Morton raised a pair of feathery eyebrows and put down his glass. “Madam,” he said, “forgive me. If you dress like a cowherd’s woman, you must be used to being mistaken for a cowherd’s woman, don’t you know. To each his or her own eccentricity. Allow me to pour you a little of this negus, and then we will talk together as equals — at least until it is proved otherwise.”
The wine was good enough to take off some of the sharpness of Morton’s speech. Greybeard said as much.
“It drinks well enough,” one of the Fellows agreed carelessly. He was a tallowy man, addressed as Gavin, with a yellow face and a forehead from which he constantly wiped sebum. “It’s only a home-grown wine, unfortunately. We finished off the last of the college cellars the day the Dean was deposed.”
The three men bowed their heads in mock-reverence at mention of the Dean. “What is your story, then, strangers?” Morton asked, in a more unbuttoned fashion. Greybeard spoke briefly of their years in London, of their brush with Croucher in Cowley, and of their long withdrawal at Sparcot. However much the Fellows regretted the absence of palpable lies, they expressed interest in the account.
“I remember this Commander Croucher,” Morton said. “He was not a bad chap as dictators go. Fortunately, he was the sort of illiterate who preserves an undue respect for learning. Perhaps because his father, it was rumoured, was a college servant, his attitude to the University was astonishingly respectful. We had to be inside college by seven p.m., but that was no hardship. I recall that even at the time one regarded his régime as one of historical necessity. It was after he died that things became really intolerable. Croucher’s soldiery turned into a rabble of looters. That was the worst time in our whole miserable half-century of decline.”
“What happened to these soldiers?”
“Roughly what you’d expect. They killed each other, and then the cholera got the rest of them, thank heaven, don’t you know. For a year, this was a city of the dead. The colleges were closed. Nobody about. I took over a cottage outside the city. After a time, people started drifting back. Then, that winter or the next, the flu hit us.”
“We missed serious flu epidemics at Sparcot,” Greybeard said.
“You were fortunate. You were also fortunate in that the flu missed very few centres of population, by all accounts, so we were spared armed bands of starving louts roving the country and pillaging.”
The Fellow addressed as Vivian said, “At its best, this country could support only half the populace by home agriculture. Under worsening conditions, it might support under a sixth of the number. In normal times, the death rate would be about six hundred thousand per year. There are of course no accurate figures available, but I would hazard that at the time of which we speak, about twenty-two or a little earlier, the population shrank from about twenty-seven million to twelve million. One can easily calculate that in the decade since then the population must have shrunk to a mere six million, estimating by the old death rate. Given another decade—”
“Thank you, no more statistics, Vivian,” Morton said. To his visitors, he added, “Oxford has been peaceful since the flu epidemic. Of course, there was the trouble with Balliol.”
“What happened there?” Martha asked, accepting another glass of the home-made wine.
“Balliol thought it would like to rule Oxford, don’t you know. There was some paltry business about trying to collect arrears of rent from their city properties. The townspeople appealed to Christ Church for assistance. Fortunately we were able to give it.
“We had a rather terrible artillery man, a Colonel Appleyard, taking refuge with us at the time. He was an undergraduate of the House — ploughed, poor fellow, and fit for nothing but a military life — but he had a couple of mortars with him. Trench mortars, don’t you know. He set them up in the quad and began to bombard — to mortar, I suppose one should say, if the verb can be used in that application — Balliol.”
Gavin chuckled and added, “Appleyard’s aim was somewhat uncertain, and he demolished most of the property in between Balliol and here, including Jesus College; but the Master of Balliol ran up his white flag, and we have all lived equably ever after.”
The three Students were put in a good humour by this anecdote, and ran over the salient points of the campaign among themselves, forgetting their visitors. Mopping his forehead, Gavin said, “Some of the colleges are built like little fortresses; it is pleasant to see this aspect is to some extent functional.”
“Has the lake we sailed over to reach Folly Bridge any particular history?” Greybeard inquired.
“Particular meaning ‘pertaining to’? Why, yes and no, although nothing so dramatic — nothing so full of human interest, shall we say — as the Balliol campaign,” Morton said. “The Meadow Lake, as our local men know it, covers ground that was always liable to flood, even in the palmy days of the Thames Conservancy, rest their souls. Now it is a permanent flood, thanks to the work of undermining the banks carried out by an army of coypus.”
“Coypu is an animal?” Martha asked.
“A rodent, madam, of the echimyidae family, hailing from South America, now as much a native of Oxford as Gavin or I — and I fancy will continue to be so long after we are put to rest, eh, Gavin? You might not have seen the creature on your travels, since it is shy and conceals itself. But you must come and see our menagerie, and meet our tame coypus.”
He escorted them through several odorous rooms, in which he kept a number of animals in cages. Most of them ran to him, and appeared glad to see him.
The coypus enjoyed a small pool set in the stone slabs of a ground floor room. They looked like a cross between a beaver and a rat. Morton explained how they had been imported into the country back in the twentieth century to be bred on farms for their nutria fur. Some had escaped, to become a pest throughout much of East Anglia. In several concentrated drives, they had been almost exterminated; after the Accident, they had multiplied again, slowly at first and then, hitting their stride like so many other rapid-breeding creatures, very fast. They spread westwards along rivers, and it now seemed as if they covered half the country.
“They will be the end of the Thames,” Morton said. “They ruin any watercourse. Fortunately, they more than justify their existence by being both very good to eat and to wear! Fricasseed coypu is one of the great consolations of our senility, eh, Vivian? Perhaps you have observed how many people are able to afford their old bones the luxury of a fur coat.”
Martha mentioned the pine martens they had seen. “Eh, very interesting! They must be spreading eastwards from Wales, which was the only part of Britain where they survived a century ago. All over the world, there must be far-reaching changes in animal behaviour and habitat; if only one could have another life in which to chart it all… Ah well, that’s not a fruitful thing to wish, is it?”
Morton finished by offering Martha a job as an assistant to his menagerie keeper, and advising Greybeard to see a farmer Flitch, who was wanting a man for odd jobs.
Joseph Flitch was an octogenarian as active as a man twenty years his junior. He needed to be. He supported a house full of nagging women, his wife, his wife’s two hoary old sisters, their mother, and two daughters, one prematurely senile, the other permanently crippled with arthritis. Of this unhappy crew of harridans, Mrs. Flitch was, perhaps because the rule in her household was the survival of the fiercest, undoubtedly the fiercest. She took an instant spite to Greybeard.