She Died Young Read Online Free PDF Page B

you, that’s what the Principal told us. We’re being educated to be diplomats’ wives.’
    ‘Really?’ Charles thought fleetingly of the only girl in his seminar, a dreary young woman with glasses. ‘How depressing.’
    ‘You just find everything depressing at the moment. You need cheering up. Come to the party later. Please come. Alistair won’t be able to take me. He has to be there early. He’s one of the hosts. And I won’t know many people. Most of Julian’s friends are rather grand. I was only invited because of Alistair. He and Julian see a lot of each other these days. You know – that Christ Church set.’
    Charles could see she was anxious, so he said: ‘We’ll meet up beforehand and go together, shall we?’
    ‘Oh, can we? Yes, let’s.’ On this, she stood up, knocking her cup over so that the dregs of coffee dribbled onto the table. ‘I’ve got a lecture.’
    He stood up when she did. ‘I have to see Quinault. But I’ll meet you outside St Hilda’s at six.’

    Charles was not in fact due to see Professor Quinault until four in the afternoon. He went back to Blackwell’s bookshop and loitered there for a while, then biked to the Bodleian in search of the learned paper a fellow doctoral student had recommended.
    At three-thirty he left the library and set off on foot for Corpus Christi College. He’d collect his bike later. He hadn’t eaten, but wasn’t hungry.
    The mauve November afternoon suited his mood. A mist rolling up from the river further softened the faded old buildings of Cotswold stone. The dank cobbled lanes along which he paced lived in perpetual dusk. Tattered yellow leaves clung to branches but most of the foliage was underfoot, rustling in the gutters like torn brown paper. He could imagine he was walking through some impressionistic painting – Whistler, Corot, Piper even.
    But how wearisome it was to experience life through the veil of art instead of directly. As he wandered along, a pair of rugger players in muddy shirts and shorts jogged past him. He envied them. To experience life directly, physically, was so much more authentic than to be a pallid aesthete.
    He walked slowly, reluctantly. He didn’t enjoy his sessions with Professor Quinault and was only too glad they were few and far between. It wasn’t even as if it’d be a proper discussion of his work. There’d be other people invited to tea.
    On this occasion, however, there was, after all, no-one else. A fire spat and glowed in the stone grate, providing more illumination than the foggy light bulbs. Everything in the room was ancient and shabby, like the Professor himself. Like Oxford itself. Oxford wore its ancient shabbiness to disguise the ambitions of members such as Professor Quinault. Indeed, the Professor himself had once said: ‘Patina, my dear Hallam, patina, is so important in creating the right impression.’
    Certainly the room created the impression of a scholarship and a culture with a pedigree so long and precious as to take any foreigner’s breath away (but particularly any American’s). Patina, however, was hazardous and the room full of booby traps. The ancient Turkish carpet, for example, was frayed at the edge so that the unwary visitor was in danger of tripping up on its unravelling strings; an ancient book sent up a cloud of dust if removed from its shelf; and the springs of the visitor’s leather armchair had long ago collapsed, so that sitting down involved an undignified bump.
    Professor Quinault himself, shrunken and mummified inside the stiff tweed three-piece suit he always wore, matched the room. Sparse strands of tallow-coloured hair straggled across his scalp and hung over his forehead to meet eyebrows as unruly and sprouting as his locks were scant. His lizard skin was dry and cracked and he had cultivated (Charles felt sure it was cultivated) a shuffling, wavering walk. His voice sounded equally uncertain; but – and that was the trick – he managed to infuse his