After lunch they went for a walk through the fields and admired the new-leafed trees and the fat lambs, the dog on a length of rope in case he worried the lambs. When the danger was past, he was set free and ran like a prisoner released, not just running but rolling over and over and over on the grass in a frenzy of excitement. “He’s a city dog,” Frobisher said. “As am I nowadays.”
“I think I would make a very good rustic,” Gwendolen said. Perhaps, Gwendolen thought, her future life should not be in York or even London, but somewhere in the deep green of the countryside. A tumbledown thatch, chickens pecking on the verge. A bean pole with scarlet-flowering runners and heady-scented wallflowers in the beds. The rolling fields and the copses and shady woods, the tumbling sweet streams that ran through everything. She was quite carried away by this bucolic idyll. At a stretch, she could almost see Frobisher inside the tumbledown thatch, but she could not get Niven through the door. Or even the garden gate. She must stop comparing them, she chided herself. Frobisher never came out best, when really he should.
He surprised her by confiding that he was actually, himself, a countryman—the son of a Shropshire ploughman—and Gwendolen said, “As the team’s head-brass flashed out on the turn,” and he said, “Edward Thomas,” and she thought, Oh, this is good, a man who knows Edward Thomas. Neither of them continued on to quote the next line, which was about lovers disappearing into the wood, and anyway the poem was not about the lovers but about the war and its losses, and so they talked about Thomas for a while and what a fine poet he was (“Elegiac,” Frobisher said, “but no wonder”) and what a finer one he might have become if he hadn’t been killed at Arras.
They were both more sombre on their return to the car, but the mood was swept aside by the effort necessary to crank the Austin back into life after its siesta. It seemed to be an extraordinarily complicated process. “I haven’t yet learnt this by rote,” he apologized, passing her the car’s handbook (“my Bible at the moment”).
It will repay you to read these notes carefully, the handbook warned sternly. Frobisher had already fiddled with knobs and levers inside the car and now Gwendolen dictated to him. “If the car has been standing for some time—which it has, obviously—starting should be assisted by using the hand priming lever on the fuel pump to give the carburettor a full supply of fuel.”
“Yes, I’m doing that, Miss Kelling,” he shouted from somewhere beneath the bonnet. The dog sat on the verge next to him, as if willing help on him.
“And then—make sure that the crankshaft is free, pushing the handle in to engage fully with the starting dog—what on earth is that?”—the dog gave her an interested look—“before turning it. The ignition key is turned to the right—”
“Can you do that for me, Miss Kelling?”
“Rightio.”
* * *
—
Finally, they were back on the road once more, rattling along at a pace too noisy for conversation, and the melancholy mood soon dissipated.
“Why Oxford?” he asked when they arrived. “Why choose it for our little run?”
“The elder of my two brothers was here. He didn’t even finish his first term, but I had a fancy to see where he was. See what he saw.”
“He went out to the Front? And didn’t come back? And you also had a younger brother?”
“Yes.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“Let’s not dwell on lives not lived, it won’t do any more. It’s already half past four. I would imagine that Oxford is the kind of place where you can find a very good high tea.”
And so it proved to be.
Afterwards, they wandered around the college quads, and as the light was softening towards evening they came by chance upon a group of students putting on what seemed to be an extempore performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream on Christ Church Meadow. The costumes seemed to have been gleaned from a dressing-up box and many of the actors were reading from the text, but that did not dim the magic, indeed it seemed somehow to augment it. It would be exam time soon, wouldn’t it? Perhaps this was a respite.
“How lovely,” Gwendolen whispered to Frobisher. “It’s my favourite play.” Frobisher said nothing. It was not a manly play and it was not midsummer so Gwendolen imagined he might object on both fronts, but then this, she reminded herself, was a man who found Edward Thomas “elegiac” and possessed a dog called Pierrot, so perhaps was not the dry stick she kept taking him for.
He found a place for them to sit on the grass and put his jacket down for her. Lanterns had been lit around the lawn to denote the stage. The staging was very pretty and captured the essence of the play without fuss. Unfortunately, it was nearing its end, Hippolyta declaring that Pyramus and Thisbe was “the silliest stuff that ever I heard,” and Gwendolen thought how more than three hundred years later it was a judgement that could be applied to so many things.
The impromptu audience, spread out on the grass, seemed to be mostly composed of fellow students and friends. They were all of them full of strength and youth, just as their doomed predecessors had once been. War was a foul thing. It should be sent back to hell where it had come from and never let out again. She gave her head a little shake to rid it of unwanted thoughts.
“Miss Kelling?”
“A wasp, I think. It’s gone now.” The dog settled down to sleep, its head against Gwendolen’s knee.
The girls playing the fairies pranced and tripped prettily around on the grass and Gwendolen thought of Freda. She had played one of these fairies, hadn’t she? Gwendolen would have liked to have seen her on stage. Perhaps she had done the girl a disservice, perhaps she had real talent. Where was she? Talented or not, I must keep looking for her, Gwendolen thought.
They had reached the restorative ending. “Give me your hands, if we be friends,” Puck said—he wore a great deal of make-up and had little papier-maché horns attached to his head—“and Robin shall restore amends.” At which the actors took each other’s hands and the members of the audience, on a whim, shuffled closer and did the same.
The girl nearest to Gwendolen, wearing a coronet woven from daisies, the kind a child would make, reached out a shy hand to her. Gwendolen was reminded somewhat incongruously of being in a Quaker meeting—she had attended them several times in York on her return from the war in an attempt to find solace or meaning, but had found neither. She looked to Frobisher on the other side of her. She expected him to be embarrassed, and perhaps he was, but nonetheless he held out his own hand and grasped hers in a brief but strong grip.
And then it was over. The dog woke up. Everyone dispersed into the gloaming and Frobisher helped her to her feet. “Time to go home,” he said. He looked rather crestfallen at the idea.
Hail, Mortal!
It was over a week since Freda had been invited by Ramsay Coker to step over the threshold of the Amethyst and into “fairyland.” She had been very quickly disabused of her previous assumption that a nightclub would be an enchanted place.
Although, naturally, she had kept the information to herself, Freda had never actually danced with a man. At her dance school in York, they had kept up with all the latest dances on a Saturday afternoon after tap class, but they had practised with each other, taking it in turns to lead and follow. It was novel, and not particularly pleasant, to be partnered now by a member of the opposite sex.
The Amethyst was a raucous place, horribly hot and airless. Freda was surprised that people didn’t die of suffocation. All trussed up in their evening suits, the men seemed to sweat from every pore, which only intensified the fug of tobacco and alcohol around them. And they all seemed so big compared to Freda—and very prone to standing on her poor toes. Still, she did seem to be quite a success, if success was measured in the volume of men who sought her out. “She’s a popular little thing,” Betty Coker told her mother. “Quite the little bon-bon.”
“A novelty,” Shirley added.