The September Society Read Online Free PDF

perhaps twelve. He was plump with fiery red hair and a freckly face.
    “Go on, sir,” he said, rather rudely.
    “Hello there—I was hoping I might have a room?”
    “Full up, compliments.”
    “No rooms at all?”
    “How about a beer instead?”
    Lenox laughed. “I don’t think so.”
    “Tom Tate, what d’you reckon you’re doing!” A strong, very short woman emerged from the front bar, looking at the boy. Lenox smiled at her in recognition.
    Her eyes focused on him after she had dealt the lad a cuff and told him to see to the tables in front. “Is that … is that Mr. Lenox, there?” she said. “Not Edmund, but Charles?”
    “Too right, Mrs. Tate.”
    “Mr. Lenox!” She called back Tom, who was in high dudgeon with the world at having been cuffed, and told him to look out for Lenox’s bag.
    “You do have a room, then, Mrs. Tate?”
    “Have a room! Bless you, of course we have a room!”
    She led him up the staircase, behind her disgruntled employee and son. “Breakfast, then?” she said, looking back.
    “That might do me well, thanks.”
    She led him down to the end of the hallway—to his old room. Clearing Tom out and promising that breakfast would arrive soon, she left, saying only, “Excellent to see you, Mr. Lenox! You must excuse me, we’re busier than bees at the moment!” on her way out. Her brusqueness put Lenox in an affectionate mood; it meant nothing had changed.
    It was a room small in proportions but comfortably arranged. There were two windows with a lovely view of New College, a large bed in one corner, a nicked and blackened desk that had seen many first letters to home, and by the window a round, rickety table with a comfortable armchair alongside it and a fireplace behind it in the corner. There would have been a better turned-out (and perhaps even more comfortable) room in one of the nice hotels on Beaumont Street or the High, but he wouldn’t have been happy at either, knowing his room above the kitchen at the Turf was still available. He had spent so many nights here just before term started—that first, nervous night of his fresher year, in fact, waiting for his brother, Edmund, a third-year, to come fetch him for supper. Edmund—he would have understood. He would have stayed here too, as their father had, and his father, and his father.
    A moment later the chastised Tom staggered in under a tray about as big as him. Lenox slipped him a sixpence and smiled conspiratorially. “Not a word to Mum, eh?” he said.
    Then he slipped the window open to feel the breeze andpoured himself a cup of coffee. There was a plate loaded down with toast, eggs, kippers, rashers, fried tomatoes, baked beans, and sausages on the tray, and he tucked into them with his mind on anything but a dead cat, smiling.

CHAPTER SIX
    L enox washed his face, changed his clothes, had a final gulp of coffee, and at the appointed time stood at the gates of Lincoln College.
    Oxford was made up of about twenty constituent colleges. Each of these had its own traditions, its own library, its own chapel, its own dining hall, its own professors, and its own buildings (though most of the colleges were in the same Gothic style, which gave Oxford its medieval look). United, along with the structures that belonged to Oxford as a university, like the Bodleian Library and the Sheldonian Theater, one of Wren’s most beautiful buildings, they formed Oxford. Against Cambridge every student from every college was an Oxonian, but within the university there were these other minor allegiances, though there was a great deal of exchange and friendship across their fluid boundaries.
    Lincoln was a middling sort of college, full of young men more amiable and athletic than scholarly, young men who would rather drink at the pub than debate at the Union. Both it and its students were well liked around the university. The first rank of colleges—Christ Church, Balliol, Merton—couldbe less cheerful places, especially when class