Death Lives Next Door. Gwendoline Butler

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СКАЧАТЬ at Ezra, “have you seen anything of Rachel lately?”

      “Yes,” said Ezra shortly. “And I don’t know why she reminds you of Regan.” The worst of being in love was that it made you so touchy.

      “Oh, just the initials,” said the producer. “I wanted to talk to her.”

      “She was at Marion Manning’s. I’m on my way round to Marion’s now.” Marion’s name produced the silence it usually did. She was a fabulous figure. But what did people really know about her? That she had been four years old when the First Great War started, in which her father had been killed, and only nine when it ended, and yet she had written one great poem on it which anyone would have been glad to have written, and then never touched the subject again. That she had become an anthropologist, been a member of a highly publicised and tragic expedition to Central America on which two men had died; that she had written a controversial book about it and then announced that anthropology did not provide the discipline she wanted, and turned herself into a philologist and a very good one at that, but that her name was still good for a paragraph in the Sunday newspapers. What did this young producer know about her? That he had seen her stocky grey-haired figure (with the slightly dragging left leg where the bomb had lamed her) at parties and heard her talking?

      The three of them walked a little way with him before the producer looked at his watch and remembered a tutorial, and with an anxious look, which at once reduced his age by ten years (and, so Ezra thought, added them to his) disappeared.

      “Give my love to Tommy,” Ezra shouted. He knew the producer’s tutor.

      “Unless I have had some good things to say about the French Revolution I won’t dare,” called back the young man. The third member of the party was a silent young man from St. John’s who had never in all the time Ezra had known him spoken one word, but drew constantly upon an old pipe and looked deep. Lamia and the silent man, who was continuing to look deep, went off together.

      Ezra continued on his way down St. John Street and through Wellington Square to where Chancellor Hyde Street runs into Little Clarendon Street. When the houses it contained were built there were fields where Walton Street now lies. The houses were old pretty red brick cottages converted at great cost into cosy little houses watched over by the Georgian Trust. Marion lived in the corner house and although Ezra had got used to it the house was unmistakably Marion’s.

      Marion was standing in the window reading a book and her tom-cat, Sammy, was sunning himself in the garden. There was no love lost between Sammy and Ezra. Sammy raised his head as Ezra came past, and glared at him, slightly showing his teeth as he did so. All right, thought Ezra, if that’s how you feel, I don’t feel any better about you, and he bared his teeth back. The Professor of Morphology who was passing looked apprehensive, and Ezra realised sadly that the Professor, a nervous and humble man, had taken the threat as directed at himself. By the time he got to Marion’s he was in a bad temper.

      “I find the human race difficult and incomprehensible at the moment, Marion,” he said, falling back into a chair.

      Marion stood there running a hand through her short silver hair which seemed to shine with a light no one else’s had; her bright friendly brown eyes looked at him with inquisitiveness.

      “I don’t suppose it’s occurred to you to number yourself among the unaccountable?” Marion’s tone was wry.

      Ezra blinked.

      “Oh, do you think so?” He considered. Perhaps this curious atmosphere he had noticed among his friends lately was coming from within him and not from without.

      “I think I’m having an intellectual crisis!”

      “What a luxury for you. I couldn’t afford one.” Marion was continuing in wryness. “Too old.”

      “You’ve had them though,” pointed out Ezra, remembering the change-over from anthropology to linguistics. He looked at Marion and saw that she looked dry and thin. It struck him that he had not really observed Marion for a long time. She did look older.

      “Oh, you have the special Oxford disease … Ennui, reluctance, it comes over everyone. Closely related, I always think, to the medieval ‘accidie’, one of the seven deadly sins, you may remember. Sloth is its other name.”

      Ezra flushed. Marion could always sting.

      “It especially attacks intellectuals. I suppose you count as that?”

      “You’ve brought me up to be one.” Ezra regarded Marion as his intellectual mother. He hardly remembered his real one. Marion, however, was not obviously maternal. He had come to her for teaching in his first term, young and earnest, and she had moulded him. It was going to be difficult to tell Marion what he wanted to tell her.

      “I begin to feel that perhaps I’d better get away and strike out in a new sea.”

      Marion frowned.

      “I’ve had a sort of offer,” he hurried on. “From Bridport. You know John Farmer has the new Chair, he’s sort of offered …”

      “Oh, there! They have a vested interest in mediocrity there.”

      “That’s unfair.” He wanted to say, “Hold back your blows, Marion,” but he could see she was deeply hurt.

      “Go if you like.” She shrugged.

      That was the trouble, Ezra did not know if he did like. He was happy here. He loved the rhythm of his life, the autumn and winter for quiet work, his acting in the spring and summer, the cheap trips abroad; in some moods he even loved his pupils. He knew all the little side streets of Oxford. Blue Boar Lane which lets on to the back premises of Christ Church and the houses, so like country mansions, of the Canons of the Cathedral. He knew and loved Magpie Lane and New College Lane and the tiny stretch of Catte Street. As a ghost, thought Ezra, this would be the world he would haunt, these loved little streets. He had walked them in the autumn when they smelt of wood smoke, and when they were frosty with snow, but he thought he liked them best in the summer. If condemned ever to be a revenant it would be to this summer world he would come back, walking the streets on warm moonlit evenings, dreaming of long-dead Commemoration Balls and evenings on the river. (In real life Ezra was a poor hand with a punt and hardly ever went near the water, but a ghost, of course, would be able to do everything.) Or perhaps the ghosts of the dancers and the musicians would be there, too, and he would hear music floating across the wall from Merton or over from the New Buildings at Magdalen which were new when Dr. Johnson was a young man. He loved all this and didn’t really want to be uprooted, but Rachel, with her acid clear judgements, had changed everything. His indecision was mirrored in his face and Marion saw it.

      “And who’s been suggesting all this to you?”

      “No one,” said Ezra, deeply troubled; he was doing this so badly.

      But Marion knew the answer to her own question. “Rachel, I suppose. John Farmer knows her father, of course.”

      She sat down at her desk and drew a thin brown hand across it for a cigarette. “Dusty,” she observed. “I don’t keep this house the way I should.” On the top of her desk was a picture of a young man wearing an open-neck shirt and nursing Sammy.

      Ezra walked over and picked up his photograph. “I was quite chubby then, wasn’t I?”

      Marion nodded.

      “You СКАЧАТЬ