Dead Man Riding Read Free Page A

again.
    *   *   *
    Candlelit figures came and went across the platform by the lake, drifting into the light and out of it as what they were saying to each other wandered in and out of hearing. ‘… which he would call abbominable. It insinuateth me of insanie …’ Time to think of other things like what I was going to do in the long vac. My new stepfather had invited me to join them in Athens and probably meant it but I couldn’t afford the fare, even third class. If he’d guessed that he’d probably have paid it for me but though I liked him I didn’t want to put myself under any obligation. Beside me, Midge was fidgeting again. When I looked her way she mouthed, ‘What time is it?’ I looked at my watch. Ten to ten. She started getting up.
    â€˜We’ll have to run.’
    We all motioned to her to sit down. There were still streaks of light in the sky and fluttering home like scared schoolgirls was more than Imogen and I would stand. ‘… To congratulate the Princess at her pavilion, in the posteriors of the day; which the rude multitude call the afternoon …’
    I wondered if Michael Meredith really intended to join their reading party. With most dons the question wouldn’t need asking because you couldn’t imagine them sleeping in barns and living on bread and cheese. Meredith was different. For one thing, he wasn’t so very much older than we were, probably under thirty. For another, he was quite capable of doing it just to annoy the university authorities. In the small world of Oxford Meredith was famous or, more accurately, notorious. He was such a brilliant classicist that his college had very little choice except to award him a fellowship. Once installed – and college fellows are notoriously difficult to shift – he’d set about trampling under foot most of the conventions that had kept Oxford snug for the past six hundred years or so. Stories grew round him. For instance, it was a condition of his fellowship that he should read the lesson in chapel once a term, in Latin naturally. He was an agnostic so, according to legend, simply slipped a copy of Apulius’s The Golden Ass inside the Bible and read a passage about Cupid and Psyche without any of the drowsy congregation noticing. He complained in public about the stupidity of some of the pupils who came to him from the public schools and said he could take a boy at random from any board school in the country and make a better classicist out of him. He proved it, rumour said, by secretly coaching the son of his college scout and entering him for Moderations under an assumed name, with the result that he came out second from top on the list. (His opponents denied the story. His supporters, mostly undergraduates, said of course the authorities had hushed it up.) There was no telling whether it was one of his real or legendary offences that had led to his removal as Alan’s and Kit’s tutor but it was no surprise. Though the college could take away his tutorial pupils it couldn’t stop him lecturing on philosophy, either as part of the official university course or unofficially to anybody who cared to come along, women included. Among his other eccentricities, he was a leading figure in the campaign to allow women to take degrees, just like the men. It didn’t make him any more popular with the die-hard dons that his lectures were always packed out, with people standing at the back. Alan and Imogen had met when he gave up his seat to her.
    â€˜I Pompey am, Pompey surnam’d the Big …’ We’d got to the masque scene now. The last of the light was gone from the sky but the platform was bright with torch flares, held on long poles by assorted courtiers and rustics. There was a cough from behind us.
    â€˜Excuse me sir, do you know where Mr Alan Beston is?’
    It was a lad of about fourteen in cap, jacket and heavy boots. He was