Tim had his back to the door, the chair swiveled round so he could see Hollingshead, whom he’d been chatting with in the absence of any of the students, though when Fitz gave a formal tap at the doorframe, Tim—who was either clairvoyant or had caught a glimpse of his reflection in the windowpane—said, “Come on in, Fitz.” And then, swinging round, added, “Long time no see. What’s up?”

The room was overheated—all the rooms were, a feature of academe he’d first noticed as an undergrad, as if higher learning was as much a function of the sweat glands as the brain—and he was wet under both arms as he came through the door and shrugged out of his coat. “Oh, nothing in particular,” he said. “I just wanted to, I don’t know, touch base?”

He saw Tim exchange a look with Hollingshead, who had nothing for him, not a hello or even a nod of the head. “Touch away,” Tim said. “You can even steal second if you want.”

Hollingshead seemed to find this funny, though he couldn’t have gotten the reference. Fitz hadn’t known many Englishmen, but as a tribe they seemed supremely indifferent to baseball—or any American sport for that matter.

He was about to invent something, an imaginary problem he was having with the heavy Skinnerian emphasis of the required text for the Psych 101 course he was teaching, when Tim stood abruptly and lifted his coat down from the hook on the wall behind his desk, announcing, “Michael and I were just about to take a little stroll down to the Square for a drink.” He paused as Hollingshead slid down off the filing cabinet, buttoned his sports jacket (a houndstooth tweed, like Tim’s) and reached for his own coat, hat and muffler. It was an awkward moment and Tim kept him in suspense for the length of it, which only made him sweat the more, before adding, almost as an afterthought, “You’re welcome to join us—if I’m not keeping you from anything. You did want to talk, didn’t you?”

At the bar—raucous with students, rattled by the jukebox, suspended in smoke—Tim put an arm round his shoulder and told him to order anything he wanted and not to worry about it. “It’s on me, Fitz, because you don’t have to tell me what it’s like to have to live on a student income, and with a family too—been there, done that. Suzie came along when I was doing my doctoral work at Berkeley, did you know that?”

He hadn’t known. All he knew of Tim was gossip—the suicide wife, the heroic struggle, the peripatetic scholar with the two motherless children to raise and the shining aura of the crusader glowing round him with every breath he took.