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Chapter Fifteen
As the days take on a mellower light, and the apple at last hangs really finish’d and indolent-ripe on the tree,
Then for the teeming quietest, happiest days of all!
WALT WHITMAN, ‘Halcyon Days’
Robin received his exam marks in his pidge the next morning (Merit in Translation Theory and Latin, Distinction in Etymology, Chinese, and Sanskrit), along with the following note printed on thick, creamy paper: The board of undergraduate studies at the Royal Institute of Translation is pleased to inform you that you have been invited to continue your tenure as undergraduate scholar for the following year.
Only when he had the papers in hand did it all seem real. He’d passed; they’d all passed. For at least another year, they had a home. They had room and board paid for, a steady allowance, and access to all of Oxford’s intellectual riches. They would not be forced to leave Babel. They could breathe easy again.
Oxford in June was hot, sticky, golden, and beautiful. They had no pressing summer assignments – they could do further research on their independent projects if they liked, though generally, the weeks between the end of Trinity and the start of next Michaelmas were tacitly acknowledged as a reward, and brief respite, that incoming fourth years deserved.
Those were the happiest days of their lives. They had picnics of ripe, bursting grapes; fresh rolls; and Camembert cheese on the hills of South Park. They went punting up and down the Cherwell – Robin and Ramy got passably good at it, but the girls could not seem to manage the art of pushing them straight ahead instead of sideways into the bank. They walked the seven miles north to Woodstock to tour Blenheim Palace, but did not go in, as the sightseeing fee was exorbitant. A visiting acting troupe from London put on some excerpts of Shakespeare at the Sheldonian; they were undeniably awful, and the heckling from badly behaved undergraduates probably made them worse, but quality was not the point.
Near the end of June, all anyone could talk about was the coronation of Queen Victoria. Many of the students and fellows still on campus took coaches to Didcot for the train to London the day before, but those who remained in Oxford were treated to a dazzling lighting-up show. There were rumours of a grand dinner to be put on for Oxford’s poor and homeless, but the city authorities argued that the richness of roast beef and plum pudding would put the poor in such a state of excitement that they would lose their ability to properly enjoy the illumination.* So the poor went hungry that night, but at least the lights were lovely. Robin, Ramy, and Victoire strolled with Letty down High Street with mugs of cold cider in hand, trying to conjure up the same sense of patriotism visible in everyone else.
Near the end of summer they took a weekend trip to London, where they drank in the vitality and variety that Oxford, suspended centuries in the past, so lacked. They went to Drury Lane and saw a show – the acting wasn’t very good, but the garish make-up and the ingenue’s pitchy warbling kept them fascinated for the full three-hour run time. They browsed the stalls at New Cut for plump strawberries, copper trinkets, and sachets of supposedly exotic teas; tossed pennies to dancing monkeys and organ-grinders; dodged beckoning prostitutes; perused street stands of counterfeit silver bars with amusement;* had dinner at an ‘Authentick Indian’ curry house that disappointed Ramy but satisfied the rest of them; and slept overnight in a single crowded townhouse room on Doughty Street. Robin and Ramy lay on the floor swaddled in coats while the girls huddled on the narrow bed, all of them giggling and whispering until long past midnight.
The next day they took a walking tour of the city that ended by the Port of London, where they strolled down to the docks and marvelled at the massive ships, their great white sails, and the complex interlacing of their masts and rigging. They tried identifying the flags and company logos of the departing vessels, speculating on where they might be coming from or going. Greece? Canada? Sweden? Portugal?
‘A year from now we’ll be getting on one of these,’ said Letty. ‘Where do you think it’ll be sailing to?’
Every graduating cohort at Babel went on a grand, fully compensated international voyage at the conclusion of fourth-year exams. These voyages usually corresponded with some Babel business – graduates had served as live interpreters at the court of Nicholas I, hunted for cuneiform tablets in the ruins of Mesopotamia, and once, accidentally, caused a near diplomatic breakdown in Paris – but they were primarily a chance for the graduates to simply see the world, and to soak in the foreign linguistic environments they had been sequestered from during their years of study. Languages had to be lived to be understood, and Oxford was, after all, the opposite of real life.
Ramy was convinced their class would be sent to either China or India. ‘There’s simply so much happening. The East India Company’s lost its monopoly in Canton, which means they’ll need translators for all kinds of business reorientations. I’d give my left arm for it to be Calcutta. You’ll love it – we’ll go and stay with my family for a bit; I’ve written to them all about you, they even know Letty can’t take her tea too hot. Or perhaps we’ll go to Canton – wouldn’t that be lovely, Birdie? When’s the last time you were home?’
Robin wasn’t sure he wanted to return to Canton. He’d considered it a few times, but couldn’t summon any feelings of excitement, only a confused, vaguely guilty dread. Nothing awaited him there; no friends, no family, just a city he only half remembered. Rather, he was afraid of how he might react if he did go home; if he stepped back into the world of a forgotten childhood. What if, upon return, he couldn’t bring himself to leave?
Worse, what if he felt nothing at all?
‘More likely we’ll be sent somewhere like Mauritius,’ he said. ‘Let the girls make use of their French.’
‘You think Mauritian Creole is anything like Haitian Creole?’ Letty asked Victoire.
‘I’m not sure they’ll be mutually intelligible,’ said Victoire. ‘They’re both French-based, of course, but Kreyòl takes grammar cues from the Fon language, while Mauritian Creole... hm. I don’t know. There’s no Grammatica, so I’ve nothing to consult.’
‘Perhaps you’ll write one,’ said Letty.
Victoire cast her a small smile. ‘Perhaps.’
The happiest development of that summer was that Victoire and Letty had gone back to being friends. In fact, all the strange, ill-defined awfulness of their third year had evaporated with the news that they’d passed their exams. Letty no longer grated on Robin’s nerves, and Ramy no longer made Letty scowl every time he opened his mouth.
To be fair, their fights were tabled rather than resolved. They had not really confronted the reasons why they’d fallen out, but they were all willing to blame it on stress. There would be a time when they had to face up to their very real differences, when they would hash things out instead of always changing the subject, but for now they were content to enjoy the summer and to remember again what it was like to love one another.
For these, truly, were the last of the golden days. That summer felt all the more precious because they all knew it couldn’t last, that such delights were only so because of the endless, exhausting nights that had earned them. Soon year four would start, then graduating exams, and then work. None of them knew what life might look like after that, but surely they could not remain a cohort forever. Surely, eventually, they had to leave the city of dreaming spires; had to take up their respective posts and repay all that Babel had given them. But the future, vague as it was frightening, was easily ignored for now; it paled so against the brilliance of the present.
In January of 1838, the inventor Samuel Morse had given a demonstration in Morristown, New Jersey, showing off a device that could transmit messages over long distances using electrical impulses to convey a series of dots and dashes. Sceptical, the United States Congress declined to grant him funding to build a line connecting the capitol in Washington, DC, with other cities, and would drag their feet in doing so for another five years. But scholars at the Royal Institute of Translation, as soon as they heard that Morse’s device worked, went overseas and cajoled Morse into making a months-long visit to Oxford, where the silver-working department was amazed that this device required no match-pairs to work, but instead ran on pure electricity. By July 1839, Babel hosted the first working telegraph line in England, which was connected to the British Foreign Office in London.*
Morse’s original code transmitted only numerals, under the assumption that the receiver could look up the corresponding words in a guidebook. This was fine for conversations that involved a limited vocabulary – train signals, weather reports, and certain kinds of military communications. But soon after Morse’s arrival, Professors De Vreese and Playfair developed an alphanumeric code that allowed exchange of messages of any kind.* This expanded the telegraph’s possible uses to the commercial, personal, and beyond. Word spread quickly that Babel had means of communicating instantaneously with London from Oxford. Soon clients – largely businessmen, government officials, and the occasional clergyman – were crammed in the lobby and lined up around the block clutching messages they needed sent. Professor Lovell, exasperated by the clamour, wanted to set the defensive wards on crowd. But calmer, more financially attuned heads prevailed. Professor Playfair, seeing great potential for profit, ordered that the northwest wing of the lobby, which was formerly used for storage, be converted into a telegraph office.
The next obstacle was staffing the office with operators. Students were the obvious source of free labour, and so every Babel undergraduate and graduate fellow was required to learn Morse code. This took only a matter of days, since Morse code was the rare language that did in fact have a perfect one-to-one correlation between language symbols, provided one was communicating in English. When September bled into October and Michaelmas term began that autumn, all students on campus were assigned to work at least one three-hour shift a week. And so, at nine o’clock every Sunday night, Robin dragged himself to the little lobby office and sat by the telegraph machine with a stack of course readings, waiting for the needle to buzz into life.
The advantage of the late shift was that the tower received very little correspondence during those hours, since everyone in the London office would have already gone home. All Robin had to do was stay awake from nine to midnight, in case any urgent missives arrived. Otherwise, he was free to do as he liked, and he usually spent these hours reading or revising his compositions for the next morning’s class.
Occasionally he glanced out of the window, squinting across the quad to relieve the strain of the dim light on his eyes. The green was usually empty. High Street, so busy during the day, was eerie late at night; when the sun had gone down, when all the light came from pale streetlamps or from candles inside windows, it looked like another, parallel Oxford, an Oxford of the faerie realm. On cloudless nights especially, Oxford was transformed, its streets clear, its stones silent, its spires and turrets promising riddles and adventures and a world of abstraction in which one could get lost forever.
On one such night, Robin glanced up from his translation of Sima Qian’s histories and saw two black-clad figures striding briskly towards the tower. His stomach dropped.
