fell over – ‘I shall go to Oxford.’
‘Oxford. Ah.’ Mr Spode recovered himself. He was glad of this temporary reprieve from the embarrassing claims of business. ‘A very good idea. I sometimes regret moving my business into Town, even after a year. One can’t have lived there as long as I did without feeling occasionally homesick.’ Complacently he patted the rather doggy petunia waistcoat which corseted his plump little form, as though this sentiment somehow redounded to his own credit.
‘And well you may be.’ Cadogan wrinkled his patrician features into a grimace of great severity. ‘Oxford, flower of cities all. Or was that London? It doesn’t matter, anyway.’
Mr Spode scratched the tip of his nose dubiously.
‘Oxford,’ Cadogan went on rhapsodically, ‘city of dream-spires, cuckoo-echoing, bell-swarmed (to the point of distraction), charmed with larks, racked with rooks, and rounded with rivers. Have you ever thought how much of Hopkins’s genius consisted of putting things in the wrong order? Oxford – nursery of blooming youth. No, that was Cambridge, but it makes no odds. Of course’ – Cadogan waved his revolver didactically beneath Mr Spode’s horrified eyes – ‘I hated it when I was up there as an undergraduate: I found it mean, childish, petty, and immature. But I shall forget all that. I shall return with an eyeful of retrospective dampness and a mouth sentimentally agape. For all of which’ – his tone became accusing – ‘I shall need money.’ Mr Spode’s heart sank. ‘Fifty pounds.’
Mr Spode coughed. ‘I really don’t think…’
‘Nag Nutling. Oust Orlick,’ said Cadogan with enthusiasm. He seized Mr Spode by the arm. ‘We’ll go inside and talk it over with a drink to steady our nerves. God, I will pack, and take a train, and get me to Oxford once again…’
They talked it over. Mr Spode was rather susceptible to alcohol, and he loathed arguing about money. When at last he went away, the counterfoil of his cheque-book showed the sum of fifty pounds, payee Richard Cadogan Esquire. So the poet got the better of that affair, as anyone not wholly blinded by prejudice would have expected.
When his publisher had departed, Cadogan piled some things into a case, issued peremptory instructions to his servant, and set out for Oxford without delay, despite the fact that it was already half past eight in the evening. Since he could not afford to keep a car, he travelled on the Tube to Paddington, and there, after consuming several pints of beer in the bar, boarded an Oxford-bound train.
It was not a fast train, but he did not mind. He was happy in the fact that for a while he was escaping the worrying and loathsome incursion of middle-age, the dullness of his life in St John’s Wood, the boredom of literary parties, the inane chatter of acquaintances. Despite his literary fame, he had led a lonely and, it sometimes seemed to him, inhuman existence. Of course, he was not sanguine enough to believe, in his heart of hearts, that this holiday, its pleasures and vexations, would be unlike any other he had ever had. But he was pleased to find that he was not so far gone in wisdom and disillusion as to be wholly immune to the sweet lures of change and novelty. Fand still beckoned to him from the white combs of the ocean; beyond the distant mountains there still lay the rose-beds of the Hesperides, and the flower-maidens singing in Klingor’s enchanted garden. So he laughed cheerfully to himself, at which his travelling companions regarded him warily, and, when the compartment emptied, sang and conducted imaginary orchestras.
At Didcot a porter walked down beside the train, shouting, ‘All change!’ So he got out. It was now nearly midnight, but there was a pale moon with a few ragged clouds drifting over it. After some inquiry he learned that there would be a connection for Oxford shortly. A few other passengers were held up in the same way as himself. They tramped up and down the platform, talking in low voices, as though they were in a church, or huddled in the wooden seats. Cadogan sat on a pile of mail-bags until a porter came and turned him off. The night was warm and very quiet.
After rather a long time a train drew in at the platform and they all got into it, but the porters called out ‘All change!’ again, so they climbed out and watched the lights being extinguished, carriage by carriage. Cadogan asked a porter what time the Oxford train was expected, and the porter referred him to another porter. This authority, discovered drinking tea in the buffet, said without any apparent sense of outrage that there were no more trains to Oxford that night. The statement provoked some opposition from a third porter, who maintained that the 11.53 had not come in yet, but the porter drinking tea pointed out that as from yesterday the 11.53 was not going to come in any more, ever again. He banged his fist on the table with frequency and force to emphasize this point. The third porter remained unconvinced. A small, sleepy-eyed boy was, however, dispatched to consult with the driver of the train that had just arrived, and he confirmed that there were no more trains to Oxford that night. Moreover, the boy added unhelpfully, all the buses had stopped running two hours ago.
Faced with these unpalatable facts, something of Cadogan’s enthusiasm for his holiday began to wane; but he quickly shook off this feeling as being shamefully indicative of a middle-aged desire for comfort and convenience. The other passengers, grumbling bitterly, had departed in search of hotel accommodation, but he decided to leave his bag and make for the Oxford road in the hope of getting a lift from a belated car or lorry. As he walked he admired the effect of the weak, colourless moonlight on the ugly brick houses, with their diminutive asphalt paths, their iron railings, and their lace curtains, and on the staring windows of Methodist chapels. He felt, too, something of that oddly dispassionate lifting of the heart which he knew meant poetry, but he was aware that such emotions are shy beasts, and for the moment he turned a blind eye to them for fear of frightening them away.
Cars and lorries, it seemed, were reluctant to stop – this was 1938, and British motorists were having one of their periodical scares about car thieves – but eventually a big eight-wheeler pulled up at his hail, and he climbed in. The driver was a large, taciturn man, his eyes red and strained with much night driving.
‘The Ancient Mariner did this better than me,’ said Cadogan cheerfully as they started off. ‘He at least managed to stop one of three.’
‘I read abaht ’im at school,’ the driver replied after a considerable pause for thought. ‘“A thahsand, thahsand slimy things lived on and so did I.” And they call that poetry.’ He spat deprecatingly out of the window.
Somewhat taken aback, Cadogan made no reply. They sat in silence while the lorry bucketed through the outskirts of Didcot and into open country. After about ten minutes:
‘Books,’ the driver resumed. ‘I’m a great reader. I am. Not poetry. Love stories and murder books. I joined one o’ them’ – he heaved a long sigh; with vast effort his mind laboured and brought forth – ‘circulatin’ libraries.’ He brooded darkly. ‘But I’m sick of it now. I’ve read all that’s any good in it.’
‘Getting too big for your Boots?’
‘I ’ad a good un the other day, though. Lady Somebody’s Lover. That was the old firm, if you like.’ He slapped his thigh and snorted lecherously.
Being mildly astonished by these evidences of culture, Cadogan again failed to answer. They drove on, the headlights picking out mathematical segments of the flying hedges on either side. Once a rabbit, dazed by the glare, sat up and stared at them for so long that it only just escaped the wheels.
At the end of a further interval – perhaps a quarter of an hour – Cadogan said with something of an effort:
‘I had a pretty bloody journey from London. Very slow train. Stopped at every telegraph pole – like a dog.’
At this the driver, after
