“I’ve asked George if I can stay on here for another six months, perhaps as long as a year. I would continue to help with the accounts and in the office generally, if you think I could be useful. Obviously once Marcus has left I’d pay a proper rent. I don’t want to stay on if you’re not happy about it. I ought to mention that I shan’t be here for three days next week. I’m flying to Toronto to arrange some kind of pension for Grace Holmes, the nurse who helped me with Father.”

So Marcus was going. It was about time he made up his mind. His loss would be a major inconvenience for George, but no doubt he’d find a substitute. Helena said, “We wouldn’t find it easy to do without you. I’d be grateful if you could stay on, at least for a time. I know that Lettie will feel the same. So you’ve finished with the university?”

“The university has finished with me. There are not enough students to justify a Classics Department. I saw it coming, of course. They closed the Physics Department last year to enlarge Forensic Science, and now the Classics Department is to close, and Theology will become Comparative Religion. When that’s judged to be too difficult—and with our intake it undoubtedly will be—then no doubt Comparative Religion will become Religion and Media Studies. Or Religion and Forensic Sciences. The government, which proclaims a target of fifty per cent of young people going to university, and at the same time ensures that forty per cent are uneducated when they leave secondary school, lives in a fantasy world. But don’t let me get on to the subject of higher education. I’ve become a bore about it.”