if you could recommend any good restaurants around here to me?”
“Well, there’s the Blue Boar. And there’s a French one in Grantchester that’s supposed to be good, Le Marquis. And a new Italian one, Il Pavone.”
“Have you eaten at any of them?”
“Well, no …” She blushed slightly and he knew she regretted appearing at a disadvantage. He was well aware that she had named the three most expensive restaurants. His own favorite had not been mentioned; it was less showy and less expensive, but the food was excellent.
“If you could choose, which one would you go to?”
“Oh, Le Marquis. It looks a lovely place.”
“The next time I’m up from London, if you’re not doing anything, I would count it as a great favor if you would have dinner there with me.” He smiled intimately at her. “It gets pretty dull, traveling alone, eating alone.”
“Really?” she gasped. “Oh, I mean …” She struggled furiously to repress her triumphant excitement. “Yes, I’d like that very much.”
“Fine. If I could have your telephone number …”
She hesitated and Peterson guessed she had no telephone. “Or if you’d rather, I can simply stop by this shop early on.”
“Oh yes, that would be best,” she said, seizing on this graceful out.
“I’ll look forward to it.”
They walked forward to the front desk, where he paid for his book. When he left Bowes & Bowes, he turned the corner towards Market Square. Through the side windows of the bookstore he could see her in consultation with her two friends. Well, that was easy, he thought. Good God, I don’t even know her name.
He crossed the square and walked through Petty Cury with its bustling throng of shoppers, coming out opposite Christ’s. Through its open gate the green lawn in its quad was visible and behind that, the vivid colors of a herbaceous border against the gray wall of the Master’s Lodge. In the gateway the porter sat reading a paper. A knot of students stood studying some lists on the bulletin board. Peterson kept on going and turned into Hobson’s Alley. He finally found the place he was looking for: Foster and Jagg, coal merchants.
CHAPTER TEN
John Renfrew spent Saturday morning putting up new shelving on the long wall in their kitchen. Marjorie had been after him for months to do it. Her bland asides about where the planes of wood should go “when you get around to it” had slowly accreted into a pressing weight, an agreed duty, unavoidable. The markets were open only a few days each week—“to avoid fluctuations in supply” was the common explanation, rendered on the nightly news—and with the power cuts, refrigerating was impossible. Marjorie had turned to putting up vegetables and was amassing a throng of thick-lipped jars. They waited in cardboard boxes for the promised shelving.
Renfrew assembled his tools systematically, with as much care as he took in the laboratory. Their house was old and leaned slightly, as though blown by an unfelt wind. Renfrew found that his plumb line, nailed to the wainscotting, weaved a full three inches out from the scuffed molding. The floor sagged with an easy fatigue, like a well-used mattress. He stepped back from the tilting walls, squinted, and saw that the lines of his home were askew. You put down the money on a place, he reflected, and you get a maze of jambs and beams and cornices, all pushed slightly out of true by history. A bit of settling in that corner, a diagonal misaimed there. He had a sudden memory of when he had been a boy, looking up from a stone floor at his father, who squinted at the plaster ceiling as if to judge whether the roof would fall.
As he studied the problem his own children caromed through the house. Their feet thumped on the margins of polished wood that framed the thin rugs. They reached the front door and ricocheted outside in a game of tag. He realized that to them he probably had that same earnest wrenched look of his father, face skewed in concentration.
He arrayed his tools and began to work. The piles of lumber on the back porch gradually dwindled as he cut them into a suitable lattice. To fit the thin planks at the roof he had to make oblique cuts with a rip saw. The wood splintered under his lunging thrusts, but kept to line. Johnny appeared, tired of tag with his older sister. Renfrew set him to work fetching tools as they were needed.