She paused, and Lally opened her eyes for a brief moment, watched a towel on its hook sway through a hundred and eighty degrees and shut them quickly.
‘More fool, they,’ Miss Tyrell finished. ‘The child is father to the man, I’ve always believed that. I’ve seen enough of my charges and their friends grow up to know I’m right about that. There are those you can trust, and those you’d be unwise to believe a word they say, five or fifty.’
‘You’d trust Claudia.’
‘Oh, yes.’
‘Not Mr Petrus, though.’
‘Never trust a man who looks you straight in the eyes. Either he’s hiding something, or he wants you to believe he’s sincere and interested in you. Either way, take care. Now, I’ll just take this glass away, you don’t want it sliding about.’
The door shut behind her with a soft click. She lifted a hand to push away a strand of hair from her face. Peter said she looked green; well, she felt green.
Claudia didn’t suffer from seasickness, Miss Tyrell said.
Lucky Claudia.
Wild as a monkey? Lally’s mind wandered back through the tossing of the boat, to the day she first met Claudia. Maybe remembering times when she was on dry land would make her less aware of the endless rise and fall of the ship, and the constant sound, creaking and shifting and the crash of waves breaking against the sides.
Oxford, 1932, and the motion of the ship seemed to alter into the steady rhythm of an English train. Tuppence three farthings, tuppence three farthings. American trains, how did they sound? She couldn’t remember, it was quite a while since she’d travelled on a train in her native land. Nothing as old world and romantic as tuppence three farthings, though.
English money was still a mystery to her in those days, fresh from America, used to the simplicity of a hundred cents to the dollar. A pound divided by twenty shillings and each shilling divided into twelve pennies, and then each in half for a ha’penny, which she had wanted to call a halfpenny, and fourths for a farthing. There was a ship on the copper ha’penny coin, no, she wasn’t going to think about ships. The farthing, concentrate on the farthing, with that cute little bird on it. What was it, a wren?
She’d pitied the kids in school when she first wrestled with change. However did they learn to do any math except adding and subtracting and dividing their odd currency?
The train journey hadn’t taken long, from Paddington, London, to Oxford. An hour and ten minutes. The train had been full. Mostly with students, just to see them milling about the platform had given her a thrill. There’d been another woman in her compartment, a young woman in spectacles, who’d opened a fat and serious-looking book even before the train had started.
Lally squinted at the spine. P. Vergili Maronis Opera. Latin. Unquestionably a student.
Pale eyes looked at Lally through the round spectacles. She held the book up so that Lally could see it more clearly.
Lally laughed. ‘I was snooping, I guess. I’m always curious to see what people are reading. Vergil’s impressive.’
A long, considering stare. ‘You’re American?’
‘Yes.’
‘Tourist, I suppose.’
‘No, I’m going to college in Oxford.’
‘College? Do you mean the university?’
‘Yes, Grace College.’
That earned her a longer, more appraising look. ‘I’m at LMH.’
LMH? What was that?
‘Lady Margaret Hall. Another women’s college.’ The pale eyes swivelled up to the luggage rack. ‘Is that a musical instrument?’
Lally nodded. ‘I play French horn.’
That got a look of pure astonishment. ‘The French horn? A brass instrument?’
‘Yes. Is that so strange?’
‘It is in England. Women don’t generally play brass instruments in England. Piano, violin, cello, harp, flute. Not the French horn.’
‘Then they’ll welcome me into the college orchestra.’
The young woman gave a kind of harrumph and returned ostentatiously to her text.
Lally sat back and gazed out of the window, loving the still green countryside that was sliding past: villages with churches, a big house on a hillside, hedged fields, a line of elms on a ridge … The train gave a shriek and dived into a tunnel, smoke drifting past the darkened window, then out into the sunshine.
‘Did England look like this in Jane Austen’s day?’ Lally asked the Latinist opposite her.
‘I don’t read novels.’
‘Your loss,’ Lally said equably. Now they were on the outskirts of a town, rattling past streets of identical terraced houses, built of red brick. Some of the houses were so close to the line you could see into the windows. A woman ironing, a boy on a swing in a tiny garden, a man sitting in a chair, reading a newspaper.
‘Is this Oxford?’
‘Reading.’
‘What’s that building that looks like a fortress?’
A quick flick of the pale eyes from the page to the scene outside the window.
‘Reading Gaol.’
‘Reading Gaol!’ Entranced, Lally twisted to try to catch a better view. ‘Where Oscar Wilde wrote The Ballad of Reading Gaol. Did they really imprison him in there?’
‘I don’t read poetry.’
‘Vergil is poetry.’
‘I don’t read English poetry.’
Lally was of too sanguine a temperament to feel dampened by this contempt for England’s great writers. She’d just landed up in the company of a dull girl, the students wouldn’t all be like her. Or maybe they would at – what was it? LMH – but not at Grace.
Lally looked at her wristwatch. Not so long now. Wasn’t Oxford the next station?
This time there was no doubt about it. There were the spires, the dreaming spires, unmistakable, serene against the cloudless blue sky.
‘I don’t suppose you read Matthew Arnold,’ she said to her fellow passenger, who had got up from her seat and was pulling down a battered canvas suitcase with brown leather corners. ‘“Home of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names, and impossible loyalties!” That’s what he said about Oxford.’
‘No.’
Lally was tempted to say a quick prayer to St Jude for this woman, who was so clearly a lost cause, but the train was slowing down and she had her luggage to think about.
Then it was down on to the platform, even more full of jostling people than Paddington. Lally stood wide-eyed, holding her French horn in one hand and a suitcase in the other. She must go to the baggage van, make sure her trunk was taken off.
‘Porter, miss?’
She pointed out her trunk and boxes in the van.
‘You go over the footbridge, miss, I’ll bring this lot across.’
So many of these people seemed to know each other, they were calling out greetings and news. Even the girl from LMH had joined up with an acquaintance and was engaged in earnest conversation a few feet in front of her. Then out into the crowded station forecourt. There was her porter.
‘A taxi, miss?’
‘Yes, please. I guess I’ll have to wait a while.’
‘This lot will soon be gone,’