Operation Pax (41 page)

In the upper reading-room the long day’s task was almost done, and learning had turned to packing up for the night. The unashamed were yawning, the reflective were finally sorting out their musings, the industrious were gathering up sheaves of notes. In its hutch in one corner the Emett-like conveyor belt moaned with a suggestion of weariness stoically borne; in another corner Bodley’s Librarian was amiably assisting an Ethiopian to decipher a manuscript, and for this purpose he superimposed three pairs of spectacles each upon the last. A broken light still struggled through the broad Tudor windows, and sent long, soft shadows exploring across the littered, or ordered, desks. The people continuing here and there to get up and go were commonplace and familiar; at the same time it was possible to feel them as growing shadowy and insubstantial – a race of middle spirits, grown half ethereal with long feeding on books, and presently to be succeeded, as the dark came down, by other spirits wholly transmuted – the veritable ghosts to whom the tremendous place most truly belonged. Bodley at midnight, Jane thought, must be the strangest of all places ever reared by mortal hands.

Miss Butterton – Jane Appleby forty years on, Jane Appleby as she would be if the transmuting years were to wash over her here – was gone; her tiny duodecimo and sextodecimo volumes were marshalled into disciplined ranks, as if waiting to stand guard through the night. And Dr Undertone was gone too. But his desk was empty.

Jane paused for a moment, disconcerted. Then she turned away and retraced her steps down the reading-room. There was an assistant sitting at the table near the great catalogue. She went over and spoke to him. ‘Has Dr Undertone finished with all his books, do you know?’

The man nodded. There was nothing out-of-the-way in the inquiry, for in Bodley people are always mildly hunting one another’s volumes. ‘Yes. As he went out at lunchtime he said that he would need none of them again. So they were cleared.’

‘Simply all put back on the shelves?’

‘Yes. Dr Undertone spoke quite decidedly – in fact curiously so. I’m afraid it will be too late to get anything back for you now.’

‘Thank you.’ If Jane had been disconcerted before, she was now nonplussed. But she asked one more question, although she already knew the answer to it. ‘There wouldn’t be any record of the books he’s been using?’

‘Oh, no.’ The man was surprised. ‘The books go back on the shelves and the slips are destroyed.’

‘Yes – I see.’ Jane moved away. An understanding of the extreme queerness of what had occurred came to her fully as she walked towards the door. If in all the wide world the little man had sought an inviolate hiding place for his scrap of paper he could scarcely have found a better than he had done. For the paper now lay between the leaves of one among several million books. If old Dr Undertone’s present studies were markedly off a beaten track – and with so immensely learned a person they almost certainly were – it might be a generation, or even a hundred years, before – quite fortuitously – the thing was again held in human hands. It was Dr Undertone alone who could now abbreviate this process.

So struck was Jane by this strange consideration that she stopped dead in her tracks – thereby just avoiding, as it happened, being bumped into by a hurrying figure now entering the reading-room. She stood aside, gave the figure an abstracted glance, and saw that it was Geoffrey’s uncle, Dr Ourglass. Her heart sank a little. He was certainly the most harmless of men. But – just at the moment – she had no list for a further colloquy with him. In a moment, however, this apprehension turned out to be groundless. Dr Ourglass had not noticed her. He hurried down the reading-room with a purposeful air not altogether common in him. No doubt he wanted to verify a reference before the place closed. When Jane last glimpsed him he had stopped, disconcerted, before an empty desk. So he, too, had been balked of some book.

It had been Dr Undertone’s desk
. Jane was halfway down the sixty-four steps, and had taken six of the right-angled turns, when this fact confronted her. Her head whirled – much as if she had been taking the right-angled turns much too fast. Then she turned and ran upstairs. When she reached the upper reading-room again it was to find Dr Ourglass departed. Exercising some lofty privilege, he must have gone down in the lift.

Jane came downstairs again – slowly, this time – and in the Bodleian quadrangle stopped to think. One or two readers came out and passed her; a nondescript man was examining the Pembroke statue; another nondescript man was staring at the effigies on the ornate East Tower. Jane turned to her right and emerged into Radcliffe Square. It was just here that they had got him…

Again standing still, and absently watching through the great arched windows of the Camera young persons for the time more studious than herself absorbed in the reading of law or of English literature, she firmly dismissed the behaviour of Dr Ourglass as coincidental and distracting. Old Dr Undertone was her quarry. She knew that he was a Fellow of St Gregory’s. And, almost certainly, he was a bachelor and lived in college. Even at ninety-six, only a bachelor could have looked at her quite as he had done that morning – as if she had been a camel or a crocodile. And, remembering that look, Jane hesitated. Better leave it to John. Dr Undertone might decidedly not welcome the visit, close upon his dinner hour, of a beast of burden or a creature of the mud claiming the status and consideration of a member of the University.

But Jane Appleby – at this late stage of our narrative it can, like some other things, no longer be concealed – was a girl of impetuous and even headstrong disposition, lightly disguised by an air of learning. She ought to have been in Somerville; she had been told to remain there by an admired brother greatly senior to herself; nevertheless her legs were now taking her rapidly in the direction of St Gregory’s College. There are no long distances at Oxford, and in five minutes she had passed through the gates. ‘Can you tell me,’ she asked the porter, ‘which are Dr Undertone’s rooms?’

‘Number five staircase in the next quadrangle, madam.’ The man had hesitated before replying. Probably the inquiry was unprecedented; in all Dr Undertone’s seventy-odd years at St Gregory’s no female had ever inquired for him before. But Jane marched on. The second quadrangle was small and high and dark and damp; its walls – like many stone walls in Oxford – tattered and peeling; evening mist was beginning to thicken in it and lie in almost palpable folds, as if nature were concerning herself with the weaving of a shroud.

Jane found number five staircase. The stone treads were worn and hollowed; the walls were grimy and flaking; there was an indescribable smell – the smell of centuries of food and wine and polished leather. Dr Undertone had rooms on the first floor. Jane climbed. The whole quadrangle was very silent.

She stopped on the landing and listened. There was no sound. Dr Undertone’s oak was not sported and she knocked at the door. There was no reply. She knocked again, without result. Perhaps he was a bit deaf. Indeed, he might well be. And he would have several rooms, and perhaps be in a farther one… Jane knocked a third time and waited. Perhaps she should go down again and find the scout who worked on the staircase. Probably Dr Undertone kept a personal servant who might be discovered in some dungeon decanting port or counting claret… Jane gave a fourth and perfunctory knock, opened the door and peeped in.

The room was large and lofty, and completely surrounded with books. The only light was from a single candle, set in a candlestick with a reflector to it. This had probably been a bold innovation of Dr Undertone’s in the eighteen-eighties. He must have turned conservative before the spread of gas or the invention of electricity. There was a dull glow from an open fire which had been allowed to go almost out. It played upon the surface of a large, shabby desk, piled with disordered books and papers. Everywhere the books overflowed from the walls into the room; they were piled on chairs, on occasional tables, on decaying horsehair sofas, on the threadbare and ragged Turkey carpet. On other chairs – since there was no wall space for them – pictures were propped with the air of having been set down there many decades before: photographs of athletic groups fading into mere yellow stains, as those they represented must, for the most part, have already crumpled into dust; photographs, equally ancient, of dead and buried St Gregory’s dons assembled round dead and buried royalty; copies of Raphael Madonnas and Murillo saints such as mothers used to give to undergraduate sons with injunctions to attend the sermons of Dr Pusey. Over the mantelpiece was a portrait of Archbishop Tait, and directly under it a small shield displaying the arms of Rugby School. On the desk, in a silver frame, was a photograph of an early Victorian lady. All Dr Undertone’s life was concentrated in this room. But Dr Undertone himself was absent.

To go farther would not be decent. She must try – Jane decided – to find a servant and inquire when Dr Undertone might be able to receive a visitor. But as she was about to close the door softly, and exp1ore the situation downstairs, another door opened at the far side of the room. It was a manservant. Perhaps he had heard her.

Jane took a step forward. ‘Is Dr Undertone at home?’

‘Yes, miss.’ The man closed the door behind him. ‘Never more so, if you ask me.’

Jane hesitated. ‘Do you think he can see me?’

‘Yes, miss.’

‘Then will you tell him –’

‘I can’t tell him anything, miss. He’s dead.’

Jane felt rather queer. She was seeing and hearing too much of death today. ‘Dr Undertone has died – this afternoon?’

‘Just after luncheon, miss. When he came back from the Bodleian he wasn’t looking at all well. And I think he knew it was coming, for he ordered an extra chop.’

‘An extra chop?’

‘Yes, miss – for his luncheon. “Finch,” he said, “two chops” – just like that. And he ate them’. The man paused. ‘Ate them right down to the bone, the Doctor did.’ He spoke with a good deal of pride.

Jane considered. ‘I hope I shall be able to do that.’

‘That’s right, miss.’ The man nodded approval. ‘And he drank a couple of glasses of burgundy. Then, when I came in to clear, he flew into a terrible rage.’

‘A rage?’

‘A terrible rage, miss. It was fearful to watch. “You rascal,” he said. The Doctor often addressed me like that, miss. He was a good honest-spoken gentleman of the old school. “You rascal,” he said, “when did you uncork that wine?” And he stood up, all swollen and purple in the face. “How often have I told you,” he said, “that burgundy must breathe?” And then, miss, he fell dead. It was what you might call a very peaceful end.’

‘I suppose it was.’

‘I’ve seen worse, miss, by a long way. For instance–’ The man checked himself. ‘But such talk isn’t proper to a young lady. I don’t expect, miss, that you’d ever seen death?’

Jane smiled rather wanly. ‘I have – as a matter of fact.’

The man’s serious face lit up. ‘Then perhaps, miss, you’d care to view the body? Very fine it is. Just like a baby.’

‘Thank you…but I think I’d rather–’ Jane scarcely knew how she got out of the room and into the air, now turned more damp and raw, of the little quadrangle. It was still very silent, and this time she knew why… From somewhere on the other side a wafer of eaten stone detached itself from the wall and fell with a dull, small explosion. Change and decay she thought, in all around I see. And she hurried from St Gregory’s. Nothing, she was sure, would ever bring her back there.

Moreover she should be in college. A sense of urgency so possessed her that she took a taxi, pausing only to scrutinize the driver. He was elderly and uninterested.

A telephone message was waiting for her. It said simply ‘Ten o’clock – John.’ Which was something – but she disliked its brevity. She looked at her watch. In a few minutes she would have to go into hall and dine with some two hundred of her kind. The prospect rose before her as unusually depressing. Her mind had ceased to work, either anxiously or eagerly, on the problem of Geoffrey’s peril, the chances of saving him, what John would prove to have done. She felt simply that she had come to a dead stop, that all the wishes and fears left in her were very small and very futile, that life was bad and Oxford worse. But her body was shockingly tired, and perhaps it was only for a time that it was dictating this craven line of thought. The only sound resource was to find the next thing to do, and do it. But there wasn’t anything… And then she remembered that there was. She had a duty to walk round to the Radcliffe Infirmary and inquire about Remnant. Perhaps they had been able to send him away. On the other hand, they might have had to clap him into bed.

She ran into him under the archway by the lodge. After the manner of Oxford males preparing for a foray into unknown regions, he was making a cautious survey of Somerville in the gathering darkness. His arm was in a black silk sling. But he had managed to change, and was now dressed in an immaculate dark suit, like a fashionable undergraduate prepared to go up to town. The effect needed only a hard hat and an umbrella to be complete – and it was disconcerting. Jane felt that he was a stranger, after all. But Remnant smiled, and she realized that she had guessed wrong. ‘Come along,’ he said. ‘We need dinner badly.’

‘Are you all right?’

‘Perfectly all right, thank you. But hungry – as I say.’

‘And do you often dress like that?’

Remnant nodded his head seriously. ‘Only change I have. That and a pair of pyjama trousers. Everything else gone up the spout to support the wife and little nippers… Any news?’

‘Yes and no. No news from John – nothing about Geoffrey. But I have found out something queer myself.’

Remnant looked at her, she thought, with momentary apprehensiveness. ‘Something to tell?’

‘Oh, yes. And John’s coming to see me at ten.’

‘We can eat quite a lot by then. Where would you like to go? Mitre? George?’

‘If the family is right down on the breadline like that, Mr Remnant, you oughtn’t to be thinking of going anywhere at all.’