Greybeard

“Looks as if some of the tapes on which we recorded have gone. But the film’s all here, filed as we left it! Remember how we hurtled across Littlemore Bridge in this bus? We must have been mad in those days. What a world ago it all is! Jeff Pitt will be interested.” He turned to Norman Morton and the other Students. “Gentlemen, this truck was issued to me as a solemn obligation by a group whose motives would immediately win your sympathy — a study group. I was forced to exchange it for food at a time when we and the rest of Sparcot were starving. I must ask you to be good enough to return it to me for my further use.”

The Students raised eyebrows and exchanged looks. “Let us go through to my rooms,” Morton said. “There perhaps we can discuss the matter, and draw up agreements if need be. You understand there is no question of your receiving the truck as a gift?”

“Quite so. I am asking for its return as my right, Mr. Morton.” Martha squeezed Greybeard’s arm as they made their way out of the cathedral and locked the door. “Try to be tactful, darling,” she whispered. As they walked along, Gavin said, “You are newcomers here, but you will have observed the guard we keep posted along the walls. The guard is perhaps hardly necessary; certainly it is hardly efficient. But those old men are pensioners; they come here when there is nowhere else for them to go, and we are bound in all charity to take them in. We make them earn their keep by doing guard duty. We are not a charity, you understand; our coffers would not allow us to be; whatever our hearts said. Everyone, Mr. Greybeard, everyone would come here and live at our expense if we let them. No man wishes to labour once he is past his half-century, especially if he has no future generations who may profit by his labours.”

“Precisely so, Gavin,” Vivian agreed, tapping his stick along the worn flags. “We have to make this place pay its way in a manner quite foreign to our predecessors and our founders. Cardinal Wolsey would have died the death… that is why we run the place as a mixture of tavern, auction room, cattle market, and bawdy house. One cannot escape the cash nexus.”

“I get the message,” Greybeard said, as they turned into Morton’s chambers, where the same sharp-nosed fellow they had met on their first day in the college hurriedly put a stopper back in one of his master’s bottles and disappeared into the adjoining rooms. “You expect me to pay for what is mine.”

“Not necessarily,” Morton said, bending before a bright fire and stretching out thin hands towards it. “We could, if the point were conceded that it was your vehicle, charge you a parking fee… A garaging fee, don’t you know. Let me see — the Bursar would have a record somewhere, but we must have kept the vehicle in our luxurious ecclesiastical garage for seven or eight years now… Say a modest fee of three shillings per diem, er… Vivian, you are the mathematician…”

“My head isn’t what it was.”

“As we are aware…”

“It would be a sum of approximately four hundred pounds.”

“That’s absurd!” Greybeard protested. “I could not possibly raise that amount, or anything like it. How did you acquire the vehicle, I would like to know.”

“Your labouring pursuits are telling on you somewhat, Mr. Greybeard,” Morton said. “We raise glasses but never voices in this room. Will you drink?” Martha stepped forward. “Mr. Morton, we would be delighted to drink.” She placed a coin on the table. “There is payment for it.” Morton’s lined face straightened and achieved such a considerable length that his chin was lost inside his coat.

”Madam, a woman’s presence does not automatically make of this room a tavern. Kindly pocket money you are going to need.”

He poked his tongue round his upper gum, smiled sourly, raised his glass, and said, in a more reasonable voice than he had used before, “Mr. Greybeard, it was in this manner that the vehicle in which you are so interested came into our possession. It was driven here by an aged hawker. As friend Gavin will remember, this hawker boasted one eye and multitudinous lice. He thought he was dying. So did we. We had him taken in, and looked after him. He lingered through the winter — which was something a good many stronger men failed to do — and recovered after a fashion in the spring. He had a species of palsy and was unfit even for guard duty. To pay for his keep, he handed over his truck. Since it was worthless to us, he got good value for his money. He died after a drinking bout some months ago, cursing — as I heard the story — his benefactors.”

Moodily, Greybeard swigged his wine. “If the truck is valueless to you, why not simply give it to me?”

“Because it is one of our assets, we hope an asset about to be realized. Suppose the garaging dues to be roughly as Vivian has estimated, four hundred pounds; we would let you take it away for two hundred pounds. How’s that?”

“But I’m broke! It would take me… you know how little I earn with Joe Flitch… It would take me four years to put that amount by.”