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college.
    “Goodnight.” She headed off into the dark, up towards Hythe Bridge Street. Alan was vaguely disappointed. If she had been going his way, he would have walked her home.
    It was the place, she thought. It was the weather and the geography and the architecture all working together. A mist-filledairless swampy lowland ringed round by hills. Filled with walled-in spaces. Walls that guarded libraries, lawns and cloisters like children shielding their answers with an arm. Great wooden doors, studded and barred, that creaked open for you if you knew the code, if you had the key. Bolted side doors, back gates, barbed wire and blackened sandstone. Men in bowler hats patrolling the street in front. She tried to look confident, to look like she belonged, but she knew that it was only a matter of time before she got caught out.
    She kept every letter sent to her by the college or the university. Anything with a crest or a letterhead or an official stamp. She laid down each sheet of paper in her desk drawer, filling it eventually so full that she could hardly shuffle it shut. She was never quite sure whether the papers were souvenirs, an archive or evidence.
    There was a code, Latinate, ecclesiastical, abrupt. She learned it, but it never seemed quite natural. The sounds did not attach themselves to the world around her. There seemed to be fewer articles and more capitals than in the language she was used to. Schools was just one building, many-roomed, draughty, where they had exams and Freshers’ Fair. Sub fusc were the clothes you wore underneath your gown. Halls were where you lived, Hall was where you ate, Front Hall was where the notice boards were. St. Cross was a college just down St. Giles, but it was also the name of the Faculty building.
    It had taken her a whole term to learn her way around the college, the university, the city. When she tried to cycle to St. Cross for her first lecture she got swept up by the traffic, unable to pull over, looking desperately around her for the turning, the right way. She was deposited, like jetsam, halfway up the Banbury Road. By the end of the year she stillhad not found an easy way to get from College to Faculty and back. Each time her journey was nervous, faltering. She dodged down the Lamb and Flag Passage, careered across St. Giles, dismounted to push the bike through the churchyard.
    Her room was draughty. When someone left the hall door open, wind rushed in under her door where the floor was worn away with age. The warp and weft showed through the carpet, which didn’t reach the walls. Her desk was too small. It wasn’t a desk at all really, but a narrow fragile hall table, an occasional table. She couldn’t cross her legs underneath it, but sat sideways, twisted round, to lean over her work. She didn’t think to ask for a different desk. It didn’t occur to her that it mattered.
    Brown mineral scum floated on the surface of tea and coffee. When she washed her hair, the hard water left it dull and rough. She got used to the metallic taste in her mouth, but found herself daydreaming of soft clean water from off the fells, tasting of geraniums and grass.
    She got used to feeling hungry. There was nowhere to keep food fresh, nowhere to cook but a baby gas-ring in a cramped, overpopulated pantry, up two flights of stairs. There was never enough money to eat out. When she ate in Hall, the food was pale and flaccid, cooked almost beyond recognition. And she quailed at the communal joviality that the awful meals generated, the girls’ school laughter. She ate only when it became necessary, when hunger threatened her concentration. She ate furtively, in her room, bread and peanut butter and apples that she kept in her bottom drawer. If anyone knocked while she was eating, she froze, apple juice gathering and running down her chin, until the caller walked away.
    Her bed was metal, narrow, and creaked when she turned.
    Sometimes, at night, under the parchment-shaded lamp, when