Gavin chuckled and added, “Appleyard’s aim was somewhat uncertain, and he demolished most of the property in between Balliol and here, including Jesus College; but the Master of Balliol ran up his white flag, and we have all lived equably ever after.”
The three Students were put in a good humour by this anecdote, and ran over the salient points of the campaign among themselves, forgetting their visitors. Mopping his forehead, Gavin said, “Some of the colleges are built like little fortresses; it is pleasant to see this aspect is to some extent functional.”
“Has the lake we sailed over to reach Folly Bridge any particular history?” Greybeard inquired.
“Particular meaning ‘pertaining to’? Why, yes and no, although nothing so dramatic — nothing so full of human interest, shall we say — as the Balliol campaign,” Morton said. “The Meadow Lake, as our local men know it, covers ground that was always liable to flood, even in the palmy days of the Thames Conservancy, rest their souls. Now it is a permanent flood, thanks to the work of undermining the banks carried out by an army of coypus.”
“Coypu is an animal?” Martha asked.
“A rodent, madam, of the echimyidae family, hailing from South America, now as much a native of Oxford as Gavin or I — and I fancy will continue to be so long after we are put to rest, eh, Gavin? You might not have seen the creature on your travels, since it is shy and conceals itself. But you must come and see our menagerie, and meet our tame coypus.”
He escorted them through several odorous rooms, in which he kept a number of animals in cages. Most of them ran to him, and appeared glad to see him.
The coypus enjoyed a small pool set in the stone slabs of a ground floor room. They looked like a cross between a beaver and a rat. Morton explained how they had been imported into the country back in the twentieth century to be bred on farms for their nutria fur. Some had escaped, to become a pest throughout much of East Anglia. In several concentrated drives, they had been almost exterminated; after the Accident, they had multiplied again, slowly at first and then, hitting their stride like so many other rapid-breeding creatures, very fast. They spread westwards along rivers, and it now seemed as if they covered half the country.
“They will be the end of the Thames,” Morton said. “They ruin any watercourse. Fortunately, they more than justify their existence by being both very good to eat and to wear! Fricasseed coypu is one of the great consolations of our senility, eh, Vivian? Perhaps you have observed how many people are able to afford their old bones the luxury of a fur coat.”
Martha mentioned the pine martens they had seen.
“Eh, very interesting! They must be spreading eastwards from Wales, which was the only part of Britain where they survived a century ago. All over the world, there must be far-reaching changes in animal behaviour and habitat; if only one could have another life in which to chart it all… Ah well, that’s not a fruitful thing to wish, is it?”
Morton finished by offering Martha a job as an assistant to his menagerie keeper, and advising Greybeard to see a farmer Flitch, who was wanting a man for odd jobs.
Joseph Flitch was an octogenarian as active as a man twenty years his junior. He needed to be. He supported a house full of nagging women, his wife, his wife’s two hoary old sisters, their mother, and two daughters, one prematurely senile, the other permanently crippled with arthritis. Of this unhappy crew of harridans, Mrs. Flitch was, perhaps because the rule in her household was the survival of the fiercest, undoubtedly the fiercest. She took an instant spite to Greybeard.
Flitch led him round to an outhouse, shook his hand, and engaged him for what Norman Morton had said would be a fair price. “Oi knows as you will be a good man by the way the missus took against you,” he declared, speaking in a broad Oxfordshire that at first barely escaped incomprehensibility.
He was — not unnaturally in the circumstances — a morose man. He was also a shrewd and enterprising man, as Greybeard saw, and ran an expanding business. His farm was at Osney, on the edge of Meadow Lake, and he employed several men on it. Flitch had been one of the first to take advantage of the changing natural conditions, and used the spreading reed beds as a supply of thatch materials. No brick or tile was made in the locality; but several of the better houses thereabouts were handsomely covered in a deep layer of Farmer Flitch’s thatch.
It was Greybeard’s job to row himself about the lake, harvesting armful after armful of the reeds. Since he used his own boat for this, Flitch, a fair dealer, presented him with a gigantic warm and waterproof nutria coat, which had belonged to a man who died in debt to him. Snug in the coat, Greybeard spent most of his daylight hours working slowly about the lake, feeling himself absorbed between the flat prospect of water and marsh and the mould of sky. It was a period of quiet punctuated by the startlements of water birds; sometimes he filled the dinghy with an abundance of reed, and could then spend half an hour fishing for his and Martha’s supper. On these occasions, he saw many different sorts of rodent swimming in and out the swampy places: not only water rats, but the larger animals, beaver, otter, and the coypu in whose skin he was clad. Once he saw a female coypu with young being suckled as they swam along.
He accepted that hard-worked time among the reeds; but he did not forget the lesson he had gained at Sparcot, that serenity came not from the external world, but from within. If he needed reminding, he had only to cut reeds in his favourite bay. From there he had a view of a large burial place, to which almost every day a grey knot of mourners came with a coffin. As Flitch drily remarked, when Greybeard commented on the graveyard, “Ah, they keep a-planting of ’em, but there ain’t any more of ’em growing up.”
So he would then go home to Martha, often with his beard coated with frost, back to the draughty room in Killcanon that she had succeeded in turning into a home. Both Charley and Pitt lived outside Christ Church, where they had secured cheaper and more tumbledown lodgings; Charley, whom they saw most days, had secured a job of sorts in a tannery; Pitt had returned to his old game of poaching and made little attempt to seek out their company; Greybeard saw him once along the south bank of the lake, a small and independent old figure.
On the darkest mornings, Greybeard was at the great college gate at six, waiting for it to be opened to go to work. One morning, when he had been working for Flitch for a month, a bell in the ruinous Tom Tower above his head began to toll.
It was New Year’s Day, which the inhabitants of Oxford held in festival.
“I don’t expect any work off you today,” Flitch said, when Greybeard showed himself at the little dairy. “Life’s short enough as well as being long enough — you’re a young man, you are, go and enjoy yourself.”
“What year is it, Joe? I’ve lost my calendar and forgotten where we are.”
“What’s it matter where we are? I barely keep the score of my own years, never mind the world’s. You go on home to your Martha.”
“I’m just thinking. Why wasn’t Christmas Day celebrated?”
Flitch straightened up from the sheep he was milking and regarded Greybeard with an amused look. “You mean why should it be celebrated? I can tell you’re no sort of a religious man, or you wouldn’t ask that. Christmas was invented to celebrate the birth of God’s son, wasn’t it? And the Students in Christ Church reckon as it aren’t in what you might call good taste to celebrate birth any more.” He moved his stool and pail to a nanny goat and added, “Course, if you were under tenancy to Balliol or Magdalen, now they do recognize Christmas still.”