Autumn in Oxford: A Novel Read online

  PRAISE FOR THE GIRL FROM KRAKOW

  “Well researched and well imagined, the novel expands historical data into full, vivid scenes. Fans of historical fiction or readers looking for something new after finishing Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See will enjoy Rosenberg’s story of reinvention, self-discovery, the power of personal connections, and the kindness of strangers.”

  —Booklist

  “[The Girl from Krakow] is a page-turner with a focus on how ordinary people cope when trapped in totalitarian systems. With its strong characters, Rosenberg’s novel is a winner.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “When a prominent philosopher like Alex Rosenberg turns his mind to writing a novel, there is reason to celebrate. With vivid, fast-paced storytelling verve, Rosenberg sweeps us across Europe during a morally fraught decade in a novel that is as sure to make you think as to feel.”

  —Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, author of 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction

  ALSO BY ALEX ROSENBERG

  THE GIRL FROM KRAKOW

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Text copyright © 2016 Alex Rosenberg

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Lake Union Publishing, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Lake Union Publishing are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781503939073

  ISBN-10: 1503939073

  Cover design by Shasti O’Leary-Soudant

  Photograph of couple by FPG / Getty Images

  Photograph of Oxford University by Lynn James / Getty Images

  CONTENTS

  PART I

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  PART II

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  PART III

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  PART IV

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  PART V

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  PART VI

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  AFTERWORD: DRAMATIS PERSONAE

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  PART I

  22 January 1959

  No Service on the Circle Line:

  Accident at Paddington

  CHAPTER ONE

  At 2:30 p.m. Tom Wrought left the college for London. He was to meet his lover, Liz Spencer, at the Gresham, a shabby hotel in Bloomsbury. They would spend a few hours in the room, then walk over to Charlotte Street and find a restaurant. Afterwards they would return to the hotel and continue to make love with an ardour that seemed inexhaustible.

  It was a blustery day in mid-January 1959. Grey clouds still lowered, but the rain had stopped. Tom decided to walk to the Oxford railway station. He told Lloyd—the staircase “scout” or servant—to cancel his tutorial. After checking his pigeonhole at the porters’ lodge, Tom came out the Trinity College gate and headed down the Broad to George Street. There the beauty of the college gave way to a hundred grim little shops, each cadging a living from undergraduates with overdrafts.

  Tom carried nothing more than a toothbrush, a package of sheaths, and a book under review. He was working against a deadline, and the hour and a half to London would not be wasted. The reviewing—for the Times Literary Supplement, the New Statesman, and the Manchester Guardian—supplemented his meagre fellow’s stipend. It also made him something of a public figure in England—the Pulitzer Prize–winning historian, blacklisted in the States, and now making things difficult for the establishment’s admiration of America.

  As Tom stood in the queue for a London return ticket, his eye wandered beyond the booking stall to the platform. There, a few dozen feet from the open door, was Liz’s husband, Trevor Spencer, looking every inch the banker—in a black homburg and a trench coat, carrying a tightly wound umbrella. Spencer was no banker, but it suited his self-image to dress like one. His face was in a newspaper, the Express, which evidently absorbed him completely.

  How to avoid him? Surely Spencer would not be travelling first. Tom decided to ask for first class, took his ticket, and immediately walked out of the small station back into the street. Separated from the view of the platform by the walls of the building, Tom waited. He watched the 3:05 express come in from Cheltenham. When he heard the conductor’s whistle, he hastened onto the platform and found a compartment in first class. He settled himself against the plush blue velour, covered at the headrest by an antimacassar, and contemplated the printed appeal for Dr. Barnado’s children’s homes in a frame opposite.

  His travelling companion was a taciturn woman. Tom was grateful. But he was unable to concentrate on the book he had to review and instead watched the rolling pastureland turn into the suburbs of Reading and then the industrial ring round London. Should he worry about where Trevor Spencer was going? No. It was simply an unhappy coincidence.

  When the train reached Paddington he remained in his seat until Spencer passed the carriage window. Only then did Tom rise and walk slowly down the platform, allowing the distance between them to increase. He needed Trevor to buy his underground ticket and be on his way down one of the long moving staircases before Tom did so.

  At the tube station booth there was no sign of Trevor and no queue for tickets either, so no reason to postpone his own descent to the trains. But as Tom stepped onto the escalator, he could see at the bottom of the long descent Trevor’s black homburg just getting off and heading for the Circle line in the direction of Baker Street—where Liz worked.

  Now what? Suddenly Tom’s desire not to be spotted turned into a need to follow Spencer, at least until he could be sure this was no more than a coincidence. Liz had said enough about her husband’s suspicions to worry him.

  As Tom reached the platform, he heard a train, and looking down the tunnel he saw its headlamps. When he turned, there was Trevor well along in the middle of the platform, still reading his paper.

  Then it happened. In a matter of seconds, no more. The train began to slow as it entered the station. Trevor Spencer looked up towards the train, saw Tom watching him, and dropped his newspaper. Suddenly a man darted out and pushed Trevor onto the tracks just in front of the still rapidly moving train. Trevor’s assailant could not have timed it better. Too soon and Trevor might have scrambled away across the track; too late and he would have bounced off the side of the carriage. Then the man turned calmly and walked off the platform under the WAY OUT sign in the direction of the ascending escalators.

  There were dozens of people on the platform, but no one had actually been watching or could have seen much beyond what their peripheral vision took in. Trevor Spencer’s sudden, aborted cry, audible over the screech of the train, brought them all to attention. People were converging at the point of the platform from which he had been pushed, though there was nothing to see in the gap between train and platform, nothing at
all. It was as if Trevor Spencer had simply vanished. But everyone knew there was a body down there on the tracks.

  Tom, however, saw nothing of this. The instant after Trevor recognized him, seventy-five feet or so down the platform—the instant Trevor disappeared beneath the train, the instant the murderer calmly began walking towards the WAY OUT sign at the end of the platform—that was the moment Tom began to run in an urgent attempt to apprehend the man. Arriving at the base of the long upward escalator, he could see no one hurrying, and no one even resembling the killer. He turned and looked down the corridors to the other lines. There were five at the combined Paddington and Edgware Road stations, each adorned by the identical advert for Bovril. If Trevor’s killer wasn’t in sight, it was hopeless. So, Tom thought, I need to find a policeman and tell him what I saw.

  But what had he seen? All he could describe was the colour of the man’s coat, and that he wore a hat pulled down in a way that covered most of his face. That wouldn’t help much. What would you say to a policeman anyway: you knew the victim, you were conducting an affair with his wife? He might have discovered we were to meet in London and intended to confront us? And then Tom began to feel an icy sweat. Why don’t you just tell the police you actually cooked up this very murder in your head three months ago?

  The platform was the worst place he could be. How to escape? The cramp in his stomach made rational thought difficult. He began to walk back to the Circle line platform he had come from. Before he had taken five steps, he realized that there would be no trains at that platform till the body was recovered. Instead he turned towards the Hammersmith line and began walking briskly down the passageway.

  When he reached the first landing of steps, he again stopped. Wiping the cold sweat from his brow, he unbuttoned his topcoat, one that he now realized looked rather like that of Trevor’s assailant, as did his hat. He loosened his tie and took a deep breath. How can I reach Liz? Should I even try to reach her? He looked at his watch. Would she still be at her office? If I call, her assistant will answer. Then her assistant would know . . . know what? Know about us? She already does. She’ll know something is wrong. Tom was already thinking like a guilty man, or at least a suspect. He turned and sought the escalators. In the cold air of the pavement on Praed Street, the perspiration was still running off his forehead, stinging his eyes. He mopped his face and began looking round for a telephone box. Liz would leave the office at five and would go to the hotel. He had to leave a message for her. It would have to be guarded.

  “Gresham Hotel,” came the strong Irish accent of the desk clerk they both knew well by now.

  “Can you take a message for Mrs. Spencer?” The room was always booked in her name. “Tell her that there has been an emergency in”—if he said Oxford, she’d think it was the children—“in London, and she should go home immediately.”

  “Is this Mr. . . . Spencer?” Evidently the man had recognized Tom’s voice. Liz and Tom had always used Spencer, her name, when they booked. Could he dissimulate? He had to.

  “No, my name is”—Tom looked out of the call box at the gold lettering on the darkened windows of the pub across the street—“Watney, Mr. Watney, like the lager.”

  “Very good.”

  Sitting in the train back to Oxford, the cold sweat returned, along with the cramp in the stomach. His temples began to throb, his pulse to race. Tom had to get up from his seat, seek the corridor, and throw open a window. He sought to calm himself with a cigarette. And now he felt the same nemesis that had sought him out back in the Hürtgen Forest during the war. It was the thought that he might as well be dead.

  The rush of nicotine to his lungs made him dizzy, and the smoke in his nostrils burned. He flung the cigarette onto the tracks. He had to face the fact that almost everything he had done in the last hour or so was wrong. When the police found out—and not if, but when—his actions would all make him appear to be guilty of Trevor’s murder. There was really nothing to do but wait for the nemesis, just as he had done in combat.

  You joked about doing it, that evening coming back from Paris, with Liz in the sleeper car corridor. Could you have done it, Tom? Well, you love her enough to want him . . . dead? No. Not dead. Just gone. You love her. She’s unhappy. You’d do anything to put an end to that unhappiness. Yes, but my doing this wouldn’t end it. Killing Trevor Spencer wouldn’t be a solution to our problem. But, Trevor dead—is that a solution? No, Tom. Not the way it happened.

  At 5:05 p.m. Liz Spencer found herself in front of the Baker Street tube station in a crowd. Before them was a chalked sign on a hoarding: NO SERVICE ON DISTRICT AND CIRCLE LINES—ACCIDENT AT PADDINGTON. She looked at her watch. There was no stop very nearby that could get her directly to Russell Square. In the rush hour a cab could take an hour. What to do? She sought a tube map. Ah, Bakerloo line to Piccadilly, and Victoria up to Russell Square. Very good! Pleased with her improvisation, she descended the steps to the ticket booth.

  Liz was no more than a quarter of an hour late. Plenty of time before the dinner reservation she had made at the little Italian seafood restaurant down at the end of Charlotte Street. And plenty of time after supper as well, she thought, smiling to herself. It was already dark as she ascended the stair against the current of sombre office workers moving down out of the early gloom of a winter night. Liz, however, welcomed the velvet darkness of the street as a deep cloak over the intimacy she would share with Tom.

  She entered the Gresham Hotel to a smile from the Irishman at the desk. “Ah, Mrs. Spencer.” And then a frown came over his face. “Message for you.” He wouldn’t say aloud what he had written out. Bad news was better read than heard.

  She looked at the paper, then back at him blankly.

  “Sorry, nothing else. I thought it was Mr. Spencer, but he said not.”

  Liz looked at the note again. It has to be Tom. No one else knows, except perhaps your assistant, if she suspects. She might, no, she must! But it was a man who called asking for you.

  Liz turned and left. Preoccupied by the message, she was on automatic pilot as she made her way to Russell Square for the tube up to Kings Cross and over to Paddington. By the time she was on the District line, service had returned to normal. At Paddington she had to wait an hour for an Oxford train. In the waiting room on the platform, all the way back, she couldn’t help running through scenarios. She didn’t want to. Whatever it is, you’ll imagine something worse. You’re just working yourself up. It wouldn’t help. But anxiety drove out all control over her consciousness. The message had been from a Mr. Watney. But I don’t know anyone named Watney. It wasn’t the children. It couldn’t be. They hadn’t been in London, surely! It could only be Tom. But why would he have made up a name when he called the Gresham? Why would he have told me to go back to Oxford? There was just no way to fit the pieces together, nothing she could add that would even narrow the possibilities. She could steel herself if she knew what awaited her. Instead, she could only imagine the worst. Fumbling for a cigarette, she realized that she had seated herself in No Smoking.

  It was 9:30 p.m. by the time the train pulled into Oxford. Had Liz been in Smoking, she might have seen the two Scotland Yard detectives travelling up to Oxford in the same train. They were in a cab heading to Park Town crescent well before Liz reached the car park in front of the station.

  The au pair, Ifegenia, a young Italian girl, met her at the door. “There are two police here to see you. They’ve just come. In the lounge.” She helped Liz off with her coat and hung it next to the two rather shabby coats she had just taken from the policemen. Then the girl disappeared into the kitchen.

  “Mrs. Spencer?” It was properly interrogatory. The men had risen as Liz came to the threshold of the room and remained there. She nodded. “Chief Inspector Bennett, Scotland Yard.” The man was squat and wide, with thinning hair combed over a glistening pate, five lines of deep wrinkles across his forehead, a boxer’s flattened nose. He was in serious need of a shave. Liz bit her lip and waited. �
��This is Detective Sergeant Watkins.” Bennett indicated the thin and chinless younger man beside him, with NHS glasses and heavy eyebrows below a short haircut. Watkins and his governor were both dressed in dark off-the-rack suits with unstarched shirts and plain woollen ties. They looked tired, impatient, out of sorts. But they were making an effort to be polite.

  “I fear I must inform you that your husband, Trevor Spencer, has been killed, in London. A homicide, actually.” The inspector looked down at his notepad. “At four ten he was standing on the District and Circle line platform at Paddington. Someone pushed him in front of an oncoming train, and then left the scene.”

  The older detective was continuing to speak, but Liz couldn’t hear. Instead, she found herself in Trevor’s place, falling to the tracks before the oncoming train. She felt that horror as a sharp pain in her abdomen, followed by a wave of nausea. She put her hand to her mouth, but the urge to vomit passed. As the enormity of what he had said washed over her, Liz began to lose balance and had to grasp the lintel. The two men reached out to steady her, but she fended them off as the blood quickly returned to her brain. She needed to sit. The men moved back towards the chesterfield, and Liz took the armchair.

  Detective Bennett was silent, waiting for her to regain some composure. But Liz was still absorbing Trevor’s death. The visceral dread she felt erased at a stroke all the anger, resentment, fury at Trevor that the years had accumulated. Suddenly—and permanently, she later realized—they were transformed into pity, grief, regret. When the tears came, it was Watkins, the younger policeman, who proffered a handkerchief.

  Finally she searched for something to say. “Are you certain it was him?”

  “I am afraid so, ma’am. Identification on the body.”

  “And you are confident it was murder?” Liz had to ask the question. Then she worried. Was this question appropriate as the first response from a sudden widow?