‘I – I believe there is a porter in the lodge, sir. Perhaps it would be fitter if -’
‘I should be so very grateful, Mr Soresby.’
‘Yes, sir. Of course, sir.’
The man slipped away to the doorway leading to Archdale’s staircase. Richardson laid a hand on Holdsworth’s arm, detaining him. Once again, the light above the doorway fell on Soresby’s stooping figure and shabby gown. The singing continued for a few minutes more and then tailed away. To Holdsworth’s surprise, Richardson did not move. Next came a silence, followed swiftly by a great burst of laughter. In another moment, the two sash windows belonging to the room were closed and the shutters were drawn across. This was followed almost immediately by a thumping sound, as if someone had fallen down a flight of stairs, which terminated in a gasp of pain. Richardson made a sign to Holdsworth, and the two men walked away.
The arcade, which ran the entire length of the eastern range, backed on to the chapel in its centre but on either side of this were two bays that opened on to the gardens beyond. Stretching south from the arcade was another range, which the tutor said was known as New Building.
Mr Richardson led Holdsworth on to a path running eastwards into the gathering darkness. Holdsworth’s eyes became accustomed to the gloom. The flagged path glimmered before them. The stars were beginning to emerge. On their left was the chapel, and then a stretch of water crossed by a humped wooden footbridge.
‘Mr Soresby did not have an enviable task by the sound of it,’ Holdsworth said.
‘He is a sizar,’ Richardson replied. ‘It is not an enviable position.’
‘They are the very poorest of the undergraduates?’
‘Indeed they are. The statutes laid down that they should be supported partly from the foundation but that they should also earn their keep through working as menials. That has largely changed, I am glad to say. But when I entered this college as a youth of sixteen, they still waited upon the fellows and fellow-commoners as they ate, and then they dined from the scraps left over. Some of them would even act as private servants to the fellows. Even now, many are poor devils who scrimp and save to take a degree, who are not too proud to run errands to make ends meet. Yet we may be sure that among them are those who will go on to earn distinction both in the University and in the wider world. In point of fact, I was once a sizar myself.’
The night was very still. The revelry in Chapel Court had died away and they might have been in the depth of the country. Most of the windows of New Building were in darkness. They passed under the shadow of a great tree.
‘Soresby serves as my library clerk – you will meet him again tomorrow.’ Richardson gestured at the shadows above and around them. ‘By the way, we are beneath the Founder’s oriental plane. We are very proud of it here. Sir Walter Vauden planted it with his own hands. Some say it is the greatest tree in Cambridge, and certainly there is none quite like it.’
‘There was a wager concerning a plane tree.’
Richardson chuckled. ‘Members of this college take notice of plane trees wherever they find them. That one is in Herodotus. The Emperor Xerxes conceived an admiration for it and ordered it to be adorned with gold.’
‘Is this water called the Long Pond?’ Holdsworth asked.
‘Yes.’
Holdsworth waited but Richardson made no mention of the body that had been found in it earlier in the year.
The pond curved to the left and the path came to a gate set in a wrought-iron screen. Richardson unlocked it and they passed through.
‘This is the Fellows’ Garden,’ he said. ‘The ancients would have called it a hortus conclusus.’
‘An enclosed garden?’
‘Just so. Enclosed and inviolate.’ Richardson’s voice was so quiet now that the other man had to strain to hear it. ‘The college itself becomes a fortress at night when its gates are locked. But here, in the Fellows’ Garden, we are doubly enclosed, and so doubly inviolate. Look to your left, my dear sir, through that opening among the branches on the other side of the water. There you see Dr Carbury’s private garden. It runs all the way from here up to the Master’s Lodge.‘
Holdsworth stared through the gap at the further bank. Directly ahead was a lighted window on the first floor of the Lodge. The window was open, and the sound of raised male voices came faintly through the still night air. Beside him, Richardson was as rigid as a dog scenting game.
As they watched, a figure appeared at the window. Holdsworth saw only a fuzzy silhouette, outlined by candlelight in the room behind, but the shape was almost certainly Carbury’s. The lower sash scraped downwards and hit the sill with the sound like the rapping of a gavel.
Carbury tugged the curtains across the window. The light vanished.
‘Ah,’ said Richardson, letting out his breath in a lingering sigh. ‘And now all is darkness.’
Out of the darkness.
‘Georgie? Georgie?’
The voice pulled Holdsworth towards consciousness. Maria. This was his first thought, instantly suppressed.
It was still dark. Am I dreaming? He was too warm, his body shrouded in the bedclothes. His mouth was dry, which was not surprising after so much wine at supper. And he was uncomfortably aware of another source of discomfort, as shameful as it was urgent. He was as stiff as a ramrod.
‘Georgie? Come to Mama.’
Let me consider this analytically, he thought, I am not an animal.
His wife returned to his sleeping self more often now than just after her death. Sometimes it was only the echo of her voice or a smell lingering in the air – or even a painfully sharp awareness of her absence, as though she had very recently been there. Or not there, depending on how you looked at it. Because that, surely, lay at the heart of the thing: it was not really she who was or had been there. It was a personalized emptiness – a sort of enclosed nothing, a longing for something that no longer existed, or not in this world.
But still – one could give a name even to an irrational sensation. Why should he not call this one Maria? It was a species of philosophical shorthand.
He tried to turn his body in the bed but the blankets still held him fast. All the abortive movement achieved was the application of sweetly uncomfortable pressure to his membrum virile.
My love, forgive me. My prick misbehaves.
Somewhere between waking and sleeping, he sensed Maria’s presence. He fancied he saw her outline, just for a moment, a shadow among shadows between the bed and window, but somehow darker than the shadows that surrounded it.
He was breathing too fast, and he couldn’t suck in enough air. He tried to slow the rhythm but something stronger than his will increased the tempo instead. Soon his nightshirt was drenched with sweat. He shivered, and once he had started he could not make himself stop.
Slowly the dream, if that was what it was, filled with grey light, a sort of illuminated mist that cloaked as much as it revealed. He was no longer in his bed but standing in the Fellows’ Garden and looking down at the Long Pond, just as he had with Richardson a few hours earlier. The transition did not strike him as in any way strange. He looked down and there was Maria, floating face upwards on the water, her body submerged an inch or two below the surface. Despite this apparent handicap, she was speaking, or rather he heard her voice quite distinctly.
‘Georgie,’ she cried. ‘Georgie, I am here now. Come here, my little one.’
Maria, who had drowned in the Thames, was now drowning in the Long Pond. In the logic of the dream, the water was the same, and perhaps all times and places flowed through the same essential nexus of circumstance, and you saw one or the other – in this case the Long Pond at Jerusalem in May or the Thames at Bankside in March – according to your perspective on the matter. In the dream, this speculation seemed entirely rational and he wondered why he had not thought of it before.