Autumn in Oxford: A Novel

by Alex Rosenberg

  He decided to walk to Baker Street. It was not more than a mile up the Edgware Road. His pace exceeded the convoy of red double-deckers, seemingly stopping at every corner, where Londoners queued with never-diminishing patience. But for the smoke, Tom almost enjoyed the treacle sweetness of the diesel lorries’ exhaust. The shafts of light they drove into the morning gloom made the roadway into a scene of cinematic mystery.

  Fully a block behind Tom, walking up the Edgware Road, was another man, almost exactly Tom’s height and build, wearing a coat and hat remarkably similar to his. This man had watched Tom and Liz separate on the platform at Oxford and momentarily worried that it was him they had spotted. Watching Liz go off with the next-door neighbour lady was a relief. He and his partner had been shadowing Tom off and on for the better part of a month now, with no reason to think they’d been noticed.

  “I saw your Mr. Wrought just now, on the kerb across the street, when I came back from my elevenses,” Liz’s assistant said with a bright smile.

  Play dumb! was her thought as Liz replied, “Oh, really? I’m not expecting him.”

  “Well, perhaps you should go along and see to him, Elizabeth.” Beatrice Russell always called Liz by her full Christian name. She smiled. Is that look conspiratorial? Liz asked herself. I think so. She pulled her jacket off the back of her chair and tried to look unconcerned as she walked out of the office.

  Tom saw Liz come out. Catching her eye, he walked down Baker Street to a nearby tea shop. He waited at the entry, and they found a booth.

  Liz began, “Well, that was a dog’s breakfast! Couldn’t shake that Selwyn woman. What’s more, she told me that it was you on the platform in front of me.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I said that I had noticed the resemblance but thought it was just someone who looked rather like you. Then she stuck with me right down to the underground and on to the Circle line. She even got off at Baker Street, walked me right up to the office. I had no choice but to go in. It’s worse. She made me promise to catch the train back this evening with her.”

  “What a limpet. Had no idea you were such friends.”

  “Neither did I.” She sighed. “Anyway, there goes the day. And it gets worse still. My P.A., Mrs. Russell, saw you just now. Surely she’s twigged to us. I don’t know what it means.”

  “I’m sorry. I had no idea where you went, how to reach you. So I came here, hoping I’d catch you coming or going.”

  “Well, at least that idea worked out. But the day is shot.” She squeezed his hand.

  “Never mind. I’ll go back to Oxford. I’ve plenty of work to do. Suddenly I’m the most popular book reviewer in England.”

  When Liz came back to the training department, Beatrice Russell smiled knowingly and volunteered, “Why don’t you just give Mr. Wrought our number here? I’ll be glad to keep track of things for both of you.” Then she put her finger to her lips to forestall any reply from Liz, who had to resist the urge to actually hug the woman. What should I tell her? Everything? Nothing? Some of the truth? Do as she says, Liz. Beatrice doesn’t want to know. She just wants to help. That’s best.

  Liz was right. Beatrice Russell had worked with her for several years. They had come to the training department together. She felt badly that Liz had to travel so much but knew she was supporting two children and a husband. So Beatrice had taken the travel arrangements in hand and tried to make them simple, comfortable, and workable. It was difficult, plotting an efficient circuit round the country for Liz, but Beatrice had become good at it.

  Nearly fifty, Beatrice was a widow. Like Liz, she too had once been a stranger to London. She’d come from a small fishery town on the Suffolk coast, Lowestoft, as a young woman. Her husband had been a fireman, killed in a flying bomb conflagration at almost the end of the war. She lived alone and liked it. There were no children. Instead, Beatrice Russell had two Jack Russell terriers. Fancy that, Liz would often think. They fended for themselves in a back garden during the workday. The only vice Beatrice allowed herself was active membership in the newly formed CND—Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Its iconic peace circle pin had become her only adornment. More than once she’d encouraged Liz to sign a petition, come to a rally, or make a contribution, but only in the gentlest way.

  Somehow she understood what Liz was experiencing. She wouldn’t judge.

  Liz was to visit a half-dozen branches of the Abbey National in Birmingham and its surroundings on a Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. Tom reorganized his tutorials and was waiting for her at Magdalen Bridge when her car pulled up at 2:00 p.m. As he hefted a heavy cloth bag into the back seat, she said, “What’s in the bag, burglar’s tools?”

  “Books. I have half a dozen to choose from for review. You’ll be busy most of each day, so I thought I’d combine work and play.”

  “Not a bad idea.” She let down the clutch, and they motored off. “Mrs. Russell has booked us into a lovely place in Warwick, at company expense this time. There’s a happy thought!”

  “Do you trust her?”

  “No choice, really. Can’t knock the knowledge out of her head. And complicity makes her an accomplice, no? I think our secret is safe with her.”

  After a long moment, she said, “Actually, we have other things to worry about.” She paused, deciding how many of the details to report. “Light me a cigarette.” She drew on it. “That biddy next door, Mrs. Selwyn, had to tell Trev all about seeing me at the train, and about you, or your double.”

  “Really? Why was she so interested?”

  “Perhaps you made an impression on her too?” Liz squeezed his hand. “Anyway, Trev mentioned it to me. I had to cheerfully go along with the story. Oh yes, I had seen him too, did look vaguely like Wrought from a distance. But not up close, where I was standing. Anyway, that seemed an end to it.”

  “And then?”

  “Well, this morning when I was packing my case, Trev came into the bedroom and noticed some of the lingerie we’d bought in Paris. I had laid out the half bra and the fishnet stockings on the bed. I thought I swept those up before he could be sure what they were.” She puffed again. “But then he asked me, in a jokey sort of way, who I was meeting in Birmingham.”

  Tom spent his days writing. There were reviews, the article he’d promised Foot for the Tribune on the Little Rock desegregation crisis, and a profile for the Manchester Guardian of Martin Luther King Jr., the American Negro leader who had been the victim of an assassination attempt in New York the previous month. Tom decided on an angle unlike other articles on this last subject. He would tell the story of how a long-time peace activist named Bayard Rustin had come to Montgomery just as the famous bus boycott started, taken away King’s handgun and rifles, and begun to instruct him in the effectiveness of Gandhi’s nonviolent resistance.

  When he finished, he began to worry. Are you being too clever by half again, Tom? Will the Guardian ask about your sources? You’ll have to tell them you knew Rustin when you were both in the party in New York in the ’30s. Will you have to tell them he was arrested after the war for loitering round public toilets? Maybe the whole angle was a mistake. What if papers in the United States picked it up? He asked Liz what she thought.

  She told him not to worry so much. “The story is important.”

  On Friday Liz drove them back into Oxford. She crossed the Magdalen Bridge and stopped just beyond, at the corner of High and Longwall Streets. The narrow lane led discreetly round New College towards Trinity.

  “So, weekend with the kids?” Tom wondered aloud.

  “Exactly.” She beamed at the thought. “I’ll take them for a Cotswolds walk tomorrow. They’ll like that.”

  “With Trev?”

  “I doubt it. He’s not much for outings with the children. You?”

  “I’d love to go.” The thought took hold of him—a day with Liz and her kids, a small taste of normality, of real life with her . . . and them.

  “Sorry, not what I meant, Tom. We can’t ri
sk it—the kids’d be sure to say something to Trevor.” He could see she was right. “I meant what will you do this weekend?”

  “Polish the piece we worked on a little more. There’s a concert at Holywell Music Room on Sunday morning I want to go to. The local prodigy, Jacqueline du Pre, is playing the Bach cello suites.”

  Tom walked away up Longwall Street, its eponymous wall hiding the lush green lawns of Magdalen College. So he didn’t see the small sedan that had stopped a hundred feet behind them and now came to the same corner. It hesitated, about to turn into the narrow lane after him, but then continued up the high street, its driver and his passenger agreeing there was too much risk of Tom noticing a single car moving slowly along behind him. They knew where he was going anyway.

  It rained hard the next day, Saturday. Liz would not take the children walking on a day like this, Tom thought. But it was a good day to spend in London. He had a dozen books reviewed and ready to sell to one or another of the used bookshops between Trafalgar Square and Oxford Street. The price they paid was not insignificant to someone on a don’s fellowship, even one who wrote for the broadsheets. Perhaps he’d find a cheap matinee in the West End as well.

  Tom had already placed most of the books at his usual buyer a block or so up the road from the Leister Square tube stop, and now he found himself looking in the window of Marks and Co. at 84 Charing Cross Road. As he peered in, the face of one of the customers looked familiar. Yes, it was an old friend from New York in the ’40s. Lona Cohen was a striking woman, to whom he had once taken a fancy, though she was older and married. He stepped into the shop. As the woman turned to leave, Tom touched her arm and said, “Why, hello, Lona. What a surprise seeing you here!”

  The woman’s face seemed to show dawning recognition, but then, in a very Mayfair girls’ school accent, she said, “So sorry, you’ve mistaken me for someone else.” She drew his hand off her arm and left the store quickly.

  Tom put down his last three books and asked if the proprietor was interested. He was, and Tom got a good price for them. On the point of leaving, he asked, “That lady who just left, what is her name? I am sure I’ve seen her somewhere before.”

  “Oh, that’s Mrs. Kroger, Helen Kroger, antiquarian bookseller.”

  Could two different people look that similar? It wasn’t just the looks, Tom realized. It was the smell, the same seductive scent that Lona Cohen had cast over him once in New York, which now came back with visceral force.

  Sunday morning dawned cloudy but without rain. It would be fine, at least by British standards, for Liz’s walk in the Cotswolds. As he prepared to leave for the du Pre cello concert, Tom thought how much he’d rather be with her and the children setting out for a Cotswolds village in search of a Rambler’s footpath.

  Tom’s telephone rang only just after he had left for the concert, so he missed Liz’s urgent call. And he had already passed through the Trinity gate into Broad Street when she tried the number at the porters’ lodge. “Hello. Have you seen Mr. Wrought? Has he passed through the gate yet?”

  “Haven’t noticed, ma’am.”

  Liz thought for a moment. How to put this without creating suspicion? “If he passes, please just tell him not to go to the concert.”

  “Very well. Is there a name?”

  “Tell him, it’s . . . Mrs. Russell.”

  The porter at the lodge scribbled a note and placed it in Tom’s pigeonhole.

  The Holywell Music Room was the oldest hall purpose-built for music in Europe. Set above a low retaining wall, the building was small and unimpressive outside. But its chapel-like interior had been recognized as acoustically superb by Handel.

  Almost since he had arrived at Oxford the year before, Tom had been attending Sunday morning concerts. The practice was almost an observance for nonbelievers. Walking down the Broad that early winter morning, the town was still—there wasn’t a motor to be heard in the roadway. The clouds cast a sombre twilight on the sepulchral silence of Broad Street, broken only by the murmur of a brace of churchgoers pedalling down Parks Road from Keble to St. Mary’s.

  Just as the young cellist began the saraband of the fifth suite, Tom’s eyes fell upon the familiar face in the pews of the gallery opposite. It was Trevor Spencer, staring intently at Tom. Composing his face, Tom moved his head back towards the cellist, leaned forwards, and rested his elbow on his knee. Then he cradled his face in his hand to cover it, and gazed at her intently for the remainder of the program.

  But he no longer had an ear for Bach. He certainly couldn’t get up and march through the row of other listeners in his pew. That would assure Trevor Spencer that he was seeing right. What’s the best strategy, Tom? Leave quickly at the end. Melt into the departing audience so that Spencer can’t find you? No. The audience in the building did not number more than 150. There simply wouldn’t be a large enough crowd to get lost in. If Spencer left first, he would only have to wait till Tom emerged from the sole entryway.

  No, your only strategy is to sit tight when the concert ends, then shuffle along to the exit with glacial slowness, inviting every lady in the audience to go ahead. Once in the vestibule, he’d duck into the gents’ lavatory, lock a stall behind him, and wait. If he had enough patience, Spencer would eventually leave. He wouldn’t come back in to search the gents, would he? He couldn’t force open a toilet stall, could he?

  Well, brazen it out. Don’t be a fool, Tom. Hiding would only strengthen any suspicion Spencer had formed. Behave normally. So what if Spencer did find him? Tom would accost him like a friend unexpectedly encountered after a lengthy separation. “Ah, Trev, so nice to see you . . . Yes, I’ve been back since before Michaelmas term began, living in college . . . How is Liz? And the children?”

  Could he pull it off? No, an encounter could end in disaster. Well, then, back to the sit-tight strategy.

  Her program completed, Jacqueline du Pre returned to the platform to acknowledge the extended ovation, which then died away slowly. Reluctantly Tom had to stand to allow others to pass him on the way to the exit. But then he seated himself again and opened the program, seemingly oblivious to the fact that the concert had ended. Surreptitiously he took things in by peripheral vision. To his relief, Spencer simply rose and moved out of the hall along with the audience on his side of the hall. When Tom was the last person still in the room, he moved towards the exit. Nipping quietly into the gents’ lavatory, Tom found an empty stall among the men making use of the facility and locked it behind him. And there he sat until, twenty minutes later, the custodian came in to clean the facility.

  It was raining when Tom emerged into the street. There was no sign of Trevor Spencer. Could he not have noticed you, Tom? Did he not recognize you? Perhaps he just didn’t care. Tom began to feel himself something of a fool, but a lucky one. With a spring in his step, he returned to College. Seeing the note, he understood that Liz had sought to warn him. Well, he said to himself, a near miss.

  For Tom it was a near miss. For the two men who had followed Tom from Trinity and Spencer down from Park Town crescent, it was the beginning of a plan.

  By the time Liz drove home from their afternoon’s walk, the children were cold, wet, and tired. Pulling up the handbrake, she turned to the back seat. “Go along inside, take off your wellies in the hall, and I’ll make some tea.”

  She was disappointed not to see a warming flame on the gas grate in the lounge, but went through to the kitchen and reached for the kettle. There was Trev reading Sunday papers in the nook that overlooked the muddy and leafless back garden.

  He put down the Sunday Express. “Well, it looks like the neighbour lady was right and you were wrong.”

  “Oh, what about?” Liz was desperate to not know.

  “Come off it.” The words were ominous, but the tone was casual, not at all argumentative. “About Tom Wrought.”

  “Really?” Could she sound just surprised enough?

  “I saw him at the du Pre recital in Holywell Music Room. But I don’t th
ink he noticed me. He was alone. No Barbara Wrought. But then, she doesn’t like that sort of thing as much as he does.”

  Liz decided silence on the matter was the best response. She busied herself with the tea, and the children came into the kitchen. “Lovely walk. We started at Stow on the Wold—such a perfect little town.”

  Trevor had returned to his newspaper. It’s just as well, thought Liz.

  Trevor Spencer didn’t want to be suspicious. He recognized that it was not in his interest. No use disturbing an agreeable state of affairs. It was true his wife wouldn’t accommodate him in the bedroom. But after more than a decade of marriage, that was probably not so unusual. He was only rarely aroused, and neither of them wanted more children. He could live with it.

  Still, it gnawed at him; it was a scratch he felt he had to itch. Despite her demur, it had troubled him to see Wrought that morning.

  Twice, Trevor could recall, Tom Wrought had taken Liz to high table at Trinity. It was true that each time, Tom had invited him, but Trev had to decline. Yet it was, to say the least, unusual to take a woman, let alone another man’s wife, to dine in hall. And she’d accepted with alacrity. Then there was the “misidentification” by the biddy next door and the underclothes she’d never worn before, for him at least. And now this sighting, with no apparent interest from Liz at all. Why?

  Just to put the matter to rest, he’d do something. What exactly? First he’d check the lecture lists in the faculty of history. Was Wrought lecturing? Then he could ask for Wrought at Trinity. Was he living in college or out? Perhaps it was just a visit.