Daniel Martin Read Online Free PDF Page A

and they have decided to be themselves.
    They descended on Oxford with one other slight difference. They had lived abroad a lot, for their father had been an ambassador. He had died the year the war started; and their mother had remarried a year later to yet another diplomat, though this time he was an American. The two girls had spent the war in the United States, and an aura of that culture still clung about them a frankness, a trace of the accent (then, it later disappeared), a certain freedom other English girl students of their age, brought up amid rationing cards and the wail of sirens, lacked. They also had, though they were not ostentatious in that way, wealth. Their English parents had not been poor; and their American stepfather, though he too had children from a previous marriage, was reputedly far from poor. They were privileged in so many ways; and to have good brains and good looks on top of everything else seemed almost unfair. Neither had close female friends at the university.
    The girl looks up to the young man at work.
    ‘My offer’s still open.’
    ‘I enjoy it. Honestly. I need the exercise. Revising like a maniac these last three days.’ He pushes on the pole, recovers it, stabs it forward till he feels the soundless thump on the river-bottom, waits till the onward motion of the punt brings it vertical, thrusts down, makes a little adjustment to the direction by using the trailing pole as a rudder. He grimaces down at the girl.
    ‘I’m going to plough. I feel it in my bones.’
    ‘Sez you. I bet you get a first.’
    ‘I’m leaving that for Anthony.’
    ‘He’s worried about ancient history. He thinks he may only get an alpha minus.’ She lowers her glasses professorially, guys gloom. ‘I’m vulnerable on Thucydides.’
    He grins. She turns and watches the river ahead. Another punt comes downstream, with four other students in it, sophomores, a girl and three men. They look across at the pair in the upstream punt. One of the young men turns and says something to the girl; and all four look again, idly, casually, as would-be sophisticated passers glance again at local celebrities, Zuleikas and princes of the senior year. The cynosures make no comment; they are used to this.
    A few hundred yards later the young man lets the pole trail longer than usual and wipes his forehead with the back of his hand.
    ‘I say, Jane, I’m getting hellish shagged. And starving. I don’t think the Victoria’s on.’
    The girl sits up, solicitous.
    ‘Well let’s tie up here. I don’t mind.’
    ‘There’s a cut just ahead. We could go up there a bit. Be out of the wind.’
    ‘Fine.’
    In a minute they come in sight of the cut, an old drainage dyke at right angles east from the river and running between two willow-hedged leys. The public footpath is on the other bank. At the mouth of the cut is an old peeling notice-board: Private. Landing forbidden. By order. But, as they discover when they head in to the mouth, another punt lies moored there. Two undergraduates sprawl at opposite ends of it, reading, an open bottle of champagne between them. The gold-foiled neck of another bottle pokes up, suspended by string, from the cooling green water beside the stern-seat. The taller student of the two, with a mop of blond hair and a faintly flushed face, glances up at the intrusion. He has strange vacuous eyes, a glaucous grey-green.
    ‘Good God. Jane darling. Daniel. Don’t one’s friends ever leave one in peace?’
    Daniel slows his punt, grins down at the blond head, the textbook in hand.
    ‘You bloody sham, Andrew. You’re reading.
    ‘Well not quite really, dear boy. Rotten old governor. Bet me a hundred I won’t get through.’
    Jane grins. ‘How sick-making. You poor thing.’
    ‘Rather fascinating stuff, actually, some of it. Isn’t it, Mark?’ The other student, an older man, grunts in dissent. ‘I say, do have a mouthful of fizz.’
    Jane smiles again. ‘Unlike you, we really have come to