In the Easter term, Cambridge was busy and bright. Coaches bearing tourists were backed up on the B roads. The swans hatched their eggs and ceased their territorial prowling around their nests on the Backs, so that the Cam and the Mill Pond were full of cygnets. People drank their pints in the sunshine by the river. The leaves returned to the trees, so the views through skeletal branches that had been daunting and spectacular in the winter were closed down, leaving a leafy privacy on sun-dappled walkways. Huge white boards appeared beside the playing fields as the white lines of football and rugby pitches disappeared under the calm authority of cricket. The lawns in the courts were perfectly clipped and dry, like the green on a golf course, and groups of students began to sit on the grass beside the beech tree outside my window. Glass lifted and curtains were pulled back, and the private sounds of music, laughter and conversation echoed on the warm stone of the courts. Walking along the paving beside a line of rooms, I would pick up a whole sequence of fragments, some snatches of academic debate, weed smoke, stifled gasps and television. At the same time that the sun became a reliable friend, the third years disappeared. They retreated to the University Library and holed up for revision. Finals began in May. We all of us had exams ourselves, but none of us paid them any attention. The academic world was fading away with the rest of our former concerns. We kept handing in fake essays, and went to enough supervisions to avoid being sent to the dean, but these were essential maintenance, like eating and sleeping. In the evenings we climbed out through the window that Michael had used to crash into my life the previous autumn, and drank cocktails in highball glasses, watching the sun go down over the Backs. On storm nights I would shelter under the protective spike of the lightning conductor and close my eyes in the warm rain and thunder. The summer seemed the accomplishment of the whole year, and in this atmosphere our plan neared fruition in a way that seemed bound by seasonal logic. Lisa found a buyer, a businessman named Augustus White, and fixed the price at four million, exactly Francis’s original estimate. My visits to Misha had maintained my flagging interest in the actual act of drawing, and I was producing a whole series of viable pieces from which we could choose our replacement. Francis had a frame and mount made up and hidden under Jessica’s bed. She had hired a car to drive the painting a little way out of the city to a hotel in Peterborough, where an expert, a private restorer who did a very profitable sideline in no-questions-asked chemical and stylistic analysis, would verify its authenticity on behalf of the buyer before its onward journey to London. Francis had volunteered to be the driver. At the time, I wondered at his eagerness to perform this chore.