He might have responded by asking me how I dared speak to him like that or even telling me to come back when I was in a more tractable frame of mind, but he didn’t. Standing up to bullies is supposed to work and sometimes it does. I swallowed hard but invisibly, I think. He turned his head to the window as if he had found something very interesting in the garden (Mabel tightrope-walking the trellis, maybe) and said, “Why haven’t you been to that polytechnic of yours?”

I couldn’t tell him I had had shingles. I opted for the truth or half the truth. “I don’t like the course. It’s not what I want. I didn’t know that before I started. I’m not interested in business.”

The head-shaking began. Actress she might be, but Selina would never learn to do it as well as he did. It was such a tiny subtle movement, perhaps through no more than twenty degrees of the circle, the merest tremble, but perfectly controlled, of vertebra on vertebra. It signified far more than disapproval: wonder at folly as well, ruefulness for my misspent past, amazement at the youth of the day.

“I ask myself if you realize, Clodagh, how fortunate you are to be one of those who have the opportunity to enjoy higher—I should say, further— education totally free of charge. It may not always be so, no doubt the time will come when students will once more pay their own tuition fees as I had to, as my poor grandmother whose last home you currently occupy had to on my behalf, working her fingers to the bone.” Max censured a cliché on the lips of others but never minded using one himself. “No, that time will come under some future government, but it hasn’t come yet. Students arrive from all over the world to benefit from our free education—did you know that? Do you think they abandon a course just because the discipline is temporarily not to their taste? Do you think they fail to understand that in this life the rough has to be taken with the smooth?”

I wasn’t sure whether Max meant “discipline” in the sense of control or in the sense of a mode of instruction. It didn’t much matter. “I don’t want to work in an office,” I said, “and I don’t want to be a social worker working in an office.”

“No, you want to be a steeplejack. I’ve never forgotten that ambition of yours, Clodagh, and I don’t think I ever shall.” Max looked at his cup, picked it up and, thinking better of finishing the coffee in it, set it down again. “Needless to say, I took it less than seriously. That being so, what do you propose to do now?”