“Are those my cousin’s boys?” came a voice from behind her. “I am sorry, I thought you were…from the movers. Come in, and I’ll show you your quarters for the night. Cicely said you would be here for just the one night,” and the trio followed her up a creaking staircase to a large room with a worn and faded coverlet over a double bed, with an antique folding camp bed beside it. “You’ll have lunch with Bridget when she calls you. I shall have to run as I have patients to see.” She turned away as if to leave the room, but then added, as an afterthought, “I am Dr. Strong, by the way,” and before asking them in turn their own names, abruptly left.
“Well, said Brian, “at least we found the place.” But was Dr. Strong then a woman?
Over sandwiches in the kitchen, Bridget was her friendly self, overcoming their polite shyness with her effusive charm, explaining to them that her employers were both doctors; the husband, as they had been told by Brian’s friend Piers back in Toronto, was the Professor of English they had been encouraged to meet, and the wife a family physician who had called to them from the window. “She should ‘ave hexplained,” said Bridget, and asked them about their trip, giving all three the chance to speak, and listening with interest to their stories of riding the Underground for the first time (that from Neville, the youngest), getting lost in the British Museum (that from Dennis, the bookish one) and details of their home in Rosedale in Toronto and their next-door neighbours the Waylands, whose son Piers was Brian’s friend and whose mother Cicely was the cousin to the woman whom they had just met. “So this Mrs. Wayland is not your aunt, then?”
Brian confirmed this with a nod, and told her how they had come to be there. It was a lengthy tale, but Bridget listened carefully. Piers and Brian had an obsessive love for The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, and other works by J.R.R. Tolkien, and had formed a Tolkien Society at their school, to which his brothers now also belonged. Mrs. Wayland, an enthusiastic if notoriously forgetful librarian in Toronto who had been educated in England like her distant cousin Annabel, had encouraged the boys to visit her there, knowing that Annabel, a nurse, she said, was married to Dr. Peregrine Strong, a Professor of English at one of the Oxford colleges, and knew Tolkien personally. She told her son’s friends, “This is your chance to meet the man who has written those famous stories about hobbits and elves! Perry knows him; they are both English scholars! You’ll have to stay with him and his wife. You’ll have a wonderful time. I wish I could go with you, but I fear that’s not possible…”
