Autumn in Oxford: A Novel Page 9

  “Trev, let’s go back to North America.” She had made a prediction to herself about how this conversation would go. Now she would test it.

  “Back? Back to Toronto?”

  “Doesn’t have to be Toronto. Anywhere in Canada. Even the States.”

  “Not a chance. Can’t go back.”

  Suddenly she knew why. “What do you mean ‘can’t go back’?”

  “Just can’t. There it is.” Trevor looked like a small child about to stamp his feet.

  She would try to be calm. She reached for a dressing gown, covered herself, and repeated his words. “Just can’t? Surely there’s a reason, Trev. Why ever not?”

  “Ask your father.” There was deep belligerence in his voice.

  “My father? What’s he to do with this?” Will Trevor storm out of the room? she wondered.

  No, he was going to answer her question. “Your father told me if I came back, he’d turn me in.”

  “What are you talking about?” Would he admit to Keith’s disclosure, or would the shame prevent it?

  “He covered a . . . a . . . defalcation.”

  She had to think what the word meant. “A what? You mean a fraud, a theft?”

  “Yes, my theft.” There. He had said it. His look glared the thought You deserved to hear the unpleasant truth just for provoking me. It was too late, far too late for her to do anything about it. “You might as well know. It was the income tax. I just never kept the right records, and besides, I couldn’t figure out the damn forms. I wasn’t going to ask for your help with the maths. You would have made fun of me.” Trevor stopped.

  You’re right, Liz thought, but suppressed the words.

  “So I just skipped it for three years. Then they came after me. I took a bit of money from an escrow account to make enough on the stock market to pay it off.” He stopped, hoping to see some understanding or acceptance on her face. Seeing none, he continued, “Should have known better . . . lost it all to a shyster broker. Your father paid it—the escrow and the taxes. Then he bought us the steamship tickets to Liverpool.”

  “But that was what, six, seven years ago? Why can’t we go back?” Liz was reeling. Had she been exiled by her own father?

  “Told me if I came back without the money, he’d press charges.”

  “But we haven’t saved anything.”

  “Well, he thinks I’m putting it together. Reckons we’re doing alright.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I haven’t told him the truth, and neither have you.”

  Well, Liz thought, standing there, now at least you know exactly where you are. She moved to the bed, took off the dressing gown, and slipped in between the sheets, keeping well away from Trevor’s torso.

  The next morning when Liz arrived in the kitchen, Trevor was alone, making a cup of tea. She had begun to put together the coffee percolator when he spoke.

  “I’m sorry about last night, Liz.” She made no response. “I’ve been meaning to tell you everything for . . . for years.” Liz did not express her disbelief. “I wanted to make good, to earn the money before I told you . . . then pay it back.” Trevor was so close to tears Liz almost wanted to comfort him. He was trying to build a bridge, to find a modus vivendi. Would she help from her side of the divide? She decided to try.

  “But then, Trev, you’ve got to find some other way to earn that money.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Look, you’ve been trying to sell for years now, first commercial real estate, then houses . . . now you’re down to used cars. It’s not working. You don’t have the knack.”

  “I just need to make the contacts.”

  “Six years almost. The club dues we can’t afford, standing people to drinks, squash, tennis club, Tory party dinner dances . . . you, dressing the part. I’ve paid for it all, along with rent, the school fees. It’s not a matter of contacts. It’s a matter of trust. People won’t buy things from you.”

  “What would you have me do?”

  “Drive a cab, learn a trade, get a job at the Cowley Motor Works. Anything that brings in some money. It doesn’t matter . . .” She stopped for a moment. “How much do we need before we can go back to Canada?”

  Trevor glared at her. “I’m never going back. And that’s flat.” Then he walked out.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Tom was sitting on the deck of the boathouse. It was a quiet late afternoon four days after his return to the United States. He was in a low-slung Adirondack chair stained to match the dark log building. The deck planking was accented by gleaming turnbuckles and white painters loosely holding a matched set of inboard Chris-Crafts to the dock. He could hear their rhythmic tapping against the deck in the wake of a passing launch. The glare of sunlight was redoubled by reflection off the polished teak prows that narrowed from each rakish windscreen. The intensity of the light forced his eyes to the north, where the shore was already an indistinct purple in the shade of the mountains surrounding the lake.

  Tom knew that he would have to return to England. The question was how soon he could go. Perhaps not before October, when the Oxford Michaelmas term began. That was three months away. If he went back much sooner, Barbara would want to know why. And if she learned the truth, Trevor Spencer would soon know it too.

  Behind him he suddenly detected his wife’s emphatic footsteps. “Bladen told me you were down here.” She bent down and gave Tom a peck somewhere between his cheek and his hairline.

  “Barb, when you called you said you’d be back tomorrow.”

  “I wanted to surprise you.” Why does it sound more like “catch you”? Barbara Wrought was still in her Chanel travelling suit, a narrow skirt and fitted jacket, topped by a pillbox hat. She folded her long frame into the matched chair next to his and went on, “So, after ten years of trying to get you to go camping with me, you go off alone. Very surprising, totally out of character. What possessed you?”

  Tom had been trying without much luck to contrive a response to this question for days. They were interrupted by the servant carefully balancing a tray of two martini glasses. It gave Tom a little more time. Barbara glanced at him. “I asked Bladen to bring us a couple of cocktails.”

  Tom waited till the man had turned up the path to the main lodge. “I went into the state park for a few days because I needed time alone to think things through.” It sounded more ominous than he meant it to be.

  “Time alone? You were alone here. There was no one to bother you.” He made no response. “What sort of things did you need to think through?”

  “The future, my future, our future.” Our future? Why did he put it that way? He almost laughed as he thought, I don’t want to provoke you, just divorce you. But he couldn’t give her the slightest hint of why. She had always been a jealous wife, interposing herself between her husband and any woman she thought might find his company agreeable. Could it have entered her head that he had already gone back to England only a week after living there for a year? It would be an easy step to the conclusion that he’d gone back for a woman.

  “Barb, I’ve decided to go back.”

  “You’ve already decided? Can’t we discuss it?”

  “We can discuss it, but I have pretty well decided.”

  “I don’t get it. You spent the whole year complaining about the tight little island—the class system, the cold, the rain, the meanness of life. What’s happened to change your mind?”

  “Barb, I can’t work in the States.”

  “You don’t need to work. You haven’t needed to since we got married. Besides, with the Pulitzer you’ll get a hefty advance for your next book.”

  “It’s not the money.”

  “You liked being an Oxford don?” Her tone was dismissive. “How will you like it living on a don’s salary?”

  “Like you said, Barb. With an advance on my next book, perhaps I’ll be able to.”

  Barbara rose. “Tom, I don’t think you’ll really go back. It won’t be me that holds you. I know
that. In Britain you’d be too far away to contribute anything to the Negro civil rights movement.”

  “You’re wrong, Barb. I’ll be able to do just what I’ve been doing all along.” She looked at him quizzically. “I don’t have to be in America to write things. In fact, that history of Negro education in the South I wrote for the Brown v Board of Ed case back in ’54, I didn’t even claim authorship.” Tom’s paper had been cited in the famous desegregation case, but they’d asked him to be anonymous. The blacklist again. Tom had realized that his usefulness to the cause would be limited till the Red Scare was over.

  Barbara shrugged her shoulders. “I’m going to shower and change for dinner.” She finished the drink and slowly unfolded her long body out of the deck chair.

  Coming back into the house, Tom passed his desk. Next to the Olivetti 22 portable typewriter was his US passport, lying open, facedown. Had he left it that way? Had Barbara leafed through the pages, checking the dates? Surely she would have confronted him if she had noticed the latest stamps. Quietly he slipped it into a pocket. Now, where could he hide it?

  If Tom was going back to Oxford, he’d need money, and the only source was an advance from his publisher on a new book. He’d need a subject and an outline, and it would take several days to put one together. One had been kicking around in his head ever since the morning he had driven back to Heathrow with Liz: a book about the New Deal’s almost comprehensive compromise with Southern racism. So, Tom spent most afternoons the next week at the Saranac Lake Public Library, reading spools of New York Times and Herald Tribune microfilm. Undisturbed in the mornings, he’d sit at the portable typewriter trying to turn ten or fifteen years of congressional politics into a story that people would want to read. He needed characters. The ones that emerged were villains—Southern senators like Bilbo and Thurmond playing the race card to win votes from poor whites while personally enriching themselves. There was only so much he could write about Eleanor Roosevelt’s fight for an antilynching bill. He knew who his heroes had been, the anonymous men and women he’d known as a student. They had come out of the South and gone back to organize sharecroppers—white and black. And too many had been Communists.

  When he was finished, he went to the public stenographer in the St. Regis Hotel, who typed a fair copy of the eight-page outline. Then he mailed it off to his New York publisher.

  That was the night he realized he’d have to leave sooner rather than later. Barbara had been back for nearly ten days, and they had not had intercourse once. When it came to sex she was clinical, and that’s what she called it—intercourse. A dry spell this long was unusual, and unthinkable after a separation such as they’d experienced when Barbara had gone to California.

  Sex had kept their marriage a going concern for almost a dozen years. It had repeatedly and reliably expunged the bitterness their occasional infidelities had induced in each other. Tom could always tell when Barbara wanted or expected sex. He’d come into the bedroom and find her in underclothes available only from Frederick’s of Hollywood. This was a mail-order business whose packages really did arrive in plain brown wrappers with a post office box for the return address.

  It was a warm night, but Barbara was lying across the bed wearing mesh stockings, whose seams ran right up to black lace tops. Each was held by a pair of black garters snaking down from a dark-purple garter belt around her waist. Below the belt there were no panties at all. Across her back was a single band without a clasp and two straps, both off her shoulders. The bra was one that opened in the front that she knew he particularly liked.

  Barbara dropped the book she had been reading on the floor and twisted her head over her right shoulder. Tom noticed the title, Anatomy of a Murder. It had been on the New York Times bestseller lists for three months, but had not yet been available in Britain. Smiling ruefully, he took off his clothes, a pair of chino ducks and a plain white T-shirt. When he was down to his boxers, he threw himself on the bed next to Barbara. She turned towards him, proffering a leg so that he could roll the stocking off. Obediently he did so, and then repeated the process, moving his hands slowly down the other long leg. As he finished, he began to worry. He was not as yet even slightly aroused. Barbara had not noticed, and clambering over his prostrate body, she was soon astride him, looking down at herself and his torso.

  Suddenly she stopped. He was not ready. This had never happened in more than a decade of marriage. Never, not once. She had to know what it meant. She moved off his body, and then casting her eye from his head downwards towards his groin, she finally spoke. “Well, you certainly aren’t finding me attractive tonight, dear. What’s the matter? Preoccupied? Can’t focus on the sex?”

  “No.” His denial was weak. What excuse do men give when they can’t get it up? he wondered. “Maybe I’m catching something. Can’t figure out what’s come over me.”

  “If I didn’t know better, I’d say it was love . . . and for someone else.”

  “Why’s that?” Was she reading his mind? It wasn’t a cause of impotence he’d ever heard of. Men famously fucked almost anything anytime. Having to be in love in order to be aroused was something for women, he’d always thought. Now he knew differently. At least this man at this time couldn’t service this woman for that very reason. He was in love with someone else. And it was the last thing he could admit to.

  Tom rose from the bed and walked into the bathroom to wash his face. Opening the medicine cabinet, he noticed her diaphragm kit open, with the diaphragm still inside. So, she had tried to seduce him without protection. This was as unheard of between them as his own failure. She was trying to become pregnant without his consent.

  Now he had to factor in the unanticipated strength of Barbara’s interest in keeping him with her. It was evidently strong enough to make his wife willing to have a child. Barbara Wrought had never been drawn to parenthood. Like Tom, she had been an only child, she out of her own parents’ choice and he owing to the early widowhood of his mother. He’d expected to have children, looked forwards to them, wanted them. But once they’d been married a few years, Barbara told Tom she was having too much fun to follow their friends into the postwar baby boom. By then he’d recognized his marriage was very possibly a mistake, so he didn’t argue. Now Barbara was almost forty. Without children to have borne or tended, she looked far younger. Could she still have children? Of course. Was she willing to use a child as a pawn in a struggle to keep her husband from leaving her? Evidently.

  Several weeks later, on an unseasonably cold and rainy day in late July, Tom sat in the cone of light cast by a standing lamp, smoking cigarettes, sipping coffee, and reading. Even in the late morning, one could still see the lights in the lodges that dotted the lakeshore. The only boats to be seen were utility craft carrying supplies to estates with no road connection to the town.

  Barbara came in with the mail, sat down at the dining table, and put a thick envelope before her. “Tom, will you please come here.” She indicated the seat at right angles to hers. Wordlessly he rose and carried his book to the table, put his cigarette in the ashtray, and faced her. “I had my lawyers draw up these papers.” She removed them from the envelope. “They protect my property in any divorce proceeding.” He did not interrupt. “They told me if you contested a property settlement, you’d have to be served papers. But they said if it were uncontested, you’d only have to have your signature witnessed. Bladen can do it.” Still Tom said nothing.

  “I have to protect myself and my assets. If you go back to Britain, I’ll sue for divorce.” They both knew each of them had grounds. Almost from the beginning Barbara had been unfaithful, in ways so casual Tom couldn’t take them seriously. It was the fact that he had not felt any jealousy that made him realize he had ceased to love her, if he ever had to begin with. There was a line in one of those wonderful British novels he always remembered: “I wore my cuckold’s horns like a crown of manumission.” He’d had to look up the word manumission, only to discover it was the act of freeing one’
s slaves. Embarrassing. It was a word any historian of the American South should have known. Barbara’s indiscretions had given him licence for his own. Now his rare lapses had provided her grounds for divorce. It didn’t matter.

  “Where do I sign?” He took the documents from her and began to read them through.

  “Don’t you understand? You’ll be penniless.”

  “I don’t actually have any money of my own now, Barbara. I live on you.”

  “Yes, you do. And you won’t be able to live on me if I divorce you.”

  “I can work for a living.”

  “When you left Howard University, you were making six thousand dollars a year. We used up the ten thousand from your Pulitzer in Britain. You didn’t even take any notice of what Trinity and the history faculty were paying you.”

  “Barbara, do you really want to make it plain that the only reason I should stay with you is the money? Why do you want to be married to me that badly anyway?” He hadn’t meant to be so brutal. It was just the habitual pattern between them asserting itself once more. But this time she didn’t snap back. As she walked away from the table, he sought to say something that might cushion the blow, spare her self-esteem. “You never really loved me.” She turned back with a bitter smile. Tom spoke again. “You loved the idea of being married to me.”

  She glared at him. “You egoist!”

  Tom’s placatory aim vanished. “No, it wasn’t me you wanted. Just someone like me who’d serve as a sign of your own rank. You’ve kept me all these years like an object gaining value. It was the prestige of having a professor for a husband, one with a slightly risqué pedigree and then a glittering prize or two.” He paused. “You’ve always treated me like one of those minks you throw over the shoulders of a cocktail dress.”