‘Canterbury Quad, Miss,’ said the porter, pointing, and gave her a staircase and room number. Following his directions Helen came out into the sunlight in Tom Quad. For a moment, nervous but unwilling to admit to herself that a mere tea-party could intimidate her, she stood to admire the view. Cardinal Wolsey’s great unfinished quadrangle seemed to capture and intensify the Oxford light. The gold of late autumn afternoon sunshine was reflected from the deeper gold stone, the rows of leaded windows, and the flat face of the water in the fountain basin. The space seemed immense and airy, yet the proportions made it intimate, too. The only sounds, magnified in the stillness, were the faint splash of water spouting from the statue of Mercury, and the whirr of cameras belonging to a distant group of Japanese tourists. Ahead of her the smooth green lawns rolled away to encircle the fountain and its fringe of lily pads. An undergraduate in a fluttering black scholar’s gown brushed past Helen and it occurred to her that, tourists apart, this scene must be almost unchanged since the sixteenth century.

Then in a babble of noise a crowd of jostling people emerged from one of the doorways and simultaneously a blare of music burst from an upstairs window. Helen jerked herself back into the present and walked on towards whatever awaited her in Oliver’s rooms.

She found Canterbury Quad without difficulty. Built more than two hundred years after Tom Quad, it still looked to Helen profoundly ancient and magnificent as she stared up at its classical proportions. She was used to her own College, of which the oldest parts were late nineteenth century, and to its comfortable air of being a random collection of reasonably well-preserved outbuildings to something much more important.

Oliver’s rooms were on the first floor of the central building. Helen read the white-painted names on the board in his staircase doorway: Mr G.R.S. Sykes, Lord Oliver Mortimore, Mr. A.H. Pennington. At the top of the stone staircase she came to Oliver’s outer door, open, and then tapped lightly on the inner one.

‘Cm’in,’ someone shouted. Helen squared her shoulders inside the vivid scarlet of Chloe’s brief sweater dress, glanced down briefly at what felt like far too much leg which it left on show, and went inside.

The room seemed at first sight to be uncomfortably full of people, all of them women. The atmosphere was charged with smoke and the sound of laughter and clamouring, insistent talk.

‘… all through the Vac, darling. Not just in London, but in Italy as well …’

‘… so I told him to stuff it. No, honestly, he was such a swine …’

‘… Mummy bought it in the end, it was so funny …’