LITMIR.BIZ

      FIVE

      It was only when he passed the clock outside the Post Office that he discovered the time. It was quarter to six: he had, he realized, spent most of the day in a stupor fuelled by anger and alcohol. But now, at last, he had some action to take. It was not much – after all, his wife was in the Bodleian fairly regularly – but Grey was a shrewd judge of character: if she believed Florence’s visit yesterday might be significant, that his wife had somehow seemed agitated, then that had to be taken seriously.

      He had peddled furiously past Keble when a blur from his left suddenly slammed into view. He swerved to avoid it, but it was too late: a fellow cyclist had sprung from South Parks Road without looking, clipping the back of James’s rear wheel.

      He landed hard, thankfully on his backside rather than his shoulder. His right hand, which had taken some of the impact, was scratched, the graze revealing itself as a grid of blood spots.

      ‘So sorry, Zennor. I am so frightfully sorry.’

      James looked upward, shading his eyes to see Magnus Hook, research fellow at New College and wearer of the roundest, thickest glasses in Oxford, standing over him. Poor eyesight had kept Hook out of the army, but he was doing his bit for the war effort: he had been seconded by the Ministry of Food, which had taken over large chunks of St John’s to control the national supply of fish and potatoes. ‘I now work at the largest fish and chip shop in the world,’ was his pet conversational gambit; James had heard it at least three times.

      Just the glimpse of Hook sapped his energy. For one thing, he embodied the category in which he, Zennor, now belonged. Thanks to his damned shoulder, he too was a D-band reject, just like Hook and the rest of the other half-blind cripples. But combined with this contempt was envy: for Hook had taken his place alongside the hundreds of dons of non-military age who had been drafted as civil servants. That was why Oxford in July, usually empty thanks to the Long Vacation, was teeming: the city had become a displaced Whitehall. Merton housed parts of the Department of Transport, Queen’s had the Ministry of Home Security and Balliol, characteristically for a college which regarded itself as primus inter pares, was host to a good part of the most prestigious of all departments, namely the Foreign Office. Word was that the section in question was intelligence. A further rumour insisted that one unnamed college was being kept empty, ready to house the royal family should the King flee London.

      James had watched as this gradual transformation of the university had happened – Brasenose College becoming a hospital, the Ashmolean Museum opening its doors to the Slade School of Art – and wondered when the call would come for him. He had a first-class mind, at least that was what it said on his degree certificate, and he had military experience – experience that had not come cheap. He had even picked up a grounding in intelligence, before … well, before. When James heard that Oriel was taking in the War Office Intelligence Corps, he had stood by, waiting for the call. But it never came.

      Instead he was supposed to spend the war in the Department of Experimental Psychology, reading Viennese scholars and drafting learned monographs. A mere five-year-old department in a university that measured its life in centuries, it lacked all status. Located far up the Banbury Road in a converted house, it would have had to be sited in Slough to be any more peripheral. All that had been true before the outbreak of war. Afterwards, its irrelevance increased tenfold.

      It was obvious to James that his work there was pointless. Once the requisitioning of college buildings and senior faculty was underway, he had put himself forward, either by means of a discreet chat with colleagues or twice writing formal letters of application. He had heard nothing back. He told himself it was the chaos of war. So he had gone to see Bernard Grey, who knew everyone in Whitehall, and asked him to put in a word. He assumed it would be a formality. But Grey had eventually had to apologize over sherry in the Master’s Lodgings. ‘I’m afraid, Dr Zennor, it seems this is one war you’re going to have to sit out.’

      And now here was Hook in his grey flannels, smiling smugly even under his cringing apologies and clumsy, myopic attempts to help James to his feet.

      ‘Are you sure you’re all right? I feel awful. I thought you could see me, but you were haring along at such a speed, I—’

      ‘You should have been looking, you damn fool.’

      ‘That’s just it you see, Zennor. I have the most appalling eyes. Hence these binoculars.’ He gestured at his spectacles which, Zennor guessed, would have enabled a normal man to gaze at the surface of the moon.

      James pulled himself up to full height, so that he was now looking down at Hook with the advantage of at least a foot. Maybe it was the imploring, not to say intimidated, look on the poor man’s face; or the recollection that Hook was a staunch anti-fascist – as intolerant as James himself of the appeasers who had had quite a presence in Oxford not so long ago – but James felt a dose of sympathy for Hook, standing there in his bottle glasses. And with the sympathy came shame for his rudeness, and the attendant need to make amends.

      ‘Apology accepted.’ He extended his hand, which Hook took gratefully. ‘So what you working on then, Hook?’

      ‘Well,

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