Chapter Twelve

As she walked down Broad Street at 7.40 a.m. the following morning (Thursday), Christine Greenaway was thinking (still thinking) about the man who had spoken to her the previous evening in Ward 7C on the top floor of the JR2. (It was only on rare occasions that she welcomed her father’s pride in his ever-loving daughter!) It wasn't that she’d been obsessively preoccupied with the man ever since; but there had been a semi-waking, overnight awareness of him. All because he'd asked her, so nicely, to look up something for him in the Bodley. So earnest, so grateful, he’d seemed. And that was silly, really, because she'd willingly have helped him, anyway. That's why she'd become librarian in the first place: to be able to locate some of landmarks in the fields of History and Literature, and provide where she could the correct map-references for so many curious enquiries. Even as a five-year-old, with blonde plaits reaching half-way down her bony back, she'd envied the woman in the Summertown Library who similarly located tickets somewhere in the long drawers behind the high counter; envied, even more, the woman who stamped the dates in the front of the borrowed books, and inserted each little ticket into its appropriate, oblong folder. Not that she, Christine Greenaway, performed any longger such menial tasks herself. Almost forgotten now were those inevitable queries of who wrote The Wind the Willows; for she, Christine, was now the senior of the three august librarians who sat at the northern end of the Bodleian's Lower Reading Room, where her daily duties demanded assistance to both senior and junior members of the University: checking slips, identifying shelf-marks, suggesting reference-sections, making and taking phone-calls (one, yesterday, from the University of Uppsala And over these last years she had felt a sense of importance and enjoyment in her job – of functioning happily in workings of the University.

Of course, there had been some major disappointed in her life, as there had been, she knew, with most folk. Married at twenty-two, she had been a divorcee at twenty three. No other woman on his part; no other man on hers – although there'd been (still were) so many opportunities No! It was simply that her husband had been so immature and irresponsible – and, above all, so boring! Once the pair of them had got down to running a home, kept, a monthly budget, checking bank-statements – well, she'd known he could never really be the man for her. And as things now stood, she could no longer stomach the prospect of another mildly ignorant, semi-aggressively macho figure of a bed-mate. Free as she was of any financial worries, she could do exactly as she wished about issues that were important to her; and she had become a modestly active member of several organizations, including Greenpeace, CND, Ramblers' Association, and the RSPB. Quite certainly, she would never join one of those match-making societies with the hope of finding a more interesting specimen than her former spouse. If ever she did look for another husband, he would have to be someone she could, in some way, come to respect: to respect for his conversation or his experience his intellect or his knowledge or his – well, his anything an all, really, except a pride in his sexual prowess. So what (she asked herself) had all this got to do with him'? Not much to look at, was he? Balding, and quite certainly carrying considerable excess weight around the midriff. Though, to be honest with herself, she was beginning to feel a grudging regard for those men who were just slightly overweight, perhaps because she herself seemed never able to put on a few pounds – however much she over-indulged in full-cream cakes and deep-fried fish and chips.

Forget him! Forget him, Christine!

Such self-admonition prevailed as she walked that morning down the Broad, past Balliol and Trinity on her left, before crossing over the road, just before Blackwell's, and proceeding, sub imperatoribus, up the semi-circular steps to the gravelled courtyard of the Sheldonian. Thence, keeping to her right, she walked past the SILENCE PLEASE notice under the archway, and came out at into her real home territory – the Quadrangle of the Schools.

For many days, when six years earlier she had first started working at the Bodleian, she had been conscious of the beautiful setting there. Over the months and years, though, she had gradually grown over-familiar with what the postcards on sale in the Proscholium still called The Golden Heart of Oxford'; grown familiar, as she'd regularly trodden the gravelled quad, with the Tower of the Five Orders to her left, made her way past the bronze statue the third Earl of Pembroke, and entered the Bodleian Library through the great single doorway in the West side, beneath the four tiers of blind arches in their gloriously mellowed stone.

Different today though – so very different! She felt once again the sharp irregularities of the gravel-stones beneath the soles of her expensive, high-heeled, leather shoes. And she was happily aware once more of the mediaeval Faculties painted over those familiar doors around the quad. In particular, she looked again at her favourite sign: SCHOLA NATURALIS PHILOSOPHIAE, the gilt capital-letters set off, with their maroon border, against a background of the deepest Oxford-blue. And as she climbed the wooden staircase to the Lower Reading Room, Christine Greenaway reminded herself, with a shy smile around her thinly delicious lips, why perhaps it had taken her so long to re-appreciate those neglected delights that were all around her.

She hung her coat in the Librarians' Cloakroom, and started her daily duties. It was always tedious, that first hour (7.45-8.45 a.m.), clearing up the books left on the tables from the previous day, and ensuring that the new day's readers could be justifiably confident that the Bodley's books once more stood ready on their appointed shelves.

She thought back to the brief passages of conversation the previous evening, when he'd nodded over to her (only some six feet away):

'You work at the Bodleian, I hear?'

'Uh – huh!'

'It may be – it is! – a bit of a cheek, not knowing you… '

' – but you'd like me to look something up for you.'

Morse nodded, with a winsome smile.

She'd known he was some sort of policeman – things like that always got round the wards pretty quickly. His eyes had held hers for a few seconds, but she had been conscious neither of their blueness nor of their authority: only their melancholy and their vulnerability. Yet she had sensed that those complicated eyes of his had seemed to look, somehow, deep down inside herself, and to like what they had seen.

'Silly twerp, you are!' she told herself. She was behaving like some adolescent schoolgirl, smitten with a sudden passion for a teacher. But the truth remained – that for that moment she was prepared to run a marathon in clogs and calipers for the whitish-haired and gaudily pyjamaed occupant of the bed immediately opposite her father's.