Oliver’s black clouds seemed to have gathered even more thickly after the brief light of the evening. He watched in sardonic silence as Tom found him a dark grey suit with a Savile Row label, a white shirt and wing collar, and the dismembered butterfly of his white bow tie. He flung on the clothes without looking at them and then stood looking at the dark-clad groups crossing the Quad.

‘Neat, tidy little people,’ he murmured.

‘Gown? Mortarboard?’ Tom prompted. ‘It’s time to go.’

Oliver rounded on him.

‘If you know so much about it, why don’t you sit the papers for me? I can get there by myself, Hart. I don’t need you to carry me.’

‘I’d like to come,’ Tom said quietly.

At the steps he didn’t see Oliver go. Tom’s eyes were raking the muted crowds for Helen’s black gipsy hair. Twice he thought he glimpsed her, and then the heads turned to disappoint him with the faces of strangers. He waited until the shrill bells were ringing and the last stragglers ran up the steps. Only when the heavy doors closed did he turn away. He knew where she was, and he would come back again.

Inside Oliver stalked to his place, hating the smell of tension and the serious faces milling around him. He felt unspeakably isolated, and faintly dizzy with the meaninglessness of his presence here. On the rickety little desk in the middle of a long line of identical desks he read his name on a white label. There was a blank script, and a question paper carefully placed face down so that he couldn’t catch a glimpse of the questions until the decreed second. The futility of that brought a bitter smile.

The quiet girl in the next seat glanced up and saw him. Lord Oliver Mortimore looking like an unshaven archangel, she thought, and sighed a little.

‘You may begin writing now. You have three hours in which to complete the paper.’

The morning’s invigilator was an elderly professor whose mincing delivery Oliver had once enjoyed mimicking. Now he turned over the paper without glancing at him, and looked down the list of questions.

Not one of them meant anything to him.

Oliver unscrewed his pen and wrote in the space provided, Oliver Mortimore (Lord). His own name and the empty title mocked him. He stared down at the blank white space and the sick isolation was slowly submerged under a pulsing tide of regret, so powerful that he almost put up his arms to ward it off.

It wasn’t the exams. His father had done just the same, and had been half applauded as an amusing tearaway. It went far deeper. Oliver felt that he was being sucked down into a sterile sea, and had been incapable of striking out against it. The wastefulness choked him.