wondered 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, II 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. Through the window a tinny radio announced that Argentina had joined the nuclear club. “What’s a nuclear club, Daddy?” Johnny asked, eyes big. “People who can drop bombs.” Johnny fingered a wood file, frowning at the fine lines that rubbed his thumb. “Can I join?” Renfrew paused, licked his lips, peered into a sky of carbon blue. “Only fools get to join,” he said, and set back to work.
The radio detailed a Brazilian rejection of preferential trade agreements, which would have established a Greater American Zone with the US. There were reports that the Americans had tied the favor of cheaper imports to their aid on the southern Atlantic bloom problem. “A bloom, Daddy? How can the ocean do like a flower?” Renfrew said gruffly, “A different kind of bloom.” He hoisted boards under his arm and took them inside.
He was sanding down the ripped edges when Marjorie came in from the garden for inspection. She had mercifully taken the battery-operated radio into the garden with her. “Why’s it jut out at the base?” she asked by way of greeting. She put the radio on the kitchen table. It seemed to go with her everywhere these days, Renfrew noted, as though she could not bear to be alone with a bit of quiet.
“The shelves are straight. It’s the walls that are tilted.”
“They look odd. Are you sure… ?”
“Have a go.” He handed her his carpenter’s level. She put it gingerly on a rough-cut board. The bubble bobbed precisely into the place between the two defining lines. “See? Dead level.”
“Well, I suppose,” Marjorie reluctantly conceded.
“Worry not, your jars aren’t going to topple off.” He put several jars on a shelf. This ritual act completed the job. The boxy frame stood out, functional pine against aged oak paneling. Johnny stroked the sheets of wood tentatively, as though awed that he had had a hand in making this wood lattice.
“Think I’ll be off to the lab for a bit,” Renfrew said, collecting his rip saw and chisels.
“Steady on, there’s more fathering needs doing. You’re to take Johnny on the mercury hunt.”
“Oh
“You’d put in an afternoon tinkering,” Marjorie finished for him with mild reproof. “Fraid not.”
“Well look, I’ll just go round to pick up some notes, then, on Markham’s work.”
“Best make it on the way with Johnny. Can’t you leave off for a weekend, though? I thought you had settled things yesterday.”
“We worked out a message with Peterson. Ocean stuff, for the most part. We’re letting pass the lot on mass fermentation of sugar cane for fuel.”
“What’s wrong with that? Burning alcohol is cleaner than that wretched petrol they’re selling now.”
Renfrew scrubbed his hands in the washbasin. “True enough. The snag is that the Brazilians cut back so much of their jungle for the sugar cane fields. That lowers the number of plants which can absorb carbon dioxide from the air. Trace that effect round a bit and it explains the shifts in the world climate, greenhouse effect and rainfall and so on.”
“The Council decided that?”
“No, no, research teams worldwide did. The Council simply make policy to offset problems. The UN mandate, extraordinary powers, and all that.”
“Your Mr. Peterson must be a very influential man.”
Renfrew shrugged. “He says it’s pure luck the United Kingdom has a strong voice. The only reason we do is that we’ve still got research teams working on highly visible problems. Otherwise, we’d have a seat appropriate to Nigeria or the Viet Union or some other swacking nobody.”
“What
Renfrew chuckled. “No, it’s bloody transparent. Peterson’s deflected some help my way, but he’s doing it as sort of a personal lark, I’ll wager.”
“That’s very nice of him.”
“Nice?” Renfrew dried his hands, meditating. “He’s interested intellectually, I can tell that, though he’s no
