A Quiver Full of Arrows (24 page)

Philippa waited for a feeble punch line and
was not disappointed.

“My father told me if I spent the night with
a barmaid then I should simply order an extra pint of beer, but if I spent the
night with the vicar’s daughter, I would have to marry her.”

Philippa laughed. William, tired, unshaven,
and encumbered by his heavy coat, struggled to get down on one knee.

“What are you doing, William?”

“What do you think I’m doing, you silly
woman. I am going to ask you to marry me.”

“An invitation I am happy to decline, William.
If I accepted such a proposal I might end up spending the rest of my life
stranded on the road between Oxford and Stratford.”

“Will you marry me if I win the Charles
Oldham?”

“As there is absolutely no fear of that
happening I can safely say, yes.

Now do get off your knee, William, before
someone mistakes you for a straying stork.”

The first bus arrived at five-past-seven
that Saturday morning and took Philippa and William back to Oxford. Philippa
went to her rooms for a long hot bath while William filled a petrol can and
returned to his deserted MG. Having completed the task, he drove straight to
Somerville and once again asked if he could see Miss Jameson. She came down a
few minutes later.

“What you again?” she said. “Am I not in
enough trouble already?”

“Why so?”

“Because I was out after midnight,
unaccompanied.”

“You were accompanied.”

“Yes, and that’s what’s worrying them.”

“Did you tell them we spent the night
together?”

“No, I did not. I don’t mind our
contemporaries thinking I’m promiscuous, but I have strong objections to their
believing that I have no taste. Now kindly go away, as I am contemplating the
horror of your winning the Charles Old ham and my having to spend the rest of
my life with you.”

“You know I’m bound to win, so why don’t you
come live with me now?”

“I realise that it has become fashionable to
sleep with just anyone nowadays, William, but if this is to be my last weekend
of freedom I intend to savour it, especially as I may have to consider
committing suicide.”

“I love you.”

“For the last time, William, go away.

And if you haven’t won the Charles Oldham
don’t ever show your face in Somerville again.”

William left, desperate to know the result
ofthe prize essay competition.

Had he realised how much Philippa wanted him
to win he might have slept that night.

On Monday morning they both arrived early –
in the Examination Schools and stood waiting impatiently without speaking to
each other, jostled by the other undergraduates of their year who had also been
entered for the prize.

On the stroke of ten the chairman of the
examiners, in full academic dress, walking at tortoise-like pace, arrived in
the great hall and with a considerable presence at indifference pinned a notice
to the board. All the undergraduates who had entered for the prize rushed
forward except for William and Philippa who stood alone, aware that it was now
too late to influence a result they were both dreading.

A girl shot out from the melee around the
notice board and ran over to Philippa.

“Well done, Phil. You’ve won.”

Tears came to Philippa’s eyes as she turned
towards William.

“May I add my congratulations,” he said
quickly, “you obviously deserved the prize.”

“I wanted to say something to you on
Saturday.”

“You did, you said if I lost I must never
show my face in Somerville again.”

“No, I wanted to say: I do love nothing in
the world so well as you; is not that strange?”

Old Leon He looked at her silently for a
long moment. It was impossible to improve upon Beatrices’s reply.

“As strange as the thing I know not,” he
said softly.

A college friend slapped him on the shoulder,
took his hand and shook it vigorously. Proxime accessit was obviously
impressive in some people’s eyes, if not in William’s.

“Well done, William.”

“Second place is not worthy of praise,” said
William disdainfully.

“But you won, Billy boy.”

Philippa and William stared at each other.

“What do you mean?” said William.

“Exactly what I said. You’ve won the Charles
Oldham.”

Philippa and William ran to the board and
studied the notice.

Charles Oldham Memorial Price The examiners
felt unable on this occasion to award the prize to one person and have
therefore decided that it should be shared by. They gazed at the notice board
in silence for some moments. Finally, Philippa bit her lip and said in a small
voice:

“Well, you didn’t do too badly, considering
the competition. I’m prepared to honour my undertaking but by this light I take
thee for pity.”

William needed no prompting. “I would not
deny you, but by this good day I yield upon great persuasion, for I was told
you were in a consumption.”

And to the delight of their peers and the
amazement of the retreating don, they embraced under the notice board.

Rumour had it that from that moment on they
were never apart for more than a few hours.

The marriage took place a month later in Philippa’s
family church at Brockenhurst. “Well, when you think about it,” said William’s
room-mate, “who else could she have married?” The contentious couple started
their honeymoon in Athens arguing about the relative significance of Doric and Ionic
architecture of which neither knew any more than they had covertly conned from
a half-crown tourist guide. They sailed on to Istanbul, where William
prostrated himself at the front of every mosque he could find while Philippa
stood on her own at the back fuming at the Turks’ treatment of women.

“The Turks are a shrewd race,” declared
William, “so quick to appreciate real worth.”

“Then why don’t you embrace the Moslim
religion, William, and I need only be in your presence once a year.”

“The misfortune of birth, a misplaced
loyalty and the signing of an unfortunate contract dictate that I spend the
rest of my life with you.”

Back at Oxford, with junior research
fellowships at their respective colleges, they settled down to serious creative
work. William- embarked upon a massive study of word usage in Marlowe and, in
his spare moments, taught himself statistics to assist his findings. Philippa
chose as her subject the influence of the Reformation on seventeenth-century
English writers and was soon drawn beyond literature into art and music.

She bought herself a spinet and took to
playing Dowland and Gibbons in the evening.

“For Christ’s sake,” said William,
exasperated by the tinny sound, “you won’t deduce their religious convictions
from their key signatures.”

“More informative than if s and ends, my
dear,” she said, imperturbably, “and at night so much more relaxing than pots
and pans.”

Three years later, with well-received D.
Phils, they moved on, inexorably in tandem, to college teaching fellowships. As
the long shadow of fascism fell across Europe, they read, wrote, criticised and
coached by quiet firesides in unchanging quadrangles.

“A rather dull Schools year for me,” said
William, “but I still managed five firsts from a field of eleven.”

“An even duller one for me,” said Philippa,
“but somehow I squeezed three firsts out of six, and you won’t have to Old Lose
invoke the trinomial theorem, William, to work out that it’s an arithmetical
victory for me.”

“The chairman of the examiners tells me,”
said William, “that a greater part of what your pupils say is no more than a
recitation from memory.”

“He told me,” she retorted, “that yours have
to make it up as they go along.”

When they dined together in college the
guest list was always quickly filled, and as soon as grace had been said, the
sharpness of their dialogue would flash across the candelabra.

“I hear a rumour, Philippa, that the college
doesn’t feel able to renew your fellowship at the end of the year?”

“I fear you speak the truth, William,” she
replied. “They decided they couldn’t renew mine at the same time as offering me
yours.”

“Do you think they will ever make you a
Fellow of the British Academy, William?”

“I must say, with some considerable
disappointment, never.”

“I am sorry to hear that; why not?”

“Because when they did invite me, I informed
the President that I would prefer to wait to be elected at the same time as my
wife.”

Some non-University guests sitting in high
table for the first time took their verbal battles seriously; others could only
be envious of such love.

One Fellow uncharitably suggested they
rehearsed their lines before coming to dinner for fear it might be thought they
were getting on well together.

During their early years as young dons, they
became acknowledged as the leaders in their respective fields. Like magnets,
they attracted the brightest undergraduates while apparently remaining poles
apart themselves.

“Dr. Hatchard will be delivering half these
lectures,” Philippa announced at the start of the Michaelmas Term of their
joint lecture course on Arthurian legend. “But I can assure you it will not be
the better half. You would be wise always to check which Dr. Hatchard is lecturing.”

When Philippa was invited to give a series
of lectures at Yale, William took a sabbatical so that he could be with her.

On the ship crossing the Atlantic, Philippa
said, “Let’s at least be thankful the journey is by sea, my dear, so we can’t
run out of petrol.”

“Rather let us thank God,” replied William,
“that the ship has an engine because you would even take the wind out of
Cunard’s sails.”

The only sadness in their lives was that
Philippa could bear William no children, but if anything it drew the two closer
together. Philippa lavished quasi-maternal affection on her tutorial pupils and
allowed herself only the wry comment that she was spared the probability of
producing a child with William’s looks and William’s brains.

At the outbreak of war William’s expertise
with handling words made a move into cipher-breaking inevitable.

He was recruited by an anonymous gentleman
who visited them at home with a briefcase chained to his wrist.

Philippa listened shamelessly at the keyhole
while they discussed the problems they had come up against and burst into the
room and demanded to be recruited as well.

“Do you realise that I can complete The
Times crossword puzzle in half the time my husband can?”

The anonymous man was only thankful that he
wasn’t chained to Philippa. He drafted them both to the Admiralty section to
deal with enciphered wireless messages to and from German submarines.

The German signal manual was a four-letter
code book and each message was reciphered, the substitution table changing
daily. William taught Philippa how to evaluate letter frequencies and she
applied her new knowledge to modern German texts, coming up with a frequency
analysis that was soon used by every code-breaking department in the
Commonwealth.

Even so breaking the ciphers and building up
the master Old Low signal book was a colossal task which took them the best
part of two years.

“I never knew your if s and ends could be so
informative,” she said admiringly of her own work.

When the allies invaded Europe husband and
wife could together, often break ciphers with no more than half a dozen lines
of encoded text to go on.

“They’re an illiterate lot,” grumbled
William. “They don’t encipher their umlauts. They deserve to be misunderstood.’

“How can you give an opinion when you never
dot your i’s William?”

“Because, I consider the dot is redundant
and I hope to be responsible for removing it from the English language.”

“Is that to be your major contribution to
the scholarship, William, if so I am bound to ask how anyone reading the work
of most of our undergraduates’ essays would be able to tell the difference
between and I and an i.”

“A feeble argument my dear, that if it had
any conviction would demand that you put a dot on top of an n so as to be sure
it wasn’t mistaken for an h.”

“Keep working away at your theories,
William, because I intend to spend my energy removing more than the dot and the
I from Hitler.”

In May 1945 they dined privately with the
Prime Minister and Mrs. Churchill at Number Ten Downing Street.

“What did the Prime Minister mean when he
said to me he could never understand what you were up to?” asked Philippa in the
taxi to Paddington Station.

“The same as when he said to me he knew
exactly what you were capable of, I suppose,” said William.