the mother of young children she was fascinated by the ease with which they acquired language and wanted to learn more about it. In truth she never had any natural aptitude for linguistics, but she made the best of her limited ability and, with only a little help from himself, scored a straight A in Art History for an extended essay on the difference between Surrealism and Cubism. He had always taken a mild interest in visual art, and it developed further through his association with Winifred.
She was a ‘mature student’ in her late thirties, and looked rather more mature than that. She was tall, big-boned and heavy-breasted, and her wavy dark brown hair was already flecked with grey. She wore gold-rimmed reading glasses which, when they were not perched on the bridge of her nose, reposed on her impressive bosom, suspended from her neck by a thin gold chain. In other ways too she stood out from the student crowd when she arrived in the Department. She was posh - obviously, inescapably, unignorably posh. Her speech was posh, her manners were posh, and her clothes were posh in a curiously old-fashioned way: twin-sets and tweed skirts and leather court shoes. She had the idea when she started the course that you ought to present yourself to professors and lecturers as you would to your doctor or solicitor.The young women students in her first year seminar groups, in their monogrammed tee-shirts, denim miniskirts, striped tights and Doc Martens, stared at her in disbelief, or rolled their eyes at each other as she asked a perfectly formed question in her cut-glass accent. In due course she adopted a more casual style of dress, and blended in better with the habitat, but she could never disguise her accent.
It wasn’t until her second year that he became her tutor (he was a Senior Lecturer at that time). The Department’s system in those privileged days was a weekly tutorial group of two or three students to discuss an essay or other assignment, and the staff also kept office hours when their tutees were free to drop in for advice and counselling. Winifred availed herself of this facility with some frequency, perhaps because she had no close friend among her fellow students, and he soon learned the outline of her life story, which she shaded in with more intimate detail as their relationship ripened. She belonged to an English Catholic family who could trace their descent back to the Norman period and had kept the faith through the penal days of the Reformation - there was a Jesuit martyr somewhere in the record. Her grandmother had been the daughter of a Viscount, but there was no significant wealth or property in the immediate family. Winifred’s father was in the consular service, and she had been brought up in various foreign countries and at an English convent boarding school, insulated from the youth culture of the 1960s. She had not distinguished herself academically and there was no family tradition of sending girls to university, so instead she spent six months at a finishing school in Geneva, followed by a secretarial course at a commercial college in London, in the expectation that she wouldn’t have to earn her living for very long before acquiring a husband.A favourite aunt took Winifred under her wing, as her parents were abroad, and introduced her to eligible Catholic young men, one of whom was an investment adviser called Andrew Holt, Downside and Oxford, with whom, as she said, ‘I imagined I was in love, when really I just wanted to have sex with him, and since I believed then that the only way you could have sex was in marriage, I married him.’ They had their first child, Marcia, within the year, followed fairly rapidly by Giles and Ben. ‘Catholics and birth control, you know,’ she said, grimacing. ‘But after Ben, I went on the pill. And then we came here.’ Andrew’s firm was expanding, and he was offered a promotion if he moved to one of the new branches they were opening in the north of England. They looked for a house near the University because it was convenient for travel to the city centre and not too expensive in those days, before the big property boom: an area of more or less shabby older houses, mostly big Victorian villas built of the grey local stone for the city’s merchants and manufacturers, many of them converted into flats popular with