Gifted and Talented Read Online Free PDF Page B

while certainly not a car to impress people, it was perfectly serviceable for a gardener, and it was as a gardener – a poor one at that – that Diana had bought it.
    Her aggressor was walking briskly away now. Diana, red faced and feeling, despite everything, unpleasantly bested, stared at the concrete college walls as he picked up his bicycle and cycled away.
    ‘Who was that?’ Rosie wondered with interest, watching as he disappeared down the tree-lined road.
    ‘Just a silly man, darling.’ Diana drove crossly into Branston’s back yard.
    ‘He was American ,’ Rosie remarked, evidently awed.
    Diana smiled at her daughter. ‘You get people from all over the world coming here to study.’ She hoped, even so, that the aggressive cyclist wasn’t typical of the town’s international population. Still less that he was one of her new colleagues.
    Diana got out of the car. Rosie, released into the wild, ran ahead into the garden. Her mother trudged after her, over the bald and soggy lawn, the sodden black soil scattered with worm casts, pine needles, straggly weeds, bits of rubbish that would have to be picked up.
    Rosie was whirling round on one of the lawn’s few lush patches, a few yards of intense sunlit green, which Diana had already identified as moss. Head flung back, soaked in light, Rosie seemed, not a child in an old pink sweatshirt and too-short tracksuit bottoms, but a mysterious, triumphant, celebrating spirit. Looking at her, Diana felt, despite her gloom, a sudden, piercing conviction that everything would be all right. After all, if Rosie was happy, what else could possibly matter? She crossed to the little spinning figure and gave her a hug.
    Professor Richard Black cycled impatiently on, annoyed by the near collision with the woman in the car. Part of his agitation arose from the fact that, in his heart of hearts, he knew himself to be the guilty one. He was, as Amy had always laughingly pointed out, far crosser about things when he sensed himself partly to blame.
    Stopping at a crossroads, he watched a family carrying what looked like most of the contents of a house – chairs, a TV, a bookcase – and Richard wondered briefly what it would be like to have a child starting university. That his and Amy’s marriage had been childless had been her only source of unhappiness in an existence in which everything else seemed a delight. But of course, if they had had a child, he would be bringing it up himself now, alone. And what would that be like?
    Difficult, Richard imagined. All the students he could see here seemed to have two parents. Adoring, concerned, proud parents into the bargain. The place was packed with happy couples and blissful families; what on earth, he wondered bleakly, had possessed him to think it was somewhere he could come and hide and try to forget? It seemed to him now that nowhere on earth was more likely to remind him of everything he had lost.
    He cycled faster. The woman in the car had only delayed him further. He was late, much later than he usually was. This was entirely due to the advanced hour he had retired the night before, when he had been obliged to attend a tedious drinks reception marking his arrival as Master of Branston. It had been as exhausting as it had been wearisome and unexpected.
    He had understood that, being one of the university’s lower-profile colleges and in line with its – pretty crazy – appearance, Branston was less formal than most. But, no. An entire line-up of other college heads had been present, some, frankly, caricatures. The Master of St Alwine’s, for instance, was as ludicrously anachronistic as the foundation over which he presided was rumoured to be. He’d been resplendent in black robes, gold lace and a floppy, feather-trimmed bonnet. Why, Richard wondered, had he gone into academia when he was obviously more suited to pantomime?
    Possibly because the booze was better. As his puce nose attested, the Master’s main interest appeared