The House on Fortune Street Read Online Free PDF Page A

explaining how the parts of Endymion written in Oxford owed a debt to the seventeenth-century poet Katherine Philips. As he tried to retrace his argument, he caught sight of the folder of case histories lying on the corner of the desk. What had he meant by c.f. Canto IV? He reached for the poem, hoping to find a marginal note or yellow flag. A fat, metal-lic fly buzzed in through the window, orbited his desk, and sauntered out again. Following its flight, Sean noticed that the sky was no longer a cloudless blue but had, in the last hour, turned to some molten non-color. It was already very warm. He stood up. On his way to fetch a glass of water, he moved the folder to the bookcase by the door.
    Back at his desk he switched on his computer and, refusing the lure of e-mail, opened his current chapter. Was it necessary, he pondered, to give much detail about the obscure Philips? The mere possibility was aggravating, but he had an appointment with his supervisor next week. At their last meeting, when he had expected her to dismiss him until late September, Georgina had suggested that they get together once a fortnight throughout the summer. Sean had not had the wit, or the wherewithal, to protest that he could barely produce enough material for their present monthly schedule. The last four or five days before each meeting found him at his desk until midnight, trying to grind out a few more paragraphs. And (surely it was just his imagination) Abigail often seemed, during these busy times, to have free tickets to a play, or to want to invite friends to dinner. Judy had sometimes been frustrated by his working methods, by his need to have each sentence perfect before he could proceed, but she had sympathized with his ambitions. Abigail, at first so full of admiration, had lately seemed bewildered by
     
    his lack of progress. Last week she had remarked that Dickens wrote
    Great Expectations in less than a year.
    Even more than the anguish of producing pages, Sean hated going back to Oxford. He had first come to the city as an eighteen-year-old, thrilled to have got a place at Wadham College. He had loved wandering the busy streets and he had loved leaving the streets for the cloistered world of the colleges. After graduation he had left reluctantly to pursue his sensible job in London. When at last he returned, he had thought of himself as following, far behind but honorably, in Keats’s footsteps, choosing this arcane world over more conventional ambitions: a career, a mortgage, children. In leaving Judy, he had not understood that he was also leaving Oxford. Although he still went to the college, and still worked at the Bodleian Library, he was now an outsider. On the bus from London his heart sank as the city came into view; the sight of each familiar landmark was like a hammer blow to his spirits. When he finally got off the bus, near St. Catherine’s College, he would wear his sunglasses and keep his gaze on the pavement, in the hope of not meeting anyone he knew, or if he did, of passing unnoticed. On the rare occasions when people recognized him, he asked about their lives, their work, and, as soon as they began to reciprocate, claimed an urgent appointment. Now Georgina was telling him to subject himself to these torments even more frequently only to end up in her study, stammering out his meager insights, while she gazed at the college’s exquisite gardens.
    Slowly Sean found his way back into his argument; slowly he tracked down a crucial passage in Philips, then looked up a phrase in Para-dise Lost, losing himself for nearly an hour in Milton’s fluent verse. He consulted a letter Keats had written to Benjamin Bailey, and reviewed Bailey’s comments on Book III of Endymion, at which point it was time for lunch.
    The kitchen was a little cooler, and he decided he might as well
     
    glance at the case histories while he ate. Stupid to dread a pile of pages. He must try to take Valentine’s robust attitude: this was