Operation Pax (26 page)

The staircase upon which she presently found herself was deserted. Provided one has the agility necessary for cornering neatly as one moves, its shallow wooden treads admit of a considerable turn of speed. Jane found herself going down hell for leather. If her progress brought her full tilt into collision with the Vice-Chancellor, slipping upstairs to snatch half an hour’s fearful joy from a book, it just couldn’t be helped. It had come to her that she was involved, personally and deeply, in something very urgent indeed.

She reached the open air. It was now possible to take several routes. She might make her way by the entrance to the Divinity School – obscurely known as the ‘Pig Market’ – in the direction of Broad Street. Or she might move in the same general direction by way of the Clarendon Building. Or, again, she might take the little tunnel or passage on her right that gave immediately upon Radcliffe Square. She chose the last of these courses. And in a moment she knew that she had guessed right.

A small crowd had collected. It was very like the sort of crowd of which she had been the centre an hour before. Only this time there was a policeman. And this time the person who had drawn the crowd together didn’t get up.

It was the man with the scratched face. He lay just off the footpath, supine on the cobbles of the square. As backcloth he had one of the great buildings of Oxford – the rounded magnificence of the Radcliffe Camera. In such a setting it would have been possible to feel the prostrate figure as something too insignificant for pathos – a mere piece of crumpled or deflated, of pashed and pounded, organic matter. But Jane’s heart contracted as she glimpsed him. She shoved to the front. It wasn’t difficult, for the crowd was no more than a knot of people – some standing, some doing no more than linger for a moment as they passed. Nothing sensational was happening. It was possible to suppose that the man was dead – dead of heart failure, or something of that sort – if one didn’t notice that a cheek – the unscratched cheek – was twitching faintly. And he seemed to be lucky in having gained medical attention quickly.

For close by, at the corner of Catte Street, stood a large black car, with a chauffeur sitting impassively at the wheel. Out of this must have stepped the figure now kneeling, stethoscope in hand, beside the fallen man. He was dressed in a dark coat, and on the ground beside him he had laid a Foreign Office hat and a pair of immaculate yellow kid gloves. It looked as if, by some odd chance, the accident had attracted the notice of some very grand doctor indeed. And then this reassuring figure glanced up. In the same moment, as if his doing so had been a signal to them, all the bells of Oxford fell to chiming the hour. For Jane Appleby it was a moment of chaos, and she could not have told whether the angling was inside her own head or out of it. For this dignified physician was the identical donnish person of the late drama in the upper reading-room. He had in some degree changed his spots, but he was discernibly the same leopard. And he had made his kill. Almost without knowing what she did, Jane pushed forward once more and dropped on her knees beside the hunted man. He had opened his eyes. Now he moved his head slightly and looked at her. She saw that he recognized her – or perhaps that he took her for somebody else. His lips trembled, but no sound came. Then his glance went to the man kneeling opposite, and Jane saw his eyes dilate. She knew that it was in terror. Something moved at his side. It was his hand, groping towards Jane. ‘Mummy,’ he whispered, ‘darl–’ His voice faded into a faint, thin wail.

Jane turned. She had remembered the policeman. But the policeman was briskly waving people to the footpath. To the accompaniment of an urgent little bell that had been quite lost amid the chiming all around, an ambulance had driven up, halted and backed, and was now standing with its open doors within a yard of the prostrate man’s head. Attendants were getting a stretcher out. A sense of desperate urgency seized Jane. She scrambled to her feet and caught the policeman by the arm. ‘Stop!’ she cried, ‘I want to tell you–’

But the policeman shook himself rather roughly free. ‘Just a moment, miss,’ he said brusquely. ‘Plenty of time when we’ve got him in.’

The stretcher, with the man on it – the hunted man – was being lifted into the ambulance. ‘You don’t understand,’ Jane cried. ‘It’s a trick! These people–’

From behind her she heard again the hunted man’s thin wail. She was irresistibly impelled to turn back to him. He was just disappearing. Their eyes met. His head moved slightly in a sort of agony of impotence, ‘No!’ he whispered. ‘You can’t do it to me…not…not to Milton–’

The door of the ambulance slammed. The policeman was by the bonnet shouting to people to keep clear. The ambulance moved. The policeman opened the door beside the driver and stepped inside. In a second’s swift acceleration the ambulance had swung out of Radcliffe Square and was gone. Jane turned round. The black car, with its spurious doctor, had gone too. The little knot of spectators was dispersing. To rush at one of them with a cock and bull story would be completely futile. It was the first downright adventure of her life. And she had been roundly defeated.

But there was something more than that. She stood where the hunted man had lain – stood fighting for recollection, for clarity, for what she knew was a single supremely important perception. She had a sudden irrational wish to be in open country, to be in a quiet room. All around her was a massive apparatus of learning: cliffs of books in the Camera, in the Codrington, in the Bodleian – and even beneath her feet, she knew, more and more learning, profound, unfathomable, in subterranean chambers deep down below the cobbles on which had been flung by some horrible and surreptitious violence the wretched little man who in his agony had called out to her as to his mother… Jane laughed aloud, in incipient hysteria. It was like being very thirsty on a broad, broad ocean. All that knowledge – and she wanted one single elusive fact alone.

She dug her nails hard into her palms. They were nails inadequately prepared to be very effective in this way, but she contrived to make them hurt. The man had whispered something just as he was whisked away. It was something idiotic, meaningless…something about a poet…
Not to Milton
…that was it. But why –

And then Jane understood. The sudden, full wash of lucidity over her brain was like a plunge into cold and reviving waters. Milton was not a man but a place. And the poor devil’s last gasped word had been an agonized cry against being swept off to it.

And now he had vanished. And it was through a Milton – Milton Porcorum – that somebody had reported seeing another man being driven. Another vanished man…

For a moment her whole body felt very cold; it was as if she had indeed been plunged into icy water for a long time. But she knew she could run – and she ran. She ran through the Bodleian quadrangle, careless of its violated quiet, and through the gap between the Clarendon Building and the Sheldonian Theatre. There was no car for hire – as she had hoped there might be – in the rank between Turl Street and the gates of Trinity. But she had only to go onto the foot of St Giles’ to be sure of finding one. She might have got there quicker on her bicycle, but she had forgotten all about that.

At the most, it would take little over an hour and a half… Struck by a sudden thought, she stopped and turned, panting, into the Broad Street post office. She was out of it within three minutes and running up Magdalen Street. It was just here that she had had that idiotic collision. But not so idiotic, either. She would never have noticed what was going on in the upper reading room had she not earlier knocked the man down in the street. And she wouldn’t have done
that
had she not been in such a hurry to get away from poor old Dr Ourglass and that ass Bultitude. So even fat and famous dons had their utility…

She tumbled into a waiting and reasonably powerful-looking car. The driver, a young man in an enveloping duffel coat, received her instructions with unobtrusive respect – with a respect so unobtrusive, indeed, that Jane took a second look at him. If the morning’s events had not made her sensitive to the notion of imposture, she would probably have held her peace. As it was, she spoke out baldly and with frank suspicion. ‘Didn’t I use to see you at lectures?’

The young man’s eyebrows raised themselves slightly in mild reproach. ‘Madam,’ he said, ‘must I always be reproached with my past?’

Despite the turmoil of her thoughts, Jane still had some area of her mind available for the sensation of feeling a fool. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘It just surprised me. Will you please–’

Her speech was cut short by a sudden and astonishing commotion all around her. It was rather like being incontinently in the middle of a flock of starlings. This commotion wheeled on the car as on a pivot and disappeared down Beaumont Street. The young man was startled too. ‘That’s odd,’ he said. ‘What on earth can the little creatures–’ Then it seemed to occur to him that a taxi driver should be a man of few words. He shut the door on Jane, jumped in front, and took the wheel. The car moved smoothly off down Magdalen Street and the Cornmarket. It had turned at Carfax and was nearing the railway station when the young man spoke over his shoulder. ‘I know fares sometimes don’t like it,’ he said, ‘but do you mind if I make an observation?’

Jane compressed her lips. The world – or certainly the world of Oxford – is full of tiresome young men. ‘Not in the least,’ she said coldly.

‘Well, it’s about those lectures. I was carried away by presumption. It wasn’t me you saw. Your question prompted me to claim a higher station in life than I am rightfully entitled to. I hope you will forgive me.’

‘Stuff and nonsense. It was certainly you. You came from Balliol.’

The young man gave a low moan. ‘Then it has happened again – this humiliating, this intolerable confusion.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘It was my brother.’

‘Your brother?’

‘My
legitimate
brother, Herbert. I’m just ’Enery.’

Jane lost patience. ‘For goodness sake, shut up. And get a move on.’

The road ahead was clear. The young man who was pleased to call himself ’Enery cast a swift backward glance at his passenger. ‘In a hurry?’ he asked.

‘Yes.’

There was that in Jane’s voice that the young man took a moment to digest. ‘Life or death?’

‘Quite honestly – just that.’

The young man thrust at his accelerator so that the car seemed to punch Jane in the back. ‘If I lose my licence,’ he said, ‘and – mark you – it’s all that stands between a poor bastard boy and the gutter, I am wholly yours. They say these things will touch eighty.’

Jane set her teeth. ‘Then,’ she said, ‘touch it.’

The play had been timed for the eve of the half-term holiday. This avoided complications over homework. And the play had been quite a success. But this served only to lend the morrow a tiresome air of anticlimax. Stuart Buffin, having improvidently made no arrangements whatever for its expenditure, felt this with peculiar force. The sensation, however, was pervasive throughout North Oxford that morning. Had this not been so, things might have turned out very differently. To begin with, Jane Appleby and her driver ’Enery would not have experienced that startled moment at the spot which has now for some time been the hub of our narrative: that corner, to wit, of St Giles’ and Beaumont Street the dominating feature of which is Bede’s College.

Stuart’s sense, moreover, of having brushed adventure on the preceding evening was another important factor. And – further to this again – was his indignation that this sense of having brushed adventure had itself been brushed rudely aside. His father, lingering for a few moments in benevolent if absent contemplation of the frugal family supper before going off to dine in Bede’s, had received the story of the hunted man without enthusiasm. He had even made a derogatory remark about the effects of too much Superman – a quip that had offended Stuart as much by its
passé
‚ quality as by its injustice. The world, Stuart considered, was not so pervasively dull and securely ordered a place as long years of comfortable dining in Bede’s and similar establishments led elderly persons to believe. Things
did
happen. Only, when they began to happen, authority was prone to take one firmly by the ear and lead one into inglorious security. That was what had occurred during the war, when substantial numbers of future Tigers had been bundled off to America. It was what had happened when the gym caught fire and they had been indecently herded into the middle distance much as if the fire engines had been a force of hostile tanks.
They
would always nip in and cut you out of things if given the chance.

These and other dark thoughts had disposed Stuart Buffin to make a most belated appearance at breakfast that morning. They disposed him, when he realized that his mother wanted to get the table cleared, to sit owlishly over the repast, nibbling his way through toast and marmalade at the steady rate of one slice every twelve minutes. This recalcitrance, however, was visited with its just penalty, and Stuart found himself implacably roped in to help with the washing up. By the time that this tiresome operation was accomplished and he had emerged into the hall the clock was striking ten. He wished that he had fixed something up with Martin or Miles or Dick or Malcolm. As things were, he addressed himself gloomily to climbing the stairs, being persuaded that nothing lay before him but a morning’s communion with his stamp collection. And stamp collecting, he was rapidly coming to feel, was a nauseating practice… It was at this moment that the telephone bell rang.

Stuart’s mood being not at present co-operative, he at first felt disposed to ignore the instrument. His father had already left the house. If his mother had to hurry in from coping with the hens in order to answer the thing, or if Mrs Sparks emerged from her soap suds to deal with it and got the message hopelessly muddled – well, that was just too bad. Stuart, however, was really a child tolerant of – indeed, amiably disposed towards – those with whom fate had directed that he should live. Partly because of this, and partly because the call was probably from one of his father’s pupils, tiresomely wanting to change the hour of a tutorial – in which event Stuart would give himself the satisfaction of replying to the great lout with the most awful and freezing courtesy – he decided to answer the summons after all. He moved over to the telephone and picked up the receiver. What he heard was a low voice with a foreign accent. What he believed this voice to say was ‘Stuart, is that you?’