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I suppose, to take it on.”
    â€œWhy don’t they tear it down and build houses or apartments?”
    â€œI don’t know.”
    â€œThey could take a stick of dynamite. They could throw hand grenades at it.”
    â€œSome people think it’s romantic, a decaying ruin.”
    â€œThen they should think more about the future, the past is bullshit, believe me. That’s what’s wrong with this whole damned place.”
    â€œOxford?”
    â€œNo, Europe.”
    And yet they still wanted to go on sleeping with each other. The reasons had nothing to do with the past, with life stories, champagne minks or executed soft toys.

Pity the Poor Immigrant
    S tephen’s first year as a Rhodes Scholar was spent industriously toiling in the Dyson Perrins Laboratory over his research area: peptides. To synthesize a molecule is a daunting thing but if it were possible to make full-size biological proteins, the pharmaceutical applications were awesome. Stephen was one small but critical cog in the grand endeavor to make synthetic analogues of insulin; the pharmaceutical industry was breathing down their necks—the market could be measured in the billions of dollars. So there you were in your white coat, pursuing a doctorate, and the world was waiting, all those diabetics out there who were relying on you, reading the articles in the popular science magazines, or Reader’s Digest, or the newspaper reports of these groundbreaking miracles, because that was how the future was made in those days: in the lab. Scientists were above the common herd of men. They had done away with the need for the old god and Stephen felt himself to be, at the very least, a minor deity in the new scheme of things.
    Outside Dyson Perrins, Oxford was not what he had expected. It was not a university as UCLA was: a campus, a student newspaper, classes, cafeterias, the administration, sit-ins and demonstrations against the war, a huge student body, most of whom you never saw. Oxford was a private members’ club, it was something to which you gained admission and once he had entered, it was a world hedid not understand. There was no membership fee, the government actually paid you to go there and no one had to work their way through college. His own career as a merchant seaman, shipping out every vacation, was regarded with bewilderment. These guys had never had a job.
    There were dinners in hall, gowns, the dons sitting at their High Table (like a wedding back home) and common rooms for students graded in some way he didn’t understand. There were student societies that involved their members wearing tuxedos and top hats. Meanwhile, out on the grass, the freaks were smoking joints and from the windows of a seventeenth-century bedroom with oak carvings came the unremitting sound, amplified by professional equipment, of Pink Floyd battering the gillyflowers.
    But Stephen Newman was likable, and he was from California, and he had a comprehensive record collection of West Coast music dating back to the early sixties. Of the early stuff he had Jan and Dean, the Surfaris, the Beach Boys—all their albums—then the Chantays, the Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Creedence Clearwater Revival (“Oh Susie Q!”) and the Grateful Dead. Of course the Dead. His hair was thick and black and curly and had the potential to grow into a mighty bush. He was invited to sit out there on the grass with the freaks; he became friends with the college dealer (His flashing eyes, his floating hair!) and ensured himself a regular stash that alleviated the boredom of life at Oxford, the ennui experienced by a man who was used to going to sea and mixing with the common merchant seamen, and observing the potentates who traveled in first class.
    He badly missed ports, entrances and exits. Oxford lay in a stagnant marsh by a sluggish river that got interesting only when it had gathered speed and moved out of