It took somewhat longer than that. We stowed Terence’s luggage, which consisted of a large Gladstone bag, two bandboxes, a valise, three hampers, a wooden crate, a tin box, a roll of rugs, and two fishing poles, in the prow, and mine in the stern, which completely filled the boat, so that we had to pull it all out and start again.
“We need to go at this scientifically,” Terence said. “Large items first, then fill in with the smaller.”
We did, starting with the Gladstone and ending with the rugs which we unrolled and crammed into corners. This time there was a space approximately a foot wide in the middle. Cyril immediately came over and lay down in it.
I felt I should volunteer to leave some of my bags behind, but as I had no idea what was in them, I decided I’d better not.
“I knew I should have brought Dawson,” Terence said. “Dawson’s a wonder at packing.”
I assumed that Dawson was his valet. Then again, it might be his pet raccoon.
“When I came up to Oxford, he managed to fit all Cyril’s and my earthly possessions in a single trunk with room left over. Of course, if he were here, there’d be his luggage to consider. And him.” He looked speculatively at the luggage. “Perhaps if we started with the smallest first—”
Eventually I suggested we tip Jabez an additional noinbob (whatever that was) and have him try. He did, jamming and mashing things in by brute force, and keeping up a running monologue. “Keep Jabez waiting half the day for his money,” he muttered, cramming the satchel under a seat, “and then expect him to pack the boat, as if he was a common servant. And then stand there watching Jabez like a pair of fools.”
We were. At any rate I was. Watching him with a sort of sick fascination. He had apparently not had the fierceness and tenacity bred out of him. I hoped there was nothing fragile in any of the boxes. Cyril, evicted from the boat, had gone back to sniffing at the covered basket, which must contain food. Terence pulled out his pocket watch and asked Jabez if he couldn’t go faster, which seemed to me extremely unwise.
“Faster, he says,” Jabez said, smashing in the side of Terence’s bandbox. “If they hadn’t brought along everything they own, it wouldn’t take this long. You’d think they were going to find the sources of the Nile. Serve ‘em right if she sinks.”
Jabez finally succeeded, after much dark muttering and some denting of the valise, to get everything stowed. It wasn’t scientific, and the pile in the prow looked like it might topple over at any moment, but there was space for the three of us.
“Right on schedule,” Terence said, snapping his watch shut and stepping into the boat. “Avast, mateys, we’re off. Step lively now.”
Cyril ambled into the boat, lay down on the boards, and went to sleep.
“Ahoy, Ned,” Terence said. “Time to shove off.”
I started for the boat, and Jabez stepped in front of me, his hand outstretched for a tip. I gave him a shilling, which was apparently too much. He broke into a snaggled smile and stepped back immediately, and I climbed into the boat.
“Welcome aboard,” Terence said. “This first bit’s rather tricky to navigate. You row to start, and I’ll be cox.”
I nodded and sat down at the oars, looking dubiously at them. I’d rowed some at school, but only with automatically coordinated supraskims. These oars were wooden and weighed a ton. And they didn’t appear to have any linkage. When I tried to move them together, one hit the water with a flat splash, and the other didn’t even make contact with it.
“Sorry,” I said, trying again. “I haven’t done much rowing since my illness.”
“It will come back to you,” Terence said cheerily. “It’s like riding a horse.”
The second time I got both oars in the water, and could hardly get them out again. I gave a mighty pull, as if I were lifting roof beams in Coventry Cathedral, and sent a fountain of water over everything in the boat.
“Pair of fools!” Jabez said to no one in particular. “Never been in a boat before. They’ll be drowned before they get to Iffley, and what’ll become of Jabez’s boat then?”
“I say, I’d better row to start,” Terence said, scrambling over to change places with me, “and you be cox.” He took the oars and lowered them expertly into the water together and out again with scarcely a splash. “Just till we’re through this tricky bit.”
This tricky bit was the bridge, and then a veritable forest of skiffs, punts, rowboats, and two large yellow-and-red-painted barges. Terence rowed energetically past them, shouting orders to me to pull the tiller lines straight, which I was trying to do, but the boat seemed to have something of the same tendency as Cyril and kept canting to the left.
In spite of my best efforts, we were drifting steadily sideways toward some willows and a wall.
“Hold her to starboard,” Terence shouted, “to starboard!”
I had no idea what starboard was, but I pulled experimentally on the tiller lines until the boat more or less straightened, and by that time we were past the boats and opposite a wide grassy field.
It took me a moment to realize the field was Christ Church Meadow, though not the one I knew. No dozers, no scaffolding, no billowing sheets of plastic. No cathedral rising up out of heaps of red sandstone and mortar and roof slates. No workmen shouting orders to the robot masons. No Lady Schrapnell shouting orders at the workmen. No pickets protesting the ruination of the environment, education, the skyline of Oxford, and things in general.
A trio of cows were placidly chewing their cuds where the west tower and its spire now stood, swathed in blue plastic and waiting for Lady Schrapnell and the Coventry City Council to complete the bell negotiations.
A dirt path led past them, and, halfway up it, two dons strolled toward Christ Church’s honey-colored walls, their heads bent together, discussing philosophy or the poems of Xenophon.
I wondered again how Lady Schrapnell had managed to talk them into letting her build there. Back in the Nineteenth Century, the city had tried for thirty years to build a mere road across Christ Church Meadow before it finally lost to the university, and later, when the tube came to Oxford, the outcry at the mention of a tube station there had been even greater.
But temporal physics had reached a point in its research where it couldn’t go anywhere without building a nuclear-powered fine-structure oscillator. And there was no money to be gotten from the multinationals, who’d lost interest in time travel forty years ago, when they found out they couldn’t rape and pillage the past. No money for buildings, either, or for fellowships or salaries. No money, period. And Lady Schrapnell was an extremely determined woman and extremely rich. And she had threatened to give the money to Cambridge.
“No, no,” Terence said, “you’re steering us into the bank!”
I hastily pulled on the lines and we headed back out into the current.
Ahead lay the college boathouses and the green-arched mouth of the Cherwell, and beyond that the gray tower of Magdalen and the long sweep of the Thames. The sky overhead was a gauzy blue, and, ahead, piled white clouds caught the sun. Near the far bank there were waterlilies, and between them the water was a deep, clear brown, like the Waterhouse nymph’s eyes.
“ ‘Dark brown is the river,’ ” I quoted, “ ‘golden is the sand,’ ” and then hoped that had been written before 1888.
“ ‘It flows along forever, with trees on either hand,’ ” Terence said, so apparently it had.
“Although actually it doesn’t,” Terence said. “After this next bit it’s mostly all fields till Iffley. It doesn’t flow along forever, either, of course, only as far as London. That’s the thing about poetry, it’s scarcely ever accurate. Take the Lady of Shalott. ‘She loosed the chain and down she lay; The broad stream bore her far away.’ She lies down in the boat and goes floating down to Camelot, which couldn’t possibly happen. I mean, one can’t steer lying down, can one? She’d have ended up stuck in the reeds a quarter of a mile out. I mean, Cyril and I always have trouble keeping the boat headed in a straight line, and we’re not lying down in the bottom of the boat where one can’t see anything, are we?”