Autumn in Oxford: A Novel Read online

  “You really think you’re going back, don’t you?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “Well, you’re not.” She turned and finally left the room.

  What could her categorical statement mean? Tom became anxious.

  For an hour early that afternoon they moved through the house in silence, wary of each other, taking care their paths not cross. The gloom outside matched the ominous mood inside, as if both were preparing for a violent storm. About one thirty Barbara came out of the bedroom wearing the Chanel suit, white gloves, a hat with a fine mesh veil, carrying her pocketbook. To no one in particular she said, “I’m going to Plattsburgh. I’ll probably be back late.”

  Plattsburgh? It was the nearest large town, two hours away, along narrow alpine roads. What could be in Plattsburgh? An air force base and not much else. The combination of uncertainty about what Barbara might do and her absence decided matters for Tom. Once she’d gone he found a suitcase in the storage room of the boathouse, brought it up to the lodge, and began to pack. He wouldn’t be able to take much, and he would have to hide the bag. When it was packed, he took his passport from its hiding place beneath a dresser drawer and placed it on top of the Olivetti portable, snapped down the metal case, and put it and the valise in the woodshed next to the carport.

  Then he called BOAC and Trans-Canada Airlines in Montreal. Suddenly he had to think about cost. It was, he ruefully admitted to himself, a new experience. Then he remembered Barb had insisted on securing a Diner’s Club charge card in his name. At least he’d be able to buy the ticket on credit. Paying for it later would be another matter.

  Tom was in bed feigning sleep when he heard Barbara pull in towards midnight. He was relieved. The car was essential to his plan. He needed to wake at 4:00 a.m. if he was to make his flight at Lachine, west of Montreal.

  When he next looked at his watch, it was three thirty, and he felt as though he’d never gotten to sleep at all. There was no point trying to snatch that last thirty minutes. With infinite slowness he rose from the bed, lifting the covers just enough to emerge from them. In bare feet he tiptoed down the wooden stairs, each tread groaning slightly with his weight. Entering the laundry room behind the kitchen, he closed the door and then snapped on the light. There was the suit, shirt, tie, socks, and shoes he’d laid out the night before. Quickly he dressed, came out of the lodge by the back door, grabbed the suitcase from the woodshed, and made for the car. As he swung the bag into the trunk, something gnawed at him . . . what was the matter? Why did he feel as though he had forgotten something? He patted his pockets, feeling for his wallet, keys, money clip. Then it hit him . . . he had nearly ruined everything. He was about to drive off without the typewriter and passport! His body relaxed, and he tiptoed back into the woodshed for the grey metal box.

  Now he sat in the car, put the key in the ignition, and began to worry about the noise the motor would make. Opening the door, he put his foot out onto the ground, then pulled the shift lever on the steering wheel column into neutral. Slowly disengaging the handbrake, he turned the key in the ignition switch to on and gave the car a push with his foot. Gently it moved away, gathering speed on the gradual descent to the main road. By the time the car was coasting into the turn of the road, he was going fast enough to slowly let in the clutch so the wheels could silently start the motor. Suddenly Tom felt the exhilaration of action. Yes, like the last time you did this, in June!

  “Show them in.” Even before the men had offered their FBI badges and names, Barbara began, “I told your boss yesterday. If you waited till this morning he might be gone. Well, he is.”

  “Excuse me, ma’am?” The older of the two looked perplexed. He had removed his hat to reveal a crew cut that he was much too old to carry off. His two-piece gabardine suit was so wrinkled, one would be excused for thinking he had slept in it. In fact he had, on a flight from Washington, DC, and then on a long drive from Albany along narrow valley roads that had begun before dawn. In a vaguely Midwestern accent he continued, “If you told somebody something ’bout Mr. Wrought’s leaving, it wasn’t my boss. I report directly to the director of the FBI himself.” He looked at his younger partner. “My name is Sandusky, and this is Agent Geary.” The latter looked a little more like the fresh-faced FBI agent one expected, trim, dark hair held down by something that smelled like Brylcreem, and no immediate need of a shave, unlike his older partner. Geary was wearing a seersucker suit that had travelled better in the heat, but his collar was open and tie disarrayed. Both looked like they needed refreshment.

  “Gentlemen, can Bladen get you some coffee?”

  Geary spoke, apparently slightly out of turn, as Sandusky’s face grimaced in slight annoyance. “Glass of cold water would be fine, ma’am.”

  Bladen went to the kitchen and returned with two glasses tinkling with ice. Both were gratefully accepted.

  By now Barbara had realized that their call had nothing to do with her trip the day before to the local FBI office in Plattsburgh. “So, what can I do for you, gentlemen?”

  Sandusky spoke. “We came to see Mr. Wrought. But you say your husband is gone. How long ago did he leave?”

  “Probably sometime during the night or early this morning. My car is gone too. A ’58 Lincoln coupe, licence plate BF 825.” She wondered if the FBI could get her car back. “Probably he’s gone to Montreal for the Trans-Canada Constellation to London.”

  “Let me get this straight, ma’am,” Geary said. “You knew he wanted to leave and tried to get the FBI to stop him? Why’s that?”

  Barbara was slightly flustered. I wanted to keep my husband, that’s why. But she replied, “I know the Justice Department wants to take his passport away. I wanted to warn them he was going to leave the country.”

  “I see.” Geary subsided, and Sandusky began again.

  “Mrs. Wrought, we’re not here about your husband’s passport. Not directly. Do you mind if we ask you a few questions?”

  “Not at all, Mr. . . . Sandusky.”

  The agent removed a large billfold from his suit coat pocket and withdrew a piece of paper. It was a photostat of a newspaper article. “We wanted to speak to Mr. Wrought about this article in a British newspaper, the Tribune.” He handed her the photostat. “We’d like to know if Mr. Wrought wrote the article.”

  Barbara was perplexed. “Why not check the byline?” She began to scan the writing. It was about the atom spy case of 1951, in which a couple, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, had been convicted of providing the Soviet Union with the trigger designs for the first nuclear weapon.

  “There isn’t any byline. Do you by any chance recognize it?” Geary asked.

  “No. I’ve never been interested much in Tom’s . . .” She sought the right word—fun, avocation, hobby, writing? It wasn’t really “work,” but that was the word she settled on. “Why don’t you just ask the editor?”

  Without suppressing the sarcasm, Sandusky replied, “Thanks for the suggestion.” Then he changed the subject. “Why would your husband suddenly want to leave the country?”

  “I don’t know. He didn’t give me a reason. It was more a matter of getting back to England than leaving the US. But I can’t understand the urgency.”

  “So he didn’t get a message or hear from anyone that made him suddenly want to leave?”

  “No, nothing like that. I told you, he wasn’t fleeing the US. He had decided to get back to England.”

  Now Geary inquired, “Did Mr. Wrought ever talk to you about his past, what he did in the war or afterwards?”

  “He was a captain with a Negro service company in France and then took them into combat in Germany in the winter of ’44–’45.”

  “And after that?”

  “Oh, he once said he’d been a spy in Finland for the OSS right after the war. I suppose I can tell the FBI that, can’t I?”

  “We know all about that. Anything else?”

  “Not that I recall . . . oh, wait, he went back to Europe, I think it was Sweden, in
1951 for three weeks. Said it was research for a book he wanted to write. But that didn’t make sense. I accused him of meeting another woman.”

  “What did he say, if I may ask?”

  “He just laughed. But he wouldn’t say any more about it.”

  Sandusky tried once more. “So, he hadn’t talked to anyone lately, someone he might have known from back in New York City, someone who might have scared him or warned him to get out of the country or anything like that?”

  Barbara had become impatient. These men weren’t listening. “No, no, no. He didn’t want to leave this country. He just wanted to get back to England. You want to know why he left? Figure out why he’d want to go back to England right after he spent a year there. Why would he come home and go back a month later?” When the two agents said nothing, she went on, “Look, before I answer any more questions, I need to know what this is about. You didn’t come for his passport. Why did you come?”

  Both men rose, looked at each other, and put on their hats in unspoken agreement that it was the moment to leave. As they moved to the door, Sandusky only said, “I’m sorry, we can’t discuss the matter. Good-bye.”

  “But thanks for the ice water, ma’am,” Geary added in a tone that suggested regret for his partner’s abruptness.

  “What about my car?” Barbara said to no one in particular.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  At the moment Tom’s Super Constellation touched down at Heathrow, Liz was driving the Humber sedan down a narrow valley in the Pyrenees. It was her annual holiday from the Abbey National. The Spencers had endured a rough passage in a car ferry crossing the channel, and several tailbacks coming into and going out of Paris. Everyone had been seasick, the children carsick, and the parents cross about each other’s driving and map reading. But a week later they had discovered Lescun—a small village in the high Pyrénées. As the crow flew, it was a kilometre off the road down to Spain, but three times as far in switchbacks, with a hostel and spectacular views down the valley and back towards the magnificent cirque of peaks that surrounded the village.

  Saturday was market day in the jardin publique of Oloron-Sainte-Marie, the only town of any size near Lescun. Under the plane trees, the stalls had been doing a strong business since early that morning. Goat cheese, olives, saucisson, braids of garlic pegged above tables covered in thyme and tarragon, all clamoured for attention. Competing against them were endive, leeks, a half-dozen different varieties of lettuce and dried mushrooms, gigot of lamb, pig’s knuckles, and fowl half-plucked to show their local provenance. At the boulanger’s truck, baguettes were still available, but there was no more bon pain de quatorze—the bread of ’14, what the veterans of the First World War pretended they had subsisted on in the trenches.

  Walking through crowded rows, Liz’s eye was drawn by one delicattese after another, mostly unknown on the other side of the channel. The trouble was keeping track of her children, darting from stall to stall, plucking samples and swiping treats. Ian, the younger, was struggling between keeping his mother in sight and following his more venturesome older sister. Olivia was extending her distance from her mother with each passing minute. Finally they came rushing back to her, importuning the purchase of two plastic bow and suction-cup arrow sets. After pretending to resist such an enormously expensive purchase, Liz gave in.

  With two string bags full of provisions for the evening, she led the children back to the café where they had left Trevor. He was sitting on the terrasse sipping an express and trying to make sense out of Le Monde. But he couldn’t read French. Then it came to her: Trevor was not going to be seen reading the American Paris Herald Tribune, even though it hung on a wooden spool from a rack on the café wall.

  Liz put down her bags on an adjacent seat and handed out the bow-and-arrow sets. “Olivia, take Ian across to the park. Stay in view. Teach your brother how to use it and not to point it at anyone.” The kids pulled the toys off the cardboard and rushed off. Liz picked up the litter and pulled out a chair. She was tempted to ask what Trevor had learned in Le Monde, but since they both knew he couldn’t make out the French beyond immediate cognates, it would just have been provocative.

  The waiter came up, and she ordered a café crème, ripped the end off a baguette, and looked round. At the boundary between the terrasse and the interior of the café, where prices were slightly cheaper, two men of about sixty were engaged in an argument. It started quietly enough, but within moments they were hissing at each other. Then one of them rose, picked up a glass of milky liquid—pastis, she would soon learn—and pitched its contents in the other’s face. Walking out of the café, he turned and hurled a parting condemnation: “Sale petite putain bourgeois connard réactionnaire.”

  Perplexed, Liz turned to the only other person sitting on the terrasse. He was tall and rather dark, with short brown hair too stiff to respond to a comb. He had the weathered, tanned face of a local. With feet stretched out, the Frenchman was lounged as naturally as if he owned the café, smoking an aromatic Gauloise. Catching his eye, Liz asked, “Excusez-moi, monsieur. Pouvez-vous expliquer ce qui se est passe?”

  “Oui, madame.” He smiled, but catching her accent immediately shifted to a faultless English. “They were discussing current events.”

  “De Gaulle’s new government?” She wanted to sound informed.

  “Not that current. No, they were arguing about the war. It’s still pretty current in these parts.” He looked across the broad footpath between the terrasse and the road. “See the plaques on the trees?” She looked up and realized she had not noticed them before. “The Germans hung résistants from those trees in ’43 and ’44. The plaques bear their names.”

  “Is that what they were arguing about?”

  “That’s how it started. For years now the local branch of the Communist Party and the veterans of de Gaulle’s anti-German resistance have been arguing about how many plaques each gets.”

  Trevor put down his Le Monde. “But why did that bloke douse the other one with . . . the drink?”

  Their interlocutor smiled. “The pastis? Ah, well, the ancient Communist claimed that they had been the only résistants during the war. Then the other said the Communists might as well have been Nazis, the way they had started out the war collaborating with the Germans against the British.”

  “Too complicated for me.” Trevor picked up Le Monde and began again to try to make something of the closely printed articles.

  But Liz remained interested. “So, the Communists in France only started fighting the Nazis because the Germans attacked Russia?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “What about everyone else? Wasn’t everyone else in the Resistance?”

  “Not quite. Mostly people just waited round to see who would win. The French were worried about food, wine, and cigarettes during the war, not politics. So, now you know what that argument was about.”

  Liz was grateful. “Thank you for the history lesson, monsieur. Where did you learn English so well?”

  “Ah, I was what they called a ‘premature antifascist.’ I left France with the Free French in 1940, went to England, and returned with de Gaulle in ’44. Whence my English.” The words had an echo to Liz. “Premature antifascist.” Where had she heard the expression? It could only have been from Tom.

  Giving up the hopeless challenge presented by Le Monde, Trevor had begun to listen again. “So, you were with us, in the Blitz and all? Whenever I come to France, I notice how untouched by the war it seems. We still remember the austerity, even after the war. Nothing like that in Paris.” The pronoun “us” in Trevor’s mouth burned in Liz’s ears. Then he did it again. “Most of your countrymen didn’t seem to have suffered in the war the way we did.” We? Had her husband convinced himself he had spent the war in Britain? And why are you trying to provoke this Frenchman anyway? Liz fumed silently.

  Trevor didn’t notice the anger contorting Liz’s face. If the Frenchman did, no gesture of his betrayed it. “Yes, we weren’t
bombed, we didn’t go as hungry, we didn’t lose so many lives. But we lost our souls by the collaboration—and the lies we told ourselves afterwards. That’s why those two old men are still at each other’s throats.”

  Liz had to change the subject before her anger bubbled over. “Monsieur, permit me to introduce myself. Elizabeth Spencer . . . and this is my husband, Trevor.”

  “Enchanté,” he responded. “D’Alembert, Philippe D’Alembert, à votre service.”

  Liz took his hand. It was not the French brief tug at the fingers, but a solid English grip. “On holiday here?”

  “No, I’m an agent immobilier, an estate agent. My card . . .” He reached into a shirt pocket and proffered one. Without thinking, Liz put it in her purse. D’Alembert turned to Trevor, trying again. “So, Monsieur Spencer, we were comrades-in-arms.” He extended his hand.

  Trevor hesitated for a moment and replied, “Suppose so . . .” Then he accepted the hand.

  Liz didn’t want to hear any more dissimulation from Trevor. She interrupted. “We’re at a hostel in Lescun, down the road towards Spain.”

  “Quelle coïncidence. I’m on my way there . . . to walk the GR10 to Pic d’Anie this afternoon.”

  “We were hoping to do it, but it seems a long tramp. Can it be done in an afternoon?” Liz looked doubtful.

  “Mais bien sur!” D’Alembert looked towards the children, still absorbed by their new bows and arrows. “Even for children, if they are strong and the weather is fine, like today.” He looked first at Liz, then decided he had better address Trevor. “It would be my pleasure to be your guide.”

  By now the children’s plastic bows had broken. As they returned to the café disconsolately holding the broken halves of their toys, Liz rose. Without giving Trevor a chance to concur or dissent, she announced, “That would be wonderful. We accept.” She turned to her children. “We’re off back to the village for an adventure. Monsieur D’Alembert here is going to lead us up Pic d’Anie.” As she expected, the children immediately forgot about the tragedy of broken bows and arrows.