Uncommon Enemy Read Online Free PDF Page B

acknowledgements
and then, at the second time of asking, a morning coffee in George Street, when the five minutes she said she had became fifty, and later – made possible only by Charles’s having a car
– dinner in the Studley Priory hotel outside Oxford. Then all that followed.
    One day, in the early weeks of the affair, he’d suggested tea in his room. She hesitated. ‘D’you mind coming to mine again?’
    ‘Okay.’
    ‘It’s just that – to be honest, I’m uneasy in your college because there’s someone there who’s been pursuing me. It’s embarrassing, because I
haven’t told him about you, and every day I don’t it becomes more difficult. It’s stupid of me, I know. I’ll have to find a way.’
    ‘Who?’
    She told him, explaining that she had met Nigel at a birthday breakfast party, punting on the Cherwell. She had found him charming, saw that people were a little in awe of him and was flattered
by his attention. But the aggression of his pursuit had put her off, conducted as it was in public without regard for how she might feel in front of others. By the time she’d begun to see
Charles, Nigel’s invitations – usually notes he dropped in her pigeonhole or delivered by college messengers – were arriving daily. She accepted some of the more neutral and
social ones, avoiding the personal, but his campaign intensified. Now he had invited her to the Merton ball.
    ‘I’ve got to tell him, I must. I can’t let him take me without him knowing. But it’ll be awful, because it’ll be perfectly obvious I should’ve told him before
but chickened out.’
    ‘Can’t you just say no?’
    ‘Of course I could, but it’s difficult without a reason. And I don’t want to lie. Anyway, I’d love to go to a ball.’
    ‘Tell him you can’t because you’re going with me.’
    ‘Am I?’
    ‘Looks like it.’
    Neither he nor Nigel mentioned it and their relationship continued outwardly as before. The frequency and urgency of Nigel’s invitations to Sarah diminished but he still asked her to
social events, and sometimes she went. She was always in demand but Charles didn’t mind. It flattered him that other men were keen to show off the woman who filled his waking moments. Nor did
he doubt her; the at first barely credible fact that he really was preferred to all others made him more generous than jealous. In retrospect it seemed a golden age, a time with no beginning and no
end; but the reality had been no more than a few weeks.
    Early one morning, after a forbidden night spent in her all-female college, Charles left as usual over the garden wall before anyone was about and walked across the university parks back to
breakfast in his own college. He loved those cool summer mornings after hot near-sleepless nights and this time detoured into the fields on the other side of the Cherwell. Returning, he saw Nigel
standing on the high arched bridge, elbows on the railings, looking down into the slow water. He must have been aware that someone was approaching but did not look up. His dark eyes seemed more
bulbous than usual and his expression was remote and self-absorbed. He would have made no acknowledgement if Charles had not stopped.
    ‘Don’t do it, it’s not worth it,’ Charles said, regretting it immediately.
    Nigel straightened and turned. ‘I wasn’t going to,’ he said quietly. ‘Where – you’ve been—’
    Charles nodded. Neither of them wanted it said. ‘How about some breakfast?’
    ‘No, thanks.’
    Detachment, remoteness and introspection were uncommon in Nigel. He normally seemed fully engaged, whatever he was doing. He clearly wanted to be alone now but Charles didn’t know how to
leave. It felt too abrupt to walk on without saying more, but he wasn’t sure what note to strike.
    ‘I really love her, you know,’ said Nigel, suddenly. ‘I hope you do.’
    ‘I do.’ Charles walked on, wondering why he had never told her.
    Although neither he nor Nigel ever