After lunch they went for a walk through the fields and admired the new-leafed trees and the fat lambs, the dog on a length of rope in case he worried the lambs. When the danger was past, he was set free and ran like a prisoner released, not just running but rolling over and over and over on the grass in a frenzy of excitement. “He’s a city dog,” Frobisher said. “As am I nowadays.”
“I think I would make a very good rustic,” Gwendolen said. Perhaps, Gwendolen thought, her future life should not be in York or even London, but somewhere in the deep green of the countryside. A tumbledown thatch, chickens pecking on the verge. A bean pole with scarlet-flowering runners and heady-scented wallflowers in the beds. The rolling fields and the copses and shady woods, the tumbling sweet streams that ran through everything. She was quite carried away by this bucolic idyll. At a stretch, she could almost see Frobisher inside the tumbledown thatch, but she could not get Niven through the door. Or even the garden gate. She must stop comparing them, she chided herself. Frobisher never came out best, when really he should.
He surprised her by confiding that he was actually, himself, a countryman—the son of a Shropshire ploughman—and Gwendolen said, “As the team’s head-brass flashed out on the turn,” and he said, “Edward Thomas,” and she thought, Oh, this is good, a man who knows Edward Thomas. Neither of them continued on to quote the next line, which was about lovers disappearing into the wood, and anyway the poem was not about the lovers but about the war and its losses, and so they talked about Thomas for a while and what a fine poet he was （“Elegiac,” Frobisher said, “but no wonder”） and what a finer one he might have become if he hadn’t been killed at Arras.
They were both more sombre on their return to the car, but the mood was swept aside by the effort necessary to crank the Austin back into life after its siesta. It seemed to be an extraordinarily complicated process. “I haven’t yet learnt this by rote,” he apologized, passing her the car’s handbook （“my Bible at the moment”）。
It will repay you to read these notes carefully, the handbook warned sternly. Frobisher had already fiddled with knobs and levers inside the car and now Gwendolen dictated to him. “If the car has been standing for some time—which it has, obviously—starting should be assisted by using the hand priming lever on the fuel pump to give the carburettor a full supply of fuel.”
“Yes, I’m doing that, Miss Kelling,” he shouted from somewhere beneath the bonnet. The dog sat on the verge next to him, as if willing help on him.
“And then—make sure that the crankshaft is free, pushing the handle in to engage fully with the starting dog—what on earth is that?”—the dog gave her an interested look—“before turning it. The ignition key is turned to the right—”
“Can you do that for me, Miss Kelling?”
“Rightio.”
* * *
—
Finally, they were back on the road once more, rattling along at a pace too noisy for conversation, and the melancholy mood soon dissipated.
“Why Oxford?” he asked when they arrived. “Why choose it for our little run?”
“The elder of my two brothers was here. He didn’t even finish his first term, but I had a fancy to see where he was. See what he saw.”
“He went out to the Front? And didn’t come back? And you also had a younger brother?”
“Yes.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“Let’s not dwell on lives not lived, it won’t do any more. It’s already half past four. I would imagine that Oxford is the kind of place where you can find a very good high tea.”
And so it proved to be.
Afterwards, they wandered around the college quads, and as the light was softening towards evening they came by chance upon a group of students putting on what seemed to be an extempore performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream on Christ Church Meadow. The costumes seemed to have been gleaned from a dressing-up box and many of the actors were reading from the text, but that did not dim the magic, indeed it seemed somehow to augment it. It would be exam time soon, wouldn’t it? Perhaps this was a respite.
“How lovely,” Gwendolen whispered to Frobisher. “It’s my favourite play.” Frobisher said nothing. It was not a manly play and it was not midsummer so Gwendolen imagined he might object on both fronts, but then this, she reminded herself, was a man who found Edward Thomas “elegiac” and possessed a dog called Pierrot, so perhaps was not the dry stick she kept taking him for.