‘Bronwen,’ she said curtly. Clearly, Dryden had used that gambit before.

‘Enchanted,’ I exclaimed in the galant voice which I hoped would most enrage her, ‘it’s high time this stuffy old place had a few pretty faces to brighten it up.’

She turned on me that particularly nasty look which your breakfast kipper gives you when you have a hang-over.

‘And what’s your field?’ I asked.

‘Sexual Sociometrics.’

‘I might have guessed,’ I replied archly. She turned away. Never let a day go by without making an enemy, is what I say, even if it’s only a woman.

‘You have made a conquest,’ murmured Dryden in my ear.

‘Have you any whisky in your rooms?’

‘Only Chivas Regal.’

‘Then let us go there.’

His rooms are the best set in Scone: there are boiseries and a pair of bookcases only rivalled by those in the Pepysian Library in Cambridge and a certain house in Sussex, whose name escapes me. Moreover, he has a bathroom of his own, an unheard-of luxury in Scone, where the corpus sanum – or vile – runs a very bad second to the mens sana. (The story goes that, long ago, when it was first proposed in the College concilium that bathrooms should be provided for undergraduates, an ancient life-fellow protested in piping tones that the lads couldn’t possibly need such things: ‘Why, they’re only here for eight weeks at a time!’ But then came the strange late-Victorian epoch, shot through with obscure guilts, when the English – whom Erasmus had named as the grubbiest race in Europe – found that nothing would do but that they must scrub themselves from head to foot whenever they could spare a moment from smartening up Fuzzy-Wuzzy and other Breeds Without The Law. There are three times as many undergraduates in Scone now, and the bathrooms are just as few, but now no one seems to mind any more.)

‘Well now,’ said Dryden, when the beaded bubbles of Chivas Regal were winking at the brim, ‘I gather that you have taken up the worship of Wicca and find that it compels you to range around the countryside stealing ducks.’

‘No, no, no, John, you must have mis-heard me on the telephone: duck was not the word I used and it’s not me at all, it’s some other chap.’

‘That’s what they all say,’ kindly, sadly, ‘but tell me all about your, ah, friend.’

He was, of course, teasing me, and he knew very well that I knew that he knew that I knew he was, if I make myself clear. I started from the beginning, for lam not skilled in narrative, and went on to the end. It electrified him; he sat up straight and poured profligate drinks for both of us.