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'NO REGRETS' 'Gilded Rubbish' - Magistrate
    Twenty-year-old Viscount Saffron, undergraduate heir of former Foreign Secretary, the Marquess of St Ives, pictured leaving Oxford magistrates' court yesterday, where he was fined £750 with costs. He was among other students found guilty of causing damage to the Martyrs Hotel, Cornmarket, Oxford, after a student party following an exclusive (£50 a head) Chimneysweepers' Dinner of the 'Oxford Bloods'. High-living Lord Saffron, heir to what is estimated to be one of the largest landed fortunes in Britain, told reporters that he had 'no regrets' about the damage caused to the hotel, 'since he had plenty of money to pay for it'. Lord Saffron added with a laugh: 'There's nothing wrong with money, so long as you don't earn it.'
    Jemima, as she sped forward once more amid the hooting cars, felt sick then angry. Oxford Blood indeed! You scarcely needed a knowledge of the latest unemployment figures - which some sardonic newspaperman had in any case thoughtfully placed alongside the lead item concerning Lord Saffron - to be disgusted by such a gratuitous display of upper-class insolence. Jemima felt herself in total sympathy with the remarks of the magistrate who referred feelingly to behaviour 'unacceptable in supporters of a football club' and all the more disgraceful in someone who had been raised 'in such a privileged manner' as Lord Saffron.
    The magistrate was also particularly incensed by the fact that Oxford Bloods called their function the Chimneysweepers' Dinner, thus mocking what had once been a decent profession for a working man; many people, he opined, would regard these young people themselves as mere 'gilded rubbish', at the bottom rather than the top of society. And this was the type of delightful young person Cy Fredericks expected her to study in his precious Golden Lads and Girls programme. By the time she reached her flat, Jemima had worked herself into a royal rage which even Midnight's soft purring welcome round her ankles hardly assuaged.
    She studied the story in the newspaper in detail - nearly a thousand pounds' worth of damage had been caused by the so-called Oxford Bloods at their Chimneysweepers' Dinner (presumably its members, unlike Cy, did know how the 'Golden Lads' rhyme ended). Lord Saffron had the pleasure of paying that sum as well as the fine. Glasses and plates had been smashed: well, that, if not edifying, was not so surprising, and various other pieces of minor vandalism carried out; but the principal item consisted of repairs to a marble mantelpiece which had been deliberately attacked by Lord Saffron with a hammer. Hence the fact that the case had been brought against him personally rather than the various other members of the club.
    About that damage, young Lord Saffron had been theoretically penitent, or at any rate his lawyer had been so on his behalf. Outside the court however he had positively revelled in the destruction of something he castigated as 'artistically beyond redemption and fortunately now beyond repair'.
    Jemima took a cold bottle of white wine out of the fridge and looked out of her wide uncurtained windows towards her winter balcony. Delicate exterior lighting made it into another room. A large pot of yellow witch hazel was flowering. Daring the cold Jemima pulled back the glass, cut a sprig, and put it in a little vase at her elbow. Soon the delicate sad perfume was stealing into her nostrils.
    She would run a bath, allow the Floris Wild Hyacinth oil to challenge the ham amelis mollis, sip the wine, listen to Mozart (Clarinet Quintet, guaranteed to soothe and transport) and in complete contrast to that, yes, she would glory in the new Ruth Rendell, hoping it was one of her macabre ones ... She would forget Golden Lads and Girls. She would forget the odious and arrogant Lord Saffron. Above all she would forget Cy Fredericks ...
    So that when the telephone rang as though deliberately intending to thwart these plans, Jemima knew,