1
Harriet Abroad
Those who had said she should never have chosen the tour were right—of course. These persons were all her academic colleagues, none of whom had actually attended Oxford University but all of whom, with a certain amount of backsliding on the part of Betty Campbell, had been quite sure that she would not enjoy a tour of Oxford and environs incorporating all the delights glimpsed, of course in glorious sunshine, on those Inspector Morse programmes. “Those interminable Morse things,” as Julie Proctor had put it. Jack Bedford, who was even more outspoken than Julie, had pointed out that the tour party would be composed entirely of “cretinous wrinklies”. Enza Cacciotti, who had a very nice nature, had murmured that it sounded quite interesting but for the same price there were some lovely tours of Italy, but Harriet had sort of managed to dismiss that in her head as partisan without actually being racist about it. Even Betty Campbell, though noting wistfully that it did sound rather nice, and personally she’d always thought Morse’s sergeant was lovely, had mentioned that it was always twin-share on those package tours.
Those who had been enthusiastic about the tour qua tour but extremely dubious about its suiting Harriet were also right—naturally. They were all her close relatives. Or relative by marriage, in the case of Steve Drinkwater, who’d croaked: “Heck, Harrie, it’ll all be wrinklies that’ll spend half the time asking the guide where the bogs are, ya don’t wanna go on one of them!” –He and Jack Bedford were clearly brothers under the skin—yes. Well, all Aussie males were, as far as Harriet could see. Even the few literate ones, like Jack. Trisha Drinkwater, née Harrison, Harriet’s sister, had thought, predictably, that it sounded lovely, that series had been gorgeous, there’d probably be lots of lovely stately homes in it and, also predictably, that Harrie wouldn’t like having to share a room—those guided tours were always twin-share, they were aimed at the baby-boomers. Kyla Mary Patricia Drinkwater and James Stephen Harrison Drinkwater, Jimbo to his peers, hadn’t appeared to think anything, much, but that was probably due to the electronic equipment plugged into the ears: they both belonged to one of those generations that had letters, their Aunty Harriet wasn’t sure whether it was X, Y or Z, but definitely a letter. Uncle Don Harrison had broken down in sniggers, gasping something about the amount of rain England got. Aunty Mary Harrison had duly reproved him but though admitting that the tour sounded lovely, that series had been lovely, wasn’t John Thaw lovely, wasn’t it sad he’d died, had pointed out that they’d all be older than Harriet—“more our generation, dear”—and didn’t Don think that maybe next year they might manage— All right, there was no need to take that attitude! No-one had been claiming he was made of money! And wasn’t there a tour of those sweet little English villages they had in Midsomer Murders? That might be nicer, there wouldn’t be all those old buildings.
They had all, of course, been right. Uncle Don most of all. Goodness only knew how the BBC or whoever it was had ever managed to film those Morse things, ’cos it had been raining steadily in Oxfordshire ever since the tour got here. It was late July, which Harriet had worked out must be the holidays, because there were no students around. Nominally summer—right.
The wrinklies bit was also spot-on. All of the participants except for the bus driver and the guide were over sixty, in fact most of them were over sixty-five. And eighteen of the twenty participants were in couples—not necessarily married couples: there were several sets of nice ladies in, variously, twinsets and polyester slacks, or smart polyester pants suits, perforce shrouded in nice gabardine raincoats over these outfits, except for Mary Lou Wiedermeyer and Suzie O’Callaghan from Denver, who were shrouded in highly technological fold-up-to-nothing clear plastic raincoats complete with hoods. And why anyone who lived within cooee of the Rockies should be so keen on “quaint old” Oxford and “those darling English stately homes”— Forget it. Manifestation of the global village phenomenon. After all, Harriet lived—well, not within cooee, no. But within comparatively easy reach of Uluru; and as a matter of fact that was where she wished she was now, standing beneath the giant red monolith, while the scorching Central Australian sun warmed you to the very marrow of your bones!
The twin-share bit had been oh, so accurate, too. The tour group was composed entirely of foreigners, that was, persons who were not British citizens but came from English-speaking countries: five Australian couples, a New Zealand couple, two American couples, the second lot being from Connecticut, one Canadian couple, and one spare Canadian lady who had joined the tour in Oxford itself, just when Harriet had been hoping she might get a room to herself after all. There was nothing wrong with Mrs Jessie Craig—such was her name—except that she talked incessantly, was super-capable, had been everywhere and done everything, including the Midsomer Murders tour that Aunty Mary fancied, and did not hesitate to ask other people the most searching personal questions. In short, she was exactly like the middle-aged moos Harriet knew back home, Aunty Mary not excepted. Harriet blocked her probing as much as possible and responded with downright lies when desperate, but it was awfully, awfully tiring. Especially as Mrs Craig had expressed, in her loud and very cheerful voice, the thought that it was such a pity that there couldn’t have been a nice unattached man for Harriet—but then, these package tours were all like this, couples and widows—and she did hope that Harriet wasn’t too disappointed? This last, unfortunately, not being a rhetorical question.
Today they were slated for a bus trip round historic Oxfordshire—in the rain, yep—including tours of three stately homes and lunch at one of them. Reading this place’s brochure, Harriet realised that it had been turned into a hotel—some time back, if this was accurate—and there was no doubt whatsoever that it’d be just like that plutey place in Keeping Up Appearances, the one that Whatserface, that always overacted, dragged the hubby to for afternoon tea and her sister Rose was there shacked up with a bloke. Harriet might have dismissed that series, which she’d only watched on babysitting nights at Trisha’s place because the kids’ pop music was usually blaring out too loud to make reading possible, as a complete exaggeration, but unfortunately, if the example of Mum wasn’t enough, not to mention Aunty Mary, also a keen contender in the Granite Bench-Top Stakes and the Building-On-a-Pergola Cup, right here on this very tour there were Mrs Mary Lou Wiedermeyer and Mrs Suzie O’Callaghan (the Denverites), Mrs O’Riordan from Perth, Australia, Mrs Hatton and Mrs Connors from Sydney, Australia (friends: widows), Mrs Johnstone and Mrs Macdonald, also from Sydney (sisters), Mrs Lamont from Brisbane, Australia, Mrs Perkins from Adelaide, Australia, Mrs Harmon from New Plymouth, New Zealand, Mrs Amelia Jones and Mrs Cora Lee Kowalski from Connecticut, Mrs Andrews from Ottawa, and Mrs Jessie Craig herself, all prime examples of the type. –Bucket. Hyacinth Bucket, pronounced “Bouquet.” The specifics might not all be the same, allowing for the colonial influence, but the general type sure was.
And some of the specifics were identical: the prim, pursed-mouthed Mrs Perkins from Adelaide, where they made ’em extra-nayce, actually bothered about upgrading the pronunciation of one’s name from plebeian to U. Unfortunately this wasn’t possible with Perkins, but her maiden name, as she didn’t fail to inform the tour, was Dalziel, not pronounced “Dee-ell”, like that awful coarse man in that detective show, she never watched it, but “Day-ell”. And she and Vincent were headed for Scotland after the tour, to visit her ancestral home, weren’t they, dear? The martyred Vincent had meekly agreed, he was even more under the thumb than poor Mr Bucket, and had meekly said nothing when, on his telling Mr Lamont in his wife’s hearing to call him Vince, she had grimly corrected this to “Vincent.” Oh, boy.
Harriet might have started feeling sorry for the male of the species but in very short order Mr Lamont had told her all about the new cream pavers he’d had laid over his entire “sweep,” so-called, Harriet had not hitherto been aware the word was even used in Australia, let alone Brizzie, Mr O’Riordan had corrected her miscalling of him as “Steve” like her brother-in-law, to “Stephen,” Mr Harmon had imparted the thrilling news that his ancestor had arrived on the first ship to New Plymouth (Help! It must be like the ruddy First-Fleeters back home, Harriet had always thought the Kiwis were even more laid-back than our mob), and Mr Andrews had explained that they almost never watched the American television shows, it was such a relief to get a really nice English show, and did they get the Antiques Roadshow in Australia? He and Meredith had taken their little 18th-century plate along when the Roadshow came out to Canada, and the expert had been so kind— So she could only conclude that they all thoroughly deserved the Hyacinth Bucket clones they were welded to in unholy matrimony and didn’t need her pity at all. And refrained from pointing out that (a) “Meredith” was actually a man’s name, (b) that if you had Welsh ancestry there was the option of pronouncing it “Me-red-ith” and (c) that as he wasn’t boasting that his blimming plate had got onto the actual show it couldn’t have been much. She might have gone on feeling very sorry for the squashed Mr Perkins for some time, though, had he not been overheard loftily correcting poor Mary Lou Wiedermeyer’s pronunciation of “Magdalen” as she was wrote to “Maudlin”. Mrs Wiedermeyer then giving a shaken laugh and saying she guessed neither the Hueblers nor the Wiedermeyers were out of the top drawer, if they did have Great-grandmother Huebler’s spinning-wheel that had travelled in a covered waggon all the way to Denver with her. And she guessed Adelaide was ever so much more English than us plain folks back home. –Not needling him at all, sadly.
So Harriet said fiercely: “Mary Lou, it doesn’t matter what you call the blimmin’ tower, it’s the fact that you appreciate it that matters!”
“It sure is pretty,” the plump American conceded, smiling rather wistfully at her. “But gee, there’s nothing like a cultural tour for showing a person’s ignorance up.”
At which Harriet took a very deep breath and didn’t say that flaming Inspector Morse was not cultural, that Morse as written was one of the most up-himself characters ever depicted in print including everything from the pen of Mr E. Waugh, that nothing on the tour so far—apart from the actual architecture—had been in the least cultural, and that ruddy old Perkins could get choked. After some quiet seething, however, a glorious thought occurred to her and she went and said sweetly to Mr Perkins: “Isn’t the tour lovely? I was torn between this and the Brideshead Revisited tour, but I’m glad I chose this one.”
Mr Perkins smirked and agreed, though adding condescendingly that he and Louise (a name that Harriet had always loathed, and this proved she was right) had decided it would be much more cost-effective to see Castle Howard privately. Adding condescendingly that that was where it had been filmed.
“Oh, was it? I sort of thought it was another one,” said Harriet mendaciously. “While we’re on the subject, who did write the book of Brideshead Revisited?”
Mr Perkins looked down his nose at her—he was shorter than her but he managed it, no sweat—and replied condescendingly: “Ever-lyn Waugh, of course.”
Exactly. Harriet Harrison five hundred, Perkinses naff all! Harriet smiled gratefully and walked away from the twerp.
The verbal expressions of opinion about the stately homes varied slightly but not the sentiments. “Lovely” just about summed it up. The first one was Victorian Gothic, with at least one genuine Burne-Jones and a probable Dante Gabriel Rossetti and some genuine Scottish hairy cows on its walls, and an awful lot of William Morris wallpapers, curtains and carpets jostling together in most of its rooms—perhaps the son who had inherited from the Gothic fancier had had the place redecorated, or perhaps his wife? Their tour guide didn’t seem to know and couldn’t tell them the names of any of the William Morris designs. This didn’t matter, because Louise Perkins kindly told him, incidentally imparting a lot of fascinating detail about some filthy-rich 19th-century Adelaide family that had had a lot of stuff specially woven for them—possibly sawn up, nailed together and varnished for them as well, Harriet didn’t really listen—and shipped out to the Colonies at humungous expense. Hitherto Harriet had sort of thought of herself as quite an admirer of William Morris—in moderation—but there was nothing moderate about this house.
Never mind Adelaide had one of the finest William Morris collections in the world, unquote, Louise Perkins happily bought up just as many genuine Morris & Co. tapestry patterns at the gift shop as did Jill Harmon from New Zealand, Amelia Jones from Connecticut, and Helen Lamont from Brisbane. Cora Lee Kowalski from Connecticut, Suzie O’Callaghan from Denver and Meredith Andrews from Ottawa all expressed regret that there were no quilting patterns on offer, so you might have concluded that this craft was still, as traditionally, a North American preoccupation, had it not been for the fact that the sisters from Sydney, Lesley Johnstone and Susan Macdonald, and Kathleen O’Riordan from Perth all expressed the same sorrow.
The friends Daphne Hatton and Janette Connors from Sydney were both deeply into scrapbooking, in fact belonging to the same scrapbooking club, and were disappointed that there were no offerings especially prepared for this hobby, but greatly cheered by the inspiration that if they bought up some of these lovely postcards and greeting cards and this lovely wrapping paper, they could all be cut up for it! –Garlands of William Morris rug edgings and chunks of wreath from a wallpaper design, pasted round a doleful-faced, drooping Pre-Raphaelite maiden—oh, well. The colours would tone perfectly, they were right about that. Their guide urged Harriet to buy something, everyone on the tour got a discount—read, he got a commission—so to spite them all she bought a really horrid tapestry pattern of the said Pre-Raphaelite face. It came ready-provided with the appropriate yarns, but Harriet wasn’t gonna use them, oh, no. She was gonna do it in completely surreal colours, as bright as she could find, and—not present it to Trisha for her birthday or Christmas, no: she wouldn’t appreciate it and would smile kindly and then consign it to a cupboard. Okay, she’d make a cushion cover out of it and use it in her lounge-room and if anyone spotted the design for what it was, she’d award them a medal! And if they actually spotted it and laughed, she’d—well, marry them, really. But there was no risk of that: Harriet was now forty-one and had had more than time enough to discover that there were no kindred spirits in the entire world. Certainly not in Australia, which was where she was fated to live. And weren’t her fellow tour members proof enough of the other?
The second stately home was where they were slated for lunch. So far the food provided on the tour had fallen into only two categories: Traditional British Horrible (slime puddings, frozen peas and pressed ham figuring largely) and Twenty-First-Century Trendy (Cheap Version), all little piles sitting on swirls and dotted with olive oil. Surprisingly enough the food at the converted stately home belonged to Category 2—though to those interested in provenance the influence of Category 1 might have been discerned in the elegant rolls of pressed ham tied with bows of chive and dotted with olive oil. The cuboid piles of potato salad masquerading as “Salade Niçoise” were pretty dire, too. Louise Perkins knew all about what a real Salade Niçoise should be but was slightly upstaged in the Cordong Blue Stakes by Jessie Craig’s having eaten a real one in Nice, France. Their party had two large tables in the hotel’s big dining-room and it was fairly evident, if you looked at what the other diners, all à la carte, were being served, that the tour menu was a cheapo special.
They weren’t allowed to look around the old house itself—rather a nice, chunky 18th-century design, of course heavily restored but as to the exterior, quite unobtrusively. However, they were graciously permitted to peek in at the main downstairs lounge (Georgian lines retained, uninspiringly painted in pale blue above pale oatmeal panelling, dark blue curtains, null oatmeal body carpet and large modern oatmeal leather suites, no sign of the original Georgian fireplace), the main downstairs bar (panelled, darkish, lots of little green-shaded lamps), and the converted conservatory, used for balls and conferences. This last was an airy, handsome Victorian space that would have been much nicer, in Harriet’s opinion, if left as a conservatory. Mary Lou Wiedermeyer evidently felt the same: she said wistfully in Harriet’s ear: “Gee, I was hoping they’d have left some plants.” Quite.
The grounds, however, were open to view, so they’d do that. But first they all prudently visited the Powder Room (so labelled). Very institutional: white bathroom furniture, white Formica benches, only slightly brightened by a large bowl of pink carnations and Australian silver-dollar gum foliage and gee, not half as nice as Niemann Marcus’s ladies’ rooms, if Harriet would forgive the comparison. (She would: she was beginning to feel she'd forgive Mary Lou Wiedermeyer anything, if she was still far from a kindred spirit.)
The grounds were exceedingly spacious but rather bare, possibly it was the Capability Brown look but Harriet couldn’t see anything that looked like a vista, didn’t Capability Brown have to have those? This was just stretches and stretches of rather bumpy green lawn, not all of it used for car parking, backed, a fair way off, by lots of bushes. Well, some of them were probably trees. However, many resemblances to such-and-such in Inspector Morse were loudly discerned by the vivid imaginations of the tour party and the coach rolled off to do the rounds. That was a lake? Diana’s Final Resting Place was being loudly mentioned and excited comparisons made so Harriet didn’t say that to her doubtless prejudiced Antipodean eye it looked like a pond. Slightly larger than yer actual billabong—yeah. Paul Harmon from New Zealand might have been heard to mutter something about fitting five hundred of them in Lake Taupo and never noticing them, let alone Te Anau, and where was the view? But Jill Harmon quickly hushed him. It was still raining, not hard, but steadily, so they didn’t get out. Further on was the golf course that belonged to the hotel—oddly enough no keen golfers were out there in the rain—and further on still was the place where the artificial waterfall used to be. It was being restored. What was visible was a pile of rocks, possibly twice Harriet’s height but no more, but excited comparisons were being made with something on Rosemary & Thyme, so Harriet just kept stumm, not revealing that she had never watched this offering, having discovered it featured simpering Barbara Good: yep, still simpering after all these years. God. It was still raining, not hard, but steadily, so they didn’t get out.
Then it was ho! for the third stately home! It was still raining, not hard, but steadily, when they got there and Harriet for one would have been quite happy not to get out, but of course they all had to. Besides, most of them needed to go to the bogs again, how right Steve had been! So they did that and then were assembled in the spacious marble-tiled front hall and firmly led off to see the rest of it by Jeavons, their guide (his first name, he was quite a young man and this, after all, was the twenty-first century, and Harriet’s own nephew was at school with a boy called Calvert White). This house was another Georgian edifice, at a guess about the same vintage as the hotel, but French polished and National Trusted till it came out yer ears. Harriet had had a bit of this at home so she was fairly well prepared, but boy, the Aussie mob sure didn’t have the dough to fling around that the Brits obviously did! The place was pristine. Lovely, but completely unliveable in. Most of the rooms—like something out of a museum exactly, Jessie, and no doubt you’re right in saying there are some rooms just like these in the Metropolitan Museum in New York, N.Y.—were roped off from the dirty great boots and curious fingers of the hoi polloi. Just as well, really, seeing what the curious fingers of Mrs Helen Lamont and Mrs Louise Perkins, to name only two, were touching when Jeavons wasn’t looking.
The “Long Gallery” was, disappointingly, carpeted in what Harriet privily decided must fall within the definition of “drugget”, though she couldn’t have said what the definition was. Ugh. She had seen a gallery just like it on the Antiques Roadshow, Louise Perkins and Bruce and Meredith Andrews were quite right in spotting that comparison, but she wasn’t gonna admit it, no sirree.—The punters hadn't been allowed in it, the ghastly female compère had merely wandered down it spouting unrelated garbage, as far she could remember.—Some of the Long Gallery’s paintings were pretty ordinary but some of them were lovely—but all of them would have been much, much better appreciated without the incessant voice of Jessie Craig yacking in her ear about the Metropolitan Museum and the Louvre and the Briddish National Portrait Gallery et al. Ad infinitum.
In one of the bedrooms Louise Perkins unerringly identified a Lawrence as a Reynolds but by this time Harriet couldn’t even raise a smile. Besides, it was a rather inferior Lawrence. Another bedroom was completely hung with views of—not Venice, no, they only looked like it at first glance. Water. Flat, with a few smudges that could have been anything in the misty distance. This was the Blue Room. Aw, yeah, in between the jostling gilt frames you could just discern glimpses of faded blue. Matched the bedspread—yep. Genuine 18th-century silk according to Mrs Meredith Andrews, who had been present when one of the Antiques Roadshow experts in Ottawa had identified a very similar one—which might have got onto the show, but if it had, Harriet had certainly missed it. Which she didn’t think she could have: the things were shown over and over and over again on Seven back home, they had evidently latched onto the fact that there was an audience, though this didn’t explain why they screened them at the very time the said audience would be getting the dinner for itself and hubby. Aw, right, one of the daughters of the family had been a keen watercolourist—no wonder they looked so wishy-washy!—and they were all views of, gulp, the Norfolk Broads. Lady Pamela Who’syerface, mm, fascinating. Funnily enough by the time they got downstairs again good old Mary Lou Wiedermeyer’s feet were killing her, and actually, so were Harriet’s.
Next day they had a free afternoon but the morning was dedicated to a walking tour of old historic Oxford. Which was very confusing, because their first full day here had been a walking tour of old historic— Oh. That had been the colleges. It sure was confusing, Mary Lou was right about that, and even though she was also loudly confused about the usage “colleges” because she and Suzie had been told you said “university” over here in England, and hadn’t Louise Perkins said the other day it was “Oxford University” but she was almost sure Jeavons had said “Oxford University College”, Harriet didn’t bother to put her right because (a) she was sure she wouldn’t retain it, (b) all idiolects of all exclusive groups were barmy and intended to confuse the outsider, and (c) who gave a rat’s, anyway? Mary Lou loved the architecture and wasn’t that what mattered? So, after they’d all been to the bogs again—a tedious affair, as their small, undistinguished hotel was very cramped and had no ensuites and there were only two toilets for their ten rooms, one unlucky floor having to go downstairs into the bargain, off they set.
Okay, that was the Radcliffe Camera—Jeavons couldn’t explain why “camera”, so they would have remained baffled for all time except that fortunately Stephen O’Riordan and Paul Harmon had both bought reliable guidebooks and Louise Perkins had bought a much more reliable guidebook, so they were able to enlighten them. Just like in the series, as Daphne Hatton unerringly discerned, and if they took a really good digital photo of it, Janette, they could use it in their new Oxford scrapbook! Everybody except Harriet immediately raised their digital cameras...
By the time they got to the Bodleian by a bafflingly circuitous route five of them had already asked for, depending on the local vernacular concerned, the little girls’ room, a nice clean ladies’ room, or a loo (Mrs Perkins—thought it was U, clearly), so they were running late. But as they weren’t going in anyway, it didn’t really matter, and Jeavons thought there’d be time for a few quick snaps and then back to the hotel in time for lunch, taking a very interesting route past some charming old— No, lunch today was included, it was this afternoon they were free. No-one pointed out that the hotel’s meals had all without exception been horrible (Category 1) and they’d be much better off grabbing a sandwich and a glass of beer in one of the many tempting Oxford pubs that Jeavons had whisked them past except for the times that Lionel Lamont, Paul Harmon and Bruce Andrews had needed the bogs (severally, not simultaneously). And they all snapped hurriedly and followed Jeavons as he took them over to get a much better angle, coincidentally in the direction of back-to-the-hotel—except for Harriet. She went in the other direction, leaned on a piece of old Oxford, and said aloud very, very sourly: “I might have known! All this way and I can’t even get to see inside Bodley!”
And from somewhere behind her an amused and very posh Pommy tenor voice said: “That does seem a pity. Do excuse me, won’t you, but I think your tour group’s moving off without you.”
Harriet swung round and gave him a good— Glare. Help! Flaming Lord Peter Wimsey personified!
Harriet Harrison had come all this way because on reading Gaudy Night at the age of nineteen she had fallen hopelessly in love with Miss Sayers’s doubtless highly romanticised picture of Oxford. The University, not the town. That was University with a capital U, yes. At that age she had also fallen hopelessly in love with Lord Peter Wimsey, of course. More than twenty years down the track the passion for Lord Peter had worn off—never mind that her benighted mother had been and gone and named her “Harriet”, which at nineteen had sort of seemed meant and had made up for the cacophony of being called Harriet Harrison and jeered at by her peers throughout her schooldays. By this time she’d had, though her mother would not have believed it for an instant, quite a considerable amount of experience of real-life men, and had decided that no-one could possibly be that perfect, that his being good at absolutely everything from detection to punting to jumping off stupid fountains to hitting cricket balls to writing fake Metaphysical sonnets was completely sickening, that his knowing about everything, from the effects of arsenic on the human system and how to test for same through Ancient Greek literature, incunabula (Harriet had had to look that word up) and the complete works of William Shakespeare to campanology via French wines and back again was also completely sickening and off-putting, that his verbal persiflage was totally off-putting and his flaming unlikely upper-class family and stupid title the most sickening thing of all. She had re-read Gaudy Night shortly before coming on the tour, true, but although she’d enjoyed it almost as much as she had way back when, it was now impossible to believe that any real person, however up-himself, over-educated and highly strung (that last’d be Hell on wheels to live with, by the way) would actually propose to the woman he loved in flaming Latin! For one thing, speaking in a foreign language, however expert you might be in it, did not have the same affective impact, emotive if you liked, on the speaker, let alone the addressee. In other words, he would not instinctively have used Latin at what must surely have been the most important moment of his life. Not if he was an actual person.
Crossly she said to this actual person, fair-haired, supercilious-looking an’ all, though he didn’t sport a flaming monocle: “The flaming tour group can move off without me, I hate the lot of them and I wish I’d never come!”
“And they won’t let you look round Bodley,” he murmured.
“Yeah. Well,” said Harriet, her usual fair-mindedness and honesty overcoming her grumps and prejudice, “the rest of them only want to take snaps of the buildings’ outsides anyway, they’re not interested in old books. I did mention Duke Humfrey’s library to a couple of them but it didn’t ring any bells. And our tour guide did say there were no lifts and quite a lot of stairs.”
“I see,” he murmured. “Er—you’re not going to miss your bus, are you?”
“No, we’re here for days yet, they’re only going back to the hotel to eat pressed ham and frozen peas with slime pudding,” said Harriet with a sigh.
His long mouth twitched. –Possibly this was what Miss Sayers had meant you to envisage, though his was actually more like Robson Green’s than anything Harriet had ever read about in a book: not only rather long, but beautifully shaped with a wonderfully bowed but not soppy upper lip and a fullish but definitely not pouty bottom one, blast!
“In that case, if you’d allow me, I could show you round Bodley.”
Harriet went very red: he must be deliberately mocking her terminology. “It’s all right, I know us non-Oxford oiks are supposed to say ‘the Bodleian’. I was talking to myself, see?”
“I do see, of course; and I apologise most sincerely if I’ve given you the feeling I was mocking you,” he said nicely. “But I assure you the expression is quite acceptable.”
“Is it?” said Harriet, very weakly indeed. “Mrs Perkins corrected me, before.”
“Then I fear Mrs Perkins was wrong,” he said politely.
“She’s one of the worst ones,” she revealed abruptly. “Even more U and ladylike than the others. Though there’s a New Zealand couple that are pretty bad, too, and actually Mr Andrews, he’s Canadian, he’s a real pain as well. I thought at least the blokes might be normal.”
“So it’s not just an Australian tour group?”
“No, it’s a mixture. Well, ex-Colonials, really. Mostly Aussies, quite a few Americans and Canadians, and the New Zealand couple. And the fascinating thing is,” she added, suddenly warming to her theme, “that they’re all the same! They live thousands and thousands of miles apart and they’ve all seen every episode of that ghastly up-himself Inspector Morse thing and Midsomer Murders, and that frightful thing with Barbara Good being some sort of gardening lady, I forget its name but it’s something to do with herbs, and they all do genuine William Morris tapestries or quilting or scrapbooking!”
He laughed. “My God, you poor soul!”
“Yeah. Well, it’s my own fault, I shouldn’t have come on the blimmin’ thing, only I wanted to see Oxford and I’ve never been on an overseas trip before and I’m hopeless at guidebooks and maps and stuff, and I thought it’d be the easy way to do it and I could just close my ears to the garbage. Only it’s overwhelming,” she ended, relapsing into gloom.
“I can well believe it. So: shall we soothe your soul with the Bodleian?”
“You don’t have to,” said Harriet, going very red.
“It would be my pleasure. Er—I’m quite a respectable citizen, don’t worry,” he said meekly.
“You’ve gotta be, if they’ll let you into the Bodleian,” replied Harriet frankly. “Though I suppose theoretically you could’ve nicked that gown from somewhere.”
“Been to a semi-formal affair at my old college.”
“I see. I didn’t know they still wore them,” she admitted weakly.
“Mm, off and on,” he murmured. “My name’s Crispin Narrowmine, by the way.”
“I’m Harriet Harrison,” she admitted. “Don’t laugh, my mother’s tone deaf, and Dad always gives in to her over everything.”
“I wouldn’t dream of laughing, Harriet,” he said nicely. “I like it: rather old-fashioned. Nice.”
“Um, is it?” she said limply. “Um, Crispin’s a very old English name, isn’t it?”
“Yes. Lots of Crispins in the family, likewise Ruperts and Christians. Mummy fancied ‘Christian’ but Dad said he wouldn’t saddle any kid of his with that in the second half of the twentieth century, so she settled for ‘Crispin’.”
What with the sudden flood of intel and the vocabulary—Harriet had never before met a person of above the age of five years, let alone a grown man who must be about her own age, who called his mother “Mummy”—she could only smile weakly at him.
Crispin Narrowmine smiled back. Apart from the mouth he was rather ordinary-looking, with an oval face with a slightly underslung jaw, though you couldn’t have called him chinless by any means, and a longish, thinnish nose, but he had lovely, very clear blue eyes. And as he smiled they crinkled up at the corners in a completely irresistible way and that mouth, smiling or in repose, was also irresistible and in short, couldn’t she just die now, because he was gonna turn out to be either very married or gay. Harriet’s hormones indicated the former, but that was bad, too, wasn’t it? The stupid thing was that he wasn’t even her type, he wasn’t tall, he couldn’t be more than five foot nine and she was five foot seven against Mum’s kitchen door, which hadn’t gone over to the metric system with the rest of Australia. Quite slim, but nothing remarkable as far as could be seen for the gown. His fair hair, just starting to silver at the temples, not that she was looking that closely, of course, was shortish but in a very ordinary, traditional sort of style. Well, over-trendy with spikes would be ridiculous on a man of his age, true, but that didn’t stop most of them. He looked, in fact, very conventional, and Harriet knew that conventional men never fancied her and as a matter of fact they usually bored her solid. And he wasn’t tanned. And as a matter of fact didn’t come over as very masculine—well, nothing even slightly approaching macho, put it like that.
“Shall we?” he said, holding out his arm politely.
Cripes. “Um, yeah, if you’re sure it won’t be a waste of your time,” she muttered.
“I’m quite sure, Harriet. Come along!” he said cheerfully.
Limply Harriet took his arm—she couldn’t even remember when she’d last been offered a bloke’s arm. Um, oh, yeah: nice Garry Wedder from work when they’d all gone to old Prof Brownloe’s funeral, ages ago. Garry was the genuinely kind sort that didn’t mean anything by it, and ruddy Sean Nesbitt, who by rights should have been the one giving her his arm, had been there with, gee, his wife. That he claimed never went anywhere with him these days and never addressed a word to him if she could help it and that he was only staying with because of the kids. Yeah. Sean had been very tanned and very macho: not good-looking but terrifically masculine—actually his facial structure wasn’t unlike Crispin Narrowmine’s, but with a much flatter nose, only partly the result of all the boxing he’d done in his youth—and he was an expert swimmer—most Aussies could swim but Sean had been competition-level in his day—and he’d had one of those very male grins that didn’t make him look handsomer but completely bowled you over. In his holidays he went bush with an old mate and a couple of hunting rifles—that type. It wasn’t that uncommon in Australia at large but fairly thin on the ground in their somewhat refined academic circles, and such a contrast to the nice but wet males that mostly infested the staff common room that Harriet had been completely overcome. And ruddy Sean was also highly intelligent, he’d been a bloody Rhodes scholar. The fact that he was more than twenty years her elder and when he made the pass had told her flatly that he had no intention of breaking up his marriage hadn’t stopped her, but that was her all over. Added to which, no-one else had been offering.
She went into the Bodleian with Crispin Narrowmine and looked at what he pointed out and was introduced to someone who seemed very high up and admired the wonderful old books in Duke Humfrey’s Library that this someone and Crispin together decided she might like to see and when it was all over honestly couldn’t have said what she’d seen.
“Thank you very much, Crispin,” she said earnestly, outside on the pavement again.
“My absolute pleasure, Harriet!” he said with a laugh, taking her arm again. “Now. what about a spot of lunch? Something nice, help you to forget the taste of frozen peas and slime pudding, mm?”
It had emerged in the course of the visit that he was actually staying with the Warden of his old college, so she said feebly: “Um, but aren’t you expected back for lunch, though?”
“No, no, the Warden’s got some frightfully stuffy people coming, so he said he’d spare me!”
“Well, um, then yes, thanks, I am awfully hungry,” Harriet admitted. “They don’t seem to give you very big helpings here.”
“We’ll go somewhere that gives you very decent helpings, in that case.”
Belatedly she looked down at her faded parka and newish but crumpled jeans—the heaviest pair she had with her: she’d expected it to be summer, of course. “Nowhere too fancy, I’m not dressed for it!”
He smiled that smile at her. “Not fancy, but with solid nosh. I was thinking about a pleasant place on the river, but it’s not the weather for it. I think it had better be the Mitre. Solid steak and kidney—something of that sort?”
“That sounds great!”
“Good show!” he said, sounding more like flaming Lord Peter than ever, but as by this time Harriet’s hormones had almost completely taken over it didn’t really register. “Come along, then.”
Harriet let him lead her where he listed. Only realising when it was far too late that flaming Lord Peter had stayed at the Mitre, which was why the name had seemed vaguely familiar, and therefore it would be far, far too up-market for her and her jeans. Not to mention this grungy old parka. She did have a clean tee-shirt on under it but it was rather faded and as the hotel appeared never to have heard of the electric iron, rather creased.
The Mitre didn’t appear to mind or even notice her jeans, and it was lovely and warm inside, so she was able to take her parka off—both the waiter and Crispin leapt to take it, heck. There was loads of baffling cutlery—it was a proper sit-down dining-room with proper tablecloths—but after they’d ordered the waiter quietly removed the stuff they wouldn’t need, phew! Not that she didn't know theoretically that you started at the outside and worked in, but managing it in public in front of Crispin Narrowmine was a different kettle of fish. The steak and kidney pud wasn’t on today but they had roast beef with Yorkshire pudding, so as he recommended it, Harriet, who had only ever read about it in a battered copy of Jane Grigson’s English Food picked up for two dollars at a second-hand bookshop, agreed to have it. Though reserving judgement. He seemed to think it was okay to have gravy, so even though he was slim and she wasn’t Harriet thought what the heck, it’s one meal and I’ll never see him again after today, and had some, too. Though with the mental reservation that all those slim ladies he was undoubtedly accustomed to lunch with, married or not, wouldn’t have had a bar of it, even without—and this was the really depressing thought—the factor of not wanting to let yourself down in front of Crispin Irresistible-Mouth Narrowmine.
“Well?” he said as she tasted the Yorkshire pudding.
Harriet swallowed and beamed. “It’s lovely! I thought it’d be, um, you know. Pudding-y.”
“Slime?” he murmured, raising his blond eyebrows at her.
Harriet collapsed in giggles, nodding madly. “That or stodge!” she gasped.
The clear blue eyes twinkled. “Quite. English cuisine at its sparkling best.”
“Aussie’s just as bad.” Harriet ate excellent roast beef hungrily, not allowing her mind to dwell on what the meal was gonna cost him—he’d insisted on paying, and as both her Visa and MasterCard accounts were pretty nearly maxed out, she hadn’t objected. Besides, that discreetly pinstriped grey suit, palest grey shirt, probably silk, and totally tasteful blue and silvery-grey tie must have cost, all up, considerably more than she earned in a month.
“Really?” he said with interest.—Came out “Rallih?”, actually, boy did that label him as top flaming drawer, not that the rest of it hadn’t already.—“I somehow had the impression that it was terribly exotic these days: er, Indonesian or Thai influences?”
Harriet swallowed a great mouthful of roast potato with gravy—the whole hog, yeah, but so what, he was getting himself round the spuds, too—and said: “Some of it, yeah. Doesn’t stop it from being bad, though. Smothered in garlic, chilli and MSG and drowning in salt. I had a so-called Malaysian meal for lunch about a week before I left—it called itself Chicken in Plum Sauce but it was those awful chicken nuggets smothered in batter, and I dunno whether it was the so-called plum sauce or the brown stuff the noodles were soaked in, but I was as high as a kite for the next twenty-four hours. I only got about three hours’ sleep, woke up about five all hyped up. Well, it wasn’t a restaurant as such, it was one of those lunch places, um, maybe you don’t have them here,” she conceded, looking somewhat limply at the assembled Oxford lunchers, “but they’re very common back home. You know, sort of a basement food hall, under a big shop. Or mall. Um, separate stalls, kind of. I hadn’t tried the Malaysian one before. The Chinese one isn’t much better, mind you.”
“I see. And the cuisine that doesn’t purport to be ethnic?”
“I can’t afford to go to the really expensive joints, but from what I’ve seen on the foodie programmes on TV they’re the same as the rest of the would-be trendy places: everything smothered in garlic and chilli and handled fifteen times over in order to create artful little piles, sitting on artful little swirls and sprinkled with artful little dots of olive oil. –And if they’re really up with the play, little wings on top,” she added thoughtfully.
Crispin’s shoulders had been shaking by the time she got to the second “artful little” but at the peroration he broke down and laughed helplessly.
Harriet watched him, grinning, very pleased with the success of her effort.
“Jesus!” he gasped, blowing his nose on a pristine white hanky. “Just like home!”
“Yep, global village phenomenon,” said Harriet comfortably.
“Don’t start me off again! Eat your lovely roast beef.”
“I am. It’s what roast beef oughta be,” said Harriet with a deep sigh, tucking in. When the roast beef, the gravy, the Yorkshire pud and the roast potatoes had been duly punished, she ventured: “Do you mind if I ask you something really dumb? It might sound a bit personal.”
The very clear blue eyes were watchful but he said mildly: “Ask away.”
“Well, is it, like, very U to have a white hanky in your pocket rather than a pale grey one, like, to tone with the rest of the outfit?”
Very, very weakly Crispin Narrowmine replied: “Run that one by me again, if you would, Harriet.”
Harriet was now rather red. “Well, everything else tones, I mean, you must have put it together on purpose!” she gasped. “But your hanky’s white.”
“I see. Yes, I suppose it is U to have a plain white handkerchief, nose-blowing after hysterics at one’s lady companion’s lunch repartee for the use of, in one’s pocket. But the handkerchief in the breast pocket with this outfit, should I elect to wear one, would be pale grey, yes. Silk.”
“I get it. So why didn’t you today? Would it be non-U with an academic gown?”
Crispin Narrowmine appeared to think this over seriously. “No, I think it would be acceptable, but I just had an instinctive feeling that it might be a bit much—I didn’t reflect on the matter at all, really, you understand—so I refrained. Clear?”
“Yes, very, thank you. Um—it’s interesting,” she explained awkwardly.
He nodded calmly. “Yes, I quite see that. New species, is that it?”
“Yes. We have got quite a few English people at the uni, but none of them sound like you, and they just wear ordinary clothes like everybody else.”
“Er—not gowns, then?”
“No, not that—nobody wears gowns except at Graduation, or maybe if they’re opening a new building with the Governor there, but they haven’t done that for ages, the Howard government stopped funding any uni expansion way back and now they all have to be user-pays and cost-effective or go under.”
“I see,” he said weakly. “I sort of thought these were ordinary clothes.”
“Eh? Mate, these rags I’ve got on are ordinary clothes! That suit of yours isn’t even clothes, it’s a work of art!”
“My tailor and I thank you, Harriet,” said Crispin weakly.
“Yeah—no, sorry,” she growled, very flushed. “I didn’t mean to call you mate like that, either.”
“Oh? It was very interesting—since we’re discussing these new species encountered today—to hear you use it. I’ve always wondered if people actually do, in real life.”
“Rather than in those dumb Crocodile Dundee movies—yeah. People do, but men much more than women, and it’s very largely a matter of class, too—though Aussies don’t talk about class, at all. But nice ladies like Louise Perkins from the tour group never use it, and in fact the sort of blokes they marry never seem to, either—though I’m not sure whether or not they might with their peer group. But it’s also used with... different shades of meaning, I suppose you could say, depending on the context and the inflexion.” Harriet took a deep breath. “And the way I used it just then was meant to be—well, rude would be going too far, but people use it like that as a mild put-down that the other person can’t object to.”
“I see. Not etiquette to take umbrage when called ‘mate’, even if the intention isn’t entirely kind?”
“Yes, that’s it, Crispin.”
“Mm, very interesting. May I ask whether your subject is linguistics, Harriet?”
“No,” said Harriet weakly. “We have got a linguistics department but they’re not interested in that sort of thing. Um, no, Australian literature,” she admitted glumly. “And don’t dare to say that sounds interesting!”
“Isn’t it?”
“No. It was stupid—well, typical me, of course. I let myself be talked into it. I started off wanting to look at the bowdlerisation of the English fairy tradition and the misuse of native Australian iconography in Australian children’s literature, particularly the earlier stuff, and they said I had to do it as Australian literature, not English, fair enough, only that was the thin end of the wedge, the professor wouldn’t let me talk about bowdlerisation or misuse, and it all got watered down till it was unrecognisable, but that was the only way he’d accept it.”
“Was this your M.A. thesis?”
“No, Ph.D.,” said Harriet glumly. “I wrote a short thesis on misconceptions about the bunyip in English-language literature for my M.A. It was mostly exams, back in those days, only that was when the Prof was on sabbatical and we had an English bloke filling in for him—I mean, he was English. He was really keen, you see, and a real help, only when the Prof came back he only stuck it out for another year. Anyway, the Prof let me get the watered-down version bound and pushed through the viva, and I got through, but of course nobody wanted to publish the thing, it was feeble. So then the Prof offered me a junior lectureship, and I knew it was the thin end of the wedge, but I was flat broke by then, so I took it. And six months after I’d started one of the senior lecturers upped and left so they pushed all his first- and second-year lectures onto me and I’ve been doing them ever since.”
“Let me get this straight. This was all his first- and second-year lectures on top of the stuff you were already doing?”
“Yes.”
“All Australian literature?”
“Yes.”
Crispin looked at her limply. “I suppose I shouldn’t ask, why didn’t you leave?”
“Because after you’ve been relegated to the bottom of the academic heap working like a dog for five years or so there’s nowhere else to go. I am a full lecturer now, but there’s no such thing as tenure any more, it’s all three-year appointments.”
“I see. How long have you had this job?”
She did complicated arithmetic on her fingers, her lips moving silently. “I was thirty-two by the time I’d got through—I had to do it all part-time. This’d be my ninth year.”
He gnawed on his lip. “Mm. Haven’t published anything?”
Harriet had been mesmerised by the lip business. She jumped. “Eh? Oh—no. It took me ages to recover from the thesis, and then when I felt like doing my own stuff I had to try and cram it into the Christmas holidays—um, that’s our long vacation. I had far too much marking during the term, and you might think teaching’s a doddle but it isn’t: a one-hour lecture takes it out of you like three hours’ hard yacker on the roads, believe you me! And a tutorial’s worse, you have to prepare the stuff and then half the little buggers don’t turn up or haven’t done the work and if they do do it they expect it back marked the next week, and there was a craze for replacing lectures with tutorials almost entirely, don’t ask me why, mad crazes justified by the In theory of the moment seen to typify the academic life, and for about, um, seven years, at least, most days I had a nine-hour teaching load.”
“What?”
Harriet nodded. “Mm. Big classes, you see: they’ve all done so-called Australian literature at school and they think it’s gonna be a few easy credits. And the tutorial groups weren’t allowed to have more than fifteen people in each. If they got too big the students made official complaints. But anyway, I did work up an article, but I couldn’t get it published. Jack Bedford, he’s with the English literature mob, he actually rang up an editor that was a mate of his and asked him what the Hell was wrong with my paper and the mate had the brass gall to admit he hadn’t read it: when he’d seen where I was from he’d just sent it to Prof for peer review and he’d said it was under-researched idiosyncratic rubbish. Jack was wild, see, he’d read it over for me and he thought it was quite good, but his mate didn’t want to get on Prof’s bad side, he had too much clout with the academic Establishment. So that was It.”
“But—”
“See, they're all like that, they just ask who’s this So-and-So and contact your HOD. And there’s no way Prof wanted to see me get published, because all the people who got published in the past were able to get better jobs and leave.” She ate the last of the Mitre’s miraculous green beans, and sighed. “Anyway, he’s dead now. We all went to the funeral; I felt a complete hypocrite.”
“Mm, I can see that... You couldn’t have had a convenient cold?”
Harriet smiled a little. “It woulda had to be hay fever, it was March. No, I couldn’t face the aggro if I didn’t turn up. I dunno what your work’s like, but ya live your life in a goldfish bowl under a microscope at our dump, believe you me!”
He made a sympathetic face. “Ghastly. My dump’s not so bad, but if you’re spotted out with a new face, it’s broadcast over the tea urns in the morning and all over the building by lunchtime! And they don't let it drop—well, largely a load of chaps working together, you see.” He rubbed his long nose. “Not a matter of taking a breathless interest in one’s love life per se, more a matter of seizing on the chance to torture a pal unmercifully.”
“I see. Yes, that’d be a male-peer-group thing. It’s the ladies that take a breathless interest in everyone’s love life. Not that they can see when a thing’s going on under their noses,” she added drily.
“Er—wouldn’t that depend on how careful the parties concerned are about hiding it?”
Harriet made a face. “Yeah. He was married, of course. I mean, I knew it from the off, it was stupid... Not that I could ever really envisage being a conventional suburban wife, which is what they all want.”
“But—uh—surely you could go on working?”
Harriet took a deep breath. Then she said flatly: “Never mind. It’s a whole different world, you couldn’t possibly understand.”
A flush rose to his high cheekbones. “But I should like to understand, Harriet, if you don’t feel I’m prying.”
Prying? The man didn’t know the meaning of the word! When she thought of ruddy Betty Campbell from work—not to mention flaming Jessie Craig and Louise Perkins, let’s hope today’s slime pudding was choking them!
“You’re not prying. Well, our place is full of working mums, they all work as hard as the men—harder, mostly, you never see them skiving off for an afternoon’s golf—and as well, they cook the dinners and drive the kids to school and as often as not pick them up after school as well, plus and drive them to their flaming sports fixtures in the weekends. Plus and do all the housework and the blimmin’ shopping. You never see a bloke struggling in to work at lunchtime laden down with shopping bags, that’s for sure! That’s all Women’s Lib has done for the Australian woman, and you can tell ruddy Germaine Greer that with my compliments!”
He shuddered. “Wouldn’t dare to!”
Harriet grinned reluctantly. “No, she is pretty awful, eh? But that’s how it is, even though the families are all quite well off, usually with two cars and often the kids are at a private school—one more reason why the mums have to work. All the blokes do is their paid uni work and as a great concession put the bins out and mow the lawn a couple of times a month, max’, usually on a giant sit-on mower, and really pat themselves on the back if they manage to do one stir-fry a week and take the son—it never seems to be the daughter—to one sports fixture a term.”
“That’s a pretty foul picture,” he said slowly.
“Yes. –It’s not sour grapes, it’s observation. They’re all wonderful, hard-working, uncomplaining women, some of them quite good at their subjects, too,” said Harriet with a sigh, “and absolutely none of them would grasp that they’re even more victims of the system than their mums and grandmas were if you tried to explain it to them in words of one syllable. –It’s not just the lecturers, of course, the Registry’s full of more of the same, and the library. That’s what middle-class life is, apparently.”
“Yes...” he said slowly. “I’ve never thought about it before, how shaming... Yes, I’m sure it’s the same here, too.”
“Mm.” Harriet put her knife and fork neatly together and looked hopefully at his plate, which was also empty. Was he going to suggest pudding? “Sorry to introduce such a gloomy note, on top of this wonderful meal.’
“No, no: salutary, in its way. –You haven’t finished your wine. Don’t you care for it?”
“Well, not all that much: it’s a bit light, isn’t it?”
“Oh, Lor’. You’re used to the Australian reds, of course. I’m afraid I chose a Beaujolais in deference to a lady’s palate. I’m Hellishly sorry, Harriet,” he ended lamely as she collapsed in giggles,
“No!” gasped Harriet. “That’s salutary, if ya like! –I’m not a lady,” she said, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand.
He grinned. “Well, thank God for that! Now, game to try a pud? Or shall we settle for cheese? Or you could have honey and condensed milk, of course.”
“But don’t bother about the Beaujolais, thanks,” said Harriet, grinning. “The thing is, what are their puddings like?”
“I’ve had the crème caramel: that’s always nice. Don’t really know. We’ll ask,” he said, turning and sort of giving a half-wave—Harriet couldn’t have said how the Hell he did it, but the waiter was there like a shot.
In view of the weather there was a traditional English fruit pudding—yes, madam, like a Christmas pudding—a treacle tart, a millefeuilles—many of the ladies liked that—and the crème caramel. And an excellent Stilton today, sir.
“In England you have the cheese last, don’t you?” said Harriet to her escort.
“Er—yes,” he said, looking very startled. “Would you prefer to eat French-fashion? You could have the pudding last, of course, if you wish.”
“The thing is, um, I really hate having cheese after the pudding but, um, I would like to try the Stilton.”
“In that case, we’ll both have the Stilton next, thanks, and the lady will have pudding after that. What do you fancy, Harriet?”
What was a millefeuilles, when it was at home? Feebly she asked the waiter. Heck, it was like a blimming pavlova and didn’t even sound as nice as Aunty Mary’s! Overcooked, by the sound of it, if it was in thin layers, she just hated overcooked meringue. Like Mum's pavlovas: they always came out flat and chewy— Er, yeah. She admitted she wasn’t very fond of meringue and then floundered between the crème caramel and the treacle tart. Competently Crispin solved that one for her by ordering the crème caramel plus a small slice of the tart for the lady. Shit, he wasn’t having any himself! Then he hadda see the wine list and decided she should try some port with the Stilton. Harriet didn’t let on that she usually drank a hefty Shiraz if she had a nice strong cheese at home—she usually bought a Castello, white or blue, they were both good, and the local so-called Bries and Camemberts tasted like soap and cost The Earth. But he’d probably think that was very non-U. Ugh, Aunty Mary had had a bottle of port last Chrissie, it had been putrid. Well, alcoholic, yeah. But putrid. Horrendously over-sweet.
The cheese was wonderful, so was the port, and the puds, which by this time she certainly didn’t need, were extra. Over it all he chatted amiably about music, having tactfully discovered that she loved Bach and hated pop music. He knew a Helluva lot more about the subject than she did but somehow this didn’t surprise her. Gradually the awful feeling grew on her that blimming Lord Peter Wimsey had also known a Helluva lot about music—of course. Yes, he bloody well had, because in one of the books—oh, yes, the one where he met her namesake, with the arsenic and the cracked egg, had the woman actually tried to introduce anything into an egg through a ruddy— Um, yeah. He’d played the piano for one of the ladies from the Cattery. Shit.
Crispin looked in surprise at her expression. “Is anything the matter?”
“No,” said Harriet quickly, going very red.
“If it’s too much for you, my dear, don’t finish it,” he murmured.
No doubt he called all the ladies he took to lunch—those slim ones, yeah—“my dear” in that causal way but this didn’t stop H. Harrison from going redder than ever, blast!
“Um, yeah, I think I will stop. It’s lovely, but I’m full. –Sorry, you’re gonna think I’m mad, but I’ve gotta ask you this. Can you play the piano?”
“No. Unless you count Chopsticks.”
Harriet sagged. “Oh, good.”
“Uh—are you making odorous comparisons?” That beautiful, elegant mouth tightened for an instant. “Because if so, let me assure you that whoever he was, I’m not him, Harriet.”
“No!” she gasped, feeling herself turn positively puce, right to the top of her scalp. “He’s not anyone! I mean, he’s not even real!”
“Who, for God’s sake?” he said, staring.
“I’m sorry, Crispin,” said Harriet miserably. “It’s barmy. Especially when you’ve given me this lovely lunch. It’s the fair hair, I think. And the accent.”
“Just tell me, before I go barking mad and run round tearing my hair out in handfuls!”
“And the way you talk,” she added glumly.
“You just said that.”
“No; I mean, it’s not only the accent, it’s the way you talk. Lord Peter Wimsey,” revealed Harriet abruptly.
“Uh—who?”
She swallowed. “In the Dorothy Sayers books. You probably haven’t even read—“
“Good Lord!” Crispin ran his hand through his short fair hair. “He always struck me as a bit of a nancy-boy.”
“I think that’s because you’re the wrong sex,” said Harriet miserably. “I tried to tell myself that, but it never worked. My friend Gillian and I—she was a girl I was at school with and we started our degrees at the same time—we both thought he was awfully sexy.”
Crispin laughed weakly. “Thanks for that small mercy!”
“Yeah,” said Harriet glumly. “Anyway, he could do absolutely everything, I mean, he’s totally nauseating, really, and I suddenly remembered that he played the piano—brilliantly, of course, not just bashing out a tune like an ordinary person—and I suddenly felt if you did too, it’d be the last str— Shit. Sorry.”
After a moment he managed to say: “I concede that I felt a strong desire to give the too-perfect Wimsey a swift kick when I read those books—they’re not bad, though: bloody well written and well researched, aren’t they?—if a bit far-fetched—but if you see me as totally nauseating, why the Hell did you agree to have lunch with me?”
By the end of this speech Harriet was not only puce again—or still—she was scowling horribly. “It might’ve been because I was bloody hungry and wanted a decent meal, had ya thought of that one?”
“Was it?” he said neutrally.
“No!”
Crispin’s eyes began to twinkle. “Why, then, Harriet?” he murmured.
“Shuddup. You know perfectly well why,” she growled.
Suddenly he reached across and laid his hand on top of hers. “I hope I do, but I was beginning to think I might be wrong,” he murmured.
“No,” said Harriet, scowling more than ever.
“That’s good!” he admitted with a laugh in his voice. “Shall we forget the comparisons, odorous or otherwise, and just have our coffee and then go off to a nice quiet motel and discuss the point?”
“Mm!” she agreed, nodding convulsively. His hands, fairly large but not very big for a man’s, were not in the least like Lord Peter’s, thank God—as described by Miss Sayers they alone would have been sufficient to justify the “nancy-boy” appellation, actually. Crispin’s were rather square, capable-looking hands, and if anyone’s, they reminded her of Sean Nesbitt’s.
“Can you do boxing?”
“Look, if bloody Wimsey could box, the answer’s no!” he said heatedly.
“Um, no, I don’t think so.—Box, yes, I can never remember to use it verbally.—She can’t have thought it was gentlemanly enough. No, um, your hands remind me a bit of someone who used to do b—to box, when he was younger.”
Crispin sighed. “I’ll admit to it, then—when I was younger—if you’ll also allow me to admit to the fact that you remind me of a Spanish girl I once knew—also when I was younger.”
“Really?” said Harriet in astonishment.
He eyed her tight red, faded tee-shirt with blatant admiration. “Really. Especially the salient points.”
Harriet waited for him to say “If you’ll forgive my [possessive pronoun] saying [gerund] so” or some such—Lord Peter certainly would have, supposing he’d ever lowered himself to the point of making such a crass remark, not to say giving anyone a look like that—only he didn’t, phew! She swallowed. “You can say it if you like. It’s odd, no-one’s ever spotted it before: I have got Spanish blood. A couple of generations back, on Dad’s side.”
Crispin looked at the cloud of untidy, glossy black curls, not in any sort of hairdo, just rioting on her shoulders, the honey-coloured skin with the bright pink flush on the round cheeks, and the big dark eyes, and smiled. “They must all be blind, then, Harriet. Your skin isn’t as dark as Consuelo’s, but otherwise you’re very like her. Especially the figure.”
Harriet sighed. “I don’t seem to be able to lose any weight, whatever I do. I walk to work when it’s not too hot but it doesn’t make any difference. Well—keeps it in check, maybe.”
“Jesus, don’t think of trying to lose any more, I like it as it is!” This apparently reduced her to silence. He smiled and added mildly: “You walk when it’s not too hot? Where do you live, Harriet? You haven’t actually said.”
“Haven’t I? Sorry. The thing is, I’ve been, um, sort of lying to the tour group because of ruddy Louise Perkins. Well, we do come from Sydney, that wasn’t a lie, and I just sort of let them believe I still live there. –Adelaide,” she revealed glumly.
“Where the ultra-refeened ladies come from? Oh, Lor’!”
“Yeah, hah, hah,” she said glumly as he dissolved in hysterics.
“My—poor—Harriet!” he gasped.
“’Tisn’t all like that, of course,” she admitted as he once again mopped his eyes with the sparkling white hanky. “There’s actually quite a large working class. A lot of them still live in Elizabeth,” she revealed pointedly, giving him a good glare, “which was built in the Fifties to house the flood of working-class British immigrants that came out under the White Australia policy. Named after Guess Who.”
“Stop it,” said Crispin weakly. “That has got to be apocryphal!”
“No, it isn’t. Adelaide’s like that, actually,” said Harriet on a thoughtful note.
Promptly Crispin dissolved in hysterics again. Eventually he was able to say: “I think we’d better just have our coffee and go. Any more like that and I may be rendered incapable.”
“Shuddup,” she growled, biting her lip.
He smiled, gave that half-wave, got the usual rapid servile response and in no time flat they were sipping short blacks—they didn’t call them that in England but that was what they were. Not nearly as good as the Sydney ones and not even as good as the better Adelaide ones, actually, but Harriet didn’t say so. He had sugar in his like an ordinary person, far from sipping it “austerely” without, like ruddy Lord P— Well, heck, it was impossible not to make the comparison!
Crispin Narrowmine was rather relieved when she didn’t ask why he didn’t take a room here, but just let him grab them a taxi and drive off to a quiet little motel on the outskirts of the town. Or, to earthly paradise, you could have put it like that—yes.
Next chapter:
https://trialsofharrietharrison.blogspot.com/2023/10/harriet-agley.html