"The Children of Men" - читать интересную книгу автора (James P. D.)

Friday 22 January

Today is my daughter’s birthday, would have been my daughter’s birthday if I hadn’t run her over and killed her. That was in 1994, when she was fifteen months old. Helena and I were living then in an Edwardian semi-detached house in Lathbury Road, too large and too expensive for us, but Helena, as soon as she knew she was pregnant, had insisted on a house with a garden and a south-facing nursery. I can’t remember now the exact circumstances of the accident, whether I was supposed to be keeping an eye on Natalie or thought that she was with her mother. All that must have come out at the inquest; but the inquest, that official allocation of responsibility, has been erased from memory. I do remember that I was leaving the house to go into College and backing the car, which Helena had clumsily parked the previous day, so that I could more easily manoeuvre it through the narrow garden gate. There was no garage at Lathbury Road but we had standing for two cars in front of the house. I must have left the front door open and Natalie, who had walked since she was thirteen months, toddled out after me. That minor culpability must have been established at the inquest, too. But some things I do remember: the gentle bump under my rear left wheel like a ramp but softer, more yielding, more tender than any ramp. The immediate knowledge, certain, absolute, terrifying, of what it was. And the five seconds of total silence before the screaming began. I knew that it was Helena screaming and yet part of my mind couldn’t believe that what I was hearing was a human sound. And I remember the humiliation. I couldn’t move, couldn’t get out of the car, couldn’t even stretch out my hand to the door. And then George Hawkins, our neighbour, was banging on the glass and shouting, “Get out you bastard, get out!” And I can remember the irrelevance of my thought, seeing that gross, anger-distorted face pressing against the glass: He never liked me. And I can’t pretend that it didn’t happen. I can’t pretend it was someone else. I can’t pretend I wasn’t responsible.

Horror and guilt subsumed grief. Perhaps if Helena had been able to say, “It’s worse for you, darling,” or “It’s as bad for you, darling,” we might have salvaged something from the wreckage of a marriage which from the start hadn’t been particularly seaworthy. But of course she couldn’t; that wasn’t what she believed. She thought that I cared less, and she was right. She thought that I cared less because I loved less, and she was right about that too. I was glad to be a father. When Helena told me she was pregnant I felt what I presume are the usual emotions of irrational pride, tenderness and amazement. I did feel affection for my child, although I would have felt more had she been prettier—she was a miniature caricature of Helena’s father—more affectionate, more responsive, less inclined to whine. I’m glad that no other eyes will read these words. She has been dead for almost twenty-seven years and I still think of her with complaint. But Helena was obsessed by her, totally enchanted, enslaved, and I know that what spoiled Natalie for me was jealousy. I would have got over it in time, or at least come to terms with it. But I wasn’t given time. I don’t think Helena ever believed that I’d run Natalie over on purpose, at least not when she was rational; even at her most bitter she managed to prevent herself from saying the unforgivable words, as a woman burdened with a sick and cantankerous husband, out of superstition or a remnant of kindness, will bite back the words, “I wish you were dead.” But, given the chance, she would rather have had Natalie alive than me. I’m not blaming her for that. It seemed perfectly reasonable at the time and it seems so now.

I would lie distanced in the king-sized bed waiting for her to fall asleep, knowing that it might be hours before she did, worrying about next day’s over-filled diary, about how, with the prospect of endless broken nights, I would be able to cope, reiterating into the darkness my litany of justification—“For Christ’s sake, it was an accident. I didn’t mean to do it. I’m not the only father to have run down his child. She was supposed to be looking after Natalie, the child was her responsibility, she made it plain enough it wasn’t mine. The least she could have done was to look after her properly. “ But angry self-justification was as banal and irrelevant as a child’s excuse for breaking a vase.

We both knew that we had to leave Lathbury Road. Helena said: “We can’t stay here. We should look for a house near the centre of the city. After all, that’s always what you’ve wanted. You’ve never really liked this place.”

The allegation was there but unspoken: you’re glad that we’re moving, glad that her death has made it possible.

Six months after the funeral we moved to St. John Street, to a tall Georgian house with a front door on the street, where parking is difficult. Lathbury Road was a family house; this is a house for the unencumbered, if agile, and the solitary. The move suited me because I liked being close to the city centre, and Georgian architecture, even speculative Georgian requiring constant maintenance, has a greater cachet than Edwardian. We hadn’t made love since Natalie’s death but now Helena moved into her own room. It was never discussed between us but I knew that she was saying that there would be no second chance, that I had killed not only her beloved daughter but all hope of another child, of the son she suspected I had really wanted. But that was in October 1994 and the choice was no longer there. We didn’t stay permanently apart, of course. Sex and marriage are more complicated than that. From time to time I would cross the few feet of carpeted floor between her room and mine. She neither welcomed me nor rejected me. But there was a wider, more permanent gulf between us and that I made no effort to cross.

This narrow, five-storeyed house is too large for me, but with our falling population I’m hardly likely to be criticized for not sharing my over-provision. There are no undergraduates clamouring for a bed-sitting-room, no young homeless families to prick the social conscience of the more privileged. I use it all, mounting from floor to floor through the routine of my day, as if methodically stamping my ownership on vinyl, on carpet and rugs and polished wood. The dining-room and kitchen are in the basement, the latter with a wide arc of stone steps leading to the garden. Above them, two small sitting-rooms have been converted into one which also serves as a library, a television-and-music room and a convenient place in which to see my students. On the first floor is a large L-shaped drawing-room. This too has been converted from two smaller rooms, the two discordant fireplaces proclaiming its former use. From the back window I can look out over the small walled garden with its single silver birch tree. At the front, two elegant windows, ceiling—high, with a balcony beyond, face St. John Street.

Anyone pacing between the two windows would have little difficulty describing the room’s owner. Obviously an academic; three walls are lined with bookshelves from ceiling to floor. A historian; the books themselves make that plain. A man concerned primarily with the nineteenth century; not only the books but the pictures and ornaments proclaim this obsession: the Staffordshire commemorative figures, the Victorian genre oil paintings, the William Morris wallpaper. The room, too, of a man who likes his comfort and who lives alone. There are no family photographs, no board games, no disarray, no dust, no feminine clutter, little evidence, indeed, that the room is ever used.

And a visitor might guess, too, that nothing here is inherited, everything acquired. There are none of those unique or eccentric artefacts, valued or tolerated because they are heirlooms, no family portraits, undistinguished oils given their place to proclaim ancestry. It is the room of a man who has risen in the world, surrounding himself with the symbols both of his achievements and his minor obsessions. Mrs. Kavanagh, the wife of one of the college scouts, comes in three times a week to clean for me and does it well enough. I have no wish to employ the Sojourners to whom, as ex-adviser to the Warden of England, I am entitled.

The room I like best is at the top of the house, a small attic room with a charming fireplace in wrought iron and decorated tiles, furnished only with a desk and chair and containing the necessities for making coffee. An uncurtained window looks out over the campanile of St. Barnabas Church to the far green slope of Wytham Wood. It is here I write my diary, prepare my lectures and seminars, write my historical papers. The front door is four storeys down, inconvenient for answering the doorbell; but I have ensured that there are no unexpected visitors in my self-sufficient life.

Last year, in March, Helena left me for Rupert Clavering, thirteen years younger than she, who combines the appearance of an over-enthusiastic rugby player with, one is forced to believe, the sensitivity of an artist. He designs posters and dust jackets and does them very well. I recall something she said during our pre-divorce discussions, which I was at pains to keep unacrimonious and unemotional: that I had slept with her only at carefully regulated intervals because I wanted my affairs with my students to be driven by more discriminating needs than the relief of crude sexual deprivation. Those weren’t, of course, her words, but that was her meaning. I think she surprised both of us by her perception.

The task of writing his journal—and Theo thought of it as a task, not a pleasure—had become part of his over-organized life, a nightly addition to a weekly routine half imposed by circumstance, half deliberately devised in an attempt to impose order and purpose on the shapelessness of existence. The Council of England had decreed that all citizens should, in addition to their ordinary jobs, undertake two weekly training sessions in skills which would help them to survive if and when they became part of the remnant of civilization. The choice was voluntary. Xan had always known the wisdom of giving people a choice in matters where choice was unimportant. Theo had elected to do one stint in the John Radcliffe Hospital, not because he felt at home in its antiseptic hierarchy or imagined that his ministrations to the sick and aged flesh which both terrified and repelled him was any more gratifying to the recipients than it was to him, but because he thought the knowledge gained might be the most personally useful, and it was no bad idea to know where, should the need arise, he could with some cunning lay his hands on drugs. The second two-hour session he spent more agreeably on house maintenance, finding the good humour and crude critical comments of the artisans who taught there a welcome relief from the more refined disparagements of academe. His paid job was teaching the full- and part-time mature students who, with the few former undergraduates doing research or taking higher degrees, were the University’s justification for its existence. On two nights a week, Tuesday and Friday, he dined in Hall. On Wednesday he invariably attended the three o’clock service of Evensong in Magdalen Chapel. A small number of colleges with more than usually eccentric collegers or an obstinate determination to ignore reality still used their chapels for worship, some even reverting to the old Book of Common Prayer. But the choir at Magdalen was among the best regarded and Theo went to listen to the singing, not to take part in an archaic act of worship.

It happened on the fourth Wednesday in January. Walking to Magdalen as was his custom, he had turned from St. John Street into Beaumont Street and was nearing the entrance to the Ashmolean Museum when a woman approached him wheeling a pram. The thin drizzle had stopped and as she drew alongside him she paused to fold back the mackintosh cover and push down the pram hood. The doll was revealed, propped upright against the cushions, the two arms, hands mittened, resting on the quilted coverlet, a parody of childhood, at once pathetic and sinister. Shocked and repelled, Theo found that he couldn’t keep his eyes off it. The glossy irises, unnaturally large, bluer than those of any human eye, a gleaming azure, seemed to fix on him their unseeing stare which yet horribly suggested a dormant intelligence, alien and monstrous. The eyelashes, dark brown, lay like spiders on the delicately tinted porcelain cheeks and an adult abundance of yellow crimped hair sprung from beneath the close-fitting lace-trimmed bonnet.

It had been years since he had last seen a doll thus paraded, but they had been common twenty years ago, had indeed become something of a craze. Doll-making was the only section of the toy industry which, with the production of prams, had for a decade flourished; it had produced dolls for the whole range of frustrated maternal desire, some cheap and tawdry but some of remarkable craftsmanship and beauty which, but for the Omega which originated them, could have become cherished heirlooms. The more expensive ones—some he remembered costing well over £2,000—could be bought in different sizes: the newborn, the six-month-old baby, the year-old, the eighteen-month-old child able to stand and walk, intricately powered. He remembered now that they were called Six-Monthlies. At one time it wasn’t possible to walk down the High Street without being encumbered by their prams, by groups of admiring quasi-mothers. He seemed to remember that there had even been pseudo-births and that broken dolls were buried with ceremony in consecrated ground. Wasn’t it one of the minor ecclesiastical disputes of the early 2000s whether churches could legitimately be used for these charades and even whether ordained priests could take part?

Aware of his gaze, the woman smiled, an idiot smile, inviting connivance, congratulations. As their eyes met and he dropped his, so that she shouldn’t see his small pity and his greater contempt, she jerked the pram back, then put out a shielding arm as if to ward off his masculine importunities. A more responsive passer-by stopped and spoke to her. A middle-aged woman in well-fitting tweeds, hair carefully groomed, came up to the pram, smiled at the doll’s owner and began a congratulatory patter. The first woman, simpering with pleasure, leaned forward, smoothed the satin quilted pram cover, adjusted the bonnet, tucked in a stray lock of hair. The second tickled the doll beneath its chin as she might a cat, still murmuring her baby talk.

Theo, more depressed and disgusted by the charade than surely such harmless play-acting justified, was turning away when it happened. The second woman suddenly seized the doll, tore it from the coverings and, without a word, swung it twice round her head by the legs and dashed it against the stone wall with tremendous force. The face shattered and shards of porcelain fell tinkling to the pavement. The owner was for two seconds absolutely silent. And then she screamed. The sound was horrible, the scream of the tortured, the bereaved, a terrified, high-pitched squealing, inhuman yet all too human, unstoppable. She stood there, hat askew, head thrown back to the heavens, her mouth stretched into a gape from which poured her agony, her grief, her anger. She seemed at first unaware that the attacker still stood there, watching her with silent contempt. Then the woman turned and walked briskly through the open gates, across the courtyard and into the Ashmolean. Suddenly aware that the attacker had escaped, the doll-owner galumphed after her, still screaming, then, apparently realizing the hopelessness of it, returned to the pram. She had grown quieter now and, sinking to her knees, began gathering up the broken pieces, sobbing and moaning gently, trying to match them as she might a jigsaw puzzle. Two gleaming eyes, horribly real, joined by a spring, rolled towards Theo. He had a second’s impulse to pick them up, to help, to speak at least a few words of comfort. He could have pointed out that she could buy another child. It was a consolation he hadn’t been able to offer his wife. But his hesitation was only momentary. He walked briskly on. No one else went near her. Middle-aged women, those who had reached adulthood in the year of Omega, were notoriously unstable.

He reached the chapel just as the service was about to begin. The choir of eight men and eight women filed in, bringing with them a memory of earlier choirs, boy choristers entering grave-faced with that almost imperceptible childish swagger, crossed arms holding the service sheets to their narrow chests, their smooth faces lit as if with an internal candle, their hair brushed to gleaming caps, their faces preternaturally solemn above the starched collars. Theo banished the image, wondering why it was so persistent when he had never even cared for children. Now he fixed his eyes on the chaplain, remembering the incident some months previously when he had arrived early for Evensong. Somehow a young deer from the Magdalen meadow had made its way into the chapel and was standing peaceably beside the altar as if this were its natural habitat. The chaplain, harshly shouting, had rushed at it, seizing and hurling prayer books, thumping its silken sides. The animal, puzzled, docile, had for a moment endured the assault and then, delicate-footed, had pranced its way out of the chapel.

The chaplain had turned to Theo, tears streaming down his face. “Christ, why can’t they wait? Bloody animals. They’ll have it all soon enough. Why can’t they wait?”

As Theo looked now at his serious, self-important face it seemed, in this candle-lit peace, no more than a bizarre scene from a half-remembered nightmare.

The congregation, as usual, numbered fewer than thirty and many of those present, regulars like himself, were known to Theo. But there was one newcomer, a young woman, seated in the stall immediately opposite his own, whose gaze, from time to time, it was difficult to avoid although she gave no sign of recognition. The chapel was dimly lit and through the flicker of candles her face gleamed with a gentle, almost transparent light, at one moment seen clearly, then as elusive and insubstantial as a wraith. But it was not unknown to him; somehow he’d seen her before, not just with a momentary glance, but face to face and for a stretch of time. He tried to force and then trick his memory into recall, fixing his eyes on her bent head during the confession, appearing to stare past her with pious concentration during the reading of the first lesson, but constantly aware of her, casting over her image memory’s barbed net. By the end of the second lesson he was becoming irritated by his failure and then, as the choir, mostly middle-aged, arranged their music sheets and gazed at the conductor, waiting for the organ to begin and his small surpliced figure to raise his paw-like hands and begin their delicate paddling of the air, Theo remembered. She had been briefly a member of Colin Seabrook’s class on Victorian Life and Times, with its subtitle Women in the Victorian Novel, which he had taken for Colin eighteen months previously. Seabrook’s wife had had a cancer operation; there was a chance of a holiday together if Colin could find a substitute for this one four-session class. He could recall their conversation, his half-hearted protest.

“Shouldn’t you get a member of the English Faculty to do it for you?”

“No, old boy, I’ve tried. They’ve all got excuses. Don’t like evening work. Too busy. Not their period—don’t think it’s only historians who go in for that crap. Can do one session but not four. It’s only one hour, Thursdays, six to seven. And you won’t have to bother with preparation, I’ve only set four books and you probably know them by heart: Middlemarch, Portrait of a Lady, Vanity Fair, Cranford. Only fourteen in the class, fifty-year-old women mainly. They should be fussing round their grandchildren, so they’ve time on their hands, you know how it is. Charming ladies, if a little conventional in their taste. You’ll love them. And they’ll be tickled pink to have you. The comfort of culture, that’s what they’re after. Your cousin, our esteemed Warden, is very keen on the comfort of culture. All they want is to escape temporarily into a more agreeable and permanent world. We all do it, dear boy, only you and I call it scholarship.”

But there had been fifteen students, not fourteen. She had come in two minutes late and had quietly taken her seat at the back of the group. Then as now he had seen her head outlined against carved wood and lit by candles. When the last intake of undergraduates had gone down, hallowed college rooms had been opened to mature, part-time students, and the class had been held in an agreeable, panelled lecture room at Queen’s College. She had listened, apparently attentively, to his preliminary discourse on Henry James and had at first taken no part in the ensuing general discussion until a large woman in the front row began extravagantly praising Isabel Archer’s moral qualities and sentimentally lamenting her undeserved fate.

The girl had suddenly said: “I don’t see why you should particularly pity someone who was given so much and made such poor use of it. She could have married Lord Warburton and done a great deal of good to his tenants, to the poor. All right, she didn’t love him, so there was an excuse and she had higher ambitions for herself than marriage to Lord Warburton. But what? She had no creative talent, no job, no training. When her cousin made her rich, what did she do? Gad round the world with Madame Merle, of all people. And then she marries that conceited hypocrite and goes in for Thursday salons gorgeously dressed. What happened to all the idealism? I’ve got more time for Henrietta Stackpole.”

The woman had protested: “Oh, but she’s so vulgar!”

“That’s what Mrs. Touchett thinks, so does the author. But at least she has talent, which Isabel hasn’t, and she uses it to earn her living, and support her widowed sister.” She added: “Isabel Archer and Dorothea both discard eligible suitors to marry self-important fools, but one sympathizes more with Dorothea. Perhaps this is because George Eliot respects her heroine and, at heart, Henry James despises his.”

She might, Theo had suspected, have been relieving boredom by deliberate provocation. But, whatever her motive, the ensuing argument had been noisy and lively and for once the remaining thirty minutes had passed quickly and agreeably. He had been sorry and a little aggrieved when, the following Thursday, watched for, she had failed to appear.

The connection made and curiosity appeased, he could sit back in peace and listen to the second anthem. It had been the custom at Magdalen for the last ten years to play a recorded anthem during Evensong. Theo saw from the printed service sheet that this afternoon there was to be the first of a series of fifteenth-century English anthems, beginning with two by William Byrd, “Teach Me, O Lord” and “Exult Thyself, O God.” There was a brief anticipatory silence as the informator choristarum bent down to switch on the tape. The voices of boys, sweet, clear, asexual, unheard since the last boy chorister’s voice had broken, soared and filled the chapel. He glanced across at the girl, but she was sitting motionless, her head thrown back, her eyes fixed on the rib vaulting of the roof, so that all he could see was the candle-lit curve of her neck. But at the end of the row was a figure he suddenly recognized: old Martindale, who had been an English fellow on the eve of retirement when he himself was in his first year. Now he sat perfectly still, his old face uplifted, the candlelight glinting on the tears which ran down his cheeks in a stream so that the deep furrows looked as if they were hung with pearls. Old Marty, unmarried, celibate, who all his life had loved the beauty of boys. Why, Theo wondered, did he and his like come week after week to seek this masochistic pleasure? They could listen to the recorded voices of children perfectly well at home, so why did it have to be here, where past and present fused in beauty and candlelight to reinforce regret? Why did he himself come? But he knew the answer to that question. Feel, he told himself, feel, feel, feel. Even if what you feel is pain, only let yourself feel.

The woman left the chapel before him, moving swiftly, almost surreptitiously. But when he stepped out into the cool air, he was surprised to find her obviously waiting.

She came up beside him and said: “Could I please speak to you? It’s important.”

From the ante-chapel the bright light streamed out into the late-afternoon dusk and for the first time he saw her clearly. Her hair, dark and luscious, a rich brown with flecks of gold, was brushed back and disciplined into a short, thick pleat. A fringe fell over a high, freckled forehead. She was light-skinned for someone so dark-haired, a honey-coloured woman, long-necked with high cheekbones, wide-set eyes whose colour he couldn’t determine under strong straight brows, a long narrow nose, slightly humped, and a wide, beautifully shaped mouth. It was a pre-Raphaelite face. Rossetti would have liked to have painted her. She was dressed in the current fashion for all but Omegas—a short, fitted jacket and, beneath it, a woollen skirt reaching to mid-calf below which he could see the highly coloured socks which had become this year’s craze. Hers were bright yellow. She carried a leather sling bag over her left shoulder. She was gloveless and he could see that her left hand was deformed. The middle and forefinger were fused into a nailless stump and the back of the hand was grossly swollen. She held it cradled in her right as if comforting or supporting it. There was no effort to hide it. She might even have been proclaiming her deformity to a world which had become increasingly intolerant of physical defects. But at least, he thought, she had one compensation. No one who was in any way physically deformed, or mentally or physically unhealthy, was on the list of women from whom the new race would be bred if ever a fertile male was discovered. She was, at least, saved from the six-monthly, time-consuming, humiliating re-examinations to which all healthy females under forty-five were subjected.

She spoke again, more quietly: “It won’t take long. But please, I have to talk to you, Dr. Faron.”

“If you need to.” He was intrigued, but he couldn’t make his voice welcoming.

“Perhaps we could walk round the new cloisters.”

They turned together in silence. She said: “You don’t know me.”

“No, but I remember you. You were at the second of the classes I took for Dr. Seabrook. You certainly enlivened the discussion.”

“I’m afraid I was rather vehement.” She added, as if it were important to explain: “I do very much admire The Portrait of a Lady.”

“But presumably you haven’t arranged this interview to reassure me about your literary taste.”

As soon as the words were spoken he regretted them. She flushed, and he sensed an instinctive recoil, a loss of confidence in herself, and perhaps in him. The naivety of her remark had disconcerted him, but he need not have responded with such hurtful irony. Her unease was infectious. He hoped that she wasn’t proposing to embarrass him with personal revelations or emotional demands. It was difficult to reconcile that articulate confident debater with her present almost adolescent gaucherie. It was pointless to try to make amends and for half a minute they walked in silence.

Then he said: “I was sorry when you didn’t reappear. The class seemed very dull the following week.”

“I would have come again, but my hours were changed to the evening shift. I had to work.” She didn’t explain at what or where, but added: “My name is Julian. I know yours, of course.”

“Julian. That’s unusual for a woman. Were you named after Julian of Norwich?”

“No, I don’t think my parents had ever heard of her. My father went to register the birth and he gave the name as Julie Ann. That’s what my parents had chosen. The registrar must have misheard, or perhaps Father didn’t speak very clearly. It was three weeks before my mother noticed the mistake and she thought it was too late to change it. Anyway, I think she rather liked the name, so I was christened Julian.”

“But I suppose people call you Julie.”

“What people?”

“Your friends, your family.”

“I haven’t any family. My parents were killed in the race riots in 2002. But why should they call me Julie? Julie isn’t my name.”

She was perfectly polite, unaggressive. He might have supposed that she was puzzled by his comment but puzzlement was surely unjustified. His remark had been inept, unthinking, condescending perhaps, but it hadn’t been ridiculous. And if this encounter was the preliminary to a request that he should give a talk about the social history of the nineteenth century it was an unusual one.

He asked: “Why do you want to speak to me?”

Now that the moment had come he sensed her reluctance to begin, not, he thought, out of embarrassment or regret that she had initiated the encounter, but because what she had to say was important and she needed to find the right words.

She paused and looked at him. “Things are happening in England—in Britain—that are wrong. I belong to a small group of friends who think we ought to try to stop them. You used to be a member of the Council of England. You’re the Warden’s cousin. We thought that before we acted you might talk to him. We’re not really sure that you can help, but two of us, Luke—he’s a priest—and I, thought you might be able to. The leader of the group is my husband, Rolf. He agreed that I should talk to you.”

“Why you? Why hasn’t he come himself?”

“I suppose he thought—they thought—that I’m the one who might be able to persuade you.”

“Persuade me to what?”

“Just to meet us, so that we can explain what we have to do.”

“Why can’t you explain now? Then I can decide whether I’m prepared to meet you. What group are you talking about?”

“Just a group of five. We haven’t really got started yet. We may not need to if there is a hope of persuading the Warden to act.”

He said carefully: “I was never a full member of the Council, only personal adviser to the Warden of England. I haven’t attended for over three years, I don’t see the Warden any longer. The relationship means nothing to either of us. My influence is probably no greater than yours.”

“But you could see him. We can’t.”

“You could try. He’s not totally inaccessible. People are able to telephone him, sometimes to speak to him. Naturally he has to protect himself.”

“Against the people? But seeing him, even speaking to him, would be to let him and the State Security Police know we exist, perhaps even who we are. It wouldn’t be safe for us to try.”

“Do you really believe that?”

“Oh yes,” she said sadly. “Don’t you?”

“No, I don’t think I do. But if you’re right, then you’re taking an extraordinary risk. What makes you think you can trust me? You’re surely not proposing to place your safety in my hands on the evidence of one seminar on Victorian literature? Have any of the rest of the group even met me?”

“No. But two of us, Luke and I, have read some of your books.”

He said drily: “It’s unwise to judge an academic’s personal probity from his written work.”

“It was the only way we had. We know it’s a risk but it’s one we have to take. Please meet us. Please at least hear what we have to say.”

The appeal in her voice was unmistakable, simple and direct, and, suddenly, he thought he understood why. It had been her idea to approach him. She had come with only the reluctant acquiescence of the rest of the group, perhaps even against the wish of its leader. The risk she was taking was her own. If he refused her, she would return empty-handed and humiliated. He found that he couldn’t do it.

He said, knowing even as he spoke that it was a mistake: “All right. I’ll talk to you. Where and when do you next meet?”

“On Sunday at ten o’clock in St. Margaret’s Church at Binsey. Do you know it?”

“Yes, I know Binsey.”

“At ten o’clock. In the church.”

She had got what she had come for and she didn’t linger. He could scarcely catch her murmured, “Thank you. Thank you.” Then she slipped from his side so quickly and quietly that she might have been a shadow among the many moving shadows of the cloister.

He loitered for a minute so that there would be no chance of overtaking her and then in silence and solitude made his way home.