tion id="ua2a13aa2-759c-5c9f-a8e6-733a3a605e8f">
GWENDOLINE BUTLER
Death Lives Next Door
ToAylmer Macartney
Contents
Oxford, which presents so glamorous and beautiful a face to the world, has also its seedy side. The world of grey stone colleges and elegantly panelled common rooms is not the only one. Not all scholars are dons comfortably housed in college rooms with cheerful and dignified servants or live happily in North Oxford in a house with trees in front and a lawn behind. There is a sadder side made up of those who have not quite succeeded in the battle, a sort of sub-world of failures and hangers-on.
At the top of the scale are the newly graduated but not yet established, living outside college life but teaching for the colleges and looking at them with envious eyes. A fellowship is their ambition and they look at the possessors of them hopefully, longing for a death, an early retirement or a promotion. There are not nearly enough to go round. So for some hope dies, and some move away, while others obstinately linger on. If they linger long enough they sink towards the bottom of the scale where are all the people who should never have hung on at all, the people for whom Oxford represents a dream, a drug, an illusion. And these people you must pity because they are in thrall to a harsh deity who takes no notice of them and never will. Such people are the third class honours students, the women graduates who find an exciting world here they find nowhere else, the people who don’t want to go home. They take poor teaching jobs, hack coaching, a job as a porter, as Father Christmas, a warder in Oxford prison by night, a poet and scholar by day, or so they hope, in order to hang on.
To this group are attached all the people who should never have been in Oxford anyway and would be banished if the Proctors knew they were there: the refugee who is so rootless that he has no real home anywhere except an attic in Wellington Square and who fills in his time and his pockets with a little odd blackmail, spying, and petty theft, and who is on the black lists of half the Embassies of Europe, even if low down: the actress without a play who hovers hopefully around the Playhouse and Ma Brown’s café.
Prominent among this society is the perpetual scholar; the man who is always proceeding to the next and then the next degree. Labouring endlessly on theses which he may never present, eternally concerned with the minutiae of scholarship and losing the vitality, the perpetual scholar seems specially a product of the nineteen forties and fifties, of a society lavish with grants, eager to compensate for the security it cannot really provide.
Geographically this world centres on Wellington Square and Walton Street, although of course its members may be found anywhere. The hallmark of their lodgings is that they live in a contrived sort of way, with kettles hidden under the bookcase and dirty cups tucked neatly away in cupboards.
Because all the members of this world know each other or of each other, rumours spread rapidly; deliriously rapidly in the case of the rumour that the Dean of Gaveston was giving an open party which brought two-thirds of the members thirstily but mistakenly to the unhappy man’s rooms. This day was afterwards known as the Glorious Thirst of June. Or with sinister rapidity as in the case of the present rumour, which was that in Oxford at the moment one was liable to be followed.
The gossip snowballed. Everyone adding his share.
Ezra added his.
Ezra found passing on the gossip a useful relief from thinking. Thirty-five years of being Ezra had accustomed him to all the thoughts he was likely to have, he didn’t see much chance now of his thinking anything new, he was stuck with his old mind, with all its connections, associations and responses, and they were boring. He was even bored with his work. There was not the freshness to the study of Beowulf and Guthric that there had been ten years ago when he started it, he himself had not the same enthusiasm that he had felt when he had first landed in Oxford after five years in the army. That had been three years before starting on Beowulf so altogether he had been at it thirteen years now. Thirteen years too long possibly. It depended how you. looked at it. You could say he was adding to scholarship, which was how Ezra’s supervisor put it, or you could say he was wasting his time, which was how Ezra’s father put it. Ezra himself put it half way between: he had added perhaps half a dozen new facts to the study of Beowulf, he had suggested a new interpretation of the Grendel figure (another myth he thought) and he had enriched his own mind. If he had wasted any time it had been his own.
But so far it had not brought him any further in the world. He was still living in the same rooms in which he had set himself up ten years ago with an electric gramophone and an electric coffee pot as a student, he still had to hide his tea tray under the bed when his pupils came (he did a great deal of tutorial work for Prelims, grinding Anglo-Saxon into the heads of dull girls from St. Agatha’s). In all this time it had never dawned on Ezra that his pupils could see his tea tray perfectly clearly under the bed drape. He always sat in the same chair. He had noticed however that the girls who had once seemed more or less his own contemporaries now got younger and younger every year and that he himself had almost got to thinking of them indulgently as pretty young things. He did occasionally ask them out for a drink or for dinner but now they always seemed shy and nervous whereas ten years ago everything would have gone bouncingly. He had no idea that his young pupils regarded his sombre good looks with respectful