Dead Man Riding (3 page)

Imogen asked, ‘What's up, Nell?'

But by then the dark-cloaked messenger was in sight, standing in the prow of the punt and everybody was concentrating on the play. Alan had one of the first lines to deliver after the messenger's words and Kit had to nudge him to remind him. He managed it and if other people noticed the hesitation and the shakiness in his voice they probably put it down to good acting. After all, he was supposed to be shocked.

*   *   *

The play ended and Midge practically dragged us away to get out before the rest of the crowd. Alan and Kit, still in costume, caught up with us. They wanted to escort us back to Somerville, but we pointed out that if anything were needed to make our delinquency more conspicuous it was being squired to a locked door by the King of Navarre and friend. Even so, Alan managed to get in a few quick words with Imogen before Midge hustled us out to the street.

‘Come on. Run.'

I'd been walking fast, but I slowed down deliberately. ‘No point. We're late and that's it.'

‘Oh Nell, they'll have to unlock the gate for us. We'll be in such trouble.'

The feeling of rebellion that had been with me for most of the term took practical form.

‘Then we'll just have to climb in over the back gate like the men do.'

‘Men climbing in over our back gate?' Midge was appalled.

‘Of course not. Over their own back gates into their own colleges. They've been doing it for centuries so if we want to be equal it's about time we started.'

As the three of us walked side by side up Walton Street I said to Imogen, ‘Did you ask Alan what was in the telegram?'

‘It was an answer from his uncle. It said he was welcome to come and bring his whole tribe with him.'

So I must have been wrong. Torchlight can be deceptive after all.

Chapter Two

A
T BREAKFAST NEXT MORNING I TOLD IMOGEN
I'd decided to go. She dropped her toast.

‘Nell, there'll be such a terrible row.'

‘Why? What could be more worthy than a pure and simple life discussing philosophy?'

‘With a party of men?'

‘I've been thinking about that.' (I hadn't been able to sleep much. When I closed my eyes I kept seeing the black messenger rippling across the water.) ‘We've been talking about the kind of world we want in the twentieth century – no hypocrisy or silliness between the sexes, men and women meeting and working together on equal terms. So do we mean it or don't we?'

‘Of course we do, but discussing it's one thing. Going off and risking your reputation for the sake of…'

‘In other words, it's all right having theories as long as you don't do anything about them?'

‘No, I don't mean that. But you don't go off and wreck your whole future just to make a debating point.'

‘How would I be wrecking my future?'

‘If it gets out, they might not allow you back next term.'

‘Would that be such a bad thing?'

It would at least bring to a crisis the question of what to do with my life.

‘Of course it would, and you know how people would take advantage of it. Give women a chance of higher education and they throw the whole thing over chasing after men.'

‘That's ridiculous. You know that's not true.'

We were getting angry. Other women were turning to look at us.

‘I know it's not true about you, but it's what people will say all the same.'

‘Well, if people are as stupid as that, maybe that's the best reason for doing it.'

‘Just to shock them?'

‘No. To refuse to give up a perfectly rational course of action because of other people's irrationality.'

Midge came towards us carrying her coffee cup, obviously intending to act as peacemaker. She was trying to hide a limp, the result of twisting her ankle jumping down from the back gate. As soon as she sat down Imogen hissed, ‘Nell says she's going on their reading party.'

‘That's good. So am I.'

‘What!'

Imogen's one of the few people I know who can still look beautiful with her jaw dropped and her mouth wide open.

‘I need somewhere to work in peace and there's precious little chance of that at home with my brothers all over the place.'

‘But what will your father say?'

‘I shall tell him I'm staying with friends.'

‘That's lying by implication.'

Midge is one of the most honest people I know and fair minded as well. I watched her face as she thought about it.

‘Then I'll tell him we're a mixed party. I don't think he'll mind.'

That was possible. Midge's father, a widower, was also a mathematician and in spite or because of that seldom seemed to know how many of his large family were in residence at any particular time.

‘But the college…'

‘In any case, I can say Nell's there as a chaperone.'

‘Oh no you can't,' I said. ‘I spent months chaperoning my own mother and I'm not going to start doing it for my friends. If you come, it's on your own responsibility, not mine.'

After all those walks trailing tactfully behind two middle-aged lovers in the cool of the Athens evenings I felt I'd already paid a lifetime's subscription to convention. Midge took it calmly.

‘Come on Imogen. Admit you want to go with us. You've said your aunt wouldn't miss you.'

Imogen's father was helping the Viceroy rule India with her mother in support, so she was doomed to spend the long vac with an aunt she didn't like much in Eastbourne. The remoteness or lack of our parents was one of the things that had brought the three of us together. Imogen stared down at her plate.

‘It's just not possible.'

*   *   *

Two weeks later, sitting in the corner seat of a railway compartment as the train hauled northwards up Shap Fell, she said it again.

‘It's just not possible. I don't know why I ever said yes to it.'

Midge said, ‘You didn't say yes. You just stopped saying no.'

Steam from the engine was blowing back, half hiding the green fells to our left, on the eastern flank of the Lake District. It was quite cool for early July with cloud shadows flying over the hillsides and shafts of sunlight in between picking out patches of bright green bracken or pink-green bilberry, glinting on small waterfalls. We'd closed our window against the smuts and steam because the engine was having to labour hard to pull us up the gradient, and the smell inside the compartment was of faint soot from the upholstery and ripe strawberries. But my mind was full of memories of musky bracken and moss by little hidden pools. Beyond the hills going past our window were fells I'd known the names of almost as long as I'd known anything, the long ridge of High Street, Helvellyn, Scafell Pikes and, to the northwest, my father's favourite, Great Gable. I decided that if the reading party got tedious I'd go wandering off on my own and see them all again. My walking boots were in the old knapsack in the bulging baggage net overhead, along with the battered case that held enough books for a month, including Plato's
Republic
in Ancient Greek. Learning Greek and reading Plato in the original was one of my aims for the next few weeks. Imogen, Alan and Kit could all read it easily and I was tired of being told that I couldn't understand the subleties of Plato's arguments in translation. Two more cases, not quite as battered as mine, contained Imogen's and Midge's books.

We'd unpinned our hats and they were lying on the seats beside us. There was plenty of room to spread ourselves and our luggage because we had the whole compartment to ourselves. The four men were in the one ahead of us. That had been agreed at the start of the journey on the grounds that we couldn't be expected to stand the fug of Nathan's pipe at close quarters, but we all knew that there was more to it than that. Now that the decision had been taken we were all – women and men – a little scared. We knew that we were being rational and blazing a trail, only anticipating the way we hoped all men and women would be able to live in the century ahead: in honesty, in companionship, in respect for each other, not confused or embittered by what Imogen had referred to blushingly one day as ‘the sex question'. The sex question was another matter that would have to be dealt with and debated in its place, but that was a different place and a different time. So we were all clear about what we were doing, but when it came to it we were quite happy to put the interval of a long day's rail journey between the decision and its effect. Not that we were completely isolated from each other. We met on platforms when we changed trains and the men kept putting their heads round the compartment door to ask if we were quite comfortable and did we want anything. Alan was the most attentive. At Crewe he'd somehow got hold of a punnet of strawberries for us, and after Preston, it was lemonade in a glass-stoppered bottle. From the way he looked at Imogen you could tell he could hardly contain his wonder at having her there in the same carriage with only the compartment partition between them. He seemed nervous, untypically clumsy and dropped strawberries on Midge without even noticing. Thinking of the weeks ahead of us, I wondered whether the sex question would wait its turn to be dealt with, after ‘What is the purpose of life?' and ‘Why don't good men go into government?'.

*   *   *

After a while I felt restless from being so near the hills and not walking on them and went into the corridor to stretch my legs. There was somebody outside the men's compartment, smoking a cigarette and looking out at the scenery. When I saw it was Michael Meredith I thought I'd walk the other way. The three of us had been formally introduced to him by Alan on the platform at Oxford station. Apart from that, we'd never exchanged a word in our lives and I knew him only as a presence on the lecture platform. I was still surprised that he'd bothered to come on an undergraduate reading party and was also a little wary of his quick and mocking intelligence. But before I could turn away he smiled at me, an open smile with no visible mockery in it.

‘Are you enjoying the journey, Miss Bray?'

‘Very much.'

He was satisfactorily taller than I was and slim as a greyhound. Watching him on the platform when we changed trains it had struck me that he stood and moved like a gymnast, in a relaxed way but with an underlying tension, as if he might suddenly turn a back somersault. He was wearing a light grey suit and a soft-collared shirt with a floppy blue tie, unconventional but not eccentric. His clean-shaven face was dark in complexion and his black hair cut very short, curving neatly round his ears. According to Oxford gossip his mother was Jewish, born in Andalucia, ‘which explains the complexion', people said. If they didn't like him – and he made enemies in academic society with the carelessness of a puppy scattering flocks of pigeons – there'd be an unspoken addition that it explained a lot of other things as well.

‘Cigarette?'

He was offering me one from a silver case. I said no thank you, but was pleased he thought I was a woman unconventional enough to smoke in public.

‘They tell me you're a great traveller.'

‘Hardly that.'

As the train picked up speed and went running down towards Penrith I told him about our wanderings, Athens and even my father's death and my mother's remarriage. It surprised me that he was easy to talk to. I'd expected sharp questions, even attack for some sloppiness of thought or phrasing. He just listened and nodded occasionally, wafting his clouds of cigarette smoke away from me.

‘Don't you find Oxford a little constricting after all that?'

‘It's not Oxford's fault.'

‘Meaning yes.' Still not sharply, but he was smiling.

‘If I'd come to Oxford when I was just out of school it would have been everything I'd hoped for. Now I can't help thinking that I'm wasting time. I shouldn't be sitting in libraries reading French classical drama. I should be out in the world doing something.'

‘Such as what?'

‘Doing something about injustice.'

That was deliberately putting myself in danger of being intellectually squashed. ‘What is Justice?' had been the title of his popular lecture series on Plato. He raised his eyebrows. Very elegant eyebrows they were too, like the inside sweep of a bird's wing. I plunged on, like the train rushing downhill.

‘Social injustice, I mean. My father worked deliberately in some of the worst slums in England because most other doctors wouldn't. Money the rich wouldn't miss could transform those places.'

‘The rich are defined by their money. Would you politely request a pig to abdicate its piggy nature?'

‘I might give it a smaller trough.'

He laughed. He was on holiday after all, and this wasn't a tutorial in logic.

‘So what are you going to do about it?'

‘I thought for a while that I might be a lawyer.' The eyebrows went up again. ‘I know. I sat in at the back of lectures on Roman law for three whole terms. It cured me.'

‘Possibly one of the few cases on record of a university lecturer doing something useful.'

‘Your lectures are useful. You challenge things.'

I said that because it was true, not meaning to flatter him. He took it without embarrassment so I risked another comment.

‘I'm surprised you're coming with us. I'd have thought you had a lot of other things to do.'

‘I've got a book to finish and Oxford smothers me sometimes, especially in July and August. I want fresh air and light-hearted company.'

‘I hope we come up to scratch then.'

This time he didn't smile, just looked at me as if the remark had said more than I'd intended.

‘You think there might be some failure of light-heartedness?

‘I think there might be tensions.'

‘Ah.' He took a long drag on his cigarette. ‘Beston, you mean?'