She Died Young Read Online Free PDF

never got anywhere with Alistair, but he and Penny became friends, which was ironic, really.
    He didn’t know quite why he liked her. He just liked having a girl friend, someone to chat and giggle and talk about clothes with, but that was another irony, because Penny wasn’t the chattering or giggling type. She’d rather talk about Simone de Beauvoir.
    ‘It’s different, being a postgraduate,’ he said. ‘It’s a different world.’
    ‘I should’ve thought it’d be rather exciting.’
    ‘It isn’t.’
    ‘But last year – and this summer even – you were enjoying it, you seemed to be …’
    ‘It was still new then, it was still a novelty. And that was before I got lumbered with Professor Quinault.’
    She looked at him with wide-eyed anxiety. ‘So what are you going to do? You’re not going to chuck it up, are you?’
    Silly idiot. She always took everything so literally. At face value. Face value was everything where Penny was concerned.
    ‘Of course not. I might if I could think of anything else to do. You know I did the Russian course for National Service.’
    ‘I’m not sure what that is.’
    ‘It seemed like a cushy option for intellectuals, miles better than going to Cyprus or Germany. We just did all this Russian. But one gradually realised it was really for recruiting spies. I might have joined the secret services.’
    ‘Might you really? How exciting!’
    ‘It didn’t appeal.’
    ‘Anyway, your research is so interesting. The first Roman emperors. You mustn’t lose heart.’
    Both of them were utterly unaware of it, but as Penny spoke she looked just as her mother used to when making conversation with Indian dignitaries: head slightly on one side, an encouraging smile, hands locked together on her lap. The difference was, Penny’s interest and concern were genuine.
    He longed to write a really shocking book about the early Roman Empire; but it was already too late. The Romans – Tacitus, Suetonius, Juvenal – had started the scandalmongering themselves and it had gone on from there, right up to the eighteenth century and Edward Gibbon’s enormous history, Decline and Fall . There was no shocking revelation you could unearth that had not already been reported by all those historians and writers, and as if that wasn’t bad enough, Charles had been pipped to the post by Robert Graves’ much more recent novel, I Claudius .
    Anyway, that sort of thing was not what Oxford wanted at all. A study of Roman farming practices in the Latium with a discussion of the slave economy would be far more appropriate; an article in the Journal of Roman Studies , not some lurid bestseller. Even were he capable of writing such a book, it would only create a sensation if it was totally counter-intuitive, if those bloodthirsty pagan murderers could be presented as heroes: a revisionist account of the Emperor Caligula, tragically thwarted transvestite, the Oscar Wilde of his day. Now that the fin de siècle , Aubrey Beardsley and the Yellow Book were coming back into fashion, of course, all things were possible. Charles rather liked the idea of spearheading a revival of decadence, something to shake up the stodgy tedium of the mid-twentieth century.
    ‘What you don’t understand, Penny, is that undergraduates are here to have fun. It’s a children’s tea party. But fun is an entirely foreign concept to the world of the postgraduate. As postgraduates the troglodytes, the cave dwellers, come into their own. It’s a world of dreary grammar-school types.’
    ‘I’m sure that’s nonsense,’ said Penny firmly – again, it was her mother speaking. ‘You’re being awfully cynical. And snobbish. Janey – you know my friend Janey – she went to a grammar school and she’s much cleverer than me. She wants to go into the civil service.’
    ‘I thought girls were here to get husbands.’ This was deliberately provocative, all part of Charles’ bad mood.
    ‘Don’t be like that. That’s just nasty. Mind