Oxford was a Wonderland.
It had snowed again overnight, so the city looked stunning in the low sunshine – half Gormenghast, half Winterfell.
It was lucky we couldn’t park, because we got to see everything. Nel nosed the gold Mini around the narrow streets and I swear we actually followed one of those open-top tourist buses for a good twenty minutes. We glimpsed the quiet quads of the colleges, the mad, bike-crammed stone bridges and the snow-kissed spires reaching into the bluest of skies. ‘Good job we left early,’ said Nel ruefully, negotiating a cobbled street.
Actually it gave me time to think. Somewhere beyond the anxious, pattering thoughts about the interview, it occurred to me that I had never really thought too much about my application to Oxford – intellectually, as it were – what with all that had been going on at STAGS. In fact, I’d pretty much applied here because at STAGS that was just what you did – here or Cambridge. I’d plumped for Oxford basically because my friends had applied here; that thing your teachers say you must never, ever do. I realised, on that little Magical Mystery Tour in search of a parking spot, that I’d never really considered actually living here, studying in all the buildings we were passing – that huge square library and that big round reading room and that fancy theatre with the big Greek heads outside it. It occurred to me, too, that if I had the smallest ghost of a chance of getting into this place, I’d been helped, in the weirdest and murkiest of ways, by the Dark Order of the Grand Stag itself. If I hadn’t been manipulated into putting on The Isle of Dogs, and Professor Nashe hadn’t come to see it, I would probably not be here now, having an interview with the world’s foremost Jonsonian expert. Did that go some way to compensating me for the trial, the hanging, the branding? I sucked my branded thumb like I was a child, and then pressed it to the chilly window. It left a silvery thumbprint, with a clear little M missed out of the middle.
We finally parked right by Christ Church, the college I had applied to, and as I unfolded myself from the little car I saw, with rising panic, that this was the biggest and grandest college we’d yet seen. At the gatehouse Nel said goodbye.
‘Where will you be?’ I asked nervously, like she was my mum.
‘Starbucks,’ she said. Nel was a globalisation girl to her acrylic fingertips. ‘I saw one when we were driving round. Actually I saw it about ten times.’
Her tiny joke relaxed me a bit. ‘Call me when you’re through,’ she said. ‘Go get ’em.’ And then she gave me this massive hug. I was properly touched. As she walked high-street-wards I gave my name to the porter guy who was actually wearing – I’m not kidding – a bowler hat. Then we passed through the arch into the main quadrangle, and that small sliver of hope I’d felt in the car disappeared. My own cheek almost made me laugh. What? Greer MacDonald actually dared to think she could come here, to this golden palace of a college? Lewis Carroll himself had studied here, had walked this quad. Had found a low door in the wall of the college gardens which had inspired him to write Alice-in-fricking-Wonderland. I’d recently seen that crazy cheese-dream of a film version by Tim Burton, and I felt like I was living it now. I was truly Through the Looking Glass. My nerves, my lack of preparation because I’d had my head in this STAGS/DOGS thing – how could I not be found out?
I followed the porter up a winding stone stair to a solid oak door. He knocked on it for me before touching his bowler and leaving, so I couldn’t even chicken out. I had no choice, when a faint voice said ‘Enter’, but to go in.
At the desk, Professor Nashe was writing without looking up, her iron-grey hair escaping from her messy bun. ‘One moment,’ she murmured, so I waited, looking round the room as I did so. There were three walls of books crammed onto dark-wood shelves, and the fourth wall was taken up with a huge leaded Tudor window, opening out onto a snowy quad and a frozen fountain. A grandfather clock stood tall in the corner, ticking ominously, and a rogue sunbeam struck through one of the diamond panes straight into my eye. The scratching of the pen and the ticking of the clock and the sunbeam were hard to bear. I felt the weight of no one speaking pressing down on me. I don’t know if this was part of the test, but if it was, I failed it. I blurted out: ‘I saw Ben Jonson.’
She looked up. Despite the grey hair, she had a young face, and she was much sterner than I remembered. Of course, I’d never actually met her – I’d been otherwise engaged hanging from the rafters of the De Warlencourt Playhouse – but I did recall her smiling at some gag of Abbot Ridley’s during his introductory speech to The Isle of Dogs. But she didn’t smile at me. In fact, she looked a bit startled.
‘When?’
‘Yesterday. I went to Westminster Abbey. I saw the standing-up grave and the … questionable epitaph: O rare Ben Jonson.’
She looked almost like she might smile, but then said, ‘Oh – it’s not such a bad epitaph when you come to think about it.’
Wow. What a great start – I’d pissed her off. I backtracked. ‘Well, he was rare, I suppose. Or even a one-off.’
She didn’t reply. Instead, she indicated a chair with her pen, and I sat in it. ‘You know Ben Jonson lived here, I expect?’
‘Yes.’ It was one of the things Friar Waterlow, the STAGS librarian, had told me.
‘Only for a short time. But that’s why the Ben Jonson Institute, of which I am the principal, is based here.’
I looked out of the window, and could almost see Ben crossing the snowy quad, in a black Tudor coat like the ones we wore at STAGS. Professor Nashe spoke again, pulling my attention back into the room.
‘So. Greer. I very much enjoyed your production of The Isle of Dogs. Quite a coup.’
‘Thank you.’
‘I have, of course, since your performance, read the play in some detail, and it has now been registered and catalogued with the British Library.’
I swallowed. This was big stuff.
‘And you’ve applied here to read English with Renaissance drama, so today we are going to have a conversation about some of the aspects of your chosen subject, in the historical context of the times. There are no right or wrong answers. I just want to hear your ideas.’ She shuffled her notes and looked at me with a direct gaze. ‘So, tell me, Greer: what is the purpose of a play?’
I thought back to my conversation with Nel earlier that term. ‘To be performed.’
She nodded. ‘Why?’
‘To entertain?’
‘Yes. Anything else?’
‘I guess … to change the way people think.’
‘Yes,’ she said, very definitely this time. ‘Have you read Jonson’s play Volpone?
Great. I’d fallen at the first fence. ‘No. I mean, not really.’
She folded her hands together and fixed me with green eyes that reminded me of her past pupil Abbot Ridley. ‘Expand.’
‘I mean, I had a look at it when I was doing The Isle of Dogs. I read the argument at the beginning.’ In fact, I’d copied it out for Nel when I’d discovered the Longcross acrostic in the Lorem Ipsum text. ‘You know, the bit at the beginning that spells out VOLPONE.’
She nodded. ‘You know what the word “Volpone” means, I suppose?’
‘Yes. It means …’ I stopped, thunderstruck. Then I recovered myself. ‘It means “The Fox”.’ See if you can find out about Foxes. But what Ty had messaged couldn’t have anything to do with this, could it? Surely she’d meant what we’d found out yesterday, about the law Rollo had blocked and the Boxing Day foxhunt at Longcross? ‘I’m sensing that Jonson liked the fox metaphor,’ I went on. ‘You know, because of the character of Volpone in The Isle of Dogs.’ The one that Cass had played.
‘Well, he certainly liked foxes. The creature, that is. He even had one of his own.’
‘What, you mean like a pet?’
‘Yes. It lived in his house at Blackfriars. It was tame as a dog. He even named it.’ She fixed me with her green gaze. ‘He called it Reynard.’
I think I stopped breathing for a second. In my mind Ben Jonson crossed the quad again, black as a crow, and this time a fox trotted after him, a red smear against the snow. This was too much of a coincidence. Ben Jonson had named his fox Reynard, the same name as the fox in the Masefield poem Rollo had used to frustrate the law in the House of Lords, the same name as the fox heads that adorned the walls of Cumberland Place.
‘Why’d he call it that?’ I asked breathlessly.
‘Because of the medieval literary convention. There were a number of twelfth-century folk tales from all over western Europe featuring a red fox who was a trickster figure, always called Reynard. Renard is French for “fox” of course.’
‘Oh. Yes, of course,’ I said, trying to sound intelligent.
‘Ben Jonson added to this convention, the notion of the wily fox, in his own beast fables. Volpone as a character in The Isle of Dogs, then his play Volpone, subtitled The Fox.’
A thought occurred. ‘Wait, so is it the same guy from The Isle of Dogs? The Volpone character, I mean. Is Volpone a spin-off? Like the Han Solo movie was a spin-off of Star Wars?’
For the first time she gave a tiny smile. ‘Well, you could say that. I mean, I wouldn’t make the Thor comparison, but recent scholarship suggests that Volpone in the eponymous play represents Robert Cecil, the same courtier who was represented by the character of Volpone in your Isle of Dogs.’
I liked the way she called it mine.
‘By the time Volpone was written, Robert Cecil was King James’s chief advisor. He was the most powerful man in England, after the monarch. He was also an extremely dangerous man and concerned himself with the interrogation and torture of those he considered a danger to the state. For many, Cecil’s face was the last one they saw.’
I shivered a little, and not from the cold.
‘So what do you think that says about Ben Jonson, that he wrote a play satirising Cecil?’
I didn’t even have to think about this one. ‘That he liked taking shots at authority. I mean, the whole of The Isle of Dogs was a critique of Elizabeth I and her courtiers, and that got him thrown in jail. And then, if he was poking fun at Cecil in Volpone, now that he was Top Dog – no pun intended – well … I think he must have been a bit of a rebel.’
She looked at me, considering. ‘He was a lot of a rebel.’
‘How big? Extinction Rebellion big?
‘Try the Anonymous movement. Hacktivists. Occupy. The gilets jaunes.’
I didn’t know much about those guys, so I just said, ‘Cool.’
‘Yes. Jonson went to prison on several occasions, not just for the murder of Gabriel Spenser. Although that was the worst time of course. His nearest squeak.’
She didn’t have to tell me. I’d lived it. ‘Did he get in trouble for Volpone?’
‘No. He was in an interesting position by then.’
‘Interesting how?’
‘Cecil thought Jonson was on his side.’
‘Why?’
‘Because Jonson was a double agent. A spy.’
I whistled. ‘James Bond,’ I breathed.
‘Indeed. What do you think about that?’
‘I think he is even cooler than I did before, if that’s possible.’
I could see she liked that. Encouraged, I asked, ‘But who did he spy for?’
‘Other rebels. Catholics.’
‘Like who?’
She raised an eyebrow. ‘I thought I was conducting the interview.’
I wound my neck in. This was an interview about my future. I needed to focus on that. ‘Of course.’ I tried to answer intelligently her questions about my Probitiones syllabus, and other Renaissance dramatists, but I was really thinking about Ben Jonson being a spy.
‘And have you given any thought to the dissertation that you will have to complete if your application is successful? No matter if not – it is not required until your third year.’
‘Well, I mean, and this is just off the top of my head as I’ve literally just heard about it, but I’d like to do something about sedition in drama. I mean, using words to communicate stuff.’ Jeez, Greer, get it together. There was something about Professor Nashe’s penetrating green gaze that reduced my vocabulary to that of a Valley Girl. ‘I mean, using dramatic ideas and tropes to communicate radical or even revolutionary ideas, possibly leading to political insurrection.’
She gave a tiny nod. ‘Ha,’ she said. ‘Just like Nathaniel.’
‘Nath— you mean Abbot Ridley?’
‘Yes. He wrote something along those lines himself. His conclusions were very interesting indeed.’ I didn’t mind at all that I’d said something unoriginal. As far as I was concerned, if I’d hit on something Abbot Ridley had done, and he was her star student, then I was doing something right. ‘You must be very proud of him. Nathaniel, I mean.’ It felt weird using his first name.
‘In what way?’ she said guardedly.
Stuttering a little, feeling as if I was suddenly on shaky ground, I said, ‘Well, he’s the head of a major private school and he can’t be more than, what … thirty?’
Professor Nashe was silent – she seemed reluctant to confirm or deny her former student’s age.
Nervous, I blew more smoke. ‘I mean, he’s a credit to you. To have got that far, that young. It’s pretty … unusual.’ I meant it as a compliment, but it was something I’d wondered about before. Abbot Ridley had been parachuted in when the Old Abbot ‘died’ – fair enough, they’d needed someone quickly. But an emergency temporary position was one thing – how had someone so young been given the abbot gig for keeps?
Professor Nashe breathed in through her nose, the fine nostrils flaring a little. ‘Nathaniel Ridley’s credentials are impeccable, and for that I can only take partial credit. He was the head of Ampleforth College, you know, before he came to your own establishment.’ Ridley had told me this before, so Professor Nashe was only backing him up, but somehow her saying it made it sound even less likely. That meant Ridley was a headmaster of a major private school in his late twenties? It just didn’t add up. But I was definitely being warned off. ‘If you’re good, you’re good, no matter how youthful you may be,’ the professor went on. ‘Ben Jonson wrote The Isle of Dogs aged twenty-five, you know. Now –’ she shifted slightly in her chair – ‘let’s leave aside the achievements of others, and return to yours.’ She looked at me closely. ‘In conclusion, I’ll ask you again: what is the purpose of a play?’
This was clearly the last question, so I had to make it count and show I had learned from our conversation. I was determined to give a definite answer and not do that Australian rising-at-the-end-of-a-sentence thing that made all my previous answers sound like questions. I said clearly, ‘To start a fire.’
She nodded slowly, over and over again, like those toy dogs you see in the back of cars. But it was impossible to tell, just from that, whether she was thinking that I was right, or whether she was thinking that she was right in thinking that I was a moron. So I just rose when she rose and politely shook her proffered hand. ’Have you any other plans, while you are in Oxford?’
We hadn’t really. ‘Just to look around. I haven’t been to Oxford before. It all seems so beautiful.’
This seemed to please her. ‘The Ashmolean Museum is really wonderful. Not to be missed.’
She held onto my hand as she said this, and it seemed less like a Tripadvisor recommendation than a direct order.
‘Oh, OK,’ I said faintly.
As she showed me to the door she said, in the same make-sure-you-do-this tone, ‘Don’t forget to read Volpone.’
‘I won’t.’
She fixed me with that green gaze once more. ‘Remember, Remember,’ she said.
‘I will.’
And then she smiled properly for the first time.