Number one was get laid a lot. So far, that was going swimmingly.

Number two was party a lot. Another check.

Number three was to get a rowing Blue, but he had given up on that one early on. Tom hadn’t realized quite what a demanding, incessant drag it was on one’s time. They expected you to rise before the sun almost every day, even when it was freezing cold, and practice until your arms dropped off. That was fine—for the stiff-upper-lipped Englishmen and their brawny American cousins. Thomas Massot was a civilized Frenchman, however, and he preferred the sun to find him in altogether softer surroundings—silk sheets brought with him from Paris and the willing arms of some chick. Nationality not important. He was an equal-opportunity employer, like Bill Clinton.

Massot admired Clinton, another foreigner at Oxford. What a taste in women! People laughed at him for it. But of course, the true connoisseur knew that looks, although pleasant, were the least important factor in a woman’s sex appeal. An ugly woman who knows what she’s doing beats a pretty-but-cold debutante any day, he thought.

Polly, of course, was hot and pretty. And gutsy—and clever. Tom liked her, a lot. She was easily the favourite of his women. For a moment Tom experienced a fleeting pang of guilt. Sex was fun, sure, and he liked his women in a variety pack. But what if Polly found out?

Don’t be bourgeois, he told himself; she never will find out. How could it harm her if she never knew about it?

Oh well. It was almost noon. He was going to be late for another tutorial, and Mr. Hillard was getting to be tiresome about it, threatening to complain to the Junior Censor. Tom supposed he had better take a shower and go to it.

On his way to Hillard’s rooms in Peckwater, Tom stopped at the Porters’ Lodge. The rows of wooden pigeonholes stood crammed with post and flyers from all sorts of clubs and societies he had no interest in. The Union, the college beagles—who could be bothered? It was that much less time for partying.

There was a letter in his pigeonhole from his mother. Tom sighed; not another one. He wished Maman would leave him alone. She was forever pestering him to study more, to make some real friends, to stop going down to London in cabs and spending his money in nightclubs. But Thomas was hardly going to travel on public transport, and he had crashed his Porsche too many times on the English roads with their stupid driving on the left.

“You are half English, Tom,” his mother would remind him. Lately they had drifted apart. But the difference between us, Tom thought, is that I welcome it; I know it is natural. And Maman wants to cling to a time when I was five years old and needed her.