Anna still struggled with coldness, shrinking up like a touched snail.

  ‘How?’ she asked provocatively. Peter made no answer, only leaned over her, rubbed his warm face against hers over and over and murmured, not really to her, ‘I love you, I love, I love you,’ until in the end she said, experimentally, in a small, too clear voice, ‘I love you too.’ They would both have been so happy if it had been true, she thought.

  There was something entirely comfortable about the solidness of his shoulder, and the warmth of his jacket and the strength of his hands. And something putting off, something ridiculous and distasteful about his heavy brooding face over hers. Sexual excitement, Anna had decided, did something horrible to men’s faces, it made the skin heavier, they developed blubber mouths and staring, out-of-focus eyes, they grew all hot and damp and lined and stretched. She could see that if she was involved, she might not notice. But she had not been involved and she did notice, and resented what she was pleased to call their loss of humanity – whilst remaining, she considered, deploring it, herself all too human. She gave a twist of impatience, and said, ‘Oh, please, can’t we leave now? Can’t we go? I do want to go –’

  Peter hesitated, and then decided. ‘Right, we’ll go. To hell with them, for once. Look, wait only half a minute, I’ll get your coat and our bags, you don’t have to fight your way in again. Will you? Good. God, I love you, Anna.’

  Anna knew from experience that to be slightly drunk inside the building was quite different from being slightly drunk outside it. She watched Peter turn and vanish into his staircase and wrapped her arms round herself. A wind had whipped up, which fluttered her skirts, chilled her knees, and got into her hair. Inside, lightheadedness and insecurity were comfortably cushioned. If one fell, one fell against someone else, or a piece of furniture. But out here, where the air thrust coldly through one’s clothes and into one’s flesh, there was no protection. The court was grey and bare and round, a wide gravel path circling a plot of untouched and untouchable grass. Anna shivered, felt her stomach turn and saw the path lurching elliptically round her and heaving up in serpent coils under her feet.

  From Peter’s window a strip of light hung like a banner, its pennant points split round the silhouette of an embracing couple, and the jangle and moan of the music dropped thinly down, until light and sound blunted themselves against the darkness. It looked warm and safe, and Anna, an unreasoning fright rising in her, nearly went after Peter. But she went instead over to the grass and sat down firmly on the edge of it. From there, the party took on all the colour and warmth of other people’s firesides, seen dimly in their own light through half-closed curtains, or the party in the fairy story, where the poor child stands in the snow and sees the infinitely desired world from which she is shut out, the whirl of silks and velvets, the glitter of chandeliers and flicker of candles, the glow of the wines in the glasses, the giant sugar roses on the cakes, oranges, lemons, grapes, flute, violin, bassoon, and all the rest of it. Anna had sympathized dreadfully with this child, all through her own childhood, and did still, but she was learning, she knew now, that it would not do – that the complete pleasure imagined from the outside had no counterpart inside, that peering through glass was a necessary part of it, at least for her, although others, perhaps Peter, might possess the world inside and enjoy it as it presented itself to be enjoyed.

  She leaned backwards, and spread her hands in the cold, hard earth behind her, dropping her head out and down between her shoulders. The dark stone of the buildings rose in a circle round her, and the mist swirled and was blown in it, but above the pit of the walls the night sky was clear and luminous and the stars on it winked, and shrank, and sprang into life again with no apparent order or arrangement. She shook her head angrily at them, and they swooped and dived like pale brilliant fish on a swelling sea.

  By dipping her head even further back she managed to trap one tiny point of light between the turreted corner of the gatehouse and the edge of the first roof. There, she told it, I’ve got you, I fix you, I know you, I shall remember you, I win. The bulk of the gatehouse building swayed gently and Anna’s star was sucked into a funnel of darkness and disappeared. She was ready to weep with rage, jerked her head forward again so abruptly that she was nearly sick, and put it between her knees.

  ‘I can’t manage –’ she said, and saw that she was addressing a pointed pair of black shoes on the path in front of her. These, as she considered them, turned slowly and took a step towards her, then stopped again, close together, at attention. They were rather scuffed shoes, ornamented with a pattern of unlovely little sprays of intricate punch-holes.

  ‘Rather rude,’ she told them. ‘Peering at other people’s drunken distress.’

  ‘I feel I should remind you that grass is college property, and that no one is allowed to be on it unless accompanied by a Fellow of the College. And even then, I should hope, not in those pernicious shoes.’

  ‘Wait,’ said Anna, looking up. ‘I knew it,’ she cried, with drunken triumph. ‘Oliver. You would, of course. What are you doing here?’

  ‘Visiting friends,’ said Oliver, looking bird-like down at her with his hands crossed behind his back and his head on one side. ‘I do have friends in Cambridge.’

  ‘I’m sure you do,’ Anna said, soothing him, and added, ‘I saw you once.’ This had been on Magdalene Bridge, where Anna, advancing, had seen the dark figure between bursts of traffic, leaning over and looking into the water, and had quietly gone back the way she had come, not wishing to meet him. ‘I ran away,’ she said. ‘Silly of me.’

  People were leaving Peter’s party unsteadily, clutching their coats around their throats, laughing and arguing, in twos and threes. Between them and Oliver there were fences of solid mist, set up, defined and limited by the light from the windows.

  ‘They’re, they’re coming out. That’s Peter’s party, that I’m at, supposed to be. I’m waiting for Peter here, that’s what I’m doing. He ought to have come by now. I can’t think what’s come over him, unless he’s being sick. He looked rather sick,’ she finished unfairly. Oliver looked down at her with disgust. She cried, ‘I can see what you’re thinking. Just like you. You’d make any party into an orgy. I don’t suppose you were ever just happy.’

  ‘Are you happy?’ said Oliver. He held out an indisputable hand, and pulled her to her feet. ‘I think I’ll take you back with me to be sick if you have to, and have some black coffee to put you straight.’

  ‘No, thank you. I told you, I’m waiting for Peter.’

  ‘This Peter. Who is he?’

  ‘He’s called Peter Hughes-Winterton. He’s nice. You wouldn’t like him. I think I shall marry him –’

  ‘Indeed.’

  ‘Even if it would please my mother, which it will.’

  ‘I see.’

  Anna looked at him sharply. ‘I wish I knew what you did think you could “see” in that tone of voice. Not that I care. When Peter comes, we are going to get in his car and drive to London. It’s his birthday tomorrow, and I’m going to stay with his parents and be vetted. So you see, it’s all quite proper, and I don’t need any help.’

  Oliver stood for some time and then observed, ‘He doesn’t seem to be in any hurry.’

  ‘I told you, he’s probably sick. It was a pretty good party.’

  ‘If he’s as drunk as you imply, he’s probably passed out. In the meantime, you are in danger of being locked into a men’s college. Girls have been sent down for less. Moreover, if he’s so drunk, I owe it to your father not to let you be driven to London by anyone in that condition. So you’d better come with me.’

  ‘I don’t want to.’ Oliver began to quote accident rates and drunkenness figures, making his points in a dry grinding voice, with little stabs of the hands.

  He said again, ‘As a friend of your father’s –’ and Anna pushed confusedly at the wind in her skirts, resenting her own attempts to follow his arguments, and nevertheless, in her drunkenness, bothered by them.

  ‘Whatever this Peter wants, he will want just as much tomorrow,’ Oliver said, very firmly. Anna felt suddenly too tired to bother, too tired to wait, too tired to stay awake between Cambridge and London.

  ‘It’s utterly mean of me,’ she said. ‘But I always do what comes easiest. I think you’re being bloody, Oliver, but I’ve not got strength to argue.’

  ‘Good. Let us not try to find out who is to blame for what. We must hurry. Have you no coat?’

  ‘Peter’s got it.’

  ‘You’d better have mine.’ He was wearing a fawn raincoat, like a gunman in a thriller. Anna, as he wrapped it round her, felt furtively as though she was herself a criminal, slinking away from a crime committed, and was not really reassured by Oliver’s look of approval. It turned out that he had a motor-car, hidden away in a back street.

  ‘You never used to drive,’ said Anna. It was an old car, a Ford Popular, high and square on little wheels, with uncertain doors and a stuffy smell, saturated with petrol.

  ‘I do now,’ he said. ‘I rise in the world, slowly. An article here, a talk there, and I am in the motor-car-owning classes. Along with most of the rest of the populace.’

  ‘How nice for Margaret,’ said Anna, gritting her teeth as Oliver started the car, a single spluttering sound in the night emptiness of Cambridge streets. The movement changed the uneasiness of her stomach into a definite turmoil. At the beginning of Trumpington Street, in front of Corpus, she said, ‘I’m sorry. You’ll have to stop. I’m going to be sick.’

  Oliver glared at her. ‘Can’t you wait?’

  ‘No,’ said Anna, and then, on a rising note, as he did not stop immediately, ‘No, I tell you, I can’t.’ She struggled with the door and fell out onto the pavement as he drew up. She was very sick. Oliver sat back and watched her.

  ‘How very unpleasant,’ he said. ‘Mind my raincoat, please. I can’t afford another cleaner’s bill and, whatever you say, they destroy the proofing. Can’t you hurry? Someone might come.’

  ‘Shut up,’ said Anna, raising a haggard face from the gutter. ‘You would make me come in your stuffy car, when you knew I was sick. Do you think I like it?’

  ‘Quite easy to avoid it. I dislike drunken women. There’s something basically repellent about it. My mother used to say, drunken women are an abomination. I’ve seen no reason to disbelieve her.’

  ‘Oh, Christ,’ Anna said, sitting down on the pavement. ‘You do nag so, and always when I’m not up to it. I just want to go to bed. I’ve had enough.’

  ‘It’s your own fault –’

  ‘Oliver –’ Anna screamed desperately. ‘Please leave me alone.’

  Oliver got out of the car and looked furtively up and down King’s Parade to see whether a proctor or a policeman might emerge from a gate or an alley. He shook Anna violently by the shoulders and hauled her to her feet.

  ‘Get in. I won’t have you behaving like this in public. Get into that car,’ he said, pushing, and slamming the door to prevent Anna falling out again. He came round and drove at a bouncing and careful thirty miles an hour out towards the Barton Road, with his passenger bunched against the door with rolling head and chattering teeth. After a time, she muttered, ‘Where’re we going –’

  ‘Professor Ainger’s house. He lends it to me.’

  ‘Is Margaret there?’

  ‘No,’ said Oliver, opened his mouth, and shut it again.

  ‘Are you here much?’

  ‘I have a term off. I’m trying to write something. I use the library and talk to people.’

  He turned into a pebbled drive, switched off the lights and let the car choke to death. The darkness pushed them suddenly very close together. Oliver said socially and stiffly, ‘The Aingers are on an archaeological expedition. He was my Tutor. Incompetent, but kind. Still is kind.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Anna, struggling for some reason to get out of the car as though Oliver might attack her. ‘I see.’ Oliver got out himself and came round to open the door. He seemed irritated.

  ‘What is the matter, girl? I won’t bite. Pull yourself together.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Anna said, standing behind him on the door step and shivering whilst he hunted for the keyhole. ‘I’m being an awful nuisance to you, I do see. You should have left me.’

  ‘Nothing that coffee won’t put right now,’ said Oliver more cheerfully, finding the keyhole, and a switch which revealed a heavy Victorian cavern, flushed with deep salmon pink lights and furnished with several wild little mahogany tables, two enormous Chinese jars, protruding smoothly between them, and an involved coat, hat and umbrella stand, carved and beaded, with tortured and convoluted arms like Yggdrasil, on one of which Oliver, neatly, hung his mackintosh, retrieved from Anna.

  ‘Goodness,’ Anna said. ‘Is it real?’

  ‘Very. These houses were built by rich dons, to last, and furnished accordingly. The upper floors are let as flats, now, of course. There’s a touch of the folly about this house. My bed – or rather, Ainger’s bed – has curtains on brass rings. Cinnamon velvet. I find it soothing. It’s the sort of middle class ostentatious comfort and showing off that my kind aims at, going in for this life, I suppose. Come in, come in and see.’

  Anna came in. The room was red velvet and mahogany and leather and tapestry and lace, with a huge oil painting of a blasted heath in a gilt frame dominating one wall. There were two polar bears, trailing their two-dimensional flaps of furred skin behind their almost three-dimensional glassy-eyed heads. Oliver turned on more very pink silk lights. He waved at an embroidered screen in the hearth, which stood between two bamboo cylinders of pampas grass.

  ‘You’ll find the fire behind that. Warm yourself, whilst I provide the promised coffee.’ Anna knelt down weakly and unearthed, from the deep fireplace, a single-barred electric fire. ‘Stingy,’ said Oliver, returning from the hall. ‘Still, I find it does, if you sit right over it. What I came to say was, the bathroom’s on the first floor, first on the left, if you need it again. I suppose you may. I think Mr Peter Whatever-his-name-is is as well rid of you as you are of him.’

  ‘Possibly,’ said Anna, struggling with the electric cord, which was wound neatly and impossibly round itself. ‘Did you tie this up? It looks like you.’

  ‘It’s quite easy,’ said Oliver, not offering to help. ‘Once you’ve undone the first knot.’ He disappeared again. Anna untied the first knot with hands that hardly seemed to belong to her, found the electric point behind an embossed brass coal bucket, switched on the fire and curled herself painfully in a leather armchair amongst a pile of fringed red velvet cushions. Oliver came back, with a Benares brass tray, two coronation mugs (Edward VII), a steaming kettle, a pewter sugar bowl, two apostle spoons and a large tin of Nescafé. These he put down on a pouffe in front of the hearth, and knelt before it in fur, mixing the powder at the bottom of the mugs with the inadequately short spoon.

  ‘There. Hot, black. There isn’t any milk, I find it’s not worth getting it in. I hope you don’t object to Nescafé. Some people, my wife, for instance, makes a great deal of fuss about it. I’ve never been able to tell the difference myself.’

  ‘Oh, Oliver,’ Anna protested, taking the burnt-smelling brew and sniffing it, hoping her stomach was resilient enough to take it on top of the punch and the brandy without disaster.

  ‘I should think you’d better have several cups,’ Oliver said generously, looking at her over his own mug, and smiling with sudden warmth. There was a long silence. Anna sipped her coffee heroically, to show willing, and because Oliver was so obviously pleased to have been able to provide it. Surprisingly, it seemed to improve things, or something else did – the room became stable, and Anna began, drowsily, to relax. She plumped up the cushions, kicked off her shoes and dropped her head back. It occurred to her that in spite of the massive discomfort of the room, and the gloomy furniture, in spite of the thin red line of fire and the sharp, powdery Nescafé which had only heat to recommend it as a night-cap, in spite of fingers scalded in saving the spoon from submerging, in spite of the hangover, in spite of her background guilt over Peter, in spite, perhaps, of Oliver himself, she was for once wholly present, in that room, in some unthinking way, like an inhabitant of one of the houses she peered into in her imagination. She laughed, briefly.

  ‘What is it? What are you thinking?’

  ‘Only that I had forgotten how comfortable you can be. In spite of the nagging.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Oliver. ‘I seem to remember it wasn’t so, last time we met.’

  ‘I was younger, then. I wouldn’t remember that, if I were you.’

  There was another silence. Oliver began, conversationally, ‘Well, how are you doing? How’s Cambridge?’

  ‘I don’t like it,’ Anna said briefly, after some thought.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘It’s a forcing house. You have to be able to do something, to make anything of it. And I can’t.’

  ‘You could work hard, at least.’

  ‘Shall I tell you, I don’t like literature? I – it seems to me – it’s like a religion to them. They go to D. H. Lawrence like the Ten Commandments, to show them how to live. If I’ve got to be here, I’ll tell you, I wish I did something pure and absolutely intellectual, like mathematics or crystallography. I was happier at home, when I didn’t have to see everything in terms of someone else’s seeing. Do you know what someone said to me at that party? He said, Are you a Lawrentian woman? Me. Who am I? I don’t want to find out, in those terms. And I’ll tell you a lot more, he didn’t want to find out, either. Or he’d have asked differently.’

  ‘You are very vehement, anyway,’ said Oliver, leaning forward. ‘More than I remember you.’

  ‘More than I am usually. It’s the drink.’

  ‘Good, in that case. I’m not with you, of course, you know that. I believe in reading. It’s necessary, if you don’t happen to be a Lawrence, or a – a – a Lawrence, yourself, someone’s got to see a bit further or a bit deeper, and we ought to be capable of learning, if not of finding out originally. Don’t you agree? No, of course you don’t. You can’t. I ought to have seen that at first. You can’t even begin to listen. What do you want to do?’