Dreaming Spies (2 page)

Trinity Term’s mist
.

The following morning was wet and blustery. We took our breakfast in front of the fire, reading an accumulation of newspapers. Inevitably, the news was all about the horrors of the weather (a woman killed when a tree fell across her house), imminent threats to world peace, and the attempts at good-humoured news that convince one the human race is a lost cause. With yesterday’s reminder of Japan, my eyes were caught no fewer than three times by the country’s name: an art display in London, the Japanese-Russian treaty that was going into effect soon, and the results of an inquest into a drowned Japanese translator named Hirakawa. At this last, I glanced out the window at the rain-soaked rock, and closed the newspaper.

Minutes later, I abandoned Holmes to The Mystery of the Emperor’s Stone (as well as a meeting he had that afternoon in London, concerning Turkey’s upcoming Hat Law) to turn my face towards Oxford. I took the Morris, having tasks to do along the way, and although the drive promised to be difficult, as I passed through tiny East Dean, I found myself
humming in time with the pistons. When I crossed the Cuckmere, I was singing aloud—tunelessly, yes, but with modern music, who cares?

Once my business in Eastleigh was concluded (an elderly tutor, installed there and in need of good cheer and enticing reading material), I turned north. Traffic crept around an overturned wagon outside of Winchester, and again slowed out in the countryside twenty miles later, for some reason I never did see. As a result, although I’d intended to be in Oxford before tea-time, I could tell that it would not be until after dark. I was glumly bent over the wheel, bleary-eyed and trying to ignore the growing headache (a bad knock in December had yet to heal completely), when a snug and ancient building rose up alongside the road ahead: grey stone, heavy vines, yellow glow from ancient windows, wood-smoke curling from a chimney dating to Elizabeth. With Japan so recently in my mind, for a brief instant I saw the building as a
ryokan
—an ancient inn, with steaming baths and a waiting masseur. A cook who had worked there his entire life, a welcoming tray of pale, scalding, deliciously bitter tea … But no, it was just a pub.

Still, my arms were already turning the steering wheel. The quiet of shutting down the engine made my ears tingle. I picked up my bag and, coat pinched over my head against the heavy drops, scurried for the door.

Heaven lay within, an ancient gathering space that could only be in England, every breath testifying to its centuries of smoke and beer, damp dogs, and the sweat of working men. I made for the massive stone fireplace, and stood close enough to feel the scorch of the glowing coals through the back of my coat. A placid barmaid took my order, while I continued to stand, revolving slowly, divesting myself bit by bit of the layers. Heavy gloves, woollen scarf, and fur hat migrated to a nearby chair, eventually joined by my fur-lined driving coat. When my food came, I was down to a heavy cardigan, and my bright pink fingers were restored enough to grasp fork and knife.

After a few bites, I paused to retrieve a pair of books from the bag. The first was an unlikely but colourful novel I had bought in the Gare de Lyon two days earlier, by an Englishman named Forster. It was a year since Holmes and I had watched Bombay fade behind us—almost exactly
a year, come to that: seemed like a decade—and I’d bought it thinking that Forster’s
Passage
might remind me of the pleasanter aspects of our trip. Instead, I was finding the plot increasingly difficult, and after another chapter I closed the covers on Dr Aziz and the criminally ridiculous Adela, to pick up the other volume, a melancholy old friend.

What is it about Oxford that puts one in a poetical state of mind? One would think that a long-time resident like me would grow inured to Oxford poetry, if for no other reason than the sheer volume of the stuff. Every undergraduate (and most tourists) who walked through one of her doors found it necessary to sit down and compose verse about the experience, all of it romantic and most of it twaddle. But still, in private moments, Matthew Arnold crept under my guard. Who would not wish to be a scholar-gipsy, leaving the safe walls—
this strange disease of modern life, with its sick hurry, its divided aims
—to learn the eternal secrets of the gipsies, like some latter-day Merlin? Which of us had not deliberately chosen to return to the city by way of Boar’s Hill, in hopes of glimpsing one of the few remaining views of the city below, and thus be given an excuse to murmur Arnold’s enchanting phrase:

And that sweet city with her dreaming spires
,

She needs not June for beauty’s heightening
.

I sighed, and squinted at the pub’s rain-streaked window. Not much of June’s beauty-heightening today. Were it not for the pull of Oxford—less its dreaming spires than its comfortable bed and waiting fire—I would have taken a room here and ordered another pint of the man’s very decent beer. Instead, warm through and well fed, I paid for my meal and dashed back through the rain, wishing I had Arnold’s luck.
This winter-eve is warm, Humid the air; leafless, yet soft as spring
.

It was spring by the calendar alone, with no softness in sight. I got the wiper-blades going and turned cautiously back out onto the road, hoping the headlamps would last until I got in.

Newbury. Abingdon.
Here came I often, in old days. Too rare, too rare grow now my visits …

Rare, indeed. Every time I set out with the firm intention of installing myself as a fixture amongst the stacks in Oxford’s ever-blessed libraries, some figurative bomb went off under my feet and hauled me away. Once, a literal bomb.

Littlemore; Iffley. The morning’s singing had long given way to groans of tedium. To keep myself awake, I recited mathematical formulae, irregular verbs, and poetry. Haiku was ideal for the purpose, being both mathematical and poetic: the 5/7/5 structure was deceptively simple, which I supposed was why old Bashō came up with so many of them on his wanderings. What would the man have produced if he’d been driving through rain? Perhaps—

Sweet city of minds:

Her spires dream, wrapped in earth’s folds
.

June gilds the lily
.

Or what about:

Dark tyres splash along
,

Wanting nothing better than

A place for the night
.

I snorted. Matsuo Bashō need feel no threat from me.

The tyres did indeed splash along, down the darkening road, until the edges of civilisation came down to greet me. Much more of this weather and the two Hinkseys would again be separated by swamp—despite the efforts of that other poet, Oscar Wilde, during his unlikely road-building days at Magdalene. I noticed (as Matthew Arnold had foretold) that yet more houses had been raised since I last drove this way: the dreaming spires would soon vanish beneath a tide of suburban villas.

At Folly Bridge, the heavy raindrops turned to sleet. Grandpont was all but afloat. Christchurch probably had a lake at its door instead of a meadow. Even the Scholar-Gipsy would require a roof over his head
tonight. The shops on the High were shuttered, the restaurants closing, and only the drinking establishments glowed in contentment.

Dodging trams and the odd umbrella-blinded pedestrian, I wound my way through Carfax and Cornmarket, past St Michael’s and the martyr’s memorial, giving a tip of the hat to the Ashmolean (without actually taking my eyes from the road). At long last, more than half a day since I’d left Sussex, I turned off the many-named Banbury Road into my own lane, and my own front gate, left standing open for me.

The car tyres eased into their place for the night. The engine gave a small shudder of gratitude, and went still.

I had been blessed, three years earlier, to find a house and a housekeeper in one, when one of my aged college dons died and her lifelong companion fell on hard times. Miss Pidgeon understood the conflicting urges of comfort and privacy, and provided the first without threatening the second. She lived in what had once been the servants’ quarters, separated by a small garden from the house proper, and with so much as a few hours’ warning, I would arrive to find the ice-box filled with milk and essentials, a fire laid (if not actually burning), newspapers beside the settee, and never more sign of an actual person than a brief note of welcome on the kitchen table. She never made the mistake of tidying my papers, and she had an unexpectedly good eye for who might be an intruder and who looked like one of the owner’s odd friends.

I could, therefore, rest assured that although I should have to carry my own belongings from car to door, once inside I would find warmth, refreshment … and silence.

Holmes and I had been in each other’s pockets for a bit too long.

The house was still, weighty with the comfort of a thousand books. The air was warm from the radiators, and fragrant with the housekeeper’s lemon-scented wax. As I drew closer to the kitchen, the scent gave way to bay and onions: a soup kept warm on the back of the stove.

Tea caddy, pot, and cup were on an ancient tray beside the modern
electrical kettle. I checked it for water—full, of course—switched it on, and carried my bag upstairs.

I was rather longer than I anticipated, since halfway up I decided to change out of my driving clothes into more comfortable garments, and needed to dig slippers from the depths of the wardrobe. I came back down the stairway at a trot, hearing the kettle spouting furious gusts of steam into the kitchen, but even with that distraction, my head snapped up the moment I left the last step: the air from the kitchen doorway was nowhere near as warm and moist as it should have been. In fact, it felt decidedly chilly—and scented with the sharp tang of rosemary.

A rosemary bush grew outside of the back door.

One of Miss Pidgeon’s estimable qualities was her horror of invading my privacy: even when she suspected the house was empty she would first knock, then ring the bell, and finally call loudly as she ventured inside. For her simply to walk in was unthinkable.

My response was automatic: I took three steps to the side, stretched for a high shelf, thumbed a latch, and wrapped my fingers around one of the house’s three resident revolvers. The weight assured me it was loaded. I laid it against my thigh as I moved stealthily towards the kitchen door.

From the hallway, I could see that the door to the garden was shut. I could also see footprints marring the clean tiles: prints composed of rain, and mud, and something more brilliant than mud.

I raised the weapon. “I am armed. Stand where I can see you.”

The sound of movement came—not from just inside the door, where an attacker would wait, but from the pantry across the room. Its light was off, but enough spilled from the kitchen to show me the dim figure inside.

A tiny woman with short black hair and the epicanthic fold of Asia about her eyes. Her muscular body was inadequately clothed, as if she had fled into the rain too fast to grab a coat. Her shoes were sodden, her trousers showed mud to the knees.

Her right arm lay across her chest, the fingers encircling the left biceps dark with blood.

“Mary-san,” she said. “Help me.”

Bombay: oppressive

Harsh sky pounds the land below
.

Faint breeze thrills the spine
.

The only thing that made Bombay’s heat anywhere near bearable was a faint breeze off the sea, stirring the back of my neck. To think that when we’d first come down from the Himalayan foothills the week before, I had actually welcomed the balmy tropical climate! Now, with clothing that scraped my skin’s prickly-heat and spectacles that slipped continually down my nose, any change from this torpid steam-room would be for the better. If someone had handed me a razor, I’d have shaved off what little hair I possessed.