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the train journey we'd also sat next to each other since, being friends in the eyes of the world, not to have done sowould have struck anyone seeing us as even odder. A member of the Russian department called Rook had certainly seen us. He was dozing, slumped in the first-class carriage we had initially got into because, from the platform, it had appeared to be empty. He saw us and we saw him when we were already advancing down the corridor, laughing in a compromising or overly frank and unEnglish manner and he, with what one presumed to be a nod of his sunken head, addressed Clare first with a "Mrs Bayes" and then - doubtless because he didn't know how to pronounce my name, or because he found it difficult to remember — bade me a simple "Good evening". We walked on to find a seat as far away as possible from him, but even there dared utter nothing but the briefest of noncommittal phrases in the lowest of voices. Afterwards, when we walked the streets of Oxford, for the first time together and alone, beneath the fickle, mellow moon, our faces to the wind, we heard his footsteps a little way behind, echoing the rhythm of our steps, or at least we thought they were his and not just the echo of our own. We neither turned round nor exchanged a word until the moment came for us to part and then we simply said "Goodbye" without even stopping or looking at each other (such is the sadness of secrecy). I heard nothing after that except, for an instant, Clare's footsteps hurrying away; I doubt she heard my own weary steps. Rook was famous because for the past twelve years he'd been engaged on a new translation of Anna Karenina and because, during an academic year spent in America, he'd met and become friendly with Nabokov. His translation — though no one, not even his publisher, had as yet seen a line of it - was to be both definitive and incomparable, beginning with a fundamental innovation in the title, for, according to both Rook and Nabokov - to whom he always referred as "Vladimir Vladimiro-vich" to indicate his familiarity both with the man and with Russian patronymics — the correct tide was Karenin not Karenina, since Anna was neither ballerina, singer or actress, the only women, however authentically Russian, whose family name it would be admissible to feminise in a text in English or in any other Western language. He and I had met on more than one occasion in the Senior Common Room in the Taylorian where, drinking cups of anaemic coffee and casting the occasional lazy, loathing glance at the scholarly contents of our respective briefcases, we lounged around pretending to be putting the finishing touches to our lesson preparation. Rook - a man with a massive head perched on a slender body - was always only too ready to talk about Nabokov or to enlighten me about Lermontov or Gogol, but his personal life was a closed book to the other members of the Oxford congregation. For that reason one could quite happily attribute to him any habit or characteristic one liked, and the reputation he had was of being a dreadful gossip. In fact in Oxford that is of no great significance. What would be extraordinary would be for someone not to have such a reputation: anyone who's not a scandalmonger or, at the very least, malicious is doomed to live as marginal and discredited an existence as someone unfortunate enough to have graduated from a university other than Cambridge or Oxford itself, and such a person has no chance of adapting because he will never be accepted. In Oxford the only thing anyone is truly interested in is money, followed some way behind by information, which can always be useful as a means of acquiring money. The information obtained can be important or superfluous, useful or trivial, political or economic, diplomatic or epistemological, psychological or genealogical, familiar or ancillary, historical or sexual, social or professional, anthropological or methodological, phenomenological, technological or