The Moving Toyshop. Edmund Crispin

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       2

       The Episode of the Dubious Don

      Out of the grey light came a gold morning. The leaves were beginning to fall from the trees in the Parks and in St Giles’, but they still made a brave show of bronze and yellow and malt-brown. The grey maze of Oxford – from the air, it resembles nothing so much as a maze – began to stir itself. The women undergraduates were the first abroad – cycling along the streets in droves, absurdly gowned and clutching complicated files, or hovering about libraries until the doors should be open and admit them once again to study the divine mysteries which hang about the Christian element in Beowulf, the date of the Urtristan (if any), the complexities of hydrodynamics, the kinetic theory of gases, the law of tort, or the situation and purposes of the parathyroid gland. The men rose more circumspectly, putting a pair of trousers, a coat, and a scarf over their pyjamas, shambling across quadrangles to sign lists, and shambling back to bed again. Art students emerged, subduing the flesh in their endeavour to find a good light, elusive and nearly as unattainable as the Grail itself. Commercial Oxford, too, awoke; shops opened and buses ran; the streets were thronged with traffic. All over the city, in colleges and belfries, the mechanism of clocks whirred, clanged, and struck nine o’clock, in a maddening, jagged syncopation of conflicting tempo and timbre.

      A red object shot down the Woodstock Road.

      It was an extremely small, vociferous, and battered sports car. Across its bonnet were scrawled in large white letters the words LILY CHRISTINE III. A steatopygic nude in chromium leaned forward at a dangerous angle from the radiator cap. It reached the junction of Woodstock and Banbury roads, turned sharply to the left, and entered the private road which runs up beside the college of St Christopher, patron saint of travellers (for the benefit of the uninitiated, it should here be said that St Christopher’s stands next door to St John’s). It then turned in at a wrought-iron gate and proceeded at about forty miles an hour down a short gravel drive which was bordered with lawns and rhododendron bushes and which terminated in a sort of half-hearted loop where it was just impossible conveniently to turn a car. It was evident that the driver had his vehicle under only imperfect control. He was wrestling desperately with the levers. The car made directly for the window where the President of the college, a thin, demure man of mildly epicurean tastes, was sunning himself. Perceiving his peril, he retreated in panic haste. But the car missed the wall of his lodging and fled on up to the end of the drive, where the driver, with a tremendous swerve of the wheel and some damage to the grass borders, succeeded in turning it completely round. At this point there seemed to be nothing to stop his rushing back the way he had come, but unhappily, in righting the wheel, he pulled it over too far, and the car thundered across a strip of lawn, buried its nose in a large rhododendron bush, choked, stalled, and stopped.

      Its driver got out and gazed at it with some severity. While he was doing this it backfired suddenly – a tremendous report, a backfire to end all backfires. He frowned, took a hammer from the back seat, opened the bonnet and hit something inside. Then he closed the bonnet again and resumed his seat. The engine started and the car went into reverse with a colossal jolt and began racing backwards towards the President’s Lodging. The President, who had returned to the window and was gazing at this scene with a horrid fascination, retired again, with scarcely less haste than before. The driver looked over his shoulder, and saw the President’s Lodging towering above him, like a liner above a motor-boat. Without hesitation, he changed into forward gear. The car uttered a terrible shriek, shuddered like a man smitten with the ague, and stopped; after a moment it emitted its inexplicable valedictory backfire. With dignity the driver put on the brake, climbed out, and took a brief-case from the back seat.

      At the cessation of noise the President had approached his window again. He now flung it open.

      ‘My dear Fen,’ he expostulated. ‘I’m glad you have left us a little of the college to carry on with. I feared you were about to demolish it utterly.’

      ‘Oh? Did you? Did you?’ said the driver. His voice was cheerful and slightly nasal. ‘You needn’t have worried, Mr President. I had it under perfect control. There’s something the matter with the engine, that’s all. I can’t think why it makes that noise after it’s stopped. I’ve tried everything for it.’

      ‘And I see no real necessity,’ said the President peevishly, ‘for you to bring your car into the grounds at all.’ He slammed the window shut, but without any real annoyance. The eccentricities of Gervase Fen, Professor of English Language and Literature and Fellow of St Christopher’s, were not on the traditional donnish pattern. But they were suffered more or less gladly by his colleagues, who knew that any treatment of Fen at his face value resulted generally in their own discomfiture.

      Fen strode with great energy across the lawn, passed through a gate in a mellow brick wall against which, in their season, the peaches bloomed, and entered the main garden of the college. He was a tall, lanky man, about forty years of age, with a cheerful, lean, ruddy, clean-shaven face. His dark hair, sedulously plastered down with water, stuck up in spikes at the crown. He had on an enormous raincoat and carried an extraordinary hat.

      ‘Ah, Mr Hoskins,’ he said to an undergraduate who was perambulating the lawn with his arm round the waist of an attractive girl. ‘Hard at it already, I see.’

      Mr Hoskins, large, raw-boned and melancholy, a little like a Thurber dog, blinked mildly. ‘Good morning, sir,’ he said. Fen passed on. ‘Don’t be alarmed, Janice,’ said Mr Hoskins to his companion. ‘Look what I’ve got for you.’ He felt in the pocket of his coat and produced a big box of chocolates.

      Meanwhile Fen proceeded into an open passage-way, stone-paved, which led from the gardens into the south quadrangle of the college, turned into a doorway on the right, passed the organ scholar’s room, ran up a flight of carpeted stairs to the first floor, and entered his study. It was a long, light room which looked out on the Inigo Jones quadrangle on one side and the gardens on the other. The walls were cream, the curtains and carpet dark green. There were rows of books on the low shelves, Chinese miniatures on the walls, and a few rather dilapidated plaques and busts of English writers on the mantelpiece. A large, untidy flat-topped desk, with two telephones, СКАЧАТЬ