Without Reservations_ The Travels of an Independent Woman - Alice Steinbach [62]
Somewhere in this last Circle of Hell I lost, temporarily, all my adolescent optimism and high spirits.
Finally, just as I was considering abandoning the car and setting out on foot, I came upon the gated entrance to Radcliffe Square. Parking the car was easy; opening the gate was not. The key handed me by the college porter, a surly, unhelpful man dressed in a tired, shapeless black suit, was a huge, ancient-looking thing attached to a large board. As I struggled to open the gate, small crowds of tourists gathered to watch. Help finally came in the form of a passing taxi driver. He opened the gate; I drove through and parked in front of the massive, sixteenth-century stone walls guarding Brasenose College.
From the outside it looked like a medieval fortress: forbidding, impenetrable, damp. The unwelcome thought crossed my mind: had I made a mistake? Should I have taken a room at some nice bed-and-breakfast where there might be heat to warm the cold Oxford nights and a tea kettle whistling on the stove all day long? I found myself wondering, as Elisabeth Bishop did in a poem, “Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?”
But once I passed through the outer walls, through the damp darkness of the porter’s lodge, and stepped out into the light of the interior courtyard—a rectangle of perfect emerald-green grass surrounded by buildings whose casement windows blazed with trailing red flowers—my doubts vanished. It was as though I had stepped into the Middle Ages. And into the great history of all those who throughout the centuries have studied at Oxford. Now, in a small way, I was a part of that.
I was shown to my rooms in the “Old Quad” part of Brasenose by Albert, a tall, thin student at nearby Lincoln College. Albert, who was born in Sri Lanka, earned money during the summer vacation by looking out for off-season students like me.
“You’re lucky,” Albert said, as he lugged my huge suitcase up three steep flights of narrow, winding steps. “Your rooms have a private bathroom.” His accent was very British, clipped and clear.
My “rooms” during the school year were occupied by an undergrad and they looked it. The larger of the two rooms contained an aging mud-colored leather chair and matching sofa, a threadbare Turkish rug, a small desk, and a wooden table with matching chairs. The walls were bare and the tilted floors creaked. The overall effect was that of a rundown hospital waiting room. The bedroom was tiny; just a chest with drawers that either stuck or fell on the floor when pulled out, a small night table, and a lumpy cot that could barely support my weight.
But as Albert pointed out again, there was a private bath. Even better, I had been assigned rooms with a view. A breathtaking view; a view in its own way that rivaled the glories of E. M. Forster’s Florentine room with a view.
On one side of the living room was a row of wide casement windows through which I could see not only the green grass and flowering courtyard of Brasenose, but also the outlines of the medieval Radcliffe Square buildings: the massive dome of the oddly named Radcliffe Camera, home to part of the Bodleian Library’s two million volumes; the fourteenth-century spires of the Church of St. Mary the Virgin, the spectacular towers of All Souls’ College, where the legendary Lawrence of Arabia once studied.
I opened the windows and leaned out. No matter where I looked there was a spire or dome pushing its way into the soft, pliant backdrop of the Oxford sky. It looked unreal, like a stage set for a fairy tale.
I looked around the room, so stark and yet so full of the past. Who, I wondered, had lived here and studied here