“Go and sit down,” said Rowan. “I’ll see to it.”
Later that evening at dinner, Elizabeth told the story of the vicious light switch to her table partners with considerably more aplomb and self-deprecation than she had felt at the time. “And to top it all off, it wasn’t even my room!” she concluded with a laugh. “It was Susan’s, but she made me swap with her because she didn’t like the view. Just my luck!”
No, thought Rowan with a heavy heart. Just mine.
The next morning, Rowan endeavored to be cheerful during breakfast, but his thoughts were elsewhere. His face was beginning to show the strain of too much planning and too little success. He had got very little sleep, and he made only a perfunctory show of paying attention to the conversation of his breakfast partners, the Warrens. Fortunately, since they were pontificating about their children, his long lapses into silence went unnoticed.
At ten o’clock he downed his coffee and signaled for the last of the stragglers to finish their meals and prepare to depart. “You will need coats today,” he warned them. “It’s rather windy.”
“I’ll just be a minute,” said Frances Coles, scooping up the uneaten pastries from beside her plate.
Eyeing Frances’ slender figure, Nancy Warren sighed. “Where does she put it all?”
“In her bag,” snapped Rowan.
A short time later the troop marched down the front steps of the Randolph and set off to see the dreaming spires of Oxford. To everyone’s quiet amusement, Susan had appeared wearing her newly acquired navy coat, identical to Martha Tabram’s. As predicted, however, Martha appeared oblivious to the occurrence, although she did manage not to walk in the vicinity of Susan.
Oxford really was a perfect town for a tour, Rowan reflected, as he led the procession: compact, picturesque, and with historical associations for every taste. There were plenty of photo opportunities for Charles. Mystery readers like Susan could visit Balliol College, alma mater of Peter Wimsey, and scour the campus for scenes from the Edmund Crispin novels. Elizabeth MacPherson could see the cross in the street marking the place where the martyrs were burnt, and the church where Amy Robsart was buried. For Kate, the TV buff and moviegoer, he could offer vistas from Brideshead Revisited and Dreamchild. The intellectuals would enjoy the descriptions of the various colleges and a brief look at the Bodleian Library. And for the rest-the easiest tour of alclass="underline" the Oxford of Alice in Wonderland. The two-hour tour of the city that he conducted that morning was a skillful blend of all these, as he walked them from college to college, reeling off anecdotes dredged up from his prodigious memory. All the while his mind was busy on another track altogether.
He marched them out to Somerville College, which boasted Dorothy L. Sayers among its graduates. That venerable institution for women was not located in the cluster of other colleges, but was a good distance away from the city center-and scarcely worth the walk when supplemented by Susan’s droning recital of the plot of Gaudy Night in meticulous detail.
“And it wasn’t her best book to begin with,” muttered Maud Marsh.
They admired the Radcliffe Camera and the Sheldonian Theatre, while Rowan fantasized about the possibility of throwing Susan out a window of either one. They walked through the Bodleian courtyard and into the churchyard of St. Mary the Virgin, where Elizabeth instituted a search for the final resting place of Amy Robsart. A clerk in the church gift shop told her that a small plaque in the chancel was the only trace of the ill-fated lady of Leicester.
Susan kept saying that she didn’t see how students could get any studying done at Oxford, since all the colleges bordered on streets that hummed with incessant traffic. The others contrived to ignore her remarks.
“It isn’t like the American university system,” said Rowan. “Traditionally, tutors made assignments entirely on an individual basis.”
“But suppose you don’t want to learn anything?” asked Elizabeth.
“Then you don’t,” Rowan replied.
Elizabeth considered it. “What about graduate school? Did it take you two years to get your master’s?”
The guide sighed. Trust her to ask. “At Oxford, a graduate is automatically awarded a master’s degree upon graduation if he pays an additional fee.”
“What?” howled Elizabeth. “You mean the only difference between a B.A. and an M.A. at Oxford is fifty bucks?”
“Less than that in my day, I believe,” Rowan admitted.
“I am going to drown myself,” Elizabeth declared. “Now you tell me! After I’ve spent umpteen months of my life writing term papers for that gang of pedants in Virginia! Honestly!”
“Typical,” sniffed Maud Marsh. “Did I tell you about their so-called lemonade over here?”
The tour continued past Braesnose and looped back past a cordoned area of renovation work beside the library.
“And this is the back wall of Exeter College,” Rowan was saying. “You see that it is quite high and without footholds. As I am too old to demonstrate, let me just tell you how undergrads used to sneak over the wall to get in after curfew…” Exeter, he thought. The very name of the college was urging him on. Exit-her. Forty-five minutes later their ramble had led them to the gardens of Christ Church, which is both college and cathedral. It was there, he told them, that Charles Dodgson-in literature Lewis Carroll-came as an undergraduate in 1851 and remained for the rest of his life. His literary inspiration, Alice, was the daughter of the Reverend Henry George Liddell, the dean of Christ Church, and many of the images in Alice and Wonderland are based on familiar objects in Oxford.
“Name one,” said Maud Marsh, still resentful over the non-isle of Glastonbury and other misrepresentations.
Rowan was ready for her. He had done his homework on Oxford. “The brass firedogs in the Great Hall at Christ Church have the figure of a woman’s head set on a long stalk of a neck. Remember when Alice drinks the potion and stretches out of shape? The Tenniel illustration greatly resembles those firedogs. And the illustration of Alice and the frog knocking at the door shows that they are standing at the Chapter House door. And the deer at Magdalen are featured-”
Susan Cohen interrupted. “What is that place across the street?”
“That was the shop kept by the sheep in Through the Looking Glass,” said Rowan triumphantly. “Now it is called Alice’s Shop and, appropriately enough, it specializes in Alice in Wonderland memorabilia.” He called after the sudden stampede in the direction of the shop, “That’s it for this morning, then! I shall see you all for tea at four! Look out for the traffic, all!”
Rowan spent the remainder of the sunny afternoon in a solitary walking tour of the university town, reminiscing about his student days. He found a wonderful serenity in Oxford that somehow diminished all his financial problems-and the even more pressing moral one that confronted him at present. As he contemplated the graceful arch of the Bridge of Sighs in Hertford College, he found it easy to believe that he was nineteen again, with a glorious academic future in front of him and no ex-wives to haunt him like avenging Furies. He strolled through the South Park and wondered if life would have been simpler if, like the Reverend Dodgson, he had come to Oxford at nineteen and never left.
“Not bloody likely,” he muttered in a moment of realism. “I’d probably be crazier than Lewis Carroll. I’d like to see him try to get away with his infatuation with little girls in this jaundiced century!”