn’t.”
They crossed Walton Street and continued down Walton Well Road. Almost immediately they were on the bridge over the railway tracks, with a clear view of a factory, product indeterminable, and then they were in the country. This quick transition from pavement to fields was, Kate always felt, close to the heart of England (whatever that meant), and she wondered how long England would be able to preserve it against the encroachments of suburbia and council housing. So far she had noticed that their town planning, like their broadcasting, was superior to America’s, if their urban architecture was not. They crossed the river, passed through a gate, and were on the tow path to the Perch. This establishment was so picturesque, at least from the outside, that Kate began, as she always did at such moments, to wonder about the possibility of a job in England and a cottage nearby. Perhaps Phyllis, who had ended up on St. Bernard’s Road beached on the shoals of boredom, had dreamed the same thing.
They went inside, which was rather more modern, and found their cheese and pickle sandwiches, ordered a pint of beer each, and passed through a good deal of rather noisy conviviality into the garden. Here, as it happened, they were alone, possibly because the English drink indoors in a properly civilized manner. On the roof of the pub there rested, looking like something from a Blake drawing, two large white doves with fanlike tails.
“Not an hallucination,” Phyllis said, following Kate’s glance. “They live here. They’re moulting or breeding or something sedentary at the moment, which is why they have that statuesque look. Hugh and I asked the owner about them not long ago. Well, Kate, here’s to your adventure among the postwar Oxford generation. Keep me informed, will you? I feel like one of those dreary women who take up pottery or baking when the children start school, because there is no demand for their services from outside themselves. We always think we want life to be impromptu when we’re middle-aged, but I expect I never meant as impromptu as all this.” For a moment the boredom and depression showed forth from behind the glib talk.
“I shall certainly keep you informed,” Kate said. “How about splitting another cheese and pickle?”
* Chiefly in Vera Brittain, The Women at Oxford, London: Harrap, 1960.