I wasn’t listening. Muchings End, he’d said, and I knew as soon as I heard it, it was the name I’d been trying to remember. “Contact someone,” he’d said, and this was clearly the someone. His references to the river and my physician’s orders, his crooked mustache and identical blazer, couldn’t all be coincidences.
I wondered why he didn’t simply tell me who he was, though. There was no one else on the platform. I looked in the station window, trying to see if the station agent was eavesdropping, but I couldn’t see anything. Or perhaps he was just being cautious in case I wasn’t the right person.
I said, “I’m—” and the station door opened, and a portly middle-aged man wearing a bowler and a handlebar mustache came out. He tipped the bowler, grunted something undistinguishable, and went over to the notice board.
“I should like very much to go with you to Muchings End,” emphasizing the last two words. “A trip on the river will be a restful change from Coventry.”
I fished in my trouser pocket, trying to remember what Finch had done with the purse full of money. “How much do you need for the hire of the boat?”
“Sicksunthree,” he said. “That’s for a week’s hire. I’ve already put noin bob down.”
The purse was in my blazer pocket. “I’m not certain if I brought enough with me,” I said, tipping the bank note and coins out in my hand.
“There’s enough there to buy the boat,” Terence said. “Or the Koh-i-noor. This your kit?” he said, indicating my stacked luggage.
“Yes,” I said, and reached for the portmanteau, but he’d already grabbed it and one of the twine-tied boxes up in one hand, and the satchel and hamper in the other. I grabbed the other box and the carpetbag and the covered basket up and followed him.
“I told the hansom driver to wait,” he said, starting down the steps, but there was nothing outside the station except a mangy spotted hound, lazily scratching its ear with its hind leg. It paid no attention as Terence passed, and I felt another surge of jubilation that I was years and years from vicious dogs and downed Luftwaffe pilots, in a quieter, slower-paced, more decorous time.
“Uncivilized blighter,” Terence said. “I told him to wait. We’ll have to get a cab on Cornmarket.”
The hound shifted position and began licking its private parts. All right. Not entirely decorous.
And not all that slow. “Come along then,” Terence said. “There’s no time to lose,” and took off up Hythe Bridge Street at a near-gallop.
I followed at as fast a clip as I could manage, considering the luggage and Hythe Bridge Street, which was unpaved and badly rutted. It took all my attention to keep my footing and juggle the luggage.
“Come along then,” Terence said, pausing at the top of the hill. “It’s nearly noon.”
“Coming,” I said, adjusting the covered basket, which was slipping, and struggled up the hill to the top.
When I got there, I stopped, gaping as badly as the new recruit had at the cat. I was in the Cornmarket, at the crossroads of St. Aldate’s and the High, under the mediaeval tower.
I had stood here hundreds of times, waiting for a break in the traffic. But that was in Twenty-First Century Oxford, with its tourist shopping centers and tube stations.
This, this was the real Oxford, “with the sun on her towers,” the Oxford of Newman and Lewis Carroll and Tom Brown. There was the High, curving down to Queen’s and Magdalen, and the Old Bodleian, with its high windows and chained books, and next to it the Radcliffe Camera and the Sheldonian Theatre. And there, down on the corner of the Broad, was Balliol in all its glory. The Balliol of Matthew Arnold and Gerard Manley Hopkins and Asquith. Inside those gates was the great Jowett, with his bushy white hair and his masterful voice, telling a student, “Never explain. Never apologize.”
The clock in Cornmarket’s tower struck half past eleven, and all the bells in Oxford chimed in. St. Mary the Virgin, and Christ Church’s Great Tom, and the silvery peal of Magdalen, far down the High.
Oxford, and I was here in it. In “the city of lost causes” where lingered “the last echoes of the Middle Ages.”
“ ‘That sweet city with her dreaming spires,’ ” I said, and was nearly hit by a horseless carriage.
“Jump!” Terence said, lunging for my arm, and pulled me out of the way. “Those things are an absolute menace,” he said, looking longingly after it. “We’re never going to find a hansom in this mess. We’re better off walking,” and plunged in amongst a host of harried-looking women with aprons and market baskets, murmuring, “Sorry,” to them and tipping his hat with the hamper.
I followed him down Cornmarket, through the bustling crowd and past shops and greengrocers’. I glanced in the window of a hatter’s at the people reflected there, and stopped cold. A woman with a basket full of cabbages crashed into me and then went round me, muttering, but I scarcely noticed.
There hadn’t been any mirrors in the lab, and I had only been half aware of the garments Warder was putting on me. I had had no idea. I looked the very image of a Victorian gentleman off for an outing on the river. My stiff collar, my natty blazer and white flannels. Above all, my boater. There are some things one is born to wear, and I had obviously been fated to wear this hat. It was of light straw with a band of blue ribbon, and it gave me a jaunty, dashing look, which, combined with the mustache, was fairly devastating. No wonder Auntie had been so anxious to hustle Maud off.
On closer inspection, my mustache was a bit lopsided, and my eyes had that glazed, time-lagged look, but those could be remedied shortly, and the overall effect was still extremely pleasing, if I did say so my—
“What are you doing, standing there like a sheep?” Terence said, grabbing my arm. “Come along!” He led me across Carfax and down St. Aldate’s.
Terence kept up a cheerful stream of chatter as he went. “Look out for the tram rails. I tripped over one last week. Worse for the carriages, though, just the right size to catch their wheels, and over they go. Well, over I went, and lucky for me that the only thing coming was a farm wagon and a mule old as Methuselah, or I’d have gone to meet my Maker. Do you believe in luck?”
He crossed the street and took off down St. Aldate’s. And there was The Bulldog with its painted pub signboard of angry proctors chasing an undergraduate, and the golden walls of Christ Church, and Tom Tower. And the walled deanery garden, from which came the sound of children laughing. Alice Liddell and her sisters? My heart caught, trying to remember when Charles Dodgson had written Alice in Wonderland. No, it had been written earlier, in the 1860s. But there, across the street, was the shop where Alice had bought sweets from a sheep.
“The day before yesterday I’d have told you I didn’t believe in luck,” Terence said, trotting past the path to Christ Church Meadow. “But after yesterday afternoon, I’m a true believer. So many things have happened. Professor Peddick getting the trains mixed, and then you being there. I mean, you might have been going somewhere else altogether, or you mightn’t have had the money for the boat, or you mightn’t have been there at all, and then where would Cyril and I have been? ‘Fate holds the strings, and Men like children move but as they’re led: Success is from above.’ ”
A hansom cab pulled up beside us. “Tack ye summers, gemmun?” the driver said in a completely unintelligible accent.
Terence shook his head. “By the time we got all our luggage in, it’s faster to walk. And we’re nearly there.”
We were. There was Folly Bridge, and a tavern, and the river, with a ragtag of boats tied up to its edge.
“ ‘Fate, show thy force. What is decreed must be, and be this so,’ ” Terence said, crossing the bridge. “We go to meet our destiny.” He started down the steps toward the dock. “Jabez,” he called out to the man standing on the riverbank. “You haven’t rented our boat, have you?”