she can sort something out for you two, just for a night.”
After an uncomfortable night, Julian had woken up to feel Peter’s toes nudging his shoulders beneath the filthy blanket. At least the warmth of another human body was some comfort in the freezing air and he hoped the combination of his shirt and the threadbare coverlet on the landlady’s daughters’ bed would provide something of the same for May. She had not balked when the woman showed her the downstairs room that passed for accommodation. In better days the room must have served as a parlour because a piano was wedged up against a wall, its shape just visible beneath sheets of old newspaper. As luck would have it, the landlady explained, her daughters were away on a visit to some cousins in the countryside.
“Mind you,” the woman had cautioned, “it’s just for one night. You, young man, can go top to toe with Pete. If my girls pedal hard they will be back by tomorrow nightfall and I want you both gone by then.”
Julian had assured the landlady, Peter, and in particular May, that they would both be gone first thing in the morning. He and May had planned to spend a few more days in Wigan and he wanted those precious days to unfold in lodgings more suitable for them both. Soon he would have to return to Oxford for his last summer term. He was not looking forward to the prospect of such finality. The weeks would be dominated by exams and by his own pressure on himself to excel. He felt unnerved by the uncertainties involved in leaving a town where he enjoyed an unprecedented sense of belonging. Although the undergraduate content changed so frequently, Oxford had bestowed on Julian and on almost every member of its shifting student body an easy and privileged connection to the place. He felt apprehensive at the thought of leaving the familiar little doors set within the large wooden entrace gates of the colleges, the innumerable grassy quadrangles, the layers of bicycles, leaning one against the other at the entrance to the courtyard of the Bodleian library and the billowing black gowns, which when swollen by a sudden belch of wind gave the wearer his wizard-like silhouette.
Despite the stability of his surroundings, Julian’s undergraduate mind was in a constant whirl. He was unable to work out exactly what he thought, what he felt, what he believed in, or even, latterly, whom he loved. First there was his degree. He had originally thought himself suited to the combined disciplines of philosophy, politics and economics. But latterly he had begun to question whether he was taking his studies seriously enough. He had an uneasy feeling that he was spreading himself thinly and not mastering the depth of any of them. That term T. S. Eliot had come to read some of his poems to the English Club. A little stunned to realise he had been sitting in the same room as a literary genius, Julian had later wondered whether he might find the greater truths of life in literature instead.
He was also troubled by the world’s political polarity. Fascism was penetrating not only the furthest corners of Germany but was now flooding into the rest of Europe, enveloping countries as fast as a street becomes submerged beneath a burst water main. Maybe communism offered the only viable line of defence.
He could not understand the obduracy of the privileged classes with whom he mixed in refusing to acknowledge the reality of the German threat. The idea promoted especially by the prime minister and by Chancellor Neville Chamberlain of appeasing Hitler’s Germany, a country still highly angered by the viciousness of the punishment it had received at the end of the Great War, seemed shortsighted and frankly unrealistic. And judging by that terrible exchange at the Bryanston Court dinner, the new king seemed as complicit in screening out the truth as the rest of them. Indeed, Julian had heard during the occasional private asides at Cuckmere with Evangeline that senior members of the Nazi Party were sometimes invited to cocktails at Wallis’s flat, when the king also happened to be present.
Evangeline had formed a breathy habit of whispering nuggets of sensitive information in his ear while begging Julian to keep these confidences to himself. And while recoiling at the manner in which he acquired it, and annoyed that whenever he was alone in the library Evangeline would invariably appear, Julian remained fascinated by