Colin Dexter: The Jewel That Was Ours

But the next stop was Oxford.

CHAPTER THREE

'O come along, Mole, do!' replied the Rat cheerfully, still plodding along.

'Please stop, Ratty!' pleaded the poor Mole, in anguish of heart. 'You don't understand! It's my home, my old home! I've just come across the smell of it, and it's close by here, really quite close. And I must go to it'

( Kenneth Graham, The Wind in the Willows)

'ARKSFORD? THIS IS ARKSFORD?'

Seated on the nearside front seat of the luxury coach, John Ashenden glanced across at the diminutive septuagenarian from California: 'Yes, Mrs. Roscoe, this is Oxford.' He spoke rather wearily, yet wholly without resentment. Hitherto little on the Historic Cities of England Tour (London — Cambridge — Oxford — Stratford — Bath — Winchester) had appeared unequivocally satisfactory to the well-read, eager, humourless (insufferable!) Mrs. Roscoe; and yet as he looked out of his own side-window Ashenden could sympathise with that lady's disappointment. The eastern stretch of the A40 could hardly afford the most pleasing approach to the old University City; and as the coach slowly moved, one car-length at a time, towards the Headington roundabout, a litter-strewn patch of ill-kempt grass beside a gaudily striped petrol station lent little enchantment to the scene.

The tour party — eighteen women, nine men (three registered husband-and-wife combinations) — sat back in their seats as the coach drove past the sign for 'City Centre' and accelerated for a few miles along the featureless northern section of the Ring Road, heading for the Banbury Road roundabout.

For some reason Mrs. Laura Stratton was ill-at-ease. She re-crossed her legs and now massaged her left foot with her right hand. As agreed, it would be Eddie who would sign the forms and the Visitors' Book, and then identify the luggage and tip the porter — while she would be lying in a hot herbal bath and resting her weary body, her weary feet.

'Gee, I feel so awful, Ed!'

'Relax, honey. Everything's gonna be OK.' But his voice was so quiet that even Laura had difficulty in picking up his words. At sixty-six, four years younger than his wife, Eddie Stratton laid his hand briefly on the nylon-clad left foot, the joints of the toes disfigured by years of cruel arthritis, the toe-nails still painted a brightly defiant crimson.

'I'll be fine, Ed — just once I get in that bairth.' Again Laura switched legs and massaged her other foot again — a foot which like its partner had until recently commanded the careful ministrations of the most expensive chiropodist in Pasadena.

'Yeah!' And perhaps someone else on the coach apart from his wife might have noticed Eddie Stratton's faint smile as he nodded his agreement.

The coach had now turned down into the Banbury Road, and Ashenden was soon into his well-rehearsed commentary: '. and note on each side of the road the cheerful orange-brick houses, built in the last two decades of the nineteenth century when the dons in the University — there, look! — see the date? — 1887. '

Immediately behind Ashenden sat a man in his early seventies, a retired civil engineer from Los Angeles, who now looked out of his window at the string of shops and offices in Summertown: banks, building societies, fruiterers, hairdressers, housing agents, newsagents, wine shops — it could almost have been back home, really. But then it was back home, decided Howard Brown.

Beside him, Shirley Brown was the second wife who had seen a smile upon a husband's lips — a smile this time of wistful satisfaction; and suddenly she felt a sharp regret.

'Howard?' she whispered. 'Howard! I am glad — you know I am — glad we booked the tour. Really I am!' She laid her right arm along his long thigh and squeezed it gently. 'And I'm sorry I was such' (pianissimo) 'such an ungrateful bitch last night.'

'Forget it, Shirl — forget it!'

But Howard Brown found himself wishing that for a little while at least his wife would perpetuate her sullen ill-humour. In such a mood (not infrequent) she presented him with the leeway he needed for the (not infrequent) infidelities of thought and deed which he could never have entertained had she exhibited a quarter of the affection he had known when they'd agreed to marry. But that was in 1947—forty-three years ago — before she'd ever dreamed of checking his automobile mileage, or scrutinising the postmarks on his private mail, or sniffing suspiciously at him after his coming home from the office.

'. and here' (Ashenden was in full and rather splendid spate) 'we see the Ruskin influence on domestic architecture during that period. You see — there! — on the left, look! — the neo-Gothic, mock-Venetian features. And here, on the left again, this is Norham Gardens, with the famous University Parks lying immediately behind. There! You see the iron gates? The Parks are one of the greatest open spaces in Oxford — still, even now, liable to be closed to the public at the whim of the University authorities — unless, of course, you get to know how to sneak in without being noticed by the keepers at the main entrance.'

'And to sneak out again, surely, Mr. Ashenden?'

For once, one of Mrs. Roscoe's inevitable interruptions was both pertinent and good-humoured, and her fellow passengers laughed their light-hearted approval.

Howard Brown, however, had been quite unaware of the exchange. He was craning his neck to look across at the Keeper's Lodge; and as he did so, like Mole, he sensed and smelled his old home territory, and inside him something long dormant woke into sudden life. He felt his eyes welling up with nostalgic tears, before fiercely blowing his nose and looking obliquely at his wife once more, gratified to observe that her lips had once again settled into their accustomed crab-crumpet discontent. She suspected nothing, he was virtually certain of that.

As the coach drew into St Giles', the sky was an open blue, and the sunlight gleamed on the cinnamon-coloured stone along the broad tree-lined avenue. 'Here we are, in St Giles'.' (Ashenden slipped into over-drive now.) 'You can see the plane trees on either side of us, ablaze with the beautifully golden tints of autumn — and, on the left here, St. John's College — and Balliol just beyond. And here in front of us, the famous Martyrs' Memorial, modelled on the Eleanor Crosses of Edward the First, and designed by Gilbert Scott to honour the great Protestant martyrs — Cranmer and Latimer and, er. '

'Nicholas Ridley,' supplied Mrs. Roscoe, as the coach turned right at the traffic lights and almost immediately pulled in on the left of Beaumont Street beneath the tall neo-Gothic facade of The Randolph Hotel.

'At last!' cried Laura Stratton, with what might have been the relief of a prisoner learning of a late reprieve.

In retrospect, it would have seemed an odd coincidence (though not an important one) that the middle-aged man housed in a nondescript block of flats at the top of the Banbury Road had been looking out from his second-floor double-glazed windows as the long luxury coach carrying Ashenden's group had passed by that late afternoon. Inside, a recently renewed needle glided through the well-worn grooves of the Furtwängler recording of Götterdämmerung; but the man's mind was more closely concentrated with an almost physical hurt on the greasy wrappings discarded by the previous night's fish-and-chip brigade as they'd walked homeward from the Chicken Barbecue in Summertown.

CHAPTER FOUR

'The cockroach Blattella germanica,' it was observed darkly in 1926, 'was at one time recorded as present in the Randolph Hotel kitchen'

( Jan Morris, Oxford)