‘Well, maybe back in Cornwall it was hard. I wasn’t terribly open about it there; I was the head boy at my school. I kissed girls in public and boys in private. But here, in Oxford, it’s different,’ Jim said thoughtfully. ‘Haven’t you noticed, Omar? Here, no one quite belongs, and no one is quite themselves. They’re all big fish from little ponds and they don’t know what to do now they’re not special any more. They’re all playing a part - pretending to be clever, pretending to be best friends with people they met a few weeks ago, pretending to care about all the twee Oxfordy stuff like the Union and rowing and stripy scarves and crap like that, just to fit in.’

Omar felt chastened, and relieved at the same time; he’d been wallowing in his complexes and melancholy, and yet here was Jim blithely saying that everyone shared the same disease as him. ‘I guess we’re all guilty of doing that a bit,’ agreed Omar. He felt a great weight lifted from him.

Although the threat of Benj had also been lifted, Jim stayed for another cup of tea and finished the rest of Omar’s HobNobs, inspecting his record collection with a mixture of glee and groans. ‘Are you sure you won’t come down to the bar?’ he asked when he finally made to leave.

‘No, I’ll try and finish this essay off the old-fashioned way,’ said Omar, ‘but good luck with sharking the second years.’

As Jim got up, Omar couldn’t resist asking him, out of pure self-interest, ‘So what do you think you do, if you don’t want to play a part, if you just want to be yourself?’

Jim smiled naughtily. ‘You do the only honest, sincere thing that an Oxford student can do,’ he said, gesturing towards the moonlit buildings beyond Omar’s turret window. ‘You admire the bloody architecture.’

Between Greek Tragedy and

Courtly Romance

THE DAY THAT Dermot was due to sit in on her lesson, Shona walked into her classroom a good five minutes early, to see that he had already installed himself at the far end of the long, oval table at which she took her class. He was being accosted by the anally keen Imogen, a bespectacled, frazzle-haired student who must have raced straight up to the room after her lunch to get a head start on her classmates.