It was Friday afternoon, and Pat had been in the university library on George Square. It was late May, and the university examinations were all well out of the way, as were lectures and tutorials. Pat had worked hard throughout the year – she was extremely conscientious, even if some of the others in her tutorial group were less so, or were conscientious enough, but only in a very last moment way. In fact, towards the end of the semester, as examinations loomed, she had met classmates whom she had not seen for the entire year. Suddenly they appeared at lectures, looking slightly confused and worried, desperate to make up for a year of neglected studies. One of them, a young man with long blond hair and Raphaelesque features, to whom Pat found her gaze returning after he took the seat next to her in the lecture theatre, had even revealed that he had come to the wrong lecture altogether. He was a student of English literature who had attended so infrequently that he was unaware of where he was meant to be.

‘This is Art History,’ Pat whispered to him.

The young man turned to her and fixed her with a gaze that was a mixture of regret and resignation. ‘I’ve had a rather busy year,’ he said.

She wondered what his busy year had consisted of, and then decided. That could keep one busy, she supposed. ‘You could always repeat,’ Pat reassured him. ‘Plenty of people do.’

‘I don’t have the time,’ he said. ‘Tempus fugit, et cetera, et cetera. I must try and pass. It’s not difficult to scrape a few ideas together, you know.’

Pat was not sure about that. She thought it was quite difficult, at least it was for her. She was getting reasonable marks – somewhere around a good upper second – and would end up, in two years’ time, with a respectable degree at about that level. It was always possible – just – that she might even get a first; one or two of her essays had been rated that highly by Dr Fantouse, in particular, who said that he ‘liked her insights’.