Death Is Now My Neighbour (3 page)

storrs
, Julian Charles;
b
9 July 1935;
Educ
Christ's Hosp, Services S Dartmouth, Emmanuel Coll Cambridge (BA, MA);
m
Angela Miriam Martin 31 March 1974;
Career
Capt RA (Indian Army Secondment); Pitt Rivers Reader in Social Anthropology and Senior Fellow Lonsdale Coll Oxford;
Recreations
taking taxis, playing bridge.

cornford
, Denis Jack;
b
23 April 1942;
Educ
Wygges
ton GS Leicester, Magdalen Coll Oxford (MA, DPhil);
m
Shelly Ann Benson 28 May 1994;
Career
University Reader in Mediaeval History and Fellow Lonsdale Coll Oxford;
Recreations
kite-flying, cultivation of orchids.

Each of these entrie
s may appear comparatively unin
formative. Yet perhaps in the more perceptive reader they may provoke one or two interesting considerations.

Was, for example, the Senior Fellow of Lonsdale so affluent that he could afford to take a taxi everywhere? Did he never travel by car, coach, or train? Well, quite certainly on special occasions he would travel by u-ain.

Oh, yes.

As we shall see.

And why was Dr Cornford, soon to be
fifty-four years old, so recentl
y converted to the advantages of latter-day matrimony? Had he met some worthy woman of comparable age?

Oh, no.

As we shall see.

How right I should have been to keep away, and let You have your innocent—guilty—innocent night Of switch
ing partners in your own sad set.
How useless to invite

The sickening bre
athlessness of being young Into my life again

(Philip Larkin,
The Dance)

Denis Cornford,
omnium consensu,
was a fine historian. Allied with a mind both sharp and rigorously honest was a capacity for the assemblage and interpretation of evidence that was the envy of the History Faculty at Oxford. Yet in spite of such qualities, he was best known for a brief monograph on the Battle of Hastings, in which he maintained that the momentous conflict between Harold of England and William of Normandy had taken place one year earlier than universally acknowledged. In 1065.

In the Trinity Term of 1994, Cornford - a slimly-built, smallish, pleasantly featured man - had taken sabbatical leave at Harvard; and there - somehow and somewhere, in Cambridge, Massachusetts - something quite extraordinary had occurred. For six months later, to the amazement and amusement of his colleagues, the confirmed bachelor of Lonsdale had returned to Oxford with a woman who had agreed to change her name from Shelly Benson to Shelly Cornford: a student from Harvard who had just gained her Master's degree in American History, twenty-six years old - exa
ctly
half the age of her new husband (for this was her second marriage).

It is perhaps not likely that Shelly would have reached the semi-final heats of any Miss Massachusetts beauty competition: her jawline was slightly too square, her shoulders rather too strong, her legs perhaps a little on the sturdy side. Yet there were a good many in Lonsdale College - both dons and undergraduates - who were to experience a curious attraction to the woman now putting in fairly regular appearances in Chapel, at Guest Nights, and at College functions during the Michaelmas Term of 1994. Her wavy, shoulder-length brown hair framed a face in which the widely set dark brown eyes seemed sometimes to convey the half-promise of a poten
tial intimacy, whilst her quietl
y voiced New England accent could occasionally sound as swe
etly
sensual as some enchantress's.

Many were the comments made about the former Shelly Benson during those first few terms. But no one could ever doubt what Denis Cornford had seen in her, for
it
was simply what others could now so clearly see for themselves. So from the start Shelly Cornford was regularly
lusted after; her husband secretl
y envied. But the couple themselves appeared perfe
ctly
happy: no hint of infidelity on her part; no cause for jealousy on his. Not yet.

Freque
ntl
y during those days they were to be seen walking hand-in-hand the short distances from dieir rooms in Holywell Street to the King's Arms, or the Turf Tavern ('Find Us If You Can!'), where in bars blessedly free from juke-box and fruit-machine Shelly had quickly acquired a taste for real ale and a love for the ambience of the English public house.

Occasionally the two of them ventured further afield in and around Oxford; and one evening, just before Christmas 1994, they had taken the No. 2 bus from Cornmarket up to another King's Arms, the one in the Banbury road, where amid many unashamedly festive young revellers Cornford watched as his (equally young) wife, with eyes half-closed, had rocked her shoulders sensuously to the thudding rhythm of some pop music, her black-stockinged thighs alternately lifted and lowered as though she were mentally disco-dancing. And at that point he was conscious of being the oldest person in the bar, by about twenty years; inhabiting alien territory
there
; wholly excluded from the magic circle of the night; and suddenly sadly aware that he could never even begin to share the girlish animality of the woman he had married.

Cornford had said nothing that evening.

Nor had he said anything when, three months later, at the end-of-term Gaudy, he had noticed, beneath the table, the left hand of Julian Storrs pressed briefly against Shelly's right thigh as s
he sat drinking rather a lot of
Madeira, after drinking rather a lot of red wine at dinner, after drinking rather a lot of gin at the earlier reception
...
her chair perhaps unnecessarily close to the Senior Fellow seated on her right, the laughing pair leaning together in some whispered, mutual, mouth-to-ear exchange. Perhaps it was all perfectly harmless; and Cornford sought to make
little
of it. Yet he ought (he knew it!) to have said a few words on that occasion -
lightl
y, with a heavy heart.

It was only late in the Michaelmas Term 1995 that Cornford finally did say something to his wife
...

They had been seated one Tuesday lunchtime in the Turf Tavern, he immediately opposite his wife as she sat in one of the wooden wall-seats in the main bar, each of them enjoying a pint of London Pride. He was eagerly expounding to her his growing conviction that the statistical evidence concerning the number of deaths resultant from the Black Death in 1348 had been wildly misinterpreted, and that the supposed demographic effects consequent upon that plague were - most decidedly! - extremely suspect. It should all have been of some interest, surely? And yet Cornford was conscious of a semi-preoccupied gaze in Shelly's eyes as she stared over his left shoulder into some more fascinating area.

All right. She
ought
to have been interested — but she wasn't. Not everyone, not even a trained historian like his wife, was going to be automatically enthralled by any re-evaluation of some abstruse mediaeval evidence.

He'd thought
little
of it

And had drunk his ale.

They were about to leave when a man, in his early thirties or so, walked over to them - a tall, dark, slimly built Arab with a bushy moustache. Looking dire
ctly
i
nto Shelly's eyes, he spoke softl
y to her:

'Madame! You are the most beautiful lady I see!'

Then, turning to
Cornford
: 'Please excuse, sir!' With which, picking up Shelly's right hand, he imprinted his full-lipped mouth most earne
stly
upon the back of her wrist

After the pair of them had emerged into the cobbled lane that led up again into Holywell Street, Cornford stopped and so roughly pushed his wife's shoulder that she had no choice but to stand there facing him.

"You - are - a - bloody - flirt! Did you know that? All the time we were in there - all the time I was telling you—'

But he got no further.

The tall figure of Sir Clixby Bream was striding down towards them.

'Hell-o! You're both just off, I can see
that.
But what about another
little
snifter? Just to please me?'

'Not for me, Master.' Cornford trusted that he'd masked the bitterness of his earlier tone. 'But if
...
?' He turned to his wife.

'No. Not now. Another time. Thank you, Master.'

With Shelly still beside him,
Cornford
walked rather blindly on, suspecting (how otherwise?) that the Master had witnessed the awkward, angry scene. And then, a few steps later - almost miraculously - he felt his wife's arm link with his own; heard the wonderful words spoken in her quiet voice: 'Denis, I'm so very sorry. Do please forgive me, my darling.'

As the Master stooped slightl
y to pass beneath the entrance of the Turf Tavern, an observer skilled in the art of labiomancy would have read the two words on his smoothly smiling mouth: 'Well! Well!'

Wednesday, 7 February

Disciple
(weeping): O Master,
I
disturb thy meditations.

Master:
Thy tears are plural; the Divine
Will is one.

Disciple:
I
seek wisdom and truth, yet my
thoughts are ever of lust and the necessary pleasures of a woman.

Master:
Seek not wisdom and truth, my
son; seek rather forgiveness. Now go in peace, for verily hast thou disturbed my meditations — of lust and of the necessary pleasures of a woman

(K'ung-Fu-Tsu, from
Anale
cts XXIII)

'Well, at least
it's
left on
time.'

'Not surprising, is it? The bloody thing
starts
from Oxford. Give it a chance, though. We'll probably run into signalling failure somewhere along the line.'

She smiled, attractively. 'Funny, really. They've been signalling on the railways for - what? - a hundred and fifty years, and with all these computers and things

'Over one hundred and seventy years, if we want to be accurate - and why shouldn't we? Eighteen twenty-five when the Stockton to Darlington line was opened.'

Yeah. We learned about that in school. You know, Stephenson's
Rocket and
all that.'

'No, my dear girl. A few years later, that was. Stephenson's first locomotive was called
The Locomotion
- not very difficult to remember, is it?'

'No.'

The monosyllable was quietl
y spoken, and he knew that he'd made her feel inadequate again.

She turned away from him to look through the carriage window, spotdng the great sandstone house in Nuneham Park, up towards the skyline on the left. More dian once he'd told her something of its history, and about Capability Brown and Somebody Adams; but she was never able to remember things as accurately as he seemed to expect. He'd told her on their last train journey, for example, about the nationalization of the railways after World War II: 1947 (or was it 1948?).

So what?

Yet there was one year she would
never
forget: the year the network changed its name to 'British Rail'. Her father had told her about that; told her she'd been born on that very same day. In that very same year, too.

In 1965.

'Drinks? Refreshments?'

An overloaded trolley was squeezing a squeaky passage along the aisle; and
the
man looked at his wristwatch (10.40 a.m.) as it came alongsid
e, before turning to the elegantl
y suited woman seated next to him:

'Fancy anything? Coffee? Bit too early for anything stronger, perhaps?'

'Gin and tonic for me. And a packet of plain crisps.'

Sod him! He'd been pretty insufferable so far.

A few minutes later, after pouring half his can of McEwan's Export Ale into a plasdc container, he turned towards her aga
in; and she felt his dry, slightl
y cracked lips pressed upon her right
cheek. Then she heard him say th
e wonderful word tha
t someone else had heard a month
or two before; heard him say 'Sorry'.

She opened her white-leather handbag and took out a tube of lip-salve. As she passed it to him, she felt his firm, slim fingers move against the back of her wrist; then move along her lower arm, beneath the sleeve of her light-mauve Jaeger jacket: the fingers of a pianist. And she knew that very soon - the Turbo Express had just left Reading - the pianist would have been granted the licence to play with her body once more, as th
ough he were rejoicing in a gentl
e Schubert melody.