The Runes Have Been Cast E-Book

Robert Irwin

• Herausgeber: Dedalus
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Serie: Dedalus Original Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Seitenzahl: 333

Beschreibung

The Runes Have Been Cast is a black comedy of darkest hue about academic and literary life set in Oxford and St Andrews in the early 60s.A tin of alphabet spaghetti brought about Lancelyn's first encounter with the apparently supernatural. Unfortunately it was not to be his last. Runes, ghosts and spaghetti apart, there is much for Lancelyn to be afraid of: the future, women, Critical Theory, sex romps, The Times' crossword puzzle, succubi and creative writing classes.The pages of The Runes Have Been Cast are haunted by M.R. James, Thomas de Quincey, Mr. Raven, St. Ignatius of Loyola, Iron Foot Jack, J.R.R. Tolkien and an anonymous tramp.'This is novel is great fun. Irwin mocks all and sundry while introducing us to some of the darker recesses of English and even Scottish literature as well as to the 1960s second hand books scene in London. I do not think that I can have read a novel which makes so many references to actual works that I have never heard off. With a fairly complex plot, ghosts popping in and out, strange but colourful academics, much mirth and mockery, two young men too full of themselves, a rampaging sex goddess, lots of interesting books and authors, intertextuality galore, the idea of God as a novelist, immersive literature and Tolkien and his bloody elves, this book is a thoroughly enjoyable read.'

Leseprobe

Dedalus Original Fiction in Paperback

THE RUNES HAVE BEEN CAST

Robert Irwin (born 1946) is a novelist, historian, critic and scholar. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

He is the author of eight previous novels, all published by Dedalus: The Arabian Nightmare, The Limits of Vision, The Mysteries of Algiers, Exquisite Corpse, Prayer-Cushions of the Flesh, Satan Wants Me, Wonders Will Never Cease and My Life is like a Fairy Tale.

All of Robert’s novels have enjoyed substantial publicity and commercial success although he is best known for The Arabian Nightmare (1983) which has been translated into twenty languages and is considered by many critics to be one of the greatest literary fantasy novels of the twentieth century.

All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental. In particular, I have no idea at all what the English Department in the University of St Andrews was like in the early 1960s, but I would be utterly astonished if it bore any resemblance whatsoever to the one depicted here.

Should any of my readers incline to a serious study of the subject of this book, and thus come in contact with a Man or Woman of Power, I feel that it is only right to urge them, most strongly to refrain from being drawn into the practice of the Secret Art in any way. My own observations have led me to an absolute conviction that to do so would be a complete waste of time.

CONTENTS

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Copyright

CHAPTER ONE

‘Procul hinc, procul este, severae!’‘Stay far hence, far hence, forbidding ones!’

(Ovid, Amores.)

Although Lancelyn owed (if ‘owed’ was the right verb) his first experience of the apparently supernatural to a tin of alphabet spaghetti, his introduction to the theory and literature of hauntings had come a couple of years earlier. It was an evening in the eighth week of Michaelmas Term 1960. It must have been in early December then. Their tutor Mr Edward Raven had set them both an essay on the Victorian ghost story. Bernard was as annoyed as Lancelyn was, since time was running out and in May they would be sitting finals and the chances of an essay question on how spectres managed to comport themselves in Victorian literature was negligible. They ought to have been doing something on somebody major, Browning, Thackeray or Gaskell. But Raven never paid much attention to the syllabus and he set little stock on the apparent need of undergraduates to get good degrees, for Oxford was not to be thought of as a kind of sausage machine for producing degree-bearing students.

Lancelyn had arrived first, a bit breathless, having finished his essay five minutes earlier and he accepted the ritual glass of sherry. Bernard arrived ten minutes later and Raven’s eyebrows rose, but only for an instant. He was used to Bernard’s lateness and to his coloured waistcoats. But the spats! This was something new. Lancelyn wondered what on earth spats were for. He had read about them in books, but literature gave no guidance on the subject. There were so many subjects on which English literature could give no guidance. The short term ad hominem answer was that they, like the coloured waistcoats, were part of the image Bernard had been madly cultivating ever since his first year. Right at the start he put it about that now he was at Oxford he had no other aim than to be elected to the Bullingdon Club. Hence the waistcoats and the preposterous speech mannerisms. This was absurd. Bernard was a grammar schoolboy and God knows how he could have afforded the waistcoats and when his talk was reported to the Bullingdon, some of its members, quite reasonably suspecting that he was taking the mickey, turned up at Merton and trashed his room, but Bernard had emerged from the room seemingly proud of even that much recognition.

Lancelyn read first. His essay was the product of a diligent trawl through the obvious texts by Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Bulwer-Lytton and Le Fanu. He drew attention to the moralising messages that such stories delivered and in his conclusion (of which he was quite proud) he suggested that the growth in popularity of the ghost story in the nineteenth century was a reaction to the age’s rationalism, utilitarianism and industrialisation. Shortly afterwards the antiquarian ghost fictions of M.R. James would usher in a new era of horror.

Raven did not comment, but gestured for Bernard to read his essay.

‘Righty ho.’

The essay that Bernard read covered some of the same ground, though ‘read’ was not strictly the right word since what Bernard ‘read’ from (and Raven, sitting where he was, could not see this) were several blank sheets of paper. Though Bernard stumbled a couple of times, he apologised and claimed that this was due to an inability to read his own handwriting and, talking fluently as ever, he picked up on several points that Lancelyn had missed. He pointed out the childishness of so many of the ghostly fictions in which goodness was invariably rewarded and wickedness punished, just as in the stories of Enid Blyton. Mostly though he focussed on the importance of ambiguity and uncertainty in some of the writings of Sheridan Le Fanu and in Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw. He too concluded with Monty James and the way he set so many of his tales in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries rather than in ‘the age of steam and cant’.

Raven did not respond immediately to the essays. Instead, and this was something new, he poured them each a second glass of sherry, before speaking,

‘Did you know that our college has a ghost?’

They did not.

‘It would be strange if after so many centuries Merton had not acquired a ghost. He has been seen in the upstairs part of the library, where the chained books are, as well as just outside the College walls in Dead Man’s Walk. We know who he is – or rather was. He was Colonel Francis Windebank, the son of Charles I’s Secretary of State. In 1645 the King put him in charge of Bletchingdon Park. This great house was well fortified and Windebank had a garrison of two hundred men under him. Since he was newly married, he thought to mark the occasion and impress his bride by holding a ball in the place. There were many guests, but before the ball could get under way, Cromwell arrived on one of his raiding parties into Oxfordshire and began to make preparations for a siege of the house. But Windebank, anxious for the lives of his bride and their guests, promptly surrendered to terms. Then he and his bride made their way back to Oxford. There he was promptly arrested and, after a three-hour court martial, he was sentenced to death for cowardice and taken out to Dead Man’s Walk to be shot. It was reported that before the firing squad was quite ready, he bared his chest and shouted ‘Long live the King!’ And so now his apparition occasionally manifests itself along the wall just below Merton’s garden and more frequently in the library. It is odd, the affinity that ghosts seem to have for libraries. Why am I telling you all this?… I don’t know… yes, I do.’

Raven drained his sherry before continuing, ‘You have not been visualising your stories in the way that I taught you and you are both missing something. To start with, people who have seen the ghost of Windebank merely report that they have seen the ghost. They are not gibbering or crazed out of their wits by terror. They have no sense that the ghost has been sent to them to deliver a message or to punish them for curiosity or some unspeakable personal sin. Nor is there any Jamesian ambiguity. (Here I mean Henry James, not M.R.) They have just seen the damn thing. The ghost story, on the other hand, aims to induce fear in the reader. That is almost always the main purpose of a ghost story and yet the word ‘fear’ never appeared in either of your essays. But I suppose you are too young to have experienced real fear… you will … you will. Anyway, in your essays you needed to address the ways in which prose technique and narrative structure can be controlled in such a way as to induce fear. Then, of course, you should have considered the readership and the desire of so many readers to experience fear. Why this need on their part?’

They had no ideas. But soon Raven moved on to other matters and, in particular he queried Lancelyn’s argument that the ghost story was a reaction against Victorian rationalism, for surely it was the Victorians’ scientific approach to everything that led to the founding of the Society for Psychical Research in 1881 and this had to be seen as evidence of the Victorians’ rational drive to understand the mysteries of the unseen.

Afterwards, ‘What do you think he meant by saying that we would know fear?’

‘Hmm, a bit of a poser that one. Perhaps he was talking about finals. Fancy a drink? Or perhaps he was just trying to put the heebie-jeebies on us.’

‘Why should he do that?’

Bernard shrugged, ‘A strange man. Fancy a drink?’ he asked again.

They went to The Chequers on the High Street and Lancelyn bought the beers.

They talked about Raven’s many prejudices, including his hatred of doctorates and research, his contempt for publication (which was rather odd in someone who taught literature) and above all his detestation of Professor Tolkien and his ‘bloody elves’. ‘If a novelist is ever stuck for what happens next in a plot, all he needs to do is just have another bloody elf come in.’ Tolkien thought that English literature came to an end with Chaucer, whereas Raven was certain that true literature only started to appear in the early eighteenth century. But Tolkien was now Emeritus, having retired from the Merton Professorship of Language and Literature in the previous year and nowadays he was only rarely glimpsed making his way across Mob Quad and heading for the library.

The pub was not crowded. There was a young woman in a dark blue sheath dress at the next table along from them, busy writing with her glass of white wine untouched. Though she looked like a student, it was pretty much taboo for female undergraduates to drink alone in pubs.

Bernard and Lancelyn drifted on to talk about life after finals. Was there life after finals? Lancelyn thought that he might become a librarian. Bernard was incredulous.

‘A librarian! My hat! Are you sure that you will be safe from real life in a library?’

‘It is all my third-class degree will be good for.’

‘Don’t play the giddy ass! You must know that Raven thinks that we are both brilliant. He just doesn’t say so, but that is why we are in the same tutorial. We are both certain to get firsts.’ Then, ‘How about another drink?’

Lancelyn bought this round too and Bernard made his ritual remark about expecting a postal order any day now from his aunt in India. Lancelyn knew almost nothing about Bernard’s real family, but a great deal about the clan of fantasy aunts, one or two of whom were always threatening a visit to Oxford.

Their talk became more general about the future. Bernard was sure he could find a way of not working for a living. Life would be one long lark in which barmaids were kissed, policemen’s helmets were stolen and ten pound notes were burned. Lancelyn, on the other hand, did not want the future to happen. He had read Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and had been appalled by its prospectus of sex and drugs on demand – on demand and all but compulsory.

Sex was almost as certain as death. He could easily imagine that sexual love would prove to be a far more testing exam than the Oxford finals. But there were so many other uncertainties. Friendships made and lost, emotional and physical pain and, between all that desire and anguish, so very many hours of pure boredom. And there were so many things he would have to tackle for the first time in his life and he had as yet so little experience to draw on with which to tackle them. The prospect of finding his way in a world which did not yet exist terrified him. And finally he would have to learn how to say goodbye to so much beauty. Did it all have to happen? Yes, the future had to be filled somehow.

Bernard was talking about how he would end up comfortably in an old folk’s home in one of the domed cities of Mars, when suddenly, and still talking, he leapt from his chair and seated himself opposite the young woman, who, alarmed, stopped writing.

‘You have been eavesdropping on us and writing down everything we say. What’s going on? Are you by any chance a spy for Mr Raven? How much is he paying you?’

The woman looked uncomfortable and shook her head.

‘I am writing a novel,’ she said.

‘Neither are we,’ said Bernard dismissively and gestured for Lancelyn to join them. Lancelyn brought the beers over.

‘No, I really am,’ she insisted. ‘I take my notebook with me and go about on buses and sit in cafes and pubs trying to get it right how people talk and think. I want to write from real life and not copy other people’s books.’

Her hair was luxuriant, her face a little plump and her breasts heavy. She was flushed and angry. Also beautiful and she knew it.

Bernard nodded impatiently. Then, ‘Eeeh, look! A man in a gorilla suit has just walked in.’

She turned to look and as she did so he snatched her notebook from her. He riffled through the pages until he got to the last two with writing on.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘She has got most of it down. God! Are we not brilliant? You do not often hear conversations like this on buses. And what’s this?’ He read out, ‘Tall, ash-blonde, brilliant blue eyes, strong chin. That is you, Lancelyn. What about me? There is nothing about me. Oh yes, there is. Just one word. “Spats”.’

Disappointed, he pushed the notebook back to her.

‘Are you an undergraduate?’

She nodded.

‘Where?’

‘Somerville.’

‘Reading?’

‘History.’

‘And your name?’

‘Molly. Molly Ransom.’

‘We will wait for your novel, for years, for decades if necessary. I am Bernard. And this is Lancelyn. We are both at Merton.’ He drained his beer. ‘And now, Miss Ransom, we must be going. Toodle pip!’

As he rose, he made as if to tip his non-existent hat. Lancelyn, looking apologetic, followed him out.

Outside, Bernard turned to Lancelyn, ‘Of course if we had realised that what we were saying was being written down, we might have managed to talk even more brilliantly yet. I am really cheesed off, since anybody can write a novel and anybodies do. But I have always wanted to be a character in a novel. That would really be something – like Leigh Hunt got into Dickens’ Bleak House as Harold Skimpole and William Henley made it as Long John Silver in Treasure Island. That would really be something, to be immortalised in fiction. But that girl is never going to write her novel, and, even if she did, you, not me, would be its hero. You see me downcast and chopfallen. So I could do with another drink.’

That meant repairing to Lancelyn’s rooms where he had a bottle of vodka. Just inside the porter’s lodge they picked up Marcus, an amiable second-year historian. Then on the way to the room they met Sam Garner, the scout on their staircase, lurking at its foot. He was good at lurking. Bernard paused to ask him, ‘Garner, have you ever seen this ghost of a cavalier, Sir Francis Somebody?’

Sam nodded, ‘Yes sir, two years ago I saw a man in very old-fashioned costume coming out of the library. Then suddenly he was not there.’

‘And you were not frightened?’

‘There was no nothing to be frightened of. As I say, he was not there.’ And Sam went off to lurk somewhere else.

Once they were inside Lancelyn’s room, Bernard commented, ‘Real life ghosts are wasted on someone like Sam.’

‘Ghosts seem pretty pointless anyway,’ said Lancelyn. ‘Besides how do we know it is Windebank’s ghost? It might be some other cavalier, or the ghost of someone who was up in the 1920s and who went to a fancy dress party.’

‘Yes, I Iike that. A fancy dress party in which identities were mistaken and which ended in a lethal tragedy…’ Bernard continued to fantasise in this vein.

Meanwhile Marcus was gazing with wonder at Lancelyn’s books. A bookcase covered a whole wall and it was tightly packed and some of the books were bound in leather. There were no paperbacks, but there were many early books on conjuring and other magic, including Thomas Hill’s A Briefe and Pleasaunt Treatise, Intituled Naturall and Artificiall Conclusions, Reginald Scot’s The Discoverie of Witchcraft, S.R.’s The Art of Jugling or Legerdemaine and the anonymous Mathematical Recreations. If Marcus had been invited to Bernard’s room, he would have found no books at all except for stuff borrowed from libraries, and no alcohol either.

Lancelyn passed round cigarettes. They were the Black Russian cigarettes that he and Bernard affected.

‘That girl we met was quite a popsy-wopsy, wasn’t she Lancelyn?’

Lancelyn reflected, Yes, judging the matter objectively. he could see that she had been beautiful. Perhaps a woman out of a Titian painting. No, not Titian. Her hair was too dark and luxuriant and the eyes so large. More Alphonse Mucha. Yes, she would have been perfect for a poster by Mucha. Intimidatingly beautiful then. But Lancelyn said nothing and merely nodded.

‘An absolute corker!’ Bernard insisted. ‘I really think we must pay Somerville a visit, don’t you?’

Again Lancelyn said nothing and this time he did not nod. He was damned if he was ever going to set foot in Somerville.

The glasses had been taken away by Sam to be washed and had not yet been returned. So they drank the vodka out of coronation mugs.

Marcus could not see why English literature was a degree. Surely anybody could just read all those novels and poetry in the bath? There was no need to teach one how to read books in the bath. But, if the stuff really was so obscure that it needed to be taught, then it was almost certainly not worth reading. But then perhaps, after all, he too should have read literature. As it was, he was depressed, ‘The whole history syllabus is devoted to training us up to be professional historians, but I don’t want to be an academic. None of us does. I want to do something in the real world.’

Then looking over to the shelf, ‘I envy you your books.’

‘But you have lots of books. I have seen them all over the place in your rooms.’

Marcus sighed, ‘There are a few history textbooks but most of the rest are about coal mining.’

‘We had no idea that you were a bit of a coal buff,’ said Bernard, who was excited to learn this.

Marcus sighed again. (He was rather prone to sighing.)

‘I am not, but second-hand books on coal are so very cheap that they are just irresistible. It is very easy to build up a big collection of books on coal. So cheap, it is like stealing sweets from a baby.’

Previously Lancelyn had entertained the notion that historians were more sensible than Eng. Lit. students. He now dropped this idea.

A second round of vodka emptied the bottle.

‘And I am sad to find that I am nothing in Molly Ransom’s eyes,’ said Bernard. ‘But hey! We shall all look back on our time at Oxford as the best years of our lives. You will see if I am not right. I now propose a toast.’

What should the toast be to?

Bernard thought for a minute. Then, ‘To Professor Tolkien and his bloody elves.’

‘Professor Tolkien and his bloody elves!’

‘Professor Tolkien and his bloody elves!’

Having swiftly drained his mug, Bernard hurled it back against the wall behind him on which it smashed. Marcus followed suit and his mug did the same. Then Lancelyn threw his mug back. He fleetingly had the sensation of something passing over the bookshelf opposite, perhaps like a hand, but perhaps more like nothing. The next thing he was aware of was Bernard, looking concerned and leaning over him and sprinkling water over his face. Apparently Lancelyn’s heavy mug, instead of smashing, had bounced back and hit him on the back of the head and had briefly knocked him out.

Bernard and Marcus, after checking that his head was not bleeding and that he really was alright, left Lancelyn to his groggy reflections. ‘The best years of our lives?’ Certainly not. The best years of his life had already passed and they had been at Eton. There was the rowing on the river; the voices of the Eton College Chapel Choir; the Greek dramas performed in their original language; the Eton versus Harrow cricket match; the long walks with handsome and clever youths. ‘Are we not men?’ Well, not quite. Lancelyn had been a colleger, a fagmaster, a rower and a member of Pop, in short, one of the Lords of Creation. He had come close to crying on his last day at Eton. Nothing would ever be so good again. Thenceforth the Gates of Paradise were guarded with a fiery sword by the Angel of the Past. Oxford was only tolerable as an inferior substitute for Eton. In the same way and soon real life would surely turn out to be an inferior substitute for Oxford.

CHAPTER TWO

A few days later it was the end of the university term. Lancelyn’s parents were in New York and they invited him to join them there. He was seriously tempted. The Met would be staging Nabucco and Salome. But he really needed to work. So instead he went where he would not be disturbed and he booked himself into the Majestic in Cannes and he arrived there with two suitcases, one of which was full of books. They included works by Spenser, Webster, Tourneur, Browne, Burton, Herrick, Donne and De Quincey. But he had also brought along an omnibus volume of M.R. James and a string of thrillers by someone called Fleming. He had first read the M.R. James stories as a schoolboy. It was hard to be at Eton and not be aware of the scary stories produced by its former Provost, but the Fleming stuff was new to him and it turned out that Fleming had been at Eton too.

When the sun shone, Lancelyn sat out on the terrace with his books and a drink. He took daily walks along the Croisette or the Rue d’Antibes and in the evening he relaxed in a hot tub or went to the Casino and gambled small sums of money. The Times Crossword arrived a day late. He did not bother with the rest of the newspaper. He avoided speaking to any of the other guests. He heard nothing from Bernard and fantasised that he must be staying with one of his imaginary aunts.

By the time Lancelyn returned to Oxford, his parents had moved on to Caracas.

They were idle rich and it was hard to imagine anyone idler or richer, though they complained to him of the most excruciating boredom. It was now Hilary Term and he gave up rowing in order to concentrate on work. He saw less of Bernard this term. It was part of Bernard’s act that he never did a stroke of work, but this was indeed an act and, in order to keep it up, he had to seclude himself in small and obscure libraries where he hoped he would not be seen to be diligently reading and taking notes. The other reason Bernard seemed to be less about was because of his frequent visits to Somerville.

‘You have got to come with me next time. The place has to be seen to be believed. They are supposed to be reading Classics, French or Forestry, but that seems to be all a lot of ballyhoooo. In reality Somerville is the Grand Seraglio of north Oxford. It is just like that painting by Ingres, Le Bain Turc. You know the one. There they are, all young women, sitting, standing and languorously lying about, just like in the painting – except that they have got their clothes on of course.’

‘Ah.’

‘And so, once through the door and past that dragon of a doorkeeper, I find that wherever I turn, I see oodles of embonpoint on display and at the same time I become conscious of being observed by so many eyes, flashing eyes, doe eyes, smiling eyes, and behind all those eyes the light of love and the longing to be loved. Feminine espièglerie, is there any other kind? I fancied that I could hear their siren voices pleading for them, no, for us, to be allowed a bit of canoodling. I felt myself to be the Pasha of all I surveyed, for I could see that they were all jeunes filles en fleur and definitely up for some umpus bumpus.’

But Lancelyn was not tempted by this vision of the Grand Seraglio of north Oxford.

Towards the end of Hilary Term something extraordinary happened. He was coming back to his rooms after a tutorial with Nevill Coghill on the relationship between Shakespeare’s plays and the revenge tragedies when Garner stopped him in the quad and warned him, ‘Sir, there is a woman in your study. I thought it best to let her wait inside.’

A woman in his rooms! How strange. It could not be his mother. She was currently in Paris.

The woman was Molly Ransom. She had been sitting at his desk but with her back to it, and she now rose and made an apologetic gesture, ‘Dear Mr Delderfield, may I call you Lancelyn? Bernard has talked so much about you that I feel that I know you already.’

Lancelyn nodded and gestured that she should resume her seat. He retreated to the dilapidated armchair in the corner of the room. There was a very long silence. Finally she spoke again, ‘Actually it is about Bernard that I have come. I know that you are his friend, his good friend and he deserves his friends and… oh dear, this is awkward… you see I have come to ask you to use your influence to stop your friend visiting me in my college. I am afraid that he is nursing unrealistic hopes of some kind of emotional relationship. Those hopes are not reciprocated by me and besides the frequency of his visits and his ridiculous way of speaking are causing talk in the college. He doesn’t seem to hear anything I say, but he might listen to you. You are my best hope.’

Lancelyn was silent and thinking frantically. Certainly, however this played out, it was going to be extremely awkward. Even more awkward than he had anticipated, for at the next moment she had risen and crossed the room to throw herself at his feet and place a hand on one of his legs. One thing Eton did not teach you was how to deal with girls.

‘Please, you have to help me,’ she said. ‘I can never be his “popsy”.’

How to get rid of the hand?

‘Would you like a cigarette?’

She shook her head.

‘Well, I would. I need to think how to go about this.’

She reluctantly removed her hand and got back on her feet and this allowed him to stride over to his desk and find his cigarette case. Meanwhile she wandered over to his bookshelves.

‘What a lot of books!’

‘I assure you that they are designed for use rather than ostentation.’

‘Hmm.’ She ran her fingers over some of them. ‘They are awfully dusty. I could come here another time with a feather duster and clean them for you.’

‘I rather think that my scout would be awfully put out to see me employing the most glamorous charlady in all of Oxfordshire,’ he replied with awkward gallantry. ‘Besides I prefer them dusty. Sherlock Holmes would never allow Mrs Hudson to dust his books, because he reckoned that the thickness of the dust on their respective tops gave him a good idea of when he had last consulted each of them. But come, if you have never been to Merton before, you must not leave before admiring our beautiful garden.’

He opened the window and stepped out onto the lawn before in turn helping her to step out from his room. At last he had his cigarette alight and he was thinking furiously. She was looking round in wonder. The walls of the parapet that separated the Fellows’ Garden from Dead Man’s Walk glowed yellow in the sunlight of late afternoon. A gleaming armillary sundial stood close to a rather frail-looking walnut tree that had been planted in the reign of James I. The sound of Chopin floated across the garden from the music room at the far end.

She gazed in wonder. Then, ‘Sod it. Somerville has nothing like this.’ She was bitter. Then, ‘You don’t want to do this, do you? Say something.’

He shook his head before reluctantly replying, ‘Surely you are capable of telling him that he is wasting his time. Just tell him to push off.’

Then she smiled, but her smile was grim.

‘He says that you are his best friend, but I wonder if you really know him. He may play the silly ass, but underneath he is completely ruthless. He will stop at nothing to get what he wants and what he wants is me. I am actually frightened of what he will do to me if I turn him down again and yet I am even more frightened of what he will do to me if I do not turn him down. But you must be strong enough to deal with him.’ (If only they had not gone for that drink at The Chequers last term.)

‘Very well, I will see what I can do.’

At which point she lunged up at him and, knocking the cigarette out of his mouth, kissed him on the lips. Then at last he was able to escort her out of the college.

He did not find it easy to sleep that night. How on earth was he going to take this up with Bernard? And was Bernard really ruthless? Was he in truth like the Scarlet Pimpernel, affecting the manners of a foppish chinless wonder, but secretly masterminding coups and the elimination of all who opposed him? No, it was absurd. But it was inevitable that visions of Molly should mingle with his thoughts on that matter. He added her to his harem of phantom succubi and masturbated to her image. (‘Masturbation’ was 306.77.)

Molly was now queen of the harem. Was she not lovely? But, when he thought of all that hair, he thought of the M.R. James story ‘Canon Alberic’s Scrapbook’ and the long coarse hair of the monstrous creature that sought to attack the scholar by night. But no, he dismissed this wholly inappropriate image. She was a woman and surely every woman ‘that came his way was an immense world of delight closed to his senses five’. Women were lovely, kind and soft. But then, without wishing to, he found himself drifting on to recall the horrid climax of another story by the same author, ‘The Treasure of Abbot Thomas’, in which the thing, whatever it was, released from its dark hiding place by another over-curious scholar ‘slipped forward on to my chest, and put its arms around my neck’. In this manner the investigator ‘became acquainted with the extremity of terror and repulsion which a man can endure without losing his mind’. Lancelyn tried instead to think of Molly clinging to him and the consequent arousal of his desire, but almost immediately he found himself worrying once more about what to say to Bernard. And so things went round and round. Finally he resorted to reciting a couple of lines from Catullus:

‘Odi et amo. Quare id faciam requiris Nescio, sed fieri et excrucior.’

He did this again and again until finally towards dawn, lulled by the unholy mantra, he fell asleep.

It was a while before the opportunity to confront Bernard seemed to present itself. Neither of them often dined in hall, but two weeks later they found themselves sitting opposite each other at dinner. Bernard was talking loudly and madly about the gherkin, ‘the uncrowned queen of all the vegetables’, when Lancelyn cut in, ‘Bernard I need to talk to you about a certain lady in Somerville ‒’

‘A certain lady!’ Bernard interrupted. ‘Molly Ransom seems utterly uncertain as to ‒’

At which point Bernard was in his turn interrupted by the man sitting on his left, Henry Powys, a rather obnoxious scientist whom Lancelyn vaguely knew from rowing sessions.

‘I challenge you to a sconce,’ Powys said.

Talking about religion, politics or work during dinner in hall at Merton was banned. Drawing attention to the pictures in the hall fell under the ban and so was the mention of a lady’s name. Anyone who broke that rule might be sconced which is to say obliged to drink a yard of ale, which was two and a half pints of beer, in a single draught and, if he failed, he had to pay for the beer. Bernard first exercised his right to appeal to the high table. This had to be done in a classical language, and so he scribbled a note in Latin to the effect that Molly Ransom was not a real woman, but only a character in a novel and hence a mere flautus voci. His appeal was rejected.

Though Lancelyn approved of ancient rituals, the timing of the invocation of this one was inconvenient. Bernard successfully downed his first yard of ale in one go and, since he had done so, his challenger had to attempt the same or pay for Bernard’s beer. But he was also successful and so one of the waiters presented another tankard. Bernard hesitated, but then tipped the entire draught down his throat. The challenge went back to Powys who grimly managed his second yard. By now bets were surreptitiously being taken up and down the tables and all the waiters were standing round the pair. Bernard, presented with his third tankard downed it with a splashy flourish and smiled beerily at his opponent. At which point Powys surrendered and paid for all the beer. Lancelyn and Bernard had to leave their dinners unfinished as Bernard had to be supported out of the hall and across the quad. Lancelyn lugged him up the stairs and dumped him on his bed. So the opportunity had passed and Lancelyn found that he just could not muster the strength of will to broach the matter on any future occasion. Alas.

Three weeks later he was coming out of Thornton’s second-hand bookshop when he found his way barred by Molly.

‘Ah Mr Delderfield, I have got something for you.’

‘I hope it is something nice.’

‘Well, it will certainly suit you. You have not spoken to Bernard have you? What is it with you? Were you just too bloody idle to do the decent thing? Or is it that you are afraid of him? Perhaps you should be. He is tougher and cleverer than you… bloody hell, you are trembling right now. Are you even afraid of me as well? Why for fuck’s sake could you not have talked to him?’

‘Video meliora proboque deteriora sequor.’

‘What the fuck is that supposed to mean?’

‘“I see better things and approve; I follow the worse.” It is Ovid from The Metamorphoses.’

‘Is it now? Well across the fucking centuries you and Ovid are a pair of shits. And now here is your present.’

With that she fished into her handbag and produced a white feather which she stuck in the buttonhole of his suit and then she marched away down The Broad.

A white feather! So old-fashioned. That sort of thing became passé after the First World War. Now the honourable thing, the exciting thing, the redemptive thing would be for him to return to his rooms, pack a few things, travel down to London, enlist in the army, seek to be sent to fight in somewhere hot and dangerous like Sudan and finally come back to Oxford, a bemedalled hero and return the white feather to Molly. Then perhaps he might yet be the subject of her hypothetical novel. No, on reflection, he did not want to feature in anything that she might write, and besides going off to fight in Sudan would be more excitement than he felt that he could take. As for the white feather, it might do for a quill pen. But, alas no, it looked like a chicken feather and not strong enough to write with. He needed cheering up. He went back into the shop and bought an expensive facsimile edition of Francesco Colonna’s Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. That night he dreamt of a black-haired woman, clad only in a shift, who climbed up a tree and cut off twigs with a curved knife.

She smiled at him and said, ‘I thought that this tree needed a bit of pruning.’ He thanked her and hurried on for he had a bus to catch, though he would almost certainly miss it. One of his typically boring dreams.

The rest of the term passed without incident. Then came Trinity Term which was full of preparations for exams, followed by the exams themselves. The last of the finals papers was on the third of June. There were a dozen English Literature finalists from Merton that year and three of them had invited their girlfriends to meet them at the end of the exams, and one of those three was Molly. She had been waiting for Bernard as he stepped out of the Examination Schools. Raven was also at the steps and he conducted his flock of finalists and the girls to the small lawn on Merton Street beside the Examination Schools. There the champagne was just being opened.

Champagne fell under technology, then, narrowing it down, home and management, then food and drink, then drinks, then wine. So it was 641.22. Lancelyn shook his head to clear it.

‘Well that was a doddle,’ said Bernard. ‘It was like shooting fish in a barrel. I felt like answering all the questions on the paper instead of the requisite four.’