Autumn in Oxford: A Novel

by Alex Rosenberg

  “What are you talking about, Wrought?” In his irritation Foot had given up calling him “Tom.”

  “Just that. The Jim Crow system that has been in place since 1876 reenslaved the Negroes under terms economically even more favourable to the whites than slavery. And the whites don’t intend to lose those war gains.”

  “Well, don’t refight the Civil War. But tell our readers why Eisenhower can’t enforce the law and how the governor gets away with flouting it.”

  “Now that’s interesting, Michael.” Tom wanted to get back to first names. “First of all, why suppose Eisenhower wants to enforce the law? After all, when he was chief of staff in ’48, he was opposed to integrating the US Army. Said so before a congressional hearing.”

  “Didn’t know that.” Foot was genuinely surprised.

  “Hell, during the war he was against letting Negroes into combat even when he needed infantry replacements. I know because I had a unit of black soldiers that were sneaked into the fight in spite of his orders.”

  “Tom, that’s another story. Let’s stick to this one.”

  “Well, the other interesting angle is Orville Faubus, the governor. You’d think he might be in favour of integration. After all, he’s an old-time fellow traveller, maybe even a former Communist.”

  Foot almost shouted down the line, “What?”

  “Yup. At the start of the Depression, Faubus was student body president at Commonwealth College in a town called Mena. In Arkansas.” Tom made a point of pronouncing it clearly so that Foot would not make the same mistake again. “College was supported by the party, and Faubus had no trouble with that as student body president. Like most successful politicians, he only became a racist to win elections.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Same reason I know Ethel Rosenberg was innocent. Firsthand. I met Faubus during the war when he was an intelligence officer in the Third Army.”

  “I knew you were the right man for this piece, Tom. Get to it.”

  It is the moment to strike, Tom thought. “Just one thing. I’ll want twenty-five quid for the piece. Can the Tribune pay that much?”

  “Make it fifteen guineas, Tom.”

  What exactly is a guinea? Tom had lived in Britain for a year and was still too embarrassed to ask.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Tom met Liz at Victoria Station for the 8:15 Fleche d’Or express to Paris on a Monday late in September. By that time they had found the moments, hours, afternoons, even a night or two on one of Liz’s branch visits to slake the ardent edge of their sexual appetites. Neither had ever realized such ravenous desires lurked beneath the identities they presented to the world, or for that matter to themselves. But it wasn’t just that. They’d learned enough about each other to be sure that they were a match, they needed to be together, they completed each other.

  Paris in September. Three nights, and each wanted to show their Paris to the other. The prospect dominated their thoughts and words until they were confronted with the realities of the English Channel. Leaving Folkstone they stood, arm in arm, at the rail below the captain’s bridge, enjoying the breeze over the bow. By the time they arrived, both Tom and Liz were stretched prone on the hard benches of the second-class lounge, completely preoccupied by their throbbing heads and leaden, cramping stomachs. Grasping their cases, they lurched from bulkhead to bulkhead out of the lounge and down the gangplank towards the waiting French train. Curiously, they seemed cured by the time they found their reserved seats in a second-class carriage. A few minutes later, they were hungry and stopped the trolley passing through the corridor for baguettes spread with ham and Camembert, along with bottled mineral water.

  They arrived in Paris at the onset of l’heure d’affluence—a rush hour different from any on the London Underground. They could hear the metro pull in as they came down the stair, only to be confronted by the portillions automatique—large grey barriers that closed to prevent anyone rushing onto the platform as a train came in. When the train pulled out, it left the strong smell of ozone each of them already associated with the Paris metro. In the second-class nonsmoking carriage, the men, and especially the women, round them looked more fashionable and more lightly dressed. No tweeds or double-breasted suits, narrower waists, lapels and ties among the men, more than one woman wearing a nylon see-through blouse revealing a lacy bra. Strangers were standing much closer together than they ever did in the crush of a London rush hour. But from even the most attractive of them, an occasional strong scent of body odour assailed Liz as they swayed against her. Then there was the endless correspondence—change of lines—at Chatalet Les Halles, a corridor at least two hundred metres long, smelling like a urinal. The passage was crowded with shoppers carrying home their evening meals, in some cases still alive, Tom noticed.

  It was past six o’clock when at last they found themselves before a three-star hotel on the Rue Racine just up from the Boulevard Saint-Michel. Liz had stayed there years before. They entered, and by agreement, Liz would do the talking. “Would there be a room for three nights?” Her French was quite passable.

  “Désolé, complet”—the young desk clerk looked up, decided on the right salutation, and went on—“madame. Perhaps the Hotel Moderne, at the end of the street, may have rooms.” He pointed away from the Boul’Mich.

  It had but one star and a small entry from which a banister, blackened by years of wear, turned its way steeply up six flights of a central opening beneath a skylight darkened with soot. A naked incandescent bulb hung down the middle of the stairwell reflected the badly painted gloss across the walls’ mottled surface. “Well, more money for dinner,” Tom said brightly as he dropped their bags.

  A well-fed elderly lady came bustling into the foyer, her evidently hennaed hair pinned up firmly, glasses hanging from a string round her neck. Do all hotelkeepers wear them? Tom recalled the lady in Exeter the last time they had travelled together. It seemed so long ago now that it might have been in the previous century. As she approached the registration, the woman smiled brightly and addressed Tom, “Combine du nuits?”

  Liz cleared her throat and answered for them, “Trois.”

  “D’accord. Vos documents, s’il vous plaît. Paiement en avance, seize francs par nuit.” In return for their passports, she handed them a key. “Quatrieme.”

  “That’s the fourth floor,” Tom protested as he picked up the cases.

  “No, it’s your fifth floor, Yank,” Liz corrected. “But you’re paying about two bucks a night.”

  They ate round the corner at the Cremerie Polidor, a restaurant Tom had found when he had first come to Paris, three days after the liberation in August 1944. It was still the same fourteen years later. The tables were long, and soon Liz and Tom were being jostled in the friendliest way by students rushing in from the Sorbonne across the Boul’Mich and stagehands from the Comédie Française a street away.

  Tom flourished a carnet of metro tickets at her. “Where to tomorrow?”

  “Let’s decide tomorrow.” She became serious. “I’m afraid Beatrice, my assistant, has found us out.”

  “How?”

  “Carelessness. Last time we were in London, I left my diary at that hotel on Bloomsbury Street, the Gresham. They very kindly called round with it.”

  “Ouch. What did she say?”

  “Nothing. She just left it on my desk. Never said a word.” She paused. “Then, when I told her on Friday, I’d be out of touch for a few days this week, she said, ‘Have a nice time.’”

  “My dear, she knows! She’s probably smart enough to have realized it’s me. If I were you, I’d bring a propitiatory gift back from Paris.” He laughed.

  “It’s serious, Tom.” She couldn’t suppress a small smile. Then she turned grave. “Everything could unravel.”

  “Liz, what’s the worst that can happen if it ever came out? I’m living in Oxford now, probably for good. If you divorce Trev, you’ll get at least joint custody of the kids. You won’t need to take them out o
f the country because we’ll stay here.” He smiled at the neat solution.

  Liz put her knife and fork down, swallowed her last bite, and began, “I can’t divorce Trev, ever.”

  Tom’s ears pricked up. Ever? Did I hear the word right? What are you going to tell me?

  Tom said nothing, but Liz saw the despairing look. She gulped. You have to tell him. Now! “I’ve a confession, Tom. Something happened to me during the war, before I met Trev. I didn’t go to university immediately, and I didn’t go to work either. I had a breakdown. No one ever knew why. It just came on. I was in a mental hospital for a year. Started out as depression . . . just couldn’t get myself out of bed. Then I became manic.” How much can you tell him? About losing yourself with soldiers on leave—strangers, up against alley walls, sometimes twice or three times a night, shooting up dope outside of dives no one thought even existed in “Toronto the Good.”

  Tom was still silent.

  “Anyway, it got worse till my family couldn’t deal with it anymore. I was out of control . . . hearing voices. What they were saying was pretty lurid. There were other experiences so real the only reason I don’t believe they happened is that they’re impossible. I had shock therapy. They tried insulin too, along with a lot of talking to trick cyclists.”

  Tom didn’t understand. “Trick cyclists?”

  “Oh, it’s what Brits call psychiatrists.” She stopped and gripped the table as though she needed to hold on to something. “I’ve never told anyone.” She stopped. “But Trev knows.”

  “How did he find out?”

  “Snooping. There was a copy of my case history. My mother kept it for me. Hidden away in a drawer. The week Olivia was born, Trev stayed at my parents’. One morning the next week, she noticed the file in her drawer. It had been put back carefully, but not carefully enough. All the case notes were in reverse order. The hospital envelope was put back upside down. She told me. I’ve never confronted him. But I’m pretty sure.” She picked up her fork. “Heard enough?”

  After a moment Tom spoke. “It’ll take a lot more to scare me off you, Liz.” He looked at her steadily. Do I need to say more? No. She knows how I feel about her. Words won’t add anything just now. Then he reached across for her hand.

  “Thank you.” She smiled. “I didn’t mean to tell you quite this way. I knew I had to sometime. All the years since the children came, I’ve worried about a relapse. So I did everything I could to cement my life into a pattern that would prevent its ever happening again.” She pulled their clasped hands to her. “But now, with you, I’m certain it’s over, forever. My life really matters to me again.”

  Tom replied, “I think I understand, at least a little. With you I feel like I’ve been able to start over again myself.”

  “But we still have the problem. I don’t have any grounds for divorce. If I left him, he could threaten to sue for divorce—desertion, maybe even use the history of mental illness, adultery too. If he found out, he’d claim it was a symptom of returning schizophrenia. I’d lose any chance at custody for sure.”

  “But won’t he sue for divorce anyway if he finds out about us?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe not. If we’re discreet and if I can keep him comfortable, he might turn a blind eye. What he’d worry about is other people finding out—his family, his brother, our friends, the parents in the kids’ school, the stuffy Dragon school for that matter. For Trev, image is everything. I think if he twigged to you and me, he’d use the threat of divorce to maintain the status quo.”

  “What about sex?” Tom couldn’t help asking.

  “Possessive, aren’t you? I told you, Trev and I haven’t slept together for a year.”

  “Finish your croissant, and I’ll show you the most extraordinary thing tourists never see.” Liz rose as she made the command and began looking for the bra she’d shed the night before.

  They’d found their breakfast on a tray at the foot of their door, announced with a sharp rap. Tom had brought it in, and they’d taken it sitting on each side of the unmade bed. Their clothes were in heaps on the floor. The double window was open to a view of a soft blue sky rising above the Ecole du Médecine across the narrow street, drawing in the warmth of a late summer day.

  “Where are you going to take me that I haven’t been before in Paris?” Tom challenged.

  “Not telling.”

  Under Liz’s guidance they walked down Rue Monsieur le Prince towards the metro stop at Place de l’Odéon. More than once Tom stopped to survey the lithographs and posters in the windows of small galleries and print shops. “Go in if you like,” Liz encouraged. “There’s no rush where we’re headed.”

  “I’d like to buy a couple of those Klees and Kandinskys for my college rooms. It would rather shock the tastes of the undergraduates.”

  “More than demure nudes by Alma-Tadema?”

  They were still laughing when they reached the Odéon metro. When Tom stopped to buy a Le Monde, Liz immediately recalled the morning in the Pyrenees the month before when they had met that nice estate agent. What was his name? She had the card, she realized, somewhere at the bottom of her purse.

  As the carriage lurched out of the Gare du Nord metro station, Tom leaned over to Liz. Under the noise of the wheels he said, “I know where you’re taking me. The marché aux puces just beyond the last stop at Porte de Clingancourt.” Liz nodded. Tom admitted, “Well, you’re right. I’ve never been there.” It was the vast flea market, the oldest, or at least the largest, in Europe.

  She replied, “Too lowbrow for you, Monsieur les Grandes Boulevards?”

  “Not at all. Just frightened of pickpockets.” He made a show of stealth as he reached into her open handbag.

  It was all they could do not to lose each other a dozen times in the next few hours. Tom found himself wandering through the history of the nineteenth century: shops full of medals, service ribbons, decorations from the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, even the Crimean War fifteen years earlier, bookstalls with complete sets of classics back to the eighteenth-century Encyclopedia, dozens of kiosks from which boxes of old picture postcards flooded out onto the sidewalk. In one corner he could relive the campaign of the Dreyfusards of 1900 and in another the defence of Verdun during the First World War. Here and there faded, fraying posters hung proclaiming the war bond drives of ’14, the smiling soldier, the Poilu, above the slogan Nous les aurons—“We’ll get them!” If only they had known, Tom groaned within. There were framed pictures of Clemenceau—the tiger of France, prime minister in 1918. Even pictures of Petain, the collaborationist leader during the German occupation. But the new president, de Gaulle, was only to be seen in ancient copies of Paris Match, stacks and stacks of them, from the weeks after the liberation of Paris in 1944, that no one seemed interested in.

  Liz meanwhile was always no more than three shops away but in another world entirely. She moved along the racks of dresses and coats, designer suits from two decades before, rows of well-polished but equally well-worn pumps and mules, tables laden with a profusion of cloche hats that had once been chic, and then on to the glass cases of costume jewellery still glittering sixty years after they had last adorned the bosoms of Belle Epoch debutantes. Or perhaps these were tools of the courtesan’s trade.

  Escaping from the heat, they both turned into a covered arcade of “better” shops, more restrained in their display, less importuning in their solicitation of business, each item on display tagged by a small “etiquette”—a price tag to discourage haggling. Shops with almost identical Chinese vases on black pedestals and French empire chairs, newly reupholstered, seemed to glare at one another across the passageway. Beyond them were stalls selling silver plate from the time of Napoleon III, tarnish too deep in their tracery for any amount of silver polish to remove.

  They emerged from the gallery to find themselves in the region of ancient toys and taxidermy. Tom drew Liz to one of the shops. “Let’s find something for the children.”

  Liz was surprised but gr
atified. She’d been thinking of Ian and Olivia off and on all morning, wondering about their day with Kevin Spencer’s kids in Birkenhead. Had they gone for a walk along the Mersey, or was it bleak and rainy? If only I could be there with them for a moment or two. “I’m afraid they take no interest in antiques.”

  “There’s got to be something . . .” He began moving between the tables, picking up toys he’d recognized from his own childhood—windup trains, balsa wood biplane gliders, a sheet metal steamroller.

  Liz gestured towards a large bright-yellow toy car, a Citroen Deux Chevaux made from Meccano parts, emblazoned with the words République Française PTT on each side. “The children would like that if we could bring it back. They made a fuss about one last summer in the Pyrenees.” She turned the toy round in her hands, remembering the cirque of peaks surrounding the village of Lescun.

  “Yes, but you’d need a jumble sale to find anything like that in England. Trev would surely ask you where it came from.”

  “You’re right.” She put the car back on the table.

  Tom gazed thoughtfully at the toy for a moment and then, with some trepidation in his voice, looked up and said, “Liz, I love you, but I hate to take you away from your kids like this.”

  “It’s not you taking me away, Tom.” She shook her head. “Besides, after them, you’re about the best thing in my life now. You make me better when I’m with them.” She reached down and rocked the little car back and forth on its wheels. “All these years working, I’ve gotten used to not showing anyone how much I miss them, trying not even to feel it myself. I can’t really. Sometimes I want to chuck my job . . . Just go home to them.” Her eyes glistened, but Liz blinked back the tears. She looked at the toy on the counter, remembering the summer walks with Ian and Olivia. “When I feel like that, I just have to get to grips with reality.” She smiled grimly. “I was with them when they were babies. But if I don’t work, we can’t stay afloat. I’ve known that for a long time. Trev’ll never earn enough to support us, I’m afraid.” Liz mulled a further thought and then came out with it. “If I were trapped at home, my resentment would just make life impossible for him. I don’t want the kids to see that anger. In some ways it’s better I’m gone so much.” Her eyes brightened. “But when I get home, there’s nothing more wonderful than Ian and Olivia rushing to hug me. You’ve never had any kids or you’d understand. You watch them grow. They’re part of you, the best part, the part you want to work at to get better.”